Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 44, No. 5, September 28, 1929

It Was an Open and Shut Murder Case Until Officer Hawley Recalled He Was Once a Kid

I

Fully fifty people must have witnessed the prelude to the tragedy, for the light in that second floor window of No. 31 was brighter than showed in any other along the row, and the half-strangled and terror-shaken scream had come from somewhere close behind it.

“Bradley! For God’s sake! Don’t, Bradley, don’t!”

Then those two figures, sharp-etched in black on the yellow of the drawn shade; after that the wilder cry, the crash of the gun and the muffled echoing thump of a heavy body on a hard floor.

Up the block, on one of the crowded boardinghouse stoops, some one had been strumming a ukelele. The playing stopped abruptly. A breathless silence settled on the breathless summer night.

On the steps of No. 38, diagonally across from the house of the brightly lighted window, two men who had been looking at a girl sitting between them leaped to their feet and stared at each other.

“That’s murder!” snapped Detective Sergeant William Brill. “A job for me!”

A flush came into the cheeks of the younger man who had been bidding against him for the girl’s attention. It was just like Brill to point that distinction for Mary Corcoran’s benefit; he never passed a chance to rub it in. He was a first-grade man, drawing top pay in the Detective Bureau, close to a lieutenancy. And Jim Hawley was a mere patrolman, a pavement-pounder, a wearer of the “harness” — one of the rankers that Brill liked to call “you guys with your brains in your feet.”

Hawley felt the flush, but he forced a grin.

“There it is for you, Bill,” he said. “Go get it. I’ll be behind you.”

Brill threw a hurried word to the girl:

“Excuse, kiddo! Business before pleasure!”

It wasn’t exactly necessary, so far as Hawley could see, that he should have drawn his gun there, before her. But he did, and flourished with a clatter down the steps. Jim Hawley, off duty and in civilian clothes, lingered a second.

“Listen, Mary,” he whispered urgently. “Get in the house, will you? There may be — a gunplay. Leave it to us.” He caught himself and swallowed hard. “I mean,” he amended, “to Bill.”

He was halfway across the street when he eased his pistol in the service holster under the tail of his shiny serge coat, and Brill, ahead of him, was racing up the stoop of No. 31 two steps at a time.

Hawley stayed on the sidewalk below, an all-gone feeling at the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t afraid of anything that might happen; hadn’t even thought of that. But to him there was something symbolic in Brill’s swift ascent.

It wasn’t only the closed and curtained door above that Brill was making for: it was his lieutenancy. Not discounting the nerve that he really had, good breaks had taken him up where he was. Now, first on the job at a killing, close enough by to collar the murderer red-handed, he was getting the breaks again. Give him this hot grab here, with a lieutenant’s rank and a lieutenant’s pay coming to reward it, and the race for Mary was over. Hawley couldn’t see it any other way. He’d have to drop out; let that be the proof of his love for her; leave her for Bill.

Looking up, he saw Brill’s big hand at the bell — saw it come away as the front door, with a soft glow behind its curtains, was snatched open. A broad figure blocked the light. From the sidewalk, Hawley got an impression of wild eyes in a round, red, bewildered face.

The red-faced man started back at sight of Brill’s pistol and his flashed badge.

“A cop?” he croaked. “It — it’s Hammett! He’s shot!” He drew a deep breath wheezily. “I’m Easier,” he explained, as if that guaranteed him. “Easier of the City Contracting Company.”

“I get you,” said Brill, but he still barred the way.

To Hawley the name meant something too. Both names did. He could remember them coupled, years back, on building jobs all over town. There was a time when a man couldn’t walk a dozen blocks without seeing their signs — “Hammett & Easier, General Contractors.” After that, for awhile, the signs put it: “City Contracting Company, Successors to Hammett & Easier.” John Easier, if he was that Easier, was a sure enough big shot.

But Bill Brill wasn’t handling the red-faced man with gloves.

