Nightmare Town

Guy turned his head toward Margaret, blinking in the light.

“Good girl,” he commended her. “This Greek was no baby to jump at in daylight.”

One side of Guy’s face was wet red under a red furrow. She sought escape in his wound from the implication of was.

“You’re hurt!”

He took his hands away from the Greek’s neck and rubbed one of them across the cheek. It came away dyed red. Doucas’s head hit the floor hollowly and did not quiver.

“Only nicked me,” Guy said. “I need it to show self-defence.”

The reiterated implication drove Margaret’s gaze to the man on the floor, and quickly away.

“He is-?”

“Deader than hell,” Guy assured her.

His voice was light, tinged faintly with satisfaction.

She stared at him in horror, her back pressed against the wall, sick with her own part in this death, sick with Guy’s callous brutality of voice and mien. Guy did not see these things. He was looking thoughtfully at the dead man.

“I told you I’d give him a bellyful if he wanted it,” he boasted. “I told him the same thing five years ago, in Malta.”

He stirred the dead Doucas gently with one foot. Margaret cringed against the wall, feeling as if she were going to vomit.

Guy’s foot nudged the dead man slowly, reflectively. Guy’s eyes were dull with distant things, things that might have happened five years ago in a place that to her was only a name on a map, vaguely associated with Crusades and kittens. Blood trickled down his cheek, hung momentarily in fattening drops, dripped down on the dead man’s coat.

The poking foot stopped its ghoulish play. Guy’s eyes grew wide and bright, his face lean with eagerness. He snapped fist into palm and jerked around to Margaret.

“By God! This fellow has got a pearl concession down in La Paz! If I can get down there ahead of the news of the killing, I can – Why, what’s the matter?”

He stared at her, puzzlement wiping animation from his face.

Margaret’s gaze faltered away from him. She looked at the overturned table, across the room, at the floor. She could not hold up her eyes for him to see what was in them. If understanding had come to him at once – but she could not stand there and look at him and wait for the thing in her eyes to burn into his consciousness.

She tried to keep that thing out of her voice.

“I’ll bandage your cheek before we phone the police,” she said.

THE MAN WHO KILLED DAN ODAMS

When the light that came through the barred square foot of the cell’s one high window had dwindled until he could no longer clearly make out the symbols and initials his predecessors had scratched and pencilled on the opposite wall, the man who had killed Dan Odams got up from the cot and went to the steel-slatted door.

“Hey, chief!” he called, his voice rumbling within the narrow walls.

A chair scraped across a floor in the front of the building, deliberate footsteps approached, and the marshal of Jingo came into the passage between his office and the cell.

“I got something I want to tell you,” the man in the cell said.

Then the marshal was near enough to see in the dim light the shiny muzzle of a short, heavy revolver threatening him from just in front of the prisoner’s right hip.

Without waiting for the time-honoured order the marshal raised his hands until their palms were level with his ears.

The man behind the bars spoke in a curt whisper.

“Turn around! Push your back against the door!”

When the marshal’s back pressed against the bars a hand came up under his left armpit, pulled aside his unbuttoned vest, and plucked his revolver from its holster. “Now unlock this here door!”

The prisoner’s own weapon had disappeared and the captured one had taken its place. The marshal turned around, lowered one hand, keys jingled in it, and the cell door swung open.

The prisoner backed across the cell, inviting the other in with a beckoning flip of the gun in his hand. “Flop on the bunk, face-down.”

In silence the marshal obeyed. The man who had killed Dan Odams bent over him. The long black revolver swept down in a swift arc that ended at the base of the prone official’s head.

His legs jerked once, and he lay still.

With unhurried deftness the prisoner’s fingers explored the other’s pockets, appropriating money, tobacco, and cigarette papers. He removed the holster from the marshal’s shoulder and adjusted it to his own. He locked the cell door behind him when he left.

The marshal’s office was unoccupied. Its desk gave up two sacks of tobacco, matches, an automatic pistol, and a double handful of cartridges. The wall yielded a hat that sat far down on the prisoner’s ears, and a too-tight, too-long, black rubber slicker.

Wearing them, he essayed the street.

The rain, after three days of uninterrupted sovereignty, had stopped for the time. But Jingo’s principal thoroughfare was deserted – Jingo ate between five and six in the evening.

His deep-set maroon eyes – their animality emphasised by the absence of lashes – scanned the four blocks of wooden-sidewalked street. A dozen automobiles were to be seen, but no horses.

At the first corner he left the street and half a block below turned into a muddy alley that paralleled it. Under a shed in the rear of a poolroom he found four horses, their saddles and bridles hanging near by. He selected a chunky, well-muscled roan – the race is not to the swift through the mud of Montana – saddled it, and led it to the end of the alley.

Then he climbed into the saddle and turned his back on the awakening lights of Jingo.

Presently he fumbled beneath the slicker and took from his hip pocket the weapon with which he had held up the marshal: a dummy pistol of moulded soap, covered with tinfoil from cigarette packages. He tore off the wrapping, squeezed the soap into a shapeless handful, and threw it away.

The sky cleared after a while and the stars came out. He found that the road he was travelling led south. He rode all night, pushing the roan unrelentingly through the soft, viscid footing.

At daylight the horse could go no farther without rest. The man led it up a coulee – safely away from the road – and hobbled it beneath a clump of cottonwoods.

Then he climbed a hill and sprawled on the soggy ground, his lashless red eyes on the country through which he had come: rolling hills of black and green and gray, where wet soil, young grass, and dirty snow divided dominion – the triple rule trespassed here and there by the sepia ribbon of county road winding into and out of sight.

He saw no man while he lay there, but the landscape was too filled with the marks of man’s proximity to bring any feeling of security. Shoulder-high wire fencing edged the road, a footpath cut the side of a near-by hill, telephone poles held their short arms stiffly against the gray sky.

At noon he saddled the roan again and rode on along the coulee. Several miles up he came to a row of small poles bearing a line of telephone wire. He left the coulee bottom, found the ranch house to which the wire ran, circled it, and went on.

Late in the afternoon he was not so fortunate.

With lessening caution – he had seen no wires for more than an hour – he rode across a hill to stumble almost into the centre of a cluster of buildings. Into the group, from the other side, ran a line of wire.

The man who had killed Dan Odams retreated, crossed to another hill, and as he dropped down, on the far side, a rifle snapped from the slope he had just quit.

He bent forward until his nose was deep in the roan’s mane, and worked upon the horse with hand and foot. The rifle snapped again.

He rolled clear of the horse as it fell, and continued to roll until bunch grass and sagebrush screened him from behind. Then he crawled straight away, rounded the flank of a hill, and went on.

The rifle did not snap again. He did not try to find it.

He turned from the south now, toward the west, his short, heavy legs pushing him on toward where Tiger Butte bulked against the leaden sky like a great crouching cat of black and green, with dirty white stripes where snow lay in coulee and fissure.

His left shoulder was numb for a while, and then the numbness was replaced by a searing ache. Blood trickled down his arm, staining his mud-caked hand. He stopped to open coat and shirt and readjust the bandage over the wound in his shoulder – the fall from the horse had broken it open and started it bleeding again. Then he went on.

The first road he came to bent up toward Tiger Butte. He followed it, ploughing heavily through the sticky, clinging mud.

Only once did he break the silence he had maintained since his escape from the Jingo jail. He stopped in the middle of the road and stood with legs far apart, turned his bloodshot eyes from right to left and from ground to sky, and without emotion but with utter finality cursed the mud, the fence, the telephone wires, the man whose rifle had set him afoot, and the meadow larks whose taunting flutelike notes mocked him always from just ahead.

Then he went on, pausing after each few miles to scrape the ever-accumulating mud from his boots, using each hilltop to search the country behind for signs of pursuit.

The rain came down again, matting his thin, clay-plastered hair – his hat had gone with his mount. The ill-fitting slicker restricted his body and flapped about his ankles, impeding his progress, but his wounded shoulder needed its protection from the rain.

Twice he left the road to let vehicles pass – once a steaming Ford, once a half-load of hay creeping along behind four straining horses.

His way was still through fenced land that offered scant concealment. Houses dotted the country, with few miles between them; and the loss of his horse was ample evidence that the telephone wires had not been idle. He had not eaten since noon of the previous day but – notwithstanding the absence of visible pursuit – he could not forage here.

Night was falling as he left the road for the slope of Tiger Butte. When it was quite dark he stopped. The rain kept up all night. He sat through it- his back against a boulder, the slicker over his head.

The shack, unpainted and ramshackle, grovelled in a fork of the coulee. Smoke hung soddenly, lifelessly above its roof, not trying to rise, until beaten into nothingness by the rain. The structures around the chimneyed shack were even less lovely. The group seemed asprawl in utter terror of the great cat upon whose flank it found itself.

But to the red eyes of the man who had killed Dan Odams – he lay on his belly on the crest of the hill around which the coulee split – the lack of telephone wires gave this shabby homestead a wealth of beauty beyond reach of architect or painter.

Twice within the morning hour that he lay there a woman came into view. Once she left the shack, went to one of the other sheds, and then returned. The other time she came to the door, to stand a while looking down the coulee. She was a small woman, of age and complexion indeterminable through the rain, in a limp, grayish dress.

Later, a boy of ten or twelve came from the rear of the house, his arms piled high with kindling, and passed out of sight.

Presently the watcher withdrew from his hill, swung off in a circle, and came within sight of the shack again from the rear.

Half an hour passed. He saw the boy carrying water from a spring below, but he did not see the woman again.

The fugitive approached the building stealthily, his legs carrying him stiffly, their elasticity gone. Now and then his feet faltered under him. But under its layers of clay and three-day beard his jaw jutted with nothing of weakness.

Keeping beyond them, he explored the outbuildings – wretched, flimsy structures, offering insincere pretences of protection to an abject sorrel mare and a miscellaneous assortment of farm implements, all of which had come off second-best in their struggle with the earth. Only the generous, though not especially skilful, application of the material which has given to establishments of this sort the local sobriquet ‘hay-wire outfit’ held the tools from frank admission of defeat.

Nowhere did the ground hold the impression of feet larger than a small woman’s or a ten – or twelve – year-old boy’s.

The fugitive crossed the yard to the dwelling, moving with wide-spread legs to offset the unsteadiness of his gait. With the unhurried, unresting spacing of clock-ticks, fat drops of blood fell from the fingers of his limp left hand to be hammered by the rain into the soggy earth.

Through the dirty pane of a window he saw the woman and boy, sitting together on a cot, facing the door.

The boy’s face was white when the man threw the door open and came into the unpartitioned interior, and his mouth trembled; but the woman’s thin, sallow face showed nothing – except, by its lack of surprise, that she had seen him approaching. She sat stiffly on the cot, her hands empty and motionless in her lap, neither fear nor interest in her faded eyes.

The man stood for a time where he had halted – just within the door to one side – a grotesque statue modelled of mud. Short, sturdy-bodied, with massive sagging shoulders. Nothing of clothing or hair showed through his husk of clay, and little of face and hands. The marshal’s revolver in his hand, clean and dry, took on by virtue of that discordant immaculateness an exaggerated deadliness.

His eyes swept the room: two cots against the undressed board side walls, a plain deal table in the centre, rickety kitchen chairs here and there, a battered and scratched bureau, a trunk, a row of hooks holding an indiscriminate assembly of masculine and feminine clothing, a pile of shoes in a corner, an open door giving access to a lean-to kitchen.

He crossed to the kitchen door, the woman’s face turning to follow.

The lean-to was empty. He confronted the woman.

“Where’s your man?”

“Gone.”

“When’ll he be back?”

“Ain’t coming back.”

The flat, expressionless voice of the woman seemed to puzzle the fugitive, as had her lack of emotion at his entrance. He scowled, and turned his eyes – now redder than ever with flecks of blood – from her face to the boy’s and back to hers.

“Meaning what?” he demanded.

“Meaning he got tired of homesteading.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. Then he went to the corner where the shoes were piled. Two pairs of men’s worn shoes were there – dry and without fresh mud.

He straightened, slipped the revolver back into its holster, and awkwardly took off the slicker. “Get me some grub.”

The woman left the cot without a word and went into the kitchen. The fugitive pushed the boy after her, and stood in the doorway while she cooked coffee, flapjacks, and bacon. Then they returned to the living-room. She put the food on the table and with the boy beside her resumed her seat on the cot.

The man wolfed the meal without looking at it – his eyes busy upon door, window, woman, and boy, his revolver beside his plate. Blood still dripped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them.

His hunger appeased, he rolled and lit a cigarette, his left hand fumbling stiffly through its part.

For the first time the woman seemed to notice the blood. She came around to his side. “You’re bleeding. Let me fix it.”

His eyes – heavy now with the weights of fatigue and satisfied hunger – studied her face suspiciously. Then he leaned back in his chair and loosened his clothes, exposing the week-old bullet-hole.

She brought water and cloths, and bathed and bandaged the wound. Neither of them spoke again until she had returned to the cot.

Then: “Had any visitors lately?”

“Ain’t seen nobody for six or seven weeks.”

“How far’s the nearest phone?”

“Nobel’s – eight miles up the coulee.”

“Got any horses besides the one in the shed?”

“No.”

He got up wearily and went to the bureau, pulling the drawers out and plunging his hands into them. In the top one he found a revolver, and pocketed it. In the trunk he found nothing. Behind the clothes on the wall he found a rifle. The cots concealed no weapons.

He took two blankets from one of the cots, the rifle, and his slicker. He staggered as he walked to the door.

“I’m going to sleep a while,” he said thickly, “out in the shed where the horse is at. I’ll be turning out every now and then for a look around, and I don’t want to find nobody missing. Understand?”

She nodded, and made a suggestion.

“If any strangers show up, I guess you want to be woke up before they see you?”

His sleep-dull eyes became alive again, and he came unsteadily back to thrust his face close to hers, trying to peer behind the faded surfaces of her eyes.

“I killed a fellow in Jingo last week,” he said after a while, talking slowly, deliberately, in a monotone that was both cautioning and menacing. “It was fair shooting. He got me in the shoulder before I downed him. But he belonged in Jingo and I don’t. The best I could expect is the worst of it. I got a chance to get away before they took me to Great Falls, and I took it. And I ain’t figuring on being took back there and hung. I ain’t going to be here long, but while I am -“

The woman nodded again.

He scowled at her and left the shack.

He tied the horse in one corner of the hut with shortened rope and spread his blankets between it and the door. Then, with the marshal’s revolver in his hand, he lay down and slept.

The afternoon was far gone when he woke, and the rain was still falling. He studied the bare yard carefully, and reconnoitred the house before re-entering it.

The woman had swept and tidied the room; had put on a fresh dress, which much washing had toned down to a soft pink; had brushed and fluffed her hair. She looked up at his entrance from the sewing that occupied her, and her face, still young in spite of the harshness that work had laid upon it, was less sallow than before.

“Where’s the kid?” the man snapped.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

“Up on the hill. I sent him up to watch the coulee.”

His eyes narrowed and he left the building. Studying the hill through the rain, he discerned the outline of the boy, lying face-down under a stunted red cedar, looking toward the east. The man returned indoors.

“How’s the shoulder?” she asked.

He raised an experimental arm.

“Better. Pack me some grub. I’m moving on.”

“You’re a fool,” she said without spirit as she went into the kitchen. “You’d do better to stay here until your shoulder’s fit to travel.”

“Too close to Jingo.”

“Ain’t nobody going to fight all that mud to come after you. A horse couldn’t get through, let alone a car. And you don’t think they’d foot it after you even if they knew where to find you, do you? And this rain ain’t going to do your shoulder no good.”

She bent to pick up a sack from the floor. Under the thin pink dress the line of back and hips and legs stood out sharply against the wall.

As she straightened she met his gaze, her lids dropped, her face flushed, her lips parted a little.

The man leaned against the jamb of the door and caressed the muddy stubble of his chin with a thick thumb.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

She put away the food she had been bundling, took a galvanized pail from the corner, and made three trips to the spring, filling an iron tub that she had set on the stove. He stood in the doorway watching.

She stirred the fire, went into the living-room, and took a suit of underwear, a blue shirt, and a pair of socks from the bureau, a pair of gray trousers from one of the hooks, and a pair of carpet slippers from the pile of footwear. She put the clothing on a chair in the kitchen.

Then she returned to the living-room, closing the connecting door.

As the man undressed and bathed, he heard her humming softly. Twice he tiptoed to the connecting door and put an eye to the crack between it and the jamb. Each time he saw her sitting on the cot, bending over her sewing, her face still flushed.

He had one leg in the trousers she had given him when the humming stopped suddenly.

His right hand swept up the revolver from a convenient chair, and he moved to the door, the trousers trailing across the floor behind the ankle he had thrust through them. Flattening himself against the wall, he put an eye to the crack.

In the front door of the shack stood a tall youth in a slicker that was glistening with water. In the youth’s hands was a double-barrelled shotgun, the twin muzzles of which, like dull, malignant eyes, were focused on the centre of the connecting door.

The man in the kitchen swung his revolver up, his thumb drawing back the hammer with the mechanical precision of the man who is accustomed to single-action pistols.

The lean-to’s rear door slammed open. “Drop it!”

The fugitive, wheeling with the sound of the door’s opening, was facing this new enemy before the order was out.

Two guns roared together.

But the fugitive’s feet, as he wheeled, had become entangled in the trailing trousers. The trousers had tripped him. He had gone to his knees at the very instant of the two guns’ roaring.

His bullet had gone out into space over the shoulder of the man in the doorway. That one’s bullet had driven through the wall a scant inch over the falling fugitive’s head.

Floundering on his knees, the fugitive fired again.

The man in the door swayed and spun half around.

As he righted himself, the fugitive’s forefinger tightened again around the trigger –

From the connecting doorway a shotgun thundered.

The fugitive came straight up on his feet, his face filled with surprise, stood bolt upright for a moment, and wilted to the floor.

The youth with the shotgun crossed to the man who leaned against the door with a hand clapped to his side. “Did he get you, Dick?”

“Just through the flesh, I reckon – don’t amount to nothing. Reckon you killed him, Bob?”

“I reckon I did. I hit him fair!”

The woman was in the lean-to. “Where’s Buddy?”

“The kid’s all right, Mrs. Odams,” Bob assured her. “But he was all in from running through the mud, so Ma put him to bed.”

The man who lay still on the floor made a sound then, and they saw that his eyes were open.

