Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, Fall 1941

Dime a Dance by Cornell Woolrich

A distinguished yarn of the hard-boiled school, with the impact of a machine gun and the jangle of honky-tonk.

Patsy Marino was clocking us as usual when I barged in through the foyer. He had to look twice at his watch to make sure it was right when he saw who it was. Or pretended he had to, anyway. It was the first time in months I’d breezed in early enough to climb into my evening dress and powder up before we were due on the dance floor.

Marino said, “What’s the matter, don’t you feel well?”

I snapped, “D’ya have to pass a medical examination to get in here and earn a living?” and gave him a dirty look across the frayed alley-cat I wore on my shoulder.

“The reason I ask is you’re on time. Are you sure you’re feeling well?” he pleaded sarcastically.

“Keep it up and you won’t be,” I promised, but soft-pedalled it so he couldn’t quite get it. He was my bread and butter after all.

The barn looked like a morgue. It always did before eight — or so I’d heard. They didn’t have any of the “pash” lights on yet, those smoky red things around the walls that gave it atmosphere. There wasn’t a cat in the box, just five empty gilt chairs and the coffin. They had all the full-length windows overlooking the main drag open to get some ventilation in, too. It didn’t seem like the same place at all; you could actually breathe fresh air in it!

My high heels going back to the dressing-room clicked hollowly in the emptiness, and my reflection followed me upside-down across the waxed floor, like a ghost. It gave me a spooky feeling, like tonight was going to be a bad night. And whenever I get a spooky feeling, it turns out to be a bad night all right.

I shoved the dressing-room door in and started: “Hey, Julie, why didn’t you wait for me, ya getting too high-hat?” Then I quit again.

She wasn’t here either. If she wasn’t at either end, where the hell was she?

Only Mom Henderson was there, reading one of tomorrow morning’s tabs. “Is it that late?” she wanted to know when she saw me.

“Aw, lay off,” I said. “It’s bad enough I gotta go to work on a empty stomach.” I slung my cat-pelt on a hook. Then I sat down and took off my pumps and dumped some foot powder in them, and put them back on again.

“I knocked on Julie’s door on my way over,” I said, “and didn’t get any answer. We always have a cup of Java together before we come to work. I don’t know how I’m going to last the full fifteen rounds—”

An unworthy suspicion crossed my mind momentarily: Did Julie purposely dodge me to get out of sharing a cup of coffee with me like I always took with her other nights? They allowed her to make it in her rooming-house because it had a fire-escape; they wouldn’t allow me to make it in mine. I put it aside as unfair. Julie wasn’t that kind; you could have had the shirt off her back — only she didn’t wear a shirt, just a brassiere.

“Matter?” Mom sneered. “Didn’t you have a nickel on you to buy your own?”

Sure I did. Habit’s a funny thing, though. Got used to taking it with a side-kick and — I didn’t bother going into it with the old slob.

“I got a feeling something’s going to happen tonight,” I said, hunching my shoulders.

“Sure,” said Mom. “Maybe you’ll get fired.”

I thumbed my nose at her and turned the other way around on my chair. She went back to her paper. “There haven’t been any good murders lately,” she lamented. “Damn it, I like a good, juicy murder wanst in a while!”

“You’re building yourself up to one right in here,” I scowled into the mirror at her.

She didn’t take offense; she wasn’t supposed to, anyway. “Was you here when that thing happened to that Southern girl, Sally, I think, was her name?”

“No!” I snapped. “Think I’m as old as you? Think I been dancing here all my life?”

“She never showed up to work one night, and they found her— That was only, let’s see now... ” She figured it out on her fingers. “Three years ago.”

“Cut it out!” I snarled. “I feel low enough as it is!”

Mom was warming up now. “Well, for that matter, how about the Fredericks kid? That was only a little while before you come here, wasn’t it?”

“I know,” I cut her short. “I remember hearing all about it. Do me a favor and let it lie.”

She parked one finger up alongside her mouth. “You know,” she breathed confidentially, “I’ve always had a funny feeling one and the same guy done away with both of them.”

“If he did, I know who I wish was third on his list!” I was glowering at her, when thank God the rest of the chain gang showed up and cut the death-watch short. The blonde came in, and then the Raymond tramp, and the Italian frail, and all the rest of them — all but Julie.

I said, “She was never as late as this before!” and they didn’t even know who or what I was talking about. Or care. Great bunch.

A slush-pump started to tune up outside, so I knew the cats had come in too.

Mom Henderson got up, sighed. “Me for the white tiles and rippling waters,” and waddled out to her beat.

I opened the door on a crack and peeped out, watching for Julie. The pash lights were on now and there were customers already buying tickets over the bird cage. All the other taxi-dancers were lining up — but not Julie.

Somebody behind me yelled, “Close that door! Think we’re giving a free show in here?”

“You couldn’t interest anyone in that second-hand hide of yours even with a set of dishes thrown in!” I squelched absent-mindedly, without even turning to find out who it was. But I closed it anyway.

Marino came along and banged on it and hollered, “Outside, you in there! What do I pay you for anyway?” and somebody yelled back: “I often wonder!”

The cats exploded into a razz-matazz just then with enough oompah to be heard six blocks away, so it would pull them in off the pave. Once they were in it was up to us. We all came out single file, to a fate worse than death, me last. They were putting the ropes up, and the mirrored tops started to go around in the ceiling and scatter flashes of light all over everything, like silver rain.

