She showed up at my office one day wanting me to find her husband. He was a salesman and had been in Manhattan three weeks ago for a convention, but he hadn't come home. People back in White Plains had told her to forget him, he'd probably run off with a girl he found here. She didn't know what to think. I fiddled with the intercom and nodded for her to go on.

"He called me the second night of the convention," she said, "and then I didn't hear anything for the rest of the week and I thought he would be home Sunday. But he never showed up and I found out he checked out of his hotel sometime Saturday."

"Why'd you wait so long to start looking for him?"

"I didn't. I mean, not really. That Monday I was worried and all, but I figured it was just a bad hangover and a missed train and that he would call and be home Tuesday. And then he didn't show up and I got mad, and I thought, well, just let him go on his darned fling and when he gets home.... I talked to people who were at the convention, but they didn't know anything. And I can't go on not knowing." The eyes were sad and her mouth was a grim line. It could have been an act or she could have been both mad and worried. Who knows with women.

I told her what my fees were. She said okay as long as I didn't take too long to find him.

"You talk to the cops?" I asked her. "What'd they say?"

"'No evidence of foul play, wayward husbands aren't our business.' They don't care if he's in the East River or somewhere up in Yonkers or something."

"Why do you say Yonkers?"

"Doesn't mean anything. I just said it. Do you think you can find him?"

"Dunno. I can try. He know anybody in town?"

"Just some fire captains, crewmen, that kind of thing. He sold fire engines."

"You said you talked to them."

"Some of them, but...." She shook her head and sniffled.

"Had he been here before, New York?"

"A couple of times a year, I guess."

She was dressed in a drab winter coat and a wool dress that probably didn't fit any better when it was new, with her slip showing. A hat that had been stylish a few fashion cycles ago. High heels but no rubbers to get her through the slush. New matching gloves and scarf; Christmas gifts I figured.

"Any kids?"

"No. Why?"

"How long you been married?"

"Six years next June."

"How were things between you two?"

"What do you mean?"

"Look, you're paying me by the hour." I checked my watch. "You've been here twenty minutes and all you've told me is he disappeared. You said you didn't talk to all the people who might know something about him. I asked you why you waited three weeks and you didn't answer. I asked how the marriage is and you don't answer. I need information. If you want me to line up all five million people in New York and ask them if they know where--what did you say his name is?--"

"Ray. Ray Loomis."

"--ask them if they know where Ray Loomis is, I can do that, but I don't think you can afford it."

That did it. The tears flowed like wine. A very sad tomato.

When she got control of herself, she put her hanky away and said she was sorry.

"For what? Lying or crying?"

She sat up like I'd slapped her. "I haven't lied to you. I...I...." And the tears began again. I got my first aid kit out and poured her a shot and went around the desk. "Here, drink this."

She snuffled a couple of times before downing it like a pro. "I'm not lying to you," she said as she handed the glass back.

"Look, I can't work with someone who won't answer questions. Maybe you'd better find--"

"No," she insisted. "I don't want to go find someone else. I just, well, I don't like talking to strangers about private things."

I went back to my chair and looked at her a long time. Was I going to regret not throwing her out?

She wasn't a bad looker if you straightened her out some, made her quit slumping and frowning. She hadn't done her hair in a while or bothered with makeup. But a kind of fire showed through her frumpiness. A determined woman.

"Let's get a few things straight," I told her. "When I ask a question, you're supposed to answer. I don't have time to pull teeth."

She nodded, looking down.

"Okay. How was your marriage?"

"Okay."

I slapped the desk and got up.

"All right!" she said. " You don't have to get upset. It was okay. He'd flirt a little bit, but nothing serious."

"You fight about it?"

"Once."

"Did you fight about other things, money, relatives?"

"No. He made a lot of money. Every year he did better. His friends used to joke he could sell lipstick to chickens."

"You have a boy friend?"

"Of course not."

"Who'd you talk to in town about him?"

She took a list from her purse and handed it over. "I got these names from his address book."

There were maybe twenty names. "You talked to all of them?" I asked, and she shook her head no.

