Black Mask Detective (Vol. 35, No. 2 — November, 1950)

It was their last chance to go home, that six o’clock bus — which gave the small-town boy and girl just four short hours... to wriggle off a homicide hook.

Chapter One

She happened to look down there, at the sidewalk in front of her rooming house, and he was still hanging around, that young fellow who had brought her home. As though he didn’t know where to go, was afraid to go back to wherever it was he belonged.

It got her sore. She thought maybe it was on her account he was hanging around like that. She threw open the window and called down: “Why don’t you go home? What’re you waiting for?”

He looked up at her and didn’t seem to know what to say. Then suddenly a white-roofed patrol car slithered around the corner down at the lower end of the street and started up that way. It wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just cruising; you could tell by its lackadaisical gait. He gave that nervous start again, as he had when coming home with her before, as he had when he’d ducked into her own doorway and taken cover.

First she was going to hail the patrol car and have them investigate and tell him to move on. Afterwards, she was glad she didn’t. All her life she was glad she didn’t. It coasted by, and its occupants didn’t even glance over at the house. Then it turned the upper corner and disappeared again.

She stood there in the open window, waiting for him to come out again. He didn’t. He stayed out of sight inside there some place. Well, he wasn’t going to get away with that. She wasn’t going to have him lurking in the hall down there all night. She crossed the room, threw open the door, went out to the head of the dimly lit stairs and peered down the well.

She saw him down there. He was sitting disconsolately on the stairs, halfway between the ground floor and the first landing. She saw him run his fingers through his hair a couple of times, as though some deep-seated predicament was gnawing at him.

That influenced her a little, softened her original idea of a raucous tirade. “Hey, you down there!” she called. “I want to talk to you a minute! Come up here!”

He sprang to his feet, cleared the intervening three-and-a-half flights in an almost noiseless sprint that showed how welcome the idea of sanctuary was.

She waited until he’d joined her in the upper hall, then returned to her room. “Better come inside a minute, so we won’t be heard. I’ve got some coffee on the stove. You can have a cup with me.” And then as he took off his hat and closed the room door on the two of them, she warned: “But keep your thinking clear. This is no invitation to a two o’clock date!”

“I know,” he said gratefully, edging down beside the table where she’d been writing her letter. “Anyone can tell just by looking at you—”

“You’d be surprised how many nearsighted bozos there are.” She picked up the little tin pot to pour from it, and the heat made the envelope she’d addressed to her mother stick to the bottom of it. He freed it, glanced at it as he was about to put it aside. Then he sort of hitched, as though a drop of the hot liquid she was pouring had spattered him.

“Glen Falls, Iowa? Is that where you’re from?”

“Yeah, why?”

“That’s where I’m from, too! That’s my home town! I only came away six months ago—”

She wasn’t believing him right away. She put down the pot, stared at him searchingly. “What street did you live on there?”

He didn’t have to stop to think twice. “Anderson Avenue, between Pine and Oak, the second house down from—” He stopped short, scrutinizing the aghast look on her face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Oh, my gosh! D’you know where I lived? On Emmet Road! That’s the street behind yours. Our two houses must have been practically back-to-back. How is it we never knew one another back there?”

“We only moved in after my dad died, a little over two years ago.”

“I’d come here to the city by that time,” she said.

“But right now, my folks must already know your folks back there — back-fence neighbors.”

They spoke about it, their hometown, for a while, in low voices, eyes dreamily lidded. The Paramount clock, riding the night sky there outside the window, seemed very far away. They could almost hear the steeple bell of the little white church down by the square toll the hour, instead. “Do you remember the Elite Movie, down on Main Street?”

“And Pop Gregory’s candy store?”

“Folks saying good morning to you from across the street, even if they’d never set eyes on you before in their life. Morning glories on the porch lattices—”

“And look at us now.” Her head dropped into her folded arms on the tabletop.

He watched the shaking of her shoulders a while. Then when she’d looked up again, trying to smile, trying to pretend her eyes weren’t wet, he asked: “Why don’t you go back?”

“Because I didn’t make good. They think I’m in a big Broadway production. I’ve tried to go back, over and over. I’ve priced the fare. I’ve inquired until I know the bus schedule by heart. There’s only one through bus a day and it leaves at six in the morning. The evening one, you have to stop overnight in Chicago. And overnight you lose your nerve.”

She stopped. “I’ve never had the courage to face them all and admit that I’m a flop. Once I even got as far as the terminal, bag all packed, and then I backed out. The city has a half-nelson on me. The city’s bad; it gets you down. Maybe the reason I wasn’t able to give it the slip was because I was all alone. Maybe if I had some one going back home with me, someone to grab me by the arm when I tried to back out, I wouldn’t weaken.”

His face tightened up. “I wish I’d met you yesterday.” He drew an imaginary boundary line across the table with the edge of his hand. She knew what he meant. He’d done something he shouldn’t, since yesterday, and now he couldn’t go back.

She waited a long time, then finally she said, in a husky voice: “They’re after you, aren’t they?”

“They will be, by about nine or ten in the morning.” He started to tell her about it, maybe because she was from his hometown and he had to tell someone. She was the girl next door, the one he would have told his troubles to if they were both still back home. “My name’s Bowder — Frank Bowder.”

“I’m Carol Warren,” she said.

He fumbled in the lining of his coat, unpinned a slit that looked as though it had been made purposely. He worked slim sheaves of rubber-banded currency free through it, with probing fingers. Large bills, twenties and fifties and even some hundreds. It took him some time. He’d evened them out around the hem of his coat so their bulk wouldn’t betray him. When he had them all spread out on the table, there was fourteen hundred and eighty dollars there.

“I had a job as an electrician’s helper until a couple months ago, then I lost it. When I saw that I couldn’t get another right away, I should have gone back home while I still had the fare. Or written them for money. But I was like you, I guess; I hated to admit I was licked. One of the places my boss and I had been called in to do repair work was a swanky private house over on East Seventieth.

“Someone must have left their front-door latch key lying around loose while we were in there working, and it got mixed up with my kit. I carried it out with me by mistake. I meant to drop around the next day and return it to them, but I was on the jump from seven in the morning until late at night, and first thing, I forgot it.

“Then I was laid off, and my money all went, and — well, yesterday I got out my kit and looked it over, thinking maybe I could get something on it at a hock shop. And I saw the key and I remembered where it had come from. So I went back there with it. All that was in my mind was that maybe they’d give me a little work to do, even if it was only tightening a lamp socket.

“I kept ringing away, and no one answered. I started to leave — and how I wish I’d gone home again — and then a delivery boy, who saw me turning away from the door, told me they’d all gone to their country place for the summer the week before. They hadn’t boarded up the house yet, because the oldest son had stayed behind to finish up some business; he was supposed to follow them a week later.

“I walked around the block with the key in my pocket, and I kept fighting the idea. I even tried to drop the key into a rubbish can, to overcome the temptation. But I weakened and went back and picked it up again. I hadn’t eaten right for two weeks, and I hadn’t eaten anything for a whole day. I’d seen the wall safe in there when my boss and I were doing the job — in fact, that was what we’d been wiring up — and I knew by the looks of the house and by the things that were said that it had plenty in it at all times.

