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

I’ll Never Play Detective Again

I sat there with my top-hat over one eye, listening to him whistle like a canary off-key while he struggled with his white tie. His engagement to Marcia had just broken in all the papers, and her people were throwing a party at the Park-Ashley to celebrate it.

“Give up,” I kidded as he fumbled his tie for the fifth time, “you’ll never get those two ends to meet.”

The telephone started-in again. “Another reporter?” he groaned.

But she didn’t sound like it when I got over there. “Tommy darling, is it really true? Let me be the first to—”

I doused it against my shirt-front and wagged him over. “Somebody wants Tommy darling. Just wait’ll I tell Marcia this.”

I could joke about it because he wasn’t that kind at all. We’d been rooming together ever since the days when we only had one dress-suit between the two of us, and whoever happened to wear it, the other guy had to stay home in bed.

I went in to get a spare collar; parties like those last all night. When I came back he’d hung up already.

“I’d have been just as pleased without her good wishes,” he told me, going down in the elevator. “That was that Fortescue gal just then.”

She’d developed rather a bad case of it the year before, before he met Marcia. The minute he found out about it, he started to dodge and duck and go into reverse; her nature was too explosive to have around the house. She’d even tried to have him beaten up by gangsters, probably so she could nurse him back to health, only he fractured the jaw of one and chased the other to the corner of First Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where he lost him in the traffic. Tom couldn’t prove it was she, of course, but he’d had his suspicions. After that she’d given up the job as hopeless and we hadn’t heard any more of her — until tonight.

“Funny thing about it,” he went on, while we were waiting at the door for a taxi, “is the big change in her all of a sudden, saying maybe it was all for the best. Wonder how much of it she really meant?”

In the cab he suddenly snapped his fingers. “Forgot all about it! I should have sent Marcia some flowers.”

We stopped by at a florist and he went in. I waited where I was.

“Where are they?” I asked when he came back empty-handed.

“He’s rushing them down there by special messenger. Some of the swellest red roses you ever saw, kind they call American Beauties. She must be tired of orchids by now.”

It was a three-ringed circus when we got there. The Park-Ashley was seething with debs, sub-debs, post-debs, Princeton and Dartmouth undergrads, dowagers, men-about-town, the whole social zoo. The party was supposed to be on the second floor but it was spilling over in every direction.

Tom and I hired a room together to change collars in later on, before breakfast. We had a highball apiece to see us through the first eighty dances, then we went downstairs and reported for duty. We found Marcia standing next to her mother on the receiving line.

“Almost thought you were going to renege on your own party,” she smiled.

“Did you get my flowers?” he asked under his breath, like a fellow in love will.

She looked blank for a minute, then began to laugh. “You must have forgotten to put a card in, in your excitement! Whole carloads of them have been coming all evening.”

“I bet I find ’em!” a crystalline voice piped up. Marcia’s kid sister was standing there, eyes alight with excitement. “I know his taste.”

“Red roses,” I said behind the back of my hand, to help her along. She turned and ran outside.

Tom began to dance with Marcia, and just as I was girding up my armor to step into the fray, the kid came darting back again. “I see you found them all right,” I said. One was pinned to her dress and she was holding a smaller one, a bud, in her hand.

“Here, this one’s for you.” She reached for my lapel and drew the long stem through the buttonhole, then snapped it off short. “Ow!” she complained, and put her thumb to her lips for a second.

“See, that’s what you get!” I grinned.

We started to dance, but before we were halfway around the room she was leaning against me in a funny sort of way all at once, as if she were tired out. I put my hand to her chin, tilted her head back, and looked into her face. Her eyes were just drooping closed. “Tired,” she murmured. “Dick, I — can hardly stand up any more—”

Suddenly she crumpled and would have toppled over if my arm hadn’t been around her waist. I managed to half-carry and half-lead her over to the door, and no one noticed; it looked like one of those crazy new dance-steps. As soon as I got her outside I picked her up from the floor altogether and made for the nearest elevator with her. She weighed less than nothing, just somebody’s baby sister.

“What do you feel, kid?” I breathed, “What hurts you? Old Man Dick’ll take care of you.”

She opened her eyes just enough to show two slivers of white, like crescent moons. “Old Man Dick ’n’ Little Girl Jean,” she sighed. Then she sort of passed out altogether. The elevator-slide opened and I snapped, “Hurry up, take me up to wherever their suite is! And get hold of a doctor!”

The Planters seemed to have taken a whole floor for the occasion. I stumbled through three rooms with her before I got to anything with a bed in it. Flowers everywhere; they were all going to be distributed to hospitals in the morning. A pert-looking number with a lace handkerchief cocked over one eye was sitting reading Ballyhoo, legs crossed way up to here.

“C’mon, get your thrills later,” I ordered. “Help me with Miss Planter.”

She squeaked like a mechanical mouse and got the expensive covers at half-mast.

A distinguished-looking man with a silver goatee miraculously found his way in to where we were without a road-map; shoving a bridge-hand into his breast-pocket. He swept aside his dinner-tails and sat down beside her. “Turn the other way,” he said to me and began to undo the shoulder-straps of her dress. Something fell across one of my patent-leathers as he tossed it aside, a huge cabbagy red rose; I kicked it out of the way. “This child is dead,” he said, in the same tone of voice he would have said “Three spades.” The French maid squeaked again, then covered her mouth.

