The Evil Star

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

THE night chief of detectives was not a large man, but he was dynamic. He barged into McCord’s office, cursing a blue streak and loudly wondering what the police department was coming to. Without in the least looking like the cartoon character he gave the impression of an irate Jiggs. Behind Regan, a lumbering and apologetic Saint Bernard, came Gus Hammerschlag. McCord just sat there.

“By God,” Regan bawled, “I'll see you broken for this night’s work!”

McCord leaned back in his chair. “I’m supposed to be running the Homicide Detail.”

“You’re a d**k, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been called that,” McCord admitted, “among other things.”

Regan’s jaw muscles bulged. “Then prove it. Get busy and find that girl.”

“All right,” McCord said. He waited till Regan had finally stamped out before even pretending to notice Hammerschlag. Then, still quietly but with no lack of interest, “What happened, Dutch?”

Hammerschlag looked miserable.

“Well, Steve, it’s just one of them things, I guess. Inside of ten minutes after you left there was an airplane crash, a streetcar accident and a three-alarm fire. In the excitement the girl managed to walk out. She even took her clothes.”

McCord tamped tobacco into his pipe.

“Don’t let it worry you. When the papers hit the street somebody will identify her.”

“That’s the hell of it,” Hammerschlag groaned. “We ask a couple million people do they know this girl, and when they come in and say they do, we ain’t got the girl. The papers are going to rib hell out of us.”

McCord hadn’t thought of this angle, and of another even more appalling. It seemed a simple enough matter to trace the missing girl once you found out who she was. But there was now a new danger. Suppose the girl, on the loose, was once more spotted by the guy or guys who had beaten her into unconsciousness? Suppose they really made a job of it on the second try? She’d be picked up out of some ditch and then the department would be held responsible for her death. Not so good, McCord decided.

He got up and went to the squad-room door.

“Outside, gang. Out on the streets and look for this girl.”

Aided by Hammerschlag he pieced together an excellent description, including the clothes.

“If you can get copies of the early home editions you’ll find her picture spread all over the front pages.”

The room emptied. Hammerschlag still stood there.

“Steve, I’m sorry as hell about—”

“Forget it,” McCord said. He picked up a phone, got the radio room and found that Inspector Regan had already put the girl’s description on the air. Presently Hammerschlag went away.

McCord was at the locker, getting out his topcoat, when footsteps paused outside his open door. He turned. He swallowed. The girl he was looking for; the girl a thousand other cops were looking for, was standing right there in his doorway. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered her.

“Pardon me,” she said in a perfectly composed voice, “I’m looking for the Missing Persons Bureau.”

McCord felt little icy prickles race up and down his spine. He made his voice carefully casual.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh yes, of course.”

Fixing her with a calm eye, like the hypnotists are supposed to do, he edged around her and closed and locked the hall door.

“Now, baby,” he said through clenched teeth, “you and I are going to have a little talk.”

“I—I don’t believe I quite understand.”

Beautiful, he thought. And crazier than seven hundred whirling dervishes. He decided to be nonchalant about it.

“That makes two of us, darling.”

He leaned a finger on the annunciator switch. “Get me Regan and Hammerschlag."

The girl stared at him. Angry color had come into her cheeks and her voice shook a little.

“See here, is this the Missing Persons Bureau or isn’t it?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, this is the Missing Persons Bureau.”

In reverse, the lettering on the ground-glass panel of the hall door said that he was a liar, but he didn’t think she was in any condition to notice. His smile was engaging.

“It’s a lovely night, isn’t it?”

“You know what I think?” the girl demanded. “I think you’re crazy!”

“They always do,” McCord said under his breath.

There was a sudden banging at the hall door. The girl pivoted slowly, eyeing him with macabre intensity. He unlocked the door. Hammerschlag and Regan almost fell on their faces. McCord waved a casual hand, directing their attention to his guest.

“There.”