“So I came back around the corner, and I rang the bell one last time. The son who had stayed in town was obviously not home. I used the key and I went in. It was my first attempt at anything like that, but it was easy, because my boss and I had worked around that very safe. I didn’t have to fiddle with the combination or anything. I chopped a hole through the plaster in the room behind — the bath — big enough to dislodge one of the wooden panels lining the safe and squeeze the cash box out backwards. It was an old-fashioned safe; only the lid and the frame were steel. The lining that the cash box fitted into was wood.”

He indicated the money on the table ruefully. “I only took the cash; fifteen hundred even. I left the jewelry and the securities they had in it. I cleaned the chipped plaster up off the floor, and I put the cash box back. I spread out the shower curtain a little, so that it covered the hole. He’ll discover it by about nine or ten in the morning, when he swings the curtain around him to take his bath. And probably the errand boy’ll remember seeing some fellow ringing the doorbell there earlier in the evening. I didn’t try to run out of town because—”

He shrugged hopelessly. “If they’re going to get you, they’ll get you.” He sat there staring down at the floor with a puzzled, defeated smile showing dimly on his face.

Something about that got to her. The boy next door, she thought poignantly. He came here to do big things, to lick the town, but now instead, the town had licked him. Back home his folks probably read his letters across the back fence to her folks, bragged about how good he was doing. And her folks read her letters and bragged back. He shouldn’t end up like this, hunted up and down the streets, never knowing when a hand was going to fall on his shoulder from behind and the accusing voice start speaking.

“Listen,” she said, hitching her chair forward. “I’ve got a proposition for you. What d’you say we both go back where we belong, get our second wind, give ourselves another chance? Both get on that six o’clock bus that I was never able to make alone.”

“They’d only be waiting to grab me when I get off at the other end, and I’d drag you into it.”

“Not if nothing’s missing, if nothing’s been taken out. Have you still got the key?”

He felt in his pocket. “Yeah.”

She riffled the money together, thrust it into his hand. “How much have you blown already?”

“Twenty bucks. After I had it, I found out I didn’t know what to do with it. A five-buck meal, and fifteen dollars’ worth of dance checks up at your place—”

She jumped up, ran over to the cot, half-dismantled it, thrust her hand into a gap along the seam, brought something out. “Here’s the twenty bucks to complete the amount you originally took. You can pay me back after we get home and you’re working again. And I’ve still got enough left to take care of both our bus tickets. You can pay me that back, too.”

“I can’t let you get tangled up in it like this—”

She put on her best dancehall armor, sliced her hand at him. “I’m doing the talking, and I don’t want to hear any argument. You got in once. You can get in twice — to put back what you took out the first time. A summer bachelor, living alone like that in the city without his family — there’s an even chance he’s stepping out somewhere, won’t get back till three-thirty or even four.” She hurried over to the window, squinted out at the Paramount clock in the near distance. “Hurry up, you’ve still got time...”

Chapter Two

They came down the rickety stairs one behind the other, he in the lead with her battered, latched valise in his hand. It didn’t weigh much. It had hardly anything in it — just busted hopes. They came out into the slumbering early-morning street and started hurriedly toward the nearest corner, huddled close together, footsteps echoing hollowly in the before-dawn stillness.

“Good-by, Manhattan,” he heard her whisper.

At the corner he stopped, put down the valise a second. “You better go down and wait for me at the bus terminal, while I go over alone about — the other thing.”

She tightened her grip on his arm, as if afraid of losing him. “No, if we separate we’re licked. The city’ll get its dirty work in. I’ll think: ‘Can I trust him?’ You’ll think: ‘Can I trust her?’ We’re staying together. I’m going right over there with you. I’ll wait outside while you go in.”

“Suppose he’s gotten home by now? You’re likely to be picked up for complicity.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. We’re taking it together. Catch a cab; the longer we wait to get it back in that safe, the riskier it gets.”

“On your money?”

She smiled benevolently. “This reformation is on me.”

They sat side by side in the taxi, streaking cross-town through the park, and he squeezed her hand. “Gee, I’m glad I met you tonight, Carol.”

They got out two blocks from their destination, in order not to reveal it to the driver. They covered the remaining distance on foot, one of his long strides to two of hers, turned into East Seventieth from Fifth Avenue, came to a stop again in the sheltering shadows just beyond the corner.

“It’s on this side, just past the second street light down there,” he said guardedly, looking all around to make sure they weren’t observed. “Don’t come any nearer than this, just in case. Wait here with your valise. I’ll be back in no time.”

“Don’t take any chances. If you see any lights, if it looks like he’s gotten back already, don’t go all the way in — just drop the money inside the door. Let him pick it up in the morning.”

He gave his hat brim a tug, moved away from her down the silent street. She watched him go. It was an old-fashioned residence with a high stoop. She saw him glance cautiously around, then turn aside, go up the steps to the entrance. He opened the outer glass doors and went in.

As soon as he had, she picked up her valise and moved after him. She wanted to stay as near him as she could. When she had reached the house, she continued on past it, in order not to draw attention by loitering in front of it.

The vestibule behind the glassed doors showed empty by the reflected street light as she glanced in on her way by. He’d gone in. But suppose the one member of the family who had stayed behind was asleep in there right now? Suppose he woke up, discovered Frank?

She was trying her best to be calm, but her heart was beating unavoidably faster as she sauntered along the sidewalk so slowly, so aimlessly. It was still breaking and entering, even to return the money. Maybe Frank should have mailed it back, instead of coming back in person with it. They hadn’t thought of that; she wished they had, now.

A figure suddenly materialized at the lower corner ahead, on the opposite side from her. It was just barely visible beyond the building line, standing with its back to her. A patrolman on tour. She whisked quickly down into the shelter of one of the shadowed areaways at hand, valise and all. It would have looked too suspicious to be seen loitering there on the sidewalk at such an hour, with a piece of luggage in her hand.

If he came up this way — if Frank should come out while he was still down there... Metal clinked faintly as the policeman opened a call-box to report in. Even the blurred sound of his voice reached her in the still night air. The box clashed shut again. She could hear the scrape of his step crossing over, then it faded.

She peered out, and he’d gone on past along the avenue, was out of sight. She drew a deep breath, stepped up onto the sidewalk again. She turned back the other way, eyeing the inscrutable house front apprehensively as she neared it. What was taking him so long in there? What had gone wrong?

Just as she reached the stoop a second time, the vestibule doors parted noiselessly and he came out. He stood there looking down at her as though he didn’t see her. He started down the steps uncertainly, and broke the short descent twice to stop and look behind him at the doorway he’d just left. He was almost staggering, and when he stood before her at last, his face looked white and taut even in the gloom.

“What’s the matter? What’re you looking so frightened about?” she whispered hoarsely.

He kept staring blankly in a sort of dazed incomprehension. “He’s dead. He’s lying in there — and he’s dead.” She gave a shuddering intake of breath. “Who — the son?”

“I guess so. I never saw him before.” He passed his hand across his brow.

She made a move toward the bottommost step, as if to go up.

“No, don’t you go in there! Stay out of there!” He gripped her roughly, tried to turn her around. “Hurry up, get out of here! I shouldn’t have let you come. Get your own ticket, climb on the bus, and forget you ever saw me.” She struggled passively against his hold. “Carol, will you listen to me? Get out of here before they—”

He pushed her to start her on her way. She only swerved, came in closer. “I only want to know one thing. I only want you to tell me one thing. It wasn’t you, was it — the first time?”

