Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 46, No. 6. Whole No. 265, December 1965

Just Enough to Cover a Thumbnail by Cornell Woolrich

A 24-carat detective thriller — and when we say “detective” we mean just that. Watch a real detective at work, investigating a chain of circumstances leading, step by step, to murder — from an unknown man to an unknown place to, eventually, a “room with singing walls.”

This is one of Cornell Woolrich’s finest short novels — high voltage suspense on every page and the special brand of Woolrich-lrish terror-by-night, and even more terrifying, terror-by-day...

I knew what it was like to wake up after being drunk the night before — everyone does, I guess — but that wasn’t in it compared to what this was like. This had all the same symptoms of the other, and then some new ones of its own. My mouth felt just as dry and my head felt just as heavy and my stomach felt just as bad. And then in addition, my eyes wouldn’t focus right — everything I looked at seemed to have rings around it; and my hands were cold and clammy, and my teeth were on edge, as though I’d been chewing lemons.

But worse than anything else was the mental conditioning it had left behind; I was afraid. I was as afraid as a seven-year-old kid in an old dark house. And when you’re afraid at one o’clock of a blazing bright afternoon, mister, you’re afraid.

And at that, the after-effects were nothing compared to what the symptoms had been like the night before, while I was still under it. I grabbed my eyes tight to shut out the recollection, and if I’d had an extra pair of hands I’d have stopped up my ears at the same time. But the images were inside, in my memory, where I couldn’t get at them. Blurred, but there.

He was a fellow I’d known slightly — so slightly that I didn’t even know his last name; just Joe. Joe said, “Aw, you need cheering up. Come on with me, I’m going somewhere that’ll cheer you up.” And then, probably an hour later, the parting hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy, be seeing you around, I’m blowing now.”

I remembered saying, “Well, just a sec, I’ll go with you. I came here with you after all.”

I remember the knowing wink he’d given me. “Naw, you better hang around a while; I’m taking that girl in green home. You know how it is, two’s company—” Exit Joe, whoever he was.

So I stayed on there, like a fool, in a strange place with strangers.

The rest of it came crowding back on me, all mixed up like what they call montage in the movies. The man with the white scar on his jaw. I kept seeing that white scar, hearing disconnected things he’d said. “Just enough to cover your thumbnail. Always remember that and you can never go wrong; just enough to cover your thumbnail. Then you bring it up the long way, like you were going to wipe your nose.”... “Nice-looking place, isn’t it? You want it, you can have it. Listen, I’d give away anything tonight. Make yourself at home, I’ll be right back.”... “What’d you do, have some trouble in here while I was gone? Look at that, look at the blood all over your shirt!”... “No, you can’t get out that way! That’s a dead window, you fool! Can’t you see by looking at it? It’s nailed down fast, it’s painted over. They built a house right up next to this, and the brick work sealed it up.”... “Aw, that’s nothing; you want that to go away? I’ll show you how to make that go away. Now hold steady. Just enough to cover your thumbnail. Watch and see how that makes it go away.”... “Don’t get excited, I’m not going anywhere. Just wait here for me, I’ll be right back—”

And then it got worse and worse. At the end it was almost a frenzy, a delirium. Of fear and flight and pursuit. The very walls had seemed to whisper. “Look at him, sitting there waiting! They’ll get him, they’ll get him!”

They seemed to sing, too. Music kept oozing out of them. Ghost music. I could hear it so plain, I could even recognize some of the tunes, I could even remember them now! Alice Blue Gown, Out on a Limb, Oh, Johnny, and the Woodpecker Song.

And then the climactic madness, the straining, tugging trip to the closet along the floor; the frantic closing of the door; the locking of it, on what it held; the secreting of the key in my pocket; the piling up and barricading of it with a table, a chair, anything and everything I could lay my hands on. Then flight, through the labyrinth of the city, hiding in doorways, sidling around corners, hugging the shadows. Flight that went on forever. From — where? To — where? Then kindly oblivion at last.

All of it a junk dream, of course. But needles of cold sweat came out on my forehead even now, it was still so vivid, so haunting.

I didn’t know what to do for a hangover of this kind. But I figured water, lots of cold water inside and out, was good for almost anything under the sun, so it ought to be good for this too. At least it couldn’t hurt it any.

I staggered rubber-kneed into the bathroom and filled the washbowl and sloshed my eyes, and ducked my whole face in it, and slapped it across the back of my neck. After I got through, I felt a little better. Not a lot, though.

I went back to my room and combed my soaked hair and started to get dressed. If I’d had a job I would have been out of it by now, I’d overslept so long. But I didn’t have one anyway, so it didn’t make any difference.

Just after I’d got my shoes and trousers on, Mildred knocked on the door. She’d heard me moving around, I guess. I told her to come in. I was ashamed to look at her, but only I knew the real reason why; she didn’t. She looked in and said, “Hello, Tommy. I guess you had a drink or two too many last night.”

I thought, “I only wish it was that!” I was sorrier than ever the thing had happened.

“I understand how it is — it helps to take your mind off your troubles once in a while.” Then she rested a hand on my arm for a minute, to show she didn’t mean it for criticism. “But don’t do too much of it, Tommy. It doesn’t make it any easier to get a job. I’ll fix you some coffee, that’ll brace you up.”

She was my older sister. She was swell. I was not only living with her, but she’d even been keeping me in pocket money since I’d been out of a job. She went out again, and I went ahead with my dressing.

First I was going to put on a clean shirt, but I thought I better not be too extravagant while I was out of work, so I decided I’d stick to the old one a day more. The way it was folded or rumpled must have hidden the stain. I only saw it after I had the shirt on, and tucked into my belt, and was buttoning it down in front of the glass. It was brown, a sort of splashy stain in front.

I stared at it in a sort of paralyzed horror. I don’t think I moved for about two minutes. Finally I touched it, and where it was brown it was stiff. Good and stiff. “What’d you do, have some trouble in here? Look at the blood all over your shirt!” It rang in my ears again. So that part of it was real at least, it hadn’t been just a snow mirage.

All right, it was real. But it had to come from somewhere. It didn’t just appear from nowhere, like a miraculous stigmata. I pulled the shirt up out of my belt, and hoisted my undershirt, and scanned my body, all around the lower ribs. There wasn’t a scratch on me anywhere. I looked higher up, on my chest. I even rolled up my sleeves and looked at both arms. There wasn’t a nick anywhere on my skin. And whatever had bled that much must have been a pretty good-sized gash.

So it had come from someone else.

I finished dressing. I kept talking it into myself that it meant nothing. “Somebody you were with cut himself on something. You don’t remember it, that’s all. How’d it get on me, then? Well, maybe you were lurching around. You leaned up against someone, or someone did against you. You better quit thinking about it. You want to hang onto your self-control, don’t you? Then quit thinking about it.”

Which was a lot easier said than done, but I finished up my dressing, put on my coat. The last stage of all was what everyone’s last stage usually is. To put my change, matches, keys, whatever loose accessories there were, back into my pockets where they belonged.

Even in last night’s befogged condition, habit had been strong enough to assert itself. The stuff was dumped out on top of the bureau, the way I always found it every morning. I started collecting it item by item, dropping each category into the particular pocket where it belonged. Three nickels and a dime. (I’d started out with thirty-five cents last night, I distinctly remembered that, so I must have spent a dime sometime during the course of the night; I couldn’t remember doing it.) A withered pack that contained a last cigarette — broken into two sections from pocket pressure. I put one into my mouth, threw the other away. And last of all, my keys — one that Mildred and Denny had given me to the apartment here, and the other a little jigger that opened my valise.

This time I didn’t stand staring in frozen horror. The half cigarette fell from my relaxed lips to the floor, and I lurched forward, steadied myself by gripping the front edge of the bureau. I stayed that way, sort of hunched over, goggling down at it.

There was one key too many there.

There were three keys staring me in the face, and up to last night I had only two. There was a strange key there mixed up with my own two, a key that didn’t belong to me, a key I’d never seen before. Or at least, only in a — snow flurry.

It wasn’t one of these modern, brass, safety-lock keys; it was an old-fashioned iron thing, dun-colored, with an elongated stem and two teeth at the end of it shaped like a buzzsaw. The kind of a key used in an old-fashioned house, that has old-fashioned rooms with old-fashioned doors.

It was an interior key. I mean, you could see it wasn’t for an outside door, a street door, but for some door on the inside of a house — a room door or a closet door.

