Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951

Woman Expert by Thomas Walsh[2]

In his always stimulating, sometimes brilliant column, “Speaking of Books,” in “The New York Times Book Review,” J. Donald Adams once wrote: “Personally, I feel some trepidation in discussing the whys and wherefores of mystery fiction, because, although I have read a fair amount of the best in the field, I am by no means qualified to offer myself as a tried and true fan.” Nevertheless, Mr. Adams goes on to say: “May such an obvious impostor as myself put forth one or two apologetic questions on this sacred ground?” And one of the questions Mr. Adams asks is “why must the man from Scotland Yard, or the chief of our homicide bureau at home, always be presented as having the mental agility of my old friend Zip, whose egg-shaped cranium used to bob above the crowd as it circulated below the platforms of the freaks in the basement of Madison Square Garden...”

Mr. Adams has a point, but the point is not as sharp as it used to be. In recent years there has been a growing movement on the part of detective-story writers to make their official policemen realistic. If anything, the pendulum is now in danger of swinging to the other extreme. But there are some writers who have never depicted their detective characters as “dumb cops” or as “the butt of derision and contempt.” One of those writers is Thomas Walsh.

Indeed, we have heard some acute observers make the statement that Thomas Walsh does not write detective stories — even when his chief character is a professional detective. It is far more accurate, if simpler, to say that Thomas Walsh writes cop stories, and the distinction implied is not a quibble or a splitting of hairs. “Cop stories,” in the sense that they describe Thomas Walsh’s work, implies not only a foundation in realism, but a solid structure rather than a false front. The basic truth is, Walsh’s detectives are always human beings — and that maizes the crucial difference.

She wasn’t at all the kind of girl Kerrigan had built up in his mind. Small and dark, rather sturdy, with cheeks flushed rosily from the cold and crystals of snow sparkling on the collar of her worn fur coat, she came down the aisle behind the porter, smiling a little, obviously excited.

When the porter had racked the luggage on the shelf above her chair, Kerrigan had just a side glimpse of thick dark hair drawn back severely about a round young face — a glimpse that for a moment worried him, until he saw the man in the gray coat and brown hat walk down the station platform outside and stop by her window to light a cigarette. That was the finger, the handover; and, relieved, Kerrigan yawned and picked up his newspaper, deciding that this girl of Scarfe’s was nobody’s dumbbell. The get-up was good; he’d have to be careful. Even a woman expert would never have picked her out of a crowd as Johnny Scarfe’s girl.

In a moment they began to glide past the platform, deserted now save by a few redcaps and the man in the gray coat, who was hurrying along toward the nearest stairway with his collar bundled high about his face. He did not look up as they went by, and Kerrigan, warm and relaxed, seeing the skirts of his coat bellied out by the wind, rather pitied him. Out here they certainly had winters.

Kerrigan shivered delicately and edged his sharp young face deeper into the cushion at his back. It was a bit small for his body, that face, under black hair that curled crisply, close clipped above his temples; and very handsome too with its genial, Irish-blue eyes, its straight mouth that had a twist of perpetual and audacious good humor crinkled at its corners. Little Boy Blue, he was called sometimes in certain quarters — though rarely to his face. Lou Evans favored the woman expert, but that, Kerrigan conceded, wasn’t bad, though you had to know how to say it the right way. Men who knew Kerrigan usually said it the right way.

He thought of all that with a complacent comfort as he sprawled out in the chair, his lean, big-knuckled fingers resting on his knees. He didn’t think of the girl very much until the white-coated Negro came down the aisle with the first call to dinner, for he had decided that he shouldn’t push things too much; there was plenty of time. New York was still a night away and, as it happened, he didn’t have to make the break at all. Things couldn’t have been better.

The diner was crowded when he entered, with only one vacant table for two; and he’d just finished his tomato juice when the steward ushered the girl to the chair across from his. She seemed pretty enough, rather timid, a bit too unconscious of him as she read the menu. And Kerrigan himself seemed abashed, avoiding her eyes and clearing his throat several times, until the silence became awkward. Then, hesitatingly, he remarked that it was bad weather.

She looked at him for the first time, with big dark eyes that seemed to have no guile about them.