"I don't see any notes here. What'd they say?"

"None of them had anything to say, really. They know Ray but they said they don't know anything about where he is. They thought I was a bother."

"What's the name of the company he worked for?" She gave me the name of a company out on the island and its address. "Any life insurance?"

"Thirty thousand."

I whistled. "That's a lot."

"Like I said, he made a lot of money. Fifteen of that was from the company as a fringe benefit. He bought the other fifteen."

"Got a picture of him?"

She handed over a color snapshot of a couple on a front lawn in bright sunshine. The woman wore a light summer dress and a hat with a veil pulled up out of the way. She clutched a large bouquet before her with both hands.

"That's me and Ray right after our wedding."

I wouldn't have recognized her. Smiling, happy, having a great time. In her high heels and standing straight, she was maybe an inch taller than her husband, a red-haired guy with the kind of big, open face people like. He had a hand on her ass and was grinning like a devil. Written in ink below the picture was "RL + HL ever."

"What's your name?"

"Harriet."

I told her to give me some money for the first couple of days, walked her through my outer office, and bid her goodbye at the door.

My secretary, Ella, raised eyebrows at me. "Think you can find him?"

"I don't know. What do you think, Bright Eyes?"

"I think Madame X from White Plains is leading you on a wild goose chase."

"Oh ho ho. Could it be that you were listening at the door?"

"Oh ho ho, yourself. Could it be that you turned the intercom on for me to hear? She wouldn't give you a straight answer. She's a good actress, and a lot snazzier than she made herself up to be today."

"Tell me, All-Wise-and-Knowing-One, how do you know?"

"Her nails were perfect, that was real lace showing at the bottom of her skirt, nobody under 60 lets her hair get that bad unless they want it to, and ten to one that was Chanel No. 5 trailing her out of here. Do you guys ever notice anything but busts and butts?"

"Oh, legs now and then. Tell me, which one of us is the detective?"

"Only one of us claims to be, if that helps. You gonna look for her husband?"

"I took her money." I grabbed my hat and coat from the rack. "See you tomorrow." I think I heard, "One of the job hazards" as I was closing the door.

It was about five o'clock when I found the The Continental Equipment Company among a dozen other buildings in an industrial area near Hicksville out on Long Island. A dirty red and white wooden sign on the roof of the corrugated metal building said "Continental Fire Engines get there first. And last."

The office was closing as I walked in. A woman with the expression of having seen it all and not liked any of it was turning off the telephone switchboard and the lights. A name plate on top of the switchboard said Miss Norma Ruth Reynolds. She wasn't old but she had some miles on her, maybe as many as the chewing gum she was working over. She had a natural wiggle that would have brought sailors in from the horizon, and big round breasts that defied gravity.

"I'm looking for Ray Loomis," I said.

"Join the club," she said, ignoring me to put some papers away.

"What was the last anyone here heard from him?"

"You a cop? 'Cause if you are, you already know everything we know, and if you're not, you're bothering me."

I gave her my card and told her I'd been hired by his wife. "Maybe you'd like to talk over dinner."

"Maybe I'd like to kiss a duck's ass. I'm locking the doors. You staying in or out?"

I watched her go to her car, a ten-year-old black Chevy coupe with a Connecticut license plate. It didn't look like it could take the daily commute from Connecticut and back, and anybody who didn't want to talk about Ray as much as she didn't want to talk about him made me think she could tell me a lot about him. I decided to see where she lay her head for the night.

I let her get around the next building before taking off in my Mercury. We were the only cars on the cinder road that jigged and jogged for the next couple of minutes out to a paved road. She didn't stop but sped out into eastbound traffic like she was trying to lose me, so I pulled out into west-bound traffic. I cruised at twenty-five until I had a stack of angry drivers behind me, then hooked the wheel left and made a U-turn.

I kept at least two cars between us for the next eight miles. She pulled over into a gas station. I went by and did another U-turn about a half mile up the road. The coupe was at the pumps when I went back but she wasn't in sight. Until I got a look inside the gas station. She was on the phone.