“Where were you goin’ in such a hurry?” he demanded, stretching out a detaining arm.

“To find a policeman.”

“Yeah?” said Brill. “Well, you’ve got one.” Briskly he patted Easier’s hips and his coat pockets. “No cannon on you, hey? No; there wouldn’t be.”

The red face grew redder.

“W-what d’ you mean? Say! You don’t think—”

“Never mind what I think,” grunted Brill. “You get back in the house while I have a look. Upstairs, is he? And who is he, did you say?”

“Hammett. Oscar Hammett, that used to be my partner. Yes — upstairs. In front.”

Brill gave the stout man a push, straight-armed, that sent him back to the door through which he had just come.

“Come along, Hawley!” he called; and over Hawley’s shoulder he cast a withering glance at the crowd of excited stoop-sitters marshaled behind him. “Come in, and close the door on them rubber-necks.”

When the door was shut and the three of them stood under the hall light, Brill dropped his pistol out of sight.

“Now, Easier!” he barked. “I know who you are, all right; but that don’t get you nothing — not now. If you didn’t do it, who did? Tell me that! And where is he?”

Wrath and a dawning fright had started perspiration in a beady deluge down the contractor’s cheeks.

“I don’t know,” he protested. “I didn’t see anybody. Didn’t think there was anybody in the house but Hammett and me. But somebody got him. I guess you heard.”

“I heard,” Brill agreed grimly. “I wasn’t more than a mile away, see? And you’re the only one I’ve seen comin’ out. Shake a foot now! Upstairs! Lead me to it!”

The impact of his staccato command carried Easier up a step or two. He stopped there and turned.

“You’re making a mistake, officer,” he said. “Being hard-boiled like this — with me. You’ll find it out.”

Then he began to climb again, Brill at his heels, Hawley trailing. At the front of the second floor hall the door of a lighted room stood open. Easier hung back and made way for Brill to pass him.

“In there,” he said with a shudder, and pointed.

Brill walked into the room, but Hawley halted at the threshold. One glance at the figure prone and rigid on the rug was sufficiently convincing. It had the posture and the immobility of death.

“He’s done,” Hawley said. “We’d better get busy, Bill, hadn’t we? — and see where our man got to?”

Brill’s sidelong eyes mocked the suggestion, and so did the exaggerated seriousness with which he considered it.

“You’re a fast thinker, Hawley,” he grinned. “If they knew their pineapples they’d had you in the Detective Bureau long ago. Sure they would. They’d ’a’ slung out some of us dumbbells to make a place for you.” He cast a quick glance about the room, marking an upset chair and a reading lamp overturned at the end of a table, and came back into the hall. “All right,” he gibed. “It’s a smart idea. You hang onto Mr. Easier here, Hawley, and I’ll check up.”

He ran up the stairs to the floor above, and before a minute had passed was down again.

“Nobody went out that way, mister,” he informed Hawley, broad in his deference. “Not over the roof. The trap’s locked on the under side. And, in case you might think that somebody jumped out one of the back windows — they’re all locked, too.” He passed down the hall and opened a door at its rear. “No; nobody hidin’, either. Nobody in the closets, nobody under the beds.”

He vanished into the dark room, and lights presently flashed on to reveal him trying windows.

“All locked here, too, Hawley,” he reported. “But I aim to satisfy. S’pose you want me to try downstairs? And the basement and the cellar?” He turned his grin on Easier. “How about you? Want me to keep on huntin’?”

He started toward the entrance hall, beckoning Hawley to follow with the sweating and speechless contractor. Hawley, from the front hall, saw him trying windows again — heard him puttering below afterward.

When he returned he said nothing, but crinkles of malicious mirth were about his twinkling small eyes as he looked at Hawley and at Easier and picked up the telephone.