That gave me a shot in the arm, that last word. I straightened up from my leapfrog position and did things around the room fast. First, I gave it the benefit of the doubt — although I knew as sure as I was born I’d never seen it before in my life, that it didn’t belong around here. I went over to my own closet with it, to try it on that. It wouldn’t go in, because the closet’s own key was sticking out, blocking the keyhole. Then I went to my room door, but there wasn’t anywhere on that to try it. It had no lock at all; it closed on a little horizontal bolt run into a hole. There wasn’t any place else for me to match it up with.

It came from somewhere outside. Somewhere in a dope dream.

Then the panic came on again from last night, only now it was worse, because this was broad daylight and now I was in my right senses. I swung out my valise and kicked the lid up. I didn’t have much to pack, so it didn’t take long. But everything there was to pack, I packed.

I’d gotten halfway down the short little hall with my bag in my hand when Mildred looked out and saw me. She gave a little moaning protest, ran after me. “No, Tommy — what’re you doing?”

“I’ve got to go. Don’t stop me, I’ve got to get out of here.”

“No, Tommy — what is it?” She took the valise and set it down. I let her. I didn’t want to go myself, that was why I stood there undecided. But yet, I knew I couldn’t stay — not now.

“I’ve got to, I tell you!”

“But why? Where? You have no money.” She took me by the arm and coaxed me into the kitchen. “At least drink a cup of coffee before you go, don’t leave like this; I just made it fresh.”

It was just a stall, she only wanted to gain time. I knew that, but I slumped into a chair anyway, and cradled my head, and leaned way over my own lap, staring down at the floor.

I heard her slip out to the phone when she thought I wasn’t noticing, but I didn’t try to interfere. I heard her saying in a guarded voice, “Denny, will you come home right away? See if you can get relieved from duty and come home right away — it’s very important.”

He was a detective. In one way, I wanted to talk to him very much. In another way, I didn’t.

I guess I must have wanted to more than I didn’t want to, because I was still sitting there when he showed up. He got there quickly, not more than ten or fifteen minutes after she’d phoned him.

He came striding in looking worried, and tossed his hat onto the seat of a chair. He was a slow-moving, even-tempered guy as a rule, misleadingly genial on the surface, hard as nails inside. Mildred and I, of course, only saw him when he was off duty, we hadn’t had much chance to see the latter quality in him. I only suspected it was there, without being sure. I had him sized up for the kind of man who would give you a break if you deserved one, or crack down on you like granite if you didn’t.

He spoke to her first. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s Tommy,” she said. “He packed his things and wants to leave. You better talk to him, Denny. I’ll leave the two of you alone if you want me to.”

“No,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go in your room, Tom.” He brought the bag in with him and closed the door after the two of us.

He sat down on the edge of my bed and looked at me, waiting. I stayed up. Nothing came, so finally he said patiently, “What’s the matter, kid?”

I gave it to him right away. What was the good of paying it out slow? I said, “I think I killed a man last night.”

He churned that around in his mind, without taking his eyes off me. Then he said, “You think? Listen, that’s a thing you usually can be pretty sure of. You either did or didn’t. Now which is it?”

“I was kind of fuzzy at the time.” “Well, who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You don’t know where or who or if—” He gave me a half-rebuking, half-whimsical look. “I don’t get it, Tom. You don’t look yourself today. You look a little funny. And you sure sound a whole lot that way.”

“Yes, that’s it,” I said bitterly. “I better start from the beginning and try to tell you as much as I can.”

“You better,” he agreed drily.

“There won’t be very much. At 11:30 last night I was standing on a corner waiting to cross with the light when a guy I knew by sight happened along. I don’t know who he is or where I knew him from — just that I’d seen his face some place before — fellow named Joe. I told him I was down in the dumps and he said I needed cheering up. He asked me to come with him and like a sap I went.

“I can remember that much clearly. He took me to some apartment where there was a big party going on. I don’t even know just where that was — down on one of the side streets off Kent Boulevard somewhere. I didn’t know anyone there, and I can’t remember that he bothered introducing me. They seemed a sort of free and easy bunch, no questions asked; it was almost like open house — new people kept showing up all the time and old ones leaving. He left, and when I tried to go with him, he gave me some excuse and shoved off alone, leaving me there.

“From then on it gets all woozy. It was late and there were fewer people. The lights got dimmer and the place got quieter, people talking in whispers. There was some guy with a white sear along his jaw. I remember he seemed to be watching me for a long while. Finally he came over and offered me something—”

This was the part that was hardest to tell him, but I had to if he was to make any sense out of it.

“Offered you what?” he said.

“I thought it was a headache powder first. He told me to stick my thumb out, and he sifted it onto the nail, from a little paper.”

He just asked the question with his eyes this time. I looked down at the floor. “Coke,” I murmured half audibly.

“You damn fool,” he said. “You ought to have your head examined!”

“I was feeling low; I thought if it would make me forget my troubles for even half an hour it would be worth it. You don’t know what it’s like to be without a job for months, to mooch off your relatives—”

“Well, get drunk then, if you have to,” he said scathingly. “Get so pie-eyed you fall down flat on your face — I’ll pay your liquor bill myself! But if you ever go for that stuff again, I’ll break your jaw!”

Again was good. There didn’t have to be a next time; all the damage had been done the first time. I finished up the rest of it. It came easier once I’d gotten past that point. “—and I piled stuff up in front of it, and I beat it out of there, and I don’t remember getting home.”

He hinged his palm up and down on his knee once or twice before he said anything. “Well, whaddya expect if you go monkeying around like that,” he growled finally, “to dream of honeysuckle and roses? It’s a wonder you didn’t imagine you stuffed six dead guys into a closet instead of just one.”

“But do you think that’s what got me rattled?” I expostulated. I held my head tight between both hands. “I found the key on the bureau when I got dressed a little while ago! And his blood on my shirt!” I hauled it out and waved it at him. I pitched the key down and it went clunk! and bounced once and then lay still.

And his face showed me I’d made my point. He picked the key up first and turned it over and over. You could tell he wasn’t so much looking at it as thinking the whole thing over. Then he traced a fingernail back and forth across the stain once or twice. Also absent-mindedly.

“A knife,” he murmured. “A bullet wound wouldn’t have bled that much — not on you. Can you remember a knife? Can you remember holding one? Have you looked — around here?”

I shuddered. “Don’t tell me I brought that back here with me too!”

He flipped up both thumbs out of his entwined hands. “After all, you brought the key, didn’t you?”

He got up from the bed to look for it around the room. And then he didn’t have to — it was there. His getting up had unearthed it.

The bedsprings he’d been pressing down twanged out, settled into place again. Something fell through to the floor with a small, soft thud. Something that had evidently been sheathed between them and the mattress all night.

He picked up a scabbard of tightly folded newspaper, with a brown spot or two on it. He opened it — and there it was. With one of those trick blades that spring out of the hilt. Not even cleaned off.

All he said was, “This don’t look so good, does it, Tom?”

I stared at it. “I don’t even remember slipping it under there. It isn’t mine, I never owned it or carried it—” I took a couple of crazy half turns around the room without getting anywhere. “You haven’t told me yet what I’m*going to do.”

“I’ll tell you what you’re not going to do; you’re not going to lam out. You’re going to stay right here until we find out just what this thing is.” He rewrapped the knife, this time in a large handkerchief of his own. “Here’s how it goes. There’s a possibility, and a damn good one, that there’s some guy stuffed in a closet, in some room of some house, somewhere in this city at this very minute — and that you killed him last night under the influence of cocaine. Now he’s going to be found sooner or later. But we’ve got to find him first — do you get that? We’ve got to know ahead of time, before it breaks, whether you did kill him or not.”

He stepped up and grabbed me hard by the shoulder. “Now if you did, you’re going to take the knock for it, I’m telling you that here and now. That’s the way I play. But if you didn’t—” He opened his hand and let my shoulder go. “We’ve got to get to him first, otherwise I’ll never be able to clear you.”

“I think I did, Denny,” I breathed low. “I think I did — but I’m not sure.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. And I’m pulling for you — for Mildred’s sake, and yours — and even my own. I don’t exactly hate you, you know.”

“Thanks, Denny.” I gripped hands with him for a minute. “If it turns out it was me, I’m game, I’m willing to—”

But he had no more time for loving cups. He was on a case now. He took out an envelope and a pencil stub so worn down that the lead point practically started right out of the eraser. He sat down, turned over one foot, and began to use his shoe for a writing board. He used the back of the envelope to jot on.

“What are you doing?” I asked, half terrified in spite of myself by these preliminaries to police activity, even though they were still confined to my own bedroom.

