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

One and a Half Murders

“A fine how-d’ye-do,” Mike Travis scowled at his blubbering sister across the kitchen table. “I come down here for a little rest and a breath of sea-air, and I run into this smelly mess! Right in my own family. You could have knocked me over with a feather! And that’s a fine way to hear it, too, from the kids on the street when I asked them the way to your house!”

“I wrote you,” gurgled Mrs. Murray. “Didn’t you get my let—?”

“No,” barked Travis, jerking his cup away. “And quit crying into my coffee, it’s weak enough as it is!”

“I thought maybe you could do something for him, working with a private detective agency like you do,” sniffled Mrs. Murray.

“Used to, y’mean! I was let out only last week, that’s why I’m here. After the depresh is over everywhere else, it suddenly hits the investigation business as an afterthought. And at my age, too!” His face grew beet-red to the roots of his snow-white hair and his cigar-stub jerked from the left corner of his mouth to the right without his lifting a finger at it. “Too old, they think! Not up-to-date enough!”

His sister was the sort who could always spare a word for somebody else’s troubles, even in the midst of her own. “You could fall back on barbering; you once took a course in that, didn’t you, before you went into the detective business?” She dabbed her apron to her face and went back to her grief once more. “Frank’s a good lad, he wouldn’t kill anybody in cold blood like that. I know he didn’t do it.”

“Suppose you tell me just what happened,” said Mike impatiently. “I ain’t in the fortune-telling business.”

His sister took a deep breath. “Well, you know how crazy he is about dancin’. There’s no harm in that, is there? Well, one night—” and she launched into the past.

The rich girl hurried through the crowded lobby, holding her breath for fear of being recognized and stopped. Just when she thought she had made it, as she came out of the hotel, she met Arnold face to face. Her parents weren’t with him for once.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she explained hastily. “Arnold, don’t let on you saw me go out. I’ll explain when I come back—”

He put out his hand and tried to stop her. “A girl your age shouldn’t be out alone, at this hour, with a diamond bracelet like that on your wrist. Be careful, Sylvia, this is a bad town. Let me go with you—”

She turned away. “I can take care of myself. And if you breathe a word about this, I’ll never speak to you again.”

As she lost herself in the crowd moiling slowly along the thronged Boardwalk, she had a feeling that he was coming after her, keeping her in sight. But she didn’t look back.

Young Murray was waiting for her just outside the Million Dollar Pier and he had the admission tickets in his hand. He didn’t look like he could afford even the fifty-cents apiece it cost to enter. She took his arm with a smile and they went in.

It stretches way out over the Atlantic, and most of it is the big dancing-pavilion under colored lights. But at the back there is a verandah or promenade-deck, purposely left dark at all times. And along both sides there are two more. Anyone who’s ever been there knows the set-up.

They had nothing to check, so they stepped right off and went to it. After about five minutes, she slipped the diamond bracelet off her wrist and asked him to carry it in his pocket for her. “The catch needs to be fixed, I’m afraid I’ll lose it,” she said. “Don’t let me go home without it, they’re real.”

He gave her a look when he heard that, but he did what she asked. She’d only known him for three nights — but she was very young, and he danced so well.

When they stopped for a minute between numbers, a girl with too much eyeshadow on came over to where they were standing clapping.

“You can’t ditch me like this!” she said to Murray. “Doing pretty good for yourself, aren’t you!” She turned to the girl then, and her voice rose to a yell. “Watch yourself with this guy, Miss Millionbucks! Remember I told you so. He’s death to dames!” Everyone around them heard her say it.

Somebody came after her and pulled her away, but she shouted back: “I’ll fix you, Murray, if it’s the last thing I do!”

“Brrh!” the rich girl said, and pretended to shiver. But many a truth is spoken in jest.

Half an hour later they left the floor together, he and she, to rest for awhile. They went out on the darkened end of the Pier, away from all the lights and noise. There was no one around out there just then. No one ever saw her alive again.

