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

Mystery in Room 913

They thought it was the Depression the first time it happened. The guy had checked in one night in the black March of 33, in the middle of the memorable bank holiday. He was well-dressed and respectable-looking. He had baggage with him, plenty of it, so he wasn’t asked to pay in advance. Everyone was short of ready cash that week. Besides, he’d asked for the weekly rate.

He signed the register James Hopper, Schenectady, and Dennison, eyeing the red vacancy-tags in the pigeonholes, pulled out the one in 913 at random and gave him that. Not the vacancy-tag, the room. The guest went up, okayed the room, and George the bellhop was sent up with his bags. George came down and reported a dime without resentment; it was ’33, after all.

Striker had sized him up, of course. That was part of his duties, and the house detective found nothing either for him or against him. Striker had been with the St. Anselm two years at that time. He’d had his salary cut in ’31, and then again in ’32, but so had everyone else on the staff. He didn’t look much like a house dick, which was why he was good for the job. He was a tall, lean, casual-moving guy, without that annoying habit most hotel dicks have of staring people out of countenance. He used finesse about it; got the same results, but with sort of a blank, idle expression as though he were thinking of something else. He also lacked the usual paunch, in spite of his sedentary life, and never wore a hard hat. He had a little radio in his top-floor cubbyhole and a stack of vintage “fantastics,” pulp magazines dealing with super-science and the supernatural, and that seemed to be all he asked of life.

The newcomer who had signed as Hopper came down again in about half an hour and asked Dennison if there were any good movies nearby. The clerk recommended one and the guest went to it. This was about eight p.m. He came back at eleven, picked up his key, and went up to his room. Dennison and Striker both heard him whistling lightly under his breath as he stepped into the elevator. Nothing on his mind but a good night’s rest, apparently.

Striker turned in himself at twelve. He was subject to call twenty-four hours a day. There was no one to relieve him.

The St. Anselm was on the downgrade, and had stopped having an assistant house dick about a year before.

He was still awake, reading in bed, about an hour later when the deskman rang him. “Better get down here quick, Strike! Nine-thirteen’s just fallen out!” The clerk’s voice was taut, frightened.

Striker threw on coat and pants over his pajamas and got down as fast as the creaky old-fashioned elevator would let him. He went out to the street, around to the side under the 13-line.

Hopper was lying there dead, the torn leg of his pajamas rippling in the bitter March night wind. There wasn’t anyone else around at that hour except the night porter, the policeman he’d called, and who had called his precinct house in turn, and a taxi driver or two. Maxon, the midnight-to-morning clerk (Dennison went off at eleven-thirty), had to remain at his post for obvious reasons. They were just standing there waiting for the morgue ambulance; there wasn’t anything they could do.

Bob, the night porter, was saying: “I thought it was a pillow someone drap out the window. I come up the basement way, see a thick white thing lying there, flappin’ in th’ wind. I go over, fix to kick it with my foot—” He broke off. “Golly, man!”

One of the drivers said, “I seen him comin’ down.” No one disputed the point, but he insisted, “No kidding, I seen him coming down! I was just cruisin’ past, one block over, and I look this way, and I see — whisht ungh — like a pancake!”

The other cab driver, who hadn’t seen him coming down, said: “I seen you head down this way, so I thought you spotted a fare, and I chased after you.”

They got into a wrangle above the distorted form. “Yeah, you’re always chiselin’ in on my hails. Follyn’ me around. Can’t ye get none o’ your own?”

Striker crossed the street, teeth chattering, and turned and looked up the face of the building. Half the French window of 913 was open, and the room was lit up. All the rest of the line was dark, from the top floor down.

He crossed back to where the little group stood shivering and stamping their feet miserably. “He sure picked a night for it!” winced the cop. The cab driver opened his mouth a couple of seconds ahead of saying something, which was his speed, and the cop turned on him irritably. “Yeah, we know! You seen him coming down. Go home, will ya!”

Striker went in, rode up, and used his passkey on 913. The light was on, as he had ascertained from the street. He stood there in the doorway and looked around. Each of the 13 s, in the St. Anselm, was a small room with private bath. There was an opening on each of the four sides of these rooms: the tall, narrow, old-fashioned room door leading in from the hall; in the wall to the left of that, the door to the bath, of identical proportions; in the wall to the right of the hall door, a door giving into the clothes closet, again of similar measurements. These three panels were in the style of the Nineties, not your squat modern aperture. Directly opposite the room door was a pair of French windows looking out onto the street. Each of them matched the door measurements. Dark blue roller-shades covered the glass on the inside.

But Striker wasn’t thinking about all that particularly, just then. He was interested only in what the condition of the room could tell him: whether it had been suicide or an accident. The only thing disturbed in the room was the bed, but that was not violently disturbed as by a struggle, simply normally disarranged as by someone sleeping. Striker, for some reason or other, tested the sheets with the back of his hand for a minute. They were still warm from recent occupancy. Hopper’s trousers were neatly folded across the seat of a chair. His shirt and underclothes were draped over the back of it. His shoes stood under it, toe to toe and heel to heel. He was evidently a very neat person.

He had unpacked. He must have intended to occupy the room for the full week he had bargained for. In the closet, when Striker opened it, were his hat, overcoat, jacket and vest, the latter three on separate hangers. The dresser drawers held his shirts and other linen. On top of the dresser was a white-gold wristwatch, a handful of change, and two folded squares of paper. One was a glossy handbill from the show the guest had evidently attended only two hours ago. Saturday through Tuesday — the laugh riot, funniest, most tuneful picture of the year, “Hips Hips Hooray!” Also “Popeye the Sailor.” Nothing in that to depress anyone.

The other was a note on hotel stationery — Hotel Management: Sorry to do this here, but I had to do it somewhere.

It was unsigned. So it was suicide after all. One of the two window halves, the one to the right stood inward to the room. The one he had gone through.

“You the houseman?” a voice asked from the doorway.

Striker turned and a precinct detective came in. You could tell he was that. He couldn’t have looked at a dandelion without congenital suspicion or asked the time of day without making it a leading question. “Find anything?”

Striker handed over the note without comment.

Perry, the manager, had come up with him, in trousers and bathrobe. He was a stout, jovial-looking man ordinarily, but right now he was only stout. “He hadn’t paid yet, either,” he said ruefully to the empty room. He twisted the cord of his robe around one way, then he undid it and twisted it around the other way. He was very unhappy. He picked the wristwatch up gingerly by the end of its strap and dangled it close to his ear, as if to ascertain whether or not it had a good movement.

The precinct dick went to the window and looked down, opened the bath door and looked in, the closet door and looked in. He gave the impression of doing this just to give the customers their money’s worth; in other words, as far as he was concerned, the note had clinched the case.

“It’s the old suey, all right,” he said and, bending over at the dresser, read aloud what he was jotting down. “James Hopper, Skun-Skunnect—”

Striker objected peevishly. “Why did he go to bed first, then get up and go do it? They don’t usually do that. He took the room for a week, too.”

The precinct man raised his voice, to show he was a police detective talking to a mere hotel dick, someone who in his estimation wasn’t a detective at all. “I don’t care if he took it for six months! He left this note and hit the sidewalk, didn’t he? Whaddaya trying to do, make it into something it ain’t?

The manager said, “Ssh! if you don’t mind,” and eased the door to, to keep other guests from overhearing. He sided with the precinct man, the wish being father to the thought. If there’s one thing that a hotel man likes less than a suicide, it’s a murder. “I don’t think there’s any doubt of it.”

The police dick stooped to reasoning with Striker. “You were the first one up here. Was there anything wrong with the door? Was it forced open or anything?”

Striker had to admit it had been properly shut; the late occupant’s key lay on the dresser where it belonged, at that very moment.

The police dick spread his hands, as if to say: “There you are, what more do you want?”

He took a last look around, decided the room had nothing more to tell him. Nor could Striker argue with him on this point. The room had nothing more to tell anyone. The dick gathered up Hopper’s watch, change and identification papers, to turn them over to the police property-clerk, until they were claimed by his nearest of kin. His baggage was left in there temporarily; the room was darkened and locked up.

Riding down to the lobby, the dick rubbed it in a little. “Here’s how those things go,” he said patronizingly. “No one got in there or went near him, so it wasn’t murder. He left a note, so it wasn’t an accident. The word they got for this is suicide. Now y’got it?”

Striker held his palm up and fluttered it slightly. “Teacher, can I leave the room?” he murmured poignantly.

The stout manager, Perry, had a distrait, slightly anticipatory expression on his moon face now; in his mind it was the next day, he had already sold the room to someone else, and had the two dollars in the till. Heaven, to him, was a houseful of full rooms.

The body had already been removed from the street outside. Somewhere, across a coffee counter, a cab driver was saying: “I seen him coming down.”

The city dick took his departure from the hotel, with the magnanimous assurance: “It’s the depresh. They’re poppin’ off like popcorn all over the country this week. I ain’t been able to cash my paycheck since Monday.”

Perry returned to his own quarters, with the typical managerial admonition, to Maxon and Striker, “Soft pedal, now, you two. Don’t let this get around the house.” He yawned with a sound like air brakes, going up in the elevator. You could still hear it echoing down the shaft after his feet had gone up out of sight.

“Just the same, “ Striker said finally, unasked, to the night clerk, “I don’t care what that know-it-all says, Hopper didn’t have suicide on his mind when he checked in here at seven-thirty. He saw a show that was full of laughs, and even came home whistling one of the tunes from it. We both heard him. He unpacked all his shirts and things into the bureau drawers. He intended staying. He went to bed first; I felt the covers, they were warm. Then he popped up all of a sudden and took this standing broad jump.”

“Maybe he had a bad dream,” Maxon suggested facetiously. His was a hard-boiled racket. He yawned, muscularly magnetized by his boss’ recent gape, and opened a big ledger. “Some of ’em put on a fake front until the last minute — whistle, go to a show, too proud to take the world into their confidence, and then — bang — they’ve crumpled.” And on that note it ended. As Maxon said, there was no accounting for human nature. Striker caught the sleepiness from the other two, widened his jaws terrifyingly, brought them together again with a click. And yet somehow, to him, this suicide hadn’t run true to form.

He went back up to his own room again with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, that wasn’t strong enough to do anything about, and yet that he couldn’t altogether throw off. Like the feeling you get when you’re working out a crossword puzzle and one of the words fills up the space satisfactorily, but doesn’t seem to have the required meaning called for in the solution.

The St. Anselm went back to sleep again, the small part of it that had been awake. The case was closed.

People came and went from 913 and the incident faded into the limbo of half-forgotten things. Then in the early fall of ’34 the room came to specific attention again.

A young fellow in his early twenties, a college type, arrived in a roadster with just enough baggage for overnight. No reservation or anything. He signed in as Allan Hastings, Princeton, New Jersey. He didn’t have to ask the desk if there were any shows. He knew his own way around. They were kind of full-up that weekend. The only red vacancy-tag in any of the pigeonholes was 913. Dennison gave him that — had no choice.

The guest admitted he’d been turned away from two hotels already. They all had the S.R.O. sign out. “It’s the Big Game, I guess,” he said.

“What Big Game?” Striker was incautious enough to ask.

“Where’ve you been all your life?” he grinned.

Some football game or other, the house dick supposed. Personally a crackling good super-science story still had the edge on twenty-two huskies squabbling over a pig’s inflated hide, as far as he was concerned.

Hastings came back from the game still sober. Or if he’d had a drink it didn’t show. “We lost,” he said casually at the desk on his way up, but it didn’t seem to depress him any. His phone, the operator reported later, rang six times in the next quarter of an hour, all feminine voices. He was apparently getting booked up solid for the rest of the weekend.

Two girls and a fellow, in evening clothes, called for him about nine. Striker saw them sitting waiting for him in the lobby, chirping and laughing their heads off. He came down in about five minutes, all rigged up for the merry-merry, even down to a white carnation in his lapel.

Striker watched them go, half-wistfully. “That’s the life,” he said to the man behind the desk.

“May as well enjoy it while you can,” said Dennison philosophically. “Here today and gone tomorrow.”

Hastings hadn’t come back yet by the time Striker went up and turned in. Not that Striker was thinking about him particularly, but he just hadn’t seen him. He read a swell story about mermaids kidnapping a deep-sea diver, and dropped off to sleep.

The call came through to his room at about four-thirty in the morning. It took him a minute or two to come out of the deep sleep he’d been in.

“Hurry it up, will you, Strike?” Maxon was whining impatiently. “The young guy in nine-thirteen has taken a flier out his window.”

Striker hung up, thinking blurredly, “Where’ve I heard that before — nine-thirteen?” Then he remembered — last year, from the very same room.

He filled the hollow of his hand with cold water from the washstand, dashed it into his eyes, shrugged into some clothing, and ran down the fire stairs at one side of the elevator shaft. That was quicker than waiting for the venerable mechanism to crawl up for him, then limp down again.

Maxon, who was a reformed drunk, gave him a look eloquent of disgust as Striker chased by the desk. “I’m getting off the wagon again if this keeps up — then I’ll have some fun out of all these bum jolts.”

There was more of a crowd this time. The weather was milder and there were more night owls in the vicinity to collect around him and gape morbidly. The kid had fallen farther out into the street than Hopper — he didn’t weigh as much, maybe. He was lying there face down in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross. He hadn’t undressed yet, either. Only his shoes and dinner jacket had been taken off. One strap of his black suspenders had torn off, due to the bodily contortion of the descent or from the impact itself. The white of his shirt was pretty badly changed by now, except the sleeves. He’d had a good-looking face; that was all gone too. They were turning him over as Striker came up.

The same cop was there. He was saying to a man who had been on his way home to read the after-midnight edition of the coming morning’s newspaper: “Lemme have your paper, Mac, will you?”

The man demurred, “I ain’t read it myself yet. I just now bought it.”

The cop said, “You can buy another. We can’t leave him lying like this.”

The thing that had been Hastings was in pretty bad shape. The cop spread the paper, separating the sheets, and made a long paper-covered mound.

The same precinct dick showed up in answer to the routine notification that had been phoned in. His greeting to Striker was as to the dirt under his feet. “You still on the face of the earth?”

“Should I have asked your permission?” answered the hotel man drily.

Eddie Courlander — that, it seemed, was the police dick’s tag — squatted down, looked under the pall of newspapers, shifted around, looked under from the other side.

