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

Murder at the Automat

Nelson pushed through the revolving-door at twenty to one in the morning, his squadmate, Sarecky, in the compartment behind him. They stepped clear and looked around. The place looked funny. Almost all the little white tables had helpings of food on them, but no one was at them eating. There was a big black crowd ganged up over in one corner, thick as bees and sending up a buzz. One or two were standing up on chairs, trying to see over the heads of the ones in front, rubbering like a flock of cranes.

The crowd burst apart, and a cop came through. “Now, stand back. Get away from this table, all of you,” he was saying. “There’s nothing to see. The man’s dead — that’s all.”

He met the two dicks halfway between the crowd and the door. “Over there in the corner,” he said unnecessarily. “Indigestion, I guess.” He went back with them.

They split the crowd wide open again, this time from the outside. In the middle of it was one of the little white tables, a dead man in a chair, an ambulance doctor, a pair of stretcher-bearers, and the automat manager.

“He gone?” Nelson asked the interne.

“Yep. We got here too late.” He came closer so the mob wouldn’t overhear. “Better send him down to the morgue and have him looked at. I think he did the Dutch. There’s a white streak on his chin, and a half-eaten sandwich under his face spiked with some more of it, whatever it is. That’s why I got in touch with you fellows. Good night,” he wound up pleasantly and elbowed his way out of the crowd, the two stretcher-bearers tagging after him. The ambulance clanged dolorously outside, swept its fiery headlights around the corner, and whined off.

Nelson said to the cop: “Go over to the door and keep everyone in here, until we get the three others that were sitting at this table with him.”

The manager said: “There’s a little balcony upstairs. Couldn’t he be taken up there, instead of being left down here in full sight like this?”

“Yeah, pretty soon,” Nelson agreed, “but not just yet.”

He looked down at the table. There were four servings of food on it, one on each side. Two had barely been touched. One had been finished and only the soiled plates remained. One was hidden by the prone figure sprawled across it, one arm out, the other hanging limply down toward the floor.

“Who was sitting here?” said Nelson, pointing to one of the unconsumed portions. “Kindly step forward and identify yourself.” No one made a move. “No one,” said Nelson, raising his voice, “gets out of here until we have a chance to question the three people that were at this table with him when it happened.”

Someone started to back out of the crowd from behind. The woman who had wanted to go home so badly a minute ago, pointed accusingly. “He was — that man there! I remember him distinctly. He bumped into me with his tray just before he sat down.”

Sarecky went over, took him by the arm, and brought him forward again. “No one’s going to hurt you,” Nelson said, at sight of his pale face. “Only don’t make it any tougher for yourself than you have to.”

“I never even saw the guy before,” wailed the man, as if he had already been accused of murder, “I just happened to park my stuff at the first vacant chair I—” Misery liking company, he broke off short and pointed in turn. “He was at the table, too! Why doncha hold him, if you’re gonna hold me?”

“That’s just what we’re going to do,” said Nelson dryly. “Over here, you,” he ordered the new witness. “Now, who was eating spaghetti on his right here? As soon as we find that out, the rest of you can go home.”

The crowd looked around indignantly in search of the recalcitrant witness that was the cause of detaining them all. But this time no one was definitely able to single him out. A white-uniformed busman finally edged forward and said to Nelson: “I think he musta got out of the place right after it happened. I looked over at this table a minute before it happened, and he was already through eating, picking his teeth and just holding down the chair.”

“Well, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is,” said Nelson. “We’ll catch up with him, whether he got out or didn’t. The rest of you clear out of here now. And don’t give fake names and addresses to the cop at the door, or you’ll only be making trouble for yourselves.”

The place emptied itself like magic, self-preservation being stronger than curiosity in most people. The two table-mates of the dead man, the manager, the staff, and the two dicks remained inside.

An assistant medical examiner arrived, followed by two men with the usual basket, and made a brief preliminary investigation. While this was going on, Nelson was questioning the two witnesses, the busman, and the manager. He got an illuminating composite picture.

The man was well known to the staff by sight, and was considered an eccentric. He always came in at the same time each night, just before closing time, and always helped himself to the same snack — coffee and a bologna sandwich. It hadn’t varied for six months now. The remnants that the busman removed from where the man sat each time, were always the same. The manager was able to corroborate this. He, the dead man, had raised a kick one night about a week ago, because the bologna sandwich slots had all been emptied before he came in. The manager had had to remind him that it’s first come, first served, at an automat, and you can’t reserve your food ahead of time. The man at the change-booth, questioned by Nelson, added to the old fellow’s reputation for eccentricity. Other, well-dressed people came in and changed a half-dollar, or at the most a dollar bill. He, in his battered hat and derelict’s overcoat, never failed to produce a ten and sometimes even a twenty.