Yet how could anything happen to her, with hundreds of people within reach of her voice? Thoughts of death must have been very far from her mind. But a noisy jazz-band can drown out the loudest scream. The tune it was pounding out was “I’m The Boogy Man.”

She murmured, “I’m thirsty, will you get me a drink of water?”

As he got up, he leaned across the back of her deck-chair and slipped both arms around her shoulders, in a double embrace from behind. She turned to look up at him. A cloud hid the moon for a moment, and they were both in pitch-darkness.

The eye-shadow girl came out on the left-hand “porch” of the Pier with someone, to get a breath of air. The moon was behind a cloud and the water was black.

“Wait, I’m not through with him!” she burned. “I’ll get even—” She broke off suddenly and grew rigid. “What was that? D’ja hear that splash just then? Sounded like someone fell in.”

“Just a wave slapping up against one of the piles,” the fellow with her said.

“It came from down the end there. Let’s go look.”

She hurried away from him and turned the corner. She didn’t come back and he finally had to go after her. When he got there she was leaning over the railing scanning the water.

Just then the moon came out again. She jerked back and caught him by the sleeve. “You look, is there anything down there? I thought I saw a white arm reaching up out of the water just now!”

Silvery patches appeared here and there, dazzling to the eyes. “It’s the reflection of the moon,” he said.

“Guess you’re right. But gosh, it had me for a minute! Let’s go back and dance.”

As she turned to go, she saw something lying on a deck-chair, a tiny ball of white, and stopped to pick it up. A girl’s handkerchief dropped by somebody, a costly one too. She was a thrifty soul and she took it with her; once it was laundered it would be as good as new. Her companion, who had gone ahead, didn’t see her do it.

As she followed him in to the dance-floor, she said once more: “I’ll get even with that two-timer yet!”

Meanwhile, someone had tapped Frank Murray on the shoulder as he bent over the water-cooler beside the illuminated fish-tanks at the rear of the dance-floor. Even before he looked up to see who it was, some of the water spilled out of the wax-paper cup he was filling; his hand didn’t seem to be very steady.

His eyes lifted, and he didn’t know the man.

The other’s voice was dangerously low. “You came in here an hour ago with a girl in a white satin dress. What’ve you done with her? I’m taking her back with me, she doesn’t belong in a place like this. Now, don’t fool around with dynamite. I don’t know if she’s told you her name or not, but that’s Sylvia Reading, the chain-store man’s girl.”

Murray wasn’t holding the cup straight enough, more water slopped out of it. His wrist was jerking like a piston. His voice was steely enough when it came, though. “I know all about who she—” His teeth clamped tight and bit off the rest of it short. Finally he said, “You’re wasting your time. She left half-an-hour ago.”

“No, that doesn’t go,” the stranger said. “You were taking that drink to her, see? You’re too crummy to spend a penny on yourself, you’d put your mouth right down on the tap, but for her you’d shoot a whole Lincoln-head at once. She’s out there in back, I guess, waiting for you.” He didn’t wait for the answer.

The cup folded up in Murray’s fist and the water spurted out and he went after him.

She wasn’t out there. The other guy was standing there in the dark squinting all around and calling, “Come on, Syl, snap out of it. If your people ever find out about this—”

He hardly turned his head at all to meet the sudden onslaught. There was a smack, and Murray was staring dazedly up at him, stiff-armed against the floor.

“I learned to box at Princeton,” the stranger informed him, fastidiously shaking out his cuff, “not in poolrooms.” He swooped down on him all at once, straightened up again, holding something in his hand. Something that sparkled. “What’s this, that fell out of your pocket? Seems to me I’ve seen it before.” He turned the bracelet slowly around. “So she went home half-an-hour ago, did she? And left this with you for a souvenir, I suppose. You robbed her while you were dancing with her, you little sewer-rat!”

Murray scrambled to his feet, face whiter than the moonlight. The palsy that had afflicted his wrist awhile ago had now spread to his whole body. His tone had changed to one of frightened pleading. “I didn’t, Jack, I swear I didn’t! Don’t start anything like that, gimme a break, will ya? She handed it to me to hold for her. I left her waiting out here only a minute ago—”

“A five-thousand-dollar, piece of jewelry she handed to you? Oh, of course! Just like that — I don’t think!”

