Black Mask (Vol. 20, No. 8 — October 1937)

Face Work by Cornell Woolrich

Beauty plus brains makes a deadly weapon.

I had on my best hat and my warpaint when I dug into her bell. You’ve heard make-up called that a thousand times, but this is one time it rated it; it was just that — warpaint.

I caught Ruby Rose Reading at breakfast time — hers, not mine. Quarter to three in the afternoon. Breakfast was a pink soda-fountain mess, a tomato-and-lettuce, both untouched, and an empty glass of Bromo Seltzer, which had evidently had first claim on her. There were a pair of swell ski slides under her eyes; she was reading Gladys Glad’s beauty column to try to figure out how to get rid of them before she went out that night and got a couple more. A smoke had opened the door, and given me a yellowed optic. “Yes ma’am, who you wish to see?”

“I see her already,” I said, “so skip the Morse Code.” I went in up to Ruby Rose’s ten-yard line. “Wheeler’s the name,” I said, “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Should it?” She was dark and Salome-ish. She was mean. She was bad medicine. I could see his finish right there, in her eyes. And it hadn’t been any fun to dance at Texas Guinan’s or Larry Fay’s when I was sixteen, to keep him out of the orphan asylum or the reformatory. I hadn’t spent most of my young girlhood in a tinseled G-string to have her take apart what I’d built up, just to see what made him tick.

I said, “I don’t mind coming right out with it in front of your dinge — if you don’t.”

But evidently she did. Maybe Mandy was on a few other payrolls beside her own. She hit her with the tomato-and-lettuce in the left eye as preamble to the request: “Whaddo I pay you for, anyway? Take Foo-Too around the block a couple of times!”

“I tuk him once already, and he was a good boy,” was the weather report she got on this,

“Well, take him again. Maybe you can kid him it’s tomorrow already.”

Mandy fastened something that looked like the business-end of a floor mop to a leash, went out shaking her head. “You sho didn’t enjoy yo’self last night. That Sto’k Club never do agree with you.”

As soon as the gallery was out of the way I said. “You lay off my brother!”

She lit a cigarette, nosed the smoke at me. “Well, Gracie Allen, you’ve come to the wrong place looking for your brother. And, just for the record, what am I supposed to have done to him, cured him of wiping his nose on his sleeve or something?”

“He’s been spending dough like wild, dough that doesn’t come out of his salary.”

“Then where does it come from?” she asked.

“I haven’t found out. I hope his firm never does, either.” I shifted gears, went into low — like when I used to sing “Poor Butterfly” for the customers — but money couldn’t have dragged this performance out of me, it came from the heart, without pay. “There’s a little girl on our street, oh not much to look at, thinks twelve o’clock’s the middle of the night and storks leave babies, but she’s ready to take up where I leave off, pinch pennies and squeeze nickels along with him, build him into something, get him somewhere, not spread him all over the landscape. He’s just a man, doesn’t know what’s good for him, doesn’t know his bass from his oboe. I can’t stand by and watch her chew her heart up. Give her a break, and him, and me. Pick on someone your size, someone that can take it. Have your fun and more power to you — but not with all I’ve got!”

She banged her cigarette to death against a tray. “O.K., is the screen test about over? Now, will you get out of here, you ham-actress, and lemme get my massage?” She went over and got the door ready for me. Gave a traffic-cop signal over her shoulder with one thumb. “I’ve heard of wives pulling this act, and even mothers, and in a pitcher I saw only lately, Camilly it was called, it was the old man. Now it’s a sister!” She gave the ceiling the once-over. “What’ll they think of next? Send grandma around tomorrow — next week East Lynne. Come on, make it snappy!” she invited, and hitched her elbow at me. If she’d touched me, I think I’d have murdered her.

“If you feel I’m poison, why don’t you put it up to your brother?” she signed off. And very low, just before she walloped the door after me: “And see how far you get!”

She was right.

I said, “Chick, you’re not going to chuck your job, you’re not going to Chicago with that dame, are you?”

He looked at me funny and he said, “How did you know?”

“I saw your valise all packed, when I wanted to send one of your suits to the cleaners.”

“You ought to be a detective,” he said, and he wasn’t pally. “O.K.,” he said, “now that you mention it,” and he went in and he got it to show me — the back of it going out the door. But I got over there to the door before he did, and pulled a Custer’s Last Stand. I skipped the verse and went into the patter chorus. And boy did I sell it, without a spot and without a muted trumpet solo either! At the El-Fay in the old days they would have all been crying into their gin and wiring home to mother.

“I’m not asking anything for myself. I’m older than you, Chick, and when a girl says that you’ve got her down to bedrock. I’ve been around plenty, and ‘around’ wasn’t pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so... so... Oh, I didn’t know why myself sometimes; just so you wouldn’t turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharp-shooter, a bum like the rest of them. Chick, you’re just a punk of twenty-four, but as far as I’m concerned the sun rises and sets across your shoulders. Me and little Mary Allen, we’ve been rooting for you all along; what’s the matter with her, Chick? Just because her face don’t come out of boxes and she doesn’t know the right grips, don’t pass her by for something that ought to be shampooed out of your hair with gasoline.”

But he didn’t have an ear for music; the siren song had got to him like Ulysses. And once they hear that... “Get away from the door,” he said, way down low. “I never raised a hand to you in my life, I don’t want to now.”

The last I saw of him he was passing the back of his hand slowly up and down his side, like he was ashamed of it; the valise was in the other one. I picked myself up from the opposite side of the foyer where he’d sent me, the place all buckling around me like seen through a sheet of water. I called out after him through the open door: “Don’t go, Chick! You’re heading straight for the eight-ball! Don’t go to her, Chick!” The acoustics were swell, every door in the hall opened to get an earful.

He just stood there a split-second without looking back at me, yellow light gushing out at him through the port-hole of the elevator. He straightened his hat, which my chin against his duke had dislodged — and no more Chick.

