Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

The man wasn’t dead, for I could hear the intern asking him questions and the old man answering in a weak voice. I couldn’t hear what they said, but after a few moments the intern rose and spoke in a louder voice to one of the cops.

“He may have a fractured hip. Can’t tell for sure without X-rays. I don’t think anything else is broken.”

Then, under the intern’s instructions, two attendants got the old man on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance.

“I didn’t get the guy’s name,” the cop complained.

“John Lischer,” the intern said. “You can get his address later. His temporary address for a while will be City Hospital.”

By now it was twenty after one. I re-entered the Happy Hollow for a nightcap, and while I was sipping it I wrote down on an envelope I found in my pocket the three license numbers and the name John Lischer.

2

The private detective business isn’t particularly good in St. Louis. In New York State a private cop can pick up a lot of business gathering divorce evidence, because up there the only ground for divorce is adultery. But in Missouri you can get a divorce for cruelty, desertion, non-support, alcoholism, if your spouse commits a felony, impotency, if your wife is pregnant at marriage, indignities, or if the husband is a vagrant. So why hire a private cop to prove adultery?

I have to pick up nickels wherever I can find them.

By noon the next day I’d learned from the Bureau of Motor Vehicle records that license X-42-209-30 was registered to Mrs. Lawrence Powers at a Lindell address across the street from Forest Park. The address gave me a lift, because there aren’t any merely well-off people in that section. Most of them are millionaires.

I also checked the licenses of the Dodge and the Ford, learning their owners were respectively a James Talmadge on South Jefferson and a Henry Taft on Skinker Boulevard. Then I called City Hospital and asked about the condition of John Lischer.

The switchboard operator informed me it was listed as fair.

I waited another twenty-four hours before calling on Mrs. Lawrence Powers. I picked two P.M. as the best time to arrive.

The Powers’s home was a huge rose granite affair of at least fourteen rooms, surrounded by fifty feet of perfect lawn in all four directions. A colored maid came to the door.

“Mrs. Powers, please,” I said, handing the maid one of my cards reading: Bernard Calhoun, Confidential Investigations.

She let me into a small foyer, left me standing there while she went off with the card. In a few minutes she came back with a dubious expression on her face.

“Mrs. Powers is right filled up with appointments this afternoon, Mr. Calhoun. She wants to know have you got some particular business?”

I said, “Tell her it’s about an auto accident.”

The colored girl disappeared again, but returned almost immediately.

“Just follow me please, sir,” she said.

She led me through a living room about thirty feet long whose furnishings alone probably cost a year of my income, through an equally expensive dining room and onto a large sun-flooded sun porch at the side of the house. Mrs. Lawrence Powers reclined at full length in a canvas deck chair, wearing brief red shorts and a similarly-colored scarf. She wore nothing else, not even shoes, and obviously had been sun bathing when I interrupted her.

The maid left us alone and I examined Mrs. Powers at the same time she was studying me. She was the same woman I had seen at the wheel of the Buick convertible. She was about thirty, I judged, a couple of years younger than me, and she had a body which started my heart hammering the moment I saw her. Not only was it perfectly contoured, her flesh was a creamy tan so satiny in texture, I had to control an impulse to reach out and test if it were real. She was beautiful clear from the tip of her delicately-shaped little nose to the tips of her small toes. Even her feet were lovely.

But her face didn’t have any more expression than a billiard ball.

After a moment she calmly rose from her deck chair, turned her back to me and said, “Tie me up, please.” Her voice was pleasantly husky, but there was a curious flatness to it.

She had folded the scarf into a triangle and now held the two ends behind her for me to tie together. Taking them, I crossed them in the middle of her back. The touch of my knuckles against her bare flesh sent a tremor up my arms and I had an idiotic impulse to lean down and press my mouth against the smooth shoulder immediately in front of me.

Killing the impulse, I asked, “Tight enough?”

“It’ll do.”

I tied a square knot.

She turned around right where she was, which put her face an inch in front of mine and about six inches below. She was a tall woman, about five feet eight, because I stand six feet two.

Looking up at me without expression, she said in a toneless voice, “You’re a big man, Mr. Calhoun.”