Hammerschlag sucked in a great gulp of air. “I’ll be God damned!” Inspector Regan, no less surprised, drove at once to the point. “Where in hell did you get her?”

“It’s nothing,” McCord assured him with a trace of smugness.

“Nothing at all. Just give Homicide an assignment. You lose ’em, we find ’em.”

Hammerschlag moved purposefully toward the girl. “All right, sister, why did you run out on us?”

The swift anger on her face was replaced by sudden terror. She raced for the door. Inspector Regan tripped her. Almost before she hit the floor she began screaming. The sound was worse than eighty-seven sirens.

“You’re all crazy,” the girl panted.

“Oh, yeah?” Regan pinioned her flailing arms, looking helplessly at McCord and Hammerschlag. Outside, the corridor rapidly filled with detectives, reporters and the usual gang who hung around at night.

Quite without warning the girl bit Regan on the wrist. He let out a howl.

“Take her away!” He practically hurled her into the arms of two d***s from the Safe and Loft squad. “Toss her in a tank and see that she stays there, by God!”

Between them they wrestled her out and along the crowded halls. Her screams drifted back to the now augmented group in McCord’s office.

“You’re all crazy, I tell you. Crazy as March hares!”

McCord wiped little beads of sweat from his forehead. “Damned if I don’t think she’s right, at that.”

A couple of new faces boiled to the surface in the maelstrom beyond his open door and he recognized Saul Saracco and his attorney, Webb Fallon. Saracco had a press-damp copy of the morning Times in his hands. “That the gal you were looking for?”

Inspector Regan snatched at the paper. Over his shoulder McCord could see the girl’s picture under the glaring caption: “Do You Know This Girl?”

Regan flung the paper from him and began sucking at his bleeding wrist.

“The little hellcat” He broke off to stare at Saracco. “What’s your interest in this?”

“None,” Saracco said.

He was a big man in his early fifties, broad and flat of face, well-dressed, aware of his own importance but not objectionably so. He lobbied for the construction interests, the paving and street-lighting blocs, and there were some who said he had a fist in other things less respectable.

“Then what are you doing here?”

Saracco smiled, showing very white teeth.

“Webb and I heard screams and thought it might be fun to watch you boys beating hell out of some poor kid that probably snitched a pocketbook.”

“I didn’t mean that!” Regan snarled. “I meant here— at Headquarters.”

“Oh.” Saracco was not unaware of his audience. “Well, the truth of the matter is that a friend of mine was picked up for drunk driving. Mind?”

“Mind! I’m damned glad of it.”

Regan had run into Saracco’s influence two or three times and didn’t like the big man very well.

McCord engaged Webb Fallon in conversation. “You’re looking well, Counsellor.” He couldn’t have told you why it occurred to him to ask Fallon about the girl. “You wouldn’t happen to know the little lady, would you?”

Fallon looked mildly startled.

“You mean you don’t?” He was a lean handsome man of forty-two or -three, dark-eyed, dark-haired except for interesting touches of silver at the temples. In spite of a leaning toward foppishness he was admittedly one of the best court actors in the state. Now that Old Man Gilbert was gone, Fallon was the headman at Gilbert, Fallon and Gilbert.

McCord shook his head. “We don’t, and that’s a fact.”

In Fallon’s dark eyes there was a trace of humor.

“Try asking her?”

“Once,” McCord said. “She doesn’t like to be asked. It makes her nervous.”

“Women are always a problem, aren’t they?”

Webb Fallon probably knew what he was talking about. He didn’t exactly have to fight them off, but he never seemed to have any trouble filling vacancies either. He nodded pleasantly, and presently he and Saul Saracco took themselves away.

Hammerschlag was recounting to the reporters the manner in which the girl had first been brought to the department’s attention, her escape and later reappearance. Inspector Regan stamped out. Gradually the room emptied and McCord sank into his own chair.

