Great American Detective Stories

I Won’t Take a Minute by Cornell Woolrich

This is the only DICK GILMAN story. But GILMAN is blood brother to BURGESS in Phantom Lady and DENNY in “Cocaine” and all the other hardheaded professionals who have enough humanity to believe the impossible. The terror of the impossible is Woolrich’s special field; and he’s played as many variations on the Lady-Vanishes situation as Ellery Queen has on the dying message or John Dickson Carr on the locked room. You’ll find this variation one of the most terrible, with that enormous impact of the everyday-gone-wrong that is peculiarly Woolrich: the story of a man who simply watched his girl go to deliver a parcel (she wouldn’t take a minute), and then — all at once, no Steffie.

She was always the last one out, even on the nights I came around to pick her up — that was another thing burned me up. Not with her of course, but with her job there. Well, she was on the last leg of it now, it would be over with pretty soon. We weren’t going to be one of those couples where the wife kept on working after the marriage. She’d already told them she was leaving anyway, so it was all settled. I didn’t blame her for hanging on up to the very end. The couple of extra weeks pay would come in handy for a lot of little this-ems and that-ems that a girl about to settle down always likes to buy herself (knowing she’s going to have a tough time getting them afterwards). But what got me was, why did she always have to be the last one out?

I picketed the doorway, while the cave-dwellers streamed out all around me. Everyone but her. Back and forth and back and forth; all I needed was a “Don’t Patronize” sign and a spiel. Finally I even saw the slave-driver she worked for come out, but still no her. He passed by without knowing me, but even if he had he wouldn’t have given me any sunny smiles.

And then finally she came — and the whole world faded out around us and we were just alone on the crowded sidewalk. I’ve heard it called love.

She was very good to look at, which was why I’d waited until I was twenty-five and met her. Here’s how she went: first a lot of gold all beaten up into a froth and poured over her head and allowed to set there in crinkly little curls. Then a pair of eyes that — I don’t know how to say it. You were in danger of drowning if you looked into them too deep, but, boy, was drowning a pleasure. Yes, blue. And then a mouth with real lines. Not one of those things all smeared over with red jam.

She had about everything just right, and believe me I was going to throw away the sales-slip and not return the merchandise once it got up to my house.

For trimmings, a dark-blue skirt and a short little jacket that flared out from her shoulders, and a kind of cockeyed tam o’shanter. And a package. I didn’t like the looks of that package.

I told her so the minute I stepped up and took off my hat, while she was still looking down the other way for me. “What’s that?”

She said: “Oh, Kenny, been waiting long? I hurried up all I could. This? Oh, just a package. I promised His Nibs I’d leave it at a flat on Martine Street on my way home.”

“But you’re not going home. I’ve got two ducats for ‘Heavens-abustin’ and I was gonna take you to Rafft’s for dinner first; I even brought a clean collar to work with me this morning. Now this is going to cut down our time for eating to a shadow—”

She tucked her free hand under my arm to pacify me. “It won’t take any time at all, it’s right on our way. And we can cut out the fruit-cup or something.”

“Aw, but you always look so classy eating fruit-cup,” I mourned.

But she went right ahead; evidently the matter had already been all settled between us without my knowing about it. “Wait a minute, let me see if I’ve got the address straight. Apartment 4F, 415 Martine Street. That’s it.”

I was still grouching about it, but she already had me under control. “What are you supposed to do, double as an errand-girl, too?” But by that time we were halfway there, so what was the use of kicking any more about it.

“Let’s talk about us,” she said. “Have you been counting the days?”

“All day. Thirteen left.”

“And a half. Don’t forget the half, if it’s to be a noon-wedding.” She tipped her shoulders together. “I don’t like that thirteen by itself. I’ll be glad when it’s tomorrow, and only twelve left.”

“Gee you’re cute,” I beamed admiringly. “The more I know you, the cuter you get.”

“I bet you won’t say that a year from now. I bet you’ll be calling me your old lady then.”

“This is it,” I said.

“That’s right, 415.” She backed up, and me with her. “I was sailing right on past it. See what an effect you have on me?”

It was the kind of building that still was a notch above a tenement, but it had stopped being up-to-date about 1918. We went in the outer vestibule together, which had three steps going up and then a pair of inner glass doors, to hold you up until you said who you were.

“All right, turn it over to the hallman or whoever it is and let’s be on our way.”

She got on that conscientious look that anything connected with her job always seemed to bring on. “Oh no, I’m supposed to take it right up personally and get a receipt. Besides, there doesn’t seem to be any hallman...”

She was going to do it her way anyway, I could see that, so there was no use arguing. She was bent over scanning the name-plates in the brass letter-boxes set into the marble trim. “What’d I say that name was again?”

“I dunno, Muller or something,” I said sulkily.

“That’s it. What would I do without you?” She flashed me a smile for a bribe to stay in good humor, then went ahead scanning. “Here it is. 4F. The name-card’s fallen out of the slit and gotten lost, no wonder I couldn’t find it.” She poked the button next to it. “You wait downstairs here for me,” she said. “I won’t take a minute.”

“Make it as fast as you can, will you? We’re losing all this good time out of being together.”

She took a quick step back toward me. “Here,” she said, “let this hold you until I come down again.” And that mouth I told you about, went right up smack against mine — where it belonged. “And if you’re very good, you may get a chaser to that when I come down again.”

Meanwhile the inner vestibule-door catch was being sprung for her with a sound like crickets with sore throats. She pushed it open, went inside. It swung shut again, cutting us off from one another. But I could still see her through it for a moment longer, standing in there by the elevator-bank waiting to go up. She looked good even from the back. When the car came down for her, she didn’t forget to turn around and flash me another heartbreaker across her shoulder, before she stepped in and set the control-button for the floor she wanted. It was self-service, nobody else in it.

The door closed after her, and I couldn’t see her any more. I could see the little red light that told the car was in use, gleaming for a few minutes after that, and then that went out too. And there wasn’t anything left of her.

I lit a cigarette and leaned against the right-hand wall waiting. Then my shoulder got tired and I leaned against the left-hand wall. Then my both shoulders got tired and I just stood up by myself in the middle.

I’ve never timed a cigarette. I suppose they take around five minutes. This one seemed to take longer, but then look who I was waiting for. I punched it out with my foot without bothering to throw it out through the door; I didn’t live there after all.

