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

I

“Just one night,” Miss Dulcy Harris was saying dramatically. “Just one night is all I ask! One night without hearing all about who you arrested and what they were wanted for and what their past record was and what they said in the line-up! Just one night away from crime!”

She put her foot down, both literally and metaphorically. A little puff of dust rose from the ground at the impact. “Is this your night off, or isn’t it? Well, you can take those tickets to ’X-Men’ and just tear them up, because I’m not going to sit through any more crime pictures with you and then spend the rest of the night listening to why the detectives aren’t like detectives in real life. I’ve planned our evening for us, for once! You’re taking me out to that showboat in the river.”

Inspector Whittaker (Whitey) Ames, her affianced, unhappily swiveled his neck around inside his starched collar. “Aw, gee, honey,” he pleaded, “not a showboat. Anything but that.”

“Just why so?” she queried suspiciously.

“Because I’m a total loss on anything floating. It upsets me—” She hooted incredulously. “You mean you get seasick? But it’s anchored, it isn’t even moving!”

“But it probably jiggles a little with the current.”

Dulcy narrowed her eyes determinedly. “Everyone but me has been there by now—” She had more to say, much more. Before she had half finished he took her heroically by the arm.

“You win,” he said, “let’s get the tickets. But I shoulda skipped that cocoanut pie at dinner.”

Dance music came blaring up, and the excursion tug that linked the showboat to the shore fitted its apron neatly into the pier. The crowd made a dive for the floating bar it boasted, and sounds of ice rattling against metal filled the night.

“Let’s go round to the other side,” gulped Whitey, “away from the smell of that orange peel.”

“It’s just your imagination,” Dulcy told him. “Don’t give in. Keep saying the multiplication table over to yourself. It works wonders.” The sail down-river lasted for about three-quarters of an hour, and Ames held out manfully. The last outlying lights of St. Louis on the right had petered out before a playful searchlight beam sent a shaft of pale blue up into the sky ahead of them. The excursion tug tracked it down, and presently a low-lying hulk showed up on the river bosom, garlanded with colored lights. The tug came alongside, nudged it, retreated, and finally stuck as closely as a stamp to a letter.

A ribbed incline on castors was wheeled out, the showboat lying lower in the water, and down it poured the audience. Almost before the last stragglers had cleared it, it was hauled up again, the tug gave a toot, beat the water white, and headed back where it had come from. The crowd it had brought was left there in midstream, cut off from the shore until the end of the show on something that had been a freighter and was no longer fit to go to sea.

The whole superstructure had been planed off, leaving a flat surface not more than ten feet above water level. An awning on metal stanchions roofed it, leaving the sides open to the breeze. Under this were ranged rows of folding wooden chairs packed tightly together with an aisle running down the middle of them. The bow, which was the stage, was curtained off. There were no footlights, but the same rickety platform back at the stern that lodged the sky-writing searchlight also held a couple of spots with gelatin slides. These were trained out across the heads of the audience, giving people red or green necks if they sat up too high.

A scramble for seats began and Dulcy, who was very dexterous in crowds, shot ahead and got two on the aisle before Whitey had disentangled himself from everyone else’s arms and legs.

“How you getting along with yourself?” she wanted to know when he joined her.

“I’m up in the fourteens now,” he muttered tensely. “I’m going to need an adding machine pretty soon.”

Jazz blared out, the curtain rolled out of the way, and a long line of little ladies without much clothing pranced out onto the stage. They began to imitate people who have eaten green apples and have a pain in the stomach. It may have been that thought more than anything else, but Whitey suddenly gave up the struggle.

“’Scuse me, be right back,” he said in a strangled voice, and bolted up the aisle, hand soldered to his mouth. A bartender on duty at that end mercifully caught him by the arm and guided him down a short, steep companionway to the lower level. At the bottom of it he found a short elbow of passageway, an open porthole — and peace.

The footsteps of the dancers on the planks over his head sounded like thunder down here. Just as he was about to duck in again he saw something out of the corner of his eye. From where he was, by turning his head sidewise, he could look along the whole hull. The row of lighted portholes was like a succession of orange circles, diminishing in perspective toward the bow.

