Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 41, No. 4, October 1977

“They were all hustling,” Macauley said in a flat voice. “But that still doesn’t get us anywhere. We know why they were out on the streets late at night, but that’s all.”

“You think it’s a psycho with a thing for prostitutes, then?”

“And how will we ever find him in a city like this?”

“So what do we do, Lieutenant?”

Macauley got up heavily. “I’ll check back on the other three girls, make sure they were hookers, then put a report in the file. All we can do after that is recommend increased patrols in the park.”

Macauley spent the day doing the necessary leg-work. He wondered briefly why he was putting so much effort into a seemingly pointless case, but he could come up with no answer.

Wanda Ansley had been dead less than two months, but she was already well on her way to being forgotten. Her landlady remembered her vaguely, as did her supervisor at the library. Both agreed that she had been a fairly pretty girl, shy and not overly bright. Her parents were both dead, and she seemed to have no living relatives.

Jennifer Warren had already been well checked out by Carlisle, so Macauley drove up into the northern fringes of the city to see Linda Metcalf’s parents.

Mrs. Metcalf was glad to answer Macauley’s questions. She was too obese to do much more than sit on a sofa and talk. Macauley tried to sift some grains of real information out of her endless prattle.

Mr. Metcalf was a thin, bony man who sat silently smoking a pipe, evidently used to the fact that he would get to speak only occasionally. Any questions Macauley put to him were answered at great length by his wife.

Macauley had about concluded that his trip had been a waste of the city’s time and gas, and he was ready to shut his notebook and interrupt Mrs. Metcalf’s endless flow of words, when she said, “Then there was that social worker Linda met somewhere, what was her name?”

Before anyone had a chance to speak, she answered her own question. “Oh, yes, Miss Everett. She tried to help Linda find a job. Lord, things might have turned out entirely different if Linda had found a good honest job. Miss Everett used to get so frustrated and angry with her when she couldn’t find work.”

Macauley managed to get in, “Do you remember her first name?”

“Whose first name? Oh, the social worker! Why, I don’t know that I ever heard her first name. Linda just called her Miss Everett.”

“Could you describe her?”

“Well, she was a very good-looking young woman. She had dark hair and such a pretty, wholesome face. Just like Linda.”

“How old would you say she was?”

“In her thirties, I’d say. Mature, but still young.”

Macauley was certain that the woman had been Joanne Everett. He felt a little stupid for not making the connection earlier. He suspected all four girls of prostitution, and Joanne Everett’s speciality was counseling prostitutes and exprostitutes.

He left the Metcalfs and headed back to the downtown area, wondering if it would be worth his while to get a picture of Joanne Everett and show it to Wanda Ansley’s landlady and employer, and to the personnel in the building where Jennifer Warren had lived.

He asked himself what the point would be, and he didn’t have an answer for that question, either.

By the middle of the afternoon, Carlisle had dug up a newspaper photograph of Joanne Everett taken two years earlier. She had been a speaker at a Mayor’s Seminar on Inner City Crime, and since she was the prettiest member of the panel, her picture had been featured in the paper.

Macauley paid a return visit to Wanda Ansley’s landlady, armed this time with the picture. The woman had a dim recollection of someone resembling Joanne who had visited Wanda. At the library, though, he had better luck.

“Oh, yes, that’s Miss Everett,” the supervisor of library clerks told him. “It was on her recommendation that we hired Miss Ansley.”

A different doorman was on duty at the building where Jennifer Warren had lived. The doors were not locked during the day, but the man was there to screen visitors to the building.

When Macauley showed him the picture, he pondered for a moment, then said, “Hey, yeah, I know where I seen her. She had a fight one day with Four C.”

“Four C?” Macauley asked.

“Yeah. The Warren girl, you know, the one that got killed. She lived there then.” He tapped the picture. “This lady went up to see her one afternoon. About a half-hour later, she came back down, and the Warren gal was right on her heels, yapping away.”

“What was she saying?”

“She was telling this lady to stop playing God, that she would live her life her own way, and to stay out of her business. She was really hot.”

“How about Miss Everett?”

“That her name? She was mad, too, but in a different way. She kept her cool and went on, left Warren here yelling at her. But she sure had fire in her eyes when she left. I tell ya, it was kind of embarrassing, there was people around, you know.”

Macauley knew.