Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

From the body on the floor to the body in the film strip, the case seemed to grow hotter at every step, even as the trail seemed to be growing colder — and then Selby learned a very strange thing...

I

The naked girl on the roof was no longer screaming. But she was trying to. She stood just back of the foot-high parapet, head thrown back and fists clenched hard against her bare thighs, her whole body rigid with terror as she tried to force the frozen scream past her throat.

She was a silver blonde, with long, tapering legs, a tiny waist, and the kind of pointed, upthrust breasts that meant she was probably still in her teens.

I opened the kiosk door a little wider, stepped out onto the roof, and motioned to my detective partner, Stan Rayder, to circle around her, just in case. The alarm that had brought us barreling halfway across Greenwich Village to this three-story brownstone on Bleecker Street had said the girl was a jumper.

Although I myself didn’t make her for one — still, you can never be sure. The difference between a jumper and a non-jumper can sometimes be as little as an unexpected noise or a sudden movement.

She’d heard us. Slowly her chin came down, and then with short, jerky movement’s of her head, she turned to face us. But she didn’t really see us, I knew; she was looking through us and beyond us.

I took a single slow step toward her, paused for a moment, and took another. The girl didn’t move. She stared at me unblinkingly, and even when Stan Rayder started off at an angle that would bring him up behind her, her eyes stayed on me.

With Stan already in motion, there was no point in hesitating any longer. I tried to work up the kind of big, friendly, reassuring smile that seemed to be called for, took a deep breath, and walked across the asphalt toward her, as casually as if approaching a naked girl on a rooftop at high noon were something a man did every day of his life.

We almost lost her. With about ten feet remaining between us, her eyelids fluttered and her rigid, quivering body sagged abruptly. If we’d been only another foot apart, and if I hadn’t been a fairly fast man on my feet, she’d have toppled over the parapet and ended up on the pavement three floors below.

Even so, it was much too close. At the same instant I grabbed her, I felt my left ankle turn a little, and for a very long and very bad moment I found myself looking straight down into the upturned faces of the crowd beneath us on the sidewalk.

It couldn’t have lasted longer than a second or so, but it was long enough to chill the film of sweat along my ribs and across my back. By the time I’d recovered my balance and carried the girl a few steps away from the parapet, my heart was slugging away like an air hammer.

“A close one, Pete,” Stan Rayder said softly as he came up to us. “I thought you’d had it.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “Only the good die young, Stan.”

“Very pretty,” he said, studying the unconscious girl as I shifted her around to a more comfortable position in my arms. “And she smells pretty, too. Offhand, I’d say it was a blend of Chanel Number Five and Vat Sixty-nine.”

“That’s bad?” I asked.

He grinned and fell into step beside me as I started back across the roof to the kiosk. Stan’s a deceptively thin, deceptively mild, studious-looking young cop with a little premature silver in his crewcut, a look of perpetual surprise in his gray eyes, and a bomb in both fists.

“I was just making a clinical observation,” he said. “And besides, on this girl, even kerosene would smell good.”

“Let’s keep it clinical,” I said. “And while you’re resting, how about opening that door a little wider?”

He pushed the kiosk door all the way open, stood aside while I carried the girl through it, and followed me down the steep, narrow stairway to the third-floor corridor.

“Now to find out where she came from,” Stan said as I lowered the girl to the floor. “Which reminds me — I wonder where all the gawkers are? You’d think every tenant in the house would be up here by now.”

I took off my jacket, spread it over as much of the girl as it would cover, and turned to look down the dimly-lit corridor. “Maybe they’re scared,” I said.

“Scared? Scared of what?”

“Maybe of the same thing that scared our girl here.”

He glanced at her, and then bent down on one knee to peer at her face more closely.

“She was moving her eyelids a little,” he said. “I think she might be coming out of it.”

There was a half-open door about three quarters of the way down the hall. “Stay here with her, Stan,” I said. “I want to see what’s on the other side of that door there.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Take your time.”

I walked down to the doorway, stood looking about the living room inside for a moment, and then stepped in.

It wasn’t the kind of room you’d want to spend much time in if you were subject to nightmares. It had two bright-orange walls, one blood-red wall, and one wall painted dull black with silver lightning flashes zigzagging across it from all directions. Most of the furniture was made of chrome pipe, twisted into futuristic curves and angles and strung with fishnetting dyed pink and green and purple.

The room looked like an explosion in a paint factory, even without the bilious yellow carpet and the dozen or so colored mobiles that festooned the ceiling.

Looking very much out of place was a quite ordinary combination bar and hi-fi cabinet, and scattered about the room were a black sheath dress, a pair of very small black suede pumps, and a few wisps of black lace lingerie.

There was a draped archway in one of the orange walls, with the drapes parted just far enough for me to see the corner of a bed.

“Police officer,” I called. “Anyone that’s in there, come out.”

Aside from the muted hiss of a needle circling in the safety grooves of a record on the hi-fi’s turntable, there was no sound of any kind.

I switched off the hi-fi and walked through the archway to the bedroom, which surprised me by being as commonplace as the living room was otherwise.

Beyond the bedroom was a small bathroom, and beyond that an almost equally small kitchen. But there was no one, and nothing of any immediate interest, in either place.

I started back toward the bedroom. If there was anyone in the apartment, he — or she — would have to be in the bedroom closet or on the floor beneath the bed.

Of so I thought. As it turned out, he was in neither place. He was in the living room, lying on the floor between the sofa and the wall, where he’d been hidden from me by the furniture and the half-open hall door when I came in.

He lay on his back, a handsome, even-featured man in his early forties, with overlong hair the color of wet sand, a pencil-line mustache, and wide-set gray eyes that stared up at me with the dry, lusterless film of death.

He was lying with both arms folded tightly across his middle, as if he’d been hugging himself against the cold, and spreading out at either side of his forearms were dark blotches, stark and ragged-edged against the white of his sport shirt.

According to the rule book, of course, a cop doesn’t touch a body until it’s been examined by the Medical Examiner or one of his assistants.

Of course.

I reached down and, very carefully, grasping only the thumbs, lifted his forearms away from his chest.

There were four bullet holes, none of them more than two inches from the others, and all of them made at such close range that the cloth around them was not only stained with burned powder but charred by the muzzle blast.

They were very small holes, and if they turned out to have been made by anything bigger than a .22, I was going to be very much surprised.

I lowered the arms to their original position, walked back to the living room, picked up the black sheath dress and the suede pumps, and went out to where I’d left Stan Rayder and the naked girl.

It was hard to believe that she was the same girl I’d almost dived off the roof with. She was sitting up now, holding my jacket tightly against the front of her body, watching my approach with just about the same degree of irritation she might have shown had I surprised her while she was taking a sun bath in the raw.

Still, when I reached her, I saw that she was breathing a little raggedly, and that she seemed to have all she could do to keep her lips from trembling.

Stan Rayder was leaning against the wall, studying per bemusedly. “She’s okay now, Pete,” he said. “She snapped out of it, just like that.”

“So I see,” I said. I put the shoes down on the floor beside her and dropped the dress across her thighs.

“They’re yours, aren’t they?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Better put them on,” I said. “There’ll be a lot of people around here any minute now.”

She hesitated for a moment. Then, still holding my jacket in front of her with one hand, she reached for the dress with the other and made a tentative effort to get to her feet. “Look the other way,” she said.

Stan and I walked down the hall a few steps and turned to face the open door of the apartment I had just left.

“Anybody home down there?” Stan asked me!

“There’s a man between the wall and the sofa in the living room. Somebody hit him four times with a small-caliber gun. You could cover all four wounds with a dollar bill.” I gestured back toward the girl. “She say anything?”

“Just her name. She says it’s Doris Hagen. And she didn’t even say that until just before you got back. She came out of it all at once, but she’d lost her voice. Which figures. The way she was screaming up on that roof, she’s lucky to get it back at all.”

I’d been listening to the soft, slithering rustle of the dress as the girl got into it, but now the sound had stopped.

“You about ready, Miss Hagen?” I called over my shoulder.

She didn’t say anything, but her heels clicked toward us, and we turned around. She was carrying my jacket. She handed it to me and I put it on. Even with nothing whatever beneath it, the sheath dress fit her like so much shimmering black lacquer. How she’d managed to get into it while wearing the lacy black lingerie I’d seen in the living room of the apartment, I couldn’t guess.

She bobbed her chin almost imperceptibly and raised a small, slender hand to brush the silver-blonde hair back from her forehead. “I really threw a fit up there on the roof, didn’t I?” she said.

“It happens,” I said. “This is my precinct partner, Detective Rayder. My name’s Selby. We’ll be carrying this homicide all the way.”

“He’s — dead, then?”

“You didn’t know that?”

She looked toward the open doorway. “No,” she said. “I was hoping he...” She broke off, her eyes suddenly very bright.

“Who did the shooting?” I asked, making it almost casual. “You?”

“Me? Oh, no. God, no. It wasn’t me.”

“Who, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but I... I mean, I was in the apartment, but not in the living room. I was in the bedroom.”

“You didn’t see the person that killed him?”

“Whose apartment is it? Yours or his?”

“His.”

I turned toward the open doorway. “We’d better go inside,” I said. “After you, Miss Hagen.”

“Do we have to?”

“You won’t have to look at him,” I said. “The body’s between the sofa and the wall, where you can’t see it.” I gestured, toward the door.

She hesitated, then squared her shoulders and walked resolutely to the doorway. At the threshold she hesitated again, then quickly stepped inside, sat down in the first fishnet chair she came to, and crossed her legs.

I drew another chair close to hers, got out my notebook, and sat waiting while Stan made a fast inspection of the body. When he’d finished and had taken a seat on a hassock, I said, “What’s the dead man’s name, Miss Hagen?”

“Larry. Larry Yeager.”

I wrote the name in my book and glanced over at Stan. “How about calling Barney?” I asked. “Tell him what we’ve got and ask him if he’ll start the ball rolling on this with Communications.”

Barney was Acting-Lieutenant Barney Fells, the commander of the Sixth Precinct detective squad, and Stan’s and my immediate superior.

Stan crossed to the phone, lifted the handset by hooking his left index finger beneath the flange at the receiver end — a method that neither leaves nor obliterates fingerprints — and began to dial.

II

By phoning Barney Fells we’d be saving time, but we would not, of course, be going by the book. In New York, the first police officer on the scene of a crime is usually a member of the uniform Force, and SOP is for him to immediately phone the Communications Bureau at police headquarters on Centre Street.

In the present case, however, Barney Fells would take care of the call to Communications, and they in turn would dispatch an ambulance and notify the Sergeant on Patrol, the Medical Examiner’s office, the District Attorney’s office, the Bureau of Identification, the Photographic Bureau, the crime lab, and others.

“Can I get my things?” Doris Hagen asked.

I nodded, and while she was about it, I looked in the outsize handbag that had been lying on the coffee table. There wasn’t any gun in it. I handed it to her, and she stuffed her underthings and stockings into it.

“First,” I said, when she was settled in her chair again, “let’s establish the relationship.”

She looked at me sharply. “What?” Her position in the chair had caused her dress to slide halfway up her thighs, but she made no effort to pull it down again. I got the feeling that little things like that made no difference to her, either way.

“You his girl friend?” I asked.

“I guess you could say that. We weren’t engaged or anything, though.”