I picked up the pale-green telephone and asked them to page Tommy Nye in the ballroom. I acted as hard as a callus on a mailman’s foot but I was crying away inside of me; too much Princeton won’t let you show what you feel. There was a long wait and the music from down-stairs came over the wire clear as a bell and out into the room, almost like a radio tuned very soft — that damned waltz of Coward’s, Nevermore. Her first party and her last, she’d never dance again. I made a face and muffled the thing against my shirt-front. “Tom,” I said when he got on, “better take Marcia and her mother back to their house, give them any excuse at all, only don’t let them come up here—”

“What’s up?” he said worriedly.

“The kid just died up here. Don’t let it get around, you can break it to them when you get them home. Get back as quick as you can, will you?” He hung up without a word, I couldn’t tell how he was taking it; but then how would anyone take a thing like that? I told the maid to take the Planters’ wraps down to them, and then go home with them; she was too frilly for a death-chamber.

That society doctor, meanwhile, had gotten in my hair. He’d telephoned in his notification to the authorities all right, and exerted himself to the extent of tipping one of the pale-green sheets over the poor youngster’s mouth. But the next thing I knew he was back at the phone again, had some other suite on the wire, and was bidding in his hand in the game that was awaiting his return. I’d seen some cold-blooded things in my time but that topped them all; I suppose he thought I wasn’t listening. “—in that case my partner and I will double,” he was saying, “you can begin leading, I’ll be right down.”

“Let me help you get there even quicker!” I blazed, and hurtled him through the three adjacent rooms with one hand at the back of his neck and the other at the opposite end of him. He stumbled when I let go of him, and by the time he had recovered and turned to puff himself up like a pouter pigeon, I had slammed the door in his face.

I paced back and forth for half an hour amidst the chrysanthemums, gardenias and sweet peas while the medical examiner was busy in the inner room with her. A policeman with hay-fever was sneezing his life away at the outside door. And down below they were still dancing, I suppose, and drinking fizz all over the place. Tom showed up very pale around the gills. “God, what a ghastly experience! They both went all to pieces, had my hands full—” The inner door opened and the examiner came out and went by without a word — or would have but Tom got in front of him and blocked his way. “What’s the score?” he asked in a husky voice. Behind him the other two showed up who had come in with him; I hadn’t identified them yet, all this was new to me. But they weren’t leaving yet, far from it. I could tell by the way they strolled out and took in everything; they were there for the night — and maybe then some. The examiner tried to side-step Tom, but the latter wouldn’t let him, snagged him by the lapel. “I’m engaged to her sister — I have a right to know — the whole thing was too sudden — what’s it all about?”

One of the two watching us spoke up, in a slow drawl dripping with some sort of hidden meaning. “Funny you should say that, about it was too sudden. You seem to be ahead of us. How come you know it wasn’t all jake, when we haven’t told you yet? You a mind-reader by any chance?” His eyes never left Tom’s face.

“Anyone would say the same thing — she was only seventeen — to drop that suddenly—” Tom broke off. “Who are you, by the way?”

“Homicide squad, by the way,” the drawl came back. He snapped off a bud from a sheaf of long-stemmed La Frances and drew it through his buttonhole. We both of us sort of tensed at that. That word, ominous-sounding. He nodded to the examiner. “Go ahead, tell him, if he wants to know so bad. Then maybe after that it’ll be our turn, he’ll tell us one or two little things.”

“Tell, hell,” snapped the examiner, “I don’t get paid for overtime.”

“Poetic, aren’t you,” I murmured. “You really should be rhyming couplets for tombstones.”

“She was killed in a poetic way too,” he tossed back just before he closed the door after him, “like this was medieval Italy. Killed by a rose. A rose whose stem was sprayed with something deadly, a rose whose thorns were impregnated with it whatever it was. She pricked herself on it separating it from its mates. The ball of her thumb tells the story. We’re having an autopsy—”

“That ain’t all we’re having, either,” observed the more truculent of the two detectives. He scanned the cardboard lid of a box he’d brought out with him, then asked for The Fernery, Incorporated, on the wire. “Every floral piece in these three rooms has a card stuck in it — except the bunch that red rose came from. We’re having a talk with the florist delivered ’em—” I gave Tom a look, but he was staring down at the floor, I couldn’t catch his eye. I hadn’t seen him select them, but the kid had claimed she’d found them, and Marcia had said something about his having forgotten to send a card with them; it sounded an awful lot like his. The horticulturist who’d grown them must have made some ghastly slip-up, sent them on to the florist without realizing that death lurked along their stems—

But then why didn’t Tom speak up, I wondered, save them the trouble of checking with the florist? It would only look worse if they got the information that way. What did he have to hide? He had had nothing to do with it, an accident like that could have happened to anyone. But then maybe he didn’t realize even yet that they were the ones he’d sent.

I cleared my throat, said “Sounds a lot like the ones—.” And then looked at him, to let him finish it himself.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes, kept staring down at his feet.

Meanwhile the detective had gotten through to The Fernery and it was too late to do it the easy way. “Evans, Homicide Squad,” he snapped. “You the manager? You deliver two dozen American Beauty roses to Miss Marcia Planter at the Park-Ashley Hotel this evening? That ain’t what I asked you, I didn’t ask if you delivered ’em personally or sent ’em by messenger! What I wanna know is, did they come from your shop? Well, who ordered ’em?... Didn’t write out any card, eh? Well, would you know him if you saw him again?” His eyes flicked over at Tom and back again, as he put the question.

I shrugged violently at him, gestured with both hands, meaning in pantomime, “Why don’t you tell him, what are you standing there mum like that for?” He just looked at me and smiled a little, with the left half of his mouth.

The dick, Evans, hung up. “Any objections to accompanying us — and the flowers — up to the shop for a couple of minutes, Mr Nye?” But it wasn’t exactly a question, it was an order.

