Double, Double

Tuesday, April 11

The next morning, when Ellery called at Upham House, the desk clerk handed him a note.

She had sketched a route through Low Village. The shack was indicated by a black X.

Ellery walked down Washington Street, passed Crosstown Avenue — the dividing line between High Village and Low Village — and turned into Plum. Here he sought and found Homer Findlay’s garage, whose placard in the Hollis lobby advertised a Drive Urself service. He drove out in a 1939 Plymouth coupé (or “coop,” in Homer’s version) with 92,000-odd miles on its mileage meter.

Back uptown he found an empty space by a parking meter on Wright Street. He strolled up Washington toward Slocum, searching the shop windows. In the middle of the block he spied PURDY’S — DRY GOODS & FURNISH’GS, and he went in. He purchased two large bath towels.

“Anythin’ else today?” asked Mr. Purdy.

Ellery hesitated. He was feeling not the least bit stuffy this morning. On the other hand... “Yes,” he said firmly. “A pair of swimming trunks.”

Mr. Purdy said he didn’t have his summer stock in yet, but he might fish out an odd pair... He returned with a dusty box which revealed three one-piece swimming suits seasoned with moth crystals. Mr. Purdy held one up.

“Left over from one or two seasons back,” he said.

Eying the long limp shanks, Ellery decided that Mr. Purdy’s mathematics were at fault and he said no, he didn’t think so. Mr. Purdy nodded gloomily.

“Might try the Waldo brothers next door. In the Granjon Block. They’re tailors, but ever since Otis Holderfield found himself a gold mine and began toggin’ himself out like a movie star, the Waldos been getting ideas — puttin’ in bathrobes, sport jackets, what-all... talkin’ about carryin’ a full line of gents’ furnishings! Wouldn’t surprise me if they got just what you want. Direct from Paris, likely.”

There was no reason why the name Waldo in Mr. Purdy’s rather bitter accent should have startled Ellery. On the sidewalk, his package of towels under his arm, Ellery stared at the shop next door. It showed evidences of a new prosperity — freshly painted, one window draped elegantly with bolts of men’s suiting, the other displaying men’s furnishings of apparently good quality. There was a brand-new sign over the front: WALDO BROS. EXCLUSIVE TAILORS. Still, his scalp itched and the backs of his hands were fizzy. As if he were on the verge of a discovery.

Ellery entered the shop. Here prosperity had not yet penetrated: the fixtures were aged and few, the triple mirror was tarnished in streaks, and from what he could see of the workroom in the rear, past the calico curtain, it was dingy and miserably lit.

A very small man in his shirt sleeves, vest covered with snips of thread, a tape measure about his neck, appeared at the curtained doorway. “Yes?” Then he brightened. “Oh, you’re the gentleman was in Mr. Holderfield’s office yesterday afternoon. Something in a suit?”

Ellery could hear nothing from the workroom. Apparently David Waldo was alone in the shop.

“Would you have a pair of bathing trunks? Mr. Purdy next door said—”

The itch and fizz were really pretty bad. And they seemed to get worse the longer he was in the shop. Or perhaps it was the soft touch of the little tailor’s hands as he measured Ellery’s waist. What was it?

“We’ve only just put in this line—”

“Fine. Just what I want. By the way, did you know Tom Anderson?”

“Who? Oh! No, not to talk to. Too bad, the way he went. Got some fine-quality gabardine here—”

“I’m not surprised. I mean, I imagine your clientele is a little more exclusive. Didn’t John Spencer Hart get his clothes made here?”

“Wish he had. But Mr. Hart had his tailoring done in Boston, I heard. That camel’s hair we’re making up for Mr. Holderfield—”

“Maybe you’re lucky. Didn’t Hart die owing a lot of money? It’s a bad habit that partner of his didn’t get into, I understand — what was his name again?...”

“MacCaby.”

“That’s it. Wasn’t MacCaby the original miser?”

“I wouldn’t know. If you’re thinking of going swimmin’ this early in the year, maybe a beach robe—?”

