Into the Night

Madeline first saw her one night at a place called the Intime. She was the singer there. She had a small combo of three backing her up, piano, traps, and bass. She was the singer there, and she was good.

There was a sort of narrow platform or balcony running along one side of the room just a little above head level, and she was on it, hands on railing, looking down on the listeners. A pencil spotlight from the other side of the room measured off her face with the exactitude of a white mask, leaving not a sixteenth of an inch of light over, leaving her throat and shoulders and arms and dress in smoky brown dusk.

Singing of love, of love lost. There was that utter velvet hush that means complete command of the listeners.

Couples side by side, holding hands, heads nestled on shoulders, believing it, drinking it in, living it. No one in the place was too much over thirty. It was for the young. The operator had had a good idea there, and Madeline caught on at once what it must have been.

People with a lot of money to spend on their night life go to one of the big flashy clubs with their dance floors, chorus lines, and twenty-piece bands. People with no money to spend on their night life go to the bar on the corner and watch TV with their neighborhood friends around them. But there is an in-between group that doesn’t fall into either category. The young engaged couples and the young married pairs, still wrapped in rosy mists of love, still believing in it, still wanting to hear it sung. This place was for them and the buck or two they had to spend; Madeline could see them all around her, stars in their eyes, cheek pressed to cheek, dreaming their dreams. They’d come back again and they’d bring their friends, others of their own kind: the young-and-in-love. Mr. Operator had a built-in patronage. Young Mr. and Mrs. Tomorrow. Yes, he had a good gimmick there.

Throughout the song and the two or three that followed, she kept thinking, But this isn’t enough. How do I get to know her? Get to really know her? Send her a fan note, saying I admire her, want to meet her? That’s only good for a smile, a handshake, a few polite phrases, and then I’m expected to be on my way again. When men want to meet a performer, they became stage-door Johnnies. That’s what I’ll do she decided. Become something on that order, but with a slightly different purpose in mind. I’ll become a stage-door Jenny.

She waited just long enough to gauge the applause. It wasn’t thunderous, it wasn’t crashing, it wasn’t that kind of place. But it was warm and friendly, like soft summer rain belting a tin shed. They liked her, which is always half the battle.

From the outside the place was so inconspicuous you could easily have missed it. There was no canopy, no doorman, no conveyor belt of arriving or departing taxis. There was a very modest neon in handwriting script that spelled “Intime” over the door and to one side a sandwich board on an easel that simply said “Adelaide Nelson, song-stylist,” and had her photograph on it and the name of the combo, “The Partners Three.”

After a few minutes of standing about uncertainly in front of the place, she got a cab by forfeit, so to speak. One drove up, unloaded, and she got in and sat down before the seat was even cool.

The driver finally glanced around inquiringly, after waiting for her to give the destination of her own accord.

“I’m waiting for someone to come out,” she told him, “so just stand awhile. Do you see that vacant slot up past the car just ahead of us? See if you can slide in there; that’ll leave the entrance clear.”

He did so, with a dexterity and sleekness only a professional cabman could have shown. That took her out of the direct line of Adelaide Nelson’s vision when she would come out. She tested for range of visibility on several people who came out ahead, and found she could see them perfectly at that distance by looking through the rear window with a half turn of her head.

The driver smoked and toted up his logbook.

She just sat watching and waiting.

“Turn out the light,” she said suddenly.

Adelaide Nelson had a fur scarf slanted carelessly over one shoulder, and no hat. Madeline got a perfect look at her. She had the same wait Madeline had had. At one point she even started up toward the cab Madeline was in, although its dome light was plainly off. Madeline cowered back into a corner. Before the woman could reach Madeline’s cab, another one came gliding by, and she hailed and stepped into that instead.

Madeline said, “See that cab that woman just got into right in back of us? Just follow that the rest of the way from here.”

“One of those things,” he said noncommittally.

“You don’t have to crowd it, but don’t lose it either.”

He was one of those rhythm drivers. He’d learned to time himself and space himself so that he took each light just before it changed, didn’t have to stop once.

The lead cab got blocked off by a transverse bus at one crossing and lost the light, so he had to let himself lose it too and stay back in company with it. After that, the beat was lost and neither one of them got across a single light without stopping. But they both stayed together on the same block each time.

The pilot cab finally stopped, Adelaide Nelson got out, transacted her fare, and went inside a building under a long dark green sidewalk canopy.

“What’s the number on that?” Madeline asked, peering closely at it.

“Two-twenty.”

She’d already made it out for herself by that time.

“All right, now you can keep going.” She gave him her own address, the residential hotel where she’d taken a room.

“That was it?” he asked blankly.

“That was it.”

She knew more was coming. It did.

“She take your fellow away from you, is that the angle?”

“I don’t have any fellow to take. And if I did, and he took that easy, she could keep him.”

The papier-mâché briefcase she’d bought in Woolworth’s. The musical score sheets she’d bought at a music store. The notes on the score sheets were her own. Poor things but her own, she’d reflected as she set them down, and that wasn’t kidding.

She knew piano, in a very circumscribed, lesson-a-week-at-the-age-of-twelve sort of way. And she could hum, who can’t? And she knew that in a lyric the end word on every second line has to rhyme with the end word two lines before, but the in-between lines don’t have to. Which is about as far as some songs go, anyway. But she wasn’t interested in salability, just plausibility. Getting to know a woman.

The door opened, and they were close to each other for the first time.

At such point-blank range, Adelaide’s makeup was a caricature. But it wasn’t individual personal makeup, it was performing makeup, Madeline realized, so that had to be allowed for. A pair of artificial eyelashes, superimposed on her own with no regard for nature, stuck out all around her eyes like rays in a charcoal drawing of the sun. A bouquet in which alcohol and floral essence strove for mastery was distinguishable for several yards around on all sides of her. Her hair was frizzy to the point of kinkiness, and the color of ginger. Combing it must have been like trying to comb a bramble bush. She had a pair of untrue blue eyes, which probably deepened almost to green when she hated. She probably hated a lot. She had on some sort of a hip-length quilted coat and a pair of quarter-thigh-length shorts, both white. Her feet were bare, and her toenails, Madeline noted, were painted gold.

There was something defiant about her as she stood there; not specifically toward Madeline, toward the world in general. Don’t touch me or I’ll claw you; an air like that.

“You the one?” she said. “I thought you were a man, the way the note read.”

“I thought I stood a better chance that way,” Madeline admitted.

“You did,” Adelaide told her bluntly. “Come on in anyway,” she added gruffly, “and let’s see what your stuff is like.”

She flung herself backward into a chair, but from the side, so that one leg caught over its arm and remained that way, cocked out at an angle from her body. She began to riff through the score sheets. She did remarkable things with a mouthful of smoke; protruded her underlip and sent it up in a jet so perpendicular that it actually stirred her hair a little where it over-hung her forehead on that side.

“Not bad for a title,” she remarked, and repeated it aloud. “‘Have a Heart (Take Mine).’”

She got up and went over to the piano. Leaning over it standing up, she took one finger and started to tap out the notes on the keyboard. She shook her head dizzily, as if to clear it of the disharmony, and started over again. Shook her head again and stopped.

“What’ve you got here?” she growled. “This stuff doesn’t even jell.”

A sudden thought occurred to her. “Maybe I’m holding it upside down,” she remarked, and reversed it on the music rack. Then she turned it back again. “No, the clef signs are all pointing this way.”

She gave Madeline a long, skeptical stare. “Didja ever study composition?” she demanded.

“Not exactly,” Madeline said. “All my friends say it comes naturally to me.”

“Oh it does?” Adelaide snapped. “Well, take my tip and send it right straight back again. I don’t know what it is you’re getting, but it sure isn’t music. I think it’s the Morse code in Slovakian.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you don’t know the least thing about music,” Adelaide snapped. “You think all you have to do is throw a handful of notes on the page and they come out a song. That’s not the way it works, any more than you can throw paint on a canvas and get the ‘Mona Lisa.’”

“I worked hard on that song,” Madeline protested.

“Oh yeah? The way it looks to me, you don’t know what hard work is. I knew a man once who was a physics teacher. He said there’s a formula for work. I said sure, two parts elbow grease and one part sweat. But he told me the formula and it stuck. You know what it is?”

Madeline waited.

“Force times distance. In other words, it’s not just how hard you push something. It’s also how far you move it. If you push with all your strength against a wall, and it doesn’t move an inch, you haven’t performed any work And this” — she brandished the score sheets — “this doesn’t move anything. It certainly doesn’t move me.”

“I don’t understand,” Madeline said. “When you talk about walls—”

“You’re beating your head against one,” Adelaide said briskly, “if you expect to get anywhere with this. And you’re wasting my time.”

It’s your song, Madeline told herself. You’ve got your whole life tied up in it and this woman just told you it’s no good. This is your chance. If you can’t win her with the song, win her with the way you feel about it.

She willed her face to sag in disappointment. “I’m very sorry,” she said stiffly, reaching to gather the score sheets and take them from Adelaide. “I certainly had no intention of wasting your time.”

She walked to the door, turned the knob, drew it open. She turned, looking on the verge of tears. “Thanks anyway,” she managed, her voice breaking on the second word, and then she was through the door and drawing it shut behind her.

A moment or two passed. She heard the knob start to work around, as the door was about to open once more. She quickly planted her forearm against the wall and buried her face in it, in an attitude of crushed, heartbroken youthful despondency. She even made her shoulders quiver a little, as if with soundless sobs.

The door opened, and she knew Adelaide was standing watching her.

“Kid.” Adelaide’s husky voice softened a little. At least, insofar as it was capable of softening. “Sorry I was so rough on you, kid. Forget about it, and come on back in. I won’t buy your songs, but I’ll buy you a drink on the house. It’s a lonely, dreary Tuesday afternoon.”

Madeline slowly prepared to unearth her face and turn it, giving herself time to form a timid, tremulous smile on it. But underneath she was exultant. She was In.

Women can often form friendships with one another far more easily and far more quickly than men can. For one thing, their egos are less brittle, less ready to take offense and bridle at some misconstrued word or action. Once the pact is a fact, has been accepted, they are less inclined to stand on their dignity with one another, they show far less reserve toward one another. That is because a number of the precipitant factors producing this are lacking. They are seldom if ever financially jealous of one another per se, and by the same token are apt to be more trustworthy financially with regard to one another. The throat-cutting urge of business is lacking.

It was pity that opened Adelaide to the possibility of friendship with Madeline, pity combined with the guilt she felt over her outburst. But pity and guilt can only sustain a relationship for a certain amount of time before the object of pity becomes the object of resentment for having burdened the other party with an unpleasant emotion. In this case, the two women moved quickly past the stage of pity and guilt to the foundation of a deeper relationship.

Madeline realized, as she came to know Adelaide, that she filled a need the other woman had for a friend. She was someone to talk to, someone to confide in. At the same time, she was someone to lead and to instruct, someone to whom Adelaide could feel superior.

“Call me Dell,” she told Madeline early on. “What’s Adelaide, anyway? A city in Australia. I bet you’ve never been to Australia.”

“You’re right.”

“Neither have I, but I’ve been enough places to know I don’t have to go there. You know why? Because all places are the same. Or, even if they’re different, I’m the same person wherever I go. And the life I’d find there would be the same life I fall into wherever I go. There’d be the same kind of men, even if they spoke with different accents. They’d want the same thing from a girl and offer the same thing in return as they do here. I’d be singing the same songs and hearing the same line of crap from everybody I met.”

“You sound bitter,” Madeline offered.

“Do I? That’s good news. You’re better off being bitter than sweet. If you’re sweet, the world’s full of people looking to eat you up. When you’re bitter enough, they take one taste and walk away.”

“And that’s what you want?”

“That’s how I stay alive,” Dell said.

While friendship softened Dell’s attitude toward Madeline, it didn’t make her change her mind about the music Madeline had written. “These aren’t songs,” she said flatly. “From the looks of what you’ve done, you don’t know anything about putting a melody line together, let alone figuring out the chords. If you had a great sense of melody, you could get somebody else to work out the chords and do up a lead sheet, but I don’t see any of that here. Why are you so hipped on writing songs, anyway?”

“It just feels like something I have to do.”

“Yeah,” Dell said. “Well, I can understand what that feels like. Anything that gets in your blood that way, it’s hard to find a way to say no to it. If you’re lucky, the desire and the talent come in the same package. But some unlucky people get the one without the other. Of course, if you get the talent and not the desire, it’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world. I knew a girl, I swear she had a voice like an angel. Unbelievable pipes. And not just the raw material. Her phrasing, her timing, everything was right about her. Everything but one thing.”

“What was that?”

“She didn’t have the desire. She didn’t care about it. She could have been a headliner right off the bat, and she probably could have made it big. Records, television, maybe even the movies. She had that kind of talent. But without the drive she didn’t put up with the crap that’s part of the business, and you know what happened to her?”

“What?”

“She met a real nice guy and married him, and the only singing she does now is to her husband and her kids, and she’s living in a house in the suburbs and happy as a clam. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s what happens when you got the talent and not the drive. When it’s the other way around, you got a lifetime of disappointment. Well, what the hell — that’s what you get when you’ve got the drive and the talent, too, because this is a business where even the winners lose most of the time. But at least there are a few victories along the way, something to keep your hopes up.”

“And I don’t have any talent?”

“Not in the music department. But I’ll tell you something, much as I hate to encourage you—”

“What?”

“Some of your lyrics aren’t so bad. None of ’em really work, because a lyric can’t exist in a vacuum. A lyric’s not a poem, it’s the verbal part of a song, and it has to be suited to a melody. A really good lyric, even when it’s all by itself, has a melody locked up inside it waiting for a composer to find it and yank it out. You don’t have lyrics in that sense, but you’ve got bits and pieces that show a certain flair.”

“Like what?”