“No, I only took the money. He wasn’t there. I didn’t see him at all. He must have come back since. Carol, you’ve got to believe me. I swear by — the little town we both want to go back to; I swear by the trust that people have in one another there; I give you my word of honor, as we do at home, and you know what that means.”

She smiled sadly up at him in the semi-darkness. “I know you didn’t, Prank. I should have known without asking. The boy next door, he’d never kill anyone.”

“I can’t go back home now. I’m finished. They’ll think I did it. They’d only be waiting to get me at the other end, when I got there. And I’d rather have it happen here than there, where everyone knows me.”

“The city, the city,” she breathed vindictively. She drew herself up defiantly beside him. “We’re not licked yet. The deadline still holds good. We still have until daylight. They haven’t found him yet, or the place’d be full of policemen by this time. No one knows; only us — and whoever did it. Come on, we’re going back in there and see if we can figure this thing out. We’ve got to. It’s our only hope. We’ve fighting for our happiness, Frank; we’re fighting for our lives. And we have until six o’clock to win out.”

They started up the stoop of the house where a man lay dead. A church belfry somewhere around in the dark bonged the hour.

Chapter Three

The misappropriated key shook a little as he fitted it into the door for the third time that night. They went in. The door receded behind them into a blurred grayish square that was the glass panel set into it.

“He’s in the back, on the floor above,” he whispered. “I don’t want to light any lights in the front. They might be seen from outside.”

She could sense rather than see him reaching toward his pocket for something. “No, don’t light any matches, either,” she cautioned. “You lead the way. I’ll follow with my hand on your sleeve.”

She set down the valise close against the baseboard of the wall, where she could find it again readily. They toiled forward in a sort of swimming darkness that was almost liquid, it was so dense. “Step,” he whispered.

She raised her foot, pawed, found the foremost step with it. The rest of the stairs, followed in automatic succession, were no trouble at all. The stairs creaked once or twice under them in the stealthy silence. She wondered if anyone else was in the house, anyone still alive. For all they knew, someone might be. Many a nocturnal murder isn’t discovered until the following day.

“Turn,” he whispered.

His arm swung away, to the left. She kept contact, wheeled her body after it. The stairs had flattened out into a landing. She felt his sleeve go up again, after the brief level space. She found the new flight of steps. Finally they, too, had leveled off. They were in the upstairs hall now.

“Turn,” he breathed.

She felt herself go over a wooden door sill, slightly raised. His sleeve stopped. She stopped beside it. He reached behind her and did something, and she felt a slight current of air as a door closed in back of them.

“Get your eyes ready, here go the lights,” he warned.

She squinted protectively. They flashed on with unbearable brilliance after the long pilgrimage in the dark.

The dead man was the most conspicuous thing in the room.

It was a sort of library or den, by the looks of it. One doorway led into a bedroom, the other, at a spaced distance from it, into a bath. Frank left her to go into the former and draw the heavy, sheltering drapes together over the windows, to keep the light from showing through at the rear of the house.

He didn’t bother with the bath, so it evidently had no outside window. She stood there staring down in grim fascination until he’d rejoined her. She’d never seen anyone dead before.

The man was about thirty-five or so, lying face upward. Even in death he was still immaculately attired in evening clothes, the starched shirt bosom scarcely rumpled at all, the flower in his buttonhole still in place. Only the jacket had sprung open with his backward fall, and a small reddish-black swirl was revealed, marring the expanse of white pique vest.

She had drawn slowly near, crouched down by him, as if drawn by an irresistible compulsion. “Can you tell what — it was done by?” she asked with bated breath.

He saw her arch her hand timidly above the wound, fingers spread as if trying to undo the vest buttons without coming into contact with it.

“Here, I’ll do that for you,” he said quickly. “It looks partly burnt. It must have been a gun.” He undid the buttons, then an inner layer, and peered through without letting her see. He nodded. “Yeah, bullet wound.”

“Then we can be sure there’s no one else in the house right now, or they would have heard it happen.”

He was scanning the room. “Must have taken the gun out with them; there’s no sign of one around.”

“What’s their name — the people who live in this house?”

“Gadsby.”

“This is the son, you said?”

“The older one; there’s another, still a student, away at college somewhere. Then there’s the mother, well-known society woman, and a couple of debutante sisters. Gadsby senior’s dead.”

“If we could get at the motive — was anything taken out of the safe, when you went back to it the second time?”

“I don’t know. After I’d stumbled over him, I tossed the money back in without stopping to look.”

“You said there was some jewelry in it. Let’s make sure, shall we?”

They went into the bathroom. He had hacked a square opening through the plaster, behind where the safe was, large enough to pass the cash box through. The lining of the safe was not steel but only wood paneling. He had removed the rear section of this first, then brought out the box. He did this now a second time and they examined its contents.

“Everything’s still there,” he murmured. “Nothing’s been taken out since I—”

He was ashamed now, she could see. As dangerous a situation as they were in, his face still had time to color at the recollection of his theft. That was all to the good; that was the way the boy next door should feel about a thing like that.

They put it back, turned away. Just as he was about to poke the light out, she glanced behind them into the expensive built-in tub. There was a little piece of paper lying in the bottom of it, a little piece of light-blue paper that looked strangely out of place there.

“What’s that?” She went back, leaned over and picked it up. It was a check. Some one’s personal check. It was made out to Stephen Gadsby for twelve thousand five hundred dollars. It was endorsed by Stephen Gadsby. It was signed by Arthur Holmes. It was stamped, in damning letters diagonally across the face of it: Returned — No Funds.

They exchanged a look. “How’d a thing like that get down in there?” she puzzled.

“It must have been in the cash box, and when I pulled the box out through here, it slipped out into the tub without my noticing it.”

“Then maybe this Holmes came around here tonight to see Gadsby, either to make good on it, or to ask him to delay prosecution until he’d raised the money. Gadsby couldn’t find it when he went to look for it. Holmes thought he was trying to put something over on him. They got into an argument about it, and he shot him.”

“Then, in a way, I’m still responsible for his death.”

“Forget that. He didn’t have to kill him, even if he did think he was holding out the check on him. Have you — looked him over yet?” she asked in a hesitant voice.

He knew what she meant; had he searched him. “No. I didn’t even see him until my foot caught against something. I got out fast.”

She conquered her repulsion, knelt down by the motionless form. “Come on, help me go through his pockets.”

He dropped down on the opposite side. They resembled, grotesquely, two overgrown kids playing with their pails in the sand. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his face he was thinking they didn’t have a chance — not in the time left to them.

She reached out across what lay between them, gripped his arm, shook it imploringly. “We can figure this out, Frank, we can! If we think we can’t, if we start saying we can’t, then we never will!”

A clock on the book shelf behind them went tick-tock, tick-tock mockingly. So fast, so remorselessly. They both kept from turning to look at it by sheer willpower alone.

“Take out everything,” she breathed, “no matter what it is.”

They made a sort of audible inventory as they went along. “Cigarette case, given to him by somebody with the initial B. Two, ticket stubs from the show at the Winter Garden. I wonder who went with him?”