“One of these misers, eh?” said Nelson. “They always end up behind the eight-ball, one way or another.”

The old fellow was removed, also the partly consumed sandwich. The assistant examiner let Nelson know: “I think you’ve got something here, brother. I may be wrong, but that sandwich was loaded with cyanide.”

Sarecky, who had gone through the man’s clothes, said: “The name was Leo Avram, and here’s the address. Incidentally, he had seven hundred dollars, in C’s, in his right shoe and three hundred in his left. Want me to go over there and nose around?”

“Suppose I go,” Nelson said. “You stay here and clean up.”

“My pal,” murmured the other dick dryly.

The waxed paper from the sandwich had been left lying under the chair. Nelson picked it up, wrapped it in a paper-napkin, and put it in his pocket. It was only a short walk from the automat to where Avram lived, an outmoded, walk-up building, falling to pieces with neglect.

Nelson went into the hall and there was no such name listed. He thought at first Sarecky had made a mistake, or at least been misled by whatever memorandum it was he had found that purported to give the old fellow’s address. He rang the bell marked Superintendent, and went down to the basement entrance to make sure. A stout blond woman in an old sweater and carpet-slippers came out.

“Is there anyone named Avram living in this building?”

“That’s my husband — he’s the superintendent. He’s out right now, I expect him back any minute.”

Nelson couldn’t understand, himself, why he didn’t break it to her then and there. He wanted to get a line, perhaps, on the old man’s surroundings while they still remained normal. “Can I come in and wait a minute?” he said.

“Why not?” she said indifferently.

She led him down a barren, unlit basement-way, stacked with empty ashcans, into a room green-yellow with a tiny bud of gaslight. Old as the building upstairs was, it had been wired for electricity, Nelson had noted. For that matter, so was this basement down here. There was a cord hanging from the ceiling ending in an empty socket. It had been looped up out of reach. “The old bird sure was a miser,” thought Nelson. “Walking around on one grand and living like this!” He couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the woman.

He noted to his further surprise that a pot of coffee was boiling on a one-burner gas stove over in the corner. He wondered if she knew that he treated himself away from home each night. “Any idea where he went?” he asked, sitting down in a creaking rocker.

“He goes two blocks down to the automat for a bite to eat every night at this time,” she said.

“How is it,” he asked curiously, “he’ll go out and spend money like that, when he could have coffee right here where he lives with you?”

A spark of resentment showed in her face, but a defeated resentment that had long turned to resignation. She shrugged. “For himself, nothing’s too good. He goes there because the light’s better, he says. But for me and the kids, he begrudges every penny.”

“You’ve got kids, have you?”

“They’re mine, not his,” she said dully.

Nelson had already caught sight of a half-grown girl and a little boy peeping shyly out at him from another room. “Well,” he said, getting up, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your husband had an accident a little while ago at the automat, Mrs. Avram. He’s gone.”

The weary stolidity on her face changed very slowly. But it did change — to fright. “Cyanide — what’s that?” she breathed, when he’d told her.

“Did he have any enemies?”

She said with utter simplicity. “Nobody loved him. Nobody hated him that much, either.”

“Do you know of any reason he’d have to take his own life?”

“Him? Never! He held on tight to life, just like he did to his money.”

There was some truth in that, the dick had to admit. Misers seldom commit suicide.

The little girl edged into the room fearfully, holding her hands behind her. “Is — is he dead, Mom?”

The woman just nodded, dry-eyed.

“Then, can we use this now?” She was holding a fly-blown electric bulb in her hands.

Nelson felt touched, hard-boiled dick though he was. “Come down to headquarters tomorrow, Mrs. Avram. There’s some money there you can claim. G’night.” He went outside and clanged the basement-gate shut after him. The windows alongside him suddenly bloomed feebly with electricity, and the silhouette of a woman standing up on a chair was outlined against them.

“It’s a funny world,” thought the dick with a shake of his head, as he trudged up to sidewalk-level.

It was now two in the morning. The automat was dark when Nelson returned there, so he went down to headquarters. They were questioning the branch-manager and the unseen counterman who prepared the sandwiches and filled the slots from the inside.

