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

Murder on My Mind

The alarm smashed me wide open, like a hand grenade exploding against my solar plexus. I was already into my shoes and pants before my eyes were even open. Funny, I thought dazedly, when I looked down and saw them on me, how you do things like that automatically, without knowing anything about it, just from long force of habit.

The tin clock went into another tantrum, so I chopped my arm at it and clicked it off. “All right, so I’m up!” I groaned. “What more do you want?” I went into the bathroom and shaved. I looked like the morning after a hard night, eyes all bleary and with ridges under them, and I couldn’t understand it. Eight hours’ sleep ought to be enough for anyone, and I’d gone to bed at eleven. The mattress must be no good, I decided, and I’d better tackle the landlady for a new one. Or maybe I’d been working too hard; I ought to ask the captain for a leave of absence. Of the two of them, I would have much rather tackled him than her.

She was going off like a Roman candle, at Ephie, the colored maid, when I stepped out of my room into the hall. “Wide open!” she was complaining. “I tell you it was standing wide open, anyone could have walked in! You better count the silverware right away, Ephie — and ask the roomers if any of them are missing anything from their rooms. We could have all been murdered in our beds!” Then she saw me and added with a sniff, “Even though there is a detective lodging on the ground floor!”

“I’m off-duty when I come back here at nights,” I let her know. I took a look on both sides of the lock of the front door, which was what was causing all the commotion. “It hasn’t been jimmied or tampered with in any way. Somebody in the house came in or went out, and forgot to close it tight behind them; the draft blew it open again.”

“It’s probably that no-account little showgirl who has the third-floor-back, traipsing in all hours of the morning!” she decided instantly. “Just let me get my hands on her!”

I took a deep breath to get my courage up, and made the plunge. “Wonder if you could change my mattress. It must be lumpy or something; I don’t seem to be getting my right rest.”

This time she went into vocal pyrotechnics that would have put a Fourth of July at Palisades Park to shame. It was the newest mattress in her house; she’d bought it only two years ago last fall; nobody else in the house seemed to find anything wrong with their mattresses; funny that a husky young man like me should. She didn’t like single young men in her house, anyway, never had; she’d only made an exception in my case. (“It’s not my fault if I’m not married,” I protested mildly. “Girls have something to say about that, too.”) She liked detectives even less; always cleaning their guns in their rooms. (“I don’t clean my gun in my room,” I contradicted a little more heatedly, “I clean it down at headquarters.”)

She was still going strong by the time I was all the way down at the corner, flagging the bus for headquarters. I had sort of waived my request, so to speak, by withdrawing under fire.

A call came in only about an hour after I got in, sent in by a cop on the beat. The captain sent Beecher and me over. “Man found dead under suspicious circumstances. Go to 25 Donnelly Avenue, you two. Second floor, front.”

Riding over in the car Beecher remarked, “You look like hell, Mark. Losing your grip?”

I said, “I feel like I’ve been dragged through a knothole. I’m going to ask the Old Man for a leave of absence. Know what’s been happening to me lately? I go home and I dream about this stuff. It must be starting to get me. You ever have dreams like that?”

“No,” he said. “It’s like a faucet with me, I turn it off and forget about it till the next day. You used to be that way too. Remember when we were both second-graders, the night that messy Scallopini case finally broke, how we both went to see a Donald Duck flicker, and you fell off your seat into the aisle just from laughing so hard? That’s the only way to be in this racket. It’s just a job like any other, look at it that way. Why don’t you slow up a little, take it easy? No use punishing yourself too hard.”

I nodded and opened the door as we swerved in to the curb. “Just as soon as we find out what this thing is.”

Number 25 Donnelly Avenue was a cheap yellow-brick flat. The patrolman at the door said, “Now, get away from here, you people. Move on. There’s nothing to see.” There wasn’t, either. Not from down there. “Them are the windows, up there,” he said to us. Beecher went straight in without bothering. I hung back a minute and looked up at them. Just two milky-glass panes that needed washing pretty badly.

Then I turned and looked across at the opposite side of the street, without exactly knowing why. There was a gimcrack one-story taxpayer on the whole block-front over there, that looked as if it had been put up within the last year or so, much newer than this flat.

“Coming?” Beecher was waiting for me in the automatic elevator. “What were you staring at out there?”

