The League of Frightened Men

Hibbard had an account with Galbraith Bowen that had been fairly active fooling with bonds, not much margin stuff, and while I more or less took Bowen in my stride, calling on all the members of the league, there was a little more chance of a hint there than with the others. Entering the office on the twentieth floor of one of the Wall Street buildings, I told myself I'd better advise Wolfe to give a boost to Bowen's contribution to the pot, no matter what the bank report said. Surely they had the rent paid, and that alone must have been beyond the dreams of avarice. It was one of those layouts, a whole floor, that give you the feeling that a girl would have to be at least a duchess to get a job there as a stenographer.

I was taken into Bowen's own room. It was as big as a dance hall, and the rugs made you want to walk around them.

Bowen sat behind a beautiful dark-brown desk with nothing on it but the Wall Street Journal and an ash tray. One of his little hands held a long fat cigarette with smoke curling up from it that smelled like a Turkish harlot – at least it smelled like what I would expect if I ever got close to one. I didn't like that guy. If I'd had my choice of pinning a murder on him or Paul Chapin, I'd have been compelled to toss a coin. 1 He thought he was being decent when he grunted at me to sit down. I can stand a real tough baby, but a bird that fancies himself for a hot mixture of John D.

Rockefeller and Lord Chesterfield, being all the time innocent of both ingredients, gives me a severe pain in the sitter. I told him what I was telling all of them, that I would like to know about the last time he had seen Andrew Hibbard, and all details.

He had to think. Finally he decided the last time had been more than a week • before Hibbard disappeared, around the I twentieth of October, at the theater. It had been a party, Hibbard with his niece and Bowen with his wife. Nothing of any significance had been said, Bowen declared, nothing with any bearing on the present situation. As he remembered it, ^_ there had been no mention of Paul›k I Chapin, probably because Bowen had J been one of the three who had hired the Bascom detectives, and Hibbard disapproved of it and didn't want to spoil the evening with an argument.

I asked him, "Hibbard had a trading account with your firm?"

He nodded. "For a long while, over ten years. It wasn't very active, mostly back and forth in bonds."