A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Night I Died

The point about me is: that I should stay on the right side of the fence all those years, and then when I did go over, go over heart and soul like I did — all in the space of one night. In one hour, you might say.

Most guys build up to a thing like that gradually. Not me; why, I had never so much as lifted a check, dropped a slug into a telephone-slot before that. I was the kind of a droop who, if I was short-changed, I’d shut up about it, but if I got too much change back I’d stand there and call their attention to it.

And as for raising my hand against a fellow-mortal — you had the wrong party, not Ben Cook. Yet there must have been a wide streak of it in me all along, just waiting to come out. Maybe all the worse for being held down all those years without a valve, like steam in a boiler.

Here I’d been grubbing away for ten or twelve years in Kay City, at thirty per, trying on suits (on other guys) in the men’s clothing section of a department store. Saying “sir” to every mug that came in and smoothing their lapels and patting them on the back. I go home one night that kind of a guy, honest, unambitious, wishy-washy, without even a parking-ticket on my conscience, and five minutes later I’ve got a murder on my hands.

I think it was probably Thelma more than anyone else who brought this latent streak in me to the surface; it might have stayed hidden if she hadn’t been the kind of woman she was. You’ll see, as you read on, that she had plenty of reason later to regret doing so. Like conjuring up the devil and then not being able to get rid of him.

Thelma was my common-law wife. My first wife, Florence, had given me up as hopeless five years before and gone to England. We parted friends. I remember her saying she liked me well enough, I had possibilities, but it would take too long to work them out; she wanted her husband readymade. She notified me later she’d got a divorce and was marrying some big distillery guy over there.

I could have married Thelma after that, but somehow we never got around to it, just stayed common-law wife and husband, which is as good as anything. You know how opposites attract, and I guess that’s how I happened to hook up with Thelma; she was just my opposite in every way. Ambitious, hard as nails, no compunctions about getting what she wanted. Her favorite saying was always, “If you can get away with it, it’s worth doing!”

For instance, when I told her I needed a new suit and couldn’t afford one, she’d say: “Well, you work in a men’s clothing department! Swipe one out of the stock — they’ll never know the difference.” I used to think she was joking.

After she egged me on to tackle our manager for a raise, and I got turned down pretty, she said: “I can see where you’ll still be hauling in thirty-a-week twenty years from now, when they have to wheel you to work in a chair! What about me? Where do I come in if a hit-and-run driver spreads you all over the street tomorrow? Why don’t you take out some insurance at least?”

So I did. First I was going to take out just a five-thousand-dollar policy, which was pretty steep for me at that, but Thelma spoke up. “Why not make it worth our while? Don’t worry about the premiums, Cookie. I’ve got a little something put away from before I knew you. I’ll start you off. I’ll pay the first premium for you myself — after that, we’ll see.” So I went for ten thousand worth, and made Thelma the beneficiary, of course, as I didn’t have any folks or anyone else to look after.

That had been two years before; she had been paying the premiums for me like a lamb ever since. All this made me realize that under her hard surface she was really very bighearted, and this one night that I started home a little earlier than usual I was warbling like a canary and full of pleasant thoughts about “my little woman,” as I liked to call her, and wondering what we were going to have for dinner.

Six was my usual quitting-time at the store, but we had just got through taking inventory the night before, and I had been staying overtime without pay all week, so the manager let me off an hour sooner. I thought it would be nice to surprise Thelma, because I knew she didn’t expect me for another two or three hours yet, thinking we would still be taking inventory like other nights. So I didn’t phone ahead I was coming.

Sherrill, who had the necktie counter across the aisle, tried to wangle me into a glass of suds. If I’d given in, it would have used up my hour’s leeway. I would have got home at my regular time — and it also would have been my last glass of suds on this earth. I didn’t know that; the reason I refused was I decided to spend my change instead on a box of candy for her. Sweets to the sweet!

Our bungalow was the last one out on Copeland Drive. The asphalt stopped a block below. The woods began on the other side of us, just young trees like toothpicks. I had to get off at the drug store two blocks down anyway, because the buses turned around and started back there. So I bought a pound of caramels tied with a blue ribbon, and I headed up to the house.

I quit whistling when I turned up the walk, so she wouldn’t know I was back yet and I could sneak up behind her maybe and put my hands over her eyes. I was just full of sunshine, I was! Then when I already had my key out, I changed my mind and tiptoed around the house to the back. She’d probably be in the kitchen anyway at this hour, so I’d walk in there and surprise her.

She was. I heard her talking in a low voice as I pulled the screen door noiselessly back. The wooden door behind that was open, and there was a passageway with the kitchen opening off to one side of it.

I heard a man’s voice answer hers as I eased the screen closed behind me without letting it bang. That disappointed me for a minute because I knew she must have some deliveryman or collector in there with her, and I wasn’t going to put my hands over her eyes in front of some grocery clerk or gas inspector and make a sap out of myself.

But I hated to give the harmless little plan up, so I decided to wait out there for a minute until he left, and motion him on his way out not to give me away. Then go ahead in and surprise her. A case of arrested development, I was!

She was saying, but very quietly, “No, I’m not going to give you the whole thing now. You’ve got seventy-five, you get the rest afterwards—”

I whistled silently and got worried. “Whew! She must have let our grocery bills ride for over a year, to amount to that much!” Then I decided she must be talking in cents, not dollars.

“If I give you the whole two hundred fifty before time, how do I know you won’t haul your freight out of town — and not do it? What comeback would I have? We’re not using I.O.U.’s in this, buddy, don’t forget!”

She sounded a lot tougher than I’d ever heard her before, although she’d never exactly been a shrinking violet. But it was his next remark that nearly dropped me where I was. “All right, have it your way. Splash me out another cuppa java—” And a chair hitched forward. Why, that was no delivery-man; he was sitting down in there and she was feeding him!

“Better inhale it fast,” she said crisply, “he’ll be showing up in another half-hour.”

My first thought, of course, was what anyone else’s would have been — that it was a two-time act. But when I craned my neck cautiously around the door just far enough to get the back of his head in line with my eyes, I saw that was out, too. Whatever he was and whatever he was doing there in my house, he was no back-door John!

He had a three days’ growth of beard on his jawline and his hair ended in little feathers all over his neck, and if you’d have whistled at his clothes they’d have probably walked off him of their own accord and headed your way.

He looked like a stumblebum or derelict she’d hauled in out of the woods.

The next words out of her mouth, lightning fizzled around me and seemed to split my brain three ways. “Better do it right here in the house. I can’t get him to go out there in the woods — he’s scared of his own shadow, and you might miss him in the dark. Keep your eye on this kitchen-shade from outside. It’ll be up until eight thirty.

“When you see it go down to the bottom, that means I’m leaving the house for the movies. I’ll fix this back door so you can get in when I leave, too. Now, I’ve shown you where the phone is — right through that long hall out there. Wait’ll you hear it ring before you do anything; that’ll be me phoning him from the picture-house, pretending I’ve forgotten something, and that’ll place him for you. You’ll know just where to find him, won’t run into him unexpectedly on your way in.