Dell thumbed through Madeline’s papers. “Well, like this,” she said. “‘You and I together all alone, in a little country of our own, where the population’s only two.’ That’s just a fragment, but there’s something about it I like. But that doesn’t mean it’s a lyric yet.”

“Maybe I can work on it.”

“Maybe you can, but I don’t know why you’d want to bother. When you stop to think about it, all songs say the same thing. They all tell you love’s wonderful, one way or another. Some say it hurts and some say it’s a picnic, but they all think it’s what makes the world go round. You think the world needs to hear that message again?”

It was funny, she thought, how quickly Dell sought to erase the sensitive side of herself. She couldn’t say a nice word about a partial lyric without wiping it out with a bitter sarcastic comment in the next breath. What Madeline came to realize was that there were two Dells. The worldly cynical brassy Dell was onstage most of the time, but there was always the other Dell waiting in the wings.

The other Dell was quieter, less forceful. And this other Dell spoke so seldom, spoke so little, that you wanted to hear every word she said. She was dead, had been killed off, would never be alive, and you wanted to know as much about her as you could.

“There was Johnny Black. He wrote the biggest hit of its day, ‘Dardanella.’ They took it away from him. Or at least, moved in on it, cut in on it. To get it published, he had to let them tinker, rearrange a note or two. All to get their split. You know that long, mournful wail that starts up in the verse, and then dies down again? And then starts up, and then dies down again. Every time I hear it, I think it’s Johnny Black, moaning in his grave because they cut his heart out.

“There was Byron Gay. He died dead broke. Twenty years after he was gone, somebody dug up one of his numbers. It was called ‘Oh!’ Just ‘Oh!’ Probably the shortest song title on record. It made twenty-five thousand dollars in one season. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer corpse.

“It’s a tough business. A bitch of a tough business. Don’t let yourself be hooked into it. Marry, and have a school bus full of kids. You strike me as more that type.”

And then at another time, in self-contradiction, she would say: “It has its moments of sudden inspiration, too, that make all the rest of it worthwhile, I guess.

“Like the struggling young songwriter who got caught in a rainstorm on the streets of New York one day. He ducked into the nearest hotel lobby to get in out of the wet, and while he was sitting there waiting it out, he overheard a wife say to her husband, ‘Hasn’t it let up? Can’t we leave yet?’ The husband turned around from the window he was looking out of and said, ‘In just a few more minutes. Wait till the sun shines, Nellie.’

“Or the time Rodgers and Hart were in a near car collision in Paris, and one of the girls with them put her hand over her rib cage and gasped, ‘My heart stood still!’”

In all of us, Madeline thought broodingly, there are two. The one we might have been, the one we are.

There was a shrewd side to Dell, as there is to many women who appear at first sight to live by frivolity alone. It was more than just shrewdness, she had an excellent business head. Granting her original premise of getting something for nothing (and is that so foreign to business?), she took it the rest of the way from there with an acumen that would have met with the approval of any board of directors.

Showing off a solitaire one day, breathing on it lovingly, then frictioning it against her sleeve to polish it, she remarked idly, “This has about two weeks to go.”

“What d’you mean? You give them back?” Madeline asked in surprise.

Dell arched her eyebrows in rebuke. “Be sensible,” she admonished her. “Only the weak in the head do that.

“That old song Carol Channing used to sing,” she went on. “‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ that’s the bunk. Not so. You can hoard them for twenty years, and what have you got? Still diamonds. They’re beautiful, but they don’t work for you. And anything that doesn’t work for you isn’t really beautiful at all, is it? Put it this way: AT&T pays three point six a year. Diamonds pay exactly oh point oh a year. Diamonds don’t feed the kitty.

“So here’s what I do. I have a sort of special personal friend—” She interrupted herself to laugh at herself. “Well, he’d have to be a special personal friend, wouldn’t he? — who comes up with a piece of this stuff every now and then. On special occasions. Like Christmas, like a birthday. I give it a run of about two months, and then when he’s good and used to seeing it on me and doesn’t pay any more attention to it, I take it off display. I take it down to a diamond broker I know, he puts it up for sale, takes his commission, and I collect the balance. I take a beating every time, but I don’t mind that. For instance, a piece worth two thousand, I’m glad to take twelve hundred for. You never can get back the full price. Then I take my twelve hundred, which is now all clear, to another special friend I have, this one’s an investment broker, and he buys me a hunk of U.S. Steel or General Motors or some other blue chip with it. I put it away and forget about it, and it starts working for me from then on. So when I wind up someday with too much rust in my pipes to go on singing, and when the men don’t turn up anymore with the diamonds, I’ll have enough money coming in to keep body and soul together.”

“You’ve got it figured out,” Madeline said admiringly.

“You’ve got to, the way life is. You know that song Billie Holiday sang? ‘God Bless the Child Who’s Got His Own.’ God, it tears me up, the way she sang that song. She didn’t just sing it, you know. She wrote it. She wasn’t a songwriter, nobody who sings like that should have to do anything but sing, but she wrote that song. And before she wrote it, she did something else.”

“What?”

“She lived it. ‘God bless the child who’s got his own.’ You can’t wait for other people to give it to you, you can’t live on crusts of bread from other people’s sandwiches. ‘God bless the child who’s got his own.’ If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re always going to be the kid outside the candy store, nose against the glass, looking in, wondering why everybody else has got the candy and all you’ve got is a cold nose and an appetite.”

Later, she asked Dell how her gentleman friend would feel if he knew she sold his gifts.

“Take it from me,” Dell said, “he doesn’t want to know. Because if he knew, he’d think he had to be upset about it, but why should he? He gives me diamonds because he can’t give me money because that would give our relationship a name neither of us wants it to have. But what’s a diamond beside money disguised as beauty? He could give me fake jewelry and it would look the same when I wore it. Diamonds are an acceptable way for him to give me money, and if I invest that money instead of wearing it, all I’m being is smart. But he wouldn’t like it if he knew, because it would mean looking at something he doesn’t want to see.”

“And God bless the child,” Madeline said.

“Amen to that. You know how to write a song? Start off with a feeling — your own feeling, not one you got secondhand from a song. Something you feel as deeply as Lady Day felt that song. Then write a lyric that’s so good it’s got the melody curled right up inside it.”

“I’d have a better chance,” Madeline said, “if I had a piano. That’s why my melodies are so bad. I’m trying to hear the notes in my head. If I had a piano, I could sound them out, write down the melodies that I hear instead of guessing at them.”

“So save your pennies and buy yourself a piano.”

“I haven’t got enough pennies. And even if I did, I don’t have room for a piano. I was thinking—”

“Oh?”

“There’s plenty of time when you’re not here,” she said. “If I could come here when you’re out, not all the time but whenever I’ve got something I want to work out on the piano all by myself. If I did that, I think I could come up with some lead sheets that wouldn’t look like the Morse code in Slovakian.”

“Was that what I called your song? Yeah, I guess it was.”

“And if I came up with something decent, you’d get first crack at it. Since you’d be helping me with it, you could even be coauthor, in case the song turned out to be a big hit and other singers covered it.”

Dell shook her head. “I thought I was good at building castles in the air,” she said. “You not only build them, you turn around and start renting out rooms. Here you haven’t even written the song yet and you’ve got it on the Top Forty and the two of us splitting the royalties. What is it you want, exactly? I hope you’re not looking to move in here because I don’t want roommates.”

“Just a key to the apartment,” Madeline said. “I’d call first, to make sure you weren’t home.”

“I should hope so. The last thing I need is somebody walking in at the wrong moment.”

“I’d be very careful,” Madeline said dutifully.

“All right, it’s a deal,” Dell said. “You can have my duplicate key. On one condition. Anything missing it’s understood you take direct personal responsibility for and make good on it.”

“I agree,” Madeline said.

“Here’s the key, then.” Dell went over to her dressing table, opened a drawer, took the key out, and tossed it into Madeline’s lap.

“I’m not Santa Claus,” she let her know. “I might get a good workable song out of this yet, at that. For peanuts.”

After a good thorough wall-to-wall casing on the occasion of her first two visits in Dell’s absence, which revealed very little or nothing that she didn’t already know, she didn’t bother going there with any great regularity anymore. Paradoxically, and against all expectation, she found she stood to learn a great deal more when Dell was present, sousing and chattering away, than from her muted — and carefully sterilized — surroundings when she was absent. They had nothing to tell, no voice in which to tell it. What could they show her? A double strip of purple stamps in a desk drawer, a bottle of amber Chanel on a dressing-table top. A jigger of aspirin on a medicine cabinet shelf. A quart of the ubiquitous Canadian Club in the refrigerator, along with a six-pack of Heineken for those who were tapering off. Even her little blue booklet for telephone numbers, hanging by a loop beside the instrument itself, was chastely discreet. A liquor store. A music publisher. An all-night delicatessen, for those four-in-the-morning snacks — with whom? The place where she bought her shoes. Not a personal name in it.

Smart; she must have kept them all in her head.

People didn’t seem to write to Dell to any very great extent. Not because they were afraid to, probably, as much as because the world in which she and they moved was too swift to wait for letters to catch up. A phone call said everything that needed to be said. Yesterday’s keenness for a get-together, by the following day might already have cooled to disinterest, or somebody else might have come along in the meantime.

There were no photographs of the two principals in her present life, nor of her former husband either, the man who had later married Starr, but then this last wasn’t to be wondered at. She’d probably torn them all up at the time of the debacle — as Starr herself, apparently, had torn up the one in her room when things unraveled later.

There was a whole row of medical bills, all from the same doctor. The first had just the amount. The second had “Please” added to it in handscript. The third bore an imploring “Third notice.” The final one had the sum x-ed off, and the notation “How about tonight?” in its place.

“So that’s how she took care of that,” Madeline caught on with a sudden flash of wry insight.

She left little notes on the piano a couple of times after having been there. “Was here. Had workout. Mad.” And one time, just to make it sound plausible, “Is ‘The Blues I Get from You’ a good title?”

The next day there was a curt answering note from Dell, left in the same place. “Can it. I don’t do blues, remember? If you’re going to work at my piano, do material I can use, at least!”

Madeline thumbed her nose at it.

Madeline knew a time would come when she’d start talking about her former husband, and that time came. If a woman loves a man, she is bound to talk about him sooner or later to her confidante. If a woman hates a man, she is equally bound to talk about him sooner or later. She wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t. She wouldn’t have loved, she wouldn’t have hated, if she didn’t.

Madeline bided her time, threw out no leads, dropped no hints, planted no verbal traps. It would be freer, fuller, if it came by itself. It came by itself.

She was browsing through sheets of music one day, looking for something new to break into her repertoire. She came to one and she started to hum her way through it. Then she broke off and put it down so sharply it almost amounted to slapping it against the piano top. Madeline looked up at the sound. She could make out the title on the cover, upside down, from where she was. “That Old Feeling.”

“No good?” she asked.

“Too good,” Dell said. “It’s more than a song, it’s an actual experience. I know, because I’ve been through it. I saw you last night and I got that old feeling.” She turned to Madeline. “What the hell,” she said. “You don’t want to hear this.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why? Just because I pick up some sheet music and get in a mood? That doesn’t mean I have to tell you a sad story and bring us both down.”

“Sometimes it helps to tell it to another person, whatever it is,” Madeline said. “To get it off your own chest.”

“And onto yours instead? What’s the point?”

“That’s what friends are for.”

“Don’t give me that,” Dell snapped. “I don’t know what friends are for, but it’s not to listen to all the garbage people got locked up in their hearts. Maybe it’s what psychiatrists are for, but not friends. So why should you listen? What’s in it for you?”

Madeline shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get a song out of it.”

“A song?”

“Or an idea for a song.”

“I told you,” Dell said. “You don’t get the good ideas by looking inside other people. You get ’em by looking inside yourself.”

“Maybe looking inside other people, or listening to what’s inside other people, is a way I can find out what’s inside myself.”

Dell thought about that. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “That makes sense. Well, I can stand it if you can. But I’m warning you, you might want to pick up a violin and accompany me. It’s that kind of a story.”

“Sad, huh?”

“It’s the story of a marriage,” Dell said. “There are two kinds of marriages. Bad ones and imaginary ones, because the real ones aren’t good and the good ones aren’t real.” She shook her head. “I don’t know where to start.”

“How did the two of you meet?”

“We first met at the mail desk of the Eastland Hotel in Portland, Maine. We were both up there on our time off. All I wanted was my key. Instead, the clerk handed me a message. Before I even looked at it I said, ‘This can’t be for me, I don’t know anyone in this town!’ I was right. It was for some Swede named Miss Nilson and they’d put it in the wrong box. The ‘i’ was looped, looked like an ‘e.’

“He smiled at me, and I let him. He began to talk, and I let him. I liked him almost from the minute he first began to talk. Before we separated he said, ‘Now you can’t say you don’t know anyone in this town anymore.’

“The next night he came over to me in the lobby, and took me into one of the lounges, and bought me a drink. The night after, he bought me dinner. When time was up, we came back to the city separately, but we had arranged to meet again after we returned, and we did. By that time, I was in love with him already. He wasn’t in love with me, I see that now. I was the one way out in front all through the whole thing. But we both made the same mistake: we both mistook my love for him for a return love on his part. When he kissed me, he was only answering my kisses, not giving me originals. When he held me in his arms, he was only completing the half circle of my own embrace. On the strength of this illusion, we got married; he said the words, I put them into his mind.

“It was a bad risk from the start. I was safe only as long as he still hadn’t come up with a love of his own. When he did, and it hit him, I was all screwed up.

“It hit him about two and a quarter years after we were married. Twenty-seven months; that would be about right. We got along very well, those first twenty-seven months. He didn’t even know he didn’t love me. For that matter, I even forgot about it myself, I was so taken up in loving him.

“I can’t pinpoint exactly when she came along. I’m not that good. She didn’t break one of those electronic beams that open or close a door, her arrival wasn’t that precisely registered. But somewhere between the twenty-sixth and the twenty-eighth month she came along.