Marino said, “Where you goin’, Ginger?” and when he used your front name like that it meant he wasn’t kidding.

I said, “I’m going to phone Julie a minute, find out what happened to her.”

“You get out there and goona-goo!” he said roughly. “She knows what time the session begins! How long’s she been working here, anyway?”

“But she’ll lose her job, you’ll fire her,” I wailed.

He hinged his watch. “She is fired already,” he said flatly.

I knew how she needed that job, and when I want to do a thing I do it. A jive-artist was heading my way, one of those barnacles you can’t shake off once they fasten on you. I knew he was a jive, because he’d bought enough tickets to last him all week; a really wise guy only buys them from stretch to stretch. The place might burn down for all he knows.

I grabbed his ticket and tore it quick, and Marino turned and walked away. So then I pleaded, “Gimme a break, will you? Lemme make a phone call first. It won’t take a second.”

The jive said, “I came in here to danst.”

“It’s only to a girl friend,” I assured him. “And I’ll smile pretty at you the whole time.” (Clink! Volunteer 8-1111.) “And I’ll make it up to you later, I promise I will.” I grabbed him quick by the sleeve. “Don’t go way, stand here!”

Julie’s landlady answered. I said, “Did Julie Bennett come back yet?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I ain’t seen her since yesterday.”

“Find out for me, will ya?” I begged. “She’s late and she’ll lose her job over here.”

Marino spotted me, came back and thundered: “I thought I told you—”

I waved the half ticket in his puss. “I’m working,” I said. “I’m on this gentleman’s time,” and I goona-gooed the jive with teeth and eyes, one hand on his arm.

He softened like ice cream in a furnace. He said, “It’s all right, Mac,” and felt big and chivalrous or something. About seven cents worth of his dime was gone by now.

Marino went away again, and the landlady came down from the second floor and said, “She don’t answer her door, so I guess she’s out.”

I hung up and I said, “Something’s happened to my girl friend. She ain’t there and she ain’t here. She wouldn’ta quit cold without telling me.”

The goona-goo was beginning to wear off the jive by this time. He fidgeted, said, “Are you gonna danst or are you gonna stand there looking blue?”

I stuck my elbows out. “Wrap yourself around this!” I barked impatiently. Just as he reached, the cats quit and the stretch was on.

He gave me a dirty look. “Ten cents shot to hell!” and he walked off to find somebody else.

I never worry about a thing after it’s happened, not when I’m on the winning end anyway. I’d put my call through, even if I hadn’t found out anything. I got back under the ropes, and kept my fingers crossed to ward off garlic-eaters.

By the time the next stretch began, I knew Julie wasn’t coming any more that night. Marino wouldn’t have let her stay even if she had, and I couldn’t have helped her get around him any more, by then, myself. I kept worrying, wondering what had happened to her, and that creepy feeling about tonight being a bad night came over me stronger than ever, and I couldn’t shake it off no matter how I goona-gooed.

The cold orangeade they kept buying me during the stretches didn’t brace me up any either. I wasn’t allowed to turn it down, because Marino got a cut out of the concession profits.

The night was like most of the others, except I missed Julie. I’d been more friendly with her than the rest of the girls, because she was on the square. I had the usual run of freaks.

“With the feet, with the feet,” I said wearily, “lay off the belt-buckle crowding.”

“What am I supposed to do, build a retaining wall between us?”

“You’re supposed to stay outside the three-mile limit,” I flared, “and not try to go mountain climbing in the middle of the floor. Do I look like an Alp?” And I glanced around to see if I could catch Marino’s eye.

The guy quit pawing. Most of them are yellow like that. But on the other hand, if a girl complains too often, the manager begins to figure her for a trouble-maker. “Wolf!” you know, so it don’t pay.

It was about twelve when they showed up, and I’d been on the floor three and a half hours straight, with only one more to go. There are worse ways of earning a living. You name them. I knew it was about twelve because Duke, the front man, had just wound up “The Lady is a Tramp,” and I knew the sequence of his numbers and could tell the time of night by them, like a sailor can by bells. Wacky, eh? Half-past — “Umehouse Blues.”

I gandered at them when I saw them come in the foyer, because customers seldom come in that late. Not enough time left to make it worth the general admission fee. There were two of them; one was a fat, bloated little guy, the kind we call a “belly-wopper,” the other was a pip. He wasn’t tall, dark and handsome because he was medium-height, light-haired and clean-cut looking without being pretty about it, but if I’d had any dreams left he coulda moved right into them. Well, I didn’t, so I headed for the dressing-room to count up my ticket stubs while the stretch was on; see how I was making out. Two cents out of every dime when you turn them in.

They were standing there sizing the barn up, and they’d called Marino over to them. Then the three of them turned around and looked at me just as I made the door, and Marino thumbed me. I headed over to find out what was up. Duke’s next was a rhumba, and I said to myself: “If I draw the kewpie, I’m going to have kittens all over the floor.”

Marino said, “Get your things, Ginger.” I thought one of them was going to take me out; they’re allowed to do that, you know, only they’ve got to make it up with the management for taking you out of circulation. It’s not as bad as it sounds, you can still stay on the up and up, sit with them in some laundry and listen to their troubles. It’s all up to you yourself.

I got the backyard sable and got back just in time to hear Marino say something about: “Will I have to go bail for her?”

Fat said, “Naw, naw, we just want her to build up the background a little for us.”

Then I tumbled, got jittery, squawked: “What is this, a pinch? What’ve I done? Where you taking me?”

