“You again. For Pete’s sake don’t keep coming to see me. Brandon doesn’t like it.”
I pulled up a straight-back chair and sat down.
“Remind me to cry when I have time. I’m on official business. If Brandon doesn’t like it he can go jump in the ocean.”
“What business?” Mifflin asked, pushing back his desk chair and resting his big hairy hands on the desk.
“One of the nurses attending Miss Crosby has vanished,” I said. “Brandon should be interested because this nurse is employed by Salzer.”
“Vanished ?” Mifflin repeated, his voice off-key. “What do you mean—vanished?”
I told him how I had called on Nurse Gurney, how the front-door bell had rung, how she had gone to answer it and hadn’t returned. I gave him the details about the fat woman in the empty apartment opposite, the plum stone on the escape and how simple it would have been for a strong man to have carried Nurse Gurney down the escape to the waiting car.
“Well, that’s a damned funny thing,” Mifflin said, and ran his fingers through his shock of black hair. “About a couple of years ago another of Salzer’s nurses disappeared. She was never found.”
“Did you ever look for her?”
“All right, Vic, you needn’t be that way,” he said angrily. “Of course we looked for her, but we didn’t find her. Salzer said he thought she had run away to get married. Her father wasn’t struck on her boy friend or something like that.”