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

I

I got home that night about 6:15. “Have a hard day?” the wife wanted to know as I pitched my hat at the chandelier. “Supper’s ready.”

“With you as soon as I polish off the body,” I said. I went in the bathroom, stripped and hopped into the tub.

Halfway through, I stopped and looked around me. Either I was cockeyed or there was something the matter with the soap. It was Healthglo and it was red, like it always is, but the color seemed to be running from it. Apparently it was dyeing the water a pale pinkish shade all around me. Very pretty but not my type of bath.

All of a sudden something hit my shoulder and made me look up. I let out a yip. The whole ceiling over me was sopping wet. The stain kept spreading around the edges and a single drop at a time would come to a head right in the middle of it, very slowly, and then drop off. There must be a man-sized leak in the bathroom above, I thought, and what a leak — a young cloudburst to make it come all the way through like that! But that wasn’t what was peculiar about it. If it had been only a leak it would have been the plumber’s business and not mine. This was a pink leak! It was water mixed with something else. It was even changing the color of my bathwater little by little as it dripped into it. What that something else was I hated to think but I Had a rough idea.

I jumped into my pants and shirt, wet the way I was, and came tearing out of there. I nearly knocked my wife down getting to the door. “It’s the Frasers,” I said. “Something’s happened up there!”

“Oh, that poor woman!” I heard her say in back of me.

“You keep out of the bathroom for awhile,” I grunted.

I chased up the stairs without waiting for the elevator. We were on the third, and they were on the fourth. There was a guy standing outside their door just taking his hand away from the knob when I got up there. When he turned around I saw that it was Fraser himself.

“I can’t seem to get in,” he said. “I went off and forgot my key this morning.” He gave me a strained sickly sort of smile with it. He was a pale good-looking guy, with his hat over his left ear.

I didn’t answer. Instead I turned and hollered down the stair-well: “Katie!” She wouldn’t have been a woman at all if she hadn’t been out at the foot of the stairs listening instead of staying inside the flat where she belonged. “Call up the super from our place and tell him to bring his passkey with him.”

It didn’t seem to dawn on Fraser that something might be up. After all, I only knew him by sight. You’d think he’d wonder why it was up to me to worry about whether he got in or not. If he did, he didn’t let on. All he said was: “You don’t have to do that, my wife’ll be along any minute now.”

“I doubt that, buddy, I doubt that,” I said, but I didn’t explain what I meant. That’d come soon enough.

The elevator door banged open and the super came hustling out. I put out my hand for the key. “Give it here,” I said. “I’m doing it.”

Fraser for the first time showed some slight surprise. “I don’t get you,” he said. “What do you want in my place?”

I just said: “Save your breath, you’re going to need it,” and went in first. The first room, the living room, was perfectly O.K., neat as a pin, not an ashtray out of place. From there a short passageway led into the bedroom (same lay-out as our place) and in between the two was the bathroom. The bathroom door was closed tight and you couldn’t notice anything for a minute until you looked down at the floor. A pool of water had formed just outside the sill, still as glass. But when I opened the door — boy! It was about a foot deep in there, and the tub was brimming over. But that wasn’t it, it was what was in the tub that counted! It — or she — was in the tub, completely submerged. But she wasn’t undressed for a bath; she was clothed. There was a flatiron in the tub with her. Her head had been pounded to pieces and you couldn’t have recognized her any more, even if you had known her. It was a blood-bath if there ever was one! No wonder it had come through to our place.

It was Fraser’s wife all right. I heard a sound in back of me like air being slowly let out of a tire. Fraser had fainted dead away in the super’s arms. The super himself looked pretty green in the face, and my own stomach did a half-turn. “Take him downstairs to my place,” I said.

I locked up again to keep the other tenants out and followed them down. “Katie, do something for this man, will you?” I said, dialing Spring 7-3100 on our phone.

“Murder?” she breathed.

“And how. Pour me out two fingers will you, it’s the fiercest thing I’ve ever seen.” She wasn’t a detective’s wife for nothing; she didn’t ask any more questions sifter that.

“This is Galbraith, chief. Reporting from home. There’s been a murder right in my own building. A Mrs. Fraser, Apartment Four-C. Head mashed with a flatiron.”

“Orright, get busy,” he snapped. “I’ll have the medical examiner with you right away.” Click!

“You stay away from there, I told you. Keep that door closed.” This to Katie, whom I caught standing outside the bathroom staring hypnotized up at our stained ceiling. “We’ll have to have that replastered tomorrow.”