“You live here with him?”

“No.”

Stan Rayder finished with his call and sat back down on the hassock. “I kept one ear tuned in on you,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Suppose you take it from the beginning, Miss Hagen,” I said. “Tell us exactly what happened.”

She took a deep breath, shifted her position in the chair slightly, and crossed her legs the other way. Her skirt rode up another couple of inches, and stayed there.

“Well,” she said, “there was this knock on the door. The front door downstairs stays open all the time. So anybody who wants to come up here, well all he has to do is do it.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Just before it happened. About ten minutes of noon.”

“Where was Mr. Yaeger at the time?”

“Here, in the living room. I was in here, too.”

“I thought you told us you were in the bedroom.”

“That was later. When this knock came, I was in here with Larry.” She paused. “Look — you said tell you exactly what happened, right?”

I nodded.

“All right, then. I’d been doing... well, like a strip. It was a little game we played sometimes. What we’d do, we’d have a drink together, and then I’d take my dress off. And then we’d have another drink, and I’d take off something else. And so that’s what we were doing this morning when somebody knocked on the door. I went out to the bedroom because I didn’t have anything on. And poor Larry — he went to the door to open it.”

“You didn’t actually watch him open it?”

“No.”

“And then?”

“Well, I’d no sooner got into the bedroom when I heard the shots. I almost died. I thought whoever had shot him would come in the bedroom and shoot me, too.”

“Why?”

“Because when he saw my clothes out there, he’d know I had to be somewhere around. He’d think I saw him shoot Larry, and he’d have to kill me too to keep me from telling.”

“You say ‘he.’ You hear a man’s voice?”

“Well, no. I... Well, naturally, I just assumed it was a man.”

“But now that you think back on it, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t have been a woman?”

“Well, no. I guess not.”

“How long was it before you went up on the roof?”

“Just a few seconds. Just as soon as I could move again.”

“Weren’t you afraid the killer might still be in the living room, or out in the hall?”

“I didn’t go out that way I went out the bedroom window and climbed up the fire escape.” She paused. “After that, all I remember is trying to yell for help. But I couldn’t say anything. Any words, I mean. All I could do was scream.”

“What do you do for a living, Miss Hagen?”

“Whatever I have to,” she said. “Sometimes I model a little. Sometimes I do other things.” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”

I looked over at Stan. “Feel like knocking on a few doors?” I asked. “Maybe some of the other tenants saw or heard something.”

“There aren’t any other tenants,” Miss Hagen said. “Larry was the only one.”

“In a house this size?”

“It belongs to Old Lady Gotrocks, herself. She’s in Europe. And if you want to meet a real nut, she’s your girl. You ought to see her apartment downstairs. She’s got it painted even crazier than this one is.”

“Let’s get a little information on Mr. Yeager,” I said. “He married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“Not that I know of. He never said.”

“You know any of his family?”

“There isn’t any. At least, that’s what he told me.”

“What kind of work did he do?”

“He was an actor.”

The phone rang, and Stan walked over to answer it. “Hello?... Oh, hi, Barney... They did? Fine... He was, eh?... Yeah... uh-huh... Yeah, I’ve got it. Mrs. Reba Daniels, Paragon Apartments... You too, Barney, and many thanks.”

“What was that all about?” I asked as he hung up and returned to the hassock.

“Barney asked BCI for—”

“Asked who?” Miss Hagen said.

“The Bureau of Criminal Information,” Stan told her. “Barney is Pete’s and my boss, Miss Hagen. He asked BCI for checks on you as well as your Mr. Yeager.”

“How nice of him,” she said. “And what’d he find out?”

“About you, nothing,” Stan said.

“What about Yeager?” I asked.

“He had a yellow sheet. Not that it amounted to much. He got into a hassle with his wife once and—”

“Wife?” Miss Hagen said. “What wife?”

Stan ignored her. “This was way back in 1950, Pete. All that happened was that Yeager and his wife got into a pretty loud argument, and the neighbors called the police. Yeager was drunk and took a swing at one of the cops — which explains the yellow sheet. BCI figured we’d be asking for a check on the wife, too, so they went ahead and made one. Her first name’s Reba. Since she was married to Yeager, she’s been married and divorced a second time. A contractor named Arnold Daniels. She’s living at the Paragon Apartments, under the name of Reba Daniels.”

I wrote down the name and address and turned back to Miss Hagen. “Mr. Yeager in trouble of any kind?” I asked.

“Not so far as I know, he wasn’t.”

“He have any enemies?”

“Well... not enemies, exactly. He wasn’t getting along so well with Mr. Eads, though.”

“Who’s Mr. Eads?”

“He’s the man who wrote the play Larry was going to have a part in. Warren Eads. I don’t know what the trouble was, but Larry sure didn’t like him. I heard him blessing Mr. Eads out on the phone one day. I never saw Larry so mad in all the time I knew him.”

I put my notebook away and got to my feet. “That’ll do for now, Miss Hagen,” I said. “Stan, let’s see what we can find.”

Stan took the living room and I took the bedroom. I was just finishing up when Stan called from the living room. “C’mere a minute, Pete.”

He was down on his hands and knees, about two feet to the left of the hall door. “Take a look,” he said, pointing to a narrow, inch-and-a-half shard of green glass lying propped against the edge of the carpet. “Miss Hagen swears it wasn’t there when she vacuumed this room, just before she and Yeager started their little strip game.”

I knelt down beside Stan, picked up the shard, and turned it over in my fingers. “It’s a piece of lens from a pair of sunglasses,” I said.

“No sign of a struggle,” Stan said as he straightened up. “Not that that means there wasn’t one. It looks to me like the glasses belonged to the killer. Yeager probably opened the door, saw the gun, made a grab for it, and the killer’s glasses got knocked off and stepped on. Then the killer shot Yeager, picked up what was left of the glasses, and haul-tailed out of here.”

I slipped the green shard into my pocket and stood up.

“Miss Hagen, did Yeager have a safe-deposit box somewhere?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“We didn’t find any personal papers,” I said. “You know where he had his bank account, if he had one?”

She moved one shoulder just enough to qualify as a shrug. “Beats me,” she said disinterestedly, leaning back in the chair to stare up at one of the colored mobiles rotating lazily against the ceiling. “The things I don’t know about that guy would fill a book. A big one.”

We were interrupted then.

There was a sudden blur of men’s voices in the foyer down below, and then the pound and creak of heavy feet coming up the stairs.

“I was beginning to wonder where everybody was,” Stan said, glancing at his wrist watch. “They must have come by way of Bluefield, West Virginia.”

“And from the sound of them, they brought half the cops in West Virginia with them,” I said.

Stan shook a cigarette from his pack, lit it, blew an almost perfect smoke ring ceilingward, and sighed softly.

“Well,” he said, “So now the fun begins.”

III

The fun began, all right. The first group of arrivals was soon followed by a second, and within ten minutes the small apartment was crowded with more than two dozen men, only about half of whom had any real business there. The others were visiting royalty from other precincts — lieutenants and captains, most of them — who had heard about the squeal and dropped in to say hello to one another.

While the Assistant Medical Examiner made his preliminary examination of the body, and the print men and photographers set up shop with their dusting powders and cameras, I got busy on the phone.

Hooking a finger beneath the flange of the handset, as Stan had done earlier, I called Headquarters and asked for the assignment of a squad of patrolmen to, search the neighborhood for the murder gun. Next, I asked to be switched over to BCI, and requested an expedited check on Warren Eads, the playwright with whom, according to Doris Hagen, Yeager had had some kind of feud.

I held the line while the check was made, and a few minutes later BCI called back to report that Eads had no record. Then I had BCI switch me over to still another office, and asked that detectives be assigned to check with all the banks in the metropolitan area to see whether Yeager had rented a safe-deposit box.

Then I drew Stan Rayder over to a corner of the living room. “I’ve been thinking about that piece of lens,” I said. “If it was ground to a doctor’s prescription, the way a lot of sunglass lenses are, we just might be able to trace it.”

“How so?”

“Well, say the killer wanted that lens replaced. All he’d have to do would be to ask the doctor who prescribed the glasses for him in the first place. The doctor would have the prescription on file. All he’d have to do would be to pass it along to whatever optical outfit ground his lenses for him. And so, if we put all the manufacturing opticians on the watch-and-wait for that particular prescription, we—”

“Just a minute,” Stan said. “That’s all very well. But just how do you think we’re going to get the prescription in the first place?”

“We’ve got one of the top lens experts in the country, right in our own lab,” I said. “Ruby Wyman. By analyzing the shard you found, he might be able to reconstruct the prescription the lens was ground by.”

Stan shook his head dubiously. “I like the idea fine,” he said. “What I don’t like are the odds against it.”

I walked over to the chief of the tech crew, gave him the shard, told him what I wanted Ruby Wyman to do with it, and asked him to take it back to the lab with him when he and his men had finished at the apartment.

“Hey, Selby!” Doris Hagen called out suddenly. “How about me? What am I supposed to do — sit in this chair until I take root or something?”

“Relax, Miss Hagen,” Stan told her. “We’ll get around to you in a minute.”

“And a damn long minute too, I’ll bet,” she said petulantly.

Stan came over to where I stood and lowered his voice. “What about her?” he asked. “You going to hold her as a material witness, or what?”

“Let’s make it protective custody,” I said.

“Well, you’d better get set for some fireworks. Man, what a squawk she’ll make when you give her the news.”

“Not me, Stan. You.”

“How come? You going somewhere?”

“I thought I’d take a crack at the guy that wrote the play Yeager was supposed to be in. Warren Eads.”

I looked in the Manhattan directory, found that Eads lived at the Amador Hotel, and called him there. The desk clerk told me he was out, but that he had left a phone number where he could be reached. I called the number, listened to the click of the receiver being taken off the hook, and then to twenty seconds of the mixture of voices and clinking glassware that can come only from a bar.

“Sully’s Taproom,” a husky Irish voice said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I was supposed to meet a friend there, but I’ve forgotten the address.”

“Thirty-sixth and Third,” the voice said. “Hurry over.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, and hung up.

“Hey, Selby,” Doris Hagen yelled again. “Your minute was up half an hour ago.”

“I’ll check with you in an hour or so, Stan,” I said.

“Do that, Pete. It gets lonely around here at times.”

“You’ve got Miss Hagen, don’t forget.”

He winced. “Don’t remind me,” he said.

I went downstairs, got into the unmarked police Plymouth we had left at the curb, and headed for Sully’s Taproom and a talk with Warren Eads.

Sully’s Taproom was just another Third Avenue bar. The bartender was working hard and sweating hard. He came up to where I stood at the street end of the bar, knuckled some of the sweat out of his eyes, and stood looking at me with one eyebrow raised questioningly.

“Warren Eads been in?” I asked.

He jerked a thumb toward the rear of the room. “Last booth on the left.”

I thanked him and walked back. A middle-aged man with a moon face, very pink skin and pale red hair was sitting with a small, lush-bodied brunette. The man had one arm around the girl and seemed to be grazing on her ear. The girl had long, ragged bangs and tilted brown eyes, and judging from the pleased little sounds she was making, she liked the grazing just fine.

I slid onto the seat across from them. The moon-faced man looked over, then back at the girl.

“You know this guy, June?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Beat it, bud,” the man said, going back to his nuzzling. “This booth’s taken.”

