Obit Delayed by Helen Nielsen

silence didn’t break. Instead, there was only a click, sudden and decisive, and then the phone went dead.
    This time Mitch said it first. “Come on, let’s get out of here!”
    There was but one reason for hanging up that phone if a woman answered. Mitch thought about it for some time after he left The Duchess, shaken and subdued, at her doorstep. One reason. Rita wasn’t supposed to answer because Rita was dead. But why telephone a dead woman? There were a couple of possible answers to that, one of which had to do with somebody spotting the lights in her apartment and getting curious. Such a party might be interesting to meet under different circumstances, but Mitch wasn’t strong for heroics. He wasn’t strong for taking this unlikely story to the police either, but with The Duchess safely out of the picture there was no one to talk him out of it.
    Rita, wherever she might be, was strictly a police job; the sooner they started looking for her, the better would be the chances of finding her. There was a big expanse of empty desert out beyond the city limits, and the desert made a wonderful accomplice in the body-disposal business—dead or alive. The army of searchers for Frank Wales could vouch for that. In this manner Mitch argued himself across town again and around to the rear of City Hall where the lights were still burning and Ernie Talbot’s big sedan was nosed against the curb. The oddity of Ernie being on the job at such an hour would have bothered him if a lot of other problems hadn’t held priority. All it meant at the moment was that the man he wanted most to see was just inside.
    There were livelier places than the Valley City police headquarters at a little past three in the morning. With nobody around to restrain him, Mitch went directly to Ernie’s office and walked in without knocking. Ernie was at his desk hanging up the phone. He looked tired—for Ernie that was normal—but not too tired to give Mitch a rousing welcome. “What’s this supposed to be—the press club?” he growled. “Don’t you ever go home?”
    Mitch could have replied in kind, but he wanted to get this job over and done with. “I saw your car outside,” he said. “I thought it was about time we had a talk.”
    It wasn’t going to be easy to sell this yarn. For a moment Ernie seemed on the verge of throwing him out, and then he sighed, slumped back in his chair, and accepted the inevitable. Somebody was always trying to tell Ernie Talbot how to do his job; one more wouldn’t make much difference.
    “It’s about the Wales case,” Mitch said. “I may as well start off by telling you that you’re after the wrong man.”
    “Sure,” Ernie said. “I always am. But do you have a better suspect?”
    “Several. You know Dave Singer, of course.”
    The cynical smile that had been playing around Ernie’s mouth came into full bloom, and Mitch knew he was in for an argument. The best way to tell his story was from the beginning. It would take quite a build-up to make the little matter of Rita’s missing corpse sound convincing. So he started where it all began—back at Pinky’s lunch counter.
    “Dave was the one who put me onto the lead I’ve been following,” he began. “That was yesterday—Monday, I mean, right after I’d been in here talking to you and Mrs. Wales. I stopped in at Pinky’s afterward, and who should breeze in but Singer acting like a regular around that counter. That alone was enough to arouse my curiosity. Pinky’s place just isn’t Dave Singer’s style.”
    “Wait a minute,” Ernie protested. “Pinky’s may not be stylish, but it’s handy. I eat there now and then myself.”
    “Let me finish. The thing that really caught my interest was the way Dave reacted when he asked for Virginia and Pinky told him that she’d been murdered. He took it hard, Ernie, Too hard. And then he started cussing out the so-and-so who killed her.”
    Ernie was listening. He didn’t want to, but he