Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

Barney had seen the old man get hit, but he didn’t feel sorry for him. The old man might provide him with some cash.

1

At one o’clock in the morning the taverns along Sixth Street are usually full. But there aren’t many people on the street. With only a half hour left until curfew, most people don’t want to waste drinking time walking from one bar to another.

When I stepped out of the Happy Hollow, the only other person in sight was an elderly and rather shabbily-dressed man who was just starting to cross the street. And the only moving vehicle in sight was the green Buick convertible which came streaking along Sixth just in time to catch the elderly man with its left front fender as he stepped from between two parked cars. The car was driving on the left side of the street because Sixth is one-way at that point and either lane is legal.

The old man flew back between the cars he had just walked between to land in a heap on the sidewalk. With a screech of brakes the green convertible swerved right clear across the street and sideswiped two parked cars.

The crash was more terrific than the damage. Metal screamed in agony as a front fender was torn from the first parked car and a rear fender half ripped from the body of the second. The convertible caromed to the center of the street, hesitated for a moment, then gunned off like a scared rabbit.

But not before I had seen all I needed to see. That section of Sixth is a solid bank of taverns and clubs, and neon signs make it as bright as day. With the convertible’s top down, I could see the occupants clearly.

The driver was a woman, hatless and with raven black hair to her shoulders. I could see her only in profile, but I got an impression of evenly molded features and suntanned complexion. The man next to her I saw full face, for as the car shot away he stared back over his shoulder at the motionless figure on the sidewalk. He too was hatless, a blond, handsome man with a hairline mustache. I recognized him instantly.

He was Harry Cushman, twice-married and twice-divorced café society playboy whose romantic entanglements regularly got him in the local gossip columns.

Automatically I noted the license number of the Buick convertible was X-42-209-30.

The crash brought people pouring from doorways all along the block. A yell of rage from across the street, followed by a steady stream of swearing, told me at least one of the damaged cars’ owners had arrived on the scene.

“Anybody see it?” I heard someone near me ask.

Then somebody discovered the man lying on the sidewalk. As a crowd began to gather around him, I crossed the street to look at the two damaged cars. Beyond a ruined fender on each, neither seemed particularly harmed. One was a Dodge and one a Ford, and I tried to file the license number of each in my mind along with the Buick’s.

Apparently someone in the crowd had thought to call an ambulance and the police, for a few moments later they arrived simultaneously. I stood at the edge of the crowd as the police cleared a path for the City Hospital intern who had come with the ambulance and the intern bent over the injured man.

The man wasn’t dead, for I could hear the intern asking him questions and the old man answering in a weak voice. I couldn’t hear what they said, but after a few moments the intern rose and spoke in a louder voice to one of the cops.

“He may have a fractured hip. Can’t tell for sure without X-rays. I don’t think anything else is broken.”

Then, under the intern’s instructions, two attendants got the old man on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance.

“I didn’t get the guy’s name,” the cop complained.

“John Lischer,” the intern said. “You can get his address later. His temporary address for a while will be City Hospital.”

By now it was twenty after one. I re-entered the Happy Hollow for a nightcap, and while I was sipping it I wrote down on an envelope I found in my pocket the three license numbers and the name John Lischer.

2

The private detective business isn’t particularly good in St. Louis. In New York State a private cop can pick up a lot of business gathering divorce evidence, because up there the only ground for divorce is adultery. But in Missouri you can get a divorce for cruelty, desertion, non-support, alcoholism, if your spouse commits a felony, impotency, if your wife is pregnant at marriage, indignities, or if the husband is a vagrant. So why hire a private cop to prove adultery?

I have to pick up nickels wherever I can find them.

By noon the next day I’d learned from the Bureau of Motor Vehicle records that license X-42-209-30 was registered to Mrs. Lawrence Powers at a Lindell address across the street from Forest Park. The address gave me a lift, because there aren’t any merely well-off people in that section. Most of them are millionaires.

I also checked the licenses of the Dodge and the Ford, learning their owners were respectively a James Talmadge on South Jefferson and a Henry Taft on Skinker Boulevard. Then I called City Hospital and asked about the condition of John Lischer.

The switchboard operator informed me it was listed as fair.

I waited another twenty-four hours before calling on Mrs. Lawrence Powers. I picked two P.M. as the best time to arrive.

The Powers’s home was a huge rose granite affair of at least fourteen rooms, surrounded by fifty feet of perfect lawn in all four directions. A colored maid came to the door.

“Mrs. Powers, please,” I said, handing the maid one of my cards reading: Bernard Calhoun, Confidential Investigations.

She let me into a small foyer, left me standing there while she went off with the card. In a few minutes she came back with a dubious expression on her face.

“Mrs. Powers is right filled up with appointments this afternoon, Mr. Calhoun. She wants to know have you got some particular business?”

I said, “Tell her it’s about an auto accident.”

The colored girl disappeared again, but returned almost immediately.

“Just follow me please, sir,” she said.

She led me through a living room about thirty feet long whose furnishings alone probably cost a year of my income, through an equally expensive dining room and onto a large sun-flooded sun porch at the side of the house. Mrs. Lawrence Powers reclined at full length in a canvas deck chair, wearing brief red shorts and a similarly-colored scarf. She wore nothing else, not even shoes, and obviously had been sun bathing when I interrupted her.

The maid left us alone and I examined Mrs. Powers at the same time she was studying me. She was the same woman I had seen at the wheel of the Buick convertible. She was about thirty, I judged, a couple of years younger than me, and she had a body which started my heart hammering the moment I saw her. Not only was it perfectly contoured, her flesh was a creamy tan so satiny in texture, I had to control an impulse to reach out and test if it were real. She was beautiful clear from the tip of her delicately-shaped little nose to the tips of her small toes. Even her feet were lovely.

But her face didn’t have any more expression than a billiard ball.

After a moment she calmly rose from her deck chair, turned her back to me and said, “Tie me up, please.” Her voice was pleasantly husky, but there was a curious flatness to it.

She had folded the scarf into a triangle and now held the two ends behind her for me to tie together. Taking them, I crossed them in the middle of her back. The touch of my knuckles against her bare flesh sent a tremor up my arms and I had an idiotic impulse to lean down and press my mouth against the smooth shoulder immediately in front of me.

Killing the impulse, I asked, “Tight enough?”

“It’ll do.”

I tied a square knot.

She turned around right where she was, which put her face an inch in front of mine and about six inches below. She was a tall woman, about five feet eight, because I stand six feet two.

Looking up at me without expression, she said in a toneless voice, “You’re a big man, Mr. Calhoun.”

For several moments I stood staring down at her, not even thinking. I’m not used to having scantily-clad women push themselves so close to me on first meeting, and I wasn’t sure how to take her. Then I got my brain functioning again and decided she probably wasn’t used to having strange men walk into her house, take one look at her and then grab her and kiss her. Probably, despite her seeming provocation, she’d scream for her maid.

I said, “Two-ten in my bare skin,” backed away and took a deck chair similar to hers. Gracefully Mrs. Powers sank back into her own.

“You’re a private detective, Mr. Calhoun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And you wanted to see me about some accident?”

“The one night before last. Involving a green Buick convertible with license X-42-209-30, a parked Dodge belonging to a man named James Talmadge, a parked Ford belonging to a man named Henry Taft, and a pedestrian named John Lischer who’s currently at City Hospital in fair condition. A hit-and-run accident.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she merely said, “I see.”

“I happened to be coming out of Happy Hollow just as it took place,” I said. “I was the only person on the street aside from John Lischer, and I’m sure I was the only witness. I got a good look at both the driver of the Buick and the passenger. Good enough to recognize both. You were the driver and Harry Cushman was the passenger.”

Again she said, “I see.” Then, after studying me without expression, she asked, “What do you want?”

“Have you reported the accident?”

When she looked thoughtful, I said, “I can easily check at headquarters. I haven’t yet because I didn’t want to be questioned.”

“I see. No, I haven’t reported it.”

“What does your husband do, Mrs. Powers?”

A fleeting frown marred the smoothness of her brow, but it was gone almost instantly.

“He’s president of Haver National Bank.”

“Then you haven’t told your husband about the accident either.” I made it a statement instead of a question.

She regarded me thoughtfully. “Why do you assume that?”

“Because I don’t think the president of Haver National Bank would let an accident his wife was involved in go unreported for thirty-seven hours. Particularly where no one was seriously hurt, you undoubtedly have liability insurance, and the worst you could expect if you turned yourself in voluntarily would be a fine and temporary suspension of your driver’s license. He’d know the charge against you would be much more serious if the police have to track you down than if you turned yourself in on your own, even at this late date.”

Her face remained deadpan. “So?”

“So I think the reason you didn’t stop, and the reason you don’t intend to report the accident, isn’t because you lost your head. You don’t impress me as the panicky type. I think the reason you didn’t stop was because you couldn’t afford to let your husband find out you were out with Harry Cushman at one in the morning.”

When she said nothing at all, I asked, “Have you tried to have your car fixed yet?”

She shook her head.

“Where is it?”

“In the garage out back.”

“How come your husband hasn’t noticed the damage?”

“It’s all on the right side,” she said tonelessly. “A smashed front fender, bent bumper and dented door. Nothing was knocked loose. We have a three-car garage and my stall is the far right one. I parked it close to the wall so no one could walk around on that side. The station wagon’s between my car and my husband’s Packard, so there isn’t much likelihood of him noticing the damage.”

“You say nothing was knocked loose? Was your headlight broken?”

“No. I don’t believe I left any clues at the scene of the crime.”

I leaned back and put the tips of my fingers together. In a conversational tone I said, “You must have left some green paint on the two cars you hit. By now the police have alerted every repair garage within a fifty-mile radius to watch for a green car. Have you thought of that?”

“Yes.”

“How you plan to get around it?”

“I haven’t yet solved the problem.”

“Would you be interested in some advice?”

“What advice?” she asked.

“Hire a private detective to get you out of your jam,” I said.

3

For a long time she looked at me, her expression completely blank. When she spoke there was the slightest touch of mockery in her voice.

“I was frightened when Alice said you wanted to see me about an auto accident, Mr. Calhoun. But almost from the moment you walked through the door I knew you hadn’t come to investigate me on behalf of that old man or either of the two car owners. I’m a pretty good judge of character. Out of the four people involved, how did you happen to pick me as your potential client?”

“I doubt that any of the others could stand my fee.”