At about four that morning I was still snivelling into the gin he’d left behind him, and talking to him across the table from me — without getting any answer — when the doorbell rang. I thought it was him for a minute, but it was two other guys. They didn’t ask if they could come in, they just went ’way around to the other side of me and then showed me a couple of tin-heeled palms. So I did the coming-in — after them; I lived there, after all.

They looked the place over like they were prospective tenants being shown an apartment. I didn’t go for that; detectives belong in the books you read in bed, not in your apartment at four bells, big as life. “Three closets,” I mentioned, “and you get a month’s concession. I’m not keeping you gentlemen up, am I?”

One of them was kind of pash looking; I mean he’d washed his face lately, and if he’d been the last man in the world, well, all right, maybe I could have overlooked the fact he was a bloodhound on two legs. The other one had a face like one of those cobblestones they dug up off Eighth Avenue when they removed the trolley tracks.

“You’re Jerry Wheeler, aren’t you?” the first one told me.

“I’ve known that for twenty-seven years,” I said. “What brought the subject up?”

Cobblestone-face said, “Chick Wheeler’s sister, that right?”

“I’ve got a brother and I call him Chick,” I consented. “Any ordinance against that?”

The younger one said, “Don’t be so hard to handle. You’re going to talk to us and like it.” He sat down in a chair, cushioned his hands behind his dome. He said, “What time’d he leave here this evening?”

Something warned me, “Don’t answer that.” I said, “I really couldn’t say. I’m not a train-despatcher.”

“He was going to Chicago with a dame named Ruby Rose Reading; you knew that, didn’t you?”

I thought, “I hit the nail on the head, he did help himself to his firm’s money. Wonder how much he took? Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to work again at one of the hot-spots; maybe I can square it for him, pay back a little each week.” I kept my face steady. I said, “Now, why would he go anywhere with anyone with a name like that? It sounds like it came off a bottle of nail-polish. Come to the point, gentlemen — yes. I mean you two. What’s he supposed to have done?”

“There’s no supposition about what he’s done. He went to the Alcazar Arms at eight fifteen tonight and throttled Ruby Rose Reading to death, Angel Face.”

And that was the first time I heard myself called that. I also heard the good-looking one remonstrate: “Aw, don’t give it to her that sudden, Coley, she’s a girl after all,” but it came from ’way far away. I was down around their feet somewhere sniffling into the carpet.

The good-looking one picked me up and straightened me out in a chair. Cobblestone said, “Don’t let her fool you, Burnsie, they all pull that collapsible concertina act when they wanna get out of answering questions.” He went into the bedroom and I could hear him pulling out bureau drawers and rummaging around.

I got up on one elbow. I said, “Burns, he didn’t do it! Please, he didn’t do it! All right, I did know about her. He was sold on her. That’s why he couldn’t have done it. Don’t you see, you don’t kill the thing you love?”

He just kind of looked at me. “You go to bat for the thing you love too,” he murmured. He said, “I’ve been on the squad eight years now. We never in all that time caught a guy as dead to rights as your brother. He showed up with his valise in the foyer of the Alcazar at exactly twelve minutes past eight tonight. He said to the doorman, ‘What time is it? Did Miss Reading send her baggage down yet? We’ve got to make a train.’ Well, she had sent her baggage down, and then she’d changed her mind, she’d had it all taken back upstairs again. There’s your motive, right there. The doorman rang her apartment and said through the announcer, ‘Mr. Wheeler’s here.’ And she gave a dirty laugh and sang out, ‘I can hardly wait.’

“So at thirteen past eight she was still alive. He went up, and he’d no sooner gotten there than her apartment began to signal the doorman frantically. No one answered his hail over the announcer, so he chased up, and he found your brother crouched over her, shaking her, and she was dead. At fifteen minutes past eight o’clock. Is that a case or is that a case?”

I said, “How do you know somebody else wasn’t in that apartment and strangled her just before Chick showed up? It’s got to be that!”

He said, “What d’you suppose they’re paying that doorman seventy-five a month for? The only other caller she had that whole day was you yourself, at three that afternoon, five full hours before. And she’d only been dead fifteen to twenty minutes by the time the assistant medical examiner got to her.”

I said, “Does Chick say he did it?”

“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you’d have their heads examined if any of them ever admitted doing anything. Oh, no-o, of course he didn’t do it. He says he was crouched over her shaking her trying to restore her!”

I took a deep breath. I said, “Gimme a swallow of that gin. Thanks.” I put the tumbler down again. I looked him right in the eye. “All right, I did it! Now how d’ye like that? I begged him not to throw his life away on her. When he walked out anyway, I beat him up to her place in a taxi, got there first, gave her one last chance to lay off him. She wouldn’t take it. She was all soft and squashy and I just took a grip and pushed hard.”

“And the doorman?” he said with a smile.

“His back was turned. He was out at the curb seeing some people into a cab. When I left, I took the stairs down. When Chick signaled from her apartment and the doorman left his post, I just walked out. It was a pushover.”

His smile was a grin. “Well, if you killed her, you killed her.” He called in to the other room, “Hey, Coley, she says she killed her!” Coley came back, flapped his hand at me disguestedly, said, “Come on, let’s get out of here, there’s nothing doing around here.”

He opened the door, went out into the hall. I said, “Well, aren’t you going to take me with you? Aren’t you going to let him go and hold me instead?”

“Who the hell wants you?” came back through the open door.

Burns, as he got up to follow him, said off-handedly, “And what was she wearing when you killed her?” But he kept walking toward the door, without waiting for the answer.

They’d had a train to make. I swallowed hard. “Well, I... I was too steamed-up to notice colors or anything, but she had on her coat and hat, ready to leave; that’s about all I can tell you.”

He turned around at the door and looked at me. His grin was sort of sympathetic, understanding. “Sure,” he said softly. “I guess she took ’em off, though, after she found out she was dead and wasn’t going anywhere after all. We found her in pajamas. Write us a nice long letter about it tomorrow, Angel Face. We’ll see you at the trial, no doubt.”

