The Con Man by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online

his method of typing may be—doesn’t last very long in the detective division.
    When you’ve looked at missing person report after missing person report, you begin to wish you were missing yourself. After a while, they all begin to blend together into a big mass of humanity that has formed a conspiracy to bore you to death. After a while, you don’t know who has the birthmark on her left breast or who has the tattoo on his big toe. After a while, you don’t even care. There are amusing breaks in the routine, of course, but these are few and far between. Like the husband and wife, for example, who both vanished on the same day and who later filed missing person reports for each other. Very comical. Kling grinned, picturing the husband as an Alec Guinness type of character lolling with a brunette in Brazil. He formed no mental picture of the wife. He lighted another cigarette and continued his search for someone who might possibly resemble the 87th’s floater.
    He consumed two packages of cigarettes while perusing the files. He had finished the first pack before lunch. He went out for a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, which he took back to the bureau with him, together with a fresh package of cigarettes and a warning to himself to go slow on the coffin nails. By the end of the day, he had finished the second pack, and he’d also collected a sizable pile of folders that could possibly tie in with the floater. One report looked particularly promising. Kling opened the folder again and went over the material inside it.

    There were, Kling noticed, certain inconsistencies in the report. Early in the report, for example, the girl was “last seen at” her “home address” on October 31 at 11:45 P.M. Later in the report, under REMARKS , the girl was last seen at the Scranton railroad station the next morning. Kling surmised, as he was forced to surmise, that police procedure was responsible for the foul-up. Henry Proschek was the man who’d reported his daughter missing. And he had probably last seen her in his own home on the night of October 31. Someone else, apparently, had seen her at the railroad station the next morning, had observed her carefully enough to describe what she was wearing. But this someone else was not the person filing the complaint, hence the inconsistency. There was, Kling further noticed, a question mark under the word luggage. He wondered if she had, indeed, gone baggageless or if the observer at the station had simply failed to notice any luggage.
    The report was somewhat vague when it said, “See letter in folder.” Did this mean the first letter the girl had written or the longer letter she’d promised? And which of these letters was the last contact the parents had had? The answer, obviously, was in the folder.
    Kling opened it again.
    There was only one letter in the folder. Apparently, the second longer letter had never been written. And, apparently, it was this lack of further clarifying communication that had broughtHenry Proschek to the city in search of his daughter, culminating in his phone call to the closest police station.
    Feeling somewhat like a Peeping Tom, Kling began reading Mary Louise Proschek’s letter to her parents:
    November 1st
    Dear Mom and Daddy:
    I know your not worried I was kidnapped or anything because Betty Anders happened to spy me at the station this morning and by now it is probly all over town. So I know your not worried but I suppose you are wondering why I have left and when I am coming back.
    I suppose I shouldn’t have left without an explanation, but I don’t think you would understand or improvewhat Im about to do. I have been planning on it for a long time, and it is something I have to do which is also why I have been staying on at Johnson’s because I was saving my money all these years. I now have more than $4,000 dollars, you have to hand it to me for being persistint, ha ha.
    I will write you a longer letter when everything here is settled.