Nelson’s captain said: “They’ve already telephoned from the chem lab that the sandwich is loaded with cyanide crystals. On the other hand, they give the remainder of the loaf that was used, the leftover bologna from which the sandwich was prepared, the breadknife, the cutting-board, and the scraps in the garbage-receptacle — all of which we sent over there — a clean bill of health. There was clearly no slip-up or carelessness in the automat pantry. Which means that cyanide got into that sandwich on the consumer’s side of the apparatus. He committed suicide or was deliberately murdered by one of the other customers.”

“I was just up there,” Nelson said. “It wasn’t suicide. People don’t worry about keeping their light bills down when they’re going to take their own lives.”

“Good psychology,” the captain nodded. “My experience is that miserliness is simply a perverted form of self-preservation, an exaggerated clinging to life. The choice of method wouldn’t be in character, either. Cyanide’s expensive, and it wouldn’t be sold to a man of Avram’s type, just for the asking. It’s murder, then. I think it’s highly important you men bring in whoever the fourth man at that table was tonight. Do it with the least possible loss of time.”

A composite description of him, pieced together from the few scraps that could be obtained from the busman and the other two at the table, was available. He was a heavy-set, dark-complected man, wearing a light-tan suit. He had been the first of the four at the table, and already through eating, but had lingered on. Mannerisms — had kept looking back over his shoulder, from time to time, and picking his teeth. He had had a small black satchel, or sample-case, parked at his feet under the table. Both survivors were positive on this point. Both had stubbed their toes against it in sitting down, and both had glanced to the floor to see what it was.

Had he reached down toward it at any time, after their arrival, as if to open it or take anything out of it?

To the best of their united recollections — no.

Had Avram, after bringing the sandwich to the table, gotten up again and left it unguarded for a moment?

Again, no. In fact the whole thing had been over with in a flash. He had noisily unwrapped it, taken a huge bite, swallowed without chewing, heaved convulsively once or twice, and fallen prone across the tabletop.

“Then it must have happened right outside the slot — I mean the inserting of the stuff — and not at the table, at all,” Sarecky told Nelson privately. “Guess he laid it down for a minute while he was drawing his coffee.”

“Absolutely not!” Nelson contradicted. “You’re forgetting it was all wrapped up in wax-paper. How could anyone have opened, then closed it again, without attracting his attention? And if we’re going to suspect the guy with the satchel — and the cap seems to want us to — he was already at the table and all through eating when Avram came over. How could he know ahead of time which table the old guy was going to select?”

“Then how did the stuff get on it? Where did it come from?” the other dick asked helplessly.

“It’s little things like that we’re paid to find out,” Nelson reminded him dryly.

“Pretty large order, isn’t it?”

“You talk like a layman. You’ve been on the squad long enough by now to know how damnably unescapable little habits are, how impossible it is to shake them off, once formed. The public at large thinks detective work is something miraculous like pulling rabbits out of a silk-hat. They don’t realize that no adult is a free agent — that they’re tied hand and foot by tiny, harmless little habits, and held helpless. This man has a habit of taking a snack to eat at midnight in a public place. He has a habit of picking his teeth after he’s through, of lingering on at the table, of looking back over his shoulder aimlessly from time to time. Combine that with a stocky build, a dark complexion, and you have him! What more d’ya want — a spotlight trained on him?”

It was Sarecky, himself, in spite of his misgivings, who picked him up forty-eight hours later in another automat, sample-case and all, at nearly the same hour as the first time, and brought him in for questioning! The busman from the former place, and the two customers, called in, identified him unhesitatingly, even if he was now wearing a gray suit.

His name, he said, was Alexander Hill, and he lived at 215 Such-and-such a street.

“What business are you in?” rapped out the captain.

The man’s face got livid. His Adam’s apple went up and down like an elevator. He could barely articulate the words. “I’m — I’m a salesman for a wholesale drug concern,” he gasped terrifiedly.

“Ah!” said two of his three questioners expressively. The sample-case, opened, was found to contain only tooth-powders, aspirins, and headache remedies.

But Nelson, rummaging through it, thought: “Oh, nuts, it’s too pat. And he’s too scared, too defenseless, to have really done it. Came in here just now without a bit of mental build-up prepared ahead of time. The real culprit would have been all primed, all rehearsed, for just this. Watch him go all to pieces. The innocent ones always do.”

The captain’s voice rose to a roar. “How is it everyone else stayed in the place that night, but you got out in such a hurry?”

“I–I don’t know. It happened so close to me, I guess I–I got nervous.”