Her face grew thoughtful again. “I see. What kind of service do you offer?”

“I offer to arrange a quiet payment of damages to the owners of the other two cars, so you don’t have to worry about eventual suits if they ever find out who side-swiped them. With a bonus tossed in to keep them from telling the cops there’d been a contact. And to make the same kind of arrangement with John Lischer. I warn you in advance that part will cost plenty, because on top of whatever I can get him to agree to for damages, he’ll have to be paid to keep it from the cops that there’s been a settlement. I’ll also take care of having your car repaired safely.”

“Why can’t you do just the last part?” she asked. “If no one ever discovers it was my car, why should we risk contacting the other people?”

“I’m thinking of your interest,” I said. “Once there’s a settlement, even a secret one, none of the other parties will press charges in the event the police ever catch up with you. Because I’ll get quitclaim agreements from all of them. Then if you do get caught, the probability is the cops won’t press charges on their own. And even if they do, proof that you made cash settlements with all the injured parties will be an extenuating circumstance. I doubt that any judge would give you more than a token fine and suspend your driver’s license for six months. But without settling, you’re in for a jail sentence if you ever get caught.”

“I see.” Her brow puckered in a slight frown. “And you say you can get my car repaired safely?”

“Safely,” I assured her.

“How? I wouldn’t care to have some shady repairman work on it. All he’d have to do is check the license plate like you did, and be all set for a little blackmail.”

“I said safely. Does your husband ever go out of town?”

“He flies to New York this coming Monday. A banker’s convention. He’ll be gone a full week.”

“What time’s he leave?”

“Six P.M. from the airport.”

“Fine,” I said. “As soon as it’s dark Monday night, I’ll pick up the car and drive it to Kansas City. I’ll switch plates and take it to a garage where I can get fast service. By the time your husband gets back from New York, your car will be back in the garage as good as new. Meantime, between now and Monday, I’ll arrange settlements with John Lischer and the other two car owners.”

She thought it over. Finally she said, “What is your fee?”

“Five thousand dollars,” I said.

She didn’t even blink. “I see. You’re a rather expensive man, Mr. Calhoun.”

I shrugged.

“And if I refuse to engage you?”

I said, “I have my duty as a citizen.”

“How would you explain to the police keeping silent thirty-seven hours?”

“I’d phone and ask why they haven’t acknowledged my letter,” I said blandly. “I was quite drunk that night. Too drunk for it to occur to me I ought to tell the police at the scene I had seen your license number. But the very next morning I wrote them a letter. Letters can get lost in the mail.”

She nodded slightly. “I guess you’re in a pretty good bargaining position, Mr. Calhoun. But I have one more question. Suppose this John Lischer insists on as much as a five-thousand-dollar settlement? With your fee, that would run the amount up to ten thousand. Where do you suggest I get that much money?”

I looked at her in surprise. “With this home and with three cars in the garage, I assume you’re not exactly a pauper.”

“No,” she admitted. “My husband is quite wealthy. And I can have all the money I want for any purpose I want just by asking. The only catch is I have to tell what it’s for. I haven’t a cent of my own except a checking account which currently contains about five hundred dollars. I could get the money by telling my husband what it’s for, but if I did that I wouldn’t need your services. I’m not afraid of the police. The sole reason I’m willing to engage you is to prevent my husband from finding out I wasn’t home in bed at the time of the accident.”

“Think up some other excuse. A charity donation, for instance.”

She shook her head. “My husband handles all our charity donations personally. There simply isn’t any excuse I could give him. If I told him I wanted a ten-thousand-dollar launch, he’d tell me to order it and have the company bill him. He wouldn’t give me the money for it. I’ve never in my life asked him for more than a couple of hundred dollars in cash.”

I said, “Then hit your boy friend. Harry Cushman’s got a couple of odd million lying around, last I heard, and nothing to spend it on except alimony and nightclubbing.”

She looked thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose that would work. Harry wouldn’t want publicity any more than I would. Shall I ask him for a check?”

“Cash,” I said.

“I’ll phone him as soon as you leave. Suppose you come back about this same time tomorrow?”

“Fine,” I said. It sounded like a dismissal, so I got to my feet.

She gave me an impersonal nod of good-by. She was leaning forward and reaching behind her back to untie my square knot when I walked out of the room.

4

The next day was Thursday. At noon I phoned City Hospital and learned John Lischer’s condition was charted as unchanged. Two hours later the colored maid Alice again let me into the foyer of the Powers home.

This time, instead of making me wait while she checked with her mistress, she merely said, “Mrs. Powers is expecting you, sir,” walked off and let me find my own way to the sun porch.

Thick carpeting in the big living room and dining room muffled my footsteps so that Mrs. Powers couldn’t hear me coming. I stopped at the open door of the sun porch.

Perhaps Mrs. Powers was expecting me, but apparently she had also expected the maid at least to announce my arrival, because she wasn’t exactly dressed for company. As yesterday, she was stretched out in one of the deck chairs with sun flooding her body. Her eyes were closed, though she didn’t seem to be asleep, and she wore nothing but a bra and a pair of yellow shorts as brief as the red ones she had worn the previous day.

A man can stand only so much temptation. When she looked up at me with no expression whatever on her face, I dropped a hand on each of her smooth shoulders, pulled her against my chest and kissed her.

She made no resistance, but she made no response either. She just stood there, her lips soft but unmoving, and her eyes wide open. After a moment I pushed her away.

“Was your mother frightened by an ice cube?” I growled at her.

“Maybe you’re just not the man to melt the ice, Mr. Calhoun.”

Turning, she padded across the enclosed porch on bare feet to a small table. A brightly-colored straw bag lay on the table, and she removed a banded sheaf of currency from it.

“Your fee,” she said, returning and handing me the money. “One hundred fifties.”

“How about the settlement?”

“We don’t know what that’s going to amount to, do we?” she said. “Harry wants to see the agreements releasing me from further claims in writing before he pays any more money. When you bring me those, I’ll see that you get whatever money the agreements call for.”

“Harry is smarter than I thought he was,” I remarked.

I riffled through the bills enough to make sure they were all fifties, then stuffed them in a pocket without counting them. “I’ll pay my personal expenses and the car repairs out of this, and you can pay me back when it’s all over.”

Without comment she returned to her deck chair.

“I’ll try to have all three agreements drawn up by tomorrow,” I said. “Is it all right if I take them directly to Cushman for approval instead of bringing them here?”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I’d like to get that part of it settled before I take off with the car. So I won’t be in quite so much of a jam in case I get picked up driving it. By the time I deliver the agreements to you, you relay them on to Cushman and I call to get them back again, it will already be Monday.”

After reflecting she said, “I suppose that will be all right. I’ll phone Harry to expect you sometime tomorrow.”

“I’ll pick up the car about eight thirty Monday night. Leave the garage unlocked and the keys in the car.”

“Hadn’t I better phone you first?” she asked. “Suppose Lawrence changed his mind at the last minute and didn’t go?”

“Yeah,” I said after a moment’s thought. “Maybe you better.” I gave her my home number.

5

My plan was to contact the injured John Lischer before I got in touch with either of the other two men, as there would be no point in trying to settle with the others at all if Lischer refused to co-operate. But before even doing that, I decided it would be smart to find out just how much of an interest the police were taking in the case.

In St. Louis the Homicide Squad investigates all hit-and-runs in which there’s personal injury, even if the injury isn’t serious. This procedure is based on the sound theory that if unexpected complications happen to develop and the accident victim dies, Homicide has been on the case from the beginning and doesn’t have to pick up a cold trail.

So I dropped in on Lieutenant Ben Simmons, head of the St. Louis Homicide Squad.

I found him alone in Room 405, morosely going over a stack of case records. Ben Simmons is a big man, nearly as big as I am, with an air of restrained energy about him. He hates desk work, which makes up a good part of his job, and usually’s glad of any excuse to postpone it. While we’re friendly enough, we’ve never been intimate pals, but because my arrival gave him an excuse to push his case records aside, he looked up at me almost with relief.

“Hi, Barney,” he said. “Pull up a cigarette and sit down. I was just getting ready to take a break.”

Sliding a chair over to one side of his desk, I produced a pack, offered him a cigarette and flipped another in my own mouth. He furnished the fire.

Simmons leaned back in his chair and blew an appreciative shaft of smoke across the desk. “If you came in to report a corpse, walk right out again. I’m up to my neck now.”

“Just killing time,” I said. “Thought maybe I could dig up a client from among your unsolved cases. I haven’t had a job in five weeks.”

The lieutenant laughed. Regular cops always seem to get a kick out of hearing a private cop isn’t doing so well.

“You should have stayed on the force,” he said. “Probably you’d have been a sergeant by now.”

“Probably I’d still be pounding a beat. Anything interesting stirring?”

“In unsolveds? A stickup killing and a hit-and-run is all. Unless you want to look up some of the old ones from years back.”

“What’s the hit-and-run?” I asked. “Any insurance companies involved?”

“Not for the dead guy. He didn’t have any insurance. There was a little property damage covered by insurance, but not enough to pay the insurance company to hire a private eye to track down the hit-and-runner.”

Apparently he was talking about a different case, I thought, since John Lischer hadn’t either been dead or in any immediate danger of dying when I’d last checked City Hospital at noon that day.

I said, “You’ve only got one unsolved hit-and-run?”

“At the moment. And this one I was hoping I could turn over. The thing happened about one A.M. Tuesday morning, and the guy’s condition was listed as fair up until one P.M. today. Then he suddenly conked out. I just got the call an hour ago.”

I felt my insides turn cold. Forcing my tone to remain only politely interested, I asked, “Who was he?”

“Old fellow named John Lischer. All he had was a fractured hip, but he was pushing eighty and I guess he couldn’t stand the shock. His heart gave out.”

I went on calmly puffing my cigarette, but my mind was racing. Up to this moment my actions in the case hadn’t been exactly ethical, but the most I’d been risking was my license. Once I had succeeded in arriving at settlements with the three injured parties, there wasn’t much likelihood I’d get into serious trouble for not reporting what I knew to the police, even if the whole story eventually came out.

But the unexpected death of John Lischer changed the whole picture. Suddenly, instead of merely being guilty of somewhat unethical practice, I was an accessory to homicide. For in Missouri hit-and-run driving resulting in death is manslaughter, and carries a penalty of from three months to ten years.

I asked casually, “Got any leads on the case?”