“Sergeant Brill talking,” he announced when he had been connected with headquarters. “Just walked into something out here on Planton Street — No. 31. You hear me, captain? It’s Oscar Hammett’s house, and he’s been murdered. Yes; that’s what I’ve said. Sure, send the homicide squad — but, hell! I’ve got their man!”

He winked at Hawley as he hung up the receiver.

“Don’t that sound,” he wanted to know, “as though you might be seein’ me in church?”

Then, not expecting a reply, he wheeled on Easier.

“It’s all settled,” said he, “but the warrant. The whole back of the house is locked tighter than a drum — locked from the inside. That’s proof nobody went out the back way, and there’s plenty witnesses besides me to swear that nobody left by the front. There was just you and Hammett in the house when he was bumped. And say, Mr. Easier: am I wrong, or ain’t your first name Bradley?”

II

Ten minutes later, when a Police Department car sounded its siren in front of No. 31 Planton Street, busy Sergeant Brill had a dozen witnesses corralled in Oscar Hammett’s disordered “front parlor.” Hawley and Easier were there, too.

Hawley opened the front door to a gray mustached man in a square-blocked derby who brushed swiftly past him at sight of Brill in the hall beyond. Four men of the homicide squad, close at the gray man’s back, likewise piled in.

Saluting, Brill addressed the leader.

“The case is all cooked for you, Inspector Gregory,” he said. “Ready to serve up on a silver platter. Hammett’s upstairs. Want to see him first?”

Before the inspector had answered, a voice hailed him from the thronged parlor — and Hawley recognized the voice as Easier’s, tremulous with relief.

“Hello, Tom! Glad to see you! That’s no lie!”

Gregory straightened and stared.

“Brad Easier! What’re you doing in this?”

Glaring at Brill, Easier jerked a thumb in his direction.

“Ask him,” he said savagely. “He thinks that he’s got me arrested.”

The inspector glanced sharply at Brill, who nodded.

“He was here alone with Hammett,” he said succinctly. “And Hammett’s dead. Shot through the head, inspector. Yes; I’d call it an arrest!”

Gregory frowned.

“You don’t often make mistakes, sergeant,” he said, “but you’re all wrong here. Mr. Easier and I have been friends for years. I wouldn’t believe he’d shot anybody until he told me so himself.” He walked to the contractor and put out his hand. “How about it, Brad? What happened?”

Easier mopped his face with a jaunty handkerchief.

“Your man,” he said, nodding curtly toward Brill, “makes a lot out of the fact that Hammett shouted my name. Well, it’s the truth. He did. But I don’t see how anybody could hang me for that.”

Brill bared his teeth in an unpleasant grin.

“Maybe you don’t — now,” he remarked. “Go ahead, Easier. Tell Inspector Gregory the same story you told me. He’s your friend, ain’t he? Let’s see how it sets with him!”

The inspector nodded encouragement.

“Let’s hear it, Brad,” he said. “You were here visiting Hammett, were you? First time in a blue moon, wasn’t it?”

“In ten years,” Easier told him. “In exactly ten years. Hammett called me up this afternoon — reminded me it was just that long since we broke up the old partnership. He wanted me to come here to-night. Said he had something to talk over with me. We made an appointment for nine o’clock.”

“Check!” put in Sergeant Brill. “Anyway, inspector, it was just about nine when Easier got here. I was siftin’ on a stoop over the way, and I noticed him ringin’ the bell outside. He’s got a shape to remember, ain’t he?”

Gregory’s gray eyes lingered for an instant on Brill, and the gleam in them was not wholly approving.

“I’m listening to you, Brad,” he said. “Must have been a surprise to hear from Oscar Hammett.”

“It was,” admitted Easier. “But it’s a funny world. After all I’ve seen—” His eyes lifted to the ceiling. “Well, I came to call, anyhow. Even your Siberian wolfhound here agrees to that.

