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

Red Liberty

Katie must have been out of humor to say a thing like that, but it sure rankled. “And that’s why you’re no further than you are,” she went on. “Ten years from now you’ll still be a second-grade detective pinching pickpockets. Movies and beer — that’s all you ever think of whenever you have any time to yourself. Why don’t you improve your mind? Why don’t you read a book? Why don’t you go to a museum once in a while and look at the beautiful statues?”

I nearly fell over. “Look at statues!” I gasped. “What for?”

I seemed to have her there for a minute. “Why — why, to see how they’re made,” she said finally, looking bewildered.

There didn’t seem to be much sense to it, but anything to keep peace in the family. I reached for my hat and gave a deep sigh. “You win,” I said. “I’ll try anything once.”

Riding down in the sub I got a bright idea. Instead of wasting a lot of time looking at a flock of little statues I’d look at one big one instead and get the whole thing over with. So I got out at the Battery, forked over thirty-five cents for one round-trip ticket and got on the little ferry that takes you down the bay to the Statue of Liberty. It was the biggest statue around, and if there was any truth to what Katie said, it ought to improve me enough to last for the rest of the year.

There were about ten others making the trip with me, and as soon as everyone was on board, the tub gives a peep with its whistle and starts off, graceful as a hippopotamus. First the statue was about the size of your thumb. It came gliding over the water getting bigger all the time, until it was tall as an office building. It was pea-green, just like on the postcards. Finally the ferry tied up at a long pier built on piles that stuck out from the island, and everybody got off. There was another crowd there waiting to get on and go back. It seems the trip is only made once every hour.

It was certainly an eyeful once you got close up under it. The stone base alone was six stories high, and after that there was nothing but statue the rest of the way. There was just room enough left over on the island for a little green lawn with cannonballs for markers, a couple of cement paths, and some benches. But on the other wide, away from the city, there were a group of two-story brick houses, lived in by the caretakers I suppose.

Anyway, we went in through a thick, brutal-looking metal door painted black, and down a long stone corridor, and after a couple of turns came to an elevator. A spick-and-span one too, that looked as if it had just been installed. This only went up as far as the top of the pedestal, and after that you had to walk the other seventeen stories. The staircase was a spiral one only wide enough to let one person through at a time and it made tough going, but several times a little platform opened out suddenly on the way up, with an ordinary park bench placed there to rest on. There was always the same fat man sitting heaving on it by the time I got to it, with not much room left over for anybody else. When I say fat, I mean anywheres from two hundred fifty pounds up. I’d noticed him on the boat, with his thin pretty little wife. “Brother,” I said the second time I squeezed in next to him on the bench, “pardon me for butting in, but why do it? You must be a glutton for punishment.”

His wife had gone on the rest of the way up without waiting for him. He just wheezed for a long time, then finally he got around to answering me. “Brother,” he said with an unhappy air, “she can think up more things for me to do like this. You know the old saying, nobody loves a—”

I couldn’t help liking him right off. “Buck up, Slim,” I said, “they’re all the same. Mine thinks I’m a lowbrow and sends me out looking at statues so I’ll learn something.”

“And have you?” he wanted to know.

“Yep, I’ve learned there’s no place like home,” I told him. “Well, keep your chins up,” I said, and with that I left him and went on up.

At the very top you had to push through a little turnstile, and then you were finally up in the head of the statue. The crown or tiara she wears, with those big spikes sticking out, has windows running from side to side in a half-circle. I picked the nearest one and stuck my head out. You could see for miles. The boats in the harbor were the size of match-boxes. Down below on the lawn the cannonballs looked like raisins in a pudding. Well, I stood there like that until I figured I’d gotten my thirty-five cents’ worth. The rest were starting to drift down again, so I turned to go too.

At the window next to me I noticed the fat man’s pretty little wife standing there alone. He evidently hadn’t been able to make the grade yet and get up there with her. She was amusing herself by scribbling her initials or something on the thick stone facing of the window, which was about a foot deep and wider at the outside than at the inside, the tiara being a semicircle. That was nothing. Most people do that whenever they visit any monument or point of interest. All five of the facings were chock-full of names, initials, dates, addresses, and so on, and as time and the weather slowly effaced the earlier ones there was always room for more. She was using an eyebrow pencil or something for hers though, instead of plain lead, I noticed.

By that time we were alone up there. The others were all clattering down the corrugated-iron staircase again, and the ferry was on its way back from the Battery to pick us up. Much as I would have enjoyed waiting to get an eyeful of the shape her stout spouse was going to be in when he got up there, I figured I’d had enough. I started down and left her there behind me, chin propped in her hands and staring dreamily out into space, like Juliet waiting at her balcony for a high-sign from Romeo.

You went down by a different staircase than you came up, I mean it was the same spiral but the outside track this time, and there was no partition between, just a handrail. There were lights strung all along the stairs at regular intervals, of course; otherwise the place would have been pitch-dark. Some were just house bulbs; others were small searchlights turned outward against the lining of the statue, which was painted silver. In other words, anyone that was going up while you were coming down had to pass you in full view, almost rub elbows with you. No one did. The whole boatload that had come out with me was down below by now.

