5 Detective Novels Magazine Cover — page 109: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GHOST BREAKERS and then fallen.” “Exactly. But now the more serious difficulty. Your—uh—diagnosis of death. How sure were you?” “I was plenty sure,” I said. “I put my hand inside his shirt to find out whether his heart was beating.” “Was the skin warm or cold to the touch ?” “T don’t know. I didn’t touch his skin. He was wearing a slip-over undershirt, so I didn’t try to get my hand inside it. But I held my hand right over where his heart should have been beating and I held it there long enough to be sure.” “You don’t concede that you might have made a mistake? After all, you were startled. From his appearance and from the way he lay, you probably as- sumed he was dead. And the beating of a man’s heart, particularly a faint beat- ing, isn’t something that thumps his chest up and down. It could be missed, especially if one didn’t expect to find it.” The doorbell rang. Pollock stood up. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I phoned Zenas Wegs and waked him, too. He said he’d drop around. Please excuse me.” I groaned mentally at the thought of going over the whole story again. First, Carey, then Nelson, then Pollock, and now Wegs. UT I didn’t really mind so much, be- cause I was glad of the chance to meet Wegs. He was the head of the Psychic Research group, and although Pollock had hired me tentatively, he had “given me to understand that whether or not I got the real job—a permanent as- signment—depended on how their chair- man, Zenas Wegs, liked my work. Mr. Wegs’ opinion of me would make the difference between twenty bucks for one night’s work or a lot of twenties from now on. The Psychic Research Society, you see, wasn’t a penny-ante outfit. It had only a dozen or so members and only half that many active ones. But the members, mostly, were prominent business men who could afford to gild their hobby- horse. Wegs was an attorney; Pollock was the owner of a department store. Stan- ton Waldo was an oil millionaire who, 109 I’d heard, had been made a sucker of by several fake mystics and who had re- canted his superstitions and was now helping expose as many fakers as he could find. Those three I knew of, and one other, who wasn’t a business man. You’ve probably heard of Scollini, who rated next to Thurston in his heyday. Scollini was retired now, but he still interested himself in exposing mediums and dupli- cane their tricks, in the Houdini tradi- ion. Pollock came back with Wegs, a big, slow-moving man, who looked stupid until you caught his eyes. Pollock intro- duced us, and Wegs held out his hand. “I suppose Norman has pumped you dry, but can you stand telling it again?” I grinned. “My time is yours. You’re paying for it.” I let Pollock talk me into having a second drink before I began. The story was easier to tell this time. Practice had made me perfect. It was three o’clock by the time they got through with me. Wegs had come in his car and when he learned that I intended to go back to the house on Green Street, he dropped me off there on his way home. He asked me to report to him at his office whether or not I found anything of interest. I went through the house and the yard with a fine-tooth comb and didn’t find a thing. That struck me, before I’d fin- ished the search, as being odd in more ways than one. I mean that I had assumed, from the presence of the tramp, that tramps had known the house was empty and had used it. But certainly they would have left some traces, and there were none. It was getting light in the east by the time I finished. I went out into the alley, had a fruitless look from one end of it to the other, and then climbed over the wire fence that separated the alley from the railroad property. I walked on into the jungles. I saw a few tramps cooking their breakfast around a common fire. None of them even remotely resembled the man I had seen last night. I walked around the end of a string of reefers and there, sitting on the coupling of the last one, was Shorty. DOO (C(O) nn @) S (C(O) mM