Wanger started to have ants in his pants, to squirm around trying to keep the mouthpiece silenced and at the same time signal, “Trace this! Trace this!” to his superior.
The voice was almost telepathic. “Yeah, trace this, I know,” it observed dryly. “I’m getting right off, so don’t waste your time. Now, just in case there are any doubts in your minds, and you want to pass me off as a crank, the note pinned to the Moran kid’s quilt read, ‘You have a very sweet child, Mrs. Moran. I am leaving him where he will be safe until you return, as I would not want any harm to come to him for the world.’ Miss Baker couldn’t possibly know that, because you haven’t given it out yourselves. Their radio’s a Philco, he reads the Sun, I gave him scrambled eggs for his last meal, there were two moldy raincoats in the closet, and his whole cigar burned down without losing its shape, next to the chair he was last sitting in. You’d better let her go. Good-by and good luck.” Click.
The other phone on his chief’s desk was ringing at that very moment.
“A pay telephone in the Neumann Drugstore, corner of Dale and Twenty-third!”
Wanger nearly pulled the door off its hinges, left it open behind him.
Six minutes and eighteen seconds later he was panting his insides out into the face of a startled proprietor hauled out from behind the prescription counter. “Who just put in a call from that middle booth there, where the bulb is still warm?”
The proprietor shrugged with expansive helplessness. “A woman. Do I know who she was?”
Wanger’s record on Frank Moran:
Evidence:
1 note in hand-printed capitals pinned to quilt on child’s bed.
1 crayon-colored outline drawing, probably an adult imitation of a child’s handiwork.
Case Unsolved.
Part Four
Ferguson
For the portent bade me understand
Some horror was at hand.
I
The Woman
It wasn’t a well-attended exhibition, even as one-man shows go. Perhaps he hadn’t made enough of a name yet. Or perhaps he had already made too much of a name — in the wrong direction. For his work was not only to be met with here, in this gallery; you could also find it on every subway newsstand in town, nearly any day in the month, hanging diagonally downward from a little clip. For twenty-five cents you could take it home with you, and get not only the cover but a whole magazine full of reading matter behind it. And that, almost anyone in attendance at the gallery would have told you, was certainly success in the wrong direction.
But there were a few who came just the same, not so much because it was his work as because it was an art exhibition. They were the usual types who never missed an art exhibition, no matter whose, no matter where. A scattering of the dilettantes, or, as they would have preferred to be known, the cognoscenti, were drifting superciliously around, simply to have something to chatter about over their next party cocktails. A stray dealer or two was on hand, just to be on the safe side if there was any interest shown in this particular talent. A couple of second-string critics were there, because of their jobs. The exhibit would get only a half column in tomorrow’s papers. Encouragingly phrased, perhaps, but only a half column.
Then there were the two visiting ladies from Keokuk who had come to this because they were starting back home tomorrow night and it was the only one available in the time left to them and they had to take in at least one art exhibit while they were in the city. Anyway, his name was a nice American name, easy to remember and tell “the girls” about back home when they attended their next Ladies’ Thursday.
And then there was the professional art student. You could spot her in a minute just by looking at her. Here taking notes or something. The same type that sits down and copies Old Masters in the art museums. Intensely serious, a hungry look on her face, horn-rimmed glasses, lank bobbed hair under a dowdy tam-o’-shanter, oblivious of her surroundings, moving raptly from canvas to canvas, every once in a while jotting down some mystic abracadabra of her own in a cheap little ten-cent ruled notebook.
She seemed to have some inchoate critical canons of her own; she passed by still lifes, landscapes and groups with the merest of glances. It was only the portrait heads that drew her conscientious memorandums. Or perhaps that just came under the head of specialization; she was already too far advanced in her studies for fruit and sunsets.
She crept mouselike from room to room, standing back whenever somebody wanted to get a comprehensive look at one of the same subjects she had chosen. No one even looked twice at her. To begin with, the cognoscenti were so very audible that it was hard to be aware of anyone else while they were around. They saw to that.
“Auch. His pictures are photographs, I tell you! It might as well be 1900. There might as well have never been Picasso. His trees are simply trees. They don’t belong in a frame, they belong out in the woods with the other trees. What is remarkable about a tree that looks like a tree?”
“How right you are, Herbert! Doesn’t it turn your stomach?”
“Photographs!” repeated the male cognoscente belligerently, glancing around to make sure he was overheard.
“Snapshots,” contributed the female as they strode on, outraged.
One lady from Keokuk who was slightly hard of hearing asked her companion, “What’re they mad at, Grace?”
“They’re mad because you can recognize what the pictures are about,” the other one whispered informatively.
The art student sidled inconspicuously by, without pausing before the scorned trees — which should have been shriveled and sere by now, after the blast they’d received.
The cognoscenti had stopped and taken out their scalpels again, this time before a portrait.
“Isn’t that too pathetic for words? He shows the part in her hair, the very shadow cast by her lower lip. Why bother doing a picture at all? Why doesn’t he just take a living girl and stand her up there behind an empty frame? Realism!”
“Or why not just hang up a mirror and call it Portrait of the Passer-by? Naturalism! Bah!”
The art student came up in their wake and this time jotted down a note. Or rather, a pothook. The little lined blank book she was carrying bore four scribbled notations: “Black,” “blond,” “red” and “intermediate.” Under “black” was a long perpendicular column of pothooks. Under “blond” there were only two. Under the other two classifications none at all, so far. She was evidently spending her afternoon taking a census of the types of hair coloration to be found in a cross section of this particular exhibitor! Strange are the ways of art students.
The gallery was closing for the afternoon now. The stray dealer or two had gone long ago; there was nothing here for them. Good enough stuff, but why load up on it? The few remaining bitter-enders came straggling out. The cognoscenti emerged, still loudly complaining. “What a waste of time! I told you we should have gone to see that new foreign film instead.” It was noticeable, however, that they had remained as long as there was anyone at all around to hear their pontifications.