In newspaper jargonese it was what is known as "crowding." It drove
copy-desk men half out of their minds and made reporters more than
unusually bar-conscious. The overtime chalked up by the police
department in the July heat was no more staggering than the extra hours
that had to be divided up between newspapermen covering the Lathrup
slaying.
Another slaying a few days after the first would have been sensational
enough in itself. But two days after the lifeless body of a second
Eaton-Lathrup editor had been found in that editor's own apartment, the
victim of a brutal strangler, a third Eaton-Lathrup editor vanished.
Allen Gerstle, the magazine group's bespectacled, white-haired cafe
society exposé editor failed to appear at his desk at his usual hour
on a rainy Tuesday morning and in forty-eight hours, goaded into an
extraordinary burst of check-up activity by frantic telephone calls
from his wife and the implications involved in such a disappearance
when the Lathrup slaying was being referred to, by a few papers at
least, as the crime of the century--goaded, indeed, beyond the call
of duty, the police had made certain that it really was a bona fide
_missing persons_ development.
Gerstle hadn't simply gone off somewhere and gotten drunk. He wasn't
given to that and with every policeman in the city on the lookout for
him it is doubtful if he could have carried it off if he had been.
A five-state alert had failed to turn up any trace of him. He had
apparently disappeared into thin air, and while it wasn't quite as
sensational a development as the Ruth Porges slaying, it added variety
and spice to the headlines, and greatly increased the number of aspirin
tablets--and in a few instances, tranquilizers--gulped down in haste by
cops on double-duty and around-the-clock news commentators on all the
major networks.
A "mysterious disappearance" following so close on the original slaying
was just what the case needed--or didn't need, if the harassed brigade
could have made their protests heard--to round out the pattern of
violence.
To complicate everything, and give the Homicide Squad an additional
headache and a feeling of bitter frustration, all this had taken place
when they had been quite sure that the killer had been apprehended, and
was safely in custody.
A young writer who had wanted to kill Helen Lathrup badly enough to
have gone out and purchased a gun and visited the office on the very
morning of the slaying! Now he would have to be released, in all
probability. There was actually nothing to hold him on that would
stand up in court, because Ballistics had confirmed that the gun he'd
purchased had not been the murder weapon. He'd violated the Sullivan
Law, of course--
The comments of Lieutenant of Detective Joseph Fenton on that
particular aspect of the case would not have been printable.
But there was nothing unprintable about the conversation of the four
men who sat now in the Eaton-Lathrup offices discussing the case. In
Macklin's office, to be precise, because Macklin was the calmest, most
unbiased and level-headed of the four and seemed to know just how
comforting a cushion a little sensible talk could provide for pent-up
or over-charged emotions.
"I still think we'll have to look for a pathological killer and will
get nowhere if we write off that probability," Eaton was saying. He
sat in a chair by the window, the sunlight bright on his wide bald
patch, the lenses of his frameless glasses and the dial of his costly
wrist-watch. He was of medium-height, medium-build and had a gray
executive look--a top-echelon executive look--although he was sincerely
trying to relax and fraternize.
"I think so too," Ellers said. "I've thought so from the first. I
was pretty sure, when they arrested Gilmore and Lieutenant Fenton
told me they'd traced the purchase of a gun to him, that they had the
right man. That's doubtful now, but I agree with you about the psycho
likelihood."
"It's very curious," Eaton said. "This whole pathological killer
possibility ... stranger and more chilling that you might suspect.
You'd understand better why I'm saying that if you'd known Helen as
well as I did. There are people insurance companies shy away from
or label very high risks. They're known as the 'accident prone.' It
may be based on nothing but superstition, but you'd have a hard time
convincing an experienced insurance-policy salesman of that.
"Some people seem to have a rare gift for making accidents happen,
of drawing down the lightning upon themselves. They become seriously
injured time and time again. And Helen ... well, you might almost say
she invited a psychopath to kill her ... just because she dwelt on
the horror of that kind of occurrence so often in her mind. The more
gruesome aspects of crime fascinated her, and she liked to read about
'ripper cases' and brutal slayings in general. A lot of us do--normal,
well-adjusted people in search of exciting reading in the mystery story
field. But I always felt, with her, it went considerably beyond that.
It was a horror which she acutely feared, a horror of the mind--"
By some kind of near-miracle the veteran ex-newspaperman wasn't even
slightly tight and his voice was steady. He was standing a few feet
from Eaton, leaning lightly against Macklin's desk and puffing on a
light-weight briar.
"I was completely sure," Timothy Hansen said. "Every time Gilmore came
to the office to talk with Miss Lathrup I felt uneasily, just looking
at him. Those burning dark eyes, and that craggy, strange face of
his. Brother! He sure fitted the picture most people probably had of
writers--back in the Victorian Age. You'd think he'd stepped right out
of the pages of _Wuthering Heights_."