I stopped down the road in a used car lot until she left, then fell in behind the car right behind her. With traffic thinning, it was hard to stay out of her sight, but dark was coming on quickly so I crossed my fingers and trusted my luck.

As we left the corporation limits of Hicksville, the neon lights of the Paradise Club up ahead flashed red and blue against the purple evening sky. The sign promised dining, dancing, drinks and tourist cabins, a more likely spot than the office to see the best of Norma. She turned in and drove around back. I parked out front and waited, but she didn't come back so I walked around behind the building. The Chevy was parked in front of cabin three. No lights on inside. I went to the door and placed an ear against it and I guess I forgot to keep my fingers crossed. I heard a sound behind me and knew I'd made a mistake but it was too late. My skull exploded and every light in the world blinked off.

Consciousness hurt. I tried going back down to unconsciousness. I didn't think I'd ever move my head again.

A soft voice said, "Lay still, lay still. Drink this." Water dribbled down my chin and I passed out, and then the owner of the soft voice was making me come back up. "Swallow this." She put a tablet on my tongue and the glass to my lips again. She was in some kind of uniform. A waitress taking dinner orders to the cabins.

I was outside, where I had fallen. Flakes of snow hit my face. I shivered and that made my head hurt more.

"Quit moaning, you aren't dead. I'll call the police."

"No. Don't. Be all right. Let me get up."

I had the waitress open the cabin door for me. It was empty. Norma Ruth had flown the coop. I made it to my car and checked my watch by the dash lights. Eight o'clock. It had been about six when I went to the cabin. I might have frozen to death if that waitress hadn't found me.

The next day I made it to my desk with my head in a bandage and a load of aspirin eating a hole in my stomach. I'd just settled behind my desk with a glass of rye to my lips when Ella decided to play mother. "Mr. Bruck, don't you dare drink that! It will kill you."

I drank it in one gulp before she could grab the glass. "Right now, you're the threat to my health," I told her. "Get me some coffee and let me think, will you? My head is splitting."

"I can't imagine why."

When she brought the coffee, I had to pick my head up from the desk blotter. "Our hero, hard at work," she muttered.

I muttered back, "Smart-mouth secretary, giving her boss agony when he already has a truckload."

"Maybe you'd feel better if you were out there detecting instead of in here poisoning yourself."

"And where does Madam Know-It-All suggest I get out and detect? Gimme that coffee."

"For starters, where you were when you quit last night."

I told her I didn't quit, I got bonked, and when I moved my head, it still hurt like hell. "Well," she said, "the person that did it certainly isn't in this office, so it seems to me--"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I grabbed my hat and almost blacked out from the pain when I clapped it on my head, but I didn't let on. "If anybody wants me, tell 'em I died carrying out your orders."

I think I heard, "Poor boy" as I closed the door.

Funny, I told the hallway, I could have sworn it was me who was boss.

By the time I reached the Paradise Club, my head had cleared enough for me to detect that no one was likely to be inhabiting cabin three that morning. Or ever. As in, it had burned to the ground. As in, firemen standing around with hoses dribbling water, wisps of smoke rising from the charred rubble, and an ambulance just leaving with its siren note rising to a wail.

I went to a knot of people in the parking lot.

"How'd it start," I asked. They all shook their heads. "Anyone in there," I tried. One of them indicated the ambulance going up the highway. I decided my best bet was to follow it.

It wasn't hard. A couple of miles up the road, I pulled in behind it with its siren off, moving at about forty-five miles. I knew what that meant. At the hospital, I watched the attendants push the gurney past the emergency room, down the hall , and onto an elevator. Then I watched the floor indicator go down instead of up. I took the next elevator down and found myself in the morgue. The two attendants had just moved the gurney parallel to a stainless steel dissection table, and a squat little old guy in an off-green gown was directing them to place the body on the table. When he saw me, his eyebrows went up in a question and all I could give back was a blank look. He told me, "Unless you have business here, get out."

"Brattleboro Fire Insurance. Gathering information while it's still hot." I corrected myself: "Fresh."

No response, just the eyes on me.

