Chapter VIII
The next unexpected development in the Lathrup case took place in broad daylight, at two o'clock in the afternoon.
What does a police officer do when he has two sensational murders and a disappearance weighing heavily on his shoulders and he sees something of a criminal nature taking place right before his eyes?
There are several things he can do. If he happens to be sitting in a police car he can exercise quick judgment and gain an advantage right at the start. He can radio a half-dozen other cars to converge upon the scene or keep at a distance and follow his lead. He can put a call directly through to headquarters and in a matter of minutes a third of the police in the city will be alerted and a big dragnet will be spread fast.
He can even whip out a gun, step right up and do what he can to put a stop to it then and there.
But if he's on foot and off-duty, and weary as hell from days and nights of double-duty it isn't always possible for him to do any of those things, except the last, with its often dangerous and opportunity-destroying complications.
It was only by a kind of miracle—what else could you call a sudden, difficult-to-explain restlessness tugging at a cop who should have been home asleep with the blinds drawn?—that Lieutenant Fenton was there at all, a half block from the Eaton-Lathrup building at so early an hour in the afternoon. And the fact that other restless cops, cops who could never quite believe they'd done enough in the line of duty, had had similar experiences in the past, did not diminish the lucky-accident strangeness of it.
It was his sixth visit to the magazine offices in three days, and it could have been postponed. But there were still a few questions he'd neglected to ask the staff, and when sleep wouldn't come he'd gotten up, brewed himself two cups of strong coffee, put on his clothes—choosing a light gray tropical worsted suit because it was an unusually hot and muggy day even for New York in July—and taken the subway to the Eaton-Lathrup building, stopping only briefly at the drugstore on the corner to buy himself a fresh pack of cigarettes.
He was about fifty or sixty feet from the building's main entrance when Timothy Hansen, Gerstle's Man Friday on the big magazine group's two cafe society, exposé magazines, emerged into the clear, bright sunlight. The young associate editor was not alone. His steps seemed almost to drag, and two heavyset men wearing light-weight summer suits just a little darker in color than the one which Fenton had donned, had fallen into step on opposite sides of him, their turned-down panamas shading features which Fenton did not like at all.