Hansen was not quite an associate but a little more than an assistant
editor. He was still quite young--twenty-seven--and had been on the
staff for three years, working directly under Allen Gerstle's guidance.
Macklin had always translated that as "thumb" in the preparation of the
missing editor's cafe society exposure columns. Gerstle had a fiery
temper and could lose it easily, but Hansen seemed to have a genuine
affection for him and was taking his vanishment very much to heart.
Macklin sat behind his desk, idly running his forefinger over the
space-bar of his typewriter, back and forth lightly, as if he were
inwardly telling himself that if he should decide to write an account
of the progress which the police had made so far, he would only need to
depress the bar continuously.
"You're all making the same mistake," Macklin said. "It's one of the
oldest mistakes in the world--and the most foolish. You're taking
it for granted that there has to be something unusual, abnormal,
different, about an imaginative young writer, or an old one, for that
matter. Or a creative artist in any field. No, I'm not putting it in
just the right way. There is something different about them, or they
wouldn't be creative artists. But that difference doesn't reside in
their sanity--or lack of it. It is my contention that creative artists
are--if you wish to drag abnormality into it--almost abnormally sane."
"I'm afraid I don't get what you're driving at at all," Ellers said
quickly. "I can quote you a passage in refutation of that from no less
an authority than Aristotle."
He paused, smiling a little and nodding to himself, and Macklin found
himself wondering if he were trying to impress Eaton with his learning,
and was not otherwise interested in scoring a point in an argument
which, with a little effort, might be enlarged to include alcoholics.
It would be a completely false and unjustified enlargement, but Macklin
hadn't said enough so far to give Ellers any inkling of that.
"Here's the quote," Ellers went on. "'No great genius was ever without
some mixture of madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the
voice of common mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul.'"
"How can you dispute that?" Hansen said, nodding in instant agreement.
"All geniuses are a little mad. And by the same token, capable of
a sudden, explosive violence when a situation gets out of hand and
becomes unendurable to them."
"I couldn't disagree more violently," Macklin said.
Eaton sighed. "And I couldn't care less," he interposed. "Not right at
the moment, anyway. I wish all three of you would shut up."
"I'd like to thrash it out with Fred right now," Macklin said, staring
steadily at Ellers. "It angers me when someone makes a statement like
that--Plato, Aristotle or whomever. It doesn't matter what towering
minds they were supposed to have. They lived long before modern science
could give us just a little understanding, at least, of why human
beings behave as they do."
"All right," Eaton muttered resignedly. "Speak your piece and get it
out of your system. Otherwise we'll have no peace...."
He smiled thinly. "Sorry. No pun intended."
"I'll try to keep it brief," Macklin said. "To me the one great,
distinguishing quality of creative genius is sanity--a sanity that
illuminates every aspect of human experience. I'll quote _you_ a
passage from Emily Dickinson: 'Pardon me my sanity in an insane world.'
"Well, that makes sense to me, that sums it up. I'll tell you why.
A creative artist has superior insights into the nature of reality.
Reason, completely rational behavior--common sense on a high level, if
you want to put it in another way--is a _must_ with the creative mind,
if it isn't to be crippled or completely destroyed.
"A man of creative genius wages a terrific struggle for survival every
waking moment and even in his sleep. He is torn by emotions a hundred
times as tumultuous as those of the average person. He has all the
emotional intensity of your so-called 'mad genius', granted. But it
stops there. He's simply incapable of accepting the lunacies of society
at its most neurotic, its most hare-brained. In fact, he's incapable
of accepting or compromising with those lunacies at any point. His
basic sanity is too great."
"Just what are you trying to say, Jim?" Eaton asked.
"Simply this. He has a fifty percent chance of winning that struggle
because a man of creative genius has much more than the average
person's inner strength. Don't kid yourself. He has, or he'd go down
fast. Few people could survive the kind of battle he wages with himself
every waking hour for ten minutes at a stretch.
"Life itself, just the terrible kind of punishment that life
inflicts--illnesses, misfortunes of every kind, tragic accidents,
death--can hurt him much more than you or I can be hurt, simply because
he has the emotional sensitivity which goes with genius.
"All right. He has at least a fighting chance of winning that struggle
and contributing something important, a new insight, a new vision which
will enrich human life. But what intensifies the struggle, making it so
bad at times it's a wonder all creative artists don't go straight out
and jump off the bridge, is the often completely irrational behavior of
the people he meets.