Mrs. Odams and Bob knelt beside him, but he stopped them when they tried to move him to examine the wreckage the shotgun had made of his back.

“No use,” he protested, blood trickling thinly from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “Let me alone.”

Then his eyes – their red savageness glazed – sought the woman’s.

“You-Dan-Odams’s-woman?” he managed.

There was something of defiance-a hint that she felt the need of justification – in her answer. “Yes.”

His face – thick-featured and deep – lined without the mud-told nothing of what was going on in his mind.

“Dummy,” he murmured to himself presently, his eyes flickering toward the hill on whose top he had seen what he had believed to be a reclining boy.

She nodded.

The man who had killed Dan Odams turned his head away and spat his mouth empty of blood. Then his eyes returned to hers.

“Good girl,” he said clearly – and died.

NIGHT SHOTS

The house was of red brick, large and square, with a green slate roof whose wide overhang gave the building an appearance of being too squat for its two stories; and it stood on a grassy hill, well away from the country road upon which it turned its back to look down on the Mokelumne River.

The Ford that I had hired to bring me out from Knownburg carried me into the grounds through a high steel-meshed gate, followed the circling gravel drive, and set me down within a foot of the screened porch that ran all the way around the house’s first floor.

“There’s Exon’s son-in-law now,” the driver told me as he pocketed the bill I had given him and prepared to drive away.

I turned to see a tall, loose-jointed man of thirty or so coming across the porch toward me – a carelessly dressed man with a mop of rumpled brown hair over a handsome sunburned face. There was a hint of cruelty in the lips that were smiling lazily just now, and more than a hint of recklessness in his narrow gray eyes.

“Mr. Gallaway?” I asked as he came down the steps.

‘Yes.” His voice was a drawling baritone. “You are -“

“From the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch,” I finished for him.

He nodded, and held the screen door open for me.

“Just leave your bag there. I’ll have it taken up to your room.”

He guided me into the house and – after I had assured him that I had already eaten luncheon – gave me a soft chair and an excellent cigar. He sprawled on his spine in an armchair opposite me – all loose-jointed angles sticking out of it in every direction – and blew smoke at the ceiling.

“First off,” he began presently, his words coming out languidly, “I may as well tell you that I don’t expect very much in the way of results. I sent for you more for the soothing effect of your presence on the household than because I expect you to do anything. I don’t believe there’s anything to do. However, I’m not a detective. I may be wrong. You may find out all sorts of more or less important things. If you do – fine! But I don’t insist upon it.”

I didn’t say anything, though this beginning wasn’t much to my taste. He smoked in silence for a moment, and then went on, “My father-in-law, Talbert Exon, is a man of fifty-seven, and ordinarily a tough, hard, active, and fiery old devil. But just now he’s recovering from a rather serious attack of pneumonia, which has taken most of the starch out of him. He hasn’t been able to leave his bed yet, and Dr. Rench hopes to keep him on his back for at least another week.

“The old man has a room on the second floor – the front, right-hand corner room – just over where we are sitting. His nurse, Miss Caywood, occupies the next room, and there is a connecting door between. My room is the other front one, just across the hall from the old man’s; and my wife’s bedroom is next to mine – across the hall from the nurse’s. I’ll show you around later. I just want to make the situation clear.

“Last night, or rather this morning at about half-past one, somebody shot at Exon while he was sleeping – and missed. The bullet went into the frame of the door that leads to the nurse’s room, about six inches above his body as he lay in bed. The course the bullet took in the woodwork would indicate that it had been fired from one of the windows – either through it or from just inside.

“Exon woke up, of course, but he saw nobody. The rest of us – my wife, Miss Caywood, the Figgs, and myself – were also awakened by the shot. We all rushed into his room, and we saw nothing either. There’s no doubt that whoever fired it left by the window. Otherwise some of us would have seen him – we came from every other direction. However, we found nobody on the grounds, and no traces of anybody.”

“Who are the Figgs, and who else is there on the place besides you and your wife, Mr. Exon, and his nurse?”

“The Figgs are Adam and Emma – she is the housekeeper and he is a sort of handy man about the place. Their room is in the extreme rear, on the second floor. Besides them, there is Gong Lim, the cook, who sleeps in a little room near the kitchen, and the three farm hands. Joe Natara and Felipe Fadelia are Italians, and have been here for more than two years; Jesus Mesa, a Mexican, has been here a year or longer. The farm hands sleep in a little house near the barns. I think – if my opinion is of any value – that none of these people had anything to do with the shooting.”

“Did you dig the bullet out of the doorframe?”

“Yes. Shand, the deputy sheriff at Knownburg, dug it out. He says it is a thirty-eight-caliber bullet.”

“Any guns of that caliber in the house?”

“No. A twenty-two and my forty-four – which I keep in the car – are the only pistols on the place. Then there are two shotguns and a thirty-thirty rifle. Shand made a thorough search, and found nothing else in the way of firearms.”

“What does Mr. Exon say?”

“Not much of anything, except that if we’ll put a gun in bed with him he’ll manage to take care of himself without bothering any policemen or detectives. I don’t know whether he knows who shot at him or not – he’s a close-mouthed old devil. From what I know of him, I imagine there are quite a few men who would think themselves justified in killing him. He was, I understand, far from being a lily in his youth – or in his mature years either, for that matter.”

“Anything definite you know, or are you guessing?”

Gallaway grinned at me – a mocking grin that I was to see often before I was through with this Exon affair.

“Both,” he drawled. “I know that his life has been rather more than sprinkled with swindled partners and betrayed friends, and that he saved himself from prison at least once by turning state’s evidence and sending his associates there. And I know that his wife died under rather peculiar circumstances while heavily insured, and that he was for some time held on suspicion of having murdered “her, but was finally released because of a lack of evidence against him. Those, I understand, are fair samples of the old boy’s normal behaviour, so there may be any number of people gunning for him.”

“Suppose you give me a list of all the names you know of enemies he’s made, and I’ll have them checked up.”

“The names I could give you would be only a few of many, and it might take you months to check up those few. It isn’t my intention to go to all that trouble and expense. As I told you, I’m not insisting upon results. My wife is very nervous, and for some peculiar reason she seems to like the old man. So, to soothe her, I agreed to employ a private detective when she asked me to. My idea is that you hang around for a couple of days, until things quiet down and she feels safe again. Meanwhile, if you should stumble upon anything – go to it! If you don’t – well and good.”

My face must have shown something of what I was thinking, for his eyes twinkled and he chuckled.

“Don’t, please,” he drawled, “get the idea that you aren’t to find my father-in-law’s would-be assassin if you wish to. You’re to have a free hand. Go as far as you like, except that I want you to be around the place as much as possible, so my wife will see you and feel that we are being adequately protected. Beyond that, I don’t care what you do. You can apprehend criminals by the carload. As you may have gathered by now, I’m not exactly in love with my wife’s father, and he’s no more fond of me. To be frank, if hating weren’t such an effort – I think I should hate the old devil. But if you want to, and can, catch the man who shot at him, I’d be glad to have you do it. But-“

“All right,” I said. “I don’t like this job much, but since I’m up here I’ll take it on. But, remember, I’m trying all the time.”

“Sincerity and earnestness” – he showed his teeth in a sardonic smile as we got to our feet – “are very praiseworthy traits.”

“So I hear,” I growled shortly. “Now let’s take a look at Mr. Exon’s room.”

Gallaway’s wife and the nurse were with the invalid, but I examined the room before I asked the occupants any questions.

It was a large room, with three wide windows opening over the porch, and two doors, one of which gave to the hall and the other to the adjoining room occupied by the nurse. This door stood open, with a green Japanese screen across it, and, I was told, was left that way at night, so that the nurse could hear readily if her patient was restless or if he wanted attention.

A man standing on the slate roof of the porch, I found, could have easily leaned across one of the window-sills (if he did not care to step over it into the room) and fired at the man in his bed. To get from the ground to the porch roof would have required but little effort, and the descent would be still easier – he could slide down the roof, let himself go feet-first over the edge, checking his speed with hands and arms spread out on the slate, and drop down to the gravel drive. No trick at all, either coming or going. The windows were unscreened.

The sick man’s bed stood just beside the connecting doorway between his room and the nurse’s, which, when he was lying down, placed him between the doorway and the window from which the shot had been fired. Outside, within long rifle range, there was no building, tree, or eminence of any character from which the bullet that had been dug out of the doorframe could have been fired.

I turned from the room to the occupants, questioning the invalid first. He had been a raw-boned man of considerable size in his health, but now he was wasted and stringy and dead-white. His face was thin and hollow; small beady eyes crowded together against the thin bridge of his nose; his mouth was a colourless gash above a bony projecting chin.

His statement was a marvel of petulant conciseness.

“The shot woke me. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything. I’ve got a million enemies, most of whose names I can’t remember.”

He jerked this out crossly, turned his face away, closed his eyes, and refused to speak again.

Mrs. Gallaway and the nurse followed me into the latter’s room, where I questioned them. They were of as opposite types as you could find anywhere, and between them there was a certain coolness, an unmistakable hostility which I was able to account for later in the day.

Mrs. Gallaway was perhaps five years older than her husband; dark, strikingly beautiful in a statuesque way, with a worried look in her dark eyes that was particularly noticeable when those eyes rested on her husband. There was no doubt that she was very much in love with him, and the anxiety that showed in her eyes at times – the pains she took to please him in each slight thing during my stay at the Exon house – convinced me that she struggled always with a fear that she was about to lose him.

Mrs. Gallaway could add nothing to what her husband had told me. She had been awakened by the shot, had run to her father’s room, had seen nothing – knew nothing – suspected nothing.

The nurse – Barbra Caywood was her name-told the same story, in almost the same words. She had jumped out of bed when awakened by the shot, pushed the screen away from the connecting doorway, and rushed into her patient’s room. She was the first one to arrive there, and she had seen nothing but the old man sitting up in bed, shaking his feeble fists at the window.

This Barbra Caywood was a girl of twenty-one or -two, and just the sort that a man would pick to help him get well – a girl of little under the average height, with an erect figure wherein slimness and roundness got an even break under the stiff white of her uniform; with soft golden hair above a face that was certainly made to be looked at. But she was businesslike and had an air of efficiency, for all her prettiness.

From the nurse’s room, Gallaway led me to the kitchen, where I questioned the Chinese cook. Gong Lim was a sad-faced Oriental whose ever-present smile somehow made him look more gloomy than ever; and he bowed and smiled and yes-yes’d me from start to finish, and told me nothing.

Adam and Emma Figg – thin and stout, respectively, and both rheumatic – entertained a wide variety of suspicions, directed at the cook and the farm hands, individually and collectively, flitting momentarily from one to the other. They had nothing upon which to base these suspicions, however, except their firm belief that nearly all crimes of violence were committed by foreigners.

The farm hands – two smiling, middle-aged, and heavily moustached Italians, and a soft-eyed Mexican youth – I found in one of the fields. I talked to them for nearly two hours, and I left with a reasonable amount of assurance that none of the three had had any part in the shooting.

Dr. Rench had just come down from a visit to his patient when Gallaway and I returned from the fields. He was a little, wizened old man with mild manners and eyes, and a wonderful growth of hair on head, brows, cheeks, lips, chin, and nostrils.

The excitement, he said, had retarded Exon’s recovery somewhat, but he did not think the setback would be serious. The invalid’s temperature had gone up a little, but he seemed to be improving now.

I followed Dr. Rench out to his car after he left the others, for a few questions I wanted to put to him in privacy, but the questions might as well have gone unasked for all the good they did me. He could tell me nothing of any value. The nurse, Barbra Caywood, had been secured, he said, from San Francisco, through the usual channels, which made it seem unlikely that she had worked her way into the Exon house for any hidden purpose which might have some connection with the attempt upon Exon’s life.

Returning from my talk with the doctor, I came upon Hilary Gallaway and the nurse in the hall, near the foot of the stairs. His arm was resting lightly across her shoulders, and he was smiling down at her. Just as I came through the door, she twisted away so that his arm slid off, laughed elfishly up into his face, and went on up the stairs.

I did not know whether she had seen me approaching before she eluded the encircling arm or not, nor did I know how long the arm had been there; and both of those questions would make a difference in how their positions were to be construed.

Hilary Gallaway was certainly not a man to allow a girl as pretty as the nurse to lack attention, and he was just as certainly attractive enough in himself to make his advances not too unflattering. Nor did Barbra Caywood impress me as being a girl who would dislike his admiration. But, at that, it was more than likely that there was nothing very serious between them, nothing more than a playful sort of flirtation.

But, no matter what the situation might be in that quarter, it didn’t have any direct bearing upon the shooting – none that I could see, anyway. But I understood now the strained relations between the nurse and Gallaway’s wife.

Gallaway was grinning quizzically at me while I was chasing these thoughts around in my head.

“Nobody’s safe with a detective around,” he complained.

I grinned back at him. That was the only sort of answer you could give this bird.

After dinner, Gallaway drove me to Knownburg in his roadster, and set me down on the doorstep of the deputy sheriff’s house. He offered to drive me back to the Exon house when I had finished my investigations in town, but I did not know how long those investigations would take, so I told him I would hire a car when I was ready to return.

Shand, the deputy sheriff, was a big, slow-spoken, slow-thinking, blond man of thirty or so – just the type best fitted for a deputy sheriff job in a San Joaquin County town.

“I went out to Exon’s as soon as Gallaway called me up,” he said. “About four-thirty in the morning, I reckon it was when I got there. I didn’t find nothing. There weren’t no marks on the porch roof, but that don’t mean nothing. I tried climbing up and down it myself, and I didn’t leave no marks neither. The ground around the house is too firm for footprints to be followed. I found a few, but they didn’t lead nowhere; and everybody had run all over the place before I got there, so I couldn’t tell who they belonged to.

“Far’s I can learn, there ain’t been no suspicious characters in the neighbourhood lately. The only folks around here who have got any grudge against the old man are the Deemses – Exon beat ‘em in a law suit a couple years back – but all of them – the father and both the boys-were at home when the shooting was done.”

“How long has Exon been living here?”

“Four-five years, I reckon.”

“Nothing at all to work on, then?”

“Nothing I know about.”

“What do you know about the Exon Family?” I asked.

Shand scratched his head thoughtfully and frowned.

“I reckon it’s Hilary Gallaway you’re meaning,” he said slowly. “I thought of that. The Gallaways showed up here a couple of years after her father had bought the place, and Hilary seems to spend most of his evenings up in Ady’s back room, teaching the boys how to play poker. I hear he’s fitted to teach them a lot. I don’t know, myself. Ady runs a quiet game, so I let ‘em alone. But naturally I don’t never set in, myself.

“Outside of being a cardhound, and drinking pretty heavy, and making a lot of trips to the city, where he’s supposed to have a girl on the string, I don’t know nothing much about Hilary. But it’s no secret that him and the old man don’t hit it off together very well. And then Hilary’s room is just across the hall from Exon’s, and their windows open out on the porch roof just a little apart. But I don’t know -“

Shand confirmed what Gallaway had told me about the bullet being.38 calibre, about the absence of any pistol of that calibre on the premises, and about the lack of any reason for suspecting the farm hands or servants.

I put in the next couple of hours talking to whomever I could find to talk to in Knownbure, and I learned nothing worth putting down on paper. Then I got a car and driver from the garage, and was driven out to Exon’s.

Gallaway had not yet returned from town. His wife and Barbra Caywood were just about to sit down to a light dinner before retiring, so I joined them. Exon, the nurse said, was asleep, and had spent a quiet evening. We talked for a while – until about half-past twelve – and then went to our rooms.

My room was next to the nurse’s, on the same side of the hall that divided the second story in half. I sat down and wrote my report for the day, smoked a cigar, and then, the house being quiet by this time, put a gun and a flashlight in my pockets, went downstairs, and out the kitchen door.

The moon was just coming up, lighting the grounds vaguely, except for the shadows cast by house, outbuildings, and the several clumps of shrubbery. Keeping in these shadows as much as possible, I explored the grounds, finding everything as it should be.

The lack of any evidence to the contrary pointed to last night’s shot having been fired – either accidentally, or in fright at some fancied move of Exon’s – by a burglar, who had been entering the sick man’s room through a window. If that were so, then there wasn’t one chance in a thousand of anything happening to-night. But I felt restless and ill at ease, nevertheless.

Gallaway’s roadster was not in the garage. He had not returned from Knownburg. Beneath the farm hands’ window I paused until snores in three distinct keys told me that they were all safely abed.

After an hour of this snooping around, I returned to the house. The luminous dial of my watch registered 2:35 as I stopped outside the Chinese cook’s door to listen to his regular breathing.

Upstairs, I paused at the door of the Figgs’s room, until my ear told me that they were sleeping. At Mrs. Gallaway’s door I had to wait several minutes before she sighed and turned in bed. Barbra Caywood was breathing deeply and strongly, with the regularity of a young animal whose sleep is without disturbing dreams. The invalid’s breath came to me with the evenness of slumber and the rasping of the pneumonia convalescent.

This listening tour completed, I returned to my room.

Still feeling wide-awake and restless, I pulled a chair up to a window, and sat looking at the moonlight on the river which twisted just below the house so as to be visible from this side, smoking another cigar, and turning things over in my mind – to no great advantage.

Outside there was no sound.

Suddenly down the hall came the heavy explosion of a gun being fired indoors! I threw myself across the room, out into the hall.

A woman’s voice filled the house with its shriek – high, frenzied.

Barbra Caywood’s door was unlocked when I reached it. I slammed it open. By the light of the moonbeams that slanted past her window, I saw her sitting upright in the centre of her bed. She wasn’t beautiful now. Her face was twisted with terror. The scream was just dying in her throat.

All this I got in the flash of time that it took me to put a running foot across her sill.

Then another shot crashed out – in Exon’s room.

The girl’s face jerked up – so abruptly that it seemed her neck must snap – she clutched both hands to her breast – and fell face-down among the bedclothes.

I don’t know whether I went through, over, or around the screen that stood in the connecting doorway. I was circling Exon’s bed. He lay on the floor on his side, facing a window. I jumped over him – leaned out the window.

In the yard that was bright now under the moon, nothing moved. There was no sound of flight. Presently, while my eyes still searched the surrounding country, the farm hands, in their underwear, came running barefooted from the direction of their quarters. I called down to them, stationing them at points of vantage.