Tom saluted with one finger at his brow, turned toward the door without saying a word.

“Me, either,” I said.

“Who’s the echo?” the second detective wanted to know. “Ain’t it about time we were finding out?”

“If you’d taken the trouble to ask, you’d have found out long ago,” I remarked uppishly. “The name is R. Walsh, Princeton ’32.”

He didn’t pop any collar-buttons over it. “Well, meet B. Doyle, P. S. 62,” he said, without offering his hand.

I thought I’d kid him a little. “Howju?” I said gravely, ducking my chin. “I’m this chap’s flat-mate and slated to be his best man. Anything else you’d like to know?”

“Liking,” he said, “has nothing to do with it, Trained Tonsils. I’d like never even to have seen you yet, much less heard of you, but this is business. So pop open your trick hat and tail us.”

“Tail you?” I said, “What am I, a collie?”

“Oh,” he protested coyly, “now don’t pin me down that closely!” and went out after Tom and Evans. I caught up with them at the elevator, which I suppose is what he meant by tailing in the first place. The last thing I heard, at the far end of the corridor, was that poor policeman with hay-fever still sneezing his brains out back there.

The four of us got in a taxi — technically Tom was accompanying them voluntarily, there was no question of an arrest — and went up there to where he’d bought the flowers, which Evans had brought along, box and all, under his arm.

The proprietor was a silly-looking duck wearing a morning-coat. “Ah, yes,” he said, taking a peep under the lid, “these are from my shop. Is there something wrong?” And he washed his hands without soap or water.

“That,” said Evans bluntly, “is none of your business. The main idea is, who bought ’em?”

“Why, this gentleman did, of course.” He turned to Tom, and even asked for corroboration from that quarter. “Didn’t you, sir?”

Tom said quietly, “I bought two dozen roses from you and told you to send them where these were sent, yes. But I hardly think these are the same ones you brought out of the case to show me — or else there’s something wrong with your stock. You see, they say one of them killed my fiancee’s young sister.” And he looked down at the floor again, like he seemed to be doing all evening.

The florist went “Ip!” and jumped back about a foot from the box Evans had been holding under his nose.

Doyle said, “Yeah, let’s see the rest of ’em he picked these out of.”

Evans gave Tom a dirty look. “Why don’t you let us do the talking? We’ll tell him anything we think he needs to know.”

He didn’t answer, so I chipped in: “What’s so secret about it? She did die, didn’t she, or are we having hallucinations?”

Doyle, who seemed to have it in for me — inferiority-complex probably — growled softly out of the corner of his mouth: “One more twenty-five-cent word like that outa you, and I’ll send you home with a note to your mother.”

The florist shoved back a glass slide all sweaty with steam and showed us triple tiers of long-stemmed roses. They had a blue light shining on them — why blue I don’t know, either to make them look pretty or ultraviolet rays to take the place of sunlight. “They came out of here,” he said nervously, “but I’m sure you won’t find anything the mat—”

Doyle reached in, said: “Mind if we take a few samples for the research lab on Poplar Street? Nothing like making sure. And don’t sell any more of them till we get the results — that’s a police order!”

The poor florist acted like he wanted to break down and cry. “They’ll be a total loss, you’re quarantining one of the most perishable items I carry in stock!”

“Watch it,” Evans advised his pal, who was pawing at them clumsily, “don’t get a puncture like she did.”

“In which case,” I murmured softly to no one in particular, “the poor rose’ll probably be the one to curl up and die!”

Doyle blew up, violently and completely. I seemed to have that sort of effect on him. “This cake-eater,” he yelled at his partner, “is getting in my hair! He must think he’s out on a party! Do we have to have him along, what’s he doing here with us anyway?”

“Slumming,” I said nastily.

Evans didn’t seem interested in this side-feud. “How is it,” he drawled indifferently, “you didn’t put a card with them when you bought them, Mr Nye?” But he was looking straight at the florist and not Tom as he asked it.

“I didn’t have one with me, and I was in a hurry to get down there, we were late as it was. It was my engagement party, after all.”

The jittery shop-owner, whom Evans was watching, didn’t seem to have any control over his eye-, eyebrow-, or lip-muscles; they all moved simultaneously. Evans didn’t wait for the signs to become audible. “Meaning he did write out a card — or what? You told me over the phone he didn’t!”

“N-no, he didn’t.” He stumbled over it, and yet he seemed to mean it. “Did you, sir?”

“You’re talking to us, not him!” Doyle jumped down his throat.

Tom was standing over by some kind of a potted plant, idly poking his index-finger into the soft mould around the bottom. I could see him getting sorer by the minute, a pulse in his jaw started bobbing up and down. He looked hard at the florist, then at them. “I didn’t,” he said irritably, coming back again to where the rest of us were. “What’s all this business about a card, anyway? I bought two dozen roses in this shop — without even putting my hands on them, just pointed at the ones I wanted! I didn’t take them down there with me, didn’t even lay eyes on them again, until you two men brought them back here with you just now! Am I supposed to have doctored them up or something? With what object? To — to endanger the girl that’s going to be my wife?” His voice was shaking uncontrollably, which showed me — if not them — how deeply affected he was by the tragedy.

Loyal-friend-like, I gave them a dirty look, most of it for Doyle. “They’ve got to make a mystery out of it, that’s what detectives are for,” I said scathingly. “You and I, Tom, we’re just laymen. It’d be obvious to us, or to anybody else for that matter, what must have happened. Some sort of spray or insecticide was used on them and wasn’t properly removed afterward. That’s all there is to it, just a frightful accident. But of course that isn’t enough for our fine feathered friends here, they’ve got to go around wanting to know why you didn’t send a copy of your birth-certificate down there with them!”