A hand was sticking out of the one next in line. It stood out white against the black hull. It was slowly moving, drooping downward as it lengthened. The forearm showed up, and told him it was a woman’s. As the elbow cleared the porthole the whole limb sagged bonelessly, like a white vine growing out of the side of the ship, and dangled there against the hull.

Meanwhile a second hand showed up, obviously the mate of the first. Then between them came a head of wavy red hair, hanging downward like the arms, so that the face was hidden. The slowness of the whole thing held Whitey there pop-eyed.

“What’s she fixing to do, crawl halfway out to get a breath of air?” he muttered.

But when people want a breath of air they lift their heads. Her nose was practically scraping the rusty side of the hull. From the first glimpse of her fingertips she had been slowly emerging, like a human snail from its shell; now she stopped and went into reverse, began to disappear backwards. He guessed the reason at once: the porthole wasn’t wide enough to let her shoulders through. Then suddenly he saw something that made his hair stand up. She was a freak! A third hand had showed up. It trailed down the nearest arm, got a grip on it at the elbow, and began to pull it in again after it. It was a heavier hand than the woman’s; darker, rougher.

He got it at once, after the first momentary optical illusion had passed. It was a man’s hand, pulling her back inside again. Her head disappeared, then her upper arms. Last of all went her two hands, crossed at the wrists and inanimate as severed chicken-claws. Then the porthole was empty, just an orange circle. He decided he wanted to see what was going on in there. If she’d fainted, he knew better ways of bringing her to than ramming her in and out of the porthole like a laundry bag.

Somebody else had beaten him to the door when he rounded the comer of the passageway. A very nautical-looking lady stood there, knocking peremptorily. She wore a white yachting cap atop frizzed gray hair, a jacket with brass buttons, and tennis shoes. Her only concession to femininity was her skirt. A cigarette dangled from her lower lip.

“C’mon, Toots,” she was saying in a raspy voice. “You’re holding up my show. I’m gonna dock you for this. Y’shoulda been on long ago! Quit stalling and open up this door!” She saluted Whitey with a terse “Upstairs! No customers allowed down here!” Then went back to rattling the doorknob again.

“Upstairs yourself. I’m homicide squad, St. Louis,” grunted Whitey, crowding her aside. “Dig me up a passkey, or I’ll bust down this door.”

“I’m in the red enough,” rasped the nautical lady. “If you want to get in that bad, go through the chorus dressing room at the end. There’s a door between that won’t cost as much to repair.”

Whitey ran. The dressing room, luckily, was empty. The chorines were all onstage just then. One shoulder cracked the communicating door like a match box, it was that flimsy.

The girl was seated at her dressing table. She was alone in the room; the third hand and whoever it had belonged to had vanished. She was motionless, slumped before the mirror with her head on her arms. She had on even less than the girls upstairs, and that held Whitey for a minute.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you!” Then he went over to her and noticed that the top of the dressing table was all messed up with rouge.

Only it wasn’t rouge. He lifted her head and for a moment had a horrible impression that it had come off in his hands. A yawning red mouth opened, lower down than the real one. Her throat had been gashed from ear to ear. At her feet was the jagged sliver of glass that had done it, with the rag that had protected the wielder’s hand still folded around the upper half of it.

That let suicide out then and there. Who cares about cutting their hand if they’re going to cut their own throat anyway? The glass had come from the porthole — the casing stood inward, just an empty hoop bolted to the frame. Under it the floor was iced with fragments, and with them lay the heavy curling iron that had smashed the glass.

She had probably thrown it at her murderer in the struggle and unwittingly furnished him with a weapon. Or else broken the porthole purposely in a vain attempt to top the blare of the show and attract the attention of those above. The slow-motion pantomime he had seen, Whitey realized, must have been an unsuccessful attempt to get rid of her body. And the line of escape was fairly obvious — the same side-door he had come through, locked by the murderer on his way out. But of all the quick getaways! He must have just missed the killer by the skin of his teeth. But what counted was that the murderer was still on board, and had to stay there until the tug came back — unless he jumped for it and swam the Mississippi River.

