Murder by the Book

She stayed haughty. "Last September? They've waited long enough to inquire."

"They've been trying to find him."

"If we typed it a page couldn't have got lost. It would have been fastened into one of our folders."

The boys had told me of running into that one. I nodded. "Yes, but editors don't like to read fastened scripts. They take the folders off. If you typed it for him, you can bet he would want you to help us find him. Give the guy a break."

She had remained standing. "All right," she said, "I'll look it up as soon as I get something straightened out." She left me.

I waited for her twenty minutes, and then another ten while she fussed through a card file. The answer was no. They had never done any work for a Baird Archer. I took an elevator up to the eighteenth floor, to the office of the Raphael Typing Service.

Those first two calls took me nearly an hour, and at that rate you can't cover much ground in a day. They were all kinds and sizes, from a big outfit in the Paramount Building

called Metropolitan Stenographers, Inc., down to two girls with their office in their room-bath-and-kitchenette in the upper Forties. For lunch I had canneloni at Sardi's, on John R. Wellman, and then resumed.

It was warm for February, but it was trying to make up its mind whether to go in for a steady drizzle, and around three o'clock, as I dodged through the sidewalk traffic to enter a building on Broadway in the Fifties, I was wishing I had worn my raincoat instead of my brown topcoat. My quarry in that building was apparently one of the small ones, since its name on my list was just the name of a woman, Rachel Abrams. The building was an old one, nothing fancy, with Caroline, women's dresses, on the left of the entrance, and the Midtown Eatery on the right. After stopping in the lobby to remove my topcoat and give it a shake, and consulting the building directory, I took the elevator to the seventh floor. The elevator man told me to go left for 728.

I went left, rounded a corner to the right, continued, turned right again, andin ten paces was at Room 728. The door was wide open, and I stuck my head in to verify the number, 728, and to see the inscription:

RACHEL ABRAMS

Stenography and Typing