The Evil Star

Chapter 1 "I’VE GOT a funny one,” Hammerschlag said. Hammerschlag was detective sergeant working out of the Missing Persons Bureau. Passing McCord’s open door and seeing McCord with his feet on the desk, it was second nature for Hammerschlag to pause and observe that he had a funny one. Sometimes he really had, though McCord always pretended to be skeptical about this. McCord spread his feet a little. “I’ll bet,” he said. He was a long man, long and thin, with an amiably cynical mouth and the eyes of an intelligent but disillusioned spaniel. He ran the Homicide Detail, nights. “I’ll bet.” “Well, I have,” Hammerschlag said aggrievedly. He felt around in a sagging coat pocket of the baggy blue serge and brought out two halves of a sadly mutilated cigar. These he fitted together with great care and joined precariously with a moistened cigarette paper. “I think she’s faking,” he said. “Who?” “Ain’t I been telling you? The girl!” “Oh.” McCord watched Hammerschlag’s futile struggle to draw smoke through the battered cigar. Presently he relented and got Captain O’Meara’s private box out of the desk. “Here, have one on the house, Dutch.” “Well,” Hammerschlag said, “I don’t mind if I do.” He put his own masterpiece back in his pocket. His bulbous nose savored the skipper’s Havana. “Whee-ee!” “Maybe you’ll be a captain some day,” McCord said. “Then people can steal your cigars.” He took his feet off the desk so that he could scratch a match on its already scarred surface. Smoke billowed from his well-blackened briar. “What’s so funny about the girl?” “Well,” Hammerschlag said—he nearly always began his sentences with “Well”; the brief hesitation gave his mind time to catch up with his mouth—“well, they bring this dame in around seven o’clock tonight and she’s got a concussion and a flock of bruises, like a car hit her.” “And you think that’s funny,” McCord said. “Now look, I didn’t mean it was funny. I mean it’s—now—” “Peculiar?” “Yeah, peculiar. On account of there ain’t a thing on her in the way of identification.” Hammerschlag blushed as McCord pretended to be shocked. “Now there you go, always jumping to conclusions. Of course she had her clothes on.” “Then how do you know there are bruises?” Hammerschlag was outraged. “I’ll have you to know that us cops have got morals just like anybody else.” “That’s right,” McCord said. “Cops are just like everybody else.” He sighed. “Well, let it pass, Dutch. You could have found out about the bruises from Doc Stein.” Mollified, Hammerschlag continued: “So they put her in Receiving, and the doc goes to work on her. After a while he brings her around, but she claims she don’t remember nothing. Hell, she don’t even remember who she is. At least this is what she claims. I think she’s faking it.” McCord was really interested now. “Why should she be?” “You tell me,” Hammerschlag growled. “All I know is I got a hunch. She’s faking a loss of memory that ain’t really so, and I got no time to go chasing down shoe label leads and one thing and another. So I call in the boys with the cameras and we get a picture and rush it down for the next editions of the morning papers." He looked triumphant. “I’ll fix her.” “A fine business,” McCord leered. “I hope she had her clothes on.” “Dam you, Steve,” Hammerschlag yelled, “all we took was her head!” “I still say it’s a fine business,” McCord insisted. “How’s she going to remember anything if you took her head?” He stood up as Hammerschlag dashed the skipper’s cigar to the floor. “All right, Dutch, let’s go down and have a look at her. That’s what you really wanted, isn’t it?” “Well—” “But I’ll have no more of your insults,” McCord said sternly. “I’m only doing this for the good of the service, understand? Esprit de corps, that sort of thing.” Hammerschlag made an inelegant sound with his mouth. “You oughta go on the radio.” He bent, retrieved the smoldering cigar from the floor. Wiping the chewed end on a coat sleeve he replaced it between his lips. “You know what you are? You’re nothing but an educated heel.” McCord picked up the inter-office phone. “The educated heel speaking. Well, a guy just called me that. Look, Jake, I’m going down to Emergency for a minute. Anything comes up, you can get me there.” Eight o’clock in the evening is a dull hour in the detective division. There was the click of teletypes. Here and there a phone rang. A civil clerk with a batch of reports came out of the press room, where he had probably been giving the legmen a preview of the night’s doings before passing the information on to its proper destination, the desk of Inspector Regan, the night chief. McCord and Hammerschlag caught a down elevator to the basement. The receiving hospital adjoined the police garage and an ambulance was just clanging its way up the ramp. Hammerschlag, panting a little, pushed through double swing doors, past the receiving desk presided over by the horse faced Miss Kling, and paused outside the open door of one of the semi-private cubicles. Dr. Stein and a nurse, both in stiffly starched white, were staring resentfully at the girl on the cot. The girl was beautiful. Even without rouge and lipstick, and with her blue-black hair drawn straight back from her forehead she was beautiful. Blue eyes regarded the new arrivals without interest. “I can’t understand it,” Dr. Stein said irritably. “She’s as normal as I am, yet she can’t remember.” Stein was a gnome-like little man. “I simply can’t understand it.” McCord essayed a stratagem so old that apparently even Hammerschlag had discarded it. He patted the doctor’s shoulder. “Forget it, Doc. We know who she is.” Stein was surprised. “You do?” “Of course.” McCord carefully refrained from looking at the girl. “Some of the boys found her purse.” Hammerschlag’s mouth fell open. McCord stepped on his foot And then, quite suddenly, he turned his eyes full on the girl. “Who hit you, hon?” Something very like terror flared in her eyes for an instant. Then it was gone and her face was utterly blank again. “I can’t remember.” McCord shrugged. “All right, don’t worry about it, sister.” He turned and went out. Hammerschlag and Dr. Stein followed him. “What’s the big idea?” Hammerschlag wanted to know. “Your hunch was good, Dutch. The lady is faking.” He drew a slow breath. “Not only that, she’s scared to death, and if I were you I wouldn’t leave her alone for a minute.” Dr. Stein took off his glasses and pointed them at McCord’s nose. “You were lying about the purse.” “ That’s right.” McCord nodded. “She knew I was lying, too, when she stopped to think about it. But it caught her off guard. There’s nothing wrong with her memory. The trouble is, she remembers too much.” “You mean she knows who did it and won’t talk?” “I think so,” McCord said soberly. He didn’t like people who went around beating up young ladies as beautiful as this one. “Anyway, it’s your case, Dutch, though I wouldn’t exactly call her a missing person.” Hammerschlag sighed heavily. “It’s just that Regan thought Missing Persons could get an identification quicker than anybody else.” He made a fist of a hamlike right hand. “By God, she can’t do this to me.” “There’s always her picture,” McCord reminded him. “The papers ought to be on the streets pretty soon now.” He rode an elevator back up to his own office. Somehow he couldn’t get the girl out of his mind. Despite her good looks, there was a certain indefinable hardness about her. Another girl under the same circumstances would have had hysterics or something. This one was thinking every minute. What she was thinking about was a deep dark mystery, and mysteries always rode Stephen McCord like a nagging woman. He was just about to call Hammerschlag when one of the phones on his desk came to life. Answering it, he recognized Inspector Regan’s voice. Regan was terrifically upset. “You, McCord! What do you know about this dame down in Emergency?” “Not a thing,” McCord said. “At least nothing beyond what I told Hammerschlag and Doc Stein. Why?” “Because she isn’t in Emergency any more,” Regan yelled. “She isn’t anywhere in this whole damn building.”