Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938

A gripping story of Washington, where the cost of living is the highest of any city in the nation, and the cost of dying is often at bargain rates.

Chapter I

All day long the money had been flowing into the old house on Mount Vernon Highway; piles upon piles of greasy currency that passed through Greg Cooper’s hands for counting and dropped like waste paper into boxes. With the money came a mood. Across the room from him, Cooper could see Senator Bradford Weller sitting smugly behind his desk, his pepper-and-salt colored wig looking more false than ever and his narrow, greedy face relaxed.

Greed! That was the thing that came into the house with the money. That was the mood. It was in the senator’s face and it was like something living and tangible in the house itself; driving out all of the things that had existed here before it, even hatred. Cooper mopped the perspiration from his forehead with a limp handkerchief, his young face tense.

He was feeling it himself, the unsettling power of money in large amounts. His fingers fumbled as he checked the currency over. None of the bills felt crisp any longer. They felt greasy, slimy. They repelled him and, at the same time, attracted him. He found himself wanting them and, at the same time, wanting to escape from them.

“What is the total now, Cooper?”

The senator’s voice had the dry quality of rustling paper. Greg Cooper ran the tip of his pencil across the latest entry on the sheet before him.

“One hundred and fifty-four thousand, five hundred and fifteen dollars,” he said huskily.

The senator put his fingertips together, his elbows resting on his carved mahogany desk. The light of late afternoon came through the Venetian blinds and fell across him in bars. It was a kind light to a man of the senator’s years. It softened the pouches under his eyes and the slack lines of his mouth. If the room had not been crowded with currency, he might have looked benevolent. His eyes, however, were hard with money hunger and the light did not soften that.

“There will not be very much more,” he said. “It is not an impressive sum.”

“It is too much to be stacked in an old house.”

Cooper’s voice was sharper than he intended it to be, but he did not qualify the statement. His lean jaw was hard and there was a vast sincerity in the depths of his level gray eyes. He did not have to pussyfoot when he felt strongly about anything. He was one of those strange products of Washington, a senator’s secretary; a young man with legal training and newspaper experience, a sound body and a hard mind — too young to be a senator himself but with more knowledge of the senator’s job than the senator would ever have. Bradford Weller turned slowly in his chair.

“A man’s money is his own, Cooper,” he said, “and he’s foolish only when he lets others tell him what to do with it.”

Cooper shook his head. “That’s rhetoric. Save it for the voters. A man is foolish with his money any time that he takes it to a place where he can’t protect it properly. He’s being foolish with his life, too. People kill for money.”

The senator chuckled. “I have my private joke on you, Cooper. You are going to be surprised. And not you alone.”

His voice choked off into another chuckle. He was holding his chin against his chest and he had turned his chair so that the shadows hid his expression. Cooper shrugged and put his attention once more upon the sheets spread out before him.

The penciled figures were the piles of currency reduced to symbols; the record of the senator’s resources pulled into this house for some obscure reason. There were bank accounts that had been closed out, stocks and bonds that had been sold, debts that had been collected. In none of the transactions had a check figured. Every deal, at the senator’s insistence, had been closed in cash. And the cash was here in the study of the senator’s Virginia home — heaps of it.

The door to the big hall opened slowly and Cooper looked up. Hito, the Japanese man of all work, was standing there, his squat body bent slightly forward, his beady black eyes on the senator.

“A Misser Terry Black to see you. You see him, yess?”

His voice was a blend of hiss and lisp that hit the esses hard. The senator leaned back in his chair. “Terry Black? Ah, yes. Show him in, Hito.”

He turned to Cooper as the Japanese bowed out. “This Black,” he said doubtfully. “It’s that taxi fellow, isn’t it?”

Cooper nodded grimly. “It is. He saved your life in 1935. You’ve got him down as owing you five hundred dollars.”

“I’m letting him off for two hundred and fifty.”

“I know. I wrote the letter to him. It’s a shame to take a dime.”

The senator cleared his throat. “It’s my money, Cooper. Maybe you can afford to give away two hundred and fifty dollars. I can’t.”

Greg Cooper snorted. He remembered Terry Black very well; a depression down-and-outer without a job who had jumped off a park bench to knock a gun out of the hand of a man who tried to assassinate Bradford Weller. It had been quite a show. With the newsreel cameras grinding, Senator Weller had publicly presented Terry Black with a check for five hundred dollars and solemnly accepted the man’s note in exchange. He had been applauded for that; for saving the man’s pride while he paid him a reward. Nobody who read the newspapers or saw the newsreels took the loan angle seriously. Terry Black brought his wife and youngster to Washington and bought a taxicab. Now Bradford Weller was trying to collect.

The door to the big hall opened again and Terry Black came into the room. He was a slender man of medium height with lean jaws, high cheekbones and large eyes set deep. He was wearing a blue serge suit that was shiny from much pressing. He had a taxi driver’s cap in one gnarled hand and a creased envelope in the other. He bobbed his head rather awkwardly.

“How do you do, Senator. I... I got over as soon as I could.”

The senator half rose to extend a limp hand. “How are you, Black? Quite well, I hope. You are prepared to pick up your note, I presume?”

Terry Black swallowed hard. “Yes, sir. I didn’t have much warning. You told me, you know, that any time I had the money.”

Bradford Weller cleared his throat noisily. “That was two years ago, Black. I haven’t pressed you.”

“I know.” There was a strange expression in the taxi driver’s deep eyes. He laid the envelope on the senator’s desk. “It’s there,” he said hoarsely, “but, Senator...”

“Yes. What?”

“I’d appreciate it if you could wait a while. I had to get it from a loan shark. They never let go, those fellows. The interest—”

The senator waved his hand. “Quite impossible, Black. I need the money. I made it easy for you. Cut the note in half.”

He reached out one hand and drew the envelope to him. Terry Black watched it across the desk top and Greg Cooper watched Terry Black. There was perspiration heavy on Greg Cooper’s forehead again. He was, he knew, looking at an honorable man who met his debts when they were called; whatever the price to himself. The taxi driver’s shoulders slumped.

“All right, sir,” he said. “Thank you.”

He turned to go and his eyes rested on Greg Cooper’s desk and on the box beside it; the desk that was stacked with currency and the box that was filled with it. His slightly stooped figure became rigid. He stared hard and then his eyes swung back to the senator. Bradford Weller was counting the money that he had taken from the envelope and he did not look up. Terry Black swore under his breath, put his cap on his head and stalked from the room. Greg Cooper looked after him.

“He was an honorable man when he came in,” he thought. “What was he when he went out?”

Something had risen out of that greed-polluted room and entered the soul of Terry Black. Greg Cooper had seen it happen. He passed the handkerchief across his forehead and looked toward the senator. Bradford Weller tossed the currency-stuffed envelope from one desk to the other.

“Two hundred and fifty more, Cooper,” he said. “Make a record of it.”

Greg Cooper made no comment. There were times when the words at his command were inadequate to express his thoughts or his feelings. He had no awe of the senator. He had written speeches for Bradford Weller that Weller could never have written himself. He had written diplomatic letters to irate constituents and he had ferreted out the hidden hands behind important bills so that the senator could line up on the right side. He had no more illusions about statesmanship and he knew the senator for what he was. Yet strangely, he had an affection of a kind for the man; the affection of a foster parent for a spoiled and detestable brat which has, nevertheless, a helpless appeal. Bradford Weller couldn’t walk alone in a world of politics but he thought that he could and he was quite vain. Cooper granted him his vanity and watched over him. It was all part of a good political secretary’s job.

The room was quiet again. Cooper made the pencil entry on a long sheet and the ink entry in a ledger. He checked through the thin sheaf of tens and twenties for which Terry Black had entered the slave ranks of a loan shark, then tossed the bills into the box with the rest.

The door at the end of the room opened. Hito was bowing to the senator again.

“Misser George Arlington. You see him, yess?”

At sound of the name, Cooper raised his head sharply. The senator came out of his reverie. “Yes. Yes. Of course, I’ll see him.”

He was squaring away behind his desk like a man of affairs rather than like the idle dreamer of a long afternoon. He made a gesture toward Cooper.

“You might drop the lid on that box,” he said.

Cooper had acted ahead of the command. The box was closed and he was stacking the last of the unchecked bills in a desk drawer when the latest visitor came in.

George Arlington was big and expansive; a massive study in blue and gray. Six feet tall and over two hundred pounds, he looked like a wealthy western cattleman dressed for the city. He was carrying a pearl gray Stetson of the broad-brim type in his hand. A broad, white-toothed smile split his bronzed face.

“Ah, Senator. I’m glad to see you.”

A whiff of lilac blew across the room and Greg Cooper wrinkled his nose. His eyes had narrowed and he was sitting stiffly behind his own desk. The name George Arlington had been familiar but he had been willing to grant the fact that more than one man might bear the name. There was no mistaking the big man in the gray suit and the blue shirt, however. They had met before. Greg Cooper had been a newspaper man then and Big George had been under indictment for fraud.

“Leave us alone for a while, Cooper. I’ll call you.”

The senator had risen to his feet. Big George half turned and the smile left his face momentarily. He was remembering Cooper. Cooper was looking at the senator.

“Do you know who this man is?” he said curtly.

Bradford Weller frowned. “If you are referring to Mr. Arlington, I am quite familiar with... ah, his record.”

“He’s a con man. A darned good one. He’s made his living by trimming suckers for years and he’s only slipped once.”

“Cooper, this is embarrassing.”

Big George laughed. “Not to me, Senator. A newspaper man never quite gets the hang of being a gentleman.”

“Thanks.”

Cooper looked the big man over briefly. The look of expansive geniality had come back to George Arlington, but his eyes had grown small and narrow. They were small eyes normally, but Arlington had learned the trick of holding them wide open so that they appeared frank and friendly. He wasn’t holding them open while his face was turned away from the senator. Greg Cooper stood his ground. He faced the senator once more.

“Embarrassing or not,” he said, “this baby can get the fillings out of your teeth. Don’t buy anything from him.”

The senator threw back his head and laughed. His laugh was a sudden, explosive sound in the room. Big George’s chuckle rumbled an accompaniment. The two men looked at each other and Greg Cooper was outside of the secret that they shared. He knew that he was outside and that there was nothing that he could do about it. The senator had taken the bit in his teeth like this once before. He had played with a utility crowd at a time when Greg Cooper told him that it was political suicide to do so.

That was why Bradford Weller was a senator now by courtesy only. He retained the title but the voters had swept him out of office in the last election and he was actually an ex-senator. Cooper shrugged. He could nurse and jockey a man only to a certain point; beyond that point, the man was on his own. He had thrown out his warning and if the senator preferred to laugh, that was the senator’s business.

Big George Arlington blocked his way to the door. The con man was holding out his hand. “No hard feelings?” he said.

Greg Cooper took the extended hand gravely. They shook hands as two fighters might shake before the opening bell. There was a grim smile on Greg Cooper’s face.