Meanwhile, behind me, Gong Lim and Adam Figg had put Exon back in his bed, while Mrs. Gallaway and Emma Figg tried to check the blood that spurted from a hole in Barbra Caywood’s side.

I sent Adam Figg to the telephone, to wake the doctor and the deputy sheriff, and then I hurried down to the grounds.

Stepping out of the door, I came face to face with Hilary Gallaway coming from the direction of the garage. His face was flushed, and his breath was eloquent of the refreshments that had accompanied the game in Ady’s back room, but his step was steady enough, and his smile was as lazy as ever.

“What’s the excitement?” he asked.

“Same as last night! Meet anybody on the road? Or see anybody leaving here?”

“No.”

“All right. Get in that bus of yours, and bum up the road in the other direction. Stop anybody you meet going away from here or who looks wrong! Got a gun?”

He spun on his heel with nothing of indolence.

“One in my car,” he called as he broke into a run.

The farm hands still at their posts, I combed the grounds from east to west and from north to south. I realised that I was spoiling my chance of finding footprints when it would be light enough to see them, but I was banking on the man I wanted still being close at hand. And then Shand had told me that the ground was unfavourable for tracing prints, anyway.

On the gravel drive in front of the house I found the pistol from which the shots had been fired – a cheap.38-calibre revolver, slightly rusty, smelling freshly of burned powder, with three empty shells and three that had not been fired in it.

Besides that I found nothing. The murdere r- from what I had seen of the hole in the girl’s side, I called him that – had vanished.

Shand and Dr. Rench arrived together, just as I was finishing my fruitless search. A little later, Hilary Gallaway came back – empty-handed.

Breakfast that morning was a melancholy meal, except to Hilary Gallaway. He refrained from jesting openly about the night’s excitement, but his eyes twinkled whenever they met mine, and I knew he thought it a tremendously good joke for the shooting to have taken place right under my nose. During his wife’s presence at the table, however, he was almost grave, as if not to offend her.

Mrs. Gallaway left the table shortly, and Dr. Rench joined us. He said that both of his patients were in as good shape as could be expected, and he thought both would recover.

The bullet had barely grazed the girl’s ribs and breast-bone, going through the flesh and muscles of her chest, in on the right side and out again, on the left. Except for the shock and the loss of blood, she was not in danger, although unconscious.

Exon was sleeping, the doctor said, so Shand and I crept up into his room to examine it. The first bullet had gone into the doorframe, about four inches above the one that had been fired the night before. The second bullet had pierced the Japanese screen, and, after passing through the girl, had lodged in the plaster of the wall. We dug out both bullets – they were of.38 calibre. Both had apparently been fired from the vicinity of one of the windows – either just inside or just outside.

Shand and I grilled the Chinese cook, the farm hands, and the Figgs unmercifully that day. But they came through it standing up – there was nothing to fix the shooting on any of them.

And all day long that damned Hilary Gallaway followed me from pillar to post, with a mocking glint in his eyes that said plainer than words, “I’m the logical suspect. Why don’t you put me through your little third degree?” But I grinned back, and asked him nothing.

Shand had to go to town that afternoon. He called me up on the telephone later, and told me that Gallaway had left Knownburg early enough that morning to have arrived home fully half an hour before the shooting, if he had driven at his usual fast pace.

The day passed – too rapidly – and I found myself dreading the coming of night. Two nights in succession Exon’s life had been attempted – and now the third night was coming.

At dinner Hilary Gallaway announced that he was going to stay home this evening. Knownburg, he said, was tame in comparison; and he grinned at me.

Dr. Rench left after the meal, saying that he would return as soon as possible, but that he had two patients on the other side of town whom he must visit. Barbra Caywood had returned to consciousness, but had been extremely hysterical, and the doctor had given her an opiate. She was asleep now. Exon was resting easily except for a high temperature.

I went up to Exon’s room for a few minutes after the meal and tried him out with a gentle question or two, but he refused to answer them, and he was too sick for me to press him.

He asked how the girl was.

“The doc says she’s in no particular danger. Just loss of blood and shock. If she doesn’t rip her bandages off and bleed to death in one of her hysterical spells, he says, he’ll have her on her feet in a couple of weeks.”

Mrs. Gallaway came in then, and I went downstairs again, where I was seized by Gallaway, who insisted with bantering gravity that I tell him about some of the mysteries I had solved. He was enjoying my discomfort to the limit. He kidded me for about an hour, and had me burning up inside; but I managed to grin back with a fair pretence of indifference.

When his wife joined us presently – saying that both of the invalids were sleeping – I made my escape from her tormenting husband, saying that I had some writing to do. But I didn’t go to my room.

Instead, I crept stealthily into the girl’s room, crossed to a clothespress that I had noted earlier in the day, and planted myself in it. By leaving the door open the least fraction of an inch, I could see through the connecting doorway – from which the screen had been removed – across Exon’s bed, and out of the window from which three bullets had already come, and the Lord only knew what else might come.

Time passed, and I was stiff from standing still. But I had expected that.

Twice Mrs. Gallaway came up to look at her father and the nurse. Each time I shut my closet door entirely as soon as I heard her tiptoeing steps in the hall. I was hiding from everybody.

She had just gone from her second visit, when, before I had time to open my door again, I heard a faint rustling, and a soft padding on the floor. Not knowing what it was or where it was, I was afraid to push the door open. In my narrow hiding place I stood still and waited.

The padding was recognisable now – quiet footsteps, coming nearer. They passed not far from my clothespress door.

I waited.

An almost inaudible rustling. A pause. The softest and faintest of tearing sounds.

I came out of the closet – my gun in my hand.

Standing beside the girl’s bed, leaning over her unconscious form, was old Talbert Exon, his face flushed with fever, his nightshirt hanging limply around his wasted legs. One of his hands still rested upon the bedclothes he had turned down from her body. The other hand held a narrow strip of adhesive tape, with which her bandages had been fixed in place, and which he had just torn off.

He snarled at me, and both his hands went toward the girl’s bandages.

The crazy, feverish glare of his eyes told me that the threat of the gun in my hand meant nothing to him. I jumped to his side, plucked his hands aside, picked him up in my arms, and carried him – kicking, clawing, and swearing – back to his bed. Then I called the others.

Hilary Gallaway, Shand – who had come out from town again – and I sat over coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen, while the rest of the household helped Dr. Rench battle for Exon’s life. The old man had gone through enough excitement in the last three days to kill a healthy man, let alone a pneumonia convalescent.

“But why should the old devil want to kill her?” Gallaway asked me.

“Search me,” I confessed, a little testily perhaps. “I don’t know why he wanted to kill her, but it’s a cinch that he did. The gun was found just about where he could have thrown it when he heard me coming. I was in the girl’s room when she was shot, and I got to Exon’s window without wasting much time, and I saw nothing. You, yourself, driving home from Knownburg, and arriving here right after the shooting, didn’t see anybody leave by the road; and I’ll take an oath that nobody could have left in any other direction without either one of the farm hands or me seeing them.

“And then, tonight, I told Exon that the girl would recover if she didn’t tear off her bandages, which, while true enough, gave him the idea that she had been trying to tear them off. And from that he built up a plan of tearing them off himself – knowing that she had been given an opiate, perhaps – and thinking that everybody would believe she had torn them off herself. And he was putting that plan into execution – had torn off one piece of tape – when I stopped him. He shot her intentionally, and that’s flat. Maybe I couldn’t prove it in court without knowing why, but I know he did. But the doc says he’ll hardly live to be tried; he killed himself trying to kill the girl.”

“Maybe you’re right” – Gallaway’s mocking grin flashed at me – “but you’re a hell of a detective. Why didn’t you suspect me?”

“I did,” I grinned back, “but not enough.”

“Why not? You may be making a mistake,” he drawled. “You know my room is just across the hall from his, and I could have left my window, crept across the porch, fired at him, and then run back to my room, on that first night.

“And on the second night – when you were here – you ought to know that I left Knownburg in plenty of time to have come out here, parked my car down the road a bit, fired those two shots, crept around in the shadow of the house, run back to my car, and then come driving innocently up to the garage. You should know also that my reputation isn’t any too good – that I’m supposed to be a bad egg; and you do know that I don’t like the old man. And for a motive, there is the fact that my wife is Exon’s only heir. I hope” – he raised his eyebrows in burlesqued pain – “that you don’t think I have any moral scruples against a well-placed murder now and then.”

I laughed. “I don’t.”

“Well, then?”

“If Exon had been killed that first night, and I had come up here, you’d be doing your joking behind bars long before this. And if he’d been killed the second night, even, I might have grabbed you. But I don’t figure you as a man who’d bungle so easy a job – not twice, anyway. You wouldn’t have missed, and then run away, leaving him alive.”

He shook my hand gravely.

“It is comforting to have one’s few virtues appreciated.”

Before Talbert Exon died he sent for me. He wanted to die, he said, with his curiosity appeased; and so we traded information. I told him how I had come to suspect him and he told me why he had tried to kill Barbra Caywood.

Fourteen years ago he had killed his wife, not for the insurance, as he had been suspected of doing, but in a fit of jealousy. However, he had so thoroughly covered up the proofs of his guilt that he had never been brought to trial; but the murder had weighed upon him, to the extent of becoming an obsession.

He knew that he would never give himself away consciously – he was too shrewd for that – and he knew that proof of his guilt could never be found. But there was always the chance that some time, in delirium, in his sleep, or when drunk, he might tell enough to bring him to the gallows.

He thought upon this angle too often, until it became a morbid fear that always hounded him. He had given up drinking – that was easy – but there was no way of guarding against the other things.

And one of them, he said, had finally happened. He had got pneumonia, and for a week he had been out of his head, and he had talked. Coming out of that week’s delirium, he had questioned the nurse. She had given him vague answers, would not tell him what he had talked about, what he had said. And then, in unguarded moments, he had discovered that her eyes rested upon him with loathing – with intense repulsion.

He knew then that he had babbled of his wife’s murder; and he set about laying plans for removing the nurse before she repeated what she had heard.

For so long as she remained in his house, he counted himself safe. She would not tell strangers, and it might be that for a while she would not tell anyone. Professional ethics would keep her quiet, perhaps; but he could not let her leave his house with her knowledge of his secret.

Daily and in secret, he had tested his strength until he knew himself strong enough to walk about the room a little, and to hold a revolver steady. His bed was fortunately placed for his purpose – directly in line with one of the windows, the connecting door, and the girl’s bed. In an old bond box in his closet – and nobody but he had ever seen the things in that box – was a revolver; a revolver that could not possibly be traced to him.

On the first night, he had taken this gun out, stepped back from his bed a little, and fired a bullet into the doorframe. Then he had jumped back into bed, concealing the gun under the blankets – where none thought to look for it – until he could return it to its box.

That was all the preparation he had needed. He had established an attempted murder directed against himself, and he had shown that a bullet fired at him could easily go near – and therefore through – the connecting doorway.

On the second night, he had waited until the house had seemed quiet. Then he had peeped through one of the cracks in the Japanese screen at the girl, whom he could see in the reflected light from the moon. He had found, though, that when he stepped far enough back from the screen for it to escape powder marks, he could not see the girl, not while she was lying down. So he had fired first into the doorframe – near the previous night’s bullet – to awaken her.

She had sat up in bed immediately, screaming, and he had shot her. He had intended firing another shot into her body – to make sure of her death – but my approach had made that impossible, and had made concealment of the gun impossible; so, with what strength he had left, he had thrown the revolver out of the window.

He died that afternoon, and I returned to San Francisco.

But that was not quite the end of the story.

In the ordinary course of business, the Agency’s bookkeeping department sent Gallaway a bill for my services. With the check that he sent by return mail, he enclosed a letter to me, from which I quote a paragraph:

I don’t want to let you miss the cream of the whole affair. The lovely Caywood, when she recovered, denied that Exon had talked of murder or any other crime during his delirium. The cause of the distaste with which she might have looked at him afterward, and the reason she would not tell him what he had said, was that his entire conversation during that week of delirium had consisted of an uninterrupted stream of obscenities and blasphemies, which seem to have shocked the girl through and through.

ZIGZAGS OF TREACHERY

One

All know about Dr. Estep’s death,” I said, “is the stuff in the papers.” Vance Richmond’s lean gray face took on an expression of distaste.

“The newspapers aren’t always either thorough or accurate. I’ll give you the salient points as I know them; though I suppose you’ll want to go over the ground for yourself, and get your information first-hand.”

I nodded, and the attorney went on, shaping each word precisely with his thin lips before giving it sound.

“Dr. Estep came to San Francisco in 1898 or 1899 – a young man of twenty-five, just through qualifying for his license. He opened an office here, and, as you probably know, became in time a rather excellent surgeon. He married two or three years after he came here. There were no children. He and his wife seem to have been a bit happier together than the average.

“Of his life before coming to San Francisco, nothing is known. He told his wife briefly that he had been born and raised in Parkersburg, W. Va., but that his home life had been so unpleasant that he was trying to forget it, and that he did not like to talk – or even think – about it. Bear that in mind.

“Two weeks ago – on the third of the month – a woman came to his office, in the afternoon. His office was in his residence on Pine Street. Lucy Coe, who was Dr. Estep’s nurse and assistant, showed the woman into his office, and then went back to her own desk in the reception room.

“She didn’t hear anything the doctor said to the woman, but through the closed door she heard the woman’s voice now and then – a high and anguished voice, apparently pleading. Most of the words were lost upon the nurse, but she heard one coherent sentence. ‘Please! Please!’ she heard the woman cry. ‘Don’t turn me away!’ The woman was with Dr. Estep for about fifteen minutes, and left sobbing into a handkerchief. Dr. Estep said nothing about the caller either to his nurse or to his wife, who didn’t learn of it until after his death.

“The next day, toward evening, while the nurse was putting on her hat and coat preparatory to leaving for home, Dr. Estep came out of his office, with his hat on and a letter in his hand. The nurse saw that his face was pale – ‘white as my uniform,’ she says – and he walked with the care of one who takes pains to keep from staggering.

“She asked him if he was ill. ‘Oh, it’s nothing!’ he told her. ‘I’ll be all right in a very few minutes.’ Then he went on out. The nurse left the house just behind him, and saw him drop the letter he had carried into the mailbox on the corner, after which he returned to the house.

“Mrs. Estep, coming downstairs ten minutes later – it couldn’t have been any later than that – heard, just as she reached the first floor, the sound of a shot from her husband’s office. She rushed into it, meeting nobody. Her husband stood by his desk, swaying, with a hole in his right temple and a smoking revolver in his hand. Just as she reached him and put her arms around him, he fell across the desk – dead.”

“Anybody else – any of the servants, for instance – able to say that Mrs. Estep didn’t go to the office until after the shot?” I asked.

The attorney shook his head sharply.

“No, damn it! That’s where the rub comes in!”

His voice, after this one flare of feeling, resumed its level, incisive tone, and he went on with his tale.

“The next day’s papers had accounts of Dr. Estep’s death, and late that morning the woman who had called upon him the day before his death came to the house. She is Dr. Estep’s first wife – which is to say, his legal wife! There seems to be no reason – not the slightest – for doubting it, as much as I’d like to. They were married in Philadelphia in 1896. She has a certified copy of the marriage record. I had the matter investigated in Philadelphia, and it’s a certain fact that Dr. Estep and this woman – Edna Fife was her maiden name – were really married.

“She says that Estep, after living with her in Philadelphia for two years, deserted her. That would have been in 1898, or just before he came to San Francisco. She has sufficient proof of her identity – that she really is the Edna Fife who married him; and my agents in the East found positive proof that Estep had practiced for two years in Philadelphia.

“And here is another point. I told you that Estep had said he was born and raised in Parkersburg. I had inquiries made there, but found nothing to show that he had ever lived there, and found ample evidence to show that he had never lived at the address he had given his wife. There is, then, nothing for us to believe except that his talk of an unhappy early life was a ruse to ward off embarrassing questions.”

“Did you do anything toward finding out whether the doctor and his first wife had ever been divorced?” I asked.

“I’m having that taken care of now, but I hardly expect to learn that they had. That would be too crude. To get on with my story: This woman – the first Mrs. Estep – said that she had just recently learned her husband’s whereabouts, and had come to see him in an attempt to effect a reconciliation. When she called upon him the afternoon before his death, he asked for a little time to make up his mind what he should do. He promised to give her his decision in two days. My personal opinion, after talking to the woman several times, is that she had learned that he had accumulated some money, and that her interest was more in getting the money than in getting him. But that, of course, is neither here nor there.

“At first the authorities accepted the natural explanation of the doctor’s death – suicide. But after the first wife’s appearance, the second wife – my client – was arrested and charged with murder.

“The police theory is that after his first wife’s visit, Dr. Estep told his second wife the whole story; and that she, brooding over the knowledge that he had deceived her, that she was not his wife at all, finally worked herself up into a rage, went to the office after his nurse had left for the day, and shot him with the revolver that she knew he always kept in his desk.

“I don’t know, of course, just what evidence the prosecution has, but from the newspapers I gather that the case against her will be built upon her fingerprints on the revolver with which he was killed; an upset inkwell on his desk; splashes of ink on the dress she wore; and an inky print of her hand on a torn newspaper on his desk.

“Unfortunately, but perfectly naturally, one of the first things she did was to take the revolver out of her husband’s hand. That accounts for her prints on it. He fell – as I told you – just as she put her arms around him, and, though her memory isn’t very clear on this point, the probabilities are that he dragged her with him when he fell across the desk. That accounts for the upset inkwell, the torn paper, and the splashes of ink. But the prosecution will try to persuade the jury that those things all happened before the shooting – that they are proofs of a struggle.”

“Not so bad,” I gave my opinion.

“Or pretty damned bad – depending on how you look at it. And this is the worst time imaginable for a thing like this to come up! Within the past few months there have been no less than five widely advertised murders of men by women who were supposed to have been betrayed, or deceived, or one thing or another.

“Not one of those five women was convicted. As a result, we have the press, the public, and even the pulpit, howling for a stricter enforcement of justice. The newspapers are lined up against Mrs. Estep as strongly as their fear of libel suits will permit. The women’s clubs are lined up against her. Everybody is clamouring for an example to be made of her.

“Then, as if all that isn’t enough, the prosecuting attorney has lost his last two big cases, and he’ll be out for blood this time – election day isn’t far off.”

The calm, even, precise voice was gone now. In its place was a passionate eloquence.