"The deceased." I pulled out a pad and pencil. "Appreciate it if you would help me prepare the preliminary report."

"Get out or I'll call the police," he said.

I bummed some aspirin from the pharmacy, lifted a white hospital coat from the emergency room, and found a spot in the cafeteria where I could see down the hall to the elevator doors. For the next hour or so I drank bad coffee, smoked cigarettes, and listened to the pop and sizzle of the fluorescent lights overhead. A pastime ranking just above having your eye lashes plucked out with pliers.

Finally the old guy in the off-green gown got off the elevator and headed down the hall away from me with a manila folder in his hand. He dropped it in a wire metal tray on the dutch door of an office marked Vital Statistics. I found the men's room and put on the white hospital coat.

The clerk on duty in Vital Statistics was busy filing documents down a long aisle when I stepped to the door and began scanning the folders in the metal tray. "Help you?" he called up to me.

"Ah, no. Looking for a document my nurse sent over by mistake."

He went back to what he had been doing and I picked up the next file folder and hit pay dirt. It was dated that day and labeled Coroner's Postmortem Report. Inside, the autopsy was described in medical and bureaucratic detail, but heading the first page was the only information I wanted: "Death due to asphyxia secondary to smoke inhalation. Burned beyond recognition. Approximately 33 years old. Five foot ten. 71.3 kilograms. Male"

Well, that ruled out Pneumatic Norma.

I drove back to Manhattan and stopped in the Zanzi Bar, a nice dim joint down the street from my office where I could soothe my aching eyeballs in a dark corner. I told Davey, the kid behind the bar, I needed some whiskey and quiet. With a double shot in me, I lit a Lucky and drew the smoke down to my capillaries, hoping the combination of caffeine, nicotine, aspirin and alcohol would fire up a nerve end somewhere, turn on a light. Or at least dull my headache.

I had a lot of questions, no answers. Whose corpse was cooling in the hospital? How had the fire started? Who cracked me over the head last night and why? Why had Harriet Loomis waited three weeks to start tracking down her husband? For some reason my headache was getting worse. I gave the whiskey another chance, and the next thing I knew I was waking up to the sound of Spike Jones on the juke box murdering Vaughn Monroe. Well, that was a welcome change; at least I knew who was getting it and why.

I went back to my office in time to catch Ella coming down to the sidewalk to get a newspaper. "There was something on the radio about the Loomis case," she told me. "Thought I'd see if there was anything in the late edition."

We went upstairs and opened the paper on my desk to the story on page three. The report said the fire at the Paradise Club had burned cabin three and that a man's body had been found inside. A wedding band on the corpse was engraved "RL+HL ever," and the police captain in Hicksville said there was "reason to believe the body was that of Ray Loomis, known to have been a frequent customer of the Paradise Club. The victim had suffered a head injury prior to death."

"Well," Ella said, "I guess that pretty much proves it wasn't Ray Loomis."

"What do you mean? It says right here--"

"Yes, boss, I can read, and I can also think. It says that the ring on the corpse was engraved with Mr. and Mrs. Loomis' initials. Do you believe any married guy wears his wedding ring when he's in a love nest with his sweety poo?"

"Sweety poo?"

"Sweety poo, dog poo. Don't change the subject. That wasn't Ray Loomis. Runaway husbands don't wear wedding rings."

Goddamn it. Just when I thought I had a fact pinned down that I could hang onto, she breaks it into pieces.

I was reaching for my first aid kit when something else I wanted to hang onto walked in. Norma the Pneumatic.

The manner that had told me just yesterday to go commit an unnatural act was toned down but all the body was there, and I was filling my sorry eyes when Ella snapped me back to business. "Mr. Bruck, I believe you have a client." She gave Norma the chair across the desk from me and took one herself off to the side. I didn't remember inviting her to stick around.

I got my lighter out for the cigarette Norma drew from a pack of Chesterfields. "I already have a client," I told Norma.

She crossed her legs and leaned toward me to get the light. I wasn't looking at her cigarette and almost lit her nose. "Watch what you're doing!" She buttoned another button on her blouse and took a moment to calm down. She blew out some smoke, sizing me up. "What would you say if I told you your client was a murderer?"