I thought: “Nice and fast. I mighta known it.” I thought: “What’s she doing, staying to tea up there?”

I counted my change, just to give myself something to do. I took off my hat and looked it over, like I’d never seen it before.

Things happened. Nothing much, little things that were to last so long. The postman came into the vestibule, shoved letters in here and there. 4F didn’t get any. He shifted his girth straps and went out again. A stout lady in a not-very-genuine fur coat came in, one arm full of bundles, and hauling a yowling little kid by the other. She looked to see if there was any mail first. Then she looked for her key, and it took a lot of juggling. Then she looked at me, kind of supercilious. If a look can he translated into a single word, hers said: “Loafer!” Meanwhile the kid was beefing away. He had adenoids or something, and you couldn’t tell if he was talking English or choking to death. She seemed to be able to tell the difference though. She said: “Now Dwight, I don’t want to hear another word! If pot cheese is good enough for your father, pot cheese is good enough for you! If you don’t hush up, I’ll give you to this man here!”

I thought: “Oh no you won’t, not with a set of dishes thrown in!”

After they’d gone in, more waiting started in. I started to trace patterns with my feet, circles, diagonals, Maltese crosses. After I’d covered about a block-and-a-half that way, I stopped to rest again. I started to talk to myself, under my breath. “Must be out of pencils up there, to sign the receipt with, and she’s waiting while they whittle out a new one! We’ll be in time for the intermission at the show—”

I lit another cigarette. That act, slight as it was, put the finishing-touch to my self-control. I no sooner finished doing it than I hit the opposite wall with it. “What the hell is this anyway?” It wasn’t under my breath any more, it was a full-toned yap. I stepped over, picked out 4F, and nearly sent the button through to the other side of the wall.

I didn’t want to go in, of course. I just wanted to tip her off I was still alive down here. Aging fast, but still in fairly usable shape. She’d know who it was when she heard that blast. So when they released the catch on the door, I intended staying right outside where I was.

But they didn’t. They were either ignoring the ring or they hadn’t heard it. I gave it a second flattening. Again the catch on the door remained undisturbed. I knew the bell wasn’t out of order, because I’d seen her give just a peck at it and the door-catch had been released for her. This time I gave it a triple-header. Two short ones and a long one, that went on for weeks. So long that my thumb joint got all white down to my wrist before I let go.

No acknowledgment. Dead to the world up there.

I did the instinctive thing, even though it was quite useless in the present case. Backed out into the street, as far as the outer rim of the sidewalk, and scanned the face of the building. There was just a checkerboard pattern of lighted squares and black ones. I couldn’t tell which windows belonged to 4F, and even if I could have it wouldn’t have done me any good unless I intended yelling her name up from the open sidewalk — and I didn’t yet.

But being all the way out there cost me a chance to get in free, and lost me some more valuable time in the bargain. A man came out, the first person who had emerged from inside since I’d been waiting around, but before I could get in there and push through in his wake, the door had clicked shut again.

He was a scrawny-looking little runt, reminded you of an old-clothes-man on his night off. He went on out without even looking at me, and I tackled the 4F bell some more, gave it practically the whole Morse Code.

I wasn’t frightened yet, just sizzling and completely baffled. The only thing I could figure, far-fetched as it was, was that the bell-apparatus had been on its last gasp when she rang it, and had given up the ghost immediately afterwards. Otherwise why didn’t they hear it, the kind of punishment I was giving it?

Then the first little trickle of fright-did creep in, like a dribble of Cold water down your back when you’re perspiring. I thought: “Maybe there’s some guy up there trying to get funny with her, that’s why the bell isn’t answered. After all, things like that do happen in a big city all the time. I better get up there fast and find out what this is!”

I punched a neighboring bell at random, just to get past the door, and when the catch had been released for me, I streaked into the elevator, which the last guy had left down, and gave it the 4-button.

It seemed to me to set a new record for slowness in getting up there, but maybe that was just the state of mind I was in. When it finally did and I barged out, I made a false turn down the hall first, then when I came up against 4B and C and so on, turned and went back the other way.

It was at the far end of the hall, at the back. The bell I’d rung was evidently on some other floor, for none of the doors on this one opened to see who it was. I went close against it and listened. There were no sounds of a scuffle and I couldn’t hear her saying “Unhand me, you brute!” so I calmed down by that much. But not all the way.

I couldn’t hear anything at all. It was stone-silent in there. And yet these flat-doors weren’t soundproof, because I could hear somebody’s radio filtering through one at the other end of the hall clear as day.

I rang the bell and waited. I could hear it ring inside, from where I was. I’d say: “Will you ask that young lady that brought a package up here whether she’s coming down tonight or tomorrow?” No, that sounded too dictatorial. I’d say: “Is the young lady ready to leave now?” I knew I’d feel slightly foolish, like you always do when you make a mountain out of a molehill.

Meanwhile, it hadn’t opened. I pushed the bell again, and again I could hear the battery sing out on the inside. I rapped with my knuckles. Then I rang a third time. Then I rattled the knob (as though that would attract their attention, if ringing the bell hadn’t!) Then I pounded with the heel of my hand. Then I alternated all three, the whole thing became a maelstrom of frenzied action. I think I even kicked. Without getting the results I was after — admittance.

Other doors began to open cautiously down the line, attracted by the noise I was making. But by that time I had turned and bolted down the stairs, without waiting for the paralytic elevator, to find the janitor. Fright wasn’t just a cold trickle any more, it was an icy torrent gushing through me full-force.

I got down into the basement and found him without too much trouble. He was eating his meal or something on a red-checkered tablecloth, but I had no time to assimilate details. A glimpse of a napkin tucked in collarwise was about all that registered. “Come up with me quick, will you?” I panted, pulling him by the arm. “Bring your passkey, I want you to open one of those flats!”

“What’s matter, something wrong?”

“I don’t like the looks of it. My girl took a package up — I’ve been waiting for her over twenty minutes and she never came down again. They won’t answer the bell—”

He seemed to take forever. First he stood up, then he finished swallowing, then he wiped his mouth, then he got a big ring of keys, then finally he followed me. As an afterthought he peeled off the napkin and threw it behind him at the table, but missed it. He even wanted to wait for the elevator. “No, no, no,” I groaned, steering him to the stairs.

“Which one is it?”