“Search me,” I shrugged. I’d expected to see a row of old-fashioned brownstone houses with high stoops, and then when I turned I saw a cheap row of modern shops instead. But I couldn’t have told him why. I didn’t know why myself. Maybe the neighborhood seemed to call for them; there were so many other rows of brownstone fronts scattered about here and there. Just some sort of optical illusion on my part, I guess. Or rather, to be more exact, some sort of illusory optical expectancy that had been disappointed. There was almost a sense of loss derived from that particular facade, as though it had flattened to one-story height, cheated me of extra height (as I had turned to glance).

A second patrolman outside the flat-door let us in. The first room was a living room. Nothing in it seemed to have been disturbed. Yesterday evening’s paper was spread out on the sofa, where somebody had last been reading it; yesterday evening’s headline was as dead as the reader who had bought it. Beyond was the bedroom. A man lay dead on the bed, in the most grotesque position imaginable.

He was half-in and half-out of it. He died either getting into it or getting out of it. I looked at the pillow; that answered it for me. He’d died getting out of it. The indentation made by his head overlapped a little on one side. Therefore he’d reared his head, been struck, and his head had fallen back again onto the pillow; but not exactly into the same indentation it had been lying in before.

One whole leg was still under the covers, the other was touching the floor, toes stuck into a bedroom-slipper. The covers had been pitched triangularly off him, up at the right shoulder and side; that was the side the leg was out of bed on. The leg that had never carried him again, never walked again. The window was open about an inch from the bottom, and the shade was down half way.

Apart from the fact that he was half-in, half-out of bed (and that did not constitute a sign of struggle, but only of interruption) there were no noticeable signs of a struggle whatever, in here any more than in the outer room.

The man’s clothes were draped neatly across a chair, and his shoes were standing under it side by side. There were three one-dollar bills and a palmful of change standing untouched on the dresser, the way most men leave their money when they empty their pockets just before retiring at night. I say “untouched” because the three bills were consecutively atop one another, and the change was atop the topmost one of them in turn, to hold them down as a weight. And although the continuing presence of money does not always obviate a robbery-motive (it may be too small an amount to interest the killer) the presence of money in that formalized position did proclaim it to be untouched; no intruder would have taken the trouble to replace the coins atop the bills, after having dislodged them to examine the small fund.

I’d worked on Homicide five years to be able to tell small things like that. Only, in murder cases, there are no small things. There are only things.

We were in the bedroom one minute and fifty seconds, by my watch, the first time. We would be in there again, and longer, of course; but that was all, the first time. We’d gotten this from it: It was just like a room with somebody sleeping in it, apart from the distorted position of the dead man’s right leg and the scowlingly violent look on his face.

The examiner showed up several minutes after we had got there, and while he was busy in the bedroom we questioned the superintendent and a couple of the neighbors in the outside room. The dead man’s name was Fairbanks, he clerked in a United Cigar store, and he was a hardworking respectable man as far as they knew, never drank, never chased women, never played the horses. He had a wife and a little girl in the country, and while they were away for a two-weeks’ rest he’d kept his nose to the grindstone, had gone ahead batching it here in the flat.

The couple in the flat across the hall had known him and his wife, and while she was away they’d been neighborly enough to have him in for coffee with them each morning, so he wouldn’t have to stop for it on his way to work. In the evenings, of course, he shifted for himself.

They were the ones had first found him dead. The woman had sent her husband over to knock on Fairbanks’s door and find out why he hadn’t shown up for his morning’s coffee yet; they knew he opened his store at seven and it was nearly that already. Her husband rang the bell and pounded for fully five minutes and couldn’t get an answer. He tried the door and it was locked on the inside. He got worried, and went down and got the superintendent, and the latter opened it up with his passkey. And there he was, just as he was now.

Beecher said, “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Last night,” the neighbor said. “We all went to the movies together. We came back at eleven, and we left him outside of his door. He went in, and we went in our own place.”

I said, “Sure he didn’t go out again afterwards?”

“Pretty sure. We didn’t hear his door open anymore, at least not while we were still awake, and that was until after twelve. And it started teeming not long after we got in. I don’t think he’d have gone out in that downpour.”

I went in the other room and picked up the shoes and looked closely at them. “No,” I said when I came back, “he didn’t go out, the soles of his shoes are powder-dry with dust. I blew on them and a haze came off.” I looked in the hall-closet and he didn’t own a pair of rubbers. “If he was murdered — and we’ll know for sure in a few minutes — somebody came in here after you people left him outside his door. The position of the body shows he didn’t get up to let them in, they got in without his knowledge.”

And they hadn’t forced their way in, either. The flat-door hadn’t been tampered with in any way, the living-room window was latched on the inside, the bedroom window was only open an inch and there was a safety-lock on it — besides there was no fire-escape nor ledge outside of it. A quick survey, quick but not sketchy, had been enough to establish all these points.