I tried picturing Harriet hitting Ray over the head and then cooking him. "If you have proof of that, you ought to be talking to the police."

"Proof and certainty are two different things. Are you interested or not?"

"Go on."

"For one thing, look at that newspaper story," she said, pointing to the one I'd just read.

"Yeah. So what?"

"There's a reason someone would put a ring on his finger. Those Hicksville cops are well named--they took it at face value. But the state cops will be fooled in a different way. They'll see it as a clumsy setup--the way Harriet wants it to be seen. They'll think it was somebody trying to fake Ray's death with his ring on some bum's body."

Between my headache pounding and me watching parts of her move, I couldn't think, let alone follow the convoluted reasoning. A minute before, Ella had me convinced the ring proved that the barbecued guy wasn't Ray; now it seemed Norma was telling me that's what proved it was Ray. "I give up," I said. "You think it was Ray?"

"I know it was. Don't you see? She put the ring on his finger so the cops would say, 'Oh, this can't be Ray Loomis. He wouldn't wear his wedding ring here.' That will make them and the insurance company keep looking for him."

Time out for a drink. I offered one to Norma, which she accepted. Didn't bother offering one to Ella because she doesn't drink anything stronger than mint tea. I took a long slug myself from the bottle. "Play that again, real slow," I told Norma. "Someone made it look like Ray so the cops would think it wasn't?"

With patience: "She took care to create what would look like an obviously false clue. Got that?"

"Why?"

"To throw the cops off of her trail. If Ray died in a way that she got the insurance money, that would automatically make her a hot suspect. If there's no insurance payoff, she's just a grieving wife who had been trying to find her husband."

"So why did she kill him?"

"Vengence."

"Thirty thousand dollars' worth? That's a lot of vengence."

A look passed between her and Ella that said: Guys will never understand women, will they?

"Then why did she hire me to find him?"

She laughed. "She's quite an actress. She knew where he was all the time. When Ray left her, he told her all about me. She hired you so she could show the cops and the insurance company that she went through the motions of looking for him."

"But you just said--"

"Oh, at first, she was willing to let Ray go if he'd send her money every month and disappear so she could collect the insurance after he'd been gone long enough to be declared legally dead. But I told Ray there was no sense in letting her have the whole thirty thousand. We ought to get half. When he told her that, she blew up. Ray told her she couldn't blow the whistle on us because she was already in on an illegal scheme. She went nuts, wanted to tear his eyes out. Anyhow, that happened a week ago, and I think that's when she decided to get revenge."

My head was swimming. More goddamned angles than a carload of coat hangers. Ray's wife knocks him out, slips his wedding ring on his finger, torches the cabin, and waits for the cops to say, That ain't Ray, no married man wears a wedding ring after he leaves his wife. Then she waits a few years until the law declares him legally dead and collects all the thirty thousand instead of splitting it with him and his doggy poo. I mean sweety poo. Jesus, whatever happened to plain old homicide.

"Okay. Who clubbed me over the head?"

Norma waited a beat. "Why?"

"Because if it was Harriet, trying to keep me from upsetting her scheme or something, I've got to do something about it. If it was you--"

"It was Ray. I called him from the gas station when I realized you were following me. You showed up, and, well, he didn't want anybody snooping around."

"Why are you telling me this? I can't go to the cops without implicating you in the insurance scheme. So why tell me?"

"Because, little man, Harriet will realize sometime, sooner or later, that you and I are the only ones who can put all the pieces together. And when she does, I'll need you to protect me. She'll come after us with the same viciousness as when she went after Ray. Think you can watch my back?"

Visions of her back went through my mind. Front, too. I nodded.

She got up to go. I went to the door with her. "I guess," I said, "that means we'll especially have to watch it when we're in the same room."

She put her hand on the doorknob and blew smoke in my eyes. "Oh, I don't know. When you think about it, what are the chances of her looking in a Paradise Club cabin again?"

Return to collection of Derringer Award-nominated stories by Robert L. Isles.