“A little green paint and a bumper guard. Enough to identify the car as a green Buick.”

That did it, I thought. So much for Mrs. Powers’s assurance that she’d left no clues at the scene of the crime. With the case now a homicide instead of merely a hit-and-run, there’d be a statewide alert for a damaged green Buick. Even Kansas City wouldn’t be safe.

Somehow I managed to get through another five minutes of idle conversation with Ben Simmons. Then I pushed myself erect with simulated laziness.

“I guess I won’t pick up any nickels here,” I said. “See you around.”

“Sure,” the lieutenant said. “Drop in any time.”

It was four o’clock when I left Headquarters. I debated returning to the Powers home at once, then decided it was too close to the time Mr. Powers would be getting home from the bank. Instead I phoned from a pay station.

The colored maid Alice answered the phone, but Mrs. Powers came on almost immediately.

“Barney Calhoun,” I said. “There’s been a development. I have to see both you and Cushman at once.”

“Now?” she asked. “I expect my husband home within an hour.”

“Arrange some excuse with Alice. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t urgent. Can you get in touch with Cushman?”

“I suppose.”

“Then both of you be at my place by a quarter of five. It’s on Twentieth between Locust and Olive. West side of the street, just right of the alley. Lower right fiat. Got it?”

“That isn’t a very nice neighborhood,” she said with a slight sniff.

“I’m not a very nice person,” I told her, and hung up.

6

Harry Cushman arrived first, coming in a taxi.

When I opened the door, he asked, “You’re Calhoun?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on in.”

He didn’t offer his hand. Following me into my small and not particularly well-furnished front room, he looked around superciliously, finally chose a straight-backed chair as the least likely piece of furniture to be contaminated.

“Helena said it was urgent,” he said. “I hope you can make it fast. I have a five-thirty cocktail date.”

It was the first time I had heard Mrs. Powers’s first name. Helena Powers. Somehow it seemed to suit her calm and expressionless beauty.

I said, “Depends on how fast Helena gets here. What I have to say won’t take long.”

The buzzer sounded at that moment and I went to let Helena Powers in. Glancing past her at the curb, I saw she had come in the station wagon.

Harry Cushman rose when she came into the room, crossed and bent to kiss her. She turned her cheek, then moved away from him and took my easy chair with the broken spring. She was wearing a bright sun dress which left her shoulders bare, open-toed pumps and no stockings. Her jet-black hair was tied back with a red ribbon and she looked about sixteen years old.

Cushman returned to his chair.

Without preliminary I said, “John Lischer’s dead.”

Cushman stared at me with his mouth open. As usual Helena’s face showed no expression.

“But you told Helena you’d been checking the hospital and his condition was listed as fair,” Cushman said stupidly.

“His heart gave out. All he had was a fractured hip, but he was nearly eighty.”

Helena asked in a calm voice, “How does this affect our arrangements?”

“It changes the whole picture,” I told her. “You can’t settle with a corpse. If you get caught now, you’ll be charged with manslaughter. You’ll be charged even if you turn yourself in.”

Harry Cushman’s face was gray. “Listen, I can’t afford to be accessory to a manslaughter.”

“You already are,” I informed him. “You were in the car that killed Lischer. If you didn’t want to be an accessory, you should have reported to the cops at once.” I let a little contempt creep into my voice. “Of course if you go to them right now, they’ll probably let you off the hook because they’ll be more interested in the driver. Mrs. Powers will take the rap... probably five years... and all you’ll get is a little bad publicity.”

He licked his lips and flicked his eyes at Helena, who stared back at him expressionlessly.

“Naturally we have to protect Helena,” Cushman said with an effort to sound protective. “What’s your suggestion?”

“They know it was a green Buick.” I looked at Helena. “Your belief that you hadn’t knocked anything loose was a little wrong. You left a bumper guard at the accident scene.”

I turned my attention back to Cushman. “Now that it’s classified as a homicide instead of just a hit-and-run, every repair garage in the state and halfway across Illinois will be alerted. The risk of getting the car fixed has at least tripled. And so has my fee. I want another ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand!” Cushman squeaked. “You agreed to five!”

“Not to help cover a homicide, I didn’t. Make up your mind fast. Either it’s fifteen grand or nothing. If you don’t want to play, I’ll hand back your five right now and call the police.”

Both of them stared at me, Cushman with petulant belligerence and Helena with mild curiosity, as she might have examined an interesting bug on a flower.

Finally Helena’s husky voice said, “I don’t see what there is to argue about, Harry. Mr. Calhoun seems to be in a perfect bargaining position. He always seems to be in a perfect bargaining position.”

Cushman sputtered and fumed for a few minutes more, but finally he agreed to deliver me ten thousand more in cash at noon the next day. The money didn’t mean anything to him, of course, because he’d been left more millions than he could possibly spend in a lifetime, but I think he was beginning to wish he’d never heard of the beautiful Helena Powers. I could tell by the way he looked at her she held a terrific fascination for him, but I suspect he was beginning to wonder if she was worth the complications she was bringing into his life.

I didn’t care what he thought so long as he came up with an additional ten thousand dollars.

7

Hit-and-run deaths don’t create much newspaper stir in a city the size of St. Louis, particularly where the victim isn’t important from a news point of view. The Friday papers carried a brief account of John Lischer’s death and the statement that the police were searching for a green Buick damaged on the right side. The original report of the accident had been only a paragraph back in the stock market sections, but this appeared on the second page of both the Post and the Globe. Apparently there was a dearth of other news.

At noon Cushman brought me two more sheafs of fifty-dollar bills. I took them and the original packet down to my safe deposit vault, first transferring a thousand dollars to my wallet.

Then I relaxed for the weekend, resting up in the expectation of not getting any sleep at all Monday night.

At seven o’clock Monday evening Helena Powers phoned me to say her husband had caught his plane and the way was clear for me to pick up the Buick.

“The keys in the car?” I asked.

“No. Stop at the house for them. Alice isn’t here and I’m all alone. No one will see you.”

At eight-thirty, just as it was beginning to get dark, she opened the front door to my ring. She was wearing a plain street dress and a pert little straw hat, and she carried a light jacket over her arm. Silently she locked the door behind me, then led me back to the kitchen, switching off lights as we passed through each room. On the kitchen table stood a small suitcase.

“You going somewhere?” I asked.

“With you,” she said, giving me a deadpan look.

Setting down my own bag, I looked at her in astonishment. “Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“I’ll be gone nearly a week.”

“I’ve made arrangements with Alice,” she said. “She thinks I’m driving up to my sister’s in Columbia. I gave her a week off.”

“Suppose your husband tries to phone long distance and doesn’t get any answer?”

“He never phones. He just writes a card every day when he’s gone. And I never write back.”

I shrugged. “It’s your car. I guess you can ride in it if you want.”

I picked up her bag and my own, waited while she flicked out the lights and opened the back door for me. Then I waited again while she locked the door behind us.

In the garage I set down the bags and asked her for the car keys. Silently she handed me a leather key case.

“Which is the trunk key?” I asked.

She pointed to one.

I slid it into the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. I tried it upside down, but it wouldn’t go in.

“The lock’s jammed,” I said.

Helena tried it with no more success than I had. Finally she said, “I’m sure it’s the right key,” and looked puzzled.

“The devil with it,” I said. “We haven’t got that much luggage anyway.”

I tossed our bags on the floor of the small back seat. The top of the convertible was still down, as it had been on the night of the accident, but I put it up before we started.

Apparently the only damage the car had suffered was body damage, because it drove perfectly. I noted with satisfaction the gas tank registered nearly three-fourths full, which should take us better than two hundred miles before we’d have to worry about refueling.

I didn’t figure there was much risk of us being stopped even in St. Louis by some cruising patrol car, because it was now six days since the accident and four days since John Lischer had died. I knew a routine order would have been issued to all cars to look for a damaged green Buick, but I had also ridden patrol enough back in my police days to know that by now this order would be filed ’way at the back of most cruising cops’ minds. They wouldn’t actually be searching for the hit-and-run car to the extent of carefully looking over every green automobile they saw. Even if we ran into a cop and he noticed the damage, there was a good chance it wouldn’t register on him immediately that our car was green or that it was a Buick.

It also helped that it was now dark and that the damage was all on the right side. Simply by keeping in the right-hand lane I could prevent any cars passing us in the same direction we were going from noticing it. The only real danger was in meeting a squad car coming from the opposite direction, for the front bumper was badly bent and the front right fender was crushed all out of shape.

To increase our odds, I skirted the congested part of town. My destination was Illinois, but instead of turning east, I took Lindell west to Skinker Boulevard, circled Washington University campus to Big Bend Road, turned right and drove north to the edge of town. Then I cut across to North Eighth, turned right again and headed toward McKinley Bridge.

Puzzled by this maneuvering, Helena said, “I thought we were going to Kansas City.”

“That was before I was accessory to a homicide,” I said. “We’re going to Chicago.”

“Chicago! That’s three hundred miles!”

“K. C. is two fifty,” I told her. “K. C. garages will be looking for a bent Buick. Chicago garages won’t. We’ll be there by morning.”

At that moment we had a bad break. Up to now we hadn’t seen a single radio car, but now, only five blocks from McKinley Bridge and relative safety, one suddenly appeared coming toward us. As it cruised by, it blinked on its highway lights, then lowered them again.

With my heart in my mouth I wondered if the two patrolmen in the car had noticed our damaged right front. In the rear-view mirror I saw them swing in a U-turn and start back toward us. I had been traveling at twenty-five, but I risked increasing the speed to thirty.

A siren ground out a summons to halt.

For a wild moment I contemplated pushing the accelerator to the floor and running it out. Then I realized there wasn’t any safe place to run. If I tried to dash over McKinley Bridge to Illinois, the cops would simply use the phone at this end of the bridge and we’d run into a block at the far toll gate. They’d have all the time in the world to set one up, because the Mississippi is nearly a mile wide at that point. And if I kept straight ahead instead of crossing the bridge, Eighth Street would shoot us into the most congested part of town.

I pulled over to the curb and stopped.

When the police car pulled next to us, neither cop got out. The one on the right said, “Haven’t you got any dimmers on that thing, mister?”

At first his words failed to penetrate, because I was expecting some question about our smashed fender. Then I flicked my eyes at the dashboard and saw the small red light which indicated my highway lights were on. My left foot felt for the floor switch and pressed it down.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t notice I had the brights on.”