When I got down even with the first resting-platform, with only a rail separating me from it, something caught the corner of my eye just as my head was due to go below the platform level. I climbed back up a step or two, dipped under the railing, and looked under the bench, where it lay. Then I saw what it was and reached in and pulled it out. It was just somebody’s brown felt hat, which had rolled under the bench.

I turned it upside down and looked in it. Knox — and P.G. were the initials. But more important, it hadn’t been left there yesterday or last week, but just now. The sweat on the headband hadn’t dried yet, and there was plenty of it — the leather strip was glistening with it. That was enough to tell me whose it was, the fat guy’s. He’d been sitting on this bench when I left him — dripping with exertion — and I remembered seeing this very lid in his hand, or one the same color and shape. He’d taken it off and sat holding it in his hand while he mopped his melting brow.

He hadn’t gone on up to where I’d left his wife, for he’d neither arrived while I was still up there nor had I passed him on the way down. It was a cinch he’d given it up as a bad job and gone on down from here, without tackling the last of the seventeen “stories” or twists. Still I couldn’t figure how he could come to forget his hat, leave it behind like this, fagged out or not. Then I thought, “Maybe the poor gink had a heart attack, dizzy spell or something and had to be carried down, that’s how it came to be overlooked.” So I took it with me and went on down to try and locate him and hand it back to him.

I rang when I got to where the elevators started from, and when the car had come up for me I asked the operator: “What happened to that fat guy, know the one I mean? Anything go wrong with him? I picked up his hat just now.”

“He hasn’t come down yet,” he told me. “I’d know him in a minute. He must be still up there.”

“He isn’t up above, I just came from there myself. And he’s the last guy in the world who’d walk down the six stories from here when there’s a car to take him. How do you figure it?”

“Tell you where he might be,” said the attendant. “Outside there on the parapet. They all go out there for a last look through the telescope before they get in the car.”

“Well, wait up here for a minute until I find out. If he shows up tell him I’ve got his hat.”

I went out and made a complete circuit of the place, then doubled back and did it in reverse. Not a soul on it. It was a sort of terrace that ran around the top of the base, protected by a waist-high stone ledge on all four sides. It was lower down than the head of Miss Liberty of course, but still plenty high.

I went back to the elevator operator. “Nothing doing. You sure you didn’t take him down in your car without noticing?”

“Listen,” he said. “When he got on the first time he almost flattened me against the door getting in. I woulda known it the second time. I ain’t seen him since.”

“Are there any lavatories or restrooms on the way up?”

“Naw,” he said, “nothing like that.”

“Then he musta walked down the rest of the way without waiting for you. Take me down to the bottom—”

“If he did, he’s the first one ever did that yet. That’s what the elevators are here for.” He threw the switch. “Say,” he said, and I saw his face light up as if he was almost hoping something would happen to break the monotony of his job, “maybe he — you don’t suppose he—”

I knew what he was driving at. “You’re trying to tell me he took a jump for himself, aren’t you? G’wan, he couldn’t have even raised himself up over that stone ledge out there to do it! And if he had, there’d a been a crowd around him below. Everyone on the island woulda seen him land. I looked down just now. They’re all strolling around down there, addressing postcards, taking it easy waiting for the boat.”

His face dropped again. “They none of ’em try that from here, they always pick bridges instead. Nothing ever happens here.”

“Cheer up, Suicide Johnny,” I told him, “your cage will probably fall down the shaft some day and kill everyone in it.”

When he let me out I made straight for the concession pavilion down near the pier, where most of the ten who had come out with me were hanging around buying postcards and ice-cream cones, waiting for the ferry to pull in. It wasn’t more than fifty yards away by this time, coasting in a big half-circle from the right to get into position, with its engine already cut off.

The fat man wasn’t in the refreshment house — one look inside from the doorway told me that. I asked one or two of the others if they’d seen him since they’d come out of the statue. Nobody had, although plenty had noticed him going in — especially on the way up — just as I had.

“He must be around some place,” one of them suggested indifferently. “Couldn’t very well get off the island until the ferry came back for him.”

“No kidding?” I remarked brittlely. “And here I am thinking he went up in a puff of smoke!”

I went around to the other side of the base, following a series of cement walks bordered with ornamental cannonballs. No rotund gentleman in sight. I inquired at the dispensary at the back of the island, and even at one or two of the brick cottages the caretakers lived in, thinking he might have stopped in there because of illness or out of curiosity. Nothing doing.

I completed my circuit of the terraced lawn that surrounds the statue and returned to the front of it again. It had dawned on me by now that I was going to a hell of a whole lot of trouble just to return a man’s hat to him, but his complete disappearance was an irritant that had me going in spite of myself. It was the size of the man that burned me more than anything. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been somebody less conspicuous, probably wouldn’t have noticed him in the first place, but to be as big as all that and then to evaporate completely—

The ferry was in when I got back and the passengers were straggling up the long, almost horizontal gangplank. It hadn’t brought anybody out with it this trip, as the statue was closed to visitors after 4:30 each day and this was its last round trip. “Turn this in at the lost-and-found for me, will you?” I said, shoving the hat at one of the soldiers on pier-duty as I went by. “I just found it up there.”