“The one thing I can’t explain now is how I knew. There was some subtle change in him. I knew what it was then, and looking back now I know that I knew then, but I still can’t say how I knew, any more than I could at the time.

“She was young, I knew that about her too. I saw him glance at a girl of eighteen or nineteen when I was with him on the street one day. He wasn’t interested in her per se, it was a speculative look, so I knew that he must have been comparing her to this other one, and I knew by that that this other one must be around the same age, eighteen or nineteen. Even in a love affair, detective work can be brought into play.

“Pretty soon I knew everything about her, everything but her actual face and her actual name. I knew almost as soon as it happened when they had begun loving up together.

“I used to sit by the hour, thinking, Maybe there’s still some way I could win him back. Maybe it’s not too late even yet. It’s happened before. It’s happened to others. Why not to me?

“Yes, but how? I’d say to myself each time. How? I was never able to get past that ‘how?’

“Then one night something happened that gave me an idea, and I thought I saw the way. I was sitting there alone, watching TV and yet not paying any attention to it, both at the same time, when the phone rang. It was a man, and he had the wrong number. He asked if Miss Somebody-or-other was there. I said, ‘Nobody by that name lives here.’ It turned out our two numbers were identical but for the two last digits, and even those were the same but in opposite order. He’d gotten them transposed, and gotten me by mistake. He excused himself and got off, and that’s all there was to it.

“But I started to think about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt it might be the very thing I’d been looking for. Jealousy. Try jealousy. Patience hadn’t worked, lack of opposition hadn’t worked. If I raised hell and stormed at him, I’d only lose him all the quicker. But maybe jealousy would do the trick. Maybe if he felt that somebody else wanted me, even though he no longer did, I would look good to him again. Men were funny that way: what the other guy didn’t want, they didn’t want either; there must be something the matter with it. What the other guy wanted, they wanted too; there must be something good about it. They were like sheep. Or I suppose I should say, wolves.

“It took me almost a week to get up enough courage to try it. I thought about it all the time, but I still didn’t do anything about it. I used to try to visualize his face on the night he would come home and find out I’d been carrying on behind his back. Stunned, first. Then angry. Maybe he’d even slap me. Maybe he’d swear me out, call me all those low-down names they call their women when they catch them cheating. I hoped so, how I hoped so. Anything, anything would be better than this indifference.

“On the day of the night that he would next be seeing her (and I told you, I was as sure of them as I was of my own birthdays) I went out and bought a few necessary props, I guess you might call them. Things I didn’t habitually buy.

“I went into a cigar store and I asked the clerk for the name of a good, expensive brand of cigar.

“‘Garcia y Vega,’ he said. ‘Twelve-fifty a box.’

“‘I don’t want a whole box,’ I said. ‘Just let me have two.’

“He put them into a small bag for me and remarked, ‘Your husband’s going to like these.’

“My husband, I said to myself, is not going to like these, is what I hope.

“From there I went into a package store and bought a half pint of bourbon, which was the smallest amount I could get. Since it wasn’t intended for drinking, there was no use spending too much money on it.

“I tried to think of what else might conjure up a fictitious masculine presence, but nothing further would come readily to mind. I was determined to make this as realistic as possible, no holds barred.

“There was a little elderly man, well, I should say about sixty, on the late-afternoon to late-evening elevator shift in our building. All the others were youngsters. I went outside to the hall and rang for him, after he’d come on, and handed him the two cigars with one of the strangest requests I bet he’d ever had yet from a woman tenant.

“‘Smoke these,’ I said, ‘but be sure you bring me back the butts. I want both butts back. And not too... er... soggy, if you can help it.’

“He did a very good job of covering up whatever surprise he must have felt. ‘Will tomorrow be all right?’ he asked. ‘I’ll smoke one when I get my coffee break at six, and I’ll save the other for tonight when I get home—’

“‘No, no, no!’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve got to have them both back, and no later than five-thirty. You’ll have to work it out the best you can.’

“‘It’s kind of heavy smoking,’ he said dubiously.

“I went inside and got the rest of the stage setting ready. I got out two highball glasses and poured about an inch of the whiskey in each one. Then I stood them side by side, very close together, on our knee-high refreshment table in the front room. Then I filled a big bowl with ice cubes, and ran hot water over them from the faucet, so they looked like they’d been slowly melting away for hours. Then I got hold of all the cushions in the room and scattered them all around that one particular place on the sofa opposite where the drinks were, throwing some on the floor, to make it look like there’d been quite a hot thing going on there.

“I went into the bedroom and I took particular pains with the bed. I pulled it all apart first, so that it looked like an earthquake had hit it. Then I telescoped the two pillows one on top of the other, and kept punching my hand into them until I had a big hollow in their centers. Then I got out a pair of my pink nylon underpants and shoved them down underneath between the sheets, but letting them show just enough. I mean, even beds that had had it happen didn’t look that realistic.

“I disarranged my hair a little bit, but not to an extreme, because the first thing a woman will do is see to her hair, no matter how preoccupied she is or was. I put on more lipstick than I usually use, and then I took a Kleenex and purposely smeared it offside from one corner, as though I’d been wildly kissed. Then I took the whiskey bottle, and using it like you do toilet water, put a drop here and a drop there and a drop behind each ear. The rest I sprinkled all over the carpet, so that I had the room smelling like a distillery.

“The bell rang and Dave had brought back the two cigar stubs sitting atop an empty envelope. ‘I kept one going on top a corner of the mailbox in the lobby,’ he said, ‘and the other on top a fire extinguisher on the fourteenth floor, and every time I had the car empty I’d step out and take a few puffs. But I feel kind of bilious. I never smoked two at once like that before.’

“I tipped him for his trouble and took the cigars. I balanced one on a tray beside the two whiskey glasses. I took the other one into the bedroom and put that in a tray right next to the bed. To get any closer it would have had to be in the bed.

“Then I sat down and waited. Waited for him to come home and be jealous. And be interested again in me.

“It would have been just the kind of luck I ran in not to have him come home at all, after I’d gone to all that trouble. He often stayed out like that on nights when he was seeing her; went straight from work to pick her up for dinner or whatever it was they had on, throwing me a terse ‘Staying downtown tonight. Be back later on’ by phone on his way over. He couldn’t have made those messages more impersonal if he’d tried — he even left out the I’s and You’s. And never even a reason given anymore. I wasn’t even worth lying to!

“But I got a break in this one small thing at least, if nothing else. A taxi stopped at the door and I saw him step out and come into the building.

“I stood up and got on cue for the curtain to rise.

“He put his key to the door and opened it, and I gave a startled little hitch, as if I’d been taken by surprise. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I didn’t expect you so soon.’

“‘When did you expect me?’ he said, with complete neutrality, complete disinterest.

“I saw that he had as little an eye for the room as he had for me, and he was going to miss the whole thing if I didn’t point it up to him.

“I rounded my mouth, drew in my breath, clapped my hand over it, glanced over at the cigar butt, then quickly away from it, and tried to look confused. I thought I did a pretty good job. It wasn’t an easy multiple play to make, all more or less at one time.

“He’d noticed the direction my eyes had taken, and he looked there himself, and finally spotted the debris of the rendezvous.

“I’m giving it to you just as it happened, blow by blow. If I had any pride I guess I’d lie a little, try to dress it up. But I didn’t then and I don’t now, not where he’s concerned.

“He grinned at me. Not sarcastically, even. Not maliciously. Nothing like that. Grinned good-naturedly, amiably, almost the way he would have grinned at another man whom he’d caught in an embarrassing moment.

“‘Who’s your new friend?’ he said. And then, starting to unfasten his necktie, he went on into the bedroom without wasting any more time on it.

“I heard him exclaim ‘Wow!’ in there. And there was laughter in his voice.

“‘Glad you’re happy,’ he called out to me. ’Cause I’m happy too. This way we’re all happy, the whole four of us.’

“And with that he started running the shower and taking a quick shave, so he could go right back to her again.

“I just stood there rooted; wilted and ashamed. And the blush that might have helped out when I did that bit of playacting a few moments before was all over my face now when I didn’t need it anymore. I could feel myself burning up with it.

“When he came out into the bedroom again and was changing over to a new shirt and necktie, he started to whistle. It wasn’t bravado, it wasn’t making fun of me, wasn’t derision. It was completely natural. I could tell, I could tell by the sound of it. He probably didn’t even know he was doing it at all. He’d already forgotten what he’d seen, it didn’t mean anything to him, didn’t exist.

“He was whistling his own happiness.

“He shrugged into his jacket, and he walked with a lilt and a bounce over to the door, and not a word passed between us, not a look, not a care. And the door closed after him.

“My head just went over, a notch at a time, lower, and lower, and lower, like something with a run-down spring.

“I was no good as a faithful wife. And I was no good even as an unfaithful wife.”

She threw her arms wide apart, and there was indescribable pathos in her voice. “What the hell was I good for, anyway?

“He came back real late again, and got in next to me. I kept my face pressed to the pillow. He snapped on the bedside lamp for just a second, I guess to see what time it was. And that cold cigar butt was still there in the tray, where I’d put it.

“He put the light right out again, but in the dark I heard him give a chuckle, deep down in his throat.”

“I could tell when he’d been with her. A wife always can. The little signs, telltale little signs that give a man away, if you know what to look for. Tired, indolent, exhausted, all vitality spent; lying there like a log beside me, not even knowing I existed. A certain peaked expression, a hollowness in the cheeks and at the temples, that was gone again inside twenty-four hours. To come back once more inside forty-eight. Circles under the eyes, which I knew he hadn’t gotten from me.”

She smiled in retrospect. It was a sad smile, remembering a sad thing.

“What was the good of saying anything? Would that have stopped it? Has it ever stopped it yet? But I knew, I knew. Oh, how I knew. He might just as well have brought me photographs.

“First it was hit or miss, haphazard, like at the beginning of any affair. Then it went into a regular rhythm, almost like a married couple. Three times a week. Never missed. They were the married couple, and I was the outsider, living under his name.

“Why does it matter so much,” she asked Madeline rhetorically, “that your husband is sleeping with another woman? I wondered then and I wonder now. He slept with other women before you met him, and you know he did, and that doesn’t bother you. I guess because she’s taking away something that is yours now, belongs to you. Before that, he was nobody’s, it hurt nobody. And there’s so much more than just the physical that you’re being robbed of. The intimate, confidential things that are said at those times, and not at any other time. She’s the recipient of them now, not you. The plans that are made at those times, the innermost thoughts that are revealed, the love names and love words that are spoken, all of them go to her now, not to you.

“You just stand there. A door has closed between you now. He’s on one side, you’re on the other. You can’t get through. Not all the keys, not all the pounding with your hands, not all the hammers, not all the axes, can make it open or break it open.

“So what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You live with it. Live with it as best you can. A few of us do away with ourselves. Not most of us, though. That’s for high-strung young girls that are just beginning the game, have no inner resources yet to fall back on.

“Then one day he comes to you about it. He comes to you, you don’t go to him.

“One day he comes to you. One night, rather. You’re lying there awake, with the lights out. You’re always lying awake with the lights out. He lies there, and he thinks. You lie there, and you think. But the two chains of thought don’t mesh anymore like they used to.

“He says quietly, ‘Dell, are you awake?’

“You say just as quietly, ‘I’m awake, Vick.’

“‘I want to talk to you.’

“Your heart starts going like the sweep hand of a watch. This is it. At last. Finally. Here it is.

“‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘I don’t know where to start.’ What do you say to that? You don’t say anything at all. You just lie there and let him work it out for himself. Half hoping he’ll forget the whole thing.

“But he doesn’t.

“He says, ‘Dell, we’ve had some good times. Haven’t we?’

“You don’t answer. It’s not the sort of question that requires an answer.

“‘But something’s changed,’ he goes on. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s not your fault. If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s my fault. But I don’t know that anybody’s ever at fault when this kind of thing happens. I don’t think people have much choice. I think things happen and people can only go along with them.’

“Get to the point, you want to shout. Put a lid on your dime-store philosophy and get to the point. But instead you just lie there and wait for him to go on.

“‘Dell, I can’t live here anymore.’

“‘Why not?’

“‘Because we used to have something,’ he says, ‘and now it’s gone.’

“‘Not for me it isn’t,’ you say, hating yourself for saying it, for needing to say it. ‘For me it’s still the same.’

“‘Dell, I’m going to move out.’

“‘When?’

“‘Now, if you want.’

“‘That’s crazy,’ you say. ‘It’s the middle of the night. You don’t want to leave now.’

“‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind—’

“‘Of course I don’t mind.’

“‘First thing in the morning, then.’

“So he takes off his clothes and comes to bed. And he lies on his side of the bed and you lie on your side, and you wish you could just fall asleep but of course you can’t. And you wish you could stay on your own side of the bed but you can’t do that either.

“So you curl up beside him. He can’t sleep either, and you know what to do, how to touch him, and you get the response you want. He’s unwilling at first. As if he’s cheating her by being with you. But you know what you’re doing and he can’t help himself.

“And while it’s going on, all you can think is that it’s the last time, the last time.

“Afterward, he falls asleep. You try to sleep, and you can’t, and after a while you give up trying. You get up and walk around the room, and then you come back and sit on the edge of the bed while your mind just spins like a top.”

“He woke up. I still sat there, looking out the window, in the other room. He got out of bed and went into the bathroom and ran the water for his shower. I thought, This is probably the last time I’ll ever hear him take a shower. And hit his chest, like he does. And snort, like he does, to clear the water out of his nostrils.

“I thought, What a funny thing to think, at a time like this. Or is it? Maybe it’s the right thing to think at a time like this.

“He got dressed, and he came to the bedroom door a minute and looked in at me, before he was quite through, while he was measuring off the two sides of his necktie.

“‘I won’t come back tonight,’ he said. ‘I won’t come back anymore. I’ll send for my things instead, some time during the day.’ And then he added, as though he were asking my permission, ‘Okay?’