I had my dinner by turning the little whiskey glass she’d handed me upside down over my mouth, then I ran back upstairs and let myself in.

I took a look at the chamber of horrors through the door and sized her up. She was wearing a flowered kimona and house-slippers with pom-poms. I reached over, closed my eyes, turned the tap off and pulled up the plug to let the water out of the tub. Then I got the hell out of there.

I went around and took a look in the bedroom. They had one of these double photograph-folders set up on the dresser — one of him, one of her — and that gave me a good idea what her face had looked like while she still had one. Not pretty, but intelligent — lots of brains. They were all over the bathroom now, I thought to myself, for anyone to see. I threw open the bureau drawers and had a look-see at them. His junk was all crowded into one little top drawer, all the others were full of hers. Liked her own way, had she? Next the closet. He had one suit, she had nine dresses. A funny thing though, the air in the bedroom was clear and odorless but that in the closet smelt distinctly of stale cigarette smoke. I quickly closed the door, took a deep breath on the outside, opened it again and sniffed inside. It was fainter than the first time but still there.

“Yeah, I’m in here, don’t bother me, go look in the bathroom,” I hollered out to the medical examiner and all the boys, who had just then arrived. A cop was hung outside the door to keep the reporters out, and everyone got down to work. When they began to get in my way I went down to my own place to give myself a little more elbow room, taking with me an insurance policy on Mrs. Fraser’s life I’d found tucked away in the bottom bureau drawer and two hairpins, one from the carpet in the bedroom, one from the mess on the bathroom floor. The policy was for ten grand and the first premium had been paid just one week before, so it was now in full swing. I phoned the salesman who’d made it out and had a talk with him.

“Naw, he didn’t, she took it out herself,” he told me. “She said she was doing it because he wanted her to very badly, kept after her about it day and night.”

“Oh-oh,” I grunted. “Got any idea who this Mrs. Drew is?”

“Some woman friend of hers. She did that because she said she’d heard too many cases of people being killed for their insurance money, so she wasn’t taking any chances. Wouldn’t make her husband beneficiary, just in case.”

But that didn’t go over at all with me. No woman that crowds all her husband’s belongings into one little top bureau drawer and appropriates all the rest for herself is afraid of her husband doing anything like that to her. She has too much to say over him. Or if she really had been afraid, why take out a policy at all, why not just lie low and steer clear of trouble altogether?

I went in to ask Fraser a few questions, ready or not. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa in our living room, sticking his tongue in a glass of spirits of ammonia mixed with water and having St. Vitus’s dance from the waist up. Katie and the super, one on each side of him, were trying to buck him up. “Out,” I said to the two of them and jerked my thumb at the door.

“Now no rough-house in here,” Katie warned me out of the comer of her mouth. “I just had this room vacuumed today.”

“How much do you make?” I asked him when they’d both gone outside. He told me. “How much insurance y’carrying?”

“Twenty-five hundred.”

“And your wife?”

“None,” he said.

I watched him hard. He wasn’t lying. His eyes went up at me when he answered instead of dropping down.

I took a turn around the room and lit a butt. “What was her maiden name?” I said.

“Taylor.”

“You got any married sisters?”

“No, just a single one.”

“She have any?”

“No.”

I went over to him and kicked his foot out of the way. “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Drew?”

“Who?” he said.

I said it over, about an inch away from his face.

He screwed his eyes up innocently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any Mrs. Drew.”

I had him figured for the nervous type. Slapping around wasn’t any good. It wasn’t in my line anyway. “All right, Mac, come on in the bathroom with me.” I hauled him in by the shoulder. He let out a moan when he saw the ceiling. I made him sit on the edge of the tub, then I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and held his head down. It was still coming through. It was mostly water but he couldn’t see that. He squirmed and tried to jerk back when the first drop landed on the back of his head. Sweat came out all, over his face like rain. “Why’d you do it?” I said.

“I didn’t, my God, I didn’t,” he choked. “Let me out of here—”

“You’re going to sit here until you tell me why you did it and who Mrs. Drew is.”

“I don’t know,” he moaned. “I never heard of her.” Another drop landed, on his pulse this time, and I thought he’d have convulsions. “Why’d you do it? Who’s Mrs. Drew?”

He could hardly talk any more. “I didn’t. I don’t know her. How can I tell you if I don’t know her?” He kept waiting for the third drop that was coming. All of a sudden his head flopped and he fainted away again.

It may have been cruel, but I don’t think so. It saved his life for him. It convinced me he hadn’t done it, and that he didn’t know who Mrs. Drew was. I got him over to a big chair and went and flagged Katie.

