The Tooth & the Nail — Bill S. Ballinger

n Portrait in Smoke, a collection agent specializing in missing persons falls in love with the photograph of a missing woman, and a man hunts down his wife's killer in The Tooth and the Nail.

DATE WITH MURDER
A beautiful doll arrives in New York with no money and a suitcase heavier than she is.

A kind-hearted magician pays her cab fare -- and marries her!

Her brief honeymoon is interrupted with murder.

His name was Lew; his second name is unimportant, and he had been known as Lew Austrian, Lewison Clark, and Patrick Paris. Actually, however, he's been born Luis Montana, which is Spanish, and later Americanized it to Lewis Mountain -- which means the same. His name, in itself, was peculiar in a way, because his family had been Americans for many generations and by the time he was born were not Spanish at all.

And, furthermore, he wasn't born in California, or Texas, or Arizona or New Mexico -- he was born on a farm, a good one with rolling acres of rich soil; it had been his grandfather's farm, and after his grandfather died his father owned it.

He was a magician -- a maker of miracles, a prestidigitator, an illusionist like Houdini or Thurston. He had been a good magician, but because he died too soon he never became really famous like them. However, he accomplished something that neither of these men ever attempted.

First, he avenged murder
Secondly, he committed murder.
Thirdly, he was murdered in the attempt