There was a glass cigarette-box at my elbow. I grabbed it and heaved, berserk. “You rotten, lowdown — detective, you! Going around snooping, framing innocent people to death! Get out of here! I hope I never see your face again!”

It missed his head, crashed and tinkled against the door-frame to one side of him. He didn’t cringe, I liked that about him, sore as I was. He just gave a long drawn-out whistle. “Maybe you did do it at that,” he said, “maybe I’m underestimating you,” and he touched his hat-brim and closed the door after him.

The court-room was so unnaturally still that the ticking of my heart sounded like a cheap alarm-clock in the wondering how it was they didn’t put me out for letting it make so much noise. A big blue fly was buzzing on the inside of the window-pane nearest me, trying to find its way out. The jurists came filing in like ghosts, and slowly filled the double row of chairs in the box. All you could hear was a slight rustle of clothing as they seated themselves. I kept thinking of the Inquisition, and wondered why they didn’t have black hoods over their heads.

“Will the foreman of the jury please stand?”

I spaded both my hands down past my hips and grabbed the edges of my seat. My handkerchief fell on the floor and the man next to me picked it up and handed it back to me. I tried to say “Thanks” but my jaws wouldn’t unlock.

“Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

I told myself, “He won’t be able to “hear it, if my heart doesn’t shut up.” It was going bangetty-bangetty-bang!

“We have, your honor.”

“Gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?”

The banging stopped; my heart wasn’t going at all now. Even the fly stopped buzzing. The whole works stood still.

“We find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”

Some woman screamed out “No!” at the top of her lungs. It must have been me, they were all turning their heads to look around at me. The next thing I knew, I was outside in the corridor and a whole lot of people were standing around me. Everything looked blurred. A voice said, “Give her air, stand back.” Another voice said. “His sister. She was on the stand earlier in the week.” Ammonia fumes kept tickling the membranes of my nostrils. The first voice said, “Take her home. Where does she live? Anybody know where she lives?”

“I know where she lives. I’ll take care of her.”

Somebody put an arm around my waist and walked me to the creaky courthouse elevator, led me out to the street, got in a taxi after me. I looked, and it was that lousy dick, Burns. I climbed up into the corner of the cab, put my feet on the seat, shuffled them at him. I said, “Get away from me, you devil! You railroaded him, you butcher!”

“Attagirl,” he said gently, “Feeling better already, aren’t you?” He gave the old address, where Chick and I had lived. The cab started and I couldn’t get him out of it. I felt too low even to fight any more.

“Not there,” I said sullenly, “I’m holed up in a cheap furnished room now, off Second Avenue. I’ve hocked everything I own, down to my vaccination mark! How d’you suppose I got that lawyer Schlesinger for him? And a lot of good it did him! What a wash-out he turned out to be!”

“Don’t blame him,” he said. “He couldn’t buck that case we turned over to the State; Darrow himself couldn’t have. What he should have done was let him plead guilty to second-degree, then he wouldn’t be in line for short-circuiting. That was his big mistake.”

“No!” I shrilled at him. “He wanted us to do that, but neither Chick nor I would hear of it! Why should he plead guilty to anything, even if it was only housebreaknig, when he’s innocent? That’s a guilty man’s dodge, not an innocent man’s. He hasn’t got half-an-hour’s detention rightfully coming to him! Why should he lie down and accept twenty years? He didn’t lay a hand on Ruby Reading.”

“Eleven million people, the mighty State of New York, say that he did.”

I got out, went in the grubby entrance, between a delicatessen and a Chinese laundry. “Don’t come in with me, I don’t want to see any more of you!” I spat over my shoulder at him. “If I was a man I’d knock you down and beat the living hell out of you!”

He came on, though, and upstairs he closed the door, behind him, pushing me out of the way to get in. He said, “You need help, Angel Face, and I’m crying to give it to you.”

“Oh, biting the hand that feeds you, turning into a double-crosser, a turncoat!”

“No,” he said, “no,” and sort of held out his hands as if asking me for something. “Sell me, won’t you?” he almost pleaded. “Sell me that’s he’s innocent, and I’ll work my fingers raw to back you up! I didn’t frame your brother. I only did my job. I was sent there by my superiors in answer to the patrolman’s call that night, questioned Chick, put him under arrest. You heard me answering their questions on the stand. Did I distort the facts any? All I told them was what I saw with my own eyes, what I found when I got to Reading’s apartment. Don’t hold that against me, Angel Face. Sell me, convince me that he didn’t do it, and I’m with you up to the hilt.”

“Why?” I said cynically. “Why this sudden yearning to undo the damage you’ve already done?”

He opened the door to go. “Look in the mirror sometime and find out,” was all he said. “You can reach me at Center Street, Nick Burns.” He held out his hand uncertainly, probably expecting me to slap it aside.

I took it instead. “O.K., flatfoot,” I sighed wearily. “No use holding it against you that you’re a detective, you probably don’t know any better. Before you go, gimme the address of that jig maid of hers, Mandy Leroy. I’ve got an idea she didn’t tell all she knew.”

“She went home at five that day, how can she help you?”

“I bet she was greased plenty to soft-pedal the one right name that belongs in this case. She mayn’t have been there, but she knew who to expect around. She may have even tipped him off that Ruby Rose was throwing him over. It takes a woman to see through a woman, even a permanently sunburnt one.”

“Better watch yourself going up there alone,” he warned me. He took out a notebook. “Here it is, 118th, just off Lenox.” I jotted it down. “If she was paid off like you think, how you going to restore her memory? It’ll take heavy sugar...” He fumbled in his pocket, looked at me like he was a little scared of me, finally took out something and shoved it out of sight on the bureau. “Try your luck with that,” he said. “Use it where it’ll do the most good. Try a little intimidation with it, it may work.”

I grabbed it up and he ducked out in a hurry, the big coward. A hundred-and-fifty bucks. I ran out to the stairs after him. “Hey!” I yelled, “aren’t you married or anything?”