“I came to call; and, far as I know, Hammett was alone in the house. He let me in himself. I didn’t see anybody else, or hear anybody. I and Hammett set down together in this very room where we’re standing. He was nervous — I can say that much. And he had liquor in him.”

“He would have,” commented the inspector. “I’ve kept some track of him. What did he want with you, Brad?”

Easier hesitated.

“Why... why, that’d be pretty hard to answer.”

“Yeah!” came a sotto voce echo from Brill. “Pretty hard is right!”

“I mean,” Easier went on hurriedly, “that I never got it clear. While we sat down here, he just talked about how long it was since we’d seen each other, and all that. I played along with him, waiting for him to come to the point.

“But he never got there. Maybe ten minutes after he let me in, or maybe fifteen, he got up and asked me if I minded being alone for a couple of minutes? He wasn’t worried about anything then, because he turned around after he was out of the door and grinned at me.

“He went upstairs, and I heard him moving right overhead, in the front room.”

“Sure it was him?” demanded Gregory hopefully.

Easier blinked.

“I never thought about it being anybody else.”

“We’ll come back to that,” observed Gregory with a quick nod. “And you sat tight down here, did you, Brad?”

“Until Hammett yelled, I did. That lifted me out of the chair like it had been dynamite under me. I couldn’t hear just what it was that he was shouting, but I could make out my name clear enough.”

He paused to mop at his sweaty face again, and Sergeant Brill dryly addressed the company at large:

“So could a lot of other people!”

Easier passed the interruption.

“He was yelling my name,” he repeated. “And his voice was enough to send a shiver through you. It was like — like a man being murdered. I ran into the hall, and just as I started upstairs there was a shot and something fell. I kept on going.

“Oscar Hammett was in the front room on the second floor, stretched out, with a bullet in his head. I gave one look at him and started to find a cop. If ever I saw a dead man, it was Hammett.”

Inspector Gregory was looking past him. A youngish man with black-rimmed spectacles, who had driven up a moment after the arrival of the police car, had poked his head in at the door.

“Killed instantly, inspector,” he said. “The gun wasn’t more than a few inches from his head. That’s about all I can tell you now.”

The inspector stared speculatively at Brill, although his question was directed at Easier.

“You’ve heard the medical examiner, Brad,” he said. “And your guess was right, you see. And then you came straight downstairs, did you, and went to look for a policeman?”

“That’s it.”

Brill, boldly holding the inspector’s eyes, made himself heard once more.

“Funny,” he remarked, “that Easier thought he had to go out to get a cop.”

“What do you mean by that?” snapped Gregory.

“That it looked more to me like he was try in’ for a fast get-away. D’you see, inspector, there was a telephone in the hall!”

Then Jim Hawley spoke. He had been listening in that stolid silence with which ordinary patrolmen, plain harness bulls with their brains in their feet, should properly attend conversations between dignitaries of the detective bureau. He hadn’t meant to butt in — but, suddenly, involuntarily, there he was doing it.

“And there was something else in the hall,” said he.

Gregory’s eyes swung to him; so did Brill’s.

“He’s just a cop,” Brill explained, scowling, “that happened to be with me. A uniformed man, off duty. I brought him over in case I’d need him.”

Swiftly the inspector sized up the accidental patrolman.

“That looks,” he decided, “as if it might be a head that you’ve got on your shoulder, officer. What else was there in the hall?”

“Mr. Easier’s hat,” said Jim. “It’s still there, on the rack. That is, I guess the brown one’s his. It’s got the initials ‘B.E.’ in it. And he was starting out without it. It didn’t seem to me that he could have meant to go far.”

The contractor flashed him a grateful glance.

“That’s right, Tom! Maybe if I said I didn’t see the phone, or think of it, that might be hard for some people to believe. But it ought to mean something that I didn’t bother about my hat, either. Yes; that brown felt is mine.”

Gregory’s relief was manifest.

“What’s your name, officer?” he asked. “Hawley? O.K., Hawley. It is a head!”