“His back’ll be toward you and I’ll be distracting his attention over the wire. Make sure he’s not still ticking when you light out, so don’t spare the trigger; no one’ll hear it way out here at that hour!

“I’ll hear the shot over the wire and I’ll hang up, but I’m sitting the rest of the show out. I wanna lose a handkerchief or something at the end and turn the theater inside out, to place myself. That gives you two hours to fade too, so I don’t start the screaming act till I get back at eleven and find him—”

He said, “Where does the other hundred-seventy-five come in? Y’ don’t expect me to show up here afterwards and colleck, do ya?”

I heard her laugh, kind of. “It’s gonna be in the one place where you can’t get at it without doing what you’re supposed to! That way I’m going to be sure you don’t welsh on me! It’s going to be right in his own inside coat-pocket, without his knowing it! I’m going to slip it in when I kiss him good-bye, and I know him, he’ll never find it. Just reach in when you’re finished with him, and you’ll find it there waiting for you!”

“Lady,” he whispered. “I gotta hand it to you!”

“Get going,” she commanded.

I think it was that last part of it that made me see red and go off my nut, that business about slipping the blood-money right into my own pocket while I was still alive, for him to collect after I was dead. Because what I did right then certainly wasn’t in character. Ben Cook, the Ben Cook of up until that minute, would have turned and sneaked out of that house unless his knees had given way first and run for his life and never showed up near there again. But I wasn’t Ben Cook any more — something seemed to blow up inside me. I heard the package of candy hit the floor next to me with a smack, and then I was lurching in on them, bellowing like a goaded bull. Just rumbling sounds, more than words. “You murderess! Your — own — husband!” No, it certainly wasn’t me; it was a man that neither of us had known existed until now. Evil rampant, a kind of living nemesis sprung from their own fetid plotting, like a jack-in-the-box.

There was a red-and-white checked tablecloth on the kitchen table. There was a cup and saucer on it, and a gun. I didn’t see any of those things. The whole room for that matter was red, like an undeveloped photographic print.

The gun came clear, stood out, only after his arm had clamped down on it like an indicator pointing it out. My own did the same thing instinctively, but a second too late; my hand came down on his wrist instead of the gun. The crash of a pair of toppled chairs in the background was inconsequential, as was her belated shriek of baffled fury: “Give it to him now, you! Give it to him quick — or we’re sunk!” Whatever else there was in that hell-howl, there wasn’t fear. Any other woman would have fainted dead away; you don’t know Thelma.

The cry, though, was like cause and effect; he didn’t need to be told. The gun was already being lifted bodily between us, by the two pressures counteracting each other — mine pushing it away from me, his pushing it toward me. Neither of us trying to push it up, but up it went in an arc, first way over our heads, then down again to body-level once more. Outside of our flailing left arms, which had each fastened on the other’s, I don’t recall that our legs or the rest of our bodies moved much at all.

She could have turned the scales by attacking me herself with something, from behind. It was the one thing she didn’t do — why, I don’t know. Subconsciously unwilling to the last, maybe, to raise a hand to me in person.

After about thirty seconds, not more — but it seemed like an age — it finally went off. Just past my own face, over my shoulder, and out somewhere into the passageway behind us. Then it started turning slowly between us, desperately slowly, by quarter-inches, and the second time it went off it had already traveled a quarter of the compass around. It hit the side-wall, that time, broadside to the two of us. It went on past that point, turning laboriously in its double grip, and the third time it went off right into his mouth.

He took it down with him — it was his hand that had been next to it, not mine — and I just stood there with both arms out — and empty.

I suppose I would have given it to her next if it had stayed in my own hand. She expected me to; she didn’t ask for mercy. “All right, I’m next!” she breathed. “Get it over as quick as you can!” And threw up both forearms horizontally in front of her eyes.

I was too tired for a minute to reach down and get it. That was what saved her. I don’t remember the next few minutes after that. I was sitting slumped in one of the chairs. I must have uprighted it again, and she was saying: “The ten grand is yours now, Cookie, if you’ll use your head.”

The way it sounded she must have been talking for several minutes, talking herself out of what was rightfully coming to her. What she’d been saying until then hadn’t registered with me, but that did.

“Get out,” I said dully. “Don’t hang around me. I may change my mind yet.” But the time for that was over, and she probably knew it as well as I did. The room had come back to its regular colors by now. Only the tablecloth was red any more; that and a little trickle that had come out of his open mouth onto the linoleum.

She pointed at him. “That’s you, down there. Don’t you get it? Readymade.” She came a little closer, leaning across the table toward me on the heels of her hands. “Why pass a break like this up, Cookie? Made-to-order. Ten grand. Play ball with me, Cookie.” Her voice was a purr, honey-low.

“Get ou—” I started to mutter, but my voice was lower now too. She was under my skin and working deeper down every minute. I was wide open to anything anyway, after what had happened.

She held up her hand quickly, tuning out my half-hearted protest. “All right, you caught me red-handed. You don’t hear me denying it, do you? You don’t see me trying to bellyache out of it, do you? It muffed, and the best man won. That’s giving it to you straight from the shoulder. But the policy I slapped on you still holds good, the ten gees is yours for the taking—” She pointed down again. “And there’s your corpse.”

I turned my head and looked at him, kept staring thoughtfully without a word. She kept turning them out fast as her tongue could manage.

“It’s up to you. You can go out to the phone and turn me in, send me up for ten years — and spend the rest of your life straightening the pants on guys at thirty per week. Have it that way if you want to. Or you can come into ten thousand dollars just by being a little smart. The guy is dead anyway, Cookie. You couldn’t bring him back now even if you wanted to. What’s the difference under what name he goes six-feet-under? He even gets a better break, at that; gets a buggy-ride and a lot of flowers instead of taking a dive head-first into Potter’s Field!”

I hadn’t taken my eyes off him, but I already wanted to hear more. “It’s wacky; you’re talking through your lid,” I said hopefully. “How you gonna get away with it? What about all the people in this town that know me? What about the guy that sold me the insurance? What about the bench down at the store where I work? I no more look like him than—”

“If it’s his face got you stopped, we can take care of that easy. And outside of a phiz, what’s so different between one guy and the next? Stretch out a minute, lie down next to him — I wanna see something.”

I wasn’t hypocritical enough to hesitate any more. She already knew I was with her anyway — she could tell. I got down flat on the floor alongside him, shoulder to shoulder. He wasn’t laid out straight by any means, but she attended to that with a few deft hitches. She stood back and measured us with her eyes. “You’re about an inch taller, but the hell with that.” I got up again.

She went over and pulled down the shade to the bottom, came back with cigarette-smoke boiling out of her nose. “It’s a suicide, of course, otherwise the police’ll stick their noses into it too heavy. A farewell note from you to me ought to hold them. Run up and bring down one of your other suits, and a complete set of everything — down to shorts and socks.”

“But what’re we going to do about his map?”