“Peek-a-boo!” somebody in the small crowd said irreverently.

Courlander looked up threateningly. “Who said that? Gawan, get outa here, wise guys! If it happened to one of youse, you wouldn’t feel so funny.”

Somebody’s night-bound coupé tried to get through, honked imperiously for clearance, not knowing what the obstruction was. The cop went up to it, said: “Get back! Take the next street over. There’s a guy fell out of a window here.”

The coup£ drew over to the curb instead, and its occupants got out and joined the onlookers. One was a girl carrying a night-club favor, a long stick topped with paper streamers. She squealed, “Ooou, ooou-ooou,” in a way you couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.

Courlander straightened, nodded toward Striker. “What room’d he have? C’mon in.”

He didn’t remember that it was the same one. Striker could tell that by the startled way he said, “Oh, yeah, that’s right too!” when he mentioned the coincidence to him.

Perry and the night porter were waiting outside the room door. “I wouldn’t go in until you got here,” the manager whispered virtuously to the cop, “I know you people don’t like anything touched.” Striker, however, had a hunch there was a little superstitious fear at the back of this as well, like a kid shying away from a dark room.

“You’re thinking of murder cases,” remarked Courlander contemptuously. “Open ’er up.”

The light was on again, like the previous time. But there was a great difference in the condition of the room. Young Hastings obviously hadn’t had Hopper’s personal neatness. Or else he’d been slightly lit up when he came in. The daytime clothes he’d discarded after coming back from the game were still strewn around, some on chairs, some on the floor. The St. Anselm didn’t employ maids to straighten the rooms after five in the evening. His patent-leathers lay yards apart as though they had been kicked off into the air and left lying where they had come down. His bat-wing tie was a black snake across the carpet. There was a depression and creases on the counterpane on top of the bed, but it hadn’t been turned down. He had therefore lain down on the bed, but not in it.

On the dresser top stood a glittering little pouch, obviously a woman’s evening bag. Also his carnation, in a glass of water. Under that was the note. Possibly one of the shortest suicide notes on record. Three words. What’s the use?

Courlander read it, nodded, showed it to them. “Well,” he said, “that tells the story.”

He shrugged.

In the silence that followed the remark, the phone rang sharply, unexpectedly. They all jolted a little, even Courlander. Although there was no body in the room and never had been, it was a dead man’s room. There was something macabre to the peal, like a desecration. The police dick halted Striker and the manager with a gesture.

“May be somebody for him,” he said, and went over and took it. He said, “Hello?” in a wary, noncommittal voice. Then he changed to his own voice, said: “Oh. Have you told her yet? Well, send her up here. I’d like to talk to her.”

He hung up, explained: “Girl he was out with tonight is down at the desk, came back to get her bag. He must have been carrying it for her. It has her latchkey in it and she couldn’t get into her own home.”

Perry turned almost unconsciously and looked into the dresser mirror to see if he needed a shave. Then he fastidiously narrowed the neck opening of his dressing gown and smoothed the hair around the back of his head.

The dick shoved Hastings’ discarded clothes out of sight on the closet floor. This was definitely not a murder case, so there was no reason to shock the person he was about to question, by the presence of the clothes.

There was a short tense wait while she was coming up on the slow-motion elevator. Coming up to see someone that wasn’t there at all. Striker said rebukingly, “This is giving it to her awful sudden, if she was at all fond of the guy.” Courlander unwittingly gave an insight into his own character when he said callously, “These girls nowadays can take it better than we can — don’t worry.”

The elevator panel ticked open, and then she came into the square of light thrown across the hall by the open doorway. She was a very pretty girl of about twenty-one or-two, tall and slim, with dark red hair, in a long white satin evening gown. Her eyes were wide with startled inquiry, at the sight of the three of them, but not frightened yet. Striker had seen her once before, when she was waiting for Hastings in the lobby earlier that evening. The other man of the original quartette had come up with her, no doubt for propriety’s sake, and was standing behind her. They had evidently seen the second girl home before coming back here. And the side street where he had fallen was around the corner from the main entrance to the hotel.

She crossed the threshold, asked anxiously, “Is Allan— Is Mr. Hastings ill or something? The desk man said there’s been a little trouble up here.”

Courlander said gently, “Yes, there has.” But he couldn’t make anything sound gentle.

She looked around. She was starting to get frightened now. She said, “What’s happened to him? Where is he?” Then she saw the right half of the window standing open. Striker, who was closest to it, raised his arm and pushed it slowly closed. Then he just looked at her.

She understood, and whimpered across her shoulder, “Oh, Marty!” and the man behind her put an arm around her shoulder to support her.

They sat down. She didn’t cry much — just sat with her head bent looking over at the floor. Her escort stood behind her chair, hands on her shoulders, bucking her up. Courlander gave her a minute or two to pull herself together, then he started questioning. He asked them who they were. She gave her name. The man with her was her brother; he was Hastings’ classmate at Princeton.

He asked if Hastings had had much to drink.

“He had a few drinks,” she admitted, “but he wasn’t drunk. Mart and I had the same number he did, and we’re not drunk.” They obviously weren’t.

“Do you know of any reason, either one of you, why he should have done this?”

The thing had swamped them with its inexplicability, it was easy to see that. They just shook their heads dazedly.

“Financial trouble?”

The girl’s brother just laughed — mirthlessly. “He had a banking business to inherit, some day — if he’d lived.”

“Ill health? Did he study too hard, maybe?”

He laughed again, dismally. “He was captain of the hockey team, he was on the baseball team, he was the bright hope of the swimming team. Why should he worry about studying? Star athletes are never allowed to flunk.”

“Love affair?” the tactless flatfoot blundered on.

The brother flinched at that. This time it was the girl who answered. She raised her head in wounded pride, thrust out her left hand.

“He asked me to marry him tonight. He gave me this ring. That was the reason for the party. Am I so hard to take?”

The police dick got red. She stood up without waiting to ask whether she could go or not. “Take me home, Mart,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’ve got some back crying to catch up on.”

Striker called the brother back again for a minute, while she went on along toward the elevator; shoved the note before him. “Was that his handwriting?”

He pored over it. “I can’t tell, just on the strength of those three words. I’ve never seen enough of it to know it very well. The only thing I’d know for sure would be his signature — he had a cockeyed way of ending it with a little pretzel twist — and that isn’t on there.” Over his shoulder, as he turned to go once more, he added: “That was a favorite catchword of his, though. ‘What’s the use?’ I’ve often heard him use it. I guess it’s him all right.”

“We can check it by the register,” Striker suggested after they’d gone.

The dick gave him a scathing look. “Is it your idea somebody else wrote his suicide note for him? That’s what I’d call service!”

“Is it your idea he committed suicide the same night he got engaged to a production number like you just saw?”

“Is it your idea he didn’t?”

“Ye-es,” said Striker with heavy emphasis, “but I can’t back it up.”

The register showed a variation between the two specimens of handwriting, but not more than could be ascribed to the tension and nervous excitement of a man about to end his life. There wasn’t enough to the note for a good handwriting expert to have got his teeth into with any degree of certainty.

“How long had he been in when it happened?” Striker asked Maxon.

“Not more than half an hour. Bob took him up a little before four.”

“How’d he act? Down in the mouth, blue?”

“Blue nothing, he was tappin’ out steps there on the mosaic, waitin’ for the car to take him up.”

Bob, the night man-of-all-work, put in his two cents’ worth without being asked: “On the way up he said to me, “Think this thing’ll last till we get up there? I’d hate to have it drop me now. I got engaged tonight.”

Striker flashed the police dick a triumphant look. The latter just stood by with the air of one indulging a precocious child. “Now ya through, little boy?” he demanded. “Why don’t you quit trying to make noise like a homicide dick and stick to your own little racket?

“It’s a suicide, see?” continued the police dick pugnaciously, as though by raising his voice he was deciding the argument. “I’ve cased the room, and I don’t care if he stood on his head or did somersaults before he rode up.” He waved a little black pocket-notebook under Striker’s nose. “Here’s my report, and if it don’t suit you, why don’t you take it up with the Mayor?”

Striker said in a humble, placating voice: “Mind if I ask you something personal?”

“What?” said the precinct man sourly.

“Are you a married man?”

“Sure I’m married. What’s that to—?”

“Think hard. The night you became engaged, the night you first proposed to your wife, did you feel like taking your own life afterwards?”

The police dick went “Arrrr!” disgustedly, flung around on his heel, and stalked out, giving the revolving door an exasperated twirl that kept it going long after he was gone.

“They get sore, when you’ve got ’em pinned down, “ Striker remarked wryly.

Perry remonstrated impatiently, “Why are you always trying to make it out worse than it is? Isn’t it bad enough without looking for trouble?”

“If there’s something phony about his death, isn’t it worse if it goes undetected than if it’s brought to light?”

Perry said, pointedly thumbing the still-turning door, “That was the police we just had with us.”

“We were practically alone,” muttered his disgruntled operative.

And so they couldn’t blame it on the Depression this time. That was starting to clear up now. And besides, Allan Hastings had come from well-to-do people. They couldn’t blame it on love either. Perry half-heartedly tried to suggest he hadn’t loved the girl he was engaged to, had had somebody else under his skin maybe, so he’d taken this way to get out of it.

“That’s a woman’s reason, not a man’s,” Striker said disgustedly. “Men don’t kill themselves for love; they go out and get tanked, and hop a train for someplace else, instead!” The others both nodded, probing deep within their personal memories. So that wouldn’t wash either.

In the end there wasn’t anything they could blame it on but the room itself. “That room’s jinxed,” Maxon drawled slurringly. “That’s two in a row we’ve had in there. I think it’s the thirteen on it. You oughta change the number to nine-twelve and a half or nine-fourteen and a half or something, boss.”

That was how the legend first got started.

Perry immediately jumped on him full-weight. “Now listen, I won’t have any of that nonsense! There’s nothing wrong with that room! First thing you know the whole hotel’ll have a bad name, and then where are we? It’s just a coincidence, I tell you, just a coincidence!”

Dennison sold the room the very second day after to a middle-aged couple on a visit to the city to see the sights. Striker and Maxon sort of held their breaths, without admitting it to each other. Striker even got up out of bed once or twice that first night and took a prowl past the door of nine-thirteen, stopping to listen carefully. All he could hear was a sonorous baritone snore and a silvery soprano one, in peaceful counterpoint.

The hayseed couple left three days later, perfectly unharmed and vowing they’d never enjoyed themselves as much in their lives.

“Looks like the spirits are lying low,” commented the deskman, shoving the red vacancy-tag back into the pigeonhole.

“No,” said Striker, “looks like it only happens to singles. When there’s two in the room nothing ever happens.”

“You never heard of anyone committing suicide in the presence of a second party, did you?” the clerk pointed out not unreasonably. “That’s one thing they gotta have privacy for.”

Maybe it had been, as Perry insisted, just a gruesome coincidence. “But if it happens a third time,” Striker vowed to himself, “I’m going to get to the bottom of it if I gotta pull the whole place down brick by brick!”

The Legend, meanwhile, had blazed up, high and furious, with the employees; even the slowest-moving among them had a way of hurrying past Room 913 with sidelong glances and fetish mutterings when any duty called them to that particular hallway after dark. Perry raised hell about it, but he was up against the supernatural now; he and his threats of discharge didn’t stack up at all against that. The penalty for repeating the rumor to a guest was instant dismissal if detected by the management. If.

Then just when the legend was languishing from lack of any further substantiation to feed upon, and was about to die down altogether, the room came through a third time!

The calendar read Friday, July 12th, 1935, and the thermometers all read 90-plus. He came in mopping his face like everyone else, but with a sort of professional good humor about him that no one else could muster just then. That was one thing that tipped Striker off he was a salesman. Another was the two bulky sample cases he was hauling with him until the bellboy took them over. A third was his ability to crack a joke when most people felt like eggs in a frying pan waiting to be turned over.

“Just rent me a bath without a room,” he told Dennison. I’ll sleep in the tub all night with the cold water running over me.”

“I can give you a nice inside room on the fourth.” There were enough vacancies at the moment to offer a choice, these being the dog days.

The newcomer held up his hand, palm outward. “No thanks, not this kind of weather. I’m willing to pay the difference.”

“Well, I’ve got an outside on the sixth, and a couple on the ninth.”

“The higher the better. More chance to get a little circulation into the air.”

There were two on the ninth, 13 and 19. Dennison’s hand paused before 13, strayed on past it to 19, hesitated, came back again. After all, the room had to be sold. This was business, not a kid’s goblin story. Even Striker could see that. And it was nine months now since— There’d been singles in the room since then, too. And they’d lived to check out again.

He gave him 913. But after the man had gone up, he couldn’t refrain from remarking to Striker: “Keep your fingers crossed. That’s the one with the jinx on it.” As though Striker didn’t know that! “I’m going to do a little more than that,” he promised himself privately.

He swung the register around toward him so he could read it. Amos J. Dillberry, City, was inscribed on it. Meaning this was the salesman’s headquarters when he was not on the road, probably. Striker shifted it back again.

He saw the salesman in the hotel dining room at mealtime that evening. He came in freshly showered and laundered, and had a wisecrack for his waiter. That was the salesman in him. The heat certainly hadn’t affected his appetite any. The way he stoked.

“If anything happens,” thought Striker with gloomy foreboding, “that dick Courlander should show up later and try to tell me this guy was depressed or affected by the heat! He should just try!”

In the early part of the evening the salesman hung around the lobby a while, trying to drum up conversation with this and that sweltering fellow-guest. Striker was in there too, watching him covertly. For once he was not a hotel dick sizing somebody up hostilely; he was a hotel dick sizing somebody up protectively. Not finding anyone particularly receptive, Dillberry went out into the street about ten, in quest of a soul mate.

Striker stood up as soon as he’d gone, and took the opportunity of going up to 913 and inspecting it thoroughly. He went over every square inch of it: got down on his hands and knees and explored all along the baseboards of the walls; examined the electric outlets; held matches to such slight fissures as there were between the tiles in the bathroom; rolled back one half of the carpet at a time and inspected the floorboards thoroughly; even got up a chair and fiddled with the ceiling light fixture, to see if there was anything tricky about it. He couldn’t find a thing wrong. He tested the windows exhaustively, working them back and forth until the hinges threatened to come off. There wasn’t anything defective or balky about them, and on a scorching night like this the inmate was bound to leave them wide open and let it go at that, not fiddle around with them in any way during the middle of the night. There wasn’t enough breeze, even this high up, to swing a cobweb.