“Naw,” he called back, “I can always get it back, anyway, if it does the trick.” And then he added, “I always did want to have something on you, Angel Face.” I went back into my cubbyhole again. “Why, the big rummy!” I said hotly. I hadn’t cried in court when Chick got the ax, just yelled out. But now my eyes got all wet.

“Mandy doan live here no mo’e,” the colored janitor of the 118th Street tenement told me. I went there during the daylight hours, don’t worry. I wasn’t taking any chances on Harlem after dark by my lonesome.

“Where’d she go? And don’t tell me you don’t know, because it won’t work.”

“She done move to a mighty presumptuous neighborhood, doan know how come all of a sudden. She gone to Edgecomb Avenue.”

Edgecomb Avenue is the Park Avenue of New York’s darktown. She’d mentioned on the stand, without being asked, that Reading had died owing her two months’ wages. Yet she moves to the colored Gold Coast right on top of it. She hadn’t been paid off — not much!

Edgecomb Avenue is nothing to be ashamed of in any man’s town. Every one of the trim modern apartment buildings had a glossy private car or two parked in front of the door. I tackled the address he’d given me, and thought they were having a housewarming at first. They were singing inside and it sounded like a revival meeting.

A fat old lady came to the door, in a black silk dress, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’se her mother, honey,” she said softly in answer to what I told her, “and you done come at an evil hour. My lamb was run over on the street, right outside this building, only yesterday, first day we moved here! She’s in there daid now, honey. The Lawd give and the Lawd has took away again.”

I did a little thinking. Why just her, and nobody else, when she held the key to the Reading murder? “How did it happen to her, did they tell you?”

“Two white men in a car,” she mourned. “ ’Peared almost like they run her down purposely. She was walking along the sidewalk, folks tell me, wasn’t even in the gutter at all. And it swung right up on the sidewalk aftah her, go ovah her, then loop out in the middle again and light away, without nevah stopping!”

I went away saying to myself, “That girl was murdered as sure as I’m born, to shut her mouth. First she was bribed, then when the trial was safely over she was put out of the way for good!” Somebody big was behind all this. And what did I have to fight that somebody with? A borrowed hundred-and-fifty bucks, an offer of cooperation from a susceptible detective, and a face.

I went around to the building Ruby Rose had lived in, and struck the wrong shift. “Charlie Baker doesn’t come on until six, eh?” I told the doorman. “Where does he live? I want to talk to him.”

“He don’t come on at all any more. He quit his job, as soon as that—” he tilted his head to the ceiling, “mess we had upstairs was over with, and he didn’t have to appear in court no more.”

“Well, where’s he working now?”

“He ain’t working at all, lady. He don’t have to any more. I understand a relative of his died in the old country, left him quite a bit, and him and his wife and his three kids have gone back to England to live.”

So he’d been paid off heavily too. It looked like I was up against Wall Street itself. No wonder everything had gone so smoothly. No wonder even a man like Schlesinger hadn’t been able to make a dent in the case.

“But I’m not licked yet,” I said to myself, back in my room. “I’ve still got this face. It ought to be good for something. If I only knew where to push it, who to flash it on!”

Burns showed up that night, to find out how I was making out. “Here’s your hundred and fifty back,” I told him bitterly. “I’m up against a stone wall every which way I turn. But is it a coincidence that the minute the case is in the bag, their two chief witnesses are permanently disposed of, one by exportation, the other by hit-and-run? They’re not taking any chances on anything backfiring later.”

He said, “You’re beginning to sell me. It smells like rain.”

I sat down on the floor (there was only one chair in the dump) and took a dejected half-Nelson around my own ankles. “Look, it goes like this. Some guy did it. Some guy that was sold on her. Plenty of names were spilled by Mandy and Baker, but not the right one. The ones that were brought out didn’t lead anywhere, you saw that yourself. The mechanics of the thing don’t trouble me a bit, the how and why could be cleared up easy enough — even by you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s the who that has me buffaloed. There’s a gap there I can’t jump across to the other side. From there on, I could handle it beautifully. But I’ve got to close that gap, that who, or I might as well put in the order for Chick’s headstone right now.”

He took out a folded newspaper and whacked himself disgustedly across the shins with it. “Tough going, kid,” he agreed.

“I’ll make it,” I said. “You can’t keep a good girl down. The right guy is in this town. And so am I in this town. I’ll connect with him yet, if I’ve got to use a ouija board!”

He said, “You haven’t got all winter. He comes up for sentence Wednesday.” He opened the door. “I’m on your side,” he let me know in that quiet way of his.

He left the paper behind him on the chair. I sat down and opened it. I wasn’t going to do any reading, but I wanted to think behind it. And then I saw her name. The papers had been full of her name for weeks, but this was different; this was just a little boxed ad off at the side.

I dove at the window, rammed it up, leaned half-way out. I caught him just coming out of the door.

“Burns!” I screeched at the top of my voice. “Hey, Burns! Bring that hundred and fifty back up here! I’ve changed my mind!”

The place was jammed to the gills with curiosity-mongers and bargain-hunters, and probably professional dealers too, although they were supposed to be excluded. There were about two dozen of those 100-watt blue-white bulbs in the ceiling that auction rooms go in for — to kid the bidders that they’re seeing what they’re getting, I suppose — and the bleach of light was intolerable, worse than on a sunny beach at high noon.

I was down front, in the second row on the aisle; I’d gotten there early. I wasn’t interested in her diamonds or her furs or her thissas or her thattas. I was hoping something would come up that would give me some kind of a clue, but what I expected it to be, I didn’t know myself. An inscription on a cigarette case maybe. I knew how little chance there was of anything like that. The D.A.’s office had sifted through her things pretty thoroughly before Chick’s trial, and what they’d turned up hadn’t amounted to a row of pins. She’d been pretty cagy that way, hadn’t left much around. All bills had been addressed to her personally, just like she’d paid her rent with her own personal checks, and fed the account herself. Where the funds originated in the first place was another matter, never explained. I suppose she took in washing.