I got out my billfold and showed him my shield. “My name’s Selby,” I said. “Are you Mr. Eads?”

He looked at the potsy, sat up a little straighter looked at it again, and reached for his drink. “Yes, I’m Eads,” he said. “What about it?”

I glanced at the brunette. “Mind leaving us alone for a few minutes, miss?” I asked her.

“Stay where you are, June,” Eads said. “This is Miss June Courtney, Selby. She’s my fiancée. Anything you’ve got to say to me, she can hear too.”

I reached for a cigar, bit the end off it, and sat rolling it around in my fingers without lighting it.

“Never mind the big dramatic pause.” Eads said, his pink face getting a shade pinker. “What’s the story?”

“You know a man named Larry Yeager?” I asked.

“Sure I know him. Why?”

“What were you and Yeager having trouble about?”

“Who said we were?”

“I’m only doing a job, Mr. Eads,” I said. “If you want to talk to me here, fine. If you’d rather talk to me at the station house, say so.”

Eads’ face was no longer pink, it was out-and-out red. He took a quick swallow of his drink and set his glass back down so hard I wondered it didn’t break.

“Larry wants more sides,” he said.

“He what?”

“Sides,” Eads said. “Speeches. He’s going to be in a show we’re doing. He wants us to build up his part.”

“Which we absolutely will not do,” the brunette put in.

“He’s the original no-talent kid,” Eads said bitterly. “A zero.”

“That’s the only trouble you’ve having with him?” I asked.

“That’s, all. But believe me, brother, it’s enough.”

“I thought the director was the one who decided who said what,” I said.

“June, here, is the director, Selby. She’s also the producer.”

“Courtesy of my father,” June said. “He’s an old moneybags.”

“If Yeager is such a zero,” I said, “why’d you hire him in the first place?”

Eads and June glanced at each other. Then June shrugged and Eads said, “Call it temporary insanity.”

“The trouble is, we can’t fire him,” June said. “He has a run-of-the-show contract.” She grimaced. “He’s such a miserable thing. He really is.”

“June’s a lady,” Eads said. “Naturally she uses very polite language. What she means is, Yeager’s a no-good son of a bitch.”

“Among other things,” June said.

“He’s a real natural-born trouble-maker,” Eads said. “Any time he can irritate you, he does it. Any time he can embarrass you, he does. Any time he can change two friends into a couple of enemies, he does that. Ever since we put him into Grade A, he’s done nothing but—”

“That’s the name of your show?” I asked. “Grade A?”

“Yes,” June said. “It’s about the people on a big dairy farm in Minnesota. It takes place at the time of the county fair, and—”

“Never mind, June,” Eads said. “The sooner Mr. Selby finishes his little third degree, the sooner he’ll go away.”

“Aside from being an all-around nice guy,” I said, “did Yeager have any real enemies?”

“Just how real?” Eads asked with a grunt.

“Real enough to want him dead.”

He stared at me a long moment, his moon face as devoid of expression as a pink balloon. Then he let his breath out very softly and nodded. “So that’s what happened,” he said, as if to himself. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

June Courtney sat very still. Her lips moved as if she were about to say something; then she caught herself, raised her glass, and drank steadily until it was empty.

“Why didn’t you say he was dead to begin with?” Eads asked. “How come you talked as if he were still alive?”

“That’s the way I wanted to handle it,” I said. “What about those enemies?”

He shrugged. “Yeager was an easy guy to hate, all right. But kill him? Maybe somebody did hate the buy that much, I don’t know.”

I looked at the girl. “How about you, Miss Courtney?”

She shook her head, and then sat looking down into her empty glass, revolving it slowly with the tips of her fingers.

The smile at the corners of Eads’ eyes had finally reached his mouth. “God bless all happy endings,” he said. “Drink up, June. We’ve lost our number one headache.”

“My glass is empty,” June said, her face brightening a little. “See?”

“Here,” Eads said. He reached for her glass, poured a little of his own drink into it, and handed it back to her. “Happy days!”

“Happy days,” June said. They touched glasses, smiled at each other, and drank.

“Well, now,” Eads said. “Things are looking up again.”

“I didn’t realize I’d brought such good news,” I said.

“Well, you did,” Eads said. “Everybody will be better off now — including Larry Yeager.”

“Yes,” June said, pressing up close against Eads. “It’s the best thing that could have happened.”

Eads laughed. “Why be hypocritical?” he said. “Have a drink, Selby. Join the celebration.”

“Thanks just the same,” I said as I slid out of the booth and turned in the direction of the street door. “Some other time.”

“Sorry you can’t stay,” Eads said. “See you on opening night, right?”

“Of course,” I said.

I walked out to the Plymouth, got inside, and sat there mulling things over for a while.

Since I was already in the neighborhood, I decided I might just as well have a talk with Larry Yeager’s ex-wife.

I took out my notebook and found the entry I’d made about her at Yeager’s apartment, but it didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t remembered. Her first name was Reba, and after divorcing Yeager she had married a man named Arnold Daniels and was now divorced from him too.

IV

The woman who answered my knock on the door of apartment 4D had the kind of beauty that makes you look a second time to make sure your eyes weren’t kidding you the first time. She was about thirty, with gray-green eyes beneath incredibly long lashes, shoulder-length auburn hair with gold highlights in it, and the body of a girl of eighteen.

There wasn’t any question about the body. She was wearing a white shorts-and-halter getup which, had she worn it on the street, would have gotten her arrested.

“Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She nodded. “What is it, please?”

“Detective Selby,” I said, showing her my shield. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. May I come in?”

“Yes, of course.” She held the door for me as I entered, then closed it and leaned back against it. “What’s happened?”

“All right if we sit down?”

She crossed to a white leather sofa, and sat down at one end of it. I sat down in one of the matching leather chairs and got out my book.

I’d noticed an almost inaudible whining sound when I came in, but I’d thought it had come from the street. Now I realized it was in the room itself.

“What’s that?” I asked. “It sounds like some kind of motor.”

“It is,” she said, smiling a little. “Don’t you recognize a Mercedes when you hear one?”

“Not every time,” I said.

“It’s on a record,” she said, gesturing toward a console at the far end of the room. “I turned it down before I answered the door.”

“I see,” I said. “And you sit around listening to the sound of car engines on records?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “We all do. We sports car buffs. I have an Austin-Healey myself.” She gestured again, this time toward a glass cabinet filled with loving cups and plaques and silver platters. “Those are some of the things I’ve won. Not in races, though. Rallies and gymkhanas. Concours d’Elégance. That sort of thing.” She drew one bare leg up beneath her and leaned back against the cushion. “Just what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Larry Yeager,” I said.

“Larry?” She smiled at me questioningly. “In heaven’s name, why?”

“You were married to him once, weren’t you?”

“Why, yes. But that was ages ago. I haven’t even talked to the man in — why, it must be all of ten or twelve years.”

“I see.”

“Has something happened to him?”

“He’s been killed,” I said. “Murdered.”

She drew her breath in sharply. “Larry? Murdered? Oh, how dreadful!”

“Most murders are,” I said.

“Do you know who did it?”

“No.”

She looked down at the floor, shaking her head, her eyes withdrawn and remote. “Larry dead,” she said softly. “Somehow it just doesn’t seem possible. He was always so... so alive.”

“You said you hadn’t talked to him in ten or twelve years,” I said. “Does that mean you hadn’t even seen him in all that time?”

“I’d seen him, yes. But never to talk to. I saw him on the street a few times, but he didn’t see me.” She paused. “We were together only a few months, you know. We got married just before the war in Korea broke out. Larry was recalled to active duty right away. By the time he came out, we both knew we’d made a mistake. We got a divorce.”

“I understand he had no living relatives.”

“That’s right. He had no one at all.”

“I wonder if you’d mind doing the police a favor, then. In cases like this, we’re supposed to have a next-of-kin identification. Which means we’ve got a problem.”

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll be glad to make the identification for you. Would you want me to do it now?”

“Not right this minute,” I said. “First, I’d like to find out a little about Larry.”

She sighed. “It’s all so strange,” she said. “It’s almost as if I hadn’t ever been married to him at all. Almost as if I’d never even known him. I... I just don’t feel anything.” She smiled faintly. “I suppose that sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it? But it’s true. I simply don’t feel anything at all.”

“Basically, what kind of person was he?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Well, if you had to say he was one thing more than any other, it would be that he was completely self-centered. He was the most completely selfish person I’ve ever known.”

“Can you think of any habits or ways of his that might have led to trouble?”

She ran the tip of a small pink tongue across her upper lip very slowly, and then shook her head.

“No,” she said.

I put my notebook away. “I appreciate your help, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “Now, if you’d be good enough to make that trip to Bellevue, we—”

“Bellevue?”

“That’s where Manhattan homicides are autopsied. Larry’s body ought to be there by now. I’ll arrange for a car to pick you up and bring you home again.”

She nodded, got to her feet, and walked toward a door at the rear of the room. “I’ll be only a minute,” she said. “I want to put on something a little more appropriate.”

The door closed behind her, and I went over to the telephone table and made arrangements for her trip to Bellevue. Then, while I waited for her to dress, I decided to call Stan Rayder at Larry Yeager’s apartment and see whether there had been any new developments. But I had, I discovered, forgotten to write down Yeager’s phone number. I looked around for a directory, but I couldn’t find one.

I walked over to the door Reba Daniels had closed behind her. “Mrs. Daniels?” I called.

“Yes?”

“I can’t seem to find your phone book.”

“I must have dragged it in here with me again,” she said. “Yes, here it is. Whose number did you want, Mr. Selby? I’ll look it up for you?”

“Larry Yeager’s,” I said.

There was a short silence; then she called out the number, and I went back to the phone and dialed Yeager’s apartment. Stan Rayder answered on the second ring.

“Pete, Stan,” I said. “Anything new happen over there?”

“Nothing important,” he said. “Doris Hagen’s on her way to the slammer, and Yeager’s body was on its way to Bellevue half an hour ago.”

I told him about my talk with Warren Eads and June Courtney.

“Where are you now?” Stan asked.

“Reba Daniels’ apartment. She’s going over to Bellevue to make our ID for us.”

“Good. She give you any dope on Yeager?”

“No. I’ve been drawing blanks ever since I left you.”

“There was a call for you. Barney passed it along from the squad room. Whoever it was that called left his number, but he wouldn’t give his name.” He told me the number and I wrote it down.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give him a call.” I said so long, depressed the receiver for a moment, and dialed the number he had given me.

“Yeah?” a man’s voice said.

“This is Pete Selby,” I said. “Someone wanted me to call him at that number.”

“It was me. G-Man Gault. Remember me?”

I remembered him, and I ought to have remembered his voice as well. He was a roving bootlegger and part-time stoolie named Donald Gault, but much more widely, and variously, known as G-Man, Creep Eye, and Gin Bag. The last name was due to the fact that he always wore an outsize trench-coat, on the inside of which were sewn several rows of pockets the exact size of pint liquor bottles.

“I remember you, Gault,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I hear you caught the Yeager squeal,” he said. “I think I got something for you on it.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“Chief do you know a cat named Dixie Ryan?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that Dixie is a man you should hit right now. I mean suddenly, chief. From what I heard, Dixie had been laying it down that he was going to cut Yeager up real good.”

“Why?”