II

Whitey threw something over the dead girl, raced out the way he had come, and continued along the passage to the upper end, careening crazily from side to side in his hurry. He whizzed up the stairs there and found himself in the wings — or what passed as such, since the showboat used no scenery. The chorus was still dancing — less than ten minutes had gone by since he’d left his seat. Between them and the backdrop, instead of in front as in a regular theater, was the band. The stage manager materialized from between two folds in the curtain and Whitey flashed his badge.

“Who’s missing out there?” he asked.

“Carrots, leading lady. She’s gonna get hell for it, too.”

“She has already,” snapped Whitey. “Then that’s the whole show, outside of her? What do they do, dance all evening?”

“The comedian and his stooge spell them. That’s them, those two standing across from us in the other wing.”

“How long have they been there?”

“From the time the curtain went up. I seen ’em myself. They always do that. It’s cooler up here.”

“Save it till later!” said Whitey, and dived down the stairs again, along the passage, and up at the other end. He made it as quickly as he would have by jumping out on the stage and running through the audience, which might have started a panic on the overcrowded boat. He ran up the short vertical ladder to the crow’s-nest containing the searchlight and the bored-looking sailor who manipulated it. Just at present, however, he was letting it shoot skyward while he followed the performers with a colored spot.

“Never mind them,” ordered Whitey breathlessly, “train that other thing down on the water, close in as you can get it, and keep it going from side to side, so that you’ll throw the light on anyone who slips overboard and starts swimming ashore—”

“I take orders from—” the sailor tried to say.

“From me from now on,” barked Whitey, “or else I’ll knock you offa here and do it myself!” He waited just long enough to see the big metal hood give a half-revolution and splash a big patch of water to daylight, then slowly wheel around to the other side. Every ripple on the surface stood out in the fierce glare.

“Will it go all the way around?” Whitey asked.

“Just halfway,” sweated the sailor, “and then back again.”

“That’ll do it,” said Whitey. “Train one of those colored ones backwards, into the arc the big one doesn’t cover, and leave it that way — that’ll give us the whole circle. And keep the other one on the go. The minute you spot anything that doesn’t belong out there — I don’t care what it is — lemme know, if you value your tattooed hide.”

“I ain’t got so much as a—” the sailor tried to contradict, but Whitey was already on his way down again. When he hit the below-deck passageway again, the lady captain was still parked outside the locked door. She had quit trying the knob and was deftly rolling herself a cigarette instead. She promptly dropped it at the sight of him.

“Where’d you come from?” she gawked. “I’ve been waiting all this time for you to get in the side way.”

“I’ve been in and out again,” he told her. “Follow me. You don’t look like the kind that throws faints, and I want to talk to you.” They went through the still empty chorus dressing room and beyond. The lady captain glimpsed the prone figure under the mirror and immediately went into an employer’s rage.

“You holder-outer! You letterdowner!” she bellowed. “What d’ye mean by gumming up my opening number? Who d’ye think you are, Ethel Merman?”

“Close what’s left of that door and shut up,” said Whitey sourly. “She’s dead.”

The lady captain was not, to put it mildly, the nervous type. She went over, tossed aside the towel, and spaded one hand under the girl’s flabby arm. “Yep,” she snapped, “cold as yesterday’s headline.” She came away stroking her chin like a man. “Have to get that gal from Tony’s to take her place. Get her five bucks cheaper, too,” she commented.

“Have a murder like this every night?” Whitey said bitingly. “No? Then why not show a little surprise?”

“Boo! I’m surprised!” she came right back at him. “What d’ye want me to do, turn handsprings? All I know is, this throws a hitch into my show. Look at that door! And look at that porthole! They put them in for nothing, you know; don’t cost a cent!”

“I’ve come across some tough cases in my time,” he let her know. “I’d offer you a cigar, only I haven’t got the kind that blows up in your face. Now let’s get going. Who was she?”

“Carrots Kirby, twenty-four, fifty a week for showing her vaccination mark.”

“Run around with anybody?”

“Anybody,” she agreed.

“Big help, aren’t you?” he glared. “Any way of getting word ashore that we have a murder case aboard?”

“Nope,” she said calmly. “Have to wait until the tug comes back at twelve.”

“What’s the idea? Why doesn’t it stand by?”

“That would cost do-re-mi,” she stated. “I’d have to hire it for the whole evening. This way I just charter it for the two trips, coming and going.”