That wasn’t necessarily a sign of guilt, Nelson was thinking. It was his duty to take part in the questioning, so he shot out at him: “You got nervous, eh? What reason d’you have for getting nervous? How’d you know it wasn’t just a heart attack or malnutrition — unless you were the cause of it?”

He stumbled badly over that one. “No! No! I don’t handle that stuff! I don’t carry anything like that—”

“So you know what it was? How’d you know? We didn’t tell you,” Sarecky jumped on him.

“I–I read it in the papers next morning,” he wailed.

Well, it had been in all of them, Nelson had to admit.

“You didn’t reach out in front of you — toward him — for anything that night? You kept your hands to yourself?” Then, before he could get a word out, “What about sugar?”

The suspect went from bad to worse. “I don’t use any!” he whimpered.

Sarecky had been just waiting for that. “Don’t lie to us!” he yelled, and swung at him. “I watched you for ten full minutes tonight before I went over and tapped your shoulder. You emptied half the container into your cup!” His fist hit him a glancing blow on the side of the jaw, knocked him and the chair he was sitting on both off-balance. Fright was making the guy sew himself up twice as badly as before.

“Aw, we’re just barking up the wrong tree,” Nelson kept saying to himself. “It’s just one of those fluke coincidences. A drug salesman happens to be sitting at the same table where a guy drops from cyanide poisoning!” Still, he knew that more than one guy had been strapped into the chair just on the strength of such a coincidence and nothing more. You couldn’t expect a jury not to pounce on it for all it was worth.

The captain took Nelson out of it at this point, somewhat to his relief, took him aside and murmured: “Go over there and give his place a good cleaning while we’re holding him here. If you can turn up any of that stuff hidden around there, that’s all we need. He’ll break down like a stack of cards.” He glanced over at the cowering figure in the chair. “We’ll have him before morning,” he promised.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” thought Nelson, easing out. “And then what’ll we have? Exactly nothing.” He wasn’t the kind of a dick that would have rather had a wrong guy than no guy at all, like some of them. He wanted the right guy — or none at all. The last he saw of the captain, he was stripping off his coat for action, more as a moral threat than a physical one, and the unfortunate victim of circumstances was wailing, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,” like a record with a flaw in it.

Hill was a bachelor and lived in a small, one-room flat on the upper West Side. Nelson let himself in with the man’s own key, put on the lights, and went to work. In half an hour, he had investigated the place upside-down. There was not a grain of cyanide to be found, nor anything beyond what had already been revealed in the sample-case. This did not mean, of course, that he couldn’t have obtained some either through the firm he worked for, or some of the retail druggists whom he canvassed. Nelson found a list of the latter and took it with him to check over the following day.

Instead of returning directly to headquarters, he detoured on an impulse past the Avram house, and, seeing a light shining in the basement windows, went over and rang the bell.

The little girl came out, her brother behind her. “Mom’s not in,” she announced.

“She’s out with Uncle Nick,” the boy supplied.

His sister whirled on him. “She told us not to tell anybody that, didn’t she!”

Nelson could hear the instructions as clearly as if he’d been in the room at the time, “If that same man comes around again, don’t you tell him I’ve gone out with Uncle Nick, now!”

Children are after all very transparent. They told him most of what he wanted to know without realizing they were doing it. “He’s not really your uncle, is he?”

A gasp of surprise. “How’d you know that?”

“Your ma gonna marry him?”

They both nodded approvingly. “He’s gonna be our new Pop.”

“What was the name of your real Pop — the one before the last?”

“Edwards,” they chorused proudly.

“What happened to him?”

“He died.”

“In Dee-troit,” added the little boy.

He only asked them one more question. “Can you tell me his full name?”

“Albert J. Edwards,” they recited.

He gave them a friendly push. “All right, kids, go back to bed.”

He went back to headquarters, sent a wire to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Detroit, on his own hook. They were still questioning Hill down to the bone, meanwhile, but he hadn’t caved in yet. “Nothing,” Nelson reported. “Only this account-sheet of where he places his orders.”

“I’m going to try framing him with a handful of bicarb of soda, or something — pretend we got the goods on him. I’ll see if that’ll open him up,” the captain promised wrathfully. “He’s not the push-over I expected. You start in at seven this morning and work your way through this list of retail druggists. Find out if he ever tried to contract them for any of that stuff.”

Meanwhile, he had Hill smuggled out the back way to an outlying precinct, to evade the statute governing the length of time a prisoner can be held before arraignment. They didn’t have enough of a case against him yet to arraign him, but they weren’t going to let him go.