“Oh, you didn’t know MacCaby.”

“No. Will that be all?”

“I was saying to Dr. Dodd just the other day—”

Waldo said quickly, “You know Doc Dodd?”

“Why, yes. Is he a customer of yours?”

“Say.” David Waldo smiled. “If we had to depend on Doc Dodd for a living, we wouldn’t stay in business long. Fine man, though. Six ninety-five.”

Ellery walked out with the trunks, still tingling.

What was it?

He crossed the street and went into Jeff Hemaberry’s Sporting Goods store, where he bought a picnic hamper and a Thermos jug. Then he visited The Delicatessen Caravansary, which lay between Logan’s Market and Miss Addie’s Anticipation Shop. Here he found food for digestion as well as reflection and when he came out he was weighted. It was all he could do to get back to Homer Findlay’s coupé.

After studying Rima’s map, Ellery drove down Washington Street into Low Village and turned left into Congress. The map instructed him to follow Congress across town as far as it went.

Congress Street rapidly turned more dilapidated, noisome, and depressing. It paralleled Polly, with the nasty trickle of Willow River between. Here the refuse of Low Village factories floated past the back doors of workmen’s barrows. There was an occasional blotch of green, chiefly weeds; there were no trees at all. Yet Ellery drove slowly. Tom Anderson had taken this route countless times, yawing along its broken walks; how many times had he run aground on the reefs of the jagged asphalt? And along about here was where Abe L. Jackson’s younger brother Garrison must have met him that Saturday night when Anderson was presumably sober and headed for his baffling rendezvous on Little Prudy’s Cliff. Whom had Rima’s father been meeting that night? The answer might lie on this crippled back street behind one of these shaky walls, in the undigested memory of some sodden millhand or his sagging wife or one of his wild children.

Or it might lie in the infinite land of chance. Nothing personal...

The narrow street came to an abrupt end in a mound of dirt, broken brick, tin cans, and assorted debris. The street fell away in a declivity to a deep gulley which was choked with the accumulated refuse of years. From this gulley rose a stench which turned Ellery pale. The thought of having to wade through its sour fumes on the rickety footbridge which spanned the chasm daunted him. Beyond the bridge stretched a skimpy belt of scrub, rubbish, and wasteland. Behind that glowered The Marshes.

Ellery locked the coupé and put a handkerchief to his nose. He was about to step onto the footbridge when he saw Rima Anderson running from a stand of crazily twisted trees a hundred yards down-gulley on the opposite side. She was barefoot and wore a sarong-like garment apparently sewn together from the remains of a man’s old suit. She sped across the bridge, hair streaming.

“I’ve been watching for you.”

It seemed to Ellery that she was tense and unhappy. “Anything wrong, Rima?”

“Wrong? Of course not.” But there was.

“These Congress Street kiddies look predatory. Is it all right to leave the car while we go over to your place?”

“We’re not going to my place.”

“What!” Rima walked to the coupé and Ellery followed her, protesting. “But why not, Rima? I want to see it.”

“Some other time.”

“But only last night you said—”

“Why did you bring a car?”

“So we could go picnicking. Wasn’t that the idea?”

“We could have walked. I always do.”

“You mean you don’t swing through the trees, like Tarzan?”

“Who’s Tarzan?”

Ellery told her as he unlocked the car and they got in.

“Oh, a grownup Mowgli.” Rima’s voice was listless. “I’ve always loved Baloo and Bagheera. And hated Shere Khan. Turn right into Shingle Street, Ellery. That’s Route 478A. You follow it up to just before Twin Hill-in-the-Beeches, then you turn off.” She curled up beside him, staring ahead.

This was not humor, or even mood. Something painful had happened this morning. It had arisen on her return to the shack, not before; her Upham House note had told him to come. Was it that after a journey into the world she had come back to see her home for the pitiful hovel it was? Or...

He could not overlook the possibility that there might be something darkly different behind it.

He drove along in silence.

After a while Rima squirmed. “I read that book last night.”

“Oh? What did you think of it?”

“I laughed. Is that what’s known as a detective story?”