“All I know is it had something to do with a movie. Dixie runs a stag show once a week regular, you know. So maybe it was one of his he-and-she movies.”

“You know where Dixie’s hanging out these days?”

“Sure. He’s padding down upstairs at the Poor Boy Bar, on West Fourth Street.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look him up.”

“And listen, chief. If you hit the old jackpot, don’t go forgetting who gave you the combination.”

“I never forget a favor,” I said, and hung up.

I walked over to the door Reba Daniels had closed behind her. “I’ll be leaving now, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “That car ought to be here any minute. And thanks again for your help.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Good-by, Mr. Selby.”

I let myself out of the apartment and walked down the corridor to the stairway.

G-Man Gault was a reliable stool pigeon. If he said that Dixie Ryan had threatened Larry Yeager’s life, Dixie had very probably done just that.

The big question was why.

V

Dixie Ryan’s room over the Poor Boy Bar contained a neatly-made day bed, a small dresser, a kitchen table with a movie projector on it, about two dozen wooden folding chairs stacked against one wall, and nothing else.

“Those chairs for your stag-show customers, Dixie?” I asked as he closed the door behind me.

“Stag shows?” he said. “Me? You’ve been listening to the wrong birds, Selby.”

Dixie Ryan had once been a pretty fair club fighter, back in the days when there were such things. Now he was a hard-bitten, jack-of-all-crimes character who had been suspected of everything from stealing pennies off newsstands to murder. His ring-ruined features showed nothing, but beneath their tracery of scar tissue, his eyes were as cold and bright as pale blue ice.

“The same birds told me you threatened Larry Yeager,” I said.

“So what if I did?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Murdered.”

Dixie stared at me. “No lie?” he said. “And so who’s supposed to have killed him? Me?”

“That might depend on where you were around noon,” I said. “Say, from half-past eleven to half-past twelve.”

“No sweat there,” he said. “I was downstairs in the bar. You don’t believe me, ask them.”

“You can count on it,” I said. “What were you and Yeager having trouble about?”

“Maybe I don’t feel talkative.”

“And maybe a little time in the tank would change all that.”

“On what charge?”

“I could think up half a dozen in about that many seconds,” I said. “But this isn’t a bust, Dixie. I’m not interested in your damn stag show. The only thing that interests me is Larry Yeager.”

He stood there, not moving, studying my face as carefully as a jeweler appraising a diamond necklace.

“Hell,” he said at last. “You’ve leveling, aren’t you?”

“All the way,” I said.

He shrugged. “All right, then. It was over a film. A stag film. I showed it one night, along with a couple or three others. Yeager got in a hell of a sweat to buy it. He was so hotted up about it he was damn near bug-eyed.”

“He say why?”

“No. I asked him, but all he did was start trying to knock me down on my price.”

“And how much was that?”

“A grand.”

“A grand? For a stag film?”

“I didn’t say it was worth any grand. It wasn’t. But when I saw how hot the guy was, naturally I hyped the price up on him. It only cost me a hundred.”

“That’s a pretty stiff markup. What happened?”

“Well, I told him it was a grand or nothing. Then he said, well, how about renting it to him for a week? And I said okay, but it’d cost him a hundred bucks, and if he wasn’t back with it inside a week, I’d come and get it. So he gave me a yard, and I gave him the film, and that was that.”

“But he didn’t bring it back oh time?”

“No. And that’s what the trouble was about. But I was just trying to throw a scare into him.” He paused. “Anyhow, he said if I’d wait just two more days, he’d have the whole thousand for me. I thought he was conning me, naturally. But he wasn’t. Two days later, damn if he doesn’t show up with a grand. I was so surprised I almost forgot to count it while he was still here.”

“Where’d you get the film, Dixie?”

“From Fred Beaumont. You remember Beaumont, don’t you? That old joker the papers made so much over about ten years ago. You know, with what they called that sex club up in the Bronx and all?”

“I remember,” I said. “I thought he was still in jail.”

“He got out about two months ago. I bought the film off him a couple of days after he hit the street. He told me he made it just before he went in, ten years ago.”

“You know where he might live now?”

“The last I saw him, he was down in some flea-bag flop on the Bowery. The Palace, I think it was.”

“Thanks, Dixie,” I said as I turned to leave. “I’m glad to hear you aren’t running stag shows, after all.”

“Who, me?” he said. “I’d never even think of such a thing.”

Downstairs in the bar I talked to enough people to satisfy myself that Dixie had been there at the time of Yeager’s murder. Then I called the squad room to see whether there had been any messages for me.

A little to my surprise, the phone was answered by Stan Rayder. “I thought you’d still be over at Yeager’s apartment,” I said.

“I just got here. Pete, we got a break. They found the gun.”

“Good,” I said. “Where?”

“Beneath a parked car, about half a block from Yeager’s building. It’s a .22 Smith & Wesson Masterpiece.” He sounded mildly excited — which, for Stan Rayder, was a very rare thing. “And not only that, but we know who it belongs to.”

“I wouldn’t have thought Ballistics would have had time to—”

“Oh, but they did,” he said. “Their test slug and the slugs from Yeager’s body all came out of the same gun. It’s registered to a buy named Earl Lambert, 834 East 31st Street.”

“You check him through BCI?”

“Sure. Nothing on him, though.”

“You think Mr. Lambert might enjoy a little visit from us?”

“There’s no doubt about it.”

“Then Suppose I pick you up in front of the station house in fifteen minutes. Okay?”

“Right. And listen, Pete. Take your time but hurry. We don’t want to keep the man waiting.”

It took me no time to hurry, and less time to reach Lambert’s.

A big delivery truck was just pulling away from the curb in front of Earl Lambert’s apartment building, and so finding a parking space for the Plymouth was, for once, no problem.

I looked along the name cards beneath the mailboxes until I found Lambert’s apartment number, and then Stan and I rode the self-service elevator up to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor to 710.

The door was opened by a young man with a couple of big cowlicks in his dark chestnut hair, a pleasantly homely face with a lot of laugh wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and a broad-shouldered, hipless body shaped like a wedge.

“Mr. Lambert?” I asked.

He nodded, smiling tentatively.

“Police officers,” I said. “My name’s Selby. This is Detective Rayder.”

Lambert’s smile wavered a little, but he held the door open a bit wider and motioned us inside.

“You know a man named Larry Yeager?” I asked.

He said the name over to himself, then shook his head. “No, I can’t say that I do. Why?”

“Where were you around noon today?”

“Here. Listen, what’s—?”

“There’s a .22 Smith & Wesson registered in your name. Mind getting it for us?”

“It — I don’t have it. It was stolen.”

“I see.”

“I’m telling you the truth. It was in a footlocker down in the basement. Somebody broke in down there and stole it. They stole a lot of other stuff down there, too.”

“What was it doing in a footlocker in the basement?”

“I wasn’t going to be using it for a while, so I put it and some other things I wouldn’t be needing in the footlocker and stored it down there, out of the way.”

“How come you to have the gun in the first place?” Stan asked. “Somebody threaten you or something?”

“No. I used it as a target gun. I belong to a couple of gun clubs.”

“When did this burglary take place?” Stan asked.

“About six weeks ago. You can ask them over at the police station.”

“We will,” Stan said.

“What am I supposed to have done with it? Hold up somebody, or kill somebody, or what?”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

“Well?” Lambert said. “You asked me if I knew a man named Larry Yeager. Am I supposed to have held him up or shot him or—” He broke off abruptly and stood there with a stunned, incredulous look in his eyes. “Good Lord!” he said. “You said noon, didn’t you? You asked me where I was at noon.”

“That’s right,” Stan said. “And you told us you were right here.”

“I was,” Lambert said. “And I can prove it. I talked with someone on the phone at noon. I know it was noon because the twelve o’clock news had just come on.”

“Who’d you talk to?” Stan asked.

“My boss,” he said. “It’s after closing time at the office, but I can give you my boss’ phone number.”

I took out my notebook. “His address too,” I said.

“I wonder what ever happened to him?” Stan said sourly.

I glanced at him. “Who?”

“Santa Claus,” he said.

By the time Stan and I had checked out Earl Lambert’s alibi, confirmed his account of the burglary with the local precinct detectives, and driven down to the Palace Hotel on the Bowery, it was half-past midnight.

Like many skid-row hotels, the Palace was oh the second floor, with a small desk at the top of a steep stairway that began the moment you stepped off the sidewalk. Fred Beaumont, the desk clerk told us, was in room 203.

The man who opened the door to my knock was nearing seventy, a small, fragile-looking man with fine white hair like spun cotton, an almost saintly face, and gentle brown eyes that seemed close to tears.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” he said, gesturing toward the bed. “I’m sorry my accomodations are so limited.”

Stan and I sat down on the bed and waited while Beaumont shuffled across the floor to the room’s single chair.

“Some night, I knew, there would be a knock on the door, and it would be the police,” Beaumont said. “But then, all parolees are rather prone to visits from the police, aren’t they?”

“Not if they keep their nose clean,” Stan said.

“Oh, that I have done,” Beaumont said. “Yes, indeed.”

“You don’t consider selling that stag film to Dixie Ryan a violation of parole?” Stan asked.

Beaumont sighed softly. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

“Yes, that,” Stan said. “That could put you right back where you came from.”

“You don’t understand,” Beaumont said. “I was in such desperate need of money that I—” He paused. “Are you going to send me back?”

“That depends,” Stan said. “A little cooperation goes a long way in this town, Mr. Beaumont.”

“Ah, yes,” Beaumont said. “And I do want to cooperate, sir. I most assuredly do.”

“We understand you made that film ten years ago, just before you went to prison,” Stan said. “Why?”

“For my own amusement. I simply installed a two-way mirror over the, fireplace in one of the bedrooms, and then set up a 16 mm movie camera in the adjoining room. Then, whenever some of my guests would wander into the bedroom, and nature took its course, I would record the proceedings.”

“Without their knowledge, of course?”

“Of course.”

“How many people were in the film altogether?” Stan asked him.

Beaumont’s forehead furrowed. “Six, I believe,” he said. “Yes, six. Three men and three women.”

“You make it all in one night?”

“Yes. And now I recall that there was someone else in it. Another girl. And a very beautiful young girl, too. I don’t know why I didn’t recall her at once.” He paused reflectively. “She did a very provocative little dance for me. Yes, very provocative. She was about fifteen, I would say, and hair as yellow as butter.”

I got out my notebook. “We’d better get some names down,” I said. “Let’s start with your dancing girl.”

“She never told me her name, sir. Not her real name, anyway. When I asked her what it was, she said to just call her Honey. It was the first time I’d ever seen her — and, as it happened, the last.” He paused. “She provided me with one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”

“What happened?” Stan asked.

“It was after she’d done her little dance,” Beaumont said. “I was... ah... understandably aroused. But when I tried to approach her, she kept backing away and laughing at me. Finally, when I’d cornered her, she broke off laughing long enough to announce that she was a virgin.”

“She was what?” Stan said.

“Exactly,” Beaumont said. “At first I thought she was merely trying to add a little spice to the moment, and I joined in the laughter.” He shook his head slowly. “But the remarkable thing about it, gentlemen, was that she was a virgin. When I scoffed at the very possibility, she invited me to verify the fact for myself.”

“And?” Stan said.

“I did,” Beaumont said. “And she was.”

“I’ll be damned,” Stan said.

