Who killed Lewis B. Allyn?
Nazis? Corporate spies?
A lone figure emerges, baggage-less, from an unremarkable black sedan, his face hidden in the shadows. He walks briskly up the steps toward the Boston & Albany moored at the Westfield train station, slipping into some gloomy corner on the platform. A moment passes before the whistle sounds.
11:47 p.m.
The man slips into the lamplight briefly and then onto the train, sliding the door closed behind him. The sedan streaks out of the parking area and speeds off into obscurity. The train gives a final whistle and then heaves itself from the platform, wheezing and grumbling into motion, clickety-clack, heading west toward Pittsfield, Albany, and New York.
Just a few miles away, a local celebrity has been murdered in his living room.
No one is yet aware that an industrial spy could be on the loose, escaping with a lucrative recipe. No one would believe in a Nazi agent fleeing Westfield with a secret formula that may turn out to be a game-changer in the war. No one has cause to suspect the lone traveler is a local prankster whose gag has gone wrong, or a mob thug calmly vamoosing the scene of his latest hit.
To the railway men, at a glimpse, he is just an ordinary passenger, already slipping from memory...
The mistress? The jealous wife?
Still smiling to herself, Dot Collins twists that magnificent sparkler of a ring, dreaming of the days ahead. Giving her notice at the paper. Saying good-bye to her friends from the laboratory. Packing her suitcase. Hopping the train to New York City and getting lost in a crowd at last. And someday, when the time is right, meeting and marrying the right man. But for now, it’s just independence she wants—a future of her own choosing.
Tonight, she feels sure, she has taken her first steps toward that future just by allowing herself to imagine it. Her escape.
The thought makes her breath catch. She suppresses a giggle. They’ll never believe it when she’s finally gone for good.
Dot can hardly believe it herself. It just goes to show, you never know how you’ll respond to a challenge. She has always been more than just red curls and a bosom...
A wailing siren interrupts.
She had found a solution. And it was all happening now, right now. Soon she would be on her way, and no one was gonna stop her.
The mob? A local businessman?
For five days, the New York Times grasped at this slippery story. The hunt was on, it cried out, for a black sedan linked to the killing. A ballistics expert was hard at work, it declared, scanning the bullets to match them to the murder weapon. Both of these assertions were true. The local police—and now the Hampden County district attorney and the state police under him—were working the case around the clock.
The broadsheets also reported on a prime suspect straight out of a B movie: the "foreign agent." Some even pointed out that elements of the slaying matched those of a mob hit. There seemed to be little evidence of mafia involvement, however, and certainly no clear motive. Why would the Cosa Nostra have wanted to send little old Professor Allyn to sleep with the fishes?
Other headlines reported suspicions that the killer was seeking a secret formula'developed by the once-famous chemist. Here, at last, was a motive! But what was this formula, and more important, who wanted it? Agents of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich? Corporate spies looking to pilfer—or quash—some new technology?
The infinite possibilities bobbed in a whirlpool of questions about the Allyn murder and would circle the drain for decades to come.