They started off with minor articles first, to warm the customers up. A cocktail shaker that played a tune, a make-up mirror with a light behind it, a ship’s model, things like that. They got around to her clothes next, and the women customers started “ohing” and “ahing” and foaming at the mouth. By the looks of most of them that was probably the closest they’d ever get to real sin, bidding for its hand-me-downs. One of the items, incidentally, was a pair of cellophane pajamas, no kidding; she must have known somebody from Missouri. No one had the nerve to bid in for them.

The furniture came next, and they started to talk real money now. This out of the way, her ice came on. Brother, she’d made them say it with diamonds, and they’d all spoken above a whisper too! When the last of it went, that washed up the sale; there was nothing else left to dispose of but the little rosewood jewel-case she’d kept them in. About ten by twelve by ten inches deep, with a little gilt key and lock; not worth a damn but there it was. However, if you think an auctioneer passes up anything, you don’t know your auctioneers at all.

“What am I offered for this?” he said almost apologetically. “Lovely little trinket box, give it to your best girl or your wife or your mother, to keep her ornaments in or old love letters.” He knocked the veneer with his knuckles, held it outward to show us the satin lining. Nothing in it, like in a vaudeville magician’s act. “Do I hear fifty cents, just to clear the stand?”

Most of them were getting up and going already. An overdressed guy in my same row, across the aisle, spoke up. “You hear a buck.”

I took a look at him, and I took a look at the box. “If you want it, I want it, too,” I decided suddenly. “A guy splurged up like you don’t hand a plain wooden box like that to any woman that he knows.” I opened my mouth for the first time since I’d come in the place. “You hear a dollar and a quarter.”

“Dollar-fifty.”

“Two dollars.”

“Five.” The way he snapped it out, he meant business.

I’d never had such a strong hunch in my life before — or since — but now I wanted that box, had to have it, I felt it would do me some good. Maybe this overdressed monkey had given it to her, maybe Burns could trace where it had been bought...

“Seven-fifty.”

“Ten.”

“Twelve.”

The auctioneer was in seventh heaven. “You’re giving yourself away, brother, you’re giving yourself away!” I warned my competitor silently.

We leaned forward out of our seats and sized each other up. If he was giving himself away, I suppose I was too. I could see a sort of shrewd speculation in his snaky eyes, they screwed up into slits, seeming to say “What’s your racket?” Something cold went down my back, hot as it was under all those mazdas.

“Twenty-five dollars,” he said inexorably.

I thought: “I’m going to get that thing if I spend every cent of the money Bums loaned me!”

“Thirty,” I said.

With that, to my surprise, he stood up, flopped his hand at it disgustedly, and walked out.

When I came out five minutes later with the box wrapped up under my arm. I saw him sitting in a young dreadnought with another man, a few yards down the street.

“So I’m going to be followed home,” I said to myself, “to find out who I am.” That didn’t worry me any; I’d rented my room under my old stage name of Honey Sebastian (my idea of a classy tag at sixteen) to escape the notoriety attendant on Chick’s trial. I turned up the other way and hopped down into the subway, which is about the best bet when the following is to be done from a car. As far as I could make out, no one came after me.

I watched the street from a corner of the window after I’d gotten home, and no one going by stopped or looked at the house or did anything but mind his own business. And if it had been that flashy guy on my tail, you could have heard him coming from a block away. I turned to the wrapped box and broke the string.

Burns’ knock at my door at five that afternoon was a tattoo of anxious impatience. “God, you took long to get here!” I blurted out, “I phoned you three times since noon.”

“Lady,” he protested, “I’ve been busy, I was out on something else, only just got back to Headquarters ten minutes ago. Boy, you threw a fright into me.”

I didn’t stoop to asking him why he should be so worried something had happened to me; he might have given me the right answer. “Well,” I said, “I’ve got him.” And I passed him the rosewood jewel case.

“Got who?”

“The guy that Chick’s been made a patsy for.”

He opened it, looked in, looked under it. “What’s this?”

“Hers. I had a hunch, and I bought it. He must have had a hunch too — only his agent — and it must have been his agent, he wouldn’t show up himself — didn’t follow it through, wasn’t sure enough. Stick your thumb under the little lock. Not over it, down below it, and press hard on the wood.” Something clicked, and the satin bottom flapped up, like it had with me.

“Fake bottom, eh?” he said.

“Don’t be an echo. Read that top letter out loud. That was the last one she got, very day it happened.”

“ ‘You know, baby,’ ” Bums read. “ ‘I think too much of you to ever let you go. And if you ever tired of me and tried to leave me, I’d kill you first, and then you could go wherever you want. They tell me you’ve been seen going around a lot lately with some young punk. Now, baby, I hope for his sake, and yours tod, that when I come back day after tomorrow I find it isn’t so, just some more of my boys’ lies. They like to rib me sometimes, see if I can take it or not.’ ”

“He gave her a bum steer there on purpose,” I pointed out, “He came back ‘tomorrow’ and not ‘day after,’ and caught her with the goods.”

“Milt,” Bums read from the bottom of the page. And then he looked at me, and didn’t see me for once.

“Militis, of course,” I said, “the Greek night-club king. Milton, as he calls himself. Everyone on Broadway knows him. And yet, d’you notice how that name stayed out of the trial? Not a whisper from beginning to end! That’s the missing name all right!”

“It reads that way, I know,” he said undecidedly, “but there’s this: She knew her traffic signals. Why would she chuck away the banana and hang onto the skin? In other words, Milton spells real dough, your brother wasn’t even carfare.”

“But Militis had her branded—”

“Sure, but—”

“No, I’m not talking slang now. I mean actually, physically; it’s mentioned in one of these letters. The autopsy report had it too, remember? Only they mistook it for an operation scar or scald. Well, when a guy does that, anyone would have looked good to her, and Chick was probably a godsend. The branding was probably not the half of it, either. It’s fairly well known that Milton likes to play rough with his women.”