“No hard feelings,” he said.

Chapter II The Promise

If the mood of the senator’s study was Greed, then the mood of the big hall was Fear. Mike Deshler was the symbol of it. A bulky, heavy-shouldered man with the face of a prize-fighter, he sat in a straight chair with a clear view of both the front door and the door to the senator’s study. He had his arms folded across his chest and his right hand was at his armpit. He was a guard who had been hired by the day from a famous detective agency. To that extent had Bradford Weller been careful; he had prepared against sudden violence.

But he had let George Arlington enter the room where he had over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in currency.

Cooper nodded to the guard and crossed the hall. A girl rose swiftly to meet him from a big chair in the parlor where she had been pretending to read a magazine. She was a slender girl; vividly dark, her brown eyes wide with worry.

“Greg,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. What is he going to do?”

Greg Cooper looked down into the girl’s face, all the prettier for its pallor, and his heart thudded painfully. Vivian Dawson had the capacity for stirring his emotions as no other girl ever had. She was the lure that had held him to his job on weary days when the senator tried his patience and his soul. She was the senator’s orphaned niece and because she was all that she was, Greg Cooper refused to believe that the senator was all that he appeared to be.

“I don’t know what he’s going to do, Vi,” he said softly. “Let us talk it over a little.”

He started into the old-fashioned parlor with her and stopped. There was a tall, thin man with long, curling gray hair in the easy chair by the window. This was Tim Weller, a Federal judge once in the long ago, and the elder brother of the senator. Tim Weller had given up his own political career when his brother started to climb. He was old now, but still the wiser of the two men when he cared to speak his mind. At the moment, his chin was on his chest and he seemed to be asleep. Vivian spoke from behind Cooper’s right shoulder.

“The little study might be better,” she said.

They went together down the hall to the small study which was used occasionally by Emily Weller, the senator’s sister and ruler of his household. The senator was a bachelor and Emily a spinster. She had been a shrewd hostess in a town where a woman can make or break a man by her skill in entertaining. As though being in the room that she used made discussion of her inevitable, Vivian said softly:

“Greg, I am worried and a little frightened. If Aunt Emily weren’t in the hospital, Uncle Bradford wouldn’t be bringing all of that money into the house. He is going to do something rash.”

Her fear showed in her eyes. Greg Cooper bulked above her, conscious of her feminine daintiness, her complete desirability. Some streak of loyalty to his chief made him say what he did not entirely feel.

“Perhaps he’s entitled to do what he wants to do for a change. Emily rides herd on him pretty hard.”

“She has to. Where would he be if she didn’t?”

Greg Cooper shrugged. He didn’t know if it was a good idea for women to dominate men, even for their own good. But he had to admit to his own soul that Emily Weller had a better brain and a sounder judgment than her brother. She was in the hospital now for a minor operation and he had not missed the significance of that fact in connection with the senator’s talk of surprises and the quick conversion of assets into currency. Vivian Dawson gripped his arm.

“It’s that woman upstairs,” she said tensely. “She’s supposed to be my house guest but she never comes near me. He had me invite her and she stays in her room. She’s an adventuress, Greg. He’s going to run away with her.”

“Nonsense.”

“It isn’t nonsense. You can tell by looking at her that she is the calculating type. She used to be an actress. He’s going to take all of his money and run away with her.”

Greg Cooper tried to hold his face in a poker mold. He had drawn conclusions of his own when Mildred Harney was invited to the Weller estate in the absence of Emily Weller, but the senator had loved them and left them before. He wasn’t the marrying type.

“The senator loves his money more than he will ever love any woman,” he said.

Vivian tapped her foot. “But suppose he doesn’t think that the money is his while he stays here? That he has no control over it? That would make a difference, wouldn’t it?”

Greg Cooper met her eyes. “It would,” he said.

“Then that’s the answer. He wants to take his money away where no one else has any say about it except himself. He’s going to take this woman with him. Greg, he mustn’t do it. He mustn’t. Aunt Emily has given him too much. He would leave her penniless.”

She was beating with her small fists against Greg Cooper’s chest and she seemed unaware of what she was doing. She hadn’t mentioned the senator’s name and reputation as a chip in the game — and Greg Cooper did not consider it a very big chip himself. The voters would never send Bradford Weller back into the senate. His political career was done. Political expediency no longer anchored him.

With over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash and a decorative blonde companion, Bradford Weller would be as free as a bird in any country on the globe. In France or England, no scandal would follow or touch him. His money would be his passport.

Vivian Dawson had been looking up into Cooper’s face and he never held a poker expression long when she was around. Sensing the fact that she had scored a point with him, she moved to the other side of the room.

“You’ve got to do something about it, Greg,” she said. “You’re the only one who can.”

Cooper frowned. He wasn’t sure that it was any of his business, past a certain point, to interfere in what might be a family matter of the senator’s. He took a step toward the girl.

“Why worry about it, Vi?” he said huskily. “You’ve never been happy here. I’ve been playing with the offer of a job in Cuba. I’ll take it like a shot if—”

The girl was standing motionless. “You’re asking me to run away from responsibility, Greg?”

He dropped his eyes. “It isn’t your responsibility.”

He felt that he should argue the point with her and prove to her that she was not concerned in what the senator did; but he found that the words wouldn’t come. He wanted to take Vi Dawson out of here and give her a home of her own — his home. But the senator and his piles of currency could not be dismissed with a gesture and a word. There was drama building up in this old house on Mount Vernon Boulevard, drama and, perhaps, tragedy. Vi Dawson was still looking at him.

“Aunt Emily would stop him from running away with a blonde actress and losing his money,” she said, “but we can’t worry her while she is in the hospital. We’ve got to do something ourselves.”

“It’s his life, Vi — and his money.”

“It isn’t. A man can’t take all his money and run out on his wife, can he? Well, Aunt Emily has managed his house for him better than most wives would. She hasn’t any money of her own. He would leave her penniless.”

The girl was becoming angry. Angry girls become unreasonable if they aren’t headed off. Greg Cooper mopped his forehead. He was more at home in a man’s world and he knew how to argue with people like the senator. He was conscious, too, of an inherent handicap — he was by nature reasonable. He could see both sides of an argument so clearly that he couldn’t become steamed up over either side.

“You’ve got to think of the senator himself, too,” she said. “No flashy young woman like Mildred Harney is really in love with an old man like Uncle Bradford. She’ll get all his money and she’ll ruin his reputation and—”

Greg Cooper grinned wryly. “And his friends won’t speak to him and the post office won’t deliver his mail and—” He became suddenly grave and gripped the girl’s shoulders with strong fingers. “I’m not a meddler, Vi. If this girl is going to marry him, I’ve got to stay out. If it is a swindle, I’m going to stay in.”

“And you’ll stop him from running away until you’re sure?”

“That’s a big order.”

“If you don’t, I’ll find some way to do it.”

“How?”

“Some way. He’s my dead mother’s brother. I haven’t any other family left.”

Her voice was breaking. Greg Cooper gripped her by the elbows, lifted her off the floor and kissed her squarely on the mouth before she had time to turn her head. He was a little bit shaken as he set her down and his voice was husky.

“Sit tight, Vi,” he said. “I don’t know what’s up, but whatever it is, I’ll find a way to block it until we know.”

He was thinking of George Arlington more than he was of the glamorous Mildred Harney. Vi Dawson held the tips of her fingers against her lips.

“That’s a promise?” she said.

Cooper nodded solemnly. “It’s a promise.”

Chapter III A Bargain in Burglary

Mildred Harney was sitting in the parlor with Tim Weller when Greg Cooper came back down the hall with Vi Dawson. The old man was wide awake now and talking in a slow drawl about the old days when actors did their acting on a stage.

“They didn’t can human bodies in celluloid and human voices in wax, then,” he said. “Not in my day.”

The blonde girl laughed. She made a vivid picture with the sunlight streaming through the window on her. She was dressed in shimmery green that molded tightly to her shapely body. She had one leg crossed over the other and she kept the balanced leg swinging. Her teeth were a startling white and she wore her makeup lightly; but for all of her spectacular quality, she did not seem quite real. Vi Dawson sighed.

“She is beautiful,” she said reluctantly. Greg Cooper squeezed her arm.

“Wax fruit looks swell in a bowl,” he said, “but it’s pretty disappointing as fruit.”

“Thanks, Greg. You’re being sweet.”

Vi Dawson left him and went into the parlor. Cooper’s eyes followed her briefly. There was an easy grace in her, a gallant straightness to her shoulders. Vi Dawson didn’t have to pick a setting or put on an act to win masculine attention; she had only to be herself.

Hito, the Japanese, was standing inside the front door with his hands clasped behind his back. Greg Cooper stopped beside him.

“Did Mr. Arlington come out yet?”

“No, Sar. He still talk to Misser Senator Weller. Yess.”

“Okay. Tell the senator I had to go down town for an hour.”

Greg Cooper went out into the balmy air of late afternoon. It was Indian summer weather and traffic flowed in a steady stream along the paved Memorial Highway. He tooled his car out of the broad parking strip behind the house and joined the procession of cars that was moving down the pavement to Washington.

“I’m a sap and a meddler,” he said, “but perhaps I am performing a public service at that.”

He was frowning at the winged goddess on his radiator cap. Behind him he was leaving a house that contained over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in currency. Before him lay Hannigan’s joint on Ninth Street and, he hoped, a date with Beau Bridwell, one of the last of the old time cracksmen.

Twenty-two minutes after leaving the senator’s house, he pulled his car to the Ninth Street curb. There was a burlesque house and a hamburger place, a couple of chili parlors, several saloons, two theaters specializing in Grade B westerns — and Hannigan’s.

Hannigan’s was a restaurant and a saloon and a club of sorts. Burglars, pickpockets, petty grifters and yeggmen down on their luck made a hangout of Hannigan’s and Big Steve Hannigan minded his own business. He knew his customers by name and reputation and business, but if they behaved themselves in his place, he didn’t care what they might plan there against the peace and the well-being of other people. The police kept an eye on him but they didn’t tap anybody on the shoulder in Hannigan’s; they made their collars outside. On the whole, it was a decent place; a little long on odors and short on beauty, but discreetly shadowed and fitted with booths that were not sounding boards.

Beau Bridwell wasn’t there, but Hannigan knew where he could be found. “I’ll have him here in five minutes, skipper,” he said. Cooper seated himself in a booth, ordered a beer and waited. Beau Bridwell showed up in four minutes flat. Hannigan’s service was always good.

The years had not been kind to Bridwell. He was undersized and stoop-shouldered and he entered a door with a kind of furtive duck that brought him in sidewise. His pasty white face was covered with dirty gray stubble. His eyes rolled uneasily under bushy eyebrows that were already gray.

“You got something for me, Mr. Cooper?” he croaked. “Hannigan says you were askin’.”

“That’s right, Beau. Have a beer.”

