Masters of Noir: Volume 1

1

The girl woke up gradually. I didn’t shake her or say her name. I just stood at the side of the bed looking down at her.

Holly Laird, a smalltime actress, but she could have been Martha seven years ago. That stubborn little chin and that trick of a nose, but mostly the hair.

Hair that lay spread like gold on the pillow.

Actresses slept late. It was close to ten in the morning and the sun was high, streaming in through the east window and touching her face. She brought up an arm as if trying to brush the sunlight away; her other hand pushed down the blanket to her waist. Her breasts were beautiful, and the rose-colored nightgown did hardly anything to cover them.

Martha used to go in for nightgowns like that, fragile and transparent. I remembered how I used to watch Martha asleep beside me — how mornings I would prop myself up on one elbow and never take my eyes off her.

‘Three years of marriage and being crazy in love with her, and then Martha had run off with another man — a public accountant, of all things, a skinny guy I could have broken in two with one hand but never got a chance to. And now it was as if I’d gone back through all the years and I was looking at her in bed, and the bitterness seized me, welling up in my throat so I almost choked.

Holly Laird’s eyelids fluttered. I’d made no sound; in sleep she must have sensed me standing there. I took a step back from the bed, and suddenly she was staring at me. Her eyes went wider and wider.

I didn’t tell her there was no reason to be scared. I wanted her to be scared, to start her off with a taste of shock that would make her plenty jittery.

Then she came all the way awake and her breasts stirred as she let out her breath. “You’re the detective,” she said. “The one who asked me most of the questions at the police station yesterday.”

“That’s right, miss. Gus Taylor. I’m in charge of the case.”

I sat down. It was a small apartment — one cramped room and bath and kitchenette. She rented it furnished. I had found out a lot about her.

“But how did you get in?” she said. “I’m sure I locked the door.”

“I got in.”

She sat up. “Picked the lock or used a passkey, I suppose. You...! Even though you’re a policeman, you have no right...”

In the dresser mirror I could see myself sitting with my hands curved over my knees. They were big hands, strong hands. I was proud of their strength. I was a big, hard guy who didn’t take anything from anybody, and I was proud of that, too.

“I don’t stand on ceremony with murderers,” I said.

“But I told you and told you I didn’t kill him.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

I smiled at her. She glanced down at herself sitting up in bed and she saw how little of her the bodice covered and how the rest of her from the waist up shimmered rosy through the rose-colored nylon. She snatched up the blanket to her throat.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“You know damn well, miss. The truth. Night before last you pushed a knife into John Ambler’s heart.”

“No!”

I took out a cigarette and slowly turned it in my fingers. She watched me with blue eyes — the same shade as Martha’s. Or Martha’s had been a bit lighter. It was hard to remember exactly after so long.

After a silence Holly Laird said tartly, “I’d like to get dressed.”

I put a light to my cigarette and didn’t move from the chair facing the bed and didn’t say anything.

“So it’s a form of third degree?” she said. “You’re going to sit there and sit there.”

“Only till you tell me you killed him.”

“You’re so sure, aren’t you?”

I said, “It figures, miss. Let me tell you how close it figures so you’ll know you can’t hold out. You’re a smalltown girl who got the acting bug. Like thousands of others. You went to New York to set Broadway on its ear. The nearest you got to a stage was when you bought a ticket to a show. But in New York you met John Ambler, who spent a lot of time there because he was backing a play. What they call an angel. You got chummy with him.”

“Acquainted, that was all.”

“I know how girls who want to get on the stage get acquainted with rich angels. And I know a thing or two about the late John Ambler. He has a good-looking wife, but I hear he likes to play outside the homestead, especially with young actresses. That was why he went in for backing plays on Broadway, and here in his home town he’s the big money behind the repertory theater. So he brought you here to Coast City and told the director to give you big parts in the different plays they put on every few weeks.”

“I earned every role. I can act.”

“Maybe. But there are lots of others can act and don’t get leading parts right off, not even in a small-city theater like ours. George Hoge, the director, says Ambler ordered him to use you no matter what. Ambler’s the angel, so Hoge had to do it. And if I knew Ambler he kept wanting payment from you. He was that kind of a guy.”

“But I’m not that kind of girl.”

I laughed harshly in my throat. Nobody could tell me anything about women. I’d been through it; I knew. They were every last one of them like Martha.

“Besides,” Holly said, “everybody in the theater can tell you I’m in love with Bill Burnett. Doesn’t that prove I wasn’t carrying on an affair with Mr. Ambler?”

“All it proves is you’re like the rest of ’em.”

“The rest of who?”