“Maybe a master-key was used,” Beecher suggested.

I asked the superintendent, “How many keys do you give your tenants, just one or a pair of duplicates?”

“Only one to a flat,” he said. “We used to hand out two where there was more than one person to a family, but so many of them moved away without returning them that we quit that.”

“Then Fairbanks and his wife only had one, is that right?” I went in and looked; I finally found it. It was in a key case, along with the keys to his store. And this key case was still in his clothing, from the night before. Just to make sure we tried the key on the door, and it was the right key. So he hadn’t lost it or mislaid it, and it hadn’t been picked up by anybody and made unwarranted use of.

The examiner came out, about now, and we shipped our witnesses outside for the present. “Compound fracture of the skull,” he said. “He was hit a terrific blow with some blunt object or instrument. Sometime between midnight and morning. He had an unusually thin skull, and a fragment of it must have pierced his brain, because hardly any blood was shed. A little in each ear, and a slight matting of the hair, that’s all.”

“Die right away?”

“Not more than a minute or two after. Goodbye.”

I called the captain. “All right, you’re both on it,” he said. “Stay with it.”

A minute later the phone rang and it was Fairbanks’s company, wanting to know why he hadn’t opened his branch store on time.

That saved me the trouble of calling them. “This is Police; he’s dead,” I said. I asked about his record with them.

“Excellent. He’s been working for us the past seven years. He is — I mean he was — a good man.”

I asked if any report had ever reached them on his having trouble with anyone, customers or co-workers.

Never, the man on the wire said. Not once. He was well liked by everyone. As a matter of fact he was known by name to a great many customers of that particular store. A couple of years ago they had shifted him to another location, and got so many inquiries for him afterward, that they’d put him right back again where he’d been. “Sounds funny in a chain-store business, but everybody missed him, they wanted him back.”

I hung up and turned to Beecher. “Can you get a motive out of this?”

“About as little as you can. No money taken — in fact no money to take — no enemies, no bad habits.”

“Mistaken identity?”

“Mistaken for who?” he said disgustedly. “Somebody else with no money, no enemies, no had habits?”

“Don’t ask me questions on my questions,” I pleaded abjectly. “We have to start somewhere. What do you suppose happened to the blunt instrument Doc mentioned?”

“Carried it out with him, I guess.”

Fairbanks had been carried out, meanwhile. I’d seen so many of them go, I didn’t even turn my head. After all, where they ended, we began. The fingerprint men had powdered everything they could, which wasn’t much, and packed up to go, too. I said, “Wait a minute!” and motioned them back in. I pointed to the ceiling.

“You don’t want us to go up there, do you?” they jeered.

“The lights are lit, aren’t they?” I said. “And they have been ever since it happened. I’ve established that. And the switch is over by the door, and he was killed with only one leg out of his bed. Now tell me you took prints on that little mother-of-pearl push-button over there.”

Their faces told they hadn’t, only too plainly. “We’ll change jobs with you,” one of them offered lamely.

“Not until you know how to do your own right,” I said, unnecessarily cuttingly.

They left in silent offense.

We continued working. My back ached from that damned mattress at the rooming-house, and my eyelids felt as if they were lined with lead.

“I’ve got something,” Beecher called to me finally. I went out to him. “What time did it rain last night? It ought to be in here.” He picked up the morning paper, the one outside the door that Fairbanks had never lived to read. What we wanted took finding. We found it finally by indirection, in connection with something else. “Started at eleven forty-five and continued until after two.” He spanked the item with his fingernail. “Whoever it was, came in here between two-thirty and dawn.”

“Why not right during the rain?”

“For Pete’s sake, use your eyes, Mark! Don’t you see the little dab of dried mud here on the carpet? Came off his shoes, of course. Well, do you see any blurs from drops of water around it? No. This nap is a cross between felt and cheap velour; it would show them up in a minute. His clothes were dry; just his soles had mud on them, probably under the arches. So he came in after the rain, but before the ground had fully dried.”

“I’ve got some more mud,” I said finally, crouching down chin to my knees. It was right beside the bed, showing where he’d stood when he struck Fairbanks. The pillows were still in position, even though Fairbanks was gone, one showing a little rusty-brown swirl. Much like a knothole in wood-grain. I stood over the tiny dirt-streak on the floor, and swung my arm stiffly in an arc, down on top of the pillow. It landed too far out, made no allowance for the weapon. No matter how stubby that had been, it would have hit him down near the shoulder instead of on top of the head. Then I remembered that he hadn’t been flat on his back but had already struggled up to a sitting position, feeling for his slippers with one foot, when he’d been hit.