But Murray didn’t wait to hear any more. A sense of his own predicament swept over him suddenly. That blind, unreasoning fear of the law, that claustrophobia, that the young, the poorlyeducated, are always more susceptible to than others, struck him like lightning. The sight of the diamonds in the other’s hand seemed to rob him of all reasoning power. He turned and fled in silent panic out toward the crowded dance-floor and the escape that lay beyond.

But Arnold’s rasping shout had reached it ahead of him. “Stop that man! Hold him, somebody!”

As the fugitive flashed out under the pitiless, revealing lights, zig-zagging like a black bullet crashing through a bouquet of flowers, the music was already dying into a succession of discordant notes and the packed dancers were coming to an uncertain stop all over the huge place.

Arms reached out to grab him, always just too late. In his wake sprawling figures stumbled to regain their balance. But his impetus began to slow, the size of the crowd was against him.

And then a small, vindictive satin slipper slithered out between his racing feet like a spoke. He plunged flat on his face, with such force that his own legs went curling up in back of him, in what was almost a forward-somersault. When the shock had cleared, his eyes followed that treacherous little slipper from the floor on up to the malignant face of the eye-shadow girl. He was lying within five yards of the outer lobby, that would have led to the Boardwalk and freedom — if he had made it. She and her partner had been the last of all the couples barring his way!

“Thanks, pal, that was something to be proud of!” he panted, chin on floor.

He was jerked to his feet and pummeled around a lot before the pier attendants could extricate him. A couple of blue-coats were already rushing in from the Boardwalk outside, with a noisy mob of celebrators at their heels.

“Hold him, now!” warned Arnold, “until I have a chance to find out—” He raced to a booth and dialed Sylvia Reading’s hotel.

Murray was moaning, “Oh my God, I didn’t do anything!” when he came back. They were all standing around him thick as bees.

“He’s a dip, he lifted a twenty-grand bracelet,” someone volunteered. Its value had quadrupled inside of five minutes. The Pier manager was blue in the face, with two windmills for arms. “You couldn’t take him nowhere else, you gotta hold jail right here in the middle? Look, millions of ’em in here without a ticket! Shoo, go home! No more dancing! We close for the night! I sue the municipality!”

Arnold came back slow and came back white. “She hasn’t gone back there, I just had her people on the wire! And it’s only a couple of blocks’ walk from here. She’s vanished!”

“You the complainant?” a cop asked. “What charges — theft?”

“My fiancée — ask him what he did with her. I saw her come in here with him with my own eyes, now she’s gone, no trace of her! The bracelet was in his pocket—”

“Look in his other pocket, maybe you’ll find the girl,” someone wisecracked.

“Better still,” a harsh voice said, “look in the water, out at the end there.” The little lady with the eyeshadow edged her way forward with business-like determination. Twice as much eyeshadow wouldn’t have softened her eyes just then. “I saw him with her. And a little later I was outside there myself, and I heard a loud splash in the water. Ask this guy with me. Then when I go look, I see a white arm sticking up out of the water. And I picked this up.”

She held up a crumpled ball of handkerchief. Her baleful basilisk-eyes never once left Murray’s shivering face.

Arnold caught at it, his face went gray. “That’s hers,” he whispered. “Look in the corner, see the S and R embroidered there. Sylvia Reading. Smell it. Gardenia — what she always used.” They had to hold him back from Murray. “You asked what charges? Suspicion of murder. I’ll bring the accusation myself. That girl is gone!”

A sudden hush fell on the crowd. Murray’s choked whimper was all that could be heard as they dragged him away. Over and over: “I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything—”

Sylvia Reading’s body was washed up on the beach down at Ventnor two days later, obviously carried there by the current. Arnold identified it at once. The satin dress hadn’t even lost its sheen yet. The very rouge that had outlined her mouth could still be discerned; “waterproof” was its trademark. The autopsy showed that she had been in the water those two full days. And there was only a little water in her lungs; life had not been quite extinct when she was thrown in. She had been garrotted, strangled to death, with the silken shoulder-straps of her own dress, caught from behind in a noose, and twisted. The marks showed plainly on her throat.