“Hand it in at the other end, at the Battery,” he said. “That’s where they come and claim things.”

I was so dead-sure of lamping the lid’s owner on the ferry, this being its last trip back, that I hung onto it without arguing and went looking for him in the saloon, or whatever they call the between-decks part of a ferry. Meanwhile the landing platform had been rolled back and we’d started to nose up the bay.

“He’s got to be on here,” I said to myself. “He’s not spending the night back there on the island. And nothing that floats came to take him off between the time we all got off the first time and just now when this thing called back for us.” I knew that for a fact, because the ferry only made the run once every hour, on the half-hour, and it was the only one in service. So I went all over the schooner from bow to stern, upstairs, downstairs, inside and out. In the saloon a couple of kids were sitting one on each side of their father, swinging their legs over the edge of the long bench that ran all around it. And a guy who didn’t give a hoot about the skyline outside was reading Hellinger in the Mirror. Nobody else.

On the port deck the other half-dozen were sitting in chairs, just like they would on a transatlantic greyhound only without rugs, and one or two were leaning over the rail trying to kid themselves they were on an ocean trip. He wasn’t there either. Then when I went around to the starboard deck (only maybe it was the port and the other was starboard, don’t expect too much from a guy that was never further away than Coney Island), there was his wife sitting there as big as life, all by herself and the only person on that side of the scow which faced good old Joisey. I walked by her once and took a squint at her without stopping. She never even saw me. She was staring peacefully, even dreamily, out at the bay.

Now, I had no absolute proof that she was his wife, or had made the excursion with him at all. He had mentioned his wife to me, so his wife was along with him, no doubt about that. But each time I had overtaken him on one of the benches inside the statue she had gone up just ahead of him and I had missed seeing her. Then when I got up to the top this particular woman had been up there ahead of me scrawling her initials. That much I was sure of. She had been at the next observation window to me with that same “come-and-take-me” far-away look that she had now. But it was only by putting two and two together that I had her labeled as his wife; I had no definite evidence of it. So I stopped up at the other end of the narrow little deck and turned and started back toward her.

I don’t care who a guy is or what his job is, it isn’t easy for him to accost a woman sitting minding her own business like that, unless he’s the masher type — which I’m not. “If she gives me a smack in the puss,” I said to myself, “I’m gonna throw this son-of-a-hat in the water and make up my mind I never saw any fat guy; it was just a trick of the lighting effects in the statue!”

I stopped dead in my tracks in front of her and tipped my hat and said: “Pardon me, but I’ve got y’husband’s hat here.” I held it out.

She looked me up and down and a lot of little icicles went tinkling along the deck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I haven’t any husband — and I’m not interested in picking one up on a ferryboat in the bay!”

This was enough to sour a saint; it was rubbing it in a little too much. First there’s a fat man and his wife. Then there’s no fat man. And now it seems there’s no wife either. Only a hat.

“I’m no picker-upper,” I growled. “Just let’s get this straight though. On the way over I distinctly noticed you with a very hefty gentleman. You were talking to each other. You were sitting side by side out on this deck-bench. And you both stood up together when it was time to get off. I remember that distinctly, on account of your shapes reminded me of the number 10. Then later I saw the guy by himself in there. And that’s the last; he does a fade-out. Now all I’m trying to do is get this blasted kelly back to—”

The temperature didn’t go up any. “Well, why pick on me?” she said. “Why marry me off to him, and turn me into his hatcheck girl in the bargain? Who are you, anyway, the census-taker? All right, a fat clown did sit down next to me on the way out and try to take a shine to me. So what? I never saw him before in my life, don’t know his name from Adam. You saw me talking to him all right — I told him a thing or two, only I’m not the kind screams for help and makes a scene. And if he stood up at the same time I did and tried to stick close to me, I outdistanced him once we hit those stairs, don’t you worry. And if you think you rate any higher than he did just ’cause your stomach goes in instead of out, think again! Next time I go on an excursion I’m bringing a bulldog along—”

“Oh, just one of these strong, silent women! Not a word to say, eh?” I told her. “Well, suppose you give me your name and address just for fun.”

She hoisted herself up and took a quick step away. “I’m going to get a cop!” she burst out.

I side-stepped around and got in front of her. “You’ve got one,” I said, and let the badge slide back into my vest pocket again. “Now are you going to tell me what I asked you?”

“You can’t compel me to give you my name if I don’t want to!” she said hotly. “Who do you think you’re dealing with, some fly-by-night chippy? I don’t care whether you’re a detec—”

Which was true enough, as far as that goes. But she had me steamed up by now. “Either you identify yourself, or you can consider yourself under arrest!” I didn’t have a thing on her, and I knew it. I had no way of proving that what she had told me about the fat man wasn’t so. True, he had mentioned his wife to me sitting on the bench in the statue, but he hadn’t tagged this particular woman or anyone else in the group as being “it.” He hadn’t even made it clear whether his wife had accompanied him on the excursion. For all I knew she might be sitting at home at this very moment, just as my own was.