“I always plot out my line of investigation ahead of time.” He showed me what he’d written.

“See the idea? One leads into the other consecutively. Interlocking steps. It’ll save a lot of time and energy. ‘Joe’ gives us the party flat, the party flat gives us the man with the scar, the man with the scar gives us the room with the singing walls. That gives us a closet with a dead man in it you either did or did not kill. A lot of dicks I know would try to jump straight from the starting point to the closet with the body in it. And land exactly in the middle of nowhere. My way may seem more roundabout, but it’s the surer and quicker way.”

He put the envelope away. “Now we disregard everything else and concentrate on ‘Joe’ first. Until we’ve isolated ‘Joe,’ none of the other factors exist for us. Now sit down a minute and just think about ‘Joe,’ to the exclusion of everything else. His whole connection with it occurred before you were stupefied by that damnable stuff, so it shouldn’t be as hard as what comes later.”

It shouldn’t, but it was.

“You absolutely can’t place him, don’t know where you had seen him before?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Let me see if I can’t build him up for myself, then. What’d he talk about on the way over to this place? You didn’t just walk side by side in stony silence.”

“No.”

“Well gimme some of that. Maybe I can get a line on him from that.”

I dredged my mind futilely. Disconnected snatches were all that would come back; it hadn’t been an important conversation.

“He said, ‘Aw, don’t think you’re the only one has troubles. Look at me, I’m working but I might just as well not be. A lot I get out of it! Caged up all day, for a lousy fifty a week.’”

“And didn’t you ask him what his job was?”

“No. He seemed to take it for granted I knew all about him, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by letting him see I hardly remembered him from Adam. Besides, I didn’t particularly care anyway, I had my own worries on my mind.”

“Well, is that all he said the whole way over?”

“That’s all that amounted to anything. The rest were just irrelevant remarks that people make to one another strolling along the street, like ‘Did you see that blonde just passed?’ and ‘Boy, there’s a car I’d like to own!’”

“Let me decide whether they were irrelevant or not,” he said impatiently. “I never throw anything away.”

“I’ve given you about all there were. Then when we got to this place, I heard him say, ‘Well, here we are,’ and he turned in. So I went in after him without particularly noticing where it was. The flat turned out to be on the second floor; it was an elevator building, but the car was in use or something. I remember him saying, ‘Come on, let’s take the stairs for a change,’ and he headed for them without waiting, like he was in a hurry to get up there, so I followed him.”

Denny drove fingernails into his hair. “Not much there, is there? Fifty a week. Caged up all day. We’ll have to try to figure him out from those two chance remarks. Caged up all day. Bank teller? They get more than that.”

“I’ve never had enough money on me at one time to go near a bank.”

“Cashier maybe, in some cafeteria or diner where you’ve been going?” He answered that himself before I had a chance to. “No, you’ve been taking your meals home with us since you’re out of work. Not a ticket seller in a movie house, they use girls for that. And you never go to stage shows, where they use men in the box office.”

“No,” I agreed.

“Caged up all day.” He kept saying it over to himself, trying to make it click. “Change booth on the transportation system maybe, on the station you used to use going to work every day?”

“No, I know both the guys on shift there, Callahan and O’Donnell.”

“Pawnbroker’s clerk, maybe. You’ve been patronizing them pretty frequently of late, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but that’s Benny, I know him real well — by now.”

“I can see where this Joe’s going to be a tough nut to crack.” He mangled the pinfeathers at the back of his head. “It might have been just an idle expression — it don’t have to mean he’s actually in a cage, literally behind some sort of bars or wicket. But it’s the only lead you’ve given me on him so far, and I’m blamed if I’m going to pass it up! Are you sure you can’t dig up something else, Tommy?”

I couldn’t have if my life depended on it. Well, it did in a way, and even so I couldn’t. I just eyed him helplessly.

He got tough. Tough with himself, I mean. I guess he always did, when something showed signs of getting the better of him. “Well, I’m gonna get it if I sit here in this room until cobwebs form all over me!” he snarled.

He raised his head alertly after a moment. “How’d they act at the door? What’d they say to him at the door?”

“Nothing. He thumped it, and I guess it was opened by whoever happened to be standing closest to it, a visitor there himself, just like we were. He didn’t say a word to us, and we didn’t say a word to him, just made our way in.”

“Pretty free and easy,” he grunted. He gnawed at it some more, like a dog with a bone. “You say he was kind of in a hurry to get up there?”

“No, not on the street he didn’t seem to be. We just ambled along, the two of us. He took plenty of time. He stopped and looked at some shirts in a window. Then another time he went in a minute and bought a pack of cigarettes.”

“But you said—”

“That was after we got in the entrance. Like I said, the elevator was in use, or at least on its way down to us. I remember the little red light over the shaft was lit up, and the indicator showed it was already down past the second floor. It would only have taken a minute more for it to reach us. But he didn’t seem to want to bother waiting. He said, ‘Come on, we’ll take the stairs for a change—’”

“That don’t make sense. On the street he’s not in a hurry, but once in the building he’s in too much of a sweat to wait. Either a person’s in a hurry to get some place the whole time, or not at all.”

Suddenly he uncoiled so suddenly I jumped back from him. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I got something out of that! See, I told you it never pays to throw away anything.” He stabbed his finger at me accusingly. “Your unknown friend ‘Joe’ is an elevator operator! I’m sure of it. Fifty a week would be right for that. And he wasn’t in a hurry when he took the stairs inside that building! He was just sick of riding in elevators, glad for an excuse to walk up for a change.”

He looked at me hopefully, waiting for my reaction. “Well, does it do anything to you, does it mean anything to you, does it click? Now do you place him?” He could tell by my face. “Still don’t, eh?” He took a deep breath, settled down for some more digging. “Well, you’ve evidently ridden up and down in his car with him more than a few times, and he took that to be sufficient basis for an acquaintanceship. Some fellows are that way, without meaning any harm. Then again, some could be that way — meaning plenty of harm. Now: where have you gone more than once or twice where you’ve had occasion to use an elevator?”

I palmed my forehead hopelessly. “Gosh, I’ve been in so many office buildings all over town looking for a job, I don’t think I’ve missed one!”

Right away he made it seem less hopeless, at least trimmed it down. “But it would have to be a place where you were called back at least a second time, probably talked to him about it riding up to the interview. Were there any?”

“Plenty,” I told him grimly.

“Well, here’s your part of the assignment — and take it fast, we haven’t got a hell of a lot of time, you know. You revisit every such place you can recall being in the past few months, where you nearly got a job, had to go back two or three times. Meanwhile, I’m going to get to work on this knife, slip it in at Fingerprints as a personal off-the-record favor, and see just what comes off it, how heavily it counts against you—”

He took out a fountain pen, spattered a couple of drops of ink onto a piece of paper, and made an improvised ink pad by having me stroke it with my fingertips. “Now press down hard on this clean piece, keep them steady. Homemade but effective. I’ll make the comparison myself while I’m down there, without letting anyone in on it — for the present. I’ll probably be back here before you are — I’m going to get sick leave until we’ve broken this thing down. You call me back here at the house the minute you have any luck with this Joe. And don’t take too long, Tom; it’s almost mid-afternoon already. Any minute somebody’s liable to step up to a certain closet in a certain house, and try to open it, and do something about it when they find it’s locked—”

I flitted out, on that parting warning, with a face the color of a sheet that’s had too much blueing used on it. He stopped me a minute just as I got the door open, and added, “Mildred’s out of this, get that straight.”

“I should hope so,” I said almost resentfully. What did he think I was?

I could remember most of the places I’d been around to fairly recently looking for openings. I mean, the ones where I’d been told to come back, and then when I had, somebody else had walked off with the job anyway. I revisited them one by one.

Some of them were old-fashioned buildings with just one rickety elevator; they were easy to cover. Others were tall modern structures serviced by triple and quadruple tiers of them, and a starter posted out front to give them the buzzer. In places like that I had to stand where I could command all the car doors and wait until they’d all opened to reveal the operators’ faces. And even then I wasn’t satisfied. I’d ask each starter, “Is there anyone named Joe working the cars here?” He might be at home sick or he might be on a later shift.

I always got: “Joe who?”

“Just Joe,” I’d have to say. “Joe Anybody.”

Once I got a Joe Marsala that way, but he turned out to be an undersized, Latin-looking youth, not what I wanted. No sign of the vague, phanton Joe who had, voluntarily or involuntarily, led me into murder.