“Maybe you can help me. What made you say ‘that poor woman!’ when I started up the first time? How is it you didn’t say ‘that poor man!’?”

She looked indignant. “Why, he abused her! You were never home enough to hear what went on up there. They used to have terrible rows. She dropped in here only this morning and told me he’d threatened her life.”

“I didn’t know you knew her that well.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “As a matter of fact today was the first time she’d ever been in here.”

“I don’t get it,” I remarked. “Why should she come to you to spill a thing like that, if she hardly knew you at all?”

“She mentioned she’d found out from one of the neighbors that I was married to a detective. Maybe she was looking for protection.” Or maybe, I said to myself, she was planting evidence against her husband. First with the insurance salesman, now with Katie. Somehow it smelled a little fishy to me. Women will gossip about other women’s husbands maybe, but never their own. This one had. She hadn’t just talked at random either. She’d shot off her mouth where it would do the most good; she’d created two star witnesses for the state in case anything happened.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I went and got the two hairpins I’d picked up upstairs and rinsed off the one I’d found on the bathroom floor. Then I went back to Katie. “You’re a woman,” I said. “How was she wearing her hair?”

It took her four and a half minutes to tell me all about it, without once repeating herself. Then I showed her the two hairpins. “Which would go with that?”

“Why, the amber one of course.” She nearly laughed in my face.

“Only a man would ask a thing like that! How could a blonde like her use a black hairpin like this other one? It would have stood out a mile off.”

“Here’s four bits,” I said. “Run along to the movies, you’ve earned it. And I don’t want you around when the boys come down to see Fraser.”

I jiggled the two hairpins up and down in my hand. The black one was the one I’d found in the bedroom. Something told me that Mrs. Drew, when she showed up a few months from now to cash in on that ten grand, was going to turn out to be a dark-haired lady. But I wasn’t going to wait until then to make sure. I very much wanted to meet her now.

I got my claws in the superintendent and hauled him in from the hallway, where Katie had lingered to give him instructions about kalsomining our ceiling. “Mrs. Fraser had a woman visitor sometime during the day today,” I told him. “Think hard.”

“I don’t have to,” he said. “She came right up to me and asked me which entrance to take, it must have been her first visit.” The building is one of those inner garden things with four wings.

“She had dark hair, didn’t she?”

Then he goes and spoils my day. “Nah, she was as blond as they come.”

I recovered after awhile. Just because he’d seen one caller didn’t mean there hadn’t been others later on that he hadn’t seen. “You didn’t see her when she left, did you?” That was asking too much. But not of him, it turned out; he seemed to know everything that was going on. “I think I did at that,” he said. “I ain’t sure.”

“Whaddye mean?” I said impatiently. “If you got a good look at her going in, how could you miss knowing her when she came out?”

“I don’t know if it was her or not,” he said. “I saw someone come out of there that looked like her, was dressed just like her, but when she went in she was alone and when she came out there was a guy with her. I wasn’t close enough to her the second time to tell if it was the same one.”

“That’s because y’mind ain’t trained,” I snapped. “Now forget all about her coming out and just concentrate on her going in. That ought to be easy because you said she stepped right up to you. All right, got it?” He nodded dumbly. “What color was she wearing?”

“Black.”

“Well, wasn’t there some ornament, some gadget or other on her that would strike your eye, catch your attention?”

“I didn’t notice,” he said.

“Close your eyes and try it.”

He did, then opened them right up. “That’s right, there was,” he grinned happily. “I saw it just now with my eyes shut. She had a big bow on the side of her hat.” He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, it must have been her I saw coming out, the second one had it too. I spotted that same bow all the way across the court.”

“See how it works?” I said. “Drop around sometime and we’ll be glad to give you a job — scrubbing the floor.” So she had a guy with her when she left. That explained who had done the smoking in the clothes closet up there. Clothes are too sacred to a woman, whether they’re her own or not, for her to risk getting sparks on them. It would take a man not to give a damn where he lit up.

It was still all balled up to me. The best I could do was this: the lady-visitor had arrived first, openly, and been let in by Mrs. Fraser. Then when Mrs. F. wasn’t looking she had slipped a male accomplice into the flat and he’d hidden in the closet and waited for a favorable opportunity to jump out and give her the works. I scratched the part out of my hair. That was lousy, it stank. First, because the woman had gone right up to the super of her own free will and let him take a good look at her when it would have been easy enough to avoid that. Second, because she was a blonde, and the hairpin I’d picked up was a black one. Third, because it was Mrs. Fraser herself and not anyone else who had gone around planting suspicion against her husband. You might almost say that she had lent a hand in her own murder.

