Chapter VII

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."