“Two-timing bitches,” I said, and took a drag at the cigarette. “All right, let’s see about Burnett. Mostly he took you home after the show. But not the night before last. He’s on the stage till the final curtain, but you’re through before the last scene. You left with Ambler. Witnesses saw you go.”

“I never denied I went with him. I told you yesterday I had a headache. It was killing me; I could hardly remember my lines. I asked George Hoge if I could leave before the curtain call. Mr. Ambler happened to be backstage and heard me and offered to drive me home.”

“Neat. Ambler happened to be backstage. Happened to drive you home. Happened to get himself murdered while you were in the car with him. How dumb do you think cops are?”

She cowered against the headboard of the bed, but she wasn’t anywhere near breaking. Those blue eyes of hers were defiant. She said, “He dropped me off at the house and drove away.”

“Drove away?” I caught her up on that. “Then how come in the morning his car was still down there in the street in front of the building and he was slumped over the wheel with a knife wound in his heart? Answer me: how come?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said he drove away.”

“Well, I didn’t actually see his car move off. I assumed he left after I got out.”

“You assumed!” I pointed the cigarette at her. “He never drove away because he couldn’t. The medical examiner says he was stabbed by somebody sitting on his right, beside him in the front seat of his car. No sign of a struggle. It had to be somebody he knew, somebody he was talking to or necking with. Maybe somebody he was kissing when the knife was slipped into his heart. In other words, you.”

Her head jerked as if I’d hit her. “But what reason would I have had? You can’t find any.”

“That’s another thing you’ll tell me before I’m through with you. Let’s try it like this. You really love this pretty-boy actor, Bill Burnett, and you tried to call it quits with Ambler. But Ambler wouldn’t play. You’re something special in looks; I can say that much for you. He said he’d tell Burnett you’d been sleeping with him. You had to stop him. You stopped him with a knife.” I flicked ashes on the floor. “Yeah, the more I think of that motive, the better I like it.”

She stared at me. “You sound as if you’re anxious for me to be guilty.”

I stopped looking at her. I muttered, “I’m doing my job, that’s all,” and rubbed my sweaty hands on my thighs.

2

This was one of these cases where you had nothing to go on but what you figured out in your head. No clues you could take to the laboratory. Fingerprints in the car were mostly smudges or belonged to people who’d had an excuse for having been in the car — Ambler’s, of course, and Mrs. Ambler’s and Holly Laird’s. As for the knife, the killer had pulled it out and disposed of it where probably we’d never find it. There had been no blood spattered because heart wounds that kill instantly don’t bleed to amount to anything.

Nothing but circumstantial evidence, and how did you make it stick without a confession?

“At least,” she said, “let me put on my robe.”

Damn her, sitting there so calmly with her golden hair like Martha’s rippling down to her shoulders! Calmer than I was.

I stood up. My hands were sweating more and more and I felt them shake.

“You killed him!” I yelled at her. “Admit it, you killed him!”

Holly looked me in the eye. She said quietly, “You’ve been wrong about everything.”

I could make her talk. I’d done it with others. I’d taken tough guys down to the basement room in headquarters and after a while they talked their hearts out. I couldn’t do it with her because she was a dame. The Skipper didn’t approve much of rough stuff anyway — and she was a dame.

This was my case. I was the detective of record. I’d be goddamned if I’d let a dame get away with murder just because she was a dame.

“You killed him!”

“No.”.

My hands went to her. I didn’t reach out for her; my hands just went to her. She tried to jerk away and the blanket slipped down a little way and my hand was on a bare shoulder. I felt the smooth, warm skin, and my fingers contracted.

“Say it, bitch! You killed him!”

Sounds trickled past her lips, but she wasn’t trying to utter the words I wanted to hear, or any words at all. A scream of pain was building up in her throat. I clamped my other hand over her mouth and kept grinding her shoulder. I have very strong hands; it must have hurt like hell. She clawed at my arms and writhed on the bed and her eyes rolled in their sockets.

“You sat in the car with him and put the knife in him. By God, you’ll say it!”

Her heaving torso and her wildly kicking legs pushed the blanket down about her knees. A blur of white skin and rose-colored nightgown thrashed on the bed and I could feel her screaming soundlessly against my hand.

Suddenly I let go of her. I stepped back from the side of the bed, and I was very tired. It didn’t make sense. Me, strong as an ox, and this little effort had pooped me.

She was crying. The blanket was over her again and I could see the outlines of her body curled up in a ball and her hand massaging her shoulder.

Tears never bothered me. “Talk,” I said, “if you don’t want more of the same.”

She gasped, “You’ve no right. I’ll report you.”

“I don’t think you will, and I’ll tell you why.” I took my time relighting my cigarette while she lay sniffling. “You try making a complaint and I’ll haul you in for prostitution.”