“I was speechless,” Beaumont said. “She kept laughing at me all the time she was putting her clothes back on. She left as soon as she was dressed, and she was still laughing as she went out the door.”

“How’d she happen to show up at your place to begin with?” Stan asked.

Beaumont looked at Kim with infinite patience. “My dear boy, that was ten long years ago. Surely you can’t expect me to recall a detail like that?”

“And the other people in the film?” Stan said.

“All of them were regulars, one might say.”

“Let’s get the names down,” I said. “Start with the men.”

“Ghosts,” Beaumont said. “That’s what they seem like to me now. Ghosts.”

I waited.

“Well,” Beaumont said, “there was Eddie Willard. Then there was—”

“Hold on,” I said. “We’re going to talk to every one of these people, Beaumont, and we’re going to need more than just their names to find them. As you said, all this was ten long years ago.”

“I understand,” Beaumont said. “And I want to help, believe me. But I knew almost nothing about their personal lives, even then?”

“Do the best you can,” I said. “Besides his name, what can you tell us about this Eddie Willard?”

“He was a student somewhere. I think Columbia.”

I nodded. “We can check the records there.”

“And then there was Bill Marcy. His father was head of the Marcy Electronics Company.” He paused. “And Dave Anders? Dave was studying to be an accountant.”

“Can’t you recall anything else about him?”

“I wish I could,” Beaumont said.

“All right, then. How about the women?”

“The one I recall most vividly is Leda Ellis. She was a lively one, Leda was. She used to tell the most hilarious jokes about her husband, Webster. What made them all the more droll was that she usually told them in the altogether. Her husband was the Webster part of Webster, Macklin & Hughes, the law firm.” He paused. “And then there was Marian Coe. She worked for the telephone company. And Genita Garren. She taught some kind of arts and crafts course, over in the Village somewhere.”

“Very good,” Stan said flatly.

Beaumont sat staring at the floor, his face set in the half-smiling, reflective expression old men get when they think about the long ago.

“It’s so strange about the past,” he said softly. “None of it realty ever dies, does it?”

“At least not in the detective business,” Stan said.

I got to my feet. “Ready, Stan?”

Beaumont sighed to himself, his eyes bleak. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” he said, his voice suddenly tired and weak. “I wonder, gentlemen — what ever could have happened to them?”

“What the hell?” Stan said. “You feel okay, Mr. Beaumont?”

“I feel old, son,” Beaumont said. “I feel like the oldest man on the face of the earth.”

VI

When Stan and I got back to the station house, I paused at the teletype machine in the muster room long enough to read back through the alarms that had come in since noon, hoping that there might be something I could connect in some way with our homicide, but there was nothing.

“Anything on the chatterbox?” Stan asked as we started up the stairs to the squad room on the second floor.

“No,” I said. “It seems to have been a fairly quiet day.”

“And meanwhile Larry Yeager’s girl friend is sitting over there in the slammer. Man, that Doris Hagen was one mad girl when I sent her over there, Pete.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “She was working up a pretty good mad, even before she knew where she was going.”

I opened the gate in the counter that runs across the forepart of the squad room, held it for Stan, and followed him into the squad room proper.

Except for Barney Fells, the room was empty, which, considering the time of evening, was very unusual. The squad commander was standing by the water cooler, a paper cup in one hand and the stub of a cigar in the other, scowling at us — a tough, wiry, graying man with quick, sharp eyes. A cop’s cop, all the way.

I draped my jacket over the back of my chair, sat down, and gave him a fast recap of the things Stan and I had done so far.

When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “That Larry Yeager must have been one sweet character,” he said. “And so you figure he recognized somebody in that stag film and decided to add a little blackmail to his other accomplishments, eh?”

“There doesn’t seem to be any other answer,” Stan said.

“It’d be pretty hard to come, up with one, at that,” Barney said. “Pete, I took a call for you a while ago, from Ruby Wyman, over at the lab. About that piece of sunglass lens you boys found over at Yeager’s apartment. He says there was enough of it for him to work out the prescription the lens was ground from.”

“Good,” I said. “Ruby’s one of the best.”

“That he is. And another thing he did was to analyze the glass as glass. It seems there’s all kinds of optical glass, and this particular kind is fairly brittle, so it’s not so widely used as some of the others. Ruby says that narrows down the number of places that could have ground it.”

“It was a particular shade of green, too,” Stan said. “Considering that we have the exact prescription, plus the exact kind of glass, plus the exact shade, that idea of Pete’s about putting all the optical houses on the watch-and-wait just might pay off.”

“It all depends on how smart the killer is,” Barney said. “If he’s real smart, he’d never have that lens replaced at all. In any case, Ruby’s data have already been mimeoed and distributed to every optical house in the area.”

“We might even go a step farther,” I said. “Seeing that Ruby’s narrowed things down so well, why not ask the optical houses to check back through their records?”

“Hell, Pete,” Barney said. “There’d be tens of thousands of prescriptions for them to go through. Millions, maybe?”

“Not the way it’s narrowed down now,” I said. “And it just might turn the trick, Barney. If we could come up with the original prescription, we’d probably also come up with our killer.”

“Why even argue about it?” Barney said. “What can we lose? I’ll get Communications to put out a rider on that circular right away.” He moved off in the direction of his cubbyhole office.

“Well, so much for the lens,” Stan said. “What next, Pete?”

I got out my notebook, found the page listing the names of the people who had appeared in Fred Beaumont’s stag film, and handed it to him.

“How about calling BCI and the Information Unit on these?” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to catch up on a little paperwork.”

Stan got busy on the phone, and I settled down to the job of typing separate reports on all the people I had talked to since our arrival at Larry Yeager’s apartment.

“Mr. Selby?” a whiny voice said, so unexpectedly and so close to me that I whirled around in my chair, half angry at having been approached from behind in such a way.

The man who stood there, nervously toying with the brim of a brown straw hat, was somewhere in his middle forties, with iron-gray hair parted exactly in the middle, a sharp, narrow face, an almost lipless slit of a mouth, and a jutting, undershot jaw with a two-day growth of beard on it.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m Selby. What can I do for you?”

“I was a friend of Larry Yeager’s,” he said. “My name’s Grimes. Obie Grimes.”

I nodded toward the straight chair at the end of my desk. “Sit down, Mr. Grimes.”

He sat down carefully on the edge of the chair and put his hat in his lap. “When I saw in the paper what had happened to Larry, I knew I had to do something right away. I called Headquarters and asked them who was in charge of the case. They said you were.” He sat fingering the hat nervously for a moment. “I’ll put it straight out,” he said. “I’m scared to death, Mr. Selby. I’m so scared that I’m sick to my stomach.”

“Why?”

“Because I know who killed Larry,” he said, suddenly beginning to sweat. “But he made a mistake. When he—”

“Just a minute,” I said. “When who made a mistake?”

“Roy Cogan,” he said. “When he finds out he killed the wrong man—”

“What do you mean, wrong man?”

“I’m the one he meant to kill. Only he got it all wrong. When he finds out, he’ll kill me.”

“You mean Cogan shot Yeager, thinking it was you?”

“No. What I mean is, Cogan thought Yeager was the one that’d been messing around with his wife. But it wasn’t Yeager. It was me. Larry never even knew Cogan’s wife.”

“One moment, Mr. Grimes,” I said, noting that Stan was hanging up his phone. “Stan, this is Mr. Obie Grimes, Mr. Grimes, this is my partner, Detective Rayder.”

The, two men nodded to each other, and I said, “I wanted you to hear Mr. Grimes’ story, Stan. He thinks he knows who killed Larry Yeager.”

“I don’t just think it,” Grimes said in his whining voice. “I damn well know it.”

“Suppose you tell us about it,” I said.

“It’s just like I already told you,” he said. “Roy Cogan thought Larry was fooling around with Vernice — with Mrs. Cogan. But Larry’d never even laid eyes on her.”

“Then why did Cogan think that?” I asked.

“Because we’d been using Larry’s apartment. Vernice and me. I couldn’t take her to my place, on account of my landlady, and Vernice was afraid somebody’d see her if we went to a hotel.”

“You take Mrs. Cogan there pretty often?”

“Yes, quite a bit. I’d call Larry to see if he was going to be out. If he was, he’d leave the door on the latch. Vernice didn’t want to risk being seen on the street with anybody, so I’d meet her over there. But somebody must have seen her go in there. Somebody that knew her husband. Because the first thing Cogan did when he got out of jail was—”

“Hold it,” Stan said. “What was he in for?”

Grimes shuddered. “Manslaughter,” he said. “He beat a man to death with his fists. He was in Dannemora, but I didn’t know that, of course. Vernice told me he was down in South America, working for some oil company. The first I knew he wasn’t was when he busted in on me over at Larry’s apartment.”

“Tell us about it,” Stan said.

“Well, when Roy came back from Dannemora, and Vernice wasn’t home, he went straight over to Larry’s. Vernice said later she hadn’t expected him home for another six weeks. Anyhow, Cogan knew all about her going over there all the time, and that’s why he didn’t let her know exactly when he was getting out. He wanted to catch her by surprise.

“And he almost did catch her, too. I was already there at Larry’s, and Vernice was on her way over. In fact, she got there not more than five minutes after he left.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was sitting there waiting for Vernice, when all at once the door flies open and there stands Roy Cogan. I don’t know who he is then, of course; all I know is he’s the meanest looking one man I ever saw in my life, and one of the biggest. And besides that he’s got a gun in his hand.

“The first thing he says is, ‘You son of a bitch!’ and then he comes tearing over to me and grabs me by the shirt front and yanks me up out of the chair and says, ‘Damn you, Yeager, I’m going to blow your damn head off. Where’s Vernice?’ I was so scared I couldn’t even talk. I kept trying to tell him I wasn’t Larry, but I just couldn’t get the words out.

“And all the time I was trying to say something, he kept pushing that gun harder and harder into my belly and yelling for me to tell him where Vernice was. And then he yanks my arm up behind me and walks me all through the apartment in front of him, looking for Vernice.” He shook his head. “You talk about scared? Boy, I was so scared I—”

“We’ll concede, the point,” I said. “You were scared. Go oh, Mr. Grimes.”

“Well, so when he couldn’t find Vernice, he grabbed me by the shirt front again, and stuck the gun in my belly again, and stuck his face right up against mine and said if I didn’t, tell him where she was in five seconds, I was one dead son of a bitch.” He paused. “That’s when I got my voice back. I told him I was only using the apartment a couple of days while Larry was out of town. I said if he’d look at the stuff in my billfold, my driver’s license and all, he’d see I wasn’t Larry Yeager, I was Obie Grimes!” The man hesitated, embarrassed.

“And did he do that?” Stan asked.

“Yes, he did. I didn’t think he would, but he did. And then he shoved me halfway across the room and said he ought to have known Vernice wouldn’t fool around with anybody as ugly as me anyhow.”

“What’d Cogan do then, Mr. Grimes?” Stan asked.

“Well, mostly he just stood there and cussed about Vernice two-timing him while he was in Dannemora and all. And about how he was going to kill Yeager. Then all of a sudden he whirled around and tore out of the apartment, like he’d just thought of somewhere he had to be in a hell of a hurry.”

“And you say Mrs. Cogan arrived, shortly after that?” said.

“Not more than five minutes after.”

“How about Larry Yeager?” I asked. “What’d he have to say when you told him what had happened?”

