Black Mask (Vol. 23, No. 4 — August 1940)

Everyone in South City knew about the first ten thousand reasons why Ralph McDonald should have been bumped off. It was the ten-thousand-and-first that came as a surprise — to all but the Bishop and Mrs. Good, that pair of none-such newshounds who knew what could happen when a honey-haired fire-ball of Southern charm got cued with a little reverse English.

Chapter One The Face at the Window

The Bishop was shooting craps in one of the upstairs gambling-rooms when the murder took place. I was standing beside him, holding his money, because the Bishop has a peg leg — he wears an artificial foot — and always carries a cane in his left hand. This leaves only his right hand free and he doesn’t want to be bothered by anything but the dice.

He was in the middle of a hot winning streak. He’d shake the dice, keeping his hand palm down, balance back on his heel and his cane, look owlishly around at the other players and say: “Wouldn’t it be terrible if I were to fling a seven?” And then he’d do it.

The Bishop is a short, heavy-bodied man of about sixty, with a head as round and bald and pink as a balloon. He has small, puckish features and no neck between his round head and his big shoulders. He looks more like an aging overgrown imp than like a newspaperman. Actually he’s the political writer on the South City Democrat, and has been on that same paper for forty-two years, or twenty years longer than I’ve been living.

This was at the Red and Black Gambling Club, at a party given by one of the city commissioners. A party given by a city commissioner at a gambling club will sound strange only to persons who don’t know South City. The government airport there was being enlarged and this was in celebration. The commissioner himself wasn’t present (he was entertaining some of the older officers elsewhere) but he’d sent a few cops to sit outside and keep everybody away except the invited guests. There were newspapermen, young men from the Civic Clubs which had worked to bring the new addition to the local air field, the young officers, their wives and dates.

That was the set-up for the murder. It was a neat, clever murder and it would have been a swell case to cover if the Bishop hadn’t got interested in it.

At this particular moment the Bishop was looking for a ten. He’d been rolling for two minutes and he couldn’t make the ten and he wouldn’t fall off. That’s when we heard the shot.

It sounded loud enough to be in the room with us, though it was actually a couple of doors down the hall. It startled everybody — except the Bishop. He’s never been startled at anything. A kind of electric silence struck the room and everybody stood tense and listening.

The Bishop said to the dice: “Be ten, I got no more time to play.” It was a ten and I scooped up the money.

Then the woman screamed. I have never heard a scream like it — one single yell that sounded as if it would split the vocal chords. A woman yelling in terror, and I mean terror. It came from down the hall where the shot had sounded.

I was the first person into the hall, running hard. The second door on the right was open and I knew that was where the yell must have come from and I went skidding over the sill. I almost banged into the girl who stood just inside the room. She was staring toward the window on the left. Her mouth was still open, though no more sound was coming out. Her eyes bulged a half-inch from their sockets and her face was so bloodless the rouge looked black against it. She didn’t say anything, just kept staring at the window.

I looked. There wasn’t anything but an open window with copper screening and the night dark beyond. Even after I went close to the window I didn’t see anything except the shingled roof of the porch — this was on the second floor — and a big overhanging oak tree.

Other persons were rushing into the room now and I turned back to face them. That was when I saw the corpse. It lay face down near the wall on the other side of the room. There wasn’t any doubting that it was a corpse, because the bullet had hit the man right at the base of the skull.

The man’s face was half turned toward me. He was — or had been — Ralph McDonald, the president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce and one of South City’s richest young men.

There were four or five persons in the room now. One of them was the Bishop. It’s surprising how fast he can move when he wants to. He was closing the door after him, locking it to keep the crowd out, and muttering: “Why the hell couldn’t they have shot him two hours ago? Damn Journal’ll get the break now. Ai God! These dumb murderers.”

The girl said, as if she’d been trying to say it for hours: “The face — there at the window! I saw it!”

The Bishop pegged over and looked out. “Nobody shot him through this window. No hole in the screen. Anyhow, looks like he was shot from behind, from about the hall door.”

“There’s a window down at the end of the hall,” I said, “which lets out onto this same porch roof.”

The Bishop was pushing and heaving and he finally got the screen up. Behind us everybody else in the room was asking the girl what had happened and she was just sobbing and saying now and then: “The face... It was — terrible!”

The Bishop said: “Crawl out there, Eddie, and see what the hell she’s squawking about. And see if the window at the end of the hall is open.”

“I’m not going out there. The guy may still be hanging around. He might pot me, too.”

“Ai God!” the Bishop said. “How’m I going to know what’s out there if you don’t go look? Go on! Crawl out!”

“There’ll be cops up here in a minute. Let them look. They’re paid for it.”

“Do I have to do it myself?”

“Oh all right,” I said.

I don’t know why I let the Bishop bully me into doing all the crazy things he thinks up.

I climbed out the window onto the roof of the porch. The Bishop said, “Look at the window at the end of the hall,” and turned back into the room again.

It was one of these huge, rambling, old-fashioned Southern houses and this side porch stretched almost the full length of the building. The roof slanted sharply so I had to walk with one leg bent at the knee to keep my balance. I keep peering all around, but there wasn’t anybody on the roof except me. I went down to the end, where the hall window was, and both the window and the screen were open.

Whoever shot Ralph McDonald had probably stood in the hallway, I figured. After that one shot they’d run to this window, crawled out, and had either dropped off the edge of the porch or had climbed into the big oak which overhung the roof and got down that way.

I was considering this when I heard a noise in the tree.

If I’d had time to think I would have pretended I didn’t hear anything. I’d have climbed in through that open window and got the hell away from there. But there wasn’t time to think. I heard the sound and I swung around and peered up into the tree.

A tiny speck of light from the window reflected off one of the leaves. I saw the leaf move. And in that tiny speck of light I saw a hand — a hand that was no bigger than a doll’s hand, a thing no more than one or two inches long, but all covered with hair. Then a face appeared. It was about the size of a baseball, matted with hair, and with eyes that gleamed blood red.

The thing made a weird peeping cry and leaped straight out of the tree onto me.

I think I yelled. The Bishop says it was either me or a cat in heat. He says it made the girl’s shriek sound like Talullah Bankhead’s whispering. I went half crazy trying to tear the thing loose from my shoulder and when I got it off my shoulder it got into my hair. It was clawing at me and cheeping. Then my feet skidded from under me and I went sailing off the edge of the roof. I came down with a bang, fortunately in a freshly spaded flower bed.

The thing which had been on my head jumped off. It ran through a rectangle of light from one of the first-floor windows, and I saw it was a monkey.

I sat there and felt a little sick and cursed myself and cursed the Bishop and cursed John Bollo. John Bollo is the man who owns the Red and Black Club, the place where all this was happening. He was nuts about animals. Besides the monkey there was a parrot, two dogs, and a tame ’coon around the place. I knew that, but I had forgotten it.