Doyle threw down the flowers, stepped up close. “I don’t like your face,” he said, “and haven’t all evening! Here’s where I change it around a little!” And he swung back, in good old 1890 style.

“Fine!” I said agreeably, “but not in here where there’s so much glass. There’s a perfectly good sidewalk outside—”

“Not there or anyplace else,” said Evans, getting in between the two of us. “Grow up, Doyle.” And to me he remarked less than affably, “You’re excused, Mr Walsh. We can get along without your company, if you don’t mind. We’re just a pair of ignorant dicks, I know, and you could carry out our routine much better; that’s why we’re being paid and you’re not. The police-lab will tell the story; shoot out there with those roses, Doyle. Keep the two bunches separate.”

“Lounge-lizard!” Doyle was muttering throatily in the background, “Ice-cream destroyer!”

“You’ll never get to meet the right people that way,” I warned lightly over my shoulder as I went out.

Tom and the two dicks got back in the cab and left me behind, sort of persona non grata. Evans wanted to ask him a few more routine questions at Headquarters — again it was a request, not an order.

“See you up at the place later,” he said to me. “Leave the key under the mat if you turn in before I get home.”

“And don’t forget to brush your teeth like a good little boy!” was Doyle’s insulting farewell out the cab-window.

“Come back and I’ll brush yours with my foot,” I promised.

The last thing I saw was the two of them holding him back by main force from jumping out then and there and taking me up on it.

It had been warm in the flower-shop and I’d taken off my neckcloth and crammed it in my pocket while we were in there. Also my gloves. When I started to put them on again, I saw that one had fallen out, I’d lost it. I turned around and went in again abruptly.

The proprietor, who evidently hadn’t gotten over the effects of our visit yet, gave a jittery jump when he saw me show up like that again. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but he happened to be standing close to that potted plant when he did so.

“I dropped a glove,” I said, but I let him look around for it. I looked, instead, at the finger-holes Tom had absent-mindedly punched into the mould around the plant that time when that card-business was going on.

“Here it is, I’ve found it,” he said. He meant the glove, but I suited my action to his words, pulled a hundred-dollar bill, rolled into a cylinder, out of one of the finger-holes. He promptly dropped the glove a second time — and a lot of complexion with it.

“What was he slipping you this for?” I asked quietly.

“Why, why I’m sure he didn’t mean that for me! He must have dropped that in there by m-mistake—”

“Oh no,” I said tonelessly. “He gave you a hard look just then, I saw him. I thought he was sore at the time, but it was a signal it seems. Not to tell — what?”

He didn’t know, hadn’t any idea, and all that sort of stuff.

“You’re not thinking hard enough,” I chided coldly. “I’m his friend. Wouldn’t you prefer to tell me and keep it sort of en famille? Or suppose I page those two missing links and let them start the whole thing over again?”

I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it, because this didn’t look so hot for Tom. They’d gone already, anyway, but he didn’t know that.

Since then, people have said to me, Why didn’t you butt out? Why be nosey? I mean, what business was it of yours whether your friend had left a century-note in a florist-shop or not? Well, that’s just the whole point. If he’d been only an acquaintance, I certainly wouldn’t have snooped. He was like a brother to me; either you get the idea or you don’t.

He gave in, rather than face the detectives again. “I’m really not absolutely certain what he meant by it myself,” he stammered, and possibly he was telling the truth, “but I judge, I imagine, he didn’t want the second two-dozen roses mentioned — in front of them. So I didn’t.”

He evidently hadn’t, if there’d been any such, because he’d neglected even to mention them to me. “I imagine so,” I agreed, as though I’d been in on it all along.

He wasn’t sure I had been, though, I could see that; the mere fact I’d cross-questioned him about the bribe made him wonder. “You know about the other young lady of course?” he said hopefully.

I did now. And it wasn’t in character at all. I nodded non-committally. He shrugged, trying to appear sophisticated. “I know how those things go, young fellows about town like you. But if I’d told them, right away it would have been in the papers — one of those gossip-columns maybe — how he sent flowers to his ex the same night he was getting engaged. Get him in hot water. That’s why I caught on and shut up about it.”

I’d been racking my brains. But there wasn’t really much of a list to check. “Fortescue?”

“Yes, on 54th, over by the river.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I assured him. I was remembering the year before. How often he’d come away from there with bites on his neck. “Same messenger take them to both places?”

“Yes, he stopped off there first, then went on the Park-Ashley.”

I locked my teeth. “Why, that devil!” I thought “Is it possible she snagged them away from him — the second bunch — long enough to do something to them, hoping to harm Marcia? She must have caught on whom they were for, no trick to that at all; pumped the kid.” I walloped my gloves viciously against the edge of the case. “I’m going down there,” I said to myself, “now — right now! Dirty little murderess!”

I speared my finger toward him, with the century curled around it the way it must have been curled around Tom’s when he stuck it into the mould. “Well, this is yours,” I said disapprovingly. “He seemed to want you to have it — and it’s his money, not mine.” It would have to come out, anyway, if she’d really done what I thought she had — Tom or no Tom.

He took it all right; I would have collapsed if he hadn’t. “D’you think I’ll get in trouble?” he wanted to know, though. “They didn’t ask me point-blank, you know—”

I wasn’t interested. “See you around,” I said, and went out.