“It’s on the fourth floor, I’ll show you!” Then when we got up there, “Here — right here.”

When he saw which door I was pushing him to, he suddenly stopped. “That one? No, now wait a minute, young fellow, it couldn’t be. Not that one.”

“Don’t try to tell me!” I heaved exasperatedly. “I say it is!”

“And don’t you try to tell me! I say it couldn’t be!”

“Why?”

“I’ll show you why,” he said heatedly. He went ahead up to it, put his passkey in, threw the door open, and flattened himself to let me get a good look past him.

I needed more than just one. It was one of those things that register on the eye but don’t make sense to the brain. The light from the hall filtered in to make a threadbare half-moon, but to make sure I wasn’t missing any of it, he snapped a switch inside the door and a dim, leftover bulb somewhere further back went on flickeringly. You could see why it had been left in — it wasn’t worth taking out. It threw a watery light around, not much better than a candle. But enough to see by.

“Now! You see why?”

The place was empty as a barn. Unfurnished, uninhabited, whatever you want to call it. Just bare walls, ceiling, and floor-boards. You could see where the carpet used to go: they were lighter in a big square patch in the middle than around the outside. You could see where a picture used to go, many moons ago; there was a patch of gray wool-dust adhering like fiber to the wall. You could even see where the telephone used to go; the wiring still led in along the baseboard, then reared up to waist-level like a pothook and ended in nothing.

The air alibied for its emptiness. It was stale, as though the windows hadn’t been opened for months. Stale and dusty and sluggish.

“So you see? Mister, this place ain’t been rented for six months.” He was getting ready to close the door, as though that ended it; pulling it around behind his back, I could see it coming toward me, the “4F” stencilled on it in tarnished gold-paint seemed to swell up, got bigger and bigger until it loomed before me a yard high.

“No!” I croaked, and planted the flat of my hand against it and swept it back, out of his backhand grasp. “She came in here, I tell you!”

I went in a step or two, called her name into the emptiness. “Steffie! Steffie!”

He stayed pat on the rational, everyday plane of things as they ought to be, while I rapidly sank down below him onto a plane of shadows and terror. Like two loading platforms going in opposite directions, we were already miles apart, cut off from each other. “Now, what’re you doing that for? Use your head. How can she be in here, when the place is empty?”

“I saw her ring the bell and I saw the door open for her.”

“You saw this door?” He was obdurately incredulous.

“The downstairs door. I saw the catch released for her, after she rang this bell.”

“Oh, that’s different. You must have seen her ring some other bell, and you thought it was this one; then somebody else opened the building-door for her. How could anyone answer from here? Six months the people’ve been out of here.”

I didn’t hear a word. “Lemme look! Bring more lights!”

He shrugged, sighed, decided to humor me. “Wait, I get a bulb from the hall.” He brought one in, screwed it into an empty socket in the room beyond the first. That did for practically the whole place. It was just two rooms, with the usual appendages: bath and kitchenette.

“How is it the current’s still on, if it’s vacant?”

“It’s on the house-meter, included in the rent. It stays on when they leave.”

There was a fire-escape outside one pair of windows, but they were latched on the inside and you couldn’t see the seams of the two halves any more through the coating of dust that had formed over them. I looked for and located the battery that gave juice to the downstairs doorbell. It had a big pouch of a cobweb hanging from it, like a thin-skinned hornet’s nest. I opened a closet and peered into it. A wire coat-hanger that had been teetering off-balance for heaven knows how long swung off the rod and fell down with a clash.

He kept saying: “Now listen, be sensible. What are you a child?”

I didn’t care how it looked, I only knew how it felt. “Steffie,” I said. I didn’t call it any more, just said it. I went up close to him. He was something human, at least. I said, “What’ll I do?” I speared my fingers through my hair, and lost my new hat, and let it lie.

He wasn’t much help. He was still on that other, logical plane, and I had left it long ago. He tried to suggest we’d had a quarrel and she’d given me the slip; he tried to suggest I go to her home, I might find her there waiting for me.

“She didn’t come out again, damn you!” I flared tormentedly. “If I’d been down at the corner— But I was right at the front door! What about the back way — is there a back way out?”

“Not a back way, a delivery-entrance, but that goes through the basement, right past my quarters. No one came down there, I was sitting there eating my supper the whole time.”

And another good reason was, the stairs from the upper floors came down on one side of the elevator, in the front hall. Then they continued on down to the basement on the other side of it. To get down to there anyone would have to pass in front of the elevator, for its entire width. I’d been right out there on the other side of the glass vestibule-door, and no one had. So I didn’t have to take his word for it. I had my own senses.

“Is there a Muller in the house anywhere at all?”

“No, no one by that name. We never had anyone by that name in the whole twelve years I been working here.”

“Someone may have gotten in here and been lurking in the place when she came up—”

“It was locked, how could anyone? You saw me open it with the passkey.”

“Come on, we’re going to ask the rest of the tenants on this floor if they heard anything, saw her at all.”

We made the rounds of the entire five flats. 4E came to the door in the person of a hatchet-faced elderly woman, who looked like she had a good nose — or ear — for the neighbors’ activities. It was the adjoining flat to 4F, and it was our best bet. I knew if this one failed us, there wasn’t much to hope for from the others.

“Did you hear anything next-door to you within the past half hour?” I asked her.

“How could I, it’s empty,” she said tartly.

“I know, but did you hear anything — like anyone walking around in there, the door opening or closing, voices, or—” I couldn’t finish it. I was afraid to say “a scream.” Afraid she’d say yes.

“Didn’t hear a pin drop,” she said, and slammed the door. Then she opened it again. “Yes I did, too. Heard the doorbell, the downstairs one, ringing away in there like fifty. With the place empty like it is, it sounded worse than a fire-alarm.”

“That was me,” I said, turning away disheartenedly.

As I’d expected after that, none of the others were any good either. No one had seen her, no one had heard anything out of the way.

I felt like someone up to his neck in a quicksand, and going down deeper every minute. “The one underneath,” I said, yanking him toward the stairs. “3F! If there was anything to be heard, they’d get it quicker through their ceiling than these others would through their walls. Ceilings are thinner than walls.”

He went down to the floor below with me and we rang. They didn’t open. “Must be out, I guess,” he muttered. He took his passkey, opened the door, called their name. They were out all right, no one answered. We’d drawn another blank.