“A bucketful of boiling lye will take care of that. We got some down the basement, haven’t we? Come on, help me get him down there.”

“Where does it figure, though? You want ’em to believe he had guts enough to stick his face in that?”

“You went down there and bumped yourself through the front teeth with the gun, see? You keeled over backwards and dumped this bucket on top of your face in falling. A couple of hours under that and he’ll be down to rock bottom above the shoulders; they won’t have much to go by. His hair’s pretty much the color of yours, and you haven’t been to a dentist in years, so they can’t check you in that way.”

“It’s still full of holes,” I said.

“Sure it is,” Thelma agreed, “but what reason’ll they have to go looking for ’em, with me there screaming the eardums off ’em that you were my husband? And waving your good-bye note in their faces! There won’t be anyone missing from this town. He was a vagrant on his way through. This was the first house he hit for a hand-out when he came out of the woods. He told me so himself, and he never got past here. The police’ll be the least of our worries, when it comes to it, and as for the insurance investigator, once I get past the first hurdle I know just what to do so there’s no chance for it to backfire: send him to the crematorium in a couple of days instead of planting him in the cemetery. Fat lot of good an order for an exhumation’ll do them after that!”

I said about the same thing he’d said, this dead guy, only a little while ago. “You’re good — damn your soul! I think we can pull it at that!”

“Think? I know we can!” She snapped her cigarette butt at the side of his face — and hit it! “Always remember — if you can get away with anything, it’s worth doing. Now let’s go — we haven’t got much time.”

I picked him up by the shoulders and she took him by the feet, and we carried him out of the kitchen and down the cellar stairs and laid him down temporarily on the floor there, any old way. The gun had gone right with him the whole way, at the end of his dangling arm.

The laundry was down there, and the oil-burner, and lines for hanging up clothes, and so on. There was a gas-heater for boiling up wash. She lit that, then she filled a pail half-full of water and put it on to heat. Then she dumped lye into it for all she was worth until there wasn’t any more left around. “As long as it takes the skin off his face,” she remarked. “Go up and get the clothes now, like I told you, and doctor up a suicide-note. Better take something and get those slugs out of the kitchen-wall; it went off twice, didn’t it, before it rang the bell? Rub ashes in the nicks, so they won’t look new. Let me know when you’re ready.”

But I wasn’t Ben Cook the slough any more. “And leave you alone down here with that gun? It’s still got three in it. You’re so full of bright ideas, how do I know you won’t go back to your original parlay after all?”

She threw up her hands impatiently. “Forget it, will you! It’s got to stay in his mitt like it is; you can’t take it up with you. We’re both in this together, aren’t we? We either trust each other the whole way, or we may as well call it quits right now!”

She was blazing with an unholy sort of enthusiasm. I could tell by looking at her I had nothing to worry about as far as she was concerned any more. It was contagious, too; that was the worst part of it — greenback-fever. I turned around and beat it upstairs to the top floor. There were spots in front of my eyes, ten-spots.

I got him out a complete set of everything. For an artistic finishing-touch I even threw in a spare truss like I wore. That had figured in my examination for the insurance. I took a razor with me and a pair of clippers that I’d been in the habit of using to save myself the price of a haircut. I chased down to the desk in the living-room, got out paper, and wrote:

Which I thought was pretty good. She did too, when I went down and showed it to her. She flashed me a look. “I think I’ve been underestimating you all these years.”

Clouds of steam were coming from the pail of lye. “Beat it up and attend to the bullet-holes, and the blood on the kitchen-floor,” I said, “while I go to work on him—”

I could hear her footsteps pattering busily back and forth over my head while I was busy down there.

I gave him a quick once-over with the razor and a cake of yellow laundry soap, clipped his neck a little, so we wouldn’t have to count too much on the lye.

I piled his own worm-eaten duds into a bundle and tied it up, then outfitted him from head to foot.

It took plenty of maneuvering to slip his arm through the sleeves of the shirt and jacket without dislodging the gun from his hand.

I tied his tie and shoelaces for him as if I were his valet, and filled his pockets with all the junk I had in my own, down to the crumpled pack of butts I was toting. I strapped my wristwatch on him, and then I straightened up and gave him the once-over. He looked a lot more like me now than he had before I’d begun.

She came trooping down again, with her hat on for the movies. “Slick,” she breathed. “Everything’s all set upstairs. Here’s the two wild bullets. What’re you doing with his stuff, putting it in the furnace?”

“Nothing doing.” I said. “That’s muffed too often. All they need’s a button or a strand of hair left over in there and we go boom! I’m taking it with me when I go and I am getting rid of it someplace else.”

“That’s the ticket!” she agreed. She handed me a pair of smoked glasses and an old golf cap. “Here, I dug these up for you, for when you light out. Anyone that knows you will know you anyway — but in case anyone passes you while you’re on the lam, they’ll do.

“Steer clear of downtown whatever you do. Better powder about ten minutes after I do; take the back door, cut through the woods; stay away from the highway until you get over to Ferndale — somebody might spot you from a passing car. You can hop a bus there at midnight — to wherever you decide to hole in, and better make it the other side of the State-line. Now we gotta finish up fast. I phoned the drug store to send over some aspirin, told ’em you felt kinda low—”

“What’s the idea?”

“Don’t you get it? I’m leavin’ just as the errand-boy gets here; he even sees you kiss me good-bye at the front door. Hold him up a minute hunting for change, so that he has me walking in front of him down the street toward the show. I don’t want to get the chair for something I didn’t do, Cookie! Now, what name are you going to use and where’ll I reach you when the pay-off comes through?”

I laughed harshly. “You’re pretty anxious to see that I get my cut.”

“I’m glad you used that word,” she said drily. “It’s my favorite little word. Nuts! You can’t come back here; you know that! I’ve gotta get it to you. What’re you worrying about? We’ve got each other stopped, haven’t we? If I try to hog the dough, all you do is show up, it goes back where it came from, and we both land in clink. On the other hand, you can’t get it without little Thelma—”

“We split it seventy-five, twenty-five, and little Thelma’s on the short end for being such a smart girl,” I growled.

Something gave one corner of her mouth a little hike up. “Done,” she said. “Now hurry up, give him his facial. Measure the distance off.”

We stood him upright on his feet, then let him down backwards in a straight line toward the heater on which the pail of lye was sizzling. The back of his head cleared it by two, three inches.

“Move him in a little closer,” she said. “His conk’s supposed to tip it over as he goes down.”

“All right, stand back,” I said, “and watch your feet.”

I took it off the stove, turned it upside down, and doused it on him, arched as far away from the splash as I could get. It dropped down on his head like a mold; only a little spattered on his body below the shoulders. Just as the pail dropped over his head like a visor, the front doorbell rang.

The last thing she said as she went hustling up was, “Watch out where you step — don’t leave any tracks!”

I caught up with her halfway down the front hall. “Whoa! Pass over that hundred-seventy-five you were going to stuff into my pocket. I can’t live on air the next few weeks!”

She took it grudgingly out of her handbag. “It comes off your share, don’t forget,” she let me know.

