The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories that Inspired Great Crime

The Witness for the Prosecution AGATHA CHRISTIE

Original publication: Flynn’s, January 31, 1925, titled “Traitor’s Hands”; first collected under its ultimate, more familiar, title in The Hound of Death and Other Stories by Agatha Christie (London, Collins, 1933)

The most popular and beloved mystery writer who ever lived, Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie Mallowan (1890–1976) was also the most successful (she has reportedly sold more than 2.5 billion books).

Born in Devon to an English mother and an American who died when she was still a girl, she began writing some romantic short stories but turned to mysteries when she was fairly young. She had numerous rejections, finally selling her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, for $125 in 1920, a paltry sum even then, and her contract bound her to the publisher for four additional books. The book introduced Hercule Poirot, the eccentric Belgian detective who became the first of her famous detectives, the other being the spinster Miss Jane Marple.

Having fulfilled her obligation to her publisher, she moved to a different publishing house, William Collins, with what many believe to be her masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which became a bestseller.

It was in 1926 that she disappeared. Feared kidnapped or murdered, her absence made headlines, boosting her sales. She was perfectly safe, having checked into a hotel under the name of her husband’s mistress. She claimed she ran away because of stress; cynics claimed it was all a publicity stunt.

She wrote sixty-six novels and scores of short stories that were collected in fourteen volumes, as well as an autobiography (which never mentioned her disappearance) and numerous plays, most famously The Mousetrap, which opened in 1952 and continues in London’s West End as the longest-running stage play of all time — a fixture on the scene for tourists as significant as the Tower of London and British Museum; there have been more than twenty-seven thousand performances.

More than two dozen theatrical films have been based on Christie’s books, approximately seventy television adaptations, and numerous BBC radio programs. Of the twenty-nine stage plays that she wrote, the best is arguably The Witness for the Prosecution, which progressed from a short story to a play to a motion picture, with added surprises in each incarnation.

In the story, Leonard Vole has been arrested for the murder of Emily French, who had been so enamored of him, in spite of the fact that he was forty years younger, that she had turned over control of her finances to him. She was murdered soon after. Vole swears his innocence and is confident that Romaine, his wife, will provide him with an unassailable alibi: he was home much earlier than the time of the murder. Shockingly, she not only refuses to testify about the alibi but asserts her hatred of Vole and states that he came home with blood on his clothes. With his alibi shattered, Vole faces certain death when his attorney suddenly acquires a priceless piece of evidence that will acquit him. The surprise ending reveals that Vole did, in fact, commit the murder.

Christie was proud of the story but unhappy with the ending because she did not like that the villain got away with his crime, so she wrote a new ending when she adapted it for the stage. In the play, which opened in London on October 28, 1953, it turns out that Vole has a young mistress, with whom he plans to run away, leaving Romaine to face perjury charges. In a rage, Romaine grabs a knife and stabs Vole to death.

Title: Witness for the Prosecution, 1957

Studio: United Artists

Director: Billy Wilder

Screenwriters: Larry Marcus, Billy Wilder, Harry Kurnitz

Producer: Arthur Hornblow Jr.

• Tyrone Power (Leonard Vole)

• Marlene Dietrich (Christine Vole/Helm)

• Charles Laughton (Sir Wilfrid Robarts)

• Elsa Lanchester (Miss Plimsoll)

• John Williams (Mr. Brogan-Moore)

• Henry Daniell (Mr. Mayhew)

• Ian Wolfe (H. A. Carter)

The film version, quite close to the original story and play, adds several elements that I won’t reveal here — I’ve already given away too many spoilers. A remarkable cast, excellent direction, screenwriters wise enough to keep most of Dame Agatha’s work intact — all resulted in an outstanding film. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Charles Laughton for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Elsa Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress, and Billy Wilder for Best Director.

Other actors had been considered for the part of Vole before Tyrone Power was hired for the role, including William Holden, Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Jack Lemmon, and the unlikely Roger Moore. Marlene Dietrich may not have been the first choice to play Christine (Romaine in the story and play), as Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner had also been considered for the role — but, then, Gardner seems to have been the first choice to play every juicy role in the 1940s and 1950s.

Screenwriter Harry Kurnitz never worked with Billy Wilder again after this film, calling him “a fiend.” He said the director was an exhausting collaborator who was “actually two people: Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde.”

Marlene Dietrich was confident that she would be nominated for an Academy Award, even recording a new introduction to her Las Vegas show mentioning her nomination. She was crushed when she failed to be nominated. Her role as a woman deeply in love was enhanced by her real-life crush on Power, who was embarrassed by her advances. It has been reported that Charles Laughton also had a crush on Power.

After seeing the movie, Agatha Christie said it was the only film based on her work that she liked. Years later, she acknowledged that she also liked Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

#

There were several adaptations of Witness for the Prosecution made for television.

• 1949: BBC Television. It starred Dale Rogers as Leonard Vole, Mary Kerridge as Romaine Vole, and Derek Elphinstone as Sir Wilfrid Roberts W. C. It was directed by John Glyn-Johns and adapted by Sidney Budd.

• 1953: CBS Television. It starred Tom Drake as Leonard Vole, Andrea King as Romaine Vole, and Edward G. Robinson as Sir Wilfred Roberts Q. C. It was directed by Richard Goode and adapted by Anne Howard Bailey.

• 1982: Hallmark Television. It starred Beau Bridges as Leonard Vole, Dianna Rigg as Christine Vole, and Ralph Richardson as Sir Wilfred Roberts Q. C. It was directed by Alan Gibson and adapted from the film version by John Gay.

• 2016: BBC Television. It starred Billy Howle as Leonard Vole, Kim Cattrall as Emily French, and Andrea Riseborough as Romaine Vole. It was shown in two parts, on December 26 and 27.

THE WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION Agatha Christie

Mr. Mayherne adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat with a little dry-as-dust cough that was wholly typical of him. Then he looked again at the man opposite him, the man charged with wilful murder.

Mr. Mayherne was a small man precise in manner, neatly, not to say foppishly dressed, with a pair of very shrewd and piercing grey eyes. By no means a fool. Indeed, as a solicitor, Mr. Mayherne’s reputation stood very high. His voice, when he spoke to his client, was dry but not unsympathetic.

“I must impress upon you again that you are in very grave danger, and that the utmost frankness is necessary.”

Leonard Vole, who had been staring in a dazed fashion at the blank wall in front of him, transferred his glance to the solicitor.

“I know,” he said hopelessly. “You keep telling me so. But I can’t seem to realize yet that I’m charged with murder — murder. And such a dastardly crime too.”

Mr. Mayherne was practical, not emotional. He coughed again, took off his pince-nez, polished them carefully, and replaced them on his nose. Then he said:

“Yes, yes, yes. Now, my dear Mr. Vole, we’re going to make a determined effort to get you off — and we shall succeed — we shall succeed. But I must have all the facts. I must know just how damaging the case against you is likely to be. Then we can fix upon the best line of defence.”

Still the young man looked at him in the same dazed, hopeless fashion. To Mr. Mayherne the case had seemed black enough, and the guilt of the prisoner assured. Now, for the first time, he felt a doubt.

“You think I’m guilty,” said Leonard Vole, in a low voice. “But, by God, I swear I’m not! It looks pretty black against me, I know that. I’m like a man caught in a net — the meshes of it all round me, entangling me whichever way I turn. But I didn’t do it, Mr. Mayherne, I didn’t do it!”

In such a position a man was bound to protest his innocence. Mr. Mayherne knew that. Yet, in spite of himself, he was impressed. It might be, after all, that Leonard Vole was innocent.

“You are right, Mr. Vole,” he said gravely. “The case does look very black against you. Nevertheless, I accept your assurance. Now, let us get to facts. I want you to tell me in your own words exactly how you came to make the acquaintance of Miss Emily French.”

“It was one day in Oxford Street. I saw an elderly lady crossing the road. She was carrying a lot of parcels. In the middle of the street she dropped them, tried to recover them, found a bus was almost on top of her and just managed to reach the kerb safely, dazed and bewildered by people having shouted at her. I recovered the parcels, wiped the mud off them as best I could, retied the string of one, and returned them to her.”

“There was no question of your having saved her life?”

“Oh! dear me, no. All I did was to perform a common act of courtesy. She was extremely grateful, thanked me warmly, and said something about my manners not being those of most of the younger generation — I can’t remember the exact words. Then I lifted my hat and went on. I never expected to see her again. But life is full of coincidences. That very evening I came across her at a party at a friend’s house. She recognized me at once and asked that I should be introduced to her. I then found out that she was a Miss Emily French and that she lived at Cricklewood. I talked to her for some time. She was, I imagine, an old lady who took sudden violent fancies to people. She took one to me on the strength of a perfectly simple action which anyone might have performed. On leaving, she shook me warmly by the hand, and asked me to come and see her. I replied, of course, that I should be very pleased to do so, and she then urged me to name a day. I did not want particularly to go, but it would have seemed churlish to refuse, so I fixed on the following Saturday. After she had gone, I learned something about her from my friends. That she was rich, eccentric, lived alone with one maid, and owned no less than eight cats.”

“I see,” said Mr. Mayherne. “The question of her being well off came up as early as that?”

“If you mean that I inquired—” began Leonard Vole hotly, but Mr. Mayherne stilled him with a gesture.

“I have to look at the case as it will be presented by the other side. An ordinary observer would not have supposed Miss French to be a lady of means. She lived poorly, almost humbly. Unless you had been told the contrary, you would in all probability have considered her to be in poor circumstances — at any rate to begin with. Who was it exactly who told you that she was well off?”

“My friend, George Harvey, at whose house the party took place.”

“Is he likely to remember having done so?”

“I really don’t know. Of course it is some time ago now.”

“Quite so, Mr. Vole. You see, the first aim of the prosecution will be to establish that you were in low water financially — that is true, is it not?”

Leonard Vole flushed.

“Yes,” he said, in a low voice. “I’d been having a run of infernal bad luck just then.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Mayherne again. “That being, as I say, in low water financially, you met this rich old lady and cultivated her acquaintance assiduously. Now if we are in a position to say that you had no idea she was well off, and that you visited her out of pure kindness of heart—”

“Which is the case.”

“I dare say. I am not disputing the point. I am looking at it from the outside point of view. A great deal depends on the memory of Mr. Harvey. Is he likely to remember that conversation or is he not? Could he be confused by counsel into believing that it took place later?”

Leonard Vole reflected for some minutes. Then he said steadily enough, but with a rather paler face:

“I do not think that that line would be successful, Mr. Mayherne. Several of those present heard his remark, and one or two of them chaffed me about my conquest of a rich old lady.”

The solicitor endeavoured to hide his disappointment with a wave of the hand.

“Unfortunately,” he said. “But I congratulate you upon your plain speaking, Mr. Vole. It is to you I look to guide me. Your judgement is quite right. To persist in the line I spoke of would have been disastrous. We must leave that point. You made the acquaintance of Miss French, you called upon her, the acquaintanceship progressed. We want a clear reason for all this. Why did you, a young man of thirty-three, good-looking, fond of sport, popular with your friends, devote so much time to an elderly woman with whom you could hardly have anything in common?”

Leonard Vole flung out his hands in a nervous gesture.

“I can’t tell you — I really can’t tell you. After the first visit, she pressed me to come again, spoke of being lonely and unhappy. She made it difficult for me to refuse. She showed so plainly her fondness and affection for me that I was placed in an awkward position. You see, Mr. Mayherne, I’ve got a weak nature — I drift — I’m one of those people who can’t say ‘No.’ And believe me or not, as you like, after the third or fourth visit I paid her I found myself getting genuinely fond of the old thing. My mother died when I was young, an aunt brought me up, and she too died before I was fifteen. If I told you that I genuinely enjoyed being mothered and pampered, I dare say you’d only laugh.”

Mr. Mayherne did not laugh. Instead he took off his pince-nez again and polished them, always a sign with him that he was thinking deeply.

“I accept your explanation, Mr. Vole,” he said at last. “I believe it to be psychologically probable. Whether a jury would take that view of it is another matter. Please continue your narrative. When was it that Miss French first asked you to look into her business affairs?”

“After my third or fourth visit to her. She understood very little of money matters, and was worried about some investments.”

Mr. Mayherne looked up sharply.

“Be careful, Mr. Vole. The maid, Janet Mackenzie, declares that her mistress was a good woman of business and transacted all her own affairs, and this is borne out by the testimony of her bankers.”

“I can’t help that,” said Vole earnestly. “That’s what she said to me.”

Mr. Mayherne looked at him for a moment or two in silence. Though he had no intention of saying so, his belief in Leonard Vole’s innocence was at that moment strengthened. He knew something of the mentality of elderly ladies. He saw Miss French, infatuated with the good-looking young man, hunting about for pretexts that should bring him to the house. What more likely than that she should plead ignorance of business, and beg him to help her with her money affairs? She was enough of a woman of the world to realize that any man is slightly flattered by such an admission of his superiority. Leonard Vole had been flattered. Perhaps, too, she had not been averse to letting this young man know that she was wealthy. Emily French had been a strong-willed old woman, willing to pay her price for what she wanted. All this passed rapidly through Mr. Mayherne’s mind, but he gave no indication of it, and asked instead a further question.

“And you did handle her affairs for her at her request?”

“I did.”

“Mr. Vole,” said the solicitor, “I am going to ask you a very serious question, and one to which it is vital I should have a truthful answer. You were in low water financially. You had the handling of an old lady’s affairs — an old lady who, according to her own statement, knew little or nothing of business. Did you at any time, or in any manner, convert to your own use the securities which you handled? Did you engage in any transaction for your own pecuniary advantage which will not bear the light of day?” He quelled the other’s response. “Wait a minute before you answer. There are two courses open to us. Either we can make a feature of your probity and honesty in conducting her affairs whilst pointing out how unlikely it is that you would commit murder to obtain money which you might have obtained by such infinitely easier means. If, on the other hand, there is anything in your dealings which the prosecution will get hold of — if, to put it baldly, it can be proved that you swindled the old lady in any way, we must take the line that you had no motive for the murder, since she was already a profitable source of income to you. You perceive the distinction. Now, I beg of you, take your time before you reply.”

But Leonard Vole took no time at all.

“My dealings with Miss French’s affairs are all perfectly fair and aboveboard. I acted for her interests to the very best of my ability, as anyone will find who looks into the matter.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Mayherne. “You relieve my mind very much. I pay you the compliment of believing that you are far too clever to lie to me over such an important matter.”

“Surely,” said Vole eagerly, “the strongest point in my favour is the lack of motive. Granted that I cultivated the acquaintanceship of a rich old lady in the hope of getting money out of her — that, I gather, is the substance of what you have been saying — surely her death frustrates all my hopes?”

The solicitor looked at him steadily. Then, very deliberately, he repeated his unconscious trick with his pince-nez. It was not until they were firmly replaced on his nose that he spoke.

“Are you not aware, Mr. Vole, Miss French left a will under which you are the principal beneficiary?”

“What?” The prisoner sprang to his feet. His dismay was obvious and unforced. “My God! What are you saying? She left her money to me?”

Mr. Mayherne nodded slowly. Vole sank down again, his head in his hands.

“You pretend you know nothing of this will?”

“Pretend? There’s no pretence about it. I knew nothing about it.”

“What would you say if I told you that the maid, Janet Mackenzie, swears that you did know? That her mistress told her distinctly that she had consulted you in the matter, and told you of her intentions?”

“Say? That she’s lying! No, I go too fast. Janet is an elderly woman. She was a faithful watchdog to her mistress, and she didn’t like me. She was jealous and suspicious. I should say that Miss French confided her intentions to Janet, and that Janet either mistook something she said, or else was convinced in her own mind that I had persuaded the old lady into doing it. I dare say that she believes herself now that Miss French actually told her so.”

“You don’t think she dislikes you enough to lie deliberately about the matter?”

Leonard Vole looked shocked and startled.

“No, indeed! Why should she?”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Mayherne thoughtfully. “But she’s very bitter against you.”

The wretched young man groaned again.

“I’m beginning to see,” he muttered. “It’s frightful. I made up to her, that’s what they’ll say, I got her to make a will leaving her money to me, and then I go there that night, and there’s nobody in the house — they find her the next day — oh! my God, it’s awful!”

“You are wrong about there being nobody in the house,” said Mr. Mayherne. “Janet, as you remember, was to go out for the evening. She went, but about half past nine she returned to fetch the pattern of a blouse sleeve which she had promised to a friend. She let herself in by the back door, went upstairs and fetched it, and went out again. She heard voices in the sitting room, though she could not distinguish what they said, but she will swear that one of them was Miss French’s and one was a man’s.”

“At half past nine,” said Leonard Vole. “At half past nine...” He sprang to his feet. “But then I’m saved — saved—”

“What do you mean, saved?” cried Mr. Mayherne, astonished.

“By half past nine I was at home again! My wife can prove that. I left Miss French about five minutes to nine. I arrived home about twenty past nine. My wife was there waiting for me. Oh! thank God — thank God! And bless Janet Mackenzie’s sleeve pattern.”

In his exuberance, he hardly noticed that the grave expression of the solicitor’s face had not altered. But the latter’s words brought him down to earth with a bump.

“Who, then, in your opinion, murdered Miss French?”

“Why, a burglar, of course, as was thought at first. The window was forced, you remember. She was killed with a heavy blow from a crowbar, and the crowbar was found lying on the floor beside the body. And several articles were missing. But for Janet’s absurd suspicions and dislike of me, the police would never have swerved from the right track.”

“That will hardly do, Mr. Vole,” said the solicitor. “The things that were missing were mere trifles of no value, taken as a blind. And the marks on the window were not all conclusive. Besides, think for yourself. You say you were no longer in the house by half past nine. Who, then, was the man Janet heard talking to Miss French in the sitting room? She would hardly be having an amicable conversation with a burglar?”

“No,” said Vole. “No—” He looked puzzled and discouraged. “But anyway,” he added with reviving spirit, “it lets me out. I’ve got an alibi. You must see Romaine — my wife — at once.”

“Certainly,” acquiesced the lawyer. “I should already have seen Mrs. Vole but for her being absent when you were arrested. I wired to Scotland at once, and I understand that she arrives back tonight. I am going to call upon her immediately I leave here.”

Vole nodded, a great expression of satisfaction settling down over his face.

“Yes, Romaine will tell you. My God! It’s a lucky chance that.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Vole, but you are very fond of your wife?”

“Of course.”

“And she of you?”

“Romaine is devoted to me. She’d do anything in the world for me.”

He spoke enthusiastically, but the solicitor’s heart sank a little lower. The testimony of a devoted wife — would it gain credence?

“Was there anyone else who saw you return at nine twenty? A maid, for instance?”

“We have no maid.”

“Did you meet anyone in the street on the way back?”

“Nobody I knew. I rode part of the way in a bus. The conductor might remember.”

Mr. Mayherne shook his head doubtfully.

“There is no one, then, who can confirm your wife’s testimony?”

“No. But it isn’t necessary, surely?”

“I dare say not. I dare say not,” said Mr. Mayherne hastily. “Now there’s just one thing more. Did Miss French know that you were a married man?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Yet you never took your wife to see her. Why was that?”

For the first time, Leonard Vole’s answer came halting and uncertain.

“Well — I don’t know.”

“Are you aware that Janet Mackenzie says her mistress believed you to be single, and contemplated marrying you in the future?”

Vole laughed.

“Absurd! There was forty years’ difference in age between us.”

“It has been done,” said the solicitor drily. “The fact remains. Your wife never met Miss French?”

“No—” Again the constraint.

“You will permit me to say,” said the lawyer, “that I hardly understand your attitude in the matter.”

Vole flushed, hesitated, and then spoke.

“I’ll make a clean breast of it. I was hard up, as you know. I hoped that Miss French might lend me some money. She was fond of me, but she wasn’t at all interested in the struggles of a young couple. Early on, I found that she had taken it for granted that my wife and I didn’t get on — were living apart. Mr. Mayherne — I wanted the money — for Romaine’s sake. I said nothing, and allowed the old lady to think what she chose. She spoke of my being an adopted son for her. There was never any question of marriage — that must be just Janet’s imagination.”

“And that is all?”

“Yes — that is all.”

Was there just a shade of hesitation in the words? The lawyer fancied so. He rose and held out his hand.

“Goodbye, Mr. Vole.” He looked into the haggard young face and spoke with an unusual impulse. “I believe in your innocence in spite of the multitude of facts arrayed against you. I hope to prove it and vindicate you completely.”

Vole smiled back at him.

“You’ll find the alibi is all right,” he said cheerfully.

Again he hardly noticed that the other did not respond.

“The whole thing hinges a good deal on the testimony of Janet Mackenzie,” said Mr. Mayherne. “She hates you. That much is clear.”

“She can hardly hate me,” protested the young man.

The solicitor shook his head as he went out.

“Now for Mrs. Vole,” he said to himself.

He was seriously disturbed by the way the thing was shaping.

The Voles lived in a small shabby house near Paddington Green. It was to this house that Mr. Mayherne went.

In answer to his ring, a big slatternly woman, obviously a charwoman, answered the door.

“Mrs. Vole? Has she returned yet?”

“Got back an hour ago. But I dunno if you can see her.”

“If you will take my card to her,” said Mr. Mayherne quietly, “I am quite sure that she will do so.”

The woman looked at him doubtfully, wiped her hand on her apron and took the card. Then she closed the door in his face and left him on the step outside.

In a few minutes, however, she returned with a slightly altered manner.

“Come inside, please.”

She ushered him into a tiny drawing room. Mr. Mayherne, examining a drawing on the wall, stared up suddenly to face a tall pale woman who had entered so quietly that he had not heard her.

“Mr. Mayherne? You are my husband’s solicitor, are you not? You have come from him? Will you please sit down?”

Until she spoke he had not realized that she was not English. Now, observing her more closely, he noticed the high cheekbones, the dense blue-black of the hair, and an occasional very slight movement of the hands that was distinctly foreign. A strange woman, very quiet. So quiet as to make one uneasy. From the very first Mr. Mayherne was conscious that he was up against something that he did not understand.

“Now, my dear Mrs. Vole,” he began, “you must not give way—”

He stopped. It was so very obvious that Romaine Vole had not the slightest intention of giving way. She was perfectly calm and composed.

“Will you please tell me all about it?” she said. “I must know everything. Do not think to spare me. I want to know the worst.” She hesitated, then repeated in a lower tone, with a curious emphasis which the lawyer did not understand: “I want to know the worst.”

Mr. Mayherne went over his interview with Leonard Vole. She listened attentively, nodding her head now and then.

“I see,” she said, when he had finished. “He wants me to say that he came in at twenty minutes past nine that night?”

“He did come in at that time?” said Mr. Mayherne sharply.

“That is not the point,” she said coldly. “Will my saying so acquit him? Will they believe me?”

Mr. Mayherne was taken aback. She had gone so quickly to the core of the matter.

“That is what I want to know,” she said. “Will it be enough? Is there anyone else who can support my evidence?”

There was a suppressed eagerness in her manner that made him vaguely uneasy.

“So far there is no one else,” he said reluctantly.

“I see,” said Romaine Vole.

She sat for a minute or two perfectly still. A little smile played over her lips.

The lawyer’s feeling of alarm grew stronger and stronger.

“Mrs. Vole—” he began. “I know what you must feel—”

“Do you?” she said. “I wonder.”

“In the circumstances—”

“In the circumstances — I intend to play a lone hand.”

He looked at her in dismay.

“But, my dear Mrs. Vole — you are overwrought. Being so devoted to your husband—”

“I beg your pardon?”

The sharpness of her voice made him start. He repeated in a hesitating manner:

“Being so devoted to your husband—”

Romaine Vole nodded slowly, the same strange smile on her lips.

“Did he tell you that I was devoted to him?” she asked softly. “Ah! yes, I can see he did. How stupid men are! Stupid — stupid — stupid—”

She rose suddenly to her feet. All the intense emotion that the lawyer had been conscious of in the atmosphere was now concentrated in her tone.

“I hate him, I tell you! I hate him. I hate him, I hate him! I would like to see him hanged by the neck till he is dead.”

The lawyer recoiled before her and the smouldering passion in her eyes.

She advanced a step nearer, and continued vehemently:

“Perhaps I shall see it. Supposing I tell you that he did not come in that night at twenty past nine, but at twenty past ten? You say that he tells you he knew nothing about the money coming to him. Supposing I tell you he knew all about it, and counted on it, and committed murder to get it? Supposing I tell you that he admitted to me that night when he came in what he had done? That there was blood on his coat? What then? Supposing that I stand up in court and say all these things?”

Her eyes seemed to challenge him. With an effort, he concealed his growing dismay, and endeavoured to speak in a rational tone.

“You cannot be asked to give evidence against your own husband—”

“He is not my husband!”

The words came out so quickly that he fancied he had misunderstood her.

“I beg your pardon? I—”

“He is not my husband.”

The silence was so intense that you could have heard a pin drop.

“I was an actress in Vienna. My husband is alive but in a madhouse. So we could not marry. I am glad now.”

She nodded defiantly.

“I should like you to tell me one thing,” said Mr. Mayherne. He contrived to appear as cool and unemotional as ever. “Why are you so bitter against Leonard Vole?”

She shook her head, smiling a little.

“Yes, you would like to know. But I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret...”

Mr. Mayherne gave his dry little cough and rose.

“There seems no point in prolonging this interview,” he remarked. “You will hear from me again after I have communicated with my client.”

She came closer to him, looking into his eyes with her own wonderful dark ones.

“Tell me,” she said, “did you believe — honestly — that he was innocent when you came here today?”

“I did,” said Mr. Mayherne.

“You poor little man,” she laughed.

“And I believe so still,” finished the lawyer. “Good evening, madam.”

He went out of the room, taking with him the memory of her startled face.

“This is going to be the devil of a business,” said Mr. Mayherne to himself as he strode along the street.

Extraordinary, the whole thing. An extraordinary woman. A very dangerous woman. Women were the devil when they got their knife into you.

What was to be done? That wretched young man hadn’t a leg to stand upon. Of course, possibly he did commit the crime...

“No,” said Mr. Mayherne to himself. “No — there’s almost too much evidence against him. I don’t believe this woman. She was trumping up the whole story. But she’ll never bring it into court.”

He wished he felt more conviction on the point.

The police court proceedings were brief and dramatic. The principal witnesses for the prosecution were Janet Mackenzie, maid to the dead woman, and Romaine Heilger, Austrian subject, the mistress of the prisoner.

Mr. Mayherne sat in the court and listened to the damning story that the latter told. It was on the lines she had indicated to him in their interview.

The prisoner reserved his defence and was committed for trial.

Mr. Mayherne was at his wits’ end. The case against Leonard Vole was black beyond words. Even the famous KC who was engaged for the defence held out little hope.

“If we can shake that Austrian woman’s testimony, we might do something,” he said dubiously. “But it’s a bad business.”

Mr. Mayherne had concentrated his energies on one single point. Assuming Leonard Vole to be speaking the truth, and to have left the murdered woman’s house at nine o’clock, who was the man whom Janet heard talking to Miss French at half past nine?

The only ray of light was in the shape of a scapegrace nephew who had in bygone days cajoled and threatened his aunt out of various sums of money. Janet Mackenzie, the solicitor learned, had always been attached to this young man, and had never ceased urging his claims upon her mistress. It certainly seemed possible that it was this nephew who had been with Miss French after Leonard Vole left, especially as he was not to be found in any of his old haunts.

In all other directions, the lawyer’s researches had been negative in their result. No one had seen Leonard Vole entering his own house or leaving that of Miss French. No one had seen any other man enter or leave the house in Cricklewood. All inquiries drew a blank.

It was the eve of the trial when Mr. Mayherne received the letter which was to lead his thoughts in an entirely new direction.

It came by the six o’clock post. An illiterate scrawl, written on common paper and enclosed in a dirty envelope with the stamp stuck on crookedly.

Mr. Mayherne read it through once or twice before he grasped its meaning.

The solicitor read and reread this strange epistle. It might, of course, be a hoax, but when he thought it over, he became increasingly convinced that it was genuine, and also convinced that it was the one hope for the prisoner. The evidence of Romaine Heilger damned him completely, and the line the defence meant to pursue, the line that the evidence of a woman who had admittedly lived an immoral life was not to be trusted, was at best a weak one.

Mr. Mayherne’s mind was made up. It was his duty to save his client at all costs. He must go to Shaw’s Rents.

He had some difficulty in finding the place, a ramshackle building in an evil-smelling slum, but at last he did so, and on inquiry for Mrs. Mogson was sent up to a room on the third floor. On this door he knocked and, getting no answer, knocked again.

At this second knock, he heard a shuffling sound inside, and presently the door was opened cautiously half an inch and a bent figure peered out.

Suddenly the woman, for it was a woman, gave a chuckle and opened the door wider.

“So it’s you, dearie,” she said, in a wheezy voice. “Nobody with you, is there? No playing tricks? That’s right. You can come in — you can come in.”

With some reluctance the lawyer stepped across the threshold into the small dirty room, with its flickering gas jet. There was an untidy unmade bed in a corner, a plain deal table and two rickety chairs. For the first time Mr. Mayherne had a full view of the tenant of this unsavoury apartment. She was a woman of middle age, bent in figure, with a mass of untidy grey hair and a scarf wound tightly round her face. She saw him looking at this and laughed again, the same curious toneless chuckle.

“Wondering why I hide my beauty, dear? He, he, he. Afraid it may tempt you, eh? But you shall see — you shall see.”

She drew aside the scarf and the lawyer recoiled involuntarily before the almost formless blur of scarlet. She replaced the scarf again.

“So you’re not wanting to kiss me, dearie? He, he, I don’t wonder. And yet I was a pretty girl once — not so long ago as you’d think, either. Vitriol, dearie, vitriol — that’s what did that. Ah! but I’ll be even with ’em—”

She burst into a hideous torrent of profanity which Mr. Mayherne tried vainly to quell. She fell silent at last, her hands clenching and unclenching themselves nervously.

“Enough of that,” said the lawyer sternly. “I’ve come here because I have reason to believe you can give me information which will clear my client, Leonard Vole. Is that the case?”

Her eye leered at him cunningly.

“What about the money, dearie?” she wheezed. “Two hundred quid, you remember.”

“It is your duty to give evidence, and you can be called upon to do so.”

“That won’t do, dearie. I’m an old woman, and I know nothing. But you give me two hundred quid, and perhaps I can give you a hint or two. See?”

“What kind of hint?”

“What should you say to a letter? A letter from her. Never mind now how I got hold of it. That’s my business. It’ll do the trick. But I want my two hundred quid.”

Mr. Mayherne looked at her coldly, and made up his mind.

“I’ll give you ten pounds, nothing more. And only that if this letter is what you say it is.”

“Ten pounds?” She screamed and raved at him.

“Twenty,” said Mr. Mayherne, “and that’s my last word.”

He rose as if to go. Then, watching her closely, he drew out a pocketbook, and counted out twenty one-pound notes.

“You see,” he said. “That is all I have with me. You can take it or leave it.”

But already he knew that the sight of the money was too much for her. She cursed and raved impotently, but at last she gave in. Going over to the bed, she drew something out from beneath the tattered mattress.

“Here you are, damn you!” she snarled. “It’s the top one you want.”

It was a bundle of letters that she threw to him, and Mr. Mayherne untied them and scanned them in his usual cool, methodical manner. The woman, watching him eagerly, could gain no clue from his impassive face.

He read each letter through, then returned again to the top one and read it a second time. Then he tied the whole bundle up again carefully.

They were love letters, written by Romaine Heilger, and the man they were written to was not Leonard Vole. The top letter was dated the day of the latter’s arrest.

“I spoke true, dearie, didn’t I?” whined the woman. “It’ll do for her, that letter?”

Mr. Mayherne put the letters in his pocket, then he asked a question.

“How did you get hold of this correspondence?”

“That’s telling,” she said with a leer. “But I know something more. I heard in court what that hussy said. Find out where she was at twenty past ten, the time she says she was at home. Ask at the Lion Road Cinema. They’ll remember — a fine upstanding girl like that — curse her!”

“Who is the man?” asked Mr. Mayherne. “There’s only a Christian name here.”

The other’s voice grew thick and hoarse, her hands clenched and unclenched. Finally she lifted one to her face.

“He’s the man that did this to me. Many years ago now. She took him away from me — a chit of a girl she was then. And when I went after him — and went for him too — he threw the cursed stuff at me! And she laughed — damn her! I’ve had it in for her for years. Followed her, I have, spied upon her. And now I’ve got her! She’ll suffer for this, won’t she, Mr. Lawyer? She’ll suffer?”

“She will probably be sentenced to a term of imprisonment for perjury,” said Mr. Mayherne quietly.

“Shut away — that’s what I want. You’re going, are you? Where’s my money? Where’s that good money?”

Without a word, Mr. Mayherne put down the notes on the table. Then, drawing a deep breath, he turned and left the squalid room. Looking back, he saw the old woman crooning over the money.

He wasted no time. He found the cinema in Lion Road easily enough, and, shown a photograph of Romaine Heilger, the commissionaire recognized her at once. She had arrived at the cinema with a man some time after ten o’clock on the evening in question. He had not noticed her escort particularly, but he remembered the lady who had spoken to him about the picture that was showing. They stayed until the end, about an hour later.

Mr. Mayherne was satisfied. Romaine Heilger’s evidence was a tissue of lies from beginning to end. She had evolved it out of her passionate hatred. The lawyer wondered whether he would ever know what lay behind that hatred. What had Leonard Vole done to her? He had seemed dumbfounded when the solicitor had reported her attitude to him. He had declared earnestly that such a thing was incredible — yet it had seemed to Mr. Mayherne that after the first astonishment his protests had lacked sincerity.

He did know. Mr. Mayherne was convinced of it. He knew, but had no intention of revealing the fact. The secret between those two remained a secret. Mr. Mayherne wondered if some day he should come to learn what it was.

The solicitor glanced at his watch. It was late, but time was everything. He hailed a taxi and gave an address.

“Sir Charles must know of this at once,” he murmured to himself as he got in. The trial of Leonard Vole for the murder of Emily French aroused widespread interest. In the first place the prisoner was young and good-looking, then he was accused of a particularly dastardly crime, and there was the further interest of Romaine Heilger, the principal witness for the prosecution. There had been pictures of her in many papers, and several fictitious stories as to her origin and history.

The proceedings opened quietly enough. Various technical evidence came first. Then Janet Mackenzie was called. She told substantially the same story as before. In cross-examination counsel for the defence succeeded in getting her to contradict herself once or twice over her account of Vole’s association with Miss French, he emphasized the fact that though she had heard a man’s voice in the sitting room that night, there was nothing to show that it was Vole who was there, and he managed to drive home a feeling that jealousy and dislike of the prisoner were at the bottom of a good deal of her evidence.

Then the next witness was called.

“Your name is Romaine Heilger?”

“Yes.”

“You are an Austrian subject?”

“Yes.”

“For the last three years you have lived with the prisoner and passed yourself off as his wife?”

Just for a moment Romaine Heilger’s eye met those of the man in the dock. Her expression held something curious and unfathomable.

“Yes.”

The questions went on. Word by word the damning facts came out. On the night in question the prisoner had taken out a crowbar with him. He had returned at twenty minutes past ten, and had confessed to having killed the old lady. His cuffs had been stained with blood, and he had burned them in the kitchen stove. He had terrorized her into silence by means of threats.

As the story proceeded, the feeling of the court which had, to begin with, been slightly favourable to the prisoner, now set dead against him. He himself sat with downcast head and moody air, as though he knew he were doomed.

Yet it might have been noted that her own counsel sought to restrain Romaine’s animosity. He would have preferred her to be a more unbiased witness.

Formidable and ponderous, counsel for the defence arose.

He put it to her that her story was a malicious fabrication from start to finish, that she had not even been in her own house at the time in question, that she was in love with another man and was deliberately seeking to send Vole to his death for a crime he did not commit.

Romaine denied these allegations with superb insolence.

Then came the surprising denouement, the production of the letter. It was read aloud in court in the midst of a breathless stillness.

There were experts present ready to swear that the handwriting was that of Romaine Heilger, but they were not needed. Confronted with the letter, Romaine broke down utterly and confessed everything. Leonard Vole had returned to the house at the time he said, twenty past nine. She had invented the whole story to ruin him.

With the collapse of Romaine Heilger, the case for the Crown collapsed also. Sir Charles called his few witnesses, the prisoner himself went into the box and told his story in a manly straightforward manner, unshaken by cross-examination.

The prosecution endeavoured to rally, but without great success. The judge’s summing up was not wholly favourable to the prisoner, but a reaction had set in and the jury needed little time to consider their verdict.

“We find the prisoner not guilty.”

Leonard Vole was free!

Little Mr. Mayherne hurried from his seat. He must congratulate his client.

He found himself polishing his pince-nez vigorously, and checked himself. His wife had told him only the night before that he was getting a habit of it. Curious things habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

An interesting case — a very interesting case. That woman, now, Romaine Heilger.

The case was dominated for him still by the exotic figure of Romaine Heilger. She had seemed a pale quiet woman in the house at Paddington, but in court she had flamed out against the sober background. She had flaunted herself like a tropical flower.

If he closed his eyes he could see her now, tall and vehement, her exquisite body bent forward a little, her right hand clenching and unclenching itself unconsciously all the time. Curious things, habits. That gesture of hers with the hand was her habit, he supposed. Yet he had seen someone else do it quite lately. Who was it now? Quite lately—

He drew in his breath with a gasp as it came back to him. The woman in Shaw’s Rents...

He stood still, his head whirling. It was impossible — impossible — Yet, Romaine Heilger was an actress.

The KC came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Congratulated our man yet? He’s had a narrow shave, you know. Come along and see him.”

But the little lawyer shook off the other’s hand.

He wanted one thing only — to see Romaine Heilger face to face.

He did not see her until some time later, and the place of their meeting is not relevant.

“So you guessed,” she said, when he had told her all that was in his mind. “The face? Oh! that was easy enough, and the light of that gas jet was too bad for you to see the makeup.”

“But why — why—”

“Why did I play a lone hand?” She smiled a little, remembering the last time she had used the words.

“Such an elaborate comedy!”

“My friend — I had to save him. The evidence of a woman devoted to him would not have been enough — you hinted as much yourself. But I know something of the psychology of crowds. Let my evidence be wrung from me, as an admission, damning me in the eyes of the law, and a reaction in favour of the prisoner would immediately set in.”

“And the bundle of letters?”

“One alone, the vital one, might have seemed like a — what do you call it? — put-up job.”

“Then the man called Max?”

“Never existed, my friend.”

“I still think,” said little Mr. Mayherne, in an aggrieved manner, “that we could have got him off by the — er — normal procedure.”

“I dared not risk it. You see, you thought he was innocent—”

“And you knew it? I see,” said little Mr. Mayherne.

“My dear Mr. Mayherne,” said Romaine, “you do not see at all. I knew — he was guilty!”

The Enemy CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG

Original publication: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1951; first collected in The Albatross by Charlotte Armstrong (New York, Coward-McCann, 1957)

Not a household name, in spite of the acclaim given to her by fellow mystery writers and critics, Charlotte Armstrong (1905–1969) enjoyed a long and highly successful career. She found a specialized niche when she wrote frequently about peril to the young and to the elderly, creating stories and novels of suspense that focused on that theme.

In no work is this characterized more graphically than in Mischief (1950), in which a psychopathic hotel babysitter gradually becomes unglued as she contemplates killing her young charge. Filmed as Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), it starred the young and beautiful Marilyn Monroe in a rare villainous role. Directed by Roy Baker, it also starred Richard Widmark, Anne Bancroft, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Another of Armstrong’s powerful suspense novels to be filmed was The Unsuspected (1946), a controversial novel that was praised by critics for its writing skill but lambasted for disclosing the identity of the killer almost at the outset. A famous radio narrator steals money from his ward’s inheritance and, when his secretary discovers his thievery, he kills her. More deaths follow before he confesses — on air. It was filmed under the same title and released in 1947 to excellent reviews. Directed by Michael Curtiz, it starred Claude Rains, Joan Caulfield, and Audrey Totter.

During the filming of The Unsuspected, Armstrong and her family permanently moved from New York to California, where she continued to write stories and more than twenty novels, one of which, A Dram of Poison (1956), won the Edgar as the best novel of the year. She also wrote television scripts, including several that were produced by Alfred Hitchcock.

In “The Enemy,” a likable boy has a disagreement with an unfriendly, mysterious neighbor, and proves to be less likable.

Title: Talk About a Stranger, 1952

Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Director: David Bradley

Screenwriter: Margaret Fitts

Producer: Richard Goldstone

• George Murphy (Robert Fontaine Sr.)

• Nancy Davis (Marge Fontaine)

• Billy Gray (Robert Fontaine Jr.)

• Lewis Stone (Mr. Wardlaw)

A charming young boy, Robert Fontaine Jr., lives a lonely life on his family’s farm until he gets a dog and all is well until the dog dies, obviously having been poisoned. He is convinced that his openly hostile neighbor is responsible. When neither his father nor the police provide any help, he goes on a mission to find out what he can about the mysterious stranger who recently moved into the neighborhood and hears a rumor that the owner of the house where he previously lived was murdered. He does all he can to spread the damning tale that the neighbor was a murderer and, when he does not get the response he had wanted, the volatile boy commits a violent, dangerous act of vandalism.

An unusually young crew made this film noir. The director, David Bradley, had graduated from Northwestern in 1950 and directed his classmate Charlton Heston in Julius Caesar the same year before directing Talk About a Stranger, and Margaret Fitts, the screenwriter, had just graduated from the MGM junior writers program in 1947; she had cowritten two adaptations before this film.

The original script was titled The Enemy, and then was called A Stranger in the House before it was ultimately given its final, appropriate, title.

THE ENEMY Charlotte Armstrong

They sat late at the lunch table and afterwards moved through the dim, cool, high-ceilinged rooms to the judge’s library where, in their quiet talk, the old man’s past and the young man’s future seemed to telescope and touch. But at twenty minutes after three, on that hot, bright, June Saturday afternoon, the present tense erupted. Out in the quiet street arose the sound of trouble.

Judge Kittinger adjusted his pince-nez, rose, and led the way to his old-fashioned veranda from which they could overlook the tree-roofed intersection of Greenwood Lane and Hannibal Street. Near the steps to the corner house, opposite, there was a surging knot of children and one man. Now, from the house on the judge’s left, a woman in a blue house dress ran diagonally toward the excitement. And a police car slipped up Hannibal Street, gliding to the curb. One tall officer plunged into the group and threw restraining arms around a screaming boy.

Mike Russell, saying to his host, “Excuse me, sir,” went rapidly across the street. Trouble’s center was the boy, ten or eleven years old, a tow-headed boy with tawny-lashed blue eyes, a straight nose, a fine brow. He was beside himself, writhing in the policeman’s grasp. The woman in the blue dress was yammering at him. “Freddy! Freddy! Freddy!” Her voice simply did not reach his ears.

“You ole stinker! You rotten ole stinker! You ole nut!” All the boy’s heart was in the epithets.

“Now, listen...” The cop shook the boy who, helpless in those powerful hands, yet blazed. His fury had stung to crimson the face of the grown man at whom it was directed.

This man, who stood with his back to the house as one besieged, was plump, half-bald, with eyes much magnified by glasses. “Attacked me!” he cried in a high whine. “Rang my bell and absolutely leaped on me!”

Out of the seven or eight small boys clustered around them came overlapping fragments of shrill sentences. It was clear only that they opposed the man. A small woman in a print dress, a man in shorts, whose bare chest was winter-white, stood a little apart, hesitant and distressed. Up on the veranda of the house the screen door was half open, and a woman seated in a wheel chair peered forth anxiously.

On the green grass, in the shade perhaps thirty feet away, there lay in death a small brown-and-white dog.

The judge’s luncheon guest observed all this. When the judge drew near, there was a lessening of the noise. Judge Kittinger said, “This is Freddy Titus, isn’t it? Mr. Matlin? What’s happened?”

The man’s head jerked. “I,” he said, “did nothing to the dog. Why would I trouble to hurt the boy’s dog? I try — you know this, Judge — I try to live in peace here. But these kids are terrors! They’ve made this block a perfect hell for me and my family.” The man’s voice shook. “My wife, who is not strong... My step-daughter, who is a cripple... These kids are no better than a slum gang. They are vicious! That boy rang my bell and attacked...! I’ll have him up for assault! I...”

The judge’s face was old ivory and he was aloof behind it.

On the porch a girl pushed past the woman in the chair, a girl who walked with a lurching gait.

Mike Russell asked, quietly, “Why do the boys say it was you, Mr. Matlin, who hurt the dog?”

The kids chorused. “He’s an ole mean...” “He’s a nut...” “Just because...” “...took Clive’s hat and...” “...chases us...” “...tries to put everything on us.” “...told my mother lies...” “...just because...”

He is our enemy, they were saying; he is our enemy.

“They...” began Matlin, his throat thick with anger.

“Hold it a minute.” The second cop, the thin one, walked toward where the dog was lying.

“Somebody,” said Mike Russell in a low voice, “must do something for the boy.”

The judge looked down at the frantic child. He said, gently, “I am as sorry as I can be, Freddy.” But in his old heart there was too much known, and too many little dogs he remembered that had already died, and even if he were as sorry as he could be, he couldn’t be sorry enough. The boy’s eyes turned, rejected, returned. To the enemy.

Russell moved near the woman in blue, who pertained to this boy somehow. “His mother?”

“His folks are away. I’m there to take care of him,” she snapped, as if she felt herself put upon by a crisis she had not contracted to face.

“Can they be reached?”

“No,” she said decisively.

The young man put his stranger’s hand on the boy’s rigid little shoulder. But he too was rejected. Freddy’s eyes, brilliant with hatred, clung to the enemy. Hatred doesn’t cry.

“Listen,” said the tall cop, “if you could hang onto him for a minute—”

“Not I,” said Russell.

The thin cop came back. “Looks like the dog got poison. When was he found?”

“Just now,” the kids said.

“Where? There?”

“Up Hannibal Street. Right on the edge of ole Matlin’s back lot.”

“Edge of my lot!” Matlin’s color freshened again. “On the sidewalk, why don’t you say? Why don’t you tell the truth?”

“We are! We don’t tell lies!”

“Quiet, you guys,” the cop said. “Pipe down, now.”

“Heaven’s my witness, I wasn’t even here!” cried Matlin. “I played nine holes of golf today. I didn’t get home until... May?” he called over his shoulder. “What time did I come in?”

The girl on the porch came slowly down, moving awkwardly on her uneven legs. She was in her twenties, no child. Nor was she a woman. She said in a blurting manner, “About three o’clock, Daddy Earl. But the dog was dead.”

“What’s that, miss?”

“This is my step-daughter.”

“The dog was dead,” the girl said, “before he came home. I saw it from upstairs, before three o’clock. Lying by the sidewalk.”

“You drove in from Hannibal Street, Mr. Matlin? Looks like you’d have seen the dog.”

Matlin said with nervous thoughtfulness, “I don’t know. My mind... Yes, I...”

“He’s telling a lie!”

“Freddy!”

“Listen to that,” said May Matlin, “will you?”

“She’s a liar, too!”

The cop shook Freddy. Mr. Matlin made a sound of helpless exasperation. He said to the girl, “Go keep your mother inside, May.” He raised his arm as if to wave. “It’s all right, honey,” he called to the woman in the chair, with a false cheeriness that grated on the ear. “There’s nothing to worry about now.”

Freddy’s jaw shifted and young Russell’s watching eyes winced. The girl began to lurch back to the house.

“It was my wife who put in the call,” Matlin said. “After all, they were on me like a pack of wolves. Now, I... I understand that the boy’s upset. But all the same, he cannot... He must learn... I will not have... I have enough to contend with, without this malice, this unwarranted antagonism, this persecution.”

Freddy’s eyes were unwinking.

“It has got to stop!” said Matlin almost hysterically.

“Yes,” murmured Mike Russell, “I should think so.” Judge Kittinger’s white head, nodding, agreed.

“We’ve heard about quite a few dog-poisoning cases over the line in Redfern,” said the thin cop with professional calm. “None here.”

The man in the shorts hitched them up, looking shocked. “Who’d do a thing like that?”

A boy said, boldly, “Ole Matlin would.” He had an underslung jaw and wore spectacles on his snug nose. “I’m Phil Bourchard,” he said to the cop. He had courage.

“We jist know,” said another. “I’m Ernie Allen.” Partisanship radiated from his whole thin body. “Ole Matlin doesn’t want anybody on his ole property.”

“Sure.” “He doesn’t want anybody on his ole property.” “It was ole Matlin.”

“It was. It was,” said Freddy Titus.

“Freddy,” said the housekeeper in blue, “now, you better be still. I’ll tell your Dad.” It was a meaningless fumble for control. The boy didn’t even hear it.

Judge Kittinger tried, patiently. “You can’t accuse without cause, Freddy.”

“Bones didn’t hurt his ole property. Bones wouldn’t hurt anything. Ole Matlin did it.”

“You lying little devil!”

“He’s a liar!”

The cop gave Freddy another shake. “You kids found him, eh?”

“We were up at Bourchard’s and were going down to the Titus house.”

“And he was dead,” said Freddy.

“I know nothing about it,” said Matlin icily. “Nothing at all.”

The cop, standing between, said wearily, “Any of you people see what coulda happened?”

“I was sitting in my backyard,” said the man in shorts. “I’m Daugherty, next door, up Hannibal Street. Didn’t see a thing.”

The small woman in a print dress spoke up. “I am Mrs. Page. I live across on the corner, Officer. I believe I did see a strange man go into Mr. Matlin’s driveway this morning.”

“When was this, ma’am?”

“About eleven o’clock. He was poorly dressed. He walked up the drive and around the garage.”

“Didn’t go to the house?”

“No. He was only there a minute. I believe he was carrying something. He was rather furtive. And very poorly dressed, almost like a tramp.”

There was a certain relaxing among the elders. “Ah, the tramp,” said Mike Russell. “The good old reliable tramp. Are you sure, Mrs. Page? It’s very unlikely.”

But she bristled. “Do you think I am lying?”

Russell’s lips parted, but he felt the judge’s hand on his arm. “This is my guest, Mr. Russell... Freddy.” The judge’s voice was gentle. “Let him go, Officer. I’m sure he understands, now. Mr. Matlin was not even at home, Freddy. It’s possible that this — er — stranger... Or it may have been an accident.”

“Wasn’t a tramp. Wasn’t an accident.”

“You can’t know that, boy,” said the judge, somewhat sharply. Freddy said nothing. As the officer slowly released his grasp, the boy took a free step backwards, and the other boys surged to surround him. There stood the enemy, the monster who killed and lied, and the grownups with their reasonable doubts were on the monster’s side. But the boys knew what Freddy knew. They stood together.

“Somebody,” murmured the judge’s guest, “somebody’s got to help the boy.” And the judge sighed.

The cops went up Hannibal Street towards Matlin’s back lot, with Mr. Daugherty. Matlin lingered at the corner talking to Mrs. Page. In the front window of Matlin’s house the curtain fell across the glass.

Mike Russell sidled up to the housekeeper. “Any uncles or aunts here in town? A grandmother?”

“No,” she said, shortly.

“Brothers or sisters, Mrs...?”

“Miz Somers. No, he’s the only one. Only reason they didn’t take him along was it’s the last week of school and he didn’t want to miss.”

Mike Russell’s brown eyes suggested the soft texture of velvet, and they were deeply distressed. She slid away from their appeal. “He’ll just have to take it, I guess, like everybody else,” Mrs. Somers said. “These things happen.”

He was listening intently. “Don’t you care for dogs?”

“I don’t mind a dog,” she said. She arched her neck. She was going to call to the boy.

“Wait. Tell me, does the family go to church? Is there a pastor or a priest who knows the boy?”

“They don’t go, far as I ever saw.” She looked at him as if he were an eccentric.

“Then school. He has a teacher. What grade?”

“Sixth grade,” she said. “Miss Dana. Oh, he’ll be okay.” Her voice grew loud, to reach the boy and hint to him. “He’s a big boy.”

Russell said, desperately, “Is there no way to telephone his parents?”

“They’re on the road. They’ll be in some time tomorrow. That’s all I know.” She was annoyed. “I’ll take care of him. That’s why I’m here.” She raised her voice and this time it was arch and seductive. “Freddy, better come wash your face. I know where there’s some chocolate cookies.”

The velvet left the young man’s eyes. Hard as buttons, they gazed for a moment at the woman. Then he whipped around and left her. He walked over to where the kids had drifted, near the little dead creature on the grass. He said softly, “Bones had his own doctor, Freddy? Tell me his name?” The boy’s eyes flickered. “We must know what it was that he took. A doctor can tell. I think his own doctor would be best, don’t you?”

The boy nodded, mumbled a name, an address. That Russell mastered the name and the numbers, asking for no repetition, was a sign of his concern. Besides, it was this young man’s quality — that he listened. “May I take him, Freddy? I have a car. We ought to have a blanket,” he added softly, “a soft, clean blanket.”

“I got one, Freddy...” “My mother’d let me...”

“I can get one,” Freddy said brusquely. They wheeled, almost in formation.

Mrs. Somers frowned. “You must let them take a blanket,” Russell warned her, and his eyes were cold.

“I will explain to Mrs. Titus,” said the judge quickly.

“Quite a fuss,” she said, and tossed her head and crossed the road.

Russell gave the judge a quick, nervous grin. He walked to the returning cops. “You’ll want to run tests, I suppose? Can the dog’s own vet do it?”

“Certainly. Humane officer will have to be in charge. But that’s what the vet’ll want.”

“I’ll take the dog, then. Any traces up there?”

“Not a thing.”

“Will you explain to the boy that you are investigating?”

“Well, you know how these things go.” The cop’s feet shuffled. “Humane officer does what he can. Probably Monday, after we identify the poison, he’ll check the drug stores. Usually, if it is a cranky neighbor, he has already put in a complaint about the dog. This Matlin says he never did. The humane officer will get on it Monday. He’s out of town today. The devil of these cases, we can’t prove a thing, usually. You get an idea who it was, maybe you can scare him. It’s a misdemeanor all right. Never heard of a conviction myself.”

“But will you explain to the boy...?” Russell stopped, chewed his lip, and the judge sighed.

“Yeah, it’s tough on a kid,” the cop said.

When the judge’s guest came back it was nearly five o’clock. He said, “I came to say goodbye, sir, and to thank you for the...” But his mind wasn’t on the sentence and he lost it and looked up.

The judge’s eyes were affectionate. “Worried?”

“Judge, sir,” the young man said, “must they feed him? Where, sir, in this classy neighborhood is there an understanding woman’s heart? I herded them to that Mrs. Allen. But she winced, sir, and she diverted them. She didn’t want to deal with tragedy, didn’t want to think about it. She offered cakes and cokes and games.”

“But my dear boy...”

“What do they teach the kids these days, judge? To turn away? Put something in your stomach. Take a drink. Play a game. Don’t weep for your dead. Just skip it, think about something else.”

“I’m afraid the boy’s alone,” the judge said gently, “but it’s only for the night.” His voice was melodious. “Can’t be sheltered from grief when it comes. None of us can.”

“Excuse me, sir, but I wish he would grieve. I wish he would bawl his heart out. Wash out that black hate. I ought to go home. None of my concern. It’s a woman’s job.” He moved and his hand went toward the phone. “He has a teacher. I can’t help feeling concerned, sir. May I try?”

The judge said, “Of course, Mike,” and he put his brittle old bones into a chair.

Mike Russell pried the number out of the Board of Education. “Miss Lillian Dana? My name is Russell. You know a boy named Freddy Titus?”

“Oh, yes. He’s in my class.” The voice was pleasing.

“Miss Dana, there is trouble. You know Judge Kittinger’s house? Could you come there?”

“What is the trouble?”

“Freddy’s little dog is dead of poison. I’m afraid Freddy is in a bad state. There is no one to help him. His folks are away. The woman taking care of him,” Mike’s careful explanatory sentences burst into indignation, “has no more sympathetic imagination than a broken clothes pole.” He heard a little gasp. “I’d like to help him, Miss Dana, but I’m a man and a stranger, and the judge...” He paused.

“...is old,” said the judge in his chair.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the voice on the phone said slowly. “Freddy’s a wonderful boy.”

“You are his friend?”

“Yes, we are friends.”

“Then could you come? You see, we’ve got to get a terrible idea out of his head. He thinks a man across the street poisoned his dog on purpose. Miss Dana, he has no doubt! And he doesn’t cry.” She gasped again. “Greenwood Lane,” he said, “and Hannibal Street — the southeast corner.”

She said, “I’ll come. I have a car. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

Russell turned and caught the judge biting his lips. “Am I making too much of this, sir?” he inquired humbly.

“I don’t like the boy’s stubborn conviction.” The judge’s voice was dry and clear. “Any more than you do. I agree that he must be brought to understand. But...” the old man shifted in the chair. “Of course, the man, Matlin, is a fool, Mike. There is something solemn and silly about him that makes him fair game. He’s unfortunate. He married a widow with a crippled child, and no sooner were they married than she collapsed. And he’s not well off. He’s encumbered with that enormous house.”

“What does he do, sir?”

“He’s a photographer. Oh, he struggles, tries his best, and all that; but with such tension, Mike. That poor misshapen girl over there tries to keep the house; devoted to her mother. Matlin works hard, is devoted, too. And yet the sum comes out in petty strife, nerves, quarrels, uproar. And certainly it cannot be necessary to feud with children.”

“The kids have done their share of that, I’ll bet,” mused Mike. “The kids are delighted — a neighborhood ogre, to add the fine flavor of menace. A focus for mischief. An enemy.”

“True enough.” The judge sighed.

“So the myth is made. No rumor about ole Matlin loses anything in the telling. I can see it’s been built up. You don’t knock it down in a day.”

“No,” said the judge uneasily. He got up from the chair.

The young man rubbed his dark head. “I don’t like it, sir. We don’t know what’s in the kids’ minds, or who their heroes are. There is only the gang. What do you suppose it advises?”

“What could it advise, after all?” said the judge crisply. “This isn’t the slums, whatever Matlin says.” He went nervously to the window. He fiddled with the shade pull. He said, suddenly, “From my little summerhouse in the backyard you can overhear the gang. They congregate under that oak. Go and eavesdrop, Mike.”

The young man snapped to attention. “Yes, sir.”

“I... think we had better know,” said the judge, a trifle sheepishly.

The kids sat under the oak, in a grassy hollow. Freddy was the core. His face was tight. His eyes never left off watching the house of the enemy. The others watched him, or hung their heads, or watched their own brown hands play with the grass.

They were not chattering. There hung about them a heavy, sullen silence, heavy with a sense of tragedy, sullen with a sense of wrong, and from time to time one voice or another would fling out a pronouncement which would sink into the silence, thickening its ugliness.

The judge looked up from his paper. “Could you...?”

“I could hear,” said Mike in a quiet voice. “They are condemning the law, sir. They call it corrupt. They are quite certain that Matlin killed the dog. They see themselves as Robin Hoods, vigilantes defending the weak, the wronged, the dog. They think they are discussing justice. They are waiting for dark. They speak of weapons, sir — the only ones they have. B.B. guns, after dark.”

“Great heavens!”

“Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to stop it.”

Mrs. Somers was cooking supper when he tapped on the screen. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

“I want your help, Mrs. Somers. For Freddy.”

“Freddy,” she interrupted loudly, with her nose high, “is going to have his supper and go to bed his regular time, and that’s all about Freddy. Now, what did you want?”

He said, “I want you to let me take the boy to my apartment for the night.”

“I couldn’t do that!” She was scandalized.

“The judge will vouch...”

“Now, see here, Mr. what’s your name — Russell. This isn’t my house and Freddy’s not my boy. I’m responsible to Mr. and Mrs. Titus. You’re a stranger to me. As far as I can see, Freddy is no business of yours whatsoever.”

“Which is his room?” asked Mike sharply.

“Why do you want to know?” She was hostile and suspicious.

“Where does he keep his B.B. gun?”

She was startled to an answer. “In the shed out back. Why?”

He told her.

“Kid’s talk,” she scoffed. “You don’t know much about kids, do you, young man? Freddy will go to sleep. First thing he’ll know, it’s morning. That’s about the size of it.”

“You may be right. I hope so.”

Mrs. Somers slapped potatoes into the pan. Her lips quivered indignantly. She felt annoyed because she was a little shaken. The strange young man really had hoped so.

Russell scanned the street, went across to Matlin’s house. The man himself answered the bell. The air in this house was stale, and bore the faint smell of old grease. There was over everything an atmosphere of struggle and despair. Many things ought to have been repaired and had not been repaired. The place was too big. There wasn’t enough money, or strength. It was too much.

Mrs. Matlin could not walk. Otherwise, one saw, she struggled and did the best she could. She had a lost look, as if some anxiety, ever present, took about nine-tenths of her attention. May Matlin limped in and sat down, lumpishly.

Russell began earnestly, “Mr. Matlin, I don’t know how this situation between you and the boys began. I can guess that the kids are much to blame. I imagine they enjoy it.” He smiled. He wanted to be sympathetic toward this man.

“Of course they enjoy it.” Matlin looked triumphant.

“They call me the Witch,” the girl said. “Pretend they’re scared of me. The devils. I’m scared of them.”

Matlin flicked a nervous eye at the woman in the wheel chair. “The truth is, Mr. Russell,” he said in his high whine, “they’re vicious.”

“It’s too bad,” said his wife in a low voice. “I think it’s dangerous.”

“Mama, you mustn’t worry,” said the girl in an entirely new tone. “I won’t let them hurt you. Nobody will hurt you.”

“Be quiet, May,” said Matlin. “You’ll upset her. Of course nobody will hurt her.”

“Yes, it is dangerous, Mrs. Matlin,” said Russell quietly. “That’s why I came over.”

Matlin goggled. “What? What’s this?”

“Could I possibly persuade you, sir, to spend the night away from this neighborhood — and depart noisily?”

“No,” said Matlin, raring up, his ego bristling, “no, you cannot! I will under no circumstances be driven away from my own home.” His voice rose. “Furthermore, I certainly will not leave my wife and step-daughter.”

“We could manage, dear,” said Mrs. Matlin anxiously.

Russell told them about the talk under the oak, the B.B. gun.

“Devils,” said May Matlin, “absolutely...”

“Oh, Earl,” trembled Mrs. Matlin, “maybe we had all better go away.”

Matlin, red-necked, furious, said, “We own this property. We pay our taxes. We have our rights. Let them! Let them try something like that! Then, I think, the law would have something to say. This is outrageous! I did not harm that animal. Therefore, I defy...” He looked solemn and silly, as the judge had said, with his face crimson, his weak eyes rolling.

Russell rose. “I thought I ought to make the suggestion,” he said mildly, “because it would be the safest thing to do. But don’t worry, Mrs. Matlin, because I—”

“A B.B. gun can blind,” she said tensely.

“Or even worse,” Mike agreed. “But I am thinking of the—”

“Just a minute,” Matlin roared. “You can’t come in here and terrify my wife! She is not strong. You have no right.” He drew himself up with his feet at a right angle, his pudgy arm extended, his plump jowls quivering. “Get out,” he cried. He looked ridiculous.

Whether the young man and the bewildered woman in the chair might have understood each other was not to be known. Russell, of course, got out. May Matlin hobbled to the door and as Russell went through it she said, “Well, you warned us, anyhow.”

Russell plodded across the pavement again. Long enchanting shadows from the lowering sun struck aslant through the golden air and all the old houses were gilded and softened in their green setting. He moved toward the big oak. He hunkered down. The sun struck its golden shafts deep under the boughs. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Freddy Titus looked frozen and still. “Okay,” said Phil Bourchard with elaborate ease. Light on his owlish glasses hid the eyes.

Mike opened his lips, hesitated. Suppertime struck on the neighborhood clock. Calls, like chimes, were sounding.

“ ’S my Mom,” said Ernie Allen. “See you after.”

“See you after, Freddy.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Mrs. Somers’s hoot had chimed with the rest and now Freddy got up, stiffly.

“Okay?” said Mike Russell. The useful syllables that take any meaning at all in American mouths asked, “Are you feeling less bitter, boy? Are you any easier?”

“Okay,” said Freddy. The same syllables shut the man out.

Mike opened his lips. Closed them. Freddy went across the lawn to his kitchen door. There was a brown crockery bowl on the back stoop. His sneaker, rigid on the ankle, stepped over it. Mike Russell watched, and then, with a movement of his arms, almost as if he would wring his hands, he went up the judge’s steps.

“Well?” The judge opened his door. “Did you talk to the boy?”

Russell didn’t answer. He sat down.

The judge stood over him. “The boy... The enormity of this whole idea must be explained to him.”

“I can’t explain,” Mike said. “I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.”

“Perhaps I had better...”

“What are you going to say, sir?”

“Why, give him the facts!”

“The facts are... the dog is dead.”

“There are no facts that point to Matlin.”

“There are no facts that point to a tramp, either. That’s too sloppy, sir.”

“What are you driving at?”

“Judge, the boy is more rightfully suspicious than we are.”

“Nonsense,” said the judge. “The girl saw the dog’s body before Matlin came...”

“There is no alibi for poison,” Mike said sadly.

“Are you saying the man is a liar?”

“Liars,” sighed Mike. “Truth and lies. How are those kids going to understand, sir? To that Mrs. Page, to the lot of them, truth is only a subjective intention. ‘I am no liar,’ sez she, sez he. ‘I intend to be truthful. So do not insult me.’ Lord, when will we begin? It’s what we were talking about at lunch, sir. What you and I believe. What the race has been told and told in such agony, in a million years of bitter lesson. Error, we were saying. Error is the enemy.”