He decided he’d strung along with me just about far enough — on what after all must have seemed to him to be a wild goose chase. “Well,” he said, slapping his sides and turning up his palms expressively. Meaning, “Now why don’t you go home like a good guy and leave me alone?”

I wasn’t having any. It was like asking you to leave your right arm behind you, chopped off at the shoulder. “You go up and stick there by that empty flat. I’m going out and get a cop.” It sounds firm enough on paper, it came out plenty shaky and sick. I bounded down the stairs. In the vestibule I stopped short, punched that same 4F bell. His voice sounded hollowly through the interviewer after a minute-“Yuss?”

“It’s me. The bell works all right up there, does it?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, stay there. I’ll be right back.” I didn’t know what good that had done. I went on out, bareheaded.

The one I brought back with me wasn’t anything to rave about on the score of native intelligence. It was no time to be choosy. All he kept saying all the way back to the house was “All right, take it easy.” He was on the janitor’s plane, and immediately I had two of them against me instead of one.

“You saw her go in, did ye?”

I controlled myself with an effort. “Yes.”

“But you don’t know for sure which floor she got off at?”

“She rang 4F, so I know she got off at the fourth—”

“Wait a minute, you didn’t see her, did ye?”

“No, I didn’t see her.”

“That’s all I wanted to know. You can’t say for sure she went into this flat, and the man here says it’s been locked up for months.”

He rang every bell in every flat of the building and questioned the occupants. No one had seen such a girl. The pot-cheese lady with the little boy remembered having seen me, that was the closest he got to anything. And one other flat, on the fifth, reported a ring at their bell with no follow-up.

I quickly explained I’d done that, to gain admittance to the building.

Three out of the twenty-four occupancies in the building were out; IB, 3C and 3F. He didn’t pass them by either. Had the janitor passkey their doors and examined the premises. Not a trace of her anywhere.

That about ended his contribution. According to his lights he’d done a thorough job, I suppose. “All right,” he said, “I’ll phone it in for you, that’s the most I can do.”

God knows how he expressed it over the wire. A single plain-clothasman was dropped off at the door a few minutes later, came in to where the three of us were grouped waiting in the inner lobby. He looked me over like he was measuring me for a new suit of clothes. He didn’t say anything.

“Hello, Gilman,” the cop said. “This young fellow says he brought a girl here, and she disappeared in there.” Putting the burden of the proof on me, I noticed. “I ain’t been able to find anyone that saw her with him,” he added helpfully.

“Let’s see the place,” the dick said.

We all went up there again. He looked around. Better than I had, maybe, but just as unproductively. He paid particular attention to the windows. Every one of the six, two regular-size apiece for the two main rooms, one small one each for the bath and kitchenette, was latched on the inside. There was a thick veneer of dust all around the frames and in the finger-grips. You couldn’t have grabbed them any place to hoist them without it showing. And it didn’t. He studied the keyhole.

He finally turned to me and gave me the axe. “There’s nothing to show that she — or anyone else — ever came in here, bud.”

“She rang the bell of this flat, and someone released the doorcatch for her from up here.” I was about as steady as jello in a high wind about it. I was even beginning to think I could see a ghost in the corner.

“We’re going to check on that right now,” he said crisply. “There’s already one false ring accounted for, attributable to you. What we want is to find out if there was a second one registered, anywhere in the building.”

We made the rounds again, all twenty-four flats. Again the fifth-floor flat reported my spiked ring — and that was all. No one else had experienced any, for the past twenty-four hours or more. And the fifth-floor party had only gotten the one, not two.

That should have been a point in my favor: she hadn’t rung any of the other flats and been admitted from them, therefore she must have rung 4F and been admitted from there — as I claimed. Instead he seemed to twist it around to my discredit: she hadn’t rung any of the other flats and been admitted from them, and since there could have been no one in 4F to hear her ring and admit her from there, she hadn’t rung any bell at all, she hadn’t been admitted at all, she hadn’t been with me at all. I was a wack. Which gave me a good push in the direction of being one, in itself.

I was in bad shape by now. I started to speak staccato. “Say listen, don’t do this to me, will you? You all make it sound like she didn’t come here with me at all.”

He gave me more of the axe. “That’s what it does sound like to us.”

I turned northeast, east, east-by-south, like a compass on a binge. Then I turned back to him again. “Look.” I took the show-tickets out of my pocket, held them toward him with a shaky wrist. “I was going to take her to a show tonight—”

He waved them aside. “We’re going to build this thing from the ground up first and see what we’ve got. You say her name is Stephanie Riska.” I didn’t like that “you say.”

“Address?”

“120 Farragut.”

“What’d she look like?”

I should have known better than to start in on that. It brought her before me too plainly. I got as far as “She comes up to here next to me—” Then I stopped again.

The cop and janitor looked at me curiously, like they’d never seen a guy cry before. I tried to turn my head the other way, but they’d already seen the leak.

The dick seemed to be jotting down notes, but he squeezed out a grudging “Don’t let it get you,” between his eye-tooth and second molar while he went ahead doing it.

I said: “I’m not scared because she’s gone. I’m scared because she’s gone in such a fairy-tale way. I can’t get a grip on it. Like when they sprinkle a pinch of magic powder and make them disappear in thin air. It’s got me all loose in the joints, and my guts are rattling against my backbone, and I believe in ghosts all over again.”

My spiritual symptoms didn’t cut any ice with him. He went right ahead with the business at hand. “And you met her at 6:15 outside the Bailey-Goodwin Building, you say, with a package to be delivered here. Who’d she work for?”

“A press-clipping service called the Green Star; it’s a one-man organization, operated by a guy named Hessen. He just rented one dinky little rear room, on the ground floor of the Bailey-Goodwin Building.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know myself. She tried to explain it to me once. They keep a list of clients’ names, and then they sift through the papers, follow them up. Any time one of the names appears, in connection with any social activity or any kind of mention at all, they clip the item out, and when they’ve got enough of them to make a little batch, they send them to the client, ready for mounting in a scrap-book. The price for the service is about five bucks a hundred, or something like that.”

“How is there any coin in that?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t know myself, but she was getting twenty-two a week.”

“All right. Now let’s do a little checking.” He took me back with him to where she worked, first of all. The building was dead, of course, except one or two offices, doing night-work on the upper floors. He got the night-watchman, showed his credentials, and had him open up the little one-room office and let us in.