Nelson was even more surprised than the prisoner at what he caught himself doing. As they stood Hill up next to him in the corridor, for a minute, waiting for the Black Maria, he breathed over his shoulder, “Hang on tight, or you’re sunk!”

The man acted too far gone even to understand what he was driving at.

Nelson was present the next morning when Mrs. Avram showed up to claim the money, and watched her expression curiously. She had the same air of weary resignation as the night he had broken the news to her. She accepted the money from the captain, signed for it, turned apathetically away, holding it in her hand. The captain, by prearrangement, had pulled another of his little tricks — purposely withheld one of the hundred-dollar bills to see what her reaction would be.

Halfway to the door, she turned in alarm, came hurrying back. “Gentlemen, there must be a mistake! There’s — there’s a hundred-dollar bill here on top!” She shuffled through the roll hastily. “They’re all hundred-dollar bills!” she cried out aghast. “I knew he had a little money in his shoes — he slept with them under his pillow at nights — but I thought maybe, fifty, seventy dollars—”

“There was a thousand in his shoes,” said the captain, “and another thousand stitched all along the seams of his overcoat.”

She let the money go, caught the edge of the desk he was sitting behind with both hands, and slumped draggingly down it to the floor in a dead faint. They had to hustle in with a pitcher of water to revive her.

Nelson impatiently wondered what the heck was the matter with him, what more he needed to be convinced she hadn’t known what she was coming into? And yet, he said to himself, how are you going to tell a real faint from a fake one? They close their eyes and they flop, and which is it?

He slept three hours, and then he went down and checked at the wholesale-drug concern Hill worked for. The firm did not handle cyanide or any other poisonous substance, and the man had a very good record there. He spent the morning working his way down the list of retail druggists who had placed their orders through Hill, and again got nowhere. At noon he quit, and went back to the automat where it had happened — not to eat but to talk to the manager. He was really working on two cases simultaneously — an official one for his captain and a private one of his own. The captain would have had a fit if he’d known it.

“Will you lemme have that busman of yours, the one we had down at headquarters the other night? I want to take him out of here with me for about half an hour.”

“You’re the Police Department,” the manager smiled acquiescently.

Nelson took him with him in his streetclothes. “You did a pretty good job of identifying Hill, the fourth man at that table,” he told him. “Naturally, I don’t expect you to remember every face that was in there that night. Especially with the quick turnover there is in an automat. However, here’s what you do. Go down this street here to Number One-twenty-one — you can see it from here. Ring the superintendent’s bell. You’re looking for an apartment, see? But while you’re at it, you take a good look at the woman you’ll see, and then come back and tell me if you remember seeing her face in the automat that night or any other night. Don’t stare now — just size her up.”

It took him a little longer than Nelson had counted on. When he finally rejoined the dick around the corner, where the latter was waiting, he said: “Nope, I’ve never seen her in our place, that night or any other, to my knowledge. But don’t forget — I’m not on the floor every minute of the time. She could have been in and out often without my spotting her.”

“But not,” thought Nelson, “without Avram seeing her, if she went anywhere near him at all.” She hadn’t been there, then. That was practically certain. “What took you so long?” he asked him.

“Funny thing. There was a guy there in the place with her that used to work for us. He remembered me right away.”

“Oh, yeah?” The dick drew up short. “Was he in there that night?”

“Naw, he quit six months ago. I haven’t seen him since.”

“What was he, sandwich-maker?”

“No, busman like me. He cleaned up the tables.”

Just another coincidence, then. But, Nelson reminded himself, if one coincidence was strong enough to put Hill in jeopardy, why should the other be passed over as harmless? Both cases — his and the captain’s — now had their coincidences. It remained to be seen which was just that — a coincidence and nothing more — and which was the McCoy.

He went back to headquarters. No wire had yet come from Detroit in answer to his, but he hadn’t expected any this soon — it took time. The captain, bulldog-like, wouldn’t let Hill go. They had spirited him away to still a third place, were holding him on some technicality or other that had nothing to do with the Avram case. The bicarbonate of soda trick hadn’t worked, the captain told Nelson ruefully.

“Why?” the dick wanted to know. “Because he caught on just by looking at it that it wasn’t cyanide — is that it? I think that’s an important point, right there.”

“No, he thought it was the stuff all right. But he hollered blue murder it hadn’t come out of his room.”