“One kind of detective story.”

“Detectives aren’t that way in life, are they? Kissing or slapping every girl they meet, beating up people, shooting off guns all the time?”

“Most detectives I’ve known have forty-eight waistlines, chronically sore feet, don’t handle a gun from one year to another, and can’t wait for the weekend to water their lawns.”

“And then that girl Ginger, the one Dave Dirk called ‘Gin’ and ‘Gingivitis’—”

“His secretary.”

“She made me tired. Getting into one silly mess after another. And why did she keep calling Dirk ‘Chief? He wasn’t a policeman.”

“He was her chief.”

“Slang,” said Rima thoughtfully. “I wondered about that. Do all detectives’ secretaries call them Chief?”

“All who have secretaries, I suppose.”

“Do you have one?”

“Not at the moment. But then, Rima, I’m not in a book.”

“You ought to be!” They both laughed, and the day brightened.

They were in the northeastern part of town now, climbing into the hills above High Village. The name “Shingle Street” on the signs had disappeared. Young cottages roosted above them. And when they rounded a curve, there were Twin Hills’ big breasts straight ahead, below which twined the expensive girdle of Twin Hill-in-the-Beeches. Beyond Twin Hills lay exclusive Skytop Road, Wrightsville’s newest residential district; and far in the distance nodded the old head of Bald Mountain.

At Rima’s instructions Ellery turned the coupé into a narrow dirt road, little more than a firebreak, hacked, pitted, and ungraded. Three miles of this and the road ended at a boulder. As far as Ellery could see, they were walled in by thick forest. There was nothing in sight that resembled a trail except the road behind them.

“What now? Aviation?”

“Just plain walking.”

Ellery’s recollections of the hour that followed were a flicker of wicked bushes, nettles, emery-barked trees, ground that rolled underfoot; he was stabbed, flogged, and tripped. Rima flitted ahead, slipping by the malignant spirits of the woods as if she carried an aerial immunity. Occasionally she paused to hack a path with a machete-like knife which she carried at the waist of her sarong. At such times he embraced a tree, gasping. At the end of eternity, just as he was about to mutiny, he found himself staggering into the anteroom of paradise.

They were in a small glade which was carpeted with moss and pine needles and guarded on three sides by immense pines, hundred-foot beeches, red spruce, balsam, hemlock, birch, cedar. On the fourth side lay a clear pool. It was fed by a tiny waterfall which came frisking down a sluice of gleaming granite, replenished the pool, and disappeared somewhere in burbly darkness. The sun sparkled on the pool, but in the glade the air was washed and cool and full of wood and earth scents. Birds flashed and chirruped everywhere.

“Ytaioa.”

“Like it?”

Ellery lay back on the aromatic carpet and shut his eyes.

He opened them to catch the glint of a brown body splitting the surface of the pool. The knife, the tweedy sarong, lay on an outcropping of rock above the water.

Her head appeared and a wet brown arm came up and grasped the ledge.

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“If you’ll...”

“Oh, piffle.”

“Well, damn it all!” began Ellery, but she was gone again, laughing. He got into his swimming trunks behind a modest beech, feeling like a fool.

They splashed and dived and romped in the pool; they dried off on the ledge, Rima disdaining his towel for any purpose whatever so that, in all conscience, he had to close his eyes; and when he awoke Rima was squatting crosslegged — in the sarong — beside one of the towels, on which she had spread the contents of the hamper.

“Come on, Ellery, I’m hungry.”

They had a feast in the glade, after which Rima plaited a wreath of vine leaves for his hair while, like a lactic Bacchus, Ellery swigged the last of the milk in the Thermos jug.

“And now if you’ll be very still,” said Rima, “I’ll have some of my friends in for tea. There’s the loveliest doe—”

“I’ll meet Bambi’s ma some other time,” said Ellery, lying back. “Make yourself into an audience, Rima. I feel a monologue coming on.”

It seemed to him the gladness went out of her; but she stretched out on the moss obediently, her head on his chest.

