​​​​​​​Susan Evans Grove

Detective Nicky Holoquist returns home from a crime scene to find the missing victim in his home. 

Nick Holoquist is a down on his luck detective. During a card game in the opening scene we learn his wife has left him, he drinks too much, and his cribbage game is down the drain. Through flashbacks we learn it wasn’t out of the blue that his wife left him. She was fed up with the late night cribbage games and his unhealthy obsession with the woman who’d come into the precinct weeks earlier with a far flung story about how she was being hunted. As the card game unravels Nick gets a call from the precinct that there has been a murder. When he arrives at the scene a cop explains that the neighbors heard a shot and there is blood everywhere but there is no body. The apartment apparently belongs to the woman who claimed she was being hunted…apparently she was right.

A bleary eyed Holoquist returns home later that night to find the woman’s body in his own apartment. Suddenly he has gone from the one trying to solve the case to the one trying to prove he didn’t do it. As the story moves on his wife becomes an unlikely ally and eventually helps him prove he was set up by fellow detective and cribbage partner James Togneri. La Treque’s relatively small part as the victim lends credence to the rumors at the time that she had suffered a nervous breakdown and was being sheltered by the studio and La Rocque to whom she was married at the time.