Holly Laird gawked at me as if she couldn’t believe I was real.

“Soliciting,” I said. “I came up here to question you and you wanted to do some business. Your price was twenty bucks.”

“You — you wouldn’t!”

“If you make me, sure I would. I don’t have to make the charge stick. All I have to do is take you in and charge you, that’s enough. Word would get to your home town, to your folks. People are ready to believe anything about an actress. How’ll your folks feel? How’ll they be able to face their friends and neighbors? You want that to happen?”

She pushed her face into the pillow. She cried some more. I stood looking down at her.

After a minute she wiped her eyes on the corner of the blanket. “Please, please let me alone.”

“Sure, miss,” I said. “Glad to. All you have to do is tell me the truth.”

She jumped out of the bed. The blanket trailed after her and then dropped away from her, and she was a white-and-rose form dashing toward the bathroom where she could lock herself in.

I lunged and caught her by her loose golden hair that was like Martha’s.

Her head jerked back and she uttered a shrill cry, and she stood there with her head way back, held back by her hair bunched in my hand. “Talk!” I said. She started to whimper like something small and hurt and helpless, and with her head back like that I could see her eyes bulging not so much with pain as with terror.

I don’t know why I let her go. Maybe she was at the breaking point and just a little more and she would have broken. Like a slap across the face. I’d learned that a slap, almost more than anything else, makes even the tough ones go to pieces. But my hand fell away from that golden hair.

Outside in the street there were traffic noises, but it was very quiet in the room. That tiredness was in me, going deeper than bone and muscle.

Holly was across the room at the closet. The nightgown clung to her back. She reached in and pulled out a robe. As she was putting it on, the doorbell rang.

She turned then, tying the cord of the robe. Her eyes were dead.

“Remember,” I said, “you don’t want me to pull you in for soliciting.”

She just looked at me.

3

The bell rang again. She went to the door and opened it.

In the hall a cheerful voice said, “Morning, sweetheart. Hope we didn’t drag you out of bed.”

“No. Come in.”

Bill Burnett stepped into the apartment. He was what they call the juvenile lead, the love interest in the plays. He had wavy hair and good shoulders and a pretty face.

He wasn’t alone. Behind him came George Hoge, the director. He was one of those slim, intense, nervous guys who always had a cigarette on his lip.

They stopped when they saw me. I’d had both of them on the grill yesterday; everybody connected with the theater had been questioned. I nodded to them and they nodded to me.

“Anything up?” Burnett asked.

“A man was murdered the other night,” I said. “Remember?”

“Very funny,” Hoge said sourly.

I rolled the cigarette in my mouth.

They were looking at Holly. She stood barefooted, holding her robe together. She wet her lips and said, “Detective Taylor has been asking me questions.” She turned her face to me without looking at me. “Is there anything else you want of me?”

“Yeah. One thing. You know what it is.”

“I told you all I know.”

I grinned at her and she cringed. Then I said to the two men, “What’s this, a conference or something?”

Hoge answered, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. “I brought the script of our next play.” He tapped the briefcase under his arm. “I want to go over it with Holly and Bill, who will have the leads. A repertory company like ours must always be preparing one play ahead.”

“That all you folks have on your mind?” I sneered.

“Of course, it’s been rough, losing Mr. Ambler, who has done so much for us, and on top of that you policemen disrupting everything. But the show must go on, you know.”

“That so?” I started toward the door and stopped. Burnett had his arm around Holly’s waist and she was leaning against him. I said, “I didn’t annoy you too much, did I, miss?”

She hesitated, but not long enough for anybody but me to notice it. “No,” she said.

I struck a match. They watched me silently, all three of them. I rolled the flame around the tip of the cigarette and blew out the match and left the apartment.

4

Five minutes after I was at my desk the Skipper called me on the phone from his office down the hall.

“Why didn’t you report in this morning, Gus?”

“I’ve been out trying to catch me a killer,” I said.

“None of your lip, Gus. I’m having a tough enough time with the Mayor and the Commissioner. Seems they think it’s against the law for big-shots like John Ambler to be murdered and want me to do something about it. As if I haven’t got the whole department looking for knives and witnesses. Who’d you see?”

“The killer,” I said. “The girl.”

“How’d you make out?”

“Not so good. But I will.”

“Look, Gus. You may be a bit too — uh — single-minded. We don’t know enough at this time to be able to concentrate on one suspect.”

“You call her the suspect. I’ll call her the killer.”

There was a silence on the line. Then the Skipper said, “All right, Gus, keep at it,” and hung up.