“‘Okay,’ I said. I still sat there.

“He said, ‘You act more dead than alive.’

“I said dully, ‘You would too.’

“He finished finally, and came out, set to go.

“I said, ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this, Vick?’

“‘Come on now,’ he said reproachfully.

“It was the funniest parting I ever heard of.

“He said, ‘What about money? You better tell me now.’

“‘That isn’t what I want,’ I said. ‘I can always get that. That’s the easiest thing to get there is.’

“He went out and closed the door after him.

“I still sat there.

“He came out of the building doorway down below on the street, and turned around and looked up at the window. He saw me looking down at him.

“He lifted his hat, tipped it way up high in parting salute to me. Then he stepped into a taxi the doorman had whistled up for him. The taxi drove off and my marriage was over.

“I never knew before what an insult it could be, how much it could hurt, how needling it could feel, to have your own husband exaggeratedly tip his hat to you like that.

“There was a bottle of goof pills in the medicine cabinet. I took them down. Then I brought a glass of water over. I sat down and kept switching from one to the other, until both were gone. The water tasted strange, but that was because I wasn’t used to drinking water straight.

“I no sooner did it than I came to my senses with a bang. I yelled at myself. What am I doing this for? Why should I make it even easier on him than it is already? I’m gonna live! I’m gonna live so that I can get hunk with him, get square with him, screw him up but good! And I grabbed up the phone and hollered into it, ‘Judas, Joseph, and Mary! Somebody send me a stomach pump up here quick, for the love of Pete!’”

“I met him on the street one day. It wasn’t planned, it was quite by accident. It was the sort of thing happens to two people maybe once in ten years in a town the size of New York.

“He looked at me and recognized me. Of course he recognized me, why shouldn’t he? I saw that he wasn’t going to stop, so I did instead, and that more or less forced him to stop against his will.

“He looked good and happy, and that didn’t make me feel good and happy.

“He said Well?

“I said Well?

“Then he said So?

“I said So?

“No great soundtrack of a conversation up to that point. But there were a thousand unspoken words in it. Hope and indifference and mockery and entreaty.

“Finally he said, ‘There’s no use standing here like this. We haven’t anything to say to each other.’

“I said, ‘If you think I’m going to give you up without a fight, you better think twice.’

“‘You already have,’ he said. ‘It’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can do about it.’ And he started to walk

“‘Isn’t there?’ I called after him. ‘Isn’t there? Watch. Watch and see.’ But he never even turned around again.

“That brought the thing to a head. That got it going, that brush-off on the street. Love ended there. There wasn’t any more love, only hate from then on. Hate, and figuring out how to hurt him.

“I worked on it, steady. While I earned my feed singing, I worked on it. While other men made love to me, I kept working on it. I worked on it in the morning, and I worked on it in the afternoon, and I worked on it at night.

“Finally, I thought I had a way figured to frame him, pin something on him he didn’t do. The details don’t matter now anymore. But I needed some help. So I turned to this friend I had, who still had connections from the old days, even though he’d gone legit a long time ago, the way most of the smart ones have.

“To my surprise, he wouldn’t have any part of it, and he talked me out of it and advised me to drop it. Those things always backfire, he said. They’re never foolproof. You’ll be the one to get hurt, Dell, not him. Let the guy go. Don’t keep trying to get him back. He made a clean break of it. Let it stay that way. Leave him alone.

“That was the man’s point of view, not the woman’s. And I was wise to his little personal angle too; he was in love with me himself, and Vick had been too much competition for him. He’d had to take a backseat the whole time I was married to Vick. No wonder he liked it better this way, Vick safely out of the way.

“Well, I gave that particular project up as unfeasible, but I didn’t quit for a minute. If he thought I’d quit trying, he didn’t know me.

“Since I couldn’t get at him himself, I decided maybe I could get at him through her. In fact the more I thought of it, the more I liked it. I decided this was the better way of the two. Do something to him, and he still had her to love him. Do something to her, and he didn’t have anyone to love him. That hurt the more of the two ways.

“She had religion of a sort, more or less. I had ways of finding out things. I found out she always went to early morning mass on Sundays. Seven o’clock mass. He never went, and she never went herself any other time the week around. She always went to this same little neighborhood church, and to get to it she had to pass through this deserted side street. On early Sunday mornings it was practically dead, not a soul around. There was a new development going up, and the old buildings that were still standing had all been vacated and boarded up. I saw that for myself. You know how they do, whitewash X’s marking the windowpanes. Then where the new construction was already well advanced, there was this long plank scaffolding to protect the sidewalk. Like they always put up, in case anything should fall from above. Walking along under it was almost like going through a long tunnel, it was so dim and walled in. And on Sunday morning no workmen would be around. She would be boxed in there, unable to advance, unable to retreat, if anyone caught her fairly in the middle of that confined place.

“Next I got hold of the addresses of a number of low-type dives or joints that were said to be hangouts for ex-cons and petty hoodlums and the like. For nearly a week straight each night after the show instead of going out on the town, I’d strip off the glitter, change to a plain black dress so I wouldn’t attract attention, and put on a pair of dark glasses.

“Then I’d go to one of those places and hang around. Oh, there were plenty of passes made, but when they saw that wasn’t the game, they gave up trying.

“Finally I made the sort of a contact I’d been looking for. Well, it was slow work. I had to be cagey. He had to be cagey. I had to build him up. He had to build me up. But after three meetings we were finally ready to get down to cases. In the meantime I’d had him checked thoroughly, knew where he was living, knew what his past record was, in fact knew much more than he knew I knew, so that he didn’t stand a chance in the world of taking me.

“Once we understood each other, the rest of it went fast. It was just a matter of agreeing on a price.

“‘I’m doing this for a friend,’ I said.

“‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so am I.’

“‘I got a friend who’d give anything if she knew somebody who’d let fly at a little twist that goes by a certain place every Sunday morning at six-thirty.’

“‘Anything?’ he said. ‘How much is anything?’

“‘Well, let’s say five hundred.’

“‘That ain’t anything,’ he said. ‘That’s a quarter of anything.’

“‘I’d have to take that up with her,’ I said.

“‘Let fly?’ he said. ‘Let fly what?’

“‘Well, the whole trouble with her is she’s too pretty. Now, a fist or a rock ain’t going to change that. It comes right back again after she heals. It’s got to be something that eats its way in slow. Then she stays like that for good.’

“‘Acid,’ he lip-read knowingly.

“‘Does your friend want to get it, or should my friend get it?’

“‘My friend can get the right stuff. He knows where. No problem there.’

“‘I’ll call and find out about the “anything.”’

“I went into a phone booth, counted out what I had brought with me, and came out to him again.

“‘You get a thousand now, she says,’ I told him. ‘The baptism of fire comes off Sunday. You get five hundred more here, this same joint, this same table, on Monday.’

“‘I’ll check,’ he said. He didn’t even bother pretending the phone bit. He just went into the men’s room, stayed a short while, came out again putting a comb into his pocket, and said, ‘On Monday another thousand, and it’s in the works.’ Well, there was another phone in there (I imagine), if one wanted to be technical about it.

“‘It’s in the works,’ I said. I gave him the first thousand under the table then and there.

“‘What’s this?’ he asked, and read the little piece of paper I’d had on top of it.

“‘That’s the real name and present address of your “friend,”’ I told him. ‘I know he can change his address easy between now and Sunday, but the info about him can also follow him to the new place just as easy. He’s done time in prison in the past. He’s got a two-strike against him.’

“He looked at me a long time. Not sore or frightened, just admiring me, like.

“Then he showed the edges of his teeth a little. ‘Smart,’ he said.

“I agreed with him. ‘Yes, she is. Very.’

“The thing would have come off perfect, without a hitch, only I started celebrating a little too early and a little too hard. I came home right after my Saturday night show and started drinking. My friend, the one I mentioned to you earlier, the one who’d talked me out of pinning something on my husband, was here in the apartment with me. I’d lift my glass each time and say something like, ‘Here’s to somebody I know that’s not going to look so good to somebody else I know, around this same time tomorrow night.’ And I started singing, ‘What a difference a day makes, twen’y-four little hours’ — and looping it up altogether.

“Last thing I remember was him going to use my phone and closing the door after him. But I didn’t think anything of it, he was the kind of guy just as apt to make a phone call at three or four in the morning as at twelve in the afternoon.

“When I woke up, it was early afternoon. He was still around. We were making a long weekend of it. I yawned and stretched enjoyably and said, ‘Well, it’s all over with by now. I wonder how she likes the new face she’s breaking in today? Above all, I wonder how he likes it. I bet he can’t look at it without turning green around the gills himself.’

“‘She’s not breaking in any new face,’ he told me. ‘She’s still wearing the same face she wore yesterday, and the day before, and she’ll keep on wearing it.’

“I sat up sudden and wide awake. ‘What do you know about it?’ I asked sharply. ‘How do you come in it?’

“He jiggled the hand he was holding a glass of tomato juice in, by way of stirring it up. ‘I sent a couple of boys I know over there bright and early, five-thirty, six this morning, to look him up where he was posted waiting for her. They did what I’d told them to; took him with them a considerable distance out of town, beat the living jazz out of him, and told him if he ever showed his face around again they’d finish up on him.’

“‘My good thousand dollars!” I squawked, and clapped my hand over my eyes.

“‘Here’s your thousand dollars,’ he said, and took it out of his pocket and handed it back to me still in the envelope in which I’d originally given it to the guy. ‘They found it still on him. Evidently doesn’t trust banks or mattresses.

“‘Next time you’re willing to put up that much,’ he added, ‘why don’t you put it into something more constructive?’”

“And then you gave up trying,” Madeline prodded.

“You don’t know me,” Dell said meaningfully. “You don’t know me at all.”

God, I wouldn’t want her down on me! Madeline thought.

“For the second time I switched. Just like I’d switched from him to her, at first, so now I gave up trying bodily harm. I saw that wouldn’t work. I switched instead to character damage.

“I got me a private detective. I got him out of the fine-print ads in the back of a disreputable magazine. You know the type of thing. ‘Do you feel unsure of your mate’s loyalty? Call on us. Strictly confidential.’

“He was a darb. He didn’t have an ethic to his name. I wouldn’t have even minded that if he’d only been personally clean. He hadn’t changed his shirt in a week and his socks in a month. You could’ve told which part of a room he was in even with the lights out. But I always say, Get a dirty guy to do a dirty job. A decent guy wouldn’t have handled an assignment like that in the first place. See, it wasn’t to save a marriage, protect it from an intruder, a third person. I was paying him to deliberately break up a perfectly good marriage, and not my own but somebody else’s. That was what I was hiring him for.

“I laid it on the line to him. My fist looked like a head of cabbage, the way bunched greenbacks were coming out between all the fingers. No wonder they’ve got that nickname for it, cabbage.

“I told him the grubby industrial town she was born in. I said, I want you to go there, and I want you to stay there, until you’ve dug up something on her. Something that’ll make her as sooty as the town is. If you can dig up something big, all the better. If you can only dig up something little, never mind, we’ll blow it up into something big. Don’t leave a stone unturned—”

Just like I did, Madeline thought parenthetically, only in reverse. Mine was benevolent, hers was malevolent.

“It’s on me, I said to him. The whole thing’s on me. I’m footing the bill. I don’t care if you stay there six months. I don’t care how you pad your expense account. I’ll pay for it. I don’t care if you have a broad in your room every night, a case of Carstairs in your room every night. I’ll pay for it. It’s worth it to me. Just so long as you come up with something on her. I’ve never enjoyed spending my money half as much as I’ll enjoy spending it now. Ask around. Dig up the kids she went to school with. Look up doctors. Maybe she had a miss once. Maybe there was syph in her family. In the old days, when it presented a problem. Or insanity, or a criminal record. Check on her birth certificate, they must have it on file there, find out what that can tell you.

“Get something on her. I don’t care what it is, but get something on her.”

And even in the repetition, her voice was a terrible thing, a thing such as Madeline had never heard before. It wasn’t a voice, it was hate incarnate.

She spoke more quietly again. “About three months after he went there, he rang me up one night long-distance. Reversed charges, of course. When I heard what he had to tell me, I was in ecstasy. I’d never expected anything like it in a million years. All I’d hoped for was to find a little mud that I could sling at her. Instead, he’d dug up an entire tar pit. I rolled over and over on the bed, carrying the phone with me up to my ear. Then when the wire started to pull up short, I rolled over and over back again the other way until it was freed again.

“It was like dropping some kind of a bomb in between them. It blew them so far apart they could never get back together again, not in this lifetime. I bet from then on if either one of them ever saw the other, they’d start running for dear life, they couldn’t get away fast enough.”

“But what?” Madeline asked. “What was it?”

Dell dropped her eyes, with self-satisfaction but also with guile. “That’s as far as it goes,” she said inflexibly. “Beyond that, we don’t talk about it in this house.”

One day the phone rang while Madeline was there. Dell got up and went inside to it. It was just past the doorway. Madeline went ahead tapping single notes and writing them down on the score sheet.

After a few intimately indistinct phrases, she heard Dell say, “A friend.”

Then she added, “Of course a girl. What do you think I do, entertain men here behind your back? I wouldn’t last long that way.”

Then she went on, “What do you mean, how do you know it is?”

Then she concluded, “Because I say so, isn’t that enough?”

Suddenly she called, “Mad, come here a minute.” Madeline got up and went in there. Dell thrust the phone out toward her, but without relinquishing it. “Say hello into this,” she instructed.

“Hello?” Madeline said uncertainly.

Dell immediately took it away again, so that Madeline had no chance to hear what was said in return. Madeline went back to the piano. “Satisfied?” Dell was saying. “You sure take a lot of convincing.”