I kept my eye on an imaginary point where his head would have been, sitting up, and then swung — and there was a space of about only two or three inches left between my clenched fist and the imaginary point. That space stood for the implement that had been used. What, I wondered, could be that short and still do such damage?

I heard Beecher whistling up for me from down below the windows and chased down. “I’ve got a print, a whole print!” he yelled jubilantly. “A honey. Perfect from heel to toe! Just look at it! I can’t swear yet it was made by the same guy that went into the flat, but I’m certainly not passing it up.” I phoned in for him and told them to send somebody over with paraffin and take it, while he carefully covered it over with his own pocket-handkerchief to protect it from harm. Then we stood around it guarding it.

It was a peach, all right. There was a cement sidewalk along the whole length of the flat, but between it and the building-line there was a strip of unpaved earth about three yards wide, for decorative purposes originally, although now it didn’t even bear grass. The sidewalk bridged this sod across to the front door, and it was in one of the two right-angles thus formed that the footprint was set obliquely, pointed in toward the building.

“He came along the sidewalk,” Beecher reconstructed, somewhat obviously, “and turned in toward the door, but instead of staying on the cement he cut the corner short, and one whole foot landed on the soggy ground. Left foot. It wasn’t made by any milkman, either; this man was making a half-turn around to go in, a milkman would have come up straight from the curb. I’d like to bet this is for us!”

“I’m with you,” I nodded.

“It’s got everything but the guy’s initials. Rubber heel worn down in a semicircle at the back, steel cleat across the toe.”

We hung around until they’d greased it and filled it with paraffin, and we were sure we had it. They also took microscopic specimens of the dried mud from the room upstairs, and some of the soil down here around the print, for the laboratory to work over.

“Tall guy and pretty husky, too,” Beecher decided. “It’s a ten-and-a-half.” He rolled up the tape-measure. “And pushed down good and hard by his weight, even though the ground was wet.”

“About my height and build, then,” I suggested. “I take a ten-and-a-half myself.” I started to lift my foot off the cement, to match it against the impression, but he’d gone in without waiting, and there was a straggling line of onlookers strung along the opposite side of the street taking it all in, so I turned and went in after him. After all, I didn’t have to make sure at this late day what size shoe I wore.

“Well, we’ve got a little something, anyway,” he said sanguinely on the way back upstairs. “We’ve got it narrowed to a guy approximately six-one or over and between one-eighty and two-twenty. At least we can skip all shrimps and skinny guys. As soon as the mold’s hardened enough to get a cast from it, we can start tracking down those shoes to some repair-shop.”

“And then like in the story-books,” I said morbidly, “they got their man.”

“I don’t think you’re eating right,” he grinned.

I told him about the arm-measurement I’d taken beside the head of the bed. I repeated it for him; he couldn’t try it for himself because his arms weren’t long enough. “With just two, three inches to spare, what else could it have been but the butt of a gun? Held right up close to the handle.”

“Let’s go over the place; we haven’t half-started yet.” He began yanking open drawers in the dresser; I went out into the other room again, suddenly turned off to one side and went toward the steam-radiator. I put my whole arm down between it and the wall and pulled up a wrench.

“Here it is,” I called. “You can stop looking.”

He came in and saw what it was, and, by my stance, where it had come from. He took it and looked at it. We could both see the tiny tuft of hair imbedded between its tightly clamped jaws, the bone splinters — or were they minute particles of scalp? — adhering to the rough edge of it.

“You’re right, Mark, this is it,” he said in a low voice. Suddenly he wasn’t looking at it anymore but at me. “How did you know it was there? You couldn’t have seen it through the radiator. You went straight toward it; I didn’t hear your step stop a minute.”

I just stared at him helplessly. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking what I was doing. I just, I just went over to the radiator unconsciously and put down my arm behind it — and there it was.”

It slipped out of my hand, the wrench, and hit the carpet with a dull thud. I passed the back of my hand across my forehead, dazedly. “I don’t know,” I mumbled half to myself.

“Mark, you’re all in. For pete’s sake, why don’t you ask to be relieved of duty, go home, and catch some sleep. The hell with how you happened to find it, you found it, that’s all that matters!”

“I’ve been put on here,” I said groggily, “and I stay on here until it’s over.”

The superintendent unhesitatingly identified the wrench as his own. He had a straightforward enough story to tell, as far as that went. He’d been in here with it one day tinkering with the radiator — that had been months ago, in the spring, before they turned the heat off — and had evidently left it behind and forgotten about it.