After a time he remembered all his own detectives, not to mention those of the other bureaus and the uniformed division, who were out combing the city for a girl who was once more in custody. He pulled a phone toward him and canceled the order.

“Pardon me,” a feminine voice said, “can you direct me to the Missing Persons Bureau?”

McCord opened his eyes. He shuddered violently.

“Again?” Then, convinced that it couldn’t be, that this was just an illusion, he once more leaned back and relaxed. This illusion was persistent.

“I said—”

“I heard you,” McCord said, adding, “but I don’t believe it.”

“What?”

“Well,” McCord said, “you’re nothing but a vision, a figment of my imagination, a pixie, a—”

He suddenly opened his eyes very wide. This girl had the same face, the same blue-black hair and startling blue eyes, but her clothes were not the same. Not only that, she carried a handbag and a folded newspaper.

McCord hastily attained his feet.

“I beg your pardon. We’ve had a rather trying time of it around here the last hour or so and I’m not quite myself. I believe you said you wanted the—”

“The Missing Persons Bureau.”

A faint frown creased an otherwise perfect brow. “It’s— it’s about my sister.” She held out the newspaper.

“Oh.” McCord, in accepting the paper, managed to touch her hand. He still wasn’t sure that she was real.

“Oh yes, about your sister.”

She was becoming annoyed with him.

“I always understood that policemen were— well, efficient.”

“Oh, we are,” McCord assured her. He put on a great show of efficiency by picking up a phone and calling the detention cells upstairs. “McCord speaking. Have you still got that package that Regan sent up a little while ago? That’s just ducky. Hang on to her.”

He cradled the phone, once more addressed the alleged sister of the package upstairs.

“Your name, please?”

She gave him a small smile this time.

“Martin—Faith Martin.” McCord acknowledged that by introducing himself. “Lieutenant McCord. And your sister’s name?”

“Hope Martin.”

“All right, let’s go up and see her,” McCord said. He took the girl’s arm. The arm was firm and round under his hand. Reassured, he began to notice other things about Miss Martin. There was not that hardness back of the eyes, at the comers of the mouth, that he had seen in her sister’s face.

“Are you familiar with your sister’s—umm— friends? Any idea of who would wish to do her harm?”

"Why no! That is, as a matter of fact I haven’t seen or heard from Hope for over a year.”

And then, a little breathlessly, “Is she—is she hurt badly?”

“Oh no,” McCord said. “What I mean to say is, not very much.”

He wondered if he looked as idiotic as he sounded. “I’m sure that after she sees you she’ll be quite all right.”

Going up in the elevator he looked down at the most beautiful profile in the world. He resisted the impulse to put an arm around her waist, assisting her from the car as the doors opened at the top floor.

“This way, please.”

He ushered her down the whitewashed concrete corridor to the cell blocks. There was no need to ask for further directions, for the first Miss Martin was making herself heard far and wide.

Standing in front of a barred tank a bulky matron in gray denim was looking longingly from the prisoner inside to the sap slung at her right wrist. The girl with McCord clutched the bars.

"Charity!”

Abruptly the cacophony ceased.

“Faith!”

The two girls stared at each other for one amazed instant. Then, as one, demanded, “What are you doing here?” Miss Faith Martin turned indignant eyes on McCord.

“This isn’t Hope. This is my sister Charity!”

McCord licked suddenly parched lips. “Now wait a minute, you mean to tell me that this isn’t the girl in the picture?”

The young lady behind bars gave every indication of going crazy again. “Of course I’m not, stupid. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody!”

McCord knew then that he had been working too hard. He forced himself to look at the young woman who only a moment before he had thought he’d like to have at his side forever.

“Then you’re not— you must be—”

“Of course,” Faith Martin said scornfully. “Anybody but a policeman would have known it long ago. We’re triplets and where is our sister Hope?”

“I wouldn’t know,” McCord said sadly. “I don’t believe I even care to know.”