The Body Lovers by Mickey Spillane

when she came back he was gone. Now on Broadway, people don’t just leave tips like that, so the girl remembered the incident after a little bit of persuasion. She hadn’t mentioned it before because she didn’t want the manager to know she had taken any cash on the side. The second thing she remembered was that while she was writing up the sales slip, Mitch kept looking at another customer down further in the store who was poking around a clothes rack and was preoccupied enough so that she had to ask him twice about the address before he gave it to her. She never saw either one again.”
    “What did Mitch buy?”
    “A black nylon shortie outfit. Real sexy, she said. What we figure is, he recognized the other guy and followed him out. The date on the sales slip tallies with the day he first started to go through the morgue files.”
    “Anybody else recognize the other one?”
    “No. There was one new girl who might have waited on him, but apparently he didn’t buy anything. If it was the one she thought she remembered, it was just a man who asked if that were all the colors they had in stock. She said that was it and he left. What was peculiar about it ... there was a complete color assortment of new stock that had just been put out that morning.”
    I looked at the two of them and felt my mind fingering out the bits and pieces until there was only one little piece left.
    “Complete except for one,” I said.
    Al Casey shook his head. “Every color. I even checked their stock records.”
    “Not white,” I told him.
    Both of them looked at each other and a frown began to form between Al’s eyes. “That’s right,” he said. “There wasn’t any white. But how would you know?”
    “Mitch Temple told me. That’s why he was reaching for that white handkerchief in his pocket. Not for anything else he had.”
    Hy shoved his glasses up on his forehead and stared at me hard. “I don’t get it, Mike.”
    “Velda spotted it first,” I told him. “Green for redheads, black for blondes. What color dame would look best in white?”
    After a moment Hy said, “A brunette or black-haired doll.” “Like Greta Service,” I added.

chapter 6
    There was a pattern coming out now. All it took was for that first piece to fall in place. Pat might have put his finger on it after all. Police records were spotted with psycho types who would go to any extremes to satisfy their own strange desires. They could be as devious as a snake and harder to track down. They could weave their own schemes into such fantastically intricate designs that there seemed to be no beginning nor end of the confusion. It wasn’t so much a pattern as a suggestion of one, but it was there.
    I said, “How much of this has Pat got?”
    “His own squad made the same rounds. If they got different answers that’s their tough luck.”
    “How long do you expect to sit on it?”
    “Until we get one step further,” Al told me. “Norm Harrison got back from Washington today where he was covering the latest Senate subcommittee investigations. He was going to go through all his papers to see if Mitch dropped a note to him after he couldn’t reach him by phone. There was a mail chute in Mitch’s apartment house, so it’s a possibility.”
    Hy lit his cigar and blew the match out through a cloud of smoke. “I’m going to see him tonight. He’s covering a political bash one of the U.N. members is giving for a newly admitted country. One of those splinter groups from Africa we’re supporting. You want to go along?”
    “Why me?”
    “Because you’re in this as deep as we are and damn well know it. We’re not passing up any chance of missing an angle on Mitch’s death even if we have to play along with you.”
    “Thanks, pal,” I grinned. I looked at Al Casey. “And you?”
    “Back to those files. I think I know the system Mitch used in going through them. It wasn’t alphabetical. If I can find the last folder he hit we’ll narrow it down