He locked the room behind him, went downstairs again with a helpless dissatisfied feeling of having done everything that was humanly possible — and yet not having done anything at all, really. What was there he could do?

Dillberry reappeared a few minutes before twelve, with a package cradled in his arm that was unmistakably for refreshment purposes up in his room, and a conspiratorial expression on his face that told Striker’s experienced eyes what was coming next. The salesman obviously wasn’t the solitary drinker type.

Striker saw her drift in about ten minutes later, with the air of a lady on her way to do a little constructive drinking. He couldn’t place her on the guest list, and she skipped the desk entirely — so he bracketed her with Dillberry. He did exactly nothing about it — turned his head away as though he hadn’t noticed her.

Maxon, who had just come on in time to get a load of this, looked at Striker in surprise. “Aren’t you going to do anything about that?” he murmured. “She’s not one of our regulars.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Striker assured him softly. “She don’t know it, but she’s subbing for night watchman up there. As long as he’s not alone, nothing can happen to him.”

“Oh, is that the angle? Using her for a chest protector, eh? But that just postpones the showdown — don’t solve it. If you keep using a spare to ward it off, how you gonna know what it is?”

“That,” Striker had to admit, “is just the rub. But I hate like the devil to find out at the expense of still another life.”

But the precaution was frustrated before he had time to see whether it would work or not. The car came down almost immediately afterwards, and the blonde was still on it, looking extremely annoyed and quenching her unsatisfied thirst by chewing gum with a sound like castanets. Beside her stood Manager Perry, pious determination transforming his face.

“Good night,” he said, politely ushering her off the car.

“Y’couldda at least let me have one quick one, neat, you big overstuffed blimp!” quoth the departing lady indignantly. “After I helped him pick out the brand!”

Perry came over to the desk and rebuked his houseman: “Where are your eyes, Striker? How did you let that come about? I happened to spot her out in the hall waiting to be let in. You want to be on your toes, man.”

“So it looks like he takes his own chances,” murmured Maxon, when the manager had gone up again.

“Then I’m elected, personally,” sighed Striker. “Maybe it’s just as well. Even if something had happened with her up there, she didn’t look like she had brains enough to be able to tell what it was afterwards.”

In the car, on the way to his room, he said, “Stop at nine a minute — and wait for me.” This was about a quarter to one.

He listened outside 13. He heard a page rustle, knew the salesman wasn’t asleep, so he knocked softly. Dillberry opened the door.

“Excuse me for disturbing you. I’m the hotel detective.”

“I’ve been quarantined once tonight already,” said the salesman, but his characteristic good humor got the better of him even now. “You can come in and look if you want to, but I know when I’m licked.”

“No, it isn’t about that.” Striker wondered how to put it. In loyalty to his employer he couldn’t very well frighten the man out of the place. “I just wanted to warn you to please be careful of those windows. The guard-rail outside them’s pretty low, and—”

“No danger,” the salesman chuckled. “I’m not subject to dizzy spells and I don’t walk in my sleep.”

Striker didn’t smile back. “Just bear in mind what I said, though, will you?”

Dillberry was still chortling goodnaturedly. “If he did lose his balance during the night and go out,” thought Striker impatiently, “it would be like him still to keep on sniggering all the way down.”

“What are you worried they’ll do — creep up on me and bite me?” kidded the salesman.

“Maybe that’s a little closer to the truth than you realize,” Striker said to himself mordantly. Looking at the black, night-filled aperture across the lighted room from them, he visualized it for the first time as a hungry, predatory maw, with an evil active intelligence of its own, swallowing the living beings that lingered too long within its reach, sucking them through to destruction, like a diabolic vacuum cleaner. It looked like an upright, open black coffin there, against the cream-painted walls; all it needed was a silver handle at each end. Or like a symbolic Egyptian doorway to the land of the dead, with its severe proportions and pitch-black core and the hot, lazy air coming through it from the nether world.

He was beginning to hate it with a personal hate, because it baffled him, it had him licked, had him helpless, and it struck without warning — an unfair adversary.

Dillberry giggled, “You got a look on your face like you tasted poison! I got a bottle here hasn’t been opened yet. How about rinsing it out?”

“No, thanks,” said Striker, turning away. “And it’s none of my business, I know, but just look out for those windows if you’ve got a little something under your belt later.”

“No fear,” the salesman called after him. “It’s no fun drinking alone. Too hot for that, anyway.”

Striker went on up to his own room and turned in. The night air had a heavy, stagnant expectancy to it, as if it were just waiting for something to happen. Probably the heat, and yet he could hardly breathe, the air was so leaden with menace and sinister tension.

He couldn’t put his mind to the “fantastic” magazine he’d taken to bed with him — he flung it across the room finally. “You’d think I knew, ahead of time!” he told himself scoffingly. And yet deny it as he might, he did have a feeling that tonight was going to be one of those times. Heat jangling his nerves, probably. He put out his light — even the weak bulb gave too much warmth for comfort — and lay there in the dark, chain-smoking cigarettes until his tongue prickled.

An hour ticked off, like drops of molten lead. He heard the hour of three strike faintly somewhere in the distance, finally. He lay there, tossing and turning, his mind going around and around the problem. What could it have been but two suicides, by coincidence both from the one room? There had been no violence, no signs of anyone having got in from the outside.

He couldn’t get the infernal room off his mind; it was driving him nutty. He sat up abruptly, decided to go down there and take soundings. Anything was better than lying there. He put on shirt and pants, groped his way to the door without bothering with the light — it was too hot for lights — opened the door and started down the hall. He left the door cracked open behind him, to save himself the trouble of having to work a key on it when he got back.

He’d already rounded the turn of the hall and was at the fire door giving onto the emergency stairs, when he heard a faint trill somewhere behind him. The ding-a-ling of a telephone bell. Could that be his? If it was— He tensed at the implication. It kept on sounding: it must be his, or it would have been answered by now.

He turned and ran back, shoved the door wide open. It was. It burst into full-bodied volume, almost seemed to explode in his face. He found the instrument in the dark, rasped, “Hello?”

“Strike?” There was fear in Maxon’s voice now. “It’s — it’s happened again.”

Striker drew in his breath, and that was cold too, in all the heat of the stuffy room. “Nine-thirteen?” he said hoarsely. “Nine-thirteen!”

He hung up without another word. His feet beat a pulsing tattoo, racing down the hall. This time he went straight to the room, not down to the street. He’d seen too often what “they” looked like, down below, after they’d grounded. This time he wanted to see what that hell box, that four-walled coffin, that murder crate of a room looked like. Right after. Not five minutes or even two, but right after — as fast as it was humanly possible to get there. But maybe five minutes had passed, already: must have, by the time it was discovered, and he was summoned, and he got back and answered his phone. Why hadn’t he stirred his stumps a few minutes sooner? He’d have been just in time, not only to prevent, but to see what it was — if there was anything to see.

He got down to the ninth, heat or no heat, in thirty seconds flat, and over to the side of the building the room was on. The door was yawning wide open, and the room light was out. “Caught you, have I?” flashed grimly through his mind. He rounded the jamb like a shot, poked the light switch on, stood crouched, ready to fling himself— Nothing. No living thing, no disturbance.

No note either, this time. He didn’t miss any bets. He looked into the closet, the bath, even got down and peered under the bed. He peered cautiously down from the lethal window embrasure, careful where he put his hands, careful where he put his weight.

He couldn’t see the street, because the window was too high up, but he could hear voices down there.

He went back to the hall and stood there listening. But it was too late to expect to hear anything, and he knew it. The way he’d come galloping down like a war horse would have drowned out any sounds of surreptitious departure there might have been. And somehow, he couldn’t help feeling there hadn’t been any, anyway. The evil was implicit in this room itself — didn’t come from outside, open door to the contrary.

He left the room just the way he’d found it, went below finally. Maxon straightened up from concealing something under the desk, drew the back of his hand recklessly across his mouth. “Bring on your heebie-jeebies,” he said defiantly. “See if I care — now!”

Striker didn’t blame him too much at that. He felt pretty shaken himself.

Perry came down one car-trip behind him. “I never heard of anything like it!” he was seething. “What kind of a merry-go-round is this anyway?”

Eddie Courlander had been sent over for the third time. Happened to be the only one on hand, maybe. The whole thing was just a monotonous repetition of the first two times, but too grisly — to Striker, anyway — to be amusing.

“This is getting to be a commutation trip for me,” the police dick announced with macabre humor, stalking in. “The desk lieutenant only has to say, ‘Suicide at a hotel,’ and I say right away, ‘The St. Anselm,’ before he can tell me.”

“Only it isn’t,” said Striker coldly. “There was no note.”

“Are you going to start that again?” growled the city dick. “It’s the same room again, in case you’re interested. Third time in a little over two years. Now, don’t you think that’s rubbing it in a little heavy?”

Courlander didn’t answer, as though he was inclined to think that, but — if it meant siding with Striker — hated to have to admit it.

Even Perry’s professional bias for suicide — if the alternative had to be murder, the bête noire of hotel men — wavered in the face of this triple assault. “It does look kind of spooky.” He faltered, polishing the center of his bald head. “All the rooms below, on that line, have those same floor-length windows, and it’s never taken place in any of the others.”

“Well, we’re going to do it up brown this time and get to the bottom of it!” Courlander promised.

They got off at the ninth. “Found the door open like this, too,” Striker pointed out. “I stopped off here on my way down.”

Courlander just glanced at him, but still wouldn’t commit himself. He went into the room, stopped dead center and stood there looking around, the other two just behind him. Then he went over to the bed, fumbled a little with the covers. Suddenly he spaded his hand under an edge of the pillow, drew it back again.

“I thought you said there was no note?” he said over his shoulder to Striker.

“You not only thought. I did say that.”

“You still do, huh?” He shoved a piece of stationery at him. “What does this look like — a collar button?”

It was as laconic as the first two. I’m going to hell, where it’s cool! Unsigned.

“That wasn’t in here when I looked the place over the first time,” Striker insisted with slow emphasis. “That was planted in here between then and now!”

Courlander flung his head disgustedly. “It’s white, isn’t it? The bedclothes are white too, ain’t they? Why don’t you admit you missed it?”

“Because I know I didn’t! I had my face inches away from that bed, bending down looking under it.”

“Aw, you came in half-asleep and couldn’t even see straight, probably!”

“I’ve been awake all night, wider awake than you are right now!”

“And as for your open door—” Courlander jeered. He bent down, ran his thumbnail under the panel close in to the jamb, jerked something out. He stood up exhibiting a wedge made of a folded-over paper match-cover. “He did that himself, to try to get a little circulation into the air in here.” Striker contented himself with murmuring, “Funny no one else’s door was left open.” But to himself he thought, ruefully, “It’s trying its best to look natural all along the line, like the other times; which only proves it isn’t.”

The city dick answered, “Not funny at all. A woman alone in a room wouldn’t leave her door open for obvious reasons; and a couple in a room wouldn’t, because the wife would be nervous or modest about it. But why shouldn’t a guy rooming by himself do it, once his light was out, and if he didn’t have anything of value in here with him? That’s why his was the only door open like that. The heat drove him wacky; and when he couldn’t get any relief no matter what he did—”

“The heat did nothing of the kind. I spoke to him at twelve and he was cheerful as a robin.”

“Yeah, but a guy’s resistance gets worn down, it frays, and then suddenly it snaps.” Courlander chuckled scornfully. “It’s as plain as day before your eyes.”

“Well,” drawled Striker, “if this is your idea of getting to the bottom of a thing, baby, you’re easily pleased! I’ll admit it’s a little more work to keep digging, than just to write down ‘suicide’ in your report and let it go at that,” he added stingingly.

“I don’t want any of your insinuations!” Courlander said hotly. “Trying to call me lazy, huh? All right,” he said with the air of doing a big favor, “I’ll play ball with you. We’ll make the rounds giving off noises like a detective, if that’s your idea.”

“You’ll empty my house for me,” Perry whined.

“Your man here seems to think I’m laying down on the job.” Courlander stalked out, hitched his head at them to follow.

“You’ve never played the numbers, have you?” Striker suggested stolidly. “No number ever comes up three times in a row. That’s what they call the law of averages. Three suicides from one room doesn’t conform to the law of averages. And when a thing don’t conform to that law, it’s phony.”

“You forgot your lantern slides, perfessor,” sneered the police dick. He went next door and knuckled 915, first gently, then resoundingly.

The door opened and a man stuck a sleep-puffed face out at them. He said, “What-d’ye want? It takes me half the night to work up a little sleep and then I gotta have it busted on me!” He wasn’t just faking being asleep — it was the real article; anyone could see that. The light hurt his eyes; he kept blinking.

“Sorry, pal, “ Courlander overrode him with a businesslike air, “but we gotta ask a few questions. Can we come in and look around?”

“No, ya can’t! My wife’s in bed!”

“Have her put something over her, then, cause we’re comin’!”

“I’m leaving the first thing in the morning!” the man threatened angrily. “You can’t come into my room like this without a search warrant!” He thrust himself belligerently into the door opening.

“Just what have you got to hide, Mr. Morris?” suggested Striker mildly.

The remark had an almost magical effect on him. He blinked, digested the implication a moment, then abruptly swept the door wide open, stepped out of the way.

A woman was sitting up in bed struggling into a wrapper. Courlander studied the wall a minute. “Did you hear any rise of any kind from the next room before you fell asleep?” The man shook his head, said: “No.”

“About how long ago did you fall asleep?”

“About an hour ago,” said the man sulkily.

Courlander turned to the manager. “Go back in there a minute, will you, and knock on the wall with your fist from that side. Hit it good.”

The four of them listened in silence; not a sound came through. Perry returned, blowing his breath on his stinging knuckles.

“That’s all,” Courlander said to the occupants. “Sorry to bother you.” He and Striker went out again. Perry lingered a moment to try to smooth their ruffled plumage.

They went down to the other side of the death chamber and tried 911. “This witch,” said Perry, joining them, “has got ears like a dictaphone. If there was anything to hear, she heard it all right! I don’t care whether you disturb her or not. I’ve been trying to get rid of her for years.”