Ellery blew a smoke ring at the dappled ceiling.

“Rima,” he began, “a thing isn’t always what it seems. In fact, there have been whole schools of thought whose scholars have insisted that a thing isn’t ever what it seems. I choose the middle road: Truth and the appearance of truth. Some things are true, and some things merely seem true when they’re not.

“The smart investigator of a crime is always aware of this ambivalence, and it’s his job to separate the conflicting elements of a case and put his fingertip on what is true in them and what is false. Some cases are more two-faced than others, and I’m beginning to believe this one bears the stamp of Janus.”

“You and Daddy,” murmured Rima; and then she was silent, not explaining what she meant. But Ellery thought he knew, and for a moment he squinted at a squirrel racing for his hole, giving Rima time to come back.

“Three deaths,” he went on. “Or two and a probable. Luke MacCaby’s by heart disease — presumably; John Spencer Hart’s by a bullet in his brain — called suicide; your father’s in the quicksand below Little Prudy’s Cliff — again presumably, and presumably as the result of violence. A great many presumptions. Appearances of truth which may be truth and, on the other hand, may be quite otherwise.

“Now let’s follow up the premise laid down by my mysterious correspondent, Anonymous: that the three deaths, or rather the three events, are connected. If they are... if they are, is there evidence of the connection? Does some common factor exist in each event? Yes, Dr. Sebastian Dodd. Dr. Dodd proved to be MacCaby’s heir. Dr. Dodd became Hart’s business associate and, as a result, Hart died in a shooting. And Dr. Dodd presented your father with five thousand dollars a short time before your father’s disappearance.

“Truth and the appearance of truth. Either the three events are what they seem, or they’re not. Either Dodd, who figures importantly in all of them, is what he seems... or he is not.”

Ellery sighted along his nose. Rima’s eyes were turned on him, startled. “Dr. Dodd?”

“I didn’t say Dr. Winship. Why not Dr. Dodd? If all three events are what they seem, they were natural developments of natural means. If the three events are not what they seem, they were unnatural developments of contrived means — in other words, they were criminally brought about. And if we accept Dr. Dodd’s story in each instance as being the whole truth, then Dr. Dodd is what he seems, a good and kind and innocent man; and if we do not accept Dr. Dodd’s story in each instance as being the whole truth, or part of the truth, or any of the truth, then Dr. Dodd may be the reverse of what he seems: that is, an evil, scheming, guilty man. A criminal, Rima.”

“A criminal?”

“There were three deaths,” said Ellery. “Or two and a probable.”

“A murderer?”

Ellery relit his cigaret, which had gone out.

“Be careful of that match!” And Rima took it from him and buried it. Then she said, “But why should Dr. Dodd have murdered Mr. MacCaby? Or Mr. Hart? Or Daddy?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Ellery. “First MacCaby. Is Dodd what he seems in the MacCaby case — a good, kind, innocent man? Then it’s true, as Dodd states, that MacCaby died naturally — that is, of heart disease. Then it’s true, as Dodd states, that he, Dodd, was unaware before MacCaby’s death of MacCaby’s wealth. Then it’s true, as Dodd says, that he had no idea that with MacCaby’s death he, Dodd, would become a very rich man.

“But suppose Dodd is not what he seems? Suppose he’s an evil schemer, cleverly garbing his wickedness in the daily garment of straitened living and good works? Then shortly before his death MacCaby told Dodd he was a wealthy man and that Dodd would inherit MacCaby’s wealth. Then Dodd hastened MacCaby’s death. How? Dodd was MacCaby’s doctor; he was giving the old man certain tablets for his heart ailment. Then Dodd gave MacCaby a rather different box of similar-appearing tablets and, when the next attack occurred and MacCaby took a tablet, MacCaby died. And Dodd, who was called, took back his little box. Truth and the appearance of truth. The two faces of the coin. Look at the obverse and Dr. Dodd is innocence incarnate. Look at the reverse and he may be the devil himself.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Rima. “Not Dr. Dodd.”