I went through the reports of the half a dozen other detectives working along with me on the case. Nothing.

I sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette. When I’d had her by the hair in her apartment, I should have kept the pressure up. A little more pain, a couple of slaps across her damned pretty face, and she might have broken before Burnett and Hoge had arrived. But I’d let her go. I’d let her walk to the closet with that clinging rose nightgown molding every curve of the back of her.

I closed my eyes, remembering how sometimes I would come home from lunch and find Martha not yet dressed, puttering around the house in nothing but a sheer nightgown, with her golden hair unpinned and loose down her back. I would pull her down on my lap and stroke that hair and bury my face in it, and I would push down her nightgown and spread her hair over the fullness of her breasts, making a golden, transparent net over the white, richly curving flesh. But then she would smile and she would say, “Not in the daytime,” and I would say, “What’s wrong with the daytime?” and she would say, “I’ve got to get your lunch,” and wriggle off me, tugging up the straps, and head for the bedroom, her nightgown clinging, her hair flowing, and come out wearing a housecoat. Not in the daytime, and toward the end seldom at night either. Because by then there must have been the accountant, the skinny guy I never suspected, and one evening there had been that note from her saying she would never be back. She never was.

Something snapped. It was a pencil I had been holding between my fingers. I stared at the two pieces and then dropped them into the wastebasket. After a while I went out to lunch.

When I returned, Bill Burnett was waiting for me outside the headquarters building.

He stood against the wall, and when he saw me he came out on the sidewalk to meet me. Both his hands were sunk deep in the pockets of his jacket and there was a fever in his eyes. I could guess what had happened.

“If you ever go near her again,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”

Burnett’s right pocket bulged more than his left, which meant that was where he had it. “What are you talking about?” I said, watching his right hand.

“You beat Holly up, you bastard!”

“She told you I did?”

“I made her. After George Hoge left. I knew something had happened. She’d been crying. She didn’t want to tell me. You’d threatened her, frightened her, I don’t know how. But I made her tell me,” He took his left hand out of his pocket and put it on my arm. “I’m warning you, I’ll kill you!”

Imagine a pretty-faced actor punk trying to throw his weight around with me! I drove my left up to his jaw. It slammed him back against the wall where he’d been waiting for me.

That was a busy street and a couple of women seeing me hit him screamed. They didn’t bother me. I leaped after him and rammed my fist into his belly.

I’ll say this for the actor — he wasn’t soft. Most other men would have gone down after having been socked twice by me. He stayed on his feet, swaying, and his right hand came out of his pocket. I could have beaten him to it with my own gun, but I couldn’t be bothered with a punk like that. I swung at his pretty face, and that did it. He slid down along the wall.

His right hand was in sight and empty. But there was a gun in his pocket, as I’d guessed. Hardly more than a toy, a .22 automatic, but at close range it could have done damage.

Burnett wasn’t out. Sobbing brokenly, he was trying to get up to his feet. I raked his face with his own gun, slashing a bloody swath down his cheek.

He wasn’t so pretty any more.

By then people were all around us. A woman was shrieking, “Stop that man! Stop him!” I tried to explain that I was a cop, but I couldn’t be heard. Then three harness bulls poured out of the building. They knew me, of course. I told them the punk had tried to assault me with a gun and let them take charge of him.

Burnett was sitting up, holding his bleeding face. He was able to walk hanging onto two of the harness bulls. I followed them in and had the desk sergeant book him for armed assault. After he was patched up, he was thrown into the can.

If I had any regrets, it was the one I usually felt at a time like this — that the guy I had beaten up hadn’t been the accountant who had run off with Martha.

5

Yesterday John Ambler’s wife had been questioned along with a lot of other people, but since then a question or two had come up that hadn’t been asked her. Especially about Holly Laird. I drove up to that big fieldstone house on the hill and found her on a side terrace with George Hoge.

She was stretched out on a chaise longue, getting the sun on her body. Since all she had on were a pair of shorts and a skimpy halter, plenty of her body got it. Hoge sat on the grass, a cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he talked to her. They both looked up when they saw me appear around the corner of the house.

“Hello, Gus,” Celia Ambler greeted me. She sounded very cheerful considering she’d become a widow so recently.

“You seem to know each other well,” Hoge said, surprised.

“Oh, but we do. Gus and I went to high school together here in Coast City.” She stretched like a kitten, her tanned skin rippling. “I imagine, Gus, you’re here strictly in your professional capacity.”

“Why else? What’s the chance of seeing you alone for a few minutes?”

“George was just about to go.” She threw him a smile. “Weren’t you, George?”