“All right, and here’s one for your memory-book,” I whispered. “I’m Ned Baker at the Marquette Hotel over in Middleburg. Don’t put it on paper, but see that you hang onto it. It’s easy enough — Cook, Baker, see?”

The bell rang a second time.

“About three weeks, the minute I put the check through,” she promised. “All set? Here goes! Loosen your tie — you’re staying in and you’re in a hari-kari mood. Play up!”

I stayed where I was. She went to the door squalling, “G’by, hon! Sure you won’t change your mind and come with me?” She opened the door and an eighteen-year-old kid named Larry whom we both knew by sight said, “Package from the drug store, Mrs. Cook. Thirty-five cents.”

Again she shook the house to the rafters. “Here’s your aspirin, dear!”

I shuffled up acting like a sick calf. I separated one of the tens she’d just given me from the rest and offered it to him. He said he didn’t have that much change. “Wait a minute, I think I’ve got it inside,” I said. Meanwhile, she was sticking her snoot up at me. “G’by, dear. You won’t be lonely now, will you?”

He was facing my way, so I tried to look tragic. “Enjoy your show,” I murmured bravely, pecking at her with my mouth. I walked down the steps with her and part of the way toward the sidewalk, with my arm around her waist. She turned back to wave a couple times, and I waved back at her. The kid was taking it all in from the doorway.

“They got a revival of Garbo tonight,” he remarked when I came back. “Don’t you like Garbo, Mr. Cook?”

I sighed. “I got too much on my mind tonight, Larry,” I told him. I let her get to the first crossing, then I brought out the thirty-five cents and gave him a dime for himself. He thanked me and started off after her.

I locked the door (she had her own key) and then I bolted back to the cellar-stairs and took a last look down from the head of them. Threads of steam were still coming out from under the rim of the lye-pail, upturned there over his face.

I picked up his bundle of clothes, which I’d left at the top of the stairs, and wrapped them in good strong brown paper. The two bullets were in there with them, and the scrapings from his jaw and neck on scraps of paper. The brownish rag, too, with which she’d scoured the little blood off the linoleum.

The latter didn’t have a mark left on it to the naked eye — and there was no reason for them to give it a benzidine test. The bullet-holes were okay too; she’d spread them to look like knotholes in the wood and dirtied them with ashes. She’d even washed and put away the used coffee-cup, and the note was in place on the desk.

I left my own hat up on the rack, and put on the cap, pulled it well down over my eyes.

I left the lights just the way they were in all the rooms, then I went up to the rear room on the second floor, which was dark, and stood watching for a long time. There weren’t any houses in back of us, just a big open field with the woods off to the right.

In the daytime, crossing the field to get to them, I might have been spotted from one of the houses farther down, but not at this hour. It was a clear night, but there wasn’t any moon.

I went downstairs, opened the screen-door, pulled the wooden one closed behind me, let the screen one flap back in place, and jumped away in a hurry from the square of light that still came through the oblong pane in the wooden one. We would have locked that on the inside if we had both left the house together, but staying home alone the way I was supposed to tonight, it could very well stay unlocked without arousing suspicion.

I cut diagonally away from the house, to get out of sight of the roadway that fronted it and bisected the woods all the way to Ferndale. It took a turn, however, halfway between the two points, so going through the woods was really a short-cut.

Within five minutes after I had left the kitchen-door, and less than a quarter of an hour since Thelma had left the house all told, the first skinny saplings closed around me and hid me from sight.

By a quarter to twelve the trees were starting to thin out again, this time in front of me, and the lights of Ferndale were glimmering through them. I was half-shot and my feet were burning, but it was worth it; I hadn’t seen a living soul — and what was more important, not a living soul had seen me. I’d kept from getting lost and going around in a circle, which could have happened to me quite easily in those woods, by always managing to keep the highway to Ferndale parallel with me on my right. Even when I was out of sight of it, an occasional car whizzing by gave it away to me. Otherwise, I might very well have done a Babe-in-the-Woods act and come out again where I started from. I’d opened the parcel and retied it again on my way. Took out the two slugs and the bloody rag and buried them in three separate places.

The clothes themselves were too bulky to bury with my bare fingernails, and I wasn’t just going to leave them under a stone or anything. Nor could I risk putting a match to them and burning them — the light might have given me away to someone. The safest thing was to keep them with me and get rid of them long afterwards at my leisure.

Ferndale wasn’t much more than a crossroads, but the interstate buses stopped there. I stopped for a minute and brushed myself off as well as I could before I showed out in the open. I looked respectable enough, but that was almost a drawback in itself.

A well-dressed guy dropping down out of nowhere at midnight to board a bus, without a through ticket, wasn’t really the most unnoticeable thing in the world. But I had no choice in the matter. Nor very much time to make up my mind. The last one through was sometime between twelve and one. I decided, however, not to buy a Middleburg ticket from here but ride right through past it to the end of the line, and then double back to Middleburg from that end in a couple of days. That would make the trail a little harder to pick up — just in case.

As for the sun-glasses, which I’d been carrying in my pocket, I decided against them altogether. That was the one detail, it seemed to me, about which Thelma hadn’t shown very good judgment. No one in Ferndale knew me in the first place, and they’d only attract attention instead of lessening it. People don’t wear those things in the middle of the night, no matter how weak their eyes are supposed to be.

I straightened my shoulders and strolled casually out of the trees into the open, past an outlying cottage or two, dead to the world at this hour, and onto the single stretch of paved sidewalk that Ferndale boasted. A quick-lunch place was open and blazing with light, and the bus depot was down at the far end. There was a small but up-to-date little waiting-room there, washrooms, a magazine-stand, etc. No one around but the colored porter and an elderly man who looked like he was waiting to meet somebody getting off the incoming bus.

I went up to the ticket-window as casually as I could and rapped on the counter a couple of times. Finally the porter called out, “Johnson! Somebody at the wicket!” and the ticket-seller came out of the back someplace.

I said, “Gimme a through ticket to Jefferson.” That was the neighboring state capital, terminus of this line.

He said, “I don’t know if I can get you a seat at this hour; usually pretty full up. You shoulda put in a reservation a-head— There’s a six-o’clock bus, though.”

“Lissen,” I said, looking him in the eye, “I gotta get home. Whaddya think I’m going to do, sit around here all night waiting for the morning bus?”

He called over my shoulder to the elderly gent, who was reading a paper, “You meeting somebody on the next bus, mister?”

The old fellow said, “Yep, my nevvew’s coming down on it—”

“That’s that, then,” he said to me indifferently. “’Leven eighty.”

“When’s it get in?” I asked, pocketing my change.

“Ten minutes,” he said, and went back inside again.

I was down at the quick-lunch filling up on hot dogs when the bus slithered in. I picked up my package and went up toward it. A young fellow of high-school age was getting off and being greeted by the elderly gent. I showed my ticket and got on.

Its lights were off and most of the passengers were sprawled out asleep. The ticket-seller had been right: there was only a single vacant seat in the whole conveyance, the one that the kid had just got out of! It was a bum one on the aisle, too.

