Portrait in Smoke by Ballinger Bill S

Author:Ballinger, Bill S. [Ballinger, Bill S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Pulp, Suspense
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 1950-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

5 – Part 1.

Now in telling about this, I hope I can make you see it the way I saw it. I know it’s screwy for a guy to see a picture and start chasing a gal he’s never met, particularly when he doesn’t know what the percentage will be…even if he finds her. But something kept pushing and prodding me, and all I knew was that if Krassy Almauniski was still alive, I had to find her.

All those days and weeks and months when I was running down leads, I found myself thinking of her as my gal. She became just as real to me as if I was going to meet her for a date every night. I’d looked at her picture so many times, I could trace each feature with my eyes closed. But by this time, I could hardly tell what was real and what I was making up in my own mind. I’d find myself talking to her and holding conversations, and then I’d realize I was walking on my heels and I’d try to stop it. Then later on, I’d remember some of the things she’d said to me, or what I thought she had said, and I’‘d have a hell of a time convincing myself it wasn’t real. The things I’d found out about Krassy…where she was born, and going to Mrs. Dukes’ to live, and getting engaged to Buckham, and going to school at Goodbody…all made me respect her. A gal like that didn’t have many breaks, and so she’d tried to make some for herself. Then she goes and gets herself a job with Jackson, Johnston, Fuller & Greene, and works her way up to being a big shot’s secretary and having a nice apartment in Oak Park. It proved to me she had plenty on the ball.

That was enough for my mind to work on, and when I mixed it with all the things I thought of, and made up, and how crazy I was just for a sight of her, it all became confused and the lines blurred, and changed, and overlapped. Just like I said, it was like trying to paint her picture in smoke. One minute she was real, and right here; and the next minute she was fading, and I couldn’t stop her from disappearing completely.

Believe me, it was a hell of a situation.

I still had a living to make, so I had to do some work at the Clarence Moon Collection Agency, but I begrudged every moment I wasn’t working at finding her. Even with the little work and time I put in the office, my business was growing and I was starting to make a little money. So one day when Bud Glasgow, who used to work with me at the old International Collections, got canned he came over to see me. Bud was a nice little guy who wore rimless glasses, and had worked for old man Crenshaw at International ten or twelve years.

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