I went up to 4-C again, giving myself a scalp treatment on the way. The cop was still outside the door. “Never mind trying to hide your cigarette behind you,” I said, “you’re liable to burn yourself where it won’t do you any good.” No more reporters, they had a deadline, and the medical examiner had gone too. She was still in there, on the living-room floor now, waiting to go out. “Oh, by the way,” I mentioned, “I’m holding the husband down in my place, in case you guys want to take a look at him.” They almost fell over each other in their hurry to get out and at him. “He didn’t do it,” I called after them, but I knew better than to expect them to listen to me.

I followed them out and right away another door down the hall opened an inch or two. It was just Mrs. Katz of 4-E trying to get a free look at the body when it was carried out. I beckoned to her and she came the rest of the way out, pounds and pounds of her. I liked Mrs. K. at sight. I bet she cooked a mean bowl of noodles. “Maybe you can tell me something I’d like to know.”

She finished swallowing the marshmallow she was chewing on. “Sure, sure, maybe I’ll get my name in the papers, huh? Poppa, come here.”

“No, never mind Poppa. Did you see anyone go in there yesterday to call on her, in a black dress?”

“No,” she said, “but somebody in a black dress was coming out. I met them down by the elevator when I was coming home from the grocer, a man and a woman together. They didn’t live in the building so maybe they was visiting.”

“Big bow on her hat?”

She nodded excitedly. “Sure, sure.”

“That’s them. Blond, wasn’t she?”

“Get out! Dark — darker as I am even.”

I wheeled her around on her base and pushed her back in again. I had it now! The super met her coming in and he said she was blond. Mrs. Katz passed her going out and said she was dark. Well, they were both right. She’d come in blond and she’d gone out brunette.

I ran all the way downstairs to the basement and dragged the super away from his radio. “What time do you start the fire in the incinerator?”

“Not until after midnight,” he said. “Let it burn out between then and morning.”

“Then all today’s rubbish is still intact?”

“Sure. I never touch it until the tenants are all asleep.”

“Show me where it is, I’ve got to get at it.” We took a couple of torches, a pair of rubber gloves, and an iron poker and went down into the sub-basement. We should have taken gas masks too. He threw open the doors of the big oven-like thing and I ducked my coat and started to crawl in head-first.

“You can’t go in there!” he cried aghast. “They’re still using the chutes at this hour, you’ll get garbage all over you.”

“How the hell else am I going to get at it?” I yelled back over my shoulder. “Which of these openings is fed by the C-apartments?”

“The furthest one over.”

“It would be! You go up and give orders no one in the building is to empty any more garbage until I can get out of here.”

I don’t ever want a job like that again. Pawing around among the remains of people’s suppers is the last word in nastiness. Slippery potato peels got in my shoes and fishbones pricked my fingers. Holding my breath didn’t help much. I was in there over half an hour. When I was through I came out backwards an inch at a time and took a good sneeze, but what I came out with was worth it. I had two fistfuls of human hair, blond hair cut off short at the scalp. Cut off in a hurry, because one of the hairpins that had dressed it was still tangled in it. It hadn’t come from the dead woman’s head; there was no blood on it. The hairpin was amber, mate to the one I’d found upstairs. I also had the crumpled lid of a cardboard box that said Sylvia, Hairdresser on it. It looked like a hatbox but it wasn’t, hairdressers don’t sell hats. I didn’t really need it, I had a general idea of what was what now, but as the saying goes, every little bit added to what you’ve got makes a little bit more.

Upstairs I hung my duds out on the fire-escape to air and put on clean ones. Then I beat it over to headquarters to talk some more to Fraser. I found him in the back room where a couple of the boys had been holding hands with him since he’d been brought in. I got the cold shoulder all around, to put it mildly. “Well, well,” said one of them, “look who’s here. Nice of you to drop in. Care to sign your name in the guest-book?”

“I remember now,” said the other. “Isn’t Galbraith the name? Weren’t you assigned to this case just tonight?”

“He wouldn’t know. It didn’t happen close enough to get him steamed up,” said the first one. “The corpse only just about landed in his—”

I stuck my hands deep in my pockets and grabbed hold of the lining. “What’s that paper you’ve got in your hand?” I cut in.

“Why, this is just the confession of Fraser here that he killed his wife, which he is now about to sign. Aren’t you, Fraser?”

