I Found Him Dead!. Gale Gallegher
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thing off. You had to admire her for it. I was about to say I’d consider handling the case, but she was ahead of me.
“I’m not asking you to investigate the kidnaping, but your business, Miss Gallagher, as I understand it, is tracing missing persons, people not involved with the law.”
“More or less,” I agreed airily, “that’s how I make a living.”
“Then I want to engage your services to try to locate for me the baby girl born to Edward and Ethel Wells on May fifth, 1933.”
“And just incidentally,” I added, “I might become involved in the Alexander kidnaping?”
“All I want,” she said slowly, “is for you to tell me—prove to me—that I’m wrong. I want to know that Bette Alexander is not my child. I want to know just that much.”
She laid her hand flat on the desk, then moved it slowly. Two crisp thousand-dollar bills looked up at me. My first astonished reflection was that such big bills didn’t get around enough to be worn limp. I got my breath and said, “It’s a bit over my usual fee.”
She smiled. “It’s not a usual case. Will you hunt for her?”
“I’d hunt elephants,” I said, picking up the bills, “for the proper fee.”
Dawn sat down again on the edge of the chair, took a lipstick and large compact from her purse, and drew on a fresh mouth. She glanced up at my words with a touch of triumph. “It’s such a relief to know someone else is with me on this. You can’t imagine what it’s been like.”
“You can’t imagine how we may get involved,” I said, making out the forms for her signature. “Suppose Eddie is in this—even helped engineer it? Would you be willing . . .”
“If that’s the case,” she spoke slowly, as she signed the agreement, “we’ll—find some way to handle it.”
She said it curiously, as though she already had a plan. She was putting the lipstick and compact in her purse. It was only an instant that the big bag was tipped toward me. Yet I spotted the glittering object inside. She pulled the zipper closed. “Then I’ll hear from you, Miss Gallagher?”
“Give me a couple of days,” I said.
She moved toward the door with buoyant professional grace. Watching her, I wondered why Dawn Ferris carried a nickel-plated automatic in her purse.
2.
I BROKE a date for dinner that evening. I had too much on my mind for company. I dined alone at a place on Central Park South, near my apartment. Louis, my favorite waiter, assured me everything was to my liking, and I took his word for it. For once I wasn’t paying attention to food. I was too busy considering the facts I’d gathered on Eddie Wells.
After Dawn left, Patsy and I set to work to earn those two lovely green bills. Digging up information fast isn’t easy, but I know a couple of places specializing in information on theatrical people. I shot Patsy over to those agencies.
By midafternoon she had an envelope of faded press clippings and cracked publicity pictures, covering the vaudeville days of Eddie Wells. There were also pictures of his partner, Ethel Wells, in buckety hats and knee-high dresses that would have set the present Dawn Ferris’s teeth on edge.
Our own master files turned up more recent leads. There were several inquiries on Eddie Wells, variously known as Ed Welsh and Ned Wills. These were warning sheets from Western agencies who were looking for him. We wired for details.
I didn’t expect much from these inquiries. They were after him for bad debts. For my money, it’s a waste of time to trace men like Eddie for debts. They’re dead beats and strictly uncollectible. But they’re easy people to trail.
I checked with the Bureau of Vital Statistics. There was no record of a child born to Edward and Ethel Wells on May 5, 1933. But there was a birth certificate recorded on that day for Elizabeth Anne, daughter of Theodore and Sylvia Alexander. I asked for a photostat.
I reread news stories on the kidnaping. On Friday afternoon Bette Alexander had stepped from the station wagon of the exclusive Purvence School, waved to her friends, and run through the gates of the family’s palatial home near Huntington, Long Island. She was not seen again. A thin, rather plain child, she was tall for her fourteen years, an excellent swimmer, and a fine horsewoman. An accident was suspected until the ransom note was received on Saturday night. Then the FBI joined the Suffolk County police in the hunt.
There were interviews with Bette’s mother, Sylvia Alexander, a handsome blonde of about forty, and with M. E. Baxter, the Alexander family lawyer and an executor of the estate. Also with John Bartley Crane, society artist, specializing in portraits of children, whose recent painting of Bette had been so widely used.
I called up a few people I knew. One of Dad’s old pals, a former Suffolk County detective, now working on the Alexander case, also a News reporter who had a by-line story on it. I kept my questions very casual, but from what I gathered in talking to them, there wasn’t the slightest indication that Bette was the adopted daughter of Sylvia and Theodore Alexander. Besides, there was also that matter of the estate I’d mentioned to Dawn. Would a man leave his entire fortune to an adopted child without some mention of that legal angle?
Very thoughtfully I left the restaurant and walked out into the soft March evening. Spring was early, but early or late, it irritated me. Spring always does. It seems to affect a weak and defenseless appeal, like a fragile female in white. I like autumn. Autumn is mature and strong and able to take care of itself.
But spring was with me that night, fuzzing everything into gentle curves, giving the bare trees a slightly pregnant look. There was a fragrance from the park that defied the aggressive fumes of carbon monoxide and incineration. There was rain in the air, and the low clouds were luminous from the lights of midtown Manhattan. I belted my all-weather coat, pulled the brim of my felt hat forward, and set out toward Central Park West. I like to walk in the rain. And besides, I wanted to look at a house in the West Sixties.
The address was in that narrow wedge of streets formed by Broadway and the west boundary of the Park. There was a large apartment house at the corner where I turned left toward Broadway. Behind the elegant frontage facing the Park, the street seemed to crumble. In the shadow of fine buildings and lofty towers, old brownstone houses huddled in shabby embarrassment.
Here spring was defeated. Moldy cellars, stale beer, and furnished-room cookery won out. The street lights were far-spaced and dim. The lights from the houses added only furtive bleakness. I walked faster, stumbled against a refuse can midway from the curb. A radio somewhere blared with studio laughter. A child cried. A couple walked past me, arguing—a young couple full of bitterness. Ethel and Eddie might have been like that.
Two doors from the next corner I spotted the house, primly respectable among its slatternly neighbors. The doorknob shone. The long front windows gleamed against chastely drawn drapes. There was no light visible. A tiny name plate in metal gleamed against the stone. Dr. Wurber. No initials, no Christian name, just the identification. Dr. Wurber.
I mounted the high stone steps and pressed the bell. I heard it jangle through the house. I pressed a second time, more persistent than hopeful. The echo had an empty sound.
“Well, now, and what do you want?”
The sudden gruff voice so startled me I almost went over backward. He was standing in the small areaway at the side of the steps where a door led into the basement. Though he was half lost in the shadows, I could make out dimly the scowling face of a thickset, white-haired man in shirt sleeves and suspenders.
“Who is it you’re after?” he asked, with a stubborn hostility.
I came down the steps quickly. I smiled and said gently, “You startled me. Didn’t know where the voice came from. I wanted to see Dr. Wurber.”
“Not in. Won’t be in.”
“You’re sure?” I leaned against the iron