“Business cards. Wait a minute. Holmes was his broker; one of these is his.”

“That’s funny. Clients usually give checks to their brokers, not the other way around. And a bad one at that.”

“Maybe Holmes misappropriated some securities that Gadsby had entrusted to him, and then Gadsby demanded an accounting sooner than he’d expected, so he tried to gain time by foisting a worthless check on him. When that bounced back and Gadsby threatened to have him arrested—”

“There’s motive enough there for Holmes to have shot him,” she agreed. “But we don’t even know for sure that Holmes was here tonight.”

“Somebody was.” He pitched his thumb toward the opposite side of the room, where a low occasional table was placed in a position accessible to two chairs. “See the two glasses, with tan rings around the bottom? See the two cigar butts in a tray, pointed toward each other?” He went over, took a closer look. “They were having an argument, too. One smoker in particular was laboring under some strong emotion; one of the butts is chewed to ribbons.”

She resumed the inventory. “Here’s his wallet. With a snapshot of himself and a girl in riding togs.”

He scanned it. “She’s in the bedroom, too, in a silver frame. Signed Barbara.”

“Then she didn’t do it. If she had, she wouldn’t still be in the bedroom in a silver frame. That’s common sense.”

“That cleans his pockets. And we’re still no further than before.”

“At least we got two names out of thin air. Holmes and Barbara.”

“What’s that?”

They both jumped violently. They were so keyed up, the sound confused them. It seemed to come from two places at once; faintly from the floor below, and a little clearer from somewhere near at hand, both synchronized.

Frank identified it first. “It’s a telephone fitted with one of these muted bells.” He went toward the bedroom entrance, looked in. “There’s an extension in here, ringing in time with the one below. Somebody that doesn’t know what’s happened is trying to get him. I’m... I’m going to take a chance and answer.” He started into the other room.

She flashed after him. Her hand found his wrist, tightened around it, ice-cold. “Don’t! We’re not supposed to be here. You’ll bring the police down on us!”

“And if I don’t answer, that’ll be an even quicker giveaway. He is supposed to be here, but he’s not supposed to be dead. I’ll have to pretend I’m he. Maybe I can get away with it.”

“But suppose it’s someone that knows his voice?”

“I’ll try to make mine sound sleepy, faint, as if I just woke up.” He poised his hand above it, ready. “Stand here by me. And keep your fingers crossed for all you’re worth!”

He lifted it as gingerly as if it were charged with high-voltage electricity. “Hello,” he said with somnolent indistinctness.

Her heart was pounding. He listened a minute. Then he hitched his head toward the dresser, for her benefit. She knew what he meant. This was Barbara now, the girl in the silver frame. And Barbara must know Gadsby pretty well, to ring up at such an hour and have her photo in his bedroom.

His face was white with strain, and she could see a pulse at the base of his throat flickering. He let the caller do most of the talking. He grunted and mouthed little blurred half-words at intervals, to show that he was still listening. “Mmm... yeah... um-hum.”

Once she heard him say, “I just wanted to tease you,” holding his face as far away from the mouthpiece as he could while yet hoping to remain audible. And at the end he said: “Guess I am kind of sleepy, at that. Call you first thing t’morrow.”

Then he hung up with a swift thrust of his hand and sort of wavered there, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.

“Whew! That was horrible!” He grimaced. “Making love to a dead man’s girl, with him lying stark dead in the very next room!” He drew the back of his hand across his mouth remorsefully. “They were engaged,” he said. “She was his fiancee. At least, she’ll have one last good night’s sleep before her heart breaks...”

“Did you manage to find out anything?”

“About that?” He motioned toward the next room. “How could I? She doesn’t know herself yet. She left him at about half-past two or so. She was out with him all evening, and they had a quarrel just before she left him. The call was to try to patch it up with him. She couldn’t sleep, she said, until they’d made up again.”

“Could you gather what the quarrel was about?”

“Yes. She thought she was rehashing the whole thing with him, the way people do, and in that way I got the drift of it. He took her to the Winter Garden, and then afterwards to the Club la Conga. While they were in there, she thought she caught one of the hostesses, a tall redhead, trying to signal to him behind her back. She paid no attention at first.

“Then a few minutes later she was sure she detected the waiter palming a note in his hand. She accused him of flirting, and he insisted he didn’t know the redhead, had never seen her before in his life. He also denied that he’d just received a note from her. And that started their quarrel. He seemed ill at ease, in a hurry to leave, after that. He saw her to her door, and they parted on the outs.”

“If we could only see what was in that note. If we only knew what he did with it!”

“Tore it up into little pieces, I suppose.”

“No, that would be admitting he had gotten one, and he didn’t want her to know it.”

“We’ve turned out all his pockets and it’s not in any of them.”

She tapped the curve of her lower lip thoughtfully. “Frank, you’re a man. Just suppose you were sitting at a table with a girl you were engaged to, and got a note from a stranger you didn’t want her to see. What would you be likely to do with it? Answer quick now, without taking too long to think it out.”

“Reach down under the tablecloth and shove it in my shoe, most likely.”

She turned and went out into the other room without a word. By the time he had followed, she was crouched down by the still form in there, her back toward him, wrenching at one of its extremities. Something thudded. Then she wrenched a second time. She didn’t say anything. She straightened and turned toward him, smoothing a crumpled little slip of paper. She handed it to him when she’d finished reading it. It said:

It was unsigned, of course.

He creased his face disappointedly. “Not much in that. The mere fact that he received the note and tucked it in his shoe doesn’t prove she actually did show up here.”

“She was here, you can count on that,” Carol let him know with a confident nod of her head.

“How do you know?”

“Anyone that would compose such a defiant note and have it smuggled into the hand of a prominent, well-to-do man whom she didn’t even know, under the very nose of the girl he was engaged to marry, wouldn’t let herself be stopped from calling around to see him once she’d made up her mind to do it!”

“That still doesn’t prove she shot him. I think it was Holmes; he had a defalcation of twelve thousand five hundred dollars to cover up.”

“Well, we’ve got to know, or that’ll make it you — and neither one of them! We have about sixty-five minutes left. You take Holmes, and I’ll take her. It’s a toss-up between them.”

“But you don’t even know her name, or where to find her!”

“We know where she works now, and we know she’s a tall redhead. They can’t all be tall redheads down at the La Conga Club.”

“The place’ll be closing by now.”

“The people that can be really helpful will still be around — waiters, scrub-women, washroom attendant. I’ll trace her from there if I have to go over the hairbrushes in the dressing-room one by one for stray red hairs!”

“I thought you said we should stick together in this?”

She was already out at the head of the darkened stairs. “There isn’t time now any more! Here’s how it is. We have these two possibilities now, a man and a woman who both came here tonight — at separate times. One of them’s innocent, one of them killed him. The thing is which? We haven’t time for the trial-and-error system; we can’t fo’low them up one at a time.

“We only have an hour. One of us is sure to be on a wild-goose chase, but the other one won’t be. You take the man. I’ll take the woman. If he turns out to be the guilty one, you’ve got to find some way of getting him back here with you, to face the music. If she does, then I’ll have to.”

“An unarmed girl like you, with just your bare hands? You don’t know what you’re likely to come up against!”