Marino soothed: “They just want you to go with them, Ginger. You be a good girl and do like they ast.” Then he said something to them I couldn’t figure. “Try to keep the place here out of it, will you, fellas? I been in the red for six months, as it is.”

I cowered along between them like a lamb being led to the slaughter, looking from one to the other. “Where you taking me?” I wailed, going down the stairs.

Maiden’s Prayer answered, in the cab. “To Julie Bennett’s, Ginger.” They’d gotten my name from Marino, I guess.

“What’s she done?” I half sobbed.

“May as well tell her now, Nick,” Fat suggested. “Otherwise she’ll take it big when we get there.”

Nick said, quietly as he could, “Your friend Julie met up with some tough luck, babe.” He took his finger and he passed it slowly across his neck.

I took it big right there in the cab, Fat to the contrary. “Ah, no!” I whispered, holding my head. “She was on the floor with me only last night! Just this time last night we were in the dressing-room together having a smoke, having some laughs! No! She was my only friend.” And I started to bawl like a two-year-old, straight down my make-up onto the cab floor.

Finally this Nick, after acting embarrassed as hell, took a young tent out of his pocket, said: “Have yourself a time on this, babe.”

I was still working on it when I went up the rooming-house stairs sandwiched between them. I recoiled just outside the door. “Is she... is she still in there?”

“Naw, you won’t have to look at her,” Nick reassured me.

I didn’t, because she wasn’t in there any more, but it was worse than if she had been. Oh God, that sheet, with one tremendous streak down it as if a chicken had been—! I swivelled, played puss-in-the-corner with the first thing I came up against, which happened to be this Nick guy’s chest. He sort of stood still like he liked the idea. Then he growled, “Turn that damn thing over out of sight, will you?”

The questioning, when I was calm enough to take it, wasn’t a grill, don’t get that idea. It was just, as they’d said, to fill out her background. “When was the last time you saw her alive? Did she go around much, y’know what we mean? She have any particular steady?”

“I left her outside the house door downstairs at one-thirty this morning, last night, or whatever you call it,” I told them. “We walked home together from Joyland right after the session wound up. She didn’t go around at all. She never dated the boys afterwards and neither did I.”

The outside half of Nick’s left eyebrow hitched up at this, like when a terrier cocks its ear at something. “Notice anyone follow the two of you?”

“In our racket they always do; it usually takes about five blocks to wear them out, though, and this is ten blocks from Joyland.”

“You walk after you been on your pins all night?” Fat asked, aghast.

“We should take a cab, on our earnings! About last night, I can’t swear no one followed us, because I didn’t look around. That’s a come-on, if you do that.”

Nick said, “I must remember that,” absent-mindedly.

I got up my courage, faltered: “Did it... did it happen right in here?”

“Here’s how it went: She went out again after she left you the first time—”

“I knew her better than that!” I yipped. “Don’t start that, Balloon Lungs, or I’ll let you have this across the snout!” I swung my cat-piece at him.

He grabbed up a little box, shook it in my face. “For this,” he said. “Aspirin! Don’t try to tell us different, when we’ve already checked with the all-night drugstore over on Sixth!” He took a couple of heaves, cooled off, sat down again. “She went out, but instead of locking the house-door behind her, she was too lazy or careless; shoved a wad of paper under it to hold it on a crack till she got back. In that five minutes or less, somebody who was watching from across the street slipped in and lay in wait for her in the upper hallway out here. He was too smart to go for her on the open street, where she might have had a chance to yell.”

“How’d he know she was coming back?”

“The unfastened door woulda told him that; also the drug clerk tells us she showed up there fully dressed, but with her bare feet stuck in a pair of carpet-slippers to cool ’em. The killer musta spotted that too.”

“Why didn’t she yell out here in the house, with people sleeping all around her in the different rooms?” I wondered out loud.

“He grabbed her too quick for that, grabbed her by the throat just as she was opening her room-door, dragged her in, closed the door, finished strangling her on the other side of it. He remembered later to come out and pick up the aspirins which had dropped and rolled all over out there. All but one, which he overlooked and we found. She wouldn’t’ve stopped to take one outside her door. That’s how we know about that part of it.”

I kept seeing that sheet, which was hidden now, before me all over again. I couldn’t help it, I didn’t want to know, but still I had to know. “But if he strangled her, where did all that blood—” I gestured sickly, “come from?”

Fat didn’t answer, I noticed. He shut up all at once, as if he didn’t want to tell me the rest of it, and looked kind of sick himself. His eyes gave him away. I almost could have been a detective myself, the way I pieced the rest of it together just by following his eyes around the room. He didn’t know I was reading them, or he wouldn’t have let them stray like that.

First they rested on the little portable phonograph she had there on a table. By using bamboo needles she could play it late at night, soft, and no one would hear it. The lid was up and there was a record on the turn-table, but the needle was worn down half-way, all shredded, as though it had been played over and over.

Then his eyes went to a flat piece of paper, on which were spread out eight or ten shiny new dimes; I figured they’d been put aside like that, on paper, for evidence. Some of them had little brown flecks on them, bright as they were. Then lastly his eyes went down to the rug; it was all pleated up in places, especially along the edges, as though something heavy, inert, had been dragged back and forth over it.

My hands flew up my head and I nearly went wacky with horror. I gasped it out because I hoped he’d say no, but he didn’t, so it was yes. “You mean he danced with her after she was gone? Gave her dead body a dime each time, stabbed her over and over while he did?”