“I don’t know what you think,” Richmond cried. “You’re a detective. This is an old story to you. You’re more or less callous, I suppose, and sceptical of innocence in general. But I know that Mrs. Estep didn’t kill her husband. I don’t say it because she’s my client! I was Dr. Estep’s attorney, and his friend, and if I thought Mrs. Estep guilty, I’d do everything in my power to help convict her. But I know as well as I know anything that she didn’t kill him – couldn’t have killed him.

“She’s innocent. But I know too that if I go into court with no defence beyond what I now have, she’ll be convicted! There has been too much leniency shown feminine criminals, public sentiment says. The pendulum will swing the other way – Mrs. Estep, if convicted, will get the limit. I’m putting it up to you! Can you save her?”

“Our best mark is the letter he mailed just before he died,” I said, ignoring everything he said that didn’t have to do with the facts of the case. “It’s good betting that when a man writes and mails a letter and then shoots himself, that the letter isn’t altogether unconnected with the suicide. Did you ask the wife about the letter?”

“I did, and she denies having received one.”

“That wasn’t right. If the doctor had been driven to suicide by her appearance, then according to all the rules there are, the letter should have been addressed to her. He might have written one to his second wife, but he would hardly have mailed it. Would she have any reason for lying about it?”

“Yes,” the lawyer said slowly, “I think she would. His will leaves everything to the second wife. The first wife, being the only legal wife, will have no difficulty in breaking that will, of course; but if it is shown that the second wife had no knowledge of the first one’s existence – that she really believed herself to be Dr. Estep’s legal wife – then I think that she will receive at least a portion of the estate. I don’t think any court would, under the circumstances, take everything away from her. But if she should be found guilty of murdering Dr. Estep, then no consideration will be shown her, and the first wife will get every penny.”

“Did he leave enough to make half of it, say, worth sending an innocent person to the gallows for?”

“He left about half a million, roughly; two hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t a mean inducement.”

“Do you think it would be enough for the first wife – from what you have seen of her?”

“Candidly, I do. She didn’t impress me as being a person of many very active scruples.”

“Where does this first wife live?” I asked.

“She’s staying at the Montgomery Hotel now. Her home is in Louisville, I believe. I don’t think you will gain anything by talking to her, however. She has retained Somerset, Somerset and Quill to represent her – a very reputable firm, by the way – and she’ll refer you to them. They will tell you nothing. But if there’s anything dishonest about her affairs – such as the concealing of Dr. Estep’s letter – I’m confident that Somerset, Somerset and Quill know nothing of it.”

“Can I talk to the second Mrs. Estep – your client?”

“Not at present, I’m afraid; though perhaps in a day or two. She is on the verge of collapse just now. She has always been delicate; and the shock of her husband’s death, followed by her own arrest and imprisonment, has been too much for her. She’s in the city jail, you know, held without bail. I’ve tried to have her transferred to the prisoner’s ward of the City Hospital, even; but the authorities seem to think that her illness is simply a ruse. I’m worried about her. She’s really in a critical condition.”

His voice was losing its calmness again, so I picked up my hat, said something about starting to work at once, and went out. I don’t like eloquence: if it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.

Two

I spent the next couple of hours questioning the Estep servants, to no great advantage. None of them had been near the front of the house at the time of the shooting, and none had seen Mrs. Estep immediately prior to her husband’s death.

After a lot of hunting, I located Lucy Coe, the nurse, in an apartment on Vallejo Street. She was a small, brisk, businesslike woman of thirty or so. She repeated what Vance Richmond had told me, and could add nothing to it.

That cleaned up the Estep end of the job; and I set out for the Montgomery Hotel, satisfied that my only hope for success – barring miracles, which usually don’t happen – lay in finding the letter that I believed Dr. Estep had written to his first wife.

My drag with the Montgomery Hotel management was pretty strong – strong enough to get me anything I wanted that wasn’t too far outside the law. So as soon as I got there, I hunted up Stacey, one of the assistant managers.

“This Mrs. Estep who’s registered here,” I asked, “what do you know about her?”

“Nothing, myself, but if you’ll wait a few minutes I’ll see what I can learn.”

The assistant manager was gone about ten minutes.

“No one seems to know much about her,” he told me when he came back. “I’ve questioned the telephone girls, bellboys, maids, clerks, and the house detective; but none of them could tell me much.

“She registered from Louisville, on the second of the month. She has never stopped here before, and she seems unfamiliar with the city – asks quite a few questions about how to get around. The mail clerks don’t remember handling any mail for her, nor do the girls on the switchboard have any record of phone calls for her.

“She keeps regular hours – usually goes out at ten or later in the morning, and gets in before midnight. She doesn’t seem to have any callers or friends.”

“Will you have her mail watched – let me know what postmarks and return addresses are on any letters she gets?”

“Certainly.”

“And have the girls on the switchboard put their ears up against any talking she does over the wire?”

“Yes.”

“Is she in her room now?”

“No, she went out a little while ago.”

“Fine! I’d like to go up and take a look at her stuff.”

Stacey looked sharply at me, and cleared his throat.

“Is it as-ah – important as all that? I want to give you all the assistance I can, but -“

“It’s this important,” I assured him, “that another woman’s life depends on what I can learn about this one.”

“All right!” he said. “I’ll tell the clerk to let us know if she comes in before we are through; and we’ll go right up.”

The woman’s room held two valises and a trunk, all unlocked, and containing not the least thing of importance – no letters – nothing. So little, in fact, that I was more than half convinced that she had expected her things to be searched.

Downstairs again, I planted myself in a comfortable chair within sight of the key-rack, and waited for a view of this first Mrs. Estep.

She came in at 11:15 that night. A large woman of forty-five or fifty, well-dressed, and carrying herself with an air of assurance. Her face was a little too hard as to mouth and chin, but not enough to be ugly. A capable-looking woman – a woman who would get what she went after.

Three

Eight o’clock was striking as I went into the Montgomery lobby the next morning and picked out a chair, this time within eye-range of the elevators.

At 10:30 Mrs. Estep left the hotel, with me in her wake. Her denial that a letter from her husband, written immediately before his death, had come to her didn’t fit in with the possibilities as I saw them. And a good motto for the detective business is, “When in doubt – shadow ‘em.”

After eating breakfast at a restaurant on O’Farrell Street, she turned toward the shopping district; and for a long, long time – though I suppose it was a lot shorter than it seemed to me – she led me through the most densely packed portions of the most crowded department stores she could find.

She didn’t buy anything, but she did a lot of thorough looking, with me muddling along behind her, trying to act like a little fat guy on an errand for his wife, while stout women bumped me and thin ones prodded me and all sorts got in my way and walked on my feet.

Finally, after I had sweated off a couple of pounds, she left the shopping district, and cut up through Union Square, walking along casually, as if out for a stroll.

Three-quarters way through, she turned abruptly, and retraced her steps, looking sharply at everyone she passed. I was on a bench, reading a stray page from a day-old newspaper, when she went by. She walked on down Post Street to Kearney, stopping every now and then to look – or to pretend to look – in store windows, while I ambled along sometimes behind her, sometimes almost by her side, and sometimes in front.

She was trying to check up the people around her, trying to determine whether she was being followed or not. But here, in the busy part of town, that gave me no cause for worry. On a less crowded street it might have been different, though not necessarily so.

There are four rules for shadowing: Keep behind your subject as much as possible; never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens; and never meet his eye. Obey them, and, except in unusual circumstances, shadowing is the easiest thing that a sleuth has to do.

Assured, after a while, that no one was following her, Mrs. Estep turned back toward Powell Street, and got into a taxicab at the St. Francis stand. I picked out a modest touring car from the rank of hire-cars along the Geary Street side of Union Square, and set out after her.

Our route was out Post Street to Laguna, where the taxi presently swung into the curb and stopped. The woman got out, paid the driver, and went up the steps of an apartment building. With idling engine my own car had come to rest against the opposite curb in the block above.

As the taxicab disappeared around a corner, Mrs. Estep came out of the apartment-building doorway, went back to the sidewalk, and started down Laguna Street.

“Pass her,” I told my chauffeur, and we drew down upon her.

As we came abreast, she went up the front steps of another building, and this time she rang a bell. These steps belonged to a building apparently occupied by four flats, each with its separate door, and the button she had pressed belonged to the right-hand second-story flat.

Under cover of my car’s rear curtains, I kept my eye on the doorway while my driver found a convenient place to park in the next block.

I kept my eye on the vestibule until 5:35 p.m., when she came out, walked to the Sutter Street car line, returned to the Montgomery, and went to her room.

I called up the Old Man – the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager – and asked him to detail an operative to learn who and what were the occupants of the Laguna Street flat.

That night Mrs. Estep ate dinner at her hotel, and went to a show afterward, and she displayed no interest in possible shadowers. She went to her room at a little after eleven, and I knocked off for the day.

Four

The following morning I turned the woman over to Dick Foley, and went back to the Agency to wait for Bob Teal, the operative who had investigated the Laguna Street flat. He came in at a little after ten.

“A guy named Jacob Ledwich lives there,” Bob said. “He’s a crook of some sort, but I don’t know just what. He and ‘Wop’ Healey are friendly, so he must be a crook! ‘Porky’ Grout says he’s an ex-bunko man who is in with a gambling ring now; but Porky would tell you a bishop was a safe-ripper if he thought it would mean five bucks for himself.

“This Ledwich goes out mostly at night, and he seems to be pretty prosperous. Probably a high-class worker of some sort. He’s got a Buick – license number 645-221 – that he keeps in a garage around the corner from his flat. But he doesn’t seem to use the car much.”

“What sort of looking fellow is he?”

“A big guy – six feet or better – and he’ll weigh a couple hundred easy. He’s got a funny mug on him. It’s broad and heavy around the cheeks and jaw, but his mouth is a little one that looks like it was made for a smaller man. He’s no youngster – middle-aged.”

“Suppose you tail him around for a day or two, Bob, and see what he’s up to. Try to get a room or apartment in the neighbourhood – a place that you can cover his front door from.”

Five

Vance Richmond’s lean face lighted up as soon as I mentioned Ledwich’s name to him.

“Yes!” he exclaimed. “He was a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Dr. Estep’s. I met him once – a large man with a peculiarly inadequate mouth. I dropped in to see the doctor one day, and Ledwich was in the office. Dr. Estep introduced us.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you know whether he was intimate with the doctor, or just a casual acquaintance?”

“No. For all I know, he might have been a friend, a patient, or almost anything. The doctor never spoke of him to me, and nothing passed between them while I was there that afternoon. I simply gave the doctor some information he had asked for and left. Why?”

“Dr. Estep’s first wife – after going to a lot of trouble to see that she wasn’t followed – connected with Ledwich yesterday afternoon. And from what we can learn he seems to be a crook of some sort.”

“What would that indicate?”

“I’m not sure what it means, but I can do a lot of guessing. Ledwich knew both the doctor and the doctor’s first wife; then it’s not a bad bet that she knew where her husband was all the time. If she did, then it’s another good bet that she was getting money from him right along. Can you check up his accounts and see whether he was passing out any money that can’t be otherwise accounted for?”

The attorney shook his head.

“No, his accounts are in rather bad shape, carelessly kept. He must have had more than a little difficulty with his income-tax statements.”

“I see. To get back to my guesses: If she knew where he was all the time, and was getting money from him, then why did his first wife finally come to see her husband? Perhaps because -“

“I think I can help you there,” Richmond interrupted. “A fortunate investment in lumber nearly doubled Dr. Estep’s wealth two or three months ago.”

“That’s it, then! She learned of it through Ledwich. She demanded, either through Ledwich, or by letter, a rather large share of it – more than the doctor was willing to give. When he refused, she came to see him in person, to demand the money under threat – we’ll say – of instant exposure. He thought she was in earnest. Either he couldn’t raise the money she demanded, or he was tired of leading a double life. Anyway, he thought it all over, and decided to commit suicide. This is all a guess, or a series of guesses – but it sounds reasonable to me.”

“To me, too,” the attorney said. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m still having both of them shadowed – there’s no other way of tackling them just now. I’m having the woman looked up in Louisville. But, you understand, I might dig up a whole flock of things on them, and when I got through still be as far as ever from finding the letter Dr. Estep wrote before he died.

“There are plenty of reasons for thinking that the woman destroyed the letter – that would have been her wisest play. But if I can get enough on her, even at that, I can squeeze her into admitting that the letter was written, and that it said something about suicide – if it did. And that will be enough to spring your client. How is she to-day – any better?”

His thin face lost the animation that had come to it during our discussion of Ledwich, and became bleak.

“She went completely to pieces last night, and was removed to the hospital, where she should have been taken in the first place. To tell you the truth, if she isn’t liberated soon, she won’t need our help. I’ve done my utmost to have her released on bail – pulled every wire I know – but there’s little likelihood of success in that direction.

“Knowing that she is a prisoner – charged with murdering her husband – is killing her. She isn’t young, and she has always been subject to nervous disorders. The bare shock of her husband’s death was enough to prostrate her – but now – You’ve got to get her out – and quickly!”

He was striding up and down his office, his voice throbbing with feeling. I left quickly.

Six

From the attorney’s office, I returned to the Agency, where I was told that Bob Teal had phoned in the address of a furnished apartment he had rented on Laguna Street. I hopped on a street car, and went up to take a look at it.

But I didn’t get that far.

Walking down Laguna Street, after leaving the car, I spied Bob Teal coming toward me. Between Bob and me – also coming toward me – was a big man whom I recognised as Jacob Ledwich: a big man with a big red face around a tiny mouth.

I walked on down the street, passing both Ledwich and Bob, without paying any apparent attention to either. At the next corner I stopped to roll a cigarette, and steal a look at the pair.

And then I came to life!

Ledwich had stopped at a vestibule cigar stand up the street to make a purchase. Bob Teal, knowing his stuff, had passed him and was walking steadily up the street.

He was figuring that Ledwich had either come out for the purpose of buying cigars or cigarettes, and would return to his flat with them; or that after making his purchase the big man would proceed to the car line, where, in either event, Bob would wait.

But as Ledwich had stopped before the cigar stand, a man across the street had stepped suddenly into a doorway, and stood there, back in the shadows. This man, I now remembered, had been on the opposite side of the street from Bob and Ledwich, and walking in the same direction.

He, too, was following Ledwich.

By the time Ledwich had finished his business at the stand, Bob had reached Sutter Street, the nearest car line. Ledwich started up the street in that direction. The man in the doorway stepped out and went after him. I followed that one.

A ferry-bound car came down Sutter Street just as I reached the corner. Ledwich and I got aboard together. The mysterious stranger fumbled with a shoe-string several pavements from the corner until the car was moving again, and then he likewise made a dash for it.

He stood beside me on the rear platform, hiding behind a large man in overalls, past whose shoulder he now and then peeped at Ledwich. Bob had gone to the corner above, and was already seated when Ledwich, this amateur detective – there was no doubting his amateur status – and I got on the car.

I sized up the amateur while he strained his neck peeping at Ledwich. He was small, this sleuth, and scrawny and frail. His most noticeable feature was his nose – a limp organ that twitched nervously all the time. His clothes were old and shabby, and he himself was somewhere in his fifties.

After studying him for a few minutes, I decided that he hadn’t tumbled to Bob Teal’s part in the game. His attention had been too firmly fixed upon Ledwich, and the distance had been too short thus far for him to discover that Bob was also tailing the big man.

So when the seat beside Bob was vacated presently, I chucked my cigarette away, went into the car, and sat down, my back toward the little man with the twitching nose.

“Drop off after a couple of blocks and go back to the apartment. Don’t shadow Ledwich any more until I tell you. Just watch his place. There’s a bird following him, and I want to see what he’s up to,” I told Bob in an undertone.

He grunted that he understood, and, after a few minutes, left the car.

At Stockton Street, Ledwich got off, the man with the twitching nose behind him and me in the rear. In that formation we paraded around town all afternoon.

The big man had business in a number of poolrooms, cigar stores, and soft-drink parlours – most of which I knew for places where you can get a bet down on any horse that’s running in North America, whether at Tanforan, Tijuana, or Timonium.

Just what Ledwich did in these places, I didn’t learn. I was bringing up the rear of the procession, and my interest was centered upon the mysterious little stranger. He didn’t enter any of the places behind Ledwich, but loitered in their neighbourhoods until Ledwich reappeared.

He had a rather strenuous time of it – labouring mightily to keep out of Ledwich’s sight, and only succeeding because we were downtown, where you can get away with almost any sort of shadowing. He certainly made a lot of work for himself, dodging here and there.

After a while, Ledwich shook him.

The big man came out of a cigar store with another man. They got into an automobile that was standing beside the curb and drove away, leaving my man standing on the edge of the sidewalk twitching his nose in chagrin. There was a taxi stand just around the corner, but he either didn’t know it or didn’t have enough money to pay the fare.

I expected him to return to Laguna Street then, but he didn’t. He led me down Kearny Street to Portsmouth, where he stretched himself out on the grass face – down, lit a black pipe, and lay looking dejectedly at the Stevenson Monument, probably without seeing it.

I sprawled on a comfortable piece of sod some distance away – between a Chinese woman with two perfectly round children and an ancient Portuguese in a gaily checkered suit – and we let the afternoon go by.

When the sun had gone low enough for the ground to become chilly, the little man got up, shook himself, and went back up Kearny Street to a cheap lunchroom, where he ate meagrely. Then he entered a hotel a few doors away, took a key from the row of hooks, and vanished down a dark corridor. Running through the register, I found that the key he had taken belonged to a room whose occupant was ‘John Boyd, St. Louis, Mo.,’ and that he had arrived the day before.

This hotel wasn’t of the sort where it is safe to make inquiries, so I went down to the street again, and came to rest on the least conspicuous near-by corner.

Twilight came, and the street – and shop-lights were turned on. It got dark. The night traffic of Kearny Street went up and down past me: Filipino boys in their too-dapper clothes, bound for the inevitable blackjack game; gaudy women still heavy-eyed from their day’s sleep; plain-clothes men on their way to headquarters, to report before going off duty; Chinese going to or from Chinatown; sailors in pairs, looking for action of any sort; hungry people making for the Italian and French restaurants; worried people going into the bail-bond broker’s office on the corner to arrange for the release of friends and relatives whom the police had nabbed; Italians on their homeward journeys from work; odds and ends of furtive-looking citizens on various shady errands.

Midnight came, and no John Boyd, and I called it a day, and went home.