I was still sitting there cursing when John Bollo came out. He chuckled when I told him what had happened. Even a murder in his gambling house didn’t dampen John Bollo’s good humor. He was plump, with blond hair and a fixed, beaming smile. Even when he was watching somebody make a long run on the roulette wheel or the dice table he’d just stand and beam at them until he looked stupid.

“Will Mr. Atticus” — the Bishop’s real name was Roscoe Atticus — “kid you!” he chuckled. “My! You should have heard the yell you let out!”

“I wish I had killed that lousy monkey of yours,” I said. I was feeling ashamed of myself, and angry, and even if I had fallen in soft ground it had been a hell of a bump.

We went back into the building. The cops who had been stationed outside were there now and one of them had phoned for Lieutenant Browder, who is Science versus Crime in South City. Browder’d said keep everybody out of the room where the murder took place until he arrived.

John Bollo and I talked to the Bishop. “It was nobody but Oscar, my monkey, that Miss Howell saw looking in the window,” Bollo said, grinning that silly grin of his. “It jumped on Eddie’s shoulder and frightened him.”

“Ai God!” the Bishop said. “I thought you were being scalped.”

He swayed back, propping himself on his stick and looking at me. “You didn’t find the gun while you were out there?”

“I didn’t find anything except that damn monkey.”

“The gun wasn’t in the room?” John Bollo asked.

“Nope,” the Bishop said. He turned toward the gambler, pivoting on his peg leg and his stick. His small puckered features were cherubic and his bald head shone pink. “You musta been sorry to see McDonald get it — with him owing you so much money.”

There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. Then Bollo chuckled. “You sure learn things in a hurry, Mr. Atticus.”

“That’s what they pay me for.” The Bishop waved one thick hand at me. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s go talk to the girl.”

I followed him, saying: “She’s all upset now. And it’s two hours after our deadline. Why not wait until this afternoon?”

The Bishop didn’t even pay attention to me. “Her name’s Nancy Howell, old Wayne Howell’s daughter, and she was supposed to marry this man, McDonald.” He walked straight through the room with the bar, even though it had been a good half-hour since he had a drink. That meant the Bishop was excited. There was something here which had him more interested than any average murder should. He was thirty-five years past police reporting, and when he got interested in a case now there was plenty to it. I knew Ralph McDonald had been a prominent young business man, but it would take more than just that to make the Bishop forget a drink.

We stopped before a door at the end of the hall. “You talk to her,” the Bishop said. “The women always love to weep on your beautiful shoulder.”

“Aw, Bishop. I—”

“Go on, handsome.”

The one thing that really gets me is to be kidded about my face. A guy can’t help his face. I’d spent four years on the college boxing team hoping to get a bent nose or a cauliflower ear, but I never did. I said: “Now damn it, Bishop—”

“Ai God! If I had your face and my inclinations—”

It was a long room furnished as a lounge with red-leather upholstered chairs and sofas. Nancy Howell was half lying on one of the sofas and a couple of girls were hovering over her. She was reduced now to a sort of quiet sobbing.

I said: “Excuse me, Miss Howell, but I’ve found out what it was you saw at the window. It was John Bollo’s little monkey, that’s all. I thought you’d want to know.”

She was staring up at me. For a few seconds she wasn’t making any sound at all. She wasn’t even breathing. She said finally: “A monkey?”

She tried a small smile at me, although her eyes were still wet with tears and her lips quivery. “That must have been it. But it was such a shock. It was so... so horrible.”

“It must have been,” I said.

One of the other girls said I was awfully brave to go outside and look, and the other girl said she knew I was Eddie Edison and I was a reporter for the Democrat and her name and phone number was... I would have made a break for it then, but the Bishop was right there and I knew he wouldn’t let me scram. So I asked Miss Howell if she felt well enough to tell what had happened.

“I... don’t know. Maybe I ought to talk about it.” She made a queer little frightened movement and put her hand on my wrist. I sat down on the sofa by her. She was a pretty girl, about twenty-five but now she looked very young and feminine and hurt. Her hair was blond and her eyes were big and gray. “I... I’d just got here, and I was looking around for Ralph—”

The Bishop interrupted: “You’d just got here?”

She looked up at him and touched a handerkerchief to her eyes. “Yes. I wasn’t feeling well and I phoned Ralph at his office this afternoon that I wasn’t coming. But after I’d slept a while I felt better, so I dressed and drove out and I looked around for him and—” Her hands tightened on my wrist. She turned her little face toward me then and I could see she was trying to keep back the tears.

“I’d just met Ralph in the hall and we stepped into that room a minute ’cause he wanted to ask how I felt, and...” Her fingers dug into my wrist. “That’s when it happened!”

“You didn’t see anybody? Anything except that face at the window?”

“That’s all. I... I must have been too shocked to move.” She began to cry softly. “I still can’t believe it.”

It was then I remembered the ten thousand dollars. I asked if she knew whether or not Ralph McDonald had had the money with him.

“The ten thousand dollars the Civic Clubs collected to buy the land for the airport,” I explained.

“I don’t think so. He wouldn’t be carrying it in his pocket, would he?”

Out in the hall the Bishop dragged me through the crowd and into a corner. “Why’d you think McDonald had that airport money?”

On a paper the size of the Democrat a reporter has a lot of slush to cover besides his regular beat, and I had to write up all the Civic Club meetings as well as police stuff. In trying to bring the new addition to the government airfield to South City three of the clubs had collected enough money to buy the necessary land and donate it to the government. “Ben Steiner from the Rotary Club, Muddy Marshall from the Lions, and Ralph McDonald for the Junior Chamber were the treasurers,” I told the Bishop. “At their meeting tonight all the money was turned over to McDonald. I was there when they gave it to him.”

“What did he do with it?”

“He was to put it in his office safe until tomorrow when the banks open.”

There was a gleam in the Bishop’s eyes that I didn’t like. “Ai God!” he said. “Come on!”

“Bishop, now listen...”

He went over to the bar and had a drink and said he wanted a pint bottle of whiskey. Their whiskey was all in quarts and the Bishop made them pour a pint into a flat rum bottle they had. He stuck that into his pocket and started out. For thirty years the Bishop has drunk two pints of whiskey every night, and on special occasions such as this, he’ll double his quota. Yet he never buys anything but pint bottles. He says they fit his hand better. And besides, he says, if he was to ever start buying his liquor by the quart he might develop into a drunkard.

Chapter Two 10,001 Motives For Murder

Ralph McDonald’s real-estate office was on the second floor of a building on Commerce Street. The office door was locked. I said: “I told you it would be locked, Bishop.”