Cooper gave the order for the beer which would keep Hannigan from butting in for a few minutes. He was measuring Bridwell thoughtfully. It was hard to believe that this shabby little down-and-outer had once been an aristocrat of the underworld; a master hand at the art of opening safes.

“I’ve got a box to be opened, Beau,” he said.

The little man jerked convulsively. His lips worked. “Nix. I’m all washed up. One more rap would finish me. I’m running straight, Mr. Cooper.”

“This is straight, Beau. I’ll take the responsibility. I am Senator Weller’s secretary. I’ll let you into his house and you open the box. You do not steal anything and you won’t have to run from cops or worry about burglar alarms.”

The little man stopped the nervous jerking of his features. He lived in a world of sharp dealing, of chiseling, of games and rackets that played along the fringe of the law. His eyes stopped rolling and concentrated shrewdly on Cooper’s face. He saw an angle and he was wondering how far he could play along in safety.

“You ain’t risking a swell job and a rep to glom some of the senator’s marbles,” he said finally. “I guess maybe I can work for you.”

“Okay.” Cooper was relieved. “Can you still open a safe by listening for the tumblers to fall?”

Beau Bridwell wet his lips. “If the box is 1910 or before that, yes. After that, maybe. One o’ them new boxes, no.”

“It’s pretty old.”

“That’s swell.”

The little man took a deep draught of the beer. He wiped his lips with his fingers. “If you wasn’t a friend o’ mine when you was on the papers, I wouldn’t touch it,” he said. “But friend or no friend, I gotta have a bit o’ money for my work. I gotta have it now.”

“How much?”

Bridwell’s eyes narrowed. “A hundred bucks, Cooper.”

“I haven’t got that much money on me, Beau.”

“I’ll take a check. I ain’t scared o’ rubber in your paper.”

The little man had thrown off his air of frightened humility. Cooper had come to him and Cooper had hired him for a job that no one else could do. The thought gave him dignity. He had a certain grim stubbornness under the dignity, too. Measuring him, Cooper knew that the man would stand on the demand for a hundred dollars and not a cent less. Cooper laid his check flat on the sticky table top and wrote.

“One hundred dollars, Beau. You won’t get drunk on me?”

“This beer is my last. I don’t drink when I’ve got a job to do.”

“That’s the spirit. Get out to the senator’s house on Mount Vernon Highway at three a.m. The back door will be unlocked and I’ll be waiting for you. Better hire a car and leave it alongside the highway.”

“Okay.” Beau Bridwell took one look at the check and folded it away swiftly. There was a tightening in the man’s slack lips, a gleam in his eye. Cooper rose slowly. He could read in the man’s face the reason for the swift acceptance of the check idea, the fixing of the amount above what a man might be expected to carry in his pocket.

That check was Beau Bridwell’s insurance against a frame-up or a slip. It was his proof of employment by Greg Cooper. Cooper’s lips twisted in a wry grin.

He stepped out of the booth and stopped short with surprise. Terry Black, the taxi driver, was sitting on a stool at the bar with a straight whiskey in his hand and his eyes fixed on the booth. When he saw Cooper’s eyes on him, he turned his back and huddled over the whiskey glass. Greg Cooper’s eyes narrowed.

He strode out to his car. He had taken a long step. If everything went all right tonight, he would take a hundred and fifty odd thousands of dollars from the senator’s safe. Provided that he was not interrupted, he would take that money and hide it in a panel that he had discovered years ago in the parlor mantel. There would be hell to pay in the morning but until the senator found his money, he would not be able to lose any of it to blondes, confidence men or second story workers.

It was not stealing money, he told himself; it was removing it from the control of its owner during a period of danger. “I know the senator better than he knows himself,” he thought. “He isn’t smart enough to go up against professional talent and win. By shifting the stakes out of the way, I’ve got a chance of confusing the players and of finding out what the senator is up against.”

But he was not entirely reassured. Whatever the moral issue might be, there would be a period of time between the safe and the mantel panel when he would be, in the eyes of the law, a burglar.

Chapter IV Blazing Currency

Dinner at Bradford Weller’s was a dull meal for everyone except the senator himself. The senator enjoyed it because he made no attempt to follow the desperate attempts that were made at conversation and because he paid no attention to anyone save himself. He found his own thoughts not only satisfying but exciting.

He was on the verge of a big step — the adventure of his career. A secret blazed in his brain and the knowledge that no one shared that secret in its entirety was thrilling knowledge. He felt like a minor god, with power over the lives of others. He looked down the table.

There was Vi Dawson, a sweet child in her way and quite pretty. He felt a little bit sorry for her because the girl would probably have to bear the brunt of her aunt’s peevishness when this business was done. He didn’t envy her the experience.

“But Cooper will probably marry her,” he thought. “A good man, Cooper.”

He smiled smugly. Next to the satisfaction that he felt over breaking free from the thralldom of his sister, Emily, he was most pleased over the fact that he was going to put one over on Cooper. Cooper had been right too often in the past. It would be good to surprise him, to shock him and to see the consternation on his face.

“Cooper will probably catch hell from little Vivian, too. Unless I miss my guess, that business of his down town had something to do with me. Vivian would like to keep me safely on ice till Emily gets back from the hospital.”

His eyes glittered. He felt a hard pounding under his ribs, the speeded action of his heart that always accompanied waves of hatred. The mere thought of Emily Weller was enough to make his heart hammer.

Two years older than himself, she had always dominated him. She was invincibly right on everything; an irresistible force, that would brook no obstacle when she was moving toward an objective — and an immovable object when she settled down to block a project that she did not approve. True, she was a strong character. She had shared his lean days and she had worked tirelessly in the face of many defeats. She had steered his career over many a treacherous social reef and she had saved him a score of times from making an imperishable fool of himself.

He granted her everything that she was and everything that she had been — and still he hated her. He had hated her for years and she didn’t know. He had played the hypocrite with her — the loving and appreciative brother — because he lacked the courage to force an issue. For his own hypocrisy, he hated her.

“If I were free, I would be different.”

He had said that often when feelings of personal inferiority goaded him. He changed that refrain now to “When I am free,” and his soul soared. He was going to avenge himself on them all — on those who had been right when he had been wrong and who had made him feel inferior with their rightness. He would be nobody’s man, nobody’s creation, nobody’s responsibility. At the same time, he would assume no responsibility for anyone else. He was looking at his brother, Tim, from beneath narrowed lids.

Tim, too, had always been an irritation. Tim never forgot that he was the eldest of the family. Showing his age noticeably and far less active than Bradford, Tim had still retained his ego; dismissing with a snort the things which he personally did not approve; refusing to argue and standing pat on the fact that, politically, Bradford Weller was his own creation, his own special protegé — the man whom he had boosted and coaxed and jockeyed into the senate and into political power.

The fact that Bradford Weller knew himself for a pawn that his brother had moved made his resentment deeper. He walked in his brother’s shadow, even now when long years led back to the day when Tim Weller’s name had meant anything by itself.

Bradford Weller had his own reputation but he could not forget that the reputation had been made for him, given to him.

There had been times when his stomach had rolled and he had turned sick with thoughts like these. But not tonight! Tonight he would break them all upon the shock of his surprise.

All? No. He looked at Mildred Harney and his expression softened. She wore soft blue tonight and there was heaven in a color like that when the woman who wore it had hair that formed a golden aureole about her head. He would not break her. He would never break her or hurt her. She was his recompense for long years of inferiority and his reward for the bold stroke that would end those years.

With the thought, the senator was young again. The years dropped from him. He was no longer a veteran of the political arena with a governorship and two senate terms behind him; he was a man who had won the love of a glorious golden woman.

Dinner was over; a meal so smoothly and effortlessly served by the faultless Hito that one was not aware of service at all. The senator looked around the table.

“I would like to see you all in my study within the next ten minutes,” he said.

He rose and Mildred Harney was beside him. Her hand rested lightly, caressingly, on his arm. He looked down into her eyes and was conscious of a wave of excitement. Her eyes were ice blue and yet, in the depths, he saw a warm glowing spark. He laid his hand over hers and liked the softness of the contact.

The others were taking his “ten minutes” provision literally, so he walked on to the study with the girl. The grim-visaged Mike Deshler was on guard before the door. The senator nodded to him.

“Come in after the others do,” he said. “I will want you.”

Mike Deshler touched his forehead with two fingers in a rough salute. The senator unlocked the study door and clicked the switch which controlled the wall bracket lights. They were soft lights and did not emphasize the mark of the years upon his face. He could see himself in the mirror over the mantel and in tailcoat and white tie, he looked taller than his five feet ten. His wig had cost him a thousand dollars in Paris and not even an expert could tell that it was not his own hair. He had been careful, too, about his teeth. When his upper plate was made, he had had the dentist put gold crowns on two of the teeth and fillings in three of the others. His own teeth had not looked more real.

He squared his shoulders and turned to the girl. “You still believe in me, Mildred?” he said softly.

Her fingers tightened on his forearm and her face lifted to his. “You know I do, Bradford,” she said. “In everything.”

He squeezed her fingers and released her. “Give me your support tonight,” he said. “After that...”

There was a promise in his voice and she smiled back at him. He looked at his old-fashioned safe in the corner of the room and then at the two boxes beside Cooper’s desk. A chuckle rose in his throat. He rubbed his hands together and went behind his desk. Mildred Harney sat down and stretched her legs straight out before her.

The door opened and Tim Weller came in. Tim was a six-footer, a bony-faced man with sunken eyes that glowed as cleanly as the eyes of a young man. He had never had much to do with dentists and the few teeth that he had left were discolored. He was biting a cigar with them now and looking at his brother from under bushy gray brows. Bradford Weller did not meet that questing regard.

Greg Cooper and Vi Dawson had stopped outside the dining room door.

“I’m a silly person, Greg, and bad company and hard to get along with and—”

“And a nail biter, a fireplug parker, an eater of hot dogs with soda pop and—”

“Stop! I’m serious. I know when I’m dreadful. But Greg, I’m worried and scared and I can’t help myself. All of that money in the house means trouble and Uncle Brad isn’t himself. You won’t let me down, Greg. You won’t let him be swindled or—”

“I gave you a promise, Vi.”

“I know.”

They went down the hall together. The senator watched them come in with a cynical smile on his lips. It was a newly developed theory of his that the young neither felt nor understood the true meaning of love. Young emotions, he felt, were essentially shallow, subject to too many future stresses which they probably would not survive. Only rich maturity could know the full flower of love. He looked at Mildred Harney and his shoulders unconsciously squared. Mike Deshler and Hito had come in. He had his full audience.

Slowly, with complete appreciation of the dramatic hush in the room, the senator moved out from behind his desk. He stood, as he had often stood before the senate; his head thrown back, his audience in a semicircle about him. He had a speech to deliver, too, and his eyes were glittering points of light behind slitted lids. He would give them the speech and he would watch it strike and wound them, watch them stiffen with the shock of what he was going to do. It was to be his night.