At five to four, or nearly an hour after I’d left Denny, I finally ran out of places where I could remember having been job hunting. I knew there must have been others, so to make sure of getting them all, I went back to the employment agency where I’d been registered for a time to see if a look at their files wouldn’t help my memory. I figured they must keep a record of where they sent their applicants, even the unsuccessful ones.

I phoned Denny from there, from a little soft-drink parlor on the ground floor, all winded from excitement. “I got him! I got him! I came back here to the employment agency to get a record of more places where I was sent to — and he was here the whole time! He runs the car right in this building!”

“Has he seen you yet?” he asked briskly.

“No, I got a look at him first, and I figured I better tell you before I—”

“Wait where you are,” he ordered. “Don’t let him see you until I get down there.” I gave him the address and he hung up.

I kept walking back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, to make sure he didn’t give me the slip before Denny got there. He couldn’t see me from where he was — the elevator was set pretty far back in the lobby. I was plenty steamed up. Kind of frightened too. We were a step nearer to murder. A murder it looked as if I’d done. A murder I was pledged to take the rap for, if it turned out I had.

Denny came fast. “In here?” he said briefly.

“Y-yeah,” I stammered. “There’s only one car and he’s running it right now.”

“Stay out here,” he said curtly, “I’ll go in and get him.” I guess he wanted to catch Joe off guard, not tip his hand by letting him see me with him right at the beginning. Then with a comprehending look at my twitching face muscles, he threw at me: “Buck up. Don’t go all to pieces — too early in the game for that yet.” And went in.

They came out together in about five minutes, after he’d asked the first few preliminary questions.

It was him all right. He was in uniform now, and he looked pretty white and shaky. I guess the shock of the badge hadn’t worn off yet. Denny said, “This your acquaintance?”

“Yeah,” I said. I waited to see if he’d deny it. He didn’t. He turned and said to me querulously, “What’d you do, get me in wrong? I didn’t mean nothing by taking you there with me last night. What happened after I left, was there something swiped from the place?”

Which was a pretty good out for himself — I didn’t have to be a detective to recognize that. In other words, he was just an innocent link in the chain of circumstances leading to murder.

If Denny felt that way about it, he didn’t show it. He gave him a shake that started at the shoulder and went rippling down him like a shimmy. “Cut out the baby stuff, Fraser,” he said. “Now are you going to talk while we’re waiting for the van?” Which was just to throw a scare into him; I hadn’t seen him put in a call for a van since he’d gotten here.

Denny took out an envelope with his free hand and showed me the back of it. “Sorrell — 795 — Alcazar, Apt. 2 B,” he’d penciled on it. He’d gotten the name and location of the party flat out of Joe. I didn’t know what more he wanted with him. It seemed he just wanted to find out whether Joe’d been in on anything or not. “How many times had you been up there before last night?”

“Only once before.”

“How’d you happen to go up there in the first place?”

“My job before this, I was deliveryman for a liquor store near there. I was sent over with a caseful one night, and they were having a big blowout, and they invited me in. They’re that kind of people, sort of goofy. They used to be in vaudeville. Now they follow the races around from track to track. Half the time they’re broke, but every once in a while they make a big killing on some long shot, and then they go on a spree, hold sort of open house. People take advantage of them, word gets around, don’t ask me how, and before they’re through they’ve got people they don’t even know crashing in on them.”

“But how’d you happen to know there was going to be a party last night, when you took this fellow up there with you?”

“I didn’t for sure, I just took a chance on it. If there hadn’t been anything doing, I would have gone away again. But it turned out they had a bigger mob than ever. They didn’t even remember me from the time before, but that didn’t make no difference, they told me to make myself at home anyway. They were both kind of stewed by that time.”

“You make fifty a week chauffeuring that cracker box in there, right? How much did they charge you up there?”

“I don’t get you,” Fraser faltered. “They didn’t charge me anything. It isn’t a place where you pay admission—”

Denny gave him a twist of the arm. “Come on, you knew what they were passing around up there. How were you able to afford it? Did you get yours free for steering newcomers?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, honest I don’t,” he quavered.

“You didn’t know that was a dope flat?” Denny slashed at him mercilessly.

Joe’s consternation was too evident to be anything but genuine. I think even Denny felt that. I thought he was going to cave in for a minute. I never saw a guy get so frightened in my life before.

“Holy smoke—!” he exhaled. “I never noticed nothing like that — I saw this girl in green and I took a shine to her, and the two of us blew the place after about fifteen minutes—”

Denny only asked him one more question. “Who was the guy with the white scar?”

“What guy with what white scar? I didn’t see no guy with a scar. He musta come in after I left.”

Denny took his hand off Joe’s shoulder for the first time. He tapped his notebook meaningfully. “You may be telling the truth and you may not. You better pray you were. I know where you work and I’ve got your home address, and if you’ve been stringing me, I’ll know where to find you. Now get back in there and keep your mouth shut!”

He turned and slunk into the building, looking back mesmerized over his shoulder at Denny the whole way.

Exit Joe.

We got in a cab. Denny said, “I think he’s telling the truth, as far as you can be sure about those things. If he isn’t, I can always pick him up fast enough. If I did now, I’d have to book him, and that would bring the whole thing out down at Headquarters.”

“How’d... how’d the knife come out?” I asked apprehensively.

“Not good for you,” he let me know grimly. “Your mitts are all over it. And there’s not a sign of anyone else on it. It must have been cleaned off good before it was handed to you. It’s going to crack down on the back of your neck like a crowbar when I’ve finally got to turn it in.”

The cab stopped and we were around the corner from the party flat. We got out and headed straight for the entrance, without any preliminary casing or inquiring around. We had to. It was 4:30 by now, and the deadline was still on us — only it was shortening all the time. It was a kind of flashy-looking place, the kind that people who lived by horse betting would pick to live in.

I couldn’t help shuddering as we went in the entrance. We were now only two steps away from murder. There remained the man with the scar and the room with the musical walls. Getting closer all the time.

We didn’t have any trouble getting in. They seemed to expect anyone at any time of the day, and made no bones about opening up. An overripe blonde in a fluffy negligee, eyes still slitted from sleep and last night’s rouge still on her face, was waiting for us at the door when we got out of the self-service car. She was shoddy and cheap, yes, but there was something good-natured and likeable about her, even at first sight.

“I never know who to expect any more,” she greeted us cheerfully. “Somebody parked their gum on the announcer a few weeks ago, and you can’t hear anything through it ever since. So I just take potluck—”

Denny flashed her the badge. She showed a peculiar sort of dismay at the sight of it. It was dismay all right, but a resigned, fatalistic kind. She let her hands hang limply down like empty gloves. “Oh, I knew something like this was going to happen sooner or later!” she lamented. “I been telling Ed over and ever we gotta cut out giving those parties and letting just anyone at all in. I already lost a valuable fur piece that way last year—”

“Okay if we come in and talk to you?” He had to ask that, I guess, because he had no search warrant.

She stood back readily enough to let us through. The place was a wreck — they hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it up yet after the night before. “Is it pretty serious?” she asked nervously. “Who told you about us?”

Denny was trying to trap her, I could see. “Your friend with the scar on his jaw — know who I mean?”

She didn’t know, and she seemed on the level about it — as on the level as Joe Fraser had been about not knowing there was dope peddled up here. “I can’t place anyone with a scar on his jaw—” She poised a finger at the corner of her mouth and looked around at various angles in search of inspiration.

“Are you denying there was a guy with a scar on his jaw up here last night?” Denny said truculently. He had my word for that, and I was sure of that part of it, if nothing else.

“No, there could have been ten guys with scars. All I’m saying is if there was I didn’t see him. The excitement was a little too much for me, and I retired about midnight.” She meant she’d passed out, I guess. “He may have come in after that. You’d better ask my husband.”

She went through the next room and spoke into the one beyond. He was asleep, I guess, and she had to talk loud. “Ed, we’re in trouble. You better come out here and answer this man’s questions.”

Ed came out after her looking like a scarecrow in a dressing gown. Interest in the races had kept him thin around the middle, if it hadn’t prevented his hair from falling out. Denny woke him up with the same question he’d just given her.

“No, I didn’t notice anyone with a scar here last night. He might have been here and just happened to have that side of his face turned away from me each time I got a look at him. But even so, he wasn’t anyone I know personally. I don’t know anyone with a scar.”

“Some guy got in here, and you not only didn’t know him but didn’t even see him the whole time he was in your place. What kind of people are you anyway?”