Meanwhile, “—never so insulted in my life!” she was boiling, but she was going through the motions of coming across, with angrily shaking hands. She threw back the lid of her pocketbook and fished around inside it. “I didn’t expect a third degree like this,” she snapped, “so I didn’t bring my pedigree with me! However, I’m Alice Colman, Van Raalte Apartments, Tarrytown. Take it or leave it!”

I felt like two cents by now, especially as I noticed her eyes growing shiny with tears. Even if the fat man had met with foul play, which there was no proof of so far, she hadn’t been anywhere near him at the time it happened. She had been away up at the top looking dreamy. I was only doing this because I’d seen them together on the trip out, and she needn’t have made me feel like such a lug. I covered it up by going through with what I was doing, taking out my notebook and jotting down the info. “Miss Alice Colman,” I said out loud, squinting down my pencil.

“I didn’t say that!” she flared. “Oh, let me alone, you dog!” And she whisked herself off down the deck as if she couldn’t stand any more. I could see her shoulders shaking as she went. I let her alone after that, didn’t try to follow her up.

“Well, well, well,” I sighed, “I certainly have the light touch with dolls!” Her last crack, I took it, meant that she was a Mrs. and not a Miss.

If I had any doubts that the fat guy might have turned out to be on the ferry after all, hiding behind a cuspidor or something, and that I had simply missed seeing him until now, they were very soon settled once the tub had tied up at the South Ferry landing. I stationed myself on the lower end of the plank ahead of everyone, and stopped them one by one as they tried to go past. “Police headquarters... Name, please... Address. Got anything to back it up?” And I killed the inevitable “What’s this for?” each time it came with a terse “None of your business!”

When I was through I had a line on every one who had made the outing with me — at least if anything turned up now I was no longer in the dark. All but the very guy who was missing. And he was still missing. He had definitely not made the trip back on the boat. The Colman person was the last one off, and came sailing by me head in air with the cold remark: “Be sure you follow me — low-down common bully!” I just stood there and looked after her, scratching my head. It was only after she’d gone that I realized she was the only one of the lot who hadn’t backed up her name and address with documentary proof.

But meanwhile there was something else I wanted to see about.

I went around to the ticket office in the ferry building; it was closed, of course. Ours had been the last trip of the day. I hammered on the wicket, and then I went around and pounded on the door. Luckily they were still in there, counting the day’s receipts or something. I recognized the guy that had sold me my own ticket. “Headquarters, it’s all right, lemme in a minute.” And when he had, “Now look. Do you remember selling a ticket down the bay to a fat guy, puffy cheeks like this, blue suit, brown hat, when the last boatful went out?”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I do.”

“How many did he buy? One or two?”

“Two,” he said decidedly. “I been selling ’em all day long, but I can remember that all right because he was lamebrained, couldn’t count straight. He wanted to tell me four-forty change was coming to him out of a finn. I says, ‘Buddy,’ I says, ‘in my country two times thirty-five adds up to—’ ”

“Never mind the trailer,” I squelched. “Did she — did anyone come up to the window with him when he bought them?”

“Naw, he come up to the window alone and bought two tickets. I didn’t see who was with him.”

“Being sore at him, you didn’t take a gander out the window after him after he moved on? Most ticket-sellers would.”

“They were all on line,” he explained. “I didn’t have time, had to wait on the next rubberneck.”

Well, if he’d bought two tickets his wife was with him — he hadn’t bought them just because he was overweight himself, that was a cinch. As for his wife, runner-up to himself when it came to staying out of sight, little Alice Colman was elected for the time being. Which added up to this — I was going back to that island. She could hold for awhile. If nothing had happened to him, then it was none of my business whether she was wife, girl-friend, or total stranger to him. But if something had — I wasn’t forgetting that she was the only person outside myself I’d seen him talking to.

I beat it outside to the ferry again. It was still there, but fixing to go wherever it is they go for the night when they’re not in service. Or maybe it was just going to stay put. But not while I knew it.

A couple of tattooed arms tried to bar my way up the gangplank. “One side,” I said, and the badge was getting a high polish just from rubbing against the serge so much, “I gotta see the captain before he slips off his suspenders!”

“He uses safety-pins,” he corrected me dryly, “but go ahead—” He came out of the saloon just then struggling into a lumber-jacket, evidently going ashore to catch up on his suds.

“Say, y’gotta take me back there,” I burst out. “Here’s what—” And I explained all about the hefty passenger that had gone out and hadn’t come back.

He was one person the badge didn’t mean a thing to; he was used to being boss of the roost. “Go ’way, man, you’re out of your head!” he boomed. “This boat’s asleep for tonight, I wouldn’t make another run there for St. Peter himself. If he missed it and got left behind, that’s his tough luck. He’ll just have to wait over until nine in the morning, there are plenty of benches on the island, just like Central P—” and he took the most graceful spiral spit over the rail I had ever seen — and made it.