"Don't you see? They fasten themselves on him, make impossible demands,
take advantage of his sensitivity by making him a kind of target for
all of their own frustrations and unrealistic adjustments to life--"
Macklin paused and spread his hands. "I could go on and on, but I think
I've said enough."
"I think you have," Ellers commented, wryly. "I don't agree at
all--with any part of it."
"There could be considerable truth in what Jim has said," Eaton
conceded. "But I agree with Aristotle too, in a way. You might say
that each opinion is a kind of half-truth. The trouble is, when you
try to fit the two parts together you run into more trouble. I still
say--and this really hasn't too much to do with what we've just been
talking about--that the man who killed Helen Lathrup and Ruth Porges
was probably mentally unbalanced. It has all the earmarks of that kind
of double slaying."
"I'm not convinced of that," Macklin said. "And what makes you so sure
the murderer was a man. It could have been a woman."
"I'm afraid I agree with Mr. Eaton," Hansen said.
Macklin regarded him steadily for a moment. "I don't think you do," he
said.
"What's that?" Hansen's color rose a little and he returned Macklin's
stare almost angrily.
"You've been agreeing with Mr. Eaton all along," he said. "And so has
Fred. But I've a feeling you're really on my side."
"What makes you say that? Why should I lie about it?"
Macklin turned to Eaton. "If he tells you what he really thinks and
why ... will that be all right? I mean, you won't mind his speaking
frankly?"
Eaton looked puzzled. "Why should I mind?"
"Because I don't think he has too much to go on, and neither have I. If
I told you what I suspect, from the few talks I had with Gerstle and
things he let slip out I'd have to do an awful lot of guessing. And I
think Tim's been hesitating to speak frankly for the same reason."
For the first time Macklin grinned, in his characteristic, almost
boyish way. It was the kind of grin which could have charmed a bird
down out of the trees, and it dispelled both Eaton's puzzlement and
Hansen's anger.
"Go ahead, Tim," Eaton said. "Disagree with me as much as you want to.
And if there are gaps in what you suspect, don't let it trouble you."
"There are plenty of gaps," Hansen said. "Frankly, I'm a little ashamed
of myself. But I was thinking of Mr. Gerstle, of the great danger he
may be in, and I felt it might be wise for me to pretend to go along
with the psychopathic--Oh, heck, I seem to be making it worse!"
"Not at all," Eaton said, reassuringly. "Things get around, even
when they're told to me in strict confidence. I'm not speaking
sarcastically, believe me, or actually blaming myself. Only a fool
would claim he can always keep every part of a confidence. A few stray
bits of information often slip out subconsciously."
"Well," Hansen said, a little more at his ease. "Gerstle had dug up
something pretty sensational and was going to run it, but Miss Lathrup
said no. She was really putting her foot down about it."
"I see," Eaton said. "Did Gerstle show you what he was going to
publish?"
Hansen shook his head. "I just know, in a general way, what kind of
hydrogen bomb it was. No names, nothing specific. He wouldn't show me
the signed statements he'd managed to assemble. But I do know this--it
would have made that Jelke, cafe-society, party-girl scandal of ten or
twelve years ago look like a pin-money racket."
"Was it wholly cafe society?" Eaton asked.
"No--it took in TV, and Hollywood. There were big producers involved."
"But it was a girls-for-sale racket, wasn't it?" Macklin asked, bluntly.
Hansen hesitated for an instant, then nodded.
"And that's all you know about it?" Eaton asked.
"That's all," Hansen said.
"Not much to go on," Eaton said. "But we'll have to tell the police
about it."
"Should we, sir? That's what's been worrying me. If Mr. Gerstle is in
danger, because of it, might it not be well to keep it to ourselves for
a few days longer?"
Eaton shook his head. "I don't think so. When a child's been kidnapped,
wise parents go straight to the police. It's the best, the safest way,
in the long run. And I doubt very much if anyone is going to phone
us, to say they'll release Gerstle if we promise to make him kill the
story. If Gerstle is in danger--he'll need all the police help he can
get."
"I agree with you there," Macklin said quietly.
Eaton got slowly to his feet. There was an utterly weary,
half-despairing look in his eyes. "This is all very bad," he said. "It
will do the magazines no good--although I suppose I shouldn't even be
thinking of that. I haven't the least idea why Helen wanted to keep
that story hushed up. She didn't tell me a thing about it and naturally
Gerstle wouldn't take me into his confidence without her permission. He
could have told me later--I wish to God he had--but I guess he had his
own reasons for preferring to keep silent. It may cost him his life, if
he isn't dead already."
Hansen paled visibly. "Sir, you don't think--"
"We just don't know," Eaton said. "You're pretty young, Tim. When
you're my age, you'll give up trying to soften, or hide from yourself,
just how ugly a turn life can take at times. There's nothing to be
gained by it."