I’d never been in the place myself until now. I’d always waited for her outside at the street-entrance at closing time. I don’t think it was even intended for an office in the first place; it was more like a chunk of left-over storage-space. It didn’t even have a window at all, just an elongated vent up near the ceiling, with a blank shaft-wall about two feet away from it.

There was a flat-topped desk taking up one side, his I guess, with a phone on it and a wire paper-basket and nothing else. And a smaller-size “desk,” this time a real table and not a desk at all, with nothing on it at all. The rest was just filing cabinets. Oh yeah, and a coat-rack. He must have been getting it for a song.

“What a telephone-booth,” remarked the dick.

He looked in the filing-cabinets; they were just alphabetized names, with a scattering of newspaper-clippings distributed among them. Some of the names they didn’t have any clippings for, and some of the letters they didn’t even have any clients for — and I don’t mean only X.

“There’s about a hundred bucks’ worth of clippings in the whole kitty,” Gilman said, “at your own estimate of what the charge was.” He didn’t follow up with what he meant by that, and I was too worried about her to pay any attention to his off-side remarks. The only thing that meant anything to me was, there was nothing around the place to show him that she had ever worked here or even been here in her life. Nothing personalized, I mean. The single drawer of the little table just had a pair of shears for clipping and a pot of paste for mounting, and a stack of little salmon-colored paper mounts.

The night-watchman couldn’t corroborate me, because the place was always locked up by the time he came on-shift. And the elevator-runners that worked the building in the daytime wouldn’t have been able to either, I knew, even if they’d been on hand, because this hole-in-the-wall was on a branch-off of the main entrance-corridor, she didn’t have to pass the cars on her way in from or out to the street, so they’d probably never seen her the whole time she’d worked here.

The last thing he did, after he’d gotten Hessen’s name and address, which was readily available in the place itself, was to open a penknife and cut a notch from the under-side of the small table. At least, it looked like he was doing that from what I could see, and he kept his back to me and didn’t offer any explanation. He thumbed me at the door and said, “Now we’ll go out there and hear what he has to say.” His tone held more of an eventual threat in it toward me than toward her employer though, I couldn’t help noticing.

It was a bungalow-type place on the outskirts, and without being exactly a mansion, it wasn’t low-cost housing. You walked up flat stones to get to the door, and it had dwarf Japanese fir-trees dotted all around it.

“Know him?” he said while we were waiting.

“By sight,” I swallowed. I had a feeling of that quicksand I’d been bogging into ever since she’d left me in the lobby at Martine Street, being up to my eyes now and getting ready to close over the top of my head. This dick mayn’t have taken sides yet, but that was the most you could say; he certainly wasn’t on my side.

A guy with a thin fuzz on his head, who looked like he belonged to some unhealthy nationality nobody ever heard of before, opened the door, stepped in to announce us, came back and showed us in, all in fast time.

A typewriter was clicking away busily somewhere near at hand, and I thought it was him first, her boss, but it wasn’t. He was smoking a porcelain-bowled pipe and reading a book under a lamp. Instead of closing the book, he just put his finger down on the last word he’d read to keep his place, so he could go right ahead as soon as this was over with. He was tall and lean, with good features, and dark hair cut so short it just about came out of his scalp and then stopped.

Gilman said; “Did you ever see this young fellow before?”

He eyed me. He had a crease under one eye; it wasn’t a scar so much as an indentation from digging in some kind of a rimless glass. “No-o,” he said with a slow benevolence. A ghost of a smile pulled at his mouth. “What’s he done?”

“Know anyone named Muller, at 415 Martine Street?” There hadn’t been any Muller in the filing-cabinets at the office.

“No-o, I don’t know anyone by that name there or anywhere else. I think we have a Miller, a Mrs. Elsie Miller on our list, who all the time divorces and marries. Will that do?” He sighed tolerantly. “She owes us twenty-nine dollars.”

“Then you didn’t send a package over to Muller, Apartment 4F, 415 Martine Street, at 6:15 this evening?”

“No,” he said again, as evenly as the other two times. I started forward spasmodically. Gilman braked me with a cut of his hand. “I’m sure I didn’t. But wait, it is easy enough to confirm that.” He raised his voice slightly, without being boorish about it. And right there in front of me, right there in the room with me, he called — “Stephanie. Stephanie Riska, would you mind coming in here a moment?”

The clicking of the typewriter broke off short and a chair scraped in the next room. “Steffie,” I said huskily, and swallowed past agony, and the sun came up around me and it wasn’t night any more, and the bad dream was over.

“My assistant happens to be right here at the house tonight; I had some dictation to give her and she is transcribing it. We usually mail out clippings however, only when there is an urgent request do I send them around by personal messen—”

“Yes sir?” a velvety contralto said from the doorway.

I missed some of the rest of it. The lights took a half-turn to the right, streaking tracks across the ceiling after them like comet-tails, before they came to a stop and stood still again. Gilman reached over and pulled me up short by the coatsleeve, as though I’d been flopping around loose in my shoes or something.

She was saying, “No, I don’t believe I do,” in answer to something he had asked her, and looking straight over at me. She was a brunette of an exotic foreign type, and she came up as high as me, and the sun had gone out again and it was night all over again.

“That isn’t Steffie!” I bayed. “He’s calling somebody else by her name!”

The pupils of Hessen’s eyes never even deflected toward me. He arched his brows at Gilman. “That is the only young lady I have working for me.”

Gilman was holding me back with sort of a half-nelson. Or half a half-nelson. The brunette appeared slightly agitated by my outburst, no more. She hovered there uncertainly in the doorway, as though not knowing whether to come in or go out.

“How long have you been working for Mr. Hessen?” Gilman asked her.

“Since October of last year. About eight months now.”

“And your name is Stephanie Riska?”

She smiled rebukingly, as if at the gratuitousness of such a question. “Yes, of course.” She decided to come a little further forward into the room. But she evidently felt she needed some moral support to do so. She’d brought a small black handbag with her, tucked under her arm, when she left the typewriter. She opened it, so that the flap stood up toward Gilman and me, and plumbed in it for something. The two big gold-metal initials were so easy to read, even upside-down; they were thick, bold Roman capitals, S. R. The bag looked worn, as though she’d had it a long time. I could sense, rather than see, Gilman’s mind’s eye turned accusingly toward me: “What about it now?” though his physical ones were fastened on the bag.