The cop nodded peremptorily and the car swung left in another U-turn to go back the way it had been going. With shaking fingers I lighted a cigarette before starting on.

8

We had no trouble at the bridge. If the toll collector had been instructed to watch for a damaged green Buick, he wasn’t watching very carefully, because he didn’t even glance at our right front fender. Of course he approached the car from my side, but even then he couldn’t have failed to notice the damage if he’d looked across the hood.

Then we were in Venice, Illinois.

I took 66, driving along at a steady fifty-five so as not to risk getting picked up for speeding. We hit Springfield about eleven-thirty and I drove aimlessly up and down side streets for a few minutes.

“What are you doing now?” Helena asked.

“We need gas.”

“We passed a station right in the center of town.”

“I know,” I said. “But we’re not going to leave any record of a banged-up green Buick with Missouri plates stopping anywhere for gas. The alert won’t reach as far as Chicago for a mere hit-and-run homicide, but it’s sure to have gone this far.”

Finally I found what I wanted. A car parked on a side street where all the houses in the block were dark. Pulling up next to it on the wrong side of the street, I got out, reached in back for my bag, opened it and drew out a length of hose.

Helena watched silently as I siphoned gas from the parked car into the Buick’s tank.

When we were on the way again she remarked, “I’d never have thought of that. I’m beginning to think you earn your money, Mr. Calhoun.”

“Why so formal?” I asked. “My name’s Barney.”

In the darkness I could see her looking at me sidewise. “All right, Barney,” she said after a moment.

We stopped for gas once more in Bloomington, getting it by the same method. Then we didn’t stop again until we hit the outskirts of Chicago at seven A.M.

As I began to slow down with the intention of turning in at a truck stop, Helena said, “What do we want here?”

“Breakfast,” I said.

“Shouldn’t we rent a couple of cabins before we do anything else?”

“No,” I said. “We’ve got several more important things to do first.”

By the time we had finished breakfast at the truck stop it was eight, and by the time we got far enough into town to begin to run into small neighborhood businesses, barber shops were open. I accomplished the second of the more important things we had to do by getting a shave.

“Couldn’t that have waited?” Helena complained when I rejoined her.

“I have to look respectable for my next stop,” I told her.

Heading in the general direction of the Loop, I drove until I spotted a sign reading “Car Rentals.” I parked half a block beyond it.

“Just wait here,” I instructed Helena. “When I come by in another car, follow me.”

As usual she showed no surprise. As I got out of the car she slid over into the driver’s scat.

The car rental place didn’t have exactly what I wanted, but it was close enough. I would have preferred a Buick coupe or convertible the same color as Helena’s, but the man didn’t have any Buicks. I settled for a Dodge coupe a shade darker green than the convertible. The rate was five dollars a day plus eight cents a mile, and I told the man I wanted it for a week. I gave him the name Henry Graves, a Detroit address and left a seventy-five dollar deposit.

Only ten minutes after I had left her I pulled up alongside Helena in the Dodge, honked the horn and pulled away again. In the rear-view mirror I could see her pull out to follow me.

I led her back to the southwest edge of town, found a street which seemed relatively deserted and parked. Helena parked behind me.

In the trunk of the rented car I found a screwdriver and a. pair of pliers. Helena watched with her customary lack of expression as I switched plates on the two cars.

Then she said, “I don’t think I understand.”

“Probably an unnecessary precaution, because I’m sure repair garages this far from St. Louis won’t be watching for a green Buick. But up here a Missouri plate stands out more than an Illinois one. Now when I take this thing in to be fixed, it’ll just be another local car. And on the off chance there’s ever a check to find out who it belonged to, the license won’t lead anywhere except to a car rental outfit and a non-existent guy named Henry Graves of Detroit.”

Her lip corners quirked ever so slightly. “You think of everything, don’t you, Barney?”

“I try to,” I told her. “I’ll drive the Buick now, and you follow me in the Dodge. Next stop is a repair garage.”

She remained where she was. In her husky but slightly flat voice she said, “Let’s get settled in cabins first. I want a bath and a change of clothes.”

“It won’t take an hour to locate a garage and make arrangements,” I argued.

She shook her head. “We’ve been here over two hours now. I wanted a cabin at seven, but I waited while you fed yourself, got a shave, rented a car and changed plates. I’m not waiting another minute.” She looked at me serenely and added, “Besides, they take your license number at tourist courts. We’ll have to drive in with the Buick.”

She was right, I realized on reflection. We should have signed in somewhere before I changed the plates, as I didn’t want the Missouri plates which were now on the Dodge listed even on a tourist court’s records. Disconsolately I considered the prospect of having to change the plates back again, then decided it wasn’t necessary. There wasn’t much danger in letting some tourist court proprietor see the damaged Buick so long as it didn’t have its own plates on it.

“You win,” I said. “Follow me again.”

Helena shook her head again. “You follow me this time. I saw just the court I want when we came in on 66. Maybe you’re smart on some things, but I prefer to trust my own judgment on a place to sleep.”

Shrugging, I climbed back in the Dodge and waited for her to start the procession.

Helena drove nearly ten miles out of town on 66, passing a half dozen motels which looked adequate to me before pulling off to the side of the road suddenly and parking. I parked behind her.

“Lock it up,” she called back to me.

Winding the windows shut, I got out and locked the Dodge. When I slid into the Buick next to her, she pointed through the windshield toward a large tourist court about a hundred yards ahead on the opposite side of the road.

“That’s the one. Isn’t it nice?”

It didn’t look any different to me than the half dozen others we’d passed, except that this one had open front stalls for automobiles.

“It’s lovely,” I growled. “Let’s get it over with.”

9

The place was called the Starview Motor Court and advertised hot baths and steam heat. Since the temperature hovered around eighty, neither seemed like much of an inducement to me.

Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution, I had Helena swing the car so that the left side was toward the office. With dozens of different automobiles driving in and out of the court daily, it wasn’t likely the proprietor would notice our green Buick convertible had changed to a green Dodge coupe a few hours after we checked in, but there wasn’t any point in deliberately calling attention to our smashed fender. Just possibly it would catch his notice enough to make it register on him.

The proprietor was a sad-faced man in his fifties who had an equally sad-faced wife. They occupied quarters behind the small office. For some reason both of them went along to show us cabins.

They were nice modern cabins, clean and airy and walled with knotty pine. The baths were large instead of the usual tiny affairs you find at most tourist courts, and contained combination bathtubs and showers.

“We’ll take two,” I told the proprietor. “We’ll be here a week, so I’ll pay the full week now. How much?”

He said the normal rate was nine dollars a day, but as a weekly rate we could have them for fifty-six dollars each. “With another fifty cent a day knocked off if you do your own cleaning instead of having maid service,” he added.

Helena surprised me by saying she preferred to do the cleaning herself, which caused the proprietor’s wife to give her a pleased smile. Apparently the wife constituted the maid service.

Helena stayed outside when I went back to the office to register. I signed as Howard Bliss and sister, Benton, Illinois, and listed the Illinois license number registered to the Dodge. Then I paid him a hundred and five dollars.

Our cabins were numbers six and seven. When I got outside again, I discovered Helena had backed the Buick into the car port between them while I was registering.

“You could have left it in front of the cabins,” I said to her. “We aren’t going to be here long.”

“We’ll be here at least a half hour. I told you I’m going to take a bath.”

“Several times,” I said wearily. “Which cabin do you want?”

She looked at both speculatively. The one on the right went with the car port we were using, because a door near the rear wall of the port led into the cabin.

Helena said, “I’ll take the right one.”

Getting her bag from the car, I carried it into the right-hand cabin via the car port door and set it on her bed. Then I got my own bag from the car and went into my own cabin.

Inasmuch as I was going to have to kill a half hour anyway, I decided to take a cold shower myself. I took my time under the water, letting its coldness knock the tiredness out of my muscles and wash some of the sleepiness from my eyes. Twenty-five minutes later, refreshed and in clean clothes, I knocked at the next cabin door.

“Just a minute,” Helena called. “I’m still dressing.”

It was closer to ten minutes before she appeared, and meantime I stood out in the sun letting the heat wilt my collar and undo all the good a cold shower had done me. When she finally appeared she was dressed in a white sun dress, low-heeled sandals which exposed bare, red-tipped toes, and no hat. Her long hair was pulled up in a pony tail.

Carefully she locked her cabin door behind her and dropped the key in a straw purse.

This time I drove the Buick. When we pulled up alongside the parked Dodge, I handed her the keys to it.

“Instead of following you, suppose we arrange to meet somewhere?” Helena suggested. “I’d like to do a little shopping.”

“You know Chicago?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Then we’ll make it somewhere simple.” I looked at my watch, noting it was nearly ten A.M. “The Statler Cocktail Lounge at two P.M.?”

“All right.”

“Be careful you don’t get picked up for anything,” I cautioned. “Even a parking ticket would put us in the soup with that Missouri plate on the Dodge.”

“I’ll be careful.”

I drove off while she was unlocking the coupe door.

I didn’t have any trouble arranging for the car to be fixed. I stopped at the first Buick service garage I saw.

The chief repairman, a cheerful middle-aged man, carefully looked over the damage. “What’s the other guy look like?” he asked.

“There wasn’t any other guy,” I told him. “My wife mistook a tree next to our drive for the garage.”

He told me he could do the whole job, including a check of wheel alignment, in three days for approximately a hundred dollars.

“That’s a rough estimate, you understand,” he said. “May vary a few bucks one way or the other.”

I gave him the name George Seward and a South Chicago address a couple of miles from the repair garage. When he asked for my phone number, I said I didn’t have a phone and just to hold the car when it was finished until I picked it up.

My business was all completed by noon and suddenly I was exhausted from lack of sleep and the strain of driving three hundred miles at night. I began to wish I had arranged to meet Helena at twelve-thirty instead of at two.

There was nothing to do but kill two hours, however. I took a taxi to the Statler, had lunch and then slowly sipped four highballs in the cocktail lounge while I waited for her. She showed up at ten after two.

“Want a drink?” I asked. “Or shall we go back to the court and collapse? I’m ready to fall on my face.”

She looked me over consideringly. “You do look tired,” she said. “We’ll pick up a couple of bottles of bourbon and some soda on the way and I’ll have my drink at the court. Maybe we can get some ice from the proprietor.”

My four drinks had relaxed me just enough so that I had difficulty keeping my eyes open. I let Helena drive.