“We haven’t any time to be afraid; we’ll simply have to use our wits. We’ll meet back here no later than a quarter to six. We’ll have to, if we want to make that six o’clock bus.”

As they parted in the darkness just inside the front door, to slip out into the street one at a time, the last thing she said, in a pleading whisper, was: “Frank, if you should get back first, before I do — wait for me. Don’t leave me behind. I want to go home tonight!”

Chapter Four

The hotel, when she had finally located it, had every earmark of one of those shady places catering to card sharps, confidence men, and other fly-by-nights. It held no terrors for her, though; she had met its type of denizen on the dance floor nearly every night for years past. She went up to the desk with the assurance of one who doesn’t expect to be turned away, asked breezily: “What room is Rose in? You know, Rose Beacon?”

The drink-sodden clerk regarded her doubtfully. “Is she expecting you?”

She flung the back of her hand at him familiarly. “Never mind the company manners. She only just left me a little while ago. I dropped by to tell her something I just remembered I forgot to tell her. What’s the matter, is it a secret?”

He grinned, relaxed. “Four-oh-nine, sugar.”

A Cleveland-administration elevator took her up four floors. The sleepy boy wanted to wait, evidently to see if she was admitted or not at this ungodly hour.

“That’s all right,” she assured him breezily as she stepped off the car, “I’ll be there quite some time.”

The power of suggestion is a great thing. Just because she had said so, he closed the door and took the car down again.

She didn’t feel breezy as she walked along the dusty, poorly lighted corridor. Her thoughts were churning while her feet carried her toward the imminent showdown.

“How am I going to get in? Even if I do, how am I going to know; how am I going to find out if she did it? And if she did, how am I going to get her back there, all the way up to East Seventieth, without causing a big commotion, dragging the police into it, involving Frank worse than he is already, getting the two of us held on suspicion for days and weeks on end?”

She didn’t know any of those things. She only knew she was going ahead.

The door numbers were stepping up on her — 07, 08, 09. This was it, facing the corridor at right angles, forming a dead end. It looked so harmless, so impersonal — and yet behind it lurked her whole future destiny, in a shape unseen.

Suddenly, just as she came to a stop, a voice spoke on the other side of it. A woman’s voice.

“He says my girl-friend’s on her way up.” The treacherous clerk must have phoned up, anyway, after she’d left the desk. “There’s no friends of mine in town. I ain’t even told nobody where I’m stopping. I’m gonna see what this is.”

The door swept open before Carol had time to do anything, or even to think what to do, and they stood looking at each other eye to eye, this unknown woman and she. She got a snapshot of a hard, enameled face, a breath of alcohol on the lips, hostile wariness in the remorseless eyes. The wariness became a challenge.

“Wait a minute, who are you? Did you tell them you know me, downstairs? What’s the angle?”

She must have taken a puff of a cigarette just before she opened the door, and had been holding it until now. Smoke suddenly appeared in two malevolent columns. She looked like Satan. She looked like some one it was good to stay away from. She was still willing to have it that way herself — so far. Her arm flexed, to swing the door closed in the girl’s face.

Carol only knew she had to get in, even if it was to her own destruction. She knew she didn’t have a chance. She knew this woman wasn’t even alone in there; she’d just overheard her addressing some one as she neared the door. A crushing sense of failure, of having bungled the thing up, came over her. But that door had to stay open.

“We don’t know each other personally,” she said, borrowing her husky dance-hall voice, “but we’ve got a friend in common, so that makes it even. I’m talking about Mr. Stephen Gadsby.”

A white flash of consternation came over the Beacon woman’s face. But she might have reacted that same way, Carol realized, even if she’d just been up there trying to blackmail him and then walked out again.

Until now, on a strip of wall visible just behind her, there had been a vague outline-shadow discernible. It now moved very subtly, slipped off, disappeared — as though whatever was causing it had withdrawn, was secreting itself.

The woman’s eyes flicked briefly in that offside direction, came back again, as though she had just received some signal. She said tautly, and with an undertone of menace: “Suppose you come in a minute, and let’s hear what’s on your mind.” She widened the door. It wasn’t done hospitably, but commandingly, as though she were saying: Either come in yourself or I’ll reach out and haul you in.

Carol Warren thought: Here I go! Hope I get out of here alive.

She walked slowly past the woman into a tawdry, smoke-stenched room. Behind her the door clamped back into its frame with an air of ominous finality; a key ticked off once against the lock, a second time as it was extracted from the keyhole.

A battle had begun, in which her only weapons were her wits, her nerve, and the feminine intuition that even a little chain-dancer is never without. She knew that every veiled glance she cast around her, every slightest move she made, must be made to count, because there would be no quarter given, no second chances.

The room was empty, apparently. A door, presumably to a bath, was already firmly closed when her eyes first found it, but the knob had just stopped turning, hadn’t quite fallen still yet. If it appeared that she didn’t know too much, the door would stay that way, wouldn’t open again. But if she turned out to know too much— Therein lay her cue — how to find out just what there was to know here, and what too much of it was. That door would tell her.

For the rest, drawers in the shabby bureau were out at narrow, uneven lengths, as though they had recently been emptied. A Gladstone bag stood on the floor at the foot of the bed. The bag was full, ready for removal. A number of objects were strewn about on top of the bureau, as though one or both of the occupants had returned in some turmoil, flung them down on entering. There was a woman’s handbag, a pair of gloves, a crumpled handkerchief. The handbag had been left yawning open, as though the agitated hand that had plunged into it in search of something had been too nervous to close it again.

The Beacon woman sidled in after her, surreptitiously ground something out under her toe; then a moment later, as she turned to face Carol, was holding a half-consumed cigarette in her hand again. Carol pretended she hadn’t noticed it smoking away on the edge of the table; the way a man will often leave a cigarette, a woman never. It really was superfluous. That flexing of the doorknob just now had been enough to tell her all she needed to know.

The woman drew out a chair, so that its back was to the closed door. “Help yourself to a seat.” Even if Carol had wanted to sit somewhere else, she made it the only one available by taking the other one herself. She lowered herself into it as though she were on coiled springs ready to be released at any moment. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“I didn’t say, but you can put me down for Carol Miller.”

“So you know a guy named Gadsby, do you? Tell me, sister, you been over to see him lately?”

Carol said with crafty negligence; “Yeah, I just came from there now.”

The Beacon woman was tautening up inwardly. You could tell it on the outside quite easily, though. Her eyes strayed to some point over and beyond Carol’s shoulder, as if in desperate search of further guidance. Carol carefully avoided following them with her own.

“How’d you find him?”

“Dead,” said Carol quietly.

The Beacon woman didn’t show the right type of surprise; it was surprise, all right, but it was a malevolent surprise, not a startled one. She didn’t answer right away. She evidently wanted to confer with the recent shadow on the wall. Or it did with her. A brief spurt of water from a faucet behind the closed door, turned on, then off again, was the signal to this effect.

“ ’Scuse me a sec,” she said, getting up. “I musta forgotten to tighten the tap in there.”

She slipped in without opening the door very widely. She closed it for a moment after her, so the visitor couldn’t look in.

She had given Carol her chance. Her chance to find whatever there was to find, if there was anything. It was only good for thirty seconds. And it wouldn’t come again.