“Well, that’s the way we live, mister. We may be careless but we have a helluva good time.”

Denny scanned him for several uncomfortable minutes. Suddenly he said, “Mind if I look around?”

“N-no, go ahead.” They were both frightened, but in the vague way of people who don’t know what to expect next.

I didn’t get what Denny was after for a minute. I trailed after him, and they trailed after me. In each room he went into, he only had eyes for the closet — when there was one. Or rather, the keyhole in the closet.

There was only one that didn’t have a key sticking out of it.

We got to it finally. It was painted white. It was in a little room at the back, a sort of spare room. My heart started to pick up speed.

It seemed to stand out from the walls, as if it was coated with luminous paint. My eyes almost seemed to be able to pierce it, as though they were X-rays, and make out, huddled on the inside — I looked around in cold, sick fear in the split second that we all stood there grouped in the doorway.

That mission-type table over there, didn’t it look like the very one I had up-ended against the locked closet? That window, with the dark shade drawn all the way down to the bottom — “No, you can’t get out that way, that’s a dead window, blocked with bricks.” I didn’t have the nerve to step over to it and raise the shade.

Denny had tightened up too, I could see. He didn’t take out the key I’d found on my bureau. Instead he said, “D’you mind unlocking that?”

Right away they both got flustered. They looked at each other helplessly. She said to him, “Where’d we put it this time?”

He said, “I dunno, you were the one put it away. I told you to pick the same place each time. You keep changing the place, and then we can’t find it ourselves!”

They both started looking high and low. She explained to Denny, “We call that closet The Safe. When we feel one of those parties coming on, we gather up everything valuable and shove it all in there, and lock it up till it’s over.”

Denny didn’t look convinced or relenting. I was leaning against the door frame — I needed support.

“It’s all our own stuff,” she said.

He gave her the stony eye.

The harder they looked, the more flustered they got. I kept wondering why he didn’t take out the key and try to fit it in. Why did he have to torture me this way? My chest was pounding like a dynamo.

Was he in there, whoever he was? Would he topple out on us when it was opened finally? But if they’d known about it, they would have smuggled him out long ago, wouldn’t they? Or else beat it away from here themselves. Or suppose they hadn’t known about it themselves and still didn’t? That wouldn’t make me any the less guilty.

The Sorrell woman suddenly gave a yelp of triumph, from the direction of the bedroom, where the ever-widening search had led her. She came running in with it, holding it up between her fingers. You could hardly distinguish what it was — it was all clotted with some white substance. “I hid it in my cold cream tin, I remember now!” she exulted. “Luckily I stopped a minute to rub a little on—”

Denny wouldn’t let her get over to the keyhole with it; he took the key, inserted it himself, gave it a twist, and the door swung out. Furs, silverware, luggage — everything that predatory guests might have made off with was piled up inside.

But no dead bodies.

I had to sit down for a minute; I felt weak all over.

“It’s all our own stuff,” the woman said for the third or fourth time. “Did somebody tell you we had something in there didn’t belong to us?”

“No, just an idea of mine,” Denny said quietly. He handed the key back and turned away.

It was dusk when we left the Sorrell apartment. All day someone had lain murdered in a closet, and we were no nearer to knowing where. And now it was night again, the second night since it had happened.

We stood down there on the street outside the place. Because we didn’t know where to go now. There was a gap. The first step had led into the second, but the second had led into a vacuum.

“Well, my way didn’t pay off,” he said glumly. “The thing’s broken in two.” He turned and looked up at the lighted windows behind us. “And I’m inclined to give the Sorrells the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think they really know this man with the scar. I don’t think they really noticed him in their place last night. I don’t think they realized anyone had cocaine on him and passed some to you. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt — for the present. I can’t go after it the way I would ordinarily — have them watched, check their movements, track down as many people as I can who were at the party, in hopes of finally getting a line on him. We haven’t got time. We’ll have to jump the gap blindfolded and try for the third foothold — the room with the singing walls.”

We passed a cigar store and Denny went in, stepped inside the phone booth. I figured it was to Headquarters, without his telling me so. It was. He came back and said, “Well, our margin of safety still holds — they haven’t found him yet. I checked on all reported homicides, and there’s no one been turned up stabbed in a closet — as of 6:45 this evening.” He gave me a look. “But that don’t mean there’s no one in a closet still waiting to be turned up. We’ve got to hustle.”

Sure we did — but where?

“Can you remember leaving here at all?”

“No, there’s a complete blank. The next I knew was the room with the singing walls. Scarface reappeared in that sequence, so I must have left with him; he must have taken me there from here.”

“Obviously. But that don’t tell us where it is.”

It was strangely topsy-turvy, this thing. Ordinarily they get the murdered remains first, have to go out and look for the murderer. In this case, he had the murderer at hand from the beginning, and couldn’t find out where the remains were. Even the murderer couldn’t help him.

“About those so-called singing walls. Was it a radio or television you heard through them? That’s the first thing occurs to me, of course.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. There wasn’t a scrap of human voice, or of station announcement in between. If I was able to distinguish the tunes clearly enough to recognize them, I would have been able to hear the announcer too, wouldn’t I? And there’s at least a title given between numbers on any radio or television program.”

“You can’t remember how you got there? Not even the vaguest recollection? Whether it was on foot, or in a cab, or in a car with him, or by bus?”

“No. Any more than I can remember how I got away afterw— Wait!” I broke off suddenly.

“What is it?” he pounced.

“I just remembered a little detail I didn’t tell you before. I wonder if it’s any good to you or not.”

“I told you I never throw anything away. Let me have it.”

“I either spent or lost ten cents sometime during the course of the night. When I met Fraser on the street, I had thirty-five cents in my pocket. I can remember standing there jingling it just before he came up to me. This morning there was only twenty-five cents on my bureau. I was out a dime. D’you think I spent it making my way home — from wherever this was?”

He liked that right away, I could see; he liked that a lot. “It could be a yardstick, to measure just how far out this place was, if nothing else. It don’t give us the direction, but it might give us the approximate distance. Can you remember making your way back at all?”

“Yeah, partly; only the opening stages, though. I remember slinking along, hugging walls and doorways, scared stiff. I don’t remember what part of town I was in, though. And then the curtain came down again, and I don’t remember how I finally got back.”

“What kind of coins was this thirty-five cents in, when you had it last night — can you remember that?”

“Easily, I counted it over enough times. Three nickles and two dimes. And this morning there were only the three nickles and a dime left.”

“That’s important,” he said. “That fact that the three nickles were carried over eliminates the possibility that you paid a fifteen-cent fare. If you paid any fare at all, you paid an exact ten cents. It’s still possible you lost the dime, of course, but we can’t let that stop us. If you spent a dime fare, that eliminates taxis. Now the bus system here runs on a mileage basis, you know that. Ten cents for a certain distance, then fifteen, and so on. This missing dime seems to show you boarded an inbound bus at some point within the ten-cent zone and rode in toward our place.

“D’you see what I’m driving at? We’re looking for some place in that ten-cent bus Zone where there’s music playing late at night, until two or three in the morning. And not a radio or television — either a real band or a phonograph that changes its own records by automatic control. Some roadhouse or resort or even just a hole-in-the-wall taproom. And then we’re looking for a room right upstairs over it, or right next door to it, with a partition wall so thin it lets this music come whispering through. There’s our problem.”

“But it seemed to me I did a lot of this running away on foot first; my starting point might have been quite a distance off from this ten-cent bus zone.”

“It seemed that way. I doubt you did in your condition. Narcotics distort your time sense, for one thing. Just down the block and around a couple of corners, to you might have seemed like an endless flight that went on for hours. Then again, of course, you may be right about it; I wasn’t on your feet. The only way we’ll find out is to put it to the proof.”

There were two bus lines that passed the immediate neighborhood our own flat was in, the Fairview line and one that went out to the municipal beach at Duck Island. The routes were parallel this far in; they only diverged farther out. The double route was two blocks over from our place.

“We’ll take whichever one comes along first,” he said while we stood waiting.

A Fairview one hove into sight first, outward bound of course. We got on and he said, “Two ten-cent fares.” Then he stood behind the driver’s back and, company regulations to the contrary, asked, “How many stops do you make in the ten-cent zone?” They ran on fixed stops.

“Only three.” He gave us the intersection names. “After that, it jumps to fifteen.”

“Well, offhand, could you mention any inns or dance joints out that way, where the music plays late?”

“Try Dixie Trixie’s, that’s just out side the city limits—”

Denny cut him short. “No, I’m asking about the ten-cent zone, between Continental and Empire Road.”