“Does that make it look bad for me, gents?” he wanted to know anxiously. When they’re scared, they always call you “gents”; I don’t know why.

“It could,” Beecher said gruffly, “but we’re not going to let it.” The superintendent was a scrawny little fellow, weighed about a hundred-thirty. Small feet. “Don’t worry about it.” Beecher jerked his thumb at the door for him to go.

“Wait a minute,” I said, stopping him, “I’d like to ask you a question — that has nothing to do with this.” I took him over by the window with me and squinted out. “Didn’t there used to be a row of old-fashioned brownstone houses with high stoops across the way from here?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s right!” he nodded, delighted at the harmless turn the questioning had taken. “They pulled them down about a year ago and put up that taxpayer. You remembered them?”

“No,” I said slowly, very slowly. I kept shaking my head from side to side, staring sightlessly out. I could sense, rather than see, Beecher’s eyes fastened anxiously on the back of my head. I brushed my hand across my forehead again. “I don’t know what made me ask you that,” I said sort of helplessly, “How could I remember them, if I never saw them be—?” I broke off suddenly and turned to him. “Was this place, this street out here, always called Donnelly Avenue?”

“No,” he said, “you’re right about that, too. It used to be Kingsberry Road; they changed the name about five years ago; why I don’t know.”

The name clicked, burst inside my head like a star-shell, lighting everything up. I hit myself on the crown with my open hand, turned to Beecher across the superintendent’s shoulder, let out my breath in relief. “No wonder! I used to live here, right in this same building, right in this same flat — 25 Kingsberry Road. Ten years ago, when my mother and dad were still alive, rest their souls, when I was going to training school. It’s been bothering me ever since we got out of the car an hour ago. I knew there was something familiar about the place, and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it — what with their changing the street-name and tearing down those landmarks across the way.”

“They remodeled this building some, too,” the superintendent put in sagely. “Took down the outside fire-escapes and modernized the front of it. It don’t look the same like it used to.”

Beecher didn’t act particularly interested in all this side-talk; it had nothing to do with what had brought us here today. He shifted a little to close the subject, and then said, “I suppose this thing’s spoiled as far as prints go,” indicating the wrench. “You wrapped your hand around it when you hauled it up.”

“Yes, but I grabbed it down at the end, not all the way up near the head the way he held it. He must have held it up there, foreshortened; the mud shows where he stood.”

“We’ll send it over to them anyway. Peculiar coincidence. Fairbanks must have come across it behind there and taken it out, then left it lying around, out in the open intending to return it to our friend here. Then this intruder comes in, whacks him with it, and on his way out drops it right back where it had been originally. Funny place to drop it.”

“Funny thing to do altogether,” I said. “Walk into a place, strike a man dead, turn around and walk out again without touching a thing. Absolutely no motive that I can make out.”

“I’m going to run this wrench over to the print-men,” he said. “Come on, there’s nothing more we can do around here right now.”

In the car he noticed the dismal face I was putting on. “Don’t let it get you,” he said. “We’re coming along beautifully. Like a timetable, almost. Got a complete, intact print. Now the weapon. And it’s not even twelve hours yet.”

“Also got a headache,” I said under my breath, wincing.

“We might get something out of his wife; she’ll be in from the country this evening. Everyone I’ve spoken to so far has praised her to the skies, but there might be some man in the background had his eye on her. That’s always an angle. Depends how pretty she is; I’ll be able to tell you better after I get a look at her.”

“I don’t agree,” I said. “If it were a triangle motive, the man would have tried to cloak it with a fake robbery motive, anything at all, to throw us off the track. He’d know that leaving it blank this way would point twice as quickly—” I broke off short. “What’s the idea?”

We’d pulled up in front of my rooming house.

“Go on, get out and get in there,” he said gruffly, unlatching the door and giving me a push. “You’ve been dead on your feet all day! Grab a half-hour’s sleep, and then maybe we’ll be able to get someplace on this case. I’ll start in on the shoeprint-mold, meanwhile. See you over at headquarters later.”

“Won’t that look great when the captain hears about it!” I protested. “Going home to sleep right in the middle of a job.”

“The case’ll still be there, I’m not swiping it from you behind your back. This way you’re just holding the two of us up. They’ll probably have the prints and the mud-analysis ready for us by the time you come down; we can start out from there.”

He drove off and cut my halfhearted arguments short. I turned and went up to the door, fumbled for my key, stuck it wearily in the lock — and the door wouldn’t open. I jiggled it and wiggled it and prodded it, and no use, it wouldn’t work. “What’d the old girl do,” I wondered resentfully, “change the lock without telling anybody, because she found it standing open this morning?” I had to ring the bell, and I knew that meant a run-in with her.