“A man with money has no private life,” he said slowly. “He is a target for relatives who need help, for organizations that believe that they need help, for chiselers and crooks and prospective heirs who are impatient for him to die.”

His voice rose. “I have had too much of all that and I am through. I know enough of the law to know how difficult is the way of escape. If I make a gift of the money that I own, a relative might possibly block that gift by challenging my competence. If I try to spend it in my own way, I am open to suits and annoyance and interference.”

He pounded his right fist into his open palm. “There is one thing that I can do with my money — beyond any appeal to the courts and beyond any other appeal. I am going to do that one thing.”

He balanced himself like a shot-putter; then literally hurled his words into the room. “I am going to burn every dollar of it,” he said.

He stopped and let the echo of his words hang. He saw Vi Dawson sit up stiffly, saw Tim Weller’s teeth bite clean through his cigar, saw the forward thrust of Greg Cooper’s body. Only Mildred Harney held control of her facial muscles. She bent slightly forward and she squeezed hard on her tiny handkerchief with her right hand, but she was unshaken.

His heart glowed and invincibility swept in a torrent through his veins. She was with him and she was game. He hadn’t told her what he was going to do.

“Every dollar,” he repeated grimly. “Light the paper under that pile of wood in the fireplace, Hito. You, Deshler, come over here near my desk!”

He snapped his commands, the servants moved forward and the spell broke. Tim Weller came to his feet with a loud snort. “Bradford, you’re insane!”

The senator met his glare. “I was never saner in my life. I am exercising a privilege. I am beset by leeches, by people looking to me for support and by people waiting for me to die. Well, I’m fooling them. When I get through, they will have nothing to get from me because I will have nothing to give.”

He was wound up to a speech-making mood but he ran down under the baleful glare of his brother. Tim Weller tapped the floor with his cane.

“Leeches!” he snorted. “Bah! You’ve lived off the brains of other people all your life. And you talk about burning money. Your right to burn money! Fiddlesticks! No man has the right to destroy what he didn’t create. Money is a form of wealth.” He shook a long forefinger at his brother. “And you never created wealth of any kind in your life.”

Bradford Weller felt his heart hammering hard again. He took a backward step and cursed himself inwardly for weakness. He was afraid of his brother, afraid of the wrath in the older man’s eyes. The conciliatory habits of the years ate at his resolve. Then, behind him he heard the snapping crackle of the flames as the paper blazed under Hito’s match. His back stiffened at the sound.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “the money is mine and I choose to burn it.”

Vivian Dawson was standing. She turned toward Greg Cooper, her wide eyes appealing to him. Cooper’s jaw was ridged hard, his brows drawn down. Bradford Weller could see him from where he stood facing his brother and he decided suddenly that he was afraid, too, of Cooper. Cooper had a keen brain and he thought things through. He would have to throw Cooper off balance.

“Hito,” he said, “you will unpack those boxes beside Mr. Cooper’s desk. Check the packages out, Cooper! Deshler! Come over closer to where I’m standing.”

He looked into his brother’s eyes as he gave his commands. The anger seemed to have drained from Tim Weller or if the anger still burned in him, he lacked the energy to throw it off in words. He sat down heavily.

“The money is in your name,” he said.

Vivian Dawson threw one more despairing look at Greg Cooper and when he did not speak, she faced the issue herself. “Please, Uncle Brad,” she said, “you’ll leave Aunt Emily penniless.”

Bradford Weller’s lips thinned to a tight line. The mere mention of Emily Weller’s name was enough to steel him in his resolve.

“The best means of making sure that your Aunt Emily does no worrying about my future,” he said, “is for me to ignore hers.”

He turned his back on Vivian Dawson and on his brother. Hito looked up at him, sweat heavy on his yellow face, his small black mustache limp. The senator felt perspiration heavy on his own forehead, the trickle of it down his spine.

“Feed that money to the fire, Hito,” he said, “as fast as Mr. Cooper can check it.”

The Japanese made a clicking sound with his tongue and looked at Greg Cooper. Cooper nodded to him. “I put rubber bands around the bills and wrote the amount of each package on a tag,” he said huskily. “Read the amounts to me.”

The senator felt the support of his armed guard, Deshler, at his back and the need for him. Tim Weller had half risen in his place again, Vivian Dawson had taken a step forward — and Greg Cooper had hesitated. Hito picked up the first package.

“One sousand dollar!” he said.

Cooper said “Check” and the package hit the flames.

Chapter V Death

It was very warm in the study of Bradford Weller as the flames in the open fireplace mounted higher and the crouching Japanese continued to feed them with packages of bills.

“One sousand, two hundrer dollar!”

“Check.”

The litany went on as Hito called the amounts and Cooper checked them off his sheet. Mildred Harney came over beside the senator and squeezed his arm. He patted her hand.

“Good girl,” he said.

He knew, himself, that it was an absurd remark but he felt stiff and uncomfortable and a little frightened. There was a feeling of doom in the room as though that small group of people concentrating upon the blazing money threw off waves of hostile force.

Tim Weller was sitting like a statue carved out of ancient wood, his hands crossed over the head of his cane and his eyes expressionless. Vivian Dawson was looking bitterly at Greg Cooper. Mike Deshler had his big fists clenched and the perspiration was running in large, rolling beads through the seams in his battered face.

“One hundred thousand dollars. Isn’t that enough to burn?”

Greg Cooper’s voice snapped through the tension in the room. He had his pencil suspended and he checked Hito with his other hand while he waited for the answer to his question. The senator shook his shoulders. He smiled grimly.

“I said every dollar, Cooper.”

“Okay.” Cooper matched the senator’s shrug with one of his own. Hito moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and lifted another package.

“One sousand dollar!”

“Check!”

Vivian Dawson rose with a sharp exclamation and hurried from the room. Greg Cooper’s eyes followed her miserably and he missed one of the packages. Hito caught his mistake for him and did the arithmetic.

“Two package,” he said. “Two sousand dollar total. Yess.”

“Double check.”

Bradford Weller smiled. He was feeling good again. He had been challenged to stop and he had asserted himself. He felt invincible. The blonde girl had one leg across the corner of his desk and she was very close to him. Even closer than the physical contact, he told himself, there was a mental bond. She had shown her faith in him. She had not protested his right to do as he wished with his own money; even though she must have wanted that money for herself. It was the ultimate test of human love.

The senator was feeling better than he ever had. When Tim Weller rose and went out of the room without a word, the senator smiled. The symbol of his enslavement to relatives and responsibility was going up in smoke. The relatives, themselves, were walking out on the show. He almost wished that his sister Emily could be here.

He had a chill feeling along his spine at the thought of her being here and his heart hammered hard against his ribs. He had to drive even the thought from his mind if he were to enjoy his triumph. She was so completely the ruler of this house and the dominator of all men that he might not even be able to command the allegiance of Cooper and of Hito if she were here.

“She won’t be able to do a thing,” he reflected.

That was a thought that pleased him and he held to it. He would be out of the reach of her wrath when she learned what had happened and she would be helpless to undo what he had done. The idea of Emily being helpless was the most pleasant thought of all.

There were only a few packages more and he watched them hit the flames and catch fire with a feeling of unholy glee. Hito staggered a little from the effects of the heat as he rose to his feet. Greg Cooper made a couple of marks with his pencil.

“One hundred and fifty-four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five dollars,” he said mechanically.

The senator rubbed his hands. “That’s fine,” he said.

“Fine if you think so.”

Greg Cooper hurled the pencil into the fire and stalked out of the room. The senator called to him and he did not turn around. The door slammed behind him and Hito looked to the senator for instructions.

Bradford Weller looked at the fire. “Scatter the ashes well, Hito,” he said. “People have been known to obtain treasury redemptions on burned currency.”

He took an envelope from his pocket. “Your pay, Deshler,” he said. “I doubled the regular rate to take care of the overtime.”

“Thank you, sir. You won’t need me any more?”

“There’s nothing left to guard.”

“Good night, sir.”

Mike Deshler walked out like a punch drunk fighter. Bradford Weller grinned after him. Mike Deshler would open that envelope and find twenty dollars — and Mike Deshler would remember that he had seen nearly a hundred and sixty thousand dollars go up in smoke. Mike Deshler would probably get drunk.

Mildred Harney swung her leg down from the edge of the desk. She gripped the lapels of the senator’s dinner coat and raised her face to his.

“I think you’re wonderful,” she said. “That was the bravest thing that I have ever seen anyone do.”

He put his arm around her and, oblivious to the presence of Hito in the room, he kissed her hard on the mouth. He held her then at arm’s length.

“And you don’t mind if I am practically broke?”

“Not a bit. You have ability. I believe in you.”

He patted her shoulders. “You are a wonderful girl.”

She kissed him, then, swiftly — and, wheeling, ran from the room. He looked after her and he could feel the rush of his own blood. She was his. He would take her with him when he left. He would take her to New York. After that? There was excitement in his brain but he had held winning cards before in his lifetime. He would collect the winnings of the hand that he held before he started to worry about the next hand. That would be his life from now on.

He had made no definite promises to the girl and a girl so obviously crazy about him might not insist upon marriage.

He watched Hito as the Japanese completed his dispersement of the ashes, then he took a decanter from his desk and poured himself a brandy.

“A big night, Hito?” he said.

“Yess, Sar.”

The Japanese waited. Bradford Weller waved one thin hand. “That will be all, Hito.”

“Yess, Sar.”

The door closed and Bradford Weller was alone. He finished his brandy, looked around the room triumphantly and realized suddenly that he was tired. It had been a strain and he had acquitted himself well under circumstances far from easy.

“I’ll go to bed,” he said.

He went out into a hall that was silent and deserted. Mildred, he supposed, had retired. His eyes gleamed at the thought of her. The others! Well, there was little to keep them up. He found amusement in the thought of Cooper. He had scored on Cooper more heavily even than he had hoped.

Cooper had been shocked and surprised into complete helplessness. He hadn’t even had one of his customary wisecracks. To cap it all, Cooper was in bad with Vivian for not doing something heroic. The senator chuckled. “It’s no time for her to be acting uppity and independent,” he said. “She hasn’t got a dime.”

He was feeling like a minor god again. He had stretched out his hand and he had scrambled lives around with it. Every person in that room would date time from this night. He had changed the course of every life with the possible exception of Deshler’s. Even little Hito would find things different. He would probably have to hunt another job when Emily came back and found her meal ticket gone.

“They made me, eh? Well, let them make themselves.”

He was in his room with the door closed and he was very tired. His head ached a little and he was glad to remove the wig. He climbed slowly out of his evening clothes. He had never been able to abide a valet but there were times when he wished that he had one. He lacked even the energy for a shower. He filled a glass of water, put his teeth into it and got into his pajamas. He turned out the light, then, and threw himself gratefully upon the bed.

