Before Midnight

Hansen did so. "The deadline was February fourteenth. The answers had to be postmarked before midnight February fourteenth. There were over two million contestants, and Dahlmann had trained three hundred men and women to handle the checking and recording. When they finished they had seventy-two contestants who had identified all twenty of the women correctly. Dahlmann had more verses ready, and on March twenty-eighth he sent five of them to each of the seventy-two contestants, by airmail to those at a distance, and the answers had to be postmarked before midnight April fourth. It came out a quintuple tie. Five of them correctly identified the five new ones, and Dahlmann telephoned them and arranged for them to come to New York. They would land the first three prizes, the big three, and also two of the ten-thousand-dollar prizes. They came, and last evening he had them to dinner in a private room at the Churchill. Talbott Heery of Heery Products was there, and so were Vernon Assa and Patrick O'Garro. Dahlmann was going to give them five more verses, with a week to solve them, but a woman who lives in Los Angeles objected that she wanted to work at home and would have to take part of the week getting there, so it was arranged to stagger the deadlines for the postmarks according to how long it would take each one to get home. The meeting ended shortly before eleven o'clock, and they left and separated. Four of them, from out of town, had rooms at the Churchill. One who lives in New York, a young woman named Susan Tescher, presumably went home."

"Get on, damn it," Assa snapped.

"I'm making it as brief as possible, Vern. – -Dahlmann also presumably went home. He was a bachelor and lived alone in an apartment on Perry Street. A woman came at seven in the morning to get his breakfast, and when she got there this morning he was on the floor of the living room, dead. He was shot through the heart, from the back, and a cushion from a divan was used to muffle the sound. She ran and got the building superintendent, and the police were notified, and they came and went to work. You may need more facts about the murder when they're available--he was found only four hours ago--but you may not, because that's not what you're needed for. You're needed for something more urgent than murder."

I uncrossed my legs. Something more urgent than murder called for muscles set to go.