“Then if he doesn’t know the difference between cyanide and bicarb of soda at sight, doesn’t that prove he didn’t put any on that sandwich?”

The captain gave him a look. “Are you for us or against us?” he wanted to know acidly. “You go ahead checking that list of retail druggists until you find out where he got it. And if we can’t dig up any other motive, unhealthy scientific curiosity will satisfy me. He wanted to study the effects at first hand, and picked the first stranger who came along.”

“Sure, in an automat — the most conspicuous, crowded public eating-place there is. The one place where human handling of the food is reduced to a minimum.”

He deliberately disobeyed orders, a thing he had never done before-or rather, postponed carrying them out. He went back and commenced a one-man watch over the basement-entrance of the Avram house.

In about an hour, a squat, foreign-looking man came up the steps and walked down the street. This was undoubtedly “Uncle Nick,” Mrs. Avram’s husband-to-be, and former employee of the automat. Nelson tailed him effortlessly on the opposite side, boarded the same bus he did but a block below, and got off at the same stop. “Uncle Nick” went into a bank, and Nelson into a cigar-store across the way that had transparent telephone booths commanding the street through the glass front.

When he came out again, Nelson didn’t bother following him any more. Instead, he went into the bank himself. “What’d that guy do — open an account just now? Lemme see the deposit-slip.”

He had deposited a thousand dollars cash under the name of Nicholas Krassin, half of the sum Mrs. Avram had claimed at headquarters only the day before. Nelson didn’t have to be told that this by no means indicated Krassin and she had had anything to do with the old man’s death. The money was rightfully hers as his widow, and, if she wanted to divide it with her groom-to-be, that was no criminal offense. Still, wasn’t there a stronger motive here than the “unhealthy scientific curiosity” the captain had pinned on Hill? The fact remained that she wouldn’t have had possession of the money had Avram still been alive. It would have still been in his shoes and coat-seams where she couldn’t get at it.

Nelson checked Krassin at the address he had given at the bank, and, somewhat to his surprise, found it to be on the level, not fictitious. Either the two of them weren’t very bright, or they were innocent. He went back to headquarters at six, and the answer to his telegram to Detroit had finally come. “Exhumation order obtained as per request stop Albert J. Edwards deceased January 1936 stop death certificate gives cause fall from steel girder while at work building under construction stop-autopsy—”

Nelson read it to the end, folded it, put it in his pocket without changing his expression.

“Well, did you find out anything?” the captain wanted to know.

“No, but I’m on the way to,” Nelson assured him, but he may have been thinking of that other case of his own, and not the one they were all steamed up over. He went out again without saying where.

He got to Mrs. Avram’s at quarter to seven, and rang the bell. The little girl came out to the basement-entrance. At sight of him, she called out shrilly, but without humorous intent, “Ma, that man’s here again.”

Nelson smiled a little and walked back to the living-quarters. A sudden hush had fallen thick enough to cut with a knife. Krassin was there again, in his shirt-sleeves, having supper with Mrs. Avram and the two kids. They not only had electricity now but a midget radio as well, he noticed. You can’t arrest people for buying a midget radio. It was silent as a tomb, but he let the back of his hand brush it, surreptitiously, and the front of the dial was still warm from recent use.

“I’m not butting in, am I?” he greeted them cheerfully.

“N-no, sit down,” said Mrs. Avram nervously. “This is Mr. Krassin, a friend of the family. I don’t know your name—”

“Nelson.”

Krassin just looked at him watchfully.

The dick said: “Sorry to trouble you. I just wanted to ask you a couple questions about your husband. About what time was it he had the accident?”

“You know that better than I,” she objected. “You were the one came here and told me.”

“I don’t mean Avram, I mean Edwards, in Detroit — the riveter that fell off the girder.”

Her face went a little gray, as if the memory were painful. Krassin’s face didn’t change color, but only showed considerable surprise.

“About what time of day?” he repeated.

“Noon,” she said almost inaudibly.

“Lunchtime,” said the dick softly, as if to himself. “Most workmen carry their lunch from home in a pail—” He looked at her thoughtfully. Then he changed the subject, wrinkled up his nose appreciatively. “That coffee smells good,” he remarked.

She gave him a peculiar, strained smile. “Have a cup, Mr. Detective,” she offered. He saw her eyes meet Krassin’s briefly.

“Thanks, don’t mind if I do,” drawled Nelson.