Staring up into the darkness, he imagined that he could see the leaping flames again; flames that danced on stacks of currency — a danse macabre for the hopes of those who had planned to inherit. Freedom had come to him from those flames — and he was not through yet. He had another surprise in store. He chuckled.

He did not hear the door open. A figure glided across the room and he was not aware of the intruder until he sensed a presence by his bed. He blinked to clear the vision of the flames from his eyes and he saw the flash of the knife coming down...

Chapter VI Noises in the Night

Greg Cooper slammed the door of the senator’s study behind him with mingled emotions. He was angry because he had just witnessed the clumsy playing of an inept game — and because he had been placed in a position where he did not have a card to play himself nor an opportunity to explain to Vivian Dawson.

“The poor kid!”

He looked into the parlor and into the small study with a vague hope that he might find her waiting for him. She wasn’t in either place and he took the stairs with long strides.

Vivian Dawson’s room was to the left from the head of the stairs. Mildred Harney’s room adjoined it and was connected to it by the bathroom which they shared. Cooper knocked on Vivian’s door and waited. There was no answer and he knocked again.

“Vi!” he called. “Vi!”

He heard her stir as though she had risen from a chair or from the bed, but she did not come near the door. He tried again.

“Vi,” he called. “Listen! I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Go away.” Her voice came muffled.

“Please, Vi.”

“Go away. There’s nothing you can say. Nothing.”

His face was grim and he was trying to frame a phrase that would tip her off to enough of the truth to intrigue her. There was a soft step in the hall behind him. Mildred Harney was standing there with her hands on her hips, a hard smile on her full lips.

“What’s the matter, kid? Won’t the girl friend talk to you?” she said mockingly.

He looked at her with unfriendly eyes. “You came up those stairs pretty softly,” he said.

Her eyes met his and there was none of the melting sweetness in her that the senator saw. “Should I tramp?” she said.

“Tramp is an apt word.”

“Oh!”

They stared at each other with undisguised hostility. Dislike had been mutual from the moment of their first meeting, but the buttons were frankly off the foils now. Cooper rammed his hands in his pockets and moved toward the stairs. He no longer wanted to talk to Vi Dawson unless Vi Dawson came downstairs. This blonde woman was too soft-footed.

“Remind me to tell you some time why you flopped as an actress,” he said.

“Did I flop?” There was ice in the inquiry.

“You did — and you made the same mistake tonight.”

He was moving down the stairs. She stamped her foot. “Maybe you’ll be working for me, too,” she said, “and then I—”

“Guess again.”

He didn’t look back. He was angry but he hoped that Vi had heard the conversation. It might make her curious. He could feel the flush still in his face. He wasn’t normally unchivalrous, but he disliked hypocrites intensely. He particularly did not like young women hypocrites who pretended to be in love with dizzy old men.

Hito was coming out of the senator’s study and the little Japanese had a nod and a white-toothed grin for him. Worlds might fall but as long as Hito still had jobs to do, he would meet his responsibilities grinning — and with a bow thrown in for good measure if there was anyone around who rated a bow.

“I’ll be using the little study for a while, Hito,” he said.

“Yess, Sar.”

Cooper went down the hall. There was a phone in Emily Weller’s study and he dialed Hannigan’s number. Hannigan himself answered.

“This is Cooper, Hannigan. Is Beau Bridwell there?”

“Bridwell? Nope. He left a while ago in a taxi, Mr. Cooper. He wasn’t drinking a thing so I don’t figger he’ll be back.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Cooper hung up with a frown. Things got more and more complicated and this was something that he couldn’t figure. It was only a few minutes after eleven and Bridwell wasn’t due out here until three. Leaving Hannigan’s in a taxi, particularly when he wasn’t drinking, was an illogical play. There was a rent-a-car place within easy walking distance of Hannigan’s.

“I’m letting little things worry me,” he growled. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

He heard the senator close the study door and mount the stairs. Hito was putting out lights in the rear of the house. In a few minutes, Hito would be through and then the Japanese would go out to his own room over the garage behind the house and everything would be quiet. Cooper rubbed his eyes.

“And I have to stay awake until three. Nice going.”

Already he could feel the tomblike silence settling upon the old house. It would be no cinch to stay awake, even with all that he had to think about. He smoked a cigarette and heard Hito putting out lights in the big study.

Cooper gave the man fifteen minutes to clean up whatever odd chores he might have to do in the rear of the house, then rose and went back through the kitchen. There was no sign of Hito and the rear door was locked. Cooper was on the point of unlocking it, but he stopped with his hand on the catch, withdrew it and snapped his fingers. “It will be time enough to do that when I come down at three o’clock.”

He went back through the house, turned out the light in the little study and ascended the stairs. His room was in the rear of the house, just across the hall from Tim Weller’s. The doors of all the rooms were closed but there was a line of light under Vivian’s door and he stopped. He was about to knock softly when he became aware of the fact that Vivian was speaking to someone. He stopped with his hand raised and then the other voice answered.

He could not distinguish words but the second voice was the voice of the blonde, Mildred Harney.

He let his hand drop arid went slowly up the hall. It was natural enough that two girls who occupied connecting rooms should be having a goodnight conversation, but he wasn’t quite happy about it. Under present circumstances, Mildred Harney would not be talking to Vi out of any feeling of affection. She was the kind of a person who had axes to grind. And she was likely to be in a mood for knifing Greg Cooper in the back with a great deal of enthusiasm.

“And I can’t help that.” He went into his room and snapped on the light. A shower would, he reflected, be a help. He slipped out of the dinner clothes. He could not, however, dismiss from his mind the thought of Vivian Dawson.

“If she had only talked to me instead of the blonde,” he thought.

Vivian Dawson herself was unhappy. She left her uncle’s study with the feeling that she had been let down, that Greg Cooper had failed her when she needed him most. The shock of her uncle’s bitter speech and of his destruction of the money had been hard enough to bear, but Greg Cooper’s failure to make a fight on the issue had been disillusioning.

“He was so weak, so helpless. And after promising me so much.”

She entered her room blindly and threw herself down upon the bed. “I never want to talk to him again. Never.”

She was still crying into her pillow when he knocked. She ignored him at first, then she rose slowly. Two instincts were at war within her. She wanted to ignore him completely — and she wanted to tell him what she thought of him. As she stood in the middle of the room with her fists clenched, she saw her own reflection in the mirror. There were two streaks down her cheeks where the tears had flowed and her fists had rubbed the tears.

She crossed to the mirror and lifted her powder-puff from the bureau top. She heard the voices in the hall and the patting motion of the powder-puff slowed. She could not distinguish the words but she knew that Mildred Harney was out there with Greg and curiosity got the better of her. She walked softly to the door. She recognized Greg’s voice and was able to distinguish the tail end of a sentence.

“... and you made the same mistake tonight.”

The blonde girl’s voice replied, “Maybe you’ll be working for me, too.”

Vivian flushed and turned away from the door. She didn’t want to be an eavesdropper and hadn’t intended to be one.

She walked back to the mirror, but when she picked up the powder-puff, she stopped with it in her hand and forgot that she had it. Her eyes were staring at her own reflection and she was looking beyond it, her mind running in desperate circles.

“He hasn’t been friendly with her and fooling me. He couldn’t.”

The fact that Greg Cooper had been talking to the blonde girl about a mistake that she had made, however, did not make sense. And she couldn’t explain satisfactorily to herself the girl’s allusion to work.

Mildred Harney had entered the adjoining room. Vivian heard her moving around. Her chin came up and she headed for the connecting bathroom.

“I’m going to talk to her. I’ve got to know what she plans to do.”

She reached the door just as the blonde girl entered the bathroom from the other door. Mildred Harney stepped swiftly into the bathroom and closed her own door behind her.

“You startled me.”

“I’m sorry.” Vivian’s lips felt stiff. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Sure.” Mildred Harney seemed nervous. She pulled at the doorknob behind her and then strode into Vivian’s room.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened tonight, kid.”

“Are you?”

“Sure.”

“You could have stopped him from burning that money. He would have listened to you.”

The blonde girl smiled and shook her head. “It would have cost me too much, kid. He’d figure that I was more interested in his money than in him.”

Vivian’s eyes came up level. “Weren’t you?”

“Did I act like it? It’s gone, isn’t it?”

Vivian blinked. There didn’t seem to be any answer to that, but the blonde girl was too flip, too casual and too sure of herself. And she was friendly after a fashion tonight, when she had always been aloof. There was an air of triumphant excitement about her that did not seem natural in a girl who had merely won an old man while losing his money. Vivian stared at her thoughtfully. The blonde girl looked away.

“You were a very good sport about it,” Vivian said.

“So were you. Swell.” The blonde girl patted her shoulder with an impulsive gesture. She was nervous, however, and seemed anxious to get away. She looked several times toward the connecting door. “I’ve got to get the beauty sleep,” she said.

Vivian let her go. There were many things that she wanted to ask, but she couldn’t ask them. The conversation was pitched on too unreal a note. There was no bond of contact between herself and this girl. The friendliness was all on the surface.

For ten or fifteen minutes after the door had closed between them, Vivian sat and stared at the wall. She hadn’t been able to mention Greg’s name at all. She got up slowly and slipped her shoulder straps. As she stepped out of the red evening gown, she heard the soft sound of subdued voices. Her body stiffened.

There was a man in Mildred Harney’s room.

The house seemed unnaturally still except for that subdued, cautious murmur. Vivian took a swift step toward the bathroom, then stopped with her face flushing. It wasn’t any of her business if someone was in there. She didn’t want to know about it.

She moved as far away from the connecting bathroom as she could and took off her other garments. She wanted to take a shower, but she hesitated. Finally she decided that she had a perfect right to take a shower and moved noisily toward the bathroom.

“I’ll give them plenty of warning. I’ll let them know that I’m not spying on them.”

She could hear nothing when she entered the bathroom. She snapped the catch which locked the door against Mildred Harney and turned on the shower. It made a lot of noise and she was glad of that. Her face still felt flushed.

“It was probably Uncle Brad... I don’t care... It isn’t any of my business.”

She scrubbed herself vigorously and argued with herself as she scrubbed. Then, suddenly, she stopped all movement and stood stiffly under the shower. Suppose that was Greg in there?

The thought chilled her. She tried weakly to tell herself that she didn’t care but she was shaken and she hurried with her toweling. When she turned off the shower, she listened deliberately at the door. There were no voices at all now and she flipped the catch off the lock. She went into her own room and locked the bathroom door from her side. Haste drove her and she slipped swiftly into a pink nightgown and a filmy negligee.

The hall was quiet and lighted by only one dim bulb. She moved along it like a ghost and halted outside of her uncle’s room. Her heart was thudding painfully but she felt that she had to know if he were in his own room or not. She stretched her hand out to the knob, then halted the gesture.

There was a tinkling sound from inside the room like the breaking of glass.

Vivian backed away from the door, then turned and almost ran. “He is in there. It wasn’t Uncle Brad.”