Brill regarded Hawley without kindness.

“Hat or no hat, inspector,” he said, “Easier’s in this mess with both feet. You’ve got to look at the simple facts. There was only Hammett and Easier here. That’s a cinch. The whole back of the place is buttoned up on the inside, and that tells the story from that end. The same goes for the roof. The bolt is shot under the scuttle. As for the front — I and Hawley can tell you that nobody came out after the shooting but Easier. And if our word ain’t good enough, there’s dozens of others can tell you the same.”

Gregory made a gesture of impatience.

“You’re careful, Brill,” he said. “I’ll agree that conditions are probably as you say they are. But why are you so set on making murder out of it? Haven’t you ever stopped to think that Hammett could have killed himself?” Gregory caught the medical examiner’s eye. “What do you say, Dr. Young?” he asked. “Couldn’t it have been suicide?”

The physician nodded.

“I certainly wouldn’t say it couldn’t have been, inspector. The bullet was fired close up, as I’ve told you already. It entered the forehead, on the right side. It’s probably not my province to remark that there are indications of a struggle up above.”

Gregory stiffened.

“I haven’t been upstairs yet myself,” he said. “What—”

Brill eagerly anticipated the question.

“A lamp and a chair upset, and a rug kicked up,” he volunteered. “And that was more than I expected. It didn’t last long.”

The inspector stared at him.

“What do you mean, it didn’t last long?”

“That’s more fact. I saw the whole of it!”

Easier’s jaw dropped; Gregory’s went up at a sharp angle. Their voices were one:

“Saw it?”

Sergeant Brill folded his arms and impressively cleared his throat.

“I saw it, Hawley saw it, and so did all these people sitting around here. I guess I could dig you up even more if I had to. You ought to know Panton Street, inspector. Along this block they’re boarding houses, mostly. And you know how boarding house crowds’ll go for the stoops on a hot night.

“I and Hawley were paying a call ourselves. We’ve got a sort of mutual friend — a lady friend, see? — that lives at No. 38. We were on her stoop. Just chinnin’ along, you know. And then, all of a sudden, somebody starts yellin’. The noise came from over here, in No. 31.”

Gregory challenged that brusquely.

“Aren’t you guessing, sergeant?”

Brill shook his head.

“Not a bit of it. It was Hammett yellin’. And he hollered out Easier’s name. That is, his first name. He was beggin’ ‘Bradley’ not to kill him.”

He glanced along the line of his witnesses for confirmation, and got it in a series of nods. Gregory’s gray face tautened, and his eyes went to Easier’s. For the first time they expressed a doubt.

III

Brill allowed a pause to let one sensation sink in before proceeding to the next. Then he resumed:

“There was a bright light upstairs, and the room it was in was where the hollerin’ seemed to come from. The shade was down, but—”

“Then you couldn’t actually see anything?” Gregory wanted to know, still covertly watching Easier.

Brill grinned.

“If you mean faces, no,” said he. “But figures — yes! They were between the lamp and the window. They were as clear on the shade, almost, as I see you now against the light.”

Gregory’s sharp chin went up again.

“They?”

“That’s what I said — and that’s the clincher, inspector! There were two men in that room. And they were scufflin’. I leave that to anybody.”

He solicited further corroboratory nods, and was not disappointed. A thin-haired man spoke up:

“That’s the truth, inspector. I testify to it — and I was on the force once myself. There were two men upstairs in No. 31. Their shadows were on the shade. I just caught a flash of them, fighting; saw one take a clip at the other. After that they got out of the line of the light, but it wasn’t another second before the shot was fired.”

“It’s right,” some one else assented breathlessly. “Just what I saw!”

Gregory took a cigar from his pocket and for a little ruminatively chewed its end. His shrewd eyes studied Brill’s parked witnesses, and nowhere along the line of them could he discover dissent. He walked to Easier and dropped a hand on his thick shoulder.