It did. The scene darkened and there was her face in the open doorway. “Well, Mr. Marquis! What did you do, lose your door-key? I haven’t got a thing to do, you know, except chase up and down stairs all day opening the door for people when they have perfectly good latchkeys to use!”

“Aw, pipe down,” I said irritably. “You went and changed the lock.”

“I did no such thing!”

“Well, you try this, then, if you think it’s perfectly good.”

She did and got the same result I had. Then she took it out, looked at it. Then she glared at me, banged it down into my palm. “This isn’t the key I gave you! How do you expect to open the door when you’re not using the right key at all? I don’t know where you got this from, but it’s not one of the keys to my house. They’re all brand-new, shiny; look how tarnished this is.”

I looked at it more closely, and I saw that she was right. If I hadn’t been half-asleep just now, I would have noticed the difference myself in the first place.

I started going through my pockets then and there, under her watchful eye, feeling — and looking — very foolish. The right one turned up in one of my vest-pockets. I stuck it in the door and it worked.

My landlady, however, wasn’t one to let an advantage like this pass without making the most of it. Not that she needed much encouragement at any time. She closed the front door and trailed me into the hall, while I was still wondering where the devil that strange key had come from. “And — ahem — I believe you had a complaint to make about your mattress this morning. Well, I have one to make to you, young man, that’s far more important!”

“What is it?” I asked.

She parked a defiant elbow akimbo. “Is it absolutely necessary for you to go to bed with your shoes on? Especially after you’ve been walking around out in the mud! I’m trying to keep my laundry bills down, and Ephie tells me the bottom sheet on your bed was a sight this morning, all streaked with dried mud! If it happens again, Mr. Marquis, I’m going to charge you for it. And then you wonder why you don’t sleep well! If you’d only take the trouble of undressing the way people are supposed to—”

“She’s crazy!” I said hotly. “I never in my life— What are you trying to tell me, I’m not housebroken or something?”

Her reaction, of course, was instantaneous — and loud. “Ephie!” she squalled up the stairs. “Ephie! Would you mind bringing down that soiled sheet you took off Mr. Marquis’s bed this morning? I’d like to show it to him. It hasn’t gone out yet, has it?”

“No, ma’m,” came back from upstairs.

I kept giving her the oddest kind of look while we stood there waiting. I could tell from her own expression, she couldn’t make out what it was. No wonder she couldn’t. It was the kind of look you give a person when you’re floundering around out of your depth, and you want them to give you a helping hand, and yet you know somehow they can’t. You want them to give you a word of explanation, instead of your giving it to them. You need it badly, even if it’s just a single word.

I distinctly recalled pulling off my shoes the night before when I was turning in. I remembered sitting on the edge of the bed, dog-tired and grunting, and doing it. Remembered how a momentarily formed knot in the lace of one had held me up, remembered how I’d struggled with it, remembered how I’d sworn at it while I was struggling (aloud, yet, and extremely bitterly); and then how I’d finally eradicated it, and given the freed shoe a violent fling off my foot. Remembered how the impetus had thrown it a short distance away and it had fallen over on its side and I’d left it there. All that had been real, not imaginary; all that had happened; all that came back clear as a snapshot.

That peculiar feeling I’d had all morning over at Fairbanks’s flat returned to me, redoubled. As though there were some kind of knowledge hidden just around the corner from me, waiting to be exposed. And yet I couldn’t seem to turn that corner. It kept pivoting out of reach. Or like a revolving door that keeps taking you past the point where you should step out and you miss it each time. Buildings that suddenly flattened from second to first-story level. Monkey wrenches that come up to meet your hand from behind a radiator. Shoes that find their way back onto your feet without your hand touching them, like magic, like with wings, like in a Disney cartoon. Tired nerves, blurred reflexes, a sick detective trying to catch a healthy murderer.

Ephie and the old girl spread out the sheet foursquare between them, as if they were going to catch someone jumping down from upstairs. “Just look at that!” she declaimed. “That was a clean sheet, put on fresh yesterday morning! I suppose you’ll stand there and try to tell me—”

I didn’t try to tell her anything. What was there to tell her? There were the sidewise-prints of muddied shoes all over it, like elongated horseshoes, and that was that. But I wasn’t listening, anyway. I’d just remembered something else, that had nothing to do with this sheet business. Something that hit me sickeningly like that wrench must have hit poor Fairbanks.