“We’ll go outside and climb up the fire-escape and get in the window. That’s a spring lock on the door. You can open it from the inside and let me in.”

I said: “There’s a law against that sort of thing. People get shot for breaking into houses.”

“Hurry up!” the Bishop said impatiently. “We ain’t got all night.”

“Damn it!” I said, and my voice was thinner than I meant for it to be. “I climbed out on that roof for you, and what happened? I almost broke my fool neck. Every time you bother with a murder case, something happens to me. Why don’t you stick to politics?”

“I am sticking to politics,” the Bishop said. “You just let me tend to my own business and I’ll tend to yours. Now hurry.”

“But if the window’s locked?”

“Then kick it out.”

“And have the cops up here by the time the glass hits the alley! You know what Lieutenant Browder’ll do if he catches me breaking in here. Even if he didn’t put me in jail for life I’d never get another spot of news out of him.”

“You let me worry about that prude. This thing is bigger than he is. Now get!”

I don’t know why I argue with him. The Bishop can always make me do his dirty work, somehow or other, and I know it. Besides, he had me excited now. I knew this was a first-rate murder story for South City though I still didn’t see the political angle that had Bishop Atticus so interested. But he’d said he was sticking to politics, and he’d said this was bigger than Lieutenant Browder — and I knew the Bishop didn’t lie about things of this kind. So I was excited.

But I was still scared.

It was black-dark in the alley. I felt my way along, stumbling over a stray tin can and making a noise that sounded to me like the bombardment of Rotterdam. I wondered if the cop on the beat would shoot me before I had a chance to yell and tell him who I was. And then I thought about the man who’d murdered Ralph McDonald and wondered if he could be close by. I remembered how very still and dead that one bullet had left Ralph. My stomach felt queasy and my hands were dripping sweat and I thought I heard something roaring down the alley toward me — then realized it was just the blood pounding in my ears.

I could barely see the fire-escape against the sky. I reached up and got ahold of it and started to climb. The iron was rusty and sharp against my hands. It made little squeaking noises. But nobody shot at me and I reached the landing without trouble. I rubbed my hands on my trousers and got ready to go to work on the window.

The window stood wide open.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” I said. It was careless of a man to leave an open window on a fire-escape, especially with ten thousand dollars inside. But the weather was hot, and maybe the money hadn’t been left here after all.

I listened, and there wasn’t any sound. So I stuck one leg over the windowsill, and then my head. And that’s when the blow landed.

I thought I’d been shot. I thought the top of my head was blown off. I could feel myself falling and it was like falling through a sky full of exploding rockets of red and green and white with me turning over and over and over between them.

I must have struck the man across the knees as I fell, though I don’t remember it. I remember hitting the floor and then there was somebody on top of me who seemed to be having convulsions trying to get off. I started swinging wild, crazy blows. Something banged me in the eye. Then my left hand got tangled up in a man’s hair and I held on. I could tell from his hair where his chin should be and I let him have about four, one after another. I fought as a middleweight in college and I’ve put on seven or eight pounds since then and I was using them all. When I let go his hair there was a slumping noise as the fellow went limp on the floor.

I got up and groped my way across the office and opened the hall door. I was panting and I felt sick. I didn’t know if I was hurt badly or not.

“Hello,” the Bishop said. “Some kind of disturbance in here?” He pushed past me. “Where’s the light? I don’t want to bruise myself stumbling around in the dark.”

He switched on the light, closed the hall door, then turned around and looked at the man on the floor. He was a thin, wiry young guy with inky black hair and one of these dark, sensitive, intellectual faces. He was out cold.

“You know him?” the Bishop asked.

“It’s Ben Steiner. He and Muddy Marshall and Ralph McDonald were the three men who had charge of the funds collected by the Civic Clubs until the money was all turned over to McDonald.”

“Thought I’d seen him. Must be old Ben Steiner’s son.” The Bishop knew the father of everybody in South City under seventy years old.

He turned around slowly, pivoting as usual on his peg leg — sort of revolving around it. And halfway around he stopped. “Yep,” he said. “There it is.”

It was a safe and the door was wide open. There were a few scattered papers inside, but there was no ten thousand dollars.

“There’s your motive,” the Bishop said. “Ten thousand of ’em.” He limped over to a watercooler in one corner and put two fingers of water in a paper cup. He added an equal amount of whiskey from the bottle he’d brought and gulped it down. Then he refilled the paper cup with water and limped back and poured it on Ben Steiner’s face.

After a few moments Steiner got up. He brushed back his wet hair. His face was already beginning to swell and grow discolored. His eyes were hard and black, with no expression in them. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I could tell he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t any more afraid than the Bishop was.

The Bishop said: “Did you get the money?”

Steiner looked at him squarely. “No.”

“Who did get it?”

“I don’t know. How would I?”

“You came here looking for it.”

“I came to see if it was here. I was at the Red and Black Club when Ralph McDonald was killed and I was afraid it was because of the money. So I came to see if it was here.”

“Looks like you would have turned on the light so you could see better,” the Bishop said.

Ben Steiner just looked straight at the Bishop without answering.

I said: “Maybe we ought to search him, Bishop?”

There was a change in Steiner’s face then. I can’t explain it exactly because it wasn’t that much of a change — just a look in his eyes. Maybe he was getting afraid. Maybe he was making up his mind what he would do.

He said: “No, I’m not being searched. I don’t have the money, but I’m not going to be searched.”

“Hell,” the Bishop said. “We’re a couple of friends. We’re better than the cops.”

“No.”

The Bishop shrugged and started limping across the room toward the telephone. If he phoned the cops, we’d be in as tough a spot as Steiner, but he might have done it regardless. God would have a hard time trying to guess what the Bishop’d do.

When he picked up the phone, Steiner said: “All right. Search me. My wallet’s in my inside coat pocket.”

There was thirty-two dollars in it. I put it back and reached in his right trouser pocket and found fifty-five cents. In his left trouser pocket was a key ring and a half-package of mints. He wore a white cotton suit, without a vest. He had a watch in the watch pocket, a handkerchief in the hip pocket. He had another handkerchief in the breast coat pocket and in the left coat pocket was a half-package of cigarettes and two paper books of matches.

I stepped around on the other side of him and stuck my hand in his left coat pocket. This put me on the left side of him, and he had plenty of room for his right uppercut. I saw it coming, but it took me so completely by surprise I was still thinking about dodging when it landed. I stumbled backward, hit a chair, and went over on my fanny.

I sat there and I could see but I couldn’t get up. I saw Ben Steiner whirl and spring for the hall door. He snatched the door open and leaped through — and came down flat on his face in the hallway. The Bishop had tripped him with his walking stick.