I got in a cab and went down seven blocks to 54th and over five to the river. I thought: would that torch-bearer be capable of doing a thing like that? But how had she known ahead of time he was going to send her flowers? How had she managed to have — whatever it was — ready? Was she a modern Lucretia Borgia or something? And yet it didn’t seem possible she’d kept the messenger-boy waiting there any length of time, Marcia’s flowers had gotten down to the hotel ahead of us, and we’d had just a straight ride in a taxi.

I vowed, I’ll knock all her front teeth out with my own little fist, if I find out—! And that sap — I thought he knew his way around! That’s what comes of picking up loose odds and ends at Twenty-One on rainy Fall nights!

But the sight of Third Avenue through the cab-window seemed to bring out the good old-fashioned qualities in me, the sense of fair-play and even a vestige of chivalry that I hadn’t known was left any more. She hasn’t brains enough, I told myself. Her speed would be to try to have him beaten up, like she did once before. Why jump at conclusions? That’s what comes of associating with detectives, even for half-an-hour! Simply an accident — and what’s more, if one bunch was tainted, then the whole consignment was, and she’s in danger of having the same thing happen to her if she fools around with them! So between wanting to sock her in the teeth and wanting to save her from a fate worse than death, I was in a hurry to get over there.

“Get across, get across there!” I prodded the driver.

“That pretty color up ahead,” he said sarcastically, “is red. They put it on just to make the street look nice. It don’t mean a thing. This your first time in a New York cab?”

“Did I ask you for a civil service examination?” I flared. “You’ve talked yourself out of á quarter tip.”

“You were just looking for an excuse to welsh, you probably haven’t got one,” he let me know. “Just for that you can open the door yourself. No tip, no service.”

I didn’t seem to get along with anyone tonight. I got out, bent down, and put sixty cents on the curbstone just out of reach. “You can get out and pick it up if you want it!” I said.

A bedecked janissary inside the Taj Mahal (the décor suggested that, with just a dash of the Colosseum and a touch of the Kremlin) wanted to know who was calling on Miss Fortescue. For which bit of red tape she, I mean Somebody, paid $5 a month extra on her rent.

“Mr Tom Nye,” I said unblushingly.

It was all right, it seemed, for Mr Tom Nye to go up. Whether it would have been just as all right for Mr Dick Walsh, I misdoubted me. She’d never bit me on the neck that I recalled — and I have a very good memory for those things, the twice it’s happened.

I read into his look that Mr Tom Nye carried an aura of something as far as he was concerned — interest, without friendliness — but since he obviously didn’t know him by sight, I couldn’t get it. Had the lady spoken out of turn when she was being poured home drunk once or twice?

I tipped my hat elaborately — upstairs. Well, at least her roses hadn’t played a dirty trick on her. “Hi, Fritzie,” I greeted her.

Her face dropped down to her scanties nearly — and there wasn’t very much interference in between, I assure you. “What’s the idea?” she said huskily, “Don’t you know your own name any more?”

“I know how it is,” I soothed her, “a nickel’s worth of last-minute perfume behind the ears shot to hell! And all the sofa-pillows punched together for nothing! Wouldn’t I do for a stand-in, at least?”

“Don’t get so wise,” she said sultrily. “You’re jealous ’cause you never got to first base, that’s all.”

She never poisoned anyone, I told myself; just a child of nature. I walked past her as though I owned the place. “My, what nice flowers,” I said. “And some tastefully arranged too. Some guys get flowers. When I call anywhere I seem to get grocery-bills.” I sat down, flattened my hat with my elbow. Pop!

She took something out of the folds of her negligee, stuck it under one of the pillows, sat back against it. I caught a flash through her fingers, though.

“Mmm,” I said, “so he was going to get flowers — in a different way, without being able to smell them. I thought you liked him.”

“What’s on your mind,” she said wearily. “Do I have to sit here all night and listen to you talk like Noel Coward?”

She had one pinned to the shoulder of her gray negligee. There was another spray of them arranged in a flat blue bowl near me. I pulled one out — with a wicked webbed thorn sticking up from its stem — started to play around with it. Prod it gently with my thumb, watching her. Not hard enough to break the skin, I assure you.

Judging by her look, she didn’t seem to give a rap whether I lived or died — not even if it happened right there on her premises. So I quit doing it, because I did give a rap. I pitched the thing over my shoulder.

“Why did you figure you’d need a gun if he came here to see you tonight?” Doyle couldn’t have done it any better. “What’d you done to make you afraid of him? What was on your mind?”

She looked hostile, rather than frightened or guilty. “What’d I done?” she yapped. “That’s a good one! What’ve I ever done to make me afraid of him? When haven’t I been afraid of him?”

Which didn’t make sense to me. “Well, when haven’t you been?” I parroted.

“Not since after I first found out—” Then she let it down easy. “A few things about him.”

There was a tap at the door. One of those prearranged taps, I somehow got the feeling. She went over and opened it and the janissary was standing there. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her.

“No, it’s all right,” she said, “it wasn’t Mr Nye.” So she’d coached him over the house-phone before she let whom she thought was Tom in, “Look in on me in a minute or two, I might need you!”

Meanwhile I switched the gun to under my own pillow.

She came back and said to me virtuously, “You know, I ought to go to the police. I should have long ago.”

I knew how she meant it, but I distorted the meaning. “You ought to,” I agreed. “And maybe you will yet before the night’s over.”

“If he comes near me again I will.”

“No, it’s not a case of his coming near you. You know, a young girl died down there tonight—”

She took it big. Closed her eyes and let her head loll back and put the back of one hand between her eyes. “Oh my God!” she shuddered, “Oh, that poor girl — I should have phoned — oh, if I’d only had the courage to phone down there! I was afraid, oh I was so afraid—!” She got up and did a couple of half-turns, this way and that. “I’ve really killed her — I’m to blame—!”