Fraser nodded like a jack-in-the-box and his eyes seemed to roll around all over his head. “Anything, anything,” he gasped. They read it back to him and he almost tore it away from them, he was so anxious to sign and get it over with. I just stood by and took it all in. It didn’t amount to a hell of a whole lot. In fact it stacked up to exactly nothing. “Phooey!” I said. “You’ve got him punch-drunk, that’s all. Who the hell couldn’t get anything out of that nerve-wreck?”

His hand wobbled so that he could hardly put his name to it. They had to steady him by the elbow. “Now will you lemme alone, now will you lemme alone?” he kept murmuring over and over.

“Get wise,” I said as I followed them outside. “Why don’t you save yourselves a lot of razzing and tear that thing up before you show it to anybody?”

“Get that!” one of them laughed.

“Green with envy,” added the other.

“Look,” I said patiently, “let me show you. He didn’t have the key, couldn’t get in to do it even if he wanted to.”

“That’s what he tried to hand us, too.”

“I know it’s the truth because I found his key myself, found it on the living-room floor right in my own flat. The super had dumped him on the sofa, see, with his feet higher than his head.”

Did they laugh! They made more noise than a shooting-gallery. “Know where it had been all the time? In the cuff of his trouser. Dropped in when he was dressing this morning and stayed there all day long. It’s a natural, one of those crazy little things that do happen ever once in a while. That’s why I believe him. If it had disappeared altogether, I wouldn’t have. But who’d think of planting a key in his own trouser-cuff? If that ain’t enough for you dimwits, I checked up on where he worked, called his employer at his home, found out what time he left the office. He’d only just gotten to his door when I came up the stairs and found him standing outside of it.”

But I could have saved my breath, it was like talking to the walls. They had their suspect in the bag and were going to see that he stayed there. They shook their heads pityingly at me and went on out to break the glad news to the chief. I went in to Fraser again and sent the cop out of the room. His hair was all down over his face and he was just staring out under it without seeing anything. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, but I didn’t let him know it.

“What’d you do that for?” I said quietly.

He knew I meant signing that cheesy confession. “It’s no fun when they jab cigarette butts up under your armpits.”

“Can that.” I gave him a hard look. “I don’t want to hear about your troubles. If there’s anything yellower than killing your wife, it’s saying you did it when you didn’t. Now try to snap out of it and act like a man even if you’re not. I want to ask you something.” I called the cop and told him to bring him in a cup of coffee. While he was slobbering it all over the front of his shirt and sniffing into it I said: “You told me you’ve got an unmarried sister. She blond?”

“Yeah,” he sobbed, “like me.”

“Where can I get hold of her?”

“She don’t live here, she’s up in Pittsfield, Mass., with my folks.”

“How’d she get along with your wife?”

“Not so hot,” he admitted.

I let him alone after that. “Put him back in mothballs,” I told the cop.

In the chief’s office the two half-baked rookies were all but doing a war-dance around their embalmed confession, while the chief read it over through his glasses. Embalmed is right, it smelled out loud.

“You showed up smart on that last case,” the chief said to me sourly.

“Why, it hasn’t broken yet, I’m still with it,” I said quietly. “That guy in there, Fraser, didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Who did?”

“A Mrs. Drew,” I said. “I’ll show her to you as soon as I can. G’night.”

I ran up a big bill by calling Pittsfield, Mass., long-distance, but it didn’t take me long to find out all I wanted to know about Fraser’s sister. Which was simply that she wasn’t there. The last anyone had seen of her had been the night before, waiting around the depot for a train. I wondered if even a girl from Pittsfield would be dumb enough to think she was disguising herself by changing her hair from blond to dark — still, you never can tell. Every once in awhile one of those 1880 twists crops up in a 1935 case. Apart from that, I found out there wasn’t anyone named Drew in the whole of Pittsfield.

Even so, I had a pretty good set-up after just twenty-four hours’ work. I had the two angles of the triangle now — the two women — Fraser’s wife and sister. All I needed was a third angle, the man in the case. And that wasn’t Fraser, he was just the fall guy in this.

Who the guy was, that had smoked in the clothes-closet and then stepped out to turn Mrs. Fraser’s head into caviar, wasn’t going to be any cinch. Starting from scratch I had this much on him: both the super and Mrs. Katz had lamped him on his way out, which wasn’t much but it was better than nothing at all. In addition there was one other little thing I didn’t need to be told by anybody. I was as sure as though I had been present at his christening that his name was going to turn out to be Drew, the same as the lady who was down on the insurance policy as beneficiary. But that was only a detail. He could call himself Smith for all I cared just as long as I got hold of him. As far as Fraser’s sister was concerned she could keep. The point being that wherever Drew was, Mrs. Drew wouldn’t be very far away. And if the Fraser girl happened to be Mrs. Drew, with or without benefit of clergy, that was her tough luck.