“Brad,” he said gently, “It doesn’t look so good. I know that Hammett has had it in for you all these years. If he got you here to trim you, if you had to let him have it to protect yourself, I want you to tell me.”

The color had drained from Easier’s face, leaving it with a pasty and blotchy pallor.

“They’re all — crazy,” he said unsteadily. “Trying to pin it on me! I don’t know any more than I told you. There wasn’t anybody but Hammett in that room when I got up there. Maybe there had been somebody. Maybe it’s fact what they say about seeing two shadows on the shade. But I can’t say anything about that.”

Gregory stood away from him, searched his ashy face.

“It’s not so good,” he repeated. “Look here, Brad! You and I have been friends for a good many years. The best I could ever do for you wouldn’t be too good. You know it. You’ve helped me when I needed help, and I’m not forgetting it.

“But there can be times, Brad, when a man’s best doesn’t mean much. Times when he hasn’t any choice. This is one of them. All I can advise you to do is come clean. And that’s a friend’s advice, remember. There’s been a killing here, and I’ve got a policeman’s duty ahead of me. No matter how it hurts, there’s no getting away from it.”

Easier dropped into a chair, and threw out his hands.

“I’m through,” he said. “What’s the use of going all over it again? You’re as cuckoo, Gregory, as any of the rest of ’em. I don’t know what it’s all about. I didn’t see anybody but Hammett in this house since I got here. I didn’t see anybody coming in or anybody leaving, front or back. I didn’t shoot Hammett. Didn’t raise a hand to him. When he was shot, I was sitting right in this same chair where I’m sitting now. If the back of the house is all locked, maybe nobody skipped that way. If a lot of people were watching the front and say that nobody went out — well, maybe nobody did. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. I’m licked!”

Gregory sighed and shrugged, and turned to Brill.

“I suppose, sergeant,” he said stiffly, “that I ought to congratulate you on another piece of good work. Mr. Easier seems to be your prisoner. It’s time, I think, to warn him that anything he says in regard to this matter may be used against him.”

Avoiding Easier’s startled eyes, he passed a thin hand wearily over his forehead.

“Now, Brill,” he said, “we’ll have a look upstairs. And you come along, too, Hawley!”

IV

At the door of the lighted room with the drawn shade, Gregory stopped to ask a curt question:

“Everything’s been left the way it was?”

“Exactly,” said Brill.

The spectacled medical examiner, who had followed them upstairs, answered with a nod.

“Naturally,” he said. “I opened the man’s coat. That was all.”

Gregory gnawed the dry cigar while his eyes roved.

“Looks as if Hammett put up a fight,” he observed. “See that lamp?”

Jim Hawley was looking at it.

“Strong, isn’t it?” he asked. “It’s a wonder the filament didn’t break when it went over. I never saw one of those high-power lamps that’d stand a lot of jar.”

Gregory, without comment, walked into the room and picked up the revolver that lay beyond Hammett’s sprawled feet. He held it close to the upset reading lamp. From the crowd on the sidewalk a strident voice came up as he bent to examine it:

“Look! The cops are up there now!”

The inspector saw the shadow of his head on the shade, magnified to giant proportions.

“That’s how it was, eh?” he murmured. He moved back out of the light stream, and turned the gun over. “Not a sign of a finger-print,” he said. “The revolver won’t tell us anything — unless we can trace it.”

Sergeant Brill patted a complacent yawn.

“Do we need to have it tell us anything, inspector?” he queried. “Did you ever see so many witnesses to a murder in your life? Or a case so open-and-shut?”

Gregory said nothing. He put down the gun carefully upon the exact spot where it had lain and picked up the pencil with which he had marked its proper place. A glint of white under Hammett’s body caught his eye then. He stooped, and gingerly plucked at the edge of it. A moment afterward he was by the lamp again, examining a rumpled silk handkerchief.

“Now, that’s sort of funny,” he reflected, aloud.