Before going to bed, I talked with Dick Foley over the wire. He said that Mrs. Estep had done nothing of any importance all day, and had received neither mail nor phone calls. I told him to stop shadowing her until I solved John Boyd’s game.

I was afraid Boyd might turn his attention to the woman, and I didn’t want him to discover that she was being shadowed. I had already instructed Bob Teal to simply watch Ledwich’s flat – to see when he came in and went out, and with whom – and now I told Dick to do the same with the woman.

My guess on this Boyd person was that he and the woman were working together – that she had him watching Ledwich for her, so that the big man couldn’t double-cross her. But that was only a guess – and I don’t gamble too much on my guesses.

Seven

The next morning I dressed myself up in an army shirt and shoes, an old faded cap, and a suit that wasn’t downright ragged, but was shabby enough not to stand out too noticeably beside John Boyd’s old clothes.

It was a little after nine o’clock when Boyd left his hotel and had breakfast at the grease-joint where he had eaten the night before. Then he went up to Laguna Street, picked himself a corner, and waited for Jacob Ledwich.

He did a lot of waiting. He waited all day, because Ledwich didn’t show until after dark. But the little man was well-stocked with patienc e- I’ll say that for him. He fidgeted, and stood on one foot and then the other, and even tried sitting on the curb for a while, but he stuck it out.

I took it easy, myself. The furnished apartment Bob Teal had rented to watch Ledwich’s flat from was a ground-floor one, across the street and just a little above the corner where Boyd waited. So we could watch him and the flat with one eye.

Bob and I sat and smoked and talked all day, taking turns watching the fidgeting man on the corner and Ledwich’s door.

Night had just definitely settled when Ledwich came out and started up toward the car line. I slid out into the street, and our parade was under way again – Ledwich leading, Boyd following him, and we following him.

Haif a block of this, and I got an idea!

I’m not what you’d call a brilliant thinker – such results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck – but I do have my flashes of intelligence. And this was one of them.

Ledwich was about a block ahead of me; Boyd half that distance. Speeding up, I passed Boyd, and caught up with Ledwich. Then I slackened my pace so as to walk beside him, though with no appearance from the rear of having any interest in him.

“Jake,” I said, without turning my head, “there’s a guy following you!”

The big man almost spoiled my little scheme by stopping dead still, but he caught himself in time, and, taking his cue from me, kept walking.

“Who the hell are you?” he growled.

“Don’t get funny!” I snapped back, still looking and walking ahead. “It ain’t my funeral. But I was coming up the street when you came out, and I seen this guy duck behind a pole until you was past, and then follow you up.”

That got him.

“You sure?”

“Sure! All you got to do to prove it is turn the next corner and wait.”

I was two or three steps ahead of him by this time. I turned the corner, and halted, with my back against the brick building front. Ledwich took up the same position at my side.

“Want any help?” I grinned at him -, a reckless sort of grin, unless my acting was poor.

“No.”

His little lumpy mouth was set ugly, and his blue eyes were hard as pebbles.

I flicked the tail of my coat aside to show him the butt of my gun.

“Want to borrow the rod?” I asked.

“No.”

He was trying to figure me out, and small wonder.

“Don’t mind if I stick around to see the fun, do you?” I asked mockingly.

There wasn’t time for him to answer that. Boyd had quickened his steps, and now he came hurrying around the corner, his nose twitching like a tracking dog’s.

Ledwich stepped into the middle of the sidewalk, so suddenly that the little man thudded into him with a grunt. For a moment they stared at each other, and there was recognition between them.

Ledwich shot one big hand out and clamped the other by a shoulder.

“What are you snooping around me for, you rat? Didn’t I tell you to keep away from ‘Frisco?”

“Aw, Jake!” Boyd begged. “I didn’t mean no harm. I just thought that -“

Ledwich silenced him with a shake that clicked his mouth shut, and turned to me.

“A friend of mine,” he sneered.

His eyes grew suspicious and hard again and ran up and down me from cap to shoes.

“How’d you know my name?” he demanded.

“A famous man like you?” I asked, in burlesque astonishment.

“Never mind the comedy!” He took a threatening step toward me. “How’d you know my name?”

“None of your damned business,” I snapped.

My attitude seemed to reassure him. His face became less suspicious.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I owe you something for this trick, and – How are you fixed?”

“I have been dirtier.” Dirty is Pacific Coast argot for prosperous.

He looked speculatively from me to Boyd, and back.

“Know The Circle?” he asked me.

I nodded. The underworld calls Wop Healey’s joint The Circle.

“If you’ll meet me there tomorrow night, maybe I can put a piece of change your way.”

“Nothing stirring!” I shook my head with emphasis. “I ain’t circulating that prominent these days.”

A fat chance I’d have of meeting him there! Wop Healey and half his customers knew me as a detective. So there was nothing to do but to try to get the impression over that I was a crook who had reasons for wanting to keep away from the more notorious hang-outs for a while. Apparently it got over. He thought a while, and then gave me his Laguna Street number.

“Drop in this time tomorrow and maybe I’ll have a proposition to make you – if you’ve got the guts.”

“I’ll think it over,” I said noncommittally, and turned as if to go down the street.

“Just a minute,” he called, and I faced him again. “What’s your name?”

“Wisher,” I said. “Shine, if you want a front one.”

“Shine Wisher,” he repeated. “I don’t remember ever hearing it before.”

It would have surprised me if he had – I had made it up only about fifteen minutes before.

“You needn’t yell it,” I said sourly, “so that everybody in the burg will remember hearing it.”

And with that I left him, not at all dissatisfied with myself. By tipping him off to Boyd, I had put him under obligations to me, and had led him to accept me, at least tentatively, as a fellow crook. And by making no apparent effort to gain his good graces, I had strengthened my hand that much more.

I had a date with him for the next day, when I was to be given a chance to earn – illegally, no doubt – ‘a piece of change.’

There was a chance that this proposition he had in view for me had nothing to do with the Estep affair, but then again it might; and whether it did or not, I had my entering wedge at least a little way into Jake Ledwich’s business.

I strolled around for about half an hour, and then went back to Bob Teal’s apartment.

“Ledwich come back?”

“Yes,” Bob said, “with that little guy of yours. They went in about half an hour ago.”

“Good! Haven’t seen a woman go in?”

“No.”

I expected to see the first Mrs. Estep arrive sometime during the evening, but she didn’t. Bob and I sat around and talked and watched Ledwich’s doorway, and the hours passed.

At one o’clock Ledwich came out alone.

“I’m going to tail him, just for luck,” Bob said, and caught up his cap.

Ledwich vanished around a corner, and then Bob passed out of sight behind him.

Five minutes later Bob was with me again.

“He’s getting his machine out of the garage.”

I jumped for the telephone and put in a rush order for a fast touring car.

Bob, at the window, called out, “Here he is!”

I joined Bob in time to see Ledwich going into his vestibule. His car stood in front of the house. A very few minutes, and Boyd and Ledwich came out together. Boyd was leaning heavily on Ledwich, who was supporting the little man with an arm across his back. We couldn’t see their faces in the dark, but the little man was plainly either sick, drunk, or drugged!

Ledwich helped his companion into the touring car. The red tail-light laughed back at us for a few blocks, and then disappeared. The automobile I had ordered arrived twenty minutes later, so we sent it back unused.

At a little after three that morning, Ledwich, alone and afoot, returned from the direction of his garage. He had been gone exactly two hours.

Eight

Neither Bob nor I went home that night, but slept in the Laguna Street apartment.

Bob went down to the corner grocer’s to get what we needed for breakfast in the morning, and he brought a morning paper back with him.

I cooked breakfast while he divided his attention between Ledwich’s front door and the newspaper.

“Hey!” he called suddenly, “look here!”

I ran out of the kitchen with a handful of bacon.

“What is it?”

“Listen! ‘Park Murder Mystery!’” he read. “’Early this morning the body of an unidentified man was found near a driveway in Golden Gate Park. His neck had been broken, according to the police, who say that the absence of any considerable bruises on the body, as well as the orderly condition of the clothes and the ground near by, show that he did not come to his death through falling, or being struck by an automobile. It is believed that he was killed and then carried to the park in an automobile, to be left there.’”

“Boyd!” I said.

“I bet you!” Bob agreed.

And at the morgue a very little while later, we learned that we were correct. The dead man was John Boyd.

“He was dead when Ledwich brought him out of the house,” Bob said.

I nodded.

“He was! He was a little man, and it wouldn’t have been much of a stunt for a big bruiser like Ledwich to have dragged him along with one arm the short distance from the door to the curb, pretending to be holding him up, like you do with a drunk. Let’s go over to the Hall of Justice and see what the police have got on it – if anything.”

At the detective bureau we hunted up O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail, and a good man to work with.

“This dead man found in the park,” I asked, “know anything about him?”

O’Gar pushed back his village constable’s hat – a big black hat with a floppy brim that belonged in vaudeville – scratched his bullet-head, and scowled at me as if he thought I had a joke up my sleeve.

“Not a damned thing except that he’s dead!” he said at last.

“How’d you like to know who he was last seen with?”

“It wouldn’t hinder me any in finding out who bumped him off, and that’s a fact.”

“How do you like the sound of this?” I asked. “His name was John Boyd and he was living at a hotel down in the next block. The last person he was seen with was a guy who is tied up with Dr. Estep’s first wife. You know – the Dr. Estep whose second wife is the woman you people are trying to prove a murder on. Does that sound interesting?”

“It does,” he said. “Where do we go first?”

“This Ledwich – he’s the fellow who was last seen with Boyd – is going to be a hard bird to shake down. We better try to crack the woman first – the first Mrs. Estep. There’s a chance that Boyd was a pal of hers, and in that case when she finds out that Ledwich rubbed him out, she may open up and spill the works to us.

“On the other hand, if she and Ledwich are stacked up against Boyd together, then we might as well get her safely placed before we tie into him. I don’t want to pull him before night, anyway. I got a date with him, and I want to try to rope him first.”

Bob Teal made for the door.

“I’m going up and keep my eye on him until you’re ready for him,” he called over his shoulder.

“Good,” I said. “Don’t let him get out of town on us. If he tries to blow, have him chucked in the can.”

In the lobby of the Montgomery Hotel, O’Gar and I talked to Dick Foley first. He told us that the woman was still in her room – had had her breakfast sent up. She had received neither letters, telegrams, nor phone calls since we began to watch her.

I got hold of Stacey again.

“We’re going up to talk to this Estep woman, and maybe we’ll take her away with us. Will you send up a maid to find out whether she’s up and dressed yet? We don’t want to announce ourselves ahead of time, and we don’t want to burst in on her while she’s in bed, or only partly dressed.”

He kept us waiting about fifteen minutes, and then told us that Mrs. Estep was up and dressed.

We went up to her room, taking the maid with us.

The maid rapped on the door.

“What is it?” an irritable voice demanded.

“The maid; I want to -“

The key turned on the inside, and an angry Mrs. Estep jerked the door open. O’Gar and I advanced, O’Gar flashing his “buzzer.”

“From headquarters,” he said. “We want to talk to you.”

O’Gar’s foot was where she couldn’t slam the door on us, and we were both walking ahead, so there was nothing for her to do but to retreat into the room, admitting us – which she did with no pretence of graciousness.

We closed the door, and then I threw our big load at her.

“Mrs. Estep, why did Jake Ledwich kill John Boyd?”

The expressions ran over her face like this: Alarm at Ledwich’s name, fear at the word “kill,” but the name John Boyd brought only bewilderment.

“Why did what?” she stammered meaninglessly, to gain time.

“Exactly,” I said. “Why did Jake kill him last night in his flat, and then take him in the park and leave him?”

Another set of expressions: Increased bewilderment until I had almost finished the sentence, and then the sudden understanding of something, followed by the inevitable groping for poise. These things weren’t as plain as billboards, you understand, but they were there to be read by anyone who had ever played poker – either with cards or people.

What I got out of them was that Boyd hadn’t been working with or for her, and that, though she knew Ledwich had killed somebody at some time, it wasn’t Boyd and it wasn’t last night. Who, then? And when? Dr. Estep? Hardly! There wasn’t a chance in the world that – if he had been murdered – anybody except his wife had done it – his second wife. No possible reading of the evidence could bring any other answer.

Who, then, had Ledwich killed before Boyd? Was he a wholesale murderer?

These things were flitting through my head in flashes and odd scraps while Mrs. Estep was saying:

“This is absurd! The idea of your coming up here and -“

She talked for five minutes straight, the words fairly sizzling from between her hard lips; but the words themselves didn’t mean anything. She was talking for time – talking while she tried to hit upon the safest attitude to assume.

And before we could head her off, she had hit upon it – silence!

We got not another word out of her; and that is the only way in the world to beat the grilling game. The average suspect tries to talk himself out of being arrested; and it doesn’t matter how shrewd a man is, or how good a liar, if he’ll talk to you, and you play your cards right, you can hook him – can make him help you convict him. But if he won’t talk you can’t do a thing with him.

And that’s how it was with this woman. She refused to pay any attention to our questions – she wouldn’t speak, nod, grunt, or wave an arm in reply. She gave us a fine assortment of facial expressions, true enough, but we wanted verbal information – and we got none.

We weren’t easily licked, however. Three beautiful hours of it we gave her without rest. We stormed, cajoled, threatened, and at times I think we danced; but it was no go. So in the end we took her away with us. We didn’t have anything on her, but we couldn’t afford to have her running around loose until we nailed Ledwich.

At the Hall of Justice we didn’t book her; but simply held her as a material witness, putting her in an office with a matron and one of O’Gar’s men, who were to see what they could do with her while we went after Ledwich. We had had her frisked as soon as she reached the Hall, of course; and, as we expected, she hadn’t a thing of importance on her.

O’Gar and I went back to the Montgomery and gave her room a thorough overhauling – and found nothing.

“Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?” the detective-sergeant asked as we left the hotel. “It’s going to be a pretty joke on somebody if you’re mistaken.”

I let that go by without an answer.

“I’ll meet you at six-thirty,” I said, “and we’ll go up against Ledwich.”

He grunted an approval, and I set out for Vance Richmond’s office.

Nine

The attorney sprang up from his desk as soon as his stenographer admitted me. His face was leaner and grayer than ever; its lines had deepened, and there was a hollowness around his eyes.

“You’ve got to do something!” he cried huskily. “I have just come from the hospital. Mrs. Estep is on the point of death! A day more of this – two days at the most-and she will -“

I interrupted him, and swiftly gave him an account of the day’s happenings, and what I expected, or hoped, to make out of them. But he received the news without brightening, and shook his head hopelessly.

“But don’t you see,” he exclaimed when I had finished, “that that won’t do? I know you can find proof of her innocence in time. I’m not complaining – you’ve done all that could be expected, and more! But all that’s no good! I’ve got to have – well – a miracle, perhaps.

“Suppose that you do finally get the truth out of Ledwich and the first Mrs. Estep or it comes out during their trials for Boyd’s murder? Or that you even get to the bottom of the matter in three or four days? That will be too late! If I can go to Mrs. Estep and tell her she’s free now, she may pull herself together, and come through. But another day of imprisonment – two days, or perhaps even two hours – and she won’t need anybody to clear her. Death will have done it! I tell you, she’s -“

I left Vance Richmond abruptly again. This lawyer was bound upon getting me worked up; and I like my jobs to be simply jobs – emotions are nuisances during business hours.

Ten

At a quarter to seven that evening, while O’Gar remained down the street, I rang Jacob Ledwich’s bell. As I had stayed with Bob Teal in our apartment the previous night, I was still wearing the clothes in which I had made Ledwich’s acquaintance as Shine Wisher.

Ledwich opened the door.

“Hello, Wisher!” he said without enthusiasm, and led me upstairs.

His flat consisted of four rooms, I found, running the full length and half the breadth of the building, with both front and rear exits. It was furnished with the ordinary none-too-spotless appointments of the typical moderately priced furnished flat – alike the world over.

In his front room we sat down and talked and smoked and sized one another up. He seemed a little nervous. I thought he would have been just as well satisfied if I had forgotten to show up.

“About this job you mentioned?” I asked presently.

“Sorry,” he said, moistening his little lumpy mouth, “but it’s all off.” And then he added, obviously as an afterthought, “For the present, at least.”

I guessed from that that my job was to have taken care of Boyd – but Boyd had been taken care of for good.

He brought out some whisky after a while, and we talked over it for some time, to no purpose whatever. He was trying not to appear too anxious to get rid of me, and I was cautiously feeling him out.

Piecing together things he let fall here and there, I came to the conclusion that he was a former con man who had fallen into an easier game of late years. That was in line, too, with what Porky Grout had told Bob Teal.

I talked about myself with the evasiveness that would have been natural to a crook in my situation; and made one or two carefully planned slips that would lead him to believe that I had been tied up with the ‘Jimmy the Riveter’ hold-up mob, most of whom were doing long hitches at Walla Walla then.

He offered to lend me enough money to tide me over until I could get on my feet again. I told him I didn’t need chicken feed so much as a chance to pick up some real jack.

The evening was going along, and we were getting nowhere.

“Jake,” I said casually – outwardly casual, that is – “you took a big chance putting that guy out of the way like you did last night.”

I meant to stir things up, and I succeeded.

His face went crazy.

A gun came out of his coat.

Firing from my pocket, I shot it out of his hand.

“Now behave!” I ordered.

He sat rubbing his benumbed hand and staring with wide eyes at the smouldering hole in my coat.

Looks like a great stunt, this shooting a gun out of a man’s hand, but it’s a thing that happens now and then. A man who is a fair shot (and that is exactly what I am – no more, no less) naturally and automatically shoots pretty close to the spot upon which his eyes are focused. When a man goes for his gun in front of you, you shoot at him – not at any particular part of him. There isn’t time for that – you shoot at him. However, you are more than likely to be looking at his gun, and in that case it isn’t altogether surprising if your bullet should hit his gun – as mine had done. But it looks impressive.

I beat out the fire around the bullet-hole in my coat, crossed the room to where his revolver had been knocked, and picked it up. I started to eject the bullets from it, but, instead, I snapped it shut again and stuck it in my pocket. Then I returned to my chair, opposite him.

“A man oughtn’t to act like that,” I kidded him; “he’s likely to hurt somebody.”

His little mouth curled up at me.

“An elbow, huh?” putting all the contempt he could in his voice; and somehow any synonym for detective seems able to hold a lot of contempt.