She reached her own door and stopped. She looked toward Greg Cooper’s door down the hall. She wanted to listen there, too, but she felt embarrassed at the mere thought of doing it. She lifted her chin high. “I don’t care what he does.”

The quiet of her own room smothered her but she threw herself down on the bed and listened to the ticking of her small clock. Each tick was like a hammer stroke beating the foundations of her life away. Tears welled into her eyes, but after a while she slept.

She woke with a jerk. As though one part of her mind had never been asleep, she knew that someone had passed her door and that she had heard him pass. She sat bolt upright in the bed and the murmur of voices came to her from the other room; not continued conversation but merely occasional words — as though two cautious people were trying to converse with a minimum of words.

Vivian rose slowly. For several minutes she sat on the side of her bed and she could no longer hear the voices. She looked at the small clock and saw that it was twenty-five minutes to three. She had been awake for perhaps six or seven minutes. “I’m being foolish.”

She smoothed out her pillow and was about to lie down once more when she heard a faint sound down the hall like the creaking of a door hinge. She held her breath and in a few seconds she heard the sound again. She got up and moved to her door.

A man walked cautiously down the hall toward her uncle’s room — or toward the stairs; she didn’t know which since she lost the sound of his footsteps after he passed her door.

“It’s like a bad dream, with frightening things happening and nothing that one can do about them.”

Vivian went back to her bed, looked at it and looked at the clock. It was nineteen minutes to three. She could no longer hear voices in the next room and the hall seemed quiet but she knew that she couldn’t sleep with that feeling of dread and uncertainty hanging over her.

It was a quarter of three. She reached for the negligee. She put it on and slipped out into the hall. She heard no one and saw no one. There was no light under any of the doors. She moved down the hall, hesitated a moment before her uncle’s door; then took a deep breath and turned the knob. She stepped into the room.

Chapter VII The Senator’s Safe

Greg Cooper dozed during his long vigil. Waiting for three o’clock in the morning when there is nothing else to do but wait is a grueling test of a man’s ability to keep awake. For a half hour, Cooper nodded. He came out of his doze with a quick jerk.

He fumbled sleepily for his watch. He had a panicky feeling that he might be late, and a vague sense that some sound had awakened him.

“Two thirty-two — and everything quiet as a tomb.”

He reassured himself on both counts and stretched his muscles. His eyes still felt heavy and he decided that he could not afford to risk another period of inaction. It was close enough to three o’clock to justify going downstairs. His watch had a luminous dial and he had not needed a light. He did not chance disturbing anyone in the household with a light now. He made his way cautiously across the room and opened the door gently. His watch said two thirty-five.

He didn’t like the sound that the hinge made and he waited in the doorway, listening. Due to the peculiar construction of the stair well, sound did not penetrate the upper floor from the first floor unless it was an unusually sharp or loud sound; but he was not worried unduly about the possibility of people being downstairs. The chief hazard, as he saw it, lay in restless sleepers.

No sound came to him from any of the rooms and he stepped out, drawing the door after him. The hinge creaked again but not as loudly as before. He balanced his weight on the balls of his feet and moved down the hall to the stairs.

He was taking his time. He was engaged in a burglary conspiracy, no matter how he might explain his motives to himself. He could not afford to be seen or delayed by any member of a nerve-taut household. He took the darkened stairs a step at a time and paused at the bottom. His forehead creased in a worried frown.

There was a line of light under the door of the senator’s study.

He moved forward swiftly now, his nerves strung like fine wires beneath his skin. He had taken a half dozen steps when he was conscious of movement behind him. A masked figure seemed to rise from the ground and there was a gun pressing against Cooper’s back.

“Take it easy!” the man growled. “And walk straight ahead.”

Cooper grunted. He had turned partly into that gun but only an idiot would try to turn the rest of the way. He saw no percentage in mock heroics.

“I was going straight ahead when you stopped me,” he said.

The man in the mask did not reply. He stayed close to Cooper and Cooper marched. Before the study door, Cooper came to a halt. The gun barrel jabbed him.

“Go on in.”

There was more nervousness than toughness in the man with the gun. Cooper could sense that from the voice and from the way in which the man gave his orders. Cooper did not find the fact reassuring. A nervous man was likely to be more dangerous with a gun than a tough man. Cooper turned the knob and stepped into the study.

There was a little man crouched in front of the safe, his fingers pressing the dial lightly. At the sound of the opening door, he leaped to his feet. There was terror in his white face as he turned, and Cooper swore.

“Bridwell!”

The man behind Cooper relaxed. He evidently hadn’t recognized Cooper in the darkness. Beau Bridwell was leaning against the safe for support.

“You scared me, Mr. Cooper. I... I—”

“You thought you’d try a double-cross?”

“Oh, no. No, sir.”

“Baloney. Who’s this wolf?”

Cooper turned. The man with the gun was holding it like a man in evening clothes holding a greasy tire iron. He no longer looked formidable, merely disconcerted. Cooper jerked the loosely strung handkerchief from his face and stared at him in astonishment.

The man with the gun was Terry Black of the taxicab. He flushed under Cooper’s hard stare, but his mouth was sullen. There was a raw odor of liquor about him.

“I ain’t interested in anything but what’s mine,” he growled.

“You mean the two hundred and fifty dollars?”

“You bet.”

“It wasn’t yours. You owed it.”

“Maybe. I was willing to admit that I did. If the senator needed the dough, it was his, see? But when I saw all that money stacked up—”

“Okay. It still isn’t your money.”

Cooper turned back to Bridwell, his jaw hard. “And you, you doublecrossing chiseler, I suppose you just got here early and went to work, eh?”

“Yes, sir. That’s how it was. My watch only cost a buck in the first place and—”

“And you’re a liar. You gave me the doublecross. You had my check if anything went wrong and you were going to glom off that money for yourself.”

“No. You got me wrong on that.”

There was white fear in Beau Bridwell’s face; the fear of a man who has served too many years behind gray walls and who knows that he will never come out if he goes in again. Cooper stood with his hands on his hips. His eyes shifted from one man to the other. Terry Black showed less fear but he was trembling with nervousness. Beau Bridwell kept moistening his lips.

Two men to one and with a gun in the hand of one of them, they had the advantage over Cooper and they seemed unmindful of it. If they wanted the contents of the safe enough to pull a doublecross to get it, they could still carry out their original intention. With his check in Beau Bridwell’s pocket, Greg Cooper was in no position to call for help. The thought, however, did not alarm him. He felt there was no need of help.

He was dealing with a broken yeggman who had dropped into the ranks of petty thievery and with a desperate taxi driver who had turned crooked only because he had learned bitterness and had washed his bitterness down with too much liquor. Small time crooks were always frightened by the size of a big job. Their imaginations were not equal to it. They would steal a hundred or two — and maybe slap a man like Cooper out of the way to get it; but a safe holding thousands was frightening. They let fright paralyze them. Cooper shoved his jaw forward aggressively.

“Put that gun on the table, Black!” he growled.

The taxi driver stopped trembling. For a second his eyes were hot with defiance; then he shrugged and laid the gun down. “You got most of it wrong,” he said. “This ain’t a double-cross. It’s a different deal, that’s all. I was going to bring Beau out here even if you hadn’t got to him first. I got desperate thinking of all the money I saw out here and how much that two fifty meant to me. I was going to take it back, that’s all.”

Cooper looked at him searchingly and believed him. He turned toward Bridwell. “And what were you going to get?”

Bridwell passed his tongue over his lips. “Just a little stake for myself, Guv’ner. I was just going to take maybe a thousand.”

Strangely enough, Greg Cooper found himself believing Bridwell, too. It was the fear of big money again. Beau Bridwell had sunk to a level where he knew that the mere possession of money in large amounts would ruin him. He wouldn’t have dared to take it — even with it lying under his hands. Terry Black was lighting a cigarette.

“It was a different deal,” he repeated. “I was going to blow. Beau was going to hang around and when you let him in, he was going to open the box again for you.”

Cooper nodded. It was fantastic and it was obviously fact. Beau Bridwell had merely hired himself out to two different men — under agreement to open the same safe twice in a night.

“You set the time pretty close,” he said.

Beau Bridwell shook his head.

“Not us. We left lots o’ time. We were going to try that box at two bells, but there was somebody moving around down here.”

Cooper stiffened. “There was what?”

“Somebody down here in this room.”

The two men were looking at him. Cooper shook his head slowly. He was regretting that nap that he had taken upstairs.

“Did you get the box open?” he asked.

Bridwell shook his head. “Nope. But I can do it.”

“Okay. Open it up.” Cooper sat on the corner of his own desk. He gestured with one hand toward the ashes in the fireplace. “There are people in this house,” he said, “who will bet you that there is a lot of money in those ashes and nothing in the safe. I’ll reverse the bet. I’ll bet you that there is nothing in the ashes and a lot of money in the safe. Go to it!”

The little cracksman looked at him curiously and bent over the dial. It was hot in the study and very still as Beau Bridwell stiffened with concentration, his head close to the steel door of the safe and his eyes fixed in a stare that was almost glassy. He moved the dial slowly, calling upon the skill of his youth — feeling for the fall of the tumblers.

Greg Cooper was holding his breath. It didn’t seem quite real and his mind refused to encompass the idea of personal danger. He was looking at the safe as, earlier in the evening, he had looked at the fire in the open grate. That hadn’t been real, either.

He had refused to believe, then, that it was possible for a man who had been miserly with money all of his life to deliberately destroy it as a gesture of spite. Trickery and malice were believable in Bradford Weller, but never a big, irrevocable gesture.

Cooper had been intrigued, too, by the fact that the safe had remained locked during all of the time that the money was coming into the house. Bradford Weller, the man who squeezed money till it shrieked, had kept his safe locked and tossed bales of currency into boxes.

It never had made sense and Greg Cooper watched Beau Bridwell’s sensitive fingers with a feeling of thrilled anticipation. When that door swung open, he expected to see currency in stacks; currency that had never been destroyed and never intended for destruction.

Beau Bridwell was only four minutes at the safe; four minutes that seemed like hours. Then he straightened. His face was streaming with sweat. “Easy, Guvner,” he said hoarsely. “A baby could ’a’ opened this old can.”

Greg Cooper came to his feet as Bridwell gripped the handle and pulled the door open. The little cracksman’s jaw dropped and he turned incredulously to Cooper.

“Empty, Guvner,” he said. “Some papers, but...”

Greg Cooper was beside him in a stride. He looked incredulously at the yawning emptiness of the big box. The silence of the room blanketed on him and he felt an emptiness within him that corresponded to that of the safe.

He had sat tamely on the sidelines while the senator had his bonfire and he hadn’t worried because he was sure of his hypothesis. Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that he might actually have witnessed over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars going up in smoke.

Beau Bridwell wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “What now, Guvner?”

Cooper turned to him — and stiffened. Upstairs, a woman screamed three times.