“But y’ don’t get what I mean!” I howled, shoving the brown felt in his face. “He didn’t just miss it — something’s happened to him. Now give your orders. You know what this means, don’t you? You’re obstructing—”

“I take my orders from the company,” he said surlily, looking longingly in the direction of the dives along South Street. “If that piece of tin means anything why don’t it get you a police launch?”

But I wasn’t going to be a back-room laughing-stock for the rest of the year in case I did get there with a launch and find the fat guy had stayed behind to pick dandelions or something. I went ashore again and had it out with one of the agents in the ferry house, and he in turn had to telephone one of the higher muck-a-mucks and put it up to him, and then sign an order for me to show the captain.

Some reporters had gotten wind that something was up, in the mysterious way that only reporters can, and a couple of them were already hanging around outside when I came out. “What’s the excitement?” they wanted to know, licking their chops. “What’s it all about?”

“Wotcha doing with two hats?” one of them cracked suspiciously.

“I always carry a spare,” I said, “in case the wind blows the first one off.”

They looked sort of doubtful, but before they could do anything about it I was back on the ferry and gave orders to keep them off. “Here’s your instructions, admiral,” I told the captain, who was drooling by this time and biting his nails at the thought of being kept overtime. “I’ll buy the first ten rounds,” I assured him, “if this turns out to be a wild-goose chase.”

“Hrrmph!” he growled, and turned around and hollered an order.

Back we plugged.

“How long you gonna be?” he wanted to know as I loped off at the island.

“When I show up again,” I promised, “I’ll be back.” That old fellow could swear.

The thick, chilly-looking, black metal doors that led into the base were shut by this time. I had to get another permit from an officer on the island, and two soldiers were detailed to come with me. The only one who seemed to get any kick out of the proceedings was Suicide Johnny, who was routed out to run us up in the elevator. He was all grins. At last something was happening to break his monotony. “Gee,” he said, throwing the switch in the car, “maybe he committed sewercide by hanging himself up there some place!”

“Nuts,” I growled, “he couldn’t have hoisted himself an inch — not without a derrick. We’ll go up to the top,” I told my two escorts when we got out of the car. “Start in from there and work our way down.” They didn’t say anything, but I could read their minds: “This guy was dropped on his head when he was a kid.”

We climbed all that weary way back again and finally stood there panting. “He never got up this far,” I said when I had my wind back, “because I was up here ahead of him. But I want to take a gander at some of these initials and names scrawled here on the stonework of the windows.”

“Aw, them!” said one of the soldiers contemptuously. “Every chump that ever comes up here since the place was built has a crack at that.”

“That’s just the point,” I said. I had a close look, first of all, at what my chief rooter and admirer Alice Colman had written, at the window next to the one I’d been standing at originally. It didn’t say Alice Colman, it didn’t say any name, but I knew her work. She’d used an eyebrow pencil and the mark it left was dark and greasy, different from the thin, faint pencil marks of the rest of them. It stood out like a headline on a newspaper.

I turned to one of the bored soldiers. “What’s today’s date?”

“The twenty-third,” he said.

That’s what I’d thought it was too. But Alice Colman seemed to have gotten her dates mixed. She had it down as the twenty-fourth.

Well, that could happen to anyone. But she had the hour right, at least. She’d even put that down — 4 o’clock. Some people are like that, though. She’d visited this place at four o’clock and she wanted the world to know.

On top of that, though, came a hitch. She had an address down, and it wasn’t her own. It was just five numbers and a letter, all run together. 254W51. But that wasn’t her own address. She’d given me that on the ferry, and I’d checked on it while I was hanging around in the ferry house waiting for the permit to come back here. Yes, the management of the Van Raalte Apartments had told me long-distance over the phone from Tarrytown, that Mrs. Alice Colman was a tenant of theirs. So she hadn’t lied to me, yet she’d lied to the world at large when she was making her mark on Lady Liberty. There was something that I didn’t get about it.

“Let’s go down,” I told the soldiers, “I want to look at that bench he was sitting on.” By this time they both hated me heartily from the guts outward, I could see, but they turned and led the way.

We never got there, though. About midway between the head and where the bench was — in other words at about where the statue’s shoulder came — there was a gap with a chain across it bearing the placard Public Not Admitted. I had noticed this twice before, the first time I came up and then later when I had gone down to look for him. Maybe the chain had thrown me off, the undisturbed chain stretched across it. And then, too, until you stood directly before it, it looked far smaller and more inaccessible than it actually was, the way the lights slurred past it and made it seem no more than a fold on the inside of the lady’s gigantic metal draperies. This time, though, I stopped and asked them what it was.

“Oh, he ain’t up in there!” they assured me instantly. “Nobody’s allowed in there. Can’t you read what that says? That used to lead up into the arm and torch in the old days. The arm started weakening little by little, so they shut the whole thing off a long time ago. It’s boarded up just a little ways past the ch— Hey!” he broke off. “Where you going? You can’t do that!”