There was no knife, or whatever it had been, left around, so either they’d already sent it down for prints or he’d taken it out with him again.

The thought of what must have gone on here in this room, of the death dance that must have taken place... All I knew was that I wanted to get out of here into the open, couldn’t stand it any more. Yet before I lurched out, with Nick holding me by the elbow, I couldn’t resist glancing at the label of the record on the portable. “Poor Butterfly.”

Stumbling out the door I managed to say, “She didn’t put that on there. She hated that piece, called it a drip. I remember once I was up here with her and started to play it, and she snatched it off, said she couldn’t stand it, wanted to bust it then and there but I kept her from doing it. She was off love and men, and it’s a sort of mushy piece, that was why. She didn’t buy it, they were all thrown in with the machine when she picked it up secondhand.”

“Then we know his favorite song, if that means anything. If she couldn’t stand it, it would be at the bottom of the stack of records, not near the top. He went to the trouble of skimming through them to find something he liked.”

“With her there in his arms, already!” That thought was about the finishing touch, on top of all the other horror. We were on the stairs going down, and the ground floor seemed to come rushing up to meet me. I could feel Nick’s arm hook around me just in time, like an anchor, and then I did a clothes-pin act over it. And that was the first time I didn’t mind being pawed.

When I could see straight again, he was holding me propped up on a stool in front of a lunch-counter a couple doors down, holding a cup of coffee to my lips.

“How’s Ginger?” he said gently.

“Fine,” I dribbled mournfully all over my lap. “How’s Nick?”

And on that note the night of Julie Bennett’s murder came to an end.

Joyland dance-hall was lonely next night. I came in late, and chewing cloves, and for once Marino didn’t crack his whip over me. Maybe even he had a heart. “Ginger,” was all he said as I went hurrying by, “don’t talk about it while you’re on the hoof, get me? If anyone asks you, you don’t know nothing about it. It’s gonna kill business.”

Duke, the front man, stopped me on my way to the dressing-room. “I hear they took you over there last night,” he started.

“Nobody took nobody nowhere, schmaltz,” I snapped. He wore feathers on his neck, that’s why I called him that; it’s the word for long-haired musicians in our lingo.

I missed her worse in the dressing-room than I was going to later on out in the barn; there’d be a crowd out there around me, and noise and music, at least. In here it was like her ghost was powdering its nose alongside me at the mirror the whole time. The peg for hanging up her things still had her name penciled under it.

Mom Henderson was having herself a glorious time; you couldn’t hear yourself think, she was jabbering away so. She had two tabloids with her tonight, instead of just one, and she knew every word in all of them by heart. She kept leaning over the gals’ shoulders, puffing down their necks: “And there was a dime balanced on each of her eyelids when they found her, and another one across her lips, and he stuck one in each of her palms and folded her fingers over it, mind ye! D’ye ever hear of anything like it? Boy, he sure must’ve been down on you taxis—”

I yanked the door open, planted my foot where it would do the most good, and shot her out into the barn. She hadn’t moved that fast from one place to another in twenty years. The other girls just looked at me, and then at one another, as much as to say: “Touchy, isn’t she?”

“Get outside and break it down; what do I pay you for anyway?” Marino yelled at the door. A gob-stick tootled plaintively, out we trooped like prisoners in a lock-step, and another damn night had started in.

I came back in again during the tenth stretch (“Dinah” and “Have You Any Castles, Baby?”) to take off my kicks a minute and have a smoke. Julie’s ghost came around me again. I could still hear her voice in my ears, from night-before-last! “Hold that match, Gin. I’m trying to duck a cement-mixer out there. Dances like a slap-happy pug. Three little steps to the right, as if he were priming for a standing broad-jump. I felt like screaming: For Pete’s sake, if you’re gonna jump, jump!”

And me: “What’re you holding your hand for, been dancing upside-down?”

“It’s the way he holds it. Bends it back on itself and folds it under. Like this, look. My wrist’s nearly broken. And look what his ring did to me!” She had shown me a strawberry-size bruise.

Sitting there alone, now, in the half-light, I said to myself: “I bet he was the one! I bet that’s who it was! Oh, if I’d only gotten a look at him, if I’d only had her point him out to me! If he enjoyed hurting her that much while she was still alive, he’d have enjoyed dancing with her after she was dead.” My cigarette tasted rotten, I threw it down and got out of there in a hurry, back into the crowd.

A ticket was shoved at me and I ripped it without looking up. Gliding backward, all the way around on the other side of the barn, a voice finally said a little over my ear: “How’s Ginger?”

I looked up and saw who it was, said, “What’re you doing here?”

“Detailed here,” Nick said.

I shivered to the music. “Do you expect him to show up again, after what he’s done already?”

“He’s a dance-hall killer,” Nick said. “He killed Sally Arnold and the Fredericks girl, both from this same mill, and he killed a girl in Chicago in between. The prints on Julie Bennett’s phonograph records match those in two of the other cases, and in the third case — where there were no prints — the girl was holding a dime clutched in her hand. He’ll show up again sooner or later. There’s one of us cops detailed to every one of these mills in the metropolitan area tonight, and we’re going to keep it up until he does.”

“How do you know what he looks like?” I asked.

He didn’t answer for a whole bar. “We don’t,” he admitted finally. “That’s the hell of it. Talk about being invisible in a crowd! We only know he isn’t through yet, he’ll keep doing it until we get him!”