Murray, whom she had last been seen alive with, was indicted for murder in the first degree and held for trial. He had stopped saying “I didn’t do anything” now. It had gotten him too many wallops. He didn’t say anything at all any more.

“Well, if he didn’t he probably did something else some other time,” commented Mike Travis unfeelingly, and stood up. He reached for his hat. “He oughta get a good swift kick anyway, going there night after night to dance like a jack-in-the-box!”

Mrs. Murray had uncovered one eye, hopefully. “Where you going?” she sobbed.

“Down to the morgue,” said Mike grudgingly.

As the door banged after him she gave a deep sigh. Strangely enough, it sounded like a sigh of relief and renewed confidence.

Sylvia Reading lay there on the slab like a statue, and her beauty was only a memory now, and all her father’s millions couldn’t bring her back again. Mike stood looking down at her.

“No,” he said over his shoulder, “I’m not a relative. I’m a private investigator retained by Murray’s family. Empire State Agency, New York.”

It didn’t deter him that that had ceased to be a fact a week ago. He’d kept the badge; that was about all he had to show for twenty-five years’ work. “Let me see her things,” he said.

The cobwebby stockings didn’t even have a run in them. There was a green grease-spot on one, probably from brushing one of the mildewed piles imbedded deep down in the water where she’d first sunk.

He handed them back. “Run along, don’t hang around me,” he said impatiently. “I’m not a body-snatcher. Oh, so it’s an open-and-shut case, is it, and I’m just wasting my time here, am I? Well, it’s my time! Skate me in a chair, I’m not as young as you lads.”

The purplish discolorations were still clearly visible, where the treacherous ribbons had cut life short. Still, there must have been a moment’s time, time enough to make just one gesture of resistance. What would be anyone’s involuntary, spasmodic gesture at such a time? To reach for the thing that was stifling you, try to drag it away. And that failing, as of course it had—

He withdrew one of her hands from under the rubber sheet and looked at it. She probably had a manicure every day of her life, he told himself. But there was a little dirt, an almost invisible line of black, under the tapered, unbroken thumb-nail. He reached for the other hand and looked. Two of them had it on that hand.

“Hand him a deck of cards,” somebody smirked in back of him, “maybe he wants to play honeymoon bridge with her!” He paid no attention.

Maybe sitting there at the end of the Pier with Murray that night she’d let her hands stray along the railing, had gotten a little dirt under her nails. But why just three fingers, why not all ten? He took a quill toothpick from his pocket and stripped the paper jacket from it. He held the lifeless hand up and prodded under the thumb-nail. The whole line of blackness moved at one time; as he withdrew the quill it had vanished from the nail — and he was holding a short human hair before his eyes. The other two nails each produced the same object. So it hadn’t been dirt after all — and Sylvia Reading’s last gesture, after trying to drag away the noose that was throttling her, had been to reach blindly upward and clutch at the head of her assailant in her death-throes.

He carefully put the three hairs away in the paper that had held the toothpick; then he got up and left. The morgue-attendants tapped their foreheads significantly as he slouched out. “Cracked,” was their verdict.

Murray thought so too when Mike showed up to visit him in his cell later in the day. “Well,” was Mike’s dour greeting, “you’re a credit! What’d you do it for anyway?”

Murray blasted him with a look. “ ’Cause she stepped on my toes while we were dancing.” As he turned his head impatiently away he felt three sharp twinges at the top of his scalp, and saw his uncle putting something into a cigarette-paper.

He sprang to his feet, his face violently contorted. “McGuffy!” he squalled through the bars, rattling them. “McGuffy!” And when the keeper came hustling along, “Throw this pest outa my cell! I got some rights, haven’t I?” The turnkey had to come between them. “Kibitzer!” shouted Murray after his departing visitor.

“Ah, youth, hot-tempered youth,” murmured Mike tolerantly as he shuffled down the corridor.