Chapter VIII Death Without Dignity

Greg Cooper charged across the study. He heard the other two men behind him. Beau Bridwell’s voice was hoarse with fright.

“We gotta lam,” he said.

It was no time to argue the question. Greg Cooper did not know what he would encounter upstairs, but whatever it was, if it were sufficiently grave to wring screams from Vi Dawson, he had no time to waste on Beau Bridwell or Terry Black.

Greg grabbed Black’s revolver. He took the black stairs three steps at a time and in the pale light of the upper hall, he saw Vivian Dawson. She was reeling away from the senator’s room, her arms held stiffly away from her sides. Her features were rigid with shock and her green negligee had fallen away from the flimsy nightgown beneath. Greg Cooper put his arm around her and steadied her.

“Vi! What is it?”

“It... it’s in there. Uncle Brad! Dead. I touched him...”

He looked toward the senator’s room, then turned. Mildred Harney was coming down the hall. Her face was chalk white.

“What has happened?” she said.

Greg Cooper shook his head. “I’ll find out. Take Vi into her room, will you?”

“Sure.”

The blonde girl seemed relieved at having something to do. She slipped her arm over Vivian Dawson’s shoulders. Vivian’s lips tightened and she straightened.

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you. I’m all right.”

She turned as though to go back to the senator’s room, but Greg Cooper shook his head at the blonde girl and went down the hall alone. He stepped into the senator’s room and closed the door behind him before he flipped the light switch.

Bradford Weller was lying on his hack in the bed with his glazed eyes staring at the ceiling. There was an Italian stiletto, that had probably come from his own collection, buried hilt-deep in his chest. His fingers were resting lightly upon the hilt as though he had plunged the stiletto home and then relaxed his grip as death took him away.

In the cruel light of the central ceiling fixture that he so seldom used, his bald head gleamed. On the floor beside the bed his false teeth lay with fragments of broken glass about them.

Greg Cooper stared for a long minute at the corpse and slowly shook his head. “Fake,” he said. “He never killed himself.”

He moved gingerly into the room, conscious of the fact that he must not touch anything lest he disturb valuable clews. His mind raced over possibilities.

All that he was immediately sure of was the fact that Bradford Weller would never have taken his wig off and removed his teeth if he were contemplating suicide. The senator’s vanity would have survived even death.

As it was, death had found him stripped of everything — even of dignity.

“He didn’t figure to be murdered. It doesn’t make sense.”

Cooper shook his head. A few hours ago, Bradford Weller had made a show out of the burning of currency with the expressed intention of foiling those who had designs on his money and who, he claimed, were waiting for him to die. Now Bradford Weller was dead. There was a fine irony in that but Cooper could not see the possible motive. He did not believe that sane people killed for vengeance unless there was another powerful factor working. There were people in the household who were resentful, but they were people capable of seeing that murder would make a bad situation worse.

There was a clicking sound from the direction of the door and Cooper turned. Tim Weller stood framed in the doorway; a tall, spare figure in a faded blue bathrobe, striped pajamas and loose house slippers. He blinked at the light and ran one thin hand through his disheveled gray hair.

“Bradford,” he said huskily. “Dead, isn’t he?”

He continued to blink into the glare of the room. He did not have his cane but he gripped the door frame for support. Cooper nodded.

“Yes,” he said gently. “He’s been dead for hours, I imagine. His body is rigid.”

Tim Weller continued to stare at the body. “He was mad,” he said. “Insane.”

“I don’t think so.” Cooper had started for the telephone but he turned back. “You’d better go to your room, Judge. It’s pretty tough.”

He never called Tim Weller “Judge” except on special occasions. The old man shook his head. “My place is here.”

“I’m going to call the police.”

“It’s the thing to do. Call Alexandria Police station.” Tim Weller crossed the room to the chair farthest from the bed and sat down. “You know,” he said, “I made Bradford. Started him in law. Made a politician out of him.”

“I know.” Cooper picked up the phone. He swore softly. There was no buzz in the receiver. The old man looked up. Cooper put the phone back on the stand. “The wire is cut,” he said.

He was frowning again. There was a cold-blooded, professional touch about cutting the phone wires. He looked casually along the line. He couldn’t see the break and because he couldn’t, he found the wire-cutting more baffling. A phone in a bedroom would naturally be an extension phone. To isolate a house without phone service, the line would have to be cut downstairs.

“An amateur would never have thought of that,” he said aloud.

Tim Weller blinked at him. “What?” he said.

Cooper shrugged. “Somebody figured that he needed a head start.”

He moved away from the phone and looked at the body on the bed. Despite his newspaper experience, he felt that queer sense of helplessness that sweeps a person in the face of violent death. He would have to go after help now, and he had a strong disinclination to go. The murderer might want just that.

But he couldn’t figure out any reason why the murderer would want him out of the house — except that the safe had been empty when he had Beau Bridwell open it. If the safe had held a small fortune in money earlier in the evening — as he suspected — then its present emptiness provided a possible motive for murder and a good reason for the murderer to want a head start or time to hide the money after the money was considered. Cooper swung around.

“Did you come downstairs tonight, Judge, after once you went to bed?”

Tim Weller blinked. “Downstairs? No.”

“Somebody did.” Cooper ground his palms together thoughtfully. Tim Weller lifted his head.

“How do you know?”

Cooper did not answer. He was remembering what Beau Bridwell and Terry Black had told him. They delayed their attack on the safe because there had been someone in the senator’s study. Cooper’s eyes passed over the lean body of Tim Weller. It was easier to believe the Judge than to disbelieve him. It would take a strong motive to make Tim Weller negotiate stairs that he didn’t have to climb.

He looked at the corpse. The senator hadn’t been down there. He had been dead for hours before Beau Bridwell arrived at the house. Who was left? The girls? Yes. Either one of them might have been in the study. He didn’t believe that either one had. Hito? Well, he would have to check up on that. The thought of Hito gave him an idea.

He didn’t have to go for the police. He had someone to send.

“I’ll have to consider the possibility that Bridwell and Black lied,” he thought grimly. “Bridwell may have been closing that safe instead of trying to open it when I came in.”

He still believed in his theory of little crooks being afraid of big money, but this had been an extraordinary night — and he was not unmindful of his own position. There was a man with a criminal record who had one of Greg Cooper’s checks that had been drawn on the day his employer was murdered.

Greg Cooper had had the opportunity personally — and any one of several motives that would look good to the police — for murdering Bradford Weller.

He was aware of Tim Weller’s blinking eyes fixed upon him. He didn’t know how long the old man had been studying him, but Tim Weller was shrewd. He might be Greg Cooper’s worst witness before a grand jury if it came to that. His report on Cooper’s unusual actions in the death room would carry weight. The old man was nodding his head slowly.

“It is no disgrace for a crazy man to kill himself,” he said huskily. “His mind broke. He didn’t know. But you better go for the police.”

Greg Cooper stared at him. “You think that he killed himself?”

Tim Weller blinked. “Obviously,” he said. He waved his hand toward the corpse with its stiff fingers resting on the stiletto hilt.

For a long minute Greg Cooper stood where he was and some perverse and cowardly thing inside of him said, “Why not?” He could send Hito to tell the police that the senator had committed suicide. They would come prepared to find a suicide, and the dignified grief of Tim Weller, who apologized for the disgrace of suicide by pleading his brother’s insanity, would convince them.

It was a temptation but he set his jaw against it. “I’m sorry, Judge,” he said, “but it isn’t that simple. He didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Murdered?” Tim Weller raised his head, his eyes widening and, for the moment, ceasing to blink.

“That’s right. And I’m going to send Hito for the cops.”

Greg Cooper was heading for the door as he spoke. He had taken only two steps out into the hall when a gun boomed outside the house. There was a hushed beat of time and then another shot from a gun of lighter caliber. Somebody shouted and on the highway the brakes of a car squealed.

Chapter IX Suspects

The door of Vivian Dawson’s room opened on the echo of that second shot. Mildred Harney came out, running. She started for the stairs and Greg Cooper was only a step ahead of her. He gripped her arm and she struck at him.

“Let me go!” she said.

He gripped harder and swung her around. She struck at him again and her body stiffened. Then suddenly she went limp. The desperate look went out of her eyes and she clutched at him.

“Oh, please,” she said. “Don’t go out. Stay with us. I’m frightened.”

He shook her, and over her shoulder he saw Vi Dawson. Vivian’s face, too, was pale but she had recovered her grip on herself.

“See what it is, Greg. I’ll take care of her.” There was a catch in her voice. Another shot sounded outside and she flinched; but she kept coming. She caught the blonde girl’s arm as Greg Cooper let go, and Copper whirled to the stairs.

He went down fast. He was thinking of Bridwell and of Terry Black, wondering if they had recovered the gun from the table in the study and if they were shooting it out with someone on the grounds. The sense of personal danger pressed on him. Anything that happened to Beau Bridwell was likely to be bad medicine for Greg Cooper. Apart from that, he didn’t want to get the little yegg into anything serious. He was responsible for Beau Bridwell being out here and he had practically given the man guarantees of safety. Even the later doublecross did not nullify that, unless the doublecross was worse than he knew.

He bounded across the lower hall and out of the front door. Upstairs he had left Mildred Harney in care of Vi Dawson. That was another irony of a case that was full of irony. The girls took turns taking care of each other. But there was a difference.

Vi Dawson had gone to pieces with shock but had found herself when there was danger to be met. Mildred Harney had not been affected by the senator’s death but she had found fear in her being when the shooting started. Why?

Cooper expected to find the answer to that question out on the grounds — when he found who was doing the shooting.

Traffic was stopped on the Mount Vernon Highway a hundred yards or so away and Cooper had an idea that the occupants of the cars were under cover from stray shots.

A dark figure moved on the sloping lawn that rolled down to the highway from the house. Instantly there was a flash of flame from a point near the garage. The dark figure folded and went down and Cooper saw another man crawling out of the garage shadow, raising himself for another shot.

“Hold it!” Cooper shouted and started forward. He had lost the sense of personal danger. He knew only that the man out on the lawn had been hit and that, with the car lights from the highway behind him, he would be a still target for the other marksman. There was something chilling about the idea of seeing a bullet pumped into a fallen man. Cooper raced toward the garage.

The man with the gun got up on one knee. He was wobbling badly but fighting for balance. Cooper put on a last burst of speed and struck at the gun with his open hand. The gun spun end over end and the man who had wielded it sank forward on the grass. Cooper recognized him.

“Hito!” he said. “You’re hit, aren’t you?”

“Shot bad.” The Japanese rolled over. He was shaking his head. Blood flowed over the front of his light pajama jacket. Greg Cooper dropped on one knee beside him and the Japanese drew a deep sobbing breath.

“Lady scream,” he said, “and I get up. Pretty soon after, man jump out of window and run. Look dishonest. I remember lady scream and I shoot. Yess.”

