telephone office. It was on the street parallel with Springer to the south. I asked for a Miami directory and flipped through the yellow pages to detective agencies. I had nothing to go on, so I chose one at random, a man listed simply as Victor Lane, Investigations. I went into a booth and put through the call, and was lucky enough to catch him in.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Chatham?” he asked, when I’d told him my name and where I was.
“I want all the information I can get on a man named Strader, who was killed here in Galicia last November. He was from Miami. I don’t have the first name, or address, but you can pick up his trai—-”
“Hmmmmm. Wait a minute— In the newspaper files. You’re mining old ground, Mr. Chatham. I remember Strader now and he’s been sifted over pretty thoroughly.”
“I know. But I don’t have access to any of it, even the newspaper stories, and I haven’t got time to come down there and dig it up myself. And there’s always the chance they missed something. Here’s what I want you to do. Hit the newspaper morgues, and any contacts you may have at police headquarters; by five o’clock you should have a pretty good package on him—at least all the stuff that came out during the investigation. Call me here at the Magnolia Lodge motel and give it to me and we’ll see if we can find the angle we want to follow up. What are your rates?”
He told me. “Right,” I said. “I’ll mail you a check for a hundred on account right now. That all right?”
“Sure,” he said. “See you at five.”
Outside again in the sun-blasted street, I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes past one. I went around the corner and found a drugstore about half-way up the block towards Springer. It was an old place, one of the few establishments in town not air-conditioned. Above the screen door a ceiling fan like an airplane propeller seen in slow motion was drowsily warning the flies to stay out but not making an issue of it. There were some marble-topped tables with iron legs and a marble soda fountain, and at the rear another counter and an open doorway leading into the prescription department. No one was in sight; it looked as if everybody had gone up the street to see if there was any more news of the Titanic and had forgotten to come back.
There was a telephone booth about half-way back on the right. I stepped inside and called the motel. Josie said nobody had tried to reach me. It was odd, I thought; she wouldn’t have given up that easily with a hundred dollars at stake. Somebody had really given her a scare. And what about the fan I’d heard? I brushed it aside impatiently; there was no point in even wondering about it.
When I stepped out of the booth, the proprietor emerged from the prescription department and looked at me inquiringly. He appeared to be in his sixties, a slight, frail man in a white jacket, with neat gray hair parted precisely in the center, rimless glasses, and serene gray eyes. He found me a dusty packet of envelopes and dug a three-cent stamp out of a drawer in the cash register. I sat down at the fountain, wrote out Lane’s check, and addressed one of the envelopes. I ordered a coke. He stirred it and set it on the counter.
“Have you been here a long time?” I asked.
He smiled gently. “I bought the place in ‘twenty-seven.”
“Well, tell me something. Why is there so much feeling about that Langston thing? You people haven’t got the only unsolved murder in the world.”
“There are a lot of reasons,” he said. “Langston was well liked. It was brutal, cold-blooded murder, and one of them got away with it. We’re a small town here and everything is more personal; people are not just names in a headline. A lot of people are distrustful and jealous of southern Florida anyway, the big money and the flashy publicity and all that, and the man was a no-good bum from Miami.”
“How long had Langston lived here?” I asked.
“He’d only been back about six months, but he was born here.”
“I see. A home-town boy.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Maybe a kind of home-town hero, in a way. A local boy that made good down there in that big-wheeling-and-dealing crowd in south