I said, “He was here that night, he was right up here on this floor with her that night, before it happened; I’m sure of it!” And I sort of moved in closer. Me, who was always griping about being held too tight. I told him about the impression the guy’s ring had left on her hand, and the peculiar way he’d held it, and the way he’d danced.

“You’ve got something there,” he said, and he left me flat on the floor and went over to phone it in.

Nick picked me up again next dance.

He said, shuffling off, “That was him all right who danced with her. They found a freshly made impression still on her hand, a little off-side from the first, which was almost entirely obliterated by then. Meaning the second one had been made after death, and therefore stayed uneffaced, just like a pinhole won’t close up in the skin after death. They made an impression of it with moulage, my lieutenant just tells me. Then they filled that up with wax, photographed it through a magnifying lens, and now we know what kind of a ring he’s wearing. A seal ring shaped like a shield, with two little jewel splinters, one in the upper right-hand corner, the other in the lower left.”

“Any initials on it?” I gaped, awe-stricken.

“Nope, but something just as good. He can’t get it off, unless he has a jeweler or locksmith file it off, and he’ll be afraid to do that now. The fact that it would press so deeply into her hand proves that he can’t get it off, the flesh of his finger has grown around it; otherwise it would have had a little give to it, the pressure would have shifted the head of it around a little.”

He stepped all over my foot, summed up: “So we know how he dances, know what his favorite song is, ‘Poor Butterfly,’ know what kind of a ring he’s wearing. And we know he’ll be back sooner or later.”

That was all well and good, but I had my own health to look out for; the way my foot was throbbing! I hinted gently as I could, “You can’t do very much watching out for him, can you, if you keep dancing around like this?”

“Maybe you think I can’t. And if I just stand there with my back to the wall, it’s a dead give-away. He’d smell me a mile away and duck out again. Keep it quiet what I’m doing here, don’t pass it around. Your boss knows, of course, but it’s to his interest to cooperate. A screwball like that can put an awful dent in his receipts.”

“You’re talking to the original sphinx,” I assured him. “I don’t pal with the rest of these twists anyway. Julie was the only one I was ever chummy with.”

When the session closed and I came downstairs to the street, Nick was hanging around down there with the other lizards. He came over to me and took my arm and steered me off like he owned me.

“What’s this?” I said.

He said, “This is just part of the act, make it look like the McCoy.”

“Are you sure?” I said to myself, and I winked to myself without him seeing me.

All the other nights from then on were just a carbon copy of that one, and they started piling up by sevens. Seven, fourteen, twenty-one. Pretty soon it was a month since Julie Bennett had died. And not a clue as to who the killer was, where he was, what he looked like. Not a soul had noticed him that night at Joyland, too heavy a crowd. Just having his prints on file was no good by itself.

She was gone from the papers long ago, and she was gone from the dressing-room chatter, too, after a while, as forgotten as though she’d never lived. Only me, I remembered her, because she’d been my pal. And Nick Ballestier, he did because that was his job. I suppose Mom Henderson did too, because she had a morbid mind and loved to linger on gory murders. But outside of us three, nobody cared.

They did it the wrong way around, Nick’s superiors at Homicide, I mean. I didn’t try to tell him that, because he would have laughed at me. He would have said, “Sure! A dance-mill pony knows more about running the police department than the commissioner does himself! Why don’t you go down there and show ’em how to do it?”

But what I mean is, the dance mills didn’t need all that watching in the beginning, the first few weeks after it happened, like they gave them. Maniac or not, anyone would have known he wouldn’t show up that soon after. They needn’t have bothered detailing anyone at all to watch the first few weeks. He was lying low then. It was only after a month or so that they should have begun watching real closely for him. Instead they did it just the reverse. For a whole month Nick was there nightly. Then after that he just looked in occasionally, every second night or so, without staying through the whole session.

Then finally I tumbled that he’d been taken off the case entirely and was just coming for — er, the atmosphere. I put it up to him unexpectedly one night. “Are you still supposed to come around here like this?”

He got all red, admitted: “Naw, we were all taken off this duty long ago.

I... er, guess I can’t quit because I’m in the habit now or something.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said to myself knowingly. I wouldn’t have minded that so much, only his dancing didn’t get any better, and the wear and tear on me was something awful. It was like trying to steer a steam-roller around the place.

“Nick,” I finally pleaded one night, when he pinned me down flat with one of his size twelves and then tried to push me out from under with the rest of him, “be a detective all over the place, only please don’t ask me to dance any more, I can’t take it.”

He looked innocently surprised. “Am I that bad?”

I tried to cover up with a smile at him. He’d been damn nice to me even if he couldn’t dance.

When he didn’t show up at all next night, I thought maybe I’d gone a little too far, offended him maybe. But the big hulk hadn’t looked like the kind that was sensitive about his dancing, or anything else for that matter. I brought myself up short with a swift, imaginary kick in the pants at this point. “What the heck’s the matter with you?” I said to myself. “You going soft? Didn’t I tell you never to do that!” And I reached for the nearest ticket, and tore it, and I goona-gooed with a: “Grab yourself an armful, mister, it’s your dime.”

I got through that night somehow but I had that same spooky feeling the next night like I’d had that night — like tonight was going to be a bad night. Whenever I get that spooky feeling, it turns out to be a bad night all right. I tried to tell myself it was because Nick wasn’t around. I’d got used to him, that was all, and now he’d quit coming, and the hell with it. But the feeling wouldn’t go away. Like something was going to happen, before the night was over. Something bad.