“Belief has nothing to do with it,” said Ellery. “It seems to me I’ve said that before, but in my line of work you can’t afford to forget it. Cover yourself with the other towel if you’re cold, Rima. Now let’s take up the case of the late John Spencer Hart. Possibility the first: that Dodd is innocent. In this case, as he says, he sent Hart a routine request through Attorney Otis Holderfield for a preliminary accounting of the dye works’s financial condition, not suspecting that Hart had embezzled part of the assets of the business. Being unaware that Hart had stolen from the company, Dr. Dodd of course could not have anticipated that his request for an accounting would drive Hart to suicide.

“But — possibility the second: that Dodd is guilty. Suppose MacCaby had told Dodd not ‘only about his riches and Dodd’s heir-apparency, but also about one other matter. Because if MacCaby was shrewd enough to invest in a business that proved as successful as the Wrightsville Dye Works, and if MacCaby was as canny in money matters as his pennypinching indicated, then he may well have kept an eye cocked on his partner and found his own way of checking on Hart’s management of the Works. Then suppose MacCaby told Dr. Dodd that he knew of Hart’s wild gambling sprees, his reckless speculation, his embezzlement. In this case, once he had murdered MacCaby, Dodd would have known that his request for an accounting before Hart could cover his tracks might well come to Hart as a deathblow. This is a close-knit community and the character and personality of a man as prominent as Hart must have been common knowledge. So Dodd must have known that John Spencer Hart could not take exposure, disgrace, social ostracism; that to a man like Hart the prospect of trial, conviction, imprisonment was intolerable. So, if Dodd is guilty and has been lying about his actual relationship with Hart, his request for an accounting became as murderous a weapon as the gun which ended Hart’s life.”

“He drove Mr. Hart to suicide?”

“Only on the face of the coin we’re considering. And then — your father’s disappearance.” Ellery scowled. “Obverse: that Dodd is innocent. In that case, as he says, he gave your father five thousand dollars to help rehabilitate a man who needed and wanted rehabilitation. A kind, a generous, a magnificently unselfish act.

“But on the reverse, with Dodd lying... Suppose your father, Rima, had stumbled on some evidence that connected Dodd criminally with Luke MacCaby’s death. For example, the pillbox which should have contained heart tablets. We’ve surmised, if Dodd gave MacCaby a lethal box of tablets, that Dodd took the box away after MacCaby died. But suppose your father got to that box first? He was a friend of Harry Toyfell’s; he might well have been persona grata in the MacCaby house; a fortuitous visit, and something about MacCaby’s death may have excited his suspicions. Since he was an intelligent man, suspicion would lead him to the tablets. And there we have Tom Anderson in possession of the evidence which could send Sebastian Dodd to the electric chair. In this case Dodd’s investment in your father’s rehabilitation may not have been entirely altruistic. In fact, it may have been — impure and simple — hush money.”

“Blackmail?” What he saw in Rima’s eyes made him study an arrangement of branches overhead. “You mean my father blackmailed Dr. Dodd? Is that what you mean?”

“We’re only theorizing, Rima. A lot of ifs stand between the theory and the fact.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“In the end, your faith will probably triumph. I certainly hope it does. But at this stage of the game, Rima, we’ve got to stick to reason. And reason points to blackmail as one face of this particular coin.

“Let’s look at it for another moment.

“Tom Anderson has demanded five thousand dollars for not turning the box of tablets over to Chief Dakin, and Dr. Sebastian Dodd has paid it. Some weeks pass. And there’s Tom Anderson again, with a demand for more — no, Rima, listen. Blackmail is a disease which manifests itself in recurrent attacks. It’s an insatiable hunger. A second demand is inevitable if you postulate a first and a reason for the first.

“Now the victim of a blackmailer has three courses open to him: He can continue to pay, he can refuse to pay, or he can so arrange matters that he has to do neither. If Tom Anderson made a second demand so soon after his first, Dr. Dodd would be far less intelligent than he actually is if he did not get a grim preview of the future... demands at increasing frequency, perhaps increasing demands, and continued over as many years as were left to him or as he submitted meekly to the squeeze. This is a prospect that attracts no guilty man, most particularly one who has other plans for his money. But suppose Dodd refused to pay the second time. Anderson might take his evidence to the police; the threat of exposure is the blackmailer’s weapon. In this case exposure meant death. Defiance was therefore out of the question. That left the third way.”