“Naw, I don’t think you’ll find many around there — one or two honkytonks maybe.”

“We’ll have to do our own scouting then,” Denny said to me. He led the way back to a seat and swore bitterly under his breath, “We’ll be at it all night.”

We got out at Continental, the first ten-cent stop, and he did a little surveying before we moved off the bus route. The task before us wasn’t as bad as it had threatened to be at first sight. It was no cinch by any means, but at least he was able to put physical limits to the terrain we had to finecomb.

The bus stops were eight blocks apart. A railroad embankment walled us off six blocks to the left, and a large park with a lake in it dead-ended the streets four blocks over the other way. He divided the difference between the two bus stops, multiplied it by ten crosswise blocks, and that gave us forty square blocks to canvass for each bus stop.

Naturally, it wasn’t a question of going into every doorway of every building along those forty blocks — that would have still been pretty much of a physical impossibility. A cop on the beat here, a storekeeper there, was able to speed us through by listing the places in his immediate vicinity that provided music late at night. That way we sometimes only had to make one stop in five or six blocks. We investigated several bars which had coin phonographs, but none had all four of the selections that I’d remembered hearing in their repertoire.

We went back and boarded the bus, rode one stop ahead, and started the whole thing over. Same lack of results. The closest we got to anything in this sector was when the harness cop told us there had been a lot of complaints about a Polish family playing their phonograph late at nights with all the stops out. But they didn’t own any of the records we were looking for.

We went back, caught another bus, got out at the third and last ten-cent stop, and finished the chore out. That fizzled too. We limped aboard an in-bound bus and rode back to where the Duck Island line diverged from this one. The thought of going through the same routine all over again, on a new bus route, was more than we could face without a breathing spell.

We dragged ourselves into the nearest resting place we could find, which happened to be a diner, and just sat there slumped over the counter, too tired even to hold our backs up straight, chins nearly dunked in our coffee cups, talking it over in low voices so the counterman wouldn’t overhear us.

“Even if I wanted to take you down with me and report it — and I don’t, God knows — I couldn’t until we’ve found out where it happened. They’d have to have that. And the longer it takes and the colder it gets, the harder it’s going to be to clear you.” He looked down at the wax-white, trembling hand I’d suddenly braked on his arm. “What is it?”

“Did you hear that, just then?”

He turned and looked over at the wire-mesh loudspeaker set on a low shelf near the coffee boiler.

“They just got through playing Alice Blue Gown and now—”

He didn’t get me for a minute. “But this diner’s in the middle of a vacant plot, you saw that when we came in. There aren’t any adjoining—”

“No, no, you haven’t been paying attention to the program, I have. They got through Blue Gown a minute or two ago; now they’ve gone into Out on a Limb. Listen, hear it? That’s the same order I heard them in last night — there.”

“That’s just a coincidence. There must be a thousand bands all over the country playing those two pieces day and night—”

“The third one’ll tell. The third one was Oh, Johnny.” I could hardly wait for it to end; it never seemed to, it seemed to go on forever. I balled a fist and beat it into the hollow of my hand to hurry it up. He sat there straining his ears too; his back was held a little straighter now.

It wound up finally and there was a short pause. Then the tune itself. I grabbed him with both hands this time, nearly toppled him off the tall stool he was perched on. “Oh, Johnny! That’s not a coincidence any more. That’s the same sequence I heard them in last night. That’s the same band.”

“But I thought you said it wasn’t a broadcast, that you heard no station announcements. This is.”

“But there are no station announcements on this either — it’s evidently a program that only makes one every five or six numbers. I still don’t think it was a broadcast; this isn’t the same hour I heard them, and they wouldn’t broadcast twice in one night. But I think it was the same band, I’m sure of it. Maybe they broadcast first, and then play in person somewhere later on—”

The Woodpecker Song had started in. I turned around to tell him that, riot sure if he knew tunes by ear as well as I did. But he’d had enough; the stool next to me was empty and he was already over at the pay phone on the wall. His coin chimed in along with the opening notes.

“What station you tuned at?” he called out. The counterman read the dial, gave him some hick station I’d never heard of before. He got its studio number from Information.

“Who’s that you got going out over the air now?” Then, “Bobby Leonard’s Band? Find out where they work about one to three or four every night. Hurry it up, it’s important. No, I can’t wait until they’re through broadcasting, this is police business. Write the question on a slip of paper and hand it in right where they are now.”

He had to wait until the answer was relayed back, evidently scribbled on the same piece of paper.

“The Silver Slipper, eh, out on Brandon Drive.” He hung up, bounced a coin on the counter, and ran out. We’d both stopped being tired, like magic.

“It’s all the way over on the other side of town,” he said to me in the cab. “God only knows how you found your way back to our place. It shows you what a wonderful thing the subconscious is, even under the influence of a drug.”

We got to it in about twenty minutes, paid off the cab, and stood there sizing it up. It was mostly glass, you could look in on three sides; it had a glass roof that could be pushed back in fine weather so they could dance under the open sky. The fourth wall was solid masoney. Only a scattered couple or two were dancing. They evidently used a radio to provide the incidental music, until this Leonard and his band came over and did a lick later on.

He snapped his head around to me. “Familiar?”

I shook mine. “Not a flicker of it comes back to me.”

On the fourth side it backed against two buildings, which in turn were set back to back, each one facing a different street. We cased them both, from their respective corners. One was a trim two-story cement garage, that looked as if it had only recently been put up. The other was a sort of rundown lodginghouse, with a milky lighted globe shining down over its doorway. It was the obvious choice of the two; garages don’t have closets. Nor furniture to pile up in front of them either.

We went in.

It couldn’t have been dignified by the name hotel. The “desk” was just a hinged flap across an alcove, within which sat a man in shirtsleeves reading a paper under a light.

One good thing, there was no question of a bell boy showing you up and looking on. You paid your fifty cents, you got a key, and you found your own way up. We didn’t want any witnesses — if it was in here.

He didn’t even bother looking up at us, just heard the double tread come in and asked: “Two-in-one or two singles?”

Denny said, “How many rooms you got here that back up against that place next door? We like to fall asleep to music.”

Even that didn’t get a rise out of him; he expected anything and everything. “One on a floor, three floors, that makes three altogether. I’ve got someone in the one on the second, though.”

So that was the one. My stomach gave a sort of half turn to the right, and then back again.

Denny said, “D’you have to sign when you get in here?”

“You got to put down something when you pick up your key, you can’t just walk in.” Meaning a place like this didn’t expect right names and didn’t care if it got them.

“Let’s see what was signed for that one you got taken on the second.”

“What’s all this to you?” But he was still too indifferent to be properly resentful about it.

“We might know the guy.”

We did. One of them anyway. It was a double entry. The cocaine had vibrated my handwriting like an earthquake but I could still recognize it. Tom Cochrane, 2228 Foster Street. For once they’d gotten a right name and a right address. It was probably the only one in the whole ledger — and it had signed for murder!

The second name, also in my handwriting, was Ben Doyle. No address given, just a wavy line. So I’d signed in for someone else too.

We just looked at each other. Then at him. Or rather, Denny did. I was afraid to.

“Were you here when this was signed?”

This time he did get annoyed, because the question touched him personally. “Naw, I go off at twelve, don’tcha think I gotta sleep sometime too?” That explained, at least, why he didn’t recognize me. But not why it hadn’t been found out yet.

“D’you give any kind of service here? Don’t you send someone in to clean these rooms in the daytime?”

He got more annoyed. “What d’ya think this is, the Ritz? When a room’s vacated, the handyman goes in and straightens up the bed. Until it is we leave it alone, for as long as it’s been paid for.” I must have paid for this one for two days in advance, double occupancy — there was the entry “$2,” after the two names. But I hadn’t had two dollars on me; I’d only had thirty-five cents.

“What’s all this talk about? Do you two guys want a room or don’t you?” We did, but we wanted that second-floor room that already had “someone” in it. Denny obviously didn’t want to use his badge to force him to open it up for us — that would have meant a witness to the revelation that was bound to follow immediately afterward, and automatic police notification before he had a chance to do anything for me — if there was anything he could do.

“Give us the third-floor one,” he said, and put down a dollar bill. The man hitched down a key with a ponderous enamel tag from the rows where they hung. The one immediately below was missing. The “occupant” still had it. If I’d taken it away with me, I must have lost it in the course of that mad flight through the shadows; only the closet key had turned up at our place this morning.