My seat-mate, by the window, had his hat down over his nose and was breathing through his mouth. I didn’t pay any attention to him, reached up and shoved my bundle onto the rack overhead, sat back and relaxed. The driver got on again, the door closed, and we started off with a lurch.

My lightweight bundle hadn’t been shoved in far enough in the dark: the motion of the bus promptly dislodged it and it toppled down across the thighs of the man next to me. He came to with a nervous start and grunted from under his hat-brim.

“Excuse me,” I said, “didn’t mean to wake you—”

He shoved his hat back and looked at me. “Why, hullo, Cook!” he said. “Where you going at this hour of the night?” And held his hand spaded at me.

A couple of years went by, with my face pointed straight ahead and ice-water circulating in my veins. There wasn’t very much choice of what to do about it. Even if the bus had still been standing still with its door open, which it wasn’t any more, it wouldn’t have done any good to jump off it. He’d already seen me.

And to try to pass the buck and tell him to his face he had the wrong party, well what chance had I of getting away with that, with our shoulders touching, even though it was dark inside the bus? I couldn’t stop it from getting light in a few hours, and there wasn’t any other seat on the bus. All I’d succeed in doing would be snubbing him, offending him, and making him start thinking there must be something phony afoot; in other words, indelibly impressing the incident upon his memory.

Whereas if I took it in my stride, lightly, maybe I could keep it from sinking in too deeply; maybe I could do something about the timing to blur it a little, make him think later on that it was the night before and not tonight that he’d ridden with me on a bus. It had to be the night before; it couldn’t be the same night that I was supposed to be bumping myself off down in the cellar back at Copeland Drive!

“Well, for the luvva Pete, Sherrill!” I said with shaky cordiality. “Where you going yourself at this hour of the night?” I shook his mitt, but there was less pressure now on his side than mine.

“Y’acted like y’didn’t know me for a minute,” he complained, but rapidly thawed out again. “What’d you get on way the hell out at Ferndale for?” he said.

But that one had to be squelched at all costs, no matter how unconvincing it sounded. After all, he’d definitely been asleep when they pulled into Ferndale, he couldn’t have seen who got on there.

“I didn’t. What’s the matter with you?” I said in surprise. “I changed seats, come back here from up front, that’s all.” There was a little girl holding one of the front seats in her own right, but she was asleep with her head on her mother’s lap; it looked like the seat was vacant from where we were. “He’ll forget about it by the time she straightens up in the morning — let’s hope,” I thought.

He seemed to forget it then and there. “Funny I missed seeing you when I got on,” was all he said. “I was the last one in; they even held it for me a minute—” He offered me a cigarette, took one himself, seemed to have no more use for sleep. “Where you heading for, anyway?” he asked.

“Jefferson, I said.”

“That’s funny,” he said, “I am too!”

If he could have heard the things I was saying inside myself about him at the moment, he would have let out a yell and probably dived through the window, glass and all. “How come?” I said, between unheard swear-words.

I knew it would be my turn right after his, and I was so busy shaping up my own explanation, I only half-heard his. Something about the manager phoning him at the last minute after he’d already gone home that afternoon, to pinch-hit for our store’s buyer, who’d been laid up with the flu, and look after some consignments of neckties that were waiting down there and badly needed in stock. “What’s taking you down there?” he asked, as I knew he would.

I told him I had to see a specialist, that I’d been below par for some time and none of the docs back home had seemed able to do a thing for me.

“When you going back?” he wanted to know.

“’Morrow afternoon,” I said. “Be home in time for supper—” I had to be “back” by then; I couldn’t hope to fog him on the time element by more than twenty-four hours. That I’d even be able to do that much was highly doubtful, but I might just get away with it.

“That’s just about when I’ll be going back, too,” he said chummily. “Be back at work Friday morning.”

I answered with careful emphasis: “Whaddya mean, Friday? The day after tomorrow’ll be Thursday. Tonight’s Tuesday.”

“No,” he said innocently, “you’ve got your dates mixed. Tonight’s Wednesday.”

This went on for about five minutes between us, without heat of course. I finally pulled my horns in when he offered: “Wait, I’ll ask the driver, he ought to be able to straighten us out—”

“Never mind, guess you’re right,” I capitulated. I wasn’t keen on attracting the driver’s attention to myself in any shape, form, or manner. But I’d done what I wanted to: I’d succeeded in conditioning Sherill’s mind. Later he wouldn’t be sure whether it was Wednesday or not, when he thought back to tonight.

Right on top of that came a honey. “Whaddya say we split expenses while we’re there?” he offered. “Share the same hotel room.”

“What do I need a hotel room for?” I said shortly. “I told you I’m going back on the afternoon bus!”

“Hell,” he said, “if you’re as rundown as you say you are, funny you should be willing to go without sleep a whole night! We don’t get into Jefferson till seven. You got a before-breakfast appointment with your doctor?”

The skepticism in his voice had to be nipped before it got steam up, I could see; the only way seemed to be by falling in with his suggestion. I could let him start back alone, pretend my appointment had been postponed until afternoon and I had to take a later bus. Technically, even one of those could get me home in time for my own suicide.

We had our breakfasts together at the bus depot and then we checked in at a hotel down the street called the Jefferson. I let him sign first, and stalled shaking a clot out of the pen until he’d already started toward the elevator. Then I wrote “Ned Baker” under his name, “Frisco.” That was far enough away — a big enough place to assure anonymity. I’d met him en route; that was all. I wasn’t going to do it to him right here in this hotel, anyway, and there was no earthly reason for him to take another look at that register in checking out, nor for the clerk to mention me by name in his presence; we’d paid in advance on account of our scarcity of baggage.

He asked for a ten-thirty call and hung a “Do not disturb” on the door when we got up to the room. Then we turned in, one to a bed. “I’m dead,” was the last thing he yawned.

“You betcha sweet life you are, brother!” I thought grimly. He dropped off into a deep, dreamless sleep — his last one. I knew I was safe enough while I had him right with me, and until he got ready to start back; I wasn’t going to do it in this hotel room anyway. So I just lay there on my back staring up at the ceiling, waiting, waiting. The wings of the death-angel were spread over us in that room; there was the silence of the grave.

The phone-peal, when it came, shattered it like a bomb. I felt good, because the time was drawing shorter now. This new self of mine seemed to be agreeing with me. “Toss you for the shower,” I offered.

“Go ahead,” he stretched, “I like to take my time.”

It was a little thing like that changed my plans, brought it on him even quicker. Just before I turned on the water I heard him open and close the door. He called in, “Gee, pretty liberal! They hand you a morning paper compliments of the management in this place!”

When I came out he was sitting there on the bed with it spread out alongside him. He wasn’t looking at it, he was looking at me; he was holding his head as though he’d been waiting for me to show up in the bathroom doorway. There were three white things there on that bed, but it was his face that was whiter even than the pillows or the paper.

“What’re you looking at me like that for?” I said gruffly, and then my own got white too.