He flung out of the chair. “We know that to tell the truth is not merely a good intention. It’s a damned difficult thing to do. It’s a skill, to be practiced. It’s a technique. It’s an effort. It takes brains. It takes watching. It takes humility and self-examination. It’s a science and an art. Why don’t we tell the kids these things? Why is everyone locked up in anger, shouting liar at the other side? Why don’t they automatically know how easy it is to be, not wicked, but mistaken? Why is there this notion of violence? Because Freddy doesn’t think to himself, ‘Wait a minute. I might be wrong.’ The habit isn’t there. Instead, there are the heroes — the big-muscled, noble-hearted, gun-toting heroes, blind in a righteousness totally arranged by the author. Excuse me, sir.”

“All that may be,” said the judge grimly, “and I agree. But the police know the lesson. They—”

“They don’t care.”

“What?”

“Don’t care enough, sir. None of us cares enough — about the dog.”

“I see,” said the judge. “Yes, I see. We haven’t the least idea what happened to the dog.” He touched his pince-nez.

Mike rubbed his head wearily. “Don’t know what to do except sit under his window the night through. Hardly seems good enough.”

The judge said, simply, “Why don’t you find out what happened to the dog?”

The young man’s face changed. “What we need, sir,” said Mike slowly, “is to teach Freddy how to ask for it. Just to ask for it. Just to want it.” The old man and the young man looked at each other. Past and future telescoped. “Now,” Mike said. “Before dark.”

Suppertime, for the kids, was only twenty minutes long. When the girl in the brown dress with the bare blond head got out of the shabby coupé, the gang was gathered again in its hollow under the oak. She went to them and sank down on the ground. “Ah, Freddy, was it Bones? Your dear little dog you wrote about in the essay?”

“Yes, Miss Dana.” Freddy’s voice was shrill and hostile. I won’t be touched! it cried to her. So she said no more, but sat there on the ground, and presently she began to cry. There was contagion. The simplest thing in the world. First, one of the smaller ones whimpering. Finally, Freddy Titus, bending over. Her arm guided his head, and then he lay weeping in her lap.

Russell, up in the summerhouse, closed his eyes and praised the Lord. In a little while he swung his legs over the railing and slid down the bank. “How do? I’m Mike Russell.”

“I’m Lillian Dana.” She was quick and intelligent, and her tears were real.

“Fellows,” said Mike briskly, “you know what’s got to be done, don’t you? We’ve got to solve this case.”

They turned their woeful faces.

He said, deliberately, “It’s just the same as a murder. It is a murder.”

“Yeah,” said Freddy and sat up, tears drying. “And it was ole Matlin.”

“Then we have to prove it.”

Miss Lillian Dana saw the boy’s face lock. He didn’t need to prove anything, the look proclaimed. He knew. She leaned over a little and said, “But we can’t make an ugly mistake and put it on Bones’s account. Bones was a fine dog. That would be a terrible monument.” Freddy’s eyes turned, startled.

“It’s up to us,” said Mike gratefully, “to go after the real facts, with real detective work. For Bones’s sake.”

“It’s the least we can do for him,” said Miss Dana, calmly and decisively.

Freddy’s face lifted.

“Trouble is,” Russell went on quickly, “people get things wrong. Sometimes they don’t remember straight. They make mistakes.”

“Ole Matlin tells lies,” said Freddy.

“If he does,” said Russell cheerfully, “then we’ve got to prove that he does. Now, I’ve figured out a plan, if Miss Dana will help us. You pick a couple of the fellows, Fred. Have to go to all the houses around and ask some questions. Better pick the smartest ones. To find out the truth is very hard,” he challenged.

“And then?” said Miss Dana in a fluttery voice.

“Then they, and you, if you will...”

“Me?” She straightened. “I’m a schoolteacher, Mr. Russell. Won’t the police...?”

“Not before dark.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“Dirtier work.”

She bit her lip. “It’s nosy. It’s... not done.”

“No,” he agreed. “You may lose your job.”

She wasn’t a bad-looking young woman. Her eyes were fine. Her brow was serious, but there was the ghost of a dimple in her cheek. Her hands moved. “Oh, well, I can always take up beauty culture or something. What are the questions?” She had a pad of paper and a pencil half out of her purse, and looked alert and efficient.

Now, as the gang huddled, there was a warm sense of conspiracy growing. “Going to be the dickens of a job,” Russell warned them. And he outlined some questions. “Now, don’t let anybody fool you into taking a sloppy answer,” he concluded. “Ask how they know. Get real evidence. But don’t go to Matlin’s — I’ll go there.”

“I’m not afraid of him.” Freddy’s nostrils flared.

“I think I stand a better chance of getting the answers,” said Russell coolly. “Aren’t we after the answers?”

Freddy swallowed. “And if it turns out...?”

“It turns out the way it turns out,” said Russell, rumpling the towhead. “Choose your henchmen. Tough, remember.”

“Phil. Ernie.” The kids who were left out wailed as the three small boys and their teacher, who wasn’t a lot bigger, rose from the ground.

“It’ll be tough, Mr. Russell,” Miss Dana said grimly. “Whoever you are, thank you for getting me into this.”

“I’m just a stranger,” he said gently, looking down at her face. “But you are a friend and a teacher.” Pain crossed her eyes. “You’ll be teaching now, you know.”

Her chin went up. “Okay, kids. I’ll keep the paper and pencil. Freddy, wipe your face. Stick your shirt in, Phil. Now, let’s organize...”

It was nearly nine o’clock when the boys and the teacher, looking rather exhausted, came back to the judge’s house. Russell, whose face was grave, reached for the papers in her hands.

“Just a minute,” said Miss Dana. “Judge, we have some questions.”

Ernie Allen bared all his heap of teeth and stepped forward. “Did you see Bones today?” he asked with the firm skill of repetition. The judge nodded. “How many times and when?”

“Once. Er — shortly before noon. He crossed my yard, going east.”

The boys bent over the pad. Then Freddy’s lips opened hard. “How do you know the time, Judge Kittinger?”

“Well,” said the judge, “hm... let me think. I was looking out the window for my company and just then he arrived.”

“Five minutes of one, sir,” Mike said.

Freddy flashed around. “What makes you sure?”

“I looked at my watch,” said Russell. “I was taught to be exactly five minutes early when I’m asked to a meal.” There was a nodding among the boys, and Miss Dana wrote on the pad.

“Then I was mistaken,” said the judge, thoughtfully. “It was shortly before one. Of course.”

Phil Bourchard took over. “Did you see anyone go into Matlin’s driveway or back lot?”

“I did not.”

“Were you out of doors or did you look up that way?”

“Yes, I... When we left the table. Mike?”

“At two-thirty, sir.”

“How do you know that time for sure?” asked Freddy Titus.

“Because I wondered if I could politely stay a little longer.” Russell’s eyes congratulated Miss Lillian Dana. She had made them a team, and on it, Freddy was the How-do-you-know-for-sure Department.

“Can you swear,” continued Phil to the judge, “there was nobody at all around Matlin’s back lot then?”

“As far as my view goes,” answered the judge cautiously.

Freddy said promptly, “He couldn’t see much. Too many trees. We can’t count that.”

They looked at Miss Dana and she marked on the pad. “Thank you. Now, you have a cook, sir? We must question her.”

“This way,” said the judge, rising and bowing.

Russell looked after them and his eyes were velvet again. He met the judge’s twinkle. Then he sat down and ran an eye quickly over some of the sheets of paper, passing each on to his host.

Startled, he looked up. Lillian Dana, standing in the door, was watching his face.

“Do you think, Mike...?”

A paper drooped in the judge’s hand.

“We can’t stop,” she challenged.

Russell nodded, and turned to the judge. “May need some high brass, sir.” The judge rose. “And tell me, sir, where Matlin plays golf. And the telephone number of the Salvage League. No, Miss Dana, we can’t stop. We’ll take it where it turns.”

“We must,” she said.

It was nearly ten when the neighbors began to come in. The judge greeted them soberly. The Chief of Police arrived. Mrs. Somers, looking grim and uprooted in a crêpe dress, came. Mr. Matlin, Mrs. Page, Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty, a Mr. and Mrs. Baker, and Diane Bourchard, who was sixteen. They looked curiously at the tight little group, the boys and their blond teacher.

Last of all to arrive was young Mr. Russell, who slipped in from the dark veranda, accepted the judge’s nod, and called the meeting to order.

“We have been investigating the strange death of a dog,” he began. “Chief Anderson, while we know your department would have done so in good time, we also know you are busy, and some of us,” he glanced at the dark windowpane, “couldn’t wait. Will you help us now?”

The chief said, genially, “That’s why I’m here, I guess.” It was the judge and his stature that gave this meeting any standing. Naïve, young, a little absurd it might have seemed had not the old man sat so quietly attentive among them.

“Thank you, sir. Now, all we want to know is what happened to the dog.” Russell looked about him. “First, let us demolish the tramp.” Mrs. Page’s feathers ruffled. Russell smiled at her. “Mrs. Page saw a man go down Matlin’s drive this morning. The Salvage League sent a truck to pick up rags and papers which at ten-forty-two was parked in front of the Daughertys’. The man, who seemed poorly dressed in his working clothes, went to the toolroom behind Matlin’s garage, as he had been instructed to. He picked up a bundle and returned to his truck. Mrs. Page,” purred Mike to her scarlet face, “the man was there. It was only your opinion about him that proves to have been, not a lie, but an error.”

He turned his head. “Now, we have tried to trace the dog’s day and we have done remarkably well, too.” As he traced it for them, some faces began to wear at least the ghost of a smile, seeing the little dog frisking through the neighborhood. “Just before one,” Mike went on, “Bones ran across the judge’s yard to the Allens’ where the kids were playing ball. Up to this time no one saw Bones above Greenwood Lane or up Hannibal Street. But Miss Diane Bourchard, recovering from a sore throat, was not in school today. After lunch, she sat on her porch directly across from Mr. Matlin’s back lot. She was waiting for school to be out, when she expected her friends to come by.

“She saw, not Bones, but Corky, an animal belonging to Mr. Daugherty, playing in Matlin’s lot at about two o’clock. I want your opinion. If poisoned bait had been lying there at two, would Corky have found it?”

“Seems so,” said Daugherty. “Thank God Corky didn’t.” He bit his tongue. “Corky’s a show dog,” he blundered.

“But Bones,” said Russell gently, “was more like a friend. That’s why we care, of course.”

“It’s a damned shame!” Daugherty looked around angrily.

“It is,” said Mrs. Baker. “He was a friend of mine, Bones was.”

“Go on,” growled Daugherty. “What else did you dig up?”

“Mr. Matlin left for his golf at eleven-thirty. Now, you see, it looks as if Matlin couldn’t have left poison behind him.”

“I most certainly did not,” snapped Matlin. “I have said so. I will not stand for this sort of innuendo, I am not a liar. You said it was a conference.”

Mike held the man’s eyes. “We are simply trying to find out what happened to the dog,” he said. Matlin fell silent.

“Surely you realize,” purred Mike, “that, human frailty being what it is, there may have been other errors in what we were told this afternoon. There was at least one more.

“Mr. and Mrs. Baker,” he continued, “worked in their garden this afternoon. Bones abandoned the ball game to visit the Bakers’ dog, Smitty. At three o’clock the Bakers, after discussing the time carefully lest it be too late in the day, decided to bathe Smitty. When they caught him for his ordeal, Bones was still there. So, you see, Miss May Matlin, who says she saw Bones lying by the sidewalk before three o’clock, was mistaken.”

Matlin twitched. Russell said sharply, “The testimony of the Bakers is extremely clear.” The Bakers, who looked alike, both brown outdoor people, nodded vigorously.

“The time at which Mr. Matlin returned is quite well established. Diane saw him. Mrs. Daugherty, next door, decided to take a nap at five after three. She had a roast to put in at four-thirty. Therefore she is sure of the time. She went upstairs and from an upper window she, too, saw Mr. Matlin come home. Both witnesses say he drove his car into the garage at three-ten, got out, and went around the building to the right of it — on the weedy side.”

Mr. Matlin was sweating. His forehead was beaded. He did not speak.

Mike shifted papers. “Now, we know that the kids trooped up to Phil Bourchard’s kitchen at about a quarter of three. Whereas Bones, realizing that Smitty was in for it, and shying away from soap and water like any sane dog, went up Hannibal Street at three o’clock sharp. He may have known in some doggy way where Freddy was. Can we see Bones loping up Hannibal Street, going above Greenwood Lane?”

“We can,” said Daugherty. He was watching Matlin. “Besides, he was found above Greenwood Lane soon after.”

“No one,” said Mike slowly, “was seen in Matlin’s back lot, except Matlin. Yet almost immediately after Matlin was there, the little dog died.”

“Didn’t Diane...?”

“Diane’s friends came at three-twelve. Their evidence is not reliable.” Diane blushed.

“This — this is intolerable!” croaked Matlin. “Why my back lot?”

Daugherty said, “There was no poison lying around my place, I’ll tell you that.”

“How do you know?” begged Matlin. And Freddy’s eyes, with the smudges under them, followed to Russell’s face. “Why not in the street? From some passing car?”

Mike said, “I’m afraid it’s not likely. You see, Mr. Otis Carnavon was stalled at the corner of Hannibal and Lee. Trying to flag a push. Anything thrown from a car on that block he ought to have seen.”

“Was the poison quick?” demanded Daugherty. “What did he get?”

“It was quick. The dog could not go far after he got it. He got cyanide.”

Matlin’s shaking hand removed his glasses. They were wet.

“Some of you may be amateur photographers,” Mike said. “Mr. Matlin, is there cyanide in your cellar darkroom?”

“Yes, but I keep it... most meticulously...” Matlin began to cough.

When the noise of his spasm died, Mike said, “The poison was embedded in ground meat which analyzed, roughly, half-beef and the rest pork and veal, half and half.” Matlin encircled his throat with his fingers. “I’ve checked with four neighborhood butchers and the dickens of a time I had,” said Mike. No one smiled. Only Freddy looked up at him with solemn sympathy. “Ground meat was delivered to at least five houses in the vicinity. Meat that was one-half beef, one-quarter pork, one-quarter veal, was delivered at ten this morning to Matlin’s house.”

A stir like an angry wind blew over the room. The Chief of Police made some shift of his weight so that his chair creaked.

“It begins to look...” growled Daugherty.

“Now,” said Russell sharply, “we must be very careful. One more thing. The meat had been seasoned.”

“Seasoned!”

“With salt. And with... thyme.”

“Thyme,” groaned Matlin.

Freddy looked up at Miss Dana with bewildered eyes. She put her arm around him.

“As far as motives are concerned,” said Mike quietly, “I can’t discuss them. It is inconceivable to me that any man would poison a dog.” Nobody spoke. “However, where are we?” Mike’s voice seemed to catch Matlin just in time to keep him from falling off the chair. “We don’t know yet what happened to the dog.” Mike’s voice rang. “Mr. Matlin, will you help us to the answer?”

Matlin said thickly, “Better get those kids out of here.”

Miss Dana moved, but Russell said, “No. They have worked hard for the truth. They have earned it. And if it is to be had, they shall have it.”

“You know?” whimpered Matlin.

Mike said, “I called your golf club. I’ve looked into your trash incinerator. Yes, I know. But I want you to tell us.”

Daugherty said, “Well? Well?” And Matlin covered his face.

Mike said, gently, “I think there was an error. Mr. Matlin, I’m afraid, did poison the dog. But he never meant to, and he didn’t know he had done it.”

Matlin said, “I’m sorry... It’s — I can’t... She means to do her best. But she’s a terrible cook. Somebody gave her those — those herbs. Thyme — thyme in everything. She fixed me a lunch box. I — couldn’t stomach it. I bought my lunch at the club.”

Mike nodded.

Matlin went on, his voice cracking. “I never... You see, I didn’t even know it was meat the dog got. She said — she told me the dog was already dead.”

“And of course,” said Mike, “in your righteous wrath, you never paused to say to yourself, ‘Wait, what did happen to the dog?’ ”

“Mr. Russell, I didn’t lie. How could I know there was thyme in it? When I got home, I had to get rid of the hamburger she’d fixed for me — I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She tries... tries so hard...” He sat up suddenly. “But what she tried to do today,” he said, with his eyes almost out of his head, “was to poison me!” His bulging eyes roved. They came to Freddy. He gasped. He said, “Your dog saved my life!”

“Yes,” said Mike quickly, “Freddy’s dog saved your life. You see, your step-daughter would have kept trying.”

People drew in their breaths. “The buns are in your incinerator,” Mike said. “She guessed what happened to the dog, went for the buns, and hid them. She was late, you remember, getting to the disturbance. And she did lie.”

Chief Anderson rose.

“Her mother...” said Matlin frantically, “her mother...”

Mike Russell put his hand on the plump shoulder. “Her mother’s been in torment, tortured by the rivalry between you. Don’t you think her mother senses something wrong?”

Miss Lillian Dana wrapped Freddy in her arms. “Oh, what a wonderful dog Bones was!” she covered the sound of the other voices. “Even when he died, he saved a man’s life. Oh, Freddy, he was a wonderful dog.”

And Freddy, not quite taking everything in yet, was released to simple sorrow and wept quietly against his friend...

When they went to fetch May Matlin, she was not in the house. They found her in the Titus’s back shed. She seemed to be looking for something.

Next day, when Mr. and Mrs. Titus came home, they found that although the little dog had died, their Freddy was all right. The judge, Russell, and Miss Dana told them all about it.

Mrs. Titus wept. Mr. Titus swore. He wrung Russell’s hand. “...for stealing the gun...” he babbled.

But the mother cried, “...for showing him, for teaching him... Oh, Miss Dana, oh, my dear!”

The judge waved from his veranda as the dark head and the blond drove away.

“I think Miss Dana likes him,” said Ernie Allen.

“How do you know for sure?” said Freddy Titus.

I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Detective Fiction Weekly, March 12, 1938, as by William Irish; first collected in I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1943)

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) was arguably the greatest suspense writer of the twentieth century. Phantom Lady (1942), the first novel he wrote under his William Irish pseudonym, is credited with inventing a staple of countless mystery and espionage films: the ticking clock. Each chapter begins with a notice about the number of days, then hours, before the innocent protagonist is due to be executed for having murdered someone. Every time James Bond or another hero in an international thriller is seen trying to prevent a bomb from exploding as we watch the seconds on the timer tick away, the screenwriter owes a word of thanks to Cornell Woolrich.

Not as technically precise as the ticking clock, perhaps, but I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes essentially replicates that process. Unable to sleep on a hot night because his open window allows him to clearly hear the shrill screams of cats in the courtyard below, a man picks up one of his shoes to throw at them so they’ll relocate. Because that doesn’t work, he throws the other. When he goes down to search for them, they have disappeared. The next day, he is arrested for murder, the footprints of his shoes having given him away. He is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

With mere hours before the scheduled execution, the detective on the case finally believes in the wife’s conviction of her husband’s innocence and tries to set him free. But, Woolrich being Woolrich, no reader can be confident of a happy ending.

Title: I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes, 1948

Studio: Monogram Pictures

Director: William Nigh

Screenwriter: Steve Fisher

Producer: Walter Mirisch

• Don Castle (Tom J. Quinn)

• Elyse Knox (Ann Quinn)

• Regis Toomey (Inspector Clint Judd)

• Charles D. Brown (Inspector Stevens)

Although I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes does not rank at the very top among the film noir classics of the 1940s, it closely follows much of Cornell Woolrich’s plot and is truly suspenseful. Unlike most films noir, it does not feature a bad girl who betrays the man who loves her but, instead, a young woman who believes her husband is innocent. It does feature elements of Woolrich’s commonly used device of the everyday gone wrong, and it does have a good twist that you probably will not have seen coming.

Steve Fisher, the writer of this B movie, was a popular crime novelist and screenwriter, mostly famous for I Wake Up Screaming (1941), the novel that was adapted as a noir classic of the same title. He was also a prolific writer for pulp magazines, as was Woolrich, and a successful Hollywood screenwriter with such titles as Johnny Angel (1945), Lady in the Lake (1946), and Song of the Thin Man (1947) to his credit.

Don Castle, who closely resembled Clark Gable, went on to produce the widely popular Lassie television series.

I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES Cornell Woolrich

It started in low and rolling each time, like a tea-kettle simmering, or a car-engine turning over, or a guy gargling mouthwash. Then it went high. Higher than the highest scream. Higher than a nail scratching glass. Higher than human nerves could stand. Eeeee-yow. Then it wound up in a vicious reptilian hiss, with a salivary explosion for a finale. Hah-tutt! Then it started all over again.

Tom Quinn pulled the bedcovers from his ears at the sound of the window-sash slamming down. His face was steaming from the ineffective sound-proofing that had only managed to smother him without toning down the performance any.

“How we going to sleep on a hot night like this with the window closed?” he said irritably.

“Well, how we going to sleep with that going on?” his wife demanded, not unreasonably. “Are they making love, or are they sore at each other, or are they just suffering down there?”

The floodgates of his pent-up wrath burst at that. It had been going on ever since they’d retired. He reared up with the violence of an earthquake, scattering the bedding all over the floor. He snatched up something from the floor, took two quick, slapping, barefooted steps over to the window, jerked it up, wound up his right arm like a big league pitcher, let fly into the obscured backyard five stories below.

His wife didn’t see what the object was in time to stop him. There was a complete lack of any answering impact or thud from below to show that the missile had found a mark. There was not even a hitch in the caterwauling. To Quinn’s inflamed ears it even seemed to take on an added derisive note, as though the felines were razzing him.

“—cats!” he panted hoarsely. He jumped back to the bed again, stooped for the mate to what he’d flung the first time, returned to the window, and again wound up.

This time she saw what it was, tried to catch his arm in time, just missed as he let go.

“Tom!” she wailed. “Not your shoes! What’s the matter with you?”

There was as complete a lack of results as the first time. The heavy-soled object might have taken wings, gone up into the air instead of down, for all the sound of striking that reached them. The vocal pyrotechnics went on unabated.

“Well, that was a smart stunt!” his wife commented acidly. “How are you going to work tomorrow? In your stocking feet?”

His anger had turned to sheepishness, the way it does when a man has made a fool of himself. “I got another pair in the closet, haven’t I?” he defended himself.

“I don’t care, you’re not throwing a perfectly good pair of shoes out of the window like that! They cost ten dollars, with those special built-in arches for your flat feet! You go down there and bring them back.”

“At this hour?”

“You march down there and get them before one of the janitors picks them up in the morning!” she insisted.

He thrust a moth-eaten robe around him unwillingly, found a pair of carpet slippers, and started out, mumbling: “Didn’t even hear them hit anything. I’ve got an aim like a—”

It was a full quarter of an hour before he came back. When he did, he looked more crestfallen, sheepish, than ever. His wife didn’t need to be told. She could see that his hands were empty. “I thought so!” she said scathingly. “Couldn’t find them, now could you?”

“I looked all around in both yards, ours and the next one over,” he said shamefacedly. “Not a sign of them anywhere.”

“They must be down there somewhere!” she insisted. “There hasn’t been anyone else down there. I’ve been watching from the window the whole time. Why didn’t you take that flashlight with you?”

“I lit matches,” he said. “I went over every square inch of those two yards, even climbed over the fence in my robe. They must have gone in somebody’s open window on one of the lower floors, on that side facing us.”

“Well then, why didn’t you ring their doorbells, find out for sure?”

“Wake people up at this hour, asking for my shoes? What kind of a sap d’you think I want them to take me for? They’d laugh in my face!” It was true; it was one of those things that the average man finds it strangely difficult to bring himself to do. He doesn’t mind appearing ridiculous to his wife, but with outsiders it’s a different matter.

“Well, don’t expect me to go down there and ask for them back for you,” she said. “You were the one threw them — now you can do without them! We’re so well off we can’t get away out of this awful heat, like most of the people that live around us, but you can afford to throw ten-dollar shoes out of the window.”

Tom Quinn was back in bed again. He looped the clothing around his upturned ear once more, not against the cats this time but against his wife’s reproaches — which he had a sneaking suspicion were well-earned.

He heard a good deal about it the next morning, more than he cared to. He went off to his work still tingling all over from her verbal thrusts and jabs. He expected to hear a good deal about it that evening when he returned, too, and in fact for several days to come. It would be a week before he heard the end of it. Not that Mrs. Quinn was a nagger — quite the opposite. She was cheerful and easy to get along with as a rule. The heat, which had been unabated for three weeks now, was probably telling on her. And then outside of that, he could see her point in this case. They were not well off, quite the reverse. Things had been getting worse for several years now with him, instead of better. His shoes, because of his arch deformity, were one of the largest items of expense they had. Unlike most couples, he paid twice as much for his as she did for hers. And the more he thought about the way he had thrown them away, the more childish and stupid he had to admit he’d been. So childish and stupid that it became doubly impossible for him to go around to the flats on the next street and make inquiries about them, or even have the janitor of his own building do it for him. The way the people were in this neighborhood, whoever had them would probably deny finding them, keep them — he tried to console himself. But it was no use.

He even toyed with the idea of buying himself a new pair, rubbing a little dust on them, and pretending to his wife that they were his former ones returned, to avoid being subjected to her sarcasm, but he found it impossible to do that because he didn’t have the necessary ten dollars to spare.

However, when he returned from work that evening expecting to hear quite a good deal more about those shoes and none of it complimentary, he found her opening remarks bewildering. She seemed to have no further complaint to make.

“Well,” she said admiringly, “I’m glad you had spunk enough to go around and demand them back, like I told you to. I really didn’t think you would.”

She pointed, and he saw the shoes there side by side on the floor, on a sheet of newspaper they’d been wrapped in.

She took it for granted it was his doing that they had been restored. “Guess you didn’t have time to come back upstairs with them yourself this morning, did you? You were late for work as it was,” she went on, answering her own question.

“Oh, then you didn’t see who brought them?” Quinn pumped.

“No, I found them standing out there at the door, wrapped up in paper, when I went out at noon. Funny they didn’t ring the bell and hand them over personally. Still, it was nice of them to go to all the trouble of climbing those four flights of stairs. Who had them?”

Quinn decided he might as well bask in her good opinion, even if he hadn’t earned it. The shoes were back, so what difference did it make? If he admitted it hadn’t been through him they were returned, she might start in criticizing him all over again. “Somebody across the way,” he said vaguely. That was undoubtedly the truth of the matter anyway, since they certainly hadn’t been able to do a boomerang loop in the air and fly in some window on this same side of the court.

She didn’t press him for further details.

He picked the shoes up and looked them over curiously, but they looked no different to his untrained eye than they had when he had taken them off last night and parked them under his bed. They needed a shine, but they had then too; he decided he’d celebrate their return by blowing them to one. He got about one shine a year, as a rule.

At the same time he was wondering how the mysterious person had known which flat to return them to. She’d turned on the light in the bedroom, he remembered, when he went down to look for them, and he supposed the finder had judged by that. But then why hadn’t they rung the bell when they were returning them and waited a minute to make sure they had the right party? Or for that matter, if they’d been awake at the time and seen the tell-tale lighted window, why hadn’t they called out to him then and there, while he was down there in the yard looking? Why wait until today?

The only explanation he could find for that was that they had been awake and had seen the window light up, but didn’t discover that the shoes were in the same room with them until today, in the daylight. Maybe they didn’t sleep in the room the shoes had landed in, therefore didn’t hear them tumble. Or if they did (and most people’s bedrooms were at the back in these flats), maybe the shoes had landed on a carpeted floor or in the seat of an overstuffed sofa. It was certainly uncanny that they had both passed through one and the same window, and avoided smashing the pane.

In any case, Quinn felt, the whole thing was too trivial, too unimportant one way or the other, to waste time wondering about. He’d miraculously gotten his shoes back, and that was all that mattered. By the following morning he and his wife had both practically forgotten the episode. By the following evening they definitely had. By the second morning after it was so completely erased that only direct mention of it could have brought it back into their minds, and they were the only ones who knew about it, so who else was to mention it to them?

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there. It wasn’t a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.

The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.

The inspector, who was a heavily-built man, looked doubtfully up at it as he stepped in under the warped porch-shed. “I hope I don’t put my foot in the wrong place and bring it tumbling down on top of us.”

“Living in a place like this was asking for it,” one of the men with him remarked. “A regular corner-pocket; it must be pitch-dark all the way back here at night.”

The house was bigger on the inside than it gave the impression of being from the front. They passed down a tunnel-like hall to a room at the back, which kept lighting up, bright blue, as though there were a short circuit in there. A couple of men lugging a camera came hustling out, nodded, and left, trailing an acrid odor of flashlight powder behind them.

The inspector went in, said: “So that’s him, eh?”

There was a man lying dead on the floor, with a section of clothesline wound around his neck. Although the activity going on all around stemmed from him, nobody was paying much attention to him any more. One of the detectives even stepped over him to save time getting from one side of the room to the other.

A pyramid of empty tin cans had toppled down in the corner. A terrified mouse darted out, around, and in again. Its long tail stayed visible between two of the cans, then vanished more slowly than the rest of it had.

The inspector said, “I’m only surprised it didn’t happen long ago.”

“He only went out once a month to buy canned goods. Never left the place outside of that. I guess that’s how he managed to stay alive as long as he did.”

“Well, he’s going out now and it ain’t to buy canned goods,” the inspector said. He called out into the hall: “Morgue! We don’t need him any more.” A couple of men waiting out there came in with a basket.

“How’d they get in, whoever it was?” the inspector wanted to know.

“Right there.” One of them indicated a wide-open window, facing the back. “The old guy would never open the front door for anyone of his own accord. Too suspicious. It was still locked on the inside when we got here, anyway. He must have left this window open a little on account of the awful heat. In came death.”

“Hidden hoard motive, like with all these recluses,” suggested the inspector. “Well, did they get it? How does it look to you men?”

A man riffling a sheaf of old papers, letters, and clippings through his fingers, and sneezing from the dust at intervals, spoke up. “I think they did get something. There’s not a sign of a bank book, safe deposit key, or memorandum of any investments anywhere around, and it’s a cinch he didn’t live on air. The storekeeper where he got his monthly groceries says he never showed up with anything smaller than a twenty-dollar bill. The large old-fashioned kind that don’t circulate any more.”

“How does he look?” asked the inspector crisply.

“Okay at first sight. He was the one notified us. You see, this Wontner had been buying from him so long, he knew just which day to expect him in. Always the first of the month. It never varied. So when he didn’t show, today being the day, the grocer came around and knocked, thinking the guy might be ill and need help. When he didn’t get any answer, he tipped off a cop.”

“It happened last night, the examiner tells me.”

“Yep, somewhere within the past twenty-four hours. The killer was unaware of Wontner’s habits, otherwise he could have timed it different and given himself a whole month’s head-start on us. By doing it last night, he cut himself down to within twenty-four hours’ margin of safety. If it had happened tonight, after he got his groceries, no one would have been any the wiser for a whole thirty days to come. The guy was a complete hermit.”

“Well, they got his hoard, proof enough,” said the inspector. “Now one of the first things we want to watch out for is sudden signs of mysterious prosperity around here in the immediate neighborhood. They’ll lie low at first, think they’re smart, but they won’t be able to hold out for long. Anyone that breaks out in a new suit or starts dolling his wife up, or moves kind of sudden to a new flat, or starts setting them up for the boys down at the corner, we’ll keep our eyes open for that kind of thing.” He added abruptly, “Where’d the rope come from? Think that’ll do us any good?”

“No, we’ve already traced it. He picked it up right out in back here. Wontner used to hang his shirts on it to dry.”

The inspector went over to the open window, peered out. Something like a high-powered lightning bug was flashing on and off around the side of the house, where there was a narrow chasm between it and the warehouse wall that towered over it. “Who’s out there?” he asked.

“Bob White, digging for worms.”

The gleam went out, and a man in horn-rimmed glasses, his collar open and his necktie-knot pulled nearly around to his shoulder to lessen the heat, came up to the outside of the window.

“Just in time, inspector,” he said. “I’ve got a beauty out here, a pip! Come on out and take a look.”

Bob White didn’t look much like a detective. He suggested a college student of the post-war generation, of the earnest, not frivolous, variety; not so much because of a youthful appearance as because of an air of enthusiasm and seriousness combined. His mates pretended to laugh at him, and they secretly admired him.

The inspector went out onto the plot of ground behind the house, littered with empty tin cans and rubbish discarded over a period of years by the murdered eccentric. The others came out after him one by one, trying to look disinterested and not succeeding.

Bob White beckoned them on, turned back into the narrow alleyway running through to the front. “Stay on that plank I’ve laid down there, will you, fellows?” he suggested. “There’s a few fainter ones back along here, and you may want more than one. But this one — zowie!”

He stopped and pointed. The others craned their necks over the inspector’s shoulders; the hindmost one squatted down frog-like and stuck his head out from behind them all.

“There’s either a drain- or water-pipe somewhere close under the surface here. It must be defective from age, and keeps the ground damp above it. Now look at that, right in the middle of it! What more could any of you ask for?”

The footprint was crystal clear as his torch played caressingly over it.

“The thing’s over, before it’s even halfway begun.” The inspector didn’t waste any more time. “Hurry up. Phone the lab to get some guys up here with moulage and take the impression of it. We can build the whole man up out of that thing. We’ll know what he looks like and everything about him by the time we’re through. This is as good as a photograph.”

“He made it when he was leaving,” Bob White pointed out. “Not on his way in. The toe’s pointed out toward the street. He was lucky the first time, missed the soggy patch. His feet landed on the hard stubbly ground before and after it. But his luck didn’t hold up on the return trip; his foot came right down smack in the middle of it.”

The inspector said grimly, “His luck’s run out now — whoever he is.”

“You can quote me,” said the inspector, bouncing a pencil up and down on its point atop his desk, “that we are confident of making an arrest shortly. The case is proceeding satisfactorily. And now, gents, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my work.”

“Aw, inspector, can’t you do better by us than that?” one of the reporters whined. “That’s the same old gag.”

“Now boys, don’t be hogs. I’ll send for you when I’ve got something more for you. Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

When they’d shoved their copy paper into their pockets and gone, he picked up his desk phone, asked for the police laboratory.

“How’s that mold coming along?”

“It’s come through pretty. I’m sending you over a sketch of the man we reconstructed from it.”

“Good. I’ll have it photostated and pass it around among my men.”

“Here are some of the details. The man you want is five foot ten, weight around one hundred seventy-five or eighty. He takes a nine shoe. He’s flat-footed; this shoe has a special built-in arch, a sort of steel rib between the heel and toe to give him support. You know, cantilever principle. That should narrow it down immensely; the firms that sell those things usually keep a list of their customers, like a doctor does patients. His occupation is sedentary; doesn’t do much walking or even standing — the heel is hardly worn down at all. Look for some kind of a white-collar worker.”

“You’ve practically handed him to me on a silver platter,” said the inspector gratefully.

A messenger had arrived with the sketch and the plaster mold in twenty minutes. Photostatic copies of the former were ready within half an hour after that. The inspector called the men he’d detailed to the case in and handed one to each.

“There’s the man,” he said. “The facial features have been left out, but study the silhouette, the build, and carriage. All we need to know now is his name and present whereabouts. I want every one of you to go to a different firm specializing in arch-support shoes, check the customers on record by the measurements on this sketch; they may be able to identify him for you by the shoe alone. If he got those shoes in this city, we’ll know who he is inside the next twenty-four hours. And even if he didn’t, we’ll have him inside a week at the most. Give me that classified directory. I’ll detail you. Keller, you take them down to the E’s, Easy-Walk Shoes, Incorporated. Michaels—” And so on.

Within five minutes he was sitting alone in his office. It was now forty-eight hours after the discovery of the murder.

Bob White had drawn the S’s to the Z’s. He phoned in at about five. “I’ve got him, inspector,” he said. “Second place on my list. Supporta Shoes. They keep a litmus-paper graph of the shape of the customer’s foot, to keep track of any improvement as he goes along. It matches our shoe-print like a hand does a glove. No possibility of error. But the salesman was almost able to identify him from the sketch, without that, anyway. Now here’s what their records have to say: Thomas J. Quinn. Thirty-eight years old. Height five-ten. Weight one hundred and seventy. Occupation, bookkeeper for a millinery concern.” White paused, then gave an address. “They keep a complete record, you see, go into it scientific, even take X-rays of the foot and all that. Bought his current pair late last spring. Grouses a lot about the expense each time, to the best of the salesman’s recollection.”

“Well, that’s another little nail in his coffin.” The inspector was jubilant. “He lives just a little farther away than I’d expected, but well within the radius of opportunity to soak up neighborhood gossip about the old miser, and also temptation to commit it. Five blocks west and one north of where Wontner lived. Ten minutes’ walk, even for a guy with flat feet.” He finished jotting, closed his notebook. “Great, White. I’ll call the rest in. Meanwhile you get over there quick. If he’s lit out already, report in to me immediately and we’ll send out an alarm. If he’s still there, keep your eye on him. Don’t let him out of your sight. I’m not pulling him in right away. I’m going to keep him under observation a little while yet, see if any of the miser’s hoard shows up. We’ve got him now, so we don’t need to be in a hurry. The stronger the case we can build up against him, the less work it is for us in the end.”

Quinn came in pale and shaken. His wife could tell at a glance something had happened to him. It was more than just his feet troubling him again.

“Tom, what’s wrong?” she said anxiously. “You look all white and disturbed! You haven’t — you haven’t lost your position, have you?” She caught him by the sleeve, stared up into his face.

“No, thank heaven,” he said, but almost absently, as though whether he had or not didn’t matter so much any more. He glanced behind him at the door through which he had just come in, as though fearful of having been followed. He stammered, “I... I been like dazed since it happened. I can’t believe it. It’s like a dream. You hear and read about things like that happening, but I never thought it would happen to me.”

He was fumbling agitatedly with his coat. He gave another of those looks behind him at the door. Then he brought something out of his inside pocket, tossed it down on the table before them for her to see.

She said, “What is it?” looking from him to it, and from it to him.

“You can see what it is,” he answered shortly. It was black and oblong. It was a wallet. “Look inside it,” he added almost fearfully.

She did. Then her own face paled a little, like his. They’d been so down-and-out for such a long time, they’d had to do without so many things for so many years now — “Tom!” she said.

“Two thousand and ten dollars,” he said. “I counted it just now, on the stairs outside. I was afraid to count it — where I first found it, afraid somebody’d see me. All the way home I expected to feel someone’s hand drop heavily on my shoulder, hear somebody say ‘Give that back to me — it’s mine!’ ” He wiped his sleeve across his damp brow, glanced apprehensively at the door again.

“But how — where—?”

“Sh!” he warned. “Talk lower. Somebody living in the house might hear you from outside. If they knew we had that much money in here... I was coming up the subway steps and — and you know how the ground’s on a level with your eyes before you get all the way to the top. Maybe that’s how I happened to see it. There were plenty of people walking past it, but they weren’t looking down, I guess. They were so thick around it, maybe that’s why none of them had a chance to see it. The man in front of me, his foot kicked it a little way and he never even felt anything, never looked down to see what it was. I reached for it, took a quick peep, and I could tell right away there was more than fifty or a hundred in it. I looked around, and no one seemed to be looking for anything they’d dropped, so I slipped it in my pocket and I—”

She was examining it hurriedly. Not the money now, the wallet itself. “Nothing,” she said. “Not a scrap of paper, not a card, not an initial, to show whom it belongs to!”

“No,” he assented eagerly, “that’s just the way it was when I picked it up. No marks of identification.”

She gave him a peculiar searching look, as though asking herself if he were telling the truth or not; whether there really hadn’t been any tokens of ownership to begin with, or whether he had purposely removed them, done away with them, to give himself an excuse for not returning it.

He was saying raptly, “We can get all the things we’ve always wanted, now. Just think, Annie.”

“But Tom, it belongs to someone. We can’t just appropriate it. Oh, if it were a matter of twenty dollars or even fifty, all right, there wouldn’t be so much harm to it. But not this amount of money, not two thousand dollars.”

“Sh! Pipe down, I tell you,” he warned, with another of those looks at the door. “D’you have to broadcast it?” Perhaps it was his conscience speaking and not he; the knowledge that he wasn’t really entitled to the money.

She lowered her voice, but went on: “It may be some poor soul’s life-savings, for all we know. It may be an emergency fund; it may mean the difference between life and death. We don’t know what it was for. We have no right to spend it. My conscience wouldn’t let me.”

“What should I have done?” he demanded indignantly. “Left it lying there — for the next one to pick up and appropriate, that has no more right to it than I have?”

“No, I don’t say that,” she conceded. “But about spending it — that’s another matter entirely.”

“How we going to notify the owner, even if we wanted to? There’s no mark on it to show who it belongs to.”

She was handling the money now. “You can tell it’s been scraped together over a period of years, wasn’t just drawn out of a bank,” she commented ruefully. “Some of them are those old-fashioned large-sized bills you don’t see any more. He — or she — must have kept it by them all along, added to it little by little. That only makes it worse, don’t you see, Tom? Some poor hardworking man or woman, alone in the world — illness or something. Maybe it was needed in a hurry, they came out with it on their person — and now where are they?”

“Ah, don’t be so sloppy,” he said crossly. “There’s just as much chance it was some well-to-do no-good, who carries that much around for spending-money and will never miss it.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Not in this kind of a wallet. Plain, cheap, turning green with age, and it’s not even real leather.”

She had him there. He flared up unreasonably, at the ethical obstacles she was putting in the way of his enjoyment of it. Almost anyone would have resented it, probably. “So what do you want me to do with it? Go round to the police and turn it in? They’re as big a bunch of grafters as anyone else. How do we know they won’t divide it up among themselves and pocket it?”

He didn’t really think that, and she knew it. He was just saying it as an excuse. “That’s really what you ought to do,” she said mildly. But he could tell she wasn’t going to insist, if he didn’t want to. She was only human. She would have liked to have the use of the money just as much as he, only she had more scruples. “Then if no one showed up to claim it, after a certain length of time, they’d turn it back to us. It would be rightfully ours.”

“Well, I’m damned if I’m going to!” he said stubbornly. “I need a break once in awhile as well as the next guy, and I’m going to give myself one!”

“Mark my words, Tom,” she said sorrowfully, “we won’t have any luck if we help ourselves to that money without at least giving the owner a chance to claim it. I’m funny that way. I have a feeling it’ll bring us misery. Call it feminine intuition, if you want to.”

Then, taking pity at the disappointment that showed plainly on his face, she suggested a compromise. Women are good at compromises. “All right, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll keep it here with us intact, say for a week. We’ll watch the lost-and-found ads in the papers. If there’s no mention made of its loss at the end of that time, we’ll consider it ours to do with as we want.”

His face brightened immediately at that. He was probably thinking there was not much danger of anyone who had lost currency, actual cash, on a crowded city street, being optimistic enough to advertise for its return. That would be just throwing good money after bad. If it had been jewelry or even negotiable securities, that would have been another matter. They wouldn’t advertise for money.

“Okay,” he agreed, “that’s a bargain.”

He found a good hiding-place for it — the cardboard box his Supporta shoes had originally come in, full of tissue paper, down on the floor of the clothes closet. Who would look for anything valuable in an old shoe-box? His wife did not examine it a second time after he had once put it in; she had seen him put it in, wallet and all, at the time. If she had looked later, she would have found the money there but the wallet strangely missing. The sole connecting link with its former ownership was gone. Tom Quinn was loading the dice in his own favor, or thought he was. But it’s the gods who do the casting.

The next day, which was the earliest it could possibly have been advertised for, he brought home the evening paper with him as usual. But she could tell just by the sanguine look on his face that he’d already taken a peek at the lost-and-found section and — much to his relief — had failed to find the item. He’d probably been very much afraid he would.

Quinn’s wife was a scrupulous woman, however. “All the papers, Tom,” she insisted, “not just one,” and sent him out again to the corner newsstand.

He came back with a whole sheaf of papers tucked under his arm. It wasn’t in any of them.

A law of increasing returns, so to speak, was working in their favor. If it wasn’t published the first day after the loss, it was far less likely to show up the second day. And if it wasn’t in by the second day, the chances of its being in the third day were almost non-existent. And so on. In other words, it would have been advertised for almost immediately — or not at all.

It wasn’t in the second day either. She made him scan all other parts of the papers as well, in search of a possible small filler or news-item dealing with a report of its loss to the police. There wasn’t that either.

Emboldened, mentally keeping his fingers crossed, he began to talk tentatively of the things they were going to get. “I haven’t had a new suit in five years. I’d like to be able to stick things in my pocket without having them drop through to the ground.”

She tried conscientiously to keep to the spirit of their bargain. “Now wait, don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched — just let’s make sure first.” But her heart wasn’t in the job of squelching him.

It wasn’t in the third day either. He was wearing down her resistance now. “There’s that Fall coat you’re needing, Annie; you could get one with a fur collar. We could get a radio, too.”

She tried to keep the shine out of her eyes. “We could move out of this crummy place, to a better neighborhood — live like real people for a change.” She went over to the window, parted the curtains, peered discontentedly down. “I’m so sick of the sight of that dingy street down there! Baby-carriages. Fire-escapes. Some loafer or other always standing in a doorway sizing you up every time you come and go. There’s one across the way there who hasn’t budged for hours.”

He was too busy building air castles to pay attention to what she was saying.

It wasn’t in the fourth day either.

“There’s no use waiting any more, Annie,” he coaxed, when they got through examining the assorted newspapers on the table. “They don’t advertise half a week after a thing is lost. They do it right away or not at all. We’ve played fair. We’ve waited. Come on, what do you say? Let’s get started.”

She gave in reluctantly, but she gave in. Her qualms weren’t downed without an effort, but they were downed. “All right, Tom,” she said slowly. “I guess they’ve given it up for lost by now, whoever they are. I still feel funny about it. I only hope it doesn’t bring us misfortune. But all right — if you say so.”

“Thatta girl!” he cried, and he slapped her delightedly on the shoulder, as he got up and went toward the closet where the shoe-box was.

Fortune’s smile was a crooked one, just then.

They subtracted a tenth of the money, two hundred, and divided that evenly between them. Then they each went on a separate buying spree the next day, because Quinn had to work until five, couldn’t get off any earlier. He got back to the flat after she did. She couldn’t see him at first, just a pyramid of cardboard boxes coming in the door. Behind them, when he’d set them down, he was resplendent in a complete new outfit from head to foot — or rather ankles. His shoes alone remained unchanged; they were too much like a medical prescription for there to be any kick in buying new ones. But everything else was brand-new — hat, suit, shirt, tie, socks.

“I picked out a radio too, a beaut, made a down payment on it.” He chuckled. “I unloaded all those old-style large bills on them everywhere I went, weeded them out. They’re too bulky. I didn’t want to be bothered with them.”

She showed him her acquisitions. The goose hung high. “I treated myself to a permanent, went for the whole works. Oh, Tom, isn’t it a wonderful feeling, to be able to spend what you please? The hair-wave must have made me look good, all right. Some lizard or other followed me all the way home, right up to the very door. I couldn’t shake him off. He didn’t try to come up to me or anything, but I know I’m not mistaken.”

He smiled tolerantly. Just like a woman; probably it was only her imagination.

“Oh — and most important of all! I found a new apartment, and paid a deposit on it. Way over across town. Elevator, steam heat and everything. The moving men are coming the first thing in the morning.”

“Well, we haven’t much time, in that case. Let’s start packing, so we’ll be ready for the van when it gets here.”

They were very happy as they started to dismantle their old home. He was whistling, shirtsleeves rolled up, as he dropped things into a pair of old valises in the middle of the room. She was humming as she went around taking things out of drawers and cupboards.

There was a knock at the door. Sepulchral, knell-like. They both stopped, looked at each other. “The transfer company must have misunderstood me; I distinctly told them to come in the morning, not—” She went over and opened the door, and a man walked past her into the middle of the room. Then another man, then a third. They didn’t have aprons, or sleeve-guards, or truckmen’s caps.

“You’re Thomas J. Quinn, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a question.

Quinn nodded, whitened a little at the way it was said. He straightened, let the armful of things he had been holding slide down into the open valise.

“You’re under arrest for murder!”

And the whole bottom seemed to fall out of the world, and leave the two of them suspended there.

“But I don’t even know who. How could I when I don’t even know who?” Huddled there on a chair in the back room at dawn, he’d been saying that hopelessly, at intervals, all night long.

“You don’t know who?” The inspector spoke quietly. They had too good a case, too perfect a case against him, to have to bother with a third degree. That almost always reacted in court, anyway; all a lawyer had to do was whisper “police brutality” to prejudice a jury in favor of a defendant. “Then why did you buy a copy of every single evening paper published in the city, three nights running, if not to follow the developments of the case? Find out when it was cool enough to spend the money that was burning a hole in your pocket.”

“But I’ve told you what I wanted the papers for. I’ve told you how I came into possession of the money.”

“You expect us to believe that? A twelve-year-old kid could think up a better alibi than that. Found it on the street, did you? Then why didn’t you turn it over to us? Where’s the wallet you say you found it in? Now you listen to me, Quinn. I’ve been on the police force thirty-five years. I’ve sent some beauties in for indictment. But I never yet in all that time — are you listening? — I never yet got hold of such an airtight unbeatable case as we’ve got on you. Yes, you can well get pale. I’m not saying it just to frighten you. Why, the very place the money was found is — is a kind of poetic justice. It went around in a circle. Your shoes betrayed you to us and when we traced them there was the money in the very box they came in. Yes, you unloaded nearly every one of the large-size bills, but you might as well have handed them direct to us. We’ve impounded every single one of them.”

“My shoes,” Quinn groaned. “You keep saying my shoes. All night long you keep saying my shoes.” He closed his eyes and put his fists up beside them. “How could they go where I’ve never gone? How could they leave a print where I’ve never put my foot? I’m telling you again, gentlemen, like I told you at midnight when you dragged me to that awful place, like I’ll tell you with my dying breath — I never saw that house before, I never set eyes on it before, I never walked there, I’ve never been within blocks of it.”

The inspector said, almost compassionately: “Don’t lie, Quinn. You can’t get around those shoes of yours.”

The suspect half rose from his chair, as if in intolerable rebellion. One of the detectives put out a hand, pressed him back again.

He kept shaking his head helplessly. “There’s something about my shoes I gotta remember — and I can’t! Something I gotta remember — and I don’t know what it is! I can’t think straight, there’s so many of you around me, you’ve got me so scared and rattled. It’s such a little bit of a thing, but if I could only remember—”

“I’ll tell you something to remember about them!” said the inspector stonily. “Remember this about them: that they’ve walked you straight into the electric chair!” He swept the unsigned confession impatiently aside. “Take him out, boys. He’s such a goner there’s no reason why we even have to waste our time on him. Darrow himself couldn’t get him off this.”

Quinn lurched from the room, half-supported by two of the detectives. He was still mumbling dazedly, as the door closed after him, “Something I gotta remember — something I gotta remember—”

“Bring her in,” said the inspector.

Bob White, who was taking part in the questioning, asked: “What are you going to do with her, hold her as an accessory?”

“I suppose we’ll have to, the way she backs him up on every flimsy statement. I’ll tell you frankly, though, I’d rather not if I could avoid it. If anything could weaken our case against him, it would be sending her up for trial along with him. You see, she’s not the type. She’s so honest and respectable to look at — oh, I know that don’t mean a thing in one way, and yet in another it does. She’ll draw sympathy, and automatically he’ll get the benefit of some of it. If I could be sure she wasn’t in on it, innocently swallowed the cock-and-bull story he told her about where the money came from, I’d take a chance and let her go, just concentrate on him.”

White said, “I found a rosary among her belongings when I cased the flat. If you’re a believer in psychology, I know a simple way to find out for sure whether she was in on it with him or not.”

“I’ll take a chance. What is it?”

“It’s half-past six now. Turn her loose, with a tail on her of course. I’ll be able to tell you within half an hour, by seven, whether she’s involved or he did it without her knowledge.”

“We’ll give it a spin.”

Mrs. Quinn came in in custody of a police matron. She wasn’t crying any more now. Her face was white and haggard with the horror of this unspeakable thing that had suddenly dropped out of the clouds on the two of them.

“Sit down, Mrs. Quinn,” said the inspector, in a more considerate voice than he had used toward her husband.

She spoke first, without waiting for him. “Won’t you believe me that he couldn’t have, that he hasn’t been out of the house at that hour for years — never since I can remember?” she said in a low, pleading voice. “You say it happened at four in the morning. He’s been asleep in the same room with me at that hour every night — not once, not once—”

“Just let me ask you one question, Mrs. Quinn,” interrupted the inspector crisply. “Have you always, invariably, every night, been awake yourself at four in the morning?”

The answer was so muffled, those in the room could barely hear it. “Seldom — hardly ever.” Her head drooped downward.

“Then how do you know he’s always been in the room with you at that time? Let’s pick a night at random. Let’s pick the night of August fourth.”

She raised a stricken face. She didn’t have to answer. They could tell. She couldn’t remember, couldn’t differentiate that night; all their nights and all their days were so much alike, it was blurred. It was gone beyond hope of recapture, with nothing to distinguish it by, to get a grip on it by, to separate it from the rest.

“You can go home, Mrs. Quinn,” said the inspector abruptly. One of his men had to open the door to get her to move, she was so dazed. As she went out the inspector raised his thumb out of his clasped hands, at Bob White.

White called back in a quarter of an hour. “She’s out of it, inspector. You can rely on that.”

“How do you know?”

“She went straight from the precinct-house to seven o’clock mass, to pray for him in his trouble. She’s in the church right now. Not even the most hardened criminal would have nerve enough to do that, if there was any guilt on his own conscience. I had her typed right.”

“Good,” said the inspector. “Then the release becomes bona fide. Come on in again. I’m glad she’s out of it. She won’t blur the issue now. He hasn’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”

Quinn was booked at eleven that same morning and bound over for the grand jury. It sat immediately after Labor Day, that is to say, within a month of the time the murder had been committed. The footprint-mold, the actual shoes, the testimony of the clerk who had sold them to Quinn; that of Wontner’s grocer as to the kind of bills he had always received in payment from the old man, that of the clothing and radio salesmen and the renting agent as to the kind they had received from Quinn within a week of the murder, were more than it needed. It was a circumstantial case without a peer. He was indicted for murder in the first degree and trial was set for the following month, October.

When it came up on the calendar, the lawyer appointed by the court to defend him told him openly, in his cell: “I have taken this case at the court’s order, but I cannot save you, Quinn. Do you know what can save you, what the only thing is? You have one chance in a thousand, and this is it: If you are telling me the truth — and bear in mind that if — and actually found that wallet where you say you did, just outside the exit kiosk of the Brandon Avenue subway station, at or around six P.M. on August 5th, there is a slim chance, a ghost of a chance and no more, that the person who lost it will recognize the circumstances through the publicity it will receive at the trial, and step forward at the last minute to corroborate you. Even if he does, that is by no means sure-fire, you understand, but it is the only ray there is for you. I am going to pound and hammer and dwell on the time and place of your finding it every time I open my mouth, throughout the trial, but it’s still a thousand-to-one shot. The person may be far away by now, where local news (and this trial of yours is after all not big-time) won’t carry. He may have died in the meantime. He may not have been in lawful possession of the money himself at the time, and hence may be afraid to step forward and identify it.”

He looked narrowly at the indicted man, lidded his eyes suggestively. “He may never have existed at all. You’re the loser, if he didn’t. If there ever was a wallet, and you destroyed it as you say you did, that more than anything else sealed your doom.”

“I tell you I did! I was obsessed with the idea of keeping the money for myself, wanted to make it as difficult for it to be successfully identified as I could. I cut the wallet up into little pieces with a razor blade, without my wife’s knowledge, and next day when I went to work I threw the pieces into successive waste-receptacles I passed on the street, a few at a time. I thought I was smart, I thought I was clever!”

Irony. He had once been afraid the rightful owner would put in an appearance, and he would lose the money. Now he was afraid that he wouldn’t, and he would lose his life.

Crouched there on the cell bunk, he lowered his head resignedly. “I used to think, in the beginning, the first few days after I was arrested, that there was something I could tell them about my shoes that would have cleared me, or given me a fighting chance at least. Gee, what torture it was, trying to think what it could be, never able to! I nearly went crazy, racking my brains. Now I know better. I don’t try for it any more. It wouldn’t come to me at this late day if it didn’t then. I guess I was mistaken.”

“I guess,” said the lawyer dryly, “you were.”

“Was the defendant — that’s that man sitting there — a regular customer of yours at the corner where you keep your shoe-shine box, Freddy?”

“Him? Naw! He lived right down the block. He passed me twice a day coming and going, and he never got a shine for years. You coulda wrote your name on his kicks, the dust was always so thick. I gave up paging him long ago. Then one day in August he comes up to me of his own accord for a work-out. I nearly keeled over.” (Laughter.)

“Can you tell the court anything in particular about that shine, Freddy?”

“I can tell ’em he needed it.” (Laughter.) “It was so long since he had one last he thought the price was still a nickel, didn’t even know we organized and went up to a dime.” (Laughter.)

“Anything else, Freddy? Can you remember anything about his shoes, outside of the fact they needed polishing badly?”

“They had steel beams underneath ’em. One of ’em was so ganged-up with dry mud or clay, not on top, but underneath, that it kept dropping off and getting in my way, so finally I took me a knife and scraped it clean for him.”

“Your witness.”

“No questions.”

“Exactly where did you find this wallet, Mr. Quinn?”

“Just outside the street exit of the Brandon Avenue subway station, the uptown side.”

“What date?”

“Wednesday, August 5th.”

Remark from the bench: “The defendant and his counsel needn’t shout so. They’re perfectly audible all over the room.”

“What time of day was it?”

“Around six in the evening.”

“Take the witness.”

“Just two questions, Quinn. A subway station at six in the evening, you say. Was there a very large crowd around you or was there not?”

“There was a — pretty large crowd around me.”

“What is this I am holding in the palm of my hand, Quinn?”

“I can’t tell. You’re standing too far away.”

“I shouldn’t be, for anyone with normal eyesight. Is your sight defective or isn’t it? Answer my question!”

“I’m — nearsighted.”

“And yet you and you alone, out of all those people coming up the subway stairs, the majority of whom must have had unimpaired eyesight — you and you alone were the one to see this wallet. The State rests its case.”

“Well, we didn’t get a nibble,” the lawyer said bitterly to Quinn in his cell, while the jury was out. “Every day since the trial first started, at least once a day, I made a point of emphasizing where and when you found that wallet, how much was in it, what it looked like. No one, not even a fake, popped up, hoping to get his hands on the money. That would have been something, created a certain effect of probability for us at least. Now it’s too late. It’s over. He won’t step forward now any more. Because he never existed anyway, except in your own imagination. If I wanted to explain how I got hold of a certain sum of money, I would have been more clever about it.”

Quinn said dismally, “But the truth is never clever. This was the truth.”

“Here he comes to bring you back again. They must have agreed already. Twelve-and-a-half minutes, by my watch! I don’t have to go in there with you. I can tell you what it’s going to be right now before I even hear it, when they’re out such a short time.”

“I’m like a dreamer dreaming a dream,” Quinn said as the court attendant unlocked the cell gate, “and I never seem to wake up.”

“We have, your honor. We find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”

“I sentence you to death in the electric chair, in the week beginning December 26th, said sentence to be carried out by the warden of the State Prison at—”

“My shoes! I gotta remember something about my shoes! Oh, somebody help me, help me to remember! I don’t want to die!”

Bob White, homeward bound on Christmas Eve, the collar of his ulster turned up around his stinging ears, met a cop he knew by sight, hustling a seedy-looking individual with silvery stubble on his face along in custody. The prisoner was not guilty of an important infraction, White could tell that by the willingness the arresting officer showed to linger and exchange a word or two with him, cold as it was. Their breaths were white nebulae floating from their mouths.

“This is a hell of a night to be running anyone in,” White kidded. “What’s he done?”

“It’s that old Wontner place, down near the river, on my beat. Him and every other vag for miles around have been pulling it apart for weeks, carting it away piece by piece for firewood. Every time we board it up they bust in all over again and carry off some more of it. They been warned time and again to stay away from there, and now we’re cracking down. I’ve got strict orders from my captain to bring any of ’em in I catch doing it from now on.”

“That place still standing?” said White in surprise. “I thought it was pulled down long ago. I was on that case. The guy gets the jolt sometime right this week, I think.”

The old stumblebum, stamping his feet fretfully on the frosty ground, whined: “Aw, hurry up and take me to the lock-up where it’s warm!” He delivered an impatient kick at the cop’s ankle to spur him on.

The latter jolted, lifted him nearly clear of the ground by the scruff of the neck, shook him wrathfully like a terrier. “Warm, is it, eh? I’ll make it warm for ye, I will!” He complained to White: “It’s all week long I’ve been doing this. There’ll be another one at it by the time I get back.”

“I’ll go down there, keep an eye on it for you till you get back,” the detective offered. “May as well. I got nothing to go home for on Christmas Eve anyway. Just four walls and a hatrack.”

“The pleasure’s all yours,” said the cop. He and his wriggling prisoner went zigzagging up the street one way, White turned down the other toward the bleak wintry waterfront, wondering what impulse was making him go near such a place on such a night of all nights. He’d heard of murderers revisiting the scene of their crimes, but never detectives.

It was a cavernous maw of inky blackness between the enshrouding warehouse-walls. His torch scarred the frozen ground before him as he sauntered idly up to it. He shifted the light upward against the face of the building itself when he got in close enough. It had looked bad enough that day last August when they came here to find Wontner’s murdered body, but it had been a mansion then compared to the shape it was in now. He could understand the cop’s exhausted patience with the neighborhood vandals. The porch-shed and porch-flooring before the door had disappeared in their entirety. There wasn’t a pane of glass left in the windows. The door was gone too, and so were the window-frames and casings. Even the very boards that the police had nailed across the apertures had been ripped out again.

He went around to the back, through that passageway where he had found the damning footprint. It was worse, if anything, back there; the vandals had been able to work with less danger of discovery from the street.

In the dead silence, while he stood there gazing ruefully at the ruin, he heard a scuttling sound somewhere inside. Rats, probably, alarmed by the penetrating rays of his torch through the fissures of the loosened clapboards. Something fell heavily, with a tinny thud, rolled restlessly, finally quieted again.

Rats undoubtedly, but he was just policeman enough to decide to go in and take a look, for the luck of it. He hadn’t intended to until now, taking it for granted Donlan, whose beat it was on, had everything under control.

He made his entrance through the gaping back door, picked clean of every impediment; he advanced weaving his torch slowly downward before him, not through caution so much as to make sure of his footing. It was a highly necessary precaution. In the room where they had found Wontner, whole sections of the flooring had been pulled up bodily, laying bare the skeletal cross-beams underneath. You could look right down through them, in places, to some kind of a sub-cellar or basement. The sound came again, from down there. Whisk! Whisht! And then a clinking, like chains. More of that loose rolling.

He advanced a cautious step or two out along one of the denuded cross-beams, like a tightrope-walker; aimed his torch downward through the interstices. There was a flurry of agitated scampering beneath. Sure, rats. The place was alive with them, crawling with them. It was a menace to the vicinity. The Board of Health should have done something about pulling the wreck down. Red tape, he supposed. But if kids ever got in here in the daytime and started playing around—

A gray torpedo-shaped object scurried by underneath, plainly visible in the attenuated pool of light cast by his torch. A second one followed, hesitated midway, turned back again. His gorge rose involuntarily.

He did something wrong. Maybe the slight motion of his head, following their movements down there, was enough to throw him off-balance. Maybe the rotted plank had just been waiting for the excuse to crumble. There was a bang, a sickening sagging, and he shot forward and down, legs out before him, like a kid riding a banister-rail. A lot of dust and junk came down around him.

It wasn’t much of a fall, six feet at the most. And the place underneath wasn’t bricked or cemented, just hard-packed earth; more like a shallow dugout or trough than an actual cellar. Perhaps excavated by hand by Wontner over a period of years, the soil carted away a little at a time. He was lucky. His torch, spun into a loop by the fall, came down after him, miraculously failed to go out. It rocked there a few feet away, casting a foreshortened eye of light. He quickly snatched it up again, got to his feet. It lessened the grisliness of the situation a little. The redoubled rustling all around him, the imagined feel of loathsome squirming bodies directly under him. He let out a yell; anyone would have. Stood there sweeping the light all around him in a circle, to keep them back.

Their frightened darts in and out of the radius of his light seemed like vicious sorties and retreats. He expected to be attacked at any minute, and knew if one did, all would follow. The shadows were lousy with them all around him. There was that clinking again, and something cylindrical rolled against his foot. He jumped spasmodically, whipped his torchbeam down at it. It was only a can, dislodged by one of the rodents in its scampering.

He snatched it up to use as a missile, poised it in his right hand, sighted the torch in his left. It caught one out midway across the earthen floor. He let fly with an involuntary huff of repulsion. The can struck it squarely, stunned it. He grabbed up a second can — the place was strewn with them — and sent that at it to finish it off. Instead the can struck the first one and split open. The top shot up, as though it had been crudely soldered by hand under the paper label. The rat, recovering, side-wound off again with a broken back or something.

White forgot it and the rest of the rats, forgot where he was, forgot to shout up for help. He just stood there staring at what lay revealed within the pool of light. Not shriveled, spoiled food, but a tightly-rolled bone-shaped wad of money was peering from the burst can.

What attracted Donlan, the cop, inside from the street sometime later was the sound White was making shattering can after can down there with a large rock.

“It’s me,” White said, when the second torch peered down on him through the shattered floor-beams. “I fell through. Watch your own step up there.”

Donlan said, “Watcha got?”

“I’ve got ninety-two thousand dollars — so far — out of old tin cans down here, and there’s still more to go. Gimme a hand up, quick! Don’t you see, that guy couldn’t have done it after all. Because this is the hoard, down here, still intact — not that two thousand we nabbed him with!”