“I never told him.”

“You didn’t warn him about the danger he was in?”

“I figured he was old enough to take care of himself.”

“What you really figured was that as long as Cogan was looking for Yeager, he wouldn’t be looking for you,” I said. “Isn’t that about the size of it, Mr. Grimes?”

“Anybody else would’ve done the same,” he said. “It’s every man for himself in this world, and you know it.”

“Where’s Vernice Cogan live?”

“The Dorsey. It’s an apartment house between 65th and 66th on Amsterdam, about halfway down the street on the east side.”

I took a moment to write down the address, and then reached for my phone. “All right, Mr. Grimes,” I said, dialing BCI. “Thanks very much for coming in.”

He stood up, mumbled something to himself, jammed the straw hat on his head, and stalked out of the room.

When BCI came on the wire, I asked that they make a check on Roy Cogan and call me back as soon as possible.

“Now all we have to do is wait,” I said as I hung up. “Stan, how’d you make out with that list of people in the stag film? You get BCI and the Information Unit squared away on them?”

“I was just finishing up when Grimes came in,” Stan said. “They said they’d do the best they could for us.”

When BCI called back, it was to say that Roy Cogan, in addition to his jolt for manslaughter, had been picked up for questioning three times as a suspect in burglaries, and released each time for lack of evidence.

Perhaps, I reflected, the .22 Smith & Wesson burgled from-the basement of Earl Lambert’s apartment house hadn’t changed hands so many times after all.

I told Stan what I had learned from BCI, and then stood up and got into my jacket. “I think I’ll run uptown for a little talk with Vernice Cogan,” I said. “It just might happen that I can get a line on where her husband is.”

“You want some help?”

“She’s just one woman, Stan.”

“If the husband’s there—”

“If he is, so much the better. I’ll bring him back with me.”

VII

The Dorsey was one of an unbroken, block-long row of scabrous-looking converted brownstones behind an iron jungle of fire escapes and barred windows.

I got out of the Plymouth, went up the trash-strewn steps to the front door, and looked around for the bell button, but there wasn’t any. I started to rap on the door, but decided I might jar loose the single glass panel that hadn’t been replaced with cardboard, and knocked on the doorjamb instead.

Nothing happened. I knocked again, waited again, and had just raised my hand to knock a third time when the door began to creak open slowly, a few inches at a time, the way they do in the horror movies.

The woman glowering at me in the dimness of the hallway was about fifty, dressed in a grimy T-shirt, sleazy black pajama bottoms, and high-heeled shoes with red anklets. Her flushed, sharp-featured face looked hung-over and she smelled the same way.

“All right,” she said in a tight, harsh voice. “What is it now?”

“Mrs. Roy Cogan live here?” I asked.

“No,” she said, starting to close the door. “She moved.”

I reached out and caught the door. “Police,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she said.

“There are worse things,” I said.

“Name one,” she said, moving back just far enough to let me step into the dank, malodorous hallway. “She ain’t here, I tell you.”

“I’ll talk to the super, then.”

“I’m the super. The super, and the handyman, and hell, you name it.”

“I’m not so sure there was one. I never seen any men around here at all. In fact, the only time I saw her was when I picked up the rent. She was a bum and a boozer, and I’m glad she’s gone.”

“This is very important,” I said. “Anything you can do to help will be appre—”

“What could I do? All she was to me was a face and a name.”

“All right, then,” I said as I turned to leave. “Thanks, just the same.”

“For what?” she said, and slammed the door. The single remaining glass panel didn’t jar loose after all.

When I got back to the squad room, Stan Rayder was hunched over his junkheap typewriter, hammering the keys so rapidly it sounded like someone popping corn.

I didn’t stop him at first.

After I’d asked Communications to put out a pickup for Roy and Vernice Cogan, I told Stan the result of my visit to the Dorsey, and then asked what BCI and the Information Unit had been able to find out about the various performers in the stag film Larry Yeager had bought from Dixie Ryan.

“They did a terrific job, considering,” Stan said, reaching for his notes. “They couldn’t do anything about that teenage blonde girl, the one that did the dance for Fred Beaumont, because the only name Beaumont knew her by was Honey. But they did fine with the other six, the ones Beaumont did know the names of. In fact, they eliminated three of them for us, right off the bat.”

“Which ones?”

“Well, first there was Dave Anders, the young guy Beaumont said was studying to be an accountant. Anders is dead. A car wreck, six years ago.”

“Who were the other two?”

“Marian Coe and Genita Garren. Miss Coe’s the one who used to work for the telephone company. She’s been in the violent ward at Bellevue for the last two years.”

“And Genita Garren?”

“Poor girl — she married a cop.”

“And that’s supposed to eliminate her?”

“It was a French cop. She’s living in Bordeaux.”

“That leaves Eddie Willard, Bill Marcy, and Leda Ellis.”

“And Honey.”

“Yes, and Honey. Let’s take them down the line. What’s Eddie Willard doing these days?”

“Loansharking.”

“Fine way for a Columbia student to end up.”

“It just shows you the value of a college education. If he hadn’t gone to Columbia, he’d probably be borrowing money instead of lending it.”

“What about Bill Marcy?”

“Like they say in the papers — a millionaire sportsman. His father left him a mint.”

“And Leda Ellis?”

“According to the Information Unit, she’s still as lively as she was when she used to go to Fred Beaumont’s parties.” He put his notes away. “And that’s it, Pete.” He paused. “Listen, Pete — you’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on, right?”

“Too much of it. Why?”

“Well, while you’re doing it, why don’t I start checking out Willard and Marcy and Leda Ellis?”

“All three of them?”

“Why not?”

“You afraid I’ll snag you into helping with the paperwork, or what?”

“Well, there’s that, too. But mainly I’m just tired of homesteading this damn squad room.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “Good-by and good luck.”

Stan had been right about my having a lot of paperwork; and since it had to be done, now was the time to do it. I lit a cigar, took the cover off my Number five Underwood, and dug in.

I worked steadily for the better part of two hours; then I went down to the corner diner, had a quick breakfast, and came back to the squad room to pick up where I had left off.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. It was Ted. Holly, over at Communications.

“Pete, I’ve got some good news for you,” he said. “That rider on the circular about the sunglasses paid off. The Emmert Optical Company says they ground a pair to that identical prescription, and with that same kind and shade of glass. Of course, we can’t assume that this is the only prescription of its kind. But it sure ought to do for starters.”

“It’ll do fine,” I said. “You know the owner’s name yet?”

“It was on the doctor’s prescription. The glasses were made for a Miss Helen Ramey, 212 Central Park West.”

“Thanks, Ted.”

“She a newcomer to the case?”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “She just might have been the biggest part of it, right from the beginning.”

“You mean, without her, there might not have been any case to begin with?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what I mean.”

I’d done enough paper work.

Helen Ramey turned out to be a small, neat girl with worried brown eyes, short brown hair, a blunt nose, and a head almost as perfectly round as a bowling ball. She had, she told me, lost her sunglasses at Atlantic City on a recent weekend there with two other girls from her office. She had come back from the water to find that someone had kicked her towel, and that her glasses had been lost in the sand or stolen. She had been very much distressed by the loss, since the glasses had cost her nearly forty dollars.

I was able to verify Miss Ramey’s story with both of the other girls, both of whom also verified the fact that, at the time of the murder, Miss Ramey had been having lunch at her desk in the office where she worked.

All of which meant that our only real lead in the homicide had evaporated, and that the glasses could have been dropped at Larry Yeager’s apartment by almost anyone at all.

After I’d driven back to the station house, I bought a quart container of black coffee and took it up to the squad room with me.

None of the messages oh my call spike had anything to do with the investigation, and the single report in my In basket, signed by the Assistant Medical Examiner who had autopsied Yeager’s body at Bellevue, boiled down to the fact that Yeager had died as a result of having been shot four times with a gun.

I’d just finished filing the report in Yeager’s folder when Stan Rayder walked in. While he got his big white mug from his desk and helped himself to some of my coffee, I told him the sad outcome of my check on Helen Ramey.

“She has an oddly shaped head,” I said. “It’s a little large, for a woman, and absolutely round. With a head like that, the frames of her sunglasses would have to be wider than most women’s frames would be.”

“I get it,” he said. “In other words, they’d be wide enough to be worn by either a woman or a man.” He shook his head. “A bum break. It means we’re right back where we started. Our hottest suspect just went right out the window.”

“That’s just about the sorry size of it,” I said. “And as long as we’re losing leads and suspects the way we are, we might as well let go of one more.”

“Who?”

“Yeager’s girl friend. Doris Hagen. I just don’t see her as a material witness, Stan. Not with the way things’ve worked out since we jugged her.”

“I agree,” he said. “And besides, if we change our minds about her later, we can always pick her up again.”

I made arrangements for Doris Hagen to be released, and then got out my notebook. “How about a run-down on how you made out with the people in that stag film?” I asked.

“I didn’t do so well,” he said. “Take Eddie Willard, for instance. The guy hasn’t been home for over a week. Nobody’s seen him around at all. And just about the same thing goes for Bill Marcy, God’s gift to women and saloon keepers. He was at a bachelor party last night. Pretty well oiled, too, it seems. Along about two a.m. he said he was going out and scout up a woman. That’s the last anybody’s seen him. He hasn’t been back to his apartment, and he didn’t show up for a breakfast date with a friend of his. A wild man, the friend says.”

“That leaves Mrs. Leda Ellis, the woman Beaumont said liked to make jokes about her husband while she walked around in the raw. She among the missing, too?”

“Yes,” Stan said. “Her husband says she left him two weeks ago. He doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t know where she is. The last time she took off that way, he says, she wound up in Acapulco with a bullfighter.”

The phone rang.

“My turn,” Stan said, reaching for the extension. “Detective Rayder, Sixth Squad... Yeah?... Hey, that’s terrific!... Yes, I will... Yes, we’ll be over there right away... You too, Bill. Thanks a lot.” He put the phone down and grinned at me. “Bill Chumley, over at Headquarters,” he said. “You remember back in the dim dark past when you asked for some men to check on whether Larry Yeager had a lock-box somewhere?”

“They found one?”

“They sure did. At the McPherson Savings Bank, on 86th Street.”

“Anything interesting in it?”

“Nobody knows. The bank says that until they see a court order, it’s strictly hands off.”

“Well, we can take care of that fast enough,” I said as I reached for the phone. “First, I want to ask Communications to put out a pickup for those people in the stag film, and then we can call ahead for a court order and pick it up on our way uptown.”

VIII

As it happened, Larry Yeager’s safe-deposit box did contain something interesting. It contained — along with a little over six hundred dollars in cash and a few personal papers — a can of 16 mm movie film.

By the time Stan and I had touched all the legal bases necessary to impound the film, rounded up a 16 mm projector, and had the film ready to roll in a small utility room at Headquarters, it was a quarter past one p.m.

The wall of the room was a little too dark to make a good screen, but it would have to do. Stan switched off the overhead light, and I pressed the button that started the projector.

Considering that the film had been made under very poor lighting conditions, with the camera in a fixed position behind a two-way mirror, the quality of the photography was surprisingly good.

“What I like about stag films,” Stan said as we watched the first couple on the bed, “is that you never have to make a guess about what the actors are up to.”