He next popped up at the barber shop of the Claymore Hotel. “Naw,” he said as three barbers sprang to attention beside their chairs, “I don’t want a workout, I want a job.”

“Got references?” said the manager unwillingly, when Mike had buttonholed him. “I can’t just hire anyone that comes in off the street—” He glanced at the dog-eared memorandum Mike passed to him. Mike was testing a pair of clippers with practiced fingers.

“Oh, you worked at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. That’s more like it! And it says here you quit of your own accord.” He glanced at Mike almost in awe. “Ain’t many do that these days.”

The three assistants gathered round, craning their necks to read the unparalleled statement with their own eyes. Mike was triumphantly warming up, snipping at an imaginary customer with a pair of shears.

Suddenly someone’s finger pointed at an upper corner of the paper. The manager let out a howl. “These references are dated 1913! Get out, get out before I—”

Mike caught the folded credentials as they came flying back at him. “All right, if that’s the way you feel about it,” he said stiffly. At the door he turned to deliver a parting thrust. “A good barber improves with age, like wine!”

They were still snickering under their breaths about it a few minutes later, when one exclaimed, “I’m missing a pair of clippers!”

“Who took my shears?” another wanted to know.

“Holy smoke!” reported the third, “my spare jacket’s gone from the hook!”

The shears, the clippers and the jacket all appeared simultaneously at the door of Room 1115, upstairs in the hotel, a little while later, and Mike, who was in the middle of all of them, knocked. It had cost him three dollars to check in just now and he was still muttering about it, but they didn’t let you get past the reception-desk unquestioned unless you had a room of your own you were going to.

The door of eleven-fifteen opened and its occupant stared coldly out at him.

“Afternoon, Mr. Arnold,” Mike said softly. “Little trim, hot towel, mud pack, nice cool shave — anything I can do for you? Compliments of the management.”

“What’s all this? I didn’t send for any barber!” Arnold scowled. He got ready to close the door.

“I know you didn’t, sir,” said Mike ingratiatingly, “but we’ve installed one on each floor, we want our guests to be as comfortable as possible—”

Arnold ran a hand across his scratchy chin, motioned him in unwillingly. “All right, get it over with.”

Mike deftly tucked a towel, snipped experimentally at the air with his shears. He hadn’t done this in over twenty years, but it all came back to him little by little. His fingers lost their rustiness; he began to remember, each time, just what to do next. Sometimes, of course, the knowledge came a little too late; he saw that he shouldn’t have run his clippers all the way up to the top of the head in the back; it looked too much like a convict-haircut. That was too bad, but the hair would all grow back again in a few weeks.

Arnold twitched and said: “Ow! What’re you doing?”

Mike peered closely at the place. “Sorry, sir, I didn’t notice. You have a little half-healed scratch there just under the hairline; I must have raked it with my comb just now.”

Arnold was suddenly silent, didn’t answer. You could have sliced the silence with a knife; it spoke louder than words. Mike cleaned the comb carefully, and the hairs that had caught between its teeth he removed and wrapped in a cigarette-paper behind the man’s back.

“Speed it up!” Arnold said impatiently. “Is it going to take you all day?”

Mike quietly removed the towel, pocketed his implements, and moved toward the door without waiting for that finishing touch to the tonsorial profession — the customer’s verdict. Which was just as well.

It caught up with him, however, halfway down the corridor. The door flew open a second time, hair-raising imprecations pursued him, as well as a shoe and a thick glass ashtray which just missed him by inches. He dove discreetly down a staircase and sought his own room two floors below.

He pinned a note to the rolled-up white jacket and implements: “Return to hotel barber shop with apologies.” Then he left, with half-a-dozen human hairs in a cigarette-paper, all he had to show for his three dollars. “We’ll see what the little glass slides have to say,” he murmured.

“And what do you want me to do with these?” demanded the A.C. Police Commissioner dryly. “Stuff a pillow with ’em, or put ’em in a locket for a keepsake?”