Mom Henderson was sitting in there reading tomorrow morning’s tab. “There hasn’t been any good juicy murders lately,” she mourned over the top of it. “Damn it, I like a good murder y’can get your teeth into wanst in a while!”

“Ah, dry up, you ghoul!” I snapped. I took off my shoes and dumped powder into them, put them on again. Marino came and knocked on the door. “Outside, freaks! What do I pay you for anyway?”

Someone jeered, “I often wonder!” and Duke, the front man, started to gliss over the coffin, and we all came out single file, me last, to a fate worse than death.

I didn’t look up at the first buyer, just stared blindly at a triangle of shirt-front level with my eyes. It kept on like that for a while; always that same triangle of shirt-front. Mostly white, but sometimes blue, and once it was lavender, and I wondered if I ought to lead. The pattern of the tie across it kept changing too, but that was all.

“Why so downcast, Beautiful?”

“If you were standing where I am, looking where you are, you’d be downcast too.”

That took care of him. And then the stretch.

Duke went into a waltz, and something jarred for a minute. My timetable. This should have been a gut bucket (low-down swing music) and it wasn’t. He’d switched numbers on me, that’s what it was. Maybe a request. For waltzes they killed the pash lights and turned on a blue circuit instead, made the place cool and dim with those flecks of silver from the mirror-top raining down.

I’d had this white shirt-triangle with the diamond pattern before; I remembered the knitted tie, with one tier unravelled on the end. I didn’t want to see the face, too much trouble to look up. I hummed the piece mentally, to give my blank mind something to do. Then words seemed to drop into it, fit themselves to it, of their own accord, without my trying, so they must have belonged to it. “Poor butterfly by the blossoms waiting.”

My hand ached, he was holding it so darned funny. I squirmed it, tried to ease it, and he held on all the tighter. He had it bent down and back on itself...

Gee, if there’s one thing I hate it’s a guy with a ring that holds your mitt in a strait-jacket! And he didn’t know the first thing about waltzing. Three funny little hops to the right, over and over and over. It was getting my nerves on edge. “If you’re gonna jump, jump!” Julie’s voice came back to me from long ago. She’d run into the same kind of a—

Suddenly I was starting to get a little scared and a whole lot excited. I kept saying to myself: “Don’t look up at him, you’ll give yourself away.” I kept my eyes on the knitted tie that had one tier unravelled. The lights went white and the stretch came on. We separated, he turned his back on me and I turned mine on him. We walked away from each other without a word. They don’t thank you, they’re paying for it.

I counted five and then I looked back over my shoulder, to try to see what he was like. He looked back at me at the same time, and we met each other’s looks. I managed to slap on a smile, as though I’d only looked back because he’d made a hit with me, and that I hoped he’d come around again.

There was nothing wrong with his face, not just to look at anyway. It was no worse than any of the others around. He was about forty, maybe forty-five, hair still dark. Eyes speculative, nothing else, as they met mine. But he didn’t answer my fake smile, maybe he could see through it. We both turned away again and went about our business.

I looked down at my hand, to see what made it hurt so. Careful not to raise it, careful not to bend my head, in case he was still watching. Just dropped my eyes to it. There was a red bruise the size of a small strawberry on it, from where his ring had pressed into it the whole time. I knew enough not to go near the box. I caught Duke’s eye from where I was and hitched my head at him, and we got together sort of casually over along the wall.

“What’d you play ‘Poor Butterfly’ for that last time?” I asked.

“Request number,” he said.

I said, “Don’t point, and don’t look around, but whose request was it?”

He didn’t have to. “The guy that was with you the last two times. Why?” I didn’t answer, so then he said, “I get it.” He didn’t at all. “All right, chiseler,” he said, and handed me two dollars and a half, splitting a fiver the guy had slipped him to play it. Duke thought I was after a kick-back.

I took it. It was no good to tell him. What could he do? Nick Ballestier was the one to tell. I broke one of the singles at the orangeade concession — for nickels. Then I started to work my way over toward the phone, slow and aimless. I was within a yard of it when the cats started up again!

And suddenly he was right next to me, he must have been behind me the whole time.

“Were you going any place?” he asked.

I thought I saw his eyes flick to the phone, but I wasn’t positive. One thing sure, there wasn’t speculation in them any more, there was — decision.

“No place,” I said meekly. “I’m at your disposal.” I thought, “If I can only hold him here long enough, maybe Nick’ll show up.”

Then just as we got to the ropes, he said, “Let’s skip this. Let’s go out to a laundry and sit a while.”

I said, smooth on the surface, panic-stricken underneath: “But I’ve already torn your ticket, don’t you want to finish this one out at least?” And tried to goona-goo him for all I was worth, but it wouldn’t take. He turned around and flagged Marino, to get his O. K.

His back was to me, and across his shoulder I kept shaking my head, more and more violently, to Marino — no, no, I don’t want to go with him. Marino just ignored me. It meant more money in his pocket this way.

When I saw that the deal was going through, I turned like a streak, made the phone, got my buffalo in. It was no good trying to tell Marino, he wouldn’t believe me, he’d think I was just making it up to get out of going out with the guy. Or if I raised the alarm on my own, he’d simply duck down the stairs before anyone could stop him and vanish again. Nick was the only one to tell, Nick was the only one who’d know how to nail him here.

I said, “Police headquarters, quick! Quick!” and turned and looked over across the barn. But Marino was already alone out there. I couldn’t see where the guy had gone, they were milling around so looking over their prospects for the next one.

