“Not closely. She said it was lying in the gutter, hideously disfigured, face bloody, an arm sawed off—”
“She did, eh?” Henry’s voice was tense.
“She did. And naturally we sent out a red flash for the car with the number she gave us.
We told her not to touch the body,” Lacey said earnestly. “What the hell was it, Henry? When Jones and Billings came in here and said they’d picked you up, I knew—”
“It was Minnie,” Henry answered in a peculiar tone.
“Minnie?” Lacey shook his head. “Anyone we know?”
Henry took a deep breath. He stood up. “Look, Lacey,” he explained with control.
“Minnie is a dummy, one of six the department-store people contributed to Civil Defense.
Minnie was made up months since, over at Jenkins hospital by some imaginative young interns, to look like an atom-bomb casualty.”
“I thought it was something of the sort!”