She rejoined Madeline a few moments later, poking her thumb resentfully over her shoulder. “That guy!” she steamed. “He sure gives me trouble. It’s getting so I’m afraid to go out on the street with him anymore, for fear my agent might pass and tip his hat to me, or the club manager might go by and give me a hello, or I might get a nod from somebody who once worked the same spot with me ten years ago. That’s all it takes, and I find myself explaining and trying to square myself all the rest of the evening. And then when I get all through he still doesn’t believe me, anyway.” She held one hand to the side of her face as though it hurt her there and took a few short steps this way and that. “I’d have to be quadruplets, and all four of us working on a double shift, to be able to crowd in all the cheating he gives me credit for.”

Madeline just looked at her solemnly, taking the tirade in. She didn’t ask who he was, and Dell didn’t say. She had a fairly good idea Dell wouldn’t have told her even if she had asked, and that was one of the principal reasons she hadn’t.

A few weeks after that, just as she was about to put the key Dell had given her into the outside door of the apartment, she held back, thinking she heard a voice somewhere on the inside. She inclined her head toward the door, but the sound didn’t repeat itself. But some cautious instinct made her put the key away and ring instead. She didn’t want any possible third party to know she had a key to the apartment in her possession, although she couldn’t have said why. In the final analysis it was no one’s business but Dell’s and her own.

Dell’s voice asked who it was, from the other side of the door. She sounded guarded, cautious, as though apprehensive about what the answer might be.

“Mad,” Madeline said.

The door opened immediately. A look of strain was just leaving Dell’s face and a look of relief coming on in its place. Nevertheless she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I can’t ask you in right now. Got one of my Big Moments in here with me. You understand, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure. Perfectly all right. I’ll drop around tomorrow instead.”

“Do that.”

Suddenly a man’s voice cut in: “Who you talking to out there?”

“Just a friend,” Dell answered without turning her head.

A larger hand than hers took hold of the door edge above where her own was resting, and pulled the door a little wider open. Then a man’s face peered out at Madeline, a little to one side of Dell’s and about a foot higher up.

Sometimes you see a face a dozen and one times, and then later on forget it. Sometimes you see a face just once, and then see it over and over to the end of your days in retrospect. This bodiless face looking out at her now from a doorway was to be like an eyeless mask, one of those twin masks representing comedy and tragedy in the theater, pinned to the curtain of her memory from then on.

It was a face that had been handsome once. Its handsomeness had worn thin now, but the configuration of it could still be detected beneath the layer of the years and the experiences. Dark, lustrous Mediterranean hair, and dark, lustrous Mediterranean eyes. A cleft in the chin that years of shaving seemed to have ground into a blue-tinged, marbleized, scooped-out hollow.

But the eyes showed no recognition whatever of Madeline as a person. Just the fact that she was a woman, and not a rival, not a trespasser. They didn’t care if she was ugly or fair, tall or short, wide or narrow. They were the eyes of jealousy, of sheer possessiveness alone.

The face withdrew without having said a word to either of the two women. But its silence was a surly, not an appeased, one.

Then a moment after, from back within the apartment, his voice sounded in a growled order. “Well, come on back in here, whenever you get through exchanging cake recipes or whatever it is you’re doing out there.”

Dell said in a harassed whisper, “Never comes around in the afternoon like this. But never. Today’s the first time.”

Then she added hastily, “Well, I better get back in there before he cracks the whip over me some more.”

Madeline went away. There’s dynamite in it somewhere, she thought.

She got things piecemeal, but she kept getting them.

“What a beautiful bracelet.”

“Ange gave me that.”

Dell was already so lit she couldn’t fasten the thing without resting her whole elbow on the dresser top and leaning on it to try to steady it.

“That the broker?”

“No, the broker’s Walter. C’mere, see if you can do this for me.”

Then another time, answering the phone she said, “Hello, Jack.”

When she came back she gave Madeline a knowing smirk and pitched her thumb back over her shoulder in derision. “Ange, checking up on me. He didn’t have anything to say, just wanted to see if he could catch me at anything.”

“But I thought I heard you say Jack.”

“That’s his first name.” Dell was too busy prodding ice into a glass to keep much of a guard on her tongue. “In the old outfit days they called him ‘Little Angie.’”

“Oh, that’s why you call him Ange sometimes. Does he like it when you call him that?”

“Why shouldn’t he like it? That’s his name.” Dell sampled her new drink. Or rather, left the sample behind in the glass, and took the drink itself. “Jack d’Angelo.”

Now she knew one of them.

During another of these matinee sessions she got “confidential” with Dell. That is to say, confidential on the subject of her finances.

“Dell, I was wondering. I have a little money put aside. Not as much as you get from some of the pieces of jewelry you sell. But I hate to leave it lying around in a savings bank. You only get a measly three and three-quarters. Would you advise me to put it into some of those stocks like you were telling me about?”

“Honey.” Dell made a pass of dissuasion with the flat of her hand. “You can’t touch them unless you’ve got a big wad of dough backing you up. The market’s sky-high right now.”

Madeline let her face droop disconsolately, as though she saw all hopes of ever attaining financial independence fading from view. “But are they all high? Aren’t there some that are a little lower than others?”

Dell had that warm glow, of friend toward friend. And there was a touch of show-off in it too. Besides, love wasn’t involved, so there was no danger.

“Wait a minute,” she said generously. “I’m going to call Walter up and ask him. I’ll let him think I want to know for myself.”

The building had a downstairs switchboard, so she couldn’t dial.

Madeline listened carefully.

“Cardinal seven, four two hundred.”

Then, “Mr. Shiller, please.”

Now she had the other one too.

She went back to her own place, asked for “Cardinal seven, four two hundred.”

A voice answered, “Warren, Shiller, Davis and Norton, good afternoon.”

She hung up. She cross-checked it with the directory, and that gave her his office address.

She sat down to write the letter. The letter of betrayal.

Why to him, why not to the other one? The other one would have seemed to be the likelier prospect, but in actuality was he? Maybe her psychology was turned inside out, but not the way she saw it.

He was insanely jealous. Right. He had lived by violence — or at least by illegality — at one time. Right. He had come up out of the underworld jungle, where punitive death was a commonplace. Right.

But when all this had been granted, that was when her reverse psychology entered into it. For these very reasons, he was the less likely candidate of the two. He had no influence, at least in respectable places, to see him through afterward. He had an unsavory past, there were all sorts of strikes against him. He wouldn’t dare to jeopardize his hard-won legitimacy by stepping out of line.

Whereas the broker was secure, respected, had an impregnable background, probably had all sorts of powerful influence backing him up in high places, and because of this very immunity would be far the readier of the two to carry out whatever measures he felt this treachery to his ego and his love life demanded.

Or so believed Madeline, the theoretical but unpracticed.

So to him she wrote.

Letter number one: “Dear Mr. Shiller: This is not a poison-pen letter—” But it was. What else was it?

Letter number two: “Dear Mr. Shiller: I think as a friend you ought to be told—” But they weren’t friends.

Letter number three: “Dear Mr. Shiller: I hate to see anyone sold out behind his back—” Sheer cant. What she was doing was sneakier than what Dell was doing.

Letter number last: “Dear Mr. Shiller: Some girls haven’t even one man. Some girls, like Dell Nelson, have two going at the same time. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

She went down to the stamp machine in the lobby, put a coin into it, and got out a stamp. She stuck it on the letter, she dropped the letter into the mail slot, and she even pounded all around the mail slot with the heels of her hands to make sure it settled down properly inside.

The getting-even was on the way.

Things started moving fast from that point on.

Dell called her up, and her voice was all unraveled with strain. This was around five in the afternoon, next day.

“I’m in a jam!” she said, as winded as though she’d run up and down a flight of stairs a half a dozen times.

“What’s up?” Madeline asked, startled but not too startled. She hadn’t expected it to start rolling quite this soon, that was all.

“I don’t know. But I don’t like the way he sounded. I guess I played both ends against the middle too long. That’s where you come in. You’ve got to help me.”

“Me? What can I do?”

“You’ve got to run interference for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ve got to come over here and stand by. There’s no telling what he may do. He may bang me around unmercifully.”

“Wait a minute,” Madeline brought her up short. “This is your life. I can’t come barging into it at the drop of a hat. You kept it pretty much to yourself all along. Now that you need help, suddenly it’s an open book with a place mark left in it specially for me. Well, no thanks.”

She couldn’t resist asking at a tangent, “Which one of them was it?”

“Walter. Walter called me up. He was sore about something. I never heard him so sore before. Every time I tried to smooth his fur and say something nice to him, he’d come back at me and say, How many others do you tell that to?”

“Well, there was your out right there. Why didn’t you just hang up and get rid of him that way?”

“I was afraid to. I didn’t want to lose him altogether. Sometimes they never come back. There’s a time to get huffy and hard-to-get, and there’s a time to hold on tight.”

“Well, what about the club, can’t you duck him down there?”

“It’s Monday. We don’t have a show on Mondays.”

“Oh, I forgot.”

“He knows that, too.”

“Well, maybe it won’t be so bad,” Madeline tried to console her.

She gave a wail of anticipatory misery. “It’ll be plenty bad. He’s one of these quiet ones. I know him.”

“The surprising thing to me,” Madeline philosophized, “isn’t that it finally happened, but that it didn’t happen long ago, the parlays you’ve been playing.”

“Preaching isn’t what I need now,” Dell told her. “I need somebody here with me, I need somebody standing by me.”

“Why don’t you call the police, if you’re that afraid of him,” Madeline said with an edge of contempt in her voice.

“You don’t do that when you’ve been what we have to each other. If he ever finds out I called a girlfriend, he’d find it easy enough to forgive that. But if he ever finds out I called the police, he’d never forgive that. You don’t know the ropes, dear.”

No, Madeline thought morosely. I guess I’ve never gone down for the count as often as you have.

She had triggered the whole thing, it was developing into what promised to be a perfectly beautiful mess, and now she was being asked to step in a second time and screen the potential victim’s hide.

“You’ve got to come! You’ve got to! You’re the one friend I have in this world. Look at all I’ve done for you. My door was always open to you. Drinks on the house. I let you use my piano.”

Oh, shove your piano, Madeline thought parenthetically. An expression she had acquired from the very person she was now returning it to.

“I even got market tips from him for you. Are you going to go back on me now, when I need you?”

“Al-l-l right,” Madeline drawled reluctantly. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call you in about an hour’s time. If he’s acting ugly and you’re finding him hard to handle, I’ll hustle on over and bring you my moral support. If everything’s under control, then you don’t need me. How’ll that be?”

She thought: Even if I get her out of it tonight, it’ll catch up with her some other night, now that the seeds of suspicion have been planted, and the second time I won’t be on hand to bail her out.

Dell almost yelped her gratitude. “Thanks, baby-honey! Oh, thanks! I knew I could count on you, I knew you wouldn’t let me down. I’ll do the same for you someday.”

Who needs you? thought Madeline scornfully. I don’t play men by the carload.

“Better than that. Y’know that stone-marten jaquette you admired, the one Ange gave me? It’s yours, I’m giving it to you right now.”

Madeline made a sound down within her throat that might have been taken for gratitude, but was actually ridicule.

“All right, I’ll take a quick tub and get dressed. Call me in an hour. Well, make it quarter past, that’ll give me more time to turn around.”

“Don’t get loaded,” Madeline warned her bluntly. “It’s important that you keep your head clear, and know what you’re doing.”

“Check,” Dell said obediently. In two months flat, Madeline had gotten the upper hand on her. And by sheer personality impact alone. For she hadn’t tried in any way, either actively or passively, to dominate her.

Six o’clock came. Now’s when I promised I’d call her, Madeline thought, and I’m not doing it.

Half past, and she still hadn’t called her. Why don’t I just let it ride? Let her take her own medicine.

At quarter of seven she finally gave in, picked up the phone. “Emerson eight, eighteen hundred.” Then when the downstairs switchboard answered, “Eighteen-A, please.”

He came back and said, “There isn’t any answer.”

At seven the same routine. “Emerson eight, eighteen hundred... Eighteen-A, please.”

“There isn’t any answer.”

At seven-fifteen, for the third time, “There isn’t any answer.”

After a moment or two of indecision, she went downstairs, outside to the street, got in a cab, and went over there to find out for herself what kind of a turn this had taken.

Dell’s doorman was busy shepherding two tailcoats, a broad-tail and an ermine, into a cab. He had his back to her, so Madeline found her way in unaided. She punched the eighteen button in the self-service elevator, the door glided closed with the softness of a purr, and she rode up.

She got out and rang the doorbell. Nobody came to the door.

She rang again, with a jab of irritation sharpening the gesture. Still nobody came. First she wets me up with her tears for help, she thought resentfully, then she clams up and ignores me. Probably they’ve reconciled, and he took her out to dinner.

She took out the key Dell had given her and opened the door. She figured maybe Dell had left some sort of a note of explanation for her on the piano, like they’d used to do so often in the old songwriting days.

“Dell?” she called out.

There was no answer. There was no one in the place. There was no note either, on the piano or anywhere else.

Dell had had a rye on the rocks, or possibly five or possibly ten, at some indeterminate point between her getting-up time and her leaving the place. Only one glass had been used. She never changed glasses when drinking alone, why should she? Her own mouth germs couldn’t affect her. But this seemed to prove he’d never shown up.

On the piano was a song sheet. Probably the last thing she’d looked at before going out. For some inscrutable reason, to the end of her days, for as long as she remembered having met and having known Dell Nelson, whenever she thought of her, this song title would flicker across the eyes of her mind. “Heaven Drops Its Curtain Down upon My Heart.”

Madeline took a cursory look into the bedroom before leaving. The bra that Dell must have changed out of before her bath lay looped around one of the footposts of the bed. From where she stood she could glimpse a narrow triangular wedge of the bathroom, and in this a sliver of green-blue showed up, just above the rim of the tub. Dell had left in such a hurry she’d even forgotten to let her bathwater run out of the tub.

