Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

“Send everything loose to 1012 Cramer. Homicide. A. and D. Pick up four men.” He gave the names and descriptions. Fletcher, Whitey, Oley, and Jimmy Cowlfax. Then he put Billy on the tape for immediate pickup and asked for another car to pick up Joyce Kitnik.

The call on the death of Anna had already come in, and a detail had been sent out there.

“What’s your angle?” the lieutenant asked me.

Once again, I shook my head. “No angle. It just... made me sick.”

The lieutenant grinned up at Quinn. “I’m surprised more of these boys don’t develop weak stomachs.” Quinn gave me a hard, unreadable look.

“Who killed Anna Garron?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And maybe you do know. Maybe you knew she could queer you and you got there in time to see this Sherman character dragging her across the tracks. You sapped him, saw the freight coming, left her on the tracks and dragged Sherman back and set fire to his place and claim to have dragged him out.”

Once again, the lieutenant looked at Quinn. He emptied out my pockets and put all my stuff on the lieutenant’s desk. He poked at the money with a lean finger, yellowed with nicotine, and whistled softly. “That’s enough for a garden variety murder in your league.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said dully.

“Then who did?”

I shook my head to clear it. It was hard to think clearly. Slowly I said, “Maybe Billy.”

“No,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve had him in here plenty of times. I know the kid. He’s rotten all the way through, but without the guts to kill.”

“Anna called somebody from that grocery store.”

The lieutenant smirked. “The mysterious moneyed man who was going to back the pool? I give up. Who is he and why would he knock her off?”

I began to grow excited. “Sure. Can’t you see. Whoever he is, he was afraid that Fletcher would get to Anna and make her talk. Then somebody like Cowlfax would be sent after him. Anna was his only link; if she were killed as soon as the whole plan blew up, nobody would ever be the wiser.”

The lieutenant pursed his lips. “Maybe — and maybe not. Anyway, it gives him a better motive than you, and we can assume he has more killer instinct than Billy.”

A uniformed man I didn’t know with rain on his blue shoulders came to the office door and said, “The Doc says she was alive until the train hit her. He figures it from the way the blood spurted.” He made a grimace. “A hell of a waste of a good-looking woman.”

The lieutenant put his lean fingertips together and looked up at the ceiling and said, “Too bad we can’t paste her together and use her as bait. If this man here is leveling with us, the killer drove off in a car after putting Sherman back in the shack and busting the lantern, Then, until the killer reads the paper in the morning, he can’t be sure she’s dead, although he’s almost sure — that is, if he saw the freight train getting up steam down in the yards on that track.”

Something about his use of words made me feel ill. Bait. Plaster her together. If I had not happened along Gulbie would have been pegged as the murderer...

Half to myself I said, “She looked like Kit.”

“Who’s Kit?” the lieutenant asked, frowning.

Quinn answered for me. “Catherine Robinson, the blonde who works in the D.A.’s office.”

“It might be worth a chance...” he said slowly.

I tried to object, but neither of them would pay any attention to me. I tried to tell them that Kit looked nothing like Anna Garron. The lieutenant got hold of Captain Jameson, and with his approval and his authority, after Kit had agreed by phone, the managing editor of the only morning paper was awakened and persuaded to kill the death story which had already been locked in the press.

Between them, they gave it a new look. Anna Garron had not died; she had been pulled practically from under the wheels of the locomotive; she suffered a superficial head injury and had been taken to Mercy Hospital for treatment and would be probably released early the following day. She was not yet recovered sufficiently to talk about her experience.

I was in “protective custody.”

But the front page space on the morning paper didn’t go to waste. There was another story to fill it. Replace a murder with a murder. Brock Sentano. Dead in an empty house. Gambling ring killing. Principals sought.

I walked back and forth in the small basement room at headquarters and cursed myself for having mentioned Kit’s name. This was nothing for her to be mixed up in, even as blonde bait. Sometimes the bait gets snatched off the hook while the fisherman takes time off to yawn.

It was two o’clock in the morning. The trap wouldn’t be set until the morning papers hit the street at six. Even if the cot in the corner had been the most comfortable bed in the world, I couldn’t have slept.

Quinn had dropped in to tell me the progress. Yes, Kit has agreed. They had checked with the D. A. She hadn’t wanted her family to know, had told them that it was special stenographic work. They had smuggled her into the Mercy Hospital.

“Clothes?” I asked.