There was nothing at all on the film for a moment or so; then we were suddenly in the bedroom again, watching one young woman help another to undress. Then the film flickered off and immediately flickered on again to show both girls in the nude, sitting on the side of the bed.

“Looks like Fred Beaumont did a little editing,” Stan said as we watched the scene progress. “Every time there was a lull in the action, he cut it out.”

The scene with the two young women lasted several minutes. When it was over, the film went to black, then brightened again to show one of the same girls, this time with a man.

“Quick switch,” Stan commented. “I wonder what she does for a change of pace?”

The film continued until we had seen, in various combinations, three different women and three different men. Then, abruptly, we were watching a very young and very beautiful blonde girl in the process of raising her skirt above her knees.

“That must be the teenage kid Beaumont told us about,” Stan said as the hem of the girl’s dress moved slowly up her legs to reveal taut round garters rolled high on her thighs. “The one who told him just to call her Honey.”

The girl was smiling directly into the camera, her face as serene and innocent as a child’s. It was an expression calculated to enhance the effect of what she was doing with her skirt, and it succeeded wonderfully.

The skirt crept past the flare of her hips, paused a moment, and then started upward again, to pause once more midway up the lower slopes of the jutting breasts. Then the breasts themselves were bared, and the girl held the hem of the skirt pressed beneath her chin, her head a little to one side and her eyes half closed, in a provocative blend of coquetry and shyness. She stood that way for fully half a minute; then, slowly at first, then faster, she began to undulate her hips, while at the same time she moved her small flat belly, in short quick thrusts in the direction of the camera.

I’d noticed nothing familiar about her face when it had first flashed on the wall, but now I began to have the uneasy feeling that I’d seen it before.

Then, the next time she turned full face to the camera, and I had a long look at the tilted, almost Oriental eyes, I realized who she was.

“June Courtney,” I said aloud as the film ended and the empty reel whirred noisily in the projector.

“What?” Stan said, switching on the overhead light.

“Honey,” I said. “Her real name’s June Courtney. It was that long blonde hair that threw me. She’s a brunette now, with short hair and bangs.”

“I know I’ve heard that name before,” Stan said. “But I can’t remember where.”

“I told you about her when I called you from Reba Daniels’ apartment,” I said. “She’s the one who’s producing the stage show Larry Yeager was going to have a part in.”

“Oh, sure,” Stan said. “I remember now. She’s the one that said Yeager’s getting murdered was the best thing that could have happened.”

“Yes,” I said, “and with a big, loud second from Warren Eads, the guy that wrote the show.”

“Didn’t you say June and Eads had real big eyes for each other?”

“Real big.”

“Well, well,” Stan said. “And she’s a girl with an outsize bank account, too, as I remember.”

“Probably so. In any case, her father has one.” I switched the reels on the projector and started the motor to rewind the film. “Neither June nor Eads made any bones about how much they hated Yeager, and they both said he was lousing up the show. But when I asked them why they’d hired him in the first place, and why they’d given him a run-of-the-show contract, they didn’t have a whole lot to say.”

Stan grinned. “Sounds almost as if Yeager might’ve had some kind of club over their heads, doesn’t it?” he said. “A little round club like — well, say like a can of movie film, for example.” His grin widened. “And with a club like that, why stop with blackmailing yourself into a stage show? Why not cut yourself in for a little cash money to go along with it?”

I turned off the projector, took out the reel of film, and replaced it in its can. “I think it’s time somebody paid another call on June Courtney,” I said.

“And on Warren Eads, too,” Stan said. “After all, Yeager wasn’t only blackmailing his girl, he was ruining his play.”

IX

June Courtney lived at “824 Fifth Avenue,” one of those stately, elderly apartment houses whose street addresses are also their names.

She opened the door for us herself. Which surprised me. I’d expected a butler, or at least a maid.

“Well, goodness me,” she said, her tilted brown eyes smiling at me from beneath the dark, ragged bangs. “If it isn’t Detective Selby. And he’s brought a friend! How nice.”

She was wearing a sleeveless jersey blouse and taut, candy-striped stretch pants, and from the slightly disheveled hair and the bruised-looking lips, I had a strong feeling she had not been spending the last few minutes alone.

“This is my precinct partner, Mr. Rayder,” I said.

“Oh, really? That is nice. Please come in.”

We followed her down the long entrance hall and turned left into a, large living room, one entire wall of which was a paneled glass window overlooking Central Park.

Warren Eads was sitting in the middle of a long, low couch in front of the window, a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his pink moon face sheened with sweat and one red-fuzz eyebrow arched quizzically.

“You remember Mr. Selby, baby,” June Courtney said to him. “This other gentleman is his partner, Mr. Rayder.”

“Hello,” Stan said.

Eads swirled the ice cubes around in his drink and said nothing.

Miss Courtney sat down beside Eads and motioned Stan and me to chairs. “It’s so nice of you to call,” she said with mock graciousness. “Incidentally, why have you?”

“Mr. Rayder and I have just seen a rather unusual movie, Miss Courtney,” I said. “It was one made about ten years ago.”

“Now that is interesting,” she said, turning toward Eads. “Warren, baby, Mr. Selby and Mr. Rayder have just seen a movie made ten years ago!”

“Incredible,” Eads said.

“So was the fact that Miss Courtney was the star performer, so to speak,” Stan said.

June shrugged prettily. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“We thought the film might have had something to do with your giving Larry Yeager an important part in your show,” I said.

“Oh, really, now,” she said. “After all, I—”

“After all,” a man’s voice boomed from the doorway to the left, “how much longer are we going to be such cowards?”

“Father!” June exclaimed, rising quickly and half running toward him. “You know what Doctor said. You’re not supposed to get out of bed for anything.”

“To hell with what Doctor said,” the man said, looking coolly at Stan and me. “I’ve been listening to this conversation ever since it began.”

He was about sixty, but built like a fire hydrant, a totally bald man with a lot of gold teeth and a jaw like a clenched fist. With his bull neck and blocky shoulders, and wearing a blue silk bathrobe, he might have been an aging wrestler coming into a ring.

June reached up to take his arm, but he brushed her hand away and strode over to stand directly in front of Stan and me.

“Who’s the head man on this case?” he demanded, looking at me. “You?”

I nodded. “My name’s Selby,” I said. “This is Detective Rayder.”

Courtney walked to the couch and sat down heavily beside Warren Eads. June sat down on the other side of her father.

“I was never sick a day in my life before,” Courtney rumbled, giving the belt of his bathrobe a savage jerk to tighten it about his hard-looking waist. “And when keeping something to himself can make a man sick, it’s time to stop. June, we’re going to bring this whole thing out in the open, right here and now.”

“But, Father—!” June began.

“Quiet,” Courtney said sharply. “We’ve all been fools. It’s time we stopped.” He looked at me from beneath shaggy eyebrows and nodded slowly. “You were right, Selby. The reason June and Warren gave Larry Yeager a part in the show was that they had to. They had to because that sniveling idiot of a Yeager had got hold of that film.”

“Father—” June began again.

“Shut up, June,” Courtney said. “The first I knew about it, Selby, was when June told me she’d hired him. I knew there had to be some reason for such an unlikely thing to do, and I kept hammering away at her until she told me what it was.” He paused, shaking his head incredulously. “That idiot. He actually thought that a part in the show would make him a star.”

“Is that all he wanted?” I asked. “Just the part? He didn’t ask for money as well?”

“He hadn’t quite got around to that yet,” Courtney said.

“He paid a thousand dollars for that film,” I said. “I’m wondering where he got it.”

“Not from us,” Courtney said.

“By the way, Mr. Courtney,” Stan said. “Where were you yesterday, between half-past eleven and half-past twelve?”

“In bed,” Courtney said promptly. “Where, according to my doctor, I ought to be at this minute.”

June leaned forward a little, her slanted eyes slightly narrowed. “Is that when Larry was killed, Mr. Rayder?” she asked. “Between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty?”

“Yes.”

“Father!” June exclaimed triumphantly. “Warren! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“What’s so wonderful about it?” Stan asked.

“We were here,” June said. “We were all right here, right in this apartment. Father and Warren and I. And Jill and Tony Edwards were here too.” She turned her smile from Stan to me. “So you see, none of us could have had anything to do with it.”

“Congratulations,” Stan said. “Who are Jill and Tony Edwards?”

“They’re doing the choreography for our show. They’d dropped by to talk about the girls’ costumes.”

“Where do they live?” I asked.

“The Colmar Arms, on West End Avenue.”

“A charming couple,” Warren Eads said. “You’ll enjoy talking to them.”

“And do give them our best,” June said, glancing pointedly at the door. “You’ll be able to find your way out, I’m sure.”

“Too bad you’re in such a rush,” Eads said.

“Warren, baby, I think little June could use a drink,” June said. “And Father, you’d better go back to bed.”

“Bed be damned,” Courtney said in his rumbling voice. “You think you’re the only one around here old enough to take a drink? Fix me one, too, Warren — and this time, damn it, put a little whiskey in it.”

June Courtney’s story proved to be as easy to verify as it had been hard to hear. Less than an hour after we’d heard it, we had corroborated her story with Jill and Tony Edwards at the Colmar Arms and were on our way back to the precinct.

We reached the squad room just as Barney Fells started out the door.

“Well, you boys have one less suspect than you thought you had,” Barney said. “Roy Cogan.”

“How come?” Stan asked.

“A patrolman up in the 20th Precinct caught him with the meat in his mouth. Burglary.”

“What about the time of the homicide?” I asked. “Where was he then?”

“Just exactly where he ought to have been — at the parole office, reporting in per schedule, right on the button,” He grinned crookedly. “Try breaking that alibi.”

Stan looked at me and shrugged resignedly. “Another ex-suspect,” he said. “We’re getting quite a collection of them.”

“Pete, there was a phone call for you,” Barney said. “Mrs. Robert Farrell.”

“Fine,” I said. “But who’s Mrs. Robert Farrell?”

“You didn’t know? She’s the lady that owns the house where Larry Yeager had his apartment.”

“I thought she was in Europe.”

“She just got back. She wanted to know what that police seal was doing on the door of Yeager’s apartment. She seemed pretty p.o’d about it, for some reason. I left her number on your call spike.” He started down the stairs to the muster room.

“I think I’ll shave,” Stan said, heading in the direction of the washroom. “Maybe it’ll wake me up a little.”

I walked over to my desk, glanced at the number Barney had left on the call spike, and dialed it.

“This is Detective Selby, Sixth Pre—” I began.

“Well!” she snapped. “You certainly took your time about calling me, didn’t you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just got back to the squad room.”

“Well, you’re too late,” she said. “I’ve a right to inspect my own property, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“You mean you took the police seal off Mr. Yeager’s door?” I said. “You ought to know better than that, Mrs. Farrell. A police seal is—”

“I can tell you what this one is,” she said. “This one is lying in shreds on Mr. Yeager’s coffee table.”

“Surely you know it’s police practice to—”

“The devil with police practice,” she said, and hung up.

I peeled the wrapper from a cigar, struck a match — and then sat motionless while the flame burned slowly up to my fingers and the significance of what had just happened gradually penetrated my overtired mind.

Then I dropped the match in the ashtray, stuck the unlighted cigar back in my pocket, and reached for the Manhattan telephone book.

The number listed for Mrs. Farrell was the same number I’d just dialed, which meant the number she’d left with Barney Fells had been the number of the phone in her own apartment on the first floor.