“All right, kid,” he said, “but I’ve got bad news for you. This evidence isn’t strong enough to have the verdict set aside and a new trial called. A clever mouth-piece could blow this whole pack of letters out the window with one breath. Ardent Greek temperament, and that kind of thing, you know. You remember how Schlesinger dragged it out of Mandy that she’d overheard more than one guy make the same kind of jealous threats. Did it do any good?”

“This is the McCoy, though. He came through, this one, Militis.”

“But baby, you’re telling it to me and I convince easy, from you. You’re not telling it to the Grand Jury.”

I shoved the letters at him. “Just the same, you chase out and have ’em photostated, every last one of them, and put ’em in a cool, dry place. I’m going to dig up something a little more convincing to go with them, if that’s what’s needed. What clubs does he own?”

“What clubs doesn’t he? There’s Hell’s Bells—” He stopped short, looked at me. “You stay out of there.”

“One word from you...” I purred, and closed the door after him.

“A little higher,” the manager said. “Don’t be afraid, we’ve seen it all before.”

I took another hitch in my hoisted skirt, gave him a look. “If it’s my appendix you want to size up, say so. It’s easier to uncover the other way around, from up to down. I just sing and dance, I don’t bathe for the customers.”

“I like ’em like that,” he nodded approvingly to his yes-man. “Give her a chord, Mike,” he said to his pianist.

“The Man I Love,” I said. “I do dusties, not new ones.”

“Good tonsils,” he said. “Give her a dance-chorus, Mike.”

Mike said disgustedly, “Why d’ya wanna waste your time? Even if she was paralyzed from the waist down and had a voice like a frog, ain’t you got eyes? Get a load of her face, will you?”

“You’re in,” the manager said. “Thirty-five, and buy yourself some up-to-date lyrics. Come around at eight and get fitted for some duds. What’s your name?”

“Bill me as Angel Face,” I said, “and have your electrician give me an amber spot. They take the padlocks off their wallets when I come out in an amber spot.”

He shook his head, almost sorrowfully. “Hang onto that face, girlie. It ain’t gonna happen again in a long time!”

Burns was holding up my locked room-door with one shoulder when I got back. “Here’s your letters back; I’ve got the photostats tucked away in a safe place. Where’d you disappear to?”

“I’ve landed a job at Hell’s Bells. I’m going to get that guy and get him good! If that’s the way I’ve got to get the evidence, that’s the way. After all, if he was sold on her, I’ll have him cutting out paper dolls before two weeks are out. What’d she have that I haven’t got? Now, stay out of there. Somebody might know your face, and you’ll only queer everything.”

“Watch yourself, will you, Angel Face? You’re playing a dangerous game. That Milton is nobody’s fool. If you need me in a hurry, you know where to reach me. I’m right at your shoulder, all the way through.”

I went in and stuck the letters back in the fake bottom of the case. I had an idea I was going to have a visitor fairly soon, and wasn’t going to tip my hand. I stood it on the dresser-top and threw in a few pins and glass beads for luck.

The timing was eery. The knock came inside of ten minutes. I’d known it was due, but not that quick. It was my competitor from the auction room, flashy as ever; he’d changed flowers, that was all.

“Miss Sebastian,” he said, “isn’t it? I’d like very much to buy that jewel case you got.”

“I noticed that this morning.”

He went over and squinted into it. “That all you wanted it for, just to keep junk like that in?”

“What’d you expect to find, the Hope diamond?”

“You seemed willing to pay a good deal.”

“I lose my head easy in auction rooms. But, for that matter, you seemed to be willing to go pretty high yourself.”

“I still am,” he said. He turned it over, emptied my stuff out, tucked it under his arm, put something down on the dresser. “There’s a hundred dollars. Buy yourself a real good one.”

Through the window I watched the dreadnought drift away again. “Just a little bit too late in getting here,” I smiled after it. “The cat’s out of the bag now and a bulldog will probably chase it.”

The silver dress fitted me like a wet compress. It was one of those things that break up homes. The manager flagged me in the passageway leading back. “Did you notice that man all by himself at a ringside table? You know who he is, don’t you?”

If I hadn’t, why had I bothered turning on all my current his way? “No,” I said, round-eyed, “who?”

“Milton. He owns the works. The reason I’m telling you is this: You’ve got a date with a bottle of champagne at his table, starting in right now. Get on in there.”

We walked on back.

“Mr. Milton, this is Angel Face,” the manager said. “She won’t give us her right name, just walked in off 52nd Street last Tuesday.”

“And I waited until tonight to drop around here!” he laughed. “What you paying her, Berger?” Then before the other guy could get a word out, “Triple it! And now get out of here.”

The night ticked on. He’d look at me and then he’d suddenly throw up his hands as though to ward off a dazzling glare. “Turn it off, it hurts my eyes.” I smiled a little and took out my mirror. I saw my eyes in it, and in each iris there was a little electric chair with Chick sitting strapped in it. Three weeks from now, sometime during that week. Boy, how they were rushing him! It made it a lot easier to go ahead.

I went back to what we’d been talking about — and what are any two people talking about, more or less, in a nightclub at four in the morning? “Maybe,” I said, “who can tell? Some night I might just feel like changing the scenery around me, but I couldn’t tell you about it, I’m not that kind.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” he said. He fooled with something below table-level, then passed his hand to me. I took it and knotted my handkerchief around the latch-key he’d left in it. Burns had been right, it was a dangerous game, and bridges were blazing and collapsing behind me.

The doorman covered a yawn with a white kid glove, said, “Who shall I announce?”

“That’s all been taken care of,” I said, “so you can go back to your beauty sleep.”

He caught on, said insinuatingly, “It’s Mr. Milton, isn’t it? He’s out of town tonight.”