Hawley saw what he meant by that. The handkerchief was knotted at either end. He looked hard at it, and then harder still at the reading lamp, on its side at the near end of the mission table.

“No!” he said suddenly. “It isn’t?”

Gregory straightened and stared at him.

“What’s that?” he demanded. “What are you saying, Hawley?”

Brill interpolated, severely:

“Better keep your oar out, young fella! I guess the inspector can get along without your advice. If you don’t think it’s queer for anybody to knot up a handkerchief that way, that’s no license for you to chip in.”

There was a strain of stubbornness in Hawley. It came hotly to the surface.

“It’s not so queer,” he insisted, coloring as Gregory’s eyes narrowed upon him.

But the inspector wasn’t rebuking him with that steady regard; his mind had flashed back to the incident of Bradley Easier’s hat — to his observation that what Hawley’s shoulders supported was a human, reasoning head.

“Why isn’t it queer?” he presently wished to be told.

Jim Hawley, so swiftly and directly caught up, had an impulse to temporize. He looked away toward the lamp and blinked in its glare. Was somebody, pretty soon, going to be telling him he was crazy?

“I mean,” he said lamely, “it is and it isn’t. If it was just the handkerchief, maybe I wouldn’t have thought anything. But — take that lamp there, now!”

Gregory transferred his stare to the lamp.

“Well?” His voice was crisp.

“It’s a reading lamp,” said Hawley.

Brill burst into an explosive and uncomplimentary laugh.

“That’s keen! Goes to show you, inspector, that we’ve got a lot of talent harnessed up in the precincts! Hawley’s found out that it’s a reading lamp! Can you beat him?”

Gesturing Brill to silence, Gregory popped out another, “Well?”

Hawley squared his shoulders and his jaw.

“There’s something funnier about the lamp than about the handkerchief,” he asserted doggedly. “Could a man read under a light like that without being blinded? It’s a hundred-watt bulb, inspector! There it is, marked on it. The glare of it off a book or paper would start your eyes watering in a jiffy. Nobody’d use more than a sixty-watt lamp for reading, at the outside.”

Gregory nodded absently. Brill was grinning.

“You must burn better than a hundred watts yourself, under your hat, Hawley,” he sneered. “But what’s the lamp got to do with the handkerchief? What has watts got to do with knots?”

Hawley wheeled on him, his eyes blazing.

“Don’t you remember anything at all,” he demanded, “from the days when you were a kid? Didn’t you ever—”

Again Brill laughed, and the sneer was caught up in the laugh, giving a cutting edge to it.

“Hey!” he cried. “What’s that got to do with — anything?”

With an effort, Hawley caught back two things that had been ready to slip. One was the latter part of an uncompleted question, the other a right fist that ached for contact with Brill’s sardonic mouth. But his defy was out before he could check it.

“I’ll show you!”

There were danger signals in his eyes, and Brill did not misread them. He looked away to Gregory, who asked quietly:

“What do you mean, Hawley? What’ll you show?”

Hawley drew a deep breath, and caught up the challenge.

“Just what happened up here,” said he. “My idea of it, anyhow.”

Again Gregory was studying him.

“Go ahead,” he invited shortly.

But Hawley shook his head.

“I can’t do it; not with both of you here,” he demurred.

“There’s nerve!” gasped Brill. “What the hell d’you think you’re pulling?”

Gregory rubbed his chin.

“I don’t understand,” he admitted. “If you think you’ve got something to show us, Hawley, let’s see it — in a hurry. We’ll have the reporters here in a couple more minutes.”

“I know,” Hawley said. “But this is something I’ve got to do my own way. Or else it won’t mean anything. You’ve got to leave me alone here.”

“And — us?”

“I want Brill to go over and sit where he was — on the stoop of No. 38. If it’s just the same, inspector, I’d like to have you alongside him. Just sit there — and watch!”

Brill held up his hands.

