Free Time Out of Mind by John R. Maxim Page B

policeman.”
    “ Retired, Twinkletoes., Lesko corrected him. “Full pension.”
    Dancer sat back, folding his arms, debating whether to point out to this thug that his retirement was no more than two hops ahead of the Internal Affairs Division, a depart mental trial, and possible indictment for drug trafficking and murder. But making Lesko defensive on the subject could be counterproductive. And his past transgressions might well have value in the immediate future.
    “ Your report.” He leaned forward. “Please continue, Mr. Lesko.”
    Lesko met Dancer's eyes for a long moment, considering whether to pick up where Dancer had seemed so anxious to stop him. The subject at hand was old Hiram Corbin's widow, mother of the first Jonathan T Corbin, who was reputed to have been a very impressive old dame. Lived to be about eighty. Which might not have been all that re markable, even for a Corbin, except.that Hiram's widow didn't come to all that peaceful an end either. Lesko thumbed a few pages back, leaving Dancer to chew his lip a while longer.
    He didn't really need his notes by this time. Lesko remembered. A coincidence, which had barely made an impression some two weeks earlier at the Hall of Records in Evanston, Illinois, now came back to him. Mrs. Hiram Forsythe Corbin, nee Charlotte Whitney of Baltimore, had also died in March of 1944. Another accident, it says here. As phyxiation. Died in her sleep when the flame of her gas heater somehow blew out. No autopsy. Wartime shortage of personnel at the coroner's office. No police investigation worth the name, either. Strange. Strange because the physical evidence could have been consistent with deliberate suffocation. On the other hand, it could have been consis tent with a legitimate accident or even a suicide. Still, there should have been an investigation. Particularly in view of the dates. There it was. March 19, 1944. That's just two days before March 21, 1944, when her fifty-five-year-old son had the life crushed out of him by a speeding car on Chicago's North Side. Here's old Charlotte Corbin, a woman of some standing in Chicago, whose sudden death was practically within a heartbeat of the sudden death of her son, Jonathan T Corbin the first. You'd think someone would have cared enough to wonder.
    What about her grandson, Captain Whitney Corbin? Didn't he care enough to wonder? Wait a minute. March of 1944. That's when he was conceiving a son of his own. Our own Jonathan T Corbin the second. Captain Whitney Corbin must have come home for a double funeral, following which he found consolation in the bed of young Agnes Haywood. Then he went back to England. The dates all fit. Corbin, the present Corbin, is a Christmas baby. That means conception was around March 25 or 26. So Whitney was home for at least a week. Let's just suppose that some body really was knocking off all the Corbins. How'd they miss Whitney? There were two funerals and that meant a lot of friends around. Too many. And old Charlotte's death probably had some press coverage. Maybe they couldn't get at him, maybe they didn't want to risk going for a triple, or maybe when they looked for Whitney he was shacked up someplace with Agnes. Then when he comes home in June to marry pregnant Agnes, he's got half the Air Corps with him because of this war bond thing. They can't touch him. Maybe they sit and wait for the war to end unless Hitler does them a favor in the meantime.
    “ Mr. Lesko.” Dancer tapped a gold pen, which he'd been nervously fingering, against the side of his glass.
    As Lesko lowered his notebook to the table, he watched Dancer's eyes. He watched them fall to the page he'd been reading, the page with the dates. Then Lesko slowly peeled the pages forward to those covering the activities of the living. The relief he saw in Dancer's tight little face was unmistakable.
    ‘ The subject,” he began reading, “was transferred last September from station WLAD-TV in Chicago to network