She was hatchet-faced, beady-eyed, and had a cap with a draw-string tied closely about her head. She seemed rather satisfied at finding herself an object of attention, even in the middle of the night, as though she couldn’t get anyone to listen to her most of the time.

“Asleep?” she said almost boastfully. “I should say not! I haven’t closed my eyes all night.” And then, overriding Courlander’s attempt at getting in a question, she went on: “Mr. Perry, I know it’s late, but as long as you’re here, I want to show you something!” She drew back into the center of the room, crooked her finger at him ominously. “You just come here!”

The three men advanced alertly and jockeyed into position from which they could see.

She swooped down, flung back a corner of the rug, and straightened up again, pointing dramatically. A thin film of dust marked the triangle of flooring that had just been bared. “What do you think of that?” she said accusingly. “Those maids of yours, instead of sweeping the dust out of the room, sweep it under the rug.”

The manager threw his hands up over his head, turned, and went out. “The building could be burning,” he fumed “and if we both landed in the same fireman’s net, she’d still roll over and complain to me about the service!”

Striker lingered behind just long enough to ask her: “You say you’ve been awake all night. Did you hear anything from the room next door, nine-thirteen, during the past half-hour or so?”

“Why, no. Not a sound. Is there something wrong in there?” The avid way she asked it was proof enough of her good faith. He got out before she could start questioning him.

Courlander grinned. “I can find a better explanation even than the heat for him jumping, now,” he remarked facetiously. “He musta seen that next door to him and got scared to death.”

“That would be beautifully simple, wouldn’t it?” Striker said cuttingly. “Let’s give it one more spin,” he suggested. “No one on either side of the room heard anything. Let’s try the room directly underneath — eight-thirteen. The closet and bath arrangement makes for soundproof side-partitions, but the ceilings are pretty thin here.”

Courlander gave the manager an amused look, as if to say, “Humor him!”

Perry, however, rolled his eyes in dismay. “Good heavens, are you trying to turn my house upside-down, Striker? Those are the Youngs, our star guests, and you know it!”

“D’you want to wait until it happens a fourth time?” Striker warned him. “It’ll bring on a panic if it does.”

They went down to the hallway below, stopped before 813. “These people are very wealthy,” whispered the manager apprehensively. “They could afford much better quarters. I’ve considered myself lucky that they’ve stayed with us. Please be tactful. I don’t want to lose them.” He tapped apologetically, with just two fingernails.

Courlander sniffed and said, “What’s that I smell?”

“Incense,” breathed the manager.

“Shhh! Don’t you talk out of turn now.”

There was a rustling sound behind the door, then it opened and a young Chinese in a silk robe stood looking out at them. Striker knew him, through staff gossip and his own observation, to be not only thoroughly Americanized in both speech and manner but an American by birth as well. He was Chinese only by descent. He was a lawyer and made huge sums looking after the interests of the Chinese businessmen down on Pell and Mott Streets — a considerable part of which he lost again betting on the wrong horses, a pursuit he was no luckier at than his average fellow-citizen. He was married to a radio singer. He wore horn-rimmed glasses.

“Hi!” he said briskly. “The Vigilantes! What’s up, Perry?”

“I’m so sorry to annoy you like this,” the manager began to whine.

“Skip it,” said Young pleasantly. “Who could sleep on a night like this? We’ve been taking turns fanning each other in here. Come on in.”

Even Striker had never been in the room before; the Youngs were quality folk, not to be intruded upon by a mere hotel detective. A doll-like creature was curled up on a sofa languidly fanning herself, and a scowling Pekinese nestled on her lap. The woman wore green silk pajamas. Striker took note of a tank containing tropical fish, also a lacquered Buddha on a table with a stick of sandalwood burning before it.

Striker and Courlander let Perry put the question, since being tactful was more in his line. “Have you people been disturbed by any sounds coming from over you?”

“Not a blessed thing,” Mrs. Young averred. “Have we, babe? Only that false-alarm mutter of thunder that didn’t live up to its promise. But that came from outside, of course.”

“Thunder?” said Striker, puzzled. “What thunder? How long ago?”

“Oh, it wasn’t a sharp clap,” Young explained affably. “Way off in the distance, low and rolling. You could hardly hear it all. There was a flicker of sheet-lightning at the same time — that’s how we knew what it was.”

“But wait a minute,” Striker said discontentedly. “I was lying awake in my room, and I didn’t hear any thunder, at any time tonight.”

“There he goes again,” Courlander slurred out of the corner of his mouth to Perry.

“But your room’s located in a different part of the building,” Perry interposed diplomatically. “It looks out on a shaft, and that might have muffled the sound.”

“Thunder is thunder. You can hear it down in a cellar, when there is any to hear,” Striker insisted.

The Chinese couple goodnaturedly refused to take offense. “Well, it was very low, just a faint rolling. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it ourselves, only at the same time there was this far-off gleam of lightning, and it seemed to stir up a temporary breeze out there, like when a storm’s due to break. I must admit we didn’t feel any current of air here inside the room, but we both saw a newspaper or rag of some kind go sailing down past the window just then.”

“No, that wasn’t a—” Striker stopped short, drew in his breath, as he understood what it was they must have seen.

Perry was frantically signaling him to shut up and get outside. Striker hung back long enough to ask one more question. “Did your dog bark or anything, about the time this — promise of a storm’ came up?”

“No, Shan’s very well behaved,” Mrs. Young said fondly. “He whined, though,” her husband remembered. “We thought it was the heat.”

Striker narrowed his eyes speculatively. “Was it right at that same time?”

“Just about.”

Perry and Courlander were both hitching their heads at him to come out, before he spilled the beans. When he had joined them finally, the city dick flared up: “What’d you mean by asking that last one? You trying to dig up spooks, maybe? — hinting that their dog could sense something? All it was is, the dog knew more than they did. It knew that wasn’t a newspaper flicked down past their window. That’s why it whined!”

Striker growled stubbornly. “There hasn’t been any thunder or any lightning at any time tonight — I know what I’m saying! I was lying awake in my room, as awake as they were!”

Courlander eyed the manager maliciously. “Just like there wasn’t any farewell note, until I dug it out from under the pillow.”

Striker said challengingly, “You find me one other person, in this building or outside of it, that saw and heard that thunder and lightning’ the same as they did, and well call it quits!”

“Fair enough. I’ll take you up on that!” Courlander snapped. “It ought to be easy enough to prove to you that that wasn’t a private preview run off in heaven for the special benefit of the Chinese couple.”

“And when people pay two hundred a month, they don’t lie,” said Perry quaintly.

“Well take that projecting wing that sticks out at right angles,” said the dick. “It ought to have been twice as clear and loud out there as down on the eighth. Or am I stacking the cards?”

“You’re not exactly dealing from a warm deck,” Striker said. “If it was heard below, it could be heard out in the wing, and still have something to do with what went on in 913. Why not pick somebody who was out on the streets at the time and ask him? There’s your real test.”

“Take it or leave it. I’m not running around on the street this hour of the night, asking people ‘Did you hear a growl of thunder thirty minutes ago?’ I’d land in Bellevue in no time!”

“This is the bachelor wing,” Perry explained as they rounded the turn of the hall. “All men. Even so, they’re entitled to a night’s rest as well as anyone else. Must you disturb everyone in the house?”

“Not my idea,” Courlander rubbed it in. “That note is still enough for me. I’m giving this guy all the rope he needs, that’s all.”

They stopped outside 909. “Peter the Hermit,” said Perry disgustedly. “Aw, don’t take him. He won’t be any help. He’s nutty. He’ll start telling you all about his gold mines up in Canada.”

But Courlander had already knocked. “He’s not too nutty to know thunder and lightning when he hears it, is he?”

Bedsprings creaked, there was a slither of bare feet, and the door opened.

He was about sixty, with a mane of snow-white hair that fell down to his shoulders, and a long white beard. He had mild blue eyes, with something trusting and childlike about them. You only had to look at them to understand how easy it must have been for the confidence men, or whoever it was, to have swindled him into buying those worthless shafts sunk into the ground up in the backwoods of Ontario.

Striker knew the story well; everyone in the hotel did. But others laughed, while Striker sort of understood — put two and two together. The man wasn’t crazy, he was just disappointed in life. The long hair and the beard. Striker suspected, were not due to eccentricity but probably to stubbornness; he’d taken a vow never to cut his hair or shave until those mines paid off. And the fact that he hugged his room day and night, never left it except just once a month to buy a stock of canned goods, was understandable too. He’d been “stung” once, so now he was leery of strangers, avoided people for fear of being “stung” again. And then ridicule probably had something to do with it too. The way that fool Courlander was all but laughing in his face right now, trying to cover it with his hand before his mouth, was characteristic.

The guest was down on the register as Atkinson, but no one ever called him anything but Peter the Hermit. At irregular intervals he left the hotel, to go “prospecting” up to his mine pits, see if there were any signs of ore. Then he’d come back again disappointed, but without having given up hope, to retire again for another six or eight months. He kept the same room while he was away, paying for it just as though he were in it.

“Can we come in, Pops?” the city dick asked, when he’d managed to straighten his face sufficiently.

“Not if you’re going to try to sell me any more gold mines.”

“Naw, we just want a weather report. You been asleep or awake?”

“I been awake all night, practickly.”

“Good. Now tell me just one thing. Did you hear any thunder at all, see anything like heat-lightning flicker outside your window, little while back?”

“Heat-lightning don’t go with thunder. You never have the two together,” rebuked the patriarch.

“All right, all right,” said Courlander wearily. “Any kind of lightning, plain or fancy, and any kind of thunder?”

“Sure did. Just once, though. Tiny speck of thunder and tiny mite of lightning, no more’n a flash in the pan. Stars were all out and around too. Darnedest thing I ever saw!” Courlander gave the hotel dick a look that should have withered him. But Striker jumped in without waiting. “About this flicker of lightning. Which direction did it seem to come from? Are you sure it came from above and not” — he pointed meaningly downward — “from below your window?” This time it was the Hermit who gave him the withering look. “Did you ever hear of lightning coming from below, son? Next thing you’ll be trying to tell me rain falls up from the ground! “ He went over to the open window, beckoned. “I’ll show you right about where it panned out. I was standing here looking out at the time, just happened to catch it.” He pointed in a northeasterly direction. “There. See that tall building up over thattaway? It come from over behind there — miles away, o’course — but from that part of the sky.”

“Much obliged, Pops. That’s all.”

They withdrew just as the hermit was getting into his stride. He rested a finger alongside his nose, trying to hold their attention, said confidentially: “I’m going to be a rich man one of these days, you wait’n see. Those mines o’mine are going to turn into a bonanza.” But they closed the door on him.

Riding down in the car, Courlander snarled at Striker: “Now, eat your words. You said if we found one other person heard and saw that thunder and sheet-lightning—”

“I know what I said,” Striker answered dejectedly. “Funny — private thunder and lightning that some hear and others don’t.”

Courlander swelled with satisfaction. He took out his notebook, flourished it. “Well, here goes, ready or not! You can work yourself up into a lather about it by yourself from now on. I’m not wasting any more of the city’s time — or my own — on anything as self-evident as this!”

“Self-evidence, like beauty,” Striker reminded him, “is in the eye of the beholder. It’s there for some, and not for others.” Courlander stopped by the desk, roughing out his report. Striker, meanwhile, was comparing the note with Dillberry’s signature in the book. “Why, this scrawl isn’t anything like his John Hancock in the ledger!” he exclaimed.

“You expect a guy gone out of his mind with the heat to sit down and write a nice copybook hand?” scoffed the police dick. “It was in his room, wasn’t it?”

This brought up their former bone of contention. “Not the first time I looked.”

“I only have your word for that.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” flared Striker.

“No, but I think what’s biting you is, you got a suppressed desire to be a detective.”

“I think,” said Striker with deadly irony, “you have too.”

“Why, you—!”

Perry hurriedly got between them. “For heaven’s sake,” he pleaded wearily, “isn’t it hot enough and messy enough, without having a fist fight over it?”

Courlander turned and stamped out into the suffocating before-dawn murk. Perry leaned over the desk, holding his head in both hands. “That room’s a jinx,” he groaned, “a voodoo.”

“There’s nothing the matter with the room — there can’t possibly be,” Striker pointed out. “That would be against nature and all natural laws. That room is just plaster and bricks and wooden boards, and they can’t hurt anyone — in themselves. Whatever’s behind this is some human agency, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it if I gotta sleep in there myself!” He waited a minute, let the idea sink in, take hold of him, then he straightened, snapped his fingers decisively. “That’s the next step on the program! I’ll be the guinea pig, the white mouse! That’s the only way we can ever hope to clear it up.”

Perry gave him a bleak look, as though such foolhardiness would have been totally foreign to his own nature, and he couldn’t understand anyone being willing to take such an eerie risk.

“Because I’ve got a hunch,” Striker went on grimly. “It’s not over yet. It’s going to happen again and yet again, if we don’t hurry up and find out what it is.”

Now that the official investigation was closed, and there was no outsider present to spread rumors that could give his hotel a bad name, Perry seemed willing enough to agree with Striker that it wasn’t normal and natural. Or else the advanced hour of the night was working suggestively on his nerves. “B-but haven’t you any idea at all, just as a starting point,” he quavered, “as to what it could be — if it is anything? Isn’t it better to have some kind of a theory? At least know what to look for, not just shut yourself up in there blindfolded?”

“I could have several, but I can’t believe in them myself. It could be extramural hypnosis — that means through the walls, you know. Or it could be fumes that lower the vitality, depress, and bring on suicide mania — such as small quantities of monoxide will do. But this is summertime and there’s certainly no heat in the pipes. No, there’s only one way to get an idea, and that’s to try it out on myself. I’m going to sleep in that room myself tomorrow night, to get the feel of it. Have I your okay?”

Perry just wiped his brow, in anticipatory horror. “Go ahead if you’ve got the nerve,” he said limply. “You wouldn’t catch me doing it!”

Striker smiled glumly. “I’m curious — that way.”

