The Body Looks Familiar by Richard Wormser

logs from the cruisers out and around that night, and concentrate on that one car: James Rein, radio operator, Ray Page, driver.
    Rein, too, had gotten a little promotion—to the detective bureau. Third Grade Detective, no raise in salary, but a chance at the ladder of promotion. But this made sense. Rein was a damned good man. Second best stolen car recovery on the cruiser list. Rein had already passed his sergeant’s examination, was fourth in line for promotion as vacancies occurred.
    But Page? Ray Page?
    There was nothing in the typewritten log to show any irregularity. Their patrol did not run along either the side or the front of the Belmont…
    Cap Martin found a pipe in his desk, filled it, lit it. It occurred to him that he was as absolutely certain of his own sense of correctness as a machine would be. It was conceit, and he rather liked himself for it. He picked up the phone, dialed his home. “Babe, I’ll be there in about half an hour. Get the chow warm again… No, I haven’t eaten yet. This stuff you get around town, it doesn’t deserve the name of food… Put some records on, too. Hell, a man deserves a little home life.”
    He hung up, grinning, and puffed his pipe as he walked down to the Records Department. The clerk on night watch there was a civilian employee; Cap Martin was careful with him. “I want the rough logs of all the two-hundred series cruisers for the last week.”
    The clerk walked down a row of files and presently came back with the sheaf of long sheets from the cruisers’ clipboards.
    These were turned in at the end of each watch and copied by girl typists. The rough logs weren’t kept very long…
    Rein and Page’s sheet for the crucial night was missing.
    Cap Martin had shielded the logs with his body as he looked through them. Now, satisfied that the clerk did not know which car he’d been interested in, he shuffled the papers a little, handed them back. “Afraid I got them out of order.”
    “I’ll straighten them, Captain. Glad to have something to do.”
    “Good.”
    The Communications Room, and then he could go home. Communications was sorry. Deputy Chief Latson had taken their log for that night. Wasn’t that the night there was the murder, the Guild case?
    Cap Martin shrugged, and went to get his hat and coat. Jim Latson, and it didn’t surprise him. Latson was cover-up man for the politicians. Latson was the politician in the department.
    Yeah. Transferring Rein and Page was a good trick. Anxious and nervous over learning new jobs, they would not gossip around about something that had probably not been very big in the first place—in their eyes. Yeah. Jim Latson. The chief was smart. A campaign was coming up, and somebody was going to kick in big for this cover-up…
    Cap Martin considered. It was highly probable that whoever was being covered up had not committed the murder.
    Latson and his politicians were much more likely to entertain bribes from a witness than from an out-and-out murderer; such a man would be very likely to freeze up, to tell no one, both from fear and from the knowledge that an admission of murder to the politicos would cause them to bleed him white.
    But that was deduction on a purely mental basis. Let’s pin it down a little.
    Let’s picture two people, Hogan DeLisle and a gent, coming to her apartment. Gent would be full of courtesy and attention, expecting both to pay off.
    So he would take her key from her, and open her door for her, and stand aside to let her enter first—
    Or maybe not, if this were an affair of long standing. Maybe she’d open her own door, go on in and—
    Suddenly Captain Martin was grinning. Key. Of course.
    The key was the key.
    There had been no key in the girl’s handbag, none in the door, none on the floor.
    So the sandwich-buyer had carried it away with him.
    Which meant panic, not premeditation. Also, Captain Martin thought it unlikely that a man planning on murdering a girl would take her out on the town