“It’s January,” she said, after a moment.

Kerrigan had his cue.

“Back East,” he said, “we don’t get winters like this. Baltimore’s my home town. It snows once or twice, and we get cold snaps all along, but day after day—” He shook his head wryly. “I guess it’s all right; I’m not knocking it. Only I hope my next time out it’ll be summer.”

Supply them with a lead, the woman expert knew, and it all would be much easier. She asked, of course, if it was his first visit, so Kerrigan, without being forward, could plant the whole story in her mind. The accountant, the main office in Chicago, the chance at a managership, the interview with the big boss —

“I don’t know,” he went on, with the grin that he could touch up to wistful shyness, “what the boss thought of me. I’m afraid to hope.”

It had been, the woman expert sensed, the right method. It made him a worried young man, nice, and in no way fresh. When she said she wouldn’t worry, it would probably turn out just the way he wanted it, the woman expert knew he had her.

Later, in the club car, where there was no question about their sitting together, there was a faint starry stir of excitement in her eyes. It seemed that she hadn’t thought there were any trains like this, with lamps and little tables. The woman expert didn’t have to lead her on. She was going all the way to New York, to a job — a fine job. There was a glow in her face when she spoke the name. New York! It was, she said, an — an adventure.

In his berth, smoking a last cigarette with an empty toothpaste carton for an ashtray, Kerrigan decided she was very good or a natural. She sounded small-town all right — she was small-town; but, then, even small towns had their measure of off-color dames. Still, if he didn’t know this one was Johnny Scarfe’s girl... The woman expert, slightly amused by himself, yawned and switched off the light. Just before going to sleep he wondered drowsily what names she’d call him when the blowoff came. He’d bet she couldn’t think of any that hadn’t been used.

In the morning, as they entered the tunnel, the woman expert got his bags down. He knew now he had her just where he wanted her.

“Awful nice,” he said. “It was swell to have someone to talk to. And look—” with just the proper mixture of embarrassment and eagerness — “I’m staying in New York tonight, to see my girl. If you wouldn’t be busy — I mean, well—” He looked for a moment confused. “Eleanor works for a ticket agency. She gets passes for all the shows. Tonight we’re planning to see the Scandals, and I just thought it might be nice — well, for you to come along. You’d like Eleanor. If you’ve got a friend we could meet you there, by the theater. If you haven’t, come yourself, anyway. They say it’s a swell show.”

Susan Butler seemed a little uncertain, and Kerrigan didn’t push it, but he thought that “come yourself” might decide her. She’d be followed from the station, of course — Johnny Scarfe would never be dumb enough to meet her there — but it wasn’t hard to slip a tail, even a good one. And Kerrigan, looking shy and eagerly boyish, wanted to work this thing out by himself; he was sure he had her figured.

“I’ll be at the Morris,” he said. “Call me there if you can make it. Been awfully nice knowing you.”

Lou Evans, who had got on the train at Harmon, came through their car then, descending to the platform with them. At the taxi stand Kerrigan shook hands with her, cried, “Don’t forget the call,” and slipped on the grin once more. Lou Evans was a good shadow, but somehow he had a hunch this girl would slip him.

She did. Along toward five o’clock Kerrigan got the news. After she’d registered at a small hotel, she’d gone down to the subway and asked some people for directions to Times Square. There she’d just made a shuttle train that Lou Evans just missed. It might have been an accident, but Kerrigan, the woman expert, only grinned. “Don’t lose your shirts,” he said. At the Morris, John Bronson, the house dick, said the call had come in: Miss Butler would meet him at eight.

She was in the lobby at eight, in the same shiny fur, but Kerrigan cursed silently when he saw she was alone. His smile was a little strained as he went forward with Miss Peel, who was the best-looking policewoman he had been able to find.

“I’ll check the passes,” he said. “You alone, Miss Butler?”

“I don’t know. I thought—” She looked anxiously around, while Kerrigan lit a cigarette and felt his heart beating hard. Johnny Scarfe would want to give him the once-over first, of course; he’d been smart to think of Miss Peel. If he didn’t like their looks— A tall man in bone spectacles and a long brown coat came out of a drugstore and crossed to them. Susan Butler waved an arm. “Mr. Adams,” she called.

