The Madman Theory by Ellery Queen Page A

warehouse manager, and then to Ricks’ fellow-employees. He learned that Ricks was older than he had thought, nearer forty than thirty. His job had consisted of loading and unloading trucks, delivering orders of sand, fertiliser, rock, peat moss and the like to customers’ cars in the parking lot. He had worked cheerfully if without any great enthusiasm. His pay had been a dollar and ninety cents an hour. He had been a braggart, with a talented imagination. About a third of his talk had dealt with the big money he had won at Las Vegas or playing the horses, the remaining two thirds celebrated his triumphs on the bandstand and in the bedroom. He had often spoken of plans to organise an all-star band for the purpose of recording his songs, of which he claimed to have composed more than a hundred. Some of these, according to Ricks, had been pirated into smash hits by competitors. He had played on weekends at the Clover Club, on Morgan and J Streets, an establishment he undiscourageably urged his fellow-employees to patronize.
    On the morning of Friday, June 12, Ricks had telephoned in to report himself sick with stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. “He laid it on thick,” Delucci, the warehouse manager, said. “Steve wouldn’t just say he was sick and hang up; he had to make like he had bubonic plague mixed with a broken leg and falling hair. He sang one pitiful song, that guy did. I even felt sorry for him. I told him to go to bed, take some asprin, and come to work when he felt better. I should have known.”
    About his background Ricks had never been explicit. He had seemed to be unmarried. His previous jobs and occupations were legion. According to him, he had sold cars, tended bar, worked in a service station, picked apricots, grapes and peaches, worked in packing sheds, dealt poker at gambling clubs, run the chuck-a-luck cage at a Las Vegas resort. As a bookmaker, he claimed to have lost nine thousand dollars on one race and won ten thousand on the next. By and large the verdict of his fellow-workers was favorable: Steve Ricks had been a blow-hard and no-good, but there were also tales of sharing his lunch with a nursing mother-cat. Collins heard nothing which might have served to link the life of Ricks with Earl Genneman’s.
    Returning to headquarters, Collins took Ricks’ workboots to the laboratory, together with the samples of mud and dirt he had collected along the Copper Creek Trail. “What I want to know,” he told Otto Kalisher, the technician, “is this: did these boots walk through this dirt or step in this mud?”
    Collins asked when he could have a report, but Kalisher would make no definite commitment. “I’m up to my ears. Likely tomorrow morning. Say ten o’clock.”
    Collins had to be content, although he itched with impatience. Had Ricks followed Genneman to Persimmon Lake and beyond? Then what? Had he shot Genneman? But they seemed to have inhabited different worlds. Or had Ricks been hired to shoot Genneman? Collins shook his head. What he knew of Ricks, of his easy life, his impudence, his braggadocio, made it hard to picture him as a paid assassin. But Collins had been wrong many times in his career and he seldom trusted his intuition. If Otto Kalisher declared that Ricks had stepped in the mud of Persimmon Lake, had scuffed his boots in the dirt of Lomax Meadow, then he must alter his thinking. But there was a top tempting simplicity to the theory that Ricks had been hired to kill Earl Genneman, and then had himself been killed, perhaps to forestall blackmail.
    Returning to headquarters, Collins found Easley at his desk, receiver to his ear, checking out the last few license numbers of the list supplied by Superintendent Phelps. He finished his call and drew a line through one of the few uncancelled names on the list.
    â€œNo leads,” he told Collins. “We’re down now to about a dozen parties who seem to be off