Denny, with unconscious humor, scrawled “Smith Bros.” in the registry (he told me later he wasn’t trying to be funny), and we started up the narrow squeaky staircase. He turned aside when we got to the second floor, motioned me to keep on climbing. “Scuffle your feet to cover me, I’m going to try to force the other door open.”

I shuffled my way up step by step, trying to sound like the two of us, while I heard him faintly tinkering at the lock with some implement. I unlocked the one we’d hired on the floor above, put on the light, looked in. Yes, there was something vaguely familiar about it; this was the end of the trail, all right. The closet in this one had a key in it, and had been left slightly ajar by the last occupant.

I crept back to the stairs and listened. The tinkering had stopped, so he must have forced the door. A curt “Sst!” sounded, meant for me. I eased down one flight.

The light from inside was shining out across the grubby passage. A half section of his face showed past the door frame, waiting for me; then it withdrew. I made my way inside, moving slow, breathing fast.

It was the right room.

He’d already taken down the stuff I’d barricaded the closet door with — a table, a chair, even a mattress.

He signed to me and I closed the door behind me. He gave the closet key I’d turned over to him a fatalistic flip-up in the hollow of his hand.

“Here goes,” he said. I got a grip on the back of a chair and hung on tight.

He fitted it into the lock. It went in like silk and turned the lock without a hitch. It couldn’t have worked easier. It belonged here. I said a fast prayer — that was all there was time for. “Make it turn out it was somebody else who did it!”

Denny’s body gave a hitch and there was no more time for praying. He’d caught it against him as it swayed out with the closet door.

It must have been semi-upright behind it the whole time. I hadn’t done a good job propping — it must have shifted over against the door instead of staying against the wall behind; and the way the knees were buckled kept it from toppling over sideways.

He let it down to the floor. It stayed in a cockeyed position from the way it had been jammed in. It was stiff as tree-bark. He turned it over on its back, made me come over.

“Remember him? Take a good look now. Remember him?”

“Yeah,” I said, dry-lipped.

“Remember him alive, that’s what I mean.”

“No, no, I only remember him lying there, only not so shriveled—” I backed away, nearly fell over a chair.

“Pull yourself together, kid,” he said. “This is something they would have put you through anyway. It’s a lot easier just with me in the room with you.”

He disarranged the clothing, peered down. “Sure, a knife did it,” he nodded. “Three bad gashes — one in the stomach, one between the ribs, and one that looks like it must have grazed the heart.”

He looked at the belt buckle. “B. D.,” he murmured. “What was that name down there — Ben Doyle?”

He started going through pockets. “No, he’s been cleaned out; but the name checks with those initials, all right.”

He drew back a little. I saw him scanning the corpse’s upturned soles. “He did a lot of walking, didn’t he?” The bottom layer of each was worn through in a round spot the size of a silver dollar. “But the heels are new, not worn down at all. What’d he do, walk around on tiptoes?”

He took something from his pocket and started to reverse a small screw that protruded like a nail-head. Then he pulled and the whole heel came off. It was hollow. Three or four folded paper packets lay inside.

He opened one into the shape of a little paper boat. I didn’t have to be told. I’d seen that white stuff before.

“He was a peddler,” he said. “But he wasn’t the guy that contacted you at the party. Where does he come in it? I wonder if the Narcotic Squad have heard of this guy before, can give me anything on him. I’m going to check with headquarters.”

Before he went out, he crossed to the window and raised the dark shade that shrouded it. The pane behind it was also painted dark, a dark green. You could see the heads of heavy six-inch nails studded all along the frame, riveting it down. Even so, he took that same screwdriver from his pocket and scraped away a tiny gash on the dried-paint surface. Then he held a lighted match close up to it.

“Solid brick backed up to it,” he commented. He started for the door. “You’re down on their blotter for this room — and in your own handwriting — along with this dead guy. I want to find out if he was seen coming here with you. Or if it was the guy with the scar. Or both. Or neither. I gotta dig up that other slouch that was in charge of the key rack here from midnight to morning — he’s the only one can answer all those things.”

I started out after him. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t have stayed in there alone for a million dollars.

“All right, go back and wait in the one over this, if it gets you,” he consented. He closed the door on the grisly sight. “But keep your eyes and ears open; make sure no one gets in here until we’re ready to break it ourselves.” He went down and I went up.

I didn’t know how long to give him, but pretty soon it seemed to be taking longer than it should have. Pretty soon the room up here started to get me, just as bad as though I’d stayed down there. Try hanging around when you know there’s a dead body under your feet in the room below, a body you’re to blame for, and you’ll know what I mean.

The band showed up for work next door while I was in there, and instead of making it better, that only made it worse. It nearly drove me nuts, that whispered music coming through the walls; it brought last night back too vividly again.

Finally I couldn’t stand it in there another minute, I had to get out, wait for him down below by the street entrance. I almost lunged for the door, a cold panic on me. I got it open, poked the bilious light out.

Then I saw something in the darkness behind me. Something that made me hold the door at half-closing point and stand there on the threshold.

It should have been pitch-black behind me in there now. The place only had a dead window. It wasn’t. A late moon must have come up since we’d been in here. Three phantom silvery lines stood out around the drawn shade, like a faint tracing of phosphorus. There was moonlight backing it, only visible now that the room light was out.

My panic evaporated. I went back in again, leaving it dark. I crossed to the shade, shot it up. Moonlight flashed at me through the dust-filmed glass. There was no brickwork, no dark paint, blanking out the windows on this floor. Denny hadn’t been up here at all, or we might have found that out sooner. The garage was only two stories high, the rooming house three — that was a detail that had escaped our attention until now.

The frame wasn’t nailed. I lifted it and it went up. The garage roof was a bare four feet below me, plenty accessible enough to— But the fact remained the body hadn’t been in this room, but in the one below, where the window was blocked.

I scanned the roof; it looked like an expanse of gray sand under me. In the middle of it, though, there was dim light peering up through some sort of skylight or ventilator.

I didn’t have any theory; I didn’t know what I thought I’d find out or what I hoped I’d find out. I just went ahead on instinct alone. I sidled across the sill and planted my legs on the graveled roof. I started to pick my way carefully over toward that skylight, trying not to sound the gravel.

I got to the perimeter of it, crouched down on hands and knees, peered over the edge and down. Nothing. Just the cement garage floor two stories below, and a mechanic in greasy overalls down there wiping off a car with a handful of waste. No way to get up, no way to get down — except head-first.

I straightened up, skirted it, eased on. I took a look down over the front edge of the roof. Just the unbroken cement front of the garage; a fly couldn’t have managed it. I went around to the side, the one way from the Silver Slipper. There was a narrow chasm there, left between the garage and some taller warehouse next door. And midway down that there was something — a pale, watery, yellow reflection cast on the warehouse wall by some opening in the garage wall directly under-me, at second-floor level. And more to the point still, a sort of rickety iron Jacob’s ladder leading down to it. I could only see this at its starting point, up where I was; the darkness swallowed the rest of it.

I swung out on it, tested it with one foot. Narrow rungs. It seemed firm enough. I started down very slow. It was like going down into a bottle of ink. The reflection of the lighted square came up and bathed my feet. The ladder didn’t go any lower, it ended in a level “stage” of iron slats, no wider than the window.

I tucked my feet in under the last downward rung so they wouldn’t show in the light, leaned out above them, gripping a rung higher up backhand. It was a grotesque position. I slanted my head forward and peered into the lighted square.

It was an office connected with the garage. There were filing cabinets against the wall, a large flat-topped desk with a cone light over it. There was a man sitting there at it, talking to two ethers. Or rather going over some accounts with them. He was checking some sort of list on a sheet of paper he held.

There was money on the desk, lots of it — more money than any garage like this would take in a month. It was separated into several stacks. As he finished checking one list, he’d riff through one stack, rapidly and deftly thumb-counting it, then snap an elastic around it, and move it over to the other. Then he’d begin on a second list.

There was something vaguely familiar about the shape of his head, even seen from the back, and the cut of his shoulders. The other two I’d never seen before, I was sure of that. One was sitting negligently on an outside corner of the desk, the other standing up against it, hands deep in his pockets. They looked too well dressed to be hanging around the upstairs room of a garage.

I must have taken too much time to size them up. After all, a paring of a face is just as conspicuous against a black-out window as a full face would be. I didn’t even see the signal passed, nor which of the two gave it. Suddenly the checkmaster had twirled around on his swivel chair and was staring out at me eye to eye.