“I’m going just that little ways between the chain and where the boarding is,” I told him, spanning the cable with one leg. “If the arm lasted this long, one more guy ain’t going to hurt it, I don’t weigh enough. Throw your lights up after me. And don’t tell me what I can’t do when you see me already at it!”

The thing was a spiral, just like the other staircase that led to the head. Or rather, it started out to be, but at the very first half-turnaround it took, the boarding had already showed up, sealing it from top to bottom. That half-tum, however, cut off their lights, which shone in a straight line like any lights would. A triangle of blackness was left in one corner which they couldn’t eliminate, no matter how they maneuvered the torches.

“Come on a little nearer with those things!” I called impatiently. “Come past the chain!”

They wouldn’t budge. “Against orders,” they called back.

I came down a few steps and reached for a torch myself. “Let me have one of those things. What d’ya think I’m doing, playing hide and seek with you? How we won the last war beats me!” I jumped up again and washed out the stubborn wedge of blackness with the thin beam in my hand.

Sure he was there. And fitted in just as neatly as though the space had been measured off for him ahead of time. In a sitting position on the turn of the steps, back propped against the boarding, legs drawn up under him to help keep him propped. I touched the side of his neck. He was as cold already as the metal statue that made a tomb for him.

“Got him,” I shouted laconically. “Come on up and gimme a hand, you two.”

“What’s he doing up there?” one of those two clucks wanted to know.

“Waiting for judgment day.”

They gasped and came on up, orders or no orders.

I bent down and looked at the backs of his shoes. The leather of both heels was scraped and scarred into a fuzz from lift to ankle. The backs of his trousers were dusty all the way to the knees. “Dragged up by the shoulders,” I said, “by just one guy. If there’d been two, one of them would have taken him by the feet, like you’re going to do getting him down out of here.”

“How could one guy, any guy, haul that baby elephant all the way up there?” one of them wanted to know.

“You’d be surprised what one guy can manage to do if he’s scared enough and has to work in a hurry,” I assured him. “All right, get started. I’ll handle your lights. It wasn’t done up here anyway, so let’s get down before we all take a header into the ocean, arm and all.” It wasn’t easy, even for the two of them, to get down with him. Automatically, I figured that eliminated Alice Colman or any other woman as having had any part in it — except as an accessory.

The thing that had done it was lying under him when they got him up off the ground between them — a wicked-looking iron bar wrapped in a stiffened, blood-brown piece of rag. The wound — it was a deadly fracture — was on the side of the head just over the ear. He hadn’t bled much, outside of the first splash on the padded weapon itself. The little there was after that had clung to the skin, running down behind the jawbone and into the collar of his shirt, hence nothing on the ground around the bench where the attack had occurred.

I examined the ground around the latter place. The two little tracks his heels had made as he was dragged backwards toward the hiding-place were there plain as day under my flashlight’s beam, without the need of any powder or hocus-pocus of any kind. My only wonder was how I’d muffed seeing them when I stooped down to pick up his hat. But of course I hadn’t used my torch then.

“Take him on down the rest of the way,” I said. “No use parking with him here — it’s gotta be done sooner or later anyway.”

They loved the job — yeah they did! They must have lost ten pounds apiece in sweat, getting him down those seventeen stories of narrow, spiral staircase. When they were down at the elevator you could hear their heaving all the way up where I was. When I got down myself — I’d waited on the murder bench until the way was clear, no use dogging their footsteps an inch at a time — Suicide Johnny, with the body tucked into his car and the two guards in a state of collapse alongside of it, was wreathed in smiles. His fondest dream had come true. Something had at last happened. “Gee!” he kept murmuring. “Gee! A moider!”

I had Fatty carried over to the barracks, and an apoplectic-looking guy of Spanish War vintage whose collar was too tight for him came out to see what it was all about.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but there’s just been a crime committed on your jurisdiction — man murdered up in the statue.”

“Who are you, sirrr?” he boomed like a twenty-one gun salute. I felt like I was going to be shot at sunrise for daring to find anything the matter around his diggings.

“Denton, New York Homicide,” I told him.

“Are you sure, sirrrr?” the old rooster crowed. He meant about the murder, not who I was. He wasn’t going to believe me until he saw it with his own eyes, so I took him over and showed it to him.

“Now, just where do I stand?” I said, resting my hand on the stiff’s knee.

“This, sirr,” he orated, “is United States Government property. This is a matter for the Federal inves—”

I’d expected that. “Oh, so I get the air!” I interrupted heatedly. “After I been up and down that blank statue eighty-six times today. O.K., you put who you want on it. I’m going right ahead with it on my own. And we’ll see who comes out ahead!” I got as far as the door, then I turned around and fired at him: “I’ll even give your guy a head-start, just so you can’t accuse me of withholding information. This guy is tagged Colman. He lived until today at the Van Raalte Apartments, Tarrytown, with his wife, who is thin, blond, pretty, blue eyes, about twenty-eight, and very ritzy front. But you won’t find her there any more, so you can tell your guy to save his carfare. She didn’t do it anyway. But if you want to get hold of her, and the guy that actually did it, I’ll tell you where to look for them—”

“Where, sirrr?” he boomed like a great big firecracker.