She got up. Then, on her way to the stove, she suddenly flared out at the two kids for no apparent reason: “What are you hanging around here for? Go in to bed. Get out of here now, I say!” She banged the door shut on them, stood before it with her back to the room for a minute. Nelson’s sharp ears caught the faint but unmistakable click of a key.

She turned back again, purred to Krassin: “Nick, go outside and take a look at the furnace, will you, while I’m pouring Mr. Nelson’s coffee? If the heat dies down, they’ll all start complaining from upstairs right away. Give it a good shaking up.”

The hairs at the back of Nelson’s neck stood up a little as he watched the man get up and sidle out. But he’d asked for the cup of coffee, himself.

He couldn’t see her pouring it — her back was turned toward him again as she stood over the stove. But he could hear the splash of the hot liquid, see her elbow-motions, hear the clink of the pot as she replaced it. She stayed that way a moment longer, after it had been poured, with her back to him — less than a moment, barely thirty seconds. One elbow moved slightly. Nelson’s eyes were narrow slits. It was thirty seconds too long, one elbow-motion too many.

She turned, came back, set the cup down before him. “I’ll let you put your own sugar in, yes?” she said almost playfully. “Some like a lot, some like a little.” There was a disappearing ring of froth in the middle of the black steaming liquid.

Outside somewhere, he could hear Krassin raking up the furnace.

“Drink it while it’s hot,” she urged.

He lifted it slowly to his lips. As the cup went up, her eyelids went down. Not all the way, not enough to completely shut out sight, though.

He blew the steam away. “Too hot — burn my mouth. Gotta give it a minute to cool,” he said. “How about you — ain’t you having any? I couldn’t drink alone. Ain’t polite.”

“I had mine,” she breathed heavily, opening her eyes again. “I don’t think there’s any left.”

“Then I’ll give you half of this.”

Her hospitable alarm was almost overdone. She all but jumped back in protest. “No, no! Wait, I’ll look. Yes, there’s more, there’s plenty!”

He could have had an accident with it while her back was turned a second time, upset it over the floor. Instead, he took a kitchen-match out of his pocket, broke the head off short with his thumbnail. He threw the head, not the stick, over on top of the warm stove in front of which she was standing. It fell to one side of her, without making any noise, and she didn’t notice it. If he’d thrown stick and all, it would have clicked as it dropped and attracted her attention.

She came back and sat down opposite him. Krassin’s footsteps could be heard shuffling back toward them along the cement corridor outside.

“Go ahead. Don’t be bashful — drink up,” she encouraged. There was something ghastly about her smile, like a death’s-head grinning across the table from him.

The match-head on the stove, heated to the point of combustion, suddenly flared up with a little spitting sound and a momentary gleam. She jumped a little, and her head turned nervously to see what it was. When she looked back again, he already had his cup to his lips. She raised hers, too, watching him over the rim of it. Krassin’s footfalls had stopped somewhere just outside the room door, and there wasn’t another sound from him, as if he were standing there, waiting.

At the table, the cat-and-mouse play went on a moment longer. Nelson started swallowing with a dry constriction of the throat. The woman’s eyes, watching him above her cup, were greedy half-moons of delight. Suddenly, her head and shoulders went down across the table with a bang, like her husband’s had at the automat that other night, and the crash of the crushed cup sounded from underneath her.

Nelson jumped up watchfully, throwing his chair over. The door shot open, and Krassin came in, with an ax in one hand and an empty burlap-bag in the other.

“I’m not quite ready for cremation yet,” the dick gritted, and threw himself at him.

Krassin dropped the superfluous burlap-bag, the ax flashed up overhead. Nelson dipped his knees, down in under it before it could fall. He caught the shaft with one hand, midway between the blade and Krassin’s grip, and held the weapon teetering in mid-air. With his other fist he started imitating a hydraulic drill against his assailant’s teeth. Then he lowered his barrage suddenly to solar-plexus level, sent in two body-blows that caved his opponent in — and that about finished it.

Out in the wilds of Corona, an hour later, in a sub-basement locker-room, Alexander Hill-or at least what was left of him — was saying: “And you’ll lemme sleep if I do? And you’ll get it over real quick, send me up and put me out of my misery?”

“Yeah, yeah!” said the haggard captain, flicking ink out of a fountain pen and jabbing it at him. “Why dincha do this days ago, make it easier for us all?”

“Never saw such a guy,” complained Sarecky, rinsing his mouth with water over in a corner.

“What’s that man signing?” exploded Nelson’s voice from the stairs.

“Whaddye think he’s signing?” snarled the captain. “And where you been all night, incidentally?”