The tall man didn’t look much like Scarfe. Going only by pictures, Kerrigan wasn’t sure of him until he was very close, and Susan Butler was turning to him, speaking. Kerrigan put out his hand. “How are you,” he said, and shook his right hand with an earnest, Frank-Carter-of-Baltimore grin, and then smashed him viciously against the chin with a left hook that had all the weight of his body behind it. Little Owen Malley from the undercover squad slipped up behind the man in the brown coat in time to catch him as he staggered back. Steel flashed against the mass of dark coats crowding the lobby. Faces swung toward them, suddenly turned, astounded, while the tall man faced Kerrigan, his glasses hung crookedly across his nose, his hands gathered together behind his back.

It was done deftly and swiftly. Kerrigan picked up Johnny Scarfe’s hat and crushed it carelessly on his head, and Malley hustled him out by the shoulder. To the crowd Kerrigan ordered, “Move on, move on,” taking Susan Butler’s arm while she stared at him, pale, stricken dumb.

“Come on,” the woman expert said. “You, too, sister.”

It was a neat job, even for Cornelius Kerrigan. There was the usual kidding after it, but Kerrigan didn’t mind that much, so long as it stayed within bounds. He knew they all felt pretty good about it, despite the cracks; for, three months before, Johnny Scarfe had killed a cop, and so his taking was, in a way, a point of personal honor.

The girl, this Susan Butler, faded from Kerrigan’s mind, for she was only one job in many to the woman expert, and the job was done with now — or at least in the D. A.’s hands. The next morning, when he entered the cafeteria on the corner down from headquarters, she wasn’t at all in his thoughts; he had, in fact, to frown at her slightly before he remembered who she was. Sitting on the high stool in the cage near the door, she didn’t see him as he came in; and after a startled moment Kerrigan went by her to a chair at the end of the long tiled counter along one wall. He said, “Hello, Joe,” to a fat man in a white apron busy draining one of the coffee urns, and when the fat man turned he jerked his head toward the front.

“Where did you pick that up?”

Joe was short and clean, comfortable-looking, with red cheeks and bright little eyes. He dried his hands on his apron and came over with a mug of coffee.

“She’s new,” he said, following Kerrigan’s nod with his eyes. “Nice kid. Rose Cady’s getting married next week and I had to get someone to take her place. I guess Rose gave up hope of hooking you, Kerrigan.”

“Cakes,” the woman expert ordered, “and some of those toothpicks you call sausages.” He stirred his coffee and looked back again at the cage. “How’d you happen to get her?”

Joe called, “Cakes with, Eddie,” and pushed the sugar bowl toward Kerrigan with one hand. “Don’t you ever get tired lining them up, fella? She seems like a good kid. Came in late last night and sat around fiddling with a cup of coffee until it was time to close up. I got to talking to her; she looked kind of lost. Got in yesterday from some place out west, thinking that a job was set for her. Somehow or other that blew up, and I guess she didn’t have the fare back, though she didn’t say so. I felt kinda sorry for her, and I knew Rose wanted to quit a couple of days ahead, to do shopping and all that. So I told her if she wanted to cashier here—”

“Sucker,” Kerrigan grunted. “She tell you she was Scarfe’s girl?”

Joe’s eyes got round and wondering in his fat face. “No!” He looked incredulous. “You kidding, Kerrigan?”

“Do I ever kid?” the woman expert demanded, stirring his coffee irritably. “We got a tip last month that Scarfe hid out in a small town in Indiana and went line and sinker for some dame there — this dame. He got sozzled one night and cried into his beer about her, and someone passed the word along. So we got the police out there to keep an eye on her. Day before yesterday they wired in she’d bought a ticket to New York on the afternoon train. She bought it a day ahead, and that gave me time to fly out there and pull the sucker act on the train. We had nothing on her but we knew she was heading for Scarfe.

“Scarfe always liked girl shows, and I figured he’d want to celebrate the first night she got to town. Guys like him can’t stay cooped up forever, so I said I had passes, and if she wanted to come and bring a friend—” He looked up at Joe moodily. “She came all right, and we put the collar on Scarfe.”