I might have tried to talk myself back into the Wisher role. It could have been done, but I doubted that it would be worth it; so I nodded my confession.

His brain was working now, and the passion left his face, while he sat rubbing his right hand, and his little mouth and eyes began to screw themselves up calculatingly.

I kept quiet, waiting to see what the outcome of his thinking would be. I knew he was trying to figure out just what my place in this game was. Since, to his knowledge, I had come into it no later than the previous evening, then the Boyd murder hadn’t brought me in. That would leave the Estep affair – unless he was tied up in a lot of other crooked stuff that I didn’t know anything about.

“You’re not a city dick, are you?” he asked finally, and his voice was on the verge of friendliness now: the voice of one who wants to persuade you of something, or sell you something.

The truth, I thought, wouldn’t hurt.

“No,” I said, “I’m with the Continental.”

He hitched his chair a little closer to the muzzle of my automatic.

“What are you after, then? Where do you come in on it?”

I tried the truth again.

“The second Mrs. Estep. She didn’t kill her husband.”

“You’re trying to dig up enough dope to spring her?”

“Yes.”

I waved him back as he tried to hitch his chair still nearer.

“How do you expect to do it?” he asked, his voice going lower and more confidential with each word.

I took still another flier at the truth.

“He wrote a letter before he died.”

“Well?”

But I called a halt for the time.

“Just that,” I said.

He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes and mouth grew small in thought again.

“What’s your interest in the man who died last night?” he asked slowly.

“It’s something on you,” I said, truthfully again. “It doesn’t do the second Mrs. Estep any direct good, maybe; but you and the first wife are stacked up together against her. Anything, therefore, that hurts you two will help her, somehow. I admit I’m wandering around in the dark; but I’m going ahead wherever I see a point of light – and I’ll come through to daylight in the end. Nailing you for Boyd’s murder is one point of light.”

He leaned forward suddenly, his eyes and mouth popping open as far as they would go.

“You’ll come out all right,” he said very softly, “if you use a little judgment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you think,” he asked, still very softly, “that you can nail me for Boyd’s murder – that you can convict me of murder?”

“I do.”

But I wasn’t any too sure. In the first place, though we were morally certain of it, neither Bob Teal nor I could swear that the man who had got in the machine with Ledwich was John Boyd.

We knew it was, of course, but the point is that it had been too dark for us to see his face. And, again, in the dark, we had thought him alive; it wasn’t until later that we knew he had been dead when he came down the steps.

Little things, those, but a private detective on the witness stand – unless he is absolutely sure of every detail – has an unpleasant and ineffectual time of it.

“I do,” I repeated, thinking these things over, “and I’m satisfied to go to the bat with what I’ve got on you and what I can collect between now and the time you and your accomplice go to trial.”

“Accomplice?” he said, not very surprised. “That would be Edna. I suppose you’ve already grabbed her?”

“Yes.”

He laughed.

“You’ll have one sweet time getting anything out of her. In the first place, she doesn’t know much, and in the second – well, I suppose you’ve tried, and have found out what a helpful sort she is! So don’t try the old gag of pretending that she has talked!”

“I’m not pretending anything.”

Silence between us for a few seconds, and then –

“I’m going to make you a proposition,” he said. “You can take it or leave it. The note Dr. Estep wrote before he died was to me, and it is positive proof that he committed suicide. Give me a chance to get away – just a chance – a half-hour start – and I’ll give you my word of honour to send you the letter.”

“I know I can trust you,” I said sarcastically.

“I’ll trust you, then!” he shot back at me. “I’ll turn the note over to you if you’ll give me your word that I’m to have half an hour’s start.”

“For what?” I demanded. “Why shouldn’t I take both you and the note?”

“If you can get them! But do I look like the kind of sap who would leave the note where it would be found? Do you think it’s here in the room maybe?”

I didn’t, but neither did I think that because he had hidden it, it couldn’t be found.

“I can’t think of any reason why I should bargain with you,” I told him. “I’ve got you cold, and that’s enough.”

“If I can show you that your only chance of freeing the second Mrs. Estep is through my voluntary assistance, will you bargain with me?”

“Maybe – I’ll listen to your persuasion, anyway.”

“All right,” he said, “I’m going to come clean with you. But most of the things I’m going to tell you can’t be proven in court without my help; and if you turn my offer down I’ll have plenty of evidence to convince the jury that these things are all false, that I never said them, and that you are trying to frame me.”

That part was plausible enough. I’ve testified before juries all the way from the city of Washington to the state of Washington, and I’ve never seen one yet that wasn’t anxious to believe that a private detective is a double-crossing specialist who goes around with a cold deck in one pocket, a complete forger’s outfit in another, and who counts that day lost in which he railroads no innocent to the hoosegow.

Eleven

“There was once a young doctor in a town a long way from here,” Ledwich began. “He got mixed up in a scandal – a pretty rotten one – and escaped the pen only by the skin of his teeth. The state medical board revoked his license.

“In a large city not far away, this young doc, one night when he was drunk – as he usually was in those days -told his troubles to a man he had met in a dive. The friend was a resourceful sort; and he offered, for a price, to fix the doc up with a fake diploma, so he could set up in practice in some other state.

“The young doctor took him up, and the friend got the diploma for him. The doc was the man you know as Dr. Estep, and I was the friend. The real Dr. Estep was found dead in the park this morning!”

That was news – if true!

“You see,” the big man went on, “when I offered to get the phoney diploma for the young doc – whose real name doesn’t matter – I had in mind a forged one. Nowadays they’re easy to get – there’s a regular business in them – but twenty-five years ago, while you could manage it, they were hard to get. While I was trying to get one, I ran across a woman I used to work with – Edna Fife. That’s the woman you know as the first Mrs. Estep.

“Edna had married a doctor – the real Dr. Humbert Estep. He was a hell of a doctor, though; and after starving with him in Philadelphia for a couple of years, she made him close up his office, and she went back to the bunko game, taking him with her. She was good at it, I’m telling you – a real cleaner – and, keeping him under her thumb all the time, she made him a pretty good worker himself.

“It was shortly after that that I met her, and when she told me all this, I offered to buy her husband’s medical diploma and other credentials. I don’t know whether he wanted to sell them or not – but he did what she told him, and I got the papers.

“I turned them over to the young doc, who came to San Francisco and opened an office under the name of Humbert Estep. The real Esteps promised not to use that name any more – not much of an inconvenience for them, as they changed names every time they changed addresses.

“I kept in touch with the young doctor, of course, getting my regular rake-off from him. I had him by the neck, and I wasn’t foolish enough to pass up any easy money. After a year or so, I learned that he had pulled himself together and was making good. So I jumped on a train and came to San Francisco. He was doing fine; so I camped here, where I could keep my eye on him and watch out for my own interests.

“He got married about then, and, between his practice and his investments, he began to accumulate a roll. But he tightened up on me – damn him! He wouldn’t be bled. I got a regular percentage of what he made, and that was all.

“For nearly twenty-five years I got it – but not a nickel over the percentage. He knew I wouldn’t kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, so no matter how much I threatened to expose him, he sat tight, and I couldn’t budge him. I got my regular cut, and not a nickel more.

“That went along, as I say, for years. I was getting a living out of him, but I wasn’t getting any big money. A few months ago I learned that he had cleaned up heavily in a lumber deal so I made up my mind to take him for what he had.

“During all these years I had got to know the doc pretty well. You do when you’re bleeding a man – you get a pretty fair idea of what goes on in his head, and what he’s most likely to do if certain things should happen. So I knew the doc pretty well.

“I knew, for instance, that he had never told his wife the truth about his past; that he had stalled her with some lie about being born in West Virginia. That was fine – for me! Then I knew that he kept a gun in his desk, and I knew why. It was kept there for the purpose of killing himself if the truth ever came out about his diploma. He figured that if, at the first hint of exposure, he wiped himself out, the authorities, out of respect for the good reputation he had built up, would hush things up.

“And his wife – even if she herself learned the truth – would be spared the shame of a public scandal. I can’t see myself dying just to spare some woman’s feelings, but the doc was a funny guy in some ways – and he was nutty about his wife.

“That’s the way I had him figured out, and that’s the way things turned out.

“My plan might sound complicated, but it was simple enough. I got hold of the real Esteps – it took a lot of hunting, but I found them at last. I brought the woman to San Francisco, and told the man to stay away.

“Everything would have gone fine if he had done what I told him; but he was afraid that Edna and I were going to double-cross him, so he came here to keep an eye on us. But I didn’t know that until you put the finger on him for me.

“I brought Edna here and, without telling her any more than she had to know, drilled her until she was letter-perfect in her part.

“A couple days before she came I had gone to see the doc, and had demanded a hundred thousand cool smacks. He laughed at me, and I left, pretending to be as hot as hell.

“As soon as Edna arrived, I sent her to call on him. She asked him to perform an illegal operation on her daughter. He, of course, refused. Then she pleaded with him, loud enough for the nurse or whoever else was in the reception room to hear. And when she raised her voice she was careful to stick to words that could be interpreted the way we wanted them to. She ran off her end to perfection, leaving in tears.

“Then I sprung my other trick! I had a fellow – a fellow who’s a whiz at that kind of stuff – make me a plate: an imitation of newspaper printing. It was all worded like the real article, and said that the state authorities were investigating information that a prominent surgeon in San Francisco was practicing under a license secured by false credentials. This plate measured four and an eighth by six and three-quarter inches. If you’ll look at the first inside page of the Evening Times any day in the week you’ll see a photograph just that size.

“On the day after Edna’s call, I bought a copy of the first edition of the Times – on the street at ten in the morning. I had this scratcher friend of mine remove the photograph with acid, and print this fake article in its place.

“That evening I substituted a ‘home edition’ outer sheet for the one that had come with the paper we had cooked up, and made a switch as soon as the doc’s newsboy made his delivery. There was nothing to that part of it. The kid just tossed the paper into the vestibule. It’s simply a case of duck into the doorway, trade papers, and go on, leaving the loaded one for the doc to read.”

I was trying not to look too interested, but my ears were cocked for every word. At the start, I had been prepared for a string of lies. But I knew now that he was telling me the truth! Every syllable was a boast; he was half-drunk with appreciation of his own cleverness – the cleverness with which he had planned and carried out his program of treachery and murder.

I knew that he was telling the truth, and I suspected that he was telling more of it than he had intended. He was fairly bloated with vanity – the vanity that fills the crook almost invariably after a little success, and makes him ripe for the pen.

His eyes glistened, and his little mouth smiled triumphantly around the words that continued to roll out of it.

“The doc read the paper, all right – and shot himself. But first he wrote and mailed a note – to me. I didn’t figure on his wife’s being accused of killing him. That was plain luck.

“I figured that the fake piece in the paper would be overlooked in the excitement. Edna would then go forward, claiming to be his first wife; and his shooting himself after her first call, with what the nurse had overheard, would make his death seem a confession that Edna was his wife.

“I was sure that she would stand up under any sort of an investigation. Nobody knew anything about the doc’s real past; except what he had told them, which would be found false.

“Edna had really married a Dr. Humbert Estep in Philadelphia in 1896; and the twenty-seven years that had passed since then would do a lot to hide the fact that that Dr. Humbert Estep wasn’t this Dr. Humbert Estep.

“All I wanted to do was convince the doc’s real wife and her lawyers that she wasn’t really his wife at all. And we did that! Everybody took it for granted that Edna was the legal wife.

“The next play would have been for Edna and the real wife to have reached some sort of an agreement about the estate, whereby Edna would have got the bulk – or at least half – of it; and nothing would have been made public.

“If worse came to worst, we were prepared to go to court. We were sitting pretty! But I’d have been satisfied with half the estate. It would have come to a few hundred thousand at the least, and that would have been plenty for me – even deducting the twenty thousand I had promised Edna.

“But when the police grabbed the doc’s wife and charged her with his murder, I saw my way into the whole roll. All I had to do was sit tight and wait until they convicted her. Then the court would turn the entire pile over to Edna.

“I had the only evidence that would free the doc’s wife: the note he had written me. But I couldn’t – even if I had wanted to – have turned it in without exposing my hand. When he read that fake piece in the paper, he tore it out, wrote his message to me across the face of it, and sent it to me. So the note is a dead give-away. However, I didn’t have any intention of publishing it, anyhow.

“Up to this point everything had gone like a dream. All I had to do was wait until it was time to cash in on my brains. And that’s the time that the real Humbert Estep picked out to mess up the works.

“He shaved his moustache off, put on some old clothes, and came snooping around to see that Edna and I didn’t run out on him. As if he could have stopped us! After you put the finger on him for me, I brought him up here.

“I intended salving him along until I could find a place to keep him until all the cards had been played. That’s what I was going to hire you for – to take care of him.

“But we got to talking, and wrangling, and I had to knock him down. He didn’t get up, and I found that he was dead. His neck was broken. There was nothing to do but take him out to the park and leave him.

“I didn’t tell Edna. She didn’t have a lot of use for him, as far as I could see, but you can’t tell how women will take things. Anyhow, she’ll stick, now that it’s done. She’s on the up and up all the time. And if she should talk, she can’t do a lot of damage. She only knows her own part of the lay.

“All this long-winded story is so you’ll know just exactly what you’re up against. Maybe you think you can dig up the proof of these things I have told you. You can this far. You can prove that Edna wasn’t the doc’s wife. You can prove that I’ve been blackmailing him. But you can’t prove that the doc’s wife didn’t believe that Edna was his real wife! It’s her word against Edna’s and mine.

“We’ll swear that we had convinced her of it, which will give her a motive. You can’t prove that the phoney news article I told you about ever existed. It’ll sound like a hophead’s dream to a jury.

“You can’t tie last night’s murder on me – I’ve got an alibi that will knock your hat off! I can prove that I left here with a friend of mine who was drunk, and that I took him to his hotel and put him to bed, with the help of a night clerk and a bellboy. And what have you got against that? The word of two private detectives. Who’ll believe you?

“You can convict me of conspiracy to defraud, or something – maybe. But, regardless of that, you can’t free Mrs. Estep without my help.

“Turn me loose and I’ll give you the letter the doc wrote me. It’s the goods, right enough! In his own handwriting, written across the face of the fake newspaper story – which ought to fit the torn place in the paper that the police are supposed to be holding – and he wrote that he was going to kill himself, in words almost that plain.”

That would turn the trick – there was no doubt of it. And I believed Ledwich’s story. The more I thought it over the better I liked it. It fitted into the facts everywhere. But I wasn’t enthusiastic about giving this big crook his liberty.

“Don’t make me laugh!” I said. “I’m going to put you away and free Mrs, Estep – both.”

“Go ahead and try it! You’re up against it without the letter; and you don’t think a man with brains enough to plan a job like this one would be foolish enough to leave the note where it could be found, do you?”

I wasn’t especially impressed with the difficulty of convicting this Ledwich and freeing the dead man’s widow. His scheme – that cold-blooded zigzag of treachery for everybody he had dealt with, including his latest accomplice, Edna Estep – wasn’t as air-tight as he thought it. A week in which to run out a few lines in the East, and – But a week was just what I didn’t have!

Vance Richmond’s words were running through my head: “But another day of imprisonment – two days, or perhaps even two hours – and she won’t need anybody to clear her. Death will have done it!”

If I was going to do Mrs. Estep any good, I had to move quick. Law or no law, her life was in my fat hands. This man before me – his eyes bright and hopeful now and his mouth anxiously pursed – was thief, blackmailer, double-crosser, and at least twice a murderer. I hated to let him walk out. But there was the woman dying in a hospital…

Twelve

Keeping my eye on Ledwich, I went to the telephone, and got Vance Richmond on the wire at his residence.

“How is Mrs. Estep?” I asked.

“Weaker! I talked with the doctor half an hour ago, and he says -“

I cut in on him; I didn’t want to listen to the details.

“Get over to the hospital, and be where I can reach you by phone. I may have news for you before the night is over.”

“What – is there a chance? Are you -“

I didn’t promise him anything. I hung up the receiver and spoke to Ledwich. “I’ll do this much for you. Slip me the note, and I’ll give you your gun and put you out the back door. There’s a bull on the corner out front, and I can’t take you past him.”

He was on his feet, beaming.

“Your word on it?” he demanded.

“Yes – get going!”

He went past me to the phone, gave a number (which I made a note of), and then spoke hurriedly into the instrument.

“This is Shuler. Put a boy in a taxi with that envelope I gave you to hold for me, and send him out here right away.”

He gave his address, said “Yes” twice, and hung up.

There was nothing surprising about his unquestioning acceptance of my word. He couldn’t afford to doubt that I’d play fair with him. And, also, all successful bunko men come in time to believe that the world – except for themselves – is populated by a race of human sheep who may be trusted to conduct themselves with true sheeplike docility.

Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. We answered it together, and Ledwich took a large envelope from a messenger boy, while I memorised the number on the boy’s cap. Then we went back to the front room.

Ledwich slit the envelope and passed its contents to me: a piece of rough-torn newspaper. Across the face of the fake article he had told me about was written a message in a jerky hand.

I wouldn’t have suspected you, Ledwich, of such profound stupidity. My last thought will be – this bullet that ends my life also ends your years of leisure. You’ll have to go to work now.

Estep.

The doctor had died game!

I took the envelope from the big man, put the death note in it, and put them in my pocket. Then I went to a front window, flattening a cheek against the glass until I could see O’Gar, dimly outlined in the night, patiently standing where I had left him hours before.

“The city dick is still on the corner,” I told Ledwich. “Here’s your gat” – holding out the gun I had shot from his fingers a little while back – “take it, and blow through the back door. Remember, that’s all I’m offering you – the gun and a fair start. If you play square with me, I’ll not do anything to help find you – unless I have to keep myself in the clear.”

“Fair enough!”

He grabbed the gun, broke it to see that it was still loaded, and wheeled toward the rear of the flat. At the door he pulled up, hesitated, and faced me again. I kept him covered with my automatic.

“Will you do me one favour I didn’t put in the bargain?” he asked.

“What is it?”

“That note of the doc’s is in an envelope with my handwriting and maybe my fingerprints on it. Let me put it in a fresh envelope, will you? I don’t want to leave any broader trail behind than I have to.”

With my left hand – my right being busy with the gun -I fumbled for the envelope and tossed it to him. He took a plain envelope from the table, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief, put the note in it, taking care not to touch it with the balls of his fingers, and passed it back to me; and I put it in my pocket.