“Not at all,” contradicted the inspector flatly in his office when they’d returned there with the one-hundred-and-fifteen thousand that had come to light. “It proves he didn’t get Wontner’s hoard, and that’s all it does prove. It doesn’t prove he didn’t commit the murder, not by a damn sight! We missed this cache ourselves, didn’t we? And we had whole days to turn it up in. He only had a few hours, from four until daylight. It took the vandals’ depredations and an accidental fall on your part to lay this sub-cellar bare. There are any number of ways of getting around it. He may have been frightened away before he had time to search the premises thoroughly. Or he may have searched thoroughly and still failed to find it. Or he may have been contented with the two thousand he found out in the open, been misled into thinking that was all the old bird had, and not troubled to search any further.”

He smoothed the large old-fashioned bills into some semblance of symmetry. “This still don’t get around that shoe-print, White, or that sudden burst of extravagance within a week after Wontner’s death. You’re overlooking a few things. Quite a few.”

“Sorry,” White said stubbornly, “I’m sold on it that we’ve sent the wrong man up for it. You mean you’re going to let him go to his death Thursday night, after this has come to light?”

“I’m most certainly notifying the District Attorney’s office at once of what we’ve found. It’s in their hands, not mine. I’m just a police officer. But I know how these things work. This’ll never get him a new trial, if that’s what you think. This isn’t new evidence, not by any manner of means. This is only evidence that he didn’t get what he was after. I doubt they’ll even grant him a postponement of execution on it.”

White flared hotly, “Then it’s going to be the worst case of a miscarriage of justice in years! It’s going to be legal murder, that’s what! You can’t see the forest for the trees, all of you! Footprints, a few old-fashioned bills, a shoeshine; where does any of that stack up against this? He was sent up on a circumstantial case entirely, and nothing else but. It was a good case, I’m not saying it wasn’t. But this, what we’ve found here, was supposed to be the whole mainspring of it. Where is the case now? It hasn’t got a foundation. It’s just a lot of disconnected little coincidences floating around in the air!”

“Then if you feel that way about it,” said the inspector coldly, “and I must say that I don’t agree with you, apart from the fact that it’s none of your business any longer—”

“It’s certainly my business!” shouted the detective. “I don’t want that man’s blood on my conscience. I helped put him where he is, and it’s up to me to do all in my power to get him out of where he is. And if you’re all too short-sighted to feel the way I do about it, then it’s up to me to go it alone.”

They were definitely hostile, thought he was showing off.

“It’s the Christmas spirit,” somebody murmured. “He’s trying to play Santa Claus.”

“Go right ahead. Nobody’s stopping you,” assented the inspector ironically. “If you feel Quinn’s the wrong man, bring me in the right one. That’s all you’ve got to do. That’s all that can save him, I’m telling you now. My desk telephone’s here at your disposal anytime you’re ready. I’ll get in touch with the D.A.’s office at a minute’s notice for you, anytime you bring me in the right man. They’ll phone the governor and get Quinn a stay of execution; they’re not any more anxious to send the wrong party to his death than you are or I am.” But the mocking tone in which it was said showed that he didn’t expect anything to come of it. “Quite a large order, I’d say,” he went on, giving one of the others the wink. “He’s due to light up on Thursday night, you know, and this is one o’clock Tuesday morning. D’you think you can do all that inside of three days? And you better make sure it’s the right man, White. Don’t make a fool out of yourself.”

Bob White grabbed up his hat, pulled the door open. “There’s nothing like trying,” he said grimly.

Somebody jeered softly, “Bob White, wotcha gonna sing tonight?” as the door closed after him. They all had a good hearty laugh over it, in which the inspector joined. Then they promptly forgot him.

A light-switch clicked on the other side of the door after he’d been knocking for some time. Quinn’s wife, a scarecrow in a wrapper, past all fear, alarm, hope, any sensation at all now, opened it.

“Didn’t think you’d still be living here,” he said. “Glad I found you.”

She said expressionlessly, “Did it happen already? Is that what you came to tell me? I thought it wasn’t until Thursday night.” But only her lips did the talking. Nothing could reach her any more. The change that had taken place in her since he’d last seen her at the trial threw a wrench into him, although he wasn’t particularly soft-boiled, his squad-mates to the contrary. Her hair was tinged with gray now, her face had set in lines of permanent despair.

“I know it’s late. Sorry to get you up at this hour.”

“I don’t sleep any more,” she said. “I sit by the window in the dark, these nights, all night long.”

“Can I come in and talk to you?”

She opened the door wider and motioned him in dully, but all she said was, “What about?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s about your husband, of course; but I mean, I don’t know what there is to talk about any more. I left my precinct-house in a huff just now, stopped by here on an impulse.”

She just sat there looking at him, hands folded resignedly in her lap.

“You don’t believe he did it, do you?” he blurted finally. “Well, I’ve come here to tell you that — I don’t, now, myself.”

He waited for some sign. No surprise, no interest, no hope.

“We found one-hundred-and-fifteen thousand dollars in that house tonight. The whole thing looks different now. To me it does, anyway.” He waited again. “Isn’t there some little thing you can tell me? Something you didn’t tell them? Don’t mistrust me. I’m on your side now.” He lowered his shoulders, brought his face down to the level of hers. “Don’t sit there looking like that! There isn’t much time. Don’t you realize it means your husband’s life?” And then, baffled by the continued stoniness of her expression, he cried almost in alarm: “You don’t think he did it, do you?”

“I didn’t in the beginning, I didn’t for a long time,” she said hollowly. “Now I—”

“His own wife!” he muttered, appalled. “You mean you do now?”

“No, I only mean I’m not sure any more. I don’t know any more. You, the police, and the public, and the whole world, said he did. They proved he did. I guess they ended up by — nearly proving it to me too. They planted doubts in my own mind, by the time they were through.”

He gripped her anxiously by her bony shoulders. “But he never said he did it, did he? He never told you he did it?”

“No, the last thing he said to me, when they took him away, was that he was innocent, that he didn’t do it.”

“Then we can still save him! You’ve got to help me. That’s why I came in here tonight. You were living with him, in the days and weeks and years before it happened. I wasn’t. There must be something, some little thing, that you and you alone can dig up that’ll turn the trick. Try, please try. Look: there are two things blocking us. One is that footprint. The other is the wallet of money he found. The footprint is the important thing. The other’s nothing, won’t stand against him by itself. They can’t prove he took that money from Wontner. They can prove his shoe made that print outside Wontner’s house. They have already. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. I worked on that angle of it myself. The Supporta Company was able to convince me, by showing me its records, that no other pair of shoes but the ones they sold your husband could have made that print. There was no possibility of duplication. They use an individual cast for each one of their special customers with defective feet, individual mechanical appliances in the arch. No two cases alike. It looks pretty insurmountable. And yet we can level it down. We’ve got to. Now first, what did he do with his old ones, what did he do with them each time when they were worn out and he was ready to discard them?”

“Just kept them. Couldn’t bear to part with them on account of how expensive they were originally. I can show you every pair he ever owned, since he first started wearing that kind of shoes.” She led him into the back room, opened a closet-door, showed him three pairs of shoes in varying stages of deterioration. Their soles, as he picked them up one by one and examined them, were worn paper-thin. One had a hole in it the size of a dime, one the size of a quarter, one the size of a half-dollar.

“None of these made that print,” he said. “It distinctly showed an intact, unbroken sole in perfect condition, heel scarcely run down at all. And the testimony of that bootblack proved it was that current pair that had the clay on its bottoms, anyway; I’d forgotten that.” He let his hand roam helplessly through his hair. “It looks like we’re up against it. I’d been playing around with the possibility, vague as it was, on my way over here, that one of his old, discarded pairs had passed into the possession of somebody else; been thrown out, let’s say, and picked up by some prowler or derelict, worn around the vicinity of Wontner’s house. But since they’re all accounted for here in the closet, that won’t hold water. Can you recall his current pair, his new pair, passing out of his possession at any time, between the time he bought them and the time of the murder? Did he send them out to be repaired at all?”

“No,” she said despondently, “they didn’t need it. They were only a couple months old, in fairly good condition.”

He shoved the closet door closed disgustedly, strolled back to the front room. “I’m in for it. I want to get some sleep at night for the next ten years, and I won’t if he—”

He put his hand on the doorknob, ready to go, stood there motionless with his head lowered. “I don’t change my mind easily, but when I do it stays changed. I’m convinced he didn’t commit that murder, Mrs. Quinn. But I’ve got to have more than my own conviction to go by. I don’t know what to do.”

She just sat there, apathetic. Emotionally dead, if not physically. A widow already, though her husband was still alive in the Death House.

In the two o’clock silence of the world around them, a sound filtered in from somewhere outside, from the back of the house. A faint wail, eerie, lonely, dismal.

“What’s that?” he asked absently, hand still on doorknob.

“Cats. Cats on the back fence,” she murmured tonelessly.

He shrugged hopelessly, opened the door. “No good hanging around,” he muttered. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.” He went out into the hall, said to her over his shoulder as he pulled the door to after him, “You can reach me at the precinct-house, Mrs. Quinn, if you remember anything you want to tell me. White’s the name.”

She just nodded lifelessly, fixing her dead eyes on him, sitting there huddled within the lighted room like some kind of a mummy, that had power of understanding and nothing much else.

He closed the door and went slowly down the outside stairs, a step at a time, flexing his knees stiffly like an automaton, chin down. Some of the flat-doors on the lower floors had cheap Christmas wreaths on them already, for tomorrow.

It had been so easy to put Quinn where he was now. It was so hard to get him out again, once there. But he couldn’t let him die. His own peace of mind was too valuable to him. He couldn’t let him die — and yet how could he prevent it?

He passed through the vestibule into the icy cold of the deserted street, turned his coat-collar up against it, spaded his hands deep into his pockets, trudged dejectedly up the street toward the corner. As he turned it, he thought he heard a drunken woman calling out shrilly from the upper story of one of the tenements behind him, but a taxi flitted by just then along the lateral avenue carrying Christmas Eve revelers, and drowned the sound out. He went obliviously on his way.

It was too cold a night to walk far, or wait for a train on an underground platform. He decided to take a taxi, himself, back to his room. He spotted one on the other side of the avenue, hailed it, and it executed a U-turn, came coasting around beside him. He got in, closed the door, gave the driver his address. The latter hesitated, hand on gear-shift, asked knowingly via the rear-sight mirror: “Want to lose her, boss, or is it all right to wait a minute?”

The cab-door pulled open again and Tom Quinn’s wife stood reeling there outside of it, still in the inadequate wrapper she’d worn in the flat just now, head bared to the bitter night air, naked feet to the frozen ground. A pennant of steam trailed from her lips, but she couldn’t articulate.

He thought she’d suddenly gone out of her mind. He lunged at her, hauled her bodily into the heated cab, shed his ulster and wrapped it protectively around her. He expected violence, a struggle, but she just sat there panting.

“Back around the corner quick, number 324,” he told the driver.

“What’s the matter with you, trying for pneumonia?” he barked at her.

She said, still in that flat, dead voice, but with her chest rising and falling from the run after him, “It isn’t anything, I guess, is it? I remembered now, though, hearing them. I’ve heard them many times since, but it came back to me only now, because you asked me what it was, I guess.”

Delirium, he thought. “What what was?” he asked her.

“The cats. The cats on the fence. He threw them at them one night. His shoes. Just before it happened, sometime around that time. It isn’t anything, though, is it? It won’t help you any, will it?” But he could detect a note of pleading in this last. She was thawing a little, not from this outer immediate cold, but from the numbness of soul that had gripped her all these weeks.

“Threw them both?”

“First one and then the other.”

“How soon did he get them back again?”

“He went down right away, but he didn’t get them back that night at all. He said he couldn’t find them. I came upon them next day at noon, outside our door, wrapped up in newspaper.”

He jolted. But it wasn’t because the taxi had stopped. It was still only coasting to a stop just then. “Allah’s good — even to a poor detective,” he murmured fervently. Then he turned on her almost savagely. “And you didn’t mention this till now! What’s the matter with you? Did you want your husband out of the way? Was he anxious to die?”

“I never remembered it until tonight. It was such a little thing. I didn’t think it was anything.”

He hustled her across the sidewalk under his ulster. They plunged into the building again, went jogging up the stairs. “Anything? It’s the whole thing! It’s the whole mechanics of the case! The rest is just pedestrian. A rookie could go on from there.” He dived in ahead of her, hustled through to the back room. “Which window was it? This one? Down a jolt of whiskey, so you don’t get a chill. Then come in here and help me with this.”

They were still serenading down there on the dividing fence. She followed him in in a moment, coughing slightly, brushing her hand across her mouth.

“You see what I’m driving at, don’t you?” he said curtly. “Somebody else had them between the time Quinn pitched them out of here and the time you found them at your door next day. That somebody, while he had them on, went and killed old man Wontner in them. Then, frightened, sensing that they might betray him in some way, saw to it that they got back to you people anonymously. Or maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was deliberate, a vicious and successful attempt to direct suspicion toward the wrong man, and thus win complete immunity for himself.

“It must have been the same night that the murder took place he threw them out. I don’t care whether you can remember it or not it must have been that night. There’s no other possibility. That cat-bearing fence down there is not more than six or seven feet above the ground. If he didn’t find them in either yard when he went down to look, it’s obvious what became of them. This was August, windows wide open top and bottom. They went in one of those two ground-floor flats in the house directly across the way. No matter how sore he was, no matter how lousy his aim was, they couldn’t have gone in any higher than that — he would have had to throw them straight out instead of down.

“All right. Somebody in one of those two back rooms had been thinking the Wontner thing over for a long time past, was all primed for it, was only being held back by fear of the consequences. The shoes, dropping into his room like something from heaven, spurred him on. Gloves or a handkerchief would do away with fingerprints, and with a peculiarly-constructed pair of shoes like this to direct suspicion elsewhere — what more did he need? He must have watched your husband looking for them out there. When he didn’t come around and ring the front doorbell asking for them, when this man saw your flat-light go out and knew you’d given them up for lost — for that night anyway — he put them on and carried out his long-deferred scheme. I’m sure now that so-perfect footprint wasn’t accidental, was purposely made, left there for us to find and draw the wrong conclusion from. To return the shoes to your door, unseen, next day involved a certain amount of risk, but not much.” He made a delighted pass at his own chin. “That takes care of the footprint. The money in the wallet will take care of itself. But never mind all that now. I’m wasting time up here. I don’t need you any more. You nearly waited until it was too late, but you came through beautifully.”

She tottered after him to the door. “But isn’t it too late? It’s — it’s over four months ago now. Isn’t he — won’t he be gone long ago?”

“Sure he’s gone long ago,” White called back from the stair-well as he spun around down, “but he can’t go any place I can’t go after him! Start dusting up your flat, Mrs. Quinn, your husband’ll be back in a few weeks.”

He routed out the janitor of the building behind the Quinns’ first of all, quelled his growls with a whiff of his badge. “Now never mind your beefs. How long the people in I-A been living in the building?”

“The McGees? Two years next April.”

“And I-B, on the other side of the hall?”

“That’s Mrs. Alvin. She’s been living in the house five years.”

He took the flat to the left of the Quinn window first. Both ran all the way through from the street to the rear. He kept his thumb on the bell.

“Headquarters. You McGee, are you?”

A man of about fifty, in long underwear under a bathrobe, admitted — with evident nervousness — that he was. His wife hovered in the background, equally nervous. Somewhere behind them a kid’s voice piped: “Is it Sandy Claus, Mom, is it, huh?”

Sandy Claus asked crisply, “Who sleeps in your back room?”

“Me three kids,” said McGee. Less nervousness now, the detective noticed. He went back just the same and took a look for himself. They had three beds in there. There was a girl of about thirteen in one, two younger girls in the other.

“They always slept back here?”

“Ever since we moved in. What’s up, mister?”

Instead of answering, White glanced down at the floor. He said, “What size shoe d’you wear?” Watched his face closely. McGee looked innocently startled at the question, but not guiltily startled. He was evidently one of those men that don’t know their own sizes.

“Twelve,” answered his wife unhesitatingly.

That, by the looks of them, was putting it mild. They were out of it, for all practical purposes. He just asked one more question, for luck.

“Ever have any relatives or friends — men friends — stop with you here in the flat, say, last summer?”

“Naw, there ain’t room. Where would the kids go?”

“G’night,” said White abruptly.

A lady of ripe vintage opened the door across the hall after a lengthy interval. She gave him the usual apprehensive reaction. “Don’t get alarmed. Just want to talk to you. Who occupies your back room?”

“Why, I rent that out to roomers.”

“This is it,” he said to himself. “I’m coming in,” he said and did so. “Who’s got it now?”

“Why, a very respectable young lady, a librarian. She—”

“How long’s she had it?”

“Since about Labor Day.”

“Early in September, eh? You may as well sit down and quit shaking. This is going to take quite some time. I want to know who had it before this very respectable young lady.”

“A young man, a... a Mr. Kosloff.”

“Mr. Kosloff, eh?” He got out his notebook. “About when did he give it up?”

It wouldn’t come to her. “Two or three weeks before—”

“You’ve got to do better than that, Mrs. Alvin. I want the exact date. That man’s under suspicion of murder. So it’s important.”

She gasped, fluttered, floundered. “Oh, you must be mis... He was such a quiet, nice young man.”

“You can always count on ’em being that way at home. Now how about it? Don’t you keep any records?”

“I... I can tell by my bank-book, I think.” She went inside, fumbled around endlessly, came out again with a dog-eared passbook. “I get ten dollars for the back room, and I make a point of depositing each room-rent as soon as I get it. Now, the last entry here, before she came, is July 30th. They pay in advance, of course. I’m very strict about that. That means he stayed on until the 5th of August.”

White narrowed his eyes joyfully at her. Wontner had been killed during the night of the 4th-to-5th. “You’re doing swell, Mrs. Alvin. Now just think back carefully. Did he let you know a day or two ahead that he was leaving, or did he walk out on you unexpectedly? This is important. See if you can remember.”

She concentrated, struggled, recaptured. “He just up and marched out at a minute’s notice. I remember now. I was put out about it. I wasn’t able to sell that room all the rest of the month.”

He’d found out all he needed to know. He got down to business, pencil to notebook. “What’d he look like?”

“About twenty-eight or thirty, light-haired, around your height but a little slimmer.”

“Eyes?”

“Er — blue.”

“Was he working while he stayed here with you?”

“No, but he kept trying. He just couldn’t seem to locate—”

“Did he say where he was going, leave any forwarding address?”

“Not a word.” That would have been too much to hope for, anyway. “As a matter of fact, a letter came for him the very next day after he left, and I kept it here for a long time, in case he should ever call around for it, but he never did.”

He nearly jumped into her lap. “Where is it? Y’still got it?”

“It was stuck in the mirror of the sideboard for months. Finally I threw it out.”

He felt like grabbing her and shaking her till her store teeth fell out. “Where was it from? What was the postmark on it?”

“Well, the idea!” she said haughtily.

“Come on, you’re a landlady. Don’t try to kid me.”

She looked slightly furtive, so he knew he’d hit the nail on the head. “Well, er — can’t a body get in trouble for opening other people’s mail?”

“No,” he lied flagrantly. “Not if it’s left unclaimed for over thirty days.”

She brightened immediately. “Well, I didn’t like to mention it, but I wanted to see if it was — er, important enough to keep any longer, so I steamed it open. It was just a trashy letter from some girl in — now let me see, Pitts — Pitts—”

“Pittsburgh?”

“No, Pittsfield.”

“What was in it?” But he was on his feet already, heading for the door.

“Oh, she said she was glad to hear how well he was doing in the city.”

But he hadn’t had a job at all, according to his landlady. That explained the motive for the murder. To live up to the glowing reports he’d sent back to his home town. White knew where he’d find him now. Massachusetts. He could get up there by noon today. Christmas Day. A hell of a day. But it was being a hell of a day for poor Quinn in the Death House too, his next-to-the-last day on earth. A hell of a way to spend Christmas.

Mrs. Alvin faded out behind him, standing open-mouthed in the doorway of her flat. She’d have something to talk about now for the rest of the winter.

“Grand Central,” he told the taxi-driver.

Christmas Night, on the outskirts of Pittsfield, was all it should have been, diamond-clear, with stars bright in the sky and new-fallen snow white on the ground. Which still made it a hell of a night to do what he’d come up here to do. The little house he was watching looked inviting, with a warm rosy glow peering through its windows and a wreath in each one. A girl’s head had been outlined against them more than once, on the lookout for somebody. Well, there was someone else around on the lookout for somebody too.

The roadster drove up at 6:30, just in time for Christmas dinner. It was a seven-hundred-dollar job. The man who got out was well-dressed, and he had something white, like a box of candy, under his arm. He turned in the gate and walked up the path to the door of the house. He reached out his hand to the knocker wreathed with holly. Light falling through a fanlight above showed him to be about thirty, light-haired, six feet. He wasn’t handsome, but he didn’t look vicious. You could understand a girl asking him to Christmas dinner at her house.

He never made the knocker. He heard the snow crunch softly behind him, and the other man was standing there.

He said with a smile, “Were you invited too?”

“No,” White said, “I wasn’t invited.” He took him by the elbow. “Let’s go back to your car,” he said. “Let’s get away from the house here before she looks out again and sees you.”

“But I’ve got a dinner date.”

“No, Kosloff,” the detective said, tightening his grip on the arm, “you’ve got a date down in the city, for the murder of Otto Wontner.”

He held him up for a minute, till the danger of his falling was past. They turned around and went back toward the car, through the blue-white snow.

Kosloff didn’t say very much until they were sitting in the railroad station waiting for the next train out. Stunned, maybe. Finally he turned around and said to the detective, “Don’t wreck my life, will you? I was going to ask that girl to marry me tonight. I’ve got a diamond ring in my pocket right now I was taking to her.”

“I know,” said White somberly. “You paid five-hundred-and-fifteen dollars for it. I watched you pick it out through the jewelry-store window. Where did all that money come from, Kosloff, you been spending since you got back here last August? You didn’t have a nickel down in the city, living at Mrs. Alvin’s.”

“My mother died right after I got back. She left it to me.”

“Yes, she did die. But not till after you got back. But you already had it when you stepped off the train. You made a big splash, bought all kinds of presents before you went out to her house, were dressed fit to kill.”

“Yes, but I did that on my last few bucks, I tell you! It was all a bluff. I knew she was going, I wanted to make her think I was a big success before she passed on. I couldn’t let her go thinking I was broke, a failure. And the hicks around here, they swallowed it.”

“And what about now? I’ve looked up the records. She turned over to you exactly five hundred dollars. Why, that car of yours alone—”

“Yes, five hundred was all she had banked. But she was old-fashioned, didn’t trust banks. I came into thousands in cash she had hidden in an old wall-safe in the house with her.”

The detective said, “Can you prove that?”

“No,” his prisoner answered. “She didn’t take anyone into her confidence but me. Can you prove that I got it from this man you think I killed?”

They just looked at each other. A train-whistle blew out along the tracks.

“Are you going to do this to me?”

White turned his head aside. He thought, for the first and last time in his career, “What a lousy business I’m in!”

“Then God forgive you,” Kosloff said.

White said, “Go over to the phone and call your girl. Just tell her you’ve been called back to town on business, can’t make it tonight.”

They were the first customers Campana had when he opened up his grocery-store for business early on the morning of the 26th.

“Did you ever see this man before? Look good at him. Take off your hat, Kosloff.”

“I think I do.” Wontner’s former grocer walked all around him, studying his features. “Sure, sure. Lasta summ’. Heessa live near here, no?”

“Was he ever in here when the old man was around, buying his monthly supplies?”

“Sure, sure. He laugh at old man onea time. I say to him, ‘You shoulda have all his mon’, then you can laugh.’ He aska quest’, heessa get very interes’.”

Kosloff said, low and unasked, “It’s true. But that doesn’t mean I— There must have been dozens of his other customers talked over Wontner with him.”

“But those dozens of others weren’t living across the way from Tom Quinn, where they could get hold of his shoes and put them on to go out and commit a murder in. You were. It’s about over, Kosloff.”

At exactly 3:15½ that afternoon, after he had questioned Kosloff, Campana, Mrs. Alvin, and Mrs. Quinn, the inspector finally picked up his desk phone, said, “Give me the District Attorney’s office.”

Bob White just took a deep breath from the ground up, and let it out again.

Tom Quinn opened the door of his flat, said with the utter simplicity that comes of great tragedy, “I’m back, Annie. I was released this morning.”

“I know,” she said, “Bob White stopped by and told me you were coming.”

“I was on the other side of the — little door already, that night, stumbling along, my slit trousers flapping against my legs. I didn’t even know it when they turned me around and started me back the other way, couldn’t tell the difference. I wondered why it was taking me so long to — get to it. And then I looked and I was back in my cell.” He covered his face with both hands, to blot out the memory.

“Don’t talk about it, Tom,” she urged.

He looked up suddenly. “What are you doing, Annie?”

She latched the valise she’d been packing, started toward the door with it. “I’m leaving, Tom. You’re back now, you’re free. That’s all that matters.”

“You mean you still think—?”

“I’ll never know. I’ll never know for sure. There are 364 days in the year; 182 of them I’ll believe you, 182 of them I won’t. Sometimes I’ll think they got the right man the second time, sometimes — the first. They build up too strong a case, Tom, too strong a case. You were gone fifteen or twenty minutes that night, looking for your shoes. It would take about that long to walk to where that old man lived and back.”

“But I came back without them. You saw me still without the shoes when I came back. I was down there looking for them the whole—”

“Yes, Tom, that’s what you said. You also said you lit matches down there. I was at the window the whole time and didn’t see a single match-flare down below.”

He wrung his hands in anguish. “I fibbed. I remember now! I told you I used matches, but I didn’t because I was a moral coward. I was ashamed to have the neighbors see me and laugh at me.”

“But that little fib is taking me from you. It’s costing you me and me you. Because if you fibbed about the little thing, how do I know you didn’t lie about the big one?” She opened the door. “Who can read that man Bob White’s heart? How can I tell just how much he knows, and isn’t saying? Who knows where duty ended and pity began? I can’t go through that hell of uncertainty, can’t face it. Goodbye, Tom.” The door closed.

Down below on the backyard fence they were at it again, wailing their dirges. It started in low and rolling each time, like a tea-kettle simmering. Then it went high, higher than the highest scream, higher than human nerves could stand. Eeeee-yow. Then it wound up in a vicious hiss, with a salivary explosion for a finale. Hah-tutt! Then it started all over again.

And So to Death CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Argosy, March 1, 1941, as by William Irish; first collected in I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1943). Note: The story was retitled “Nightmare” for its first book publication.

It is a highly subjective thing, a prejudice, admittedly, that I have held for most of my reading life: I don’t like dream sequences. Some are silly, some are overlong, some are wonderfully constructed, and some may even be necessary. I don’t like any of them except for those created by Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968). He has written these scenes in many of his stories and novels and, somehow, they are so powerful that they compel one to read them. Every word.

“First all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl’s face; like a white, slightly luminous mask swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness.” That’s the opening sentence of “And So to Death,” and the beginning of the protagonist’s nightmare. The situation gyres down and down until it’s almost too horrific to bear. And then he wakes — and the real nightmare begins.

It is common for the central character in a Woolrich story to feel lost and disoriented. A normal day for a normal person has gone off the rails and the protagonist is as helpless to stop the calamity as the reader is to stop reading. There will be darkness and terror and something will happen that cannot be avoided, as if a life suddenly were being manipulated by an all-powerful, malevolent presence, and the reader cannot tear his eyes away from the page. This is one of those stories. It relies on coincidence and a desperate reliance on the suspension of disbelief, but the writing is so compelling that you will be happy to forgive what would be intolerable in most authors.

Title: Fear in the Night, 1947

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Director: Maxwell Shane

Screenwriter: Maxwell Shane

Producers: William C. Pine, William C. Thomas

•Paul Kelly (Cliff Herlihy)

•DeForest Kelley (Vince Grayson)

•Ann Doran (Lil Herlihy)

•Kay Scott (Betty Winters)

This atmospheric film of psychological suspense adheres closely to Woolrich’s colorful if eccentric plotline. It is decidedly low-budget, in what may be called the tradition of B noir films — a B picture being generally planned as the second feature back in the day when movie houses offered two feature films (not to mention a newsreel, cartoon, short subject, and a chapter of a serial).

Audiences tended to be less demanding in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s than they are now, walking into the theater when it suited them (rather than checking the time for the beginning of a film), catching up on the plot, and sticking around until it played again without interruptions. One would have to be of an older generation to understand the phrase “this is where we came in,” uttered when a scene became familiar.

Being undemanding also allowed filmmakers to take certain liberties with viewers’ credulity. One example in Fear in the Night would be when four people are caught in a rainstorm and take shelter in a house to which they’ve never been, find it untended, so proceed to make themselves tea and take naps.

There were enough fascinating elements to the plot that it was remade nine years later with a (slightly) bigger budget and better-known actors. Titled Nightmare (1956), it starred Edward G. Robinson, Kevin McCarthy, and Connie Russell. It was again directed by Maxwell Shane, who again wrote the screenplay, so it will be no shock to learn that it didn’t get much better.

The studio also gave away a major plot element when one of its posters had the tagline: “Beware! These Are the Eyes of a Hypnotist!” next to an illustration of a crazed Robinson.

Numerous films have been titled Nightmare that have no connection to the Woolrich story, including those made in 1942, 1953, 1964, 1965, 1981, and too many others to list.

AND SO TO DEATH Cornell Woolrich

First all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl’s face; like a white, slightly luminous mask swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung.

There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face-mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around, I knew that already; and I knew that I couldn’t escape it. I knew that everything I was about to do, I had to do, I couldn’t avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to get out of wherever this was.

I even turned and tried to, but I couldn’t any more. There had been only one door when I slipped in just now. It had been simple enough. Now when I turned, the place was nothing but doors; an octagon of doors, set frame to frame with no free wall-space inbetween. I tried one, another, a third; they were the wrong ones, I couldn’t get out.

And by doing this, I had unleashed the latent menace that was lurking there around me all the time; I had brought on all the sooner the very thing I had tried to escape from. Though I didn’t know what it was yet.

The flickering white mask lost its cameo-like placidity; slowly, before my horrified eyes, became malign, vindictive. It spoke, it snarled: “There he is right behind you, get him!” The eyes snapped like fuses, the teeth glistened in a grinning bite.

The light became more diffused, as if a stage-electrician were controlling the scene by a trick switch. It was a murky, bluish green now, the kind of light there would be underwater. And in it danger, my doom, slowly reared its head, with typical underwater movements too; sluggish and held back, with a terrible inevitability about them.

It was male, of course; menace is always male.

First it — he — was just a black huddle, an inchoate lumpy mass, say like solidified smoke, at the feet of this opalescent, revengeful mask. Then it slowly uncoiled, rose, lengthened and at the same time narrowed, until it loomed there before me upright. It was still anonymous, a hulk, an outline against the dark blue background, as though the light that had played-up the mask until now, were coming from somewhere on the other side of it.

It came toward me, toward me, toward me, with cataleptic slowness. I wanted to get out, I wanted to turn and run, in the minute, the half-minute that was all there was left now. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t lift a foot, it was as though I was set into a concrete block. I just wavered back and forth, on a rigid base.

Why I wanted to get out, what It was going to do to me, wasn’t clear, I didn’t know. Only that there was soul-shriveling fear in it. And horror, more than the mind could contemplate.

The pace was beginning to accelerate now as it neared its climax, the way they always do.

He came on, using up the small remaining distance between us. His outline was still indistinct, clotted, like something daubed with mud, like a lumpy clay image. I could see the arms come up from the sides, and couldn’t avoid their lobster-like conjunction. I could feel the pressure of his hands upon my neck. He held it at the sides rather than in front, as if trying to break it rather than strangle me. The gouge of his thumbs, in particular, was excruciating, digging into the straining cords right under the ears, pressing into the tender slack of flesh right beside and under the jawbone.

I went down in a sort of spiral, around and around, following my head and neck around as he sought to wrench them out of true with my spinal column. I had to keep it from snapping.

I clawed at the merciless hands, trying to pull them off. I pried one off at last, but it wrenched itself free of my restraint again, trailing a nail-scratch on my forearm just across the knob of the wristbone. Fire was in the slight laceration, even in the midst of the total extinction threatening me. The hand clamped itself back where it had been, with the irresistibility of a suction-cup.

I beat at his arched body from underneath, then as my resistance weakened, only pushed at it, at last only grasped at it with the instinctive clutch of a drowning man. A button came off loose in my hand and I hung onto it with the senseless tenacity of the dying.

And then I was so long dying, my neck was so long breaking, he tired of the slower surer way. His voice sounded, he spoke to the macabre mask. I heard every word with Delphic clarity — like you do in those things. “Hand me that bore, that sharp-pointed bore lying over there, or this’ll go on all night.”

I raised mutely protesting hands, out and past him, and something was put into one of them. I could feel the short transverse handle. A thought flashed through my mind — and even one’s thoughts are so distinct in those things — “She’s put it into my hand instead of his!” I fixed my hand on it more securely, poised it high, and drove it into him from in back. The shock of its going in seemed to be transmitted to my own body, we were so inextricably intertwined. But, for all that, it seemed to go in effortlessly, like a skewer into butter. I could even feel myself withdraw it again, and it came out harder than it went in.

He went with it, or after it, and toppled back. After a moment, I drew near to him again, on hands and knees. And now that it was too late his face became visible at last, as if a wanly-flickering light were playing over it, and he was suddenly no formless mud-clotted monster but a man just like I was. Harmless, helpless, inoffensive. The face looked reproachfully up at me, as if to say “Why did you have to do that?” I couldn’t stand that, and I leaned over him, tentatively feeling for the position of his heart. Not for purposes of succor, but to make that face stop looking at me so accusingly. Then when I’d located it, I suddenly drove the metal implement in with ungovernable swiftness from straight overhead, and jumped back as I did so.

The mask, still present in the background, gave a horrid scream like something undone, foiled, and whisked away, like something drawn on wires.

I heard a door close and I quickly turned, to see which way she had gone, so that I might remember and find my own way out. But, as always in those things, I was too late. She was gone by the time I turned, and all the doors looked alike again.

I went to them and tried them one by one, and each one was the wrong one, wouldn’t open, and now I couldn’t get out of here, I was trapped, shut in with what was lying there on the floor, that still held fear and menace for me, greater even than when it had moved, attacked me. For the dread and horror that had been latent throughout, far from being expiated, was now more imminent than ever, seemed to gather itself to a head over me, about to burst and inundate me.

Its source, its focal point, was what lay there on the floor. I had to hide it, I had to shut it away. It was one of those compulsions, all the more inescapable for being illogical.

I threw open one of the many doors that had baffled me so repeatedly throughout. And behind it, in the sapphire pall that still shrouded the scene, I now saw a shallow closet. It was as though it hadn’t been there until now, it was as though it had just formed itself for my purpose. I picked up what lay on the floor, and I could seem to do it easily, it had become light, as easy to shoulder as a rolled-up rug or mat; I propped it up behind the closet door; there was not depth enough behind it to do anything else.

Then I closed the door upon it, and pressed it here and there with the flats of my hands, up and down the frame that bordered the mirror, as if to make it hold tighter. But danger still seemed to exude through it, like a vapor. I knew that wasn’t enough, I must do more than that, or it would surely open again.

Then I looked down, and below the knob there was a key-head sticking out. It was shaped a little like a three-leaf clover, and the inner rim of each of the three scooped-out “leaves” was fretted with scrollwork and tracery. It was of some yellowish metal, either brass or iron gilded-over. A key such as is no longer made or used.

I turned it in the keyhole and I drew it slowly out. I was surprised at how long a stem it had, it seemed to keep coming forever. Then at last it ended, in two odd little teeth, each one doubled back on itself, like the single arm of a swastika.

After I had extricated it at last, I pocketed it, and then the knob started turning from the inside, the door started to open anyway. Very slowly but remorselessly, and in another minute I was going to see something unspeakably awful on the other side of it. Revelation, the thing the whole long mental-film had been building to, was upon me.

And then I woke up.

I’d lost the pillow to the floor, and my head was halfway down after it, was dangling partly over the side of the bed, and my face was studded with oozing sweatdrops. I righted it and propped myself up on one elbow and blew out my breath harrowedly. I mumbled, “Gee I’m glad that’s over with!” and drew the back of my pajama sleeve across my forehead to dry it. I brushed the edge of my hand across my mouth, as if to remove a bad taste. I shook my head to clear the last clinging mists of the thing out of it. I looked at the clock, and it was time to get up anyway, but even if it hadn’t been, who would have risked going back to sleep after such a thing? It might have re-formed and started in again, for all I knew.

I flung my legs out of the ravaged coverings, sat on the edge of the bed, picked up a sock and turned it inside-out preparatory to shuffling it on.

Dreams were funny things. Where’d they come from? Where’d they go?

The basinful of stinging cold water in the bathroom cleared away the last lingering vestiges of it, and from this point on everything was on a different plane, normal, rational and reassuringly familiar. The friendly bite of the comb. The winding of the little stem of my wristwatch, the looping-together of the two strap-ends around my—

They fell open and dangled down straight again, still unattached, and stayed that way. I had to rivet my free hand to the little dial to keep it from sliding off my wrist.

I stared at the thing for minutes on end.

I had to let my cuff slide back in place and cover it at last. I couldn’t stand there staring at it forever. That didn’t answer anything. What should it tell me? It was a scratch, that was all.

“Talk about your realistic dreams!” I thought. “I guess I must have done that to myself, with my other hand, in the throes of it. That was why the detail entered into the dream-fabric.”

It couldn’t, naturally, be the other way around, because the other way around meant: transference from the dream into the actuality of leaving a red scratch across my wristbone.

I went ahead. The familiar plane, the rational everyday plane. The blue tie today. Not that I changed them every day, I wasn’t that much of a dude, but every second day I varied them. I threw up my collar, drew the tie-length through, folded it down again—

My hands stayed on it, holding it down flat on each side of my neck, as though afraid it would fly away, although it was a shirt-attached collar. Part of my mind was getting ready to get frightened, fly off the handle, and the rest of my mind wouldn’t let it, held it steady just like I held the collar.

But I hadn’t had those bruises, those brownish-purple discolorations, faintly not vividly, visible at the side of my neck, as from the constriction of a powerful grip, the pressure of cruel fingers, last night when I undressed.

Well all right, but I hadn’t yet had the dream last night when I undressed either. Why look for spooks in this? The same explanation that covered the wrist-scratch still held good for this too. I must have done it to myself, seized my own throat in trying to ward off the traumal attack passing through my mind just then.

I even stood there and tried to reconstruct the posture, to see if it were physically feasible. It was, but the result was almost grotesquely distorted. It resulted in crossing the arms over the chest and gripping the left side of the neck with the right hand, the right with the left. I didn’t know; maybe troubled sleepers did get into those positions. I wasn’t as convinced as I would have liked to be. One thing was certain, the marks had been made by two hands, not one; there were as many on one side as on the other, and the four fingers always go opposite to the thumb in a one-hand grip.

But more disturbing than their visibility, there was pain in them, soreness when I prodded them with my own fingertips, stiffness when I turned my neck acutely. It shouldn’t have, but it seemed to weaken the theory of self-infliction. How was it I hadn’t awakened myself, exerting that much pressure? To which the immediate and welcome corollary was: but if it had been exerted by someone else, I would have been apt to awaken even more quickly, wouldn’t I?

I forced myself back to the everyday plane again. Buttoned the collar around the bruises, partly but not entirely concealing them, knotted the tie, shrugged on vest and coat. I was about ready to go now.

The last thing I did was what I always did last of all, one of those ineradicable little habits. I reached into my pocket to make sure I had enough change available for my meal and transportation, without having to stop and change a bill on the way. I brought up a palmful of it, and then I lost a good deal of it between my suddenly stiff, outspread fingers. Only one or two pieces stayed on, around the button. The large and central button. I let them roll, I didn’t stoop to pick them up. I couldn’t; my spine wouldn’t have bent right then.

It was a strange button. Somehow I knew that even before I compared it. I knew I was going to check it with every article of clothing I owned, but I already knew it wasn’t from one of my own things. Something about the shape, the color, told me; my fingers had never twisted it through a buttonhole, or they would have remembered it. That may sound far-fetched; but buttons can become personalized to nearly as great an extent as neckties.

And when I closed my hand over it — as I did now — it took up as much room inside my folded palm, it had the same feel, as it had had a little while ago in that thing.

It was the button from the dream.

I threw open the closet-door so fast and frightenedly it swung all the way around flush with the wall, and rebounded off it, and started slowly back again with the recoil. There wasn’t anything hanging up in there that I didn’t hold it against, even where there was no button missing, even where its size and type utterly precluded its having been attached. Vests and jackets, a cardigan, a raincoat, a lumberjacket, a topcoat, bathing trunks, a bathrobe. Every stitch I owned.

It wasn’t from anything of mine, it didn’t belong anywhere.

This time I couldn’t get back on the naturalistic plane, I was left dangling in mid-air. This time I couldn’t say: “I did it to myself in the throes of that thing.” It came from somewhere. It had four center holes, it even had a wisp or two of black tailor’s-thread still entwined in them. It was solid, not a phantom.

But rationality wouldn’t give in, tried to rush into the breach, and I was on its side for all I was worth. “No, no. I picked this up on the street, and I don’t remember doing it.” That simply wasn’t so; I’d never picked up a stray button in my life. “Or the last tailor I sent this suit out to left it in the pocket from someone else’s clothing by mistake.” But they always return dry-cleaned garments to you with the pocket-linings inside-out, I’d noticed that a dozen times.

That was the best rationalization could do, and it was none too good. “It just shows you what a thing like that will do to your nerves!” I took out a fresh handkerchief for the day, but I didn’t just spade it into my pocket this time, I furtively touched my temples with it before I did — and it came away darkening with damp. “I better get out of here. I need a cup of coffee. I’ve got the jitters.”

I shrugged into my coat fast, threw open my room door, poised it to close it after me. And the last gesture of all, before leaving each morning, came to me instinctively; feeling, to make sure I had my key and wouldn’t be locked out when I returned that evening.

It came up across the pads of my fingers, but it was only visible at both ends, the middle part was bisected, obscured by something lying across it. My lips parted spasmodically, as when a sudden thrust is received, and refused to come together again.

It had a head — this topmost one — a little like a three-leaf clover and the inner rim of each of the three “leaves” was fretted with scrollwork and tracery. It had a stem disproportionately long for the size of its head, and it ended in two odd little teeth bent back on themselves, like the quarter-part of a swastika. It was of some yellowish composition, either brass or iron gilded-over. A key such as is no longer made or used.

It lay lengthwise in the hollow of my hand, and I kept touching it repeatedly with the thumb of that same hand. That was the only part of me that moved for a long time, that foolish flexing thumb.

I didn’t leave right then, for all my preparations. I went back into the room and closed the door after me on the inside, and staggered dazedly around for a moment or two. Once I dropped down limply on the edge of the bed, then turned around and noticed what it was, and got hastily up again, more frightened than ever. Another time, I remember, I thrust my face close to the mirror in the dresser, drew down my lower lid with one finger, stared intently at the white of my eyeball. Even as I did it, I didn’t know what I meant by it myself, didn’t know what it was to tell me. It didn’t tell me anything.

And still another time, I looked out of the window, as if to see if the outside world was still there. It was. The houses across the way looked just like they’d looked last night. The lady on the third floor had her bedding airing over the windowsill, just like every morning. An iceman was gouging a partition across a cake of ice with one point of his tongs preparatory to picking it in two. A little boy was swinging his books on his way to school, killing as much time as he could by walking along spanning the curb, one foot up, one foot down.

There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me.

I decided I’d better go to work maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast-counter now. I didn’t want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn’t go to work either. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was no idle excuse, even though I was upright on my two legs.

I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn’t get it bright enough or strong enough. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree.

And yet the sunshine didn’t warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed — and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy.

I went to Cliff’s house late. My mind had been made up to go there for hours past, but I went there late on purpose. The first time I got there they were still at the table, I could see them through the front window. I walked around the block repeatedly, until Lil had gotten up from the table and taken all the dishes with her, and Cliff had moved to another chair and was sitting there alone. I did all this so she wouldn’t ask me to sit down at the table with them, I couldn’t have stood it.

I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: “Hello stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it’s about time you showed up around here.”

I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don’t tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don’t know why, but you don’t. You tell them the things you have under control; the things that you’re frightened of, you tell other men if you tell anyone.

Finally she said, “I’ll just finish up the dishes, and then I’ll be back.”

The minute the doorway was empty I whispered urgently, “Get your hat and take a walk with me outside. I want to tell you something — alone.”

On our way out he called in to the kitchen, “Vince and I are going out to stretch our legs, we’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

She called back immediately and warningly: “Now Cliff, only beer — if that’s what you’re going for.”

It put the idea in his head, if nothing else, but I said: “No, I want to be able to tell you this clearly, it’s going to sound hazy enough as it is; let’s stay out in the open.”

We strolled slowly along the sidewalk; he was on his feet a lot and it was no treat to him, I suppose, but he was a good-natured sort of fellow, didn’t complain. He was a detective. I probably would have gone to him about it anyway even if he hadn’t been, but the fact that he was, of course, made it the inevitable thing to do.

He had to prompt me, because I didn’t know where to begin. “So what’s the grief, boy friend?”

“Cliff, last night I dreamed I killed a fellow. I don’t know who he was or where it was supposed to be. His nail creased my wrist, his fingers bruised the sides of my neck, and a button came off him somewhere and got locked in my hand. And finally, after I’d done it, I locked the door of a closet I’d propped him up in, put the key away in my pocket. And when I woke up — well, look.”

We had stopped under a street light. I turned to face him. I drew back my cuff to show him. “Can you see it?” He said he could. I dragged down my collar with both hands, first on one side, then on the other. “Can you see them? Can you see the faint purplish marks there? They’re turning a little black now.”

He said he could.

“And the button, the same shape and size and everything, was in my trouser-pocket along with my change. It’s on the dresser back in my own room now. If you want to come over, you can see it for yourself. And last of all, the key turned up on me, next to my own key, in the pocket where I always keep it. I’ve got it right here, I’ll show it to you. I’ve been carrying it around with me all day.”

It took me a little while to get it out, my hand was shaking so. It had shaken like that all day, every time I brought it near the thing to feel if it was still on me. And I had felt to see if it was still on me every five minutes on the minute. The lining caught around it and I had to free it, but finally I got it out.

He took it from me and examined it, curiously but noncommittally.

“That’s just the way it looked in — when I saw it when I was asleep,” I quavered. “The same shape, the same color, the same design. It even weighs the same, it even—”

He lowered his head a trifle, looked at me intently from under his brows, when he heard how my voice sounded. “You’re all in pieces, aren’t you?” he confirmed. He put his hand on my shoulder for a minute to steady it. “Don’t take it that way, don’t let it get you.”

That didn’t help. Sympathy wasn’t what I wanted, I wanted explanation. “Cliff, you’ve got to help me. You don’t know what I’ve been through all day, I’ve been turned inside-out.”

He weighed the key up and down. “Where’d you get this from, Vince? I mean, where’d you first get it from, before you dreamed about it?”

I grabbed his one arm with both hands. “But don’t you understand what I’ve just been telling you? I didn’t have it before I dreamt about it. I never saw it before then. And then I wake up, and it turns real!”

“And that goes for the button too?”

I quirked my head.

“You’re in bad shape over this, aren’t you? Well what is it that’s really got you going? It’s not the key and button and scratch, is it? Are you afraid the dream really happened, is that it?”

By that I could see that he hadn’t understood until now, hadn’t really gotten me. Naturally it wasn’t just the tokens carried-over from the dream that had the life frightened out of me. It was the implication behind them. If it was just a key turned up in my pocket after I dreamed about it, why would I go to him? The hell with it. But if the key turned up real, then there was a mirrored closet-door somewhere to go with it. And if there was a closet to match it, then there was a body crammed inside it. Also real. Real dead. A body that had scratched me and tried to wring my neck before I killed it.

I tried to tell him that. I was too weak to shake him, but I went through the motions. “Don’t you understand? There’s a door somewhere in this city right at this very minute, that this key belongs to! There’s a man propped up dead behind it! And I don’t know where; my God, I don’t know where, nor who he is, nor how or why it happened — only that — that I must have been there, I must have done it — or why would it come to my mind like that in my sleep?”

“You’re in a bad way.” He gave a short whistle through his clenched teeth. “Do you need a drink, Lil or no Lil! Come on, we’ll go someplace and get this thing out of your system.” He clutched me peremptorily by the arm.

“But only coffee,” I faltered. “Let’s go where the lights are good and bright.”

We went where there was so much gleam and so much dazzle even the flies walking around on the table cast long shadows.

“Now we’ll go at this my way,” he said, licking the beer-foam off his upper lip. “Tell me the dream over again.”

I told it.

“I can’t get anything out of that.” He shook his head baffledly. “Did you know this girl, or face, or whatever it was?”

I pressed the point of one finger down hard on the table. “No, now I don’t, but in the dream I did, and it made me broken-hearted to see her. Like she had double-crossed me or something.”

“Well in the dream who was she, then?”

“I don’t know; I knew her then, but now I don’t.”

“Jese!” he said, swallowing more beer fast. “I should have made this whiskey with tabasco sauce! Well was she some actress you’ve seen on the screen lately, maybe? Or some picture you’ve seen in a magazine? Or maybe even some passing face you glimpsed in a crowd? All those things could happen.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I seemed to know her better than that; it hurt me to see her, to have her hate me. But I can’t carry her over into — now.”

“And the man, the fellow or whoever he was?”

“No, I couldn’t seem to see his face through the whole thing. I only saw it at the very end, after it was already too late. And then when the door started to open again, after I’d locked him in, it seemed as though I was going to find out something horrible — about him, I guess. But I woke up before there was time.”

“And last of all, the place. You say nothing but doors all around you. Have you been in a place like that lately? Have you ever seen one? In a magazine illustration, in a story you read, in a movie?”

“No. No. No.”

“Well then let’s get away from the dream. Let’s leave it alone.” He flung his hand back and forth relievedly, as if clearing the air. “It was starting to get me myself. Now what’d you do last night — before this whole thing came up?”

“Nothing. Just what I do every night. I left work at the usual time, had my meal at the usual place—”

“Sure it wasn’t a welsh rarebit?”

I answered his smile, but not light-heartedly. “A welsh rarebit is not responsible for that key. A locksmith is. Drop it on the table and hear it clash! Bite it between your teeth and chip them! And I didn’t have it when I went to bed last night.”

He leaned toward me. “Now listen, Vince. There’s a very simple explanation for that key. There has to be. And whatever it is, it didn’t come to you in a dream. Either you were walking along, you noticed that key, picked it up because of its peculiar—”

I semaphored both hands before my face. “No, I tried to sell myself that this morning; it won’t work. I have absolutely no recollection of ever having done that, at any time. I’d remember the key itself, even if I didn’t remember the incident of finding it.”

“Are you sitting there trying to say you’ve never in your life forgotten a single object, once you’ve seen it the first time?”

“No,” I said unwillingly.

“You’d better not. Particularly a nondescript thing like a key—”

“This isn’t a nondescript key, it’s a unique key. And I do say I never saw it before, never picked it up; it’s a strange key to me.”

He spread his hands permissively. “All right, it don’t have to be that explanation. There’s a dozen-and-one other ways it could have gotten into your pocket without your knowledge. You might have hung the coat up under some shelf the key was lying on, and it dropped off and the open pocket caught it—”

“The pockets of my topcoat have flaps. What’d it do, make a U-turn to get in under them?”

“The flaps might have been left accidentally tucked-in, from the last time your hands were in your pockets. Or it may have fallen out of someone else’s coat hung up next to yours in a cloakroom, and been lying there on the floor, and someone came along, thought it belonged in your coat, put it back in—”

“I shoved my hands in and out of those pockets a dozen times yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. Where was it then? It wasn’t in the pocket! But it was this morning. After I saw it clear as a photograph in my sleep during the night!”

“Suppose it was in the pocket and your hand missed it — yesterday and the day-before and so on — until this morning? That would be physically possible, wouldn’t it?”

I gave him a no on this; I had a right to. “It came up over my own key, it was the top one of the two, when I got them both out this morning. So if it was already in there last night, how could I have got my own key out — as I did when I came home — without bringing it up too? And last night I didn’t bring it up.”

He waived that point. Maybe because I had him, maybe not. “All right, have it your way, let’s say that it wasn’t in your pocket last night. That still don’t prove that the dream itself was real.”

“No?” I shrilled. “It gives it a damn good foundation-in-fact as far as I’m concerned!”

“Listen, Vince, there’s no halfway business about these things. It’s either one thing or the other. Either you dream a thing or you don’t dream it, it really happens. You’re twenty-six years old, you’re not a kid. Don’t worry, you’d know it and you’d remember it damn plainly afterwards if you ever came to grips with a guy and he had you by the throat, like in this dream, and you rammed something into his back. I don’t take any stock in this stuff about people walking in their sleep and doing things without knowing it. They can walk a little ways off from their beds, maybe, but the minute anyone touches them or does something to stop them, they wake right up. They can’t be manhandled and go right on sleeping through it—”

“I couldn’t have walked in my sleep, anyway. It was drizzling when I went to bed last night; the streets were only starting to dry off when I first got up this morning. I don’t own rubbers, and the soles of both my shoes were perfectly dry when I put them on.”

“Don’t try to get away from the main point at issue. Have you any recollection at all, no matter how faint, of being out of your room last night, of grappling with a guy, of ramming something into him?”

“No, all I have is a perfectly clear recollection of going to bed, dreaming I did all those things, and then waking up again.”

He cut his hand short at me, to keep the button, key, and bruises from showing up again, I guess. “Then that’s all there is to it. Then it didn’t happen.” And he repeated stubbornly: “You either dream ’em or you do ’em. No two ways about it.”

I ridged my forehead dissatisfiedly. “You haven’t helped me a bit, not a dime’s worth.”

He was a little put out, maybe because he hadn’t. “Naturally not, not if you expected me to arrest you for murdering a guy in a dream. The arrest would have to take place in a dream too, and the trial and all the rest of it. And I’m off-duty when I’m dreaming. What do you think I am, a witch-doctor?”

“How much?” I asked the counterman disgruntledly.

“Seventeen cups of coffee—” he tabulated. It was two o’clock in the morning.

“I’m going to sleep in the living-room at your place tonight,” I said to him on the way over. “I’m not going back to that room of mine till broad daylight! Don’t say anything to Lil about it, will you, Cliff?”

“I should say not,” he agreed. “D’you think I want her to take you for bugs? You’ll get over this, Vince.”

“First I’ll get to the bottom of it, then I’ll get over it,” I concurred sombrely.

I slept about an hour’s worth, but that was the fault of the seventeen cups of coffee more than anything else. The hour that I did sleep had no images in it, was no different than any other night’s sleep I’d had all my life. Until the night before; no better and no worse. He came in and he stood looking at me the next morning. I threw off the blanket they’d given me and sat up on the sofa.

“How’d it go?” he asked half-secretively. On account of her, I suppose.

I eyed him. “I didn’t have any more dreams, if that’s what you mean. But that has nothing to do with it. If I was convinced that was a dream, I would have gone home to my own room last night, even if I was going to have it over again twice as bad. But I’m not; I’m still not convinced, by a damn sight. Now are you going to help me or not?”

He rocked back and forth on his feet. “What d’you want me to do?”

How could I answer that coherently? I couldn’t. “You’re a detective. You’ve got the key. The button’s over in my room. You must have often had less than that to work with. Find out where they came from! Find out what they’re doing on me!”

He got tough. He had my best interests at heart maybe, but he thought the thing to do was bark at me. “Now listen, cut that stuff out, y’hear? I dowanna hear any more about that key! I’ve got it, and I’m keeping it, and you’re not going to see it again! If you harp on this spooky stuff any more, I’ll help you all right — in a way you won’t appreciate. I’ll haul you off to see a doctor.”

The scratch on my wrist had formed a scab, it was already about to come off. I freed it with the edge of my nail, then I blew the little sliver of dried skin off. And I gave him a long look, more eloquent than words. He got it, but he wouldn’t give in. Lil called in: “Come and get it, boys!”

I left their house — and I was on my own, just like before I’d gone there. Me and my shadows. I stopped in at a newspaper advertising-bureau, and I composed an ad and told them I wanted it inserted in the real estate section. I told them to keep running it daily until further notice. It wasn’t easy to word. It took me the better part of an hour, and about three dozen blank forms. This ad:

The first two days there was no reaction. That wasn’t to be wondered at. It had only appeared on the first day, and any answer would still be in process of transmission through the mail on the second. On the third day there were two replies waiting when I stopped in at the advertising-bureau. One was from a Mrs. Tracy-Lytton, on deckled stationery. She had a house that she was anxious to dispose of for the winter season, with a view to going to Florida. It had a mirror lined powder-room on the second floor. It was not, she had to admit, eight-sided; it was only foursquare, but wouldn’t that do? She was sure that once I had seen it—

The other was from a man by the name of Kern. He too had one that he thought would meet my requirements. It had an octagonal breakfast-nook of glass bricks—

There wasn’t anything on the fourth day. On the fifth there was a windfall of about half-a-dozen waiting for me when I stopped in. Before I’d set to work opening and reading them, I couldn’t help being astonished that there should be this many prospective dwellings in the market with such a seldom-encountered feature as an eight-sided mirror-faced cubicle. By the time I’d waded through them I saw I needn’t have worried; there weren’t. Three of the six were from realty agents offering their services, in case I couldn’t find what I wanted unassisted. Two more were from contractors, offering to install such a feature to order for me, provided I couldn’t find it ready-made. The last one, the only one from an individual owner, and who was evidently anxious to get a white elephant off his hands, likewise offered to have one built-in for me at his own expense, if I agreed to take a long-term lease on the property.

They started tapering-off after that. A desultory one or two more drifted in by the end of the week. One of these for a moment seemed to strike a spark when I read it, and my hopes flared up. It was from a retired actress with a suburban villa which she did not occupy. She was offering it furnished and mentioned that, although it had no eight-sided built-in mirror-arrangement, there was a small dressing-room fitted with a movable eight-paneled mirrored screen, which could be adjusted so that it cut corners off and gave the room any number of sides required.

I telephoned, arranged an appointment at her hotel, and she drove me out in her car. I could see that my appearance and youth gave her misgivings as to my financial ability to meet the terms involved, and she only went through it because the appointment had been agreed upon. The villa was a stucco affair, and at first sight of the screen, when we’d gone in, my face got a little white and I thought I had something. It was folded over to the width of one panel and leaning against the dressing-room wall. “Here’s how I used to arrange it when I was trying on costumes,” she said.

We rigged it up between us in octagon-shape, so that it made sort of an inner-lining to the room, cutting off the four corners and providing eight angles instead. I stood there in the middle of it, and she stood beside me, waiting my decision. “No,” I said finally, “no.”

She couldn’t understand. “But won’t it do just as well? It’s mirror, and it’s eight-sided.”

There was no keyhole on any of the eight flaps to fit a key into, a key such as I had found in my pocket that morning; that was the main thing. I didn’t explain. “I’ll let you know,” I said, and we went back to the car and back to our starting-point.

That was the closest I’d come, and that wasn’t very close. The ad continued to run. But now it brought no further results, fell on barren ground. The supply of mirrored compartments had been exhausted, apparently. The advertising-bureau phoned to find out if I wanted to continue it. “No, kill it,” I said disheartenedly.

Meanwhile Cliff must have spotted it and recognized it. He was a very thorough paper-reader, when he came home at nights. Or perhaps he hadn’t, he just wanted to see how I was getting along. Brace me up, “take me away from myself” as the phrase goes. At any rate he showed up good and early the next day, which was a Sunday. He was evidently off, I didn’t ask him, but I hardly figured he’d wear a pullover and slacks like he had on, to Headquarters.

“Sit down,” I invited.

“No,” he said somewhat embarrassedly. “Matter of fact, Lil and I are going to take a ride out into the country for the day, and she packed a lunch for three. Cold beer, and, um—”

So that was it. “Listen, I’m all right,” I said drily. “I don’t need any fresh-air jaunts, to exorcise the devils in me, if that’s what the strategy is—”

He was going to be diplomatic — Lil’s orders, I guess — and until you’ve seen a detective trying to be diplomatic, you haven’t lived. Something about the new second-hand Chev (his actual phrase) that he’d just gotten in exchange for his old second-hand Chev. And just come down to the door a minute to say howdy to Lil, she was sitting in it. So I did, and he brought my coat out after me and locked up the room, so I went with him.

The thing was a hoodoo from the beginning. He wasn’t much of a driver, but he wasn’t the kind who would take back-seat orders on the road from anyone either; he knew it all. We never did reach where they’d originally intended going, he lost it on the way; we finally compromised on a fly-incubating meadow, after a thousand miles of detouring. Lil was a good sport about it. “It looks just like the other place, anyway,” she consoled. We did more slapping at our ankles than eating, and the beer was warm, and the box of hard-boiled eggs had disappeared from the car at one of those ruts he’d hit. And then to cap the climax, a menacing geyser of jet-black clouds piled themselves up the sky with effervescent suddenness, and we had to run for it. The storm was so instantaneous we couldn’t even get back to the car before it broke, and the rest was a matter of sitting in sodden misery while he groped his way down one streaming, rain-misted country road and up another, surroundings completely invisible and getting more thoroughly off our bearings all the time.

Lil’s fortitude finally snapped short. The lightning was giving her a bad time of it — like most women, she abhorred it — and her new outfit was ruined. “Stop at the first place you come to and let’s get in out of it!” she screamed at him. “I can’t stand any more of this!” She hid her face against my chest.

“I can’t even see through my windshield, much less offside past the road,” he grunted. He was driving with his forehead pressed against the glass.

I scoured a peephole on my side of the car, peered out. A sort of rustic torii, one of those squared Japanese arches, sidled past in the watery welter. “There’s a cut-off a little ways ahead, around the next turn,” I said. “If you take that, it’ll lead us to a house with a big wide porch; we can get in under there.”

They both spoke at once. He said, “How did you know that?” She said, “Were you ever up around these parts before?”

I couldn’t answer his question. I said “No” to hers, which was the truth.

Even after he’d followed the cut-off for quite some distance, there was no sign of a house. “Are you getting us more tangled-up than we were already, Vince?” he asked in mild reproach.

“No, don’t stop, keep going,” I insisted. “You’ll come to it — two big stone lanterns, turn the car left between ’em—”

I shut up again, as jerkily as I’d commenced, the peculiar back-shoulder look he was giving me. I poked my fingers through my hair a couple of times. “Gee, I don’t know how I knew that myself—” I mumbled half-audibly.

He became very quiet from then on, he didn’t have much to say any more; I think he kept hoping I’d be wrong, there wouldn’t be any—

Lil gave him a peremptory accolade on the shoulder without warning. “There they are, there they are! Turn, Cliff, like he told you!”

You could hardly make them out, even at that. Faint gray blurs against the obliterating pencil-strokes of rain. You certainly couldn’t tell what they were.

He turned without a word and we glided between them. All I could see was his eyes, in the rear-sight mirror, on me. I’d never seen eyes with such black, accusing pupils before; like buckshot they were.

A minute passed, and then a house with a wide, sheltering veranda materialized through the mist, phantom like, and came to a dead halt beside us. I heard his brakes go on.

I wasn’t much aware of the business of making a dash for it through the intervening curtain of water that separated us from the porch-roof, Lil squealing between us, my coat hooded over her head. Through it all I was conscious of the beer in my stomach; it had been warm when I drank it back at the meadow, but it had turned ice-cold now, as though it had been put into a refrigerator. I had a queasy feeling, and the rain had chilled me — but deep inside where it hadn’t been able to wet me at all. And I knew those weren’t raindrops on my forehead, they were sweat turned cold.

We stamped around on the porch for a minute, like soaked people do.

“I wish we could get in,” Lil mourned.

“The key’s under that window-box with the geraniums,” I said.

Cliff traced a finger under it, and brought it out. He put it in the keyhole, his hand shaking a little, and turned it, and the door went in. He held his neck very stiff, to keep from looking around at me. That beer had turned to a block of ice now.

I went in last, like someone toiling through the coils of a bad dream.

It was twilight-dim around us at first, the rainstorm outside had gloomed up the afternoon so. I saw Lil’s hands go out to a china switch-mount sitting on the inside of the door-frame, on the left. “Not that one, that’s the one to the porch,” I said. “The one that controls the hall is on the other side.”

Cliff swept the door closed, revealing it; it had been hidden behind it until now. This one was wood, not porcelain. He flicked it and a light went on a few yards before us, overhead. She tried out hers anyway, and the porch lit up; then blackened once more as she turned the switch off.

I saw them look at each other. Then she turned to me and said, “What is this, a rib? How do you know so much about this place anyway, Vince?” Poor Lil, she was in another world.

Cliff said gruffly, “Just a lucky guess on his part.” He wanted to keep her out of it, out of that darkling world he and I were in.

The light was showing us a paneled hall, and stairs going up, dark polished wood, with a carved handrail, mahogany or something. It wasn’t a cheaply fitted-out place — whatever it was. And I could say that “whatever it was” as honestly as they could.

Cliff said, pointing his call up the stairs: “Good-afternoon! Anybody home?”

I said, “Don’t do that,” in a choked voice.

“He’s cold,” Lil said, “he’s shaking.”

She turned aside through a double doorway and lit up a living-room. We both looked in there after her, without going in; we had other things on our mind, she just wanted warmth and comfort. There was an expensive parquet floor, but everything else was in a partial state of dismantlement. Not abandonment, just temporary dismantlement. Dust-covers making ghostly shapes of the chairs and sofa and a piano. An oversized linen hornet’s nest hanging from the ceiling, with indirect light peering from the top of it, was a crystal chandelier.

“Away for the summer,” Lil said knowingly. “But funny they’d leave it unlocked like that, and with the electricity still connected. Your being a detective comes in handy, Cliff; we won’t get in trouble walking in like this—” There was a black onyx fireplace, and after running her hands exploratively around it, she gave a little bleat of satisfaction, touched something. “Electric,” and it glowed red. She started to rub her arms and shake out her skirt before it, to dry herself off, and forgot us for the time being.

