Free The Body Lovers by Mickey Spillane

question. I could hear him banging drawers, but that was all.”
    “Anybody else come in while he was here?”
    Biff thought a moment, then said, “I know where he wasn’t. All the show-biz and Broadway files are on the left there. He was back in the general news section, but they’re cross-indexed alphabetically, by occupation and a few other headings. Hell, Mike, Al Casey who does the feature crime yarns even dusted around for Mitch’s prints on the cabinets and didn’t come up with anything. I don’t know where he was poking around.”
    I didn’t pay any attention to the other old guy in the coveralls who was pushing a broom around the floor until he said, “I sure know where he was.”
    Both of us turned around slowly and looked at him. He never stopped his sweeping. My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “Where?”
    “The P-T section. He left all the damn butts squashed out on the floor and I had to scrape ’em up.”
    “Why didn’t you say something?” Biff said.
    “Nobody asked me,” he growled.
    I said, “Show me,” and Biff led me back around the floor-to-ceiling rows of files until we came to the section between P and T.
    Then all we did was stand there. There were forty separate drawers in the section, each a good four feet deep and crammed with folders. Biff said, “You know how many items are in this place?” I shook my head. “Figure at least a hundred to the drawer and each folder with at least ten photographs. You got a lot of looking to do, friend. Maybe you can suggest something.”
    “How do you get to the top drawers?”
    “There’s a stepladder down the end.”
    I waved for Biff to follow me and found the old guy emptying his sweepings into a trash can. “Did Mitch Temple have that ladder out when he was here?”
    “Yep.” He spit into the can, slid the top on and walked away.
    “I know,” Biff muttered, “nobody asked him. Now what?”
    “Half of those files are eliminated. If Al Casey has the time he might try working over the other half.”
    “If I know him, he’ll make the time,” Biff said.
    “Just do me a favor, keep me out of it,” I told him.
    Biff’s face twisted into a puzzled expression. “You mean I’m supposed to have had the idea?”
    “You’ve had them before, haven’t you?”
    “That was before.”
    “Well, you got one again.”
    I grabbed a cruising cab on Forty-second Street and had him take me back to the Hackard Building. The working crowd had cleared out an hour ago and the city was going through its momentary lull while the night closed in around it. I took the elevator up to the eighth floor and walked down the corridor to my office, my heels echoing hollowly in the empty space.
    My keys were in my hand, but I didn’t put them in the lock. Tacked to the frame was a white sheet of paper that covered one of the panes of frosted glass with the simple typewritten note, Back Later, across it.
    I slid the .45 out of the sling, thumbed the safety off and the hammer back and moved so my shadow wouldn’t fall across the door. I had had other notes stuck on my door, but this one had been written on my own brand of bonded paper in the brown typing we always used and had to come from inside the room. Only it was something neither Velda nor I would have done.
    I reached over and pulled the paper away. There was a fist-sized hole in the pane right by the lock that a glass cutter had made and the note was tacked over it so nobody would notice it and possibly report it downstairs.
    They didn’t even bother to lock up after they had left. The knob turned under my hand and I shoved the door open. I reached in, flicked the light on, then walked inside and kicked the door shut with my foot
    Somebody had been very neat about it. Thorough, but neat The place had been given a professional shakedown from one end to the other and not one thing had been missed. The desk drawers and cabinets had been emptied, but their contents were in inverted piles,