He did not find it, and left the apartment without even stopping to look once more at the swollen, purplish face and protruding tongue of a woman who would have gone to prison to protect him.
Chapter VII
In newspaper jargonese it was what is known as "crowding." It drove copy-desk men half out of their minds and made reporters more than unusually bar-conscious. The overtime chalked up by the police department in the July heat was no more staggering than the extra hours that had to be divided up between newspapermen covering the Lathrup slaying.
Another slaying a few days after the first would have been sensational enough in itself. But two days after the lifeless body of a second Eaton-Lathrup editor had been found in that editor's own apartment, the victim of a brutal strangler, a third Eaton-Lathrup editor vanished.
Allen Gerstle, the magazine group's bespectacled, white-haired cafe society exposé editor failed to appear at his desk at his usual hour on a rainy Tuesday morning and in forty-eight hours, goaded into an extraordinary burst of check-up activity by frantic telephone calls from his wife and the implications involved in such a disappearance when the Lathrup slaying was being referred to, by a few papers at least, as the crime of the century—goaded, indeed, beyond the call of duty, the police had made certain that it really was a bona fide missing persons development.
Gerstle hadn't simply gone off somewhere and gotten drunk. He wasn't given to that and with every policeman in the city on the lookout for him it is doubtful if he could have carried it off if he had been. A five-state alert had failed to turn up any trace of him. He had apparently disappeared into thin air, and while it wasn't quite as sensational a development as the Ruth Porges slaying, it added variety and spice to the headlines, and greatly increased the number of aspirin tablets—and in a few instances, tranquilizers—gulped down in haste by cops on double-duty and around-the-clock news commentators on all the major networks.
A "mysterious disappearance" following so close on the original slaying was just what the case needed—or didn't need, if the harassed brigade could have made their protests heard—to round out the pattern of violence.
To complicate everything, and give the Homicide Squad an additional headache and a feeling of bitter frustration, all this had taken place when they had been quite sure that the killer had been apprehended, and was safely in custody.
A young writer who had wanted to kill Helen Lathrup badly enough to have gone out and purchased a gun and visited the office on the very morning of the slaying! Now he would have to be released, in all probability. There was actually nothing to hold him on that would stand up in court, because Ballistics had confirmed that the gun he'd purchased had not been the murder weapon. He'd violated the Sullivan Law, of course—