“Reproof received,” the lieutenant returned. He stretched, too. “Well, Buffingham takes a neat place in the list of suspects, too. He’s crooked. Admits it. His boy is in trouble. Needs dough. Tells a good tale to explain the nine bucks a week, but is it good enough? No connection with Mrs. Garr in the past as far as we know. But he moved in here right after Mrs. Garr took the house—did you get that? His testimony at the inquest said he’d lived here twelve years. Looks like Mrs. Garr might have roped him in the same way she roped in Miss Sands. He pays heavier, too—get that. If she was blackmailing him she had him good.”
“It might have been for some of his sideline rackets, the ones he admitted,” Mr. Kistler said.
“Yeah, it might. But I’m not letting that guy out of my mind. Not by a long shot. Come on, you two, I’m hungry. Don’t forget your little job tomorrow, Mrs. Dacres.”
He waved his cohorts to him, left.
Mr. Kistler and I were alone. I was dazed after listening to the testimonies, inexpressibly tired.
“I’m hungry, too,” I said.
“Oh, the poor baby. She’s tired. She’s hungry. Papa fix the orange juice?” Mr. Kistler went kitchenward to fix my supper. I pined for tomorrow. The doctor said I could have toast, eggs, milk, mashed potatoes, and fruit tomorrow. I intended to have all of that.
“It’s just like having an operation, and I haven’t even had the operation to talk about,” I moaned over the orange juice.
“What we’ve got to do is prevent you from being operated on twice.” Mr. Kistler viewed the future. “What the hell are we going to do with you tonight?”
“I think I’ll manage on my own.”
“A poor little sick girl doesn’t want extra protection?”
“I’m not sick.”
“In that case—”
“No, thanks. I’ll sleep with the policeman.”
“You mean you prefer a policeman to me?”
“Absolutely. I’ll sleep here, the policeman in the chair.”
“You’d trust the policeman to sleep in the chair?”
“They should be domesticated by this time.”
“Trust me to sleep in the chair?”
“Certainly not.”
“I’d think you were a nitwit if you did,” he said. “Now, before returning to my labors, I am going out to dine. On steak, medium rare, smothered in onions. New peas. Lettuce with Roquefort dressing. Hot biscuits—”
I moaned into my pillow, and he went out laughing like a Boucicault villain at the end of the second act.
—
THE NIGHT PASSED WITHOUT a hitch. I slept, the policeman slept, and all was serene in the morning, except that I was so weak I could hardly get my clothes on. I tiptoed past the policeman; he woke with a jump, which I was glad to see, because what is the use of having a guard if he sleeps through having someone tiptoe past him? He wiped his hand across his face and went out into the hall, so I had a free hand for dressing.
My clock said six fifteen, which was the earliest I’d been up for years. I managed to get the coffee on, made toast, cooked three eggs. After I’d eaten that I started over on three more eggs.
It’s wonderful what a little food can do for your spine, your character, and your intelligence. I wondered for a bit if I had overdone things, but my interior settled down after a while. I started putting things back into drawers; I knew I couldn’t make much headway, but I pushed Mrs. Garr’s things back into her closet; I had hung my clothes before going to bed the night before.
I was out of the house about seven; I didn’t want an argument with Hodge Kistler about going to the Comet office.
It was one of those what-is-so-rare-as-a-day-in-June days, but I had to take a streetcar; my legs hadn’t solidified enough for a long walk. I picked up a newspaper on the corner before I got on the car. There wasn’t a word in it about me, and I wondered if there had been in yesterday’s paper.
The Comet building is down on the riverfront, a decrepit hag of a building that holds up mainly, I think, because it is rusted together. It looks rusted; heaven knows what it’s made from, under the crust. The crust on the outside is reddish; the crust on the inside is black and looks, if anything, thicker. I’m fairly familiar with the Comet offices; in pinches, I’d acted as office boy and taken layouts and copy there from Tellier’s.
The board over the Comet doorway says:
GILLING CITY COMET
The Biggest Newspaper of Its Size in the World
No one much was around at that hour, but I hunted out a lanky, sleepy youngster sweeping papers back and forth in a big room full of tumbledown desks and typewriters. I asked him if he could show me to their archives.
After long thought he said sure, he didn’t know why not, and led me past hundreds of cubbyholes to a dark inside room.
Here he switched on a light, looked blankly around at the overflowing files, and left.
I thought it hopeless trying to figure out where the 1919 files would be. I poked through some huge tomes, full newspaper size, on the open-front shelves that covered the entire back wall of the library, but the rubbed white letters on the back of one volume would say Aug. 17 to Nov. 3, 1924, the one under it Feb. 22 to Apr. 9, 1907, and the one above it Jan. 27 to Mar. 25, 1913.
A wizened little man came in around eight. He poked around as helplessly as I did, seemingly, but I caught him slipping a picture into a file.
“How do you do? I’ve been waiting for the librarian,” I explained to him.
“I’m the librarian,” he admitted sadly, as if he hated to be found out.
“Lieutenant Strom of the police force suggested I come to you. He’d like to have me go over the papers for May,