But Steiner just hit and bounced. By the time I got to the hall he was down the stairs and gone. I went after him anyway. And halfway down the stair I stumbled. I didn’t fall. I just kept going faster and faster and I couldn’t stop. I managed to aim for the street door, though. It was open. As I went out somebody tried to come in and we both spilled like a ton of brick on the sidewalk

When I sat up and could see again I was looking at Muddy Marshall, the third of the three Civic Club officials who had known the money was in Ralph McDonald’s office safe. He was sitting in the gutter looking dazed and his nose was bleeding.

Behind me a voice said: “What happened? What’s the trouble here?”

I looked around and it was Lieutenant Browder, the pride of the South City police department.

I knew Browder wasn’t going to regard lightly the fact that I had broken into the office of a man who had just been murdered — an office out of which ten thousand dollars had been swiped. Browder never regards anything lightly.

“What happened?” he asked again.

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said: “Hello. Hello, Lieutenant.”

He said: “You’re both drunk. What are you doing here?”

I didn’t answer. Muddy Marshall wiped away the blood that was trickling from his nose and said: “I was just starting in the doorway when this man ran into me. I don’t know—”

He recognized me for the first time, blinking at me and looking drunk. “Oh, it’s you Edison. Why this violent and felonious assault?”

“I stumbled.”

The Bishop called cheerfully from the stairway inside the building: “Come on in, Lieutenant. We’re waiting for you.”

Browder swung around and looked at the doorway for a moment. His face was dark with suspicion. Then he went through the door and up the stair and Muddy Marshall and I followed.

The Bishop was standing at the head of the stair. The hall behind him was semi-dark. The door to Ralph McDonald’s real-estate office was closed and no light showed over the transom. The Bishop was balanced on his heels and cane, the forward thrust of his stomach helping to keep his equilibrium.

He said: “We knew you’d be right down, Lieutenant. So Eddie and I came on ahead. We’ve been waiting. We would have gone in and had a chair, but the door’s locked.”

It was too, thanks to that spring lock. Lieutenant Browder didn’t have to use the fire-escape though. He had McDonald’s keys.

Chapter Three The Social Cesspool

It’s always fun to watch the Bishop and Browder together. They don’t exactly hate one another, but there’s no love lost between them. On the other hand, each respects the other.

Browder is a rather handsome, middle-aged man. He’s a show-off and he has a good sense of the dramatic and he loves publicity. He will keep a case running just as long as the public stays interested. He lets out information to the papers a little bit at a time, so the readers get the impression that Lieutenant Browder is constantly zooming from spot to spot gathering new facts backed by scientific proof. But he’s no fool. He’s had two trips to the F.B.I. training school and he really knows his stuff. He’s a man on the way up and he takes himself with deadly seriousness and he’s honest. He’d work up a vagrancy case against Mrs. Roosevelt if he believed her guilty.

The Bishop never admits to any interest in details. He stood back now looking bored and having a drink while Browder worked. And Browder’s thorough. He must have wound up with every fingerprint in that office. He probably knew the Bishop and I had been there, but he was waiting until his prints were developed, waiting until he had proof before he did anything. He worked that way.

The only thing he asked was: “Where’d you get that black eye, Eddie? And that lump on your jaw?”

The Bishop said: “Ain’t it pretty? On him a black eye has lavender edges. He can’t help it, but he’s beautiful.”

I said I must have got the bruises when I stumbled into Marshall.

Marshall’s nose was still leaking blood into the handkerchief he held.

“You caused me bodily injury and harm,” he said. “Distress and duress. Duress per minas. Violence sufficient to inspire a person of ordinary firmness with fear of loss of life or limb. Maybe I ought to sue.”

He was a young lawyer only three years out of law school and he was supposed to be good, but some persons said whiskey would surely get him. He had a heavily fleshed face with red-veined pads beneath the eyes. Of course, he didn’t drink as much as the Bishop, but then the Bishop was a rare alcoholic genius who drank, as he said, “just to keep his throat wet,” and liquor rarely had any effect on him.

It was Marshall — he’d been at the Red and Black Club when McDonald was shot — who had told Browder about the ten thousand dollars. “The sinister circumstance,” Marshall said, having a drink with the Bishop at the water cooler, “is that I knew the combination to this safe. Ralph had to leave town tomorrow on business and I was supposed to put this coin of the realm in the bank. Perfectly legal transaction, you know. Witnesses, et cetera. Signed voucher from bank. And now the damn money’s gone. How can I put it in the bank?”

The Bishop seemed to be growing bored. He said good-night to Browder and Marshall and we left.

Driving back uptown I asked the Bishop where was the political angle in this case, the angle that had him so interested. “Ai God!” he said. “It’s all around you. This is South City! This is the Cradle of the Confederacy and Richmond is just an upstart. There ain’t another town in the world like this one.”

He was off on one of his favorite topics now — the foibles and idionsyncrasies of South City society and politics, which are often one and the same thing. He always said this was the reason he had stayed with the Democrat for forty-two years, “and never a day without a laugh.”

“But where does politics fit in here?” I asked.

“Where the hell did the murder take place?” the Bishop said. “In a gambling house. And the party was given by one of the city commissioners. Now there’s hardly a prude in South City who’ll object to a city commissioner giving a party in a gambling house — as long as it’s not made into an open scandal. But let the party get spread in the papers, they’ll kick out the commissioner. There’s always going to be gambling and gals in this town, because the town wants ’em. But the town wants ’em kept quiet. Why? Well, nobody can live comfortably without sin. And a lot of folks can’t live comfortably with it, once they admit they’re living with it. This is just South City’s way of preserving the fairest flower of its youth untarnished — and satisfied.”

“But the murder’s already committed,” I said. “It has to go in the paper.”

“Sure. But everybody connected with this thing comes from old, prominent families. If it’s solved quick, finished, folks will hush it up. They won’t talk about it, except to their friends, and nobody’s feelings will be hurt by thinking they’ve got corrupt city commissioners. But let it drag on for days, with that prude Browder feeding out facts like gasoline on a fire, and Hank Murray will get himself elected by it.”

“What kind of guy is Murray?”

The Bishop had a drink straight, which is rare, and spat out the window, which is rarer. “A self-respecting corn cob wouldn’t wipe itself on Hank Murray. He wouldn’t clean up this town — but he would make sure the graft went in his own pocket.”

“Where does it go now?”

“Believe it or not, part of it goes into the police pension fund. And part goes to the Community Chest. And who the hell knows where the rest goes? But it’s a good town. Lower taxes than any you can name. And not much city debt, and not much real crime. It ain’t heaven, but it ain’t Birmingham either.”