I glanced at him, and then I backed away, out of the doorway. I turned and went up the staircase, silently but swiftly. I saw him make for the back of the hall, equally silent and swift. We were both furtive in our movements, somehow.

I found a bedroom, dismantled like downstairs. I left it by another door, and found myself in a two-entrance bath. I went out by the second entrance, and I was in another bedroom. Through a doorway, left open, I could see the hallway outside. Through another doorway, likewise unobstructed, I could see — myself.

Poised, quivering with apprehension, arrested in mid-search, white face staring out from above a collar not nearly so white. I shifted, came closer, dying a little, wavering as I advanced. Two of me. Three. Four, five, six, seven. I was across the threshold now. And the door, brought around from its position flat against the outside wall, pulled in after me, flashed the eighth image of myself on its mirror-backed surface.

I tottered there, and stumbled, and nearly went down — the nine of me.

Cliff’s footfall sounded behind me, and the eighth reflection was swept away, leaving only seven. His hand gripped me by the shoulder, supporting me. I heard myself groan in infinite desolation, “This is the place; God above, this is the place, all right!”

“Yeh,” he bit out in an undertone. He bit it off so short it was like a single letter, shorter than “No” even. Then he said, “Wipe off your forehead, you’re all—” I don’t know why, for lack of something better to say, I guess. I made a pass with my sleeve across it. We neither of us were really interested in that.

“Have you got it?” I said.

He knew what I meant. He fumbled. He had it on a ring with his other keys. I wished he hadn’t kept it, I wished he’d thrown it away. Like an ostrich hides its head in the sand.

The other keys slithered away, and there it was. Fancy scroll-work... a key such as is no longer used or made...

One was a door, the door we’d come in by. Four of the remaining seven were dummies, mirrors set into the naked wall-plaster. You could tell that because they had no keyholes. They were the ones that cut the corners of the quadrilateral. The real ones were the ones that paralleled the walls, one on each side.

He put it into one, and it went in, so smoothly, so easily, like a key goes into the keyhole for which it was made. Something went “Cluck” behind the wood, and he pulled open the mirror-door. A ripple coursed down the lining of my stomach. There was nothing in there, only empty wooden paneling. That left two.

Lil’s hail reached us. “What are you two up to, up there?” From that other world, so far away.

“Keep her downstairs a minute!” I breathed desperately. I don’t know why; you don’t want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman.

He called down: “Hold it, Vince has taken off his pants to dry them.”

She answered, “I’m hungry, I’m going to see if they left anything around to—” and her voice trailed off toward the kitchen at the back.

He was turning it in the second one. I thought the “Cluck” would never come, and when it did, I must have shuttered my eyes in mortal terror, his “Look!” caught me with them closed. I saw a black thing in the middle of it, and for a minute I thought—

It was a built-in safe, steel painted black but with the dial left its own color. It was jagged, had been cut or burned into.

“That’s what he was crouched before, that — night, when he seemed just like a puddle on the floor,” I heard myself say. “And he must have had a blow-torch down there on the floor in front of him — that’s what made that bluish light. And made her face stand out in the reflection, like a mask—” A sob popped like a bubble in my throat. “And that one, that you haven’t opened yet, is the one I propped him up in—”

He straightened and turned, and started over toward it, as though I had just then called his attention to it for the first time — which of course wasn’t the case.

I turned to water, and there wasn’t anything like courage in the whole world; I didn’t know where other fellows got theirs. “No, don’t,” I pleaded, and caught ineffectively at his sleeve. “Not right away! Wait just a minute longer, give me a chance to—”

“Cut that out,” he said remorselessly, and shook my hand off. He went ahead; he put the key in, deep it went, and turned it, and the panel backing the mirror grunted, and my heart groaned in company with it.

He opened it between us. I mean, I was standing on the opposite side from him. He looked in slantwise first, when it was still just open a crack, and then he widened it around my way for me to see. I couldn’t until then.

That was his answer to my unspoken question, that widening of it like that for me to see. Nothing fell out on him, nothing was in there. Not any more.

He struck a match, and singed all up and down the perpendicular woodwork. There was light behind us, but it wasn’t close enough. When the match stopped traveling, you could see the faint, blurred, old discoloration behind it. Old blood. Dark against the lighter wood. There wasn’t very much of it; just about what would seep through a wound in a dead back, ooze through clothing, and be pressed out against the wood. He singed the floor, but there wasn’t any down there, it hadn’t been able to worm its way down that far. You could see where it had ended in two little tracks, one longer than the other, squashed out by the blotterlike clothed back before they had gotten very far.

The closet and I, we stared at one another.

The match went out, the old blood went out with it.

“Someone that was hurt was in here,” he conceded grimly.

Someone that was dead, I amended with a silent shudder.

Lil dozed off right after the improvised snack she’d gotten up for us in the kitchen, tired-out from the excitement of the storm and of getting lost. In that remote, secure world she still inhabited you did things like eat and take naps; not in the one I was in any more. But the two of us had to sit with her and go through the motions, while the knowledge we shared hung over us like a bloody axe, poised and waiting to crash.

I think if she hadn’t started to nod, he would have hauled me outside into the dripping dusk with him then and there, if he’d had to, to get out of earshot. He couldn’t wait to tackle me. All through the sketchy meal he’d sat there drumming the fingers of his left hand on the tabletop, while he inattentively shoveled and spaded with his right. Like an engine all tuned-up and only waiting for the touch of the starter to go.

My own rigid wrist and elbow shoved stuff through my teeth, I don’t know what it was. And then after it got in, it wouldn’t go down anyway, stuck in my craw. “What’s the matter, Vince, you’re not very hungry,” she said one time.

He answered for me. “No, he isn’t!” He’d turned unfriendly.

We left her stretched out on the covered sofa-shape in the living-room, the electric fireplace on, both our coats spread over her for a pieced blanket. As soon as her eyes were safely closed, he went out into the hall, beckoning me after him with an imperative hitch of his head without looking at me. I followed. “Close the doors,” he whispered gutturally. “I don’t want her to hear this.”

I did, and then I followed him some more, back into the kitchen where we’d all three of us been until only a few minutes before. It was about the furthest you could get away from where she was. It was still warm and friendly from her having been in there. He changed all that with a look. At me. A look that belonged in a police-station basement.

He lit a cigarette, and it jiggled with wrath between his lips. He didn’t offer me one. Policemen don’t, with their suspects. He bounced the match down like he wanted to break it in three pieces. Then he shoved his hands deep in pockets, like he wanted to keep them down from flying at me.

“Let’s hear about another dream,” he said vitriolically.

I eyed the floor. “You think I lied, don’t you—?”

That was as far as I got. He had a temper. He came up close against me, sort of pinning me back against the wall. Not physically — his hands were still in pockets — but by the scathing glare he sent into me. “You knew which cut-off to take that would get us here, from a dream, didn’t you? You knew about those stone lanterns at the entrance from a dream, didn’t you? You knew where the key to the front door was cached from a dream, didn’t you? You knew which was the porch-switch and which the hall — from a dream, didn’t you? You know what I’d do to you, if you weren’t Lil’s brother? I’d push your — lying face out through the back of your head!” And the way his hands hitched up, he had a hard time to keep from doing it then and there.

I twisted and turned as if I was on a spit, the way I was being tortured.

He wasn’t through. He wasn’t even half-through. “You came to me for help, didn’t you! But you didn’t have guts enough to come clean. To say, ‘Cliff, I went out to such-and-such a place in the country last night and I killed a guy. Such-and-such a guy, for such-and-such a reason.’ No, you had to cook up a dream! I can look up to and respect a guy, no matter how rotten a crime he’s committed, that’ll own up to it, make a clean breast of it. And I can even understand and make allowances for a guy that’ll deny it flatly, lie about it — that’s only human nature. But a guy that’ll come to someone, trading on the fact that he’s married to his sister and he knows he’ll give him an ear, abusing his gullibility, making a fool out of him, like you did me—! I’ve got no use for him, he’s low and lousy and no-good! He’s lower than the lowest rat we ever brought in for knifing someone in an alley! ‘Look, I found this key in my pocket when I got up this morning, how’d it get in there?’ ‘Look, I found this button—’ Playing on my sympathies, huh? Getting me to think in terms of doctors and medical observation, huh?”

One hand came out of his pocket at last. He threw away his cigarette, not downward but on an even keel, he was so sore. He spit on the floor to one side of him. Maybe because he’d been talking so fast and furious, maybe just out of contempt. “Some dream that was, all right! Well the dream’s over and baby’s awake now.” His left came out of the pocket and soldered itself to my shoulder and stiff-armed me there in front of him. “We’re going to start in from scratch, right here in this place, you and me. I’m going to get the facts out of you, and whether they go any further than me or not, that’s my business. But at least I’m going to have them!”

His right had knotted up, I could see him priming it. How could that get something out of me that I didn’t have in me to give him.

“What were you doing out at this place the night it happened? What brought you here?”

I shook my head helplessly. “I never was here before — I never saw it until I came here today with you and Lil—”

He shot a short uppercut into my jaw. It was probably partly-pulled, but it smacked my head back into the wall-plaster. “Who was the guy you did it to? What was his name?”

“I’m in hell already, you blundering fool, without this,” I moaned.

He sent another one up at me; I swerved my head, and this time it just grazed me. My recalcitrance — it must have seemed like that — only inflamed his anger. “Are you gonna answer me, Vince? Are you gonna answer me?”

“I can’t. You’re asking me things I can’t.” A sob of misery wrenched from me. “Ask God — or whoever it is watches over us in the night when we’re unconscious.”

It developed into a scuffle. He kept swinging at me; I sent one or two swings half-heartedly back at him — the instinctive reflex of anyone being struck at, no more.

“Who was the guy? Why’d you kill him? Why? Why? Why?”

Finally I wrenched myself free, retreated out of range. We stood there facing one another for an instant, puffing, glaring.

He closed in again. “You’re not going to get away with this,” he heaved. “I’ve handled close-mouthed guys before. I know how to. You’re going to tell me, or I’m going to half-kill you with my own hands — where you killed somebody else!”

He meant it. I could see he meant it. The policeman’s blood in him was up. All the stops were out now. He could put up with anything but what he took to be this senseless stubbornness, this irrational prevarication in the face of glaring, inescapable facts.

I felt the edge of the table the three of us had peacefully eaten at so short a time before grazing the fleshy part of my back. I shifted around behind it, got it between us. He swung up a ricketty chair, that didn’t have much left to it but a cane seat and four legs, all the rungs were gone. It probably wouldn’t have done much more than stun me. I don’t think he wanted it to. He didn’t want to break my head. He just wanted to get the truth out of it. And I... I wanted to get the truth into it.

He at least had someone he thought he could get the truth out of. I had no one to turn to. Only the inscrutable night that never repeats what it sees.

He poised the chair high overhead, and slung his lower jaw out of line with his upper.

I heard the door slap open. It was over beyond my shoulder. He could see it and I couldn’t, without turning. I saw him sort of freeze and hold it, and look over at it, not at me any more.

I looked too, and there was a man standing there eying the two of us, holding a drawn gun in his hand. Ready to use it.

He spoke first, after a second that had been stretched like an elastic-band to cover a full minute, had snapped back in place. “What’re you two men doing in here?” He moved one foot watchfully across the room-threshold.

Cliff let the chair down the slow, easy way, with a neat little tick of its four legs. His stomach was still going in and out a little, I could see it through his shirt. “We came in out of the rain, that suit you?” he said with left-over truculence, that had been boiled-up toward me originally and was only now simmering down.

“Identify yourselves — and hurry up about it!” The man’s other foot came in the room. So did the gun. So did the cement ridges around his eyes.

Cliff took a wallet out of his rear trouser-pocket, shied it over at him so that it slithered along the floor, came up against his feet. “Help yourself,” he said contemptuously. He turned and went over to the sink, poured himself a glass of water to help cool off, without waiting to hear the verdict.

He came back wiping his chin on his shirtsleeve, held out his hand peremptorily for the return of the credentials. The contents of the wallet had buried the gun muzzle-first in its holster, rubbed out the cement ridges around its owner’s eyes. “Thanks, Dodge,” the man said with noticeable respect. “Homicide Division, huh?”

Cliff remained unbending. “How about doing a little identifying yourself?”

“I’m a deputy attached to the sheriff’s office.” He silvered the mouth of his vest-pocket, looked a little embarrassed. “I’m detailed to keep an eye on this place, I was home having a little supper, and — uh—” He glanced out into the hall behind him questioningly. “How’d you get in? I thought I had it all locked up safe and sound—”

“The key was bedded in a flowerbox on the porch,” Cliff said.

“It was!” He looked startled. “Must be a spare, then. I’ve had the original on me night and day for the past week. Funny, we never knew there was a second one ourselves—”

I swallowed at this point, but it didn’t ease my windpipe any.

“I was driving by just to see if everything was okay,” he went on, “and I saw a light peering out of the rear window here. Then when I got in, I heard the two of you—” I saw his glance rest on the ricketty chair a moment. He didn’t ask the question: what had the two of us been scrapping about. Cliff wouldn’t have answered it if he had, I could tell that by his expression. His attitude was plainly: it was none of this outsider’s business, something just between the two of us.

“I thought maybe ’boes had broken in or something—” the deputy added lamely, seeing he wasn’t getting any additional information.

Cliff said, “Why should this house be your particular concern?”

“There was a murder uncovered in it last week, you know.”

Something inside me seemed to go down for the third time.

“There was,” Cliff echoed tonelessly. There wasn’t even a question-mark after it. “I’d like to hear about it.” He waited awhile, and then he added, “All about it.”

He straddled the chair of our recent combat wrong-way-around, legs to the back. He took out his pack of smokes again. Then when he’d helped himself, he pitched it over at me, but without deigning to look at me. Like you throw something to a dog. No, not like that. You like the dog, as a rule.

I don’t know how he managed to get the message across, it doesn’t sound like anything when you tell it, but in that simple, unspoken act I got the meaning he wanted me to, perfectly. Whatever there is between us, I’m seeing that it stays just between us — for the time being, anyway. So shut up and stay out of it. I’m not ready to give you away to anybody — yet.

It can’t be analyzed, but that was the message he got across to me by cutting me in on his cigarettes in that grudging, unfriendly way.

“Give one to the man,” he said in a stony-hard voice, again without looking at me.

“Much obliged, got my own.” The deputy went over and rested one haunch on the edge of the table. That put me behind him, he couldn’t see my face. Maybe that was just as well. He addressed himself entirely to Cliff, ignored me as though I were some nonentity. If there had been any room left for objectivity in my tormented, fear-wracked mind, I might have appreciated the irony of that: his turning his back on someone who might very well turn out to have been a principal in what he was about to relate.

He expanded, felt at home, you could see. This was shop-talk with a big-time city dick, on a footing of equality. He haloed his own head with comfortable smoke. “This house belonged to a wealthy couple named Fleming—”

Cliff’s eyes flicked over at me, burned searchingly into my face for a second, whipped back to the deputy again before he had time to notice. How could I show him any reaction, guilty or otherwise? I’d never heard the name before, myself. It didn’t mean anything to me.

“The husband frequently goes away on these long business-trips. He was away at the time this happened. In fact we haven’t been able to reach him to notify him yet. The wife was a pretty little thing—”

“Was?” I heard Cliff breathe.

The deputy went ahead; he was telling this his way.

“—Kind of flighty. In fact, some of the women around here say she wasn’t above flirting behind his back, but no one was ever able to prove anything. There was a young fellow whose company she was seen in a good deal, but that don’t have to mean anything. He was just as much a friend of the husband’s as of hers, three of them used to go around together. His name was Dan Ayers—”

This time it was my mind soundlessly repeated, “Was?”

The deputy took time out, expectorated, scoured the linoleum with his sole. It wasn’t his kitchen floor, after all. It was nobody’s now. Some poor devil’s named Fleming that thought he was coming back to happiness.

“Bob Evans, he leaves the milk around here, he was tooling his truck in through the cut-off that leads to this place, just about daybreak that Wednesday morning, and in the shadowy light he sees a bundle of rags lying there in the moss and brakes just off-side. Luckily Bob’s curious. Well sir, he stops, and it was little Mrs. Fleming, poor little Mrs. Fleming, all covered with dew and leaves and twigs—”

“Dead?” Cliff asked.

“Dying. She must have spent hours dragging herself flat along the ground toward the main road in the hope of attracting attention and getting help. She must have been too weak to cry out very loud, and even if she had, there wasn’t anybody around to hear her. Their nearest neighbors are — She must have groaned her life away unheard, there in those thickets and brambles. She’d gotten nearly as far as the foot of one of those stone entrance-lanterns they have where you turn in. She was unconscious when Bob found her. He rushed her to the hospital, let the rest of his deliveries go hang. Both legs broken, skull-fracture, internal injuries; they said right away she didn’t have a chance, and they were right, she died early the next night.”

Breathing was so hard; I’d never known breathing to be so hard before. It had always seemed a simple thing that anyone could do — and here I had to work at it so desperately.

The noise attracted the deputy. He turned his head, then back to Cliff with the comfortable superiority of the professional over the layman. “Kinda gets him, doesn’t it? This stuff’s new to him, guess.”

Cliff wasn’t having any of me. God, how he hated me right then! “What was it?” he went on tautly, without even giving me a look.

“Well that’s it, we didn’t know what it was at first. We knew that a car did it to her, but we didn’t get the hang of it at first, had it all wrong. We even found the car itself, it was abandoned there under the trees, off the main road a little way down beyond the cut-off. There were hairs and blood on the tires and fenders — and it was Dan Ayers’s car.

“Well, practically simultaneous to that find, Waggoner, that’s my chief, had come up here to the house to look around, and he’d found the safe busted and looted. It’s in an eight-sided mirrored room they got on the floor above, I’ll take you up and show you afterwards—”

“Cut it out!” Cliff snarled unexpectedly. Not at the deputy.

I put the whiskey bottle back on the shelf where it had first caught my eye just now. This was like having your appendix taken out without ether.

“Why don’t he go outside if this gets him?” the deputy said patronizingly.

“I want him in here with us, he should get used to this,” Cliff said with vicious casualness.

“Well, that finding of the safe gave us a case, gave us the whole thing, entire and intact. Or so we thought. You know, those cases that you don’t even have to build, that are there waiting for you — too good to be true? This was it: that Ayers had caught on Fleming left a good deal of money in the safe even when he was away on trips, had brought her back that night, and either fixed the door so that he could slip back inside again afterwards after pretending to leave, or else remained concealed in the house the whole time without her being aware of it. Sometime later she came out of her room unexpectedly, caught him in the act of forcing her husband’s safe, and ran out of the house for her life—”

“Why didn’t she use the telephone?” Cliff asked unmovedly.

“We thought of that. It wasn’t a case of simply reporting an attempted robbery. She must have seen by the look on his face when she confronted him that he was going to kill her to shut her up. There wasn’t any time to stop at a phone. She ran out into the open and down the cut-off toward the main road, to try to save her own life. She got clear of the house, but he tore after her in his car, caught up with her before she made the halfway mark to the stone lanterns. She tried to swerve off-side into the brush, he turned the car after her, and killed her with it, just before she could get in past the trees that would have blocked him. We found traces galore there that reconstructed that angle of it to a T. And they were all offside, off the car-path; it was no hit-and-run, it was no accident, it was a deliberate kill, with the car-chassis for a weapon. He knocked her down, went over her, and then reversed and went over her a second time in backing out. He thought she was dead; she was next-door to it, but she was only dying.”

I blotted the first tear before it got free of my lashes, but the second one dodged me, ran all the way down. Gee, life was lovely! All I kept saying over and over was: I don’t know how to drive, I don’t know how to drive.

Cliff took out his cigarettes again and prodded into the warped pack. He threw it at me, and looked at me and smiled. “Have another smoke, kid,” he said. “I’ve only got one left, but you can have it.” And I lit it and I smiled too, through all the wet junk in my eyes.

“He rode the car a spell further down the main road away from there, and then he thought better of it, realized there must be traces all over it that would give him away even quicker than he could drive it, so he ran it off a second time, ditched it there out of sight where we found it, and lit out some less conspicuous way. I don’t want to spend too much time on it. This is the case we thought we had, all Wednesday morning and up until about five that afternoon.

“We sent out a general alarm for Dan Ayers, broadcast his description, had the trains and roads and hauling-trucks out of here watched at the city end, we were all busy as a swarm of bees. And then at five that afternoon Mrs. Fleming regained consciousness for a short time — Waggoner had been waiting outside there the whole time to question her — and the first thing she whispered was, ‘Is Dan all right? He didn’t kill Dan, did he?’ What she told us was enough to send us hotfooting back to the house. We pried open the various mirror-panels we’d overlooked the first time and found Ayers’s dead body behind one of them. He’d been stabbed in the back with some kind of an awl or bit. He’d been dead since the night before. She died about eight that next evening. There went our case.”

Cliff didn’t ask it for quite awhile; maybe he hated to himself. Finally he did. “Did you get anything on the real killer?”

“Practically everything — but the guy himself. She was right in the alcove with the two of them when it happened. She got a pretty good look by torchlight, and she lasted long enough to give it to us. All the dope is over at my chief’s office.”

Cliff smacked his own knees, as if in reluctant decision. He got up. “Let’s go over there,” he said slowly. “Let’s go over and give it the once over.” He stopped and looked back at me from the doorway. “C’mon, Vince, you too. I’ll leave a note for Lil.”

He stood out there waiting, until I had to get up. My legs felt stiff.

“C’mon, Vince,” he repeated. “I know this is out of your line, but you better come anyway.”

“Haven’t you got any mercy at all?” I breathed muffledly, as I brushed past him with lowered head.

Cliff trod on my heel twice, going into the constabulary from the deputy’s car, short as the distance was. He was bringing up behind me. It might have been accidental; but I think without it I might have faltered and come to a dead halt. I think he thought so too.

Waggoner was a much younger-looking and trimmer man than I had expected. I’d never met a rural police-official before. I’d thought they chewed straws and ran to galluses. Instead he was teething on a Dunhill pipe, and his trousers looked as though his wife ran a hot iron over them every day. The four of us went into his inner office, at the back of the front room, and the three of them chewed the rag about it — the case — in general terms for awhile. Then he said “Yes,” to Cliff’s question, opened a drawer in one of the filing-cabinets and got out a folder; “we do have a pretty good general description of him, from her. Here’s a transcription of my whole interview with her at the hospital. I had a stenographer take it down at her bedside.” From the folder he removed in turn a quadruple-ply typescript on onionskin, began finger-tracing its double-spaced lines.

“All that,” I thought dismally. “Oh God, all that.”

The room had gotten very quiet. “Our reconstruction of the car-assault on Mrs. Fleming was perfectly accurate, as was our motivation of the safe-looting and its interruption. The only thing is, there’s a switch of characters involved; that’s where we went wrong. Instead of Mrs. Fleming being killed by Ayers, Mrs. Fleming and Ayers were killed by this third person. She saw the awl plunged into Ayers’s back, fled from the house for her life, was pursued down the cut-off by the murderer in Ayers’s car and crushed to death. The murderer then went back, completed his interrupted ransacking of the safe, and concealed Ayers’s body. He also relocked the house, to gain as much time as possible—” His voice became an unintelligible drone. “And so on, and so on.” He turned a page, then his tracing finger stopped. “Here’s what you want, Dodge. The killer was about twenty-five, and fairly skinny. His cheek-bones stood out, cast shadows in the torchlight as it wavered on his face—”

I cupped my hand lengthwise to my cheek, the one turned toward the three of them, and sat there as if holding my face pensively. I was over by the night-blacked window and they were more in the center of the room, under the conelight Waggoner had turned on over his desk.

His tracing finger dropped a paragraph lower, stopped again. “He had light-brown hair. She even remembered that it was parted low on the left side — take a woman to notice a thing like that even at such a moment — and an unusually long forelock that kept falling in front of his face.”

My hand went up a little higher and brushed mine back. It only fell down again like it always did.

“His eyes were fixed and glassy, as though he was mentally unbalanced—”

I saw Cliff glance thoughtfully down at the floor, then up again.

“He had on a knitted sweater under his jacket, and she even took in that it had been darned or rewoven up at the neckline in a different color yarn—”

Lil had made me one the Christmas before, and then I’d burned a big hole in it with a cigarette-spark, and when I’d taken it back to her, she hadn’t been able to get the same color again, it had left a big star-like patch that hit you in the eye— It was back at my room now. I looked out the window, and I didn’t see anything.

His voice went on: “It took us hours to get all this out of her. We could only get it in snatches, a little at a time, she was so low. She went under without knowing Ayers had been killed along with her—”

I heard the onionskin sheets crackle as he refolded them. No one said anything for awhile. Then Cliff asked, “They been buried yet?”

“Yeah, both. Temporarily, in her case; we haven’t been able to contact the husband yet, I understand he’s in South America—”

“Got pictures of them?”

“Yeah, we got death-photographs. Care to see them?”

I knew what was coming up. My blood turned to ice, and I tried to catch Cliff’s eye, to warn him in silent desperation: Don’t make me look, in front of them. I’ll cave, I’ll give myself away. I can’t stand any more of it, I’m played out.

He said off-handedly, “Yeah, let’s have a look.”

Waggoner got them out of the same folder that had held the typescript. Blurredly, I could see the large, gray squares passing from hand to hand. I got that indirectly, by their reflections on the polished black window-square. I was staring with desperate intensity out into the night, head averted from them.

I missed seeing just how Cliff worked it, with my head turned away like that. I think he distracted their attention by becoming very animated and talkative all at once, while the pictures were still in his hands, so that Waggoner forgot to put them back where he’d taken them from. I lost track of them.

The next thing I knew the light had snapped out, they were filing out, and he was holding the inner office-door for me, empty-handed. “Coming, Vince?” We passed through the outside room to the street.

The deputy said, “I’ll run you back there, it’s on my own way home anyway.” He got in under the wheel and Cliff got in next to him. I was just going to get in the back when Cliff’s voice warded me off like a lazy whip. “Run back a minute and see if I left my cigarettes in Mr. Waggoner’s office, Vince.” Then he held Waggoner himself rooted to the spot there beside the car by a sudden burst of parting cordiality. “I want you to be sure and look me up anytime you’re down our way—”

His voice dwindled behind me and I was in the darkened inner office again, alone. I knew what I’d been sent back for. He didn’t have any cigarettes in here; he’d given me his last one back at the Fleming house. I found the still-warm cone, curbed its swaying, lit it. They were there on the table under my eyes, he’d left them out there for me purposely.

The woman’s photograph was topmost. The cone threw a narrow pool of bright light. Her face seemed to come to life in it, held up in my hand. It lost its distortion, the stiff ugliness of death. Sight came into the vacant eyes. I seemed to hear her voice again. “There he is, right behind you!” And the man’s came to life in my other hand. That look he’d given me when I’d bent over him, already wounded to death, on the floor. “What did you have to do that for?”

The cone-light jerked high up into the ceiling, and then three pairs of feet were ranged around me, there where I was, flat on the floor. I could hear a blur of awed male voices overhead.

“Out like a light.”

“What did it, you suppose, the pictures? Things like that get him, don’t they? I noticed that already over at the house, before, when I was telling you about the case—”

“He’s not well, he’s under treatment by a doctor right now; he gets these dizzy spells now and then, that’s all it is.” The last was Cliff’s. He squatted down by me on his haunches, raised my head, held a paper cup of water from the filter in the corner to my mouth.

His face and mine were only the cup’s breadth away from one another.

“Yes,” I sighed soundlessly.

“Shut up,” he grunted without moving his lips.

I struggled up and he gave me an arm back to the car. It’s a funny feeling, to lean on someone that’s your natural enemy from now on; that has to be, through force of circumstances. “He’ll be all right,” he said, and he closed the rear car-door on me. It sounded a little bit like a cell-grate.

Waggoner was left behind, standing on the sidewalk in front of his office, in a welter of so-longs and much-obligeds.

We didn’t say anything in the car. We couldn’t; the deputy was at the wheel. We changed to Cliff’s car at the Fleming house, picked Lil up, and she was blazing sore. She laced it into him halfway back to the city. “I think you’ve got one hell of a nerve, Cliff Dodge, leaving me alone like that in a house where I had no business to be in the first place, and going off to talk shop with a couple of corny Keystone cops! Suppose you did leave a note saying where you were, that isn’t the point! This was supposed to be your day off; I can’t have one day in the year with you, without squad-stuff, squad-stuff, squad-stuff! Don’t you get enough of it all week long in the city—”

I think for once he was glad she kept his ears humming like that, kept him from thinking too steadily — about me. She only quit past the city-limits, and then the cold, empty silence that descended could be ascribed to his sulking after the calling-down he’d gotten. Once, near the end, she said: “What’s matter, Vince, don’t you feel well?” She’d caught me holding my head, in the rear-sight mirror.

“The outing was a little bit too strenuous for him,” Cliff said bitterly.

That brought on a couple of postscripts. “No wonder, the way you drive! Next time, try not to get to the place we’re going, and maybe you’ll make it!”

I would have given all my hopes of heaven to be back in that blessed everyday world she was in — where you wrangled and you squabbled, but you didn’t kill. I couldn’t give that, because I didn’t have any hopes of heaven left.

We stopped and he said, “I’ll go up with Vince a minute.”

I went up the stairs ahead of him. He closed the door after us. He spoke low and very undramatically, no fireworks. He said, “Lil’s waiting downstairs, and I’m going to take her home — first, before I do anything. I love Lil. It’s bad enough what this is going to do to her when she finds out; I’m going to see that she gets at least one good night’s sleep before she does.”

He went over to the door, got ready to leave. “Run out — that’s about the best thing you can do. Meet your finish on the hoof, somewhere else, where your sister and I don’t have to see it happen. If you’re still here when I come back, I’m going to arrest you for the murder of Dan Ayers and Dorothy Fleming. I don’t have to ask you if you killed those two people. You fainted dead on the floor when you saw their photographs in death.” He gave the knob a twist, as though he was choking the life out of his own career. “Take my advice and don’t be here when I get back. I’ll turn in my information at my own precinct-house and they can pass it on to Waggoner; then I’ll hand over my own badge in the morning.”

I was pressed up against the wall, as if I were trying to get out of the room where there was no door, arms making swimming-strokes. “I’m frightened,” I said stifledly.

“Killers always are,” he answered. “—afterwards. I’ll be back in about half-an-hour.” He closed the door and went out.

I didn’t move for about half the time he’d given me, thrown scornfully into my face, so to speak. Then I put on the light over the washstand and turned the warm-water tap. I felt my jaw and it was a little bristly. I wasn’t really interested in that. I opened the cabinet and took out my cream and blade and holder, from sheer reflex of habit. Then I saw I’d taken out too much, and I put back the cream and holder. The warm water kept running down. I was in such pain already I didn’t even feel the outer gash when I made it. The water kept carrying the red away down the drain.

It would have been quicker at the throat, but I didn’t have the guts. This was the old Roman way; slower but just as effective. I did it on the left one too, and then I threw the blade away. I wouldn’t need it any more to shave with.

I was seeing black spots in front of my eyes when he tried to get in the door. I tried to keep very quiet, so he’d think I’d lammed and go away, but I couldn’t stand up any more. He heard the thump when I went down on my knees, and I heard him threaten through the door, “Open it or I’ll shoot the lock away!”

It didn’t matter now any more, he could come in if he wanted to, he was too late. I floundered over to the door knee-high and turned the key. Then I climbed up it to my feet again. “You could have saved yourself the trip back,” I said weakly.

All he said, grimly, was: “I didn’t think of that way out,” and then he ripped the ends off his shirt and tied them tight around the gashes, pulling with his teeth till the skin turned blue above them. Then he got me downstairs and into the car.

They didn’t keep me at the hospital, just took stitches in the gashes sent me home, and told me to stay in bed a day and take it easy. I hadn’t even been able to do that effectively. These safety razor-blades, no depth.

It was four when we got back to my room. He stood over me while I got undressed, then thumbed the bed for me to get in.

“What about the arrest?” I asked. “Postponed?” I asked it just as a simple question, without any sarcasm, rebuke or even interest. I didn’t have any left in me to give.

“Canceled,” he said. “I gave you your chance to run out, and you didn’t take it. As a matter of fact I sent Lil home alone, I’ve been downstairs watching the street-door the whole time. When a guy is willing to let the life ooze out of his veins, there must be something to his story. You don’t die to back up lies. You’ve convinced me of your good faith, if not your innocence. I don’t know what the explanation is, but I don’t think you really know what you did that night, I think you’re telling the truth to the best of your knowledge.”

“I’m tired,” I said, “I’m licked. I don’t even want to talk about it any more.”

“I think I better stick with you tonight.” He took one of the pillows and furled it down inside a chair and hunched low in it.

“It’s all right,” I said spiritlessly. “I won’t try it again. I still think it would have been the best way out—”

Our voices were low. We were both all-in from the emotional stress we’d been through all night long. And in my case, there was the loss of blood. In another minute one or both of us would have dozed off. In another minute it would have eluded us forever. For no combination of time and place and mood and train-of-thought is ever the same twice. It’s like a chemical formula. Vary it one iota and you don’t get the same result.

This was the right minute now, our minute, mine and his. He yawned. He stretched out his legs to settle himself better, the chair had a low seat and he was long-legged. The shift brought them over a still-damp stain, from my attempt. There were traces of it in a straight line, from the washstand all the way over to the door. He eyed them. “You sure picked a messy way,” he observed drowsily.

“Gas is what occurs to most people first, I imagine,” I said, equally drowsily. “It did to me, but this house has no gas. So there was no other way but the blade—”

“Good thing it hasn’t,” he droned. “If more houses had no gas, there’d be fewer—”

“Yeah, but if the bulb in your room burns out unexpectedly, it can be damn awkward. That happened to the fellow in the next room one night, I remember, and he had to use a candle—” My eyes were closed already. Maybe his were too, for all I knew. My somnolent voice had one more phrase to unburden itself of before it, too, fell silent. “It was the same night I had the dream,” I added inconsequentially.

“How do you know he had to use a candle, were you in there at the time?”

His voice opened my eyes again, just as my last straggling remark had opened his. His head wasn’t reared, he was still supine, but his face was turned toward me on the pillow.

“No, he rapped and stuck his head in my door a minute, and he was holding the candle. He wanted to know if my light had gone out too; I guess he wanted to see if the current had failed through the whole house, or it was just the bulb in his room. You know how people are in rooming-houses—”

“Why’d he have to do that, couldn’t he tell by the hall?” His voice wasn’t as sleepy as before.

“They turn the lights in the upper halls out at eleven-thirty, here, and I guess the hall was dark already—”

His head had left the pillow now. “That’s still no reason why he should bust in on you. I’d like to hear the rest of this.”

“There isn’t any rest, I’ve told you all there is to it.”

“That’s what you think! Watch what I get out of it. To begin with, who was he, had you ever seen him before?”

“Oh, sure,” I smiled deprecatingly. “We weren’t strangers. His name was Burg. He’d been living in the room for a week or ten days before that. We’d said howdy passing each other on the stairs. We’d even stood and chatted down at the street-door several times in the evening, when neither of us had anything to do.”

“How is it you never mentioned this incident to me before, as many times as I’ve asked you to account for every single minute of that evening, before you fell asleep?”

“But this has nothing to do with that, with what — came up later. You’ve kept asking me if I was sure I didn’t remember leaving the room at any time, and things like that. I didn’t even step out into the hall, when he came to the door like that. I was in bed already, and I didn’t even get out of bed to let him in — now what more d’you want?”

“Oh, you were in bed already.”

“I’d been in bed some time past, reading the paper like I do every night. I’d just gotten through and put out my own light a couple minutes before, when I heard this light knock—”

He made an approving pass with his hand. “Tell it just like that. Step by step. Tell it like to a six-year-old kid.” He’d left the chair long ago, was standing over me. I wondered why this trifling thing, this less-than-an-incident, should interest him so.

“I turned over, called out ‘Who is it?’ He answered in a low-pitched voice, ‘Burg, from next-door.’ ”

He wrinkled the skin under his eyes. “Low-pitched? Furtive—? Cagey—?”

I shrugged. “He didn’t want to wake up everyone else on the whole floor, I suppose.”

“Maybe it was that. Go on.”

“I can reach the door from my bed, you know. I stuck out my arm, flipped the key and opened the door. He was standing there in his suspenders, holding this lighted candle in front of him. So he asked if my room-light was okay, we tried it, and it was.”

“Then did he back right out again?”

“Well, not instantly. We put the light right out again, but he stayed on in the doorway a couple minutes.”

“Why’d he have to stand in the doorway a couple minutes once he’d found out your light was okay?”

“Well — uh — winding-up the intrusion, signing-off, whatever you’d want to call it.”

“In just what words?”

Gee, he was worse than a schoolteacher in the third grade. “You know how those things go. He said he was sorry he’d disturbed me, he wouldn’t have if he’d realized I was in bed. He said, ‘You’re tired, aren’t you? I can see you’re tired.’ ”

“With the light out.” It was a commentary, not a question.

“The candle was shining into my face. He said, ‘Yes, you’re tired. You’re very tired.’ And the funny part of it was, I hadn’t been until then, but after he called it to my attention, I noticed he was right, I was.”

“Kind of repetitious, wasn’t he?” he drawled. “You’ve quoted him as saying it four times, already.”

“He kept saying it over and over, I couldn’t even keep track of how many times he said it, and his voice kept getting lower all the time.” I smiled tolerantly. “I guess he’s got kind of a one-track mind, used to mumbling to himself maybe.”

“All right, keep going.”

“There’s no further to go. He closed the door and went away, and I dropped right off to sleep.”

“Wait a minute, hold it right there. Are you sure that door closed after him? Did you see it close? Did you hear it? Or are you just tricking your senses into believing you did, because you figure that’s what must have happened next anyway?”

Was he a hound at getting you mixed-up! “I wasn’t so alert any more, I was sort of relaxed, like I say—” I said baffledly.

“Did it go like this?” He opened it slightly, eased it gently closed. The latch-tongue went click into the socket. “Did it go like this?” He opened it a second time, this time eased it back in place holding the knob fast so the latch-tongue couldn’t connect. Even so, the edge of the door itself gave a little thump as it met the frame.

He waited, said: “I can see by the trouble you’re having giving me a positive answer, that you didn’t hear either of those sounds.”

“But the door must’ve closed,” I protested. “What was he going to do, stay in here all night keeping watch at my bedside? The candle seemed to go out, so he must’ve gone out and left me.”

“The candle seemed to go out. How do you know it wasn’t your eyes that dropped closed and shut it out?” I didn’t say anything. “I want to ask you a few questions,” he said. “What sort of an effect did his voice have on you, especially when he kept saying ‘You’re tired’?”

“Sort of peaceful. I liked it.”

He nodded at that. “Another thing; where did he hold that candle, in respect to himself? Off to one side?”

“No, dead center in front of his own face, so that the flame was between his eyes, almost.”

He nodded again. “Did you stare at the flame pretty steadily?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t tear my eyes off it. You know how a flame in a dark room will get you—”

“And behind it — if he was holding it up like you say — you met his eyes.”

“I guess — I guess I must have. He kept it on a straight line between my eyes and his the whole time.”

He worked his cheek around, like he was chewing a sour apple. “Eyes were fixed and glassy as though he were mentally unbalanced,” I heard him mutter.

“What?”

“I was just remembering something in that deathbed statement Mrs. Fleming made to Waggoner. One more thing: when you chatted with him downstairs at the street-door like you say you did once or twice, what were the topics, can you remember?”

“Oh, a little bit of everything, you know how those things go. At first general things like the weather and baseball and politics. Then later more personal things — you know how you get talking about yourself when you’ve got an interested listener.”

“Getting the feel of your background.” He must have meant that for himself, I couldn’t make any sense out of it. “Did you ever catch yourself doing something you didn’t want to do, while you were in his company?”

“No. Oh wait, yes. One night he had a box of mentholated coughdrops in his pocket. He kept taking them out and offering them to me the whole time we were talking. Gosh, if there’s one thing I hate it’s mentholated coughdrops. I’d say no each time, and then I’d give in and take one anyway. Before I knew it, I’d finished the whole box.”

He eyed me gloomily. “Testing your will-power to see if it was weak enough.”

“You seem to make something out of this whole thing,” I said helplessly. “What is it? Blamed if I can see!”

“Never mind. I don’t want to frighten you right now. You get some sleep, kid. You’re weak after what you tried to do just now.” I saw him pick up his hat.

“Where you going?” I asked. “I thought you said you were staying here tonight?”

“I’m going back to the Fleming house — and to Waggoner’s headquarters too, while I’m at it.”

“Now? You’re going all the way back up there, at this hour of the morning?”

“And Vince,” he added from the doorway, “don’t give up yet. We’ll find a way out somehow — don’t take any more shortcuts.”

It was high noon before I woke up, after all I’d been through, and even then he didn’t show up for another two or three hours yet. I got dressed but I didn’t dare leave my room, even for a cup of coffee; I was afraid if I did I’d miss him, and he’d think I’d changed my mind and lammed out after all.

Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away. Where was there to go, anyway? He was my only salvation — now.

He finally showed up around three, and found me worriedly coursing back and forth in my stocking-feet, holding one bandaged wrist with the opposite hand. Stiffening was setting in, and they hurt plenty.

But I was as fresh as a daisy compared to the shape he was in. He had big black crescents under his eyes from not getting to bed all night, and the first thing he did was sprawl back in the chair he’d originally intended occupying the night before, and kick off his shoes. Then he blew a big breath of relaxation that fanned halfway across the room.

“Were you up there all this time — until now?” I gasped.

“I’ve been back to town once, in-between — to pick up something I needed and get a leave of absence.” He wasn’t sanguine by any means, I could tell that just by looking at him. He didn’t have that steely glint in his eye of your master-detective on the home-stretch to a solution. But he looked less harassed than the night before. Maybe the activity of running around, in itself, was good for him.

He’d brought in a large flat slab wrapped in brown paper with him. He picked it up now, undid it, turning partly away from me, scissored his arms, and then turned back again. He was holding a large portrait-photograph in a leather frame against his chest for me to see. He didn’t say anything, just watched me.

It took a minute for the identity to peer through the contradictory details, trifling as they were. The well-groomed hair, neatly tapered above the ears instead of shaggily unkempt; the clean-shaven upper lip instead of a sloppy walrus-tusk mustache — he helped this effect by holding one finger lengthwise under the picture’s nose—; above all, an intangible aura of prosperity, radiating from the impeccable fit of the custom-tailored suit-collar, the careful negligence of the expensive necktie, the expression of the face itself, instead of the habitual unbuttoned, tieless, slightly soiled shirt-collar, the hangdog aura of middle-age running to seed.

I jolted. “That’s Burg! The man that had the room next to me! Where’s you—?”

“I didn’t have to ask you that, I already know it, from the landlord and one or two of the other roomers here I’ve shown it to.” He reached under it with one hand and suddenly swung out a second panel, attached to the first. It was one of those double-easel arrangements that stand on dressers.

She stared back at me, and like a woman, she was different again. She’d been different on each of the three times. This was the third and last time I was to see her, though this crystallized, arrested glimpse of her preceded the other two in point of time. She had here neither the masklike scowl of hate at bay I had seen by torchlight, nor yet the rigid ghost-grin of death. She was smiling, calm, alive, lovely. I made a whimpering sound.

Somebody, I guess in Waggoner’s office, had stuck a gummed tab uniting the two of them across the division of the folder. Uniting them symbolically in death and mystery. On it was inked: “B-20, 263/Fleming-Ayers/7-21-40.”

“He’s also Dorothy Fleming’s husband, Joel,” Cliff said. “Waggoner gave me this, from their house.”

He must have seen the wan light of hope beginning to flicker in my eyes. He snuffed it out, with a rueful gnaw at his under-lip, a slight shake of his head. That was the kindest way, I guess; not to let it get fully kindled. Hope is so hard to kill, anyway. He closed the photo-folder and threw it aside. “No,” he said, “no, there’s no out in it for you. Look, Vince. D’you want to know now what we’re up against, once and for all? You’ve got to sooner or later, and it isn’t going to be easy to take.”

“You’ve got bad news for me.”

“Pretty bad. But at least it’s better than this weird stuff that you’ve been shadow-boxing with ever since it happened. It’s rational, down-to-earth, something that the mind can grasp. You killed a man that Wednesday night. You may as well get used to the idea. There’s no dodging out of it, no possibility of mistake, no shrugging-off of responsibility. It isn’t alone Mrs. Fleming’s deathbed description, conclusive as that is — and she didn’t make that up out of thin air, you know, imagine someone looking just like you. Fingerprints that Waggoner’s staff took from that mirror-door behind which Ayers’s body was thrust check with yours. I compared them privately while I was up there, from a drinking-glass I took out of this room and had dusted over at our own lab—” I looked, and mine was gone.

“You and nobody but you found your way into the Fleming house and punctured Dan Ayers’s heart with an awl and secreted his body in a closet.”

He saw my face blanch. “Now steady a minute. You didn’t kill Dorothy Fleming. You would have, I guess, but she ran out of the house and down the cut-off for her life. You can’t drive, and she was killed by somebody in a car. Somebody in Ayers’s car, but not Ayers himself obviously, since you had killed him upstairs a minute before yourself. Now that proves, of course, that somebody brought you up there — and was waiting outside for you at a safe distance, a distance great enough to avoid implication, yet near enough to lend a hand when something went wrong and one of the victims seemed on the point of escaping.”

That didn’t help much. That halved my crime, but the half was still as great as the whole. After being told you’d committed one murder, where was the solace in being told you hadn’t committed a dozen others.

I folded over, seated, held my head. “But why didn’t I know I was doing it—?” I groaned anguishedly.

“We can take care of that later,” he said. “I can’t prove what I think it was, right now, and what good is an explanation without proof? And there’s only one way to prove it: show it could have happened the first time by getting it to happen all over again a second time—”

I thought he was going crazy — or I was. “You mean, go back and commit the crime all over again — when they’re both already buried?”

“No, I mean get the circumstances down on record, repeat the special conditions that surrounded it the first time. Even then, it’ll be purely circumstantial and none too good, but it’s about the best we can hope for.”

“But can’t you tell me what—?”

“I think it’s safer if I don’t, until afterwards. You’ll get all tense, keyed-up; you’re liable to jeopardize the whole thing without meaning to, make it miss fire. I want you to keep cool, everything’ll depend on that—”

I wondered what he was going to ask me.

“It’s nearly four o’clock now,” he said. “We haven’t much time. A telegram addressed to Mrs. Fleming was finally received from her husband while I was up there; he’s arriving back from South America today. Waggoner took charge of it, showed it to me. He’s ordered her reburied in a private plot, will probably get there in time for the services—”

I trailed him downstairs to his car, got in beside him limply. “Where we going?” I asked.

He didn’t start the car right away, gave me a half-rueful, half-apologetic look. “Where is the place you would least rather go, of all places, right now?”

That wasn’t hard. “That eight-sided mirrored alcove — where I did it.”

“I was afraid of that. I’m sorry, kid, but that’s the very place you’re going to have to go back to, and stay in alone tonight — if you ever want to get out from under the shadows again. Whaddye say, shall we make the try?”

He still didn’t start the car, gave me lots of time.

I only took four or five minutes, and I gave him the rest of it back. I slapped in my stomach, which made the sick-feeling go up into my throat, and I said: “I’m ready.”

I’d been sitting on the floor, outside it, to rest, when I heard him come in. There were other people with him. The silence of the house, tomblike until then, was abruptly shattered by their entrance into the lower hall, their voices, the sounds they made moving about. I couldn’t tell how many of them there were. They went into the living-room, and their voices became less distinct.

I stood up and got ready, but I stayed out awhile longer, to be able to breathe better. I knew I had time yet, he wouldn’t come up right away.

The voices were subdued, as befitted a solemn post-funerary occasion. Every once in awhile, though, I could make out a snatch of something that was said. Once I heard someone ask: “Don’t you want to come over to our place tonight, Joel? You don’t mean you’re going to stay here alone in this empty house after — after such a thing?”

I strained my ears for the answer — a lot depended on it — and I got it. “I’m closer to her here than anywhere else.”

Presently they all came out into the hall again, on their way out, and I could hear goodnights being said. “Try not to think about it too much, Joel. Get some sleep.”

The door closed. A car drove off outside, then a second one. No more voices after that. The tomblike silence almost returned. But not quite. A solitary tread down there, returning from the front door, told that someone had remained. It went into the living-room and I heard the clink of a decanter against a glass. Then a frittering of piano-notes struck at random, the way a person does who has found contentment, is eminently pleased with himself.

Then a light-switch ticked and the tread came out, started unhurriedly up the stairs. It was time to get in. I put one foot behind me, and followed it back. I drew concealment before me in the shape of a mirror-panel, all but the ultimate finger’s breadth of gap, to be able to breathe and watch.

The oncoming tread had entered the bedroom adjacent to me, and a light went on in there. I heard a slatted blind spin down. Then the sound of a valise being shifted out into a more accessible position, and the click of the key used to open it. I could even glimpse the colored labels on the lid as it went up and over. South American hotels. I saw bodyless hands reach down, take things out: striped pajamas and piles of folded linen, that had never seen South America. That had probably lain hidden on a shelf in some public checkroom in the city all this time.

My heart was going hard. The dried blood on the woodwork at my back, of someone I had killed, seemed to sear me where it touched. My flesh kept crawling away from it in ripples, though my body stood there motionless. It was the blood of someone I had killed, not that this man out there had killed. No matter what happened now, tonight, nothing could absolve me of that. There was no possibility of transfer of blame. Cliff had told me so, and it was true.

A light went up right outside where I was, and an ice-white needle of it splintered in at me, lengthwise, from top to bottom, but not broad enough to focus anything it fell on — from the outside.

I could see a strip of his back by it. He had come in and was squatting down by the damaged safe, mirror-covering swung out of the way. He swung its useless lid in and out a couple of times. I heard him give an almost soundless chuckle, as though the vandalism amused him. Then he took things out of his coat-pockets and began putting them in. Oblong manila envelopes such as are used to contain currency and securities, lumpy tissue-wrapped shapes that might have been jewelry. Then he gave the safe-flap an indifferent slap-to. As though whether it shut tight or not didn’t matter; what it held was perfectly safe — for the present.

Then he stood, before turning to go out.

This was when, now. I took the gun Cliff had given me, his gun, out of my pocket, and raised it to what they call the wishbone of the chest and held it there, pointed before me. Then I moved one foot out before me, and that took the door away, in a soundless sweep.

I was standing there like that, when he turned finally. The mirror covering the safe-niche had been folded back until now, so he didn’t see the reflection of my revelation.

The shock must have been almost galvanic. His throat made a sound like the creak of a rusty pulley. I thought he was going to fall down insensible for a minute. His body made a tortured corkscrew-twist all the way down to his feet, but he stayed up.

I had a lot to remember. Cliff had told me just what to say, and what not to say. I’d had to learn my lines by heart, and particularly the timing of them. That was even more important. He’d warned me I had a very limited time in which to say everything I was to say. I would be working against a deadline, that might fall at any minute, but he didn’t tell me what it was. He’d warned me we both — this man I was confronting and I — would be walking a tightrope, without benefit of balancing-poles. Everything depended on which one of us made a false step first.

It was a lot to remember, staring at the man whom I had only known until now as Burg, a fellow rooming-house lodger, and who held the key to the mystery that had suddenly clouded my existence. And I had to remember each thing in the order they had been given me, in the proper sequence, or it was no good.

The first injunction was, Make him speak first. If it takes all night, wait until he speaks first. Some matter of recognition must have been involved, but I had no leisure for my own side-thoughts.

He spoke finally. Somebody had to, and I didn’t. “How’d you get here?” It was the croak of a frog in mud.

“You showed me the way, didn’t you?”

I could see the lump in his throat as he forced it down, to be able to articulate. “You re— You remembered coming here?”

“You didn’t think I would, did you?”

His eyes rolled, as at the imminence of some catastrophe. “You — you couldn’t have!”

The gun and I, we never moved. “Then how did I get back here again, you explain it.”

His present situation pierced warningly at him through the muffling layers of his panic. I saw his eyes flick toward the entrance to the alcove. I shifted over a little, got it behind me, to seal him in. I felt with my foot and drew the door in behind me, not fast but leaving only a narrow gap. “How long have you been in here like — like this?”

“Since shortly after dark. I got in while you were away at the funeral services.”

“Who’d you bring with you?”

“Just this.” I righted the gun, which had begun to incline a little at the bore.

He couldn’t resist asking it, he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t asked it, in his present predicament. “Just how much do you remember?”

I gave him a wise smile, that implied everything without saying so. It was Cliff’s smile, not mine — but formed by my lips.

“You remember the drive up?” He said it low, but he’d wavered on the wire, that tightrope Cliff had mentioned. “You couldn’t have! You had the look, the typical look—”

“What look?”

He shut up; he’d regained his equilibrium.

“I was holding a thumbtack pressed into the palm of each hand the whole way.”

“Then why did you do everything I — you were directed to, so passively?”

“I wanted to see what it was leading up to. I thought maybe there might be some good in it for me later, if anyone went to all that trouble—”

“You purposely feigned—? I can’t believe it! You didn’t even draw back, exhibit a tremor, when I let you out of the car, put the knife in your hand, sent you on toward the house, told you how to get in and what to do! You mean you went ahead and consciously—?”

“Sure I went ahead and did it, because I figured you’d pay off heavy afterwards to keep me quiet. And if I’d tried to balk then, I probably would have gotten the knife myself, on the way back, for my trouble.”

“What happened, what went wrong inside?”

“I accidentally dropped the knife in the dark somewhere in the lower hall and couldn’t find it again. I went on up empty-handed, thinking I’d just frighten them out the back way and get a chance at the safe myself. But Ayers turned on me and got me down, he weighed more than I do, and he was going to kill me — to keep it from coming out that they were adulterous, and had been caught in the act of breaking into your safe in the bargain. Only by mistake, she put the awl that he cried out for into my hand instead of his. I plunged it into him in self-defense.”

He nodded as though this cleared up something that had been bothering him. “Ah, that explains the change of weapon that had me mystified. Also how it was that she got out of the house like that and I had to go after her and — stop her myself. Luckily I was crouched behind the hood of Ayers’s car, peering at the open door, when she came running out. She couldn’t drive herself, so she didn’t try to get in, ran screaming on foot down the cut-off. I jumped in without her seeing me, tore after her, and caught up with her. If I hadn’t, the whole thing would have ended in a ghastly failure. I might have known you were under imperfect control—”

He’d fallen off long ago, gone hurtling down. But I still had a deadline to work against, things to say, without knowing the why or wherefore. “Your control was perfect enough, don’t let that worry you. You haven’t lost your knack.”

“But you just said—”

“And you fell for it. I didn’t know what I was doing when you brought me up here, sent me in to do your dirty-work for you that night. Haven’t you missed something from your late wife’s bedroom since you’ve been back? There was a double photo-folder of you and her. The police took that. I happened to see both pictures in one of the papers. I recognized you as Burg. I’d also recognized my own description, by a darned sweater I wore that night, and had a vague recollection — like when you’ve been dreaming — of having been in such a house and taken part in such a scene. You’ve convicted yourself out of your own mouth to me, right now. I haven’t come back here to be paid off for my participation or take a cut in any hush-money. Nothing you can give me from that safe can buy your life. You picked someone with weak will-power, maybe, but strong scruples. I was an honest man. You’ve made me commit murder. I can’t clear myself in the eyes of the law — ever. You’re going to pay for doing that to me. Now. This way.”

“Wait, don’t do that — that won’t help you any. Alive, maybe I can do something for you. I’ll give you money, I’ll get you out of the country. No one needs to know.”

“My conscience’ll always know. I’ve got an honest man’s conscience in a murderer’s body, now. You should have let me alone. That was your mistake. Here you go, Fleming.”

He was almost incoherent, drooling at the mouth. “Wait — one minute more! Just sixty seconds—” He took out a thin gold pocket-watch, snapped up its burnished lid. He held it face toward me, open that way.

I saw what he was trying to do. Cliff had warned me to be careful. I dropped my eyes to his feet, kept them stubbornly lowered, brow furrowed with resistance, while I held the gun on him. Something kept trying to pull them up.

A flash from the burnished metal of the inside of the watch-lid wavered erratically across my chest-front for an instant, like when kids tease you with sunlight thrown back from a mirror.

“Look up,” he kept pleading, “look up. Just one minute more. See — the hands are at six-to. Look, just until they get to here.”

Something was the matter with the trigger of the gun, it must have jammed. I kept trying to close the finger that was hooked around it, and it resisted. Or else maybe it was the finger that wouldn’t obey my will.

I kept blinking more and more rapidly. The flash slithered across my shuttering eyes, slid off, came back again. They wanted so bad to look up into it; it prickled.

There was a slight snap, as though he had surreptitiously pulled out the stem-winder, to set the watch back. That did it. I glanced up uncontrollably. He was holding the watch up, brow-high — like he had the candle that night — as if to give me a good, unobstructed look at its dial. It was in about the position doctors carry those little attached head-mirrors with which they examine throats.

I met his eyes right behind it, and all of a sudden my own couldn’t get away any more, as though they’d hit glue.

A sort of delicious torpor turned me into wax; I didn’t have any ideas of my own any more. I was open to anyone else’s. My voice-control lasted a moment longer than the rest of my functions. I heard it say, carrying a left-over message that no longer had any will-power behind it, “I’m going to shoot you.”

“No,” he said soothingly. “You’re tired, you don’t want to shoot anybody. You’re tired. The gun’s too heavy for you. Why do you want to hold that heavy thing?”

I heard a far-away thump as it hit the floor. As far-away as though it had fallen right through to the basement. Gee, it felt good to be without it! I felt lazy all over. The light was going out, but very gradually, like it was tired too. The whole world was tired. Somebody was crooning, “You’re tired, you’re tired — you dirty bum now I’ve got you!”

There was a white flash that seemed to explode inside my head, and hurt like anything. Something cold and wet pressed against my eyes when I tried to flicker them open. And when I had, instead of getting lighter as when you’re slowly waking up, the world around me seemed to get darker and weigh against me crushingly, all over. The pain increased, traveled from my head to my lungs. Knives seemed to slash into them, and I couldn’t breathe.

I could feel my eyeballs starting out of their sockets with strangulation, and my head seemed about to burst. The pressure of the surrounding darkness seemed to come against me in undulating waves. I realized that I was underwater and was drowning. I could swim, but now I couldn’t seem to. I tried to rise and something kept holding me down. I weaved there like a writhing seaweed, held fast to the bottom.

I doubled over, forced myself down against the surrounding resistance, groped blindly along my own legs. One seemed free and unencumbered, I could lift it from the mucky bottom. About the ankle of the other there was a triple constriction of tightly-coiled rope, like a hideous hempen gaiter. It was tangled hopelessly about a heavy iron cross-bar. When I tried to raise this, one scimitar-like appendage came free, the other remained hopelessly hooked into the slime it had slashed into from above. It must have been some sort of a small but weighty anchor such as is used by launches and fishing-craft.

I couldn’t release it. I couldn’t endure the bend of position against my inner suffocation. I spiraled upright again in death-fluid. My jaws kept going spasmodically, drinking in extinction.

A formless blur came down from somewhere, brushed lightly against me, shunted away again before I could grasp it, shot up out of reach. I couldn’t see it so much as sense it as a disturbance in the water.

There were only fireworks inside my skull now, not conscious thoughts any more. The blurred manifestation shot down again, closer this time. It seemed to hang there, flounderingly, upside-down, beside me. I felt a hand close around my ankle. Then a knife grazed my calf, withdrew. I could feel a tugging at the rope, as if it were being sliced at.

Self-preservation was the only spark left in my darkening brain. I clutched at the hovering form in the death-grip of the drowning. I felt myself shooting up through water, together with it, inextricably entangled. I wouldn’t let go. Couldn’t. Something that felt like a small ridged rock crashed into my forehead. Even the spark of self-preservation went out.

When I came to I was lying out on a little pier or stringpiece of some kind, and there were stars over me. I was in shorts and undershirt, wringing wet and shivering, and water kept flushing up out of my mouth. Somebody kept kneading my sides in and out, and somebody else kept flipping my arms up and down.

I coughed a lot, and one of them said: “There he is, he’s all right now.” He stood up and it was Cliff. He was in his underwear and all dripping too.

A minute later Waggoner stood up on the other side of me. He was equally sodden, but he’d left on everything but his coat and shoes. There hadn’t been any time by then, I guess. He said, “Now get something around him and then the three of us better get back to the house fast and kill the first bottle we find.”

There was light coming from somewhere behind us, through some fir trees that bordered the little lake. It played up the little pier. By it, I could see my own outer clothes neatly piled at the very lip of it. There was a paper on top of them, pressed down by one of my oxfords. Cliff picked it up and brought it over and read it to us.

It was in my own handwriting; the light was strong enough for me to see that when he showed it to me.

He looked at Waggoner and said, “Do we need this?”

Waggoner pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “I think we’re better off without it. These coronery-inquest guys can be awfully dumb sometimes, it might sort of cloud their judgment.”

Cliff took a match from his dry coat and struck it and held it to the note until there wasn’t any to hold any more.

I was feeling better now, all but the shivering. I was sitting up. I looked back at the glow through the trees and said, “What’s that?”

“Fleming’s car,” Cliff answered. “He tried to take a curve too fast getting away from here, when we showed up on his tail, and turned over and kindled.”

I grimaced sickly. That was about all that could have still stirred horror in me after the past ten days: a cremation alive.

“I shot him first,” Cliff said quietly.

“One of us did,” Waggoner corrected. “We all three fired after him. We’ll never know which one hit him. We don’t want to anyway. The machine telescoped and we couldn’t get him out. And then I had to give Dodge a hand going down after you, he’s no great shakes of a swimmer.”

“We had to hit him,” Cliff said. “It was the only way of breaking the hypnosis in time. You were drowning down there by your ‘own’ act, and there was no time to chase him and force him at gun-point to release his control, or whatever it is they do. We only found out about the anchor after we’d located you—”

A figure was coming back toward us from the glow, which was dwindling down now. It was the deputy. He said, “Nothing left now; I wet it down all I could to keep it from kindling the trees.”

“Let’s get back to the house,” Cliff said. “The kid’s all goose-pimples.”

We went back and I got very soused on my third of the bottle. I couldn’t even seem to do that properly. They let me sleep it off there, the four of us spent the night right there where we were. I found out later it was Fleming’s own bed I’d occupied, but at the time I wouldn’t have cared if it was the mirror-closet itself, with Ayers’s body still in it.

In the morning Cliff came in and had a talk with me before the other two were up. I knew where I was going to have to go with him in a little while, but I didn’t mind so much any more.

I said, “Did that help any, what I did last night? Did it do any good?”

“Sure,” he said. “It was the works; it was what I wanted, had to have. What d’you suppose I was doing around here all day yesterday, before he got back? Why d’you suppose I warned you to make him stay right there in the alcove with you, not let the conversation drift outside? I had it all wired up, we listened in on the whole thing. The three of us were down in the basement, taking it all down. We’ve got the whole thing down on record now. I’d emptied that gun I gave you, and I figured he’d be too smart to do anything to you right here in his own house. Only, he got you out and into his car too quick, before we had a chance to stop him. We darned near lost you. We turned back after one false start toward the city, and a truckman told us he’d glimpsed a car in the distance tearing down the lake road. That gave us the answer.

“We wouldn’t have even been able to hold the ‘suicide’ against him. You did all that yourself, you know, even to shackling your foot to that boat-anchor and dropping it over ahead of you. A person who is afraid of the jump into water but determined to go through with it might have taken such a precaution as that.

“I had a hunch it was hypnosis the minute you told me that candle incident. But how was I going to prove it? So much of that stuff is fake that most people don’t want to believe in it. Now I’ve got two other police-officers, beside myself, who saw — or rather heard — the thing happen all over again. And that’s going to carry weight that no coroner’s jury will dare disregard.

“You were in a state of hypnosis when you committed this crime, that’s the whole point. In other words, you were as unresponsible, as inanimate, as insensible, as the knife or club that a murderer wields to accomplish his deed. You were simply the weapon in the actual murderer’s hands. Your own mind wasn’t functioning, you had no mind. Two bodies were being directed by one mind. His.” He stopped and looked at me. “Does that scare you?”

“Oh boy.” I puffed out my cheeks.

“It would me too. I’d better begin at the beginning. Joel Fleming used to be a professional hypnotist in vaudeville years ago. I found enough scrapbooks, old theatre-programs, and whatnot in trunks here in this house to testify to that. Stage-name ‘Dr. Mephisto.’ He undoubtedly possesses a gift of hypnotic control — over certain subjects. (With my wife, Lil, for instance, I’m afraid he’d come a complete cropper — and even wind up helping her dry the dishes.)”

He was trying to cheer me up; I grinned appreciatively.

He went on, more seriously: “But there is such a thing, you know, it’s not all bunk by any means. Only, certain types of people are more easily influenced than others. Well, he got out of vaudeville years ago while the getting out was still good, and he went into another line of business entirely, which doesn’t need to concern us here, and he made good dough. Then like they all do, he made the mistake of marrying someone years younger than him, a hat-check girl he met at a nightclub. It wasn’t only that she married him simply for his money and to be able to quit handling people’s sweatbands at four bits a throw; she was already the sweetie of a convict named Dan Ayers, who was doing time just then for embezzlement. You get the idea, don’t you? Ayers got out, found a ready-made situation crying to be profited by — so he profited by it. He cultivated Fleming, got in solid with him; he didn’t have to get in solid with Dorothy, he was already.