“Now Dickie,” I said softly to myself, “we’re really getting somewhere. And Doyle thinks he’s so hot! Why, there’s nothing to it!”

“I’ve got to have a drink!” she shivered, and poured herself enough to launch a battleship in.

“Have one on me too,” I encouraged when she’d downed it without stopping to breathe. “And then I suppose it’ll be up to me to call the police or something. Although I hate to be a snitcher. Maybe I’ll let them do their own dirty-work.” She looked at me and I looked back at her. “So you should have phoned!” I mimicked. “That and a couple of other little things. I’ll tell you what you should have done! You should have let those g.d. flowers alone — then there wouldn’t have been anything to phone about. You’ll probably get away with it at that. ‘Beautiful love-slave mad with jealousy. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t want her to have him.’ ”

The second drink fell out of her hand and parted over her satin slippers like a gold wave. “What are you talking about?” she said in a stifled voice. “Flowers—” She gestured vaguely at the ones scattered around. “—what’ve they got to do with it?”

“You put something on them, didn’t you, and then sent them on to her from here.”

“I!” She screamed it. “I got them from him!” She glanced in horrified fascination down at the one on her shoulder. “Is that how — what happened to Marcia Planter anyway?”

“Not Marcia, her younger sister. But at least you admit whom you intended it for — which is no news to me. Why ask what happened? Something deadly on their stems got into her blood-stream—” I snapped my fingers. “Or didn’t you intend to go quite that far — did you just want to give her prickly-heat and spoil her beauty? Amateurs shouldn’t experiment with poisons—”

But she had no more time for words. I think, woman-like, my latter suggestion had frightened her even more than the thought of death itself. She was afraid to take the thing off her, the one pinned to her negligee, or touch it with her fingertips in any way, so she started pulling and tearing the whole flimsy off her shoulders. And as she did so, she kept giving little bleating wails and side-stepping around in a macabre sort of rhumba.

It should have been excruciatingly funny; it wasn’t of course anything of the kind. “Stand still!” I ordered and caught at her. “You’ll make it happen twice as quickly that way! I’ll get it off for you, I’m not afraid of it—”

I was too, but, well I wasn’t afraid enough not to try and help her. I pulled the pin out carefully, and the thing dropped of its own weight and I kicked it away with my foot.

“So you didn’t — have a hand in it,” I said, breathing hard and sitting down again. What else was there to say — after what I’d just seen? Tallulah Bankhead would have been just as convincing, but not ad lib without a rehearsal or two.

She was all in, reached up and pushed her hair out of the way. “But why before?” she said. “Why before — tonight was only the engagement, wasn’t it? I thought it was after their marriage that — that she had to worry about.”

She poured us each a drink this time — to make what she had to say go down, perhaps.

“There are two sides to the story,” she said, when she was down to the ice-cube in her glass. “Mine — and the one you’ve heard from him, or gathered from what he’d let drop. I know about that, because he’s said to me ‘Dick thinks I’m off you. All the better, let him think so.’ I can just about imagine what his side of it is — that he cooled off, that I’ve been running after him ever since, that I even sent some friends of mine out to beat him up. Now listen to my side of it — and it’s not a pretty story.”

I chewed ice with my back-teeth, noisily.

“I did go for him, I was sold on him. Then one night a year ago we were sitting here eating apples. I’d given him a fruit-knife to pare them with. All of a sudden without any warning he had me pinned down here in a corner of this same sofa we’re sitting on, was bending over me with that knife aimed at my throat. No rational reason, no jealousy — nothing like that — just a sudden urge. One look at his eyes, and I knew enough not to struggle. I just lay there limp, talking to him quietly, saying ‘You don’t want to do that — wait’ll tomorrow night—’ Oh, anything and everything that came into my head. Dick Walsh, it was a solid hour before I got him to put it down and take up his things and leave. When I got the door locked, after him, I fell in the most beautiful faint you’ve ever seen — just behind it.

“It happened once again, about a month later. Not quite as bad. I was laughing and had my head back. ‘Gee what a soft little neck you’ve got,’ he said, and closed his hands around it, sort of measuring it. He didn’t put on any pressure, and I distracted his attention by pointing to something behind him.

“I bought this gun the next day, and I’ve never received him without it since. Walsh, I knew then and I’ve known ever since — that your friend has a latent streak of homicidal mania in him. He’s probably fighting it, but it’s growing stronger all the time, and it’s going to come out some day—”

“I’ve known him since we were both in school,” I said. “You’re talking through your hat!”

She said bitterly, “A man can go through college with another man; room with him for years, be slated for bestman at his wedding, but when it comes to knowing that other man, the hidden recesses of the mind, the dark quirks revealed in unguarded moments, it takes a woman.”

“Why didn’t you drop him then?”

“I was afraid to. Afraid he’d turn on me and get me for sure if I antagonized him in any way. I couldn’t face it, the thought that he might be lurking downstairs by the door some night when I came home plastered, or get himself admitted up here and wait for me hidden in a closet. I told a couple of small-time racketeer friends of mine about it, and they went out to beat him up. That was their own idea, not mine. That scared me even worse, I begged them to lay off, let me handle it.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police, then?”

“Walsh,” she said drily, “a girl like me has no social standing, she has to take her own chances. Besides, he never actually threatened me, it was just that I never knew from one visit to the next when the thing was going to pop through the veneer of sanity that’s hidden it so well from you and everyone else.