I was just beginning to drift off to sleep sitting up when the car braked to a stop, then backed into a parking place at the curb. I opened my eyes to see we were in front of a liquor store.

Reluctantly I climbed out of the car. “You say bourbon?” I asked Helena.

When she merely nodded, I went on into the store. I bought two quarts of bourbon and a six-bottle carry-pack of soda.

When I raised the Dodge’s trunk lid to stow away my purchases, I was surprised to find the floor of the trunk was soaking wet. There hadn’t been any water on it when I had searched the trunk for tools to change license plates.

But I was too sleepy to wonder about it much. Slamming the lid shut, I climbed back in the car and let myself sink into a semi-coma again. Helena had to shake me awake when we got back to the tourist court.

I slept straight through until eight o’clock that night. Presumably Helena did the same, for when I finally looked outside to peer next door, her cabin was dark and the Dodge was still in its car port. She must have awakened about the same time I did, though, because she knocked at my door just as I finished dressing.

She was carrying the two bottles of bourbon and the carry-pack of soda.

“I thought we’d have a drink before we went out for dinner,” she said.

I found two glasses in the bathroom, but the prospect of warm bourbon and soda didn’t appeal to me.

“I’ll see if I can get some ice at the office,” I said.

But the proprietor told me he was sorry, they had only enough ice for their personal needs. When I returned to the cabin, I suggested we have our before-dinner drink at the same place we picked to eat.

“Maybe I can get some ice from him,” Helena said.

A drink didn’t mean that much to me, but since she seemed so set on one, I didn’t argue. From my open door I watched as she moved toward the office. The movement walking gave to her body would have made a corpse sit up in his casket. It occurred to me the motel proprietor would have to be made of ice himself to refuse her.

In a few moments she reappeared carrying a china water pitcher.

She stopped at her own cabin door, said to me, “I’ll be with you in a minute, Barney,” unlocked the door and went inside.

What she was going into her cabin for, I couldn’t decide, because when she reappeared a few moments later, she still carried nothing but the pitcher. Carefully she locked the door behind her and came over to my door. When she handed me the pitcher I saw it was full of cracked ice instead of cubes.

“What’s he have, an old-fashioned icebox?” I asked in surprise.

“I didn’t inquire,” Helena said. “I just asked for ice.”

We had two highballs each before going out to hunt a place for dinner.

10

We dined at a place called the White Swan, a roadhouse about a half mile from the tourist court on route 66. The place had an orchestra and after dinner we alternately danced and sat at the bar until two A.M. And every time I took her in my arms, my temperature went up another degree.

I got the impression the closeness of our bodies on the dance floor was beginning to have an effect on her too. Not from anything she said, for we did remarkably little talking during the evening, but each time we danced she seemed to move more compliantly into my arms and her eyes seemed to develop a warmer shine.

When I finally drove the Dodge back into the car port, I was on the verge of suggesting she come into my cabin for a nightcap, but before I could open my mouth Helena jumped out of the car and entered her cabin by means of the car port door without saying a word to me.

Then, as I sat there foolishly looking at her closed door, I experienced a terrific letdown. I was tempted to get angry, but on reflection I realized she hadn’t actually said or done anything to make me think she had been sharing my own cozy thoughts. Maybe she just realized the direction my thoughts were taking, and wanted to leave no doubts in my mind that our relationship was strictly a business one.

Shrugging, I locked the Dodge and went into my own cabin.

Five minutes later, just as I finished pulling on my pajamas, there was a knock at the door. I put on a robe and opened it to find Helena standing there with her suitcase in her hand.

When I had stared at her expressionless face without saying anything for nearly a minute, she asked, “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“Sure,” I said, recovering my wits enough to step aside.

Walking past me, she set the suitcase on a chair, opened it and drew out a nearly transparent nylon nightgown. Then she turned and, holding the nightgown out in front of her, examined it critically.

Her husky but flat voice said, “I’m frightened all alone over there. Am I welcome here?”

I didn’t answer because I was afraid my voice would shake. I merely closed the door, which up till then I had been too stupefied to shut, locked it and unsteadily poured out two substantial shots of bourbon.

The ice in the pitcher had all melted by now, but I needed mine straight anyway.

11

The next three days were like a honeymoon. We didn’t have a thing to do but wait for the Buick to be repaired, so we simply relaxed and enjoyed ourselves. With Helena doing the housework, which consisted only of making the bed, emptying ash trays and washing our whisky glasses, we weren’t even disturbed by the proprietor’s wife coming in to clean. Daily we slept till noon, then showered, had a leisurely lunch and spent the rest of the day at the beach.

Evenings we spent dancing and drinking at the White Swan.

In looking back I can see that Helena’s attraction for me was almost entirely physical, because except for her beauty and an unexpected fiery passion, she wasn’t a very stimulating companion. We had almost no conversation aside from-routine discussions of our plans for each day, and aside from such physical pleasures as sunbathing, dancing, drinking and love making, I don’t believe she had a single interest.

Two things about her puzzled me. One was her disappearance for a short time every morning. I would awaken about eight A.M. to find myself alone, drift back to sleep and a short time later be awakened again by her climbing back in bed. Her explanation was that she had to have breakfast coffee but didn’t want to disturb me, so she dressed and drove down the road to a diner alone.

The other thing that puzzled me was her ability to get ice from the motel proprietor. Both Wednesday and Thursday noon as soon as she was dressed, she left the cabin carrying the china water pitcher and returned with it full of cracked ice. But when on Friday I happened to get dressed first and took the pitcher to the office while Helena was still under the shower, the proprietor gave me an irritated look and told me he’d already informed me once he didn’t supply ice for guests.

When I returned empty handed, Helena took the pitcher and came back with it full five minutes later.

Friday afternoon I had Helena drive me to the Buick repair garage and discovered the convertible was all ready. The bill was a hundred and fifteen dollars.

“I had to put on a new bumper bracket,” the chief repairman said. “Could have straightened the other, but it would have left it weak. I put the old one in your trunk.”

“How’d you manage that?” I asked. “The lock was jammed last I tried it.”

“Ain’t now.” He demonstrated by walking behind the car, inserting a key and turning it. The lid raised without difficulty. He locked it again and handed me the keys.

I tried the trunk key myself and it worked perfectly.

When I drove out of the service garage Helena was waiting for me in the Dodge a half block away. Again I led the way to a quiet side street, where we stopped long enough for me to switch plates back to the right cars. Then I took the Dodge and Helena followed in the Buick while I drove to the car rental lot.

I had thirty-four dollars coming back from the seventy-five I’d deposited.

As we drove back toward the tourist court I said, “We may as well start back tonight. We can have the car back in your garage by tomorrow morning.”

Helena didn’t say anything at the moment. She waited until we were back in my cabin and I had mixed a couple of drinks.

Then she said, “There’s one other little job we have to do before we go back to St. Louis, Barney.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Drink your drink first, then I’ll show you.”

“Show me?” I asked, puzzled. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Drink your drink,” she repeated.

She sounded as though she meant I might need it. I looked at her dubiously for a minute, then drained my glass.

“All right,” I said. “I drank my drink. Now show me.”

Setting down her own drink unfinished, she took my hand and led me to the door. Still holding my hand, she led me to her own cabin door, unlocked it and drew me inside. Then she released her grip on me and locked the door behind us.

“It’s in the bathroom,” she said.

Now completely puzzled, I followed her. In the bathroom the shower curtains were drawn around the bathtub and a glittering new icepick lay on the edge of the washbowl. Without comment Helena drew the shower curtains wide.

Three damp burlap bags were spread over something bulky in the bathtub.

For a few moments I simply stared at the bags, the hair at the base of my neck prickling in anticipation of shock. Then I pushed Helena aside and lifted one of the pieces of burlap.

Underneath, cozily packed in what must have been more than a hundred pounds of cracked ice, was the naked body of a man. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest and his back to me. The back of his head was oddly flattened and was matted with dried blood.

Letting the burlap fall back into place, I staggered out of the room and collapsed in a chair in the bedroom. Helena followed as far as the bathroom door, then stood watching me with curiously bright eyes as I stared at her in stupefaction.

Finally I managed to whisper, “Who is it?”

“Lawrence,” she said without emotion. “My husband.”

I closed my eyes and tried to make some sense out of the nightmarish discovery that Lawrence Powers, who was supposed to be at a banker’s convention in New York City, was actually lying dead in an improvised icebox not a dozen feet away. Surprisingly it did make sense. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, various oddities in Helena’s behavior which had been vaguely puzzling me ever since we started the trip began to develop meaning.

Opening my eyes, I said in a dazed voice, “He was in the trunk all the way from St. Louis, wasn’t he? That’s why the key wouldn’t work. You substituted some other key so I couldn’t open the trunk, then put the right one back on the ring after you got his body out of the trunk and into your cabin.”

“It was the key to the trunk of Lawrence’s Packard you tried in the lock that first time,” she said calmly. “I had the Buick trunk key in my purse.”

“And that’s why you insisted on this particular tourist court,” I went on. “You wanted one with car ports, so you could get him out of the trunk and into your cabin without being seen. You dragged him in through the car port door while I was taking a shower.”

She shrugged. “He wasn’t very heavy. A hundred and forty. I weigh one twenty-five myself.”

Leaning forward, I put my head in my hands and mumbled, “Tell me the rest of it.”

Without a trace of emotion in her voice she said, “While you were arranging for the Buick to be fixed I located an ice house only two miles from here. I thought of ice because I knew he’d begin to smell after a few days if he wasn’t preserved. I had the man put four twenty-five pound pieces of ice in the trunk of the Dodge. He also sold me an icepick. Then I came back here and carried the pieces in one at a time. I left the plug out of the bathtub so the melted ice would run away, and I’ve been adding fifty pounds a day. I got it while you were still in bed and thought I was out after coffee.” She paused, then added, “The burlap bags were in our garage at home. I put them on the floor of the trunk in case he bled any.”

I thought of something. “Good God!” I said. “All you borrowed from the motel proprietor was an empty pitcher. The ice for our drinks has been coming out of that bathtub!”

When her lip corners quirked upward in the suggestion of a smile, I got to my feet, reeled into the bathroom and threw up.

When I returned to the bedroom Helena had seated herself on the bed and was serenely smoking a cigarette.

“Tell me how it happened,” I suggested dully.