His pinched, intense face scowled. “Everywhere today I keep running into this cop. But all right, I’m dismissed.” He got to his feet. “Then it’s agreed, Celia. You’ll continue to support the theater as generously as John did.”

“I said only for the remainder of the season. After that, we’ll see.” She turned her head to me. “Poor George is worried about his job.”

“That’s not so,” he said indignantly. “I can make ten times as much in Hollywood. Any time. But I prefer working in a little theater. It gives one a chance to fully express oneself.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth for the first time since I’d arrived; it was less than an inch long. “How is the case going, officer?”

“We’re getting there.”

“I hope you do. Thanks for giving me your time, Celia.” He walked off across the terrace.

When he was gone, Celia Ambler sat up. She pulled her halter up a bit, but it didn’t do any good. She continued to bulge lushly over it. She was a full-bodied fine-looking woman who, you’d think, would make a man want to stay home more than her husband had.

“More questions, Gus?” she asked.

“A few. When your husband didn’t come home night before last, why didn’t you report it to the police? Weren’t you worried?”

“I didn’t know he wasn’t home until a policeman came and told me he had been found dead in his car.”

“That was around nine in the morning.”

“I assumed he was in his room asleep. You see, we had separate bedrooms.”

“Uh-huh. There’s the penalty of being rich.”

“Not necessarily, but in our case that was the way we preferred it.”

“You didn’t get along, eh?”

“Gus, you’re not suspecting me?” She seemed to be amused at the notion.

I didn’t tell her I knew who’d killed him. There was no point until I could prove it. I said, “I’m merely trying to get things straight, that’s all. What do you know about Holly Laird?”

“She’s a competent actress.”

“I mean Holly Laird and your husband.”

“Oh.” Her fingers trailed along a bare, sun-baked thigh. “I really have no idea. As a matter of fact, I understand that she and Bill Burnett are very much in love with each other.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I suppose it doesn’t, if you want to be cynical. It’s no secret that John had a penchant for sweet young girls. Holly would have filled the bill.”

“And you didn’t care?”

Her tan shoulders shrugged. “John and I had an understanding. We each lived our own life. I didn’t question him and he didn’t question me.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “Does that shock you, Gus?”

“What’s the difference if it shocks me or doesn’t? I just want the truth.”

“Well, I didn’t kill him. In a detached sort of way, I was rather fond of him.”

“Yeah. Fond of being the wife of a rich man.”

“Why, Gus, I didn’t think you cared,” she said brightly. “We haven’t seen each other in so many years, and even in high school we never went out together. Don’t tell me you’ve been carrying the torch for me?”

So that was what she was, a teaser, even with a cop she had never known well. Me, I’d never had a thought for her.

I growled, “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Shouldn’t I?” She got off the chaise longue and ran her hands sensuously over her half-naked body. “Look at me, Gus. Don’t you think I have a right to flatter myself?”

“All right, you’ve got a body.”

She was standing close to me; she made me uneasy. “Now about your husband’s other girl friends?”

“I can’t answer. I told you I hadn’t been interested. But you, Gus — do you know I had a crush on you in high school? You didn’t give me a tumble. You were the big football hero, so strong, so virile-looking. You still are, you know, only more manly.”

And she kissed me.

There under the hot sun, wearing next to nothing, and more likely than not with the servants watching from the house, she pressed herself against me and kissed me.

It was a long time since I’d been kissed like that by any woman. It felt good, to my mouth, to my body, to my hands, but at the same time it made me sick to my stomach. Her husband wasn’t dead two days, and here she was. And if he had been alive, she wouldn’t have acted any differently. They’d had an understanding, she’d said. And I didn’t think she went for me in particular. Almost any man would have done who appealed to her at all.

The bitch! Like Martha. Like Holly Laird. Like every goddamn woman.

I tore her arms from around me and shoved her so hard she fell back against the chaise longue and sat down on it. I said, “I’d like to wring the necks of every one of you,” and strode off without a backward glance at her.

I hadn’t any more questions, and those I’d asked hadn’t gotten me anywhere. I was shaking all over as I climbed into my car.

6

Back at headquarters, I learned that Detective Lou Fox had found a witness. He had been assigned to question everybody in Holly Laird’s building, in front of which the murder had taken place, and he had come up with a teen-aged girl named Ann Danderman. He left off typing up his report to tell me about it.

“This kid lives a couple of floors below Holly Laird. Seventeen. Real pretty. She was out on a date and the guy brought her home around eleven. Her folks had told her to be home by eleven-thirty, so of course they hung around necking in the doorway for half an hour. There’s a street lamp close by and she could see a car parked at the curb and Holly Laird sitting in it with a man. She knew Holly well by sight, being a fan of hers. She didn’t know Ambler and didn’t see him clearly, but it must have been him.”