“You mean you haven’t any small boats on this thing? You’re crowded to the rails! What would you do if anything happened?”

“This isn’t a sea-going boat. We’re all lighted up from head to stem, if it’s a collision you’re thinking about. We’ve got fire-extinguishers, if that’s what y’mean. And my bartender doubles as a bouncer, in case of a riot.”

“With water all around, where does he bounce them to?” Whitey demanded.

“He don’t bounce ’em to anywhere,” she stated elegantly. “He just bounces ’em on the button, and they stay quiet.”

“Just a sissy enterprise from start to finish. How long were you in front of that door?”

“Just got there ahead of you.”

“How do I know that?” Whitey challenged.

“You don’t,” she agreed, “but you can check up on it with the bartender. I was watching the show from in back when I saw Carrots missed her cue. As a matter of fact, I saw you stumble by. Only came down after you did, while you were at the porthole.”

Your luck is, Whitey thought grimly, that it was a man’s hand I saw hauling her in. He said, “If you were standing in back watching, then who was missing from the show — outside of her?”

“Nobody,” she snapped. “I only have the chorus, the two comics, her and the stage manager working for me. The stage manager was on that side, signaling me from the curtain to go page her. The two comics were on the other side, kibitzing with the girls like they always do. I could see both of ’em. Every girl was in place, not one missing.”

“Who else y’got on your payroll?”

“Just Shorty behind the light up there, Butch the bartender, and an electrician down in the power room in case anything goes wrong with the lights. We generate our own power, y’know.”

“How about the audience? Anyone leave their seats before I did?”

“Not a blessed soul. They never start wandering back for refills until the show’s past the halfway mark, anyway.”

“Well, did anyone go to their seats after everyone else was seated, then?” Whitey demanded.

“Nope, they all sat down at once. You saw the scramble for seats that went on yourself.”

“Well, if I’m going to take your word for it,” he remarked, “I’ll end up by believing a swordfish took a leap in the window and did it to her. All I know is she’s been turned into a tomato surprise and whoever did it is still on board.”

There was a tap at the shattered door and the bartender’s homely face peered through the split panel. “Shorty just picked up something with the big light—” he began. Whitey nearly flattened him going by, and was up on the platform in no time flat.

“It went down,” the sailor apologized. “Only your orders was, anything that didn’t belong out there, to tip you off—”

“What the hell was it?”

“Something silver, looked like a big oil or gasoline can. Musta been dropped over the side. It was so close to us I couldn’t get the light square down on it, but I caught the reflection. It made me nervous,” he admitted. “If anything like that spreads around us, all somebody’s gotta do is toss a butt overboard, and—”

“How’d it go down, straight?”

“No, sort of sideways and slow.”

“Then it was empty.”

Shorty sighed. “Gee, that’s good.”

“Bad, you mean! Whatever was in it is still with us, probably spread around nice and lovely... How do I get to this power room, where this electrician is?”

“It’s under the stairs that lead up to the stage,” explained the sailor. “You’ve gotta look close or you’ll miss seeing the door.” Down went Whitey again. He had the rather chilling suspicion that the murderer, failing to get rid of the body through the porthole, intended to try a little wholesale arson to cover up the traces of the crime.

And yet the murderer himself was on board, would be trapped with the rest if he did such a thing. What the murderer didn’t know, since the show was still going full blast and no alarm had been raised as yet, was that the crime had already been unearthed, and that there was a detective on board. He intended taking his time, probably, and then swimming for it — with a good head-start. Whitey detoured into the audience for a moment to single out Dulcy and hustle her to the rear.

“What’s the idea, making me give up a perfectly good seat?” she said.

“I want you back here where you won’t get trampled on in case anything happens,” Whitey said. “Now don’t get nervous, but just stand here where I can find you in a hurry—”

“Well, aren’t you the cheerful little ray of sunshine!”

“Tell me about the part of the show that I missed. Did you notice anyone who came on later than the others?”

“No,” she said, then added, “Anyone at all?”

“Anyone at all. I don’t care who!”