“He was going to call the police,” she said. “It was all because he insisted on getting everywhere early. His plane didn’t leave until six, and I planned to start driving him to the airport at five. But he was all packed and ready to go before four. I intended taking the station wagon, figuring I’d make some excuse if he asked why I wasn’t driving the Buick. But Lawrence tried to be helpful. Without my knowing what he intended doing, he went out to the garage at four o’clock and backed the convertible out for me.”

She paused to crush out her cigarette and light another. “When I heard the car start up, I rushed out back to stop him. I did get him to drive it back in the garage, but it was too late. He’d already noticed the damage. And he guessed at once what had caused it. He used to read every inch of both papers, so he knew the police were looking for a green Buick. He didn’t even ask me. He just looked at me in a horrified way and said, ‘Helena, you killed that old man.’ ”

She blew twin streams of smoke from her nostrils, creating a curious mental impression on me. With her immobile face and motionless body, the smoke issuing from her nostrils made her look like a carved oriental idol.

Tonelessly she went on, “There wasn’t any reasoning with him, Barney. He was the most self-righteous man who ever lived. It didn’t mean a thing to him that I might go to jail for months or years if I was discovered. I actually pleaded with him, but he was determined to phone the police. We have five phone extensions and one of them is in the garage. He marched over to it like an avenging angel and was dialing O when I picked up a wrench and hit him over the back of the head.”

I said huskily, “Why’d you wait until now to mention all this? Why not before we started for Chicago?”

“Because I wanted to make sure you’d help me get rid of the body,” she said serenely. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to dispose of it myself. And you might have backed out of the whole deal if you’d known about Lawrence.”

“What makes you think I won’t anyway?” I asked. “I’m not an accessory to this yet. Suppose I just walk out?”

Helena yawned slightly. “Then I suppose I’d be caught. But I doubt that the police would believe you knew nothing about it. I’d tell them it was you who killed Lawrence, of course. And even if they didn’t believe me, they’d certainly never accept your story that you had nothing at all to do with it. Particularly after the motel proprietor identified you as the man who’d been with me.”

She was right, I knew. No cop would ever believe I’d transported a body three hundred miles without knowing it, or that the woman I was traveling with had kept it on ice in her bathtub for three days without my knowledge. I had to save Helena in order to save myself.

If it was possible to save either of us.

I didn’t waste any time upbraiding her. In the first place it wouldn’t have accomplished anything, and in the second place I didn’t think it would bother her in the least.

“Let’s go over to my cabin where I can think,” I said wearily.

I spent the next twenty minutes thinking, pacing up and down and chain smoking while Helena calmly watched me and sipped a highball. I had one straight shot myself. I would have preferred a highball, but I refused to use any more of Helena’s ice.

Finally I stopped pacing and faced her. “Look,” I said. “I think I’ve figured out how to get rid of him, but before we even discuss that, we’ve got to plan a story to cover you. When your husband doesn’t show up Monday, you’re going to have to act as a normal wife would. First phone his bank to ask if they’ve heard from him. Then on Tuesday wire convention headquarters in New York. They’ll wire back that he never showed, of course. Soon as you get that wire, you’ll have to phone the police and put on a worried wife act. Think you can manage all that?”

She nodded indifferently.

“Then the hard part will start. First the police will discover he never caught that plane, so they’ll know he disappeared in St. Louis...”

“I thought of that two minutes after I killed him,” Helena interrupted. “He’ll be listed on the flight.”

I stared at her. “How?”

“It was only four when all this happened,” she said. “By four twenty I had Lawrence stripped, his clothes hidden in the garage and his body in the car trunk. Then I went back inside, told Alice I wouldn’t be home for dinner after I took Mr. Powers to the airport, and she could go home. I also told her I intended driving up to my sister’s in Columbia the next morning, so she could take the week off. I had her out of the house by four thirty.”

“How’d that get your husband listed on the plane flight he was supposed to take?” I asked.

“I haven’t finished. As soon as Alice left I phoned Harry Cushman. He took a taxi to the house, picked up Lawrence’s ticket and plane reservation and went straight to the airport. He flew to New York under Lawrence’s name and took another plane back under a different name as soon as he arrived. When the police start looking for Lawrence, they’ll start looking in New York.”

12

For a long time I looked at her in wonderment. Finally I asked, “How’d you ever talk Cushman into doing a silly thing like that?”

“Silly?”

“Naturally the police will question the airline personnel,” I said patiently. “The minute they get Cushman’s description from the stewardess, they’ll know somebody substituted on the flight for your husband.”

She shook her head. “In the first place, neither Lawrence nor Harry is known on the New York run. Lawrence often flies to Washington, but almost never to New York. I know he hasn’t made the trip in three years. And Harry never flies anywhere. In the second place, though Harry is ten years younger than Lawrence was and twenty pounds heavier, a rough description of either would fit the other. Both have light hair, neither is grey, both have lean builds and both wear small mustaches. In the third place the police won’t question the stewardess too closely. Just enough to satisfy themselves Lawrence was on the plane.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because they won’t suspect murder. The first thing the police do when a banker disappears is request an audit of bank funds.”

She was right again, I realized. The probability was the first premise the police would work on was that Lawrence Powers had disappeared voluntarily. And by the time a bank audit disclosed he hadn’t absconded with any funds, the trail would be too cold to pick up.

I said, “I still don’t understand how you talked Cushman into sticking his neck out.”

“He’s in love with me,” she said complacently.

I studied her broodingly, not satisfied with the answer. “Look, Helena, if I’m going to help cover up your murders, I want the whole story. Maybe Cushman’s in love with you, but he was in a blue funk over being accessory to mere manslaughter. I don’t think he’d stick his neck out for first degree homicide even for you.”

She shrugged. “Of course Harry doesn’t know Lawrence is dead.”

Again I studied her broodingly. Finally I asked in an exasperated tone^ “What in the devil story did you tell him?”

“You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I told him Lawrence had discovered the damage to the car and guessed what caused it. I said he had threatened to call the police, but I explained to him I’d already hired a private detective to try to arrange a quiet settlement of damages, and I talked him into holding off calling the police at least until he’d discussed it with you. I said Lawrence and I went to see you at your flat, and you and Lawrence had a fight. You knocked him out and tied him up. I told Harry this was the opportunity to accomplish everything we’d planned together. For me to obtain grounds for divorce against Lawrence and marry him.”

“How did that follow?” I asked, fascinated.

“I told Harry you had agreed to hold Lawrence captive until we could get the car fixed. Then, after it was back in the garage, you’d transport Lawrence to New York in a private plane owned by a friend of yours and turn him loose in the city unshaven and in dirty clothes. When Lawrence took his story to the police, they’d think he was crazy. The flight list would show he’d flown to New York as scheduled, and when he walked into a New York police station, he’d look like he’d been on a several-day drunk. When the police came to check my car, they’d find it undamaged. Then I’d announce my husband had been suffering delusions about me for some time, I thought he was insane, and I’d file for a divorce on the ground that he constantly made me suffer indignity.”

I was conscious that my mouth had drooped open as she was speaking. “And Cushman believed that fantastic yarn?” I asked in amazement.

“Why not? He knew I’ve wanted a divorce for some time and would jump at any grounds for one. It was the divorce idea that sold him. He wants me to marry him. I don’t think he’d have agreed to take Lawrence’s place on the plane if I hadn’t included that, because he was scared silly.” She added reflectively. “Then too, Harry isn’t very bright. He’s got so much money, he’s never had to do any thinking.”

He must not be bright, I thought. But it was just as well for our chances that he wasn’t. Having taken that plane to New York under Lawrence Powers’s name, he was an accessory to murder clear up to his neck, because he’d never be able to convince the police he didn’t know Powers was dead at the time. It occurred to me that pointing that fact out to him when we got back to St. Louis ought to silence any urge he might ever develop to tell his story.

Then it also occurred to me that Helena Powers had a remarkable talent for placing her aides in positions where they had to protect her in order to protect themselves. For she had me in the identical position she had Harry Cushman. We all three had to hang together, or hang separately.

Helena broke into my thoughts by inquiring, “How do you plan to get rid of Lawrence?”

Glancing at my watch, I saw it was seven P.M. “I don’t tonight. He’ll keep in his icebox another day. But we’ve got some scouting to do. Better put on a jacket, because it may be chilly along the lake.”

I drove the car on our scouting trip. Our tourist court was not far from Berwyn Summit, and I cut straight east to the University of Chicago. Then I turned south along Lake Michigan until we began to run into beach areas.

At eight-thirty Helena said, “Shouldn’t we be thinking about dinner soon?”

“No,” I said shortly. Ever since I’d lifted that burlap bag I hadn’t been able to think of anything but the iced corpse beneath it, and the thought didn’t induce much appetite.

I drove as slowly as the traffic would let me, checking signs on the left side of the road. Finally, about nine o’clock, I spotted one which looked promising. It was on a wooden arch over an unpaved road and read: “Crestwood Beach, Private Road.”

We were past it before I spotted it, however. I had to drive on another mile before I could turn around.

Crestwood Beach proved as promising as it had looked. The beach itself was but a narrow strip of sand, and clustered along its edge were some two dozen modest summer cottages. I noted with satisfaction lights showed in not more than a half dozen.

Parking next to one of the dark cottages, I examined it carefully before getting out of the car. Apparently its owner’s summer vacation had not started yet, for the windows were still boarded up. The cottages either side of it, each a good fifty yards away, were dark also.

I climbed out of the car and told Helena to get out also.

Together we walked the scant fifty feet down to the water. As I had hoped, each of the cottages had its own small boat dock. Nothing much, merely a series of planks laid across embedded steel rods, but adequate for an outboard boat.

“Think you can find this same place alone tomorrow night?” I asked Helena.

“If I have to.”

I pointed out over the calm, moonlit water. “I’ll be out there somewhere in an outboard. I won’t be able to tell one beach from another in the dark, so you’re going to have to signal me with the car lights. We’ll set a time for the first signal, and you blink them twice. Just on and off fast, because we don’t want any of the other cottagers out here to come investigating. Then regularly every five minutes blink them again. Got it?”

“Yes.”

We went back to the car and I drove back under the wooden arch to the main road again. A mile and a half northwest of Crestwood Beach I stopped once more, this time at a sign which read: “Boats for rent.” This sign too was at the entrance to an unpaved road. I followed the road only about fifty yards before coming to the boat livery.

The proprietor was a grizzled old man in his seventies who chewed tobacco. He sat on the screened porch of a small cottage reading a Bible by the light of a Coleman gasoline lantern.