“Were they making love?”

“You mean Holly and Ambler in the car? The girl says no. Just talking. At eleven-thirty sharp Ann went upstairs. The two in the car were still talking.”

“Is that all she saw?”

“It’s something. We got them spotted out there from eleven to at least eleven-thirty.”

“Does the Skipper know about this?”

“I told him first thing I got back,” Lou Fox said. “By the way, he said send you in as soon as you showed up. He’s sore at you.”

I went down the hall to the Skipper’s office. A captain has an easy life. He was tilted back in his swivel-chair, cleaning his fingernails.

“This time you’ve gone too far,” he said as soon as I had the door closed behind me. “A dozen witnesses saw you beat up Burnett in the street.”

“He had a gun in his pocket. Did you want me to give him a chance to plug me first?”

“They say you slashed him with his gun after you’d taken it away.”

“So I got a little excited. Wouldn’t you be if somebody was out to shoot you down?”

The Skipper leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk. He had a beak like an eagle’s and small, dark eyes that could bore right through you. He said, “If somebody slapped around the girl I loved, I think maybe I’d lose my head too and grab a gun and go after the guy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“He told me that’s what you did this morning to Holly Laird.”

“He’s nuts.” I drew on my cigar. “Did you ask her?”

The Skipper lost some of his fire and I knew it was all right. “I spoke to her on the phone.”

“And?”

“She says you didn’t touch her. But I don’t know. Something screwy about this. The way you sometimes act I wouldn’t put it past you to...” He sighed. “What gets into you every now and then, Gus?”

“She says I didn’t touch her,” I reminded him gently.

“Lucky for you she does. You’re a good man, Gus, the best I’ve got, but I’m getting fed up with some of your stunts.” He picked up his nailfile. “Did you hear about Lou’s witness?”

“Yeah. Holly Laird said Ambler dropped her off at her house and drove away. Now we find out they were sitting outside in his car at least half an hour. I’ve been telling you she lied, and this proves it. They talked and talked and then she stabbed him.”

“There’s something else. This knocks hell out of the alibis of the others in the cast.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Like this,” the Skipper said. “Holly and Ambler left the theater twenty minutes before the play ended. The curtain came down at eleven-twelve. It’s no more than five minutes from the theater to where they were sitting in the car. Burnett went there and saw them together. He was crazy jealous. He had a knife.”

I nodded. “And she lied about how long she was in the car with Ambler because she was covering up for Burnett. So it was either one of them.”

The Skipper was a cautious guy. “Not necessarily, but it’s worth thinking about.”

“Either one,” I said, drawing smoke into my lungs.

7

In spite of my badge, they refused to give me a free ticket at the box office of the Empire Theater, so I had to buy one, charging it to expenses. I wasn’t stingy with the city’s money; I got me a seat in the third row orchestra.

Before the curtain rose, somebody came out and announced that Bill Burnett’s part would be played by an understudy. He didn’t mention that Burnett couldn’t show up because he was in jail.

The play was one of these grim dramas about people suffering from the weather and each other in New England. Holly Laird had her golden hair piled up on top of her head and wore a gingham dress that was cut so as not to hide her figure — the figure I’d seen a lot of this morning. And she could act. I wasn’t much for the theater, but I could tell an actress when I saw one. She was so good and, along with her talent, so easy to look at, that she wouldn’t need an angel to persuade a director to give her leading roles.

I began to have a doubt, but only a small one.

I knew she wasn’t going to be in the last scene, which was the third scene of the second act. Just before the second scene ended, I went backstage. My badge was good for something after all; it got me past the doorman.

I caught Holly Laird as she was on the way to the iron stairs running up to the dressing rooms. “Just a minute, miss,” I said.

If ever a girl looked hate at a man, she did. So what? Why should I care what a golden-haired bitch felt about me?

“We know you were sitting in the car with Ambler for half an hour or more,” I told her.

She took time to think it over, trying to make up her mind if she could get away with denying it. “We were talking,” she said.

“That’s not what you said yesterday and this morning.”

“I didn’t think it was important. We were discussing plays to do later in the season. He was interested in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and I became quite excited at the prospect of playing Eliza Doolittle.”

“You sure that’s what excited you, miss?” I drawled, striking a match.

She took a step backward and gripped the banister of the iron stairs. “Why are you persecuting us?” she said.

“I’ve got a job to do, miss. I do it.”

Behind me a voice said, “My God, the demon detective again!” George Hoge came up to us, intense eyes and dangling cigaret and all. “Haven’t you done enough damage, depriving me of my male lead?”

“Get used to it,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be losing your female lead too.”