“None of the performers did, but the bandmaster keeps wandering off and on all the time, I’ve noticed. I mean he just introduces each new turn and then strolls off again and lets the other five do the playing—”

“I could kiss you!” Whitey said fervently. “None of the others mentioned that. I suppose they thought I meant only the performers. I muffed it myself when I was in the wings before, forgot about him.”

“What do you mean? Who’s ‘he’? What’s the band leader done?” Dulcy wanted to know.

“Played a sour note. Remember what I told you — don’t move!”

III

The music was playing no longer. The two comedians had just come on, but the five musicians were sitting in full view. Only their leader was missing. When Whitey got down to the passageway below it was choked with chorus girls, all trying to get into their dressing room at once and do a quick change. They not only slowed him down, they resented his presence in their half-clad midst and began to squeal and claw at him.

“Get out of here! Go back where you belong!” Whitey emerged, protecting his bent head with both arms, and a dance-shoe came flying after him and glanced harmlessly off his skull. They banged their door after them resentfully and the corridor was suddenly quiet.

Just under the stairs was the power room doorway. A heavy smell of oil and machinery seeped out as he got the door open. The place was a labyrinth of greasy generators and what not, shot through with weird, futuristic shadows. It was empty — and it looked very much as if it needed someone in charge of it at the moment.

Quantities of newspapers were scattered about wholesale, all transparent with oil, soaked with it. Nobody read that many newspapers and drenched them that way. The door clapped back on its hinges behind him and the smell became almost overpowering. The two overworked bulbs overhead couldn’t get into the corners and angles and light them up.

He advanced warily and an overturned copper oiler on the floor clanged loudly under his foot. A moment later he stumbled over one of the newspapers and a man’s upturned shoe was revealed. Whitey crouched down and found a man in the dungarees of an engineer lying flat on his back in a narrow lane of blackness between two pieces of machinery, only his feet protruding into the light. A hefty wrench lying at his heels told most of the story.

The engineer was out cold, but still breathing. Whitey crouched down above him to haul him out into the open, careless of which way he turned his back. It was then that the wrench started to move slowly along the floor like something possessed. The comer of his eye saw it — but not quickly enough. The wrench swung up into the air just as he turned his head, then came down again. Whitey just had time to see the arm wielding it, the face behind it — then both were wiped out in a flash of white fire that seemed to come from his own head.

The fire was still there when he came to a minute or so later, but it wasn’t white and it wasn’t at his head any more. It was down near his legs. The way it was stinging and biting him would have brought the dead to life. And the blow hadn’t been as accurate as intended, or it would have finished him; too much emotion and not enough aim had been put into it. The biting and stinging made him jackknife his legs up out of the way before he had even opened his eyes.

When he did so, bright yellow flame was fluttering from the scattered newspapers all over the room, in three or four places at once. One of the burning papers had been lying across his own legs. He was partly across the body of the engineer, who was still motionless. His splitting head was still trying to drag him back into unconsciousness again, but pain defeated it. He shoved backward with his buckled legs, and felt his back slip up the oily wall behind him until he was totteringly erect.

He still saw everything double, but the oil-soaked overalls of the man at his feet were already smoking, and the air was full of dancing sparks from the papers. Grease-rags began to smoulder ominously here and there and make it tough to breathe. The room got hot. One of the two bulbs overhead suddenly popped into nothingness. The fire was past the stamping-out stage now.

Whitey grabbed the engineer by one ankle and dragged him out of the little lane that had hidden him. The slippery floor made it easier. Half of the burning papers had taken wings now and were swirling about in the torturing air like huge fire-birds. One of Whitey’s own lisle socks began to peel back in a red thread, and he rubbed it out against his other leg like a mosquito bite. He struggled through the inferno toward the door, the body of the man he was dragging after him snuffing out buttercups of flame along the floor as it passed over them. A belt on the machinery suddenly burned in two and sent up a shower of sparks like a rocket.

He had just enough strength left, in the wilting heat-waves swirling about him, to claw at the door like some idiot thing wanting out and unable to show it in any other way. The door wouldn’t move — was either warped by the heat or else locked. Whitey could feel himself going, knew he’d never get up again, would be cremated in here. But his fall was his salvation. As his body slumped against the door it gave outward under his weight — and quite easily. In his torment he’d forgotten it opened that way.