I said: “It’s a wonder you haven’t exposed this in your column. I thought you wrote the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

The Bishop had another small snifter, swallowing this one slowly, and as if he liked it. “When I first went to work on the Democrat I wrote the whole truth. I wrote the whole truth about the South City baseball team for three days and after that they wouldn’t let me in the park. I had to climb a tree and use a telescope to cover the games. The team found out about it and sawed the limb half in two so next time I climbed up there the limb broke. That’s when I broke my leg. It could have been set easy enough, but the doctor I went to happened to own stock in the baseball team.”

The last time the Bishop had told me how he lost his leg he’d said it was shot off when he was too slow getting out of a window on the one occasion in history when a train on the South City-Mobile Railroad came in ahead of time. There were a vast number of stories about how Roscoe Atticus came to be called the Bishop and about how he lost his leg, but nobody could swear to the truth.

Back at the Red and Black Club, where I’d left my ancient bus, I got out and the Bishop slid under the wheel of his own car. “I almost forgot, Eddie. Did you feel anything in Steiner’s pocket before he socked you?”

“Not a thing but a silk handkerchief. At least it felt like a silk handkerchief. I know damn well he didn’t have the money. I can’t figure why he socked me and ran.”

“Umn-n.” The Bishop rubbed one hand around the bald globe of his head. “Umn-n, you better be careful, Eddie. I don’t think so, but somebody might be willing to kill for that handkerchief. They might even be willing to kill you just because you know about it.”

He drove off and left me there staring after him.

I was still standing there, staring, when Nancy Howell came out of the Red and Black Club with John Bollo. She had stopped crying, but her face was pale and strained. Bollo had his arm around her waist and he was grinning. For some reason I didn’t seem to like that man.

They got in Bollo’s Packard and drove off.

After crawling out of bed, about two that afternoon, I went to Pete’s Restaurant for breakfast, and while downing my ham and eggs I read the afternoon Journal. They played the story up big. The murder shot, the Journal said had been fired from a distance of more than ten feet, from about the hall doorway probably. It was a small-caliber gun the exact caliber not yet known. The murderer had probably ducked out of an upstairs window and dropped from the porch roof to the ground. Moulage imprints had been made of tracks found in the flower beds, but in other places the grass came up to the edge of the house and would not hold prints. Ten thousand dollars which various Civic Clubs had collected to buy land to be given to the government for enlarging the air base was missing. It was believed stolen, but a thorough check had not yet been completed.

Sooner or later I had to go down to headquarters and face Browder, and I knew that by this time he probably was sure I had been in McDonald’s office before he got there. I wondered how much hell he’d give me, and on the chance that the Bishop might be at the paper and would go to headquarters with me, I went by the office. But he wasn’t there. The city editor’s book didn’t have anything special for me on it. I went by the jail and the courthouse and the fire-station for the day’s routine stuff. And finally I went on to headquarters.

As I was starting in the door Browder and a couple of plainclothesmen came out, walking fast. Browder saw me and his eyes got a hot glare in them.

He said: “I’m in a hurry, or I’d stop to talk to you. Be around when I get back.” It was distinctly an order.

I went into headquarters and back to what Browder liked to call The Laboratory, though South City had spent no fortune equipping it. The Journal reporter, Tommy Harris, was there with Bill Piker. Piker was a young cop, no older than I am, and Browder was training him as his “scientific assistant.”

Piker’s eyebrows went up when he saw me. “Browder went out just a minute ago. Boy does he want to see you!”

“I saw him leaving. What’s his hurry?”

“A patrolman down by the railroad phoned and said he thought he recognized Ben Steiner — on a freight train headed out of town.”

Tommy Harris said: “He was at the Black and Red last night when McDonald got killed, but nobody’s seen him since. He didn’t go home last night and about noon there was a report from his mother that he was missing. I think Browder’s got him tied up with the shooting and the ten grand somehow. And listen, what’s this you’ve done that’s got the lieutenant so hot under the collar?”

“Nothing.” I said. “Nothing. I’ll be seeing y’all.” And I left.

With Ben Steiner missing and maybe leaving town on a freight I didn’t want to have to answer Browder’s questions alone. I knew he’d take liberties with me which he wouldn’t take with the Bishop — even the governor is leary how he beards the Bishop. He’d got me into this, now let him get me out. I went back to the office.

I was heading down the hall for the newsroom when Mrs. Good saw me and called me into her office. Mrs. Good is the society editor. She is a gray-haired, rather handsome old lady with a firm jaw and bright dark eyes and she can outswear the British navy. The Anglo-Saxon words that even Hemingway characters are careful with are her favorites.

“Sit down, Eddie.” She leaned back in her chair, took a puff from a quarter-inch cigarette that she held between the blades of a huge pair of scissors, and said: “I’ve been sick all day because I didn’t go to that brawl. But how the hell could I know somebody was going to get murdered? Who killed the—?”

“I don’t know.”

“That Howell tart was in the room when it happened, wasn’t she?”

“She was talking to Ralph.”

“Then she killed him,” Mrs. Good said. “A damn wonder she hasn’t killed somebody before this. She’s done everything else.”

“She can’t be that bad. She’s a sweet-looking girl.”

Mrs. Good got the last possible drag out of her cigarette, flipped it into a spittoon and spat after it. Hers is probably the only society editor’s office in the country that has a spittoon in it. On the side next the wall was printed SOCIETY but you didn’t see that unless you turned the spittoon around. She said: “They all look sweet to you, Eddie. If all the tarts in the Junior League were as pious as the looks they get on their faces, the men in South City would be missing one hell of a lot of fun. Not that you make much use of your own face. Why don’t you get around more?”

I went back to the original subject. “Whoever killed Ralph McDonald,” I said, “probably did it for ten thousand dollars — though they must have stolen the money before they shot him. Maybe they knew that if he found it was missing he’d realize who took it. And you know Miss Howell wouldn’t shoot anybody for ten thousand bucks. She’s rich.”

“She hasn’t got a — nickel. Her father, old Wayne Howell, had pots of it, at one time or another, that he cheated people out of. But he didn’t have it when he died. Judge Jones just finished probating the estate a few weeks back. Wayne Howell owed half the folks in the state. That’s why Ralph McDonald decided not to marry her. That... wouldn’t do anything that didn’t add to his fortune.”

“Somebody told me they were going to be married, in just a week or two.”

“Somebody told you, but Ralph McDonald didn’t. He was trying to crawl out of that wedding. That’s why she killed him.”

It was a good theory. More than one man has been shot in South City because of broken engagements, but in this case I doubted it. Mrs. Good had been society editor so long, and has had to write so much sweetness-and-light that she reacts by always believing the worst.

The phone rang and Mrs. Good said: “Another old slut with some slop for my social cesspool.” But when she picked up the phone her voice changed entirely. It dripped honey. “Hell-oo.”

I heard the Bishop’s cane pegging down the hallway then and I jumped up and grabbed him as he went by the door. “We’re in a mess, Bishop! Lieutenant Browder knows we were at McDonald’s office last night and he probably knows Ben Steiner was there, and now Steiner’s missing! Vanished! They think he was seen leaving town on a freight train!”