A voice came on and I said: “Is Nick Ballestier there? Hurry up, get him for me.”

Meanwhile Duke had started to break it down again; real corny. It must have carried over the open wire. I happened to raise my eyes, and there was a shadow on the wall in front of me, coming across my shoulders from behind me. I didn’t move, held steady, listening.

I said, “All right, Peggy, I just wanted to know when you’re gonna pay me back that five bucks you owe me,” and I killed it.

Would he get it when they told him? They’d say: “A girl’s voice asked for you, Nick, from somewhere where there was music going on, and we couldn’t make any sense out of what she said, and she hung up without waiting.” A pretty slim thread to hold all your chances on.

I stood there afraid to turn. His voice said stonily, “Get your things, let’s go. Suppose you don’t bother any more tonight about your five dollars.” There was a hidden meaning, a warning, in it.

There was no window in the dressing-room, no other way out but the way I’d come in, and he was right there outside the door. I poked around all I could, mourning: “Why don’t Nick come?” and, boy, I was scared. A crowd all around me and no one to help me. He wouldn’t stay; the only way to hang onto him for Nick was to go with him and pray for luck. I kept casing him through the crack of the door every minute or so. I didn’t think he saw me, but he must have. Suddenly his heel scuffed at it brutally, and made me jump about an inch off the floor.

“Quit playing peek-a-boo, I’m waiting out here!” he called in sourly.

I grabbed up Mom Henderson’s tab and scrawled across it in lipstick: “Nick: He’s taking me with him, and I don’t know where to. Look for my ticket stubs. Ginger.”

Then I scooped up all the half tickets I’d accumulated all night long and shoved them loose into the pocket of my coat. Then I came sidling out to him. I thought I heard the phone on the wall starting to ring, but the music was so loud I couldn’t be sure. We went downstairs and out on the street.

A block away I said, “There’s a joint. We all go there a lot from our place,” and pointed to Chan’s. He said “Shut up!” I dropped one of the dance checks on the sidewalk. Then I began making a regular trail of them.

The neon lights started to get fewer and fewer, and pretty soon we were in a network of dark lonely side streets. My pocket was nearly empty now of tickets. My luck was he didn’t take a cab. He didn’t want anyone to remember the two of us together, I guess.

I pleaded, “Don’t make me walk any more, I’m awfully tired.”

He said, “We’re nearly there, it’s right ahead.” The sign on the next corner up fooled me; there was a chop-suey joint, there, only a second-class laundry, but I thought that was where we were going.

But in between us and it there was a long dismal block, with tumbledown houses and vacant lots on it. And I’d rim out of dance checks. All my take gone, just to keep alive. He must have worked out the whole set-up carefully ahead of time, known I’d fall for that sign in the distance that we weren’t going to.

Sure, I could have screamed out at any given step of the way, collected a crowd around us. But you don’t understand. Much as I wanted to get away from him, there was one thing I wanted even more: To hold him for Nick. I didn’t just want him to slip away into the night, and then do it all over again at some future date. And that’s what would happen if I raised a row. They wouldn’t believe me in a pinch, they’d think it was some kind of a shake-down on my part. He’d talk himself out of it or scram before a cop came.

You have to live at night like I did to know the real callousness of passers-by on the street, how seldom they’ll horn in, lift a finger to help you. Even a harness-cop wouldn’t be much good, would only weigh my story against his, end up by sending us both about our business.

Maybe the thought came to me because I spotted a cop ahead just then, loitering toward us. I could hardly make him out in the gloom, but the slow steady walk told me. I didn’t really think I was going to do it until we came abreast of him.

The three of us met in front of a boarded-up condemned house. Then, as though I saw my last chance slipping away — because Nick couldn’t bridge the gap between me and the last of the dance checks any more, it was too wide — I stopped dead.

I began in a low tense voice: “Officer, this man here—”

Julie’s murderer had involuntarily gone on a step without me. That put him to the rear of the cop. The whole thing was so sudden, it must have been one of those knives that shot out of their own hilts. The cop’s eyes rolled, I could see them white in the darkness, and he coughed right in my face, warm, and he started to come down on top of me, slow and lazy. I sidestepped and he fell with a soft thud and rocked a couple of times with his own fall and then lay still.

But the knife was already out of him long ago, and its point was touching my side. And where the cop had been a second ago, he was now. We were alone together again.

He said in a cold, unexcited voice, “Go ahead, scream, and I’ll give it to you right across him.”

I didn’t, I just pulled in all my breath.

He said, “Go ahead, down there,” and steered me with his knife down a pair of steps into the dark area-way of the boarded-up house it had happened in front of. “Stand there, and if you make a sound — you know what I told you.” Then he did something to the cop with his feet, and the cop came rolling down into the area-way after me.

I shrank back and my back was against the boarded-up basement door. It moved a little behind me. I thought, “This must be where he’s taking me. If it is, then it’s open.” I couldn’t get out past him, but maybe I could get in away from him.

I turned and clawed at the door, and the whole framed barrier swung out a little, enough to squeeze in through. He must have been hiding out in here, coming and going through here, all these weeks. No wonder they hadn’t found him.

The real basement door behind it had been taken down out of the way. He’d seen what I was up to, and he was already wriggling through the gap after me. I was stumbling down a pitch-black hallway by then.

I found stairs going up by falling down on top of them full length. I sobbed, squirmed up the first few on hands and knees, straightened up as I went.