Madeline went over closer and looked inside. It lay there blue-green, smooth and motionless as ice, the warmth gradually going out of it into the air around.

She leaned forward and looked closer still.

Dell was still in it. Dead in it.

A cigarette, the last cigarette she had smoked, a woman’s cigarette with a dab of red at the tip, still lay on the edge of the washbasin where she had parked it as she got in. A drop of water on the washbasin rim had stopped it from consuming itself past the quarter mark.

Her head was at the bottom, face upward. It could have fallen there, or it could have been pushed there, held down there. It could have been a heart attack, a skidding fall against the bottom of the tub, a dizzy spell from the combination of alcohol and hot water, resulting in self-drowning, or — a homicide. Madeline couldn’t tell which it was.

She looked closely at the hands. They were still looped loosely over the edge of the tub; they hadn’t gone down with the rest of her. They were caught on the turn of the rim by the wrists. Alongside of them were two small flecks of red on the enamel, about as much as a mosquito makes if you squeeze it, and a thin trickle of much paler red that had gone down into the water. The water itself showed no traces. Not enough blood had been spilled to stain it.

That told the story. It had been a murder. She’d been held under until she drowned.

Madeline got down on her heels and examined the hands exhaustively, from an inch away, without touching them. There were no marks on them anywhere, no scratches or nicks. She even looked at the undersides, the palms, by stretching out full length on the floor and putting her face up under them.

The blood was not Dell’s. But underneath the tips of all ten nails, where a smidgin of white should have showed past the point where the nail enamel ended, there was instead a caked hairline of red. She’d clawed someone, either on the face or forearms or hands, in fighting for her life.

Madeline got to her feet and stood looking down at her. At the startled blue eyes, colder than ever now, staring up through the blue-green water. Adelaide Nelson had played the game her own way and lost it.

And yet which one of us ever yet won it? philosophized Madeline. It’s a game you can’t beat. If death doesn’t take away your chips, as in this case, then old age comes along and cleans out your table stakes just as surely. Maybe she’d had the best of it at that. At least she’d gone out looking good. Still desirable enough to be killed for it.

A man should die bravely. A woman should die beautiful.

Reflex fear, which had been strangely held back until this point (possibly by the feverish excitement of the discovery), now came on fast and chilling. I have to get out of here, she told herself, big-eyed. What am I doing standing around here, lingering here, like this? Someone may walk in.

Her dread wasn’t so much of being accused of the crime itself — in fact that didn’t even occur to her — as of being inextricably enmeshed in it from then on, saddled with it past all endurance. Detained, questioned ad infinitum, and above all rendered publicly identifiable, to the frustration of any possible fulfillment of the mandate which still awaited carrying out.

She wanted no part either of it or in it.

She left the bathroom hurriedly, left it just as she’d found it, door wide, light on; moved across the bedroom like a swift, silent streak. Across the main room, eyes straying to this side, to that, in oddly nostalgic snapshots of farewell. No more oleander tree watered with highballs. No more notes left on the piano. Taps waiting to be played instead: Heaven drops its curtain down upon my heart.

She listened carefully a moment, then opened the door sparingly, and neatly sidestepped through it. The hall was empty. She closed the door after her. She didn’t bother cleaning the knob. Somehow that seemed to belong more in books than in real life, she couldn’t have said why. Anyway, there’d probably be a myriad of others touching it after her.

The indicator above the elevator was at rest. It was down at the street. She pushed and brought it up to her. Then she got in, and pushed “two,” not the street. She was lucky, no one else got on during the entire sixteen-floor ride down. No one saw her riding that car.

She got out at two, and walked quietly down the stairs, which opened out onto the lobby, to one side of the elevator. She had noticed them many times, in her comings and goings. She stopped just out of sight, just before they made their final turnaround into view, and waited there for the chance to leave unseen. She determined not to move without it, not to accept anything less, not if she had to stand there two hours on end. Just one stray glimpse of her by someone, and it could backfire later on when least expected and involve her in disaster.

The setup was favorable, from her point of view. The call-board, on which incoming visitors were announced to the various apartments, was over on the other side of the lobby, away from the foot of the stairs. In performing his chore, the doorman had his back to her. However, she would have to time herself so that he didn’t turn around too quickly and glimpse her as she went out the door (and consequently wonder where she had come from). It was a long entrance-lobby, and the distance she had to traverse was not inconsiderable.

He was outside on the street when she first came down. It was impossible to escape detection with him in that position. He had to be brought inside by some arrival and placed with his back to her.

A young man was the first arrival. The doorman came in with him. “Miss Fletcher,” the young man said. “Mr. Larkin.” Miss Fletcher promptly said to come up. A dinner date probably, and she was expecting him. He was noticeably carrying an orchid inside an isinglass box.

A single arrival was no good to her. It took too little time to announce him and left the doorman free again too soon.

A trio showed up, two men and a girl, to pick up the fourth member of their quartet. Madeline made an abortive move forward, then her courage froze and she backed up again. The doorman said the three names awfully fast. She would have been pinpointed less than halfway to her destination if she’d made the try.

But if you wait long enough for the right combination, you finally get it. If you wait for the right kind of weather, it finally comes along. If you work a safe long enough, it finally opens. If you bet on it enough, your horse finally comes in.

People came and people went. Even an elderly lady in a wheelchair was brought in by an attendant. Obviously a tenant, since she wasn’t announced.

Then finally it paid off. A whole group of arrivals came in in a body. Actually there were not more than five or six, but they seemed to fill the lobby with a clamor of voices and restless movement and carefree laughter. They were all young, high teens or low twenties, and they were evidently all invitees to some dinner party or birthday party or engagement party, for most of the boys carried wrapped gifts.

The doorman was inundated. He disappeared in the middle of all of them, and Madeline, with the calm assurance of complete anonymity, stepped down off the stairs and glided across the lobby, not a hasty motion in her entire body.

Just as she passed through the door, she heard him direct them: “Seventeen-A, everybody.” A shudder flickered down her spine. The party was being held underneath the apartment in which the corpse lay.

Sensible enough not to linger in front of the building to pick up a taxi, she walked briskly, with head lowered to lessen chances of recognition, to the nearest corner, and there made a play for one and got in.

Unless there’s an unlucky star hanging over my head, she told herself, not a living soul saw me come into or go out of that building. And she superstitiously switched her middle finger across her index and kept them that way.

The first thing she did when she got back was take a drink, to try and steady up. She, who had scorned Dell’s drinking. But this was therapy.

She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting down at a table and eating, after what she had just seen. She kept walking back and forth, walking endlessly back and forth, sometimes pinching her eyes together, sometimes holding the side of her jaw as if she had a toothache. She had one, a toothache in her conscience.

It was more than just the sight of a dead body — even a friend’s dead body — and she knew it. It came on slowly, but once it had started there was no stopping it.

I killed her. I killed her just as surely as if I was the one held her head under, instead of the man. He was only the instrument, I was the instigator. The blame for this death is on me.

So this is how I free myself from the burden of Starr’s death. By taking on another, a worse killing. One that really is a murder. This is what I’ve accomplished. This is what I’ve done for myself.

Around ten — she didn’t notice the actual time, but somewhere around ten — she took another drink. Then she resolutely put the bottle away and turned the glass upside down. It was bad for you, when you were undergoing an emotional crisis like this. It enlarged it, it blurred it, it kept you from thinking logically and plunged you into unrealistic melancholia. It was only good for physical shock, like after having seen Dell’s body, but not for mental and metaphysical distresses.

The second drink did no good, but at least she finally stopped walking around and sat down. She could tell she was building up into another guilt complex such as she had experienced following Starr’s death. Only this one promised to be far worse.

Dell was no good. The world won’t miss her, she told herself. But I had no right to kill her. It wasn’t for me to judge her, she answered herself.

This probably would have gone on all night, at increasing heat and at increasing pace, but a diversion suddenly occurred which stopped it short. Not only that, but eradicated it completely from her thoughts and from her system.

The buzzer at the door sounded, and when she went over and opened it, two men were standing out there.

“Miss Madeline Chalmers?” one said, and politely touched the edge of a finger to his hat brim.

One was average in height, the other a little better than average, and a good deal huskier in build as well. Both were the sort of people who, a moment after you had looked at them, you couldn’t have told what they looked like. Perhaps a sort of professional invisibility, you might say.

“Yes, I am,” she said tonelessly.

“We’d like to speak to you. May we come in?”

“Not now,” she said unwillingly, and turned her head aside. “I’m very tired, and I can’t see anyone right now.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to, Miss Chalmers,” he said, as polite as ever but with an added crispness. “This is police business.” And he showed credentials.

As soon as this! passed through her mind. Not more than three hours ago — and already!

But the worst part of it was the way she could feel her own face pale, as she stepped aside and let them pass. Its whitening was almost a physical sensation, like a pulling back, a drawing tight, of the skin.

They saw it too. They must have, and that wasn’t good.

She sat down on the middle section of the sofa. The larger one sat down at its end, facing her. The other one brought over a chair and sat down diagonally across from her. They formed an approximation of a small, intimate triangle. Only, she didn’t find it cozy.

It began at once. In casual fashion, but at once, without preamble and from then on without letup. Every question impeccably polite. More polite than the average ballroom or dinner-table conversation.

“Do you know an Adelaide Nelson?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How well do you know her?”

First hitch already, and only the second question.

“It’s difficult to pinpoint a thing like that,” she hedged.

“It shouldn’t be. Do you know her well or don’t you know her well?”

“I know her moderately well.”

Watch your step now, she kept warning herself. Watch your step. One wrong word and you’re in it up to your neck. These boys are experts.

“How long have you known her?”

“I first met her in September.”

“About two and a half months, would that be about right?”

“About two and a half months, that would be about right.”

“Have you ever been up in her apartment?”

“Yes, on a number of occasions.”

“Frequently, would you say, or seldom?”

The doorman used to see me coming and going all the time. I wonder if they’ve gotten to him yet. What if I say seldom, and he says the other way around?

“In the beginning, quite often. Afterward it tapered.” Which actually was the fact.

“Any particular reason why it should taper off? Did you grow cooler toward one another?”

“No-o,” she said with cautious consideration. “It wasn’t intentional. This just happens sometimes, in the course of human, human” — she couldn’t find the word for a moment — “associations.”

“How did you first come to meet Miss Nelson?”

“I looked her up.” She told them about her songwriting aspirations. “The music publishers were no good. I thought if I could tie in with a performer, I might get somewhere.”

“Did she string you along? Is that why you had to keep going back to see her repeatedly?”

What were they trying to do in this particular spot, build a grudge between Dell and herself?

“Not at all. You see, she was kind enough to let me have the use of her piano. I don’t have one of my own to work on.”

“And was she always there when you went over?”

The key! she thought in a panic. Here comes the key! My God, I’ve boxed myself in.

Another of those incriminating bleaches passed over her face. One of them reached out and held her arm a moment to steady her. It wasn’t an encouraging hold and it wasn’t a friendly one; it was a steadying one only. Like when you want to keep somebody up.

A flagrant lie was the safest, as risky as it was. It was her word against the doorman’s. She couldn’t afford to let them “place” her alone at the apartment. God knows what dangers might crop up out of that.

“Always. Without fail. You see, I never neglected to call up ahead of time to make sure she would be there. If she didn’t answer, I didn’t go.”

“That brings up another point. When was the last time you were up to see her?”

They’re coming to it now, she cautioned herself. Hang on.

“Let me see. Today’s Monday. The last time I was over there was on Friday a week ago.”

“You weren’t up there today?”

“No.”

“You didn’t go up there at any time today?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Notice how they’re pressing? she said to herself. This is very thin ice. It’s the first time they’ve made me repeat a denial.

“Did the two of you speak with one another on the telephone?”

Here was a bad one. Did the hotel switchboard keep a record of incoming calls, if they were answered? Probably not, but one of the girls might remember that a woman had called her up. Dell’s voice had been excited enough to attract attention.

She didn’t want to bring the association up this close to the deadline. It was too dangerous. And deadline was the right word. She took a chance on an out-and-out lie instead. They couldn’t prove that it had been Dell. They certainly hadn’t tapped, because Dell had still been alive, and her calls hadn’t yet become police business.

“No.”

The large one said, like a huge but deadly silent tiger landing on its prey with all four paws, “Who was the woman who called you up at about five o’clock, approximately, this afternoon?”

With every word I sink in deeper, she thought, appalled. How the hell did they find out about it? Or hadn’t they, was it just a shot in the dark? Either way, she had to stick to her lie, she was stuck with it now. She groped desperately. Hairdresser? They’d check. Relative? They’d check. Nurse in doctor’s office? I haven’t been to any doctor’s office.

“A woman who used to go to the same church I did, a few years back. She lost her daughter, and I was kind to her at the time, and she’s never forgotten it since. Today was the anniversary of the death. She’s a Mrs. Bartlett.” (How much more plausible than that can you get? she thought.)

They didn’t press further on this. It’s strange, she said to herself. Sometimes when there’s nothing there, they dig and dig and dig. Then sometimes when there’s something there just waiting to be dug up, they muff it. Maybe they’re only human after all, and it’s foolish to be so afraid of them.

“Did you ever meet any of Miss Nelson’s other friends?”

“No. Not one.”

“Did she ever discuss them with you?”

“No. She was extremely close-mouthed.”

What were they fishing for there, she wondered, a jealousy motive on her part, over one of the men?

“Didn’t you ever hear her even talk on the phone with any of them?”

“Once or twice the phone rang, but I didn’t pay attention. The music covered it up.”

“Did she ever show you any of her belongings?”

“She showed me a fur piece once. And some pieces of jewelry.”

“Didn’t you wonder who gave them to her?”

“It was none of my business,” she said piously.

“Just for a moment, didn’t you wish that you owned them, that they were yours?” the tiger one said craftily.