I had a hard time to keep from grinning in his face.

That fumbling with the handkerchief told me that the envelope in my pocket was empty, that the death note was in Ledwich’s possession – though I hadn’t seen it pass there. He had worked one of his bunko tricks upon me.

“Beat it!” I snapped, to keep from laughing in his face.

He spun on his heel. His feet pounded against the floor. A door slammed in the rear.

I tore into the envelope he had given me. I needed to be sure he had double-crossed me.

The envelope was empty.

Our agreement was wiped out.

I sprang to the front window, threw it wide open, and leaned out. O’Gar saw me immediately – clearer than I could see him. I swung my arm in a wide gesture toward the rear of the house. O’Gar set out for the alley on the run. I dashed back through Ledwich’s flat to the kitchen, and stuck my head out of an already open window.

I could see Ledwich against the white-washed fence – throwing the back gate open, plunging through it into the alley.

O’Gar’s squat bulk appeared under a light at the end of the alley.

Ledwich’s revolver was in his hand. O’Gar’s wasn’t – not quite.

Ledwich’s gun swung up – the hammer clicked.

O’Gar’s gun coughed fire.

Ledwich fell with a slow, revolving motion over against the white fence, gasped once or twice, and went down in a pile.

I walked slowly down the stairs to join O’Gar; slowly, because it isn’t a nice thing to look at a man you’ve deliberately sent to his death. Not even if it’s the surest way of saving an innocent life, and if the man who dies is a Jake Ledwich – altogether treacherous.

“How come?” O’Gar asked, when I came into the alley, where he stood looking down at the dead man.

“He got out on me,” I said simply.

“He must’ve.”

I stooped and searched the dead man’s pockets until I found the suicide note, still crumpled in the handkerchief. O’Gar was examining the dead man’s revolver.

“Lookit!” he exclaimed. “Maybe this ain’t my lucky day! He snapped at me once, and his gun missed fire. No wonder! Somebody must’ve been using an ax on it – the firing pin’s broke clean off!”

“Is that so?” I asked; just as if I hadn’t discovered, when I first picked the revolver up, that the bullet which had knocked it out of Ledwich’s hand had made it harmless.

THE ASSISTANT MURDERER

Gold on the door, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.

The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handdom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk’s scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor’s feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold.

An ugly office – the proprietor was uglier.

His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat.

These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features.

One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked. Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its colour. Veins had broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes – small, deep-set, and pale blue of iris – were bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.

A man of forty-something, ugly, sitting tilted back in his chair, feet on desk.

The gilt-labelled door opened and another man came into the office. Perhaps ten years younger than the man at the desk, he was, roughly speaking, everything that one was not. Fairly tall, slender, fair-skinned, brown-eyed, he would have been as little likely to catch your eye in a gambling-house as in an art gallery. His clothes – suit and hat were gray – were fresh and properly pressed, and even fashionable in that inconspicuous manner which is one sort of taste. His face was likewise unobtrusive, which was surprising when you considered how narrowly it missed handsomeness through the least meagreness of mouth – a mark of the too-cautious man.

Two steps into the office he hesitated, brown eyes glancing from shabby furnishings to ill-visaged proprietor. So much ugliness seemed to disconcert the man in gray. An apologetic smile began on his lips, as if he were about to murmur, “I beg your pardon, I’m in the wrong office.”

But when he finally spoke it was otherwise. He took another step forward, asking uncertainly:

“You are Mr. Rush?”

“Yeah.” The detective’s voice was hoarse with a choking harshness that seemed to corroborate the heavy-cold testimony of his eyes. He put his feet down on the floor and jerked a fat, red hand at a chair. “Sit down, sir.”

The man in gray sat down, tentatively upright on the chair’s front edge.

“Now what can I do for you?” Alec Rush croaked amiably.

“I wan t- I wish – I would like -“ and further than that the man in gray said nothing.

“Maybe you’d better just tell me what’s wrong,” the detective suggested. “Then I’ll know what you want of me.” He smiled.

There was kindliness in Alec Rush’s smile, and it was not easily resisted. True, his smile was a horrible grimace out of a nightmare, but that was its charm. When your gentle-countenanced man smiles there is small gain: his smile expresses little more than his reposed face. But when Alec Rush distorted his ogre’s mask so that jovial friendliness peeped incongruously from his savage red eyes, from his brutal metal-studded mouth – then that was a heartening, a winning thing.

“Yes, I daresay that would be better.” The man in gray sat back in his chair, more comfortably, less transiently. “Yesterday on Fayette Street, I met – a young woman I know. I hadn’t – we hadn’t met for several months. That isn’t really pertinent, however. But after we separated – we had talked for a few minutes – I saw a man. That is, he came out of a doorway and went down the street in the same direction she had taken, and I got the idea he was following her. She turned into Liberty Street and he did likewise. Countless people walk along that same route, and the idea that he was following her seemed fantastic, so much so that I dismissed it and went on about my business.

“But I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. It seemed to me there had been something peculiarly intent in his carriage, and no matter how much I told myself the notion was absurd, it persisted in worrying me. So last night, having nothing especial to do, I drove out to the neighbourhood of – of the young woman’s house. And I saw the same man again. He was standing on a corner two blocks from her house. It was the same man – I’m certain of it. I tried to watch him, but while I was finding a place for my car he disappeared and I did not see him again. Those are the circumstances. Now will you look into it, learn if he is actually following her, and why?”

“Sure,” the detective agreed hoarsely, “but didn’t you say anything to the lady or to any of her family?”

The man in gray fidgeted in his chair and looked at the stringy dun carpet.

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don’t. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and – and – well – I don’t – That’s impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all.”

“Maybe, but, mind you, I’m not saying I will. I’d want to know more first.”

“More? You mean more -“

“More about you and her.”

“But there is nothing about us!” the man in gray protested. “It is exactly as I have told you. I might add that the young woman is – is married, and that until yesterday I had not seen her since her marriage.”

“Then your interest in her is -?” The detective let the husky interrogation hang incompleted in the air.

“Of friendship – past friendship.”

“Yeah. Now who is this young woman?”

The man in gray fidgeted again.

“See here, Rush,” he said, colouring, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you, and shall, of course, but I don’t want to tell you unless you are going to handle this thing for me. I mean I don’t want to be bringing her name into it if – if you aren’t. Will you?”

Alec Rush scratched his grizzled head with a stubby forefinger.

“I don’t know,” he growled. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I can’t take a hold of a job that might be anything. I’ve got to know that you’re on the up-and-up.”

Puzzlement disturbed the clarity of the younger man’s brown eyes.

“But I didn’t think you’d be -“ he broke off and looked away from the ugly man.

“Of course you didn’t.” A chuckle rasped in the detective’s burly throat, the chuckle of a man touched in a once-sore spot that is no longer tender. He raised a big hand to arrest his prospective client in the act of rising from his chair. “What you did, on a guess, was to go to one of the big agencies and tell ‘em your story. They wouldn’t touch it unless you cleared up the fishy points. Then you ran across my name, remembered I was chucked out of the department a couple of years ago. ‘There’s my man,’ you said to yourself, ‘a baby who won’t be so choicy!’”

The man in gray protested with head and gesture and voice that this was not so. But his eyes were sheepish.

Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, “No matter. I ain’t sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I’ll take your job. It sounds phoney, but maybe it ain’t. It’ll cost you fifteen a day and expenses.”

“I can see that it sounds peculiar,” the younger man assured the detective, “but you’ll find that it’s quite all right. You’ll want a retainer, of course.”

“Yes, say fifty.”

The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.

“Your name?” he asked.

“I would rather not. I’m not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?”

Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.

“Now! Now!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “How am I going to do business with a man like you?”

The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.

“It’s in your favour, maybe,” the detective admitted as he surrendered, “though it ain’t to your credit. But if you were off-colour I guess you’d have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman – who is she?”

“Mrs. Hubert Landow.”

“Well, well, we’ve got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?”

“On Charles-Street Avenue,” the man in gray said, and gave a number.

“Her description?”

“She is twenty-two or -three years old, rather tall, slender in an athletic way, with auburn hair, blue eyes, and very white skin.”

“And her husband? You know him?”

“I have seen him. He is about my age – thirty -but larger than I, a tall, broad-shouldered man of the clean-cut blond type.”

“And your mystery man? What does he look like?”

“He’s quite young, not more than twenty-two at the most, and not very large – medium size, perhaps, or a little under. He’s very dark, with high cheek-bones and a large nose. High, straight shoulders, too, but not broad. He walks with small, almost mincing, steps.”

“Clothes?”

“He was wearing a brown suit and a tan cap when I saw him on Fayette Street yesterday afternoon. I suppose he wore the same last night, but I’m not positive.”

“I suppose you’ll drop in here for my reports,” the detective wound up, “since I won’t know where to send them to you?”

“Yes.” The man in gray stood up and held out his hand. “I’m very grateful to you for undertaking this, Mr. Rush.”

Alec Rush said that was all right. They shook hands, and the man in gray went out.

The ugly man waited until his client had had time to turn off into the corridor that led to the elevators. Then the detective said, “Now, Mr. Man!” got up from his chair, took his hat from the clothes-tree in the corner, locked his office door behind him, and ran down the back stairs.

He ran with the deceptive heavy agility of a bear. There was something bearlike, too, in the looseness with which his blue suit hung on his stout body, and in the set of his heavy shoulders – sloping, limber-jointed shoulders whose droop concealed much of their bulk.

He gained the ground floor in time to see the gray back of his client issuing into the street. In his wake Alec Rush sauntered. Two blocks, a turn to the left, another block, and a turn to the right. The man in gray went into the office of a trust company that occupied the ground floor of a large office building.

The rest was the mere turning of a hand. Half a dollar to a porter: the man in gray was Ralph Millar, assistant cashier.

Darkness was settling in Charles-Street Avenue when Alec Rush, in a modest black coupe, drove past the address Ralph Millar had given him. The house was large in the dusk, spaced from its fellows as from the paving by moderate expanses of fenced lawn.

Alec Rush drove on, turned to the left at the first crossing, again to the left at the next, and at the next. For half an hour he guided his car along a many-angled turning and returning route until, when finally he stopped beside the curb at some distance from, but within sight of, the Landow house, he had driven through every piece of thoroughfare in the vicinity of that house.

He had not seen Millar’s dark, high-shouldered young man.

Lights burned brightly in Charles-Street Avenue, and the night traffic began to purr southward into the city. Alec Rush’s heavy body slumped against the wheel of his coupe while he filled its interior with pungent fog from a black cigar, and held patient, bloodshot eyes on what he could see of the Landow residence.

Three-quarters of an hour passed, and there was motion in the house. A limousine left the garage in the rear for the front door. A man and a woman, faintly distinguishable at that distance, left the house for the limousine. The limousine moved out into the cityward current. The third car behind it was Alec Rush’s modest coupe.

Except for a perilous moment at North Avenue, when the interfering cross-stream of traffic threatened to separate him from his quarry, Alec Rush followed the limousine without difficulty. In front of a Howard Street theatre it discharged its freight: a youngish man and a young woman, both tall, evening-clad, and assuringly in agreement with the descriptions the detective had got from his client.

The Landows went into the already dark theatre while Alec Rush was buying his ticket. In the light of the first intermission he discovered them again. Leaving his seat for the rear of the auditorium, he found an angle from which he could study them for the remaining five minutes of illumination.

Hubert Landow’s head was rather small for his stature, and the blond hair with which it was covered threatened each moment to escape from its imposed smoothness into crisp curls. His face, healthily ruddy, was handsome in a muscular, very masculine way, not indicative of any great mental nimbleness. His wife had that beauty which needs no cataloguing. However, her hair was auburn, her eyes blue, her skin white, and she looked a year or two older than the maximum twenty-three Millar had allowed her.

While the intermission lasted Hubert Landow talked to his wife eagerly, and his bright eyes were the eyes of a lover. Alec Rush could not see Mrs. Landow’s eyes. He saw her replying now and again to her husband’s words. Her profile showed no answering eagerness. She did not show she was bored.

Midway through the last act, Alec Rush left the theatre to maneuver his coupe into a handy position from which to cover the Landows’ departure. But their limousine did not pick them up when they left the theatre. They turned down Howard Street afoot, going to a rather garish second-class restaurant, where an abbreviated orchestra succeeded by main strength in concealing its smallness from the ear.

His coupe conveniently parked, Alec Rush found a table from which he could watch his subjects without being himself noticeable. Husband still wooed wife with incessant, eager talking. Wife was listless, polite, unkindled. Neither more than touched the food before them. They danced once, the woman’s face as little touched by immediate interest as when she listened to her husband’s words. A beautiful face, but empty.

The minute hand of Alec Rush’s nickel-plated watch had scarcely begun its last climb of the day from where ‘VI’ is inferred to ‘XII’ when the Landows left the restaurant. The limousine – against its side a young Norfolk-jacketed Negro smoking – was two doors away. It bore them back to their house. The detective having seen them into the house, having seen the limousine into the garage, drove his coupe again around and around through the neighbouring thoroughfares. And saw nothing of Millar’s dark young man.

Then Alec Rush went home and to bed.

At eight o’clock the next morning ugly man and modest coupe were stationary in Charles-Street Avenue again. Male Charles-Street Avenue went with the sun on its left toward its offices. As the morning aged and the shadows grew shorter and thicker, so, generally, did the individuals who composed this morning procession. Eight o’clock was frequently young and slender and brisk, Eight-thirty less so, Nine still less, and rear-guard Ten o’clock was preponderantly neither young nor slender, and more often sluggish than brisk.

Into this rear guard, though physically he belonged to no later period than eight-thirty, a blue roadster carried Hubert Landow. His broad shoulders were blue-coated, his blond hair gray-capped, and he was alone in the roadster. With a glance around to make sure Millar’s dark young man was not in sight, Alec Rush turned his coupe in the blue car’s wake.

They rode swiftly into the city, down into its financial centre, where Hubert Landow deserted his roadster before a Redwood Street stockbroker’s office. The morning had become noon before Landow was in the street again, turning his roadster northward.

When shadowed and shadower came to rest again they were in Mount Royal Avenue. Landow got out of his car and strode briskly into a large apartment building. A block distant, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar and sat still in his coupe. Half an hour passed. Alec Rush turned his head and sank his gold teeth deep into his cigar.

Scarcely twenty feet behind the coupe, in the doorway of a garage, a dark young man with high cheek-bones, high, straight shoulders, loitered. His nose was large. His suit was brown, as were the eyes with which he seemed to pay no especial attention to anything through the thin blue drift of smoke from the tip of a drooping cigarette.

Alec Rush took his cigar from his mouth to examine it, took a knife from his pocket to trim the bitten end, restored cigar to mouth and knife to pocket, and thereafter was as indifferent to all Mount Royal Avenue as the dark youth behind him. The one drowsed in his doorway. The other dozed in his car. And the afternoon crawled past one o’clock, past one-thirty.

Hubert Landow came out of the apartment building, vanished swiftly in his blue roadster. His going stirred neither of the motionless men, scarcely their eyes. Not until another fifteen minutes had gone did either of them move.

Then the dark youth left his doorway. He moved without haste, up the street, with short, almost mincing, steps. The back of Alec Rush’s black-derbied head was to the youth when he passed the coupe, which may have been chance, for none could have said that the ugly man had so much as glanced at the other since his first sight of him. The dark young man let his eyes rest on the detective’s back without interest as he passed. He went on up the street toward the apartment building Landow had visited, up its steps, and out of sight into it.

When the dark young man had disappeared, Alec Rush threw away his cigar, stretched, yawned, and awakened the coupe’s engine. Four blocks and two turnings from Mount Royal Avenue, he got out of the automobile, leaving it locked and empty in front of a graystone church. He walked back to Mount Royal Avenue, to halt on a corner two blocks above his earlier position.

He had another half-hour of waiting before the dark young man appeared. Alec Rush was buying a cigar in a glass-fronted cigar store when the other passed. The young man boarded a street car at North Avenue and found a seat. The detective boarded the same car at the next corner and stood on the rear platform. Warned by an indicative forward hitching of the young man’s shoulders and head, Alec Rush was the first passenger off the car at Madison Avenue, and the first aboard a southbound car there. And again, he was off first at Franklin Street.

The dark youth went straight to a rooming-house in this street, while the detective came to rest beside the window of a corner drug store specialising in theatrical make-up. There he loafed until half-past three. When the dark young man came into the street again it was to walk – Alec Rush behind him – to Eutaw Street, board a car, and ride to Camden Station.

There, in the waiting-room, the dark young man met a young woman who frowned and asked:

“Where in the hell have you been at?”

Passing them, the detective heard the petulant greeting, but the young man’s reply was pitched too low for him to catch, nor did he hear anything else the young woman said. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, standing together in a deserted end of the waiting-room, so that Alec Rush could not have approached them without making himself conspicuous.

The young woman seemed to be impatient, urgent. The young man seemed to explain, to reassure. Now and then he gestured with the ugly, deft hands of a skilled mechanic. His companion became more agreeable. She was short, square, as if carved economically from a cube. Consistently, her nose also was short and her chin square. She had, on the whole, now that her earlier displeasure was passing, a merry face, a pert, pugnacious, rich-blooded face that advertised inexhaustible vitality. That advertisement was in every feature, from the live ends of her cut brown hair to the earth-gripping pose of her feet on the cement flooring. Her clothes were dark, quiet, expensive, but none too gracefully worn, hanging just the least bit bunchily here and there on her sturdy body.

Nodding vigorously several times, the young man at length tapped his cap-visor with two careless fingers and went out into the street. Alec Rush let him depart unshadowed. But when, walking slowly out to the iron train-shed gates, along them to the baggage window, thence to the street door, the young woman passed out of the station, the ugly man was behind her. He was still behind her when she joined the four o’clock shopping crowd at Lexington Street.

The young woman shopped with the whole-hearted air of one with nothing else on her mind. In the second department store she visited, Alec Rush left her looking at a display of laces while he moved as swiftly and directly as intervening shoppers would permit toward a tall, thick-shouldered, gray-haired woman in black, who seemed to be waiting for someone near the foot of a flight of stairs.

“Hello, Alec!” she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. “What are you doing in my territory?”

“Got a booster for you,” he mumbled. “The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?”

The store detective looked and nodded.

“Yes. Thanks, Alec. You’re sure she’s boosting, of course?”