“They’re all taken tonight, mister,” he said as soon as I put my feet on the steps. He shot a stream of tobacco juice at a cuspidor halfway across the porch. “Everybody heard the large-mouths is biting.”

Then he let out a cackle. “Don’t know who starts them rumors. Look at that lake. Calm as glass. They’ll come in with a mess of six-inch perch.” He spat again.

“You booked up for tomorrow night?” I asked through the screen-door.

“Nope.” He got up and opened the door for me.

Walking onto the porch, I said, “Then I’d like to reserve a boat. When’s best to go out?”

“Ain’t much point till it gets dark. If you mean to use live bait, that is. Eight-thirty, nine o’clock.”

I told him I’d be there at nine and paid in advance. The price of a boat and a fifteen-horsepower motor was six dollars, a Coleman lantern fifty cents extra, and I gave him a dollar for a can of night crawlers.

When I got back to the car, Helena asked, “May we eat now?”

I stopped at a roadside eatery and let her have some dinner while I drank two cups of coffee. I hadn’t eaten since noon, but I still couldn’t develop any appetite.

13

By ten the next morning we were downtown at the largest branch of Sears Roebuck. Why criminals ever buy their necessary equipment anywhere else, I can’t imagine. Police records are full of cases where kidnappers were trapped because the paper of the ransom note was traced to some exclusive stationery shop, or murderers were caught because a hammer was traced to some neighborhood hardware store where every customer is remembered. At a place like Sears you are only one of thousands of faces seen by the clerk waiting on you, and even if by some unlikely chance the item you buy is traced back to that particular clerk, the chance of his remembering anything at all about the person who bought it is remote. The chance of it’s being traced that far is even more remote, since identical items are sold across Sears counters all over the country every day.

In the men’s clothing department I bought the cheapest fishing jacket I could find.

In the sporting department I bought a cheap glass casting rod, a three-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent metal and plastic reel, fifty yards of nylon line, a cheap bait box and an assortment of leaders, sinkers, hooks and lures to fill up the bait box. I didn’t intend to use any of it, but it might have excited comment at the boat livery if I had showed up to go fishing without any gear.

I also bought two eight-pound rowboat anchors. I intended to use them.

In the hardware department I bought fifty feet of sash cord. Also to use.

I stowed all of my purchases in the trunk of the convertible.

The rest of the day we simply waited.

At seven thirty in the evening we started the job of disposing of Lawrence Powers’s body. First I transferred my fishing gear, the anchors and the sash cord from the car trunk to the rear seat of the car. The fishing jacket I put on. Then I carefully covered the floor of the trunk with the three burlap bags.

We hadn’t added any ice to the tub since Helena showed me the body, and it had melted away to no more than about twenty-five pounds. I managed to lift the dead man out without spilling ice all over the floor.

The body was stiffened in its prenatal position, the ice apparently having caused it to retain rigor mortis longer than it normally would have. I made no attempt to straighten it out because I would only have had to fold the knees up to the chest again in order to get it into the trunk.

There was little danger of anyone seeing me carry it the one or two steps from the car port door to the trunk, inasmuch as the car itself blocked the view from outside, but I had Helena stand in front of the stall anyway as a lookout.

The body was cold and slippery against my arms and chest as I staggered through the door with it and shoved it into the trunk. When I locked the trunk, I found I was drenched with sweat.

I let Helena drive. It was just nine o’clock when we pulled up across the road from the boat livery. I had Helena co-ordinate her watch with mine.

“I’ll give you a half hour,” I said. “Blink your lights exactly at nine thirty, and then again every five minutes after that until I dock. O.K.?”

“I understand,” she said.

Collecting my fishing gear from the back seat, but leaving the anchors and sash cord, I got out of the car. Helena drove off without a word.

The boat the old man gave me was a flat-bottomed scow about ten feet long. In addition to the motor it contained a pair of oars and a gas can with an extra gallon of gas. The Coleman lantern he furnished had a bolt welded to its bottom which fitted into one of the oarlocks.

I had to wait while he picked two dozen night crawlers from a large box of moss. I didn’t have a use in the world for them, but it would have looked peculiar to go fishing without bait.

When I was settled in the boat, the old man said, “Looks like a good night for bass.”

I looked out over the water, which was as smooth and moonlit as it had been the previous night.

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically. “Just a little choppy.”

He let out a cackle. “Them little six-inch perch is good eating anyway, even if they ain’t much sport. You ought to catch a bushel.”

I started the motor and pulled away while he was still cackling at his own humor.

14

For about a quarter mile I set a course straight out from shore, then swung right and followed the shoreline for what I judged to be about a mile. The water was dotted with lights of other night fishermen, some farther out and some between me and the shore.

At twenty-five minutes past nine I picked a spot several hundred yards from the nearest fisherman’s fight, cut the motor and let the boat drift. There was a slight inshore current, but I figured I would maintain the same relative position to the other boats because I assumed they would take advantage of the current for drift trolling instead of anchoring and doing still fishing.

At nine twenty-nine by my watch I began studying the shoreline, concentrating on the point I judged Crestwood Beach would be. Minutes passed and nothing happened.

With my eyes straining at the shoreline, dotted here and there by cottage lights and silhouetted by the lights of moving traffic on the highway beyond it, I sat motionless for minutes more. Finally I risked lowering my gaze long enough to glance at the time, and was shocked to see it was twenty minutes to ten. By then Helena should have flashed her lights three times.

Just as I raised my eyes again, a pair of headlights blinked twice off to my right, a good quarter mile from where I had been searching for them. I only caught them from the corner of my eye, and they blinked on and off too fast for me to take a fix. There was nothing to do but wait another five minutes with my gaze centered in that direction.

Eventually they blinked twice again.

Starting the motor, I headed at full throttle toward the point where I had seen the lights. But running a boat in the dark is confusing. I was fifty yards offshore, had turned out my Coleman lantern and was heading confidently toward a narrow dock I could see protruding out over the water when the lights blinked again a hundred yards to my left.

Changing course, I cut the throttle way down and slowly chugged up to the small dock Helena and I had stood on the night before. As I tied up I could make out the dim shadow of the convertible next to the dark and boarded-up cottage.

Helena greeted me with a calm, “Hello, Barney.”

“Any trouble?” I asked.

“Not since I got here. I missed the turn and was a few minutes late. But no one from the other cottages has come out to ask why I was blinking my lights.”

Looking in both directions, I could see no one. The cottages both sides of us were still dark. Going behind the car, I lifted the trunk lid and took the dead body of Lawrence Powers in my arms.

As I lurched past the front seat with my burden, I said, “Bring the gunny sacks.”

I’m a fairly strong man, but it’s quite a chore even for a strong man to carry an inanimate hundred and forty pounds over uneven ground in the dark. Once I stumbled and nearly dropped the body, and as I started to lower it into the boat, it slipped from my grip and nearly tumbled into the water before bouncing off the gunwale and settling just where I wanted it on the bottom of the boat.

Again I found myself drenched with sweat.

When I finished wiping my face with a handkerchief, I found Helena standing on the dock beside me, the three burlap bags in her hands. Carefully I covered her husband’s body with them.

Then I returned to the car for the two anchors and the sash cord.

When I was finally reseated in the boat and ready to start, Helena still stood on the dock.

“Can’t I go along and help?” she asked.

“I’d never find this place again in the dark,” I told her. I looked at my watch, noting it was five of ten. “Pick me up at the boat livery at ten thirty.”

When she didn’t say anything, I glanced up at her. Maybe it was only an effect of the moonlight, but I imagined there was a look of disappointment on her usually expressionless face, as though I had refused her some pleasure she particularly wanted to enjoy.

“Ten thirty,” I repeated.

She merely nodded, and I started the motor and pulled away.

I headed straight out from shore at quarter speed for about fifty yards, then stopped long enough to light my lantern. I didn’t care to have the Naval Reserve pick me up for running without lights.

When I started up again, I opened to full throttle and held it until I was even with the farthest boats from shore, approximately two miles out. I didn’t want to risk calling attention to myself by going out beyond them.

There weren’t many boats out that far, perhaps a half dozen spaced several hundred yards apart. I cut my motor halfway between two.

There was no risk working under the bright glare of the Coleman lantern, for since I could see nothing of the other boats except their lights, I knew it was impossible for them to see what was going on in mine. Working rapidly, I uncovered the body, cut a length of sash cord and tied one of the anchors around Lawrence Powers’s neck. The other I tied firmly to his feet after lashing his ankles together.

I was standing up in the boat and just getting ready to heave him over the side when a voice said almost in my ear, “Any luck?”

Starting violently, I lost my balance, made a wild grab for the side of the boat and sat down with a thump on the body. I took one wild look over my shoulder, expecting to see someone within feet of me, then drew a deep sigh of relief. There was a boat light slowly coming toward me, but it was still a good twenty yards away. I realized it was only the acoustic effect of sound traveling across water which had made the voice seem so near.

Since the two figures in the other boat were only faceless shapes to me, I realized they couldn’t see into my boat any clearer than I could see into theirs. Quickly I pulled the burlap sacks over the body and pushed myself up onto the rear seat next to the motor.

Only then did it occur to me I hadn’t even answered the other boat’s hail. Belatedly I called back in as calm a voice as I could muster. “Couple of small perch is all.”

The boat was now within ten yards, and I could make out the two men in it. The one in front was in his early twenties and the man operating the motor was middle-aged. The motor was barely turning over, which was the reason I hadn’t heard their approach. But they hadn’t been trying to sneak up on me, I realized when I saw a line stretching back from either side of the boat. They were moving at that slow speed because they were trolling.

They passed within three yards of me. As they went by, the middle-aged man said, “We ain’t having any luck either. We’re about ready to go in.”

Then they were past. Neither had glanced at the burlap-covered mound in the bottom of my boat.

I waited until I could see nothing of them but their light, then uncovered the body again, lifted it in my arms and heaved it into the water. It landed on its back, the sightless eyes peering straight up at me for a final second before it disappeared in a gurgle of bubbles.

I tossed the burlap bags overboard after it. Then, with shaking fingers, I lit a cigarette and drew a deep and relieved drag.

15

I was halfway back to shore before it occurred to me the old man at the boat livery might think it odd if he noticed my line wasn’t wet. Cutting the motor, I tied a yellow and red flatfish to my line and made a long cast out over the water. I knew the chance of getting a strike on an artificial lure at night was remote, but all I was interested in was getting the line wet.