“Murder.”

“According to this set of premises, the conclusion seems to follow that Sebastian Dodd arranged to meet your father at Little Prudy’s Cliff that night, presumably to hand over another payment for silence, actually to push him over the edge.”

Rima sat up, shivering. She looked so forlorn sitting there, so cold and bloodless and abandoned, that Ellery sat up too and put his arms around her.

“Remember, none of this may be true.”

“And all of it may be true.”

“Well,” said Ellery, “yes.”

Rima said passionately, “And maybe I don’t want to hear any more ‘truth’!”

“Maybe the decision, Rima, is no longer in your hands.” She twisted out of his embrace, resting far back on her heels, staring at him. “Once you take this kind of beast by the tail, you can’t let go. I can’t let go. Are you going to walk out on me?”

She dropped her glance to the moss. “I’d like to.”

“Run away?”

“Yes. But I won’t. You know I couldn’t.”

“I was hoping you couldn’t. All right, then.” Ellery got to his feet, tossing the wreath of vine leaves away. “Our job is to eliminate one of the two sets of possibilities. We’ve got to establish as a fact what Dodd is.”

“How would you go about doing a thing like that?”

“The proper study of Dodd is Dodd. He’s got to be watched, investigated, interpreted. If evidence exists — one way or the other — it has to be found. One of us, Rima, has to get into that Victorian antique on the corner of Wright and Algonquin and stay there. You’re indicated.”

“That’s why you said yesterday—!”

“My assistant. In the most romantic Dave Dirk tradition. I’ll even call you Gingivitis. And, in time, I’ll probably get used to your calling me Chief.”

But Rima failed to smile in return. “I never should have come to you. What you want is a spy and a lady liar. I’m sure I haven’t the talent to be either. And it all seems so silly. Just on the mathematical chance... Ellery, I don’t think I could do it.”

“Then don’t. I’ll find another way.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“Not at all.”

“You are. You think it’s because of... Dr. Winship, or something.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No!”

“It’s really too bad,” said Ellery, “because Winship’s the chink in Dodd’s armor. I mean, the way he went for you—”

“Went for me? Where?”

“I forgot, yours is a classical education. Succumbed to your charms.”

“You’re reading so much into—”

“And that beautiful Pinkle situation. Made to order. Well, forget it. Help me pack up, Rima, will you? Or do you want another plunge before we go? It’s getting kind of chilly.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

“Plunge?”

“Be your spy. It’s just that...”

“It’s so hard — I know, darling. Murder is a hard business. And smelling it out is even harder. The Thermos jug?”

Rima drifted somehow to her feet. Like a snowflake in reverse. She looked miserably about to dwindle and vanish. “Ellery, what do you want me to do?”

Ellery failed to feel triumphant. He said carelessly, “Be my eyes, ears, and legs. It’s ten to one when I get back to the hotel I’ll find a message from Winship saying he’s arranged everything on the Gloria Pinkle business to Dr. Dodd’s satisfaction and that the job of office assistant is yours. If I’m wrong, I’ll do some more spadework on it. But I’ll work you in, Rima. Leave that to me.”

“And when I get in?”

“Watch for a chance to look over Dodd’s records on Luke MacCaby, his personal papers. Listen to what he says and to whom he says it. Find out from Winship — without giving yourself away — everything about Dodd that you can which may tie in with what we’re hunting for. And report to me whatever you run across. No matter how little it seems to mean.” Ellery said gently, “Don’t worry about Winship. He’s intense, and lonely, and I’m being very generous to him.”

Rima smiled. “And to me?”

Ellery flushed. “There’s a larger ethic. I’ll discuss it with you sometime. You’ve got to stop wearing your heart on your sleeve, Rima. Are you in love with him?”