Air that was air came rushing past him. He fell on his hands and knees, and behind him the room gave a roar and turned itself into a furnace as it found the draught it had been waiting for. He tugged, strained, and the body of the engineer came slipping over the threshold after him, bringing patches of fire with it like a human torch. The door, released, clapped back again.

He beat out the fire on the man he had saved with his bare hands, listened for heart-action. Too late. There wasn’t any; he was dead. Whitey had been through all that for nothing. Chalk up two murders now instead of one. And there were the living to be thought of, dozens of them, up above. He knew better than to yell “Fire!”

He staggered to his feet, reeled down the passageway he had traversed so often tonight, looked in at the chorus girls’ dressing room. It was empty, they were onstage once more. The clink of a glass attracted him and he looked beyond, into the room where Carrots Kirby’s body was. The lady commodore sat there big as life, a bottle of gin in one hand, a glass in the other.

“Heresh lookin’ atcha, sport,” she announced blithely. “I’m the only mourner.”

She had probably never been torn away from a bottle so suddenly in her life before. It actually bounced and cracked in two.

“Never mind lookin’ at me!” he rasped. “There’s a fire — keep still about it and get the extinguishers, quick!” One look at his face and she was sober. She came tottering out after him.

“Oh, Lord, and I don’t even carry insurance!” she mourned.

“Rockets!” he yelled back. “Send up rockets if you’ve got any — attract someone on shore or some other boat!”

The clatter of a rumba held the audience spellbound as his head emerged from the companionway. Dulcy was standing there where he’d left her, looking very sulky. He flashed past and on up to the searchlight-nest. The sailor had a grievance.

“Now you come,” he growled. “First you tell me to watch the water, then you don’t show up! I picked up a guy out there five minutes ago — I’m following him with the light, but he’s halfway across the river already.”

“Yeah? Well, I was busy having my nails manicured,” Whitey said. He peered out into the searchlight beam, his eyes still smarting from the fire.

“See him?” encouraged the sailor. “Mean to say you can’t see him?”

A black dot bobbed up and down, the head of a swimmer desperately trying to make land. He was going diagonally with the current.

“The Missouri side,” said Whitey. “He’ll have all St. Louis to hide in once he steps out!” He turned and hopped down again to the deck, twisting out of his coat.

The lady captain was busy fanning herself weakly with one hand, a new gin-bottle in the other.

“The fire’s under control,” she panted. “A minute more and it would have sent the lighting system out of commish! After this, I stick to running a tea shop.”

The bartender came up from below, face smudged, dragging an empty extinguisher after him. “Wotta evening!” he grunted. Whitey was kicking off his shoes. Dulcy appeared beside him.

“Wait a minute, you can’t walk out on me like this—” she began. He clambered up on the low rail. “You just finish seeing your show, honey. I gotta little job to do out there,” Whitey pleaded.

He went overboard in a long, not too graceful curve and sent up a thin mushroom of water. Her voice split the air behind him.

“Oh no, you’re not leaving me behind — how do I know what’s going to happen to me?” There was a second splash and she bobbed up right beside him.

“Get back there, you little fool!” he spluttered. “What are you trying to do, drown yourself?”

IV

She kept abreast of him without any effort. “I can swim circles around you,” she said.

There was a pull to the current that set their course for them automatically, just as it had the fugitive’s. “All right?” Whitey kept asking. “Sure you’re all right? I gotta get that guy out there.”

“If you’re going to get him, get him!” Dulcy said crossly at last. “I can last, but I can’t make speed.”

He went into the crawl and outdistanced her. His banged head throbbed; he’d been seasick, hit with a wrench, singed and scorched — but there was no place else to go but down if he quit.

By the time it felt as if he should have been all the way into Kansas, he was still only a quarter of the way to shore. But the quarry, he reasoned, must be having his troubles too. A fellow that stayed up all night shaking to jazz music wasn’t cut out for a cross-river swim. They were sending up rockets behind Whitey, lighting the sky green. That ought to attract a police launch.