I had a flash of myself the previous Sunday night, that was the night before last, rummaging through an old valise for something, finding a lot of junk that had accumulated in my possession for years, discarding most of it, but saving a tarnished door-key, because I couldn’t remember where or what it was from, and therefore I figured I’d better hang onto it. I’d slipped it into my vest-pocket, because I’d had that on me at the time, unbuttoned and without any coat over it.

They must have seen my face get deathly white; I could see a little of the fright reflected in both of theirs, like in a couple of mirrors. Or like when you point a pocket-light at a wall, and it gives you back a pale cast of the original.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and left the house abruptly, left the street door standing wide open behind me. I sliced my arm at the first cab that came along and got in.

He took me back to 25 Donnelly Avenue. It was still light out, light enough to see by. I got out and went slowly across the sidewalk, as slowly and rigidly as a man walking to his own doom. I stopped there by that footprint Beecher had found. It was pretty well effaced as far as details went, but the proportions were still there, the length and width of it if nothing else. I raised my left foot slowly from the cement and brought it down on top of it.

It matched like a print can only match the foot that originally made it. After a while I turned the bottom of my own foot up toward me and studied it dazedly. The cleat across the toe, the rubber-heel worn down in a semicircle at the back.

The driver must have thought I was going to topple, the way I stood there rocking, and then the way I put out my hand gropingly and tried to find the doorway for support. He made a move to get out and come over to me, but saw that I’d steadied and was starting to go in the house.

I went upstairs to the locked Fairbanks flat and took out the key that I’d found in my valise two nights ago that I’d mistakenly used on the rooming house door a little while ago. It opened the flat; the door fell back without a squeak in front of me.

“Pop’s key,” came to me then, sadly, “or maybe Mom’s from the long ago and far away.” I pulled the door toward me, closing it again, without going in. And as it came back close against my eyes, the door’s shiny green coat dimmed off it and it became an old-fashioned walnut dye. “This used to be my door,” I said to myself. “I used to come in here. On the other side of it was where I came — when I came home.” I let my forehead lean against it, and I felt sort of sick all over. Fright-sick, if there is such a thing.

After a while I went downstairs again, still without having gone into the flat. I phoned Beecher from a pay station, on the outside. “Come over to my place,” I said, and I hung up again. Just those few words.

“I should never have been a detective,” I said out loud, without noticing I was back within earshot of the cabman again.

“What, are you a detective?” he said immediately. “You look awful sick right now. You guys get sick too? I didn’t think you ever did.”

“Do we,” I moaned expressively.

I was waiting for Beecher in my room when he showed up. I had the muddied sheet in there with me (evidence; detective to the bitter end). He found me sitting there staring at the wall, as though I saw things on it. “Was that you?” he said incredulously. “You sounded like the chief mourner at somebody’s funer—”

“Beecher,” I said hollowly, “I know who killed that guy Fairbanks. It was me.”

He nearly yelped with fright. “I knew this was coming! You’ve finally cracked from overwork, you’ve gone haywire. I’m going out and get a doctor!”

I showed him the sheet. I told him about the key, about measuring the footprint. My teeth started chattering. “I woke up half-dead this morning and couldn’t remember putting my pants on. And they were all wrinkled. I know now that I’d been sleeping in them. The street-door here in this house was found standing wide open first thing this morning before anyone was up yet. It was me went out, came in again, in the early hours.

“I used to live in that same flat he did. I went back there last night. Didn’t you notice how I found that wrench, went straight toward it without knowing why myself, this morning?” I ducked my face down, away from him. “Poor devil. With a wife and kid. He’s never harmed me. I’d never even seen him before. I told you I’ve been dreaming lately about the cases we’ve worked on. And this dream got up and walked.

“I must have found my way there in my sleep, with crime and criminals on my mind, all because I used to live there long ago. Put on the light in what I thought was my own room, found him there, mistook him for an intruder, and slugged him with a monkey-wrench right in his own bed — all without waking up.” I shivered. “I’m the guy we’ve both been looking for all day. I’m the guy — and I didn’t even know it!” I couldn’t stop shaking. “I’ve been chasing myself. I’ve been on both ends of the case at once!” I covered up my eyes. “I think I’m going crazy.”

I had a small-sized bottle there. It was a Christmas gift; I don’t use the stuff worth mentioning. He broke the seal and poured me a short drink. He put it away again without taking one himself. On duty, I suppose. He opened the door and looked out into the hall, to see if anyone was around. No one was; he closed it and came back in again.