Striker made arrangements as inconspicuously as possible the next day, since there was no telling at which point anonymity ended and hostile observation set in, whether up in the room itself or down at the registration desk, or somewhere midway between the two. He tried to cover all the externals by which occupancy of the room could be detected without at the same time revealing his identity. Dennison, the day clerk, was left out of it entirely. Outside of Perry himself, he took only Maxon into his confidence. No one else, not even the cleaning help. He waited until the night clerk came on duty at eleven-thirty before he made the final arrangements, so that there was no possibility of foreknowledge.

“When you’re sure no one’s looking — and not until then,” he coached the night clerk, “I want you to take the red vacancy-tag out of the pigeonhole. And sign a phony entry in the register — John Brown, anything at all. We can erase it in the morning. That’s in case the leak is down here at this end. I know the book is kept turned facing you, but there is a slight possibility someone could read it upside-down while stopping by here for their key. One other important thing: I may come up against something that’s too much for me, whether it’s physical or narcotic or magnetic. Keep your eye on that telephone switchboard in case I need help in a hurry. If nine-thirteen flashes, don’t wait to answer. I mayn’t be able to give a message. Just get up there in a hurry.”

“That’s gonna do you a lot of good,” Maxon objected fearfully. “By the time anyone could get up there to the ninth on that squirrel-cage, it would be all over! Why don’t you plant Bob or someone out of sight around the turn of the hall?”

“I can’t. The hall maybe watched. If it’s anything external, and not just atmospheric or telepathic, it comes through the hall. It’s got to. That’s the only way it can get in. This has got to look right, wide open, unsuspecting, or whatever it is won’t strike. No, the switchboard’ll be my only means of communication. I’m packing a Little Friend with me, anyway, so I won’t be exactly helpless up there. Now remember, ‘Mr. John Brown’ checked in here unseen by the human eye sometime during the evening. Whatever it is, it can’t be watching the desk all the time, twenty-four hours a day. And for Pete’s sake, don’t take any nips tonight. Lock the bottle up in the safe. My life is in your hands. Don’t drop it!”

“Good luck and here’s hoping,” said Maxon sepulchrally, as though he never expected to see Striker alive again.

Striker drifted back into the lounge and lolled conspicuously in his usual vantage-point until twelve struck and Bob began to put the primary lights out. Then he strolled into the hotel drug store and drank two cups of scalding black coffee. Not that he was particularly afraid of not being able to keep awake, tonight of all nights, but there was nothing like making sure. There might be some soporific or sedative substance to overcome, though how it could be administered he failed to see.

He came into the lobby again and went around to the elevator bank, without so much as a wink to Maxon. He gave a carefully studied yawn, tapped his fingers over his mouth. A moment later there was a whiff of some exotic scent behind him and the Youngs had come in, presumably from Mrs. Young’s broadcasting station. She was wearing an embroidered silk shawl and holding the Peke in her arm.

Young said, “Hi, fella.” She bowed slightly. The car door opened.

Young said, “Oh, just a minute — my key,” and stepped over to the desk.

Striker’s eyes followed him relentlessly. The register was turned facing Maxon’s way. The Chinese lawyer glanced down at it, curved his head around slightly as if to read it right side up, then took his key, came back again. They rode up together. The Peke started to whine. Mrs. Young fondled it, crooned: “Sh, Shan, be a good boy.” She explained to Striker, “It always makes him uneasy to ride up in an elevator.”

The couple got off at the eighth. She bowed again. Young said, “G’night.” Striker, of course, had no idea of getting off at any but his usual floor, the top, even though he was alone in the car. He said in a low voice to Bob: “Does that dog whine other times when you ride it up?”

“No, sir,” the elevator man answered. “It nevah seem’ to mind until tonight. Mus’ be getting ritzy.”

Striker just filed that detail away: it was such a tiny little thing.

He let himself into his little hole-in-the-wall room. He pulled down the shade, even though there was just a blank wall across the shaft from his window. There was a roof ledge farther up. He took his gun out of his valise and packed it in his back pocket. That was all he was taking with him; no “fantastics” tonight. The fantasy was in real life, not on the printed page.

He took off his coat and necktie and hung them over the back of a chair. He took the pillow off his bed and forced it down under the bedclothes so that it made a longish mound. He’d brought a newspaper up with him. He opened this to double-page width and leaned it up against the head of the bed, as though someone were sitting up behind it reading it. It sagged a little, so he took a pin and fastened it to the woodwork. He turned on the shaded reading lamp at his bedside, turned out the room light, so that there was just a diffused glow. Then he edged up to the window sidewise and raised the shade again, but not all the way, just enough to give a view of the lower part of the bed if anyone were looking down from above — from the cornice, for instance. He always had his reading lamp going the first hour or two after he retired other nights. Tonight it was going to burn all night. This was the only feature of the arrangement Perry would have disapproved of, electricity bills being what they were.

That took care of things up here. He edged his door open, made sure the hallway was deserted, and sidled out in vest, trousers, and carrying the .38. He’d done everything humanly possible to make the thing foolproof, but it occurred to him, as he made his way noiselessly to the emergency staircase, that there was one thing all these precautions would be sterile against, if it was involved in any way, and that was mindreading. The thought itself was enough to send a shudder up his spine, make him want to give up before he’d even gone any further, so he resolutely put it from him. Personally he’d never been much of a believer in that sort of thing, so it wasn’t hard for him to discount it. But disbelief in a thing is not always a guarantee that it does not exist or exert influence, and he would have been the first to admit that.

The safety stairs were cement and not carpeted like the hallways, but even so he managed to move down them with a minimum of sound once his senses had done all they could to assure him the whole shaft was empty of life from its top to its bottom.

He eased the hinged fire door on the ninth open a fraction of an inch, and reconnoitered the hall in both directions; forward through the slit before him, rearward through the seam between the hinges. This was the most important part of the undertaking. Everything depended on this step. It was vital to get into that room unseen. Even if he did not know what he was up against, there was no sense letting what he was up against know who he was.

He stood there for a long time like that, without moving, almost without breathing, narrowly studying each and every one of the inscrutably closed doors up and down the hall. Finally he broke for it.

He had his passkey ready before he left the shelter of the fire door. He stabbed it into the lock of 913, turned it, and opened the door with no more than two deft, quick, almost soundless movements. He had to work fast, to get in out of the open. He got behind the door once he was through, got the key out, closed the door — and left the room dark. The whole maneuver, he felt reasonably sure, could not have been accomplished more subtly by anything except a ghost or wraith.

He took a long deep breath behind the closed door and relaxed — a little. Leaving the room dark around him didn’t make for very much peace of mind — there was always the thought that It might already be in here with him — but he was determined not to show his face even to the blank walls.

He was now, therefore, Mr. John Brown, Room 913, for the rest of the night, unsuspectingly waiting to be — whatever it was had happened to Hopper, Hastings, Dillberry. He had a slight edge on them because he had a gun in his pocket, but try to shoot a noxious vapor (for instance) with a .38 bullet!

First he made sure of the telephone, his one lifeline to the outside world. He carefully explored the wire in the dark, inch by inch from the base of the instrument down to the box against the wall, to make sure the wire wasn’t cut or rendered useless in any way. Then he opened the closet door and examined the inside of that, by sense of touch alone. Nothing in there but a row of empty hangers. Then he cased the bath, still without the aid of light; tried the water faucets, the drains, even the medicine chest. Next he devoted his attention to the bed itself, explored the mattress and the springs, even got down and swept an arm back and forth under it, like an old maid about to retire for the night. The other furniture also got a health examination. He tested the rug with his foot for unevennesses. Finally there remained the window, that mouthway to doom. He didn’t go close to it. He stayed well back within the gloom of the room, even though there was nothing, not even a rooftop or water tank, opposite, from which the interior of this room could be seen; the buildings all around were much lower. It couldn’t tell him anything; it seemed to be just a window embrasure. If it was more than that, it was one up on him.

Finally he took out his gun, slipped the safety off, laid it down beside the phone on the nightstand. Then he lay back on the bed, shoes and all, crossed his ankles, folded his hands under his head, and lay staring up at the pool of blackness over him that was the ceiling. He couldn’t hear a thing, after that, except the whisper of his breathing, and he had to listen close to get even that.

The minutes pulled themselves out into a quarter hour, a half, a whole one, like sticky taffy. All sorts of horrid possibilities occurred to him, lying there in the dark, and made his skin crawl. He remembered the Conan Doyle story, “The Speckled Band,” in which a deadly snake had been lowered through a transom night after night in an effort to get it to bite the sleeper. That wouldn’t fit this case. He’d come upon the scene too quickly each time. You couldn’t juggle a deadly snake — had to take your time handling it. None of his three predecessors had been heard to scream, nor had their broken bodies shown anything but the impact of the fall itself. None of the discoloration or rigidity of snake venom. He’d looked at the bodies at the morgue.

But it was not as much consolation as it should have been, in the dark. He wished he’d been a little braver — one of these absolutely fearless guys. It didn’t occur to him that he was being quite brave enough already for one guy, coming up here like this. He’d stretched himself out in here without any certainty he’d ever get up again alive.

He practiced reaching for the phone and for his gun, until he knew just where they both were by heart. They were close enough. He didn’t even have to unlimber his elbow. He lit a cigarette, but shielded the match carefully, with his whole body turned toward the wall, so it wouldn’t light up his face too much. John Brown could smoke in bed just as well as House Dick Striker.

He kept his eyes on the window more than anything else, almost as if he expected it to sprout a pair of long octopus arms that would reach out, grab him, and toss him through to destruction.

He asked himself fearfully: “Am I holding it off by lying here awake like this waiting for it? Can it tell whether I’m awake or asleep? Is it on me, whatever it is?” He couldn’t help wincing at the implication of the supernatural this argued. A guy could go batty thinking things like that. Still, it couldn’t be denied that the condition of the bed, each time before this, proved that the victims had been asleep and not awake just before it happened.

He thought, “I can pretend I’m asleep, at least, even if I don’t actually go to sleep.” Nothing must be overlooked in this battle of wits, no matter how inane, how childish it seemed at first sight.

He crushed his cigarette out, gave a stage yawn, meant to be heard if it couldn’t be seen, threshed around a little like a man settling himself down for the night, counted ten, and then started to stage-manage his breathing, pumping it slower and heavier, like a real sleeper’s. But under it all he was as alive as a third rail and his heart was ticking away under his ribs like a taximeter.

It was harder to lie waiting for it this way than it had been the other, just normally awake. The strain was almost unbearable. He wanted to leap up, swing out wildly around him in the dark, and yell: “Come on, you! Come on and get it over with!”

Suddenly he tensed more than he was already, if that was possible, and missed a breath. Missed two — forgot all about timing them. Something — what was it? — something was in the air; his nose was warning him, twitching, crinkling, almost like a retriever’s. Sweet, foreign, subtle, something that didn’t belong. He took a deep sniff, held it, while he tried to test the thing, analyze it, differentiate it, like a chemist without apparatus.

Then he got it. If he hadn’t been so worked up in the first place, he would have got it even sooner. Sandalwood. Sandalwood incense. That meant the Chinese couple, the Youngs, the apartment below. They’d been burning it last night when he was in there, a stick of it in front of that joss of theirs. But how could it get up here? And how could it be harmful, if they were right in the same room with it and it didn’t do anything to them?

How did he know they were in the same room with it? A fantastic picture flashed before his mind of the two of them down there right now, wearing gauze masks of filters over their faces, like operating surgeons. Aw, that was ridiculous! They’d been in the room a full five minutes with the stuff — he and Perry and Courlander — without masks and nothing had happened to them.

But he wasn’t forgetting how Young’s head had swung around a little to scan the reversed register when they came in tonight — nor how their dog had whined, like it had whined when Dillberry’s body fell past their window, when — Bob had said — it never whined at other times.

He sat up, pulled off his shoes, and started to move noiselessly around, sniffing like a bloodhound, trying to find out just how and where that odor was getting into the room. It must be at some particular point more than another. It wasn’t just soaking up through the floor. Maybe it was nothing, then again maybe it was something. It didn’t seem to be doing anything to him so far. He could breathe all right, he could think all right. But there was always the possibility that it was simply a sort of smoke-screen or carrier, used to conceal or transport some other gas that was to follow. The sugar-coating for the poison!

He sniffed at the radiator, at the bathroom drains, at the closet door, and in each of the four corners of the room. It was faint, almost unnoticeable in all those places. Then he stopped before the open window. It was much stronger here; it was coming in here!

He edged warily forward, leaned out a little above the low guard-rail, but careful not to shift his balance out of normal, for this very posture of curiosity might be the crux of the whole thing, the incense a decoy to get them to lean out the window. Sure, it was coming out of their open window, traveling up the face of the building, and — some of it — drifting in through his. That was fairly natural, on a warm, still night like this, without much circulation to the air.

Nothing happened. The window didn’t suddenly fold up and throw him or tilt him and pull him after it by sheer optical illusion (for he wasn’t touching it in any way). He waited a little longer, tested it a little longer. No other result. It was, then, incense and nothing more.

He went back into the room again, stretched out on the bed once more, conscious for the first time of cold moisture on his brow, which he now wiped off. The aroma became less noticeable presently, as though the stick had burned down. Then finally it was gone. And he was just the way he’d been before.

“So it wasn’t that,” he dismissed it, and reasoned, “It’s because they’re Chinese that I was so ready to suspect them. They always seen sinister to the Occidental mind.”

There was nothing else after that, just darkness and waiting. Then presently there was a gray line around the window enclosure, and next he could see his hands when he held them out before his face, and then the night bloomed into day and the death watch was over.

He didn’t come down to the lobby for another hour, until the sun was up and there was not the slimmest possibility of anything happening any more — this time. He came out of the elevator looking haggard, and yet almost disappointed at the same time.

Maxon eyed him as though he’d never expected to see him again. “Anything?” he asked, unnecessarily.

“Nothing,” Striker answered.

Maxon turned without another word, went back to the safe, brought a bottle out to him.

“Yeah, I could use some of that,” was all the dick said.

“So I guess this shows,” Maxon suggested hopefully, “that there’s nothing to it after all. I mean about the room being—”

Striker took his time about answering. “It shows,” he said finally, “that whoever it is, is smarter than we gave ’em credit for. Knew enough not to tip their mitts. Nothing happened because someone knew I was in there, knew who I was, and knew why I was in there. And that shows it’s somebody in this hotel who’s at the bottom of it.”