She got what she was looking for out of it, and she got more than she was looking for. She brought up a common ordinary stick of chewing-gum in tin-foil, but she also accidentally brought up an envelope with it, which slipped through her fingers to the floor. She was very adroitly awkward, to coin a phrase.

Gilman didn’t exactly dive for it, but he managed to get his fingers on it a half-inch ahead of hers. “Mind?” he said. I read the address on it with glazed eyes, over his shoulder. It had been postmarked and sent through the mail. “Miss Stephanie Riska, 120 Farragut Street.” He stripped the contents out of it and read the single sheet of note-paper. Then he gravely handed it back. Again I could feel his mind’s eye on me.

She had broken the stick of chewing-gum in half, put part between her lips, and the rest she was preparing to wrap up in tin-foil again for some other time. She evidently didn’t like to chew too much at a time.

Gilman absently thumbed a vest-pocket as though he would have liked some too. She noticed that. “May I offer you some?” she said gravely.

“I wish you would, my mouth’s kind of dry.” He put the second half-piece in his own trap. “And you didn’t deliver a package for Mr. Hessen at 415 Martine Street this evening?” he said around it.

“No, sir, I did not. I’m afraid I don’t even know where Martine Street is.”

That about concluded the formalities. And we were suddenly outside again, him and me, alone. In the dark. It was dark for me, anyway. All he said when we got back in the car was: “This ‘girl’ of yours, what kind of gum did she habitually chew, wintergreen or licorice or what have you?”

What could I tell him but the truth? “She didn’t use gum, she detested the habit.”

He just looked at me. Then he took the nugget he’d mooched from the brunette out of his mouth, and he took a little piece of paper out of his pocket that held another dab in it, and he compared them — by scent. “I scraped this off that desk in the office, and it’s the same as what she gave me just now. Tutti-frutti. Not a very common flavor in chewing-gum. She belongs in that office, she parked her gum there. She had a letter addressed to herself in her handbag, and the initials on the outside checked. What’s your racket, kid? Are you a pushover for mental observation? Or are you working off a grudge against this guy? Or did you do something to some little blonde blue-eyed number and are you trying to pass the buck in this way before we even found out about it?”

It was like a ton of bricks had landed all over my dome. I held my head with both hands to keep it in one piece and leaned way over toward the floor and said, “My God!”

He got me by the slack of the collar and snapped me back so viciously it’s a wonder my neck didn’t break.

“Things like this don’t happen,” I groaned. “They can’t. One minute all mine, the next she isn’t anywhere. And no one’ll believe me.”

“You haven’t produced a single person all evening long that actually laid eyes on this ‘blonde girl’ of yours,” he said hard as flint. “Nowhere, d’you understand?”

“Where’d I get the name from then, the address?”

He looked at me when I said that. “I’ll give you one more spin for your money. You stand or fall by the place she lived.” He leaned forward and he said “120 Farragut” to the driver. Then he kept eyeing me like he was waiting for me to break down and admit it was a hoax or I’d done something to her myself, whoever she was.

Once he said, “Remember, this girl at his place had a letter, three days old, addressed to her, giving this same address were heading for now. If you still want to go through with it...”

“I took her home there,” I said.

“Parents?”

“No, it’s a rooming-house. She was from Harrisburg. But the landlady— He—” Then I went, “O-oh,” and let my head loll limply back against the back of the seat. I’d just remembered he’d recommended the place to her.

He was merciless, noticed everything. “D’ye still want to make it there — or d’ye want to make it Headquarters? And the tougher you are with me, the tougher I’m going to be with you, buddy.” And his fist knotted up and his eyes iced over.

It was a case of self-preservation now. We were only minutes away. “Listen. Y’gotta listen to me. She took me up one night, just for a minute, to lend me a magazine she had in the room. Y’gotta listen to this, for heaven’s sake. Sticking in the mirror of the dresser she’s got a litho of the Holy Mother. On the radiator she’s got a rag doll that I won for her at Coney Island.” I split open my collar in front trying to bring it all back. “On a little shelf against the wall she’s got a gas-ring, with a tube running up to the jet. From the light-fixture to that jet there runs a string, and she’ll have stockings hanging from it to dry. Are you listening? Will you remember these things? Don’t you see I couldn’t make all these things up? Don’t you see she’s real?”

“You almost persuade me,” he said half under his breath. Which was a funny thing coming from a detective. And then we got there.

We stepped down and went in. “Now if you open your mouth,” he said to me, teeth interlocked, “and say one word the whole time we’re in here, I’ll split your lip so wide open you’ll be able to spit without opening your mouth.” He sent for the landlady. I’d never seen her before. “Y’got a girl named Stephanie Riska living in your house?”

“Yep. Fourth-floor front.” That was right.

“How long?”

“Riska?” She took a tuck in her cheek. “She’s been rooming with me now six months.” That was right too.

“I want to know what she looks like.” He took a wicked half-turn in my arm that dammed up the blood.

“Dark hair, sort of dark skin. About as tall as this young fellow you got with you. She talks kind of husky.”

“I want to see her room. I’m the police.” He had to practically support me all the way up the four flights of stairs.

She threw open a door, gave it the switch. I came back to life enough to open my eyes. On the mirror, no picture. On the radiator, no rag doll. On the shelf no gas-ring, but a row of books. The jet had no tube plugged-in, was soldered-over with lead. No string led from it to the light. No nothing.

“Has she always had it fixed this way?” Gilman asked.

“Always since the first day she’s here. She’s a real clean roomer, only one thing I got to complain about— There it is again.” She went over to the washstand and removed a little nugget of grayish substance that had been plastered to the underside of it. But she smiled indulgently, as though one such peccadillo were permissible.

Gilman took it from her on a scrap of paper, shifted it from left to right across his face. “Tutti-frutti,” he said.

“Look out, you better hold your friend!” she exclaimed in sharp alarm.

He swung me so that instead of going down flat, I landed against him and stayed up. “Let him fold,” he said to her. “That isn’t anything to the falls he’s going to be taking five or ten minutes from now.” And we started down the stairs again, with two pairs of workable feet between the three of us.

“What’d he do, murder her?” she breathed avidly on the way down.

“Not her, but I got a good hunch he murdered someone — and picked the wrong name out of a hat.”