“A kid like that,” Joe said, looking worried. “You wouldn’t believe it. Think I ought to get rid of her?”

“Before she walks off with the store.”

“Yeh.” Joe rubbed his forehead vaguely. “I guess I’d better. This afternoon; soon’s I get another.”

But it didn’t really surprise Kerrigan when she was still there that evening. Joe was a soft hearted slob, and all this Susan Butler had to do was pull the old line on him. Small-town kid — no money. He could see Joe mumbling helplessly between his teeth, looking uncomfortable. Well — But she couldn’t pull that stuff on Kerrigan. He was grimly amused when she tried it. She paled a little at first as he presented his check, and then grabbed his arm. “Oh!” she said. “Wait a minute, please. I want to—” The woman expert only grunted, “Save it, sister,” and scooped up his change. He didn’t have to find out about women from her. Women were Kerrigan’s job. Some cops remembered faces, and some never forgot license tags, so that if a hundred cars went by them they’d pick out the stolen ones just by looking at the tags. But Cornelius Kerrigan knew women. They were his knack.

Joe, however, was different; every night he’d argue about Susan Butler. “Look, Kerrigan,” he’d say, “suppose she’s telling the truth?”

Kerrigan would grin wearily and ask him to shut up. He’d give this Susan Butler credit because she was smarter than the rest. She never tried to see Scarfe, or write to him, and she gave up trying to put over her story on Kerrigan. After a while her face was as cold and detached as the woman expert’s own when he gave her his check. The boys noticed that. “Falling down?” they asked. The ribbing got under his skin. “Say,” Kerrigan growled, “in a month I could have that dame shining my shoes. You want to bet?”

None of them did, but Kerrigan had done it anyway, perhaps to show them, perhaps because it seemed to reflect on his professional ability, perhaps for some other reason that would never enter a woman expert’s mind. He turned on the charm, not overdoing it, little by little — just making out he’d been wrong, and stopping by her desk a bit longer every day to talk. In two weeks he was taking her to the movies. In a month she was crazy about him.

The funny part was that this one time Kerrigan guessed he had been wrong. She’d never been Scarfe’s girl; she’d just swallowed his hot air about the broker, and the job. She hadn’t known what she was walking into. Kerrigan knew that was the truth, because nobody, not even a woman, could keep on lying like that. He wasn’t fooled into it, Kerrigan, because he never made a pass at her; he never kissed her. One night, indeed, he asked her why she didn’t go back to Indiana.

“It’s queer,” she said, her round young face grave and quiet. “I’d always thought of it as home and now it isn’t — it’s just like another place on the map. It’s like here.” She stopped a moment; but before the woman expert could put in something about the movies she went on, softly: “You’ve been nice to me — you and joe. You’re the only people I know. Oh, they try to make dates at the counter — I don’t mean that. You’re the only ones who—”

Even at the movies Kerrigan was uncomfortably aware that her thoughts were running like that. All the way home she held his arm, and in the doorway, after they’d said good night, she came very close to him.

“Cornelius,” she said, in that grave voice of hers, “you were so nice on the train, so — oh, I don’t know. But it wasn’t only your job, Cornelius? You did like me? I’m so lonesome when I don’t see you. I think you’re only making out again, perhaps. That you don’t really—”

A woman expert shouldn’t have kissed her and told her he did mean it. Kerrigan knew that, of course, but what else could he do? It was the old song and dance.

It was a queer thing he fought against — a mingling of pride and injured vanity and the dreary knowledge of all the years since they’d kidded a rookie at a Bronx precinct house about his attraction for women. You’ll have to do better than that, Cornelius Kerrigan thought — much better, sister. He wasn’t forgetting any angles. He knew how they started, trying to make you feel sorry for them, trying to get the soft spot in you. Sometimes you couldn’t cure that soft spot; but if you were a woman expert, if you knew your way, you wouldn’t give it a start.

The woman expert didn’t give it a start. For a week he simply avoided Joe’s and that kid who’d tried to give him the business. And on the last night of that week Johnny Scarfe escaped from custody.