My usual fisherman’s luck held. If I had been fishing seriously, I could have sat there all night without a single strike. But because the last thing in the world I wanted at that moment was a fish, I nailed a northern pike which must have weighed close to five pounds. It took me nearly ten minutes to land it.

Then I had another thought. I didn’t have an Illinois fishing license. And it would be just my luck to step out of the boat into the arms of a game warden.

So I unhooked one of the nicest northerns I ever boated and tossed it back in the water.

When I pulled in at the boat livery dock, the old man asked me, “Any luck?”

“A five pound northern,” I said. “But I tossed it back in.”

He cackled. I knew he wouldn’t believe me.

Helena had parked the car just off the highway on the dirt road leading down to the boat livery. She was sitting on the right side of the seat, so after tossing my fishing gear in the back, I slid under the wheel.

“Everything go all right?”

“O.K. I even caught a fish on the way in.”

“Oh? Do you like fishing?”

“Under ordinary circumstances,” I said. “It’s my favorite sport.”

“Then why didn’t you stay out a while?” she asked seriously. “I wouldn’t have minded waiting.”

The question solidified an opinion I had already formed. Beneath her beautiful exterior Helena was almost psychotically callous. The casual way in which she had borrowed ice for our drinks from the tub containing the corpse of her husband had convinced me of that. Her suggestion that I might have enjoyed a little fishing immediately after dumping the same corpse in Lake Michigan only confirmed my judgment.

I didn’t try to explain it to her. I just said, “I wasn’t particularly in the mood for fishing tonight.”

Back at the tourist court we had one more job. I set Helena to work scrubbing out the tub which had been her husband’s bier for five days.

Then I informed her there wasn’t any reason, now that her cabin was corpseless, that she couldn’t sleep in her own bed that night. She gave me a mildly surprised look, but she made no objection.

I didn’t think it necessary to explain that musing on her homicidal tendencies had begun to give me the feeling it might not be too safe to go to sleep in the same room she was in.

I locked my cabin door that night.

My last thought before going to sleep was speculation as to what Helena’s feelings would be when she stepped into that tub for a shower the next morning. Then I stopped speculating, because I knew it wouldn’t bother her in the slightest.

16

The trip back to St. Louis on Sunday was uneventful. En route I briefed Helena again on how she must behave on Monday in order to keep suspicion from herself. I elaborated a little on my original instructions and made her repeat them back to me.

“I’m to meet the plane Lawrence intended to come back on just as though I expected him to be on it,” she said tonelessly. “After it lands and everyone is off, I’m to check with the flight office and pretend to be upset because he wasn’t listed on the flight. Then I’m to wire Lawrence in care of convention headquarters in New York. When word comes back that the telegram isn’t deliverable, I’m to wire an inquiry to convention headquarters itself.” She paused, then asked, “But will anybody be there if the convention is over?”

“Conventions are always headed up by local people in the town where the convention’s held,” I told her. “Usual procedure is for the chairman to rent a temporary post office box under the convention’s name, then inform Western Union wires addressed to convention headquarters are to be delivered either to his office or home. He’ll have the same office and home after the convention.”

“I see. Well, when the wire comes back from convention headquarters saying Lawrence never reported in. I’m to phone the police and report him missing.”

“You’ve got it pretty well,” I said, satisfied that she could carry it off. “There’s only one more thing. You’ve got to get it across to Harry Cushman that if he mentions his part in this, he’s an accessory to first-degree murder. He’s going to have to know Lawrence is dead, because otherwise he may get rattled enough at his continued disappearance to take his story to the police. Don’t give him any details. Just give it to him cold that Lawrence is dead and he’d better keep his mouth shut if he wants to stay out of jail. Also tell him to stay completely away from you for the present. I don’t want the cops accidentally stumbling over him, because while I’m sure he’ll keep his mouth shut if he’s left alone, I think he’d break pretty easily under questioning. If he keeps away from you, there isn’t any reason for the cops to find out you even know him.”

“I understand,” she said. “I can handle Harry.”

We took MacArthur Bridge back into St. Louis. I drove straight to my flat, then turned the car over to Helena. I didn’t invite her in.

Standing on the sidewalk with my bag in one hand and my new fishing gear in the other, I said, “I’ve kept a list of expenses. But I’ll wait until the police lose interest in your husband and you get your affairs straightened out before I bill you. I imagine your money will be tied up for some time if everything was in Lawrence’s name.”

“Are you adding an additional fee for disposing of Lawrence?” she asked.

“That was on the house. Just don’t give me any more little jobs like that.”

“Will I see you again, Barney? I mean aside from when you submit your expense account.”

I shook my head definitely. “You’re a lovely woman, and except for the third party you rang in on our trip,

I enjoyed the week thoroughly. But this is the end. When things quiet down, you divorce Lawrence for desertion and marry some nice millionaire. Harry Cushman, maybe, if he isn’t too scared to come near you again.”

I thought for a moment her expressionless face looked a little wistful, but it may have been imagination. Her voice was as totally lacking in emotion as usual when she spoke.

“Good-by, Barney.”

“Good-by, Helena,” I said.

She drove away.

17

I had hoped that was the end of it, but at nine Monday evening Helena phoned me at home.

“Everything went smoothly, Barney,” she announced the moment I picked up the phone. “It worked out just as you said. The police were just here for a picture of Lawrence to teletype to New York. They weren’t in the least suspicious, and about all they asked me was if he’d said anything about financial troubles recently.”

Her call upset me. “Listen,” I said. “Did it occur to you your phone might be tapped?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she asked, “Could it be?”

“No,” I snapped. “They wouldn’t tap a phone on a routine missing person case. But don’t call me again. It’s an unnecessary risk.”

“I’m sorry, Barney. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Just let me know if something goes wrong,” I said. “If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’re doing fine.”

But she phoned me again at nine Tuesday night.

As soon as I recognized her voice, I said bitterly, “I told you not to phone!”

“You said I should if something went wrong. Well, something has.”

I felt a cold chill run along my spine. “What?”

“You’ll have to come out here, Barney. Right away.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone. But you must come. Immediately.”

“As soon as I can get a taxi,” I said, and hung up.

All the way out to Helena’s home in the cab I wondered what possibly could have gone wrong. There wasn’t anything that could have gone wrong, I kept assuring myself. If ever a perfect murder had been pulled, Lawrence Powers’s was it. Not only was the body beyond recovery, the police didn’t even suspect there had been a murder, and probably never would.

The only thing I could think of was that Harry Cushman had gone to the police. But that seemed inconceivable to me. If I had evaluated him right, he’d stay as far away from both the police and Helena as he could get from the minute he realized he could be charged as an accessory to first-degree homicide.

My thoughts hadn’t accomplished anything but to get me all upset by the time we arrived at Helena’s home.

Helena met me at the front door. She wore a red, off-the-shoulder hostess gown, and she looked as calm and unruffled as ever.

“Alice isn’t here,” she greeted me. “I sent her home at six because I expected Harry at seven.”

So it was Harry Cushman after all who was causing whatever the trouble was, I thought.

I asked, “He still here?”

Instead of answering, she led me into the front room. “Would you like a drink before we talk?”

“No, I wouldn’t like a drink before we talk,” I said, exasperated. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’d rather show you.”

The words raised the hair at the base of my neck. The last time she’d used similar words, she led me to her husband’s iced corpse. Now she took my hand, just as she had that previous time, and led me into the dining room. I followed numbly, almost knowing what to expect.

The light was off in the dining room, but the switch was by the door and Helena flicked it on as we entered. Then she dropped my hand and looked at me expectantly.

The dining room was large and had a fireplace on the outside wall. Against the wall closest to us was a sideboard containing a tray of bottles and glasses and a bowl of ice cubes.

Lying face down in front of the sideboard was Harry Cushman, the entire back of his head a pulpy and bloody mass from some terrific blow. His left hand clutched a glass from which the liquid had spilled, and near his outstretched right hand lay a siphon bottle on its side. Next to him lay a pair of brass fire tongs with blood on them.

The shock was not as great as you might expect, because I had anticipated something on this order from the moment Helena said she would rather “show” me. Glancing about the room, I saw the drapes were drawn so that we were safe from outside observation.

I said coldly, “It looks like you hit him from behind while he was mixing a drink. Right?”

She merely nodded.

“Why?”

“Because I was afraid he might give us away. He was in a panic when I told him Lawrence was dead.”

“Did he threaten to go to the police?”

She shook her head.

“What did he say?”

Helena shrugged slightly. “Nothing, really, except that I hadn’t any right to involve him in murder. It was the way he acted. He shook like a leaf.”

For a long time I looked at her. “Let me get this straight,” I said finally. “He didn’t threaten to expose us. He wasn’t going to the police. But just because he seemed to you like a bad security risk, you murdered him.”

She frowned slightly. “You make it sound worse than it was.”

“Then make it sound better.”

She made an impatient gesture. “What difference does it make now? It’s done. And we have to dispose of the body.”

Again she looked at me expectantly, a curious brightness in her eyes. And suddenly I realized something I had been aware of subconsciously for some time, but hadn’t brought to the front of my mind for examination.

Helena enjoyed watching me solve the problems brought on by murder.

It was a game to her, I knew with abrupt understanding, for the first time really knowing what went on under that expressionless face.

I said, “What do you mean, we have to dispose of the body? I haven’t killed anybody.”

Her lip corners curved upward in a barely discernible smile. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me caught, Barney. You can only be executed for one murder. So there wouldn’t be any point in not telling the police about Lawrence if I got caught for this one. Including how cleverly you got rid of the body.”

With a feeling of horror I looked off into the future, seeing myself disposing of corpse after corpse as Helena repeatedly indulged her newly discovered thrill.

With only one result. Nobody gets away with murder forever.

I knew what I had to do then.

For a moment I examined her moodily. Then I shrugged. “All right, Helena. We may as well start now. Get some rags.”

Obediently she went into the kitchen, returning in a few moments with several large rags. Taking one from her, I picked up the tongs.

“Lift his head a little,” I said. “So I can spread a rag under it.”

Turning her back to me, she put both hands under the dead man’s shoulders and tugged upward. I swung the brass fire tongs down on top of her head with all my force.

It isn’t much harder to dispose of two bodies than it is to dispose of one. Not with a river as deep as the Mississippi so close by.