“Mark,” he said gloomily, “I’m not going to tell you to forget it, that you’re crazy, that you’re talking through your hat. I wish I could; I’d give my eye-teeth if I could. But from me, you’re entitled to it straight from the shoulder.”

And then he made a face, like every word he was about to say tasted rotten, tasted moldy, ahead of time.

“You did. I think you did. I think you must have.”

I didn’t answer. I already knew that myself, was sure of it; he wasn’t telling me anything.

“Here are the findings, as of now. The only prints that would come off the wrench were yours — yours and Fairbanks’s. (And he obviously didn’t swing it at himself. His were on the mid-section of the stem, where he lifted it from a horizontal position behind the radiator, when he first found it back there.) The ones near the head of the wrench, where by your own calculations the killer actually held it, matched the ones down at the opposite end of the handle. Both yours. From the light push-button, they got one entire thumbprint. Yours. And those lights were already on when we first arrived this morning, I was a witness to that myself.

“Finally, I’ve already located the shoe repair-shop which did the cleat job matching up with the mold. It wasn’t hard; there aren’t many people use them; there are even fewer use them on that particular size shoe.” He said this slowly, like he hated to have to, “It wasn’t hard to find. It was the first shop I walked into, right on the corner below headquarters. I didn’t expect to find out anything there. I only went in to get an opinion from him. He recognized it at sight.” He said, ‘That’s my job.’ He said he’d only done one job like that in the past six months. He said, ‘I did that for your buddy, you know the one you call Mark, from headquarters.’ He even remembered how you had to sit waiting in one of the little stalls in your socks, because you told him you only own one pair of shoes at a time.

“Until I came over here just now, and you told me what you just did, none of this added up. I even cursed you out a little at first, I remember, because I thought you’d simply fouled up the job after we got over there this morning, being half-awake like you were all day. Left the footprint then, smudged up the wrench and pushbutton then. In spite of the fact that with my own eyes I saw that the lights were already on, that your fingers didn’t go near the handle of the wrench, that the ground was too hard and dry to take a footprint anymore by the time we got here.”

I held myself by my own throat. “You see how your side of it fits with my side. You see how it must be, has to be, the only possible thing that could have happened. You see how we’ve solved it between us, the way we’re paid to, the way we’re trained to, and come out with the right answer. I don’t remember it even yet, but I have proof now that I did. I walked over there and back in my sleep — with my eyes wide open. What am I going to do?”

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” he suggested in a rough-edged undertone, leaning over toward me and putting his hand down on my shoulder. “You’re going to shut up and forget the whole thing. Forget every word you’ve said to me in here. Get me? I don’t know anything, and you haven’t told me anything. Case unsolved.”

I shifted away from him. “That’s what you’re trying to talk me into doing because I’m your partner and because it’s me. Now tell me what you’d do if it was you.”

He sighed. Then he smiled halfheartedly, and turned away, and gave up trying. “Just about what you’re going to do anyway, yourself, so why ask?”

He stood there looking out the window of my room at nothing, brooding, feeling bad. I sat there looking down at the floor, hands pressed to my face, feeling worse.

Finally I got up quietly and put on my hat. “Coming?” I said.

“I’ll ride over with you,” he agreed. “I’ve got to go back anyway.”

In the car he said, “It’s not the first man you’ve killed”; hesitantly, as though realizing it was a rough thing to say to me, especially right then.

“Yes, but they were criminals, and they were trying to kill me at the time. This man wasn’t. He had the law on his side. I killed him in his bed.”

“It’ll be all right. The Old Man’ll know what to do. An inquiry. Sick-leave, maybe, for a while.”

“That won’t bring him back. I have to sleep with this for the rest of life.”

“Nothing lasts that long. The very mayor of New York himself, once — Memory wears out. Sound sleep comes back, one night. A year from now you’ll be chasing assignments in the car with me again, and looking at mud and looking at light-switches.”

I knew somehow, deep in my heart, that he was right. But that didn’t make tonight any easier on me. Tonight was tonight, and a year from now was a year from now, and never the two could meet. It’s the year between you have to pay for, each time, and I was ready to do my paying.

He didn’t offer to shake hands with me, when he left me outside the Old Man’s door, that would have been too theatrical. Just—

“I’ll see you, Mark.”

“I’ll see you, Beecher.”

It must be hell not to have a partner, no matter what your job is.

I opened the door and went in. I didn’t say anything; I went all the way over to his desk and just stood there.

The captain looked up finally. He said, “Well, Marquis?”

I said, “I’ve brought the man who killed Fairbanks in to you, Captain.”

He looked around, on this side of me and on that, and there was no one standing there but me.