Holly uttered a cry and dashed up the stairs.

“Cops!” Hoge said, spitting the word.

There was nothing to be gained by answering him. I went outside.

The parking lot back of the theater was empty of people. The play wasn’t over yet; they were still inside. I moved between two rows of cars toward mine at the far end, and I didn’t see him or hear him. My first warning was a terrific weight slamming down on the back of my neck, and then it was too late to do anything about it.

My legs buckled. I clawed air and fell forward and my hands came to rest on the cindered ground. On hands and knees I started to twist around. The light was dim there at the fringe of the parking field floodlights; I glimpsed a shape, a pair of pants, a foot leaving the ground. I tried to pull away from that oncoming foot, but the blow on the head had made me sluggish. The toe of the shoe caught me in the temple and knocked me over on my side.

Before I could get my gun out from under my shoulder, he kicked me again, this time flush in the face. Then he faded into the night.

After a while I heard people coming out of the theater and heading toward their cars. I roused myself. I climbed up off the cinders and staggered to my car and threw myself in.

Nothing was broken in my face, though I could feel the swelling over my left cheek. Blood trickled down the back of my neck. I sopped it up with my handkerchief. The punk hadn’t done a very good job on me.

But he was in jail, so how could he have done it?

The cars rolled out of the parking lot. By the time most of them were gone, I felt strong enough to drive. I drove to the city jail.

Ernie Crull was the turnkey on duty. He grinned at my swollen cheek and discolored temple. “I’d like to see the other guy,” he said. “Where is he — in the hospital?”

“Not yet,” I said. “How’s Bill Burnett keeping?”

“Left our bed and board an hour ago when his bail was paid.”

“Bail this late at night?”

“You got influence, you can get a judge to work all hours. He had influence. None other than Mrs. John Ambler. She also put up the bail money.”

I fingered my swollen cheek.

8

Home was a couple of furnished rooms at a second-rate hotel. I’d lived there for seven years, and it had never stopped being a lonesome place.

The alarm clock on the dresser said one-thirty when I let myself in. I looked at myself in the mirror. In addition to the marks from the two kicks, there were now scratches on my face. The knuckles of both my hands were split open.

I couldn’t remember it clearly, that last hour. I couldn’t even remember driving from the city jail to that street, but there I’d been, standing in the shadow of the building in front of which John Ambler had been murdered, and after a while Martha had come up the street, light from a lamppost catching the gold of her hair, and she was hanging onto the arm of her lover, the skinny accountant.

Was I going nuts? That hadn’t been Martha, of course. I’d never see her again. It had been Holly Laird being taken home by Bill Burnett.

And I’d taught the punk that he couldn’t slug and kick me, Gus Taylor, the hard cop, and get away with it.

Nobody else had been on the street at that late hour. But pretty soon lights went on in windows and people were sticking their heads out because Holly Laird was screaming. She clawed at my face and screamed while Burnett was trying to get up from the sidewalk where I’d knocked him. I brushed her aside and helped him get up and pounded him with both fists till he went down again.

Then a harness bull had been there, a young squirt I knew but whose name I couldn’t think of, and who knew me, and he was saying over and over, “What the hell, Taylor! What the hell!”

“Get your paws off me,” I said and squirmed away from the harness bull. But I didn’t go after Burnett again.

It had become quiet on the street, though some people had come out of the houses and others had their heads poked out of windows. Holly Laird sat sobbing on the sidewalk with her boy friend’s head on her lap.

I heard myself say to the harness bull, “Look at my face. The punk slugged me and kicked me in the Empire Theater parking lot.”

Burnett’s battered head stirred on the girl’s lap. “He’s crazy!” he said thickly. “I haven’t seen him since” — he swallowed blood — “since early this afternoon.”

“He hates us, officer,” Holly said to the harness bull. “I don’t know why.”

I had walked away from them then, my feet shuffling, my shoulders heavier than I could carry. I had gone a block past my car before I had remembered it and turned back for it, and now here I was in the loneliest home a man had ever had.

I slumped in my armchair, sucking my cracked knuckles.

Burnett said he hadn’t slugged me in the parking field. I believed him. Because if he had slugged me, wouldn’t he have admitted it? Lying battered by my fists on the sidewalk and hating my guts, wouldn’t he have boasted of it? Would he have denied it after what I’d done to him, and more than that, to the girl he loved?

All right, but if he hadn’t, who had and why?

After a while I got up from the chair. There was no use going to bed. Tired as I was, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I washed my hands and face and left the hotel.

9

He lived in a couple of small rooms on the second floor of a small frame house on a street of small houses. The light showing in two of his windows was the only light in the block, so I knew he was still up. Even if he had been sleeping, that wouldn’t have stopped me any more than it had this morning when I had visited Holly Laird.