“All right. Fleming did make these trips to South America, all but the last time. It’s obvious that he found out what was going on quite some time back, somewhere in-between the last real trip he made and the fake one just now. It’s equally obvious that he brooded and he planned revenge. They talk about a woman scorned. There’s nothing more dangerous than a middle-aged husband who finds himself betrayed by a younger wife. It wasn’t just a case of marital disloyalty involved either, he found out they were planning to make off with all his available funds and securities the next time he was away, just strip him clean and goodbye. You notice he didn’t entrust her with the combination of that safe here in the house.

“That’s the basic situation. All that we’ve got to go on is just conjecture. The three principals are dead now and can’t give evidence. I’m not trying to defend Fleming, but there is something to be said for his doing what he did. It turned him into a demon. He wanted Ayers dead, and he wanted Dorothy dead too — now. But he picked a low, lousy way of effecting his purpose. He wasn’t going to endanger himself, risk his own security. No, he started off for ‘South America,’ dropped from sight, holed-up in a rooming-house in the city under the name of Burg, and picked an innocent kid, who had never done him any harm, who had just as much right as he had to life and the pursuit of happiness, to do his murdering for him.

“He tested you out, saw that you were a suitable subject, and — well, the rest we got over the dictaphone last night. To give him his due, he wasn’t deliberately trying to have you apprehended for the crime either. He would have been just as satisfied if you were never caught yourself.

“But the point was, whatever clues came into the possession of the police pointing at the killer, would point at you, not him. He had provided himself with a buffer; he would always be one step removed from the crime. If they ever caught the man the clues pointed to, if they ever caught the actual killer, it would always be you, not him. It was a lot safer than just hiring a professional killer, in full possession of his faculties; it removed all danger of eventual betrayal and implication.

“True, he had to drive you up there, because you don’t drive. Maybe he would have had to anyway; I don’t know enough about hypnotism, I don’t know if control can be effectively maintained over such a great distance. It was just as well he did, from his point of view. You lost the knife, only killed Ayers by a fluke in struggling with him, and Dorothy would have gotten away scot-free, if he hadn’t been lurking outside to lend a hand himself. If she had lived to raise the alarm, you probably would have been nabbed then and there, before you could make a getaway in your dazed state; which would have brought the investigation back to the rooming-house too quickly to suit him, his presence there might have been revealed in spite of all his precautions. So he crushed her to death and whisked you back to immunity.”

“How is it I remembered the whole murder-scene so vividly the next morning? Especially their faces—”

“His control wasn’t one-hundred-percent effective; I don’t know if it ever is. The whole scene must have filtered dimly through to your conscious mind, remained in your memory the next morning after you woke up — just the way a dream does. And other particles, that remained imbedded in your subconscious at first, also came out later when they reduced themselves in actuality: I mean your memory of the stone entrance-lanterns, the cut-off, the spare door-key, the hall light-switch, etcetera. All that stuff is way over my head, I’m not qualified to pass expert judgment on it. I’d rather not even puzzle too hard about it, it scares me myself.”

“Why did I seem to know her, when I didn’t? Why was I so — sort of hurt, heartbroken, at the sight of her face?”

“Those were Fleming’s thoughts, not yours, filtering through your mind. She was his wife, about to desert him, helping another man to rob him in his absence.”

I was sitting down on the edge of the bed, lacing my shoes. That reminded me of something else. “It was drizzling in town that night when I went to bed — and the streets were only starting to dry off when I woke up the next morning. Yet the soles of my shoes were perfectly dry; how could they be, if I followed him even across the sidewalk to where he had a car waiting at the curb? And I doubt that he brought it up that close to the rooming-house entrance, for fear of being seen.”

“I remember you mentioned that to me once before, and it’s puzzled me too. The only possible explanation I can think of is this — and that’s another thing we’ll never know for sure, because that point didn’t come up when he was giving himself away in the alcove last night: can you remember whether you got them off easily that night, when you were undressing in your own room, or as sometimes happens with nearly everyone, the laces got snarled, you couldn’t undo the knot of one or both of them?”

I tried to remember. “I’m not sure — but I think a snag did form in the laces of one of them, so I pulled it off the way it was without really opening it properly.”

“And in the morning?”

“They both seemed all right.”

“That’s what it was, then. You couldn’t undo the knot in time while you were hurriedly getting dressed under his ‘direction.’ You followed him out and around to wherever the car was in your stocking feet, shoes probably shoved into the side-pockets of your coat. He got the knot out for you at his leisure in the car, before starting. It wasn’t raining up here that night, and by the time you got back to town again the sidewalks were already starting to dry off, so your shoes stayed dry.”

“But wouldn’t my socks have gotten wet?”

“They probably did, but they’d dry off again quicker than shoes.”

I was ready now. Waggoner and his deputy went over ahead without waiting for us. I guess he figured I’d rather just go alone with Cliff, and he wanted to make it as easy as he could for me. He said, “Bring the kid over whenever you’re ready, Dodge.”

Cliff and I started over by ourselves about half an hour later. I knew I’d have to go into a cell for awhile, but that didn’t worry me any more; the shadows had lifted.

When we got out in front of the constabulary Cliff asked: “Are you scared, kid?”

I was a little, like when you’re going in to have a tooth yanked or a broken arm reset. You know it’s got to be done, and you’ll feel a lot better after it’s over. “Sort of,” I admitted, forcing a smile.

“You’ll be all right,” he promised, giving me a heartening grip on the shoulder. “I’ll be standing up right next to you the whole time. They probably won’t even send it all the way through to prosecution.”

We went in together.

Bad Time at Honda HOWARD BRESLIN

Original publication: The American Magazine, January 1947

Although he never graduated from high school because of an automobile accident at the age of fourteen that gave him a permanent shoulder disability, Howard Mary Breslin (1912–1964) went on to study at Manhattan College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, and had a successful writing career. His attempts at securing a job as a journalist proved fruitless so he turned to writing radio scripts for such shows as Off the Air, which starred Shirley Booth, and The Honest Captain (both cowritten in alternate weeks with Knowles Entrikin), Mayor of the Town, which starred Lionel Barrymore, and Allen’s Alley (cowritten with David Howard).

He took the risk of quitting his highly paid career as a radio scriptwriter to devote himself full-time to writing novels and short stories. He had immediate success with The Tamarack Tree (1947), a novel set in 1840 in a small Vermont village of two hundred people that swells to twenty thousand to hear Daniel Webster speak during the “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” presidential campaign and becomes the scene of sudden violence. It was followed by ten additional novels under his own name, as well as Run Like a Thief (1962), a suspense novel written under the pseudonym Michael Niall. Set in New York, where Breslin was born and lived for virtually his entire life, it is a two-pronged story of a man attacked by a juvenile gang after he rescues a girl and a television tape of a bank robbery whose perpetrator the man recognizes from his neighborhood.

Curiously, after his short story inspired the motion picture Bad Day at Black Rock, Breslin wrote a novelization of the screenplay and published it with the same title as the movie but published it under the Niall pseudonym, though the original story had been published under his own name.

Another of his short stories served as the basis for Platinum High School (1960), about a man who comes to investigate his son’s death at an elite military school for delinquent boys; it starred Mickey Rooney, Terry Moore, and Dan Duryea.

Title: Bad Day at Black Rock, 1955

Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Director: John Sturges

Screenwriters: Don McGuire, Millard Kaufman

Producer: Dore Schary

• Spencer Tracy (John J. Macreedy)

• Robert Ryan (Reno Smith)

• Anne Francis (Liz Wirth)

• Dean Jagger (Sheriff Tim Horn)

• Walter Brenna (Doc Velie)

• John Ericson (Pete Wirth)

• Ernest Borgnine (Coley Trimble)

• Lee Marvin (Hector David)

The full-length film is remarkably close to the storyline and tone of the short story, though inevitably padded out to accommodate the longer format. The first difference, which does not have any impact on the story as a whole, is that its hero, John J. Macreedy (Peter in the story), has only one arm in the film, though he has no disability in the story.

Spencer Tracy, who eventually agreed to play the character, had been unsure about whether he wanted the role. Plagued by alcoholism at the time, Tracy wasn’t eager to take on any new work but producer Dore Schary wanted him for the role. As the shooting date approached, Schary had the screenwriters make a change in the script that had Macreedy lose an arm in the war, knowing that actors like to play characters with physical disabilities. Still hemming and hawing, Tracy finally agreed after being told that Alan Ladd had been offered the role and accepted. Tracy hated the idea of losing a prime role to another studio star, so went to work. It also didn’t hurt that the producer, Dore Schary, threatened to sue him for the costs the studio had incurred after he agreed to make the film before he changed his mind. The price tag would have been $480,000 — a lot of money today but a fortune more than half a century ago.

It was the right decision, as Tracy was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor in a Lead Role and won the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actor (tying for first place with the ensemble cast in A Big Family). Also nominated for Oscars were director John Sturges and screenwriter Millard Kaufman.

The film (and the story) opens with Macreedy, a former cop, getting off a train in a tiny, remote town and finding the locals hostile. He’d come to find a Japanese-American named Kamotka in order to let him know that his son had been killed in Italy.

He got little help from the townspeople but finally was taken to where the senior Kamotka lived and found his house burned down. Macreedy is shot at and threatened before learning the truth about Kamotka’s fate and getting back on the train to Chicago.

The film offers a high level of suspense, somewhat reminiscent of High Noon, in which a solitary man must face down a threatening coterie while the rest of the town is either too afraid or too impotent to help.

Filmed in the California desert, the heat during filming was oppressive, frequently hitting one hundred degrees. Tracy regularly invited the cast and crew to his hotel room for cocktails after the day’s shoot. Although an alcoholic, Tracy drank only soda pop because he tried to abstain while working — making up for it with serious binge drinking after the production wrapped.

Coincidentally and ironically, in a story and motion picture featuring anti-Japanese bigotry, the name of the town in the story, Honda, was used long before the Japanese automobile became a well-known brand. The town’s name was changed to Black Rock because it is far more memorable and because the studio wanted to avoid confusion with a recent and successful John Wayne western movie, Hondo.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s president, Nicholas Schenck, did not want the studio to make the film, as he regarded it to be subversive.

A decade after the film’s release, writer Millard Kaufman was given an award by the Japanese government for his sensitive portrayal of Japanese people. “The whole thing was absurd,” Kaufman later said, “because there are no Japanese in the movie.”

BAD TIME AT HONDA Howard Breslin

Honda sprawls between the bluff and the railroad tracks. The tracks, four strips of steel, bright in the sunlight, fence the endless Southwestern plain from the false fronts of the town. The plain is Honda’s only view; from behind the buildings the bluff, a huge, red-brown mound, roughly shaped like the crown of an enormous sombrero, rises to the sky. Against the bluff’s ancient mass the houses of Honda’s single street are garish and new, in spite of peeling paint and battered tin signs. The glaring sunshine has baked everything, thoroughly, into one color — sepia. Even the dust that swirls up as the Streamliner passes is the same thinned-out, tired brown.

The long red and silver fatly curved Streamliner streaks past Honda, heading west, three mornings a week. Eastbound, it rattles by in the night, a sound, sudden and fleeting. But on the mornings when it is seen, its length alive with glints from the ever-present sunlight, the Streamliner is an event to Honda, a glimpse of the sleekness and wealth, the silver-chromium speed, that belong to other places.

That is why the morning the Streamliner stopped it was more than an event; it was a shock. It was wrong, not normal. The whole town felt it; the range, when it heard, felt it. And even then, that morning, the feeling was that this happening would mean a bad time for Honda.

There was no warning. The shimmering heat above the railroad tracks seemed to become audible with a low humming.

Doc Velie, lounging on the porch of Sullivan’s Bar, let his chair down and looked at his watch. “That’ll be her,” Doc told the other loungers. “On time today.”

Honda prepared for the expected passage in its usual way. Papa Delvecchio came out of his grocery store; Liz Brooks climbed up from the grease pit of her garage and stood waiting, wiping her hands vigorously on a piece of waste.

The humming increased in volume. The station door banged, and Hastings, the station agent, peered down the tracks. Hastings was wearing black dust cuffs, and he raised an arm to shield his bald head from the sun.

“Here she comes,” said Doc Velie, leaning forward. Then his mouth popped open. The Streamliner wasn’t racing into Honda; she had cut her speed, and was slowing.

The loungers stared. Liz Brooks dropped her waste. Papa Delvecchio began beckoning wildly to somebody inside the store. Hastings stood as if frozen until the train slid smoothly to a stop. The moment the train ceased motion, Hastings jerked into life, running along the track. But the passenger was on the ground, and the porter was swinging back up the steps, before the station agent reached the open car door.

The Streamliner slid away, picking up speed with each yard out of Honda. Every glance in town watched it go. Then all the heads turned back in unison, to view the man the train had left behind.

He was a big man, bulky. His clothes looked rumpled and well worn. Towering over the excited Hastings, the man hefted his large, black Gladstone bag with an ease that matched his size.

Hastings’s voice was shrill; it carried across the quiet morning: “You for Honda?”

“That’s right,” said the big man. He didn’t look at Hastings. He was gazing at the town with a pair of calm, untroubled, brown eyes. There was nothing shrewd nor speculative about his gaze, but it seemed to record every feature of Honda with the emotionless efficiency of a camera.

“But there must be some mistake!” Hastings spluttered, disbelief in his tone. “I’m the agent here! Nobody told me about this! Nobody wired me the liner was stopping!”

The big man looked at Hastings, then, and smiled. He said again, softly and amused, “That’s right.”

Hastings sucked in his breath noisily and swallowed. “You being met?” he asked. “You visiting folks here?”

“No.”

The monosyllable was so casually dropped that Hastings wasn’t sure he’d heard it. “No?” he repeated.

The stranger nodded toward a two-story frame building that had a sign hanging vertically down one corner, with the single word, HOTEL. “That’s for me,” he said, and started for it.

Hastings followed him across the dust of the street, up the steps, and into the hotel. The slap of the screen door closing seemed to stir Honda into action. Liz Brooks turned and walked briskly around the corner of her garage. Papa Delvecchio herded his daughter back into the grocery store.

In front of Sullivan’s, the loungers could hear the jangle of a telephone bell as Sullivan cranked for a connection. The bar’s big Saturday trade came from the ranches, and its owner would make sure that they were informed. The loungers stirred uneasily and looked at one another.

Doc Velie brought out his knife and cut a chew off his tobacco plug. He said, munching, “Walks light for a big man.”

They knew that much themselves. A voice asked, low and quick, “What do you think, Doc?”

“How should I know?” Doc Velie answered. “He ain’t no salesman, that’s sure. Not off the Streamliner.” He laughed, a harsh, dry sound without mirth, and jabbed the point of his knife into a pillar of the porch. “Why ask me? It’s no hair off my chest, whoever he is!”

A slender, wiry man in a faded blue shirt and jeans came out of the shoemaker’s. He stood a moment in the street, smoking, and looked at the loungers. The face under a dust-colored hat was thin and tanned, and his hands were the same. He stood motionless, except for the wisp of smoke from the cigarette between his lips, and the loungers were silent. Not even Doc Velie spoke.

Snapping his cigarette away, the slender man climbed into a light truck and kicked its motor awake. He swung the truck in a smooth, competent U-turn and drove out of town.

Doc Velie spat tobacco at the settling dust. “Ask him,” he said. “Ask Lancey Horn. See what it gets you.” Again the sharp laughter rattled.

The sun climbed higher, and the shadows of Honda shortened as they always did. It was hot, the dry, breathless furnace heat that Honda expected at midday. But this day was different. Doc Velie shuffled into Sullivan’s before his usual time, and the others followed. They stood along the bar, talking quietly, drinking. Sullivan, a small, dark Irishman with a tight mouth, served his customers swiftly and said nothing. The whole room was waiting. But when Hastings came they learned only how the big man had registered:

Peter Macreedy, Chicago.

The name passed from lip to lip. No man recognized it. Sullivan slipped under his bar, went into his back room where the phone was, and shut the door. They all watched when he came back. Sullivan shook his head. The name meant nothing on the range, either.

Doc Velie tossed down a drink and slammed his glass on the bar. “He ain’t no cattle buyer, then! Not if Circle T don’t know his name!” He stopped, staring at Sullivan.

Hands on the bar propping him higher, Sullivan was on tiptoe, looking over their heads into the street. Through the window, Macreedy’s bulk was plain.

The big man was sauntering along easily, hands in his pockets, his feet stirring the dust. As he passed Sullivan’s, he glanced at the row of faces behind the window, and smiled. Macreedy went on down the street, not hurrying, and turned into the garage.

There was no one there. The gas pump in the doorway seemed to droop beneath the sun. Macreedy leaned into the car that was over the grease pit, and put his thumb on its horn. The sound was sudden and raucous.

It brought Liz Brooks from her house behind the garage. She came out to the front, walking with a long, man’s stride, saw Macreedy, and checked herself. She was a tall girl, and she carried herself well. Even the stained coverall she wore only accented the curves of her figure.

Macreedy said, “Lady at the hotel — Mrs. Jiminez. She says you rent cars.”

Liz brushed a strand of black hair off her forehead, as if to see him more clearly. “Sometimes,” she said.

“This one of the times?”

“Maybe.”

They were facing, standing apart like duelists, trying to find the range with each quiet sentence.

Macreedy moved closer. Both his manner and his voice were bland. “I need this car,” he said, “for a trip. To a place called Adobe Wells.”

The girl’s face didn’t change, but she couldn’t keep a crisp note from her tone. “Why are you going there?” she asked.

“I have to,” said Macreedy simply.

Frowning, Liz said, “There’s nothing at the Wells.” She waited for Macreedy to speak, but he just looked at her. Her next words had an edge: “Nothing and nobody!” Again she stopped, and again the big man outwaited her, his silence forcing her into speech: “What are you after, anyway?”

“A car,” Macreedy said.

Liz Brooks took a deep breath, and tightened her lips over it. She turned toward a battered station wagon. Over her shoulder she said, “I’ll drive you myself.” It sounded like a challenge.

Macreedy nodded, followed her, and got into the car. He watched while the girl backed the station wagon out into the street, and glanced once through the rear window. If he noticed the crowd staring from Sullivan’s, he said nothing. They were away from the town, dragging a curtain of dust behind them, when Macreedy unfolded a map on his lap.

“I won’t get lost!” said Liz Brooks savagely. She drove faster, looking straight ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.

Rocking on the seat beside her, Macreedy watched the landscape. He tilted his hat forward to shield his eyes from the glare.

The road paralleled the railroad tracks, and then swung away in a wide curve around the shoulder of the bluff behind Honda. After that they were on the plain for miles, the vast flatland slipping away beneath them. Nothing grew higher than a fence post, and only a few cattle moved.

Liz turned off the main road and bounced toward what looked like a low cloud on the horizon. They sped on. The floorboards under Macreedy’s feet became uncomfortably hot. Suddenly, the cloud ahead was a jumble of low hills. Macreedy counted them. There were four, tumbled together like carelessly piled grain sacks. In the white glare, each stood clearly etched, as if cut from cardboard, baked into the sepia of the country.

Adobe Wells was a pocket between two of the hills. A barbed-wire fence still stretched across the pocket, but its open gate hung listlessly by one hinge. Liz Brooks steered the station wagon through the gateway and braked abruptly beneath two shadeless, twisted trees.

“Here!” She practically barked the word.

Macreedy grunted, and got out of the car. Turning his body in a complete circle, he looked the place over. He gazed up at the hills, along the line of the fence. Only when his circuit was completed did the big man turn his attention to what had been buildings.

Two adobe walls maintained a right angle, but their fellows had crumbled. Inside the angle lay a mass of charred and blackened timbers. Behind this ruin, scattered dark patches on the rank brown grass showed that fire had taken to the outbuildings, too.

Beside Macreedy, Liz Brooks glared up at him. “I told you,” she said. “There’s nothing here! Nothing!”

“Since?”

“Not for years!”

The loud twang of metal on metal startled them. There was the high whine of a ricochet, and then, from the hills, the flat slap of a rifle.

Macreedy moved fast. He took one step, hooked a leg behind Liz’s knees, deftly shouldered her over, and fell on top of her. They were on the ground before the station wagon’s bullet-scarred fender stopped quivering.

“Stay down,” said Macreedy. The girl twisted beneath him, and he pushed her flat, holding her there with a hand on her shoulder, his arm rigid. He took a quick look at the fender, and relaxed. “It’s all right. He’s on the other side of the car.” He rolled away from Liz, and rose to a crouch, balancing on one fist like a football player. Macreedy’s other hand held a gun, a square black automatic, compact and heavy.

Liz Brooks, prone, watched, her face white and tense. But it was the paleness of anger, not fear. With sudden violence, she pounded her fist against the ground. “Fool!” she muttered. “Fool!”

“Who is?” asked Macreedy. Then, as she whirled herself to a sitting position, he said sharply, “Watch it! Down!”

“He wasn’t shooting at me! And it was only a warning, anyway!” The girl’s eyes were scornful. “You’re too big a target to miss, if a man was trying.”

“Maybe,” agreed Macreedy, smiling. But he watched the hills for a long time through the car’s windows, before he nodded. He helped Liz Brooks to her feet, noticed her glance at his automatic, and slid it back under his arm. “Habit, I guess. At his range I might just as well have thrown it at him.”

“Now will you go away?” asked Liz. “There’s nothing here!”

“Nothing?” Macreedy’s finger stroked the furrow in the fender. “Somebody doesn’t agree with you.” His head turned in a slow, deliberate survey. Shrugging, he climbed back into the car. “Let’s go.”

They drove back in silence. Once, on the flatlands, Macreedy spoke. “That gun of mine,” he said. “It’s a Beretta. Italian make. You might mention it around Honda. I’m not fond of people shooting at me.” Getting no reply, he sighed, settled himself more comfortably, and dozed.

Alongside the railroad tracks a car honked and swept past them. Liz Brooks said, “Circle T. The range is coming in.”

“That’s nice,” said Macreedy tonelessly.

The sun was lower in the sky when they came back into Honda, but it was still the same pale, yellow disk. Along the street there were more cars parked, and even a saddled horse drooped in front of Sullivan’s. Four men watching Papa Delvecchio water his vegetables stopped talking and stared at the station wagon. When Liz Brooks skidded to a stop before the hotel, a puncher in a parked sedan touched his horn twice.

Macreedy got out of the station wagon, looked at the puncher calmly, smiled. The girl shook her head impatiently, then said, gazing at Honda, “Look. Whatever you’re starting, drop it. You can’t ride these folks too long.”

“I’m not,” Macreedy said. “They’re riding themselves.” He paid Liz and mopped his face. After the wind of motion the heat was stifling. He went into the hotel.

Three men were waiting in Mrs. Jiminez’s dining room. They rose from behind an oil-cloth-covered table when Macreedy entered. The biggest of the three wore a seersucker suit and a bow tie. Except for his low-crowned Stetson he might have been a Midwestern banker.

“You’re Macreedy,” he said, without preamble. “I’m Coogan Trimble.”

“Circle T.” Macreedy nodded.

Trimble introduced the others: “Mort Lane, of the 31 spread. Randy Cameron. He manages Rancho Mesa.”

Lane was a square, stocky man with short bowed legs. Cameron, lanky, had a lean, shrewd face. They were both coatless, wearing clean white shirts.

Macreedy said, “Pleasure.” He drew a chair out and sat down. He waited, smiling, attentive. Trimble took a place across the table. The two ranchers stood behind the Circle T owner’s chair.

Trimble spoke with the easy assurance of a man to whom people listened. He grinned, teeth very white against sunburned skin, and said, “I’m a frank man, Macreedy. Your arrival was kind of a surprise to Honda. We welcome you.” The grin flashed again. “But we’re curious. What brought you here?”

“Business.”

“Fine. Just what kind?”

“Mine.”

The word hung in the quiet room. Color slowly rose behind the bronze of Trimble’s face. His grin stiffened, and disappeared. “We’re not sitting in on your game,” he said evenly. “But we all have a stake in what happens around here.”

“Sure.” Macreedy glanced at each of the three in turn. “I know. Big outfits. It’d be pretty hard to burn those out.”

Lane sucked his breath, audibly. Cameron’s voice was flat, uninterested; the tone of a dealer calling the cards. He said, distinctly, “Adobe Wells.”

“Your trail’s cold,” Trimble said. “Why not let it lie? What happened, happened. You can’t prove anything, anyway.”

“What is there to prove?” asked Macreedy.

“An old Jap squatter!” Lane spat the sentence out as if it tasted bitter.

“Born in the United States,” Macreedy said.

“Was he?” Trimble shrugged. “I never knew that. God knows what brought him to this part of the country.”

Macreedy said, “I know that, too. He didn’t like the talk on the Coast. Too much Emperor routine. He drifted this way. To be let alone.”

Trimble’s face was blank. “You’re well informed.”

“Except about the finish.”

“About that.” The rancher rubbed his chin. “I’m not saying it should have happened, Macreedy. But you know how folks felt after Pearl Harbor. And it was Sunday, and the boys were liquored up.”

“So.”

Trimble laid his palms flat on the table and leaned forward. “Maybe some of those boys rode for me. Maybe not. Nobody knows for sure. If they did, I’ll stand behind them.”

Lane and Cameron nodded in unison.

“Other places,” said Trimble, not pausing, “settled it other ways. Camps. Things like that. We only had the one. We ran him out. Burned him out. That’s all.”

“You don’t know that’s all,” said Macreedy.

“Oh, yes, I do,” Trimble said. “That’s the story I’m taking. And it’s all anybody’s going to know. The old man lived alone. There’d been some kids, but they went away years ago. Maybe a little arson spurred the old man into leaving, but that’s all anybody can say.”

Macreedy smiled. “Or wants to.”

“Or wants to.” Trimble rose, pushing back his chair. “We’ve played fair, Macreedy. You’ve got your story. Take it, and run along. There are others around here who might not just talk.”

“Lancey Horn, for one,” said Cameron, in his quiet, unaccented voice. “Liz Brooks threw him over on account of this thing.”

Macreedy looked at him, not speaking. Cameron met the gaze steadily.

“You’re sticking?” asked Trimble.

“I’m sticking.”

“Why? What’s your stake in this? What’ll it get you?”

“There are reasons,” said Macreedy.

With a snort, Trimble turned and pushed his way through the other two to the door. There he swung around. “One thing. Are you from the government?”

“No.” Macreedy shook his head. He watched them go, not moving until he heard the screen door shut behind them. He took out a cigarette, and lit it. The tiny match flame was doubled in eyes that were cold and hard.

Not many customers came in for supper. Those who did, ate hurriedly, talking low, ignoring the big man alone at his table. Macreedy gave all his attention to his meal.

When he had finished he sat on the hotel’s porch for a while. In the clear brightness of the moonlight, Honda’s street was less shabby than by day. Overhead were countless stars; the street itself was splashed with streams of light from doors and windows. Voices, and the loud music of a jukebox, made Sullivan’s neon sign unnecessary. Beneath it, in the shadows, several red dots showed where men smoked. Two punchers, coming out of the hotel, swerved away from Macreedy’s bulk and hurried toward Sullivan’s. A voice carried back through the quiet: “Yeah. That’s the guy.” Macreedy smiled into the night, stretched, and went to bed.

Most of Honda stayed up late. Even the light in the back of Papa Delvecchio’s store didn’t go out until after midnight. Sullivan’s was packed and busy. But the jukebox music couldn’t drown the uneasy note in men’s laughter, and the arguments at the poker table were sudden and frequent. Doc Velie, drunk, started the only fight, a quick flurry of punches that ended with Doc’s being carried out to sleep it off. When Sullivan’s finally closed, men hung about the street, reluctant to go home. And in the back room a select few waited with Coogan Trimble for a phone call he had put through to Chicago.

By the time Macreedy came down for breakfast, everyone in Honda knew the result of that phone call. Mrs. Jiminez, knowing, served him nervously. The big man had been a cop. Very much a cop. A boss one, they said. Mrs. Jiminez spilled the coffee. This Macreedy had been laid off since the war’s start, but who could be certain of anything with cops, except they were always bad luck?

Macreedy didn’t seem to do anything. He took one look at the sun blazing over Honda, winced, and borrowed a pack of cards from Mrs. Jiminez. He spent the morning playing solitaire in the hotel dining room.

It wasn’t quite noon when three riders from Cameron’s Rancho Mesa drifted into Sullivan’s. The bartender served them, surprised. “No work today?” he asked.

The three shuffled their feet. They didn’t look at Sullivan. One said, “We got our time. We’re drifting.” Sullivan stared: Doc Velie, nursing his head in a corner, snickered. Another of the riders said angrily, “Better pay, south a-ways!” The third gulped his drink and glanced through the window toward the hotel. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s get along.”

In spite of the heat they spurred their horses to a trot through the town. Macreedy heard them pass the hotel, but never looked up from his card game.

He left it only once all that day. He walked through Honda to Liz Brooks’s garage. Macreedy noticed that there were more men in town; all along the street they fell silent as he passed. He noticed another thing, too. Nearly every man had a gun belt buckled on.

Liz Brooks saw him coming, waited for him.

Macreedy raised his hat and asked one question: “Who fired that shot yesterday?”

The girl looked at him with tired, red-rimmed eyes. She shook her head.

“It might go easier if you’d tell me,” Macreedy said.

Liz Brooks shook her head again.

Macreedy turned and walked back to the hotel. He could feel the tension along the street. It was like the heat, steady, oppressive, mounting. It even followed him into the hotel.

He stayed there through the rest of the day, playing game after game, stopping only to eat. Outside, Honda baked and speculated.

Night brought relief only from the sun. Macreedy finished his supper, pushed the dishes aside, dealt the cards. Doc Velie, glaring, stamped out of the room. Coogan Trimble, drawn irresistibly, came all the way from Sullivan’s to stand over Macreedy’s table.

“Won’t the game come out?” Trimble asked.

“Eventually,” Macreedy said.

That night, after Macreedy had gone to bed, the tension broke in Honda. A puncher in Sullivan’s denied, heatedly, that he’d ever been to Adobe Wells. The word “lie” snapped out; a name was shouted. The saloon rocked with the roaring of gunfire. Before it was over, two men were dead, another was badly wounded, and the state police were on their way.

The shots woke Macreedy. He lay listening until the shouting had stopped, then got up and went to the open window. In the white floodlight beam of a full moon, Honda seemed crowded with men. One group was under Macreedy’s window, and from it a voice cursed Macreedy savagely, blaming him for the shooting.

A colder voice, Trimble’s, cut across the swearing: “Shut up, you fool! That’s what he wants!”

With a sudden silence, every face in the group was a white patch lifted toward Macreedy’s window. The big man stiffened. He was a clear target in the moonlight, and he knew it, and he was careful not to move. Any sudden motion might bring a gunshot from the street, instead of hatred. Macreedy gazed down on the group, until it quietly broke up and drifted off in fragments. Then he let his breath out slowly.

He stayed at the window, watching, until the state police cars had come and gone. Then he went back to bed. He was asleep when the tap came on his door.

Macreedy was out of bed with a leap, and his gun was in his hand. The room was darker. The moon was gone; the window showed blue instead of silver. Macreedy put his back against the wall by the door, and spoke very quietly: “What is it?”

Through the thin panel a voice said, “Liz Brooks sent me.”

Macreedy didn’t turn on the light. He unlocked the door, then raised his gun. “Open it,” he said. “And come slow.”

A man walked into the room, a slender shadow in the half-light.

“The bulb’s over your head,” said Macreedy. “Pull it on.”

The man reached up, fumbled, found the light, and turned it on. Then he walked across to the window and pulled the shade down. He turned, as Macreedy shut the door.

“Your name would be Horn,” said Macreedy.

“You’re good.”

“That was easy. That’s the one thing they gave me.”

“Like that.” Horn didn’t sound surprised. “That would be Cameron. He’s always wanted my place. So I’m elected.” He lit a cigarette, not hurrying, and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “I walked in alone, Macreedy. I’ll walk out alone. Italian gun or not.”

“Out at the Wells. That shot. The girl knew it was you.”

Horn smiled. “Testing. You didn’t scare.”

Macreedy wasn’t smiling. He asked, “Was it you the night they burned the old man out?”

“I was there. But I’m not going to be the goat.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Showdown, eh?” Horn took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at Macreedy for a long time. “All right,” he said finally. He sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed. “Liz didn’t want me to go out there with the crowd. I went. You don’t have to believe I went to herd them off, to slow them down. On the other hand, I don’t have to tell you anything.”

Macreedy nodded. “Go on.”

“I went. They were drunk. They had a rope. You’ve seen those trees out there; they’re not big enough for that. I thought it might save the old man. But they started burning the buildings. He broke away. Ran for it.”

Macreedy nodded again.

“He ran up the hill. You could see him plain, in all that fire. They started to chase him. But I called for the shot. I cursed them out, and called for it. Like I was one of them. I meant to miss.”

“Yes,” Macreedy said.

“He couldn’t run very fast. I gave him all the time I could. He was almost to the top when I shot. I put it beside him, into a shadow so they wouldn’t see it hit. I couldn’t believe it when he dropped.”

“You hit him?”

“No. There wasn’t a mark on him. But nobody knows that but me. The rest of them beat it. I buried him over at my own place. He was dead, all right. Fright, I guess. Or running up that hill. He wasn’t young. But there was no bullet in him.”

“The town doesn’t know that.”

“No. I got the credit. Even with Liz.” Horn bared his teeth. “But that’s the truth. I liked the old bird. Used to get vegetables from him.”

Horn stood up, suddenly tense. “Liz talked me into coming here, ending this thing. You’ve got it. You don’t have to believe it. There’s no proof. I could show you an unmarked skeleton, but you wouldn’t know it was the Jap’s. There was never any proof about what really happened. That’s why I never told my story... Take it or leave it.”

Macreedy sighed, and tossed his gun on the bed. He said, “You couldn’t stop them?”

“You can’t stop a stampede, Macreedy.”

“I guess that’s all,” said Macreedy. “And thanks.” He went to the window and raised the shade. “Almost dawn.”

Horn heard the dismissal in the words, and started for the door. He had his hand on the knob when he paused. “Why, Macreedy?” he asked. “Why, after four years? What brought you to Honda?” But Macreedy just stood, looking out the window, and Horn left.

Macreedy slept late, and he spoke to Hastings as soon as he breakfasted. The station agent raced to Sullivan’s with the news: “He’s leaving! He wants me to flag the eastbound Streamliner tonight!”

It spread through Honda like a cool wind. Sullivan passed it on to the ranches. Doc Velie took off his gun. Even Papa Delvecchio beamed when he heard, and pressed a free apple on the man who told him. And all through another scorching day Honda scoffed at Macreedy’s solitaire as the gesture of a beaten man.

Sullivan’s was crowded and happy that night. The jukebox was the only noise in the room, and Macreedy was standing in the doorway. The crowd drew back from him. Somebody pulled the plug of the jukebox out, and the silence was like a shot.

“Now, listen,” said Macreedy. “All of you. I came here to find Old Man Kamotka. You know what happened to him. So do I — now.” He could hear the breathing in the room, and he went on: “This is why I came. There was a kid named Jimmy Kamotka. He left here years ago. He never wrote his father. The old man couldn’t read. I met Jimmy in the Army. In Italy. He asked me to look in here.”

Macreedy’s smile was not a pleasant one. “Jimmy Kamotka was killed in Italy. I think maybe this town should know that. And remember it. I’m not a cop any more, and you’re all safe enough. But just remember what I told you.”

Along the railroad tracks came the humming of an approaching train.

Macreedy looked the crowd over with his calm gaze. Then he spoke, and the word crackled like an insult: “Honda!”

The big man turned and went out. He reached the station just as the Streamliner slid to a stop. Macreedy climbed aboard without looking back.

The Boy Cried Murder CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Mystery Book Magazine, March 1947; first collected in Dead Man Blues by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1948). Note: The title was changed to “Fire Escape” for its first book publication.

In the mid- to late 1940s, Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) appeared to be exhausted by his prodigious writing schedule and he was not the workhorse he had been for the previous two decades. Mark Van Doren, the noted Columbia professor and scholar, gave him a little boost when he needed it, although not intentionally.

Woolrich had not taken classes with Van Doren but it is likely they knew each other because Van Doren took the trouble to write to him early in 1947 when he saw the movie version of Woolrich’s novel Waltz into Darkness (1946) and noticed his name in the credits for the novel on which the film was based.

Woolrich appears to have been touched by the note and wrote back to Van Doren: “That was the kindest letter you sent me. I don’t get very many, and at times it’s like writing in a vacuum, you don’t know if anyone likes it or not. (For that matter, you don’t even know if anyone reads it or not.) So it did me a lot of good; made me want to write again for awhile.”

Only two new short stories were published by Woolrich in the first half of 1947, but they are among his best. Submitted as “Child’s Ploy,” “The Boy Cried Murder” is among his most frequently anthologized stories.

The story is told in third person from the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy who cannot help but tell fanciful stories, getting himself in trouble for a habit he can’t break. On a hot summer night, he climbs out onto the fire escape of the tenement building in which he lives in the hope of catching a bit of breeze. He peeks into a window where the shade hadn’t been pulled all the way down and sees his neighbors kill a man and prepare to dismember the body with a razor blade. He is almost caught peeking but, scared half to death, flees down the fire escape and into the safety of his apartment. In the morning, he tells his parents what he saw but, of course, they don’t believe him and give him a beating for his continued prevarications.

He then runs to the police station to tell them what he saw but they don’t believe him either. He’s prepared to let it drop but the killers realize that there was a witness to their crime and decide they have to dispose of him.

Title: The Window, 1949

Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

Director: Ted Tetzlaff

Screenwriter: Mel Dinelli

Producers: Frederic Ullman Jr., Dore Schary

• Barbara Hale (Mary Woodry)

• Arthur Kennedy (Ed Woodry)

• Paul Stewart (Joe Kellerson)

• Ruth Roman (Jean Kellerson)

• Bobby Driscoll (Tommy Woodry)

The Window is an outstanding suspense film that follows the entire storyline of “The Boy Cried Murder,” the minor changes nonetheless maintaining Woolrich’s vision and tone. Like most of the motion pictures made from Woolrich’s short stories, it was made on a tight budget (only $210,000, which was modest even in 1947) but the cast was first-rate and the premise so enthralling that the film was a success with substantial box office business.

It was filmed on location in the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side, adding verisimilitude to the dangers of the neighborhood. A chase scene leading to an abandoned building ratchets up the suspense as Tommy must not only flee from the killers but must be wary of the inherent dangers of a crumbling structure.

The film won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Picture, with a screenplay by Mel Dinelli and Cornell Woolrich.

It received an Oscar nomination for Frederic Knudtson for Best Film Editing, a Writers Guild of America nomination for Dinelli for Best Written American Drama, and a nomination for Best Film from Any Source from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

The Woolrich story has served as the inspiration for three further filmed versions: The Boy Cried Murder (1966), Eyewitness (1970), and Cloak and Dagger (1984), each of which careered further and further from the original story and the excellent film based on it.

Bobby Driscoll, who played Tommy so believably in The Window, was a Walt Disney discovery who won a special Oscar in 1950, given only occasionally when the Academy decides a child star is deemed worthy of the award. He was only ten when the film was made but thirteen when he accepted the award, as Howard Hughes, the head of RKO Radio Pictures, had held the film for nearly three years before releasing it.

Tragically, Driscoll spiraled into drug addiction as an adult and spent his last years as a homeless person on the streets of New York. Ironically, on March 30, 1968, two kids discovered his body in an abandoned tenement in the East Village. He was thirty-one years old.

THE BOY CRIED MURDER Cornell Woolrich

The kid was twelve, and his name was Buddy. His real name wasn’t that, it was Charlie, but they called him Buddy.

He was small for his age. The world he lived in was small, too. Or rather, one of them was. He lived in two worlds at once. One of them was a small, drab, confined world — just two squalid rooms in the rear of a six-story tenement, 20 Holt Street; stifling in summer, freezing in winter. Just two grown-ups in that world — Mom and Pop. And a handful of other kids, like himself, that he knew from school and from playing on the streets.

The other world had no boundaries, no limits. You could do anything in it. You could go anywhere. All you had to do was just sit still and think hard. Make it up as you went along. The world of the imagination. He did a lot of that. But he was learning to keep it to himself. They told him he was getting too big now for that stuff. They swatted him, and called it lies. The last time he’d tried telling them about it, Pop had threatened:

“I’m going to wallop you good next time you make up any more of them fancy lies of yours!”

“It comes from them Saturday afternoon movies he’s been seeing,” Mom said. “I told him he can’t go any more.”

And then this night came along. It felt like it was made of boiling tar, poured all over you. July was hot everywhere, but on Holt Street it was hell. He kept trying to sleep but it wouldn’t work. The bedding on his cot got all soggy and streaked with perspiration. Pop wasn’t home; he worked nights.

The two rooms were like the chambers of an oven, with all the gas-burners left on full-tilt. He took his pillow with him, finally, and climbed out the window onto the fire escape landing and tried it out there.

It wasn’t the first time. He’d done it often on hot nights. You couldn’t fall off because the landing was protected by an iron railing. Well, you could if you were unlucky, but it hadn’t happened yet. He sort of locked his arm through the rail uprights, and that kept him from rolling in his sleep.

It didn’t take him long to find out it was just as bad on the fire escape. It was still like an oven, only now with the burners out. He decided maybe it would be better if he tried it a little higher up. Sometimes there was a faint stirring of breeze skimming along at roof level. It couldn’t bend and get down in here behind the tenements. He picked up the pillow and went up the iron slats one flight, to the sixth-floor landing, and tried it there.

It wasn’t very much better, but it had to do. You couldn’t go up any higher than that. He’d learned by experience you couldn’t sleep on the roof itself because it was covered with gravel, and that got into you and hurt. And underneath it was tar-surfaced, and in the hot weather that got soft and stuck to you all over.

He wriggled around a little on the hard-bitten iron slats, with empty spaces in between — it was like sleeping on a grill — and then finally he dozed off, the way you can even on a fire escape when you’re only twelve.

Morning came awfully fast. It seemed to get light only a minute later. The shine tickled his eyelids and he opened them. Then he saw that it wasn’t coming down from above, from the sky, the way light should. It was still dark, it was still night up there.

It was coming in a thin bar, down low, even with his eyes, running along the bottom of the window beside him, on a level with the fire escape landing he was on. If he’d been standing up instead of stretched out flat, it would have run over his feet instead of across his eyes.

It was only about an inch high, for a dark shade was unrolled nearly to the bottom. But that had slipped back, maybe half a turn on its roller, allowing this narrow strip of light to escape. Now, with his eyes up close against the sill like they were, it was nearly as good as the whole window being lit up. He could see the whole inside of the room.

There were two people in it, a man and a woman. Buddy would have closed his eyes again and gone right back to sleep — what did he care about watching grown-ups? — except for the funny, sneaky way they were both acting. That made him keep on watching, wondering what they were up to.

The man was asleep on a chair, by a table. He’d been drinking or something. There was a bottle and two glasses on the table in front of him. His head was down on the table, and his hand was in front of his eyes, to protect them from the light.

The woman was moving around on tiptoes, trying not to make any noise. She was carrying the man’s coat in her hands, as if she’d just taken it off the back of the chair, where he’d hung it before he fell asleep. She had a lot of red and white stuff all over her face, but Buddy didn’t think she looked very pretty.

When she reached the far side of the table she stopped, and started to dip her hand in and out of all the pockets of the coat. She kept her back to the man while she was doing it. But Buddy could see her very well from the side.

That was the first sneaky thing he saw that made him keep on watching them. And the second was, he saw the fingers of the man’s hand — the one that was lying in front of his eyes — split open, and the man stole a look through them at what she was doing.

Then, when she turned her head to make sure he was asleep, he quickly closed his fingers together again.

She turned her head the other way again and resumed her searching.

She came up with a big wad of money from the coat, all rolled up tight. She threw the coat aside, bent her head close, and started to count it. Her eyes grew very bright, and Buddy could see her licking her lips while she was doing it.

All of a sudden he held his breath. The man’s arm was starting to crawl along the top of the table toward her, to reach for her and grab her. It moved very slowly, very quietly, like a big thick snake writhing along after somebody, and she never noticed it.

Then, when it was out straight and nearly touching her, the man started to come up off his chair after it and crouch over toward her, and she never heard that either. He was smiling, but it wasn’t a very pleasant smile.

Buddy’s heart was pounding.

He thought, “You better look around, lady!” But she didn’t. She was too busy counting the money.

Suddenly the man jumped and grabbed her. His chair went over flat, and the table nearly did, too, but it recovered and stayed upright. His big hand, the one that had been reaching out all along, caught her around the back of the neck, and held on tight, and he started to shake her from head to foot. His other hand grabbed the wrist that was holding the money. She tried to jam it down the front of her dress, but she wasn’t quick enough; he started to twist her wrist slowly around, to make her let go of it.

She gave a funny little squeak like a mouse, but not very loud; at least it didn’t have much volume when it reached the boy on the fire escape.

“No you don’t!” Buddy heard the man growl. “I figured something like this was coming! You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to put anything like that over on me!”

“Take your hands off me!” she panted. “Let go of me!”

He started to swing her around from side to side.

“You won’t ever try anything like this again, by the time I get through with you!” Buddy heard the man grunt.

All of a sudden she screamed, “Joe! Hurry up in here! I can’t handle him any longer by myself!” But she didn’t scream it out loud — just in a sort of smothered way, as if she didn’t want her words to carry too far.

The door flew open, and a second man showed up. He must have been standing right outside it waiting the whole time, to be able to rush in that fast. He ran up behind the man who was being robbed. The woman held on tight and kept the first man from turning around.

The newcomer waited until the other man’s head was in the right position, and then he locked his own hands together in a double fist, and smashed them down with all his might on the back of the fellow’s neck.

The victim dropped to the floor like a stone and lay there quietly for a minute.

The woman scrambled down and started to pick up all the money that was lying around on the floor.

“Here!” she said, handing it to the second man.

“Hurry up, let’s get out of here!” he snarled. “What’d you have to bungle it up like that for? Why didn’t you fix his drink right?”

“I did, Joe, but it didn’t work on him. He musta seen me do it.”

“Come on!” Joe said, and started for the door. “When he comes to he’ll bring the cops down on us.”

Suddenly the man lying on the floor wrapped his arm tight around Joe’s legs, pinning them together. Joe tripped and fell to the floor. The first man scrambled on top of him before he could get up, held him that way, and the battle started in all over again.

The man they were robbing was the better fighter of the two. He started to swing punches at Joe’s head, while he had him pinned to the floor like that. In another minute he would have knocked Joe out. Even Buddy could tell that. Joe’s arms spread out limply along the floor, and his fists started to open up.

But the woman went running all around the place hunting for something to help him with. Suddenly she threw open a drawer in a bureau and took out something that flashed in the light. Buddy couldn’t see what it was for a minute, she was so fast with it. She darted in close to them and placed it in Joe’s outstretched hand as he lay sprawled beneath the other man.

Then when it swept up high over both their heads a second later, Buddy got a clear view of it. It was a short, sharp knife. Buddy’s eyes nearly came out of his head.

Joe swung it and buried it in the other’s back. Right up to the hilt so you couldn’t even see the blade any more.

The fight stopped cold on the instant, but not the stabbing. Joe wrenched out the knife with a sawing motion from side to side, and swung it again, and buried it again, in a different place this time. The first man wasn’t moving any more, just sort of recoiling from the impact of the stab itself.

Joe wasn’t satisfied even yet. He freed it a second time, with a lot of trouble, and it came up and went back in again. Then both men lay there still, one of them getting his breath, the first man not breathing any more.

Finally Joe rolled the crumpled weight off him, and picked himself up and felt his jaw. Then he and the woman stood there looking down at the body of the other man.

“Is he dead?” Buddy heard her ask in a scared voice.

“Wait a minute. I’ll see.” Joe got down by the man, and put his hand underneath him, where his heart was. Then he pulled it out. Then he pulled the knife out of his back. Then he stood up.

He looked at the woman and shook his head.

“Holy smoke!” she gasped. “We’ve killed him! Joe, what’ll we do?”

She didn’t say it very loud, but it was so quiet in the room now that Buddy could hear everything they said.

Joe grabbed her arm and squeezed it.

“Take it easy. Plenty of people are killed and no one ever finds out who done it. Just don’t lose your head, that’s all. We’ll get by with it.”

He held her until he was sure she was steady, then he let go of her again.

He looked all around the room.

“Gimme some newspapers. I want to keep this stuff from getting on the floor.”

He got down and stuffed them underneath the body on all sides.

Then he said, “Case the door. See if there’s anyone out there who heard us. Open it slow and careful, now.”

She went over to it on tiptoe, and moved it open just on a crack, and looked out with one eye. Then she opened it a little wider, and stuck her whole head out, and looked in both directions. Then she pulled her head in again, and closed up, and came back to him.

“Not a soul around,” she whispered.

“All right. Now case the window. See if it’s all right out in the back there. Don’t pull up the shade. Just take a squint out the side of it.”

She started to come over to where Buddy’s eyes were staring in, and she grew bigger and bigger every minute, the closer she got. Her head went way up high out of sight, and her waist blotted out the whole room.

Buddy couldn’t move. His body seemed to be paralyzed. The little gap under the shade must have been very small for her not to see it, but he knew in another minute she was going to look right out on top of him, from higher up.

He rolled over flat on his back. It was only a half-roll because he’d been lying on his side until now, and that was about all the moving there was time for him to do.

There was an old blanket over the fire escape rail, hung out to air. He clawed at it and pulled it down on top of him. He only hoped it covered all of him, but there wasn’t much time to tuck it around evenly. About all he could do was hunch himself up and make himself as small as possible, and pray none of him stuck out.

A minute later, even with his head covered, he could tell, by a splash of light that fell across the blanket like a sort of stripe, that she’d tipped the shade back and was staring out from the side of it.

“There’s something white down there,” Buddy heard her say, and he froze all over. He even stopped breathing, for fear his breath would show up against the blanket, make a ripple.

“Oh, I know!” she explained, in relief. “It’s that blanket I left out there yesterday. It must have fallen down. Gee, for a minute I thought it was somebody lying there!”

“Don’t stand there all night,” the man growled.

The stripe of light was blotted out, and Buddy knew she had let the shade go back in place.

He waited a few minutes before he dared to move. Then he worked his head clear of the blanket and looked again.

Even the gap near the sill was gone now. She must have pulled the shade down another notch before she turned away. He couldn’t see them any more, but he could still hear them.

But he didn’t want to. All he wanted to do was get away from there! He knew, though, that if he could hear them, they could hear him just as easily. He had to move slowly. The fire escape was old and rickety; it might creak. He started to stretch out his legs, backward, toward the ladder-steps going down.

Then, when he had them out straight, he started to shove himself backward on the palms of his hands, keeping his head and shoulders down. It was a little bit like swimming the breaststroke on dry land. Or rather on iron slats, which was worse still.

But he could still hear them talking the whole time he was doing it.

“Here’s his identification-papers,” the man said. “Cliff Bristol. Mate on a merchant ship... That’s good... Them guys disappear awfully easy. Not too many questions asked. We want to make sure of getting everything out of his pockets, so they won’t be able to trace who he was.”

The woman said, as if she were almost crying, “Oh, what do we care what his name is. We’ve done it. That’s all that matters. Come on, Joe, let’s get out of here!”

“We don’t have to get out now,” the man said. “Why should we? All we have to do is get him out. Nobody seen him come up here with you. Nobody knows what happened. If we lam out now and leave him here, they’ll be after us in five seconds. If we just stay here like we are, nobody’ll be any the wiser.”

“But how are you going to do it, Joe? How you going to get him out?”

“I’ll show you. Bring out them two valises of yours, and empty the stuff out of them.”

Buddy was worming his way down the fire escape steps backward now, but his face and chin was still balanced above the landing.

“But he won’t go into one of them, a great big guy like him,” the woman protested.

“He will the way I’ll do it,” the man answered. And then he said, “Go in the bathroom and get me my razor.”

Buddy’s chin went down flat on the landing for a minute, and he felt as if he wanted to throw up. The fire escape creaked a little. But the woman had groaned at that instant and the groan covered the sound of his movement.

“You don’t have to watch,” the man said. “You go outside the door and wait, if you feel that way about it. Come in again if you hear anyone coming.”

Buddy started to move again, spilling salt water from his mouth.

“Hand me all the newspapers we got in here before you go,” he heard the man say. “And bring in that blanket you said was outside the window. That’ll come in handy, too. I’m going to need it for lining.”

Buddy wriggled the rest of the way down, like a snake in reverse. He felt his feet touch bottom on his own landing, outside his own windows. He was safe! But there was something soft clinging to them. He looked, and it was the blanket!

It had gotten tangled around his foot while he was still on the upper landing, and he’d trailed it down with him without noticing it in his excitement.

He kicked it clear of himself, but there was no time to do anything else with it. He squirmed across the sill, and toppled back into his own flat, and left it lying there. An instant later a beam of light doused the fire escape and he heard the window above go up as the woman reached out for the blanket.

Then he heard her whisper in a frightened, bated voice:

“It blew down! I see it. There it is down below. It was right out here a minute ago, and now it’s down below!”

The man must have told her to go after it and bring it up. The light went out. He must have put the light out in the room, so she’d have a chance to climb down and get it without being seen. Buddy could hear the wooden window frame ease the rest of the way up in the dark, then a stealthy scrape on the iron ladder stair.

He pressed himself flat against the wall, under his own sill. He was small enough to fit in there. He saw the white of the blanket flick upward and disappear from sight.

Then he heard her whisper, just as she climbed into her room again.

“That’s funny. There’s not a breath of air stirring either! How did it come to get blown down there?”

Then the window rustled closed, and it was over.

Buddy didn’t get up and walk to his own bed. He couldn’t lift himself that high. He crawled to it on his hands and knees.

He pulled the covers all over him, even past the top of his head, and as hot as the night had seemed only a little while ago, he shook as if it were the middle of December and goose pimples came out all over him.

He was still shaking for a long time after. He could hear something moving around right over him once in awhile, even with the covers over his head, and just picturing what was going on up there would start him shaking all over again.

It took a long time. Then everything became quiet. No more creaks on the ceiling, as if somebody were rocking back and forth, sawing away at something. He was all covered with sweat now.

Then he heard a door open, and someone moved softly down the stairs outside. Past his own door and down to the bottom. Once something scraped a little against the wall, like a valise. He began shaking again, worse than ever.

He didn’t sleep all the rest of the night. Hours later, after it was already light, he heard someone come quietly up the stairs. This time nothing scraped against the walls. Then the door closed above, and after that there were no more sounds.

In a little while his mother rose from her bed in the next room and got breakfast started and called in to him.

He dressed and dragged himself in to her. When she turned around and saw him she said:

“You don’t look well, Buddy. You feel sick?”

He didn’t want to tell her. He wanted to tell his father.

His father came home from work a few minutes after that, and they sat down to the table together like they did every morning, Buddy to his breakfast and his father to his before-bedtime supper.

He waited till his mother was out of the room, then he whispered:

“Pop, I want to tell you something.”

“Okay, shoot.” His father grinned.

“Pop, there’s a man and woman livin’ over us—”

“Sure, I know that,” his father said, helping himself to some bacon. “I’ve seen them, coming and going.”

Buddy shifted his chair closer and leaned nearer his father’s ear.

“But Pop,” he breathed. “Last night they killed a man up there, and they cut up his body into small pieces, and stuck it into two valises.”

His father stopped chewing. He put down his knife and fork. Then he turned around slowly in his chair and looked at Buddy hard.

“Mary, come in here,” he called out grimly.

Buddy’s mother came to the door and looked in at them.

“He’s at it again,” his father said. “I thought I told you not to let him go to any more of them Saturday movies.”

She gnawed her lip worriedly. “Making things up again?”

“I didn’t make—” Buddy started to protest.

“I wouldn’t even repeat to you the filthy trash he’s just been telling me. It would turn your blood cold.” His father whacked him across the mouth with the back of his hand.

“What’d he say?” his mother asked in a troubled way.

“It’s not fit for you to hear,” his father replied indignantly. But then he went ahead and told her anyway. “He said they done someone in up there, over us, and then chopped him up into small pieces and carted him off in two valises.”

His mother touched her apron to her mouth in a gesture of horror.

“The Kellermans?” she gasped. “Oh, Buddy, when are you going to stop that? Why, they’re the last people in the world... She seems like a very nice woman. Why, she was right down here at the door, only the other day, to borrow a cup of sugar from me.”

“Well, he’ll grow up fine,” his father said darkly. “There’s something wrong with a boy like that. This had to happen to me! I don’t know where he gets it from. I wasn’t that way in my whole life. My brother Ed — God rest his soul — wasn’t that way. But I’m going to take it out of him if it’s the last thing I do.”

He started to roll up his shirt sleeve. He pushed his chair back.

“Are you going to say it’s not true?”

“But I saw them. I watched through the window and saw them,” Buddy wailed helplessly.

His father’s jaw set tight.

“All right, come in here.”

He closed the door after the two of them.

It didn’t hurt very much. Well, it did, but just for a minute. It didn’t last. His father wasn’t a man with a vicious temper; he was just a man with a strong sense of what was right and what was wrong. His father just used half-strength on him; just enough to make him holler out satisfactorily, not enough to really bruise him badly.

Then when he got through, he rolled down his shirt sleeves and said to the sniffling Buddy:

“Now are you going to make up any more of them fancy lies of yours?”

There was an out there, and Buddy was smart enough to grab it.

“No, sir,” he said submissively. “I’m not going to make up any lies.” And he started for the door.

But his father added quickly, too quickly:

“Then you’re ready to admit now that it wasn’t true?”

Buddy swallowed hard and stood still, with freedom just within reach. He didn’t answer.

“Answer me,” his father said severely. “Was it or wasn’t it?”

There was a dilemma here, and Buddy couldn’t handle it. He’d been walloped for telling what they thought was a lie. Now his father wanted him to do the very thing he’d punished him for doing in the first place. If he told the truth it would be called a lie, and if he told a lie he’d only be repeating what he knew they were walloping him for.

He tried to sidestep it by asking a question of his own.

“When you — when you see a thing yourself, with your own eyes, is it true then?” he said falteringly.

“Sure,” his father said impatiently. “You’re old enough to know that!”

“Then I saw it, and it has to be true.”

This time his father got real sore. He hauled him back from the door by the scruff of his neck, and for a minute he acted as if he were going to give him another walloping. But he didn’t. Instead he took the key out of the door, opened it, and put the key in the front.

“You’re going to stay in here until you’re ready to admit that whole thing was a dirty, rotten lie!” he said wrathfully.

He went out, slammed the door after him, and locked Buddy in from the outside. Then he took the key out of the lock so Buddy’s mother wouldn’t weaken while he was asleep.

Buddy walked across the room and slumped down onto a chair. He hung his head, and tried to puzzle it out. He was being punished for doing the very thing they were trying to lace into him: sticking to the truth.

He heard his father moving around out there, getting ready for bed — heard his shoes drop heavily, one after the other, then the bedsprings creak. He’d sleep all day now, until dark. But maybe his mother would let Buddy out before she went to work for the day.

Buddy went over to the door and started to jiggle the knob back and forth, to try and attract her attention with as little noise as he could.

“Mom,” he whispered close to the keyhole. “Hey, Mom!”

After awhile he heard her tiptoe up on the other side.

“Mom, let me out.”

“It’s for your own good, Buddy,” she whispered back. “I can’t do it unless you take back that sinful lie you told. He told me not to.” She waited patiently. “Do you take it back, Buddy? Do you?”

“No,” he sighed. He went back to the chair and sat down once more.

What was a fellow to do, when even his own parents wouldn’t believe him? Who was he to turn to? You had to tell somebody about a thing like that. If you didn’t, it was just as bad as — just as bad as if you were one of the ones that did it.

He wasn’t as scared any more as he’d been last night because it was daylight now. But he still felt a little sick at his stomach whenever he thought of it. You had to tell somebody.

Suddenly he turned his head and looked at the window. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Not about getting out through the window — he’d known he could all along; it was latched on the inside. But he hadn’t tried to get out that way until now because he wanted to stay here and get them to believe him here, where he was. As long as they wouldn’t believe him here, there was another place where maybe they would believe him.

That’s what grown-ups did the first thing, whenever they were in his predicament. Why shouldn’t a kid do it? The police. They were the ones who had to be told. They were the ones you were supposed to tell, anyway. Even his father, if he’d only believe him, was supposed to tell them. Well, if his father wouldn’t, then he’d tell them himself.

He got up, walked softly over to the window and eased it up. He slung himself over onto the fire escape. It was easy, of course; nothing to it. At his age it was just as easy as going out a door. Then he pushed the window down again. He was careful to leave it open just a little so that he could get his fingers underneath and raise it up again when he came back.

He’d tell the police, and then he’d come back and sneak in again through the window, and be there when his father woke up and unlocked the door. That would get it off his mind. Then he wouldn’t have to worry any more.

He went down the fire escape, dropped off where the last section of the ladder was hoisted clear of the ground, went in through the basement, and came out the front, up the janitor’s steps without meeting anybody. He beat it away from the front of the house fast, so he wouldn’t be seen by anyone who knew him. Then as soon as he was safely around the corner he slowed up and tried to figure out how you went about it. Telling the police.

It was better to go to a station house, for anything as important as this, instead of just telling a stray neighborhood cop you met on the sidewalk.

He didn’t actually know where the nearest station house was, but he knew there must be one somewhere close around. There had to be. He saw a storekeeper sweeping the sidewalk, and he got up his courage and approached him.

“Where’s the station house, mister?” he asked.

“How should I know?” said the man gruffly. “What am I, a telephone book? Look out with your feet. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

Buddy backed away. That gave him an idea. He turned and went looking for a drug store. When he found one, he went in and looked in the telephone books they had in the back, chained to the wall.

He picked the nearest one and headed for it.

When he got there, all his instinctive fear of that kind of place, left over from when he was a kid of six or eight and cops were the natural enemies of small boys, came back again for a minute.

He hung around outside for a short while. Finally he saw the station house cat go in. That gave him courage, and he went in himself.

The man at the desk didn’t pay any attention to him for a long time. He was looking over some papers or something.

Finally the man said, kindly, “What is it, son? Lost your dog?”

“No, sir,” Buddy said spasmodically, “I... I got something I want to tell someone.”

The desk sergeant grinned absently, continuing to look at the papers.

“And what would that be, now?”

Buddy glanced apprehensively behind him, at the street outside, as though fearful of being overheard from there.

“It’s about a man that was killed,” he blurted.

The sergeant gave him his full attention for the first time.

“You know something about a man that was killed?”

“Yes sir,” said Buddy breathlessly. “Last night. And I thought I better tell you.” He wondered if that was enough, and he could go now. No, they had to have the name and address; they couldn’t just guess.

The sergeant clawed his chin.

“You’re not trying to be a smart aleck, now, or anything like that?” he asked warningly. One look at Buddy’s face, however, seemed to reassure him on that point.

“No, sir,” Buddy said nervously.

“Well, I’ll tell you. That’s not my department, exactly. You see that hall there, over next to the clock? You go down that hall to the second door. There’s a man in there. You tell him about it. Don’t go in the first door, now, or he’ll have your life. He eats kids your age for breakfast.”

Buddy went over to the mouth of the corridor, looked back from there for reassurance.

“Second door,” the sergeant repeated.

He went on. He made a wide loop around the dread first door, pressing himself flat against the opposite wall to get safely by it. Then he knocked on the one after that, and felt as scared as if it were the principal’s office at school.

“Come in,” a voice said.

Buddy couldn’t move for a minute. He felt as if he were paralyzed.

“Well?” the voice repeated with a touch of annoyance.

To stay out, now, was worse than to go in. Buddy took a deep breath, held it, caving in his middle, and entered. Then he remembered to close the door after him. When you didn’t close the door after you in the principal’s office, you had to go outside and come in all over again.

There was another man, at another desk. His eyes had been fixed in readiness at a point about six feet up along the door. When it opened and closed, and they still met nothing, they dropped down to Buddy’s four-foot level.

“What is this?” he growled. “How’d you get in here?”

The first part of the question didn’t seem to be addressed to Buddy himself, but to the ceiling light or something like that.

Buddy had to go through the thing a second time, and repetition didn’t make it any easier.

The man just looked at him. In his imagination Buddy had pictured a general rising up and an excited, pell-mell rushing out on the part of everyone in the station house, when he delivered his news; patrol cars wailing into high gear and orders being barked around. That was what always happened in the pictures.

But now, in real life — the man just looked at him.

He said, “What’s your name, son? What’s your address?”

Buddy told him.

He said. “D’y’ever have a nightmare, son? You know, a bad dream that scares the life out of you?”

“Oh, sure,” Buddy said incautiously. “I’ve had ’em, lots of times.”

The man said, into a boxlike thing on his desk:

“Ross, come in here.”

Another man came in. He, too, was in plainclothes. They conferred in low voices. Buddy couldn’t hear a word they said. He knew it was about himself, though — he could tell by the way they’d look over at him every now and then. They didn’t look in the right way. They should have looked — well, sort of concerned, worried about what he’d told them, or something. Instead, they looked sort of amused, like men who are trying to keep straight faces.

Then the first one spoke up again. “So you saw them cut him up and—”

This was a distortion, and Buddy scotched it quick. He wasn’t here to make things up, although only a few short weeks ago he would have grabbed at the chance this gave him.

“No sir,” he said, “I didn’t see that part of it; I just heard them say they were going to do it. But—”

Then, before he could reaffirm that he had seen the man fall and the knife go home three times, the detective cut in with another question. So he was left with the appearance of having made a whole retraction, instead of just a partial one.

“Did you tell your parents about this?”

This was a bad one, and nobody knew it better than Buddy.

“Yes,” he mumbled unwillingly.

“Then why didn’t they come and tell us about it?”

He tried to duck that by not answering.

“Speak up, son.”

You had to tell the truth to cops; that was serious, not telling the truth to cops.

“They didn’t believe me,” he breathed.

“Why didn’t they believe you?”

“They — they think I’m always making up things.”