She jumped to her feet, infuriated, then abruptly sat down again, just as infuriated. “What are you implying?” she said in an anger-cracked voice. “That I had my eye on them? That I took something without permission? There’s my clothes closet. Go over and look inside it. See for yourself.”

To her utter complete consternation and then complete infuriation, he took her at her word and got up and did so.

When he came back, ignoring the blazing look she gave him, he said unconcernedly to his partner, “Not a fur in there.”

But once she’d allowed herself to cool off sufficiently, she understood why he’d done it. He hadn’t seriously expected to find anything in there. It was just a psychological trick, to jangle her, undermine her self-confidence, if possible. Put her on the defensive.

She felt by now as if their questioning had been going on forever. The strain was beginning to tell, particularly so soon after the not-yet-worn-off shock of finding the body. And she had an uneasy feeling she hadn’t come through it as well as she might have. For one thing, by not asking from the beginning what had happened to Dell, which would have been the normal reaction of anybody placed in her situation. What had kept her from it, probably, was the guilty knowledge that she already knew, and the fear of letting this slip out in some way if she asked at all. It was too late now to do so with any degree of plausibility or grace.

They were at it again. The technique was to keep the person bouncing, and if possible off-balance. Somewhat like dribbling a basketball or swatting a punching bag this way and that.

“Did you leave the hotel at any time this evening?”

How could she say no? The elevator boy, the desk man, the man on door duty, had all seen her.

“I went out about seven.”

“And where did you go?”

She had taken a taxi a few yards offside to the door. She took a chance on those few yards covering her up. Because a taxi meant a destination, you didn’t take it without one.

“Nowhere. I went just for a walk. I needed some exercise and I needed some fresh air.”

“Do you go for a walk every evening at about that time? Is that your custom?”

“No. Tonight was the first time.”

“And where did you walk?” came from the tiger one, who by this time had become a personal enemy.

“On the street,” she snapped.

The other one made a strangled sound down in his throat, and murmured half audibly, “One down on you, Smitts.”

“And what street was that?” he asked dulcetly.

She recited six of them in a row. “Satisfactory?” she asked sarcastically.

“For a walk, yes,” he said imperturbably. The implication, somewhere down deep, being, “If you had taken one, but you didn’t.”

“And you came back—”

“By around eight.”

She knew why all this. That was the time slot that encompassed Dell’s death.

“Had you had your dinner before or after?”

“Neither. I did without it tonight.”

The tiger one purred, “Did something happen to make you lose your appetite?”

This time she couldn’t hold back. “Not at the time. But it has now.” And she left his partner out of the incinerating glare she sent him. He was making her very angry, which is a bad thing for a person under questioning to be.

Suddenly he got to his feet, and as if at a given signal the other one did too.

She let out a long, unconcealed sigh of relief, and let her head go limply back against the top of the sofa. The next thing she knew, he was saying, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to ask you to accompany us.”

Her head jerked upright again. “But why?” she wailed almost tearfully. “Haven’t I answered all your questions?”

“Yes,” he said briefly.

“Haven’t I answered them satisfactorily?”

“You would know more about that.” Meaning, whether the answers were true or not.

The other one, standing by the door, said, “Coming, Smitts?” but she knew he meant it for her and not his partner.

“After Miss Chalmers,” Smitts said pointedly, and brought up the rear.

She shuddered uncontrollably as she walked between them down the long carpeted hotel corridor, which seemed to stretch ahead for miles. “I feel terrible about this,” she said in a fearful whisper. “I never was taken anywhere under police escort before.”

“Weren’t you?” Smitts said laconically.

The glass-prismed chandeliers, the offside mirrors, the offside needlepoint chairs. The offside desk, not meant for anything more serious than RSVPs and thank-you notes. You weren’t supposed to walk along here with two detectives for company, involved in an act of violence. Going down to their place, at their order. You were supposed to walk along it in furs, with diamonds on your fingers and on your neck, owning the world. The only thing that hurt you, maybe a little corn because your Italian shoes are too tight.

And then, far too late, she finally asked, “What is it about? What’s happened to her?”

“Shouldn’t you have asked that before?”

“It could have been anything, how was I to know?” she said defensively. “She drinks a lot. Sometimes when a person’s drunk they make all sorts of bad accusations against others.”

“But when they’re dead,” he said, “they make the worst accusation of all.”

“Dead?” she breathed, appalled, and only hoped she did it right.

“You’ll never win an Academy Award.” He gave her the look you give a cat that’s come in out of the rain. It’s all bedraggled, but you feel sorry for it, you have a heart. You even want to give it warm milk.

The transit from hotel to street to car was made fairly painlessly. No one looked at her a second time, or if they did, seemed to see only a pretty girl escorted by two young men in business suits. Detention was the last thought anybody would have connected with her graceful free-swinging arms.

The car was unmarked. Or at least, it definitely wasn’t a piebald “Mickey Mouse” prowl car. Riding in it with them, she tried to analyze her feelings. Actual fear was minimal. But there was an uncomfortableness other than that. For the first time in her life she felt gauche, awkward, unsure of herself. That was probably because the initiative had gone over to them; she was no longer a free agent.

At the precinct house she was shown into an unoccupied room and asked, as politely as if she were a visitor or a guest, if she minded waiting there a minute. “We’ll be right with you,” one of them promised, and they both went out through a door ahead of the one they had entered by.

The room was depressing, but not particularly ominous or threatening. It was painted an ugly darkling green halfway up the walls, and the rest of the way up was just white plaster. Why the green stopped where it did was problematical. Either they’d run out of paint or they’d run out of money. Or someone had walked off with the painter’s ladder. The window was of the old-fashioned proportions of the windows of sixty years ago: tall and narrow. Its glass was protected by a pattern of wire mesh embedded in it. The purpose of this she couldn’t conjecture; certainly no one would be foolhardy enough to throw rocks at a police-station window, would they? It, the window, overlooked a backyard which it shared with a soot-blackened tenement backing up toward it from the other side. In some of the windows of this, people could be seen going about their daily lives without even a glance at the punitive place across the way, so used to it were they by a lifetime of propinquity. Which argued, at any rate, that suspects were not beaten or otherwise roughed up in these exposed rear rooms. And then again, did it? The tenement tenants might have even been immune to that.

Finally, the room had a number of scarred and scarified wooden chairs in it, ranged in a row against the wall, and a wooden table, likewise scarred, likewise scarified, cigarette burns galore scalloping its edges, and likewise back against the wall.

She turned her head, and a woman in uniform, a matron, had come into the room. She nodded pleasantly but impersonally to Madeline, sat down on one of the chairs, opened a narrow-spread paper, and lost herself in it.

Madeline could feel herself becoming highly nervous over her presence in the room. It seemed to predicate a rigorous forthcoming questioning, and perhaps even arrest, with the woman present to comply with regulations because the detainee was a woman herself.

As though she could read Madeline’s thoughts, the matron murmured, gruffly but kindly, without even looking up from her paper, “Take it easy, snooks. Probably just routine. Be over with before you know it.”

Suddenly as if she had found something she was looking for, she exclaimed: “Libra. That’s me! Let’s see what’s in store for today.”

But what was was never made known, because the door reopened at this point, and Smitts and cohort came back in again, along with two others, one a man with bushy silver hair, who obviously upranked the rest of them. A full quorum was going to question her. One of them, though, was only a stenographer; she noticed he’d brought a pad with carbon inserts with him.

Unexpectedly she found herself being introduced to the captain, which took a good deal of the curse off the imminent questioning and lent her added confidence. A person in line for arrest isn’t usually introduced formally to the arresting officer — or at least to his superior — beforehand.

“This is Miss Chalmers, Captain. Captain Barry.”

He even held out his hand toward her, and when she’d placed her own in his, turned hers first on one side, then on the other, as if in friendly reluctance to part with it.

The table was shifted out from the wall just enough to give clearance on all sides of it, chairs were ranged, and they all sat down, including Madeline, who acted on a wordless nod from the smaller of the two who had been up to the hotel, the non-tiger one, and took one of the chairs. The top leaves of the stenographer’s pad gave a preliminary rustle as he furled them back out of the way until he came to a blank space.

The matron remained obliviously against the wall, poring over her tabloid, lost to the world.

The damn thing started in all over again, only with three of them now, instead of two. (And the distance to a detention cell, she couldn’t help reflecting ruefully, that much shorter than it had been.) Unavoidably, much of the ground covered had already been gone over at the hotel. This was no hazard in itself. She had an acute memory. And the three things she had to remember to stay away from still remained the same they had been before: possession of a key to Dell’s apartment, knowledge of who the two men in her life were, and that final phone call for help an hour before her death.

The interrogation seemed endless. There were times when it proceeded like a fencing match, with her parrying their thrusts and deflecting everything they thew at her. There were times, too, when the three of them went through the motions of searching jointly for the truth.

The captain’s eyes, when they caught hers, seemed to have a fatherly glint in them. I have a daughter your age at home, they seemed to say. And she knew it would be easy to relax into the embrace of those eyes, to let them put her entirely at ease, but somehow she sensed that was how he wanted her to react. She couldn’t afford to let her guard down, no matter how warmly some man turned his eyes on her.

She steeled herself and went on playing her part.

A patrolman stuck his head in the door, said, “Captain Barry says Miss Chalmers can go home whenever she wishes.”

She got to her feet at once, the current instant being the “whenever” of her wishes.

One of the men said, “Good night. Hope we haven’t been too rough on you.”

She knew she ought to answer. She didn’t feel much like it, but reciprocal politeness is a habit hard to break. “Good night to you men too,” she said without any warmth.

She closed the door after her. A moment later she reopened it and stuck her head back inside the room. “Did I leave my handbag over there by the table?” she asked them.

Smitts glanced down at the chair she’d just been occupying, gave his head a shake. “I didn’t see one with you when we left the hotel. It’s my impression you came away without it.”

She backed a hand between her eyes. “What’ll I do for taxi fare?” she blurted out without stopping to think. A moment later she realized the hotel desk could pay it for her easily enough.

But Smitts’s teammate, who seemed to be a decent sort of person, had already reached down into his pocket. “I’ll stake you,” he offered.

To her surprise she saw Smitts slice the edge of his hand at him in dissuasion. She wondered why.

He turned around to her and said, “I’ll drop you off, if you don’t mind waiting for me a couple minutes outside by the sergeant’s desk. I’m going off at twelve.”

She would have preferred the offer to come from someone else, but the heat of battle had subsided now, and with it her grievance. She was too tired even to dislike him very heartily anymore.

She sat down on a bench out there. The desk sergeant looked her over curiously, then went back to his own concerns.

The “couple minutes” became ten, the ten, fifteen, the fifteen, twenty. She started to steam up again inside. She fidgeted, but she clung stubbornly to the bench. She kept hoping she could get some hint out of him as to where she really stood in the case. “Miss Chalmers can go home whenever she wishes” was too indefinite. She had to know: Was she in or was she out?

When he finally came outside to her at twelve-twenty, he put a worse finish to an already bad situation by clapping himself dismayedly on the forehead and exclaiming, “I clean forgot about you!”

“Obviously,” she said coldly, getting to her feet. The cutting look she gave him, if he had passed a finger in front of her eyes he would have lacerated it badly.

They got into the same car she’d been brought down in, and this time she was able to make out clearly that it had no markings.

“The cap had us all in for a last-minute briefing,” he remarked as he pushed off. “That’s what held me up.”

She wondered if it had had to do with her, and wondered if she asked him, would he answer. Before she could get up the nerve, a man with an itchy pedal foot in the adjoining lane started across the intersection before the light had changed.

“Wait for the light, bud. That’s what it’s there for,” Smitts said in a low-register growl.

The man turned and looked at him. She held her breath for a minute, remembering there was no insignia on the car. Then the man looked forward again and glided off, this time permissibly. He didn’t know what a close shave he’d had just then, she said to herself. One word spoken out of turn and...

When they reached the hotel, he got out on his side, closed the door, came around, and opened the one on her side. Before she’d caught on to the maneuver, he’d closed that one after her and they were both out of the car.

“All right if I come up for a minute?” he asked tentatively.

She turned swiftly and faced him. “Don’t you think I’ve had enough for one day? Don’t you think I’m tired? Didn’t the captain send out word I could go home?”

“You are home,” he said.

“Yes, but I want to be there alone, without any” — she looked him resentfully up and down — “supervision.”

“I’m off duty.”

“You’re never off duty. You’re trying to trip up someone even in your sleep, I bet.”

“I’ll only stay a minute. Can’t I have a cup of coffee?” Then he reminded her, “I bought you a cup of coffee.”

“And now you want your ten cents back, I suppose, is that it? Well, come on up.” And under her breath she muttered, “I hope you choke on it.”

“I’ll try,” he said accommodatingly, and followed her inside the hotel.

Upstairs, she turned on the element in the serving pantry, drew water and put it on, then came outside again. She flung herself down on the sofa with a moan of unfeigned exhaustion, without even taking off her coat.

“No wonder people break under those things. I mean guilty people.”

He came away from the window and sat companionably down without being asked. “Know something? The innocent break quicker than the guilty. They haven’t the desperate necessity to cling to their lies.”

“Why did he reach out and shake hands with me? The captain, I mean. They don’t usually do that with people who are brought in for questioning, do they?”

“He could tell you were a better type,” he said glibly.

“No, he wanted to get a look at my hands.”

“You’re on the ball,” he said with a sly smile of admission.

She reached for one of her cigarettes in the guest holder, and deliberately refrained from offering one to him. Then when he held a match for her, she didn’t seem to see that either.

“Hate the sight of me, don’t you?” he said calmly. “But if the woman who lost her life had been your sister, that would have been different. That would’ve been my job, my duty. I would’ve been too lenient if I didn’t break everyone’s arm in at least three places.”

“Well, she wasn’t my sister. Thank God for that.” She got up and went in to take the boiling water off for the coffee. “How do you take it?” she asked crossly.

“Any way it comes.”