“Today is Wednesday, isn’t it?” I answered detachedly. “Well, send your guy around to Centre Street, say day after tomorrow, that would be Friday. We’ll be holding ’em both for you down there by that time. No trouble at all, Field Marshal.” He sort of blew up internally, so I got out before he did anything about calling a firing squad.

I ducked into the statue again, for what I hoped was the last time, and decided to make Suicide Johnny useful, since he seemed to be enjoying himself so. “How would you like to help?” I said. “Come on up with me.”

When we got all the way up to the head, I took out my pocket notebook and opened it at the page where all the names were, the names I’d collected from the ten (eight really, excluding the two kids with their father) who had made the trip here and back on the ferry. Excluding Colman himself and his wife (who couldn’t have been an actual participant for reasons I’ve already given) that left six. Excluding two other women who’d been in the group, that boiled it down to four. Now the name, of course, was going to be phony — I mean the name the actual murderer had handed me — that was a pushover. But that didn’t matter. All I wanted was to connect the right guy with any name, phony or otherwise, just so I could remember something about what he’d looked like. Any little thing at all.

“You take a pencil,” I told Suicide, “and each time I call out a name, you cross off the corresponding one written down there in that book. That’s all.”

“Gee!” he said. “I’m helping a real detective!”

“My chief,” I answered drily, “sometimes has grave doubts about that. Ready? Let’s go.” I started going over the window-ledges inch by inch. They were crawling with names and initials, but I finally located one that matched one in the notebook. Johnny promptly crossed it out. Then another. Then a triple initial that matched. “Don’t cross yet,” I warned him, “just put a check next to that.”

Well, when we got through, we had nine of the ten names, women, kids and all. Each and every one of them had scribbled their names as mementoes on the stone work. “Now, which one’s left over?” I asked Suicide.

He screwed up his face and read off: “Vincent Scanlon, 55 Amboy Street, Brooklyn, real estate.”

“On circumstantial alone, that’s my guy.”

“Hully mackerel!” said the enraptured Johnny. “Can y’tell just by hearing his name like that?”

“His name ain’t Scanlon, he don’t live on Amboy Street, and he’s not in real estate,” I tried to explain. “But he’s the only one of the bunch that didn’t come up here and scrawl his John Hancock. Me and the fat guy were the last ones coming up the stairs. When I left him on the bench he was still alive. When I got up here myself even his wife was up here ahead of me, and all the others had finished their signatures and were on their way down again. Therefore, this guy who tags himself Scanlon was the murderer. Don’t you understand, he never went all the way to the top. He either came up the stairs behind me and the fat guy, or else if he was ahead of us switched into the opening that leads up into the arm, let everyone else go by, and then crept down again to where the bench was — and did his dirty work the minute the coast was clear.”

I took a notebook from him, held it open before me, and did my damndest to try and separate the party that had given me that name from the other ten. I tried to remember some feature about him, some detail, anything at all, and couldn’t, no matter how I racked my brains. There had been too many of them at one time, all getting off the ferry at once, all stopping in front of me just for a half-minute or so. He should have been nervous, just coming away from doing a thing like that, should have been pale, tense, jumpy, anything you want to call it — should have given himself away in some way, if not right then, then now that I was thinking back over it. But he either hadn’t, or — what was more likely — I was pretty much of a wash-out at my own business. I couldn’t even get him by elimination, the way I had gotten his phony name. One or two of the others started to come clear — the father of the two kids, the two other women besides Alice Colman — but not him. I might just as well have written down that name out of my own head for all I could remember of the man who had given it to me.

I took another look at Alice Colman’s regards to the statue and wondered why she hadn’t put her name down with it, and how she had come to be mixed up on her dates the way she had. And why a different address from her own. Of course the obvious answer was that she knew g.d. well what was taking place on that stairway below at the time, and was too nervous to know what she was doing. But she hadn’t acted nervous at all, she had just acted dreamy. So that probably wasn’t the answer at all. And just for luck I transcribed the thing into my notebook exactly as it stood in eyebrow pencil.

4/24/35/4 and then, 254W51. Wrong date, right hour, wrong address, no name.

“I take it all back, Johnny,” I said wearily. “Kick me here — and here. The guy did come up here after all — and right on top of what he did too.”

“But he didn’t write nothing — you looked all over them wind—”

“He didn’t come up here to write, he came to read.” I pointed at it. “He came to read that. Let’s go down. I guess I can keep my promise to General Lafayette down there after all.”

When I got ashore I halfheartedly checked Colman at the Tarrytown Apartments once more. No, neither Mr. nor Mrs. had come back yet, they told me after paging them on the house phone. I didn’t tell them so, but they might just as well have hung out a to-let sign and gotten ready to rent that apartment all over again. He wasn’t coming back any more because he was spending the night at the morgue. And she wasn’t coming back any more either — because she had a heavy date at 4. As for Scanlon’s Amboy Street address, I didn’t even bother with it. Have to use your common sense once in awhile. Instead I asked Information to give me 254 West 51st Street, which was the best I could make out of the tag end of her billet-doux.