“Love?”

“Your poets’ glibbest word—”

“I don’t know what love is. I’ve only seen him once.”

“Yes,” said Ellery. “Bear that in mind.” And for a moment he looked like a man who has lost something. But only for a moment. “At this point, baby, Dave Dirk usually grabs his doll, gets a half nelson on her, plants a few cynical smacks on her perfect mouth, and sends her off with a slap on the rump to the villain’s lair, so that ten pages later he can stroll in and cuff her from the jaws of somebody else’s lust. Ready?”

“Ellery, don’t be silly.”

“You don’t seem to get the point, babe. You never use my first name.” Ellery hissed, “Got that straight, Gingivitis?”

This time she laughed. “Got you, Chief.”

“With more humility.”

“Chief.”

“Yes. And don’t forget who is.”

“Who is what?”

“Head man.”

“Oh, you are, Chief.”

“I doubt it.” And Ellery looked so woebegone that Rima laughed and laughed, in a hysterical way.

Ellery picked Rima up at 7:30 that night at the Congress Street end of the footbridge. She was again dressed in her New York finery and she was leaning against the peeling guardrail beyond the cairn of refuse surrounded by admiring children.

Rima shooed them off and got into Homer Findlay’s car quickly.

“Well?”

“I thought we’d run down Slocum way for dinner, Rima,” said Ellery. “Barred Rock Inn. What’s the shortest way from here?”

“South on Shingle for five blocks and then east on the Old Low Road and across the railroad tracks to Route 478. But I didn’t mean that. I meant...”

“The Dodd thing?” Ellery backed and shifted, dispersing the wild seed of the underprivileged. “Why, I won my bet.”

“He’d called.” She sat back, letting her breath out.

“He?”

“All right. Dr. Winship.”

“Only three times. I was a little disappointed in him.”

“What did he say?”

“Miss Gloria Pinkle is no longer associated with Doctors Dodd and Winship. It seems she’s been secretly married to Rafe Landsman for about ten days and hasn’t had the nerve to tell anybody, much to Mr. Landsman’s dismay. They’ve been honeymooning in parks. Dr. Dodd sent her off with four weeks’ salary, his goodman’s blessing, and an order on Myers & Manadnock, Jewelers, High Village’s ‘Gemporium,’ for a hundred-and-fifty-dollar set of silver. You’re hired in Gloria’s place. Salary, thirty-five dollars per week, board and room. That last,” said Ellery, guiding the Plymouth warily over the uncertain boards of the Willow River bridge, “I’m rather proud of.”

“I’m to live there? I couldn’t!”

“And let’s have no more of the caged bird routine. You’ll live there and you’ll like it.”

“Yes, Chief.” Her laughter was candid joy.

“It’s very nearly the whole point. Actually, it was no feat; Dr. Winship did it almost unassisted. He agreed instantly that a girl who’s alone in the world, an innocent and inexperienced girl who has nowhere to live but a shanty, and who owes a New York sharper some hundreds of dollars, needs both a respectable home and the opportunity to save as much of her earnings as possible so that she can get out of the fellow’s clutches. It’s all painfully proper; Dr. Winship repeated that, as if I were a suspicious relative.”

“Aren’t you?” Rima was giggling.

“Mrs. Fowler and Essie are there to chaperon you, I’m triply assured that there will be a lock on your chamber door, and your evenings are strictly your own.” Ellery honked at the intersection, not looking at her. Giggling! He turned left into a narrow macadamized road which badly needed repaying. “Is this the Old Low Road?”

“Yes... I didn’t think I’d have to live there.”

“Adjust, adjust. You start tomorrow morning at eight. Dr. Winship is calling for you in his car.”

“No. All right.”

“Be where I just picked you up. At 7:45... Oh, don’t be flattered. Dr. Winship told me he picked Gloria Pinkle up on her first morning, too. A sort of standard office courtesy—”

“All right.”

“Chief.”

“Chief!”

Ellery scrutinized her uneasily during dinner. Rima was brilliant. She flashed, trilled, chattered.