LITMIR.BIZ

       I Found Him Dead

      Copyright © 1947 by Coward-McCann, Inc.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      1.

      SHE sat on a bench in the reception room, genuine honey blonde and beautiful. I guessed her age at thirty-five, but she was playing it younger. The round baby-neck blouse, the glowing, artless make-up, the natural-tint nails were all too carefully right. She wore a six-carat diamond but no wedding ring. She glanced up when I opened the door and her blue eyes met mine levelly for a moment. I knew that behind that carefully cool, appraising glance there was fear.

      Without speaking, I went through to the inner office closing the door. Patsy Higgins, my secretary-assistant, was tucked between her typewriter and the monitor switchboard. She made frantic signals toward the waiting room. I got the general idea and nodded. Then Patsy closed the little information window between us and the reception room, so our visitor outside wouldn’t hear.

      I dropped my sassy new spring sailor hat with my purse on the file cabinet and glanced quickly over the mail. Patsy waited impatiently, finally thrust a new record card under my nose.

      Dawn Ferris, it said. Actress. Home address: 502 East 88th Street, Manhattan. Business address: Radio City.

      “That’s her,” Patsy babbled. Patsy’s unprogressive parents never heard of orthodontry, so her projecting front teeth resulted in a lisp when she spoke and an expression of childish surprise at all times. However, she is a good kid and, at that moment, radiated sheer ecstasy.

      “I recognized her voice, Gale. Right away. The minute she came to the window and asked to see you.”

      “She’s not our first customer,” I said with deliberate, bubble-bursting flatness.

      “But she’s Dawn Ferris, the radio actress. I listened to her in the summertime when I was on vacation from school, and Mamma still hears her every day.”

      “The Katharine Cornell of the ether!”

      “Gale!” Patsy was outraged. “In the first place, she’s Ann Preston, Woman Physician. That’s ten-thirty every morning. And she’s Laura in The Uphill Way, at three in the afternoon, except week ends. Once you hear her . . .”

      Bobby-sox stuff, I thought, listening to Patsy rave because a real live radio star had walked into the office. “Hold on to your emotions, Patsy,” I said lightly. “Skip tracers can’t afford them.”

      “But she . . . she’s in trouble.”

      Patsy was appealing personally for a friend in distress. “It had better be good,” I said. “Dragging me away from Maxine’s before my nails were dry.”

      Patsy looked approvingly at my manicure with a lacquer optimistically called Rosy Future. My long oval nails were Patsy’s special envy. She approved the color, assured me they were thoroughly dry, and reported on the morning’s phone calls.

      I was only half listening to her. It was my turn now to think of the woman in the reception room. Patsy really had something. I rarely rated visits from prominent actresses. They didn’t lose the kind of things that the Acme Investigating Bureau, G. K. Gallagher, principal, hunted down.

      That look, with fear gnawing at the edges, was still there when I opened the door again. She was gazing straight ahead, as though her thoughts—and her terrors—fastened on some invisible point in the future. When I spoke her name, Dawn Ferris rose swiftly, recovered her poise practically in mid-air. Her professional smile blotted out the fear.

      “I . . . must have been daydreaming.” Her voice was deep, modulated, resonant. “I hope Miss Gallagher hasn’t been detained. I’m due at the studio at two.”

      “I’m Gale Gallagher.”

      “Oh!”

      I was used to the flash of surprise. People expect me to be fat and fifty, the police-matron type. Dawn Ferris murmured apologies for her mistake as I led her past Patsy into my private office.

      We’d done a nice job partitioning our small office space. There was the plain, bird-cage size reception room, the utilitarian inner office, and then my office. I had spread myself on that. It was finished in three tones of brown, my favorite color, with highlights of yellow, and I think it’s becoming to me.

      Seated at my desk, the wide window overlooking Fifth Avenue behind me, I can face my clients and also see my pride and joy on the opposite wall—an original Thomas Benton landscape. The picture is a kind of quiet friend. In a crazy way, I like to think that it and I together listen to the stories—the sordidness, the heartbreak, and all the trouble poured out in that room—and still keep our perspective. It made a fine backdrop as Dawn Ferris faced me across the desk, the light from the window full upon her. She smiled, an easy, tender, but somehow desperate smile.

      She said, “I heard about you from Roy Selig, my agent. You handled some work for him.”

      “Oh, yes, I remember that case. The young actor who got discouraged and left town. Then Mr. Selig landed him a movie contract on an old screen test, and couldn’t find him. It isn’t often I get a chance to hunt people down to—give them good news.”

      “I suppose not. Roy said you were very resourceful and followed every angle.”

      “Nice of him to recommend me.”

      “But he didn’t. He merely happened to mention you. I mean, he didn’t send me here. Nobody knows I came. It mustn’t become known. Only . . . I need . . .”

      She hesitated as if she were not sure what she needed, like a patient who believes she has some dreadful disease but when face to face with the physician doubts the reality of her fears. For a moment she looked past me through the wide window to the towering buildings of Manhattan. “I want you to find a little girl.” She spoke the words flatly, as if it were a first reading at rehearsal and she were trying them on for size.

      “Miss Ferris,” I said, “this sounds like a police case. We trace persons who run out on hotel bills, flighty wives who traipse off with the milkman, husbands who duck financial responsibility; but children—lost children . . .”

      She leaned forward on the desk, her slim white hands clasped together tightly. “You don’t understand. This girl is—my daughter.”

      “Your daughter—you lost her?”

      “Miss Gallagher.” She hesitated, looking straight at me. “I . . . I gave her away,” she finished, so softly it was almost a whisper.

      She was in trouble. No amount of make-up or acting ability could hide that. But a woman, I was thinking, doesn’t give up her child, not if she can help it, not for any reason. I’m not a mother. My own mother died when I was born, so I never had that kind of love. I did have the wonderful sweeping love of my father, Patrolman James Patrick Gallagher, one of the finest men in the New York Police Department. It was he, I always say, who gave me my start in crime. But this mother love—I was still sure about it even if I didn’t know it firsthand—was something one didn’t part with easily.

      Something of my emotions must have shown in my face because Dawn Ferris said, “I suppose you can’t understand how a mother with half a heart could give away a child. But—it was a different world in 1933.”

      “Fourteen years,” I said slowly. “And only now you’ve decided to look her up?”

      “I haven’t any right, even now, because that was part of the bargain. You see . . . I gave her for adoption.”

      That was different, but it still rasped in my mind even though I

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