“Capital Bus Terminal,” a voice answered at the other end.

So that’s where they were going to meet, was it? They’d stayed very carefully away from each other on the ferry going back, and ditto once they were ashore in New York. But they were going to blow town together. So it looked like she hadn’t had her days mixed after all, she’d known what she was doing when she put tomorrow’s date down. “What’ve you got going out at four?” I said.

“A.M. or P.M.?” said the voice. But that was just the trouble, I didn’t know myself. Yet if I didn’t know, how was he going to know either? I mean Scanlon. The only thing to do was tackle both meridians, one at a time. A.M. came first, so I took that. He spieled off a list a foot long but the only big-time places among them were Boston and Philly. “Make me a reservation on each,” I snapped.

“Mister,” the voice came back patiently, “how can you go two places at once?”

“I’m twins,” I squelched and hung up. Only one more phone call, this time to where I was supposed to live but so seldom did. “I may see you tomorrow. If I came home now I’d only have to set the alarm for three o’clock.”

“I thought it was your day off.”

“I’ve got statues on the brain.”

“You mean you would have if you had a—” she started to say, but I ended that.

I staggered into the bus waiting room at half past three, apparently stewed to the gills, with my hat brim turned down to meet my upturned coat collar. They just missed each other enough to let my nose through, the rest was shadow. I wasn’t one of those drunks that make a show of themselves and attract a lot of attention, I just slumped onto a bench and quietly went to sleep. Nobody gave me a first look, let alone a second one.

I was on the row of benches against the wall, not out in the middle where people could sit behind me. At twenty to four by the clock I suddenly remembered exactly what this guy Scanlon had looked like on the ferry that afternoon. Red hair, little pig-eyes set close together — what difference did it make now, there he was, valise between his legs. He had a newspaper up over his face in a split second, but a split second is plenty long enough to remember a face in.

But I didn’t want him alone, didn’t dare touch him alone until she got there, and where the hell was she? Quarter to, the clock said — ten to — five. Or were they going to keep up the bluff and leave separately, each at a different time, and only get together at the other end? Maybe that message on the statue hadn’t been a date at all, only his instructions. I saw myself in for a trip to Philly, Boston, what-have-you, and without a razor, or an assignment from the chief.

The handful of late-night travelers stirred, got up, moved outside to the bus, got in, with him very much in the middle of them. No sign of her. It was the Boston one. I strolled back and got me a ticket, round-trip. Now all that should happen would be that she should breeze up and take the Philly one — and me without anyone with me to split the assignment!

“Better hurry, stew,” said the ticket seller handing me my change, “you’re going to miss that bus.”

“Mr. Stew to you,” I said mechanically, with a desperate look all around the empty waiting room. Suddenly the door of the ladies’ restroom flashed open and a slim, sprightly figure dashed by, lightweight valise in hand. She must have been hiding in there for hours, long before he got here.

“Wait a minute!” she started to screech to the driver the minute she hit the open. “Wait a minute! Let me get on!” She just made it, the door banged, and the thing started.

There was only one thing for me to do. I cut diagonally across the lot, and when the driver tried to make the turn that would take him up Fifty-first Street I was wavering in front of his headlights. Wavering but not budging. “Wash’ya hurry?” I protested. His horn racketed, then he jammed on his brakes, stuck his head out the side, and showed just how many words he knew that he hadn’t learned in Sunday School.

“Open up,” I said, dropping the drunk act and flashing my badge. “You don’t come from such nice people. And just like that” — I climbed aboard — “you’re short three passengers. Me — and this gentleman here — and, let’s see, oh yeah, this little lady trying so hard to duck down behind the seat. Stand up, sister, and get a new kind of bracelet on your lily-white wrist.”

Somebody or other screamed and went into a faint at the sight of the gun, but I got them both safely off and waved the awe-stricken driver on his way.

“And now,” I said as the red tail lights burned down Eighth Avenue and disappeared, “are you two going to come quietly or do I have to try out a recipe for making goulash on you?”

“What was in it for you?” I asked her at Headquarters. “This Romeo of yours is no Gable for looks.”

“Say lissen,” she said scornfully, accepting a cigarette, “if you were hog-tied to something that weighed two hundred ninety pounds and couldn’t even take off his own shoes, but made three grand a month, and banked it in your name, and someone came along that knew how to make a lady’s heart go pit-a-pat, you’d a done the same thing too!”

I went home and said: “Well, I’ve gotta hand it to you. I looked at a statue like you told me to, and it sure didn’t hurt my record any.” But I didn’t tell which statue or why. “What’s more,” I said, “we’re going down to Washington and back over the week-end.”

“Why Washington?” my wife wanted to know.

“Cause they’ve got the biggest of the lot down there, called the Washington Monument. And a lotta guys that think they’re good, called Federal dicks, hang out there and need help.”