“When he first started going with Miss Planter, all I could think of was that meant an out for me, I’d finally get rid of him. I wanted to ring bells and blow whistles. But it was still there, only it had switched over to her. I’m a nice comfortable sort of person; other guys don’t hide much from me, I guess I had the same effect on him. He started in by saying that he still liked me better than her, but that he’d have to marry her, because she had all kinds of dough. Then pretty soon he was saying that he’d come back to me and show me what he really thought of me, once he got his hands on that dough. Leaving it sort of indefinite what would happen to her. Then finally it became less indefinite and less indefinite, until I couldn’t help knowing what he meant. He didn’t say so in so many words, but you couldn’t mistake his meaning — he was going to get rid of her some fine day—”

I got my own drink this time. She was getting under my skin, but every pore was fighting her.

“That’s bad enough,” she said, “that set-up. But there’s something worse to it, something worse than that. The real horror of it is, he doesn’t really want Marcia’s money, he doesn’t really want me. He just wants to kill someone. He’s sick in the head. Oh, I looked into his eyes for sixty minutes that night, with a sharp knife at my windpipe, and no one can tell me different! If it isn’t her, it’ll be someone else, sometime, somewhere—”

I looked at her like I hated her for doing this to me. “Proof,” I said huskily. “Proof. I’ve got to have proof. You’ve destroyed my confidence in him forever, damn you. But still I only have your say-so, your suspicions to go by. I’m with him day and night, I’ve never noticed anything. I’ve fallen between two stools now. You can’t leave me like this.”

“I’ll give you proof,” she said. She got up and looked frightened, like she was trying to get her courage up for something. “I called him up once tonight. You were there. You didn’t hear what he said to me, though, did you?” She went over to the hand-set and dialled Butterfield 8-1200, our number. I read the slots over her shoulder.

“Don’t ever tell him,” she breathed. “For God’s sake, don’t ever let him know about this — or I’m finished.”

She sat down on the bench, and I sat down on it the opposite way with my head affectionately on her shoulder. We weren’t thinking of love, we were both listening to the same receiver. I was shaking a little.

He got on and she said, “Hello, Tommy dear. Did I get you out of bed?”

“Who is this, Fritzie? No, I just got in,” he told her. “I’ve been down at Police Headquarters until half an hour ago. Did you hear what happened?”

She looked at me quickly and I shook my head; it mightn’t be in the papers yet. She said no, and he told her. He told her that the report from the chemical lab had come in while he was there, some kind of experimental stuff they’d been trying out for a weed-killer at the hot-houses had got on them by accident; they’d gone down there now to destroy all the rest of the bushes, and were sending out a warning to the various florists around town. “Walsh said that from the beginning,” I heard him say “but for a time they had me feeling damned uncomfortable.”

She gave me a look, but I didn’t call that proof. “And will this delay your wedding?” she led him on.

“Not if I’ve got anything to say about it,” he answered.

“So it looks like I’ve got to lose you after all,” she crooned trickly.

“I’ll be back at your door in six months, darling — a widower,” he whispered. An electric current went through me. Her eyes met mine; hers were frightened, seemed to say “I told you so”; mine were horrified, incredulous.

“You don’t really mean — those things you’ve been saying all along,” she said, to spur him on.

But he was too cagey. “I don’t want to talk any more over the phone,” he said. “See you soon.”

The more we drank, the less able to get drunk we both seemed to be. “Proof enough?” she shivered, gorging on hers.

I drew my hand across my mouth, as though I had a bad taste.

“It’s in him,” she said. “And if it isn’t her, it’ll be somebody el—”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” I breathed it as though afraid of the sound of my own voice. “D’you remember when that Andrea girl was killed about a year and a half ago — that case that was never cleared up — did you know him then? He got all excited, dwelt on it, that was all he could talk about for days—”

“Yes, yes!” she agreed. “I noticed that too. He came to see me the night after it happened. He brought in three papers with him, not one, and sat and read every word in them aloud to me. His face was all flushed, he seemed to get a thrill—”

“You scratched him too, didn’t you, that night — no, it was the night before that he came home from here all marked up, I first saw it that morning, and he laughed and told me how ‘emotional’ you’d gotten—”

She put an ice-cold hand on my wrist, so cold I jumped at the touch of it. “He wasn’t with me the night before. By all that’s holy I swear it! I was out at a bar with another man when the news of the Andrea girl came over the radio. I didn’t give him those marks. I noticed them myself the second night — he told me they came from improperly manipulating one of these new electric razors he’d just bought — ‘burns’ he called them—”

I said it so low it’s a wonder she could hear me. “He’s never owned one, never brought one into the place from first to last—”

We were awfully quiet, awfully scared. We were both thinking the same thing. We didn’t want to know for sure; I had to go back and sleep under the same roof with him, she had to receive him the next time he took it into his head to drop in on her. We didn’t want to know for sure.

I left there at three that morning. I left an entirely different girl than the one I’d called on before midnight. I’d called on a slinky, jealousy-crazed vamp, who had pursued the life out of my room-mate and wasn’t ready to give him up even yet, not if she had to murder her rival.

I came away from the flat of a girl who was no plaster saint, who wouldn’t have thought of refusing a “present” from an admirer when it was offered in the right spirit, but who, far from pursuing Tom, had been living under the shadow of death’s outspread wing for the past year or more, had never received him without having a gun handy, ever since she’d found out—

I came away with that gun of hers on me; she had urged me to take it with me herself. “I’m going to get out of here,” she said. “First thing in the morning! He’ll find out sooner or later I told you—”

“No he won’t,” I said. “He won’t come near you again, don’t worry.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s — my friend.”