“You mean you’re not through yet?”

“Through yet? I haven’t even begun!”

“Well, what’re you going to do next?”

“I’m going to catch up on a night’s sleep, first off,” Striker let him know. “And after that. I’m going to do a little clerical work. Then when that’s through, I’m going to keep my own counsel. No offense, but” — he tapped himself on the forehead — “only this little fellow in here is going to be in on it, not you nor the manager nor anyone else.”

He started his “clerical work” that very evening. Took the old ledgers for March, 1933, and October, 1934, out of the safe, and copied out the full roster of guests from the current one (July, 1935). Then he took the two bulky volumes and the list of present guests up to his room with him and went to work.

First he canceled out all the names on the current list that didn’t appear on either of the former two rosters. That left him with exactly three guests who were residing in the building now and who also had been in it at the time of one of the first two “suicides.” The three were Mr. and Mrs. Young, Atkinson (Peter the Hermit), and Miss Flobelle Heilbron (the cantankerous vixen in 911). Then he canceled those of the above that didn’t appear on both of the former lists. There was only one name left uncanceled now. There was only one guest who had been in occupancy during each and every one of the three times that a “suicide” had taken place in 913. Atkinson and Miss Heilbron had been living in the hotel in March, 1933. The Youngs and Miss Heilbron had been living in the building in October, 1934. Atkinson (who must have been away the time before on one of his nomadic “prospecting trips”), the Youngs, and Miss Heilbron were all here now. The one name that recurred triply was Miss Flobelle Heilbron.

So much for his “clerical work.” Now came a little research work.

She didn’t hug her room quite as continuously and tenaciously as Peter the Hermit, but she never strayed very far from it nor stayed away very long at a time — was constantly popping in and out a dozen times a day to feed a cat she kept.

He had a word with Perry the following morning, and soon after lunch the manager, who received complimentary passes to a number of movie theaters in the vicinity, in return for giving them advertising space about his premises, presented her with a matinee pass for that afternoon. She was delighted at this unaccustomed mark of attention, and fell for it like a ton of bricks.

Striker saw her start out at two, and that gave him two full hours. He made a bee-line up there and passkeyed himself in. The cat was out in the middle of the room nibbling at a plate of liver which she’d thoughtfully left behind for it. He started going over the place. He didn’t need two hours. He hit it within ten minutes after he’d come into the room, in one of her bureau drawers, all swathed up in intimate wearing apparel, as though she didn’t want anyone to know she had it.

It was well worn, as though it had been used plenty — kept by her at nights and studied for years. It was entitled Mesmerism, Self-Taught; How to Impose Your Will on Others.

But something even more of a giveaway happened while he was standing there holding it in his hand. The cat raised its head from the saucer of liver, looked up at the book, evidently recognized it, and whisked under the bed, ears flat.

“So she’s been practicing on you, has she?” Striker murmured. “And you don’t like it. Well, I don’t either. I wonder who else she’s been trying it on?”

He opened the book and thumbed through it. One chapter heading, appropriately enough was, “Experiments at a Distance.” He narrowed his eyes, read a few words. “In cases where the subject is out of sight, behind a door or on the other side of a wall, it is better to begin with simple commands, easily transferable. 1 — Open the door. 2 — Turn around,” etc.

Well, “jump out of the window” was a simple enough command. Beautifully simple — and final. Was it possible that old crackpot was capable of—? She was domineering enough to be good at it, heaven knows. Perry’d wanted her out of the building years ago, but she was still in it today.

Striker had never believed in such balderdash, but suppose — through some fluke or other — it had worked out with ghastly effect in just this one case?

He summoned the chambermaid and questioned her. She was a lumpy, work-worn old woman, and had as little use for the guest in question as anyone else, so she wasn’t inclined to be reticent. “Boss me?” she answered, “Man, she sure do!”

“I don’t mean boss you out loud. Did she ever try to get you to do her bidding without, uh, talking?”

She eyed him shrewdly, nodded. “Sure nuff. All the time. How you fine out about it?” She cackled uproariously. “She dippy, Mr. Striker, suh. I mean! She stand still like this, look at me hard, like this.” She placed one hand flat across her forehead as if she had a headache. “So nothing happen’, I just mine my business. Then she say: “Whuffo you don’t do what I just tole you?” I say, ‘You ain’t tole me nothing yet.’ She say, ‘Ain’t you got my message? My sum-conscious done tole you, “Clean up good underneath that chair.”

“I say, ‘Yo sum-conscious better talk a little louder, den, cause I ain’t heard a thing — and I got good ears!”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Did you ever feel anything when she tried that stunt? Feel like doing the things she wanted?”

“Yeah man!” she vigorously asserted. “But not what she wanted! I feel like busting dis yere mop-handle on her haid, dass what I feel!”

He went ahead investigating after he’d dismissed her, but nothing else turned up. He was far from satisfied with what he’d got on Miss Heilbron, incriminating as the book was. It didn’t prove anything. It wasn’t strong enough evidence to base an accusation on.

He cased the Youngs’ apartment that same evening, while they were at the wife’s broadcasting studio. This, over Perry’s almost apoplectic protests. And there, as if to confuse the issue still further, he turned up something that was at least as suspicious in its way as the mesmerism handbook. It was a terrifying grotesque mask of a demon, presumably a prop from the Chinese theater down on Doyer Street. It was hanging at the back of the clothes closet, along with an embroidered Chinese ceremonial robe. It was limned in some kind of luminous or phosphorescent paint that made it visible in the gloom in all its bestiality and horror. He nearly jumped out of his shoes himself at first sight of it. And that only went to show what conceivable effect it could have seeming to swim through the darkness in the middle of the night, for instance, toward the bed of a sleeper in the room above. That the victim would jump out of the window in frenzy would be distinctly possible.

Against this could be stacked the absolute lack of motive, the conclusive proof (two out of three times) that no one had been in the room with the victim, and the equally conclusive proof that the Youngs hadn’t been in the building at all the first time, mask or no mask. In itself, of course, the object had as much right to be in their apartment as the mesmerism book had in Miss Heilbron’s room. The wife was in theatrical business, liable to be interested in stage curios of that kind.

Boiled down, it amounted to this: that the Youngs were still very much in the running.

It was a good deal harder to gain access to Peter the Hermit’s room without tipping his hand, since the eccentric lived up to his nickname to the fullest. However, he finally managed to work it two days later, with the help of Perry, the hotel exterminator, and a paperful of red ants. He emptied the contents of the latter outside the doorsill, then Perry and the exterminator forced their way in on the pretext of combating the invasion. It took all of Perry’s cajolery and persuasiveness to draw the Hermit out of his habitat for even half an hour, but a professed eagerness to hear all about his “gold mines” finally turned the trick, and the old man was led around the turn of the hall. Striker jumped in as soon as the coast was clear and got busy.

It was certainly fuller of unaccountable things than either of the other two had been, but on the other hand there was nothing as glaringly suspicious as the mask or the hypnotism book. Pyramids of hoarded canned goods stacked in the closet, and quantities of tools and utensils used in mining operations: sieves, pans, short-handled picks, a hooded miner’s lamp with a reflector, three fishing rods and an assortment of hooks ranging from the smallest to big triple-toothed monsters, plenty of tackle, hip boots, a shotgun, a pair of scales (for assaying the gold that he had never found), little sacks of worthless ore, a mallet for breaking up the ore specimens, and the pair of heavy knapsacks that he took with him each time he set out on his heartbreaking expeditions. It all seemed legitimate enough. Striker wasn’t enough of a mining expert to know for sure. But he was enough of a detective to know there wasn’t anything there that could in itself cause the death of anyone two rooms over and at right angles to this.

He had, of necessity, to be rather hasty about it, for the old man could be heard regaling Perry with the story of his mines just out of sight around the turn of the hall the whole time Striker was in there. He cleared out just as the exterminator finally got through killing the last of the “planted” ants.

To sum up: Flobelle Heilbron still had the edge on the other two as chief suspect, both because of the mesmerism handbook and because of her occupancy record. The Chinese couple came next, because of the possibilities inherent in that mask, as well as the penetrative powers of their incense and the whining of their dog. Peter the Hermit ran the others a poor third. Had it not been for his personal eccentricity and the location of his room, Striker would have eliminated him altogether.

On the other hand, he had turned up no real proof yet, and the motive remained as unfathomable as ever. In short, he was really no further than before he’d started. He had tried to solve it circumstantially, by deduction, and that hadn’t worked. He had tried to solve it first hand, by personal observation, and that hadn’t worked. Only one possible way remained, to try to solve it at second hand, through the eyes of the next potential victim, who would at the same time be a material witness — if he survived. To do this it was necessary to anticipate it, time it, try to see if it had some sort of spacing or rhythm to it or was just hit-or-miss, in order to know more or less when to expect it to recur. The only way to do this was to take the three dates he had and average them.

Striker took the early part of that evening off. He didn’t ask permission for it, just walked out without saying anything to anyone about it. He was determined not to take anyone into his confidence this time.

He hadn’t been off the premises a night since he’d first been hired by the hotel, and this wasn’t a night off. This was strictly business. He had seventy-five dollars with him that he’d taken out of his hard-earned savings at the bank that afternoon. He didn’t go where the lights were bright. He went down to the Bowery.

He strolled around a while looking into various barrooms and “smoke houses” from the outside. Finally he saw something in one that seemed to suit his purpose, went in and ordered two beers.

“Two?” said the barman in surprise. “You mean one after the other?”

“I mean two right together at one time,” Striker told him.

He carried them over to the table at the rear, at which he noticed a man slumped with his head in his arms. He wasn’t asleep or in a drunken stupor. Striker had already seen him push a despairing hand through his hair once.

He sat down opposite the motionless figure, clinked the glasses together to attract the man’s attention.

“This is for you,” Striker said, pushing one toward him.

The man just nodded dazedly, as though incapable of thanks any more. Gratitude had rusted on him from lack of use.

“What’re your prospects?” Striker asked him bluntly.

“None. Nowhere to go. Not a cent to my name. I’ve only got one friend left, and I was figgerin’ on looking him up long about midnight. If I don’t tonight, maybe I will tomorrow night. I surely will one of these nights, soon. His name is the East River.”

“I’ve got a proposition for you. Want to hear it?”

“You’re the boss.”

“How would you like to have a good suit, a clean shirt on your back for a change? How would you like to sleep in a comfortable bed tonight? In a three dollar room, all to yourself, in a good hotel uptown?”

“Mister,” said the man in a choked voice, “if I could do that once again, just once again, I wouldn’t care if it was my last night on earth! What’s the catch?”

“What you just said. It’s liable to be.” He talked for a while, told the man what there was to know, the little that he himself knew. “It’s not certain, you understand. Maybe nothing’ll happen at all. The odds are about fifty-fifty. If nothing does happen, you keep the clothes, the dough, and I’ll even dig up a porter’s job for you. You’ll be that much ahead. Now I’ve given it to you straight from the shoulder. I’m not concealing anything from you, you know what to expect.”

The man wet his lips reflectively. “Fifty-fifty — that’s not so bad. Those are good enough odds. I used to be a gambler when I was young. And it can’t hurt more than the river filling up your lungs. I’m weary of dragging out my days. What’ve I got to lose? Mister, you’re on.” He held out an unclean hand hesitantly. “I don’t suppose you’d want to—” Striker shook it as he stood up. “I never refuse to shake hands with a brave man. Come on, we’ve got a lot to do. We’ve got to find a barber shop, a men’s clothing store if there are any still open, a luggage shop, and a restaurant.”

An hour and a half later a taxi stopped on the corner diagonally opposite the St. Anselm, with Striker and a spruce, well-dressed individual seated in it side by side. On the floor at their feet were two shiny, brand-new valises, containing their linings and nothing else.

“Now there it is over there, on the other side,” Striker said. “I’m going to get out here, and you go over in the cab and get out by yourself at the entrance. Count out what’s left of the money I gave you.”

His companion did so laboriously. “Forty-nine dollars and fifty cents.”

“Don’t spend another penny of it, get me? I’ve already paid the cab fare and tip. See that you carry your own bags in, so they don’t notice how light they are. Remember, what’s left is all yours if—”

“Yeah, I know,” said the other man unabashedly. “If I’m alive in the morning.”

“Got your instructions straight?”

“I want an outside room. I want a ninth floor outside room. No other floor will do. I want a ninth floor outside room with a bath.”

“That’ll get you the right one by elimination. I happen to know it’s vacant. You won’t have to pay in advance. The two bags and the outfit’ll take care of that. Tell him to sign Harry Kramer for you — that what you said your name was? Now this is your last chance to back out. You can still welsh on me if you want — I won’t do anything to you.”

“No,” the man said doggedly. “This way I’ve got a chance at a job tomorrow. The other way I’ll be back on the beach. I’m glad somebody finally found some use for me.”

Striker averted his head, grasped the other’s scrawny shoulder encouragingly. “Good luck, brother — and God forgive me for doing this, if I don’t see you again.” He swung out of the cab, opened a newspaper in front of his face, and narrowly watched over the top of it until the thin but well-dressed figure had alighted and carried the two bags up the steps and into a doorway from which he might never emerge alive.

He sauntered up to the desk a few minutes later himself, from the other direction, the coffee shop entrance. Maxon was still blotting the ink on the signature.

Striker read, Harry Kramer, New York City — 913

He went up to his room at his usual time, but only to get out his gun. Then he came down to the lobby again. Maxon was the only one in sight. Striker stepped in behind the desk, made his way back to the telephone switchboard, which was screened from sight by the tiers of mailboxes. He sat down before the switchboard and shot his cuffs, like a wireless operator on a ship at sea waiting for an SOS. The St. Anselm didn’t employ a night operator. The desk clerk attended to the calls himself after twelve.

“What’s the idea?” Maxon wanted to know.

Striker wasn’t confiding in anyone this time. “Can’t sleep,” he said noncommittally. “Why should you object if I give you a hand down here?”

Kramer was to knock the receiver off the hook at the first sign of danger, or even anything that he didn’t understand or like the looks of. There was no other way to work it than this, roundabout as it was. Striker was convinced that if he lurked about the ninth floor corridor within sight or earshot of the room, he would simply be banishing the danger, postponing it. He didn’t want that. He wanted to know what it was. If he waited in his own room he would be even more cut off. The danger signal would have to be relayed up to him from down here. The last three times had shown him how ineffective that was.