He saw the look they gave one another, and he knew what it meant. He’d already lost the battle. They were already on his father’s side.

“Oh, they do, huh? Well, do you make up things?”

You had to tell the truth to cops.

“I used to. But not any more. This time I’m not making it up.”

He saw one of them tap a finger to his forehead, just once. He wasn’t meant to see it, it was done very quickly, but he saw it.

“Well, do you know for sure when you are and when you’re not making things up, son?”

“I do, honest!” he protested. “I know I’m not this time!”

But it wasn’t a very good answer, he knew that. It was the only one he had, though. They got you in corners where you hardly knew what you were saying any more.

“We’ll send somebody around, son, and check up,” the first man reassured him. He turned to the other man.

“Ross, go over there and take a look around. Don’t put your foot down too hard. It’s not official. Sell them a magazine subscription or something — no, an electric razor, that’ll tie in with the story. There’s one in my locker. You can take that with you for a sample. It’s the—” He glanced at Buddy inquiringly.

“The sixth floor, right over us.”

“That’s all I’ve got to do,” Ross said in a disgruntled voice. But he went out.

“You wait out in the hall, son,” the first man said to Buddy. “Sit down on the bench out there.”

Buddy went out and sat down. A half hour went by. Then he saw Ross come back and enter the office again. He waited hopefully for the rushing out and shouting of orders to come. Nothing happened. Nobody stirred.

All he could hear was Ross swearing and complaining in a low voice through the frosted glass inset of the door, and the other man laughing, like you do when a joke has been told at somebody’s expense. Then they sent for him again.

Ross gave Buddy a dirty look. The other man tried to straighten his face. He passed his hand slowly in front of his mouth, and it came out serious at the other side of it.

“Son,” he said, “you can hear things quite easily through that ceiling of yours, can’t you? The one between you and them. Pretty thin?”

“Y-yes,” Buddy faltered, wondering what was coming next.

“Well, what you heard was a program on their radio.”

“There wasn’t any. They didn’t have a radio in the room.”

Ross gave him quite an unfriendly look.

“Yes they do,” he said sourly. I was just over there, and I saw it myself. You could hear it all the way downstairs to the third floor when I came away. I been on the force fourteen years, and this kid’s going to tell me what is in a room I case and what isn’t!”

“All right, Ross,” the other man tried to soothe him.

“But I saw it through the window!” Buddy wailed.

“It could have still been on the radio, son,” he explained. “Remember, you can’t see something that’s said. You can only hear it. You could have been looking right at them, and still hear what the radio was saying.”

“What time was it you were out there?” Ross growled at Buddy.

“I don’t know. Just — just night time. We only got an alarm clock and you can’t see it in the dark.”

Ross shrugged angrily at the other man, as if to say: “See what I mean?”

“It was the Crime-Smashers Program,” he said bitterly. “It’s on from eleven to twelve. And last night was Wednesday. Or don’t you know that either?” he flared in an aside to Buddy. “She told me herself it was a partic’ly gruesome one this time. Said her husband wouldn’t talk to her for an hour afterward because he can’t stand hearing that kind of stuff and she dotes on it. She admits she had it on too loud, just to spite him. Fair enough?”

The other man looked at Buddy, quizzically. Buddy just looked at the floor.

Ross finished rubbing it in, with vengeful relish.

“And her husband uses a safety razor. She brought it out and showed it to me herself when I tried to peddle the prop to her. Did you ever try cutting anybody up with one of them? And there are two valises still right there in the room with them. I saw them when I tried to fumble my pencil and stooped down to pick it up from the floor. With their lids left ajar and nothing worse in them than a mess of shirts and women’s undies. And not brand new replacements, either; plenty grubby and battered from years of knocking around with them.

“I don’t think cheapskates like them would be apt to own four valises, two apiece. And if they did, I don’t think they’d pack the stiff in the two best ones and keep the two worst ones for themselves. It would most likely be the other way around. And, finally, they’ve got newspapers still kicking around from two weeks back. I spotted the datelines on a few of them myself. What were they supposed to have used to clean up the mess, paper napkins?”

And he moved his arm toward Buddy, as if to let one fly at him across the ear. The other man, laughing, had to quickly reach over and hold him back.

“A little practice work won’t hurt you.”

“On level ground maybe; not up six flights of stairs.”

He stalked out and slammed the door so hard that several pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling.

The other man sent for a cop — this time one of the kind in uniform. For a minute Buddy thought he was going to be arrested then and there, and his stomach nearly sank down to his feet.

“Where do you live, son? You better take him back with you, Lyons.”

“Not the front way,” Buddy pleaded, aghast. “I can get in like I got out.”

“Just to make sure you get back safely, son. You’ve done enough damage for one day.” And the man at the desk waved him, and the whole matter he’d tried to tell them about, out the door.

Buddy knew better than to fight a policeman. That was about the worst thing you could do, fight back at a policeman. He went along with him tractably, his head hanging down in shame.

They went inside and up the stairs. They stopped in front of his own door. “Here, son?”

Buddy quailed. Now he was going to get it!

The policeman tapped, and his mother, not his father, opened the door. She must have been late leaving for work today, to still be there. Her face got white for a minute.

The policeman winked at her to reassure her.

“Nothing to get frightened about, lady. He just came over and gave us a little story, and we thought we better bring him back here where he belongs.”

“Buddy!” she said, horrified. “You went and told them?”

“Does he do it very often?” the policeman asked.

“All the time. All the time. But never anything as bad as this.”

“Getting worse, huh? Well, you ought to talk to the principal of his school, or maybe a doctor.”

There was a stealthy creak on the stairs, and the Kellerman woman had paused on her way down, was standing looking at them. Curiously, but with cold composure.

The cop didn’t even turn his head.

“Well, I gotta be getting back,” he said, and touched the visor of his cap to Buddy’s mother.

Buddy got panicky.

“Come in, quick!” he whispered frantically. “Come in quick, before she sees us!” And tried to drag his mother in out of the doorway.

She resisted, held him there in full view.

“There she is now. You apologize. You say you’re sorry, hear me?”

The woman came the rest of the way down. She smiled affably, in neighborly greeting. Buddy’s mother smiled in answering affability.

“Nothing wrong, is there?”

“No, nothing wrong,” Buddy’s mother murmured.

“I thought I saw a policeman at the door here, as I was coming down.”

“Buddy did something he shouldn’t.” Without taking her eyes off the woman, she shook Buddy in an aside. It was the signal for him to apologize. He hung back, tried to efface himself behind her.

“He looks like a good little boy,” the woman said patronizingly. “What did he do?”

“He’s not a good boy,” Buddy’s mother said firmly. “He makes things up. He tells things on people. Horrible things. Things that aren’t so. It can cause a lot of trouble especially when the people are living in the same house with us—” She didn’t finish it.

The woman’s eyes rested speculatively on Buddy for a long cool moment. Speculation ended and conviction entered them. They never wavered. She might have been thinking of a blanket that suddenly fell down the fire escape from one floor to the next when there was no wind. She might have been thinking of a razor salesman who asked too many questions.

Something about that look went right through you. It crinkled you all up. It was like death itself looking at you. Buddy had never met a look like that before. It was so still, so deep, so cold, so dangerous.

Then she smiled. The look in her eyes remained there, but her mouth smiled.

“Boys will be boys,” she said sweetly.

She reached out to try and playfully pull his hair or something like that, but he swerved his head violently aside, with something akin to horror, and she failed to reach him.

She turned away and left them. But she went up, not down. She had been coming from above just now, and she went back that way again.

“I’m always forgetting something,” she murmured as if to herself. “That letter I wanted to mail.”

Buddy knew, with an awful certainty. She wanted to tell him. The man. She wanted to tell him right away, without losing a minute.

The politeness forced on her by the spectator at an end, Buddy’s mother resumed her flurried handling of him where she had left off. She wrestled him violently into their flat and closed the door. But he wasn’t aware of anything that she said to him. He could only think of one thing.

“Now you told her!” he sobbed in mortal anguish. “Now they know! Now they know who!”

His mother misunderstood, beautifully and completely.

“Oh, now you’re ashamed of yourself, is that it? I should think you would be!” She retrieved the key from his sleeping father’s pillow, unlocked the door, thrust him in, and relocked it. “I was going to let you out, but now you’ll stay in there the rest of the day!”

He didn’t hear her, didn’t know what she was saying at all.

“Now you told her!” he said over and over. “They’ll get me for it!”

He heard her leave for work. He was left alone there, in the stifling flat, with just his father’s heavy breathing in the outside room to keep him company.

Fear didn’t come right away. He knew he was safe while his father was out there. They couldn’t get at him. That’s why he didn’t mind being in there. He didn’t even try to get out through the window a second time.

He was all right as long as he stayed where he was. It was tonight he was worried about, when his father was away at work and just his mother would be in the flat.

The long hot day burned itself out. The sun started to go down, and premonitory terror came with the creeping, deepening blue shadows. The night was going to be bad. The night was going to be his enemy, and he didn’t have anyone he could tell it to — no one to help him. Not his father, not his mother, not even the police. And if you didn’t have the police on your side, you might as well give up; there was no hope for you. They were on the side of everyone in the whole world, who wasn’t a crook or murderer. Everyone. But not him. He was left out.

His mother came back from work. He heard her bustling about as she prepared supper. Then she called his father, to wake him. He heard his father moving around getting dressed. Then the key was inserted, the door unlocked. Buddy jumped up from the chair he’d been huddled on. His father motioned to him.

“Now are you going to behave yourself?” he asked gruffly. “Are you going to cut that stuff out?”

“Yes, sir,” he said docilely.

“Sit down and have your supper.”

They sat down to eat.

His mother didn’t mean to give way on him, he could tell that; it came out accidentally, toward the end of the meal. She incautiously said something about her employer having called her down.

“Why?” his father asked.

“Oh, because I was five or ten minutes late.”

“How’d you happen to be late? You seemed to be ready on time.”

“I was ready, but by the time I got through talking to that policeman that came to the door—” She stopped short, but the damage was already done.

“What policeman that came to the door?”

She didn’t want to, but he finally made her tell him.

“Buddy sneaked out. One of them brought him back here with him. Now, Charlie, don’t. You just finished eating.”

Buddy’s father hauled him off the chair by his shoulder.

“I belted you once today. How many times am I going to have to—”

There was a knock at the door, and that saved Buddy for a minute. His father let go of him, went over and opened it. He stood out there a minute with someone, then he closed it, came back, and said in surprise:

“It’s a telegram. And for you, Mary.”

“Who on earth—?” She tore it open tremulously. Then she gave him a stricken look. “It’s from Emma. She must be in some kind of trouble. She says to come out there at once, she needs me. ‘Please come without delay as soon as you get this.’ ”

Emma was Buddy’s aunt, his mother’s sister. She lived all the way out on Staten Island.

“It must be the children,” his mother said. “They must both be taken sick at once or something.”

“Maybe it’s Emma herself,” his father said. “That would be even worse.”

“If I could only reach her! That’s what comes of not having telephones.”

She started to get her things together. Buddy pleaded, terrified:

“Don’t go, Mom! It’s a trick. It’s from them. They want you out of the way. They want to get me.”

“Still at it,” his father said, giving him a push. “Get inside there. Go ahead, Mary. You’ll be half the night getting there as it is. I’ll take care of him. Gimme a hammer and a couple of long nails,” he added grimly. “He’ll stay put. I’ll see to that.”

He drove them through the two sash joints of the window in there, riveting it inextricably closed.

“That oughta keep you. Now you can tell your stories to the four walls, to your heart’s content!”

His mother patted his head tearfully, “Please be a good boy, listen to your father,” and was gone.

Buddy had only one protector left now. And a protector who had turned against him. He tried to reason with him, win him over.

“Pop, don’t leave me here alone. They’re going to come down and get me. Pop, take me with you to the plant. I won’t get in your way. Honest, I won’t.”

His father eyed him balefully.

“Keep it up. Just keep it up. You’re going to a doctor tomorrow. I’m going to take you to one myself and find out what’s the matter with you.”

“Pop, don’t lock the door. Don’t. Don’t. At least give me a chance so I can get out.”

He tried to hang on to the knob with both hands, but his father’s greater strength dragged it slowly around in a closing arc.

“So you can run around to the police again and disgrace us? Well, if you’re so afraid of them, whoever they are, then you ought to be glad I’m locking the door. That’ll keep you safe from them. You confounded little liar!”

Click! went the key in the lock.

Agonized, Buddy pressed his face close to the door-seam and pleaded:

“Pop, don’t leave the key in. If you gotta lock me up, at least take the key with you.”

“The key stays in. I ain’t taking a chance on dropping it somewhere and losing it.”

He began to pound with his fists, frantic now and beyond all control.

“Pop, come back! Take me with you! Don’t leave me here alone! Pop, I take it back, It wasn’t so.”

His father was thoroughly exasperated by now. Nothing could have made him relent.

“I’ll see you when I come back from work, young fellow!” he rasped. “You’ve got something coming to you!”

The outer door slammed, and he was gone beyond recall.

Buddy was alone now. Alone with crafty enemies, alone with imminent death.

He stopped his outcries at once. Now they were risky. Now they could no longer help him. Now they might bring on the danger all the quicker.

He put out the light. It made it more scary without it, but he knew it was safer to be in the dark than in the light.

Maybe he could fool them into thinking nobody was there if he stayed in the dark like this. Maybe — but he didn’t have much hope. They must have watched down the stairs, seen his father go alone.

Silence, then. Not a sound. Not a sound of menace from overhead, or from the outside room. Plenty of sounds outside in the back — the blurred harmless sounds of a summer night. Radios, and dishes being washed, and a baby crying somewhere, then going off to sleep.

Too early yet; he had a little time yet. That almost made it worse, to have to sit and wait for it to come.

A church bell began to toll. St. Agnes’s, the little neighborhood church a couple of blocks over. You could always hear it from here. He counted the strokes. Nine. No, there was another one. Ten already. Gee, time had gone fast. In the dark you couldn’t keep track of it very easy.

It would take Mom a full hour and a half to get over to Aunt Emma’s even if she made good connections. She’d have to cross over to lower Manhattan first, and then go by ferry down the bay and then take the bus out to where Emma’s place was. And another hour and a half to get back, even if she left right away.

But she wouldn’t leave right away. She’d stay on there for awhile, even after she found out the message was a fake. She wouldn’t think there was any danger. She trusted everyone so. She always saw the good in everyone. She’d think it was just a harmless joke.

He’d be alone here until at least one, and maybe even after. They knew that. That’s why they were taking their time. That’s why they were waiting. They wanted things to quiet down. They wanted other people to be asleep.

Buddy got up every once in awhile and went over to the door and listened. The ticking of the clock in the other room was all he could hear.

Maybe if he could push the key out, and it fell close to the door, he could pull it through to his side underneath the door. It was an old, warped door, and the crack seemed rather wide along the floor.

It was easy to push the key out of the lock. He did that with a pencil stub he had in his pocket. He heard the key fall. Then he got a rusty old wire coat hanger that was in the room, and pushed that through the crack on its flat side and started to fish around with it, hoping the flat hook at the top of it would snag the key and scoop it toward him.

He could hear the hook striking the key, but each time he’d ease the hanger through, the hook would come back empty. Finally he couldn’t hit the key at all. It was out of reach now entirely. He’d lost it.

The church bell sounded again. Again Buddy counted. Eleven. Had a whole hour passed, just doing that?

Most of the lights in the back windows were out now. The last radio had stopped playing.

If he could last through the next hour, maybe he’d be all right. From twelve on time would be working in his favor. Mom would be on her way back, and—

He stiffened. There was a single creak, from directly overhead. From them. The first sound they’d made. Trying not to be heard. You could tell the person was going on tiptoe by the slow way it sounded. Cre — ak. It took about a half minute to finish itself.

Then nothing more for a long time. Buddy was afraid to move; he was afraid to breathe.

Then came another kind of sound, from a different place. Not wood, but shaky iron. Not overhead, but outside. Not a creak, but a kind of soft clank.

Buddy’s eyes flew to the window.

The shade. He should have thought about that sooner. But if there was no light on, nobody could see into the room anyway, even with the shade raised.

He peered through the window. He couldn’t see much — just a sort of sooty dark-gray color, a little bit lighter than the room itself. That was all. And now this was getting darker, even while he watched it. It was blotting out, as if something was coming down from above, out there in front of the window.

He crouched back against the wall, hunched his head low between his shoulders, like a turtle trying to draw its head into its shell.

The looming shape was up close now. It covered the whole pane like a black feather-bolster. He could see something pale in the middle of it, though, like a face.

Suddenly the middle of it lit in a disk about the size of an egg, and a long spoke of light shot through the glass and into the room.

It started to swing around slowly, following the walls from one side all the way around to the other. It traced a white paper hoop as it went. Maybe if he got down low he could duck under it. He bunched himself up into a ball, head below his knees now.

It arrived right over him, on the wall, and there was nothing he could push in front of him, nothing he could hide behind. Suddenly it dropped.

It flashed square into his squinting face, blinding him. Then it went out, as suddenly as it had gone on. It wasn’t needed any more. It told them what they wanted to know. They knew he was in there now. They knew he was alone in there.

He could hear fingers fumbling about the woodwork, trying the window. It wouldn’t move. The nails held it tight.

The looming black blur rose and drifted slowly upward, out of sight. The fire escape cleared. There was another creak overhead, on the ceiling. Not so slow or stealthy any more. The need for concealment was past now.

What would they do next? Would they try to get in the other way down the front stairs? Would they give up? He knew they wouldn’t — they’d already taken too much trouble, sending that phony telegram. It was now or never. They’d never have such an opportunity again.

St. Agnes’s bell chimed the half-hour. Buddy’s heart was going so fast, it was just as though he’d run a mile race at top speed.

Silence for minutes. Like before thunder, like before something happens. Silence for the last time. He was breathing with his mouth open; that was the only way he could draw enough air into his lungs. With all that he felt as if he were going to choke.

Then a lock jiggled a little. Out there, in the room past this one. You could hardly hear it, but it gave off little soft turning sounds. The outside door started to open guardedly. Buddy could hear one of the hinges whine a little as it turned. Then it closed again.

A skeleton key. They’d used a skeleton key.

The floor softly complained, here, there, the next place, coming straight toward his door. Somebody was in the next room. Maybe just one. Maybe both of them together.

They didn’t put on the lights. They were afraid of being seen from the outside. They were up to his door now. He almost thought he could hear their breathing, but he wasn’t sure — his own breathing drummed so loudly in his ears.

The knob started to turn. Then it slowly whirled back into place. They were trying the door. If only they didn’t see the key that was lying there. But then he realized they didn’t need that one anyway; the same skeleton key that had opened the outside door would work on this.

Maybe he could jam the lock — with the pencil stub that he’d used to force out the original key. He dredged it up from his pocket. Too fast, too nervously. He dropped it, and he had to go feeling all over the floor for it, with slapping hands. He found it again, floundered toward the door. The doorseam had gleamed a little, for a moment, as if a light were licking along it, to place the keyhole. Just as he got there, the keyhole sounded off, the key rammed into it.

Too late. The key was in. He was gone.

He looked around for something to shore up against the door, to buy a minute more. Nothing heavy enough. Only that chair he’d been sitting on, and that was no good.

The key was squirming around, catching onto the lock.

He hoisted the chair and he swung it. But the other way, away from the door. He swatted the windowpane with the chair. The glass spilled outward with a torrential crash just as the door broke away from its frame and buckled inward.

He got out through the jagged opening so fast that his very speed was a factor in saving him. He felt his clothing catch in a couple of places, but the glass didn’t touch his skin.

Heavy running steps hammered across the wooden floor in there behind him. An arm reached through and just missed him. The splintered glass kept the man back. He was too big to chance it as Buddy had.

Buddy scuttled down the fire escape for all his life. Around the turn, and down, and around another turn, and down, like a corkscrew. Then he jumped down to the ground, and ran into the basement.

It was plenty dark down there, and he knew every inch of it by heart from being in there so many times in the past. But he was afraid if he stayed they’d come right down after him and trap him, cut off his escape.

Eventually they would ferret him out, and dispose of him down there instead, in the dark. He wanted the open — he wanted the safety of the streets where they wouldn’t dare try anything. Where there would be people around who could interfere, come to his rescue.

So he plunged straight through the basement without stopping, and rushed up the janitor’s steps at the front to the sidewalk. Just as he gained the street the oncoming rush of his pursuer sounded warningly from the cavernous building entrance alongside him, and a moment later the man came careening out after him.

He’d come down the front stairs to try to cut Buddy off.

Buddy turned and sped away toward the corner, racing as only the very small and the very light in weight can race. But the man had longer legs and greater windpower, and it was only a matter of minutes before the unequal pursuit would end.

Buddy made the corner and scuffed around it on the sides of his shoes. No one in sight, no one around that offered any chance of protection.

The man was closing in on him remorselessly now, every long step swallowing three of Buddy’s. Buddy would have had to be running three times as fast even to break even with him, and he wasn’t even matching his speed. The woman had joined in the chase, too, but she was far behind, unimportant to the immediate crisis.

He spotted a row of ashcans just ahead, lined up along the curb. All filled and set out waiting to be emptied. About six, making a bulwark of about ten yards or so in length. He knew he couldn’t get past them, for the man was within two outstretched arms’ length of him now, and already had one arm out to bridge half that span.

In desperation Buddy sprinted to the end of the row of ashcans, caught the rim of the last one to swing himself around on — its fill held it down fast — and suddenly doubled back along the far side of them. It was a feat the man couldn’t hope to match as quickly or as deftly, because of his greater bulk. He went flying out too far on a wasteful ellipse, had to swing in close again.

Buddy was able to keep their strung-out length between the two of them from now on. The man couldn’t touch him. All Buddy had to do was swerve back a little out of his reach. The man couldn’t overthrow them either; they were too hefty with coke and ash.

But Buddy knew he couldn’t stay there long. The woman was coming up rapidly and they’d sew him up between the two of them. He stopped short and crouched warily over one of the bins. He gouged both hands into the gritty ash, left them that way for an instant, buried up to the wrist. The man dove for him.

Buddy’s hands shot up. A land mine of stuff exploded full into the man’s face, He reeled backward, clawing at his eyes.

Buddy shot diagonally into the open, heading for the other side of the street. The man couldn’t follow him for a minute; he was too busy staggering, coughing, pawing, trying to get his eyesight back.

Buddy made the most of it. He gained another corner, tore down a new street. But it was just a postponement, not a clean-cut getaway. The man came pounding into sight again behind him after a brief time-lag. Again those longer legs, the deeper chest, started to get in their work.

Buddy saw a moving figure ahead. The first person he’d seen on the streets since the chase had begun. He raced abreast of him, started to tug at his arm, too breathless to be able to do anything but pant for a minute. Pant, and point behind him, and keep jerking at his arm.

“Geddada here,” the man said thickly, half-alarmed himself by the frenzied incoherent symptoms. “Warrya doing?”

“Mister, that man’s trying to get me! Mister, don’t let him!”

The man swayed unpredictably to one of Buddy’s tugs, and the two of them nearly went down together in a heap.

A look of idiotic fatuousness overspread his face.

“Warrsh matter, kid? Somebody trying to getcha?”

A drunk. No good to him. Hardly able to understand what he was saying to him at all.

Buddy suddenly pushed him in the path of the oncoming nemesis. He went down, and the other one sprawled over his legs. Another minute or two gained.

At the upper end of the street Buddy turned off again, into an avenue. This one had tracks, and a lighted trolley was bearing down on him just as he came around the corner. That miracle after dark, a trolley just when it was needed. Its half-hourly passing exactly coinciding with his arrival at the corner.

He was an old hand at cadging free rides on the backs of them. That was the way he did all his traveling back and forth. He knew just where to put his feet; he knew just where to take hold with his hands.

He turned to face in the direction it was going, let it rumble by full length, took a short spurt after it, jumped, and hitched on.

The man came around into view too late, saw him being borne triumphantly away. The distance began to widen, slowly but surely. Legs couldn’t keep up with a motor, wind power with electricity. But the man wouldn’t give up. He kept on running just the same, shrinking in stature now each time Buddy darted a look back.

“Stop that car!” he shouted faintly from the rear.

The conductor must have thought he merely wanted to board it himself as a fare. Buddy, peering over the rim of the rear window, saw him fling a derisive arm out in answer.

Suddenly the car started to slacken, taper off for an approaching stop.

There was a huddle of figures ahead at the track side, waiting to board it. Buddy, agonized, tried to gauge the distance between pursuer, trolley, and intended passengers. He was still about twice as far away from it, in the one direction, as they were in the other. If they’d get on quick, if it started right off again, Buddy could still make it — he’d still get away from him, even if only by the skin of his teeth.

The car ground to a stop. A friendly green light was shining offside, at the crossing. The three figures huddled there went into a hubbub. Two helped the third aboard. Then they handed up several baskets and parcels after her. Then she leaned down from the top of the step and kissed them each, in turn.

“Good-by. Get home all right, Aunt Tilly.”

“Thank you for a lovely time.”

“Give my love to Sam.”

“Wait a minute! Aunt Tilly! Here’s your umbrella!”

The green light was gone now. There was nothing there in its place, just an eclipse, blackness. The car gave a nervous little start, about to go forward.

Suddenly the traffic light changed. A red glow suffused the darkness. Like blood, like fiery death. The death of a little boy.

The car fell obediently motionless again. In the silence you could hear the steady, rapid pounding of footsteps coming along the pavement.

Buddy dropped down to the ground, too late. The man’s forked hand caught him at the back of the neck like a vise, pinned him flat and squirming against the rear end of the car.

“Now I’ve got you,” his captor hissed grimly in his ear.

The treacherous trolley, now that it had undone him, withdrew, taking the shine of its lights with it, leaving the two of them alone in the middle of the darkened tracks.

Buddy was too exhausted to struggle; the man was too winded to do much more than just hold him fast. That was all he needed to do. They stood there together, strangely passive, almost limp, for a few moments. As if taking time out, waiting for a signal to begin their struggle anew.

The woman came up presently. There was a cold businesslike quality to her undertone. It was worse than any imprecations could have been. She spoke as though she were referring to a basket of produce.

“All right. Get him out of the middle of the street, Joe. Don’t leave him out here.”

Buddy went into a flurry of useless struggling, like a snagged pinwheel, that ended almost as soon as it began. The man twisted his arm around behind his back and held it that way, using it as a lever to force submission. The pain was too excruciating to disobey.

They remounted the sidewalk and walked along with Buddy between them. Sandwiched between them, very close between them, so that from the front you couldn’t tell he was being strong-armed. The pressure of their two bodies forced him along as well as the compulsion of his disjointed arm.

Wouldn’t they meet anybody, anybody at all? Was the whole town off the streets, just tonight? Suddenly they did meet somebody.

Two men this time. Not swaying, walking straight and steady, cold sober. Men you could reason with. They’d help him, they’d have to. They were coming toward him and his captors. Otherwise, the latter would have tried to avoid them. They couldn’t. The men had turned the corner just before them too abruptly, catching them in full view. A retreat would have aroused suspicion.

The man, Joe, took a merciless extra half-turn in Buddy’s already fiery arm just as a precaution.

“One word out of you,” he gritted, “and I’ll yank it off by the roots!”

Buddy waited until the two parties were abreast of one another, mustering up strength against the pain — both present pain and the pain to come.

Then he sidestepped quickly, jammed the heel of one shoe against his captor’s unprotected shinbone. The man heaved from the pavement, released his arm by reflex.

Buddy flung himself almost in a football tackle against the nearest of the two passersby, wrapped both arms about his leg, and held on like a barnacle.

“Mister, help me! Mister, don’t let ’em!”

The man, hobbled, was unable to move another step. His companion halted likewise. “What the—”

“Y’gotta listen! Y’gotta believe!” Buddy sputtered, to get his lick in first. “They killed a man last night. Now they’re gonna do the same thing to me!”

Joe didn’t do what he’d expected. He didn’t grab for Buddy. He didn’t show violence or even anger. There was a sudden change in attitude that threw Buddy off-key, put him at a disadvantage. The thing had become psychological instead of physical. And he wasn’t so good psychologically.

The lineup had turned into one of age-groups before he knew how it had happened — a kid against four grown-ups. Grown-ups that gave each other the benefit of the doubt sooner than they would give it to a kid.

“His own mother and father,” Joe murmured with mournful resignation.

The woman had a handkerchief out, was applying it effectively to her eyes.

“They’re not!” Buddy howled. “They’re not!”

The woman turned her back and her shoulders shook.

“He doesn’t mean to lie,” Joe said with paternal indulgence. “He makes these things up, and then he believes it himself. His imagination is overactive.”

“They’re not my parents!” Buddy groaned abysmally.

“Well, tell them where you live, then,” Joe said suavely.

“Yeah, kid, give us your address,” one of the two strangers put in.

“Twenty Holt Street!” Buddy answered quickly.

Joe whipped out a billfold, held it open for the men to see some sort of corroboratory identification.

“For once he admits he lives with us,” he said ruefully. “Usually he won’t.”

“He stole five dollars out of my pocketbook,” the woman chimed in tearfully. “My gas-bill money for this month. Then he went to the movies. He’s been gone since three this afternoon. We only found him just now. This has been going on all the way home.”

“They killed a man,” Buddy screeched. “They cut him up with a razor.”

“That was in the picture he just saw,” Joe said with a disheartened shake of his head. “It was no good.”

The woman crouched before Buddy now, dabbing her handkerchief at his face in maternal solicitude, trying to clean it.

“Won’t you behave now? Won’t you come home like a good boy?”

The two strangers had turned definitely against Buddy. The woman’s tears and Joe’s sorrowful forbearance were having an effect. One man looked at the other.

“Gee, I’m sure glad I never married, Mike, if this is what you get.”

The other man bent over and detached Buddy none too gently.

“Let go,” he said gruffly. “Listen to your parents. Do like they tell you.”

He dusted off his trouser-leg where Buddy had manhandled it, in eloquent indication of having nothing more to do with the matter. Then he and his companion went on about their business, down the street.

The tableau remained unaltered behind them for as long as they were within call. The woman crouched before Buddy, but her unseen hand had a vicious death-grip on the front of his shirt. Joe was bending over him from behind, as if gently reasoning with him. But he had Buddy’s arm out of kilter again, holding it coiled up behind his back like a mainspring.

“You — little devil!” he exhaled through tightly clenched teeth.

“Get him in a taxi, Joe. We can’t keep parading him on the open street like this.”

They said something between them that Buddy didn’t quite catch.

“That boarded-up place. Kids play around there a lot.”

Then they both nodded in malignant understanding.

A cold ripple went up Buddy’s back. He didn’t know what they meant, but it was something bad. They even had to whisper it to each other, it was so bad. “That boarded-up place.” A place for dark, secret deeds that would never come to light again; not for years, anyway.

A cab glided up as Joe waved vigorously, and they went into character again.

“It’s the last time I ever take you out with me!” the woman scolded, with one eye on the driver. “Now you get in there and see that you behave yourself!”

They wrestled Buddy into the cab between them, the woman holding his flailing legs, the man his head and shoulders while his body sagged in the middle like a sack of potatoes. They dumped him on the seat and then held him down fast between them.

“Corner of Amherst and Twenty-Second,” the man said. Then as the machine glided off, he murmured out of the corner of his mouth to the woman, “Lean over a little, get in front of us.” Her body blocked Buddy from the oblivious driver’s sight for a moment.

The man pulled a short, wicked punch with a foreshortened arm, straight up from below. His knuckles slammed against Buddy’s jaw and he toppled backward against the seat. He didn’t lose his senses, but he was dazed to a passive acquiescence for a few minutes. Little gritty pieces of tooth enamel tickled his tongue, and his eyes ran water without actually crying.

The cab stopped for a light, while he was slowly getting over the effects of the blow. Metal clashed, and a figure on the opposite side of the street closed a call-box and leisurely sauntered on.

A policeman, at last! What he’d been hoping for, what he’d been praying for.

The woman’s hand, handkerchief-lined, guessed his intent too late, tried to find his mouth and clamp itself tight over it. Buddy swerved his head, sank his teeth into her finger. She recoiled with a stifled exclamation, whipped her hand away.

He tore loose with the loudest scream he could summon. It almost pulled the lining of his throat inside out.

“Mr. Officer! Mr. Policeman! Help me, will ya? Help me!”

The policeman turned on his course, came toward them slowly. A kid’s cry for help wasn’t the same as a grown-up’s cry for help; it wasn’t as immediate, as crucial.

He looked in the cab window at the three of them. He even rested his forearm negligently along the rim as he did so. He wasn’t on the alert. It couldn’t be anything much — a kid squawking in a taxicab.

“What’s up?” he asked idly. “What’s he hollering for?”

“He knows what he’s going to get when we get home with him — that’s what’s up!” the woman said primly. “And you can holler at all the policemen you want to, young man. That won’t save you!”

“ ’Fraid of a licking, huh?” the cop grinned understandingly. “A good licking never hurt any kid. My old man used to gimme enough of them when I was—” He chuckled appreciatively. “But that’s a new one, calling the cops on your old man and lady to keep from getting a licking! I tell you, these kids nowadays—”

“He turned in a false alarm one time,” Joe complained virtuously, “to try and keep me from shellacking him!”

The cop whistled.

The cabdriver turned his head and butted in, unasked.

“I got two of my own, home. And if they gave me half as much trouble as this young pup’s been giving these folks here since they first hailed me, I’d knock their blocks off. I’m telling you.”

“They m-m-murdered a man last night, with a knife, and then they cut him up all in pieces and—” Buddy sobbed incoherently.

“What a dirty mind he’s got,” the cop commented disapprovingly. He took a closer look at Buddy’s contorted face. “Wait a minute! Don’t I know you, kid?”

There was a breathless silence. Buddy’s heart soared like a balloon.

At last, at last—

“Sure, I remember you now. You came over to the station house with that same story and made a lot of trouble for us this morning. Wasting everybody’s time. Brundage even sent somebody over to investigate, like a fool! And was his face red afterwards! A lot of hot air. You’re the very one — I seen you there meself. Then one of the guys had to take you home afterwards to get rid of you. Are you the parents?”

“Do you think we’d be going through all this if we weren’t?” Joe demanded bitterly.

“Well, you sure got my sympathy.” He waved them on disgustedly. “Take him away! You can have him!”

The cab glided into lethal motion again. Buddy’s head went over supinely, in ultimate despair. Wasn’t there anyone in the whole grown-up world who would believe a kid? Did you have to be grown-up yourself before anyone would believe you, stop you from being murdered?

He didn’t try to holler out the window any more at the occasional chance passerby he glimpsed flitting by. What was the use? They wouldn’t help him. He was licked. Salty water coursed from his eyes, but he didn’t make a sound.

“Any p’tickler number?” the driver asked.

“The corner’ll do,” Joe said plausibly. “We live just a couple doors up the street.” He paid him off before they got out, in order to have both hands free for Buddy once they alighted.

The cab slowed, and they emerged with him, started walking hurriedly away. His feet slithered along the ground more than they actually lifted themselves. The cab wheeled and went back the way it had come.

“Think he’ll remember our faces later?” the woman breathed worriedly.

“It’s not our faces that count, it’s the kid’s face,” Joe answered her. “And nobody’ll ever see that again.”

As soon as the cab was safely gone, they reversed directions and went up another street entirely.

“There it is, over there,” Joe said guardedly.

It was a derelict tenement, boarded up, condemned, but not demolished. It cast a pall of shadow so that even while they were still outside in front of it, they could scarcely be seen. It sent forth an odor of decay. It was, Buddy knew, the place where death was.

They stopped short.

“Anyone around?” Joe demanded warily.

Then suddenly he embraced the boy; a grim sort of embrace if there ever was one, without love in it. He wrapped his arm around his head and clutched him tight, so that his hand sealed Buddy’s mouth. Buddy had no chance to bite him as he had the woman. The pressure against his jaws was too great, he couldn’t even open them.

He carried him that way, riding on his own hip so to speak, over to the seemingly secure boarded-up doorway. He spaded his free hand under the door, tilted it out, wormed his way through, and whisked Buddy after him. The woman followed and replaced it.

A pall of complete darkness descended on the three of them. The stench was terrific in here. It wasn’t just the death of a building; it was — some other kind of death, as well. Death in two suitcases, perhaps.

“How’d you know it was open?” the woman whispered in surprise.

“How do you suppose?” Joe answered with grisly meaning.

“This where?” was all she said.

The man had taken his torch out. It snapped whitely at a skeleton stair, went right out again, instantaneously as the lens of a camera. “Wait here where you are and don’t smoke,” he warned her. “I’m going up a ways.”

Buddy guessed that he didn’t knock him completely out because that would have made him too heavy to handle. Joe wanted him to get up there on his own two feet, if possible. They started to climb, draggingly.

The soundtrack went: crunch, crunch, skff. That was Buddy’s feet trailing passively over the lips of the stairs.

He was too numbed with terror now to struggle much any more. It was no use anyway. No one anywhere around outside to hear him through the thick mouldering walls. If they hadn’t helped him outside on the street, they were never going to help him in here.

Joe used his torch sparingly, a wink at a time. Only when one flight had ended and they were beginning another. He wasn’t taking any chances using it too freely. It was like a white Morse Code on black paper. Dot, dot, dot. Spelling out one word: DEATH.

They halted at last. They must have reached the top now. There was a busted skylight somewhere just over them. It was just as black as ever, but a couple of dim stars could be seen in the sky.

Joe pressed Buddy back flat against the wall, held him that way with one hand at his throat. Then he clipped his light on, left it that way this time. He wanted to see what he was doing. He set it down on the floor, left it that way, alight, trained on Buddy. Then his other hand closed in to finish the job.

A minute, maybe a minute and a half, would be all he needed. Life goes out awfully quick — even manually, which is one of the slowest ways.

“Say good-bye, kid,” Joe murmured ironically.

You fight when you die, because — that’s what everything alive does. That’s what being alive is.

Buddy couldn’t fight off the man’s arms. But his legs were free. The man had left them free, so he could die standing up. Buddy knew a man’s stomach is soft, the softest part of him.

He kicked upward with his knee, rammed it home. He could feel it pillow itself into something rubbery. A flame of hot body-breath was expelled against him, like those pressure things you dry yourself with.

The death-collar opened and the man’s hands went to his middle. Buddy knew that one such punch wasn’t enough. This was death and you gave no quarter. The man had given him the space he needed. He shot his whole foot out this time, sole flat. There was almost a sucking noise, as if it had gone into a waterlogged sponge.

Joe reeled all the way back. He must have trodden on the cylindrical light. It spun crazily around.

There was a splintering of wood. There was a strange sagging feeling that made everything shake. Then came a roaring sound as if a lot of heavy stuff were plunging down a chute.

The light flashed across space once, and showed nothing — no Joe, no rail. Then it pitched down into nothingness itself.

There was a curious sort of playback, that came seconds later, from somewhere far below. It was almost like an echo — of something heavy and firm, something with bones in it, bones and a skull, smacking like a gunshot report.

A woman’s voice screamed “Joe!” hollowly.

Then a lot of loose planks went clat-clat, clat, bang!

The woman’s voice just groaned after that, didn’t scream any more. Then the groans stopped, too. A lot of plaster dust came up and tickled Buddy’s nose. His eyes began to smart.

It was very still, and Buddy was alone in the dark. Something told him not to move. He just stood there, pressed flat against the wall.

He didn’t know what it was, maybe the way his hair stood up on the back of his neck. As if his hair could see in the dark better than he could, knew something that he didn’t.

It didn’t last long. There were suddenly a lot of voices down there, as if people had come running in from the street. Lights began to wink below. Then a stronger one than the rest, a sort of thick searchlight beam, shot all the way up, jockeyed around and found him.

The whole stair-structure was gone. Two narrow planks had held fast against the wall, and he was standing on them. It was like a shelf — a shelf that ended at his toes. Five floors up.

A voice came up to him through a megaphone, trying to be very calm and friendly though it shook a little around the edges.

“Close your eyes, kid. We’ll get you down. Just don’t look. Keep your eyes closed. Think hard about something else. Do you know your multiplication tables?”

Buddy nodded cautiously, afraid to move his head too much.

“Start saying them. Two times two, two times three. Keep your eyes closed. You’re in school and the teacher’s right in front of you. But don’t change your position.”

He was in Six-A. Didn’t they know that? You got multiplication in the first grade. But he did it anyway. He finished the twos, he finished the threes. He stopped.

“Mister,” he called down in a thin but clear voice. “How much longer do I have to hold out? I’m getting pins and needles in my legs, and I’m stuck at four times twenty-three.”

“Do you want it fast and just a little risky, kid, or do you want it slow and safe?”

“Fast and just a little risky,” he answered. “I’m getting dizzy.”

“All right, son,” the voice boomed back. “We’ve got a net spread out down here. We can’t show it to you, you’ll have to take our word for it.”

“There may be loose planks sticking out on the way down,” another voice objected, in an undertone.

“It’ll take hours the other way, and he’s been through enough already.” The voice directed itself upward again. “Keep your arms close to your sides, keep your feet close together, open your eyes, and when I count three, jump.”

“One — two — three!”

He was never going to get there. Then he did, and he bounced, and it was over. He was safe.

He cried for a minute or two, and he didn’t know why himself. It must have been left over from before, when Joe was trying to kill him. Then he got over it; you can only do that at twelve.

He hoped they hadn’t seen him.

“I wasn’t crying,” he said. “All that stuff got in my eyes and stung them.”

“Same here,” Detective Ross, his one-time enemy, said gravely. And the funny part of it was, his eyes were kind of shiny, too.

Joe was lying there dead, his head sticking out between two planks. They’d carried the woman out on a stretcher.

Somebody came up and joined them with a very sick look on his face.

“We’ve pulled two valises out from under what’s left of those stairs back there.”

“Better not look in them just yet,” Ross warned.

“I already did.” The man gulped and bolted out into the street, holding his hand clapped to his mouth.

They rode Buddy back in state, in a departmental car. In the middle of all of them, like a — like a mascot.

“Gee, thanks for saving me,” he said gratefully.

“We didn’t save you, son. You saved yourself. We’re a great bunch. We were just a couple of minutes too late. We would have caught them, all right, but we couldn’t have saved you.”

“How’d you know where to come, though?”

“Picking up the trail was easy, once we got started. A cop back there remembered you, a cabdriver showed where he let you out. It was just that we started so late.”

“But what made you believe it now all of a sudden, when you wouldn’t believe it this morning?”

“A couple little things came up,” Ross said. “Little, but they counted. The Kellerman woman mentioned the exact program you were supposed to have overheard last night. It sounded better that way, more plausible. It’s the exact time, the exact type; it fitted in too good to waste. But by doing that she saved your life tonight. Because I happened to tune in myself tonight. Not out of suspicion, just for my own entertainment.

“If it was that good, I wanted to hear it myself. And it was that good and even better. It’s a serial; it’s continued every night. Only at the end, the announcer apologized to the listeners. For not being on the air at all last night. Tuesday is Election and the program gave up its time to one of the candidates. And what you said you heard was sure no campaign speech!

“That was one thing. Then I went straight over to their flat. Pretty late, and almost as bad as never. They must have already been on the way with you. Everything was in order, just like I’d seen it the first time. Only, a towel fell down from in back of the bathroom door as I brushed past. And under it, where nobody could be blamed for overlooking it, not even the two of them themselves, there was a well-worn razor strop. The kind you use for an open blade, never a safety. With a fleck of fairly-fresh soap still on it. Just a couple of little things that came awfully late, but counted!

“Come on, Buddy, here’s your home. I’ll go in with you.”

It was already getting light out and when they knocked, Buddy said in a scared whisper:

“Gee, now I’m going to get it for sure! I been out the whole night long!”

“Detectives have to be sometimes, didn’t you know that?” And Ross took his own badge off and pinned it on him.

The door opened, and his father was standing there. Without a word, he swung his arm back.

Ross just reached up and held it where it was.

“Now, now, just be careful who you raise the back of your hand to around here. It’s a serious matter to swat a member of the detective bureau, you know. Even an auxiliary, junior grade.”

The House of Numbers JACK FINNEY

Original publication: Cosmopolitan, July 1956; later expanded to a full-length novel (New York, Dell, 1957)

For a writer with a relatively modest output of only ten novels, Walter Braden “Jack” Finney (1911–1995) had an inordinate number of books and stories that inspired motion pictures. Ironically, his best-known work, and one of the most memorable mystery novels of all time, Time and Again (1970), is not one of them.

This superb novel, crossing genres between a mystery and time travel, is a beautiful evocation of the New York City of 1882 that conjures nostalgic sensibilities in readers with its description of trolley cars, gas lamps, horse-drawn vehicles, and the apparently simpler, slower time. A bored advertising illustrator volunteers for a secret government project that promises to change his life. It does when he undergoes a form of hypnosis that takes him back in time by nearly a century. He becomes involved in a mystery when he settles into the life of the time. Finney wrote a sequel, From Time to Time (1995), which was set in the New York of 1912.

Finney’s first novel, 5 Against the House (1954), is a caper about five college students who set out to rob a casino in Reno, Nevada. It inspired the 1955 movie of the same title directed by Phil Karlson and starring Guy Madison, Kim Novak, and Brian Keith.

The science fiction classic The Body Snatchers (1955), Finney’s second book, also was adapted for film. Titled Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), it was directed by Don Siegel and starred Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, and Larry Gates; it is the terrifying story of aliens who emerge from pods and invade the bodies of humans. Some saw the film as a metaphor for the fear of a Russian Communist takeover during the Cold War era, though Finney denied that that had been his intent. The phrase “pod people” to describe unthinking, emotionally challenged people is derived from the book. The story was filmed two more times, released in 1978 as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in 2007 as The Invasion.

Finney’s next crime story, “The House of Numbers” (1956, novelized the following year), also made it to the screen in 1957.

Assault on a Queen (1959) continued Finney’s remarkable success with Hollywood, being released on film under that title in 1966. Directed by Jack Donohue, it starred Frank Sinatra, Virna Lisi, and Anthony Franciosa and is another thriller about an ambitious caper. Much of the story is devoted to an eccentric gang attempting to raise a German U-boat sunk during World War II. What isn’t known for a long time by readers or filmgoers is that it will be used in an attempt to rob the giant luxury liner RMS Queen Mary.

Revealing another side of his personality, Finney left the crime and science fiction genres to write a comedy, Good Neighbor Sam (1963), about his career working in the advertising business. It, too, was filmed, with Jack Lemmon starring in the 1964 version. Marion’s Wall (1973), the story of a fading silent screen actress who attempts to salvage her career by taking over the body of a shy young woman, is a slightly more benign variation of the pod people attack; it was released in a much-altered version as Maxie (1985).

“The House of Numbers” is sometimes referred to as “The Pastel Penitentiary,” as when MGM acquired rights, but neither the story nor the novel ever had that title.

Title: House of Numbers, 1957

Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Director: Russell Rouse

Screenwriters: Don Mankiewicz, Russell Rouse

Producer: Charles Schnee

• Jack Palance (Arnie Judlow/Bill Judlow)

• Harold J. Stone (Henry Nova, prison guard)

• Edward Platt (Warden)

• Barbara Lang (Ruth Judlow)

The embellished storyline of Finney’s long magazine story is closely followed in the film script; both maintain suspense throughout.

Arnie Judlow is a convict in San Quentin. He has committed a murder and, while in prison, threw a guard off a balcony and into a coma. Knowing that he is doomed to spend the rest of his life imprisoned, he plots an escape. He asks his wife and his look-alike and law-abiding brother, Bill, to pose as husband and wife and move to a house nearby and, on one of their visits, Arnie and Bill switch clothes so that the convict can begin to implement the escape plan. What could go wrong?

Parts of the film were actually shot on location at San Quentin. In one scene, a cat is seen strolling past Judlow’s cell. This is authentic, as the prison allowed feral cats that squeezed through sewer and drainage pipes to remain inside as they performed a valuable service in keeping the rodent population in check.

Jack Palance (born Vladimir Ivanovich Palahniuk) had the challenging dual role of playing brothers who had very difference personalities. His role as a violent murderer was commonplace casting, as he famously played tough villains, notably in such films as Sudden Fear (1952) and Shane (1953), both of which earned him Academy Award nominations. His background as a coal miner, football player, boxer (he won his first fifteen bouts, twelve by knockout), and Army Air Force bomber pilot in World War II (his plane crashed and the subsequent injuries and burns, plus reconstructive surgery, gave his face its familiar leathery look) combined to give him the appearance of a frightening bad guy. It is only when he had a role in the 1991 comedy City Slickers that he won an Oscar.

The role of Ruth Judlow in The House of Numbers was one of Barbara Lang’s few film appearances. She had played in a couple of westerns and was being promoted as a Marilyn Monroe — type when she contracted poliomyelitis in 1953. Told she might never walk again, with her legs and facial muscles paralyzed, she turned to religion and credited her faith in performing a miracle. She fully recovered and went on to several roles in television series. She died in 1982 when she was only fifty-four.

THE HOUSE OF NUMBERS Jack Finney

Lying in the darkness, uncomfortable as always in a strange bed and room, I heard the snap of a light switch, then the click of high heels in the hall just outside the thin wood of my door. And in my mind I could see the sleek nyloned legs that were making this sound only a few feet from my bed, the delicate fine-boned ankles. A switch clicked in the bedroom we’d decided would be hers, and I tried to picture the girl’s face as it had looked when we’d met this morning, and I couldn’t. I could see her hair, very heavy and long, with the yellow, mixed with darker, strands that only genuinely blonde hair has. But her face... Then suddenly I saw it again, the prominent cheekbones, the pale magnificent complexion, and the gray intelligent eyes that revealed Ruth Gehlmann’s personality.

The heels clicked toward me again, then stepped onto the tile in the bathroom. I heard the medicine cabinet open, and then the door close, and I was intensely aware of all these sounds and of the girl, living under this roof with me now, who made them; and I tried to ignore them, and think of something else. But the door opened again, the steps sounded once more on the wooden hall floor, then stopped. There was a moment’s complete silence; then I heard them approaching. A very light tapping sounded on my door; it opened quietly, and the girl’s handsome figure stood sharply silhouetted against the hall light. “Asleep?” she whispered.

“No,” I said quietly.

She hesitated, then said, “Ben? Do you ever — are you at all — frightened?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. Yeah, a little. Why? Are you frightened?”

—

She nodded, standing there. “Yes, some. Oh, Ben,” she said suddenly, “yes, I am! I’m scared! Tonight, after you left the living room, I sat there, the house so quiet, and it was as though I had time, my first chance all day to really think, and — Ben, talk to me!” She moved quickly to my bed, and sat down on its edge facing me.

In the faint light from the hall I could see her face straining for control. I sat up, my mind searching for words, and she leaned forward suddenly, hands to her face, and dropped her forehead on my shoulder. Automatically, my arms rose and went around her, and as she huddled against me for comfort, I patted her back gently and began to murmur, “There, there, take it easy; you’ve got a right to be scared, you’ve got a right to let down and shed a few tears.” My voice a monotone, the sound of it more important than the words. I said, “All in one day, you move out of your apartment, move in here with a stranger, and the worst is still to come — why shouldn’t it get you? You’ll be all right in the morning; things will look better; you’ll be all right.” I went on and after a little time she wriggled her shoulders under my arm with a little shuddering sigh, then lay against me, breathing quietly.

For a moment longer I held her, sitting up there in bed; then I arched my chest to push her gently erect, and as she looked up, frowning in puzzlement. I put my hands on her shoulders, and leaning back, held her at arm’s length. “Go to bed now,” I said, and though I smiled to soften the effect, I hadn’t quite kept the gruffness out of my voice. “Go ahead now,” I said as she stared at me, and I couldn’t help it — there was an edge of irritation in my voice, and I knew I had to explain it. “Look,” I said gently, “I know how you feel, and I want to help you, but — damn it, Ruth,” I burst out, “you’re a beautiful woman! Not just pretty, or attractive, but beautiful! And we’re alone here, absolutely alone, living and sleeping under the same roof, and now here you are sitting—” I suddenly stopped, then said, “I’m sorry.”

She was nodding, the light from the hall yellow in her hair. “Of course,” she said quietly, “I just didn’t think; it didn’t enter my mind, at the moment. I was scared, I wanted comfort, but of course.” She stood up quickly from the bed, nervously brushing her skirt. “I’m sorry, Ben. And I’m all right now.”

My name is Benjamin Harrison Jarvis. I’m twenty-seven years old, a stocky man several inches under six feet, weighing 170 pounds, with black hair, blue eyes, and an ordinary average American face, and I’m no faster thinking than the next guy. But now for the first time in these strange and hectic past two days, I seemed to be thinking straight; things fell into focus. “Get your coat,” I said to the frightened girl standing beside my bed. “We’re going to take a little ride.”

I own a 1953 Plymouth hardtop convertible, and I’d driven up in it from Los Angeles two days before. When I’d dressed, I got in it with Ruth, and we drove out of the garage, heading for Paradise Cove, on Richardson Bay. I know Marin County; I’d lived and worked in Los Angeles for five years, until Saturday, but I grew up here in the San Francisco Bay area, and knew where I was going, and how to get there.

We didn’t talk during the quarter-hour it took us, but as the winding, almost deserted, back road came out onto the bay and we saw the pale orange glow of light almost directly ahead. I felt Ruth’s body in the seat beside me go rigid. Glancing at her profile in the faint light from the dashboard. I saw that her face muscles were set, and that her eyes were closed, but I said nothing, offering her not a word or gesture of comfort. The dark road wound on, skirting the bay, and between occasional houses or clumps of trees were caught frequent glimpses of the orange glow across the water, growing steadily larger and closer.

Then as the road emerged directly beside the bay, I pulled to the side, and parked. I turned off the motor, and we sat in the sudden silence staring at that orange glow across the black water, and now we could see plainly what it was.

It was a line of huge floodlights mounted on standards higher than telephone poles and shining on an immense, peach-colored building which rose up out of the spade-shaped point of land across the narrow bay. Before it stood a smaller structure of the same material and color. On the edge of the shore, high in the air before the great building, stood a glass-windowed hut on immensely tall, stilt-like legs. Off to the left, fading into the darkness beyond the floodlights, were more buildings, tinted a delicate green.

“Well,” I said, “there it is.” And after a moment Ruth nodded.

“It’s colored,” she murmured. “I can never get over that. It’s not gray, but colored; and in pastels.”

“Yes, San Quentin, the pastel prison: it’s almost pretty from here.” I turned. “Look at it, Ruth; fill your eyes with it. You can actually make out the bars on the windows; notice?” She nodded, her face pale. “And off to the left, way back” — I pointed — “you can see one of the walls. There are men up there, Ruth, with guns; and it’s all real. You’re looking at it now; San Quentin prison; there’s nothing more real in the world. And we’re actually talking about taking a man out of there.” I said softly. “Actually helping Arnie escape from San Quentin! Take a good look, Ruth, because that’s the kind of place you’ll end up in — you, Ruth, in the women’s prison at Corona — if anything goes wrong!”

I sat looking at her, half-turned on the car seat to face her, and her jaw muscles were rigid, but I didn’t let up. “See that green light?” I said and she lifted her face to stare up at the globe of vivid green light mounted high on a standard over the prison. “It’s green now because all’s quiet, every last man accounted for. But once that light turns red — if you helped do it, you’re in the worst trouble of your life; and you may never be free of the consequences as long as you live.” I waited, letting her look her fill of the stone-and-steel floodlighted reality before us. Then I said softly. “When I told you this morning what Arnie wanted us to do, you said yes, you’d help. That doesn’t count; it came at you too fast. But now you’ve had time to think. What about it, Ruth?”

After a moment she turned to stare at me wonderingly; then she turned back to look at the great prison ahead, and shook her head. She whispered. “Ben, you’re right; I can’t do it!” and she covered her face with her hands.

After a moment she lowered her hands and turned to me, eyes bitter. “Maybe I ought to. You didn’t see him at the trial, Ben, and right after!”

“I was in Europe; my first vacation in four years.”

“Well, he was wild, Ben; just wild at the thought of prison; I know he hates it even more than most men. And we’re engaged; we’d have been married over a year now, if he weren’t in there! I owe him my loyalty and help!” She shook her head. “But all I can tell you is that I can’t do it; I simply haven’t the courage. I don’t want to be in a prison any more than Arnie does! And I don’t care what you think!” She covered her face again; she was crying.

“Don’t be so quick about what I’ll think,” I said. “I’m not going to help him, either.” Ruth lowered her hands to stare at me. “That’s right,” I said quietly. “Arnie’s my brother, and I’d do a lot for him. But I didn’t put him in there, and I’m not going to end up in there with him. Escape,” I said bitterly. “Help Arnie escape! Why, it’s fantastic, it’s absurd. Ruth, you know what he did?” I said angrily. “I drove up here Saturday; I come up every month to visit him. I saw him Sunday, and we talked for nearly the full hour; just chitchat, as always; nothing important. He waited till the last few minutes to spring this on me! He had to escape, he was suddenly telling me; he had to, and I was to get hold of you, and we had to help him. There was no time for questions; he told me how to reach you, that we both had to get our time free somehow, move into Marin County close to the prison, and be ready to help. I’m to come back tomorrow for my second visit to hear the rest.” I shook my head. “Then the guard was tapping me on the shoulder. I had to leave, and I left with this terrible feeling of urgency. You know how Arnie can communicate that to you; you know how excited he gets: I didn’t have time to think! I phoned my boss in L.A. from a phone booth, and just quit my job: I didn’t know what else to do. I phoned my landlady, and arranged to have her express my things up here. I visited real-estate agents, and rushed around looking at furnished places for rent all afternoon, and took the house in Mill Valley. And in between, at every available phone booth I came to, I phoned you all afternoon and evening, and couldn’t reach you. Then today — well, you know what today has been like.”

“I know.” She nodded. “When you woke me ringing my doorbell, Ben, you started talking while I was still half asleep. And then all I could think of was what I had to do; get to the office, and arrange to start my vacation. That took some talking! I told them my mother was very sick. Then packing, and moving into a house with an absolute stranger.” She shook her head again.

“Well, there’s time to think now,” I said tiredly, “and it’s time to do it. Damn it,” I said furiously, “other men serve out their time in prison! Arnie can do it, too, without dragging us in there with him. This is just a sudden idea of his; he said so. And he doesn’t know how he’d escape, or even go about trying. Escape from San Quentin.” I said contemptuously. “Look at it! It’s impossible to get a man out of there; at least for us, it is. But it’d be damn easy to get into it trying. Come on,” I said angrily, and turned on the ignition, reaching for the starter button. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll drive you home in the morning, after I go talk to Arnie, and tell him to grow up and behave.” We drove back to the rented house in Mill Valley then, while I wondered if I could get my job back.

The block guard who brought the morning ducats around just before unlock had one for me Monday — Arnold Jarvis, for 9:15 on The Porch, it said — and I was glad I’d made up my mind to have Ben and Ruth get ready and stand by. I didn’t know exactly what was waiting for me this morning, but I knew what it was about and was scared.

I showed up at nine-fifteen, there on The Porch of the Yard Captain’s office; a dozen or so other inmates were already there in blue jeans and work shirts like me, lounging around, waiting, staring out at the Captain’s Garden. I glanced in through the big plate-glass window, and the Disciplinary Committee were all there. The Captain stood at his desk shuffling through his papers and pink charge sheets, wearing a very neat, well-pressed tan uniform as always, and his cap with the gold insignia. He’s a thin-faced, quiet-spoken, smart-as-hell man, maybe forty-five years old. Allingham, one of the associate wardens, and Fengle, one of the prison psychiatrists, were sitting at each side of his desk.

The buzzer sounded at nine-thirty, the Porch guard stuck his head in the office door, then turned and called, “Cahill,” and a heavy-set guy maybe thirty-five years old, with deep black circles under his eyes, walked into the bare little office to stand before the Captain’s desk. It was another hot as hell August day, the door was ajar, and I could hear what went on; it was like a hundred other weekly Disciplinary Committee hearings.

This Cahill had refused to put a pair of shoes under his bunk when a block guard told him to. It turned out they weren’t his shoes, but his cellmate’s in the top bunk, but neither of them told the guard that. Cahill just got stubborn, and wouldn’t pick up the shoes, till the guard got mad, and put him on charges. Now, Cahill’s defense was that they weren’t his shoes. “Something wrong with picking up your cellmate’s shoes?” the Captain asked. “He got athlete’s foot?”

Cahill grinned, and shrugged, and said No.

“All right, then,” says the Captain, “a guard tells you to put away some shoes, you put them away, no matter whose they are. A guard tells you to stuff some shoes down the toilet, you stuff ’em down the toilet! That’s how easy it is to get along in prison, Cahill: just do what you’re told.” They gave him seven days’ isolation, and maybe it was worth it; you couldn’t tell from Cahill’s face.

They had a guy in for fighting, and the Captain picked up his record card.

“ ‘Four days isolation. December, ’54, fighting,’ ” he read from it. “January, February, March, May, June, and July, more fighting — you missed April; must have been sick. Quite a hard-nose, aren’t you, Manfred?”

Manfred, a thin young guy, maybe twenty-three, just shrugged.

“Don’t take nothin’ from nobody, hmm?”

“That’s right,” Manfred said. He drew fourteen days.

They had a colored kid in, nineteen years old. He had rigged up a framework of wire coat hangers, and suspended a can of shellac in it, with a little hole in the cork. The shellac dripped onto the cut end of a loaf of bread underneath it. From the bottom of the loaf, the clear filtered fluid dripped into a funnel stuck into the neck of a narrow-mouthed bottle. He had this rig hidden in a paint locker, in the paint shop where he worked. “A thing I hate to do,” said Allingham. “I hate to phone a man’s relatives and tell them he’s dying in the hospital because he drank shellac, or paint thinner, or something.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man. “You won’t have to phone my relatives.”

“Why not,” says Allingham.

“I haven’t got any,” the man said, and smiled a little. He lost his job and got twenty-nine days, the maximum.

They had a little fat guy in; the block bulls had found a complete dismantled phonograph in his cell, in a surprise shakedown. They had a couple of homosexuals in, a guy who’d torn a corset ad from a prison-library magazine, a man who’d shouted at a woman visitor to the prison on one of the tours they’re always running through the place. They had a fight case; a man had broken another inmate’s arm with an axe he stole from the supply room. They had a guy in who’d been found with a homemade knife in his sock in a shakedown at the industrial-area gate, a guy who’d scratched his name on the painted wall of his cell, and so on; I got tired of listening, and just stood leaning on the rail of The Porch looking out at the Garden. It’s a beautiful garden, all right, maybe a quarter-acre of plants, shrubs, and crisscrossing paths in the northeast corner of the prison; probably the best-tended garden in the world. Across the garden, on the second tier of the old Spanish cell block, one of the old men who live there was leaning on the rail smoking a pipe.

They called me, finally, one of the last to go in; there were only six or eight guys left on The Porch — all from my block I noticed, though I didn’t know any of them personally. “Jarvis,” said the Captain, still looking down at the papers on his desk, “we got some news for you: you and a dozen other guys from your block. It’s about the officer who was hit on the head up on your tier Thursday” — he sat back in his chair suddenly, watching my face.

“Yes, sir,” I nodded.

“It didn’t kill him, didn’t fracture his skull, though it might have. Only gave him a concussion, and a few stitches. Knocked cold, is all: he’s all right now.” He sat there looking up at me, and I didn’t say anything. I knew the guard was all right; this was old news, and it wasn’t why I was here, and I knew it. “Just thought you’d like to have the official word he’s okay,” the Captain said. “You were up on that tier at the time.”

“Yes, sir. I’m glad he’s all right.”

“Then I got more good news for you.” The Captain picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk, then sat looking at me. “Didn’t look as though we would find out who did it. Most of the men were out of the block at the time. But there were a couple dozen loafing around there, including you. Could have been any of you hit the guard up on the tier; we don’t know who. And I thought maybe we never would find out; nobody’d say he saw it. But things are looking up now. Here.” He held out the papers in his hand, and I took them.

There were three papers stapled together, the top one an envelope stamped air mail, special delivery, addressed in pencil to The Warden, San Quentin Prison, California. It was canceled, Green River, Wyoming, Saturday. Under the envelope lay a small piece of rough-textured, blue-lined paper covered with penciled handwriting, with a green-ink time-received stamp on it. 9:31 A.M. yesterday, Sunday. I glanced up at the Captain.

“Go ahead,” he said, “read it.”

I read it. It was short, and to the point, and was signed, Yrs, Ralph Hafek. It said he’d been lying on his bunk up on the third tier, east block, Thursday, when the guard was hit. It said he’d seen the man who did it, and could identify him. He’d said nothing at the time because he was due out on parole Friday morning, and was afraid he’d be held on as a witness if he admitted seeing the assault. Then, home in Wyoming, he’d told his parole officer, who had advised him to testify. He didn’t know the man by name, but could pick him out if he saw him. If they, the prison, would pay his roundtrip fare — he had no money himself — he’d come up and point out the man.

I looked at the third sheet; a white flimsy carbon copy of a letter. It had been written yesterday, addressed to the Department of Corrections, and signed by the Warden. It quoted the letter I’d just read, and requested that the state authorize and issue a check in payment of the man’s railroad fare, and ended by emphasizing the importance of finding the man who struck the guard.

I looked up at the Captain. “Yes, sir?” I laid the papers on his desk.

He grinned suddenly. “This Hafek’s on parole. If he picks out our man it can help him a lot, and he knows it. But the stroke of a pen can send him back here to finish out his term, and he knows that, too. So he’s not fooling around; he’ll pick out our man. We had a phone call from Sacramento; payment’s authorized, and the check will be in the mail tomorrow. We’ll air mail it soon as it gets here, and we’ve already phoned Hafek’s parole officer; Hafek will leave after work Friday, and will be here Saturday morning. Glad, Jarvis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How come?” He leaned forward, staring up at me intently. “You didn’t like that guard; you had trouble with him.”