She only had time to go for one thing. She made it the open handbag on the dresser. It was the obvious place. More than that, it was the only accessible one. The bureau drawers were presumably empty by now. The Gladstone bag was almost certainly locked.

She reared from her chair, darted across the intervening space, put her hand in. Outright evidence she knew she couldn’t expect. That would be asking too much. But something — anything.

And there was nothing. Lipstick, powder, the usual junk. Paper crackled against her probing fingers from one of the side pockets. She drew it hastily out, opened, scanned it. An unpaid hotel bill for $17.89. A man would have left it there. It had no connection with what she was here after.

Some inexplicable instinct cried out to her: Hang onto it. It might come in handy. She flung herself back into her original seat again, did something to one of her stockings, and it was gone.

An instant later the door reopened and the Beacon woman came out again, her instructions set. She sat down, locked her glance with Carol’s, evidently to keep Carol’s attention from wandering. “What’d you do, go there to Gadsby’s alone?”

Carol gave her a knowing look. “Sure, you don’t suppose I brought my grandmother, do you?”

“Well, uh, was there a big mob, lots of cops and excitement? That how you knew he was dead?”

Carol was answering these questions on instinct alone. Until they came out, she didn’t know herself how they were going to come. It was like walking a tightrope — without a balancing pole and with no net under you.

“No, no one knew it yet. I was the first one found him, I guess. See, I had a key to the house. I went in and all the lights were out. I thought maybe he hadn’t got home yet, so I’d wait for him. I went up, and there he was, plugged.”

Rose Beacon moistened her lips. “So then I suppose you beat it out and hollered blue murder?”

“I beat it out, all right, but I didn’t tell a soul. Think I wanted to get mixed up in it? I put the lights out, locked the doors, and left the place just the way it was.”

She had a slight sense of motion behind her. The air may have stirred a little. Or something creaked. There was no time to turn her head. She just had time to think: The door has opened behind me! That shows they did it. I’ve hit the right spot!

That wasn’t going to do her any good now.

Rose Beacon had just asked her one more question; a question she really no longer needed to have answered. “How does your coming here tie into it?”

There was no need for her to worry about the answer; it wasn’t expected of her. Something thick and muffling whipped around her face from behind — a Turkish towel folded into a bandage. She reared up, and one hand was seized by the wrist, drawn behind her. The Beacon women jumped in, secured the other. They were brought together, tied cruelly with long, knotted strips of something, perhaps another towel.

She couldn’t breathe for a moment; the towel covered her whole face. The horrible thought that she was to be smothered to death then and there occurred to her — but she realized dimly they wouldn’t have tied her hands if that had been their purpose. A rough hand fumbled with the towel, lowered it a little, freeing her eyes and nostrils, tied it tightly at the back of her head.

The Beacon woman was still in front of her, talking to someone unseen behind her. “Keep it quiet now; you can hear everything through these walls.” She went over to the phone.

A man’s voice growled from across Carol’s shoulder: “Be careful what you’re doing.”

“I just want to find out what we’re up against. She may be some kind of a stooge, for all we know.” She picked up the phone. “Hello, desk? Tell the party that came with my girl-friend he don’t need to wait any more. She’s staying up here a while. You’ll probably find him hanging around outside on the sidewalk.” She waited a while, spoke again. “No one out there, eh? Well, he probably got tired waiting and left.”

She hung up, turned with a leer to the unseen man holding the writhing girl in his grasp. “It’s okay, Joe. She came here alone, the little fool!”

The man’s voice said: “Get her feet — them high heels are barking my shins.”

The Beacon woman brought out additional lengths of toweling knotted in strips — he’d evidently been occupied in producing them while he was confined in the bath room — knelt down, whipped them dexterously in and around Carol’s ankles. Carol became a helpless sheaf, tied at both ends.

“What’s the play now?” Rose asked.

Her accomplice said: “Don’t you figure we ought to—” He didn’t finish it. Carol’s blood ran cold. He said it as calmly as though they were talking about closing a window or putting out a light.

The Beacon woman answered ruefully: “That’s begging for it, Joe. They are gonna know we were in this room.” She got a sudden inspiration. “Hey, how about the window? Four floors ought to be enough. The three of us get drinking, see, and she had a little acci—”

“No good. We gotta move fast. We’d get hooked here for hours, answering all kinds of police questions. We don’t wanta make their acquaintance that familiarly.”

Rose Beacon raked a distracted hand through her hair. “Why the hell did you have to give him the one-two, anyway? I only went down to the front door and let you in so you could throw a scare into him, get him to pay off. And then you sign off on him!”

“I couldn’t help it. I only pointed it at him to keep him from calling the police like he was threatening to. He grabbed at it. You saw what happened. What should I do, let him take it away from me? What’s the good of talking about it now? The damage is done. It’s this twist we gotta think about now.”

He moved out from behind Carol for the first time, crossed the room, flung open a closet door. She got her first good look at him. He looked like the kind of sewer rat who would frame up a gin marriage between his partner in crime and a wealthy young scion, in hopes of collecting blackmail for years afterwards.

“All right,” he was saying. “We’ll truss her up in here. At least we’ll get a head-start out of it. And if she chirps and we get hauled in, they got nothing on us. We can always say she did it.”

They dragged her into the closet between them like a sack of potatoes. There was a clothes bar running across it at shoulder-height. They tied a sort of halter to her under her arms, of thick sheet and pillow-case strips, wound it around this, left her dangling with her bound feet just inches short of the floor.

“That way she won’t be able to thump them, attract anyone’s attention.”

They closed the door on her. A sudden pall of darkness obliterated everything. She could still hear them through it for a moment or two more, making their last-minute preparations for departure.

“Got the bag?”

“Hey, I’m missing that hotel bill. We gotta pay up before we can get out here. It musta fallen on the floor some place around here.”

“Never mind looking for it now; let it go. They can make out a new one for us at the desk.”

“What’ll we say about her? They seen her come up here.”

“All right, she got tanked and we left her here to sleep it off. Hang up a Don’t Disturb on the door. That’ll keep ’em out longer.”

The outside door closed and they were gone.

She dangled there in the dark, unable even to swing her feet back and try to strike the rear wall of the closet with them; it hurt her already aching, out-of-joint shoulders too much.

They’d never make that bus now. Poor Frank would wait there for her at the Gadsby house, with the dead man to keep him company, until broad daylight came and someone happened on him there, and they arrested him for it. And that would be the end; he’d never be able to clear himself.

After all, Rose and her partner hadn’t left anything half as incriminating over there as that broken wall safe he was responsible for. She could accuse them all she wanted to afterwards, when she was released herself, but it wouldn’t do much good.

Precious minutes ticking by. It must be all of 5:30 now. In another ten minutes at the latest she and Frank should have been starting for the bus terminal. What a fat chance now. She’d be here all day probably.

They might have known the city would outsmart them. It always did. Just a small-town boy and a smalltown girl — what chance did they have? He’d go up the river to the electric chair. And she’d turn into a tough chain-dancer in a treadmill, without a heart, without a soul, without even a dream any more. Precious minutes ticking by, that couldn’t be stopped, couldn’t be called back again...