The first thing I did was to get hold of the super and Mrs. Katz, one at a time, and quiz them to get a rough idea of what he had looked like. It took hours and used up thousands of words, because neither of them were exactly Einsteins, but I got a couple of interesting facts out of them. The super, who had been all the way across the court from him, could only contribute that on his way out he had taken the woman who was with him by the arm to help her manage the two very low, harmless steps that led down to the sidewalk level. Mrs. Katz, who had been waiting to go in the elevator as they came out, enlarged on this trait of gallantry he seemed to possess.

“Well, one thing, he was no loafer,” she said approvingly. “I had my arms full with bundles, so what does he do, he turns and holds the elevator door open for me, I should go in.”

Darned polite, I said to myself, for a guy who had just committed a murder. Politeness must have been an awfully strong habit with him, a hangover from whatever line of business he was in. Mrs. Katz was certainly no spring chicken, and I’ve seen better lookers. Who, I asked myself, is trained to be polite to women of all ages, no matter what they look like? Who has to be, in order to earn a living? A gigolo. A headwaiter. A floorwalker in a department store. An automobile salesman. A hairdresser—

Sure. I might have known that from the beginning. Hair seemed to have a lot to do with this. This woman had gone in there blond and come out brunette. I’d found a lot of blond hair cut off in a hurry in the incinerator, without any blood on it. This unknown guy had been up there at the time, although nobody saw him go in. And he’s so used to handing out the oil to his customers that even when he comes out with that butchery on his conscience, he instinctively holds the door open for one woman, elaborately helps the other down a two-inch step. What you might call a reflex action. And to cinch the whole thing, there was that crumpled lid of a cardboard box that had been thrown down the garbage chute; the one that said Sylvia, Hairdresser on it.

That gave me a pretty good idea of how he had employed his talents up there in the flat, apart from mangling Mrs. Fraser. But all the same it took my breath away, left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. The guy must be a monster. Was it possible for a human being to batter one woman to death and then right on top of that, in the very next room, calmly sit down and go to work giving his accomplice a quick treatment to change the color of her hair?

He must have said: “Anyone see you come in?” She must have said: “I had to ask the superintendent where it was.” He must have cursed her out for being ninety-nine kinds of a fool, then said: “Well, I took a chance on someone spotting you. I brought something that’ll fix it so they won’t know you as you go out.”

Well, I could fix it so nobody’d know either one of them this time next year, and I wasn’t wasting any more time about it either. I looked up Sylvia’s in the directory, and luckily there were only three of them to buck. If it had been Frances or Renee I would have had half a column to wade through. Nothing doing with the first two; I got to the third a little before five in the afternoon.

It was a whale of a place. Twenty-two booths going full-blast and a lot of steam and perfume and cigarette smoke all mixed up. It gave me the creeping willies to be in there, especially after somebody’s face with black mud all over it nearly scared me out often years’ growth. I stayed close to the door and asked to see the proprietor. It turned out Sylvia was just a trade-name and the proprietor was a man after all. He came out rubbing his hands; maybe he was just drying them off.

“You got anybody named Drew working for you?” I said.

“No,” he said, “we had an expert named de la Rue here until the day before yesterday, but he isn’t with us any more.”

That interested me right away. “Come again, what’d you say the name was?”

He made a mouth like that guy in the hair-tonic ads. “Gaston de la Rue,” he gargled.

I flashed my identification at him and he nearly jumped out of his skin and forgot about being French. “Break down,” I said, “I’m not one of your customers. Nobody on two legs ever had a name like that. Was it Drew or wasn’t it?”

“Sh, not so loud,” he said, “very bad for business. They like ’em French. This is just between us. Please keep it to yourself. Well yes, in private life I think he was called Gus Drew or something like that. But what an artist, he could have put a permanent-wave in a porcupine—”

“Let me see your appointment book for the past few weeks.” He took me back in his office and showed it to me. Mrs. Fraser’s name was down there three times in one month, and right next to it each time were “de la Rue’s” initials. “Why’d she always get him?” I wanted to know.

He shrugged. “She always asked for him. Some of them, they like to flirt a little.”

“Flirt with death,” I growled to myself. “Is he due back here for anything?” I asked him.

“He’s got a week’s pay coming to him, but when he called up and I asked him about it he said he wasn’t coming in for it. He told me to mail it to where he lives.”

“And did you? When?”