I shrugged. “We each had our beefs. Doesn’t mean I hit him, though, if that’s what you mean.”

“And yet you look worried.” His voice was very soft and quiet. “You’re pale. Jarvis, really quite pale — did you know that? You look worried; and maybe you should be. Because you know what the punishment is, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me remind you, just the same. So you’ll know how lucky you are — if you didn’t hit that guard.” He picked up a little brown loose-leaf book from his desk, and opened it. “You know about Section 4500 of the California Penal Code, Jarvis?”

“Yes, sir: you don’t have to read it.”

“Don’t like the sound of it, that it, Jarvis? Okay.” He tossed the little book to his desk. “See you Saturday morning, when Hafek arrives. Unless you got something you want to tell me right now?”

“No, sir.”

“Then that’s all: we got no charge sheet on you today. For a change. Just thought you and the other guys in the block when the guard was hit ought to hear the news. Where are you assigned?”

“Furniture factory.”

“Then get back to it,” he said bleakly, and I turned, and walked out.

I was shriveled up inside; I could hardly see, walking back to the furniture factory; I thought I might actually faint, and I didn’t know what I was doing when I got there. I had to escape from San Quentin prison in the next four days — had to — and I didn’t know how. But the thought of Ben and Ruth, outside, getting ready to help, kept me going.

At noon I hurried to the Yard as close to running as we’re allowed. Inside, near the gates, I waited till I spotted my cellmate, a tall, thin, white-haired guy neither old nor young; it’d be hard to guess his age. I walked up to him, and said, “Al, skip lunch. I’ve got to talk to you.” An inmate at Quentin doesn’t have to show up for a meal if he doesn’t want it. Al took a look at my face and nodded, his mouth quirking; he didn’t like missing a meal, but he knew I was serious. We found a spot in the sun, and sat down on the asphalt paving in the big Yard enclosed by the four main cell blocks, our backs against the peach-colored east-block wall. “Al,” I said, “what do you know about escape?”

“Nothin’.”

I nodded, and said, “I know. But you must have seen a fair number of escapes; been around at the time, I mean.” I pulled out cigarettes, gave one to Al, took one myself, and lighted it.

“Oh, yeah,” Al said. “I seen guys try to make it out of here. Nailed up in boxes, lyin’ on top of a truck motor, swimmin’ out to a barge on the Bay, hidin’ under a load of scrap iron, the time they was haulin’ it out of here after the jute mill burned. Once a guy tried it wearin’ a priest’s outfit he stole. You just wait, and maybe, in time, you see some kind of chance, and take it. And with luck you might make it.”

“What if you can’t wait?”

He looked at me; he had a pretty good idea of what I was talking about. “Arnie, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve thought about it, and so has every con here, and every screw, too, for that matter, and I just don’t know how. Once in a while it’s done. A con got out last year, 1954. One day he was just gone, missing at count, and that’s all anybody knows to this day. But get it through your head it’s just short of impossible. Some of these kids” — he shook his head — “the tough hot kids. You can saw out a bar in the front of your cell, you know, any time you want. Get some emery paper from the machine shops, or valve-grinding compound from auto repair. Then unravel a sock; get a supply of thread. Smear vaseline or toothpaste or soap on a thread, scrape the emery off the paper, and run the thread through it. Then saw through the bar with the threads. It’s easy; you can do it in less than a night. Everybody knows it, cons and screws both; cost a mint to equip San Quentin with chilled-steel bars. But so what? These tough hot kids — just fish, most of them, been here a few months — and they cut out of their cells every now and then; and then where are they? They just get the bulls edgy; the bulls go to hunt them out, and how do they know what the kids are carrying? Damn fool kids can get killed, and some do. They find them half an hour after the short count — hiding out in the block, or the Yard, or somewhere else. You want to get out, Arnie. Out means the other side of the wall.”

“But how? Damn it, how!” I drew hard on my cigarette, sitting there against the wall, then threw it down and crushed it out under my shoe.

“Well,” he said gently, “figure what you’re up against. This place is a hundred years old. They got you in a place where men been working and thinking over a hundred years how to keep you in it. Long before you was ever born, there been guys, and damn smart ones, figuring how to keep you right where you are. Ways there used to be to get out, they been corrected, like the guy swam out to a barge I was tellin’ you about. And they got it worked out awful damn tight — so tight. Arnie, I don’t know how to beat it. Just a wall’s all that’s between you and outside. But you can’t go over it; there’s men on top with guns who won’t let you. And inside, there’s a place you got to be nearly every minute right around the clock from your first day to your last, and they got it worked out to see that you are; I don’t need to tell you. You’re missing, they know it and hunt you right down. It ain’t like the movies, Arnie. Oh, hell” — he shrugged — “I ain’t talking about walkin’ off the farm, or out of the camps. I mean from in here, where they really aim to keep you.” He put a hand on my arm to shut me up before I spoke.

“So here’s what I mean, Arnie. You know what you got to do to beat that? I thought of it a long time, and what you got to do, you got to do what ain’t possible. Short of crazy blind luck, all the ways you think maybe you see, just looking around, they ain’t ways at all. They got you stopped long ago; they got them all figured long before you did. What you got to do — the only thing you can do, Arnie — is figure how to do the impossible; that’s the only thing they ain’t guarded against.” He leaned closer. “What I mean, there’s walls all around you. But there’s nothin’ across the top outside” — he gestured with his chin at the blue California sky high over our heads above the towering cell block roofs. “They got nothin’ between you and blue sky, Arnie, because it’s impossible for a man to fly, ain’t it? Impossible to go straight up. So they don’t guard against it. What you got to do’s figure out how to fly, how to go straight up. Or like this; there’s guards on the wall. Try throwin’ up a rope, and they see you. But if you was invisible, Arnie, they couldn’t. But that’s impossible; so they ain’t guarded against it. You got to figure how to be invisible. Or anything else that just can’t be. How do you walk through a wall? How can you be in two places, maybe, at the very same time? How do you disappear right under their eyes? How do you hide, maybe, where there just ain’t a place a man can hide in? I ain’t talkin’ foolish, Arnie. They found out what was possible long before you ever heard of San Quentin. You’re in a hurry, Arnie, you got to figure out how to do the impossible.”

We were silent for a long time just sitting in the sun, staring out at the Yard. Then Al said softly, “Once in a long while, Arnie, some guys — a guy who knows what I been tryin’ to tell you — he makes it. And they never hear of him again. Whether you’re that guy, I don’t know. I ain’t; I don’t know how to do what ain’t possible. So I just serve out my time.”

“You’ve done a lot, haven’t you, Al?”

“Three terms. Fourteen out of the last sixteen years. And a lot to go.”

“And you just serve it out.”

“That’s right.”

“How? How in hell do you do it! How do you do a long time, year after damn year!”

“A day at a time,” he said. “And I sleep a lot.” Guys were coming out into the Yard from the mess halls now, and Al got to his feet. “Good luck,” he said quietly, then walked away.

In the factory, I claimed to have stomach cramps, got a pass back to the block, and lay down on my bunk there. Ben would visit me tomorrow. I had the afternoon, the evening, and the night to figure out how to do the impossible.

Ruth’s packed bags were on the floor by the front door when I got back from the prison Tuesday. She was sitting in the big living-room easy chair smoking, waiting for me to drive her home to her San Francisco apartment, and to hear how Arnie had taken our decision. She’d been smoking a lot; the ashtray beside her was half full. I didn’t say anything right away; closing the front door behind me, I just looked at her, then walked over to the davenport, and sat down across the room from her.

“Well?” she said angrily, impatiently. I knew how she was feeling.

I nodded, “I saw him. And told him.”

She wanted to put off hearing about it, then. “Maybe you could tell me about it driving over,” she said, and started to stand.

“I think you better hear this before you leave,” I said, and she stared at my face for a moment, then sat back in her chair. “I told you escaping was a sudden idea of Arnie’s,” I said. “And it is. This last Thursday he struck a guard from behind, up on a tier of his cell block, with a glass insulator he’d stolen. He didn’t think anyone was around to see him; the block was nearly empty at the time.”

“Struck a guard?” She was frowning. “Ben, why?”

I shook my head wearily. “I don’t know, Ruth. He tried to tell me. He said the guard was a punk; a wise young punk, he said, who liked to give orders, and that he gave one too many.” I shook my head again. “He says you get charged up in prison; he says he’s known men to rip washbasins off walls with their hands, for no reason they could tell anyone, but that he knew why. Men clog up the plumbing and flood their cells, they tear up mattresses, or anything they can lay their hands on. Others fight, and Arnie hit a guard.” I shrugged. “They don’t know who did it; there were a couple dozen men in the block, and any of them might have done it. But an inmate saw it. He was due out on parole in the morning, and kept his mouth shut till he was out, but now they’re bringing him to the prison; he’ll arrive Saturday morning — this Saturday, Ruth — to point out the man who struck that guard.”

She was nodding slowly. “But — is the guard all right?”

“Sure. He was knocked out. They had to take a couple of stitches, but he’s all right now.”

“And Arnie wants to escape to avoid punishment?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what’s the punishment?”

I could feel my face go pale. “Ruth, they’ll execute him.”

She didn’t understand. “Execute him? How do you mean?”

“I mean in the gas chamber, damn it!” I shouted it, getting to my feet, glaring down at her. “They’ll try him for assault, find him guilty, and condemn him to death! Send him to Condemned Row, and execute him — that’s what I mean!”

She was shaking her head. “No, Ben. They couldn’t. Not for striking a man who wasn’t even hurt.”

“They can! They will!” Then I stopped shouting. “Listen, Ruth,” I said softly and urgently, “it was hard for me to believe and accept it, too. It’s still hard to believe.” I shook my head. “But it’s true; it’s the law in the great state of California. And it’s enforced! Section 4500 of the Penal Code. Arnie quoted it to me; he knows it word for word. Listen! ‘Every person undergoing a life sentence in a State prison of this State, who, with malice aforethought, commits an assault upon the person of another with a deadly weapon or instrument, or by any means of force likely to produce great bodily injury, is punishable with death.’ ”

“But Arnie hasn’t a life sentence!”

“Five to life is his sentence. He wouldn’t even serve the five years, of course; it doesn’t really mean life imprisonment. But that’s how the sentence reads. Ruth, he’s technically a lifer.”

She was staring at me across the room. “And they’d execute him? For striking a guard?”

I nodded. “They would. They do. There are two men on Condemned Row in San Quentin now, for just that reason. Ruth! Arnie’s got to escape! And before this next Saturday morning!”

After a moment she said, “And you’re going to help him?”

I shrugged angrily, and got up, and began pacing the room. “What else?”

“Ben, how?” she said.

I sat down and told her. I explained in detail what Arnie had worked out the night before, lying on his bunk till daylight, and when finally I finished, Ruth was shaking her head.

“No,” she whispered. “No, Ben” — she was still shaking her head — “you don’t have to do that; not even for Arnie. And no matter what it means. Ben, nobody has to do that.” She sat silent for several long moments. Then she nodded at her bags by the door, “All right,” she said. “Then I’ll have to help; you can’t do it alone.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t do it alone. Ruth, I hate to ask you, but...”

“But we can’t let Arnie die. All right, Ben.” She stood up. “We’ve got a lot to get done by two o’clock in the morning.”

By noon we had everything we needed listed, checked, and rechecked to make absolutely certain we’d included every last item; then Ruth made us some lunch with some supplies we’d laid in the day before.

At just after one o’clock we walked out of a parking lot near Mission Street in San Francisco, heading for Market Street. On Market we separated; we’d divided the list, and were to meet at the car at two-thirty. We were to shop only in the biggest, busiest store we could find.

At three-fifteen we were home in the attached garage, the big garage door closed, unloading our packages. Ruth had bought jeans and a work shirt with snap fasteners at the big J. C. Penney’s on Market. She had bought half a dozen pints of cream, and three one-pound tins of coffee at the Emporium, and another half dozen pints of cream and four one-pound tins of coffee at the Crystal Palace. In a big supermarket she had bought sandwich meat, cheese, bread, fruit, and cookies, and eight more pints of cream. She had withdrawn money from her bank, and she’d bought four big packages of absorbent cotton at a drugstore. I had bought a square of darkgreen canvas, half of a pup tent, at an Army surplus store, and a trenching tool. At a hardware store I had bought a two-foot length of pipe, a square of fine screening, a small can of brown enamel, a cheap paint brush, and eight rolls of black friction tape. At a second hardware store I had bought a dozen large bolts and nuts, a good flashlight, two spare bulbs, half a dozen spare dry cells, a large coil of copper wire, and a hundred-foot coil of new quarter-inch rope. On the way home, I had stopped at a lumber yard in the Sunset district, and had bought half a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood, which I had put into the car trunk. While I was doing that, Ruth walked across to a supermarket and bought half a dozen more pints of cream.

In the garage, our packages unloaded, Ruth put the blue jeans and work shirt into the automatic washer there, and poured in some bleach. There were hand tools and a makeshift workbench in the garage, and I marked off my plywood sheet into eight equal squares, and began sawing them out. The washing machine on, Ruth went into the kitchen, poured the cream she’d bought down the sink, and then began washing out the more than two dozen containers. When she finished, she emptied the six pounds of coffee into a paper bag and dropped it into the garbage can near the side door of the garage. I had my eight squares of wood clamped together by then, and a big J sketched on the surface of the outer one. I began sawing out this J shape.

We were busy every second, both of us; at eight-thirty we knocked off, got into the car, and drove out to a drive-in a couple miles north on Highway 101 for supper. We didn’t waste any time, and were back before nine-thirty; it was dark. I parked at the curb so I’d have more room to work in the garage, and we started across the lawn toward the front door. A man’s voice called, “Evening,” and I glanced around. A man was in the adjoining yard, a vague dark bulk in the faint light from the street lamp half a block away.

“Evening,” I answered, my voice instinctively cautious, and I was aware that my heart was beating faster. The indistinct silhouette grew. The man was walking silently toward us across the front lawn, then stopping before us, at our door, a tall, middle-aged, fat man, hatless and bald, his face large and round.

“Mr. Nova,” he said, nodding abruptly, “your neighbor from next door. Just out catchin’ a breath,” he said slyly as though not expecting to be believed, “and saw you drive up. Thought I’d say howdy to my new neighbors.”

“Glad to see you,” I said, and we shook hands. My hands aren’t small, but this man’s huge hand, soft but strong, swallowed mine. “This is my wife,” I said, “and we’re the Jarvises.”

“Evenin’,” he said to Ruth, and she responded.

I stood with the door key in my hand, waiting for him to say something that would let us say good night, and get on into the house.

But instead he glanced up at the night sky, hands shoved into his back pockets as though he had all the time in the world, and said, “Nice out tonight. Been for a drive?”

“Yeah, little drive,” I said. It was awkward, just standing there, not asking him in, but I couldn’t; we had too much to do, and he just stood there, too, in the dim light from the living room where we’d left a lamp on, nodding his head, eyes narrowed, smiling at me shrewdly, I didn’t know why. He was dressed in what looked like Army suntans; tan wash trousers, and a shirt, open at the collar. He couldn’t be in the Army though, I realized; he was fifty-five years old, maybe, with a great paunch beginning high on his chest and curving down through his belly; he was broad everywhere, from shoulders to hips, a slow-moving, powerful man evenly overlaid with fat.

“Seen you before,” he said softly, watching me, and one little eye narrowed in almost a wink, as though we were sharing some lewd joke.

“Oh?”

“Yep.” The exasperating nodding started again, while he watched me shrewdly. Then he leaned toward me, hands still in his back pockets, and said, “Out to the prison.” I felt my face muscles go slack.

“Oh,” he said, wagging a great meaty hand in reassurance, standing comfortably back on his heels now, staring down at me. “Don’t worry.” He grinned at me, then winked at Ruth. “I’m a guard out at Quentin,” he continued, then immediately added, “correctional officer, I mean,” and his paunch shook in amusement, while he glanced from one to the other of us. “I used to be a guard” — his small, blue eyes twink maliciously — “years ago. In the old Quentin I was a guard, a bull, a screw.” Deliberately he straightened his face into mocking approval, and said, “But now I’m an officer,” and again his paunch shook, his amused eyes inviting us to share the joke. “Good thing, too,” he added with intentional hypocrisy. “Much better this way. Treat ’em decent. Like human beings. Movies, classes, television even. Much better, naturally.” His voice had lost interest in what he was saying. “Seen you goin’ into the Visitor’s Room,” he said. “Month or so ago, maybe. Think it was you, anyway.”

I nodded. “I’m sure it was.”

“Well” — again he wagged his hand — “don’t worry. I see a lot of people from around here out to the prison; people got relatives there. I’m used to it — never give it a thought. Who is it, your brother?”

I wanted to drive a fist straight into that fat belly. “I’m not worried, Mr. Nova,” I said angrily. “Yes, it’s my brother. And while it’s not exactly something I’ve told everyone I know or meet, it’s no big secret as far as I’m concerned.” Oh, I was shouting silently, why does he have to live next door?

“Course not.” He smiled imperturbably, then winked confidentially. “Moved here. I expect, close to the prison, so’s you could visit him regular.”

None of your business, you fat prying slob! “Well,” I said, “that’s partly it.”

“Be glad to look him up.” Eyes narrowed, he watched me. “I can do that easy, you know; might help him out, maybe. Guard can be of help to a con. Inmate, I mean.”

“Oh” — I paused, forcing myself to act as though I were considering a friendly gesture — “I think not. Thanks just the same, but I’m afraid he’d feel he was a source of embarrassment to us if he knew a San Quentin official was a neighbor of ours. He’s doing all right; he’s settled down to do his time.” Am I protesting too much? Does he already know all about Arnie?

Nova was nodding again. “I’ll check up on him anyway; let you know how he’s makin’ out. Do it on the q.t.” He winked again. “Won’t tell him I know you.” He watched me, waiting for an answer, and reluctantly I had to nod. “Well,” he said, glancing at the closed front door. “I’ll be gettin’ on home. Just wanted to say howdy,” and we answered something or other and went on into the house, as he walked across the front lawns toward his own.

“Of all the unbelievable bad luck,” Ruth murmured, dropping onto the davenport, when the door was closed again. “Of all the places we could have moved into, we had to move next door to a San Quentin guard.”

I shrugged, and sat down in the big chair. “Well, it’s a big prison,” I said, as though I weren’t worried. “This county must be full of San Quentin people; probably most of them live here in Marin. Hardly a town you could go to, I’m certain, without guards and every other kind of San Quentin official living in it. Bad luck to move right next door to one, but not so strange.”

“Ben, what do you honestly feel?”

I stared down at the floor for a minute, fingers playing with my hat brim. Then I looked up. “He’s a prying, sadistic-minded, dangerous trouble-maker.”

She was nodding. “There’s something — I don’t know what — nasty about him.”

I shrugged, and said, “Yeah.” There was nothing more to say. There are times when you somehow know you’ve met a natural-born enemy. “Well,” I said, and got to my feet, “we’ve got a lot to do,” and Ruth nodded, and stood up, and we went out to the garage again.

We finished at one o’clock, everything done and ready, and by then it was too late to go to bed. Ruth made coffee, and we sat in the living room, the drapes pulled tight shut, just talking about anything and everything except what was about to happen. At two o’clock I shaved, so closely it hurt, changed clothes, and we went out to the car and backed it out into the street, Ruth at the wheel, as quietly as possible, only the parking lights on. I closed the garage door. Then we headed west toward Highway 101.

At two-twenty-five, then, Wednesday morning, we turned off 101 onto the narrow county road that winds through the Marin hills toward the San Rafael ferry. I was wearing the blue denims and work shirt Ruth had bought, washed out and faded now, and I wore black shoes, shorts, and a white T-shirt. Between my feet on the floor of the car lay a great bundle wrapped in the square of dark-green canvas I’d bought. Within three minutes or less we were passing the wire-mesh steel fencing that marks the outer-most boundaries of the San Quentin Prison reservation, and now I said quietly, “Anywhere along here,” and Ruth pulled off the road, then stopped and switched off the lights.

“Well,” I said, “see you soon,” and managed to smile and add, “I hope.”

But Ruth didn’t smile. In the starlit darkness I saw her head move as she nodded; then she leaned toward me, and I saw her face, strained and white. “Be careful, Ben,” she whispered. Suddenly she reached up, put both palms on my cheeks, drew my face toward her, and stared at me. “Oh, Ben, be careful!” she said again, and I put my arms around her and let myself yield to the comfort of it, holding her close, more scared than I’d ever been in my life. Then, knowing I had to leave now if I was going to be able to, I drew back, kissed her once, quickly — that last comfort I had to have — then reached for the door handle, and the canvas-wrapped bundle.

A moment later, standing on the dirt shoulder of the road, my arm moving to close the car door, I said, “Get going, Ruthie!” Then the car was sliding past me, picking up speed, and I turned, clambered a few feet up the dirt embankment to the fence, and threw my bundle over it. I climbed the fence, dropped to the other side, then stood there in the middle of the night, low-ebb time for the human body and spirit, knowing that I was about to walk into the greatest danger of my life, and that I had no stomach for it. Then I began to climb the hill before me, guiding myself to its top by the silhouettes of trees at its crest.

It took me fifteen minutes, in the darkness, before I stood looking down the gentle slope of its other side. Ahead and below me, spread out like a great map, lay the prison in black shadow and yellow electric light. I’d been through the prison twice, after Arnie was confined there; anyone can go through it — they have scheduled tours every Thursday afternoon. So I knew what I was looking at now. Far ahead lay the enclosed area of the prison itself, its sides formed partly by cell blocks and other prison buildings joined together, and partly by concrete walls. Directly below me at the base of the hill lay the prison industrial area, a concrete-walled rectangle directly adjoining the prison area, its south wall the north wall of the prison, and I began walking toward it down the dark hill.

In each of its four factorylike buildings, dim lights were burning, and there were more lights suspended from the twenty-foot concrete walls, shining down into the area. But now, work long since over for the day, most of the area except for the wall lights around its edges was dark, the buildings empty except for an inmate fire guard in each, Arnie had told me. At the four corners of the walls, and at scattered intervals between them, I saw the black silhouettes of guard towers. The area cleared now except for the four honor men in the buildings, the gate leading into the prison area locked, and all men accounted for, the towers were unmanned. But what if they’re manned tonight? The words spoke themselves in my mind. What if there’s a man with a gun in one of those wall posts? But I knew there wasn’t, I told myself; high above the prison on its standard hung the green light; all was quiet, the prison was in normal condition. Picking my way down the hill. I thought, The light’ll be red before long.

At the bottom of the hill, only a narrow road, then a dozen feet of sloping bare ground lay between me and the black rising bulk of the wall. Kneeling beside my bundle six or eight yards from the road — ready to drop face down in the darkness the instant a car came along the road — I reached under the knotted corners of my pack, and found the coil of new quarter-inch rope I’d put there. I brought it out, pulling with it the four-pronged hook I’d fastened to the rope end with a braided pleat. I’d made the hook at home this afternoon; four J-shaped hooks sawed out of plywood, the shafts bolted together, then wrapped with copper wire. Every last inch of the surface of this four-pronged grapple I’d padded with absorbent cotton, and wrapped tight with black tape. Another identical hook and rope coil still lay in my canvas bundle. Unbuckling my belt, I slipped an end under the knotted corners of my pack, cinched my belt tight, then kneeling there motionless, listened and watched. I neither saw nor heard anything, and so could not postpone what I had to do.

I stood and walked forward across the silent road, the canvas pack bumping my knees, then clambered down the short bank to the base of the wall. The coiled rope hanging in my left hand, I held the grapple in my right hand by the last few inches of rope. Once more I listened, watching the road behind and above me. Then I swung the hook back and forth twice, drew my arm far back, and heaved the hook up underhanded and with all my strength. Through three full seconds of silence the rope coils flashed off the palm of my hand, then the hook struck and fell with a dull clatter.

The top of this wall, I knew — I’d seen it in daylight — was flat concrete. Running the length of all the walls were waist-high, continuous metal hand-rails; it would be almost impossible to toss up a four-pronged grapple without its engaging some part of the guide rails, and now I pulled in the slack, and the rope tightened. Then I lifted my feet, and the rope held fast, straining and creaking.

I climbed it hand over hand, the first fifteen feet rapidly and easily, the last five or six in a desperate scrabbling agony of rapidly draining strength. Just short of the top, I hung, afraid I’d have to drop or slide back; then I managed one last heave, the sweat pouring, caught the wall edge, and in the instant before my arms gave out, I heaved my upper body onto the wall. Then I drew up my legs and lay flat, my arms strengthless.

If anyone had been in the wall towers or in the area below they’d have shot, or shouted, or been on me by now. But nothing happened; from far out on San Francisco Bay — I could see its buoy lights, the lights of a ferry approaching the slip on this side, and the glow of San Francisco far off to the south — I heard a boat whistle, low and mournful, then felt silence all around me.

I lay in darkness, but just below me the dozen feet of bare ground between the wall and the north end of the furniture factory was clearly lighted by wall lights; and the industrial area was patrolled, Arnie said, at least once every night. But there was nothing to do but what I now did. I lowered my hook till it touched the ground, then looped the rope around the base of a guide-rail post, its doubled length hanging to the ground. I unfastened my bundle, dropped it, then slid down the rope into San Quentin prison, completely visible if there was anyone to see me. My feet touched ground. I yanked the rope down after me, scooped up my hook and bundle, and ran to the corner of the furniture factory.

Around the corner, against the west wall of the factory, lay a great uneven silhouette in the darkness well past the range of the wall lights. This was the huge stack of wood crates Arnie had described. They were empties, used as needed to crate prison-made office desks. After a moment, I slipped around the building corner, and moved ahead into the darkness toward the crates.

As Arnie had promised, they were not carefully stacked. The gaps between them measured from one or two inches to more than a foot, and near the center of the great stack I found a wide gap and pushed myself into it, dragging and forcing my bundle in after me. By feel, I found a crate projecting some inches beyond the bottom of the crate on top of it, and climbed into it, rapping my head sharply against the projecting corner of another. Made to hold an office desk, it was roomy enough; I could lie almost flat, my head pillowed on my bundle, my knees bent only slightly. Now, more afraid than I remembered ever having been before, with the persistent, depressing fear of a man lying helpless in a trap, I didn’t expect to sleep. But, worn out physically and emotionally, I did, almost instantly.

Many hours later, at daylight, there was the sound of hundreds of voices all around me. I awoke quietly, knowing where I was. Moving very slowly then, my muscles stiff and my body awkward, careful never to slip or fall, I got down out of my crate, and stood in the narrow aisle I’d pushed into last night, standing well back from the front. Blue-denimed, blue-shirted men streamed past the narrow opening, alone, in pairs, and in groups, most of them talking, and I smiled a little; much of the talk reminded me of the Army, nearly every adjective an obscenity; I was surprised at the amount of laughter. Then a blue-shirted shoulder leaned beside the opening of my aisle, partly blocking it, and I saw a profile, Arnie’s. He said quietly and rapidly. “Are you in there? Ben, are you there? Just say ‘yes’ if you are.”

“Yes,” I answered.

Arnie was silent, and a little group of men passed by. Then he said, “How you doing? You okay? Talk till I cough, then shut up.”

“I’m okay, Arnie; I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“You bring anything to read?”

“No.” The notion astounded me.

“Too bad. Well, I’ll—” He coughed twice, and a moment later steps passed, and a voice said, “Hi, Arnie.”

“Charley,” Arnie answered pleasantly. “How goes it?”

“Okay.” The voice was well past the crates now.

“I’ll see you at four,” Arnie said. “And thanks, Benny,” he added softly.

“Okay, Arnie, see you later.” The blue-shirted shoulder moved, and was gone.

At noon I ate one of the waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches in my canvas bundle, and sipped from one of the cardboard cream containers Ruth had washed out, filled with water, and sealed with tape. By one o’clock, the sun beating down on the exposed pile of crates, it was terribly and oppressively hot, and I was wet with sweat. But I endured it, dozing a little, or simply lying there staring up at the bottom of the big crate above me. At three-thirty, I again climbed down into the little aisle, and the air was cooler, there was some circulation, and occasionally a warm breeze, and presently my clothes were no longer conspicuously wet.

Again the stream of blue-denimed men flowed past me, in the opposite direction now, and almost immediately a blue-shirted back leaned against the narrow opening, completely covering it. I could hear the prisoners stream on past the crates, and occasionally one or more of them would speak to Arnie, and he’d answer, his voice pleasant and unconcerned.

He changed position, leaning negligently against the end of a crate on one shoulder, still blocking most of the opening. And now, his face in profile to me, I could see that he held a lighted cigarette in his hand. Bringing the cigarette to his mouth, he murmured, “Are you all right Ben? Just answer yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“You out of the crate?”

“Yes.”

“All right; be ready to move. This is the bad moment. Benny; the guards are still on the walls, and there’s one who can see me. I’m watching him; he’s paying no attention. Far as he knows, I’m just standing here waiting for a friend from the fact—” He coughed, and several men approached, then passed us. “Move out now, Ben; come forward till you’re right behind me.” Again he leaned with his back to the opening.

I crept forward, and touched Arnie’s back.

“Take my ID card out of my back pocket.”

I felt in his back pocket, touched the little plastic-sealed card, and pulled it out. “Keep it in your shirt pocket; whatever you do, don’t lose it.”

We waited, then Arnie again turned his head, and bringing his cigarette to his mouth, said, “When I say now, just step out, and stand here talking to me.”

Two men passed, talking, and the moment they passed, Arnie said, “Now,” and I stepped out of the aisle into the daylight, and stood facing him.

“Smile, Ben! We’re just a couple of cons standing here talking.” I managed a smile, and Arnie smiled back, and said, “All set, now? You know what to do, Ben?” and I nodded, still smiling.

Four inmates were approaching from around the corner of the quonset-hut auto-repair shop twenty feet across the way from the furniture factory by which we stood; as they passed, one of them said. “Hi, Arnie,” glancing at me without interest.

Arnie replied, looking without seeming to at the wall tower ten yards or so to the south, and I couldn’t help it, I had to look, too. The guard was leaning on his forearms, the upper part of his body outside the open window of the watch post, staring down into the industrial area, but looking off to the west. Nevertheless, I knew we were completely within his range of vision. I turned to speak to Arnie, but he was gone, and before I could speak, he whispered at me harshly. “Move, Ben!” he said, and I saw his strained face in the shadows between the crates, and I turned and walked after the four inmates just ahead, taking each step in the absolute certainty of hearing a shout from behind me.

But I reached the front corner of the building, and in the moment of turning glanced back at the wall guard; he was leaning as before, staring out over the prison in a posture conveying his boredom and relief that one more tour of duty was nearly over.

And now I was part of a thin straggle of identically dressed men from all parts of the industrial area moving toward the wall gate ahead; and then I stopped dead in my tracks at what I saw. A shakedown was going on at the gates, and all I could do, feeling sick with fear, was join it, and I walked on till I reached the end of the line of men at the gate.

I watched what happened; as each man reached the head of the line, he lifted both arms, straight out at his sides. The tan-uniformed guard facing the line — a thin blond man of thirty — would stoop, grip the inmate’s ankles, then run his hands up the outside of his trousers, down the insides, then up the man’s ribs, and out along his arms. Then, at his nod, the man would step forward, and walk out the gate, his face expressionless.

My turn came incredibly fast; the shakedowns were being conducted with unbelievable speed, a few seconds to each man. And suddenly there were only three men in front of me, and I knew what was going to happen. The guard’s hands sliding up along my ribs and feeling the powerful thump of my heart, he’d peer at me closely, then say, Who the hell are you? You’re not a San Quentin man at all! The man at the head of the line dropped his arms as the man before me stepped forward, raising his. The tan sleeves moved, searching him, shaking him down for anything stolen from the shops or factories which might conceivably be sharpened into a weapon. Then the man dropped his arms, and I stepped forward, arms extended, and I knew my face was chalk white.

I felt the hands squeeze my ankles, flash up my trouser legs, then down on the insides, felt them brush my ribs, then slide out the lengths of my arms, and from the corners of my eyes, staring straight ahead. I saw the guard nod perfunctorily, not even glancing at my face, and I walked forward toward the gate, knowing — really knowing for the first time — that what Arnie had told me was incredibly true. Dressed in blue denims and work shirt, and following the routine of the prison, he said, I’d be lost among five thousand similar men, and not a man of the prison from the Warden on down could question my presence. Now I knew it was fact.

I simply followed the men ahead of me on through the prison, turning when they did, staring down at the ground, the asphalt paving, or the concrete we walked on, as though lost in thought. We passed a flat-roofed building of ancient brick, three or four stories tall, its upper windows boarded. In the distance, I glimpsed a low stone building, and recognized the old Spanish cell block built over a century before. The straggle of men ahead passed through the open gate of a wire-mesh fence, and then I passed through it, too. Three guards, one with the collar ornaments of a lieutenant, stood beside it, talking, staring absently at the prisoners passing through the gate beside them. Then I was past them, and in the vast San Quentin Yard.

The sight and sound slashed at my senses, and I stopped, staring around me. The sound was a roaring murmur; thousands of voices in an enormous open rectangle surrounded by concrete walls. And the sight was a great stretch of asphalt pavement on which stood or moved thousands of identically dressed men, the whole area completely cut off from the rest of the world. Suddenly I recognized it; like most other Americans, wherever they live, I’d seen it before — in a dozen movies filmed in California. Here it was, the great paved yard, its background the concrete walls of the cell blocks. The roar of mingled voices and the reality of the mass of blue-clad bodies were a shock to my senses, and I knew that confusion could overcome me, and that I could make a terrible and irretrievable mistake in the next moments.

Even as I watched, the mass of men around me was thinning, and I saw that men were streaming into the cell blocks through each of several great riveted doors, and I knew there wasn’t much time. Within minutes I had to find, and be inside, a cell; one certain cell, and that cell only, out of thousands of identical cells in one of these four great cell blocks joined end to end to enclose the great Yard I stood in.

East block, I said to myself; that was the block to my left, and I turned toward it, then stopped. Men were entering the east block, apparently, by one of two doors; which one was mine? One door lay far ahead to the south, at the other end of the Yard; the other was directly to my left across the Yard. I made myself think. The men at my left must be entering the north block, not the east; I could see no other entrance for the north block. The east block entrance must lie ahead to the south. There were far fewer men in the Yard now; they numbered in the hundreds, not thousands, and I began to hurry.

Once again, passing through the great cell block doorway. I stopped dead in my tracks, and the man behind me bumped into me, and cursed. I was inside a great concrete shell stretching far off into the distance before me, and soaring high overhead. It suggested an enormous dirigible hangar I’d once been in, only the inside of this huge structure wasn’t empty. In it stood another distinctly separate structure touching the concrete shell which enclosed it only at the floor. It was a high spidery-appearing structure composed mainly of vertical steel bars, and I understood what I was seeing. These were steel-barred cages, the cells, side by side, and stretching off into the distance before me in dwindling perspective. Five layers of cells, one on top of the other, rose up toward the ceiling; door after door after iron-barred door, and before each of the upper four tiers hung a concrete paved steel walkway. They were reached by an iron stairway at each end of the cell-block, and I saw men swarming up them, and along the walkways, and entering their cells, the entire block an echoing cavern of sound.

Following the men who had been passing around me, I climbed the nearest stairway to the third tier, repeating Arnie’s cell number to myself — 1042. 1042 — over and again. Turning onto the third-tier walkway, I saw the cell numbers stenciled over each steel-barred door. The first read 1291, the next 1290, then 1289, 1288; the cells stretched off ahead of me, and I began to hurry along the walkway, aware that most of the cells I was passing were already occupied, hearing the murmuring conversations of the men inside them.

I was almost running — there weren’t many men left outside now. 1233, 1232... 1196, 1195... 1148, 1147, 1146; I reached the last cell, far down at the other end of the block, and the number above it was 1100, and there were no more cells. There was no 1042.

I simply stood there, mouth hanging open, and I did not know what to do. I started to turn back, knew it was useless, then stopped again, Oh, damn Arnie, damn him; he said his cell was ten fort — actually running. I turned the corner, ran twenty-five feet, rounded the next corner, and there they were, a second great bank of cells back to back with the first, stretching ahead before me. 1001, 1002 — there was only one other man on the entire length of the walkway now, and he turned into a cell. I ran at top speed — 1034, 1035, 1036...

Then here was 1040, 1041, the walkway utterly deserted now by everyone else, and I stepped in through the half-open door of cell 1042, the other occupant staring at me, and pulled the door closed. Instantly, just outside the cell door, there was the chunking sound of heavy metal dropping onto metal. An immensely long steel bar, half the length of the tier, had been dropped into place by a hand-operated lever, to slide over the top edges of the long row of cell doors into heavy L-brackets riveted to each door, and I was locked in cell 1042 of San Quentin prison.

“Just made it,” the lean, white-haired man in the cell with me said.

“Yeah,” I nodded, and he turned to the rear, lifting a newspaper from the top of the two bunks fastened to the wall beside me. Leaning on the tiny washbasin fastened to the plaster wall at the end of the cell, he began to read, and I sat down on the lower bunk, Arnie’s bed, and began reassuring myself with what Arnie had told me. This morning Arnie had told his cellmate, this man at the washbasin, that tonight he was going to switch cells; that he was going to visit an unnamed friend in another cell. I was his friend’s cellmate, trading places with Arnie for the night. Switching cells, Arnie had explained to me, was absolutely forbidden, and severely punished when detected. Yet it happened often and regularly, for a variety of reasons, because it was almost impossible to detect. There were nearly five thousand men confined in San Quentin’s four main cell blocks, and simply counting them four times every day was time-consuming enough. To check the actual identity of each man in each of several thousand cells was an impossibility, practically speaking. On the rare occasions when it had to be done, it took hours. In the next few minutes, as on day after routine day, for this cell to contain two blue-denimed men was enough for the guard who would soon glance in, lips moving as he counted the tier.

Far at the other end of the tier walkway I heard footsteps; a guard beginning his count of the tier, and I went rigid in spite of all I had told myself, certain that he would not pass this cell without knowing I didn’t belong here.

“Hot today, wasn’t it?” the bored voice said; I looked up to see Arnie’s cellmate staring down at me over his newspaper.

“Yeah,” I nodded, listening to the footsteps, much nearer, much louder.

“You workin’?”

The steps were coming fast; it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying to me. “No, unassigned.”

“You a fish?”

This was dangerous; a fish, I knew, was a new prisoner, and I couldn’t understand how he could have guessed I was strange to this place. I simply nodded, turning to glance boredly out through the cell door, trying to end the conversation. But I heard him step quickly toward me, and as I turned to glance up, he stepped past me to stand at the front of the cell, hands clasping the bars.

Then, almost too late — the footsteps outside at the next cell — I jumped up, to stand at the bars, hands gripping them, and the guard was at the cell door while I stood frozen, actually holding my breath, and then he was gone without even breaking his stride. Still standing at the bars unable to move, as Arnie’s cellmate turned away, I realized that the guard was actually counting the entire tier in only the brief time it took him to walk its length rapidly. Then, hands trembling a little, I turned to my bunk again, knowing how close I had come to having the guard stop at this cell and reprimand me, and for all I knew, to realize that I was not who I should have been. For the guard had to see us at this count, close up, standing on our feet, hands on the bars; false counts had been made, Arnie had explained, with a dummy lying in a bunk where a man should have been. And I sat wondering how I could remember all the details of San Quentin routine Arnie had told me, and when I would make a disastrous slip.

The count has to be right! It was a silent shout of sudden remembrance in my mind, and now it was more than I could take, and I simply lay down on the bunk facing the wall, knees drawn up, to endure in helplessness the very worst moments so far. For if today there was a hideout, a prisoner missing from his cell, the count now going on would reveal it, and a search would immediately begin. Though they were not searching for Arnie at all (there was a blue-denimed man, already counted, lying where Arnie ought to be), they would nevertheless find him. Among the first and obvious places to be searched would be the big pile of crates in which Arnie was now hidden. And the moment they discovered him would be disastrous for both of us.

I lay wondering what the chances of a hideout were. They were neither frequent nor infrequent at Quentin, Arnie had said. They happened not every day or even every week, but in the course of a year there could be a fair number of them, and on any one day the danger of a hideout — as the preliminary to an escape attempt, or for no reason a man could put into words — was real.

“Slow count tonight,” Arnie’s cellmate said quietly, and I couldn’t help it, I rose up on one elbow and stared at him.

For a moment I couldn’t talk, and then when I did, all I could do was stupidly repeat, “Slow count?” I had supposed it would take much longer than this.

“Yep,” he nodded. “Shoulda had the all-clear by now.”

I had to say it. “A hideout?” Then I waited, almost cringing.

He nodded. “Could be. Hope not, though. Last hideout, a month ago — wasn’t you here? — it took an hour to find him; we had supper an hour and a half late.” He shrugged. “Probably some dumb screw can’t count straight; it usually is.” He raised his paper again.

I was more frightened than I could bear; I had to get my mind off it, and I glanced around the cell I was trapped in. For the first time I really saw it, and I was suddenly astonished. The cell I lay in was incredibly tiny; actually smaller, I realized with astonishment, than the bathroom at home, and I sat up, unable to believe it. But the bunk I was sitting on covered more than half the floor space. One end of it was actually jammed up against the barred front of the cell; yet beyond its foot there was barely room for a man to stand. And within that space was the tiny washbasin against which Arnie’s cellmate stood leaning; a lidless, seatless toilet; and two narrow wooden shelves crammed with two men’s small possessions. And, reaching out from the bunk, I could easily touch the opposite wall. A man couldn’t walk three steps in this tiny space. He couldn’t move, even, unless his cellmate lay on a bunk out of the way. I’d seen closets larger than this; it simply wasn’t a room for a man to live in and stay human. Yet two men lived in it, and, Arnie had told me, in nearly every other identical cell in San Quentin.

I knew with certainty that I could not live this way; I believed I would kill myself if I had to. And I knew that if there was a short count tonight, I was within minutes of being caught here, and that then I would shortly be a prisoner at San Quentin, sentenced to live in a cell like this for I didn’t know how many years. An electric gong sounded in the block, the merest tap of sound, and I didn’t know what it meant, and shriveled inside with fear. “Chow,” the man in the cell with me said casually, “the count’s clear,” and tossed his paper onto his bunk. The tier lock rose from the upper face of the cell door, and instantly cell doors banged open and the walkway just past my head was crowded with chattering men. Arnie’s cellmate pushed open our door, stepped out, and was gone, and I made a sudden decision.

I’d meant to skip supper, but now I stood up. I simply had to get out of this tiny cell; I couldn’t possibly stay in it all night without relief from it now. And knowing how dangerous it was to take needlessly the risk of some disastrously revealing blunder, I nevertheless stepped out onto the runway, and was instantly a part of a moving mass of men flowing toward the stairway ahead.

Down on the cell block floor, the river of men flowed out through a doorway, its metal door held open by a tan-uniformed guard. For an instant, stepping through it, I wished desperately that I’d stayed, temporarily safe, in the cell, and knew I’d done an utterly foolhardy thing in leaving it. I passed through a small enclosed space, then stepped through a doorway onto red tile and into sudden brightness, and I was in the largest cafeteria I’d ever seen. I had a confused impression of hundreds of identical varnished-wood tables, incredibly large silvery coffee urns, scores of urgently busy white-coated men; then I realized that the crowd ahead of me had stopped moving. It had become a waiting line, and I stopped, became part of it, and stood looking around me in a panic.

But there were no decisions to make. Reaching the head of the steadily moving line. I took a compartmented tray from a stack, duplicating the actions of the men before me, stepped to the long serving counter, and a bundle of paper-napkin wrapped silverware was slapped onto my tray by a white-sleeved arm, and an instant later four slices of bread.

The men behind the counter never once glanced at me, their arms and bodies moving in endless repetition of their individual rhythms. Two slices of meat loaf appeared on my tray, and were instantly covered by a ladleful of brown gravy. Then creamed boiled potatoes, green beans, a dish of rice pudding, a mug of coffee; with each step I took the tray grew heavier. At the end of the counters, I turned away, into a wide aisle, following the blue shirt ahead of me.

There was no choice about where to sit. The vast room was filled with rows of square wooden-topped tables, each with four attached stool-like seats. The rows of tables were filled one at a time, the prisoners’ movements worldlessly supervised by guards in the main aisles.

When the man ahead of me turned and sat down at a table already occupied by one man, I followed, and an instant later, the fourth seat was taken by the man behind me. Did you say Hello, or Good evening? What was dinner etiquette at San Quentin Prison? The man opposite me, unrolling his silverware, lifted his chin in a brief gesture of greeting as his eye caught mine, and I responded in the same way. The other two simply stared at nothing, chewing.

I was eating, and enjoying it. The food smelled good, it was simple, clean, and well-prepared, and like the others around me, I ate methodically and rapidly, enjoying it ravenously, and I finished everything on my tray including the four slices of bread. Then I began sipping my coffee, feeling suddenly good, knowing I was in a temporary basis of safety, and wondering when the time would come — years from now, probably — when I could tell people of the incredible thing I had done. This was actually a pleasant room — there were murals on the walls, I noticed now in burnt umber against a green background, and the place was immaculately clean. I took another sip of coffee, and out of the habit of years my thumb and forefinger dipped into my shirt pocket, found the end of a cigarette in the open package there, and withdrew it, I sat staring at the murals — I saw Albert Einstein’s sad, intelligent face — and my hands opened a match pack, struck a match, and lighted the cigarette in my mouth. Luxuriously, and almost contentedly, I exhaled a jet of smoke, and a hand smacked down on my shoulder, and I swung around to stare up at the angry face of a man.

“What the hell’s the matter with you!” said the guard, glaring, impatient for an answer before I could possibly give it, and I was frantic, astounded; then suddenly I understood. The air above the heads of these hundreds of men would have been heavy with smoke if smoking had been allowed: instead it was clear. I was the only man in this whole vast room with a lighted cigarette in his hand, and I hastily ducked it in my coffee, and heard the hiss as it was extinguished. “Boo!” I heard from the other side of the room, “Boo!” and saw the guard’s jaw muscles tighten, “Sorry.” I managed to say, feeling my neck and ears redden, and the guard cut me off. “What’s your name?”

“Jarvis.”

“Boo!” the scattered yells came from every part of the great room, and the guard said, “Let’s see your ID card,” and I pulled it from my shirt pocket, and handed it to him. That was Arnie’s picture, not mine, on the little plastic-sealed card, but there was a brotherly resemblance, and the guard only glanced at it, then handed it back. “You’re not a fish,” he said, and I understood that the date of Arnie’s admission to the prison must be on the card. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Boo! BOO!” the inmates shouted, and from a corner of my eye now. I saw another guard standing near this one, just beside and behind me. “Just dreaming,” I mumbled. “I forgot.”

For a moment longer the man stared down at me; then he turned away. “Quiet down,” he called out, keeping his voice relaxed, but I detected his tenseness and understood that a handful of guards among hundreds of prisoners were men in a powder keg, and that I had struck a spark. Not able even to look up at the other three men at my table, I sat wondering when and where I’d be called up for punishment. The moment I was — the moment I was taken out of the blue-clothed anonymous mass around me — my bluff would collapse. I sat staring at the soggy length of cigarette in my coffee cup; it wasn’t easy to understand that a single puff on a cigarette might send me to prison for years, but I knew it was true.

The men were standing at some signal I hadn’t seen or heard, each picking up his silverware, and I gathered up mine, and stood, too. The guard I’d noticed from the corner of my eye, standing just beside and behind me, was still there, and when I turned to look at him, it was Nova, the San Quentin guard who lived next door to me in Mill Valley.

“Hello, Jarvis,” he said softly, and smiled, the same, nasty, mean smile, slowly nodding his head in a pleased malicious satisfaction. I didn’t even bother trying to answer: I just stood waiting, lost in apathy. Nova jerked his head toward the main aisle. “Get moving,” he said, and I walked toward it, Nova right behind me. At the door I had come in stood a big metal bucket, and as the inmates ahead of me passed it, they dropped their silverware into it, and automatically I did the same.

In the cell block I turned to look at Nova, and again with a jerk of his head he indicated that I was to walk on, and I turned onto the first stairway, Nova right behind me. I didn’t know what he meant to do, but it didn’t matter: I knew it wasn’t good, and climbing those stairs, I realized what I would do. A part of my brain was able to stand off and consider in absolute horror and astonishment what the rest of my mind had decided to do, but I knew I would do it. I was simply not going to be confined for years in San Quentin Prison; I couldn’t take it, and whatever the consequences I was going to do what I had to do to prevent it. Maybe any man can kill if circumstances demand it; certainly millions come to it in every war. But to know you’re going to — to cross the line you’ve never crossed before, and know you are capable of killing a man — must always be an unbelievable moment.

There was no alternative; Nova dead was the only possible hope for me now, and with a terrible clarity of mind I saw how I was going to do it. There were very few men in the cell block now. After supper, I knew, most of them were off to classes, the athletic fields, movies, band practice; the guards were lounging around their hut on the cell block floor. Climbing the stairs to the third tier now, and leaning over the stair railway looking up, I saw only three or four men on it, walking toward their cells.

When I reached the third tier, I’d walk along toward my cell, and once the walkway was clear, the cells directly behind me empty, I’d stop, lean on the railing on my forearms, hands clasped, staring down at the cell block floor three stories below. It was the kind of posture that invites duplication; whatever Nova had in mind, he could hardly talk to me without leaning on the railing beside me. I’d listen, watching the runway from the corners of my eyes, making certain it remained clear of witnesses. Then I’d pull out my handkerchief, drop it, stoop to pick it up, and instead, crouched there on the walkway, I’d grab Nova tight around the legs like a tackling football player, and lift him right over the railing. He’d be leaning half over the rail to begin with, I’d lift him over, and he couldn’t hang on — not upside down — and a fall of three stories onto the concrete floor far below would kill him. The instant he dropped, I’d simply turn into the empty cell behind me, and when he hit, I’d come rushing out with the others on the tier to see what had happened. Then I’d return to my own cell. In the two or three seconds it took me to heave Nova over the railing, I could be seen by anyone rounding a corner of this walkway, or stepping out of a cell anywhere down the line, but... I was simply not going to be an inmate here. I would rather be dead.

On the third tier, two men far ahead strolled along the walkway as I did, Nova just behind me. Then they turned into a cell, and I stopped, leaned on the railing, and when Nova stopped beside me, I looked up and said, “Well? What’s it’s all about?”

He answered something or other and I pulled out my handkerchief, my heart throbbing full strength. I let it slip from my fingers, slooped to pick it up, and in that instant my mind repeated the word Nova had spoken just a moment before.

“I know your brother,” he had said, while I nodded unhearingly, but now suddenly, my fingers reaching for the handkerchief, they took on meaning. What did he mean? He didn’t know Arnie; he’d said so last night. Has he looked Arnie up since, or... And then in the split second before my arms could move to lock around Nova’s legs, I understood, and squatting there on the runway, I simply stared up at his face instead. Then I snatched my handkerchief as Nova stared down at me, and stood up.

Nova thought I was Arnie! He thought he was talking to my brother! I couldn’t believe it. He had seen my face last night; how could he fail to recognize...? But then I understood. Sitting there in the San Quentin mess hall, in the standard dress of the prison I couldn’t be anyone but Arnold Jarvis, the man he already knew was an inmate here. Naturally Arnold Jarvis would resemble his brother! But still, I thought doubtfully, resemble him exactly. Then I remembered that Nova had seen me, after all, only momentarily, and in semi-darkness. Here in the prison, in prison clothes. I could only be the brother he knew was confined here.

“—snooty sort of bastard,” Nova was saying, smiling at me nastily, “thinks he’s above people. Wouldn’t ask me in; kept me standin’ there at his door. So I just thought I’d see if I was good enough to talk to his San Quentin brother.”

I managed a smile, and stood erect, too, facing him. “Any time,” I said.

“Well, that’s just fine,” he answered sarcastically. “Glad to know I made the grade with one branch of the family. Even if it’s only the San Quentin branch.”

I shrugged, as though I couldn’t explain it either.

“Well” — he paused, stared at me thoughtfully for a moment, then continued — “see you around, Jarvis. And keep your nose clean. Wouldn’t want to bring back any bad news to your brother, would I? Or that hot-lookin’ sister-in-law of yours.”

I shrugged again, smiling. “Hope not.”

“You better hope.” He turned abruptly, and walked back toward the stairway.

I made it to the cell, dropped on the bunk, and closed my eyes; Arnie’s cellmate wasn’t there. Then, face on the pillow, arms around my head, I let it flood over me. I had nearly murdered a man; had nearly lost my freedom, and probably my life, out of panic — all started by a puff on a cigarette. I was walking a tightrope through the most dangerous moments of my life.

I got through the time that followed just lying on my bunk, like a child finding some kind of false security in his bed. I found earphones on the bunk, and put them on, and heard Frank Sinatra singing “Birth of the Blues.” Dozed, was awakened by a gong, and a moment later, from the tier above, heard a guitar being tuned, then from somewhere in the block, a trumpeter warming up. Another stringed instrument began to plink, and I heard a mouth organ. It was the music hour, I remembered — Arnie had described it in a letter once.

A string of men passed my cell door, some naked except for shoes, some wearing shorts, each with a towel. This was bath night for a section of the block; once a week, Arnie had said, each man in the block had five minutes under one of the open showers down on the main floor, and clean clothes.

I got undressed presently, and crawled under the blankets before Arnie’s cellmate arrived; I wasn’t up to talking to him. Hours later I was awakened by a sound, and the cell was dark, the only light a weak illumination from the ceiling lights of the block far overhead. I heard the sound again, and recognized it, astounded; a cat had meowed. I turned to the cell door, and there, incredibly it was; a big tortoise-shell cat, in the dim light of the walkway, sitting on its haunches staring in at the cell.

“Psst!” The sound came from the bunk just above me. Then I saw bare legs swing into view. Arnie’s cellmate sliding down from his bunk. Dropping to the floor, and squatting at the door, he extended a hand, and the cat’s neck stretched forward, nose working. Then its hind legs rose, and it jumped neatly through the bars into the cell, teeth opening daintily to accept the fragment of food in the man’s hand. Watching, I saw Arnie’s cellmate smile — his wooden face breaking into a gentle smile of pleasure — and he reached up to his bunk for another scrap of whatever he had carried in from the mess hall. Again he fed the cat, squatting before it, scratching its skull behind the ears. For a moment or so the cat accepted this, moving its head pleasurably; then it stepped forward out from under the man’s caressing, and its pink mouth opened in a meow for more food. Again the man stroked the cat, but the animal, knowing that there was no more to eat here, turned and hopped out between the bars, and trotted down the walkway. I heard it again, several cells away, meowing at another barred door, and Arnie’s cellmate put his palms on the upper bunk, heaved with his arms, and drew himself up out of sight. Then I heard him sigh, as he settled down above me. Presently I was asleep.

Standing inside the pile of stacked crates next to the furniture factory, a cigarette cupped in my palm, I stood in the darkness waiting, wondering how Ben was getting along. It was just before midnight, and I could picture San Quentin right now; the great Yard lighted by electric bulbs, silent and empty; the classrooms, offices, most of the other buildings, and the athletic fields all deserted: the four main blocks and the old Spanish block, dimly lit, and quiet. Inside the lighted Yard office, just before the Yard gates, two or three screws would be sitting around doing nothing — the best thing they do. The control room, always awake, would be lighted, an inmate clerk at his typewriter: maybe the lieutenant of this watch would be shooting the bull with his sergeant. The third watch was nearly over, and they’d be hoping, as always, that nothing out of the ordinary would happen during the rest of the watch to prevent their going home; I hoped so, too. The next few hours were the quiet time at Quentin, all activities ended, the men all in, locked up, or accounted for, the next count more than two hours off. Up in the towers, the wall bulls would be staring out over the prison, or smoking, or occasionally walking outside, rifles under their arms, to patrol the walls.

But not here. The industrial area all around me was silent, the south-wall gate locked ever since the four-thirty count came all-clear. The shops and factories were emptied of men, except for a single fire guard in each, dozing, reading a magazine, or listening to some disk jockey. So there was no need to guard this area, and now the industrial-area walls were unmanned. Twenty-five minutes ago the big third-watch sergeant had patrolled the area, flashlight bobbing as he walked. I didn’t think anyone would be back here again tonight.

Now, the first watch should be on; it was time to move, and I stepped out from the crates. In my hand as I walked along beside the crates was the yard-long miniature spade, the Army trenching tool Ben had brought in his pack.

I began digging in the narrow rectangle of bare ground between the end of the furniture factory and the great wall which paralleled it a dozen feet to the north, the wall Ben had climbed over. I worked in the corner formed by the north and east walls of the area, directly below the underside of the floor of the corner wall tower. The tower was wider by some feet than the narrow wall it sat on, and projected out over me by a yard or more. The little corner I worked in was well lighted by wall lights; anyone coming around a corner of the factory could see me, and I could only hope no one would. I didn’t think anyone would; there was no reason to.

I dug steadily, fast, and quietly, and the spade, new and sharp, bit easily into the brown, clayey soil. Still, it took over three hours; I had to carry each spadeful away from the trench I was digging, and scatter it wide. But I never stopped, and my hands, calloused from the wood and tools I worked with each day in the factory, accepted the work easily. By three o’clock in the morning I had dug a neat rectangle over six feet long, nearly a yard wide, and maybe a yard deep. The last few inches of earth I stacked along the back edge of the trench. Now I walked along the east side of the factory to a small side door I’d unlocked myself just before work ended that afternoon. Then, holding the door open a few inches, I watched and listened. But the inmate fire guard was clear up front in the office; I could see the back of his head over the top of an upholstered office chair. Beside the door, just inside the building, I silently lifted a sheet of three-quarter-inch, yard-wide plywood I’d placed there this afternoon, and set it outside the door. Then I returned for a two-and-a-half-foot length of the same wood I’d sawed off, working quite openly, this morning. Near the upper end of this shorter length, I’d bored a half-dollar-sized hole.

Setting the door latch on locking position this time, I closed it behind me, then carried my two boards to the trench. There, the two boards butted together end to end, I forced them into the slightly smaller dimensions of the trench, walking around their edges, jouncing my weight on them. When they covered the trench, forced below ground level for a few inches, I took from my pocket the length of pipe Ben had brought in his pack, and looked at it. He’d done a good job; fastened over one end of the pipe, and held on with tightly wrapped wire, was a circle of fine screening painted a dull brown. I forced the other end of the pipe into the half-dollar-sized hole I’d bored in the short length of plywood, and left it there. Then I pulled the dirt stacked along the back edge of the trench onto the boards with my shovel, heaping it up a little. I trampled the dirt flat, level with and matching the ground around it — also packed hard by the feet that trampled it every day. Now I forced the rest of the pipe length down into its hole till the circlet of screening seemed to lie on the ground. Crumbling a little clot of earth with my fingers I let it sift down onto the screening until it was covered, and now there was absolutely no visible hint of the six foot by three, yard-deep space that I’d made under the ground.

Kneeling at one end of it, I forced my fingers down into the earth, found the board edge, and lifted. It was heavy under its layer of earth, but I lifted the front edge some inches, watching the dirt on its top. A few loose nuggets of earth rolled off, but most of it, tramped solid, stayed: and when I dropped the board it fell into place again, and again the earth over my trench seemed undisturbed. I walked back to my crates, got my canvas bundle, returned to the trench, and again lifted the shorter of the two boards buried under their layers of dirt, this time wedging it open with the little spade. I shoved the bundle far into the trench, and to one side of it; then, holding the board open, I kicked the shovel in after it, and let the board drop into place once again. Dusting my hands, I stood staring down at the barren ground before me; it looked just as it had before I’d begun digging, and I glanced at my watch. It was three-forty-six in the morning, and I walked back to the stack of crates, crawled into mine, and lay down, quite certain I could sleep.

Arnie and I traded places in the crates just before eight o’clock the next morning. I was awakened, stiff and tired from dreaming, by the incredible sound — a sort of rusty squeal, like a huge wheel turning on an ungreased axle — of the hundreds of sparrows who nested in the girders of the cell block roof. In the first colorless light of day I lay in Arnie’s bunk watching them flash past the cell door, and out through the bars of the great cell-block windows, opened at the tops for ventilation. Later I heard the cell block wake; first, a cough, then from somewhere a quiet murmur of conversation. Presently water ran in a basin, more men coughed, and the volume of conversation swelled. I heard a toilet flush, heard a curse, heard an unidentifiable sound; far off down the block someone began singing. More water ran, men coughed, hawked, and spat; some shouted, calling to other men. A shaft of sunlight slanted down into the block through one of the tall windows, and presently Arnie’s cellmate — first his legs, then his upper body — slid down from his bunk.

We dressed, one at a time, and when the locking bar rose, he pushed open the door, and was gone. I followed a few moments later, and taking the same route as yesterday, lined up in the great mess hall for breakfast. I had it, then — hot cereal, toast, bacon, and coffee — with three identically dressed strangers, and I ate it with good appetite. The danger to me now was as real as yesterday’s, but I could no longer believe that. I felt confident, actually cocky about the incredible thing I had done, and in the industrial area, just before eight, I traded places with Arnie — watching the guards, I felt, as expertly as he had on the day before. We each asked and answered a few brief questions; then he was gone, and I lay back in the crate.

I gathered up my rope coil at twelve-thirty that night and climbed as soundlessly as possible out of the crate. Then I climbed the wall as before, lying on its top watching the road below me and resting for several moments; then I climbed down, yanked my rope, and began climbing the dark hill. Beside the county road on the other side, I waited half an hour, maybe, lying in the weeds. Then a car rounded a bend, moving slowly, its lights switching from bright to dim, bright to dim, and I stood up, and whistled. The car stopped, I ran out, yanked open the door, and tossed my rope and hook to the floor; then I slid into the front seat beside Ruth, and the car started up immediately. After a moment, her eyes on the winding road. Ruth said, “You all right, Ben?”

“Sure, I’m fine,” I said. “So’s Arnie.” She didn’t answer, and I turned to look at her, and in the faint light from the dashboard I saw she was crying.

On Highway 101, Ruth turned north toward the U.S. 40 junction far ahead. After I had told her all that happened, and answered all her questions, I climbed into the back seat, and lay down under the car blanket. Ruth turned the radio on low, and pretty soon I went to sleep, the car moving steadily on through the night toward the Sierra Nevadas, Donner Pass at the summit seven thousand feet up, and Reno on the other side.

Friday morning, dressing in my cell, I knew Ben had made it out of the industrial area last night; if he hadn’t, they’d have come for me during the night. At unlock I walked out of the cell thinking, the last time!, and I thought it all day at the factory, and at noon leaving the mess hall. By four o’clock, quitting time, my hands were shaking, I was so scared and excited. This was the time, during the next three or four minutes — and if they caught me now trying to escape, they’d know why, and throw me into an isolation cell under direct guard till Halek arrived in the morning to point me out. Then it would be the Row for certain.

Outside the factory, I walked back along the east wall of the building, so scared it was hard to breathe, but I made myself saunter, looking casual and unhurried, toward the big wall at the rear of the area. I was directly under the eye of the wall guard in the corner tower under which I’d stood digging last night but he wouldn’t be giving me any special attention yet. I could be walking this way to meet a friend, before we left the area for the cell blocks and the four-thirty count, or for any of a lot of other harmless reasons. For the moment I was simply one of several hundred men filling the industrial area at quitting time.

I walked slowly, conserving the steps between me and the wall ahead, and I was getting nervous and worried, when suddenly I heard it — a shout, loud and prolonged from behind me, around the corner at the front of the factory out of my sight. It was repeated right away — Yaay! Yuh-hoo! — and I knew what was happening. Two twenty-year-olds were horsing around in front of the factory in a direct line of sight over the factory rooftop for the guard in the tower a few steps in front of me. Ben had brought a hundred and fifty dollars in fives and tens into the prison with him in his canvas bundle, and I’d offered it to the two kids this morning in the block, right after unlock. I had Al with me, and gave him the money to hold while they watched, to pay over when they delivered. They knew him, and knew he would pay. They’d squawked about the price. They wanted a hundred apiece, and I didn’t blame them; they knew they were creating a diversion for something, of course, and that whatever I was up to, they’d be in for some tough questioning and punishment. It was worth a hundred, but seventy-five apiece was all I had, and when they were sure of that, they took it.

Now they were earning their money — one of them shouted again, and I knew one was standing on the other’s shoulders, balanced precariously, holding onto the other’s hair, grinning wildly, and shouting at the top of his lungs, horsing around the way the young kids here do, in spite of everything. Yaay! Yuh-hoo! the shout came again, and now for the first time I flicked my eyes upward to the tower just ahead.

The guard, almost directly above me now, was staring off in the direction of the shout, and I took one more step forward, and I was directly under the projecting floor of the wall tower, out of the guard’s sight. By the time he turned his attention from the skylarking prisoners, he’d assume I’d gone on and turned the corner ahead to the west. There was no one else in this part of the area back here; it was quitting time, and everyone was heading for the wall gate at the front of the area.

This was the moment. I shoved both hands, fingers working, into the dirt I’d dug last night, found the board edge about where I’d expected, and lifted. Instantly sitting down hard, I shoved both legs into the opening. Then, holding the board open above me, I wriggled into the cavity, then let the board drop hard, and lay panting in the velvet-black darkness. It had taken me three or four seconds, no more, to disappear, literally, from the face of the earth, and I could only wonder what my hiding place looked like from outside. I could only hope that no sliver or edge of board showed above ground. But I felt that it must look all right: I’d heard no earth slide from its surface.

I’m in a grave. I thought suddenly, and a panicky feeling that I was smothering swept through me. But I’d anticipated that, and began sliding my hands carefully through the air just over my chest, and my thumb bumped the end of the pipe just past my chin. I slid down a little till my mouth touched the end of the pipe. Bunching the canvas bundle up under my head, I adjusted the height of my head and now I lay comfortably, the pipe end in my mouth. I took a deep breath, and blew hard, then did it again. Bending my knees, I moved down in the trench till one eye slid under the pipe end, and through the tiny mesh half a foot above. I saw blue sky; the dust had blown clear; I knew I could breathe now, and the panic subsided.