And yet, when I’d called her just now, she hadn’t answered the phone in her own apartment; she’d answered the one in Larry Yeager’s.

The answer would seem to be that the phone in Yeager’s apartment was merely an extension, and that when someone called, the phones in both apartments rang at the same time.

And if that was the case, Larry Yeager would have no listing in the directory.

I looked under the Yeagers. There were fewer than I would have guessed, only a dozen or so, and Larry Yeager was not among them.

I picked up the phone and dialed Mrs. Farrell again.

“Yes?” the imperious voice said.

“Detective Selby,” I said. “It’s important that I know whether or not Mr. Yeager’s phone is an extension on the one in your own apartment.”

“I’m sure I can’t even begin to imagine why that should be impor—”

“This is serious police business, Mrs. Farrell. Answer the question, please. Is it an extension, or isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” she said, practically spitting the words, and slammed the receiver in my ear.

A few minutes later, Stan Rayder walked in. “Man, I’ll have to say one thing for you, Pete,” he said as he sat down at his desk. “You’re one guy that can really look thoughtful. What’re you brooding about? Your misspent youth?”

“Not this time,” I said. “This time, it’s Larry Yeager’s ex-wife. Reba Daniels.”

“Why? Because she’s such a dish?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Why, then? Hell, Pete, that woman walked out of Yeager’s life years ago.”

“I know,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have walked back in again.”

Stan looked at me for a long moment. “And walked back in with a gun in her hand, you mean?”

“That could be, Stan,” I said. “That just could be.”

X

Six hours of hard, fast work later, Stan and I sat on the white-leather sofa in Reba Daniels’ living room, listening to the sound of high heels coming along the corridor outside. The carpeting out there had been rolled up for waxing, and the ping of the heels was sharp, almost metallic.

The heels paused at the door and a key grated in the lock. Mrs. Daniels opened the door, saw Stan and me, and stopped stock-still in the doorway.

“Come in, Mrs. Daniels,” Stan said quietly.

The gray-green eyes beneath their long, sooty lashes seemed to grow a little darker and the overhead light in the corridor behind her caught the golden highlights in her Shoulder-length auburn hair. She was wearing an expensively simple powder-blue dress that clung to her body tightly enough to mold the dimple in her naval and limn the edges of her lingerie.

“I’m not going to ask you what you’re doing here,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I’m simply going to ask you to leave.”

“We’ll be leaving in good time, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “Meanwhile, perhaps you’d better sit down.”

She hesitated, then walked to one of the chairs across from us and sat down.

“Just to satisfy my curiosity,” she said, “would you mind telling me how you got in here?”

“By pushing the blade of my knife against the bevel of the bolt on your door,” I said.

“And the reason you wanted in here in the first place?”

“Because it was the one place where, sooner or later, you were sure to come,” I said. “And maybe you’d satisfy our curiosity too, Mrs. Daniels. When I was here yesterday, I wanted to call Larry Yeager’s apartment. But I couldn’t find your phone book. You were in the bedroom, changing your clothes for your trip to Bellevue, and I called to you through the door to ask you where it was. You said you’d taken it into the bedroom earlier, and that you’d look up Yeager’s number for me. A few moments later, you called it out to me. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what puzzles us is how you could have looked it up. You see, it isn’t listed in the book.” I paused. “You just pretended to look it up, Mrs. Daniels.”

She didn’t say anything. The green eyes weren’t merely dark now; they were almost black.

“You’d just finished telling me you hadn’t talked to Yeager in ten or twelve years,” I said. “If you hadn’t talked to him in all that time, you wouldn’t have known his phone number. But you did know his number, because you had talked to him.”

“That’s true,” she said evenly. “I did know Larry’s number. I met him on the street one day, and he talked me into having a drink with him at a bar. He kept telling me I ought to call him sometime. He repeated his phone number again and again, and kept telling me to remember it.”

“What about the sunglasses you found on the beach at Atlantic City?” Stan asked.

“I can afford to buy my own sunglasses, I assure you.”

“But these, you found,” Stan said. “At least that’s what Earl Lambert told us when we talked to him about two hours ago. You and Lambert spent a weekend at Atlantic City a couple of weeks back, Mrs. Daniels. You found those sunglasses in the sand, and you were so taken with the frames that you were going to have them altered to fit you and have the lenses replaced with plain glass.

“A fragment of one of those lenses was on the floor near Yeager’s body. Our lab was able to reconstruct the prescription the lenses were ground by, and with that we were able to trace the glasses back to the girl who lost them.”

Mrs. Daniels lowered her eyes and sighed softly. “This is all very embarrassing,” she said. “But you can’t very well blame me for not having wanted to become involved in a murder investigation, can you?”

“Then you did drop those glasses at Yeager’s apartment?”

“Yes. I called Larry one day, just as he’d asked me to. He talked me into going over to his apartment. I had the glasses in my bag. While I was there, they fell out and broke on the floor.”

“When?”

“Last Wednesday, I think it was. Yes. Last Wednesday.”

“Uh-uh,” Stan said. “You had the glasses with you, yes — but not in your bag. You were probably wearing them as a disguise. And that piece of lens wasn’t there before Yeager was murdered. We have someone to swear to that, Mrs. Daniels.”

“This is all absolutely ridiculous,” she said. “I think you’ve lost your minds — both of you.”

“There are other things,” I said.

“What other things?”

“Your access to the murder gun, for instance,” I said. “We got to wondering how you might have got hold of it, and so we paid a second visit to Earl Lambert. We found out you’d been an overnight guest of his on quite a few occasions. On one of them he showed you his target gun. He kept it in a footlocker, and sometime later he stored the footlocker in the basement. But before he did, you had several opportunities to help yourself to the gun, and you did.”

“I did no such thing!” she said, raising her voice for the first time. “You really must be mad. I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me is that you found my fingerprints on it.”

“What we did find was hurried powder on one of your white knit driving gloves,” I said.

“You — what?”

“We were here once before today,” I said. “We took all your gloves to the lab for analyses. Your right glove contains powder of exactly the same kind Earl Lambert used to load the cartridges for his target gun. He’s a gun buff, and gun buffs like to prepare their own special mixtures. Under the spectroscope—”

“Stop it,” she said, her voice suddenly very small and very frightened. “Please. Please stop.”

“You’d told me you owned a sports car,” I said. “An Austin-Healey. So I talked with the traffic officer nearest the spot where we found the gun, which was under a car parked at the curb half a block from Yeager’s apartment house.”

“And the officer not only had seen the Austin-Healey,” Stan said, “but he’d blown his whistle at the driver. At you, Mrs. Daniels, because you were going too fast. But what really marked you on his memory was a sound that made him think you’d sideswiped another car. What he actually did hear, we know now, was the sound of the gun bouncing up against the parked car when you threw it away.”

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t... say any more.”

It was very still in the room and the seconds went by slowly. Somewhere in another apartment someone began to strum a guitar, and from the street below there was a soft whisper of tires on asphalt.

A full minute passed, and still Reba Daniels sat completely motionless, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the small hands folded in her lap.

“Do you want to tell us about it, Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She gave no indication that she had heard me.

“Mrs. Daniels?”

She started, looked at me blankly for a moment, and then very slowly got to her feet and walked toward the glass cabinet that contained the loving cups and plaques and silver platters she had won in sports car events.

I watched her closely.

When she started to open the glass doors, I stood up and walked over to stand beside her.

“Did you think I had a gun hidden in here?” she asked, running a fingertip gently along the handle of a loving cup.

“Such things have been known to happen,” I said.

She shook her head, gave the cup a final caress, and closed the cabinet. “I’m afraid I’ve had my last experience with guns, Mr. Selby,” she said. “I’ll never be able to win any more prizes, will I? Or wear dresses like this again.”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

“What I hate most about this is that it means leaving so much behind,” she said. “I had everything I ever wanted. And now... now I’ve got to leave it. It just doesn’t seem possible this is happening to me.”

“We have all the answers we need except one,” I said.

She smiled a quick, wan smile that was gone so abruptly that I wondered whether it had ever really been there.

“You mean, why did I kill him?”

I nodded.

“He was extorting money from me,” she said. “He’d been doing it for years.”

“In what way, Mrs. Daniels?”

“By threatening to tell that we’d never been divorced,” she said. “Larry and I were married just before the Korean War broke out. About a year after he was recalled to service, I received a telegram from the Secretary of War, saying that he was missing in action. That was the last I ever heard from or about him until long after the war was over. In the meantime I had met Arnold Daniels.”

“You tell Daniels about Larry?” Stan asked.

“No. Arnold Daniels was nothing but a drunken hulk, and I loathed him. But he was also the wealthiest man I’d ever met.”

“And so you married him without bothering to divorce Larry Yeager?” Stan asked.

“Yes. I was sure Larry was dead. And I knew that a chance to marry so much money might never come my way again.”

“And then?” Stan said.

“Then, after I’d been married to Arnold for a suitable time, I went to Florida and got a divorce.”

“And considerable alimony?” Stan said.

“It was two thousand dollars a month,” she said. “And then, about four years ago, Larry suddenly appeared at my apartment. He said he’d been in a prison camp until the war was over, and that while he was there he’d realized our marriage was a mistake. When he got back to the States, he stayed on the West Coast.”

“And he’d done nothing about a divorce, either?” I asked.

“No. And then one day a mutual friend happened to run into Larry out there and told him about my having married Arnold Daniels. Larry took the next plane to New York.”

“And that’s when the black-mail began?”

She nodded. “That very day. Larry had found out exactly how much alimony I was getting. He said that if I didn’t start giving him five hundred dollars a month, he’d expose me. Going to prison as a bigamist and losing two thousand a month from Arnold was more than I could face, and so I began to pay him what he asked.”

“And this went on for four years?”

“Yes. Once I talked to a lawyer about that telegram from the Secretary of War saying that Larry was missing in action. I thought it might be possible to make my second marriage legal. But the lawyer said no. It seems that a telegram saying Larry had been killed would have been the equivalent of a death certificate. But one that merely said missing in action’ didn’t mean a thing.”

“I see,” I said. “But why should you continue to pay him for four years, and then suddenly decide to kill him?”

“He wanted a bigger share of my alimony. He said I would have to start giving him half of it every month. And then one night Earl Lambert showed me that gun, and I knew just what I was going to do. When I left Earl’s place the next morning, I had the gun in my bag.”

“Still,” I said, “you took that gun several weeks ago. Why so long a wait?”

“I just couldn’t summon up the courage,” she said. “But about three weeks ago Larry told me he had to have a thousand dollars in cash, and had to have it at once. I asked him why, but he just laughed and made some inane remark about wanting to buy a dirty movie. I gave him the money — but when I did, I promised myself it would be the last penny he ever got.”

“And was it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday I was supposed to take him a thousand dollars — half of my alimony. Instead, I took that gun and killed him.”

There was a long silence. Then Stan and I glanced at each other, got to our feet, and walked to the door.

“Ready, Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She rose, picked up her handbag, and walked toward us very slowly.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said in a hushed, awed voice. “It’s really happening.”

But her eyes weren’t on either Stan or me; they were on the closed door. And the look was there — the look you see only on the face of someone who stares into the kind of future that was waiting for Reba. Daniels.

“Yes, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “It’s really happening.”