The janissary came up with the car. I liked him; he didn’t want to kill anybody. I gave him fifty bucks downstairs in the lobby. He nearly sat down on his fanny. “You’re a good guy,” I said. “Look after — Miss Fortescue, will you? She’s a good guy too.”

Her “What are you going to do?” followed me away from the place. I didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t poisoned those flowers, he hadn’t done anything. He was going to do things — some day. Fritzi and I both knew that. An accident that looked like murder had revealed — a real murder, far in the future, not yet committed. That and a suspicion of murder already committed, far in the past.

I couldn’t go to the police; he hadn’t done anything they could hold him for. I couldn’t just sit by either, and watch Marcia Planter or some other girl drift slowly to her doom. I had my own life to live, but I’m funny that way. I couldn’t have gone through the months and years with that hanging over me, not knowing when—

It would have been better not to know. But I knew now. And I didn’t know what to do.

The latchkey was under the mat when I got back. That riled me for some strange reason. I felt he should have cowered behind a locked door, away from me and what I’d found out. I made faces while I unlocked, closed the door again after me. Faces like a guy going into a place where there’s vermin.

I gave the foyer the lights, took off my topper, shied it into the dark living-room, not caring if I ever saw it again. I went in through the open bedroom-door and gave that the lights. He was sound asleep, a long cylinder under the covers, on the bed nearest the window. I stood there looking at the place, looking at him. A fistful of change and crumpled bills on the dresser, where my jack always went too at nights. How many times we’d had a friendly row the next morning, trying to separate the two. “That fin was mine, y’ highway-robber! You only had singles!” Each feeling at the same time that the other guy would have given him the shirt off his back.

I’m not trying to be stagey, but put yourself in my place. A thousand pictures flashed through my mind, like a shell-shocked newsreel. The two of us in the Varsity Show. At proms. Trying out for football. Boning for exams. Getting chased in a second-hand roadster by a State motorcycle cop and piling it up against a tree. Standing together on the stag line at a hundred deb-parties, both going for the same wows and both dodging the same clucks.

And now, here he was. Showing a rotten spot, like an apple. Not showing it, rather, but having it in him. It didn’t make me want to break down and cry, it had just the opposite effect, made me sore as blazes — because it was such a dirty trick on me, I guess.

“Get up,” I growled. “Get up, you!” My voice rose as I went along. “Get up and get out of here! Murderer! Warped brain! Get out of this flat, before I—!”

He was awake then, startled, stiff-armed against the bed, blinking at me. “What’s the matter with you, one too many—?!”

“Get out of here — beat it, quick!” My mouth felt all lopsided. “Dirty murderer!”

“You’ve gone crazy,” he said. “What happened to those flowers was an accident, I waited down there till they had a full report on it—”

“Yes,” I said bitterly, “that’s the joke of it. An accident came along, and through a chain of circumstances, revealed a murder — in the making! A murder that hasn’t happened yet — and that I’m going to see doesn’t happen!”

I sloughed a chair around, sat down heavily on it, back to front, took out Fritzie’s gun and broke it open. I took out a bullet and put it in my pocket.

He made a move toward his pants. “No, wait!” I said. “You’ll go back to her, won’t you, that poor little Fortescue hustler, and you’ll do her in — for telling me!” I took out a second bullet. “Or you’ll go to Marcia Planter and you’ll say, ‘Let’s get married right away, let’s give them all the slip and leave town.’ And then some fine day she’ll have an accident, won’t she, fall out of a window or be swept overboard from a ship — or any one of a million things?” I took out the third bullet and put that away. “No she won’t! She loves and trusts you, she deserves a better break than that.”

“That lying little tart—” he said.

“You spoke into my ear over the phone an hour ago.” I took out the fourth bullet. “And it isn’t even that — I’d steer clear of you maybe, but I’d be able to understand — if it was just the money. But it’s killing for the sake of killing, that’s got you. I saw how you ate up the papers when the Andrea girl was throttled. I don’t know if you did that or not, and I don’t want to know.” I took out the fifth bullet, and I clicked the gun closed.

I saw how pale he’d gotten at the name, and how he shrank back a little.

“Whether you did or not, one thing’s sure. The insulation had already started to wear in by that time. And now there’s not very much left. It’s going to be someone — real soon. Maybe someone you haven’t even met yet. The guy that I went through school with, that I’ve roomed with all these years, wouldn’t want that to happen — even if you do. Only Fritzie and I know.” I stood up and looked at him, and he looked back at me. “And she’s — nobody. And I’m — your friend. Still your friend. Think it over.” I pitched the gun away from me on the bed. My own bed, not his.

I turned and I went to the door. “Think it over,” I said, without looking at him any more. I closed it after me and I went out.

It hit me awfully quick, I’d hardly gotten halfway through the small-sized foyer outside when it hit me. Seemed to hit me in the back, and lift my heels clear of the floor. A boom that rattled the closed bedroom-door on its hinges.

I didn’t look around at it. I went over to the phone and dialed Headquarters. I asked for Doyle, why I don’t know. I guess I wanted to talk to somebody I knew, no matter how slightly, rather than just some stranger.

He was still there and they got him for me.

I said dully, “This’ Dick Walsh, I don’t know if you remember me or not, from the Park-Ashley and the florist-shop tonight—”

He liked me as much as ever. “Sure I do,” he said sarcastically. “The amateur detective!”

“My friend just had an accident, better come around.” Something like a sob popped in my throat without my meaning it to. “You can have your job. I’ll never play detective again. You find — crawling things under the stones you turn up.”