“You’re telling me!” I thought. I’d sent him the wire that fixed that, signed the name of the manager of his Philly club. “You’ve been reading my mail,” I said, and closed the elevator in his face.

The key worked, and the light-switch worked, and his Filipino had the night off, so the rest was up to me. The clock in his two-story living-room said four fifteen. I went to the second floor of his penthouse and started in on the bedroom. He was using the jewel-case, Ruby Rose Reading’s, to hold his collar buttons in, hadn’t thrown it out. I opened the fake bottom to see if he’d found what he was after, and the letters were gone, probably burned.

I located his wall safe but couldn’t crack it. While I was still working at it, the phone downstairs started to ring. I jumped as though a pin had been stuck into me, and started shaking like I was still doing one of my routines at the club. He had two phones, one downstairs, one in the bedroom, which was an unlisted number. I snapped out the lights, ran downstairs, picked it up. I didn’t answer, just held it.

Burns’ voice said, “Angel Face?” in my ear.

“Gee, you sure frightened me!” I exhaled.

“Better get out of there. He just came back, must have tumbled to the wire. A spotter at Hell’s Bells tipped me off he was just there asking for you.”

“I can’t, now,” I wailed. “I woke his damn doorman up getting in just now, and I’m in that silver dress I do my numbers in! He’ll tell him I was here. I’ll have to play it dumb.”

“D’ja get anything?”

“Nothing, only that jewel case! I couldn’t get the safe open but he’s probably burned everything connecting him to her long ago.”

“Please get out of there, kid,” he pleaded. “You don’t know that guy. He’s going to pin you down on the mat if he finds you there.”

“I’m staying,” I said. “I’ve got to break him down tonight, it’s my last chance. Chick eats chicken and ice-cream tomorrow night at six. Oh, Burns, pray for me, will you?”

“I’m going to do more than that,” he growled. “I’m going to give a wrong-number call there in half an hour. It’s four-thirty now. Five that’ll be. If you’re doing all right, I’ll lie low. If not, I’m not going to wait, I’ll break in with some of the guys, and we’ll use the little we have, the photostats of the letters, and the jewel case. I think Schlesinger can at least get Chick a reprieve on them, if not a new trial. If we can’t get Milton, we can’t get him, that’s all.”

“We’ve got to get him,” I said, “and we’re going to! He’s even been close to breaking down and admitting it to me, at times, when we’re alone together. Then at the last minute he gets leery. I’m convinced in my own mind he’s guilty. So help me, if I lose Chick tomorrow night, I’m going to shoot Mil-ton with my own hands!”

“You won’t have to,” he said grimly. “I’ll have him beaten to death for you in some basement, habeas corpus or no habeas corpus.”

“His private elevator-light’s flashing on in the foyer, he must be on his way up!” I said frantically. “I’ll have to sign off.”

“Remember, half an hour. If everything’s under control, cough. If you can get anywhere near the phone, cough! If I don’t hear you cough, I’m pulling the place.”

I hung up, ran up the stairs tearing at the silver cloth. I jerked open a closet door, found the cobwebby negligee he’d always told me was waiting for me there whenever I felt like breaking it in. I chased downstairs again in it, more like Godiva than anyone else, grabbed up a cigarette, flopped back full length on the handiest divan, and did a Cleopatra — just as the outside door opened and he and two other guys came in.

Milton had a face full of storm-clouds — until he saw me. Then it cleared, the sun came up in it. “Finally!” he crooned. “Finally you wanted a change of scenery! And just tonight somebody had to play a practical joke on me, start me on a fool’s errand to Philly! Have you been here long?”

I couldn’t answer right away, because I was still trying to get my breath back after the quick-change act I’d just pulled. I managed a vampish smile.

He turned to the two guys. “Get out, you two. Can’t you see I have company?”

I’d recognized the one who’d contacted me for the jewel case, and knew what was coming. I figured I could handle it. “Why, that’s the dame I told you about, Milt,” he blurted out, “that walked off with that little box the other day!”

“Oh, hello,” I sang out innocently. “I didn’t know that you knew Mr. Milton.”

Milton flared, “You, Rocco! Don’t call my lady friends dames!” and slapped him backhand across the mouth. “Now scar-ram! You think we need four for bridge?”

“All right, boss, all right,” he said soothingly. But he went over to a framed “still” of me, that Milton had brought home from Hell’s Bells, and stood, thoughtfully in front of it for a minute. Then he and the other guy left. It was only after the elevator-light had flashed out that I looked over and saw the frame was empty.

“Hey!” I complained, “That Rocco swiped my picture, right under your nose!”

He thought he saw a bowl of cream in front of him; nothing could get his back up. “Who can blame him? You’re so lovely to look at.”

He spent some time working on the theory that I’d finally found him irresistible. After what seemed years of that, I sidestepped him neatly, got off the divan just in time.

He got good and peeved finally. “Are you giving me the run-around? What did you come here for, anyway?”

“Because she’s double-crossing you!” a voice said from the foyer. “Because she came here to frame you, chief, and I know it!”

The other two had come back! Rocco pulled my picture out of his pocket. “I traced that dummy wire you got, sending you to Philly. The clerk at the telegraph office identified her as the sender, from this picture. Ask her why she wanted to get you out of town, and then come up here and case your lay-out! Ask her why she was willing to pay thirty bucks for a little wood box, when she was living in a seven-buck furnished room! Ask her who she is! You weren’t at the Reading trial, were you? Well, I was! You’re riding for a fall, chief, by having her around you. She’s a stoolie!”

He turned on me. “Who are you? What does he mean?”

What was the good of answering? It was five to five on the clock. I needed Burns bad.

The other one snarled, “She’s the patsy’s sister. Chick Wheeler’s sister. I saw her on the stand, with my own eyes.”

Milton’s face screwed up into a sort of despairing agony; I’d never seen anything like it before. He whimpered, “And you’re so beautiful to have to be killed!”

I hugged the negligée around me tight and looked down at the floor. “Then don’t have me killed,” I said softly. It was two to five, now.