I’d like to put some lighter fluid in it, she thought malevolently.

He chuckled as she came back to him with the two cups. “I bet I know what you were thinking just then.”

“Even my very thoughts are under cross-examination.”

“Oh, don’t take it so big,” he said wearily. “A girl without a sense of humor is a bore.” He drank half his cup down at one swallow. He could do that because he had a very large mouth (in both senses of the word, she hastened to insist upon to herself).

“How’d you come to get mixed up with such a type as that, anyway?” he asked, looking down into his coffee as though trying to make up his mind whether there was enough of it left to make up one decent mouthful.

“I’ve been over all that twice already. I thought I could get ahead in my songwriting asp—”

“Oh, knock it off,” he cut in knowingly. “You’re no more interested in songwriting than my” — he changed whatever word he’d been about to use, and finished it — “my armhole. I bet you can’t even put two consecutive notes together. The stuff you showed her you probably cribbed from something somebody else composed and published. I picked up one of those masterpieces of yours over there. One of the cops detailed to standby duty happened to know how to play the piano. I tell you the truth, the rings made by the liquor glasses on the score sheets sounded much better than your notes. I know it’s a funny thing to do, play the piano with a corpse still on the premises, but if that didn’t wake her up we could be sure she was dead for real. Half the guys were holding their hands over their ears and begging him to quit before he even got to the end of it.”

“Go ahead,” she said with lethal suavity. “Anything else?”

He saw her glance down momentarily at what she was holding in her hands. “Don’t throw that. It can give a nasty burn.”

She put the steamy cup aside, as if to make sure she wouldn’t lose control and let it fly at him after all.

“No, the way I figure you,” he went on, sobering, “you’re one of these do-gooders. You feel guilty about some real or imaginary wrong you think you’ve done, and you’re trying to work it off in this way, by taking up with beauts like this Nelson.”

Although she scarcely moved at all, the sensation she experienced was that of receiving a stunning impact that kited her all the way back against a wall.

He’d only set eyes on her for the first time about four hours ago, and yet he already knew her that well! She kept shaking her head slightly to herself. A glaze of tears even formed in her eyes, without dropping. Tears of amazement, of humility. To think someone had read her that right.

She wondered if they realized, the fellow members of his squad, what they had working for them in this man in the way of instinct, intuitiveness, and ability to read human nature. All just as important to a detective, maybe more so, than technical know-how and cat-and-mouse stalking. He was a natural at his trade.

And yet this same man, she already knew to a certain extent, off duty could be noisy, frivolous, partial to lowbrow practical jokes, juvenile almost to the point of asininity or inanity.

But it takes many components, she realized, to make up a complete man.

He’d gone back to talking about the case again. “That stunt of pulling the shower curtain across to try to cover up the fact she was in the tub was very stupid,” he said reflectively. “The minute I spotted that I knew there had been violence committed. A person taking a shower pulls the curtain across to keep the water from getting on the floor, but a person taking a bath never does.”

“The shower curtain—” wasn’t pulled across the tub. She caught herself just in time. In the breath space between two words. The shower curtain — “could have been pulled across by her herself if she felt a draft, for instance.” Just a double space between two words instead of a single one.

But he was a detective. Was he a detective. “I knew you were up there,” he said cheerfully. “I had a pretty good hunch you were, all along, anyway. But this cinches it. Because I heard what it was you didn’t say just now.”

“So it’s still going on!” she flared. “Is that what you came up here for?”

He got to his feet. “Why not? Just to satisfy myself. I couldn’t get it out of you while you were on guard. I figured maybe I might if you were relaxed and with your guard down.”

She looked after him, and he had the door open and was about to leave — without her.

“Does the fact that you think I was over there tonight put me back into the case?” she asked him.

“There isn’t any more case,” he answered, “to put you back into. The case is closed. It was closed just as I was leaving the precinct house. That’s what delayed me.”

“But who is it — who was it?” she tried to call out after him.

But he shut the door behind him and left.

The radio didn’t carry it until about twenty hours later. It first came on on the 8:00 P.M. news break, and from then on was repeated every half hour until it had ridden out the night. In other words they, Homicide, must have deliberately withheld the news until they were sure beyond any doubt or chance of a slip-up. Smitts had already told her the case was closed when he left her door at 12:30 the night before. But that was off the record, so to speak.

It was this angle of it that froze her, frightened her stiff, much more than the news in itself. The murder item had been on the news all day long, but without the definitive arrest. She kept listening and listening, switching from station to station, and it was always the same, just with a change of tired, beat-up adjectives. “The glamorous café singer” was found dead in her tub. “The beautiful café star” was found dead in her bath. “The exotic café performer” was found slain. “Night-life-celebrity” discovered lifeless in bath.

“A tramp got croaked,” Madeline finished it off for them, with a touch of the toughness she’d learned from Dell herself.

She didn’t eat all day. Didn’t leave the room all day, because the radio was there. Why had he told her that? Had he been kidding? But why should he want to kid her? She had an impression that he didn’t kid about squadroom cases, especially not with outsiders. Well, then, what were they waiting for, what was holding them up?

Twelve times she’d heard that a dog had ridden the earth’s orbit in a capsule, and couldn’t have cared less. Twelve times what Senator Somebody had said was repeated verbatim, and it hadn’t even been good the first time. Twelve times the exact location of Hurricane Hilda was pinpointed. Twelve times Cuba, the Congo, Algeria, Vietnam, and all the pharmacopoeia of the sick and suffering sixties were trotted out on display and then trotted back in again. And twelve times poor Adelaide Nelson was drowned in her bathtub, until the old saw about belaboring a dead horse became almost literal.

The newscasts were like flying saucers circling around her, going away, then coming back again.

Then suddenly it came. Came, went, and was over with.

“An arrest has been made in the Adelaide Nelson slaying. A man named Jack d’Angelo has been brought in and is undergoing questioning.”

She cried it out loud, it was wrenched from her with such shattering violence. “My God! They’ve got the wrong man! Shiller was the one I sent the note to!”

Thirty minutes went by. She didn’t leave the side of the set. Almost picked it up and shook it, like a recalcitrant clock, to get the words out of it more quickly. They’d changed a couple of words in it this time. “...and has been undergoing questioning the greater part of the day.”

And then, the following time, “The police are confident they have the right man.”

And then, the next time, “He has been formally charged and bound over...”

And then, the time after that, “...one of the quickest in the records of the Police Department. Less than twenty-four hours after the body was found.”

“Too quick,” she thought, shuddering. “Too quick.”

The phone was in her hand.

“Forty-fifth Precinct,” a man’s voice said.

“Do you have a man there named — uh — well, I guess it would be Smith?”

The voice chuckled, probably in fondness or because it was tired answering nothing but dry duty calls all day long. “Oh, Himself. The quiet one. The mouse. John Francis Xavier Smith. Yeah, he’s known around these parts.”

She didn’t find the camaraderie at all engaging. After all, to be a professional detective, to trap human beings, trick them, trip them up, send them on to be publicly murdered (instead of privately), was for her money simply a hyperthyroid enlargement of the trait of cruelty and penchant for bullying that are to be found latent in almost all adult males. Only, a professional plainclothesman got a salary for doing it. And even a pension, when he got older.

As she stood there at the phone, waiting to tell them they had the wrong man, she was completely on the side of the man on the other end of the line, on the other end of the line from the law, the one against the millions. Only three crimes were worse than the punishment that was meted out; only three crimes deserved it. A crime against a child, the rape of an innocent woman, and a crime against the whole community which threatened it with extinction (espionage in wartime). The rest were pale replicas of the awful majesty of the law, when it set the day and it set the hour, and it said, “You shall die.”

Smitts’s house was out in a low-wage suburban development, nothing fancy about it but neat and clean as a whistle. It turned out not to be his, actually, but she hadn’t been told that.

He came to the door and let her in.

“You were able to find it all right, I see.”

The partner was in the living room when she stepped in there. They had two copper beer cans with neat digs in their tops, two more without, and two glasses going. But they weren’t drunk and it wasn’t a party, she could tell; they were just relaxing. Some mysterious woman’s touch had placed postage-stamp saltine crackers and diminutive wedges of orange cheese on a large thick blue-patterned plate. No man would have cut the bites that small. Both were in shirt sleeves and tieless. “We meet again, Miss Chalmers,” the partner said, but rather lukewarmly, as though he preferred spending his off-time among people of his own choosing.

She came out with it without wasting any further time. “The reason I had to see you so badly, the reason I insisted on coming out here, is — you’ve got to listen to me, you’ve got to believe me — you’re holding the wrong man in the Nelson case.”

It took a minute to sink in.

“Oh,” he said then.

He looked at his partner.

Then he looked back at her again.

“Oh, we are?” he said this time. He slung one rock-solid hip onto the edge of the large round table. He folded his arms speculatively. “How do you figure that?” he asked her.

A woman’s voice suddenly interrupted, saving her from what would have been a ticklish question to answer, without bringing the knife-in-the-back note into it.

“Smitts,” it called down from the head of the stairs, “Evie’s ready for her good-night kiss now.”

He got up, went outside, and went trooping up the stairs, giving the whole fairly flimsy house the shaking of its life. The chain pulls on the lamps jittered. The very floorboards she was standing on seemed to pulsate a little. Even the water level in the small greenish fishbowl began to oscillate, climbing a little on this side, dipping on that.

“I didn’t know he was married,” she said artlessly. Or artfully artlessly might be better.

“He ain’t,” the teammate said. “He lives with his sister and brother-in-law. This is their house. They’d be happy to have him along for the ride, they think that much of him, but he insists on paying for his lodging. That’s the kind of guy Smitts is. The kid’s crazier about him than her own parents.”

She snickered a little. “That nickname. For a big bruiser like him.”

“He got it the first day he went to kindergarten and it’s stuck to him ever since. He couldn’t say his own name right when they asked him what it was.”

The return trip downstairs was equally dynamic to the ascent, possibly even more so. A thin thread of plaster sifted off one corner of the ceiling like talcum powder. The fish in the bowl looked startled and changed directions abruptly.

“Is he always that noisy?” she asked, wincing.

The teammate gave her a hurt look. “You can’t expect him to go around tippytoeing in ballet slippers.”

“No, but he could tone it down a little,” she suggested.

His partner’s loyalty wouldn’t dim, not by one kilowatt. “At least you always know where he is,” he defended sturdily. “He ain’t one of these sneaks.”

He came in making a remark at a tangent for his partner alone. “That kid gets cuter every day.” Then to her, “Where were we? Oh, about the man being the wrong man.”

“Well, you’re holding d’Angelo, aren’t you?”

“We’re booking d’Angelo, is right.”

“Well, but there was another man in her life.” (And if he asks me how I knew, I’ll simply have to admit I withheld information and take whatever they dish out to me on that count.)

But he didn’t. “Shiller the investment broker? We know all about him. We questioned him right at the very beginning and we released him on his own recognizance. He had a complete and perfect alibi. He was host to a dinner party of forty celebrating his wife’s birthday at one of the swellest restaurants in town. Every society photographer on the beat there snapping him.”

“But... but—” she sputtered.

“D’Angelo’s the wrong man?” he queried with a grin.

“He is. He’s got to be,” she cried vehemently.

He gave her not only the old one-two but a one-two-three-four. Left, right, right, left, leaving her groggy and down for the count. “Then what are the strokes from her nails doing on the backs of both his hands, and on his lower forearms?

“Why do the particles of skin embedded under her fingernails match up by lab analysis with samples taken from his?

“Why did he call us up, voluntarily, wait for us at a certain place, namely his home, voluntarily, give himself up to us when we got there, voluntarily, and accompany us back to headquarters, voluntarily?

“And lastly and mostly and mainly, why did he dictate and sign, unforced and of his own free will, a full confession?

“That he killed her, not because he hated her, but because he loved her. Loved her too much to be able to go on living with his own jealousy. Above all, loved her too much to be able to go on living without her after he had killed her.

“D’ja ever read Othello? That’s it, in today’s world.

“He might have had a hundred cheap little loves in his gangster days, but the real thing only hit him at last late in his life, real enough to live for, real enough to die for.”

He sighed, almost as though he understood a thing like that, and how could he, how could anyone except the one who did the loving, lived the loving? Loved what was crass brass to others, loved it as precious imperishable gold.

The mystery of the human heart, that no detective can ever solve.

She sank down dazedly into the nearest chair at hand, still only half comprehending, and the title of the song she had seen on Dell’s piano passed through her mind like a faraway echo. “Heaven Drops Its Curtain Down upon My Heart.”

As she reentered her hotel and walked past the desk, the clerk greeted her and held out a letter toward her. She took it and stared at it with that momentary feeling of unreality which is apt to overcome anyone when they are confronted by their own handwriting. It was addressed: “Walter Shiller Esq., Warren, Shiller, Davis and Norton.” In the upper right-hand corner there was a small glossy patch where the stamp, possibly dried out by too long a confinement in the vending machine, had loosened and dropped off. Beside the glossy patch, a petulant magenta-ink post office rubber stamp chided: “Returned for failure to pay postage.”

“It came back several days ago,” the clerk apologized. “I called up to ask you if you wanted us to put a stamp on it and remail it for you, but you were out. I guess I put it in your box and forgot about it. We’ve been very busy the last few days—”

He stopped short and stared, as she pressed the envelope to her lips, passionately, voraciously, over and over, like a love note from a lover, like a refund from the Internal Revenue Service.

“I thought you wanted it to go,” he remarked uncertainly.

“So did I,” she said. “So did I. Oh, how wrong can you be?”

“Miss Chalmers, please,” he protested mournfully as she tore it into a hundred little pieces and scattered it all about her, “think of the poor porter who has to clean up here later on.”

Upstairs at her desk afterward, she took out the cheap little pocket notebook with the line-ruled pages, and where it said,

ran a line through it.

Somebody else really did the job, not I, though, was her inescapable reflection.