A desultory call or two came through the first hour he was at the board, mostly requests for morning calls. He meticulously jotted them down for the day operator. Nothing from 913.

About two o’clock Maxon finally started to catch on. “You going to work it all night?”

“Yeh,” said Striker shortly. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t let on I’m behind here at all.”

At two thirty-five there were footsteps in the lobby, a peculiar sobbing sound like an automobile tire deflating, and a whiff of sandalwood traveled back to Striker after the car had gone up. He called Maxon guardedly back to him. “The Youngs?”

“Yeah, they just came in.”

“Was that their dog whining?”

“Yeah, I guess it hadda see another dog about a man.” Maybe a dead man, thought Striker morosely. He raised the plug toward the socket of 913. He ought to call Kramer, make sure he stayed awake. That would be as big a giveaway as pussyfooting around the hall up there, though. He let the plug drop back again.

About three o’clock more footsteps sounded. Heavy ones stamping in from the street. A man’s voice sounded hoarsely. “Hey, desk! One of your people just tumbled out, around on the side of the building!”

The switchboard stool went over with a crack, something blurred streaked across the lobby, and the elevator darted crazily upward. Striker nearly snapped the control lever out of its socket, the way he bore down on it. The car had never traveled so fast before, but he swore horribly all the way up. Too late again!

The door was closed. He needled his passkey at the lock, shouldered the door in. The light was on, the room was empty. The window was wide open, the guy was gone. The fifty-fifty odds had paid off — the wrong way.

Striker’s face was twisted balefully. He got out his gun. He was standing there like that, bitter, defeated, granite eyed, the gun uselessly in his hand, when Perry and Courlander came. It would be Courlander again, too!

“Is he dead?” Striker asked grimly.

“That street ain’t quilted,” was the dick’s dry answer. He eyed the gun scornfully. “What’re you doing? Holding the fort against the Indians, sonny boy?”

“I suggest instead of standing there throwing bouquets,” Striker said, “you phone your precinct house and have a dragnet thrown around this building.” He reached for the phone. Courlander’s arm quickly shot out and barred him. “Not so fast. What would I be doing that for?”

“Because this is murder!”

“Where’ve I heard that before?” He went over for the inevitable note. “What’s this?” He read it aloud. “Can’t take it any more.”

“So you’re still going to trip over those things!”

“And you’re still going to try to hurdle it?”

“It’s a fake like all the others were. I knew that all along. I couldn’t prove it until now. This time I can! Finally.”

“Yeah? How?”

“Because the guy couldn’t write! Couldn’t even write his own name! He even had to have the clerk sign the register for him downstairs. And if that isn’t proof there’s been somebody else in this room, have a look at that.” He pointed to the money Kramer had left neatly piled on the dresser top. “Count that! Four-fifty. Four singles and a four-bit piece. He had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents on him when he came into this room, and he didn’t leave the room. He’s down there in his underwear now. Here’s all his outer clothing up here. What became of that forty-five bucks?”

Courlander looked at him. “How do you know so much about it? How do you know he couldn’t write, and just what dough he had?”

“Because I planted him up here myself!” Striker ground out exasperatedly. “It was a setup! I picked him up, outfitted him, staked him, and brought him in here. He ran away to sea at twelve, never even learned his alphabet. I tested him and found out he was telling the truth. He couldn’t write a word, not even his own name! Are you gonna stand here all night or are you going to do something about it?

Courlander snatched up the phone, called his precinct house. “Courlander. Send over a detail, quick! St. Anselm. That suicide reported here has the earmarks of a murder.”

“Earmarks!” scoffed Striker. “It’s murder from head to foot, with a capital M!” He took the phone in turn. “Pardon me if I try to lock the stable door after the nag’s been stolen.

“... H’lo, Maxon? Anyone left the building since this broke, anyone at all? Sure of that? Well, see that no one does. Call in that cop that’s looking after the body. Lock up the secondary exit through the coffee shop. No one’s to leave, no one at all, understand?” He threw the phone back at Courlander. “Confirm that for me, will you? Cops don’t take orders from me. We’ve got them! They’re still in the building some place! There’s no way to get down from the roof. It’s seven stories higher than any of the others around it.”

But Courlander wasn’t taking to cooperation very easily. “All this is based on your say-so that the guy couldn’t write and had a certain amount of money on him when he came up here. So far so good. But something a little more definite than that better turn up. Did you mark the bills you gave him?”

“No, I didn’t,” Striker had to admit. “I wasn’t figuring on robbery being the motive. I still don’t think it’s the primary one, I think it’s only incidental. I don’t think there is any consistent motive. I think we’re up against a maniac.”

“If they weren’t marked, how do you expect us to trace them? Everyone in this place must have a good deal more than just forty-five dollars to their name! If you did plant somebody, why didn’t you back him up, why didn’t you look after him right? How did you expect to be able to help him if you stayed all the way downstairs, nine floors below?”

“I couldn’t very well hang around outside the room. That would’ve been tipping my hand. I warned him, put him on his guard. He was to knock the phone over. That’s all he had to do. Whatever it was, was too quick even for that.”

Two members of the Homicide Squad appeared. “What’s all the fuss and feathers? Where’re the earmarks you spoke of, Courlander? The body’s slated for an autopsy, but the examiner already says it don’t look like anything but just the fall killed him.”

“The house dick here,” Courlander said, “insists the guy couldn’t write and is short forty-five bucks. He planted him up here because he has an idea those other three cases — the ones I covered, you know — were murder.”

They started to question Striker rigorously as though he himself were the culprit. “What gave you the idea it would happen tonight?”

“I didn’t know it would happen tonight. I took a stab at it, that’s all. I figured it was about due somewhere around now.”

“Was the door open or locked when you got up here?”

“Locked.”

“Where was the key?”

“Where it is now — over there on the dresser.”

“Was the room disturbed in anyway?”

“No, it was just like it is now.”

They took a deep breath in unison, a breath that meant they were being very patient with an outsider. “Then what makes you think somebody besides himself was in here at the time?”

“Because that note is here, and he couldn’t write! Because there’s forty-five dollars—”

“One thing at a time. Can you prove he couldn’t write?”

“He proved it to me!”

“Yes, but can you prove it to us?”

Striker caught a tuft of his own hair in his fist, dragged at it, let it go again. “No, because he’s gone now.”

The other one leaned forward, dangerously casual. “You say you warned him what to expect, and yet he was willing to go ahead and chance it, just for the sake of a meal, a suit of clothes, a bed. How do you explain that?”

“He was at the end of his rope. He was about ready to quit anyway.”

Striker saw what was coming.

“Oh, he was? How do you know?”

“Because he told me so. He said he was — thinking of the river.”

“Before you explained your proposition or after?”

“Before,” Striker had to admit.

They blew out their breaths scornfully, eyed one another as though this man’s stupidity was unbelievable. “He brings a guy up from the beach,” one said to the other, “that’s already told him beforehand he’s got doing the Dutch on his mind, and then when the guy goes ahead and does it, he tries to make out he’s been murdered.”

Striker knocked his chair over, stood up in exasperation. “But can’t you get it through your concrete domes? What was driving him to it? The simplest reason in the world! Lack of shelter, lack of food, lack of comfort. Suddenly he’s given all that at one time. Is it reasonable to suppose he’ll cut his own enjoyment of it short, put an end to it halfway through the night? Tomorrow night, yes, after he’s out of here, back where he was again, after the letdown has set in. But not tonight.”

“Very pretty, but it don’t mean a thing. The swell surroundings only brought it on quicker. He wanted to die in comfort, in style, while he was about it. That’s been known to happen too, don’t forget. About his not being able to write, sorry, but” — they flirted the sheet of notepaper before his eyes — “this evidence shows he was able to write. He must have put one over on you. You probably tipped your mitt in giving him your writing test. He caught on you were looking for someone who didn’t write, so he played ’possum. About the money — well, it musta gone out the window with him even if he was just in his underwear, and somebody down there snitched it before the cop came along. No evidence. The investigation’s closed as far as we’re concerned.” They sauntered out into the hall.

“Damn it,” Striker yelled after them, “you can’t walk out of here! You’re turning your backs on a murder!”

“We are walking out,” came back from the hallway. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” The elevator door clicked mockingly shut.

Courlander said almost pityingly. “It looks like tonight wasn’t your lucky night.”

“It isn’t yours either!” Striker bellowed. He swung his fist in a barrel house right, connected with the city dick’s lower jaw, and sent him volplaning back on his shoulders against the carpet.

Perry’s moonfaced and bald head were white as an ostrich egg with long-nursed resentment. “Get out of here!” You’re fired! Bring bums into my house so they can commit suicide on the premises, will you? You’re through!”

“Fired?” Striker gave him a smoldering look that made Perry draw hastily back out of range. “I’m quitting, is what you mean! I wouldn’t even finish the night out in a murder nest like this!” He stalked past the manager, clenched hands in pockets, and went up to his room to pack his belongings.

His chief problem was to avoid recognition by any of the staff, when he returned there nearly a year later. To achieve this after all the years he’d worked in the hotel, he checked in swiftly and inconspicuously. The mustache he had been growing for the past eight months and which now had attained full maturity, effectively changed the lower part of his face. The horn-rimmed glasses, with plain inserts instead of ground lenses, did as much for the upper part, provided his hat brim was tipped down far enough. If he stood around, of course, and let them stare, eventual recognition was a certainty, but he didn’t. He put on a little added weight from the long months of idleness in the furnished room. He hadn’t worked in the interval. He could no doubt have got another berth, but he considered that he was still on a job — even though he was no longer drawing pay for it — and he meant to see it through.

A lesser problem was to get the room itself. If he couldn’t get it at once, he fully intended taking another for a day or two until he could, but this of course would add greatly to the risk of recognition. As far as he could tell, however, it was available right now. He’d walked through the side street bordering the hotel three nights in a row, after dark, and each time that particular window had been unlighted. The red tag would quickly tell him whether he was right or not.

Other than that, his choice of this one particular night for putting the long-premeditated move into effect was wholly arbitrary. The interval since the last time it had happened roughly approximated the previous intervals, and that was all he had to go by. One night, along about now, was as good as another.

He paid his bill at the rooming house and set out on foot, carrying just one bag with him. His radio and the rest of his belongings he left behind in the landlady’s charge, to be called for later. It was about nine o’clock now. He wanted to get in before Maxon’s shift. He’d been more intimate with Maxon than the other clerks, had practically no chance of getting past Maxon unidentified.

He stopped in at a hardware store on his way and bought two articles: a long section of stout hempen rope and a small sharp fruit, or kitchen, knife with a wooden handle. He inserted both objects in the bag with his clothing, right there in the shop, then set out once more. He bent his hat brim a little lower over his eyes as he neared the familiar hotel entrance, that was all. He went up the steps and inside unhesitatingly. One of the boys whom he knew by sight ducked for his bag without giving any sign of recognition. That was a good omen. He moved swiftly to the desk without looking around or giving anyone a chance to study him at leisure. There was a totally new man on now in Dennison’s place, someone who didn’t know him at all. That was the second good omen. And red was peering from the pigeonhole of 913.

His eye quickly traced a vertical axis through it. Not another one in a straight up-and-down line with it. It was easy to work it if you were familiar with the building layout, and who should be more familiar than he?

He said, “I want a single on the side street, where the traffic isn’t so heavy.” He got it the first shot out of the box!

He paid for it, signed A.C. Sherman, New York, and quickly stepped into the waiting car, with his head slightly lowered but not enough so to be conspicuously furtive.

A minute later the gauntlet had been successfully run. He gave the boy a dime, closed the door, and had gained his objective undetected. Nothing had been changed in it. It was the same as when he’d slept in it that first time, nearly two years ago now. It was hard to realize, looking around at it, that it had seen four men go to their deaths. He couldn’t help wondering. “Will I be the fifth?” That didn’t frighten him any. It just made him toughen up inside and promise, “Not without a lotta trouble, buddy, not without a lotta trouble!”

He unpacked his few belongings and put them away as casually as though he were what he seemed to be, an unsuspecting newcomer who had just checked into a hotel. The coiled rope he hid under the mattress of the bed for the time being; the fruit knife and his gun under the pillows.

He killed the next two hours, until the deadline was due; undressed, took a bath, then hung around in his pajamas reading a paper he’d brought up with him.

At twelve he made his final preparations. He put the room light out first of all. Then in the dark he removed the whole bedding, mattress and all, transferred it to the floor, laying bare the framework and bolted-down coils of the bed. He looped the rope around the bed’s midsection from side to side, weaving it inextricably in and out of the coils. Then he knotted a free length to a degree that defied undoing, splicing the end for a counter-knot.

He coiled it three times around his own middle, again knotting it to a point of Houdini-like bafflement. In between there was a slack of a good eight or ten feet. More than enough, considering the ease with which the bed could be pulled about on its little rubber-tired casters, to give him a radius of action equal to the inside limits of the room. Should pursuit through the doorway become necessary, that was what the knife was for. He laid it on the nightstand, alongside his gun.

Then he replaced the bedding, concealing the rope fastened beneath it. He carefully kicked the loose length, escaping at one side, out of sight under the bed. He climbed in, covered up.

The spiny roughness and constriction of his improvised safety-belt bothered him a good deal at first, but he soon found that by lying still and not changing position too often, he could accustom himself to it, even forget about it.

An hour passed, growing more and more blurred as it neared its end. He didn’t try to stay awake, in fact encouraged sleep, feeling that the rope would automatically give him more than a fighting chance, and that to remain awake and watchful might in some imponderable way ward off the very thing he was trying to come to grips with.

At the very last he was dimly conscious, through already somnolent faculties, of a vague sweetness in the air, lulling him even further. Sandalwood incense. “So they’re still here,” he thought indistinctly. But the thought wasn’t sufficient to rouse him to alertness; he wouldn’t let it. His eyelids started to close of their own weight. He let them stay down.

Only once, after that, did his senses come to the surface. The scratchy roughness of the rope as he turned in his sleep. “Rope,” he thought dimly, and placing what it was, dropped off into oblivion again.