Even Kerrigan didn’t find out much about the method of his escape, for everyone around headquarters was pretty sore, and things were kept under the hat. There was a story that Powell was grilling the guards, who claimed that Johnny Scarfe had suddenly pulled a gun on them as they brought him back from the visitors’ room; but Lou Evans scoffed at that story. Johnny Scarfe’s wife, he said, had visited him that afternoon; if she brought along a bundle of cash, to be split three ways among three so-and-so turnkeys—

Kerrigan himself didn’t believe it was bribery. Dora Scarfe might have found some way to pass him a gun; but she wasn’t handing out any cash. Kerrigan was sure of that because he knew the kind of dame Dora Scarfe was. Fat and almost forty, with blond hair that anyone could see didn’t go with her dark, bold eyes, Dora Scarfe knew how to take care of herself. That type was only rabbits to Kerrigan. Fifteen years younger, he could find a dozen for you in any dance hall. Baby-eyed and hardhearted, nobody’s sucker, using perfume and highly colored nail polish, reading confession magazines and tabloids, they had given the woman expert his easiest assignments. A dame like that was always on the make, always looking out for number one; but if you knew how they reacted they were apple pie. Johnny Scarfe had married this Dora years ago, and deserted her off and on since; for the tall punk fancied himself as a ladies’ man, and Dora Scarfe wasn’t a bargain any more.

Kerrigan figured she wouldn’t know any more where Johnny Scarfe was than a fortune-teller, and when Lou Evans and his partner were detailed to follow her he thought it was an awfully dumb move. With someone like the blonde, the thing to do was make her jealous; give him five minutes alone with her, he thought, and she’d spill the story of how he got out. That night in his room he was wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to get in touch with her when the phone rang.

“Listen,” Joe said. “Susan called. She said she wanted to see you.”

“Okay,” Kerrigan grunted, and hung up. Going over to the table he poured himself a small nip of Irish whisky, drank it, and balanced the empty glass thoughtfully on his palm. The woman expert could picture what was coming up.

Kerrigan coached himself thoroughly before starting; he made it very clear how he was going to act, and why he would see her at all. Things like this were better cleared up, with no loose ends...

It was, in theory, simple enough, but Kerrigan felt a dryness in his throat as he went up the stairs. She was standing in her open doorway, outlined against the light, and Kerrigan said, “Hello,” in a surly fashion, brushed by her, and sat down inside with his light gray fedora resting on his knees. She started off as he had known she would, uncertainly, because he would not look at her face. When he hadn’t come into Joe’s all week she was afraid something had happened; she thought he was ill.

“Busy,” he said, with a rasp in his voice. When she didn’t answer, his eyes came up to her at last, and when he saw her face a kind of dumb anguish broke in him. She was trying to smile, and saying something about she just hadn’t known.

“All right,” Kerrigan mumbled. He transferred his hat from one knee to the other, and he wondered how guys like Evans ever got married—

He awoke to what he was thinking with a stunned horror; and then in a moment the horror was gone, and Cornelius Kerrigan, the woman expert, said huskily, “Wait a minute. Don’t look like that.”

He got up, although he didn’t know what he was going to do — maybe get the hell out of there. He felt caught and in the wrong, and when the door to the hall opened behind him he looked at it dumbly.

Johnny Scarfe came in. He pushed the door shut with his left shoulder and then leaned against it, watching Kerrigan for what seemed a long time. Kerrigan wasn’t a fool. He didn’t move or drop the hat out of his hands; he just stood very still. He could see the automatic in Johnny Scarfe’s right hand.

After that long while Johnny Scarfe said, “Get his keys,” to the girl. “His car keys. We’ll need a car. Then cut some rope out of your drier in the kitchen and tie his hands behind him, around his chair. Move.”

When she bent over him for the keys Kerrigan closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to see her. It was all very simple: they’d needed a car. And she had said, “If I call Kerrigan—” They had probably laughed about it. Johnny Scarfe would have advised her to put on the weeps.

And Kerrigan took the blame; he accepted it with a rage that was as cold and hard as ice in his heart. He’d been a fool.

She was standing by the door now, very pale, watching him.

“Go downstairs,” Johnny Scarfe said. “Get started.”

“Sure,” Kerrigan said. “Go on. You can always tell yourself you didn’t know what he was going to do. You don’t have to read the papers.”