The outside door suddenly opened furtively. Someone had come in again. For a minute wild hopes flashed through her mind. The hotel clerk, his suspicions aroused? Maybe even Frank himself, who had had time to find out by now that Holmes wasn’t the guilty party? Then a voice spoke guardedly, and her hopes were dashed, turned into freezing horror.

“I shoulda thought of that sooner, before we got all the way downstairs.” It was Rose Beacon’s voice. They’d come back again — maybe to finish her off then and there, right on the spot. “There musta been something there that tipped her off. It’s a cinch she didn’t pull my name and address out of a hat.”

The closet door swung out and blinding light spilled over her, rendering her eyes useless for a moment. She was aware of herself being lowered from the clothes bar, dragged out into the room between the two of them. One of them lowered the towel gag sufficiently so that she could speak. She glimpsed Rose’s hand poised threateningly toward her lips, fingers knotted.

“Now if you try to scream, I’ll let you have one!”

She couldn’t scream, even if she’d wanted to. All she could do was pant and sag exhaustedly against the man who was holding her, overcome by the excruciating strain of the position she’d been in.

“Now quick, no stalling,” Rose went on. “What was it over there at Gadsby’s place that tipped you off I knew him? How’d you know where to find me?”

Carol answered in a muffled but unhesitant voice: “You dropped a hotel bill out of your handbag to the floor. It was lying near him—”

“She’s lying; I could swear I saw it when I got back here.”

“No,” Carol panted. “It was over there; seventeen dollars and eighty-nine cents.”

“Did you bring it with you?” the man asked, giving her a merciless shake.

“No. I left it lying there right where it was.”

“Don’t take her word for it; search her handbag,” he ordered. “If she picked it up in here, she’s still got it.”

The woman did, quickly and thoroughly. “She hasn’t got it.”

“Then we’ll have to go back there and get it! We can’t leave it lying around. It’s as good as a visiting card.” This time it was toward Rose he backed his hand. “You dopey idiot! Why weren’t you more careful?”

“I took it out to show it to him for a build-up, to show him how I needed money; that was before he got tough about it. It’s better this way, don’t you get it, Joe? We’ll take her with us when we go back, and then we’ll—” she hitched her head at Carol with unmistakable meaning — “do it there. Fix it to look like she did it to him, and then bumped herself off. That way we’re in the clear.”

“How’ll we get her past the desk?”

“She’s pie-eyed — that’s what we told him just now when we came down without her, ain’t it? We’re helping her home. Leave her hands tied the way they are, just loosen her feet.” She took off her own coat, slung it loosely around Carol’s shoulders, covering the unnatural rigidity of her arms.

The man brought out something from one of his pockets, slipped a hand underneath the enshrouding coat, ground something round and hard into her spine. “If you let out a peep, this goes off into you. And don’t think I’m kidding!”

She knew he wasn’t. But the point was, why should she cry out on her way through the lobby below or outside in the street, when she was getting them to go back to the murder house and face their crime? The only difference was, now they had the upper hand, and it would probably end in her own death.

“Keep your head down,” Rose Beacon cautioned viciously, and got a grip at the back of her neck in addition to the gun muzzle her partner was holding centered against her backbone, forcing her to bend it downward. She made it look as though she was supporting her. In place of the towel gag she solicitously held a handkerchief pressed to Carol’s mouth with her other hand, as though she were on the verge of being ill.

They swayed out through the lobby with her. “She’ll be all right as soon as we get some black coffee into her,” Rose called out cheerfully to the clerk. He snickered understandingly.

They evidently had a car of their own. They maneuvered her down the street to where it had been waiting in readiness for their own getaway, squeezed her into the front seat between the two of them. Rose took over the gun, kept it prodded into her side. Joe took the wheel.

Carol sat there docilely, made no move to resist. She wanted them to get there unhindered as much as they wanted to themselves.

They braked two or three doors down from the Gadsby house, in the before-dawn desolation of the street. They couldn’t leave the car at the corner, as Frank and she had the taxi, because they had her to convey. Joe cut the ignition, watchfully scanned the dark, lifeless house for a minute.

“Still good for another quick trip in and out,” he commented finally.

Her heart was pounding wildly as they hauled her out to the sidewalk, led her over to it with quick looks around to make sure no one was in sight, hustled her up the stoop into the concealment of the vestibule.

“Made it,” Rose breathed relievedly.

He tried the door cautiously, and it fell back before them.

“I must have left it that way when I scooted out,” Carol said quickly.

Did that mean Frank had gotten back yet? But if he had, there was no light showing to indicate it. Maybe it had actually been that way ever since she and Frank had left the last time. Or maybe someone else had found their way in.

They thrust her inside between them. She’d played the game through to the end. And this was the end, now. Once they closed this door on her, every second was going to count. If Frank came back even five minutes from now, he’d be too late; he’d find her there — like Gadsby was. And if he came back now, it would only mean the two of them, instead of just one. They were armed and he wasn’t.

The darkness inside the house was as impenetrable as ever. Rose said the same thing Carol herself had the time before:

“Don’t light the lights until we get up there.”

He lit a match instead; dwarfed it in the depths of his two hands to an orange-red pinpoint. He led the way with it. Carol came at his heels, her hands still bound, coat still loose around her shoulders, prodded on by the gun. The Beacon woman came last. The silence around them was overpowering.

Suppose Frank was waiting up there in the room, with the lights out? Suppose he heard them, came forward now, saying, “Carol, is that you?” She would be bringing death on him. And if he wasn’t up there, then she had brought death on herself.

What was the difference either way? It was too late now; they’d missed the bus. The city was the real victor.

The opening to the death room loomed black and empty before them in the tiny rays of Joe’s match. He whipped it out and for a moment there was nothing. Then he lit the room lights, and they shoved her in there with the dead man. Into the emptiness where there was no Frank to offer help.

Joe said: “All right, now hurry up and get it. Let’s do what we have to, and get out of here fast!”

Rose Beacon scanned the floor, turned on Carol menacingly. “Well, where is it? I don’t see it. Where’d you find it?” She was still holding the gun in her hand.

The man said, with the calm voice of murder: “All right, give me the gun; I’ll use it. No one heard the shot the first time; no one’ll hear it this time, either.” He raised the gun, steadied it on Carol in readiness.

It took a second or two, but her thoughts took hours. Frank wasn’t here. He wasn’t in the house. He hadn’t got back yet. She was going to die now. The clock said—

Chapter Five

That was the last thing she saw. She closed her eyes as she turned back to face the winged steel death. Gadsby was lying over to her left. Joe was standing midway between her and the unlighted bedroom door, with his back to it. Rose was crouched somewhere behind her, still in quest of the errant hotel bill, looking under tables and behind chairs. Carol closed her eyes and waited.

The roar of the gun, when it came, was louder than she’d thought it would be. The pain was less — there wasn’t any. Her eyelids sprang open, and the gun, still tracing a smoky line through the air, was zig-zagging crazily upward in Joe’s hand. Another hand had his collared by the wrist, was hoisting it from behind. And the crook of an arm was wrapped around his neck, elbow pointing toward her.

Joe’s face was contorted, suffused with red, in the throes of the struggle. And another face behind his, glimpsed briefly over his shoulder, was equally contorted, equally blood-darkened. But not too much so as to be recognizable. The boy next door, fighting for the two of them — the way the boy next door should.