She went: “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. He don’t look like—”

I saw some rheumatic lodger’s knotty walking-stick up-ended out of a brass umbrella-stand at the foot of the stairs. As he marched me by, I was on that side, luckily. I let my right arm fall behind us instead of in front of us where it had been — he didn’t have me handcuffed yet, remember — and the curved handle of the stick caught in my hand, and it came up out of the holder after me.

Then I swung it and beaned him like no dick was ever beaned before. He didn’t go down, he just staggered sidewise against the wall and went, “Uff!”

She was bringing up in the rear. She went, “Oh!” and jumped back. I cleared the front steps at a bound. I went “Steffie! Steffie!” and I beat it away in the dark. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t care, I only knew I had to find her. I came out so fast the driver of the headquarters-car we’d left at the door wasn’t expecting me. I’d already flashed around the corner below before his belated “Hey, you!” came winging after me.

I made for the Martine Street flat. That was instinctive: the place I’d last seen her, calling me back. Either the car didn’t start right up after me or I shook it off in my erratic zigzag course through the streets. Anyway I got there still unhindered.

I ganged up on the janitor’s bell, my windpipe making noises like a stuffed drainpipe. I choked, “Steffie!” a couple of times to the mute well-remembered vestibule around me. I was more demented than sane by now. Gilman was slowly driving me into the condition he’d already picked for me ahead of time.

The janitor came up with a sweater over his nightshirt. He said, “You again? What is it — didn’t you find her yet? What happened to the other fellow that was with you?”

“He sent me back to take another look,” I said craftily. “You don’t have to come up, just gimme the passkey.”

He fell for it, but killed a couple of valuable minutes going down to get it again. But I figured I was safe for the night; that it was my own place, across town, Gilman would make a beeline for.

I let myself in and fit it up and started looking blindly all around — for what I didn’t know, where a professional detective had been over this ground once already and gotten nothing. The story-book ending, I kept looking for the story-book ending, some magic clue that would pop up and give her back to me. I went around on my hands and knees, casing the cracks between the floorboards; I tested the walls for secret panels (in a $50-a-month flat!); I dug out plaster with my bare nails where there was a hole, thinking I’d find a bullet, but it was only a mouse-hole.

I’d been in there about ten minutes when I heard a subtle noise coming up the hall-stairs outside. I straightened to my feet, darted through the door, ran down the hall to the stairs. Gilman was coming up, like thunder ’cross the China Bay, with a cop and the janitor at his heels. It was the fool janitor’s carpet-slippers, which had no heel-grip, that were making more noise than the other two’s shoes put together. Gilman had tape on the back of his skull and a gun in his hand. “He’s up there now,” the janitor was whispering. “I let him in about ten minutes ago; he said you sent him.”

I sped up the stairs for the roof, the only way that was open to me now. That gave me away to them, and Gilman spurted forward with a roar. “Come down here you, I’ll break every bone in your body! You won’t live to get to Headquarters!” The roof-stairs ended in a skylight-door that I just pushed through, although it should have been latched on the inside. There was about a yard-high partition-wall dividing the roof from the next one over. I tried to clear it too fast, miscalculated, and went down in a mess, tearing a hole in my trouser-knee and skinning my own knee beneath. That leg wouldn’t work right for a minute or two after that, numb, and before I could get upright again on it and stumble away, they were out on me. A big splatter of white shot ahead of me on the gravelled roof from one of their torches, and Gilman gave what can only be described as an Iroquois war-whoop and launched himself through space in a flying tackle. He landed crushingly across my back, flattening me a second time.

And then suddenly the rain of blows that I’d expected was held in check, and he just lay inert on top of me, doing nothing. We both saw it at the same time, lying on the roof there a few yards ahead of us, momentarily played up by the cop’s switching torch, then lost again. I could recognize it because I’d seen it before. The package that she’d brought over here tonight.

“Hold that light steady!” Gilman bellowed, and got off of me. We both got over to it at the same time, enmity forgotten. He picked it up, tore open the brown paper around it, and a sheaf of old newspapers slowly flattened themselves out. With squares and oblongs scissored out of them here and there. She hadn’t been sent over with clippings, but with the valueless remnants of papers after the clippings had already been taken out. It was a dummy package, a decoy, used to send her to her — disappearance.

The rest of it went double-quick — or seemed to. It had built up slow; it unraveled fast.

“Someone did bring a package here tonight, kid,” was the way he put it. “And if I give you that much, I’ll give you the whole thing on credit alone, no matter what the odds still outstanding against it are. Blonde, really named Stephanie Riska, works for Hessen, lives at 120 Farragut, never chews gum, and all the rest of it. Come on. My theory in a pinch would be she was jumped from behind outside the door of that vacant flat before she had a chance to cry out, spirited up over this roof, down through the next house and into a waiting car-while you hugged the vestibule below. Calhoun, call in and have someone get out there fast to Hessen’s house, Myrtle Drive, and keep it spotted until we can get out there. I want to take another crack at that office first.”

On the way over I gasped, “D’you think they—?”

“Naw, not yet,” he reassured me. “Or they would have done it right in the empty flat and let you take the rap.” Whether he meant it or not I couldn’t tell, so it didn’t relieve me much.

The second knot came out in the office. I went over the little table she’d used, while he turned the filing-cabinets inside-out. Again our two discoveries came almost simultaneously. “Look!” I breathed. It was stuck in a crack in the floor, hidden by the shadow of the table. A gilt hairpin she must have dropped one time at her work. Such as no brunette like the one Hessen had showed us at his house would have ever used in her life. “Blonde, all right,” he grunted, and tipped me to his own find. “I muffed this before, in my hurry: about every third name in this card-index of ‘clients’ has a foreign mailing-address. Neutral countries, like Switzerland and Holland. Why should they be interested in social items appearing in papers over here? The mere fact that they’re not living here shows the items couldn’t possibly refer to them personally. If you ask me, the guy’s an espionage-agent of some kind, and these ‘clippings’ are some kind of a code. With a scattering of on-the-level ones interspersed, to cover up. But that’s a job for the FBI. I’m only interested in this girl of yours. My lieutenant can notify their local office about the rest of it, if he sees fit.

“The second leg of my theory,” he went on, as we beat it out of there fast, “is she found out something, and they figured she was too dangerous to them. Did she say anything to you like that?”