He began shrinking away from me along the edge of the bed. He said: “They found your body in the cellar of your house — last night at eleven — you committed suicide. It’s here, on the first page of this Jefferson paper—”

I dropped the towel and picked the paper up, but I didn’t look at it; I was watching him over the top of it. He was shaking all over. He said, “Who — was that? Who’d you do it to?”

“This is a mistake,” I said furrily. “They’ve got me mixed up with somebody else. Somebody by the same name, maybe—”

His back was arched against the headboard of the bed by now, as if he couldn’t get far enough away from me. He said, “But that’s your address there — 25 Copeland Drive — I know your address! It even tells about your working for the store — it gives your wife’s name, Thelma — it tells how she found your body, with your face all eaten away with lye—” I could see beads of sweat standing out in a straight line across his forehead. “Who was that, Cook? It must have been — somebody! My God, did you—?”

I said, “Well, look at me! You see me here with you, dontcha? You can see it’s not me, cantcha?” But that wasn’t what he was driving at, and I knew it as well as he did. He knew I was alive, all right; what he wanted to know was who was dead.

I don’t know what the outcome would have been, if he hadn’t given himself away by starting to dress in that frightened, jerky way — snatching at his clothes as if he was afraid of me, trying to stay as far out of my way as he could while he struggled getting his things on. I suppose it would have happened anyway, before I would have let him go back to our own town, knowing what he now did. But not right then, not right there.

I told myself, coldly, as I watched him fumbling, panting, sweating to get into his things in the least possible time, “He’s going straight out of here and give me away! It’s written all over him. He won’t even wait till he gets back tonight — phone them long distance right from here, or else tip the cops off right here in Jefferson. Well — he’s not going to get out that door!”

The phone was between the two beds. He was bent over on the outside of his, which was nearer the door, struggling with his laces. What was holding him up was that in his frenzied haste he’d snarled them up into a knot. The door didn’t worry me as much as the phone. I moved around, naked, into the aisle between the two beds, cutting him off from it.

“Why all the rush?” I asked.

“I gotta hustle and get after those ties,” he said in a muffled voice. He couldn’t bring himself to look around at me, rigidly kept his head turned the other way.

I moved up closer behind him. My shadow sort of fell across him, cutting off the light from the window. “And what’re you going to do about what you just read in the paper?”

“Why, nothing,” he faltered. “I–I guess like you said, it’s just some kind of mistake—” His voice cracked into a placating little laugh; you wouldn’t have known what it was by the sound of it, though. And the last thing he ever said was to repeat, “Nothing — nothing at all, really.”

“You’re blamed tooting you’re not,” I rasped. I don’t know if he even heard me. I suddenly pulled him down flat on his back, by the shoulders, from behind. I had a last flash of his face, appalled, eyes rolling, staring up at mine. Then the two pillows were over it, soft, yielding, and I was pressing them down with my whole weight.

Most of the struggle, of course, was in his legs, which had been hanging down free over the side of the bed. They jolted upward to an incredible height at first, far higher than his head, then sank all the way back to the floor again, and after that kept teetering upward and downward like a seesaw between bed-level and the floor.

It was the very fact that they were loose like that that prevented his throwing me off him. He was off-balance, the bed ended just under his hips, and he couldn’t get a grip on the floor with his heels. As for his arms, they were foreshortened by the pressure of the big pillows like a bandage. He only had the use of them below the elbows, couldn’t double them back on themselves far enough to get at my face, claw as he might. I kept my face and neck arched back just beyond their reach, holding the pillows down by my abdomen in the center and by the pressure of my shoulders and splayed arms on each end.

The bedsprings groaned warningly once or twice of approaching doom. Outside of that there wasn’t a sound in the room but my own breathing.

The leg-motion was the best possible barometer. It quickened to an almost frenzied lashing as suffocation set in, then slowed to a series of spasmodic jerks that would slacken inevitably to a point of complete motionlessness. Just before it had been reached, I suddenly reared back and flung the pillows off, one each way. His face was contorted to the bursting-point, his eyes glazed and sightless, but the fingers of his upturned hands were still opening and closing convulsively, grabbing at nothing; he was unmistakably still alive, but whether he could come back again or would succumb anyway in a minute or two more was the question. It was important to me to beat his heart to the final count.

I dragged him off the bed, around the second bed, and got him over to the window. I hoisted him up, turned him toward it, and balanced him lightly with one arm against my side, as if I was trying to revive him. I looked, and I looked good. The room was on the fourteenth floor, and we’d taken one of the cheaper ones; it gave onto an air-shaft, not the street. There were, probably, windows all the way down, under this one — but the point was, there weren’t any opposite; that side was blank. No one could look in here.

I think he would have pulled through; he was beginning to revive as air got into his lungs. The congested blood started leaving his face little by little, his eyes closed instead of staying wide open, but you could hear him breathing again, hoarsely. So I edged him a little closer, threw up the lower sash all the way to the top — and just stepped back from him. I didn’t touch him, just took my support away, retreated farther into the room. He wavered there, upright by the open window. Vertigo had evidently set in as his lungs began to function and his heartbeat came back to normal. It was a toss-up whether he’d go back, forward, or sideways; the only sure thing was he wasn’t staying on his own feet just then, and was going into a faint.

Maybe there was some kind of a draught pulling at him from the long, deep shaft out there; I don’t know. He went forward — as though a current of air were sucking him through the window. It was a good high window. His head just missed the sash bisecting it. He folded up at the waist across the ledge, half in, half out, like a lazy guy leaning too far out in slow motion — and gravity did the rest. Death beat his glimmering faculties to the punch — he was gone before he could fling up his arms, grab at anything. His legs whipped after him like the tail of a kite — and the window-square was empty.

The impact seemed to come up long afterwards, from far away, muffled, distant, and even the new me didn’t like the sound of it very well. I didn’t make the mistake of going closer and looking down after him. Almost immediately there was the sound of another window being thrown up somewhere down the line, a pause, and then a woman’s screech came tearing up the shaft.

I saw that one of his unlaced shoes had come off while I was hauling him across the room. I edged it back under his own bed, smoothed that from a condition of having been struggled upon back to a condition of just having been slept in, particularly the pillows. I erased a blurred line across the carpet-nap that his one dragging shoe had made, with the flat of my own shoe.

Then I picked up the towel I’d already wet once, went back into the bathroom, turned on the shower full-blast, and got back under it again. Its roar deadened everything, but a sudden draft on my wet shoulder tipped me off when they’d used the passkey on the room-door. “Hey, Sherrill!” I boomed out just as they came in, “can I borrow some of your shaving-cream?” I stuck my head farther out and hollered, “What’s the matter with ya, didya go back to sleep in there? That’s the third time I’ve asked ya the same question—”

Then I saw them all standing looking in at me. “What’s up?” I yelled, and reached out and shut off the water.

The sudden silence was stunning.

The hotel detective said, “Your roommate just fell out of the window in there.”

