Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

Originally published in Detective Tales , June 1953.

Harry Nolan slipped his key into the Yale lock, looked surprised when it failed to turn, and raised his eyes to the brass numerals over the door. The numerals were one, three and four, just as they had been when he left for work that morning.

Withdrawing the key, he examined it puzzledly, then tried to fit it into the lock upside down. It refused to enter.

Once more he tried it the right way, but when he had no more success than before, withdrew it and dropped it back in his pocket.

The lock must be broken, he thought, trying to decide what to do about it. He left the shop at four-thirty, while Helen, his wife, worked until five, so it was unlikely she was already home, but he rang the bell on the off-chance she had left work early.

To his surprise, the door was opened by a slim, red-haired woman he had never before seen.

An unprejudiced male would have considered the redhead beautiful, or at the very least pretty. But Harry was in the habit of unconsciously appraising every woman he met by the standard of Helen’s fresh sparkle. It took more than surface beauty to match that sparkle; you had to be clean and fresh inside, in love, and sure you were loved in turn. By beauty contest standards the redhead would have surpassed Helen, but all Harry saw was her brittle hardness.

When she looked at him inquiringly, Harry said, with mild bewilderment, “For some reason my key won’t fit. Is Helen home?”

The woman looked puzzled.

“I’m Harry Nolan,” he explained. “Helen’s husband.”

“Helen?” the woman said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. There’s no Helen Nolan here.”

A man outside Harry’s range of vision called, “Who is it, honey?”

The redhead called back, “Some man looking for his wife, Kurt. Do we know a Helen Nolan?”

Harry began to grow angry. Who these strangers in his apartment were, he had no idea, but he had no intention of continuing to stand in the hall outside of his own home. He started to push by the woman, then stopped in confusion.

The front room was not that of his apartment. Not only were its furnishings entirely different, but the wallpaper was a flowered pink instead of a vertically striped green.

A tall, dark-skinned man seated on the sofa looked up at Harry with a frown, folded the paper he was reading and rose to his feet.

Harry stammered, “I’m…I’m sorry. I thought this was my apartment.”

As he backed through the door, the man crossed to stand next to the woman. He continued to frown at Harry, and now the woman was frowning too. Finally the dark-skinned man shrugged and pushed the door closed in Harry’s face.

Once again Harry looked at the numbers over the door. They still read one, three and four. Checking the doors to either side, he found they were 132 and 136, just as they should have been. Immediately across the hall, as usual, was apartment 135.

Just as his bewilderment started to become tinged with an element of panic, Harry saw the light. He was simply in the wrong building; an understandable error, inasmuch as he and Helen had moved in only a week ago and their apartment house was one of three identical buildings in the same block.

With a relieved but rather embarrassed chuckle at himself. Harry went down the stairs, passed through the front door and studied the gilded number embossed on the glass of the door. Panic jumped within him again when he saw it was 102.

Glancing left, then right, he saw identically solid, red brick apartment houses rising five stories either side of him. Wildly, he turned to study the opposite side of the street. At one end of the block was the same gas station which had been there that morning, at the other end the same drug store. And between them were the same brownstone-front houses which had once been upper middle-class homes, but now were boarding houses.

Harry felt his sanity slipping. Grasping at a straw, he ran to the corner and peered up at the L-shaped street sign. His throat contracted when the sign verified that the corner was Carlton and Fourth.

“Whoa, boy!” Harry told himself. “Let’s pull ourselves together.”

With forced calmness he marshaled facts to convince himself he was not going mad. Last Saturday he and Helen had moved into apartment 134 at 102 Carlton Avenue. It was now Friday, which meant five times he had left apartment 134 at 102 Carlton Avenue to go to work in the morning, and five times had returned after work in the afternoon…

He dismissed the possibility that he had left from and returned to either 100 Carlton or 104 Carlton, for not only was he certain of the address, he was certain it was the center apartment house. With equal certainty he discarded the possibility that his apartment was 34, 234, 334, or anything but 134. Since he always climbed a single flight of stairs to reach it, it had to be 134.

Glancing at his watch, he saw it was five-fifteen, too late to catch Helen by phone before she left work. Since she would be getting off a bus right where he was standing within another ten minutes, Harry decided to wait for her. The thought that they could tackle the problem together reduced his panic to mere worry.

When Helen failed to alight from the five twenty-five bus, Harry was disappointed. When she was not on the five forty-five, he began to experience unease.

When the five fifty-five passed without even slowing down, a cold chill crept along his spine.

Forcing himself to at least surface calmness, he crossed the street to the gas station, located a pay phone on the wall, and then discovered he had no change in his pockets. He extracted a dollar bill from his wallet—and found that he was all alone.

The station’s single attendant was outside gassing a car. Under the stress of his increasing nervousness, it seemed to Harry the man deliberately moved in slow motion when he finally hung up the hose and began wiping the windshield, though actually he was kept waiting no longer than a minute and a half.

When the attendant finally entered the station, Harry thrust the dollar bill at him and asked for change to include some dimes. To his slight annoyance the attendant gave him ten dimes.

Catching his expression, the man said, “Didn’t you want to play the machine?” For a moment Harry was puzzled, but then he noted the dime slot machine in one corner of the room. In Wright City you found slot machines everywhere: in filling stations, drug stores and even in barber shops. And of course in every tavern.

“Phone.” Harry said briefly.

Fishing from his wallet the slip of paper on which Helen had written the unlisted phone number of her boss, he dropped a dime and dialed the number. It rang several times before a woman’s voice answered, “Hello.” It was not Helen’s voice.

“Is this Mr. Dale Thompson’s office?” Harry asked.

“Yes. His home and his office.” The woman’s voice had a dulled edge, as though she had been crying.

“This is Harry Nolan. Is my wife still there?”

“Who?” the woman asked.

“Helen Nolan. Mr. Thompson’s secretary.”

For a moment there was silence. Then the woman said in a puzzled tone, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You are speaking to Mr. Thompson’s secretary. My name is Miss Wentworth.”

For a long time the constriction in Harry’s throat refused to let him speak. Finally he got out, “May I speak to Mr. Thompson, please?”

On the other end of the wire there was a silence nearly as long. Then in a muffled tone the woman said, “I’m sorry. Dale…Mr. Thompson had a heart attack this morning. He died at Mercy Hospital at eleven o’clock.”