“Cornelius,” she whispered. “Cornelius, do you think I knew he was coming? I don’t know how he found me. I thought if I did what he asked he wouldn’t hurt you. That’s why — I won’t let him kill you, Cornelius.”

“Baby,” Johnny Scarfe said, touching the side of her cheek with the barrel of his gun, “go downstairs. Now. While you can walk. I went to a lot of trouble looking you up; I took a chance of running into a nest of coppers to pick you up tonight. You go with me or you stay here — right on your back, baby.”

She stared at Kerrigan.

“I’ll stay,” she said.

The woman expert started to speak, but his voice was drowned out in the sudden bang of the downstairs door — a sharp sound that made Johnny Scarfe’s tall body rigid. Quick, light steps pattered on the stairs, and swiftly and quietly he moved against the wall. “Squeak,” he said, looking back. “Just squeak once, Kerrigan.”

The steps came up past the first landing; an instant before they reached the second, Johnny Scarfe had kicked the door ajar. Dora Scarfe stood on the threshold.

The tall man swore softly, with relief, with anger.

“Damn you!” he said. “Why did you come here? Didn’t you know they’d follow you?”

Dora Scarfe cried shrilly: “I hope they have! Do you hear that?”

Her face was twisted in a sobbing frenzy; mascara streaked the dark eyes. She looked older, haggard.

Her eyes darted to Susan Butler, glittering with triumph, with the venomous hate that lay deep in the lines of her mouth. From his chair, looking at her, and remembering that Lou Evans and his partner had been watching her, Kerrigan saw that this was how women were, this was how they betrayed you. Johnny Scarfe must have had the same thought, because he moved over to the window, flattening his body against the wall. There he cursed softly and crossed to the dark kitchen. In a moment he was back, his face pale and shiny in the light of the lamp.

“Covered,” he said slowly. “A guy front and back. The place is bottled up. In five minutes they’ll have a squad car here.”

Very carefully Kerrigan began to loosen his bonds. Susan Butler hadn’t gathered them very tightly.

Going over to the door the tall man stopped before it, with the funny shine still on his face, and the bones in it outlined as if they had been marked with white chalk. His lips were a crazy color — like liver, Kerrigan thought. After a moment he rubbed them, looked at Kerrigan, at the windows, at the blonde.

“Thanks,” he said, stolidly and harshly. “Thanks for turning me up, baby. They’re set out there; they’re waiting. I go out and it’s like doing the Dutch act.”

Dora Scarfe whimpered something that sounded like: “Johnny, Johnny.” Her expression was puffy, stupid, the way she’d look waking from sleep. “I didn’t mean to, Johnny. I didn’t know. When Al told me he’d found out for you where she lived, when I thought you were here, with her — I guess I was crazy, Johnny.” She put her palms against her temples and closed her eyes, staying like that for a long time. “How many are there — two?”

Kerrigan chuckled harshly. “That’s all they’ll need.”

She didn’t heed him. Crossing to the tall man she gripped his wrist.

“Listen, Johnny — give me your hat and coat. There isn’t much light in the yard. I’ll look like you. The one in front will come running back; the street will be clear. You can get away then, through the front.”

Kerrigan glanced up at her, narrow-eyed. He knew the type — he could tell how their minds ran and who they always looked out for, but for a minute he couldn’t figure her play. They were tricky enough; this wasn’t a bad idea. The only trouble with it was that she didn’t see the catch.

Kerrigan showed her the catch. He explained very carefully: “Go out in that derby and nobody’s going to ask you questions. You won’t get three steps. Maybe you didn’t think of that, sister.”

She looked at him then rather blankly with Johnny Scarfe’s big coat lapping down to her heels. But she didn’t answer him, and the tall man, licking his lips once with just the tip of his tongue, handed her the derby hat.

“Write to me,” she said, crumpling the hat down over her hair. “You know where, Johnny. Let me know how you are. And don’t you worry about me.”

“Sure,” the tall man said in a husky voice. “Sure, baby.”

Kerrigan thought maybe she meant to snatch his gun, and plug him to get herself clear — or maybe, at the yard door, she meant to call Lou Evans and tell him how things were upstairs. Kerrigan knew what dames like this were. Still, sometimes they did stupid things; and he wanted her to see just how things stood.