“Oh, my God!” I gasped, and had to hang onto the rubber curtain to keep from tipping over, myself, for a minute. Some soap got in my eyes and made them fill with water. Through it I could see them all looking at me, from the bellhop up, as though they knew how bad I felt, and felt sorry for me.

Three weeks to the day, after that morning in the hotel at Jefferson, Thelma’s message was waiting for me in my mailbox at the Marquette in Middleburg. I had been holed-up there for two weeks past, from the moment I’d felt it prudent to leave Jefferson. Not that I’d been under arrest or even suspicion at any time, but the detectives there had, naturally, questioned me about how well I’d known Sherrill, whether he’d said anything to indicate he intended suicide. I seemed to satisfy them on all points.

They kept me waiting another twenty-four hours — and on pins and needles. Then they sent word that I was free to leave whenever I wanted to. I didn’t waste time hanging around once I heard that! It struck me that I hadn’t been called on to make a deposition at any coroner’s inquest, but I wasn’t inclined to argue with them on that point. Nor did I bother trying to find out what disposition had been made of Sherrill’s remains. I simply left — while the leaving was good!

Beautifully as I’d got away with that, though, I had plenty of other things to get jittery about while I was waiting to hear from her the next couple weeks in Middleburg. I kept wondering whether she was going to double-cross me or not, and the suspense got worse day by day and hour by hour. If she did, I had no come-back.

She’d soaped me up by saying all I had to do if she tried to hold out was show up home and give her away. True enough as far as it went, but there was one thing I’d overlooked at the time: what was to keep her there on tap once she got her paws on the insurance check? All she had to do was blow out in some other direction and — good-bye ten grand!

That was what really had me down, the knowledge that she had been holding a trump-hand all through this little game of ours — with me trying to bluff her. And from what I knew of her, she didn’t bluff easy. I’d even set a deadline in my own mind: forty-eight hours more, and if I didn’t hear from her, I’d head back home myself, no matter what the risk, and land on her with both feet before she took a powder out on me.

Nothing had muffed at her end — I knew that for a fact; so she couldn’t alibi that she wasn’t in line for the money. I’d been buying our hometown papers daily ever since I’d been in Middleburg, watching to see if the thing would curdle or start to smell bad, and it hadn’t.

It would have been in headlines in a minute if it had, but all I had were the few consecutive items bearing on it that I’d clipped out and stuck away in my wallet. I’d been taking them out nightly and going over them, to reassure myself, and it was as good as television. First, the news announcement that had sent Sherrill to his death (although he’d seen it in a Jefferson, not a hometown paper).

Then an inconspicuous obituary the next day, mentioning a date for the cremation. Then a twenty-four-hour postponement of the cremation, with no reason given (this had given me a bad night, all right!). Then finally, two days later, the bare announcement that the cremation had taken place the day before. That was all, but that was plenty. The thing was signed, sealed, and delivered — we’d got away with it!

Even outside of all that, anyone in my position, naturally, would have been jittery. Just having to sit tight day by day waiting for the pay-off was reason enough. The one hundred and seventy-five dollars I’d chiseled out of her was starting to run down; I wanted to get my hands on the real dough and get out of this part of the country altogether. Middleburg, after all, wasn’t so very far away from the hometown. Somebody who has known me might drop over from there and spot me when I least expected it; the young mustache I was nursing along was no guarantee at all against recognition.

I stayed in my room most of the time, let them think what I’d told Sherrill, that I was in precarious health. I began to look the part, too, so it wasn’t hard to sell the idea. I haunted my letter-box downstairs, and just went as far as the corner-stand once a day, to get the hometown paper, the Kay City Star. I always soft-pedaled it by buying a Jefferson one and a Middleburg one along with it, and then discarding them in the nearest trash-can.

And up in my room I always tore the name and place of publication off the tops of every page of each copy, carefully burning the strips in an ashtray, so the chambermaid or anyone else finding it wouldn’t know just where it was published.

I had a bad minute or two one evening when the news vendor couldn’t find me a copy of the hometown rag. “They usually send me two,” he apologized, “but they were one short today, and there’s another gent been buying ’em right along, like you do yourself, and he musta got here ahead of you, I guess, and took the only one I had—”

I got very quiet, then finally I said off-handedly, “He a regular customer of yours? How long’s he been doing that?”

“Oh, two, three weeks now — ’bout as long as you have. He lives right in the same hotel you do, I think; I see him come in and go out of there a lot. Nice guy, minds his own business—”

I said, even more off-handedly than before, “D’je happen to mention to him that I been taking the Kay City Star from you too?”

“Nah!” he said emphatically, “I never said ‘Boo’ to him.”

I had to be satisfied with that, and in a day or two my apprehension had dulled again, not having anything further to feed on. The Marquette was no skyscraper honeycomb; I’d seen all the faces in it by this time, and there was definitely no one there that knew me or that I knew, or that I’d ever seen before. Nor did the register, when I went over it without much trouble, show any Kay City entries.

The whole thing was just a harmless coincidence, that was all; probably the guy took the Star purely for business reasons. There was a pudgy realtor who had the room across the hall from mine; I’d met him once or twice on the elevator, and it was probably he, keeping tab on real estate opportunities in various townships. That reassured me completely; he fitted the newsman’s description exactly, and never even so much as looked at me the few times we happened on each other.

One night I eavesdropped while I was unlocking my own door and overheard him having a long argument with somebody over the phone. “That’s an ideal site,” he was saying. “Tell ’em they can’t have it at that price. Why, it would be a gold-mine if we leased it for a filling-station—”

On the twenty-first morning after Sherrill’s death, I stepped up to the hotel desk — and for the first time there was white showing in my letter-box! My overwrought nerves began crackling like high-tension wires. It had a Kay City postmark. In my excitement I dropped it and this real-estate guy, who had come up to the desk for his own mail just then, picked it up and handed it back to me without a word.

I went over in a corner of the lobby and tore it open. There was no signature — probably she hadn’t wanted to hand me a blackjack that could be used against her — but it was from her all right. I recognized the writing, although she’d tried to distort it a little, or else her excitement had done that for her.

Jackie has come through pretty. If you want to see him, you know what to do about it. It’s up to you to do the traveling, not me. I’m not at the old place any more, so it’ll be okay. 10 State Street is where you’ll find me.

The way I burned it’s a wonder smoke didn’t curl out of my ears. So it was up to me to do the traveling, was it? She knew what a chance I’d be taking by showing up home, even if she had changed addresses!

I came to a sudden decision. “All right, for being so smart, she’s going to pony over the whole ten grand now! I’m going down there and clean her out! And if she opens her trap, she’s going to suddenly quit being alive!”

I folded the thing up, put it in my pocket, and went out. I hit the seedy part of Jefferson, across the railroad tracks, and picked up a .32 and some cartridges at a hock-shop without too many questions asked, particularly the one about where was my license. I came back and I booked a seat on the three o’clock bus, which would get me to Kay City just after dark. I bought a cheap pair of reading glasses and a flat tin of shoe polish. I went back to my room, knocked the lenses out of their tortoise-shell rims and heavied up my mustache with a little of the blacking.

