Horne stood up from the typewriter, flexed his fingers and walked around the office. Now came the ticklish business. Should he mention that Channy had been to see him about a divorce? In view of the fact that his later investigation showed pretty conclusively the man had no wife? The visit had no apparent connection with his subsequent murder. On the other hand, further developments might bring just such a connection into the open — and then who would be holding the short end of the stick? Charles Horne.
He sat down again before the typewriter. The typed sheets of paper were piling up.
Inquiries are being made at the state office of registration to determine if the man was married. I personally doubt the results of this inasmuch as the man could get married in any one of the forty-eight states. This angle is mentioned here only because Channy visited this office early on the day of his death seeking information concerning divorces. I did not learn his name at the time, and did not encourage his business because I do not practice the sort of business he said he was interested in. This visit has no apparent connection with his death, unless of course a wife is found. His landlady stated he had never had a woman in the apartment, and she had never seen him in company with one in six years.
I doubt that the woman who planted the bomb in his car was his wife.
A good description of this woman has been furnished the police by an eyewitness (so to speak) who saw her just before the explosion. As you may have read in the papers, it occurred outside my office, a short distance up the street. I was in the office at the time and was cut by falling glass.
There is absolutely no clue as to how this woman fits into the case. If you’ll pardon the expression, she seems to have appeared from nowhere and afterwards vanished into nowhere. The police and myself are stumped as to motive.
There is strong indication the woman lured Channy to Wilsey Street by prearrangement. Police questioning this afternoon revealed that Channy parked his car, walked to a drugstore on the corner, and spent some twenty minutes eating ice cream while obviously awaiting someone. The druggist who waited on him was suspicious of his actions but did not converse with him. (The druggist operates a few questionable sidelines and may have believed Channy was a detective.) He reported that Channy finished his ice cream, waited impatiently for some minutes, repeatedly glanced at his wrist watch and the store clock, and finally left. He then returned to his car.
It is fair speculation to say that the woman made arrangements to meet him at the drugstore, and kept him waiting while she wired his car. Such speculation answers the how of it, but not the why.
As you may know by now, I telephoned your office this afternoon to discuss with you the matter of the particular kind of explosive used in the crime, but was told that you were away from the office due to illness. I hesitated mentioning the matter to your assistants, realizing they would not believe me if I told them what I suspect about that explosive. I am enclosing a newspaper clipping in connection with this matter.
Hoping you are back at the office soon, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Horne whipped the last sheet from the typewriter and signed it. Fishing around in a desk drawer, he found the newspaper clipping he had torn from an Indianapolis paper.
State Senator Zachary Fulton (R., 91st Dist.) who believes that gangsters might get the atomic bomb secret, said yesterday he would introduce a bill into the next legislature banning the use of the bomb in Indiana except for military purposes. The bill would have strong “teeth” in it, he indicated.
Fulton said the bill would make Indiana the first state to protect itself against private or unlawful use of the deadly secret from the hands of unscrupulous persons. He indicated that should such a weapon fall into the hands of the Chicago underworld, Indiana would, by its nearness, not be immune.
Horne clipped the piece to the letter, inserted it in an envelope, and put it in a coat pocket. Slipping in, the envelope struck a wadded bulge of paper.
The two specimens of type of his telephone number.
He spread them on the desk to examine them again. The type characters on the envelope taken from Dr. Lainey’s office were the right size of type but obviously were from a different typewriter. The phone number was 36613. On the original letter the figure 1 wasn’t whole: the upper horizontal bar was dented, as though a heavy object had been dropped into the machine’s bank of keys and had landed a glancing blow near the top of the numeral. The loop in the 6 was dirty, too, but that didn’t amount to much.
On Dr. Lainey’s machine the 6 showed up clear and clean, and the 1 was whole and complete.
Horne suddenly stood up, took a quick turn about the desk and returned to slump down into the swivel chair. He swung far back in it, braced his feet against the desk to hold him there, and clasped his knotted fingers beneath his chin. He spent an unmoving five minutes staring at the two pieces of paper, black fury piling up like storm clouds on his face.
Finally he swore long and not too softly.
His feet crashed down from the desk to the floor. Rapidly inserting the original letter into the typewriter, he pounded out: ‘In re, policy, policy, policy, lux, lamp, lamb, lousy, llllll.’ And then a long string of sixes.
The two type characters perfectly matched those that had come to him in the mysterious letter. They should. They had been written on his own machine.
He held the unsigned letter up to the ceiling light and stared through it, reading the watermark. That was recognizable, too. Of course, other people could buy the same paper, the stationery store on Main Street did a nice business, but he was willing to bet the entire amount of his next check from the insurance company that the sheet of paper had been taken from his desk, inserted in his typewriter, his phone number typed on it, and then mailed to him.
It wouldn’t be the least surprising, he mused bitterly, to find that one of the stamps from his postage box in the desk drawer had been pilfered, too.
“What in the hell,” he muttered aloud, “is going on here?” His wire tapped, his office entered, his stationery used, his own number mailed back to him. “What’s it all about?”
Why all this? Why mail him his own number? That failed to make sense; it certainly was the weakest of weak threats and it succeeded in pointing to exactly nothing. Wait a minute... It wasn’t a threat. Of course not. To have been a threat it would have to point out something, imply something might happen if he did or didn’t do such-and-so. A typed telephone number amounted to none of these.
The message did nothing but call his attention to his telephone.
Someone else knew the wire was tapped.
Someone who, quite naturally, couldn’t call him up and tell him so, someone who preferred not to get in touch with him at all, someone who wanted or was forced to stay in the background. Someone who relied on his intelligence to understand.
But who was that trusting someone?
Dr. Saari could be checked off; her surprise had been genuine and she lacked a good reason for wanting to listen to his conversations.
Likewise Sergeant Wiedenbeck. The sergeant might tap his wire in a moment of desperation if there was reason to believe information was being withheld from him, but then the case hadn’t, as yet, progressed that far. And too, the few people at the City Hall who would know of such tapping would never betray the sergeant by warning Horne.