“Last night at closing time.”

It was just about being delivered. “Quick,” I said. “Got his last address on record? Fork it over.”

He gave it to me, then made a crack that nearly killed me. “Why ‘last,’ did he move?”

“Oh no, he’ll probably wave to me from the window.”

He followed me back to the front of the place again, sort of worried. “What’s he done?” he said. “What do they want him for?”

“The chief would like to have his mustache curled,” I answered and walked out.

I took a taxi and rode right up to the door of the address Mr. “Sylvia” had given me. I didn’t expect him to be there any more and he wasn’t. “Just moved out yesterday,” the janitor said. “Didn’t say where. Nice quiet fellow, too.”

“Where’s that letter you’re holding for him?” I said. “Did it come yet?”

“Just now. He said he’d be back for it.” His mouth opened. “How’d you know?”

“This is who I am,” I said. “Now get this. I can’t be hanging around the hallway. He mayn’t show up for days. I’ll take one of your rooms. You give him his letter when he asks for it, but watch yourself, keep a straight face on you. Then ring my bell three times, like this, see? Don’t let him see you do it, but don’t wait too long either — do it as soon as he turns his back on you. Now have you got that straight? God help you if you muff it.”

“Golly, ain’t this exciting!” he said. He showed me a sliver of a hall room at the back of the ground floor, with exactly three things in it — a bed, a light-bulb, and a window. I paid him a dollar apiece for them and after that I lived there. I tested the doorbell battery by staying where I was and having the janitor ring it for me from the vestibule. It was no cathedral chime but at least you could hear it, which was all that interested me.

They say you should be able to see the two sides to any story. Sitting here like that, waiting, with the walls pressing me in at the elbows, I saw as much of Drew’s side of it as I was ever likely to. No wonder ten grand had seemed a lot of money, no wonder murder hadn’t stopped him, if it meant getting out of a hole like this. Not that

I felt sorry for him, I just understood a little better than before. But there was one good angle to it. The ten grand wouldn’t be his for a long time yet, not for months. Meanwhile he needed what was in that envelope the janitor had, needed the little that was coming to him from “Sylvia’s,” needed it bad. He’d be around for it. I couldn’t lose.

Once in awhile I’d hear a step on the stairs, the old wooden stairs that seemed to go right up over my room, when somebody in the house came up or went down them. Once some woman hollered down from the top floor for her kid to come up. That was all. Silence the rest of the time. The minutes went like hours and the hours like weeks. I didn’t even smoke; there wasn’t room enough for two kinds of air in the place. I just sat, until I had a headache.

It came a little before eight, sooner than I’d expected. He must have needed it bad to come that quickly, or maybe he thought it was safer to get it over with right away than to wait a few days. He’d probably read in the papers by now that Fraser was taking the rap, anyway. And once he had this letter in his pocket and had walked around the corner, try to locate him again, just try.

II

Ding-ding-ding peeped the bell battery, and the air in the room got all churned up. I hauled the door out of the way and loped down the dim hallway. The janitor was standing just inside the street door waving his arm to me like a windmill. “He just went away,” he said. “There he goes, see him?” His cheap khaki waterproof was a pushover to tail.

“Get back!” I snarled and gave him a shove. “He’s liable to turn around.” I waited a second to get set, then I mooched out of the house, took a squint at the sky, turned my coat-collar up and started down the street in the same direction. He did look back from the corner just before he turned, but I’d finished crossing to the opposite side and was out of his line of vision.

I gave him a lot of rope for the first two blocks, then I saw a subway entrance heading toward us and I closed up on him in a hurry. He went into it like I’d been afraid he would. It’s about the best way of shaking anyone off there is, but he had to change a dime or something, and when I got down the steps myself he’d only just gone through the turnstile. There was a train already in, with its doors wide open and jammed to the roof. He took it on the run along with a lot of others and wedged himself in on the nearest platform just as the doors started to slip closed. There was just room enough left to get my fingernails in by the time I got there, but that was all the leverage I needed. They were the pneumatic kind. Back they went and I was standing on his feet and we were breathing into each other’s faces. “Whew!” I thought to myself, and kept my eyes fixed on the back of a newspaper the fat man next to him was reading.

He squirmed and yanked at 110th and tugged himself free. When I got up to the street myself he was just going into an A.&P. store. I took a look in the door as I went past. He was standing at the counter waiting his turn. Evidently they hadn’t even had the price of groceries until he called for that money that was coming to him. I walked all the way to the next corner, then doubled back on the other side of the street and finally parked at a bus stop and stood there waiting. But the right bus for me never seemed to come along.