“Just send ’em to Washington for me and have the Department of Justice experts find out which matches which. Be sure not to get the tags mixed. A,” he explained, “was taken from under the fingernails of the body — I have witnesses at the morgue to verify that. Group B is from the head of the accused, C from that of the chief State’s witness. The analysis ought to show which matches which.”

“Thanks for A, anyway,” the Commissioner nodded, “it’s one bet our examiner overlooked. It ought to come in handy at the trial. I’ll do it for you, though, Travis.”

“Have ’em send you a wire,” pleaded Mike. “They can forward the full report later. I know the suspect you have now will stay put, but in case it turns out to be somebody else — you can reach me at my sister’s house, South Carolina Avenue.”

“You have my word on it,” repeated the Commissioner.

Then he added, not unkindly, “I don’t like to tell you this, old-timer, but that boy’s as good as dead already. It’s one of the strongest circumstantial cases we’ve had here in years.”

Mike left, thinking, “And I’m counting on three hairs to outweigh it!”

He plodded along the Boardwalk, head down. It was hopeless. Even if the report that came back was favorable, what chance had the kid against that young swell, with all his money and influence? The dead girl’s own people would probably back him up if it came to a showdown. He thought of Murray having him thrown out of his cell, and grinned. Spunky, fiery, even in the shadow of death. Then he thought of the other youth, nervous, fidgety, in his luxurious hotel-room. There had been something soft and flabby there just under the surface, Mike had sensed it. Too much money, maybe. Why not dig in, maybe he’d get something! Why wait for the hairs to tell the story? Maybe he could get something more, to back them up with. Why wait for the phalanx of high-priced lawyers that would close in around him, shielding him the moment he was legally jeopardized?

Arnold was ramming eighty-odd neckties into a valise when the knock came on his door. He thought it was the bellhop for his baggage, and unsuspectingly went to open it. By the time he saw that it wasn’t, it was too late to close it again, they were in already.

There were three of them, and he recognized the one in the middle and knew then for a certainty what he’d already suspected all along, that his barber of awhile before had been something more than a barber. The suspicion alone had jittered him to the point of getting ready to take a run-out powder until the trial came up; the certainty of it now paralyzed him to the point of helplessness. It was characteristic of his fiber that instead of trying to bar their way he fell back flabby and limp as a rag. Sylvia Reading had known her men, she had known what she was doing when she refused to marry him. “Soft and no good.” She had carried the knowledge to her grave with her. He was vanquished before the blow was even struck.

The men closed the door behind them. One stayed beside it. One went over to the telephone and moved it out of the way. Arnold’s way.

“Remember me?” said Mike.

Arnold nodded, ashen.

Mike flashed some kind of a badge, took in the readied luggage. “So you were going away?” he drawled.

“Why? What do you want?” stammered the playboy.

“Funny you should be going away right at this time. Funny you should have that little scratch on your scalp, just above the hair-line. By the time you came back it would’ve healed, wouldn’t it?”

There was a bottle on the table, and a glass. Arnold said, “Lemme have another drink, will you? Lemme talk to the Commissioner, will you?” He sounded out-of-breath.

The one by the telephone took it up with both hands, swung downward with it. The wires came flying loose out of the soundbox. Then he handed it to Arnold.

“You’re going to talk to the Commissioner,” Mike promised. “That’s why we’re here. He sent us to get you.”

Arnold gave a hiss of relief. “Nobody has to know, do they? I can explain to him — but it won’t get in the papers, will it, your taking me there like this?”

“Won’t it?” grinned Mike. “Won’t it? Every leg-man in Atlantic City’s ganged up down at the door, there’s a camera waiting behind every post to get you—”

A cry broke from him. “I can’t stand it! Photographers, my name in all the papers — it’ll ruin my life! Can’t you take me down the back way? Let me get hold of a lawyer, at least! Oh, my God, let me have a drink!”

Mike moved the bottle away. “I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said quietly. “You can have a drink, and we’ll take you out the back way. Just take a sheet of that stationery and write, ‘I killed Sylvia Reading,’ and sign your name under it.”