“Jeez!” he ejaculated. “If that ain’t brass! How long is it, inspector, since you took orders from a rookie patrolman?”

Gregory’s gaze bathed him with a cold light. It was only a straw — but he grasped at it for his sinking friend.

“I haven’t been so long in the department myself, sergeant,” he said, “that I’m sure there isn’t anything left for me to learn. As for Hawley’s proposition, I’m ready to be shown. We’ll stroll across the street together. Brill, if you don’t mind. Where did you say you wanted us, Hawley? On the stoop of No. 38?”

V

Mary Corcoran was over there, watching No. 31 with strained eyes, when Sergeant Bill Brill came back to her. Just as he had gone, he returned — with a swagger. But now it was not a pistol he flourished, but a police inspector.

“This is my boss, kiddo,” he said. “Inspector Gregory, meet Miss Corcoran. She’s my extra special.”

The girl took the inspector’s thin hand, and by her speech betrayed how little she knew of the department. What she said — and warmly, too — was:

“Then I suppose you know Jim Hawley, Mr. Gregory!”

Brill frowned, but the inspector smiled.

“I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting him,” he replied. “An enterprising young man.”

His gaze wandered over the way, and discovered the head of the enterprising young man poking from the brightly-lighted second floor window of No. 31.

“Set?” called Hawley.

“We’re here.”

Mary Corcoran gasped.

“It’s Jim! He’s in that room where the man was killed!”

And then she was on her feet, screaming. What had happened twenty minutes ago was being repeated. A wild, horror-filled shout was echoing along the street.

“Bradley! For God’s sake! Don’t, Bradley, don’t!”

“Help him!” cried Mary Corcoran. “The murderer’s come back, and he’s after Jim! Look, look!”

Black shadows were again on the yellow shade, the swollen shadows of two men struggling behind it.

Brill’s eyes popped. He jumped up, his hand swinging automatically to his hip. But the shadows had vanished then. There was a whir, and a sharp crack.

The crack wasn’t another pistol shot; the yellow shade had been yanked and let go smacking onto its roller. Jim Hawley leaned out the window.

“A one man show!” he called across the street. “How was it, Inspector Gregory?”

Gregory was already on his way over. He pushed into No. 31 and ran up the stairs. Hawley met him at their head. He had the knotted handkerchief in his hand.

“The knots were the giveaway,” said he. “They made the shadows of the two heads. Maybe Bill Brill doesn’t remember being a kid, inspector — but don’t you? Don’t you remember making shadowgraphs between a strong light and a screen? Just with your fingers you could make a lot of things. Horses and dogs and elephants and churches. And if you tied knots in a handkerchief — say, couldn’t you put on a first-class battle?”

A roar escaped Gregory — a roar of appreciation and relief. He went down the stairs with a rush, burst into the parlor where Easier sat among the hostile witnesses.

“Brad!” he shouted. “You’re clear! It was a last dirty trick that Hammett tried to put up on you. He’d got ready finally to bump himself off — and he thought he’d leave you to swing for it. That’s what he’d been scheming these ten years toward, planning a red anniversary!”

He whirled around and caught Jim Hawley’s arm; whispered energetically to him. Then he lashed out at Brill.

“You’re a good man, sergeant,” he wound up. “I’d be the last to say you weren’t. But there’s such a thing as being too anxious to force a collar. You’re inclined to be that way, sometimes. Sometimes your brains are in your feet!”

Hawley didn’t hear that. Already he was sitting on a straw mat on the steps of No. 38, holding hands with Mary.

“Luck!” he exulted. “To-morrow I go into the detective bureau as a second grade sergeant. Pop Gregory says so, and he never breaks his word. Know what it means, Mary? A jump of a thousand a year! Now I can say the word!”

The girl’s eyes were starry.

“Why didn’t you say it a long time ago, Jim?” she wanted to know. “Ain’t I — working?”