He said with comic sadness. “I got to if you’re that guy’s sister.”

“I say I’m nobody’s sister, just Angel Face that dances at your club. I say I only came here cause — I like soft carpets.”

“Why did you send that fake telegram to get me out of town?”

He had me there. I thought fast. “If I’m a stoolie I get killed, right? But what happens if I’m the other kind of a double-crosser, a two-timer, do I still get killed?”

“No,” he said, “because you were still a free-lance; your option hadn’t been taken up yet.”

“That’s the answer, then. I was going to use your place to meet my steady, that’s why I sent the queer wire.”

Rocco’s voice was as cracked as a megaphone after a football rally. “She’s Wheeler’s sister, chief. Don’t let her ki—”

“Shut up!” Milton said.

Rocco just smiled a wise smile, shrugged, lit a cigarette. “You’ll find out.”

The phone rang. “Get that,” Milton ordered. “That’s her guy now. Keep him on the wire.” He turned and went running up the stairs to the floor above, where the other phone was.

Rocco took out a gun, fanned it vaguely in my direction, sauntered over. “Don’t try nothing, now, while that line’s open. You may be fooling Milton, you’re not fooling us any. He was always a sucker for a twist.”

Rocco’s buddy said, “Hello?”

Rocco, still holding the gun on me, took a lopsided drag on his cigarette with his left hand and blew smoke vertically. Some of it caught in his throat, and he started to cough like a seal. You could hear it all over the place.

I could feel all the blood draining out of my face.

The third guy was purring, “No, you tell me what number you want first, then I’ll tell you what number this is. That’s the way it’s done, pal.” He turned a blank face. “Hung up on me!”

Rocco was still hacking away. I felt sick all over. Sold out by my own signal that everything was under control!

There was a sound like dry leaves on the stairs and Milton came whisking down again. “Some guy wanted an all-night delicatess—” the spokesman started to say.

Milton cut his hand at him viciously. “That was Center Street, police headquarters. I had it traced! Put some clothes on her, she’s going to her funeral!”

They forced me back into the silver sheath between them. Milton came over with a flagon of brandy and dashed it all over me from head to foot. “If she lets out a peep, she’s drunk. Won’t be the first stewed dame carried outa here!”

They had to hold me up between them, my heels just clear of the ground, to get me to move at all. Rocco had his gun buried in the silver folds of my dress. The other had a big handkerchief spread out in his hand held under my face, as though I were nauseated — in reality to squelch any scream.

Milton came behind us. “You shouldn’t mix your drinks,” he was saying, “and especially you shouldn’t help yourself to people’s private stock without permission.”

But the doorman was asleep again on his bench, like when I’d come in the first time. This time he didn’t wake up. His eyelids just flickered a little as the four of us went by.

They saw to it that I got in the car first, like a lady should. The ride was one of those things you take to your grave with you. My whole past life came before me, in slow motion. I didn’t mind dying so terribly much, but I hated to go without being able to do anything for Chick. But it was the way the cards had fallen, that was all.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” I said to myself, “than growing into an old lady and no one looks at your face any more.” I took out my mirror and I powdered my nose, and then I threw the compact away. I’d show them a lady could die like a gentleman!

The house was on the Sound. Milton evidently lived in it quite a bit, by the looks of it. His Filipino let us in.

“Build a fire, Juan, it’s chilly,” he grinned. And to me, “Sit down, Angel Face, and let me look at you before you go.” The other two threw me into a corner of a big sofa, and I just stayed that way, limp like a rag doll. He just stared and stared. “Gosh, you’re swell!” he said.

“Gosh, you’re lousy,” I answered quietly.

Rocco said, “What’re we waiting for? It’s broad daylight already.”

Milton was idly holding something into the fire, a long poker of some kind. “She’s going,” he said, “but she’s going as my property. Show the other angels this, when you get up there, so they’ll know who you belong to.” He came over to me with the end of the thing glowing dull red. It was flattened into some kind of an ornamental design or cipher. “Knock her out,” he said, “I’m not that much of a brute.”

Something exploded off the side of my head, and I lost my senses. Then he was wiping my mouth with a handkerchief soaked in whiskey, and my side burned, just above the hip, where they’d found that mark on Ruby Rose Reading.

“All right, Rocco,” Milton said.

Rocco took out his gun again, but he shoved it at the third guy heft-first. The third one held it level at me, took the safety off. His face was sort of green and wet with sweat. I looked him straight in the eyes. The gun went down like a drooping lily. “I can’t, boss, she’s too beautiful!” he groaned. “She’s got the face of an angel. How can you shoot anything like that?”

Milton pulled it away from him. “She double-crossed me just like Reading did. Any dame that double-crosses me gets what I gave Reading.”

A voice said softly. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

The gun went off, and I wondered why I didn’t feel anything. Then I saw that the smoke was coming from the doorway and not from Milton’s gun at all. He went down at my feet, like he wanted to apologize for what he’d done to me, but he didn’t say anything and he didn’t get up any more. There was blood running down the part of his hair in back.

Burns was in the room, with more guys than I’d ever seen outside of a police parade. One of them was the doorman from Milton’s place, or at least the dick that Burns had substituted for him to keep an eye on me while I was up there. Burns told me about that later and about how they followed Milt’s little party but hadn’t been able to get in time to keep me from getting branded. Rocco and the other guy went down into hamburger under a battery of heavy fists.

I sat there holding my side and sucking in my breath. “It was a swell trick-finish,” I panted to Burns, “but what’d you drill him for? Now we’ll never get the proof that’ll save Chick.”

He was at the phone asking to be put through to Schlesinger in the city. “We’ve got it already, Angel Face,” he said ruefully. “It’s right on you, where you’re holding your side. Just where it was on Reading. We all heard what he said before he nose-dived anyway. I only wish I hadn’t shot him,” he glowered, “then I’d have the pleasure of doing it all over again, more slowly.”