Arnold jumped back as though he’d been bitten. “No!” he yelled. “No! I didn’t do it! You can’t make me say I did! You’re trying to catch me, aren’t you! You can’t pin it on me—”

“Can’t we?” said Mike. “We have already. We’ve proved who killed her! Show him, Lane.”

The one by the door fished out two little paper packets, undid them.

Mike said, “Your hair’s been tested, since I was here this afternoon. You didn’t know I helped myself to some, did you? It matches the specimens we found under her fingernails. Murray’s doesn’t! She reached up in her death-struggle and clawed at your head; she not only made that little scratch I reopened today, she tore out several of your hairs by the roots. They stayed under her nails, even the water didn’t dislodge them. It’s not the word of a friendless little dance-hall lizard against yours any more, it’s the word of an expert at the Department of Justice in Washington! Come on — and hold your chin up when you hear the camera-shutters go click-click!”

He looked all around him, blindly, as though he couldn’t see them any more. Suddenly he was talking through his hands, face hidden. “I couldn’t stand it, to see her night after night with that cheap. She had no use for me, and it rankled. She wouldn’t listen to me, wouldn’t get up and leave when I found her sitting there alone. I started to shake her by the shoulders, I only wanted to shake some sense into her — and then, before I knew it, it had happened! I tell you, she drove me to it, she wouldn’t take me seriously— Please,” he slobbered, “let me have a drink—”

“Do like I told you,” said Mike, “and we’ll even wait outside the door for you, let you finish the bottle in peace.”

Arnold’s face stopped twitching for a moment. “You’ll — wait — outside the door?” He snatched at a sheet of hotelpaper, scrawled two lines on it. His voice was just a whisper. “Here — now let me have my drink.”

Outside the door Mike folded the paper and put it away. “Soft and no good,” he murmured. He motioned his two companions toward the elevator.

“Ain’t you gonna wait?” one whispered curiously.

“What for?” said Mike. “He’s down there on the Boardwalk already, ahead of us.”

“You knew that — and you let him?”

“It’s the kindest thing anyone coulda done for him,” Mike answered. “Funny how too much money takes all the backbone outa you. I gotta go over to the Commissioner with this confession.

The second one crumpled the two little paper packets and threw them away disgustedly. “I ain’t getting bald fast enough,” he complained, “I gotta yank out the few I got left. He didn’t even look at ’em!”

“Quit beefing; here’s your twenty apiece,” said Mike, “and stay away from that cheesy confidence-racket of yours on the Boardwalk, or next time I will turn you both in like I threatened to!”

The Commissioner just sat back and whistled after he’d scanned Arnold’s confession. “I don’t know just how you got this out of him, brother,” he said meaningfully, “but you don’t know how lucky it is for you you did!” He passed an opened telegram across the desk to him. “Cast your eyes on that!”

Mike’s face paled as he read. It was the D. of J. expert’s preliminary report. “Group B, from head of accused, does not check with A, from fingernails victim, neither follicles, texture, nor color. Neither does Group C, from second suspect.”

Mike just stood there swallowing. The chief clues had gone haywire. The specimens of hair had probably been off the dead girl’s own head.

“We’re dismissing the case against young Murray, all right,” said the Commissioner sombrely, “but if it wasn’t for these five scribbled words, ‘I killed Sylvia Reading, J. Arnold,’ you brought me in just now, we’d have had half a case of murder against you yourself for whatever it was you did to him made him jump out the window like he did. In fact, for all I know, we probably still have at that — but I’m not going to do anything about it.” He stared curiously at Mike. “I suppose all that matters is results — but talk about putting the cart before the horse!”

“So you got your job back,” beamed Mike’s sister happily across the kitchen-table. “They must have read all about it in the papers. Special delivery, and signed by the head of the agency himself!”

“Yeah,” scoffed Mike, “took ’em long enough to find out how good I am. Well, I’ll take my time about answering, they can wait till I’m good and ready.” He took the reply he had prepared from his pocket and hurriedly sealed it. “Got an air-mail stamp?” he wanted to know.