At half-past two in the afternoon I went downstairs and paid my bill and turned in my key. The clerk didn’t say a word, but I saw him stick a bright-red pasteboard strip like a bookmark in my letter-box. “What’s that for?” I asked idly.

“That’s to show it’s available.”

“You’ve got one in the one right next to it too.” I squinted.

“Yeah, 919, across the hall from you, checked out about half an hour ago too.”

The only thing that kept me from getting flurried was that his check-out had come ahead of mine, and not after; otherwise, I’d have suspected there was something phony about it. But this way, how could he have possibly known I intended leaving myself, when the first warning I’d given was this very minute?

“Just the same,” I said to myself, “he’s been taking the Kay City Star every day. I’m gonna take a good look in that bus, and if he’s in it, I don’t get on. I’m not taking any chances, not gonna lay myself open the way I did running into Sherrill!”

I timed myself to get to the depot just five minutes ahead of starting-time. The bus was standing there waiting to go. I walked all down one side of it, gandering in every window, and then doubled back on the other side, doing the same thing, before I got on. There wasn’t a sign of him.

I found my seat and sat down on the edge of it, ready to hop off if he showed at the last moment. He didn’t.

I looked them all over after a while, and there wasn’t anything about any of them to call for a second look. Nor did I get even a first one from anybody. It was dark by the time we hit Ferndale, and about nine thirty when we got into Kay City at the downtown terminus. I slipped on the lensless pair of rims just before the doors opened, and didn’t waste any time lingering about the brightly lighted depot. Outside in the street-dusk I’d pass muster, as long as I didn’t stop to stare into any glaring shop windows.

State Street was a quiet residential thoroughfare lined with prosperous residences; it was nearer in to the heart of the city than where we had lived, though. I reconnoitered number 10 from the opposite side of the street, going past it first and then doubling back. It was just a substantial brick house, two-storied, without anything about it to make me leery. Only one window, on the ground floor, showed a light. I thought, “What the hell is she doing in a place like that?” I decided she must have rented a furnished room with the family that owned it.

I crossed over farther down, and then once more started back toward it. There wasn’t a soul on the street, at the moment. Instead of going right up to the door, I edged around to the window where the light was and took a look in.

Thelma was in the room there, and she seemed to be alone. She was right in a line with the window, sitting by herself in a big chair, holding a cigarette and staring intently over into a corner which I couldn’t see from where I was. I could tell she was under a strain — the hand holding the cigarette shook visibly each time she lifted it. I waited a while, then I tapped lightly on the pane.

She looked square over at me, didn’t show a bit of surprise. She jerked her head in the direction of the front door, but didn’t get up or anything. I went around to it and tried it cautiously. She’d left it on the latch, for me to walk in without ringing. I closed it softly behind me, tapped the .32 in my pocket, and moved a few paces down the hall, listening. The house was dead; the people were out, whoever they were.

I put my hand on the side-door that led to the room where she was and pushed it open. She was still sitting there, shakily holding that cigarette. “Hello, Cookie,” she said in a funny voice.

“Hello, yourself,” I growled, and I looked all around the room. It was empty, of course. There was another, leading out somewhere toward the back, its door standing wide open, but I couldn’t see a thing through it.

“Did you get my note?” she said. Then she said: “You’ve come back to kill me, of course. I’ve had a feeling it would end up that way all along. Is that it, in your pocket there?” And her eyes rolled around spasmodically, not at all matching the quiet dryness of her voice.

I said, “What’s the matter with you, you paralyzed or something? Whaddya keep sitting there like that for? Gimme the dough, all of it!”

She said, “What was our arrangement, again?”

“Twenty-five, seventy-five, with you on the short end. But that’s out, now; I’m taking the whole works — and here’s the convincer—” I took the gun out slowly.

The cigarette fell, but she still didn’t move.

“Up!” a voice said in my ear, and I could feel snub-nosed steel boring into my spine through my clothes. Then half of Kay City seemed to come into the room all at one time, through the door behind me and also through that other one opposite. One guy even stood up from behind the big easy chair she’d been in all along, a gun on me across her shoulder.

I let the .32 drop and showed my palms. I knew the Kay City chief of police by a picture of him I’d once seen. “Well,” he purred, “nice of you to drop in at my house like this! Wrists out, please!”

I said to her, “You dirty, double-crossing—”

“I didn’t cross you, Cookie,” she said wearily. “They tumbled the very next day—”

“Shut up!” I raged at her.

“That’s all right, Cook,” the chief of police said soothingly.

“The guy was never cremated at all — we saw to that. We inserted that phony announcement in the paper ourselves. She’s been in custody ever since — it’s just that we were waiting for the insurance check to come through, to use in evidence. You thought you were good, didn’t you? Want me to tell you what you had for breakfast Tuesday? Or what tune you whistled when you were getting ready for bed a week ago Sunday night? No trouble at all!”

They had to hold me up between them. “I didn’t kill him,” I gasped, “it was self-defense—”

The fat realtor from the Marquette came around in front of me. “Maybe it was self-defense when you pushed Sherrill out of the window in Jefferson?”

“I was taking a shower; I didn’t have anything to do with—”

“Sherrill didn’t die,” he said. “A couple of clothes-lines at the bottom of that shaft were kinder to him than you were. He’s been in a hospital down there with his back in a plaster-cast for the past three weeks. Crippled for life, maybe, thanks to you — but able to talk. He told us all about it, that’s how it blew up at this end.”

Something seemed to blow up in me too, the way it had that night. I was Ben Cook again, who’d never done anything wrong in his life. It was as if the streak of badness had worked itself out, somehow.

I shuddered and covered my face with my manacled hands. “I’m — I’m sorry. Well, you’ve got me, and maybe it’s all for the best — I’m ready to take what’s coming to me—”

“Don’t worry, you’re going to,” said the chief of police. “Take him over to headquarters and book him. Take her back to the cooler.”

As we were leaving, one of the detectives said: “All for ten grand! If you’da just hung on a little while longer, you’da gotten it without lifting your finger — like that!” He took out a cablegram from his pocket.

It was addressed to me, at the old address. It had come in only a couple days before. It was from London, from some attorney I’d never heard of. It informed me my first wife, Florence, had died two months before and left me a legacy of more than three thousand pounds.

Ten thousand dollars!

I didn’t show any emotion at all. Just turned to them and asked them if they’d do me a favor.

“Give you a swift kick, I suppose,” one of the detectives sneered.

“It’s mine to do with as I want, isn’t it, this dough? Turn it over to Sherrill, will you, for me? Maybe it’ll help to get him fixed up so he can walk again.”

They all looked at me in surprise, as though this was out of character, coming from me. It really wasn’t, though. None of us are one hundred percent bad and none of us are one hundred percent good — we’re all just kind of mixed, I guess. Maybe that’s why the Judge, the Higher One, feels sorry for us. A whole row of black marks and then a single white mark at the very end. Which cancels which? I’ll find out for sure pretty soon now...