5 Detective Novels Magazine — page 32: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

32 awake all night?” she wanted to know, handing over a memo that read: Call Ridgewood 8-009, urgent. “Some woman. Should I have underlined urgent?” “Not unless she did,” I decided. There were eight desks in the big room, two chairs at each desk, eight filing cabinets, two hatracks in corners, and apple-green walls, standard for the Clay Building. I used the pay phone in a booth, the only spot of privacy in the multiple office. Presently, a strange woman answered, and I said: “Mr. Ronald B. Darling, pri- vate investigations, calling from New York. Yes?” She talked. Twice, I tried questions. Twice, she overrode the questions. Then, click. “Should I plane over, Mrs. Macon, or tunnel through rock?” I said into the dead wire, and hung up. As I started out, Alice Rose said: “I just sit here and work all day and you have fun. What’s it this time—hat pins in the spinal cord below the occidental Bulge?” “One pin does the trick and the word is occipital, darling.” “That’s my line—darling,” and she capitalized the “d”. “Guns?” she prod- ded. “Blackjacks?” “Don’t get nosy,” I said lightly, “be- cause that’s my line and it pays the rent. You rent eight desks to eight suckers at fifty bucks per, per month. Every- thing else you supply is an extra. You got a racket. I sweat for my dimes.” Ve THE toll booth on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, the guard took my fifty cents and grunted: “Thanks.” “Thank you,” I said politely. He grunted, “There’s’ a car behind yours, bud,” and grunted again. He was in a grunt-rut... After a while I found 14 Airline Drive, Ridgewood, New Jersey. A long, low, multi-gabled house flanked by yews, flame azaleas, grass, and young pin oaks. Whistling, I strolled up the curved flagstone walk. On the : FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE open porch, I started to poke the push button, but the door opened. A middle-aged woman, wearing some kind of a white uniform, inquired, “Dar- ling?” I nodded, and she let me in. She said: “Along the central hall, through the arch on the right, and take your hat off.” I did. It was a rectangular room large enough to hold four pool tables and so expensively over-furnished that I simply held my breath. Mrs. Lester Joseph Macon sat side- ways at an escritoire. In her middle fifties. Minus makeup. Wearing pin curlers in gray hair. Her yellow house- coat had purple dragons chasing nude girls around the hem. Black, snapping eyes studied me. “When Judge Harg recommended you,” she said, “he didn’t mention a tall, young man with crew-cut black hair, shaved face, soft shirt, white-dotted blue bow tie, grey flannel suit. He said you were tough and capable, not a tail- or’s dummy.” “And I wear blue socks,” I murmured. “Judge Harg did mention your bad manners,” she said tartly, squaring around at the escritoire. “Young man, I’m a business woman of few words. I expect action. What do you charge for a job?” “That depends entirely on what you want done?” A forefinger tapped a knobby knee under the housecoat. “Pay attention, young man. My son is having an affair with a woman I never met and whom I don’t, like a Kitty Watrous. I suspect she’s camped at my summer cottage. That’s Crystal Lake, two miles off Route 23, east side of the lake, fifth house in and the only place with a four-car gar- age. You should be able to find it without radar, young man. You’re to break up the affair and bring Joe home where he belongs.” — Whipping around, she picked up a gold fountain pen and scratched on a check. “Take this, young man.” MICLOO EO S