“Well, well.” Bishop Atticus didn’t seem more than mildly interested. He waved his hand at Mrs. Good. “How are you this evening, Mrs. Good?”

She slid one hand over the mouthpiece, said: “Lousy as usual. Come on in and have a drink. I want to talk to you, too.”

The Bishop pegged past me to Mrs. Good’s watercooler, took a pint bottle out of his pocket, and broke the seal on it. With great deliberation he started mixing his two fingers of water and two of whiskey.

“Listen, Bishop,” I said. “I’m on a spot! If Browder doesn’t slap me in jail, he’ll at least be so mad I’ll never get any more news from him. What’ll I do?”

The Bishop tossed off his drink. “Just tell him who’s guilty, and let him take the credit. Give him a big play in the paper, and everything will be square again.”

“Yeah. And how am I supposed to tell him?”

“Who does Mrs. Good think killed Ralph?”

From the middle of a conversation about pink organdy and lace Mrs. Good said: “That Howell slut.”

“Is she?” the Bishop said. “Damn good-looking too. I think we ought to go out and see her, Eddie.”

Mrs. Good hung up the receiver and swung around and spat at the cuspidor. “A coming-out party for the McPherson brat,” she said. “That little pushover’s already been out more times than an alley cat. Where you going, Roscoe?”

The Bishop was pegging out the door. “Eddie and I are going to see if what you say about Nancy Howell is true. Come on, Eddie.”

“A lot of good it’ll do you, at your age!” Mrs. Good yelled.

I said, “For the first time in my life I’m looking forward to being fired,” and went wearily after the Bishop.

Chapter Four Enter — The Dead

Since her father’s death Nancy Howell had moved from the huge colonial home in which they had lived to a small white bungalow a half-block away. She was alone when we got there, except for a Negro maid who let us in, then went back to the kitchen to go on with preparations for dinner.

Miss Howell was still suffering from strain and shock, and it showed in her face, but she tried to smile at us. “I suppose y’all have to do this,” she said, “but really I don’t want to talk about it any more. I want to... to forget.”

She was wearing a white linen dress. She had an excellent figure and although the dress looked modest enough you could tell she was under it. Her eyes, without tears in them, were more blue than gray. Her face was pale and there were shadows under her eyes.

We said the usual things and sat down and talked a few minutes. And then, abruptly, the Bishop said: “Is there any chance, Miss Howell, that the face you saw at the window wasn’t John Bollo’s monkey?”

She stared at him and a little of last night’s fear came back into her eyes. “What else could it have been?”

“It could have been the murderer.”

I could see her throat move as she swallowed. “I only had a glimpse of it, and it was beyond the window. It was small and hairy. That’s all I could tell. It must have been the monkey.”

The Bishop said: “If you thought it was somebody, would you be afraid to say so?”

After a moment she said: “I see what you mean, Mr. Atticus.” The fear was gone from her eyes now. She looked straight at him. “If I had seen the man who killed Ralph and recognized him, I wouldn’t be afraid to tell you, to tell the police. I wouldn’t be afraid of what he might do to me. My father taught me how to use a gun, Mr. Atticus, and I can take care of myself.”

“I’ll bet old Wayne did teach you,” the Bishop chuckled. But his little puckered features sobered almost instantly. “I didn’t mean that you were afraid. I thought there might be some other reason.”

“You mean that — that he was somebody I am in love with?”

“Somebody that you have reason to protect.”

“I wasn’t in love with anybody but Ralph.” Her gray-blue eyes turned to me then. “Maybe I wasn’t really in love with him. I liked him. I don’t know... But I wouldn’t protect anybody who shot him.”

“Not even Ben Steiner?” the Bishop asked.

She gave just the barest kind of start. But her voice was steady when she said: “Not Ben Steiner. I’ve had dates with him. I like Ben. But I’ve never loved him and I’ve never owed him anything.” After a moment she added: “Why do you name him?”

“He seems to have skipped out of town. And the cops are looking for him.”

Her lips parted as though to speak, then closed again. Her breathing had quickened.

“What?” the Bishop asked.

“Nothing. Except that I don’t believe Ben killed Ralph. I’d never believe it.”

The phone rang then and she answered. It was evidently some girl friend offering condolences. They talked for a few minutes, and when Miss Howell replaced the phone and turned toward us again her face had gone completely bloodless. Her eyes seemed to overflow their sockets and there was a tortured look in them.

“All I want,” she said huskily, “is to forget everything. And I’ll never be able to. They won’t let me.”

“Who won’t let you?”

“The persons who are supposed to be my friends. They keep calling. They keep reminding me. They think I killed him!”

The Bishop and I stared at her. I seemed to be still hearing what she had said, and it was incredible. Finally the Bishop said: “You’re just upset. Why would anybody think you killed Ralph McDonald?”

“But they do think that! If only there was some way I could prove to them, could prove to everybody, that I’m innocent!”

“If you spotted the real murderer that’d be proof,” the Bishop said.

She looked at him for long time out of those too wide, gray-blue eyes. She closed her eyes slowly and pressed her hand over them for a moment. “I don’t know the real murderer,” she said.

And about then I had my brain storm. I said: “There’s a way you can prove you’re innocent. There’s a way you can prove it if you haven’t fired a gun at any time the last day or two. The paraffin test!”

“What’s a paraffin test?”

“I did an article for the paper on it a month or two back when I was writing about some of Lieutenant Browder’s new methods. It’s a way they can prove whether or not you’ve fired a gun during the last few days. If you have, there will be nitrate sticking to your hand. There’s no way to wash it off. And it will show up in the test.”

She was showing excitement. “Does the test take long?”

“Not very.”

“Then I want it made. Now! I want everybody to know I didn’t kill Ralph. Will you take me where they make it?”

I was suddenly remembering Browder and feeling unwilling to face him. But the Bishop said: “Sure. We’ll take you down to headquarters.”

As we were driving past the paper on the way to police headquarters the Bishop said: “Just let me out here, Eddie.” I started to argue with him, but I knew it wasn’t any use. He’d rooked me again. I let him out and with no small amount of trepidation I drove Miss Howell on to headquarters.

For the first time in all my dealings with the Bishop, however, luck was with me. Browder hadn’t yet returned from chasing after Ben Steiner, so I told Bill Piker what was wanted and he set about making the test on Miss Howell’s hands.

Muddy Marshall was there. He seemed about two thirds tight and was in his customary good humor. He said: “So you’re accused of the murder too, Nancy. I’ll get a client out of this yet, if I have to defend myself.”

I asked if they were accusing him.