“Now, Minnie!” he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. “Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it’s more than likely she’s got herself some lace by now.”

“Um-hmm,” said Minnie. “Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I’ll be with her.”

Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective’s arm again.

“I want a line on her,” he said. “What do you say we tail her around and see what she’s up to before we knock her over?”

“If it doesn’t take all day,” the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.

Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.

“Take a plant on the joint while I get a copper,” Alex Rush ordered.

When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.

“Second floor,” she said.

Behind her the house’s street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, “What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I’ll have you understand, and I -“

“Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here,” Alec Rush croaked. “Second floor. Take us up.”

The woman’s scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective’s voice for the harshness of great emotion.

“Why – why -“ she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management -n ever to stand in the way of the police. “I’ll take you up,” she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.

Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the stairs.

“Who’s that?” a casually curt feminine voice asked.

“Landlady.”

The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, “This is her,” the policeman said, “You’ll have to come along,” and Minnie said, “Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you.”

“My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There’d be just as much sense to it if you’d all jumped out at me and yelled ‘Boo!’”

“This ain’t any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let’s go in where we can talk it over.”

Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshalling the others into the girl’s rooms.

“Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I’m easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you’re counting on me talking, too, you’d better smart me up.”

“Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl’s arm. “I’m at Goodbody’s.”

“You think I’ve been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”

“Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That’s what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.

The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.

“It’s all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody’s is hanging the rap on me – somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I’ve got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”

“You’ll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody’s going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”

“Got anything with a judge’s name on it that says you can?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t get a peep!”

Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.

“Who’s this?” he asked the girl.

“Try and find out!”

“I am trying,” he lied.

“You big bum!” said she. “You couldn’t find water in the ocean!”

Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.

Twilight was around the graystone church when the owner of the deserted coupe returned to it. The chunky girl – Polly Vanness was the name she had given – had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph’s subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.

Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupe so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curb-side spot within sight of the house.

The night went along and no one left or entered the Landow house.

Fingernails clicked on the coupe’s glass door.

A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective’s notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.

Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.

“Got a match?” the man asked.

The detective hesitated, said, “Yeah,” and held out a box.

A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large nose, high cheek-bones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.

But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.

“I thought it was you,” he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. “Maybe you don’t know me, but I knew you when you were on the force.”

The ex-detective sergeant gave no meaning at all to a husky “Yeah.”

“I thought it was you in the heap on Mount Royal this afternoon, but I couldn’t make sure,” the young man continued, entering the coupe, sitting beside the detective, closing the door. “Scuttle Zeipp’s me. I ain’t as well-known as Napoleon, so if you’ve never heard of me there’s no hard feelings.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the stuff! When you once think up a good answer, stick to it.” Scuttle Zeipp’s face was a sudden bronze mask in the glow of his cigarette. “The same answer’ll do for my next question. You’re interested in these here Landows? Yeah,” he added in hoarse mimicry of the detective’s voice.

Another inhalation lighted his face, and his words came smokily out as the glow faded.

“You ought to want to know what I’m doing hanging around ‘em. I ain’t tight. I’ll tell you. I’ve been slipped half a grand to bump off the girl – twice. How do you like that?”

“I hear you,” said Alec Rush. “But anybody can talk that knows the words.”

“Talk? Sure it’s talk,” Zeipp admitted cheerfully. “But so’s it talk when the judge says ‘hanged by the neck until dead and may God have mercy on your soul!’ Lots of things are talk, but that don’t always keep ‘em from being real.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, brother, yeah! Now listen to this: it’s one for the cuff. A certain party comes to me a couple of days ago with a knock-down from a party that knows me. See? This certain party asks me what I want to bump off a broad. I thought a grand would be right, and said so. Too stiff. We come together on five hundred. I got two-fifty down and get the rest when the Landow twist is cold. Not so bad for a soft trick – a slug through the side of a car – huh?”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” the detective asked. “You want to make it a fancy caper – kill her on her birthday or a legal holiday?”

Scuttle Zeipp smacked his lips and poked the detective’s chest with a finger in the dark.

“Not any, brother! I’m thinking way ahead of you! Listen to this: I pocket my two-fifty advance and come up here to give the ground a good casing, not wanting to lam into anything I didn’t know was here. While I’m poking around, I run into another party that’s poking around. This second party gives me a tumble, I talk smart, and bingo! First thing you know she’s propositioning me. What do you guess? She wants to know what I want to bump off a broad! Is it the same one she wants stopped? I hope to tell you it is!

“It ain’t so silly! I get my hands on another two hundred and fifty berries, with that much more coming when I put over the fast one. Now do you think I’m going to do anything to that Landow baby? You’re dumb if you do. She’s my meal ticket. If she lives till I pop her, she’ll be older than either you or the bay. I’ve got five hundred out of her so far. What’s the matter with sticking around and waiting for more customers that don’t like her? If two of ‘em want to buy her out of the world, why not more? The answer is ‘Yeah!’ And on top of that, here you are snooping around her. Now there it is, brother, for you to look at and taste and smell.”

Silence held for several minutes, in the darkness of the coupe’s interior, and then the detective’s harsh voice put a sceptical question:

“And who are these certain parties that want her out of the way?”

“Be yourself!” Scuttle Zeipp admonished him. “I’m laying down on ‘em, right enough, but I ain’t feeding ‘em to you.”

“What are you giving me all this for then?”

“What for? Because you’re in on the lay somewhere. Crossing each other, neither of us can make a thin dimmer. If we don’t hook up we’ll just ruin the racket for each other. I’ve already made half a grand off this Landow. That’s mine, but there’s more to be picked up by a couple of men that know what they’re doing. All right. I’m offering to throw in with you on a two-way cut of whatever else we can get. But my parties are out! I don’t mind throwing them down, but I ain’t rat enough to put the finger on them for you.”

Alec Rush grunted and croaked another dubious inquiry.

“How come you trust me so much, Scuttle?”

The hired killer laughed knowingly.

“Why not? You’re a right guy. You can see a profit when it’s showed to you. They didn’t chuck you off the force for forgetting to hang up your stocking. Besides, suppose you want to double-cross me, what can you do? You can’t prove anything. I told you I didn’t mean the woman any harm. I ain’t even packing a gun. But all that’s the bunk. You’re a wise head. You know what’s what. Me and you, Alec, we can get plenty!”

Silence again, until the detectives spoke slowly, thoughtfully.

“The first thing would be to get a line on the reasons your parties want the girl put out. Got anything on that?”

“Not a whisper.”

“Both of ‘em women, I take it.”

Scuttle Zeipp hesitated.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But don’t be asking me anything about ‘em. In the first place, I don’t know anything, and in the second, I wouldn’t tip their mitts if I did.”

“Yeah,” the detective croaked, as if he quite understood his companion’s perverted idea of loyalty. “Now if they’re women, the chances are the racket hangs on a man. What do you think of Landow? He’s a pretty lad.”

Scuttle Zeipp leaned over to put his finger against the detective’s chest again.

“You’ve got it, Alec! That could be it, damned if it couldn’t!”

“Yeah,” Alec Rush agreed, fumbling with the levers of his car. “We’ll get away from here and stay away until I look into him.”

At Franklin Street, half a block from the rooming-house into which he had shadowed the young man that afternoon, the detective stopped his coupe.

“You want to drop out here?” he asked.

Scuttle Zeipp looked sidewise, speculatively, into the elder man’s ugly face.

“It’ll do,” the young man said, “but you’re a damned good guesser, just the same.” He stopped with a hand on the door. “It’s a go, is it, Alec? Fifty-fifty?”

“I wouldn’t say so.” Alec Rush grinned at him with hideous good nature. “You’re not a bad lad, Scuttle, and if there’s any gravy you’ll get yours, but don’t count on me mobbing up with you.”

Zeipp’s eyes jerked to slits, his lips snarled back from yellow teeth that were set edge to edge.

“You sell me out, you damned gorilla, and I’ll -“ He laughed the threat out of being, his dark face young and careless again. “Have it your own way, Alec. I didn’t make no mistake when I throwed in with you. What you say goes.”

“Yeah,” the ugly man agreed. “Lay off that joint out there until I tell you. Maybe you’d better drop in to see me tomorrow. The phone book’ll tell you where my office is. So long, kid.”

“So long, Alec.”

In the morning Alec Rush set about investigating Hubert Landow. First he went to the City Hall, where he examined the gray books in which marriage licenses are indexed. Hubert Britman Landow and Sara Falsoner had been married six months before, he learned.

The bride’s maiden name thickened the red in the detective’s bloodshot eyes. Air hissed sharply from his flattened nostrils. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said to himself, so raspingly that a lawyer’s skinny clerk, fiddling with other records at his elbow, looked frightenedly at him and edged a little away.

From the City Hall, Alec Rush carried the bride’s name to two newspaper offices, where, after studying the files, he bought an armful of six-month-old papers. He took the papers to his office, spread them on his desk, and attacked them with a pair of shears. When the last one had been cut and thrown aside, there remained on his desk a thick sheaf of clippings.

Arranging his clippings in chronological order, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar, put his elbows on the desk, his ugly head between his palms, and began to read a story with which newspaper-reading Baltimore had been familiar half a year before.

Purged of irrelevancies and earlier digressions, the story was essentially this:

Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat in Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence in pleasure on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well-known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialise for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.

One Fanny Kidd, coming as was her custom at ten o’clock one morning to “do” Jerome Falsoner’s rooms, found him lying on his back in his living-room, staring with dead eyes at a spot on the ceiling, a bright spot that was reflected sunlight-reflected from the metal hilt of his paper-knife, which protruded from his chest.

Police investigation established four facts:

First, Jerome Falsoner had been dead for fourteen hours when Fanny Kidd found him, which placed his murder at about eight o’clock the previous evening.

Second, the last persons known to have seen him alive were a woman named Madeline Boudin, with whom he had been intimate, and three of her friends. They had seen him, alive, at some time between seven-thirty and eight o’clock, or less than half an hour before his death. They had been driving down to a cottage on the Severn River, and Madeline Boudin had told the others she wanted to see Falsoner before she went. The others had remained in their car while she rang the bell. Jerome Falsoner opened the street door and she went in. Ten minutes later she came out and rejoined her friends. Jerome Falsoner came to the door with her, waving a hand at one of the men in the car – a Frederick Stoner, who knew Falsoner slightly, and who was connected with the district attorney’s office. Two women, talking on the steps of a house across the street, had also seen Falsoner, and had seen Madeline Boudin and her friends drive away.

Third, Jerome Falsoner’s heir and only near relative was his niece, Sara Falsoner, who, by some vagary of chance, was marrying Hubert Landow at the very hour that Fanny Kidd was finding her employer’s dead body. Niece and uncle had seldom seen one another. The niece – for police suspicion settled on her for a short space – was definitely proved to have been at home, in her apartment in Carey Street, from six o’clock the evening of the murder until eight-thirty the next morning. Her husband, her fiancй then, had been there with her from six until eleven that evening. Prior to her marriage, the girl had been employed as stenographer by the same trust company that employed Ralph Millar.

Fourth, Jerome Falsoner, who had not the most even of dispositions, had quarrelled with an Icelander named Einar Jokumsson in a gambling-house two days before he was murdered. Jokumsson had threatened him. Jokumsson – a short, heavily built man, dark-haired, dark-eyed – had vanished from his hotel, leaving his bags there, the day the body was found, and had not been seen since.

The last of these clippings carefully read, Alec Rush rocked back in his chair and made a thoughtful monster’s face at the ceiling. Presently he leaned forward again to look into the telephone directory, and to call the number of Ralph Millar’s trust company. But when he got his number he changed his mind.

“Never mind,” he said into the instrument, and called a number that was Goodbody’s. Minnie, when she came to the telephone, told him that Polly Vanness had been identified as one Polly Bangs, arrested in Milwaukee two years ago for shoplifting, and given a two-year sentence. Minnie also said that Polly Bangs had been released on bail early that morning.

Alec Rush pushed back the telephone and looked through his clippings again until he found the address of Madeline Boudin, the woman who had visited Falsoner so soon before his death. It was a Madison Avenue number. Thither his coupe carried the detective.

No, Miss Boudin did not live there. Yes, she had lived there, but had moved four months ago. Perhaps Mrs. Blender, on the third floor, would know where she lived now. Mrs. Blender did not know. She knew Miss Boudin had moved to an apartment house in Garrison Avenue, but did not think she was living there now. At the Garrison Avenue house: Miss Boudin had moved away a month and a half ago – somewhere in Mount Royal Avenue, perhaps. The number was not known.

The coupe carried its ugly owner to Mount Royal Avenue, to the apartment building he had seen first Hubert Landow and then Scuttle Zeipp visit the previous day. At the manager’s office he made inquiries about a Walter Boyden, who was thought to live there. Walter Boyden was not known to the manager. There was a Miss Boudin in 604, but her name was B-o-u-d-i-n, and she lived alone.

Alec Rush left the building and got in his car again. He screwed up his savage red eyes, nodded his head in a satisfied way, and with one finger described a small circle in the air. Then he returned to his office.

Calling the trust company’s number again, he gave Ralph Millar’s name, and presently was speaking to the assistant cashier.

“This is Rush. Can you come up to the office right away?”

“What’s that? Certainly. But how – how -? Yes, I’ll be up in a minute.”

None of the surprise that had been in Millar’s telephone voice was apparent when he reached the detective’s office. He asked no questions concerning the detective’s knowledge of his identity. In brown today, he was as neatly inconspicuous as he had been yesterday in gray.

“Come in,” the ugly man welcomed him. “Sit down. I’ve got to have some more facts, Mr. Millar.”

Millar’s thin mouth tightened and his brows drew together with obstinate reticence.

“I thought we settled that point, Rush. I told you -“

Alec Rush frowned at his client with jovial, though frightful exasperation.

“I know what you told me,” he interrupted. “But that was then and this is now. The thing’s coming unwound on me, and I can see just enough to get myself tangled up if I don’t watch Harvey. I found your mysterious man, talked to him. He was following Mrs. Landow, right enough. According to the way he tells it, he’s been hired to kill her.”

Millar leaped from his chair to lean over the yellow desk, his face close to the detective’s.

“My God, Rush, what are you saying? To kill her?”

“Now, now! Take it easy. He’s not going to kill her. I don’t think he ever meant to. But he claims he was hired to do it.”

“You’ve arrested him? You’ve found the man who hired him?”

The detective squinted up his bloodshot eyes and studied the younger man’s passionate face.

“As a matter of fact,” he croaked calmly when he had finished his examination, “I haven’t done either of those things. She’s in no danger just now. Maybe the lad was stringing me, maybe he wasn’t, but either way he wouldn’t have spilled it to me if he meant to do anything. And when it comes right down to it, Mr. Millar, do you want him arrested?”

“Yes! That is -“ Millar stepped back from the desk, sagged limply down on the chair again, and put shaking hands over his face. “My God, Rush, I don’t know!” he gasped.

“Exactly,” said Alec Rush. “Now here it is. Mrs. Landow was Jerome Falsoner’s niece and heir. She worked for your trust company. She married Landow the morning her uncle was found dead. Yesterday Landow visited the building where Madeline Boudin lives. She was the last person known to have been in Falsoner’s rooms before he was killed. But her alibi seems to be as air-tight as the Landows’. The man who claims he was hired to kill Mrs. Landow also visited Madeline Boudin’s building yesterday. I saw him go in. I saw him meet another woman. A shoplifter, the second one. In her rooms I found a photograph of Hubert Landow. Your dark man claims he was hired twice to kill Mrs. Landow – by two women neither knowing the other had hired him. He won’t tell me who they are, but he doesn’t have to.”

The hoarse voice stopped and Alec Rush waited for Millar to speak. But Millar was for the time without a voice. His eyes were wide and despairingly empty. Alec Rush raised one big hand, folded it into a fist that was almost perfectly spherical, and thumped his desk softly.

“There it is, Mr. Millar,” he rasped. “A pretty tangle. If you’ll tell me what you know, we’ll get it straightened out, never fear. If you don’t – I’m out!”

Now Millar found words, however jumbled.

“You couldn’t, Rush! You can’t desert me – us – her! It’s not – You’re not -“

But Alec Rush shook his ugly pear-shaped head with slow emphasis.

“There’s murder in this and the Lord knows what all. I’ve got no liking for a blindfolded game. How do I know what you’re up to? You can tell me what you know – everything – or you can find yourself another detective. That’s flat.”

Ralph Millar’s fingers picked at each other, his teeth pulled at his lips, his harassed eyes pleaded with the detective.

“You can’t, Rush,” he begged. “She’s still in danger. Even if you are right about that man not attacking her, she’s not safe. The women who hired him can hire another. You’ve got to protect her, Rush.”

“Yeah? Then you’ve got to talk.”

“I’ve got to -? Yes, I’ll talk, Rush. I’ll tell you anything you ask. But there’s really nothing – or almost nothing -I know beyond what you’ve already learned.”

“She worked for your trust company?”

“Yes, in my department.”

“Left there to be married?”

“Yes. That is – No, Rush, the truth is she was discharged. It was an outrage, but -“

“When was this?”

“It was the day before the – before she was married.”

“Tell me about it.”

“She had – I’ll have to explain her situation to you first, Rush. She is an orphan. Her father, Ben Falsoner, had been wild in his youth – and perhaps not only in his youth – as I believe all the Falsoners have been. However, he had quarrelled with his father – old Howard Falsoner – and the old man had cut him out of the will. But not altogether out. The old man hoped Ben would mend his ways, and he didn’t mean to leave him with nothing in that event. Unfortunately he trusted it to his other son, Jerome.

“Old Howard Falsoner left a will whereby the income from his estate was to go to Jerome during Jerome’s life. Jerome was to provide for his brother, Ben, as he saw fit. That is, he had an absolutely free hand. He could divide the income equally with his brother, or he could give him a pittance, or he could give him nothing, as Ben’s conduct deserved. On Jerome’s death the estate was to be divided equally among the old man’s grandchildren.

“In theory, that was a fairly sensible arrangement, but not in practice – not in Jerome Falsoner’s hands. You didn’t know him? Well, he was the last man you’d ever trust with a thing of that sort. He exercised his power to the utmost. Ben Falsoner never got a cent from him. Three years ago Ben died, and so the girl, his only daughter, stepped into his position in relation to her grandfather’s money. Her mother was already dead. Jerome Falsoner never paid her a cent.