Rose flashed by her from the rear, an andiron she’d snatched from before the fireplace upraised high above her head. But a small-town girl can be as quick as a city girl. Carol’s hands were tied; she couldn’t reach out and grab her. She slithered one leg out until it was almost calf-low to the floor, deftly spoked it between the two scampering feet.

Rose went down face-first in a rocking-horse fall, and the andiron went looping harmlessly through the air. Carol flung herself down across her, knelt on her with both knees at once, pinning her flat. Every time Rose tried to squirm free and throw her off, Carol brought up one knee and slammed it down again with redoubled force.

Meanwhile the two men had toppled over to the floor. Joe was on top, but facing the wrong way. Frank still had the half-nelson around his neck from underneath, and was still choking off the gun-hand at the wrist. They suddenly rolled over. Frank let go the half-nelson, drew back that arm, shot it forward again against the side of his head. He had to do it a second time, and then he stood up and brought the gun up with him.

“I’ll be right with you, Carol,” he said. He stood watchfully over Joe for a second. Joe twitched a little, raised a dazed hand to the side of his head, but stayed flat.

Frank picked up something from Gadsby’s desk, came around behind her, sawed her hands free. Both of them were still breathing too fast to talk.

“I saw them bringing you in, from one of the front windows on this floor. Something about the way you were walking told me they had a gun on you. I backed up into the bedroom and laid low.”

She wasn’t wasting any time; she was already taking her own severed bonds, reknitting them and fastening Rose’s wrists with them.

“Do that to him, too,” she suggested.

Frank came back with sheets and pillow cases from the bedroom, went to work. “I’d only gotten back a minute before, myself,” he told her. “Holmes didn’t do it. He was here earlier tonight and he was in hot water about that check, just like we figured; but I could tell by the way he acted he’d left Gadsby still alive. He nearly went crazy with fear when I told him Gadsby was dead; he thought Gadsby still had his bad check and he’d be accused of it.” He stood up, surveyed their handiwork. “No need to gag them.”

“Well, there they are,” she agreed, “but it’s too late to do us any good now.” She pointed. “Two past six.”

“Let’s try for it, anyway. It will be too late if we just stand here.” He caught her by the hand, pulled her out after him. “I’ll use the downstairs phone; it’s nearer to the door.” He waited until she’d retrieved the valise she’d stood against the wall the first time they came in, opened the front door, and poised herself for flight out in the vestibule.

“Ready?” he called. He picked up the phone. “Get on your mark! Get set!... Hello, gimme the police. You’ll find Stephen Gadsby murdered on the second floor of his house.” He gave the number on East 70th Street. “It was done by the two people that you’ll find tied up in the room with him. Oh — and you’ll find the gun they used under the doormat in the vestibule. No, this isn’t a rib. Never mind who I am—” He flung the instrument away from him without even bothering to rehook it. “Go!” he shouted to her.

She went flying out through the glass doors, scampering down the stoop, made for their captives’ car, and jumped in. He came dashing out after her a moment later, slammed the car door after him, and swerved it out into the middle of the road.

They’d hardly rounded the corner when they could hear the keen of the approaching cruise-car coming up from the other direction. They went tearing down Madison Avenue, almost empty of traffic at that hour. There weren’t any stop lights on yet.

“We’ll never make it, Frank.”

The buildings kept shooting up taller ahead of them all the time. The sky kept getting lighter in the east. At 59th he shot across town to Seventh, took that the rest of the way down to the Thirties. Broadway came racing diagonally across their path.

“Frank, look! The clock on the Paramount says only five-to-six now!”

Another razor-edge turn that lifted the two outside wheels clear, and they were in Thirty-fourth. And there it was, under way already, the bus they were supposed to have taken. It must have just cleared the terminal ramp as they got there.

He sent the lighter car winging after it. They overtook it just as it reached Tenth, slowed to make its turn. He made a wider, outside turn, cut in ahead lengthwise, and came to a shuddering stop that effectively blocked it.

Its brake screamed. The driver swore at them — in pantomine and also with his horn. They jumped out, ran back to it, pounded on the glass inset of the door. “Glen Falls? Let us in, let us in! We’re going your way! Don’t leave us behind!”

Anyone with a heart would have taken them on. And the driver evidently used something to pump his blood with.

Carol went reeling down the aisle, found a vacant double seat near the back. A moment later Frank had dropped down beside her, their barricading car removed from the right-of-way and their fares paid.

When she’d got her breath back, she said in an undertone: “I wonder if we’ll be able to make what we did stick? Do you think those two back there will be able to wrangle out of it? There wasn’t very much motive for the police to see.”

“There is now — back there in Stephen Gadsby’s inside coat pocket, where I put it so they’d be sure to find it the first thing. A six-page confessional letter from the younger brother. Tommy, was delivered at the house special delivery while I was waiting there for you.

“I just had time to read it before those two showed up with you. The kid brother made a clean breast of everything in it, hoping to forewarn the elder Gadsby not to come across if the Beacon woman tried to put her hooks in him. He’d been roped into a gin marriage with her; she was an entertainer at a roadhouse near his college.”

“She’d called on this former vaudeville partner of hers from the city and he’d impersonated the justice of peace at the mock ceremony. They bled the kid for all they could, until Stephen Gadsby cut his funds. Then the kid caught sight of the partner hanging around the roadhouse one day, and tumbled to the frame that had been worked on him.

“They saw the game was up at the end, so they lit out fast. They figured their dodge might be good for one more ‘painless extraction’ at this end, before Jimmy could warn his brother. Unluckily for himself, Gadsby wasn’t the type that bluffed easy. Instead of getting frightened, he got sore.”

“I know” Carol said. “I heard Rose discuss that part of it with her partner. Gadsby told her to go to hell, so she jumped down to the door and let her accomplice into the house, like a fool, thinking that would cow him. Instead, it enmeshed them in a murder.”

Frank took something out of his pocket, showed it to her. Her face paled at the sight of so much money. For a minute she thought—

“No, don’t be frightened.” he reassured her. “It’s honest this time. It was given to me. I had that bad cheek of Holmes’ with me when I went over there to see him, you know. Holmes hadn’t meant to do it. He’d just been caught short, and he’d raised the money to cover it even by the time he went over to see Gadsby last night. Only he could not square it because Gadsby couldn’t find the cheek at the time. It had dropped out of the cash box when I broke into the safe the first time.

“Anyway, I let him have the check back; it would only have gotten him mixed up in the murder. He made out a new one right under my eyes and mailed it back to Gadsby; the estate can cash it, of course. And he was so grateful and relieved at getting out of the mess, he made me a present of two hundred.

“He insisted on my taking it. He said he had a fellow feeling for me, because we’d both been guilty of mistakes last night that might have led to serious consequences — me breaking into that safe and he with his bad check — but we’d both been given another chance, and we’d probably learned our lessons. I’d told him about us, how badly we wanted to get back home.”

She wasn’t listening any more. Her head dropped to his shoulder, rocked there gently in time with the motion of the bus. Her eyes dropped blissfully closed. “We’re going home,” she thought drowsily. “Me and the boy next door, we’re going home at last.”