“No formal charges,” he said grinning. “But they found my shoeprint in one of the flowerbeds, and I’m supposed to hang around until Sherlock Browder gets back and then explain everything.”

“What were you doing in the flowerbeds?”

“Ah-ha!” he said dramatically. “Not what you think. I was chasing after that damn monkey of John Bollo’s. I wanted to give it a drink of whiskey.”

“When was that?” I asked. “Was it before or after the shot?”

It was the way he looked at me then, for just a split instant, that gave me the idea he might not be as drunk as he pretended. He said: “I don’t know exactly. I never heard the shot.”

Bill Piker had finished his test and removed the smooth coating of paraffin from Nancy Howell’s hands and examined it. “It’s perfectly clear,” he said. “There’s not a sign of nitrate.”

“That means...?” she asked.

“That means you haven’t shot a gun in the thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”

She turned to me. It was the first time I had ever seen her actually smile without shock or tears or terror in her eyes. And I thought then that she was completely beautiful. She had a clean, washed look that was almost spiritual. She took my hand in both of hers. “Thank you, Eddie! Thank you. Take me home now.”

At her front step I told her good-night. I had to go back to the paper and work. She said: “You’ve got time for one drink with me, Eddie. I feel so... so free. And it seems like years since I’ve felt that way. I want somebody to talk to.”

Well, I should have been at the paper for the last hour but, well... I went in with her.

We went into the living-room and Nancy Howell took off her hat and tossed it on the sofa. She ran her fingers through her blond hair and shook it back from her ears. She called: “Mazzie, make a couple of Manhattans, please.”

There wasn’t any answer.

Nancy Howell said: “Now I wonder where that girl is.”

She called Mazzie’s name again, loudly this time. And still there was no answer.

“She must have gone to the store for something. Well, we can make the drinks ourselves.”

We went into the kitchen and mixed a couple of Manhattans. Pots simmered on the stove. Dishes were stacked on a table. The cook had evidently gone out while in the middle of preparing the dinner.

We went back into the living-room and sat down on the sofa. It was a warm evening with the windows wide open. I remember that twice I heard insects bump against the screens. Nancy Howell sipped at her drink, then leaned and put one hand on my left hand. She said: “You’ve been awfully nice, Eddie. You don’t know how terrible it is to feel that your friends suspect you of something horrible, and have no way to prove to them you’re innocent.”

“I’m glad if I helped.”

“You did, a lot. Now—”

That was when we first heard the sound. In that first instant I don’t believe that either of us recognized it, knew what the sound was. Yet after we heard it we both sat as silent and still as statues. I remember noticing that the liquor in my glass was not even trembling.

We must have sat like that for five full seconds. It seemed like five hours. And then we heard it again.

This time I knew what it was.

It was a man moaning. Not in agony but in something worse than that. If a corpse could struggle to reach life again, it might make a sound like that. Then the moan ended and I heard the faint scratching of fingernails on wood. It seemed to come from somewhere in the little foyer that we sat facing.

I said: “What was that?” I didn’t look at Nancy Howell. I was staring at the empty foyer. And Nancy Howell didn’t answer. After a few seconds we heard that muffled horrible moaning again, and again the sound of fingers clawing on wood.

I said huskily: “It’s in the hall closet.”

“Yes.”

That was all she said. But it brought me around like the cracker on a whip.

It was a sensation that I felt not in any one place, but all through my body: in my fingertips and my brain and my feet, in my stomach and my lungs and my throat. It was a kind of electrical shock that seemed to shrivel my body, to make it shrink in upon itself. I couldn’t move. I just stood there and stared at Nancy Howell’s face.

I hardly recognized her. Her face was contorted and hideous. It was an animal face with the cheek bones sharp across it and the eyes narrowed and the lips peeled back from the teeth. She never dropped her glass, never spilled the liquor, and somehow that seemed the most horrible part of the whole business, the perfect way she balanced that glass as she backed across the room. Her eyes were riveted always on the closet door in the foyer, but she moved steadily backward to a desk in the corner of the living-room and reached back and put down the cocktail glass.

I noticed the way she was breathing, in deep quick gasps between parted lips — quick gasps that pressed her breasts tight against her dress.

Still looking at the closet door she reached behind her and opened a drawer in the desk. She did something I couldn’t see plainly — there must have been a false bottom to the drawer — and drew out a key and transferred it to her left hand. She reached into the drawer again and this time her hand came out with a small pearl-handled revolver.

“Open that door,” she whispered.

I gulped.

She looked at me for the first time and her gaze and the gun swung together. I thought the bullet was already plowing into my stomach and I felt sick. “Open that door!” She was still whispering — and for the first time I realized that she was insanely afraid.

I stumbled across to the closet and the key made jittery noises as I groped for the lock. I turned the key and backed away.

There was absolutely so sound from beyond that door now. There was no sound in the whole house. Not even the sound of breathing.

The doorknob began to turn. It moved very slowly. With a kind of infinite furious patience it turned a little at a time. There was a sudden, loud click as the latch turned free.

The door swung open and the corpse walked out into the room.

It was Ben Steiner. He wore the same white suit he had worn the night before, but the front of it now was the dark brown-black of dried blood. The bullet hole was directly over the heart. His hands hung rigid at his sides, and he looked at me with open, blank, dead eyes. I have seen men electrocuted at the state prison. I’ve seen them when the mask was taken off. That look on the face of the dead can’t be copied and you don’t have to look twice to recognize it. Ben Steiner was dead — and he was walking.

Nancy Howell must have tried to scream and the terror in her throat stopped her. She made a kind of choking gasp. Her gun was pointed straight at Steiner and her finger was white around the trigger, frozen there.

I don’t think I ever really saw the Bishop back of Ben Steiner although he spread out a couple of inches on each side. But I heard him yell: “Ai God, Eddie! Grab her gun! Don’t stand there all night! Grab her gun!”

I was still too numb to move. I heard him and I knew what he said, but for at least two seconds I just stood and gaped. And in those two seconds Nancy Howell swung her gun to cover my stomach.

The front door crashed open with a noise as loud as a cannon. Nancy Howell jumped, and fired — and the bullet made a hole in my coat. Then she was swinging away from me toward the door and she fired once as she swung, hitting nothing hut the wall.

Mrs. Good was standing in the open doorway and yelling at me: “Grab her, stupid!”

And finally I moved.

I grabbed her before she could shoot again.

She stopped struggling instantly. She dropped the gun and turned, and I released her and she went over and sat down on the sofa. She sat there and looked at us and didn’t say a word. She pushed the blond hair back from her face and just sat there and stared at us.

Mrs. Good was leaning against the doorsill, mopping her face with a handkerchief that was already soaking wet with perspiration. She was panting out names, one after another, without even commas between them, and I gathered that she was referring to me and the Bishop, tracing our ancestry back through generations of various kinds of livestock. Finally she paused for a breath.

