“Go on.”
“We watch for those quirks; we look into a man’s life and find out what his quirk is, and then we keep after him until he exhibits the quirk — and he’s in the bag.”
She nodded, but he wasn’t ready to talk about the missing detective yet.
“For instance, I knew a prize fighter in Battle Creek. Know what his quirk was? He liked to play with dolls. In a fight one night he hit a man too hard, and the man died. The boob got panicky and ran away. I looked around his house and found these dolls. The family swore they belonged to his kid sister — that was the alibi he always used, see? He was afraid people would make fun of him, and the family was afraid there was something wrong with him — you know — so they used the kid sister to cover it up.
“I saw through it when I found a doll in his closet. He wasn’t too hard to pick up. We found him in a doll store.”
“But what about Chuck?”
“I’ll get to him in a minute. My point is that there is a quirk somewhere in every one of us that makes us act differently — say when nobody is looking, or we get in a jam.”
She smiled confidently at him. “I like to look at pictures of bare-chested men.”
“See there!” He almost crowed. “That’s what I mean. If I was hunting you I’d watch the newsstands where they sell nudist magazines, or maybe keep an eye on the gymnasiums. Sooner or later you’d want to satisfy your quirk and look at a guy’s chest again. Now me...” He paused.
“Yes?” she urged him gently.
He got it out defiantly, “I make baby clothes for my kid!”
She nodded sagely. “Saves money.”
“You bet it does. Take this punk detective: he has two of them. He doesn’t lie any more than does an average man; he wouldn’t lie to me, or you, unless I put him on a tough spot and he just had to wiggle out somehow because it was too tough. I can understand that. So yesterday I warn him not to leave town and he promised me he wouldn’t. But today he’s gone. He left because his character slipped, I figure, because something happened that made unimportant the promise he made. I think he tossed the promise out the window as so much nonsense.
“Ordinarily, he’s not that kind of a man. You know that as well as I do. But just this once he slipped into his quirk and said to hell with me and promises — and he left.”
“Well,” she agreed dubiously, “it’s quite possible.”
“He’s gone,” the sergeant pointed out flatly.
“You said he had two quirks?” she reminded him.
The police officer grinned dryly. “He has. I found the second one this morning when I was searching his room. It may lead us right to him. There’s a cedar chest at the foot of his bed. It was locked, but his keys were on the floor with some other stuff — I’ll come to that in a minute. I opened the chest and found about sixty volumes of snappy poetry.”
“Snappy poetry?”
“And I do mean snappy. Not quite pornographic; there weren’t any dirty words used, only flowery terms with quite plain double-meanings. Can you picture Charles Horne collecting risque poetry?” He pronounced it “risky.”
“No. Risque stories perhaps, but not poetry.”
“That’s the quirk. We know of course that there are only two places in town that sell the stuff: Swede’s drugstore and a gasoline station out on the highway. There are plenty of other places in the state, yes. We’ll circularize the departments to watch them. And you can bet that everyone who buys a book of snappy poetry in this town from now on is going to be investigated. At least until he turns up again. He could send someone else in for it, you know.”
“Grant the point readily enough. But how are you so sure Chuck has skipped out?”
“Now there is where we have more than a quirk to work on! Incidentally, doctor, all this is confidential. I think Horne stumbled onto something — quite possibly our business down in the street yesterday afternoon.”
“He tried to question me,” Elizabeth volunteered.
“He also tried to pump the men we-brought in from Chicago. He found out one was a professor, and undoubtedly knows who the professor is and what he has been doing the last few years. He’s smart enough to tie in the professor’s background with what we were doing in the street and the force of the explosion. Which was one of the reasons why I wanted him under my thumb. If what we fear is true, we certainly can’t have him blabbing it.
“And of course, he’s the only man who can put the finger on the red-haired girl. I only half believe his yarn about the other man on the stairs below him. I don’t think he lied, there; but it might have been something he dreamed up afterwards and in the confusion of the explosion, believed he actually saw such a man.”
“There’s always the possibility he did see him.”
“Certainly. But how could this other man escape the blow of that explosion?”
“He was protected by the stairs. After it happened he could have climbed the stairs, run down the corridor, and escaped by the rear stairs. Chuck wouldn’t have heard him — he was beginning to lose his hearing by then.”
The sergeant pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered one to Dr. Saari. When he had successfully surrounded himself with a cloud of smoke he continued speaking.
“Let’s get back to when this started. Chuck, I mean. I had a hell of a night, last night. Something or somebody was waking me up every five minutes. About three o’clock this morning one of my men phoned in to say he’d woke up.”
Elizabeth frowned at him but kept silent.
He noticed the frown. “Don’t mind me, doctor. It’s my way of being sarcastic. This dumbbell telephoned me to say that he had just awakened — under the bushes of the house across the street from your place. Sure, I was having Horne watched, day and night.
“This man followed him home early in the evening, watched him mail a letter, and walk through the front door of your place. You weren’t in yet; this Mrs. Hubbard was, and Horne sat down in the living room to play cards with her. By that time it was raining rather hard so my man crossed the street and hid himself behind some thick bushes next to a house. This other house had a large bay window that jutted out over the yard, and the man could keep out of the rain by squatting down close to the house under this projection.
“He couldn’t, of course, see in the living room window where Horne and Mrs. Hubbard were playing cards, but he could see the front door and that dinky little stoop that serves your back door. He had the house covered so that Horne couldn’t get out without his knowing it, and that was all that was expected of him.”
“I think I’m ahead of you, sergeant. Chuck did get out — unobserved?”
“He did. You arrived home before midnight; Horne had already gone upstairs and gone to bed — presumably. His lights were out. My man was watching your lights — he won’t admit it but every guy’s something of a Peeping Tom — when wham! something took him across the back of the head. And out he went.”
“But isn’t it safe to assume that the people in the house across the street mistook your man for a prowler and knocked him out?”
“No. If it had been that way, they would have immediately called the station and reported him, either before or after knocking him out. Unless they were a nervy bunch they wouldn’t have touched him at all, would have simply waited for the radio car to get there before he got away. No such call was received at headquarters, so the people in that house never knew he was there.”
“Would Chuck do a thing like that?”
“Ordinarily, no. But the first quirk popped up. My man claims he didn’t betray himself to Horne but I think differently. Horne isn’t that much of a fool; he knew he was being shadowed when he visited the dog and cat hospital. I think he suddenly turned a cog in his head and decided to hell with me. Somehow or other, I still don’t know how, he got out of the house, sneaked around the block and up behind the man under the bushes.