The second awakening came hard. He fought against it stubbornly, but it slowly won out, dragging him against his will. It was twofold. Not dangerous or threatening, but mentally painful, like anything that pulls you out of deep sleep. Excruciatingly painful. He wanted to be let alone. Every nerve cried out for continued sleep, and these two spearheads — noise and glare — continued prodding at him, tormenting him.

Then suddenly they’d won out. Thump! — one last cruelly jolting impact of sound, and he’d opened his eyes. The glare now attacked him in turn; it was like needles boring into the pupils of his defenseless, blurred eyes. He tried to shield them from it with one protective hand, and it still found them out. He struggled dazedly upright in the bed. The noise had subsided, was gone, after that last successful bang. But the light — it beat into his brain.

It came pulsing from beyond the foot of the bed, so that meant it was coming through the open bathroom door. The bed was along the side wall, and the bathroom door should be just beyond its foot. He must have forgotten to put the light out in there. What a brilliance! He could see the light through the partly open door, swinging there on its loose, exposed electric-cord. That is to say, he could see the pulsing gleam and dazzle of it, but he couldn’t get it into focus; it was like a sunburst. It was torture, it was burning his sleepy eyeballs out. Have to get up and snap it out. How’d that ever happen anyway? Maybe the switch was defective, current was escaping through it even after it had been turned off, and he was sure he had turned it off.

He struggled out of bed and groped toward it. The room around him was just a blur, his senses swimming with the combination of pitch-blackness and almost solar brilliance they were being subjected to. But it was the bathroom door that was beyond the foot of the bed, that was one thing he was sure of, even in his sleep-fogged condition.

He reached the threshold, groped upward for the switch that was located above the bulb itself. To look upward at it was like staring a blast furnace in the face without dark glasses. It had seemed to be dangling there just past the half open door, so accessible. And now it seemed to elude him, swing back a little out of reach. Or maybe it was just that his fumbling fingers had knocked the loose cord into that strange, evasive motion.

He went after it, like a moth after a flame. Took a step across the threshold, still straining upward after it, eyes as useless as though he were standing directly in a lighthouse beam.

Suddenly the doorsill seemed to rear. Instead of being just a flat strip of wood, partitioning the floor of one room from the other, it struck him sharply, stunningly, way up the legs, just under the kneecaps. He tripped, overbalanced, plunged forward. The rest was hallucination, catastrophe, destruction.

The light vanished as though it had wings. The fall didn’t break; no tiled flooring came up to stop it. The room had suddenly melted into disembodied night. No walls, no floor, nothing at all. Cool air of out-of-doors was rushing upward into the vacuum where the bathroom apparently had been. His whole body was turning completely over, and then over again, and he was going down, down, down. He only had time for one despairing thought as he fell at a sickening speed: “I’m outside the building!”

Then there was a wrench that seemed to tear his insides out and snap his head off at his neck. The hurtling fall jarred short, and there was a sickening, swaying motion on an even keel. He was turning slowly like something on a spit, clawing helplessly at the nothingness around him. In the cylindrical blackness that kept wheeling about him he could make out the gray of the building wall, recurring now on this side, now on that, as he swiveled. He tried to get a grip on the wall with his fingertips, to steady himself, gain a fulcrum! Its sandpapery roughness held no indentation to which he could attach himself even by one wildly searching thumb.

He was hanging there between floors at the end of the rope which had saved his life. There was no other way but to try to climb back along its length, until he could regain that treacherous guard rail up there over his head. It could be done, it had to be. Fortunately the rope’s grip around his waist was automatic. He was being held without having to exert himself, could use all his strength to lift himself hand over hand. That shouldn’t be impossible. It was his only chance, at any rate.

The tall oblong of window overhead through which he had just been catapulted bloomed yellow. The room lights had been put on. Someone was in there. Someone was in there. Someone had arrived to help him. He arched his back, straining to look up into that terrifying vista of night sky overhead — but that now held the warm friendly yellow patch that meant his salvation.

“Grab that rope up there!” he bellowed hoarsely. “Pull me in! I’m hanging out here! Hurry! There isn’t much time!”

Hands showed over the guard-rail. He could see them plainly, tinted yellow by the light behind them. Busy hands, helping hands, answering his plea, pulling him back to the safety of solid ground.

No, wait! Something flashed in them, flashed again. Sawing back and forth, slicing, biting into the rope that held him, just past the guard-rail. He could feel the vibration around his middle, carried down to him like the hum along a wire. Death-dealing hands, completing what had been started, sending him to his doom. With his own knife, that he’d left up there beside the bed!

The rope began to fritter. A little severed outer strand came twining loosely down the main column of it toward him, like a snake. Those hands, back and forth, like a demon fiddler drawing his bow across a single tautened violin string in hurried, frenzied funeral march that spelled Striker’s doom!

“Help!” he shouted in a choked voice, and the empty night sky around seemed to give it mockingly back to him.

A face appeared above the hands and knife, a grinning derisive face peering down into the gloom. Vast mane of snow-white hair and long white beard. It was Peter the Hermit.

So now he knew at last — too late. Too late.

The face vanished again, but the hands, the knife, were busier than ever. There was a microscopic dip, a give, as another strand parted, forerunner of the hurtling, whistling drop to come, the hurtling drop that meant the painful, bone-crushing end of him.

He burst into a flurry of helpless, agonized motion, flailing out with arms and legs — at what, toward what? Like a tortured fly caught on a pin, from which he could never hope to escape.

Glass shattered somewhere around him; one foot seemed to puncture the solid stone wall, go all the way through it. A red-hot wire stroked across his instep and he jerked convulsively.

There was a second preliminary dip, and a wolf howl of joy from above. He was conscious of more yellow light, this time from below, not above. A horrified voice that was trying not to lose its self-control sounded just beneath him somewhere. “Grab this! Don’t lose your head now! Grab hold of this and don’t let go whatever happens!”

Wood, the wood of a chair back, nudged into him, held out into the open by its legs. He caught at it spasmodically with both hands, riveted them to it in a grip like rigor mortis. At the same time somebody seemed to be trying to pull his shoe off his foot, that one foot that had gone in through the wall and seemed to be cut off from the rest of him.

There was a nauseating plunging sensation that stopped as soon as it began. His back went over until he felt like he was breaking in two, then the chair back held, steadied, reversed, started slowly to draw him with it. The severed rope came hissing down on top of him. From above there was a shrill cackle, from closer at hand a woman’s scream of pity and terror. Yellow closed around him, swallowed him completely, took him in to itself.

He was stretched out on the floor, a good solid floor — and it was over. He was still holding the chair in that viselike grip. Young, the Chinese lawyer, was still hanging onto it by the legs, face a pasty gray. Bob, the night porter, was still holding onto his one ankle, and blood was coming through the sock. Mrs. Young, in a sort of chain arrangement, was hugging the porter around the waist. There was broken glass around him on the floor, and a big pool of water with tropical fish floundering in it from the overturned tank. A dog was whining heartbreakingly somewhere in the room. Other than that, there was complete silence.

None of them could talk for a minute or two. Mrs. Young sat squarely down on the floor, hid her face in her hands, and had brief but high-powered hysterics. Striker rolled over and planted his lips devoutly to the dusty carpet, before he even took a stab at getting to his shaky and undependable feet.

“What the hell happened to you?” heaved the lawyer finally, mopping his forehead. “Flying around out there like a bat! You scared the daylights out of me.”

“Come on up to the floor above and get all the details,” Striker invited. He guided himself shakily out of the room, stiff-arming himself against the door frame as he went. His legs still felt like rubber, threatening to betray him.

The door of 913 stood open. In the hallway outside it he motioned them cautiously back. “I left my gun in there, and he’s got a knife with him too, so take it easy.” But he strode into the lighted opening as though a couple of little items like that weren’t stopping him after what he’d just been through and nearly didn’t survive.

Then he stopped dead. There wasn’t anyone at all in the room — any more.

The bed, with the severed section of rope still wound securely around it, was upturned against the window opening, effectively blocking it. The entire bedding, mattress and all, had slid off it, down into the street below. It was easy to see what had happened. The weight of his body, dangling out there, had drawn it first out into line with the opening (and it moved so easily on those rubber-tired casters!), then tipped it over on its side. The mattress and all the encumbering clothes had spilled off it and gone out of their own weight, entangling, blinding, and carrying with them, like a linen avalanche, whatever and whoever stood in their way. It was a fitting finish for an ingenious, heartless murderer.

The criminal caught neatly in his own trap.

“He was too anxious to cut that rope and watch me fall at the same time,” Striker said grimly. “He leaned too far out. A feather pillow was enough to push him over the sill!”

He sauntered over to the dresser, picked up a sheet of paper, smiled a little — not gaily. “My ‘suicide note’!” He looked at Young. “Funny sensation, reading your own farewell note. I bet not many experience it! Let’s see what I’m supposed to have said to myself. I’m at the end of my rope. Queer, how he hit the nail on the head that time! He made them short, always. So there wouldn’t be enough to them to give the handwriting away. He never signed them, either. Because he didn’t know their names. He didn’t even know what they looked like.”

Courlander’s voice sounded outside, talking it over with someone as he came toward the room. “... mattress and all! But instead of him landing on it, which might have saved his life, it landed on him. Didn’t do him a bit of good! He’s gone forever.”

Striker, leaning against the dresser, wasn’t recognized at first.

“Say, wait a minute, where have I seen you before?” the city dick growled finally, after he’d given a preliminary look around the disordered room.

“What a detective you turned out to be!” grunted the shaken Striker rudely.

“Oh, it’s you, is it? Do you haunt the place? What do you know about this?”

“A damn sight more than you!” was the uncomplimentary retort. “Sit down and learn some of it — or are you still afraid to face the real facts?”

Courlander sank back into a chair mechanically, mouth agape, staring at Striker.

“I’m not going to tell you about it,” Striker went on. “I’m going to demonstrate. That’s always the quickest way with kindergarten-age intelligences!” He caught at the overturned bed, righted it, rolled it almost effortlessly back into its original position against the side wall, foot facing directly toward the bathroom door.

“Notice that slight vibration, that humming the rubber-tired casters make across the floorboards? That’s the distant thunder’ the Youngs heard that night. I’ll show you the lightning in just a minute. I’m going over there to his room now. Before I go, just let me point out one thing: the sleeper goes to bed in an unfamiliar room, and his last recollection is of the bathroom door being down there at the foot, the windows over here on this side. He wakes up dazedly in the middle of the night, starts to get out of bed, and comes up against the wall first of all. So then he gets out at the opposite side; but this has only succeeded in disorienting him, balling him up still further. All he’s still sure of, now, is that the bathroom door is somewhere down there at the foot of the bed! Now just watch closely and you’ll see the rest of it in pantomime. I’m going to show you just how it was done.”

He went out and they sat tensely, without a word, all eyes on the open window.

Suddenly they all jolted nervously, in unison. A jumbo, triple-toothed fishhook had come into the room, through the window, on the end of three interlocked rods — a single line running through them from hook to reel. It came in diagonally, from the projecting wing. It inclined of its own extreme length, in a gentle arc that swept the triple-threat hook down to floor level. Almost immediately, as the unseen “fisherman” started to withdraw it, it snagged the lower right-hand foot of the bed. It would have been hard for it not to, with its three barbs pointing out in as many directions at once. The bed started to move slowly around after it, on those cushioned casters. There was not enough vibration or rapidity to the maneuver to disturb a heavy sleeper. The open window was at the foot of the bed, where the bathroom had been before the change.

The tension of the line was relaxed. The rod jockeyed a little until the hook had been dislodged from the bed’s “ankle.” The liberated rod was swiftly but carefully withdrawn, as unobtrusively as it had appeared a moment before.

There was a short wait, horrible to endure. Then a new object appeared before the window opening — flashing refracting light, so that it was hard to identify for a minute even though the room lights were on in this case and the subjects were fully awake. It was a lighted miner’s lamp with an unusually high-powered reflector behind it. In addition to this, a black object of some kind, an old sweater or miner’s shirt, was hooded around it so that it was almost invisible from the street or the windows on the floor below — all its rays beat inward to the room. It was suspended from the same trio of interlocked rods.

It swayed there motionless for a minute, a devil’s beacon, an invitation to destruction. Then it nudged inward, knocked repeatedly against the edge of the window frame, as though to deliberately awaken whoever was within. Then the light coyly retreated a little farther out into the open, but very imperceptibly, as if trying to snare something into pursuit. Then the light suddenly whisked up and was gone, drawn up through space.

With unbelievable swiftness, far quicker than anybody could have come up from the street, the closed door flew back at the touch of Strikers passkey, he darted in, tossed the “suicide note” he was holding onto the dresser, then swiveled the bed back into its original position in the room, scooped up imaginary money.

He stepped out of character and spread his hands conclusively. “See? Horribly simple and — simply horrible.”

The tension broke. Mrs. Young buried her face against her husband’s chest.

“He was an expert fisherman. Must have done a lot of it up around those mines of his,” Striker added. “Probably never failed to hook that bed first cast off the reel. This passkey, that let him in here at will, must have been mislaid years ago and he got hold of it in some way. He brooded and brooded over the way he’d been swindled; this was his way of getting even with the world, squaring things. Or maybe he actually thought these various people in here were spies who came to learn the location of his mines. I don’t know, I’m no psychiatrist. The money was just secondary, the icing to his cake. It helped him pay for his room here, staked him to the supplies he took along on his ‘prospecting’ trips.

“A few things threw me off for a long time. He was away at the time young Hastings fell out. The only possible explanation is that that, alone of the four, was a genuine suicide. By a freak coincidence it occurred in the very room the Hermit had been using for his murders. And this in spite of the fact that Hastings had less reason than any of the others; he had just become engaged. I know it’s hard to swallow, but we’ll have to. I owe you an apology on that one suicide, Courlander.”

“And I owe you an apology on the other three, and to show you I’m not bad loser, I’m willing to make it in front of the whole Homicide Squad of New York.”

Young asked curiously, “Have you any idea of just where those mines of his that caused all the trouble are located? Ontario, isn’t it? Because down at the station tonight a Press Radio news flash came through that oil had been discovered in some abandoned gold-mine pits up there, a gusher worth all kinds of money, and they’re running around like mad trying to find out in whom the title to them is vested. I bet it’s the same ones!”

Striker nodded sadly. “I wouldn’t be surprised. That would be just like one of life’s bum little jokes.”