“Getting poisoned by the same party that croaked Avram!” He came the rest of the way down, and Krassin walked down alongside at the end of a short steel link.

“Who’s this guy?” they both wanted to know.

Nelson looked at the first prisoner, in the chair. “Take him out of here a few minutes, can’t you?” he requested. “He don’t have to know all our business.”

“Just like in the story-books,” muttered Sarecky jealously. “One-Man Nelson walks in at the last minute and cops all the glory.”

A cop led Hill upstairs. Another cop brought down a small brown-paper parcel at Nelson’s request. Opened, it revealed a small tin that had once contained cocoa. Nelson turned it upside down and a few threads of whitish substance spilled lethargically out, filling the close air of the room with a faint odor of bitter almonds.

“There’s your cyanide,” he said. “It came off the shelf above Mrs. Avram’s kitchen-stove. Her kids, who are being taken care of at headquarters until I can get back there, will tell you it’s roach-powder and they were warned never to go near it. She probably got it in Detroit, way back last year.”

“She did it?” said the captain. “How could she? It was on the automat-sandwich, not anything he ate at home. She wasn’t at the automat that night, she was home, you told us that yourself.”

“Yeah, she was home, but she poisoned him at the automat just the same. Look, it goes like this.” He unlocked his manacle, refastened his prisoner temporarily to a plumbing-pipe in the corner. He took a paper-napkin out of his pocket, and, from within that, the carefully preserved waxpaper wrapper the death-sandwich had been done in.

Nelson said: “This has been folded over twice, once on one side, once on the other. You can see that, yourself. Every crease in it is double-barreled. Meaning what? The sandwich was taken out, doctored, and rewrapped. Only, in her hurry, Mrs. Avram slipped up and put the paper back the other way around.

“As I told Sarecky already, there’s death in little habits. Avram was a miser. Bologna is the cheapest sandwich that automat sells. For six months straight, he never bought any other kind. This guy here used to work there. He knew at what time the slots were refilled for the last time. He knew that that was just when Avram always showed up. And, incidentally, the old man was no fool. He didn’t go there because the light was better — he went there to keep from getting poisoned at home. Ate all his meals out.

“All right, so what did they do? They got him, anyway — like this. Krassin, here, went in, bought a bologna sandwich, and took it home to her. She spiked it, rewrapped it, and, at eleven-thirty, he took it back there in his pocket. The sandwich-slots had just been refilled for the last time. They wouldn’t put any more in till next morning. There are three bologna-slots. He emptied all three, to make sure the victim wouldn’t get any but the lethal sandwich. After they’re taken out, the glass slides remain ajar. You can lift them and reach in without inserting a coin. He put his death-sandwich in, stayed by it so no one else would get it. The old man came in. Maybe he’s near sighted and didn’t recognize Krassin. Maybe he didn’t know him at all — I haven’t cleared that point up yet. Krassin eased out of the place. The old man is a miser. He sees he can get a sandwich for nothing, thinks something went wrong with the mechanism, maybe. He grabs it up twice as quick as anyone else would have. There you are.

“What was in his shoes is this guy’s motive. As for her, that was only partly her motive. She was a congenital killer, anyway, outside of that. He would have married her, and it would have happened to him in his turn some day. She got rid of her first husband, Edwards, in Detroit that way. She got a wonderful break. He ate the poisoned lunch she’d given him way up on the crossbeams of a building under construction, and it looked like he’d lost his balance and toppled to his death. They exhumed the body and performed an autopsy at my request. This telegram says they found traces of cyanide poisoning even after all this time.

“I paid out rope to her tonight, let her know I was onto her. I told her her coffee smelled good. Then I switched cups on her. She’s up there now, dead. I can’t say that I wanted it that way, but it was me or her. You never would have gotten her to the chair, anyway. She was unbalanced of course, but not the kind that’s easily recognizable. She’d have spent a year in an institution, been released, and gone out and done it all over again. It grows on ’em, gives ’em a feeling of power over their fellow human beings.

“This louse, however, is not insane. He did it for exactly one thousand dollars and no cents — and he knew what he was doing from first to last. So I think he’s entitled to a chicken-and-ice-cream-dinner in the death-house, at the state’s expense.”

“The Sphinx,” growled Sarecky under his breath, shrugging into his coat. “Sees all, knows all, keeps all to himself.”

“Who stinks?” corrected the captain, misunderstanding. “If anyone does, it’s you and me. He brought home the bacon!”