building except occasionally the ring of a bucket somewhere down below as the janitor went about his mopping.
I slammed a drawer shut and paused, lighting another cigarette and thinking. I wasn’t getting anywhere this way. It would take a week to go through all this stuff. The thing to do was to sit down and try to analyze it logically. What was I looking for, anyway? Well, obviously, a “wanted” notice out on Shevlin, with the picture on it. But there were two facts about it that didn’t jibe. It would be a very old one, but still one that I had seen fairly recently. It would be an old one because Doris had been living with him for over five years and he hadn’t committed any crime in that time; and it would be one that I must have seen fairly recently because there was still the fact that I had noticed something familiar about his face that day when I had run into him up the lake. I knew I had never seen him before, so I must have seen his picture somewhere, and the most logical place to have seen it was here. Therefore, it really must have been some old notice that I had looked at not too long ago. But why? In which cabinet, and what had I been looking for at the time?
I smoked the cigarette out to the end in sharp, vicious puffs, sitting there at the desk with my chin on my hand, trying to remember, to concentrate. Impatient, and conscious of the passage of time, with all the other events of the night gnawing away at the edge of thought, I struggled for the key to it. It must have been here that I saw the picture. I was more sure of it than ever. Some memory, some faint recollection of a thing that had happened here in the office lingered teasingly just beyond my grasp. I had looked at it not too long ago, and something outside the regular routine of office had made me do it. But what? I reached out for it desperately, almost knowing it, and it ran, laughing, off the edge of memory. It had something to do with Lorraine and the filing cabinets, some remark she had made. That was it! It was a joking and rather stupid observation she had made about the picture. And then I knew what it was.
It had happened three or four months ago. Lorraine had been firing papers in the cabinets and forgotten that one of the drawers had a broken stop. When she pulled it open it flew out on the floor, spilling papers all over the office. I was there at the time and had helped her gather them up. And it was while we were bent over the disordered jumble that she had picked up a picture that had caught her attention and held it out admiringly.
“Boy, but he’s good-looking! If I ever get murdered, I hope it’s by somebody as handsome as that!”
I jumped up from the desk. Well, I thought, I know what drawer he’s in. And I know what he’s wanted for.
Fifteen
It took only a couple of minutes to find it now. With a grunt of satisfaction, I jerked it from the file and put it on the desk, and stood looking down at the picture of Lewis Farrell, alias Roger Shevlin, wanted for murder and escape.
The picture had been made a long time ago, apparently in 1940, and Lorraine had been right in saying he was a handsome man, but the identity was unmistakable. Looking at it now, I could see why I had still noticed the resemblance when I saw him that day on the lake. It was the deep-set, rather brooding eyes and the well-formed bone structure of the face, which the lines of the years and that grayish stubble hadn’t been able to hide.
I read it hurriedly. He had been tried and convicted of killing his wife in 1939. There was no information about the crime itself, or the trial, but apparently it hadn’t been first-degree murder, for he had drawn a life sentence instead of death. He began serving time in the state penitentiary in 1940, was transferred to a farm as a model prisoner in 1943, and had escaped the same year. So far, so good, I thought, and very good.
The picture stared up at me. Year after year of running, I thought, and terror, and nights