Weariness began to creep in, a shortening of stroke, a slowing-up. He went into a side stroke, to give slightly different muscles play. His legs began to drag after him like so much dead weight. He threatened to fold up and go down any minute, could almost feel something pulling at him from below. He had to quit altogether finally, and not a moment too soon, roll over on his back and float open-mouthed, like a stranded fish. He paddled backhand with one hand to keep from being carried too far out of his course.

A faint threshing, a slapping noise, came from somewhere nearby. The sound of someone agonizedly trying to stay up. At first he thought it was Dulcy, but the cry, when it came, was a man’s. Whitey trod water, trying to locate the direction.

The cry came again, far over to the right but a little behind him, not in front. He’d almost passed the murderer in the head-down crawl, or else the other had lost all sense of direction and was heading back toward the boat again! By the time Whitey got to the man there he wasn’t swimming any longer but was already in the earlier stages of drowning. The face that turned up despairingly to the sky was the same one that had been limned in white fire when the wrench glanced off Whitey’s head.

Whitey came up behind him and caught him by the suspenders. Instantly he tried to turn and get a death-grip on his rescuer, coughing and retching with the water he was swallowing. Before Whitey could jerk away, one madly groping hand had caught inextricably in his shirt and they both went under together.

Whitey kicked like a horse, brought them up again. He pounded his fist like a sledge-hammer into the middle of the band-leader’s contorted face. The impact was soggy but shattering. The clutching hand relaxed, the murderer floated unconscious on the water, harmless as a lily.

But the little strength Whitey had had left was gone now. He needed rescuing almost as badly as the bandmaster had a moment ago. Like the proverbial bulldog that won’t let go, he kept his hold on the other’s suspenders, keeping the two of them afloat somehow with one wearied, slowly circling arm that felt as though it were going to drop off his shoulder at every stroke.

Thin cries of encouragement were coming across the water; yellow pinpoints marked the portholes of the showboat. Two other boats were standing by it now, attracted by the rockets, and from one of them a second searchlight beam came into play and swept the water with sketchy strokes. The river was talcum-white where it hit.

For Whitey to reach shore was out of the question, even if he let go of the bandmaster and struck out alone. To get back to where the rescue ships were congregating was equally impossible. In about three strokes more he was going to go down.

Nearer than either shore or rescue ships, though, a peculiar round white object was showing in the glare of the interlocked beams. It looked like a large poker chip floating on the water. He moiled slowly toward it, with strokes that no longer bore any resemblance to the act of swimming. It tilted from side to side, but whatever it was it didn’t go down. The three strokes were spent, but now the nearness of the objective, the feasibility of getting to it, lent him three more, and then another three — on borrowed time.

Dulcy’s head showed up in back of the white thing, paddling it toward him. Water flushed the top of it but it stayed stubbornly afloat. As the space narrowed, she suddenly swung in between them, caught at his flailing wrist, and hooked it onto the circular rim of the white thing. He couldn’t have made the gesture himself, the last inch would have defeated him. She quickly shifted over to the other side as the added weight made the object veer over toward him.

It was the bass drum from the showboat orchestra. Somebody had helpfully thrown it in after her.

“Let go of him,” she panted, makeup running down her face. “He’s gone anyway, and he’s weighing you down.” Whitey couldn’t answer, but he held on. The reason may have been he could no longer extricate his numbed hand from the other’s suspenders. The seeking searchlight-beams swept back and forth across them. A police cutter was rapidly drawing near, its green light dipping and rising in its hurry.

“He died on me in the water,” apologized Whitey to his chief, sitting beside the hospital cot, “but at least I got him. A girl in the show threw him down and he went haywire, cut her throat, slugged an electrician to death, and then committed arson to cover up what—”

“Yeah, yeah,” interrupted the chief. “Never mind about that now, he’s dead and that closes the case. You stay under that blanket and don’t be afraid of that whisky the boys sent you.” He got up to go. “I’ll probably have a little news for you after you’ve turned in your report. Somebody else waiting out here to see you.”

Dulcy came in and shot the muffled figure in the bed a rather forbidding look.

“You all right?” he asked timidly. “I–I’m sorry if your evening was spoiled—”

“I give up,” Dulcy said wearily. “I thought taking you out to that thing would get you away from crime for one evening. What’s the use? Separating you from crime is like trying to part a pair of Siamese twins. It follows you around!”