There were two doors and two vestibules off the open porch. The one on the right had his name over the bell. I was about to press it when the door at the top of the stairs opened. He closed the door and started down, and then by the light of the dim night-bulb he saw me in the vestibule.

His jaw hung slack. I said, “I want—” That was all I could get out. He turned and scurried back up the stairs.

I dashed after him. I reached the door as it slammed in my face. He had no time to lock it. I plunged into the apartment and found that he’d turned the lights off.

It wasn’t totally dark. The night-light from the stairs showed shadowy masses of furniture. But showed no movement. I stood inside the door, peering, listening, hearing only my own breath, while my hand groped for the switch which would be beside the door.

I felt it and snapped it and there was light. I stood at one end of a living room. He wasn’t in it, but Celia Ambler was.

That first look at her told me she was dead and how she had died. She lay sprawled on the floor, and her eyes were open and staring and her tongue showed.

Ahead of me there were two closed doors. He would be behind one of them, cowering, scared stiff. The only thing I had to worry about was that he would try to escape through the window. I started across the room. When I reached the dead woman, I paused to bend over her, to touch her. The marks of the fingers that had strangled her showed on her tan throat. She was still a little warm, which meant that it had happened a short time ago.

I straightened up and one of the two doors opened, and he stepped into the room. George Hoge. His pinched face looked like a skeleton’s in which two glowing coals had been put in for eye sockets. He had a rifle.

“Don’t make a move for your gun,” he said.

I should have had my gun in my hand. I should have remembered that it was always a mistake to under-estimate anybody, especially a killer.

I glanced at the dead woman. “A knife for her husband and your hands for her,” I said. “A rifle for me. You like variety.”

“I should have killed you in the parking field.”

“Sure,” I said. “Kill and keep killing. But where did it get you? It didn’t get you Celia.”

“No.” Hoge shivered. “How did you guess?”

“Don’t know if I did. Not all of it, anyway. I got the idea you were the one slugged me tonight. If not Burnett, who then? Well, this afternoon Celia Ambler had kissed me on her terrace. Out in the open where anybody could see. You’d left, but maybe you were still hanging around. Spying from around the side of the house. Maybe spying on her, or maybe wanting to hear what a cop would have to say about her husband’s murder.”

“In other words, you knew nothing,” he said.

“Not too much,” I said. “I’d gotten myself on the wrong track all day. Then a little while ago I thought there had to be another track. I’d learned the kind of dame Celia Ambler was. I’d noticed the way you looked at her this afternoon. I’d been slugged right after you’d seen me in the theater. I came here to talk to you about it.” I looked at the dead woman. “And now I know.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Hoge said.

I shrugged. “Your other killings didn’t do you any good. You figured if you knocked off John Ambler you’d have his wife to yourself. She would come up here now and then to this place of yours and have a time with you, but didn’t suspect you were merely one more guy on her string. Right?”

His rifle wavered. “Tonight she told me. We had a fight because I saw her kissing you. Then she told me there had been others. She was laughing at me.”

“Did she know you’d killed her husband?”

“No. I told her. I said I’d killed for her, and now she—” He choked on his own voice. “She looked at me with — with utter horror. She started to run out. She was going to the police. I had to stop her. I took her by the throat. I— I—”

He passed his hand over his face. I’d been waiting for something like that. I lunged at him.

It was easy. I had the rifle barrel knocked aside before he knew what was happening. I tore it from his hand and scaled it across the room and had my arm back to drive my fist into his face.

I didn’t hit him. I’d done enough hitting for one day.

10

When I entered the hospital room next morning, Holly Laird was sitting beside his bed. Most of Burnett’s face was bandaged.

“I want to tell you how sorry I am,” I said.

They didn’t say anything.

“I’ve been suspended from the force,” I went on. “There will be a departmental trial. Maybe because I brought the killer in last night they’ll go easy on me. Maybe not. I guess I don’t care much either way.”

She put her hand on his arm. They remained silent.

“I had to come here and explain,” I said. “You kids are in love. I was in love too — once. And you look like Martha. Your hair especially. I had to hurt Martha, hurt Martha when I was hurting you, and hurt the guy who loved you because—” I stopped. “It sounds mixed up, but it isn’t. Not that I’m trying to make any excuses for myself, but if you two could understand...” I stopped, because I could see that I wasn’t going to get an answer. Things had gone too far for a few words to fix things. Neither Holly Laird nor Burnett said anything. I could see their hate and feel it. I had to do something to make things right, but there was nothing to do.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. I went out. Suddenly, I was sick.