“They won’t play cops and robbers with you, sister. Go out there and you walk into a bullet. That derby—”

She looked back at Johnny Scarfe from the doorway, and she was scared. Kerrigan could see that; her voice, shaky and pretty low, proved it. She was saying something about not to worry, to be sure to write. Then she was gone, and Kerrigan had a funny feeling in his stomach. The room was very quiet; her footsteps died on the stairs. Kerrigan’s face felt clammy. He knew she was going to call Lou Evans, to tell him—

“Lou!” he yelled, just to be sure.

The tall man was over him in two leaps, smashing the gun butt against his head. Things swam. When they cleared he was on the floor, on his side, and the cords were loose around his wrists, Susan Butler was holding his head, and calling him Cornelius in a quick, panicky fashion. At the door Johnny Scarfe was bent forward, listening, one hand clenched at his side, the other tense on the knob.

There was a shout, two shots, close together and echoless as Kerrigan tore his hands free from the bonds, tore his body clear of the chair. Johnny Scarfe was moving with the shots; before Kerrigan got up he was through the door, and had it locked behind him. It was a solid door, set deep in the wall, and it threw Kerrigan’s first lunge back as if it had been made of rubber. He didn’t wait for a second; shaking off Susan Butler’s hold, he ran to the front window and thrust it up. The stone arch that covered the doorway loomed out over the stoop, a floor below him, as he had remembered it. In an instant he was through, lowering himself from the sill by his arms, and dropping when they were out straight from his body.

That way the arch was only four feet below him. No wider than a coffee table, it angled to a point in the center, sloping down sharply on either side. Kerrigan struck the left of it with his knees, grabbed the edge with a desperate lunge, and was torn free from that by the jerk of his body. That instant broke his fall, although he didn’t catch the stoop flat; his feet struck crookedly on the rim of the first step and thrust his body backward, so that he caromed down the stairs on his back, as Johnny Scarfe came through the doorway and jumped over him. The only thing Kerrigan could grasp was his ankle. Johnny Scarfe stumbled, and smashed his fingers loose with the gun. Then he was past Kerrigan, running from his knees like a drunken sprinter staggering for balance. The gun he had dropped ceased spinning on the pavement, three feet from Kerrigan’s hand.

He got to it just as Johnny Scarfe reached the corner. Kerrigan had medals at home — sharpshooters’ medals — and the tall man wasn’t ten yards away. The gun felt small and solid, part of his hand, as he fired. From his knees he watched Johnny Scarfe fall, roll over, and become formless and still against the house wall.

Slowly Kerrigan got up, wobbling and jarred. There was blood all over the four fingers of his left hand, and he stared at them for a moment dazedly, before going up the stoop and into the hall as Lou Evans ran through from the yard.

“A woman!” he cried. “A woman with his hat and coat on. Where’s Scarfe?”

Kerrigan jerked his head backward, and went on through the dim corridor to a door that pushed open on the blacker space of the yard. A man and Dora Scarfe were out there, almost at his feet; the man was standing up. Looking at Kerrigan as he stopped there, in the doorway, the blonde managed to whisper one word. The word was: “Johnny?”

“He got away,” Kerrigan said heavily. “He snatched my car.”

After the ambulance came he walked back to the stairs, to where Susan Butler stood, holding his injured hand in the pocket of his coat, so that she wouldn’t see it. With his good arm around her, he said it was all right, it was all over; he didn’t even mind when she called him Cornelius. “Now, now,” he said softly, patting her shoulder, and not caring what Lou Evans and the rest would say if they saw him.

Something was done with inside the woman expert; something that all the Maizies and Emmas and Ruths couldn’t change. He felt that, although it remained dim — he could only picture it obscurely by thinking of the way that Dora Scarfe had whispered a word in the yard. Women! He was glad he had lied to her, and he was glad he was holding this Susan Butler, because he never wanted to let her go now. They could betray you; and they could give you something. What?

Cornelius Kerrigan couldn’t name it, but in the dim hallway, holding her, it seemed that if you had that, if you were sure of it, even a woman expert wouldn’t be sucker enough to let it go.