He was in there over ten minutes, and then when he came out his arms were still empty anyway. Meaning he’d ordered so much that he couldn’t carry it himself. So they were going to stock up for the next few weeks and lie low, were they? I just barely kept him in sight after this, only close enough to tell which building he’d hit, as I knew there would be a last look back before he ducked. He finally got where he was going, gave a couple of cagy peeks, one over each shoulder, and then it was over. He was in — in Dutch.

I sized it up from where I was, tying my shoelace on somebody’s railing. It was a President McKinley-model flat on the south side of 109th, crummy as they come, without even a service entrance. That meant the groceries would have to be delivered at the front door when they came around, which was a chance for a lot more than groceries to crash in. No lights showed up in any front windows after he’d gone in, so I figured they had a flat in the rear. I eased myself into the vestibule. Half of the mailboxes had no names in them, so they were no help. I hadn’t expected his to have any, but if the rest of them had I could have used a process of elimination. It was so third-class the street door didn’t even have a catch on it, you just opened it and walked in.

I worked my way up the stairs floor by floor, listening carefully at the rear doors on each landing. There was a radio going behind one of them, but nobody seemed to be in any of the others. If I had them cornered they were lying mighty low. I hated to think I might have slipped up in some way. I started soft-shoeing my way down again, and just below the second floor met the groceries coming up in a big box about twice the size of the lad struggling with it. “Where they going?” I said.

“Fourth floor, rear.”

I had him put them down, then I thumbed him downstairs. “I’ll see that they get them.” He was too exhausted to argue. I unlimbered my gun, gave the door a couple of taps, and flattened myself back to one side of it.

Not a sound, not even a footfall, for a couple of minutes. Then all of a sudden a voice spoke from the other side of the door, only a few inches away from me. “Who’s out there?”

I thinned my voice to make it sound like a kid’s. “A.&P., boss.”

A chain clanked and fell loose. The lock, I noticed, was shiny and new, must have just been put on. I reached out with my heel and kicked a can of tomatoes to give him confidence. The door cracked and before it was an inch wide I had the gun pushing in his belt buckle. “Up,” I snapped. He lifted them all right but couldn’t keep them from shaking. He didn’t have anything on him though, so the precautions must have been just to give them time to make a get-away, and not because he’d intended fighting it out. There was no hall and the door opened right into the living room. I cuffed him to me and started to push in.

“What’s all this about?” he tried to stall, and I heard a window go up.

“Hold it!” I yelled, and covered her from across his shoulder just as she raised one leg to go over. “Come on in again, baby.”

There was my black-haired lady, a little pale around the gills, eyes nearly popping out of her head. There was something funny about her which I couldn’t dope out at first. I took a second look and nearly keeled over. If I had, though, they wouldn’t have hung around waiting for me to revive, so I gave a long whistle instead and let it go at that. I gave her a shove with my knee to show her which direction to take. “Get started, you head the daisy-chain going downstairs.”

The chief was damn near bowled over when I brought them in to him. “So your Mrs. Drew wasn’t a myth after all and you finally found her,” he opened.

I knocked the black wig off her head with the back of my hand. “Mrs. Drew your eye. If you’re holding Fraser for killing his wife better turn him loose. This is her right here.” Her blond hair, clipped off short, stood up funny all over her head.

One of the boys who had used Fraser’s armpits as ashtrays spoke up. “Then what was that we saw in the bathtub—”

“That was Fraser’s sister, poor kid,” I said. “She left Pittsfield that day and hasn’t been seen since. Fraser didn’t know she was coming but this pair did — maybe they got her to come down some way — but she must have walked in unannounced and spoiled their big love scene. Drew hid in the closet until time to come out and do his stuff. Mrs. Fraser probably led up to it with a quarrel. She and the sister didn’t hate each other. Anyway, they had the frame all planned to pass off her body as his wife’s and let him fry for it. They dressed her in Mrs. F.’s kimona, dumped her in the tub and then proceeded to mutilate her face with the iron until even her supposed husband couldn’t recognize her any more. Then the real Mrs. Fraser put on the dead girl’s clothes and this black wig and beat it with her side-kick. As soon as Fraser had hit the ceiling at Sing Sing she would have married Drew, and then there would have been a Mrs. Drew all right to collect that ten-grand premium on her own life.”

I shoved all the evidence I had across the desk at him and went home.

“Supper’s ready,” the wife said. “Should I wait until you’ve had your bath?”

“Just open the windows,” I said. “You don’t catch me in that tub again until Nineteen Forty.”