Free Date for Murder by Louis Trimble

before he came to the one that held any. When he got that—it was all over.”
    Idell shuddered a little at the picture Mark’s words brought before her. The Chief smiled sympathetically at her. “You can go with Bayless, now, Miss Manders, if you will.”
    After she and Bayless left the room, the Chief closed the door carefully and walked to the windows. He raised the shades, letting the morning light flood into the semi-gloom of the room. “Better,” he grunted.
    Mark looked around. At first there seemed to have been little disturbance, but a closer inspection showed differently. The bed had been disturbed but little; it was across the room by the dresser and in the closet that signs of a search showed most clearly. Mark went to the dresser and drew open the drawers. Inside, Link’s clothing was balled and bunched as if someone had run through it swiftly. The Chief followed Mark, grunting when he saw the condition of the drawers and the angle at which the dresser scarf lay.
    “This guy had something somebody wanted, huh?” he surmised.
    “I guess,” Mark said. He opened the closet door. The Chief whistled in surprise. The closet looked as if a whirlwind had struck it, a particularly vicious, compact whirlwind. The clothing lay on the floor—the linings torn out of suits and coats, the inner soles removed from shoes, the heels taken off them, and even the sweatbands ripped from three lightweight Panama hats. The suitcases and the single trunk which the closet held were as badly treated.
    “That,” Mark said, “is what is known as chaos.”
    The Chief nodded. “There ought to be prints laying around after this. I wonder if whoever it was got what they was after?”
    “Evidently,” Mark said. He led the way back to the bed. “The mattress isn’t ripped up. It would have been had the search gone on any more.”
    “Or unless they got interrupted,” the Chief suggested.
    “There’s that,” Mark admitted.
    “The floor ain’t scratched,” the Chief mused. “He was carried out, not dragged.”
    “Out into the hall, down the stairs and out the back?” Mark asked. “It was a pretty big risk.”
    The Chief looked around for a place to spit, located the wastebasket by the dresser and peered in. It was empty. He made the metal side ring with a mass of brown tobacco juice. “He didn’t fly out and tie himself up,” he said.
    There was a rap on the door, and the Chief opened it carefully. Bayless stood in the corridor, sweat streaming from his heavy red face.
    “They’re all downstairs,” he reported. “All but young Manders. He’s dead to the world. His sister says he passed out last night.”
    “I can believe it,” Mark said. “He was well on his way when I saw him.”
    The Chief shifted his tobacco from one cheek to the other. “They all asleep when you got to ‘em?”
    Bayless said, “All but the Farman boy,” in a suspicious-sounding voice. “He had his clothes on already.”
    “How was his hair?” Mark asked. “I mean was it wet like he had been swimming?”
    Bayless looked as if he wanted to remember but wasn’t having much luck. “It’s black and he wears it plastered on his head,” he said. “But I couldn’t say if it was wet or just held down with grease.”
    The Chief scratched his round cheek with a stubby finger. “Nobody else was awake, huh? You got ‘em all out of bed.”
    “All but Mr. Manders,” Bayless said. “He’s right at the end of the hall. I was trying to wake him when the Queen came up and did it herself.” He grinned half-heartedly at the recollection. “She said I was making too much noise and that he was a sick man. She wouldn’t let me wake up young Manders, neither.”
    “She’s a busybody if I ever saw one when it comes to this family,” the Chief grunted. “Okay; fix the library up. I’m going to start asking questions.”
    Bayless’ footsteps had hardly began to move down the stairs when a pair of lighter, more swiftly moving ones were