He stopped to light a match. I didn’t have any, but his helped me too, showed me the outline of things. I was on the first-floor hall now, flitting down it. I didn’t want to go up too high, he’d only seal me in some dead-end up there, but I couldn’t stand still down here.

A broken-down chair grazed the side of my leg as I went by, and I turned, swung it up bodily, went back a step and pitched it down over the stair-well on top of him. I don’t know if it hurt him at all but his match went out.

He said a funny thing then. “You always had a temper, Muriel.”

I didn’t stand there listening. I’d seen an opening in the wall farther ahead, before the match went out. Just a blackness. I dived through it and all the way across with swimming motions, until I hit a jutting mantel slab over some kind of fireplace. I crouched down and tucked myself in under it. It was one of those huge old-fashioned ones. I groped over my head and felt an opening there, lined with rough brickwork and furry with cobwebs, but it wasn’t wide enough to climb up through. I squeezed into a corner of the fireplace and prayed he wouldn’t spot me.

He’d lit another match, and it came into the room after me, but I could only see his legs from the fireplace opening, it cut him off at the waist. I wondered if he could see me; he didn’t come near where I was.

The light got a little stronger, and he’d lit a candle stump. But still his legs didn’t come over to me, didn’t bend down, or show his face peering in at me. His legs just kept moving to and fro around the room. It was awfully hard, after all that running, to keep my breath down.

Finally he said out loud: “Chilly in here,” and I could hear him rattling newspapers, getting them together. It didn’t sink in for a minute what was going to happen next. I thought, “Has he forgotten me? Is he that crazy? Am I going to get away with it?” But there’d been a malicious snicker in his remark; he was crazy like a fox.

Suddenly his legs came over straight to me, without bending down to look he was stuffing the papers in beside me. I couldn’t see out any more past them. I heard the scrape of a match against the floor boards. Then there was the momentary silence of combustion. I was sick, I wanted to die quick, but I didn’t want to die that way. There was the hum of rising flame, and a brightness just before me, the papers all turned gold. I thought, “Oh, Nick! Nick! Here I go!”

I came plunging out, scattering sparks and burning newspapers.

He said, smiling, pleased with himself, casual, “Hello, Muriel. I thought you didn’t have any more use for me? What are you doing in my house?” He still had the knife — with the cop’s blood on it.

I said, “I’m not Muriel, I’m Ginger Allen from the Joyland. Oh, mister, please let me get out of here, please let me go!” I was so scared and so sick I went slowly to my knees. “Please!” I cried up at him.

He said, still in that casual way, “Oh, so you’re not Muriel? You didn’t marry me the night before I embarked for France, thinking I’d be killed, that you’d never see me again, that you’d get my soldier’s pension?” And then getting a little more vicious, “But I fooled you, I was shell-shocked but I didn’t die. I came back even if it was on a stretcher. And what did I find? You hadn’t even waited to find out! You’d married another guy and you were both living on my pay. You tried to make it up to me, though, didn’t you, Muriel? Sure; you visited me in the hospital, bringing me jelly. The man in the next cot died from eating it. Muriel, I’ve looked for you high and low ever since, and now I’ve found you.”

He moved backwards, knife still in hand, and stood aside, and there was an old battered relic of a phonograph standing there on an empty packing-case. It had a great big horn to it, to give it volume. He must have picked it up off some ash-heap, repaired it himself. He released the catch and cranked it up a couple of times and laid the needle into the groove.

“We’re going to dance, Muriel, like we did that night when I was in my khaki uniform and you were so pretty to look at. But it’s going to have a different ending this time.”

He came back toward me. I was still huddled there, shivering. “No!” I moaned. “Not me! You killed her, you killed her over and over again. Only last month, don’t you remember?”

He said with pitiful simplicity, like the tortured thing he was: “Each time I think I have, she rises up again.” He dragged me to my feet and caught me to him, and the arm with the knife went around me, and the knife pressed into my side.

The horrid thing over there was blaring into the emptiness, loud enough to be heard out on the street: “Poor Butterfly.” It was horrible, it was ghastly.

And in the candle-lit pallor, with great shadows of us looming on the wall, like two crazed things we started to go round and round. I couldn’t hold my head up on my neck; it hung way back over my shoulders like an overripe apple. My hair got loose and went streaming out as he pulled me and turned me and dragged me around...

Still holding me to him, he reached in his pocket and brought out a palmful of shiny dimes, and flung them in my face.

Then a shot went off outside in front of the house. It sounded like right in the area-way where the knifed cop was. Then five more in quick succession. The blare of the music must have brought the stabbed cop to. He must’ve got help.

He turned his head toward the boarded-up windows to listen. I tore myself out of his embrace, stumbled backwards, and the knife point seemed to leave a long circular scratch around my side, but he didn’t jam it in in time, let it trail off me.

I got out into the hall before he could grab me again, and the rest of it was just kind of a flight-nightmare. I don’t remember going down the stairs to the basement; I think I must have fallen down them without hurting myself — just like a drunk does.

Down there a headlight came at me from the tunnel-like passage. It must have been just a pocket-torch, but it got bigger and bigger, then went hurling on by. Behind it a long succession of serge-clothed figures brushed by me.

I kept trying to stop each one, saying: “Where’s Nick? Are you Nick?”

Then a shot sounded upstairs. I heard a terrible death cry: “Muriel!” and that was all.

When I next heard anything it was Nick’s voice. His arm was around me and he was kissing the cobwebs and tears off my face.

“How’s Ginger?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, “and how’s Nick?”