That white scar along the underside of his jaw stood out as visibly as a strip of court plaster. So there he was at last, the diabolus ex machina.

My position on the ladder was too complicated to make for a streamlined getaway, I had too many things to do simultaneously. I had to extricate my tucked-in feet, make a complete body turn to face the ladder, before I could start up. Even then, I missed a rung in my hurry, jolted down half a foot, and hit my chin on one of the upper ones. By that time the window had flashed up and a powerful grip had me around the ankle.

I was torn off the ladder, dragged in feet first, and the only thing that saved my skull from cracking in the bounce from window sill to floor was that it bedded against one of their bodies. I lay flat for a minute and their three faces glowered down at me. One of them backed a foot and found my ribs. The pain seemed to shoot all the way through to the other side.

Then I was dragged up again and stood on my own feet. One of them had a gun bared, brief as the onslaught had been.

The man with the scarred jaw rasped, “He’s the patsy I used last night I toldje about!”

“There goes your whole set-up, Graz!” the third one spat disgustedly.

The man with the scar they called Graz looked at me vengefully. His whole face was so livid with rage it now matched the weal. “What the hell, it still holds good! He was one of Doyle’s customers, Doyle cut off his supply, so he knifed him!”

“Yeah, but he ain’t up there in the room with him any more.”

“All right, he come to, lammed out through a third-floor window — like he did. He’ll be found dead by his own hand in Woodside Park, when morning comes. What’s the difference? It changes it a little, but not much. It’s still him all the way through. Him and Doyle took the room together to make a deal. He was seen going in where Doyle’ll be found. And you know how snowbirds act when they’ve got the crave on and are cut off. There’s a lake there in Woodside. We’re gonna dunk his head in it and hold it there until his troubles are over. Then throw the rest of him in. How they gonna tell the difference afterwards?”

“Suppose Doyle had already sang a note or two to the police, mentioning names, before you—”

“He didn’t sing nothing, I stopped him before he had a chance to — the minute I seen that narcotics dick beginning to cultivate him, I cut out his tonsils! An operation like that in time saves nine. Come on, let’s get started.” He gathered up the money and lists from the desk. “And another thing,” he added, “we’re giving this joint up, it’s no good to us any more. We’re coming back as soon as we ditch this punk and move out all them filing cabinets, right tonight!”

His two subordinates wedged me up between them. He put out the light behind us, and the four of us started down a cement inner stair to the main floor of the garage. “Run out the big black one, Joe,” one of them said to the grease monkey I’d seen through the skylight, “we’re going out for a little air.”

He brought out a big sedan, climbed down, and turned it over to them. He must have been one of them, used for a front on the main floor; they didn’t try to conceal ray captivity from him.

They shoved me into it. It was like getting into a hearse. That’s what it was intended for, only it was taking me to the cemetery before death instead of after. I didn’t say a word. “Denny’ll come back to that room too late. He won’t know what happened to me; he’ll start looking for me all over town, and I’ll be lying at the bottom of the lake—”

Graz and one of his two underlings got in with me and the other one took the wheel. We glided down the cement ramp toward the open street beyond. Just as our fenders cleared the garage entrance, a taxi came to a dead stop at the curb directly before us, effectively walling us in. The way it had crept forward it seemed to have come from only a few yards away, as though it had been poised waiting there. I saw the driver jump down on the outside and run for his life, across the street and around the corner. The sedan’s furious horn-tattoo failed to halt his flight.

The big car they had me in was awkwardly stuck there, on the slant, just short of the entrance. It couldn’t go forward on account of the abandoned cab, it couldn’t detour around it on account of its own length of chassis, and the mechanic had sent down a sort of fireproof inner portcullis behind us, without waiting, keeping us from backing up.

They weren’t given much time for the implications of the predicament to dawn on them. Denny suddenly straightened up just outside the rear window on one side and balanced a gun over its rim. The precinct harness cop did the same on the opposite side. They had them between a threat of crossfire.

Denny said, “Touch the ceiling and swing out, one on each side.”

But he and the cop couldn’t control the man at the wheel — he was a little too far forward and they were wedged in too close. I saw his shoulder give a slight warning dip against the dashboard as he reached for something. I buckled one leg, knee to chin, and shot the flat of my shoe square against the back of his head. His face slammed down into the wheel. He didn’t want to reach for any more guns after that.

It took a little while to marshal them back upstairs, and send in word to Headquarters, and clean out the files and all the other evidence around the garage. They found traces of blood on the cement inner stairs, showing where Doyle had been knifed as he was trying to escape from the death interview with Scarjaw, kingpin of the dope ring.

Denny said to me while we were waiting: “A guy on the Narcotics Squad recognized this Doyle right away, even from the little I was able to give them over the phone. They’d picked him up several times already, and they were trying to dicker with him to get the names of the higher-ups he worked for. When I got back to the room, that open window on the third tipped me off which way you’d gone.

“From what Officer Kelly here had just finished telling me a little while before, I figured there was something fishy about this garage. He’d seen people drive up at certain hours to try to have their cars serviced, and they’d be turned away. And yet it was never particularly full of cars. I figured the smart thing to do was arrange a little reception committee at the street entrance, where they weren’t expecting it.”

The final word, however, wasn’t said until several hours later. He came out of the back room at Headquarters, near daylight, came over to where I’d been waiting. “You didn’t do it, Tom. It’s official now, if that’ll make you feel any better. We’ve been questioning them in relays ever since we brought them in, and we just finished getting it all down.”

He waved a set of typed sheets at me. “Here’s how it goes. Graz and his two lieutenants killed Doyle in the garage about midnight last night just around the time you were arriving at the Sorrells’ party with Fraser. That rooming house had already come in handy to them once or twice — it’s got a vicious name on the police records — so they used it again, for a sort of dumping ground.

“Graz sent one of his stooges around and had him take a room on the third floor, within easy access of the garage roof. That was just to obtain a convenient back way in. They smuggled the body across the roof and passed it in to the stooge through the window. But this stooge wasn’t supposed to take a murder rap, he was just acting as middleman. Graz himself went out looking for the real stooge, the stooge for murder — and that turned out to be you.

“Graz had been to those dizzy parties of the Sorrells before, so he knew all about them. He went there last night, picked you out, got you higher than a kite, brought you over to the rooming house in his car. He saw to it you were given a room on the second floor, directly under the one where the body lay waiting for transfer. Not only that, he had you sign for it for yourself and for Doyle, who was already dead. Doyle was supposed to be along in a minute or two.

“He got rid of the fellow in charge of the keys by sending him next door to the Silver Slipper for some coffee to ‘sober’ you up. By the time he got back with it, Doyle was already supposed to have shown up. The original stooge on the third floor spoke loudly to you to show there was somebody up there in the room with you. Graz said, ‘His friend’s up there with him now; he’ll be all right, so I’ll shove off.’

“Doyle had shown up, but in a different way. They’d carried him down the stairs from the third-floor room to your room with the bricked-up window. They wiped off the knife handle and planted it on you; they smeared your shirt front with Doyle’s blood. You were dazed, in no condition to notice anything that went on around you. Graz was careful to carry the coffee up only to the door, pass it in to you, come right down again, and leave. Doyle’s ‘voice’ still sounded up there with you in the room, for the fellow at the key rack to hear.

“You were given another whiff of coke to hold you steady for a while. Then the original stooge came down, presumably from the third floor, handed in his key, and checked out.

“You were left there drugged, with a murdered man in your room, his blood on your shirt, the knife that had been used concealed on your person in newspaper. You even helped the scheme out up to a point; you got the horrors, hid the body in the closet, locked it, and piled everything movable you could lay your hands on up against the door. Then you fled for your life.

“You got a small break, that wouldn’t have helped out in the end. The guy at the key rack must have been either dozing or out of his alcove again. I spoke to him just now, and he never saw you leave. That postponed discovery, but wouldn’t have altered anything.

“As I said, the subconscious is a great thing. In all your terror, and stupefied as you were, you somehow found your way back to where you lived. You didn’t wake up in the same room with the dead man, the way they were counting on your doing, and raise an outcry, and thereby sew yourself up fast then and there. You had a chance to talk it over with me first; we had a chance to put our heads together, without you being in the middle of it.”

It was getting light when we got back to our own place. The last thing I said to him, outside the door, was: “Tell the truth, Denny, up to the time it broke, did you really figure I did it?”

His answer surprised me more than anything else about the whole thing. “Hell, yes!” he said. “I would have eaten my hat that you did!”

“I did too,” I had to admit. “In fact, I was sure of it!”