“Not a word. But she had told him she was quitting end of next week to get married.”

“Well, then she didn’t find out anything, but he thought she did, so it amounted to the same thing. He could not afford to let her quit. And did he cover up beautifully, erase her existence! They only slipped up on that package. Maybe some tenant came up on the roof to take down her wash, before they could come back and pick it up, so they had to leave it there, rather than risk being identified later. Come on, we’ll stop off at that rooming-house on the way, I want that landlady picked up. She’s obviously one of them, since he recommended the girl there as a lodger in the beginning. Changed the whole room around, even to sticking a wad of tutti-frutti gum on the washstand.”

“Let’s go,” I cried.

A second knot came out at the rooming-house, but it was simply a duplicate of the one at her office: confirmation of the color of her hair. “A girl shampoos her hair once in a while,” he said to me, and stuck a matchstick down the drain of the washbasin. He spread something on a piece of paper, showed it to me: two unmistakably blond hairs. “Now why didn’t I think of that the first time?” He turned the steel-plated landlady over to a cop to be sent in, and we were on our way again — this time out to the Myrtle Drive house, fast.

There was no sign of the guy he’d sent out ahead of us to keep it cased, and he swore under his breath, while my heart deflated. The place was dark and lifeless, but neither of us was foolish enough to believe they’d gone to bed yet. He took the front door and I took the back, with a gun he furnished me — he was on my side now, don’t forget. We blew the locks simultaneously and met in the middle of the hall that ran through the place. In three minutes we were downstairs again. Nothing was disturbed, but the birds had flown; suave Hessen, and the butler, and the pinch-hitting brunette. No incriminating papers, but a very incriminating short-wave set. Incriminating because of the place it was located. It was built into the overhead water-tank of a dummy toilet, not meant to hold water or be used. Gilman made the discovery in the most natural way possible.

“Spy-ring, all right,” he grunted, and phoned in then and there from the place itself.

That wasn’t getting me back Steffie. I was in such a blue funk that I didn’t notice it as soon as I should have; I mean, something had seemed to tickle my nostrils unpleasantly the whole time we were in there. It only registered after I came out into the open again with him, and we stood there crestfallen in front of it. Before I could call his attention to it, headlights slashed through the dark and a car drew up in front.

We crouched back, but it was only the spotter that was supposed to have been hung up there before. Gilman rushed him with a roar. “What the hell’s the idea? You were supposed to—”

“I tailed ’em!” the guy insisted. “They piled into a car, locked up the house, and lit. I tailed ’em the whole way, those were the only orders I got!”

“Where’d they go?”

“Pier 07, North river. They boarded some kind of a fuzzy tramp-steamer, and it shoved off in less than a quarter of an hour later. I tried to reach you at Head—”

“Was there a blonde girl with them?” Gilman rapped out.

“No, just the three that were in the house here when I first made contact; the two men and a dark-haired girl. There was no one else smuggled aboard ahead of them either; I pumped one of the crew—”

“Oh no they’re not,” Gilman promised viciously. “They may have cleared the pier; a police-launch can pull them off again at Quarantine.” He spilled in the house again, to phone in the alarm.

I went after him; that was when I again noticed that unpleasant tickling. I called his attention to it when he got through on the wire. “Don’t it smell as though they’ve had this place fumigated or some—”

He twitched the end of his nose. Then his face got drab. “That’s gasoline!” he snapped. “And when you smell it that heavy — indoors like this — it’s not a good sign!” I could tell he was plenty scared all at once — which made me twice as scared as he was. “Bill!” he hollered to the other guy. “Come in here fast and give us a hand! That girl they didn’t take with them must be still around these premises someplace, and I only hope she isn’t—”

He didn’t finish it; he didn’t have to. He only hoped she wasn’t dead yet. I wasn’t much good to them, in the sudden mad surge of ferreting they blew into. I saw them dimly, rustling around, through a sick haze.

He and I had been over the house once already — the upper part of it — so they found the right place almost at once. The basement. A hoarse cry from Gilman brought myself and the other guy down there after him. I couldn’t go all the way, went into a paralysis halfway down the stairs. She was wedged down out of sight between two trunks, she’d been loosely covered over with sacking. I saw them lifting her up between them, and she carried awfully inert.

“Tell me now,” I said, “don’t wait until you get her—” I waited for the axe to fall.

“She’s alive, kid,” Gilman said. “Her chest’s straining against the ropes they’ve got around—” Then he broke off, said to the other guy, “Don’t stop to look at her now, hurry up out of here with her! Don’t you hear that ticking down around here someplace, don’t you know what that gasoline-reek means—?”

I was alive again; I jumped in to help them, and we got her up and out of the cursed place fast. So fast we were almost running with her.

We untied her out by the car. She was half-dead with fright, but they hadn’t done anything to her, just muffled her up. The other guy wanted to go back in again and see if they could locate the bomb, but Gilman stopped him. “You’ll never make it, it’ll blow before you—”

He was right. In the middle of what he was saying, the whole house seemed to lift a half-foot above its foundations, it lit up all lurid inside, there was a roar, and in a matter of minutes flame was mushrooming out of all the lower-story windows.

“An incendiary-bomb,” Gilman said. “Turn in a fire-alarm, Bill, that’s about all we can do now.” He went off someplace to use a phone, and when he came back some time later, he had a mean face. A face I wouldn’t have wanted to run up against on a dark night. I thought he’d heard bad news. He had — but not for us. “They got ’em,” he said. “Yanked ’em off it just as the tub was clearing the Narrows. They’re earmarked for the FBI, but before we turn them over, I wouldn’t be surprised if they show wear and tear— She is pretty at that, kid.”

She was sitting there in the car by now, talking to me and crying a little. I was standing on the outside of it. I was standing up, that was my mistake.

“Well, I gotta go,” I heard him say. And then something hit me. It felt like a cement-mixer.

Our roles changed. When my head cleared, she was the one bending over me, crooning sympathetically, “—and he said to tell you, No hard feelings, but when anyone socks Dick Gilman on the head with a walking-stick, they get socked back even if they’re the best of friends. And he said he’d see us both down at Headquarters later in the night, to be sure and get there on time if we don’t want to miss the fun.”

I was still seeing stars, but I didn’t care, I was seeing her too. And now it was only twelve days off, we’d licked the thirteenth.