The Bishop beamed at her. “You’re in rare form indeed tonight, Mrs. Good!”

She said: “You... you—” She shook her head and took a long breath. “It’s a good thing I decided to get some live news in my social septic-tank for once and drove out here.”

The Bishop chuckled. “You came because you wanted to see if I was really making any profit out of your information about Miss Howell’s morals. You were jealous.”

“Of who?” Mrs. Good snapped. “Not of you, you bald-headed old—”

Chapter Five The Final Motive

Lieutenant Browder, the Bishop, Mrs. Good, and I were in Nancy Howell’s kitchen. Miss Howell had departed with a couple of plainclothesmen. At the sink the Bishop poured two fingers of whiskey into a glass, added an equal amount of water, and with one swallow consumed everything but the glass.

I said: “Give me a drink, Bishop. I still feel a little shaky.”

“You’re slowing down, Eddie. The only reason I take you around with me is to do the crude work. And now you’re slowing down. You must be getting old.”

Browder cleared his throat and looked important and said: “I think I have all the details, but I’d like to know exactly how you figure this thing, Mr. Atticus.”

“I can tell you how he figured it,” Mrs. Good said. “He figured it because I told him.”

“The lieutenant is interested in the slower, more sordid method of reason, rather than feminine intuition,” the Bishop said. And to Browder, “I figure she was probably at Ralph McDonald’s office early last night, with Ralph, before the brawl at the Red and Black. I figure they quarreled and he said definitely he wasn’t going to marry her.”

“That’s what I explained to you,” Mrs. Good said.

I asked the Bishop if he thought that was the reason Nancy Howell had killed McDonald.

“That’s one of them. Outraged womanhood. A lot of women have shot men who tried to jilt them.”

“She had ten thousand other reasons,” Mrs. Good said, “that she got out of Ralph McDonald’s safe. She damn well knew about that money before she shot him.”

“She had already stolen it when she shot him,” the Bishop said. “She probably knew the combination to his safe, since she’s often visited him at his office. And she needed the money. She was flat broke — which didn’t matter if she was going to marry Ralph. But she’d always lived as a lady and she meant to keep on living as a lady. One of South City’s fairest examples of young womanhood” — Mrs. Good made a snorting noise — “wasn’t going to be reduced to poverty and doing her own house work — not if simply shooting a guy would keep her from it. The ten thousand would keep her two years, if she was careful. And by that time she’d have picked up some other man with plenty of money and have him headed down the aisle toward matrimony. But she would need a year to work in, if she was going to have any choice. And she had to live comfortably.”

“If she had simply stolen the money,” Browder said, “Mr. McDonald would have known who took it. So she had to get him out of the way.”

“Figure it that way if you want to,” the Bishop said. “I think she shot him because he turned her down.”

“But she didn’t seem to be much in love with him,” I objected.

“Who the hell said she was? She was in love with herself, like most women — God bless ’em! Ralph was going to soil her reputation, make her a publicly discarded woman. So she let him have it.”

Browder hemmed a couple of times and brought himself to a difficult admission. “I was almost certain of my killer, Mr. Atticus, but I have to thank you for discovering the gun, and the long glove she wore to prevent the paraffin test showing positive on her hand. I hadn’t been able to find any prints on the edge of the roof where the killer was supposed to have hung and dropped into the yard below. The only deep print in the earth such as a man would have made by jumping or falling was the one Eddie made.”

“Ai God! You should have heard him yowl! And you can thank Eddie for her using that glove. She read one of his articles in the paper about your methods. That’s where she got her idea.”

“It’s all clear enough now,” I said. “But I wonder why somebody didn’t think of it at the time, why somebody didn’t search her. She must have had that gun and glove on her person all the time.”

Browder looked shocked. The Bishop said: “You’re nuts. Of course she had ’em on her, and you know where she was carrying ’em. Or you should know.”

Mrs. Good said: “At my age, Eddie, do I have to show you?”

“All the searching of that kind done in South City,” the Bishop said, “is purely unofficial. There are no police women in this town. And imagine a cop, imagine our good Lieutenant Browder here, searching the secret regions of one of the fairest flowers of young womanhood in South City.”

Browder got swiftly to another subject. “All my checking indicates that Mr. Ben Steiner was in or near the hallway down which the murderer was supposed to have escaped. He must have suspected from the first that Miss Howell was guilty. I believe that he went from the Red and Black Club to McDonald’s office, and there found Miss Howell’s handkerchief, which showed she’d been there since the money was brought to that office in the afternoon. Then, I believe, he brought the handkerchief here to Miss Howell.”

“Yep,” the Bishop said. “I’ll bet she thought his was the face she saw outside the window. She could never be certain it was the monkey — and whoever it was knew she had killed Ralph. When he brought the handkerchief to her she was certain. I’ve got an idea Steiner was in love with the gal. I don’t believe he would have turned her over to the cops. But anyway, she made certain. She potted the guy. That’s one way to be sure they stay quiet.”

“It must have been almost morning by the time he got here,” I said.

“It was morning, or by the time they talked and she potted him it was morning. That’s why she had to keep the corpse in the house until tonight. She couldn’t go riding through town in daylight with a corpse. While you had her down at headquarters I came back to look for the gun — I sent the maid home — but all I found was poor Ben. So I thought if she had shot Ben once I might get her to produce the gun and shoot him again.”

“The key to that closet was in the drawer with the gun,” I said. “How’d you get in there?”

“Did you ever see a house where half the closets wouldn’t open with the same key? Soon as I found that one was locked I got the key out of another and looked inside. And there he was.”

After another drink we went outside and Browder looked up at the house. It was dark here and I couldn’t see the lieutenant’s face clearly. He said: “The way things have turned out I’m not going to take any official action, but it is strictly illegal to break into the office of a man who has just been murdered.”

The Bishop said: “Nuts, Lieutenant. And good-night. Eddie’ll give you a big spread in the paper tomorrow.”

Mrs. Good’s car was parked just behind the Bishop’s. We walked back with her and the Bishop handed her in. I asked the two of them what they thought would be done with Nancy Howell.

“Why she’ll give the money back,” the Bishop said, “and swear she was just keeping it for Ralph. And she’ll say she shot him because she had to defend her honor, and cook up the same kind of yarn about Ben. I wouldn’t bet the case will ever come to trial. Folks will discuss it only with their friends and nobody will remember that the city commissioner gave a party in a gambling house.”

“One other thing, Bishop. When did you first know she was guilty?”

“Ai God! I knew all the time. But you think I was going to tell anybody last night and let the Journal get the whole story? What kind of a newspaper man do you think I am?”

“A stinker,” Mrs. Good said, starting the motor. “And you are also one of the world’s goddamndest liars.”