“You fired at him without knowing who he was?” Cooper was wadding a handkerchief against the man’s wound and looking toward the road. A car with green lights had pulled in through the gates and there were two men with flashlights moving gingerly toward the man who was lying on the lawn. Hito sighed.

“I shoot to scare,” he said. “Not try to hit. He shoot back and I try to hit next time.”

“Okay. Take it easy. We’ll have a doctor for you. Don’t talk any more.”

Cooper rose to his feet. One of the cops threw a flashlight beam at him and he knew that there was a gun pointed down the beam. He raised his hands high.

“There’s a man shot here,” he said.

“There’s one shot here, too.”

“We’ll have to get them into the house.”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Cooper. I belong here.”

The policeman walked up to meet Cooper. He was a young cop with broad, blocky shoulders and a rolling walk. He was wearing the uniform of the District Park Police that limited his jurisdiction to the Mount Vernon Highway, but he had the aggressive manner of a man who, having blundered into something, intends to see it through.

“What’s it all about?” he said. Cooper shrugged.

“I don’t know yet myself. Our Japanese servant shot someone running away. He got shot himself doing it.”

There was another car pulling into the driveway. Three men piled out and entered into conversation with the policemen down on the grounds. They were Scoutmasters visiting Washington for the Boy Scout Jamboree and while one of their number stood guard to keep curious persons off the grounds, the other two helped Cooper and the two policemen to get the wounded men into the house.

The second wounded man was George Arlington, master con man.

He smiled grimly with pain-taut lips when he recognized Cooper. “I thought we said ‘No hard feeling,’ Cooper.”

“That’s right. But I didn’t shoot you. And the senator hadn’t been murdered then.”

“Murdered?” Arlington’s small eyes opened wide. Cooper stared hard at him. The blocky policeman straightened from his examination of Hito’s wound. He was the senior cop of the patrol and his name was Brennan.

“What’s this about a senator being murdered?” he said.

“Bradford Weller. He was stabbed in his bed,” Cooper said grimly. “By a person or persons unknown.”

“And this guy was running away?” The policeman jerked his thumb at Arlington.

There was a commotion at the door and Mildred Harney broke away from Vi Dawson and Tim Weller. She threw herself down on her knees beside Arlington and would have put her arms around him if the second policeman, a lean youngster with red hair, hadn’t gripped her shoulder.

“He didn’t do it,” she said. “He didn’t do it.”

Brennan turned to the Scoutmasters. “We need some authority here,” he said. “Be good guys and get us a couple of medicos and some law from Alexandria.”

The Scoutmasters saluted and went out on the double. Brennan ran his hand through his hair. “How do you know that he didn’t do it?” he said.

Mildred Harney looked up defiantly. “Because he didn’t have any reason to do it. And he was in my room all night. That’s why he ran away.”

She was like a tigress at bay, her eyes flashing. Brennan looked embarrassed. He looked to his partner for suggestions but the red-haired youth didn’t know what to do, either. Tim Weller sank into a chair, his eyes on Mildred Harney’s face. He looked very old and tired.

“You had promised to marry my brother,” he said accusingly.

She looked at him and laughed bitterly. “I didn’t,” she said. “Your brother was careful about that. He didn’t make any offers that he didn’t have to make.”

“But you would have married him.”

“I couldn’t. I’m married to George.” Her voice caught in a sob and the fight went out of her. She tried to put her arms around the injured con man again. “Are you hurt badly, darling?” she said.

The red-haired policeman kept her back. “He’s just nicked, Miss. Thigh and shoulder. He’ll be okay.”

Greg Cooper had been bending over the Japanese. Hito decidedly was not okay. He had been hit in the chest and he was bleeding internally. There was froth on his lips. His eyes, however, were alive. He seemed to be vitally interested in everything that was being said in the room.

“I am fidelity always,” he whispered. “Missy scream. I shoot.”

“You were right about that, Hito.” Greg Cooper’s voice was soft. “Take it easy.”

George Arlington was speaking to the blonde girl. “Sit tight and keep your nerve,” he said. “We’re in the clear, see?”

Mildred Harney nodded. Vi Dawson came over beside Greg Cooper. “Is there anything I can do, Greg?”

“Yes. Try to keep Hito comfortable till the doctor comes.”

Cooper rose slowly to his feet. George Arlington was looking at him with narrowed calculating eyes. The blonde girl watched him with open hostility. Tim Weller had his chin on his chest. The two policemen were standing awkwardly, charged with responsibility but lacking authority. Greg Cooper looked slowly around the room.

“Somebody here murdered Senator Weller,” he said gravely.

Tim Weller lifted his chin from his chest. He stretched out one thin arm. “Wait,” he said. “Let me ask this girl a question.” He leaned forward in his chair.

“You couldn’t marry my brother,” he said. “So you had no chance of collecting his insurance. He had a lot of that and it was all that he did have after you let him burn up his money. What did you stand to gain?”

The girl looked at him and laughed. “Suppose you guess,” she said defiantly.

Greg Cooper measured her with his eyes and there was no friendliness in his face. “Suppose that I do the guessing,” he said. “What you stood to gain was exactly one hundred and fifty-four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

The girl stiffened and George Arlington ignored the pain of his wounds to come up on one elbow. Tim Weller was staring haggardly as though only dimly comprehending what was said. Greg Cooper shifted his stare to the con man.

“I couldn’t figure out your business with the senator,” he said, “until he pulled his grandstand act about burning up his fortune. Then I guessed. I knew Bradford Weller for too many years to believe in that gesture. It would break his heart to burn up a single dollar. And he didn’t burn a single dollar — not one.”

The room became quiet. “The senator wanted to eat his cake and have it, too,” he said. “He wanted his relatives to think that he had no money — and he wanted money to throw away on blondes. He bought hot money or badly made, unpassable counterfeit money and he substituted it for the real thing before that big show of his. And you, Arlington, sold it to him.”

Arlington winced but Mildred Harney managed a laugh. “How silly!” she said. “Why those bills that he burned had your tags on them.”

“Sure. And the senator had plenty of time alone in his study while I was down town to take those tags from one set of currency and transfer them to another.”

Mildred Harney tried to laugh again but the laugh did not quite come off. Cooper’s voice was relentless. “You two swindlers could have clipped the senator for every dime of that money and he wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it,” he growled. “His fortune no longer existed legally. He had burned it before witnesses. He could never have accused you of stealing what he had burned. It was the perfect con game.”

Big George Arlington found his voice. “You don’t arrest people for what they might have done,” he said. “Mildred and I had nothing to do with killing him. We had no reason for killing him.”

Greg Cooper’s face looked drawn. “That’s right,” he said, “and I don’t believe that either one of you did kill him.”

Big George and the blonde girl relaxed visibly. The room was very quiet and Greg Cooper seemed reluctant to say more. Hito, the little Japanese, was watching every one of the tense actors in the scene, his eyes unnaturally bright. He coughed to call attention to himself.

“I kill him,” he said. “I kill the senator. All okay now.”

Chapter X The Motive

Greg Cooper whirled to the sound of Hito’s voice. He stared blankly at the little yellow man who was struggling to sit up against the support of Vi Dawson’s arms. Two cars stopped outside and there were strangers entering the room. Brennan was explaining the case.

“Senator Weller has been murdered. We are about to get a confession. The murderer’s dying, I think.”

Greg Cooper was kneeling now beside the Japanese. Tim Weller had come unsteadily to his feet and was moving forward. A man with a doctor’s bag knelt on the other side of Hito. The Japanese smiled, almost happily.

“Very simple,” he said. “No money left. Insurance maybe, yess. Miss Boss come from hospital. No money. Very bad. Miss Boss come from hospital. Much insurance. Very good. You see. Yess?”

“All right. I’ve written your confession as you gave it. It says that you know that you are about to die. Can you sign it?”

“Yess.” Hito reached for the fountain pen and scrawled rapidly across the bottom of the sheet. His eyes had a swimmy look but he was staring up at Tim Weller. “Much better,” he said. “I have nobody. No family. Nobody.”

The police had their confession and they did not pay much attention to that. Greg Cooper did — because Greg Cooper knew that Hito had lied.

He looked at Tim Weller. The old man’s hands were clenching and unclenching. There were tears in his eyes and a vast hopelessness; the hopelessness, perhaps, of a man who sees himself chained to an endless responsibility and an unsharable secret. Greg Cooper knew, then, what he had suspected before. He bent above the Japanese.

“I understand, Hito,” he said softly. “Fidelity always.”

“Yess. Fidelity always. Good motto.”

Hito smiled and died. Greg Cooper came slowly to his feet. He wanted to take Vi Dawson in his arms but he couldn’t do that yet. He linked his arm to Tim Weller’s and drew him across the room to the chair that he had occupied before.

“You better sit down, Judge,” he said. “Your sister Emily will need you when she gets out of the hospital. You have to be fit for the job.”

The old man looked into Cooper’s eyes. “You know?” he said huskily.

Cooper nodded. “I know that you killed your brother, yes. And Hito knew that you did. He was dying and he took the load from you. He believed in fidelity. You have to carry on, Judge.”

Tim Weller’s eyes misted. “I will. I made Bradford, you know. I made a lawyer out of him. I made a politician of him. And I made him a senator.”

He was mumbling half to himself when Greg Cooper left him. Tim Weller had told his brother in this very room that no man had the right to destroy what he did not create. Tim Weller felt in his heart that he had made the man that Bradford Weller had been — and he had been consistent with his philosophy when he destroyed the man for what he considered the greater good.

Perhaps the officers of the law were entitled to the facts but Greg Cooper felt no obligation to tell them.

He was crossing the room and he saw the young policeman, Brennan. The blonde girl was gripping him by the arm. George Arlington was supporting himself on one elbow and looking at them.

“There’s nothing that we can be held for. Nothing,” the girl said.

Cooper’s jaw hardened. Here were the perpetrators of a callous and premeditated crime; a crime predicated upon the gullibility of an old man who believed that a young girl loved him. These two people would have stripped a family of money and lived at ease.

Now this precious pair thought that they could walk out. Cooper took a short step.

“No,” he said. “There isn’t a thing that you can be held for unless George Arlington took that money out of the senator’s safe tonight and hid it in your room. Take a look, Brennan.”

Cooper was watching the girl as Brennan left the room with another officer. The bravado was out of Mildred Harney now and she was wax white. In a few moments, Brennan was back. He opened a bag solemnly and stacks of money tumbled out — thick stacks of currency that were never intended for the fire. Cooper snapped his fingers.

“You killed that Japanese while you were engaged in a burglary, Arlington,” he said grimly, “and the girl was your accomplice. Maybe you think that you can’t be held for that.”

He turned his back and he was suddenly weary of it all.

He stepped out into the hall and Vi Dawson was waiting for him.

“I think I can get a good job in Cuba,” he said huskily.

She lifted her face to his. “Cuba would be lovely,” she said.