I found the shape of the flashlight in the canvas pack, worked it out, flicked on the light, and as best I could looked at the shallow depression in which I lay. I could see the curve of blue shirt over my chest, and its row of fasteners, and beyond that the black tips of my shoes. Just overhead, and extending on past my feet, I saw the white pine undersurface of the plywood, and my other hand lying on my chest, and the blurred end of the pipe, too close to my eyes to see clearly, I snapped off my light, and fitted my mouth over the pipe end again. Tonight the four-thirty count wouldn’t come all clear, the red light would go on, and the guard in the wall tower twenty-odd feet over my head would begin to curse, knowing that now he’d have to pray on duty, that the walls in this and every other area of the prison would stay manned now, day and night, till the missing man was found or escaped. Within the next minutes, the prison would be alive with prowling guards, off-duty men called in to help search every place they could imagine a man hiding. I had to hope that they couldn’t imagine this one. I lay breathing through my pipe, and waiting. Minutes passed and when the siren actually sounded — first a moan, muffled through the earth over my head, then the sound climbing rapidly higher, higher, and still higher to a piercing painful wail — I couldn’t help it, I shivered a little; now I was a hunted man. And yet, at the very same time, it was a thrill, it was a kick. I was terribly frightened, yet terribly excited, and now I knew why men have hidden out just for the simple hell of it. You’re nobody in prison; just a pair of blue pants and a blue shirt, doing what you’re told. But once you’re missing at Quentin — boy, you’re somebody then!

Ruth and I had breakfast at the Riverside Hotel, in that coffee, sandwich, and breakfast place just off the gambling casino on the street floor. She’d packed a bag with my electric razor and a change of clothes for me, including a tan sport shirt and my tan slacks, my clothes and things had arrived from L.A. I’d changed clothes in the back of the car on the floor, and when we stopped for gas just outside Reno, I had shaved quickly in the filling-station washroom.

Ruth wore a sleeveless cotton dress, white with a little pattern of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, one of those dresses with a kind of flaring skirt. She had a faint golden tan, and looked very summery and nice, as we walked out of the hotel. The streets were already fairly crowded with summer tourists, and we joined them, walking up Virginia toward Second Street.

The first pawn shop we came to had a couple of customers in it, and we passed it by. But the next one, half a block on, was empty except for the proprietor, a middle-aged man leaning on the counter reading a newspaper. Ruth walked on, to saunter along looking in windows, waiting for me, and I went into the pawn shop, and bought a .32 Colt revolver with a blue barrel and a scored grip. It cost thirty-five dollars, and took less than two minutes with no questions asked; as I walked out, the gun shoved into my pants pocket, the proprietor was reading his paper again, and maybe three minutes later we were on our way out of Reno, heading for the mountains again.

I drove, feeling rested now, feeling good, and during the six-hour drive back we talked a lot. Ruth’s an intelligent girl, an interesting person, and we talked about everything and anything except the prison, which was a relief. In Sacramento we left the car near the big park around the State buildings, and walked to the business district for lunch. Then we found a big toy store and hobby shop and bought a wood-carving set, a big elaborate one with a lot of razor-sharp little knives and chisels, and an assortment of soft pine blocks. It was a nice day, pretty warm, but summery and pleasant, and for the first time in a long while, it seemed, I was enjoying myself; I felt happy, and it was good to be alive again. As we crossed the park toward the car, along a wide graveled path. Ruth pointed to a big oval-shaped bed of red flowers, and said, “What kind of flowers are those?”

“Those?” I said. “They’re hemophilias.”

“Really?” She nodded; it must have sounded vaguely familiar to her.

“Yeah. You don’t know much about plants, do you?”

“Not much.” She smiled at me, sauntering along the path in her summer dress, her arm under mine.

“Well, the ones next to them,” I said, “are tularemias; they’re fairly rare. And the ones by the iron fence are Hepplewhites. Next to the night-blooming hollyhocks.”

“All right,” she said, in amused rebuke, and I laughed, and squeezed her arm under mine, feeling good.

But at four o’clock, after we reached home, the whole mood, the good time we’d had driving home over the mountains, was suddenly gone. I looked at my watch as we walked into the house, and said. “He’s hiding out right now; the hunt will begin any minute.”

Ruth nodded, standing there in the living room, looking at me. Then, her voice very low and quiet, she said, “Ben, do you think he’ll make it?”

I was silent for a moment, staring down at the floor; then I looked up again. “He’s in midstream right now,” I said, “neither out nor in, and I feel almost superstitious about even talking about it.” Then, seeing the anguish in her eyes, I added softly, “But yes, I think he’ll make it. Certainly he will.”

She turned toward the bedrooms. “I’ll go change,” she said, and I walked to the big living-room window, pulled the drapes closed, then turned on the living-room lamps and got out a card table I’d seen in the closet. I moved it next to the lamp on the davenport end table, brought in a straight-backed kitchen chair, then opened up the wood-carving set I had bought, and spread it out on the table. I found a ruler and a soft-lead pencil in the kitchen, and brought them in, then put the revolver I had bought on the table, and sat down.

Ruth came in, in a white blouse and summer flowered skirt, and sat down on the davenport at my elbow. I picked up one of the large pine blocks, and began slowly sketching on its smooth white surface the outline of the revolver lying on the table before me.

I’m pretty skillful with my hands, and I worked quickly but carefully, constantly checking the measurements of my sketch against the real gun. The outline was finished in half an hour, and I cut it out of the soft, straight-grained pine easily, with the largest of the razor-sharp knives. Then I began work on the details with the chisels and smaller knives. Ruth dusted the living room, washed some of our clothes, and about six o’clock went out to the kitchen to prepare supper.

All evening, I carved and sliced away the wood, Ruth on the couch beside me. Occasionally she read, but mostly we talked as I worked, talked for some reason about things we liked: books, music, plays, sports, all sorts of things, keeping at it, I guess, because our tastes agreed on so many things. Every hour Ruth would turn on the radio to a local news broadcast, and at nine o’clock we heard the first announcement of Arnie’s hideout. The Warden, the announcer said, had reported that a San Quentin inmate was missing at the four-thirty count that afternoon. The Warden was certain the inmate had not escaped from the prison; there was no indication that he had. He was believed to be hiding within the prison. A search was going on, and would continue till the man was found. Up to this hour, the announcer concluded, the missing man had not been found.

“And he won’t be,” I said; I felt a sudden rush of optimism about Arnie, and grinned at Ruth. Then I took the revolver from the table, and stood up, jamming the gun into my belt. Feet wide apart, arms hanging down at my sides, the fingers curled inward, my face sternly expressionless, I said, “I’ve just stepped out of the Silver Dollar Hotel onto the dusty street, under the hot yellow sun. Two men lounging against a pillar of the Deux Magots Saloon see me, and dart inside, the shuttered doors swinging behind them. A long-skirted woman grabs a child, and runs out of sight. Shopkeepers hurriedly close their iron shutters, and within seconds the street is empty except for one man.

“There he stands in the yellow dust, half a block away, facing me, gun slung from his hip. He stares at me from under the wide brim of his sweat-stained hat, eyes narrowed, lips contemptuous.” I glanced at Ruth. “Now, slowly, hands hanging carefully at our sides, we begin walking toward each other.” Eyes straight ahead, I began walking across the room in slow measured steps. “The breathless seconds tick by, a full orchestra ominous and low, in the background. Nearer and nearer, our deadly eyes never wavering, we approach.” I reached the center of the room. “Suddenly our hands move in two simultaneous blurs of speed!” — my hand shot up, sweeping the gun from my belt. “Bang! Bang! Two shots roar out as one!” I turned to Ruth. “What happened?”

“The honest sheriff was killed,” she said. “For once.”

“His own bullet went wild, striking an old lady asleep in a rocking chair, in the kneecap. And Wilkes, the hired killer from Dallas, is triumphant, the poor sheepherders are driven from the range, and I, for one, am glad to see it: danged varmints.” I whirled toward Ruth, snatching the revolver from my belt again. “Reach lady!”

“Ben, for heaven’s sakes, put that away! Honestly.” She shook her head, mildly exasperated. “Let a man get his hands on a gun, and he’s like a child.”

“You’re lucky I don’t make you dance in the road, pumping bullets at your heels.” I shoved the gun into my belt again, and walked over to her, legs slightly bowed. “You the new school mar’m?”

“Yes, for heaven’s sakes. Sit down; you make me nervous.”

“Reckon I will.” I sat down at the card table again. “Hear you’re one of Ravenhill’s new gals; gonna work over to th’ new saloon.”

“That’s right; in long black stockings, and a short red skirt.”

I nodded, picking up my carving knife. “You’d look pretty good, too, Ma’m,” I added.

“Think so?” Ruth smiled up at me.

I shrugged, eyes on the wooden gun in my hand. “I think so,” I said. Then I looked up, my eyes met hers, and for a moment we stared at each other.

“Funny, isn’t it,” Ruth said then, “you and I here like this.” I nodded, and she dropped her head to the back of the davenport. “You know,” she said quietly, “a lot of it I like. I’m a domestic type, I guess, and I like keeping house, too. I enjoy cooking meals, when there’s someone to cook for. And while you were gone, I worked in the garden, watered the lawn, shopped for groceries, trying to get my mind off what was happening, and there were moments when I actually enjoyed it. Sometimes, dusting or vacuuming or even washing dishes, I’ve felt almost happy; it’s almost seemed real.” She smiled. “In a way, I could feel sorry that it’ll be ending soon. Though of course it’s good that it is; it’s been hard on you. I know. Hard on me, too.”

I smiled. “Propinquity getting in its licks,” I said. “I hope Arnie realizes what he’s putting me through.”

“I imagine he’s thought of it,” Ruth said soberly.

At eleven-twenty that night, the revolver I had bought in Reno was duplicated in pine, right down to the grooves and screw heads on the grip. Then I sealed the wood with wood filler, applied dark blue liquid shoe polish to all the simulated metal parts, burnishing them with a soft rag; and now, gleaming softly when I turned the gun in my hands, they looked like blued gun metal. When the handle had been stained brown by the wood filler, Ruth couldn’t tell which gun was which from even a few feet away.

We got in the car and drove toward San Francisco, and on Golden Gate Bridge, in the middle of the span, no cars visible behind us, Ruth picked up the gun I’d bought in Reno. She held her arm outside the car for a moment. Then her arm moved outward in a sudden arc, and for an instant we saw the revolver turning in the air, glinting in the yellow lighting of the bridge, and then, curving over the rail, it was gone, to fall into the deepest, most turbulent part of the Bay, over two hundred feet below. On the way home, we heard a late news broadcast; the missing San Quentin inmate had not yet been found.

All through the night, the ground under the canvas I lay on was hard and cold. I slept badly, waking often, and sometimes I heard the voices of the guards searching the prison for me; once I heard steps pass directly by my head. In the morning — I could see a little circle of blue sky through my pipe — I took a waxed-paper package and a carton of water from the things that had been in the canvas bundle. Then I brought out an empty tight-lidded coffee can. “No plumbing in here,” I thought to myself, “but this is the next best thing.”

Presently, the sun warming the ground I lay in, I slept soundly. I’d learned that I need not lie breathing with my mouth at the pipe. Small though the pipe opening was, so was the space I lay in, and since my body movements and oxygen consumption were at a minimum, I got enough air. At times I felt stifled, as if the quality of the air were bad; but a few minutes of breathing the outside air directly, my mouth at the pipe, would overcome that. Drifting asleep now, I had a feeling of certainty that it would not occur to the prowling guards to look for me in the ground under their feet.

I was nearly ready to give up by early afternoon, to heave open the lid above me, and come crawling and stumbling out no matter what the consequences — I had never been in or imagined such heat in my life before. Lying there with the rigid, inescapable heat of the sun pounding down on the earth just above me, I was gasping for each breath of air, and I lay most of the time with my mouth at the pipe, all my clothes off long since, feeling the sweat trickle steadily from my body, soaking the canvas underneath me.

By midafternoon I was no longer entirely sane. Once, years ago, I’d worked at a desk for two hours in a room where the recorded temperature was a hundred and nineteen degrees. I knew vaguely that the motionless cocoon of air I lay in now was much hotter; and I lay in simple agony, mouth at the pipe, chest heaving, my heart laboring to stay alive. The deadly oppressiveness of the awful heat was an actual physical pressure I could feel on every fractional inch of my naked skin, clogging and blocking my pores, and I drifted often into unconsciousness, drifting out of it more and more sluggish each time, half delirious and not wanting to awaken. But a little core of resistance and will to live inside me somewhere understood that my weakened dehydrated body would die in the carbon dioxide of its own making, if I simply lay here as I wanted to in motionless suffering. And I made myself rouse, over and again, to suck in the life-giving air from outside.

I was buried alive, I could no longer endure it, and nothing else mattered; I had to burst out of here. Yet I waited, postponing it second after second, the fight not entirely gone from me. Men have been chained in steel boxes under the sun all day long, but no one, I believed, had ever endured this, and I felt a sleepy pride at the thought, and again postponed a little longer the simple act that would end this agony.

I got through the afternoon that way, by minutes and seconds at a time, enduring on the endless promises I made to myself — and endlessly broke — of relief after only a little bit longer. After an incalculable time, only barely conscious, my mouth muscles slack and without strength at the pipe, I became aware of a minute decrease in the terrible temperature. A little more time passed, and now there was a definite slackening off of the heat: then steadily and perceptibly, minute by minute, the heat drained out of the air around me, and the air I was pulling into my lungs from outside was suddenly actually cool, wonderfully refreshing, and I came into full consciousness again, limp, terribly weak, but exultant.

A long time later, using my handkerchief, and water from a carton, I forced myself to take a kind of bath, sponging the drying sweat from every surface of my body. Then I ate; forcing myself at first, then suddenly ravenous. I drank steadily, sipping the tepid water from the cartons, chewing down salt from a little cardboard shaker Ben had brought in. Presently, well after I had heard the men leaving the industrial area at four, it was cool enough to work myself quietly into my clothes again. I heard the guard in the wall tower above me call to another down the wall, cursing because they had to man the walls again tonight, and I grinned; I had made it.

Ruth and I rented a small furnished apartment in the city, on Sutter Street, Saturday morning, or rather Ruth did while I waited in the car; I hadn’t shaved since the previous morning. She told the landlady it was for her brother who was moving up from Los Angeles, paid a deposit, got the key, and came down, and gave it to me.

We had lunch in a drive-in, then went to a movie on Market Street. We saw half the picture, maybe, and then I couldn’t stand it, and neither could Ruth; our nerves were jumpy, we couldn’t watch it, and we got up and left. I headed back for Marin then, and we went to Muir Woods, and walked along by the little stream that runs through it under the giant redwoods, and that was a little better. It was cool and peaceful, and we stayed for a couple of hours, just wandering around. But still, a large part of the time, we walked holding each other’s hand, clinging to each other for comfort against what lay ahead.

Somehow we got through the evening. We talked; I don’t know about what. We watched some television, or at least stared at the set. But apprehension lay in the air around us and once when I made some inconsequential remark Ruth burst into tears. I walked over toward the davenport where she was sitting, and she stood up, and stepped toward me, and I took her in my arms to comfort her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I mean it. I really do. It’s almost over; it will be in a few hours,” and I felt her relax a little, and she stopped crying. “Take it easy, and don’t worry,” I said. “Arnie’s going to be all right” — and then she burst into tears all over again.

We got through the evening till a little after ten, I guess. Then I changed into my blue denims and work shirt, and took the wooden gun from the dresser drawer, glancing into the mirror at the black stubble on my face. In the garage, I smeared some black car oil from the floor on my pants and shirt, and rubbed dust into the stains. Then with Ruth at the wheel, me sitting on the floor beside her, we drove out, heading for 101, and on the highway turned north once again toward the prison.

But at the county road leading to San Quentin we turned west this time, away from the prison, and onto the Greenbrae road. A few hundred yards west of the highway, Ruth pulled off onto the wide shoulder, U-turned, and parked on the other side facing the highway again. When she turned to me, her face was angry. “You look terrible,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” I said, smiling at her, rubbing the bristles on my face. “I’m the Schweppes man; I look distinguished.”

But she wouldn’t smile. “And now I can start waiting and worrying about you again,” she said. I started to say something, smiling again, but she burst out at me. “I hate it!” she said. “I hate sitting alone wondering what’s happening to you. Damn Arnie!” Then she put a hand to her forehead, and shaking her head slowly as though to clear it, she said, “Oh, I don’t mean that, I didn’t mean it.”

I put a hand on her arm. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Of course not!” she said angrily. “Before you might have ended up in prison; tonight you may only get shot.”

“I’ve got to go, Ruth.”

“All right,” she said, and leaning across me, opened my door. “Go ahead!”

There were no cars coming from either direction, and I got out, closed the door, and watched the car move on toward the highway ahead, stop at the intersection, and wait for the traffic light to change. Then it swung onto the highway, heading south. The lights of a car were approaching from far behind me, and I lay down in the dry drainage ditch beside the road, until it passed. Then I got up, and walked down the dark road. Twenty yards from the busy highway, I lay down in the drainage ditch again, pulled an envelope from my back pocket, and tore it open. From it I shook out a dozen scraps of torn paper coated with clear plastic onto the ground.

Over a dozen cars passed before one driven by a man alone and with its right-hand front window down stopped at the highway for the light, no car behind it. Then I got up, and walked toward it, keeping the rear corner of the car between me and the driver; passing the back end of the car, I saw the driver’s face turned away from me, staring to the north watching the traffic signal. Pulling the wooden pistol from my pocket with one hand, I stepped to the right-hand door, pulled up the little plastic-capped door-locking device, and yanked open the door as the man’s head swung toward me. My revolver pointing at his face, I got in beside him, pulling the door closed behind me without turning away from him. “Don’t act crazy, and you won’t get shot.” I said quietly. I waited a moment, while he stared at me, eyes wide with astonishment. “Understand?” I said pleasantly. “Just don’t get panicky; I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

He nodded, swallowing; he was a man of perhaps fifty, stout but not fat. He had on a dark brown suit and hat. “Don’t worry,” he said then. “I got a family. I’m not trying anything.”

I told him what to do, and when the light changed he did it. He headed south on the highway and drove for two miles to a point where the road passed between two high embankments slicing through a hill. There was a wide place here where bulldozers had removed a lot of earth fill, and I had him swing well off the road there, turn off his lights, and set the hand brake, leaving the motor on. I made him get out, then walk as far off the road as he could get, his back against the high dirt embankment, well away from the car. While he walked, I rubbed the gun hard, both sides of it, on my shirt, wiping off any fingerprints. Then, holding it between two knuckles. I leaned out the right-hand window. “Here,” I called to him, as he turned to face me, and I switched on the car lights. “Here’s a souvenir,” and I tossed the gun out toward the man’s feet. “Go ahead,” I said, “pick it up. I’ll trade you; the gun for the car,” and I burst into laughter, glanced into the rear-view mirror, then released the clutch, gunning the car, gravel spurting under the wheels. He was a 2.2 mile walk from the nearest telephone; I’d clocked it on the way back from Muir Woods.

I had my window open, and I had my change ready as I approached the toll gate on Golden Gate Bridge six minutes later; then I was moving past it on toward the cutoff just ahead that led to the old San Francisco Exposition building whose domed roof I could see ahead.

Driving into the little tree-sheltered street that curves around the empty old building, I saw just the one car there, and I stopped mine right behind it. With my handkerchief I wiped every surface I’d touched, then got out, walked ahead to my own car, and got in the driver’s seat beside Ruth. The motor was running, and I started right up, heading out of the deserted little street, and I glanced at Ruth, smiling. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

She nodded, drew a sudden deep involuntary breath, then exhaled in a long sigh. She smiled, and said, “I want to hear about it; right away. Stop somewhere, Ben.”

I drove to the Marina a couple blocks away, and stopped at the edge of the Bay along with other cars in the parking space there. We stayed an hour, perhaps; talking and watching the Bay and the beautiful yellow-lighted expanse of the Bridge. I was tired, it was nice sitting there, and I enjoyed it.

Ruth drove back with me on the floor in the rear as we passed the toll gate. In the garage, the big metal door closed. I opened the kitchen door, waited for Ruth to step past me, then followed her into the house. Entering the lighted living room, she stopped so suddenly I bumped into her; then I, too, saw Nova, sitting in the big easy chair near the window. “Evenin’,” he said, “I been waitin’ for you.”

We just stood there, stunned and motionless, and Nova said, “All alike, these houses,” nodding at the back door. “All got one more door’n you can ever remember to lock. So I come in, even though I ain’t been invited. Got some news for you.”

I walked on, then, toward the davenport, dead furious and terribly frightened at this malicious fat man who’d walked into my house. “Yeah?” I said.

“I was s’posed to be on tonight,” he said, “out to the prison. Extra man on the first watch. Lot of extra duty lately, you know” — he grinned as though this were funny. “Most hideouts don’t last long, though,” he said complacently, “so I phoned the prison maybe ten minutes ago, just before time to leave. And sure enough, the sergeant says, ‘We don’t need you; Jarvis made it out tonight.’ ”

I nodded slowly. “How?”

Nova threw back his head, laughing silently. “How?” he said. “You don’t know how? Well, I’ll tell you somethin’. They don’t either, out to the prison.” He sat forward in his chair, glancing from one to the other of us, grinning. “Seems some guy got his car clouted tonight. At the Greenbrae intersection; just where you’d expect a con might come out on the highway from the prison. And when he tells the state cops how — guy took it with a wooden pistol; young guy in blue denims all dirtied up, needs a shave — the cops take the man right to the prison. And he picks out your brother’s photograph from a batch of them. That’s him all right, the guy says; I can tell from the eyes and the hair. Put a two, three day black beard on the picture, and that’s the man.”

Nova shook his head. “Warden’s a slow man to give up a search, though. Anybody can clout a car wearin’ blue denims and needin’ a shave” — he stared at my clothes and face, then winked. “And the guy coulda made a mistake about the picture, though the wood pistol looks suspicious, like maybe a con carved it out. But the Warden kept the red light on just the same. Only now they had a state cop, radio-car man, pokin’ around where this car was clouted, and this cop brings in your brother’s ID card, all tore up. The pieces fit together like a jig-saw, and it didn’t fly over the walls by itself. So looks like your brother made it out; they don’t know how, but he sure as hell must have. Green light’s on again now, and I can go home and get some sleep.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Nova, “only I wouldn’t be able to sleep.” He leaned toward me. “I lie in bed and worry, Mr. Jarvis.”

I knew he wanted me to say it, so I did. “About what?”

“Money. Money, Mr. Jarvis. They’ll retire me soon, and I ain’t saved much. If I had few thousand dollars — I could go home and sleep, ’steada worryin’ about some escaped con. I tell you I met your brother the other day?” I didn’t bother answering, and he said, “Yep; looked just like you. Exactly like you, now I see you in a good light. Especially wearin’ those clothes you got on.” He slapped his knee, as though at a sudden hilarious notion. “Say!” he said. “If you was to’ve clouted some guy’s car tonight in that get-up — ’stead of your brother, I mean — wouldn’t that’ve been funny! They’d figure it was your brother, figure he was out. And all the time he’d still be in the prison somewhere! And where would that be?” he said thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. “Only one place I’d want to be. Green light goes on, they come down off the walls in the industrial area; that’s where I’d want to be. Place quiets down for the night, over you go, and nothin’ to stop you.” He smiled. “Almost makes a man wish it did happen that way. Go out there, wait by the wall, and when he comes over, grab him. Chance for promotion and more money.” Again he laughed silently, shaking his head in amusement. “Just shows you the notions a man can get, sittin’ around thinkin’ and worryin’ about money, instead of just goin’ home and sleepin’.”

“I haven’t any money, Mr. Nova,” I said quietly. “Couple hundred dollars.”

“Well,” he said, and put his hands on his knees, “money isn’t everything.”

“All right, Nova,” I said. “What is?”

“Friendship,” he said softly. “You know, I had the idea you folks was settin’ yourself above people. Had to force myself in here” — he smiled as though he’d made a joke — “ ’fore I even got to sit down in your livin’ room. ’Spect I was wrong about you, though. Hope so, anyway, ’cause I’m a friendly man. Nothin’ I like better than people droppin’ in on me, any time at all. Even now, for example; old lady’s asleep, and a house fallin’ down wouldn’t wake her. Yes, sir, if I had company drop in on me tonight, I wouldn’t even think of goin’ out.”

I was staring at him, trying to fathom what he could be talking about.

“Nothin’ll happen out at Quentin for an hour,” Nova said. “Leastways, I’m willin’ to gamble on that. So I’m goin’ home, and stay there — for thirty minutes. Company drops in on me. I’ll stay home. Her, I’m talkin’ about. You.” He pointed at Ruth. “Just a half hour’s company” — his eyes were shiny, and his tongue touched his lips — “while we get better acquainted. And I stay home, and glad to.”

I was at him, right arm swinging as hard as I could throw it, and it stopped in mid-air, my fist smacking his meaty palm like a .22 rifle shot. Then he grabbed me, his immense arms wrapped around me, holding mine tight to his sides, and he lifted me off my feet without effort, squeezing me harder and harder, his mean little eyes grinning into mine. Ruth flailing at him. The pressure tightened, the pain flashing till I knew another fractional increase of pressure would crack my ribs. Then he simply arched his great chest and belly, stepping forward as he let go of me. I’m not a small man, and I’m strong, but I landed hard on the floor, and rolled twice from the force of that powerful beer-barrel of a body. “Thirty minutes.” Nova said, “to make up your mind.” Then he opened the door, stepped out, and was gone.

Ruth was sitting on the davenport beside me some two or three minutes later, clutching my forearm. “Ben, calm down!” she was saying. “He won’t let you get near him with a poker, an iron bar, or anything else; you think he doesn’t know you’d want to try? Even if you did, you might kill him, and one thing you’re not going to do for Arnie is murder!”

“Then I’ve got to warn Arnie; go over that wall again, and—”

“Ben, Ben, you’re not thinking, you’re just wild! Right now Nova’s sitting at his window; you know he is. You couldn’t even open the garage door before he’d see you, and he’d be out there as fast as you would. Or just phone San Quentin.”

I was on my feet shouting at her. “Are you trying to tell me there’s nothing to do! That we just sit here and let him go out and take Arnie!”

She was shaking her head. “No,” she said. She reached up, and put a hand on my arm. “Ben, I hate that old man. If his hand touched mine, I couldn’t be comfortable till I’d washed it a dozen times. And anything more than that—” She just shook her head, eyes closing. Then she opened them, her face white. “But, Ben, it’s death for Arnie, the gas chamber, or... the worst half-hour I’ll ever live through. What right have I got to choose! Other women have been through even worse, and survived! Oh, Ben, can I let Arnie go to the gas chamber?”

“No!” I actually shouted it, staring down at her wild-eyed. “Ruth, no! That’s” — I couldn’t find the word — “wrong! It’s not possible to even think about! What do you think I am! Why, damn it, I love you!”

Her hands were at her face, and she was whispering, “I couldn’t. I couldn’t have done it! But Arnie in the gas chamber... but I couldn’t have. Ben, I love you, too,” she said, hands still over her face. “I can’t help it, but I do; I wish I were dead.” Sitting down beside her, I held her close. After a time, she looked up at me. “What are we going to do?”

“Listen,” I said quietly, “Could you get on the phone, and talk to Nova? Lower your voice, get close to the phone, and sound upset, as though you’d been crying. Tell him — tell him you finally brought me around, that we had a big fight about it, but I had to say yes. Tell him — anything; just talk. Tell him you’ll be over in a few minutes; make it real, believe it yourself, sound upset and tearful. Just hold him there. Ruth, till I can get out of the garage, and past his house in the car. Give me all the time you can, then hang up, lock all the doors, and wait. Ruth, can you do that?”

She nodded. “Ben, kiss me,” she said, and I did.

I held her tight, and kissed her then, and I wished we were a long way from here. I wished anything but the way things were. Then we went out to the kitchen, and as I stepped into the garage, Ruth picked up the phone, leafing through the book.

Once again I climbed that dark hill, and once again entered the prison as I had before, climbing down directly beside the furniture factory, and leaving my rope suspended from the wall; I had no time to waste. The area looked the same — silent, empty — and the bare earth at my feet in the light from the walls looked undisturbed. I actually had to kneel, my eyes only inches from the ground, as I hunted for the tiny circlet of screening. I couldn’t find it. Minutes passed, as I stumbled on my knees over that patch of earth between the high concrete wall and the factory.

Finally I had to do it. “Arnie!” I called, in as loud and harsh a whisper as I dared. “Arnie!” I said it louder. “It’s Ben! Open up!” Then I drew a deep breath, and shouted it. “Arnie! It’s Ben!” Then I heard a sound, turned, and Arnie was heaving himself out of his shelter just behind me, eyes wide and questioning, his face white and washed-out looking under the black stubble. “We’ve got to leave!” I said. “Don’t ask any questions, but be ready for trouble!”

He just nodded quickly, and jerked his chin at the rope hanging down the wall. I ran to it, and climbed it. Grasping a metal post on the wall top. I pulled myself to my feet, and a quiet voice in the darkness below me on the other side said, “All right, come down easy; I’ve got a gun on you.” And then I saw Nova, his bulky silhouette barely darker than the ground he stood on, and I knew it had been foolish to hope Ruth could fool him into stupidly waiting in his house, giving us the time we had needed. I pulled up my rope, Nova watching me from below, gun aimed at my belly, and I looped it around a guard rail, clattering and banging the hook against the metal. Then I tossed the hook and rope end over, and slid down, face to the wall. As my feet touched the ground, the gun muzzle pressed into my back and Nova said, “Hands on your head; and walk down the road slow.”

I clasped my hands on my head, still facing the wall, and moaned. “My ankle, I can’t walk; it’s—”

“Move!” Nova stepped up beside me, pulling at my shoulder, prying me from the wall, and Arnie, legs doubled up, hugging his knees, dropped from the wall he had climbed to the moment Nova spoke, onto Nova’s back, smashing him to the ground with such terrible force that I knew if he’d landed squarely it would have broken Nova’s neck. Arnie rolled, hugging his legs, then scrambled to his feet, and ran back. He snatched up the gun which had spun from Nova’s hand, and then, his feet straddling Nova’s body, Arnie leaned over him, the gun barrel aiming directly at Nova’s head. From the jerk of Arnie’s hand, I understood suddenly that he was tugging at the trigger, and I reached out, and yanked the gun from his hand.

“Oh,” Arnie said, in a little sound of surprise and understanding, “the safety’s on; gimme that gun.”

I said, “No; let’s get out of here,” and Arnie blinked, then nodded, and turned to pull down my rope, then pick up his from where he’d thrown it as he leaped.

We couldn’t leave Nova there, and we took him under an arm, and dragged him to his feet, staggering toward the road with him, and the hill just beyond it. And astoundingly, this massive man began to walk, stumbling along, shaking his head, and beginning to mutter. Within half a dozen steps, he was wrenching his arms from ours, and I shoved the gun into his back, and we climbed the hill, then down the other side to our cars.

I had Nova drive into my open garage in my car, with me in the back seat, the gun at his head. Arnie, following in Nova’s car, parked it at the curb, then came on into the garage. I pulled the garage door down, watching Nova, then turned to see Ruth standing in the kitchen doorway staring at us. Arnie hurried across the garage, stepped up into the kitchen, grabbed Ruth to him, and then stood, his back to me, holding her, squeezing her tight, his cheek against hers, and murmuring something. I couldn’t hear what — while Ruth stared at me over his shoulder, her eyes stricken and pleading for help. Herding Nova before me, I moved toward them, my mind hunting for words.

But I didn’t find them. A man at gunpoint before me, Ruth in Arnie’s arms, all I could think of to say was, “Arnie,” and when he turned to look at me questioningly — I didn’t know how to tell him! All I could say was, “Arnie, it’s about Ruth and... me, Arnie, you’ll have to try to understand!” I stopped, because he was no longer listening. His head swung to Ruth, and, her face anguished, she could only nod; but that was enough. He turned and walked into the living room, his face averted, and we followed after; I motioned Nova to a chair, and he sat down.

Arnie was standing, staring out the window at the dark empty street. When he turned back, he was smiling, and he glanced from Ruth to me. “I can understand it,” he said. “You’ve been here, together, and...” He shrugged, and said, “Well, I can understand it. Sure I can! And I won’t hold it against you. Either of you! I was gone, and... You’ve both done a lot for me! But now I’m out, and” — the smile was gone, and his voice was suddenly desperate — “Ruth, we’ll forget it! Forget it ever happened! I’ll never mention it! You’ll come along with me, and—”

“Arnie!” I said, and he turned to stare at me. “You don’t understand,” I said, my voice begging him to try. “It’s not what you think. Arnie, we love each—”

“Don’t say it!” He spat it out like a single word. “I don’t want to hear it” — he was shaking his head violently. “It’s not true! It can’t be. You only think—”

“Arnie, Arnie,” I said desperately, “It is true. I’m sorry, we didn’t mean it, never intended it, we tried not to, but—”

His hand was up, cutting me off, and now he walked toward Ruth, sitting on the davenport. He bent down to stare into her eyes. “You say it,” he said softly. “So far you’ve only nodded your head. But now I want to hear it from you, if you’ve got the nerve. You tell me you’ve ditched me! You tell me you didn’t have the simple guts and loyalty to stick with me; go ahead!” he shouted, the cords of his neck standing out. “Tell me!”

Her eyes suffering, she said. “I can only tell you, Arnie, that I love Ben. And if it’ll help you, and I hope it will, that I didn’t love you, much as I liked you, and still do. We’d never have been married, Arnie, I know that now, and Ben had nothing to do with that. Even if I’d never met Ben, you and I could never—”

He turned away from her. “Well, I’m glad,” he said quietly, conversationally, addressing no one in particular. “I’m damn glad to know we’d never have been married. Because you’re a tramp,” he said, turning to Ruth again, “and I’m lucky to find it out now. Whoever happens to be around — that’s who appeals to you, as it turns out. I’m away, out of circulation, so whoever comes along suits you just as well.”

I could have said something, I could have moved across the room, and shut him up, but I didn’t have the heart, and I knew Ruth would understand it.

“Well, I wish you luck with her, pal,” he said to me. “I wish you luck with this two-bit—” He began to cry. “Ruth, please come with me,” he said in a low voice. “Ruth, I’ve counted on it” — his eyes squeezed shut, the tears running down his cheeks. “Ruth, you’ve got to. Oh, Lord” — he swung away toward the window, hiding his face — “I’m alone.”

This was worse than anything I’d ever expected. I couldn’t stand it, and counting on Ruth to say so if Nova moved. I crossed the room, put an arm around Arnie’s shoulders, and said, “You’ve got to try to understan—”

“No!” — he jerked away. “You took her away, damn you! You help me escape — take Ruthie away — that’s a fair trade, I suppose! Well, I just don’t want to understand.” He turned and walked past me, toward the hall. “I’m still dependent on you, Benny,” he said quietly. “I’m not allowed any pride. I’ve got to shave. I need clothes, and I need the key you’ve got for me.” And I nodded, told him where he could find what he needed, and gave him the key to the apartment we had rented. Then I sat down on the davenport beside Ruth, to sit watching Nova till Arnie was ready to go. Presently he walked out through the living room, shaved and dressed, wearing a suit of mine. He walked straight to the door, opened it, and walked out without looking at any of us, and my heart cried out for him, but there was nothing to say. A moment later we heard Nova’s car start up.

Then we sat in silence, in the dead of night, drained of emotion. Nova sat impassively, his face averted. I gave Arnie a half hour’s start, plenty of time, then got up, and motioned Nova to the door with the gun. He walked out, and as he crossed the lawns toward his own house, I broke open the revolver, unloaded it, then called to him. When he turned, I tossed his gun across the lawn to land at his feet. He glanced at me, then stooped, picked up his gun, and walked on toward his door, as I closed mine.

In the living room I dropped into a chair, and when we spoke it wasn’t about Arnie; we weren’t up to that yet. Ruth said, “What about Nova, Ben?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I just don’t know what he’ll do, Ruth, or what I can do about it. I’m hoping he’ll do nothing. He messed this up, and Arnie got away; Nova wouldn’t look good explaining that. The big single-handed capture is fine if it works, but you’re a blundering fool if it doesn’t. Nova should have phoned Quentin, and they’d have walked out into the prison, and picked up Arnie with as many men as they needed. Instead, Nova lost him. The kind of guy he is, I think maybe he’ll just keep his trap shut. But you never know; he hates us, for sure. And for all I know he’s on the phone right now telling everything he knows, whatever they may think of him.” I sighed. “But I’m tired now, Ruth; I’m dead tired, and I’m sick of planning, sick of thinking, sick of the whole damn thing, and I couldn’t hold Nova here forever. If I could do something — anything at all — to get you in the clear, I’d be doing it. But I don’t know what to do. I’m just tired as hell, Ruth. I feel pretty bad, and all I want to do is go to sleep.”

The phone didn’t ring all night, and no one pounded at our door. I slept the whole night through, worn out. But twice, I learned later, Ruth awakened to lie there listening for — something. And in the morning, at breakfast, she heard it — the doorbell; and when I opened the door a sheriff stood there; another sat at the wheel of the police car at the curb. Would we come out to San Quentin, please?

They drove us to Quentin, no one speaking, then in through the gates, and up to the vine-covered Administration Building. They escorted us to the reception room of the Warden’s office, and a girl led us into the office.

It’s a big, quiet, very long room, green-carpeted, with white Venetian blinds at the windows. As we walked silently over the rug toward the big desk at the far end of the office, a man stood up from it; he was of average height and weight, had straight brown thinning hair, and a patient intelligent face, a man in his forties, wearing a brown double-breasted suit. “I’m the Warden,” he said quietly, and we murmured something in reply. Then he indicated two chairs beside the big desk, and sat down as we did.

He got right to it. “Early this morning,” he said, “I received a phone call from a man who said he lived somewhere in your general neighborhood; an anonymous call. He’s been watching you, he told me, has become suspicious, and says he has good reason to believe you helped your brother escape from San Quentin.”

With a sort of rueful admiration for Nova, I admitted to myself that it simply hadn’t occurred to me how easily he could involve me without involving himself — by picking up his phone. I couldn’t even mention his name short of confessing everything I had done. I felt Ruth’s hand slip under my arm.

“I have no great respect for anonymous calls,” the Warden was saying: idly he picked up a brass letter opener, then glanced up at me again. “But I have to pay attention to this one. For one thing, he did know something about you; more than we did. He knew you lived here, at least, very close to the prison; you moved up from Los Angeles, he said, about a week ago. But in our records, on your brother’s list of accredited visitors, we still have your old address; you didn’t notify us of the change.”

I shrugged. “I just didn’t think of it, Warden.”

“Well, it’s a coincidence that interests us; your moving up here just before your brother escaped. But that’s not all your neighbor told us. He suspects it was you and not your brother who stole a car last night at the point of a wooden gun. He saw you going out in what seemed to be prison clothes.”

I shrugged again. “I wear blue denims around the house, Warden. So do a lot of people. And we did go out last night, in our car, but—”

He leaned toward me over the desk top. “Two things you’ve got to think about, Mr. Jarvis. You’ve come under suspicion, and now if you helped your brother escape, we will probably find it out. I can’t make you any sort of promise about what the district attorney of this county will or won’t do then, but if you tell us now where your brother is, he may not prosecute. This makes sense; in effect, you’ll have helped undo your crime. But if you wait till we catch him, I think you’ll end up here as an inmate.” He held up a hand as I started to speak. “I know; if you helped your brother, it wasn’t to turn him in, but I’m not finished. Your brother has to come back here, Mr. Jarvis, because your brother is a murderer.” Again he held up a hand. “I don’t mean actually; not yet. But just listen.”

He picked up a large white card, and I caught a glimpse of Arnie’s photographed face stapled to its front. “He came in here,” said the Warden, “for driving while drunk, killing a man with his car. I’ve always thought that crime betrayed callousness and indifference toward other human beings. Then” — he flicked his finger against a long series of penned notations on the back of Arnie’s card — “his record here is one of fights and violence, beginning soon after his first months in the institution. And it’s a growing record, the violence increasing and taking on a quality of dangerous recklessness. Six months after he arrived, we found a razor-sharp homemade knife in your brother’s cell. Our psychiatrist’s report on him tells us he’s quite capable of killing. And a week ago, an officer here was struck on the head with a heavy weapon. We don’t know your brother did it, but we suspect that he did, and I suspect you know that he did. It was a blow which might have smashed in the officer’s skull, and the man who struck it, Mr. Jarvis, didn’t care if it did, at the moment. Now, listen to me” — his face strained, he leaned far over the desk toward me. “I didn’t begin this work yesterday. I began years ago as a correctional officer in the federal prison system, and now I’m a warden. I tell you out of the experience of years that there are times when I can say something like this with absolute certainty, and I say it now about Arnold Jarvis. I tell you he will kill somebody, unless we get him back here before he can.”

It wasn’t reaching me, and he knew it. It worried me, but asking me to turn Arnie in was absurd, and he knew it, and he sat back in his chair, slowly and helplessly shaking his head. Then — actually almost speaking to himself, with no real hope of reaching me — he said something that terrified me. “I suppose it’s impossible,” he murmured, “to make you believe your own brother would murder to keep from going back to prison,” and I felt the blood withdrawing from my skin. Believe? I’d almost done it myself. “I suppose it’s impossible,” the Warden was saying, “to make you believe your own brother is actually capable of pointing a gun at a man’s head and pulling the trigger.” But I’d seen him do it only hours before!

The Warden brought his fist down on the desk. “Some men will kill, Mr. Jarvis! Put them in the situation, and some men will kill to get out of it. And the situation is recapture; faced with it your brother will shoot! And he’s going to be faced with it. The man who escapes and is never heard of again because he’s leading a quiet exemplary life is so rare he hardly exists. It takes iron strength and self-discipline to break all ties and become a new man somewhere else, and your brother hasn’t got it! He’ll come sneaking back to his old ties and associations when he thinks it’s safe. Or get into trouble again, as he did before. Sooner or later he will face recapture. Does your brother have a gun right now?”

I hesitated, then shook my head.

“Then it has to be now, while he’s sleeping, and before he can get one,” he said softly. “Where is he, Mr. Jarvis?”

But I was hardly hearing him. My mind was fighting; the image of Arnie as he had once been was being replaced by a new and terribly different conception, and I was on my feet shouting against it. “But he wasn’t that way! He wasn’t like that!”

“No,” the Warden said slowly. “But now he is.”

“But why? Why? What happened?”

He shrugged a little. “Prison; that’s what happened. It takes strength to come through it whole.”

“So now, damn it” — I could feel my neck cords thrust out — “that’s what you want me to send him back to! Back to your lousy pastel prison, painted on the outside, rotten on the inside!”

He smiled a sad little smile. “Where else?” he said softly. “Do you have a better place? Have you got a good prison to send him to? Why, damn you!” he shouted suddenly, standing to face me, leaning far forward over the desk. “You never gave a thought in your life to the prisons you send men into, until now! We spend our lives and careers here — scrounging second-hand ball bats and discarded television sets, begging free movie films, fighting for an extra five-cent-a-day food allowance per man — trying to drag this prison a single step closer to what it ought to be! You’ll spend millions for highways, but prisons...” He shook his head slowly. Then he said quietly, “We put in hours we’re never paid for; we put in our lives, doing our damnedest with what we’re given and what we can scrounge, trying to get these men through the prisons you provide and still keep some spark of humanity alive in them. The pastel prison — well, it’s not gray concrete, and that’s something at least! And we have to wheedle and cajole the very paint we use to do that much. Don’t ask me where to send your brother, mister! I’ve spent my life for your brother.”

For several seconds he stood staring at me. Then, wearily, he turned away. “We’ll do our best for him,” he said quietly, and sat down. “That’s all I can promise you. And it may not be enough. That’s San Quentin, Mr. Jarvis. Not enough room, not enough money, not enough jobs, not enough teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, equipment, or even time to do much more than just lock these men up, and try to make their lives bearable. I believe San Quentin is one of the best prisons in the country, Mr. Jarvis. I know that it is. And it’s a bad prison; there are no good ones. But I didn’t send nearly five thousand men into a prison built for two thousand. You tell me where to put the overflow you and the rest of California send to me. I obey your orders.

“We’ll do the best we can for your brother, Mr. Jarvis, but for better or worse, he’s got to come back here; there’s no other place for him.”

“No other place but the gas chamber, Warden?”

He smiled a little. “No, you don’t ask a man to send his brother to the gas chamber. We don’t know who hit the officer, and the only witness is back in Wyoming again. Tell me where your brother is, and I give you my personal word that the charge will be dropped; you’ll have gained that much, and certainly I have to offer you that much. Mr. Jarvis, don’t you realize that this is the only way you can save your brother from the gas chamber?”

It almost succeeded. This man was speaking truth, and I knew it. And yet — I gave up thinking, because it didn’t matter; I simply was not going to turn in my brother.

He saw it in my face. “All right,” he said gently, “I know.” Then he shook his head in genuine sadness. Not hoping at all to affect me any more, he said, “But it’s too bad, because he’s a man who’ll do anything. Cross him, take away what he wants, and he’ll do anything. I tell you, it’s true.”

And as he spoke, something rose up in my mind past all belief, and I sat stock still, no longer listening, knowing it was true. Cross him and he’ll do anything — with a terrible finality something clicked into place in my mind. He told me, the Warden had said when I entered this room, that you moved up here from Los Angeles. It was such a little thing, utterly trivial, yet there was no escape from it — Nova did not know where I’d come from; he simply didn’t. It was Arnie — frustrated and wild with rage, an Arnie who’d do anything. I knew now — who’d phoned Quentin about me early this morning, knowing I’d be certain to think it was Nova.

I know I thought honestly in the terrible moments that followed; I wasn’t revenging myself. I’d turned loose a sick and dangerous man, and finally I knew it; there was no longer a choice about what I could do. I was actually shaking my head as though to clear it as I got to my feet, and Ruth’s arm slipped under mine as she stood up beside me. I felt the warm tears begin to slide down my face as I reached for the pad and pen on the desk before me; then I wrote. “Here’s the address, Warden,” I said, and I was crying for my lost brother, as he picked up his phone.

The Killer Is Loose JOHN HAWKINS & WARD HAWKINS

Original publication: The Saturday Evening Post, June 13, 1953

John Hawkins (1910–1978) appears to have written crime novels exclusively with his brother, Ward Hawkins (1912–1990). Among their collaborations are We Will Meet Again (1940), Pilebuck (1943), Broken River (1944), Devil on His Trail (1944), The Floods of Fear (1956), and Violent City (1957). They did, however, sometimes write individually when they turned to the short form, though most of their work was still collaborative.

Pilebuck was reissued as Secret Command, which was the title under which it was released on film a year after its first publication. It starred Pat O’Brien, Carole Landis, and Chester Morris. It is an interesting if uninspired World War II film with a former foreign correspondent — turned United States government agent taking a job in a shipyard where it is suspected that Nazi agents are planning sabotage.

The Floods of Fear was released as a film in 1958 under that title, starring Howard Keel, Anne Heywood, and Cyril Cusack. It’s an action-packed story of convicts working to shore up a dike during a flood when two of them, along with their guard, are swept away in the raging river. Battling the river and one another, they wind up in a house with a young woman who is, understandably, scared to death.

In addition to mystery, crime, espionage, and thrillers, the brothers had very successful careers in television, most notably as writers in the 1960s for the highly rated Bonanza and in the 1970s for Little House on the Prairie, for which John Hawkins was the producer and a writer while Ward Hawkins was the story editor, as well as the writer for some of the teleplays.

The brothers began their writing careers by immediately having their stories accepted by the most important (and best-paying) “slick” magazines (so called to distinguish their paper from the cheaper pulps), notably The Saturday Evening Post but also Collier’s and Cosmopolitan, as well as their share of pulps and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

In “The Killer Is Loose,” a bank employee helps rob a bank and is caught. When the police come to arrest him, a battle ensues and his wife is accidently shot to death. While in prison, the thief plans vengeance when he gets out — he will kill the wife of the cop who killed his own wife.

Title: The Killer Is Loose, 1956

Studio: United Artists

Director: Budd Boetticher

Screenwriter: Harold Medford

Producer: Robert L. Jacks

• Joseph Cotten (Detective Sam Wagner)

• Rhonda Fleming (Lila Wagner)

• Wendell Corey (Leon “Foggy” Poole)

• Alan Hale (Detective Denny)

• Michael Pate (Detective Chris Gillespie)

The film version of The Killer Is Loose follows almost scene for scene the story that the Hawkinses wrote. A bit of fleshing out appears from time to time but the story of cold-blooded revenge is essentially the same.

Although somewhat later than the best noir films of the 1940s, The Killer Is Loose bears most of the trademarks of that subgenre of the crime film except that it eschewed the usual city streets and took the action to the suburbs. It is a black-and-white B picture, but it features one of the most successful actors of the 1940s in Joseph Cotten, who starred in some of the greatest films of the era, including The Third Man (1949), Citizen Kane (1941), Gaslight (1944), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Portrait of Jennie (1948), and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

Known more for her great beauty and lush red hair than her transcendent acting ability, Rhonda Fleming mainly played the lead role in costume dramas or the second female lead in other films, such as Spellbound (1945), Out of the Past (1947), and The Spiral Staircase (1946).

Wendell Corey, here playing against type as a quiet, apparently mild-mannered clerk, was often cast as a tough cop or bad guy, notably in such films as Desert Fury (1947), The Accused (1949), The File on Thelma Jordan (1950), and Rear Window (1954).

THE KILLER IS LOOSE John Hawkins & Ward Hawkins

Sam Wagner was dreaming when the telephone rang. He was sitting in a blind in duck heaven and the mallards were coming in, settling over the decoys, when the shrill ringing called him home to the bedroom on Montgomery Street. He pawed blindly at the bedside table and found the telephone.

“Yeah,” he said; “Wagner here.”

“Sergeant Baxer, Sam. You awake?”

Sam Wagner threw the covers back and put his feet on the floor. He peered at the luminous face of the clock. Two A.M.

“Now I’m awake,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Leon Poole took a walk,” Baxer said. “The chief thought you ought to know. He told me to call you.”

“Leon Poole,” Sam Wagner said. “How’d he do it?”

“He was a trusty on the honor farm. One of the guards took him along as a helper on a truck, late this afternoon. The truck never got to town. Took ’em a while to find it.”

“The guard?”

“Dead. Poole put a knife in his throat.”

After a moment, Sam said, “Any sign of Poole?”

“Not yet. He ditched the truck fifteen miles this side of Winston. The state and county boys are out in force. They want him bad, Sam. That guard was a cold-blooded piece of work.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No. Chief wanted you to know, that’s all. You put Poole in the pen. Sit tight, he says. Keep a sharp eye.”

“O.K.,” Sam said. “Thanks for calling.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the wind rip through the fir trees that stood behind the house. Rain slashed at the windows. The storm the papers had been talking about had finally arrived.

“Sam,” Lila said, “who was that?”

The telephone had awakened her. Sam rubbed the back of his neck and shuffled his feet on the cold floor. He thought if Don Ameche had had a wife like Lila — nervous and a fretful sleeper — he would never have invented the telephone. For Lila, a ring in the night always signaled a major calamity.

“Sergeant Baxer,” he said. “A trusty got loose from the state honor farm. The chief thought I ought to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a cop,” Sam said. “It’s part of my work to know about things like that. Tomorrow’s work.” He swung his feet back into bed, leaned over, found her nose, and twisted it gently. “Remember your condition,” he told her. “Plenty of rest, the doc says. Now turn it off and go back to sleep.”

He put his head on the pillow. Beside him, Lila moved restlessly. Lila was good people, his one true love — ten years of married life had sold him on that a million times. But she was a worry bird, first class. Give her a big item like what dress to wear and she could fret herself into a pink tizzy. Give her a cop for a husband and she really—

She sat up beside him. “Sam, I’m hungry.”

“You had a big dinner.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m hungry again.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “We’re hungry.”

“Unfair tactics,” he said. “You’re ganging up on me.”

“Would you deny your son nourishment?”

“Five months before he gets here,” Sam said, “and he’s already got an appetite like a horse. Better send him back. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to afford him.”

“Sam,” she said, “we’re hungry.”

He threw the covers back. “Hot chocolate and cinnamon toast,” he said. “Comin’ up.” He found his robe and slippers and went through the house to the kitchen. He put a pan of milk on the stove. He covered slices of bread with butter, sugar, and cinnamon and put them in the oven.

“What a gal,” he said.

He was thirty-five, an even six feet tall, hardfleshed and lean. His hair was close-cropped. He had big, rough hands and rangy shoulders. His face was not a gentle face. His cheekbones were prominent, his jaw was taut and narrow, his heavy brows grew almost solidly over his blue eyes. But there was kindness in his eyes. Now worry pulled at the corners of his mouth. He turned to find Lila in the doorway.

“What’s this?” he said. “You don’t like the service?”

“I want to talk, Sam.”

She came into the kitchen, pulling tight the belt of her robe. She was tall and underweight — her pregnancy had yet to add a pound. She had a rather long face and large, hazel-brown eyes. A beautiful woman, a sensitive woman and a devoted wife. Sam knew it well.

He knew she had built her life around him, completely and for good, and he called that fine. But there were times when caring too much meant worrying too much. Take that deal about the gun. A couple of weeks ago, all of a sudden, she’d blown up a storm because he had to carry a gun to earn a living. So now he got in and out of his shoulder rig in the closet where she couldn’t see it.

“Two A.M.’s no time for a talk,” he said.

“It’s Leon Poole, isn’t it?”

“You heard me say so.”

“And while you were out here I remembered who he is. He’s the one — I mean, it was his wife you killed, wasn’t it?”

“That’s the guy,” Sam said.

“I remember seeing him in court.” Her lips tightened. “He’s dangerous, Sam. Very dangerous.”

Sam spread his arms in exasperation. “Dangerous,” he said. “To you, even a bicycle thief is lethal. Why don’t you be sensible? This guy is nobody.”

Lila looked at him steadily. She looked past him, back more than three years, and saw Leon Poole again. In the courtroom. She’d been there because it had been Sam’s case, and a big one. Big in the papers, at least, with the wife killed. She saw Poole whisper to his lawyer, saw the lawyer turn and find her, saw Poole turn and find her.

“He frightened me,” she said.

It was hard to know why. He hadn’t been rough-looking. Soft was the word for him, a fleshy man of medium height, with plump hands and cheeks. Features almost feminine — straight nose, large long-lashed dark eyes, thick dark hair. His eyes, she thought. His eyes were liquid, steady and staring.

“He was a thief,” Sam said. “And not a very good one.”

“He says you killed his wife.”

“She wound up with three bullets in her,” Sam said. “Mine and two others. Which one did it? Nobody knows.”

“He says you did it.”

“Because he’s got to stick it on somebody. Just one man, not three. It was my case. I questioned him, I ran him down. So he chose me for the guy that killed her.”

“He said he’d get even.”

“Quit it!” Sam leaned stiff-armed on the table. “If you think Poole will get a chance to take a shot at me, you’re very mistaken. In the first place, he isn’t going to want to. That ‘I’ll get you for this, copper!’ is a lot of blow. We hear it all the time. Nothing comes of it. Second place, he hasn’t a chance of staying loose.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Common sense,” Sam said. “He’s wearing prison numbers on his back a foot high. He’s got no dough, no gun, and he’s afoot. Every cop in the state’s looking for him.” Sam took his hands off the table and thrust them into the pockets of his robe. “A lot of big, tough men try to bust out of Winston. Not one in a thousand gets more than a few miles.”

The milk was boiling, the toast was burning. Sam swore, threw it all away and started over. When he turned to Lila, he found her pale, eyes large and dark.

“Hey, cut it out,” he said.

“You know what I’m thinking?”

“I should,” he said. “I’ve seen that look often enough. And I’ve heard the story often enough too. You don’t want to be a cop’s widow. If I loved you as much as you love me, I’d get out of police work.”

“You think I’m being selfish?”

“Just the opposite.” Sam said it earnestly, meaning and believing every word. “You’re gone on me — why I’m that lucky I’ll never know. You’re scared to death something is going to happen to me. I know you can’t any more stop worrying than you can stop breathing. But the answer’s still no. I’m not going to quit police work.”

“What about him, Sam?” Lila asked. “There’s two of us.”

“That’s not a clean punch,” Sam said.

“I think it is.”

Sam put chocolate and toast on the kitchen table. He did not speak again until he had finished the task. Lila, watching him, knew what he would say. His blue eyes were stubborn, his brows were pulled down in a line she knew only too well.

“There are thousands upon thousands of men in police work,” he said. “They live full and satisfying lives — long lives, most of them. Their wives put up with it. Their kids put up with it. You and the lad will have to do the same. I’ll do any reasonable thing for you. This is not reasonable. I won’t do it.”

Lila said, “I’ll ask again.”

Sam was up at six o’clock. Lila was standing beside the table when he walked into the kitchen. Her eyes were huge. The morning paper was beside his plate, opened upon headlines big and black.

“He killed a guard, Sam. You didn’t tell me.”

“At two A.M.? — no, I didn’t tell you,” he said. “There’s nothing to fret about, Lila. They’ll get him. A guard’s the same as a cop. A cop-killer doesn’t get away.”

“Then cops do get killed?”

Sam wondered if every man was as thickheaded as he was at six in the morning. Cop-killer — what a thing to say. “They’ll get him,” he said.

His breakfast eggs got cold while he explained how a man hunt was organized. The escape routes were blocked — the main highways, side roads, railroads, rivers. Then the enclosed area was searched, house to house, barn to barn, field to field. Poole had killed a guard. He’d get the big treatment — bloodhounds, planes, helicopters, cops by the hundred. More than that, every man, woman, and child would be on watch for him. What chance would a man wearing prison clothes have?

“No chance at all,” Sam said.

“Some do get through.”

“With help,” Sam said. “They have a pal waiting at a certain place at a certain time with money, clothes, and transportation. Poole didn’t have help. How could he have known the guard was going to take him to town? He saw the chance, grabbed it, and ran. He won’t get far.”

The doorbell rang. Sam saw the convulsive closing of Lila’s hands. For all his talking, he’d done very little good.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

There were two uniformed cops on the front porch, a prowl car parked at the curb. Sam Wagner knew both officers, Harris and McNamee. They were both veterans, big and competent.

Harris gave Sam a grin. “We’re on special duty out here,” he said. “We’re goin’ to keep an eye on the place.”

“Poole’s still loose then?”

“But not for long. It’s coming daylight now.”

“Right,” Sam said.

Lila was waiting for him in the kitchen, her hands locked at her waist. “Why are they here?” she asked. “What do they want? Sam, please don’t lie to me.”

“O.K.” He put big hands on her shoulders. “If Poole gets through, he might come here. That’s about as long as a chance can get, but it’s being covered. You see? There’s nowhere Poole can go — nowhere — that he won’t find cops waiting for him.”

“I see,” she said.

But her eyes told him she didn’t see it the right way. Her eyes told him she had taken about all she was able to take.

“Time I went to work,” he said.

Quietly, she said, “Good-by, Sam.”

Sam backed his car out of the garage, drove two blocks to the main east-west freeway, and fell in with the stream of early-morning traffic. He found himself thinking of Leon Poole again. A real odd-ball, that one. Clever as Satan in some ways, very dumb in others. He’d been a building-and-loan teller. He’d rigged a holdup, scheduling it for a time when an unusually large amount of cash was on hand. An accomplice had waved a gun and made off with the loot. A clean score, until it became obvious that only three men had known when the till would be stuffed with money.

An inside job then, clearly. Sam had interrogated and released all three suspects. Leon Poole’s telephone had been tapped. Poole, on the second day, had called the accomplice. That one had confessed quickly enough, naming Poole as the man who’d planned the holdup. Sam and two others had gone to make the arrest, and there the simple job had jumped the rails.

Leon Poole’d had a gun. The plump man with the round face and big smile had opened fire when he heard the police at his apartment door. He’d put a bullet through the arm of a uniformed officer. They’d gone in after him — what else? The rest had been unfortunate. They’d thought Poole was alone. Four of the neighbors had seen his wife leave the building. But when it was done, when the fat and weeping man was handcuffed, Doris Poole, the wife, was dead. Four of the neighbors had seen her leave the building, none had seen her return. Stalking an armed man through strange, dark rooms is uneasy work. Reflex is faster than thought. Doris Poole had simply appeared in the wrong doorway at the wrong time.

Sam Wagner shook his head. Three years and more, and he could still remember the numb despair of that moment.

But you can’t bring a dead woman back to life. And you can’t dwell in the past. You have to go on to the next day and the next. Tough, but there it is. Not heartless, helpless.

Sam parked behind police headquarters. He rode the elevator to the third floor. The bulletin board was on his left. Leon Poole’s mug had been posted there. Some face, Sam thought. Dark, long-lashed eyes; dark, rumpled hair; white, plump cheeks; a wide, full mouth. A malleable face. It had been sullen before the police camera, but Sam could remember it reflecting other moods: full of boyish charm and cheer, crumpled and streaked with tears, loose and torn with grief, snarling with hate — an actor’s face.

A voice said, “Here early, aren’t you, Sam?”

“Only a couple of hours,” Sam said.

He turned. This guy he liked: Chris Gillespie. Chris was big and loosely built, a little overweight, but hard under the padding. He was a cop with an education and better off than most for looks: curly hair, straight nose, white teeth. He liked blue suits, loud blue ties and white shirts. Sam had the seniority — two years — and half Chris’s education, but in four years of working together they’d never had a rumble. Sam wrinkled his nose.

“You smell,” he said.

“New shaving lotion. Like it?”

“Lovely,” Sam said. “Just lovely.”

Chris grinned. “Chief wants to see you.”

“Poole?”

“What else?” Chris said. He took Sam’s arm. Going down the hall, he said, “How’s Lila?”

“Not real happy,” Sam said. “Baxer called me at two this morning. About Poole. Lila got in on it and hit the roof. You know how she’s always after me to quit the cops and get in a safe line of work. Now, with a killer loose, blaming me for killing his wife, wanting my blood, she’s taking it hard.”

“It won’t get better,” Chris said.

“What d’you mean?”

“I’ll let the chief tell you,” Chris said.

The chief of detectives, Bob Brennan, was busy. He had one phone propped on his shoulder, another was ringing. A tape recorder used one corner of his desk, the rest was covered with reports. Jim Snow, lieutenant, state patrol, was waiting with something half said. A pair of sharp young men — FBI, likely — were watching the chief; waiting too. Sam and Chris Gillespie went to stand by a window.

Sam said, “How’d Poole make the honor farm?”

“A model prisoner,” Chris said.

Poole had done three years inside the walls. Cheery, hardworking, eager to please from the first day. The guards had liked him, the brain doctor had liked him, the warden had liked him. Poole was a first offender, determined to pay his debt to society and make a new life. He’d deserved a break; they’d given it to him.

“A bill of goods,” Sam said.

“They know it now,” Chris said. “Poole was just building for the break. Worked on it a long time and brought it off as smooth as a—”

“Sam.”

It was Bob Brennan, chief of detectives. Sam went over to the desk and Brennan introduced him. “Jim Snow, Fisk and Cassidy, FBI,” he said. “This is Sam Wagner, the arresting officer.” Now he looked steadily at Sam. “Turns out we’ve got a psycho on our hands.”

“Poole’s a psycho?” Sam asked.

“Looks that way.”

Bob Brennan was a cop. He’d been one for thirty-five years and he wore the stamp. A big man, strong and beefy. He had slate-gray eyes, a rough-hewn face and short, stiff gray hair. And he was shrewd. When he gave an opinion, men listened.

“What’s the pitch?” Sam asked.

“He was a short-timer,” Brennan said. “He had only a few years to do, and that on the honor farm. But he broke out the hard way, killing a guard. All to get even with you.”

Sam said, “If I had a dollar for every thief who’s promised me a hole in the head, I’d be a rich man.”

“You and me and a million others,” Brennan said. “But this one’s different. It’s what makes him a psycho. He doesn’t want to put a hole in your head. He wants to kill your wife.”

“My wife!”

“That’s right,” Brennan said. “He blames you for killing his wife, he wants an eye for an eye. I expect he’d settle for you, if he can’t get your wife, but she’s his target.” He flicked the switch of the tape recorder. While the tubes warmed, he said, “The warden of the state prison sent us this tape. After the break, he put Poole’s old cell mate on the carpet, thinking he might get something we could use.” He adjusted the tape reels. “Listen.”

“...the truth, s’help me. He kept saying he was dead. He kept saying he died the day that — that Sam Wagner killed his wife. Only one idea in Poole’s head, just one. If I heard him say it once, I heard him say it a thousand time. Why should Wagner’s wife be alive after Wagner killed Poole’s wife? Was his wife any better? A lot of that — hour after hour. He said he’d bust out someday and kill the cop’s wife. After that, he don’t care what happens to him.”

Brennan switched the recorder off. “Well?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “It’s hard to believe.”

“He murdered a guard to get off an honor farm,” Brennan said. “If I can believe that, I can believe this.”

Sam Wagner looked at the faces of the other men in the room. They believed it.

Brennan spoke again. “We ran the whole tape before you got here,” he said. “An hour of it. This guy and a couple of others. They all say the same thing. Want to hear it?”

Sam said, “Some other time.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. This was something. Something a long way from the story he’d given Lila. He was wondering what Lila would say about it when one of the desk phones rang.

Brennan answered it. “Brennan speaking.” He listened for several minutes. The men waiting learned nothing from his heavy face. “Thanks,” he said. “Keep me informed.” He pushed the phone aside and looked at those around the desk.

“Now he’s got a gun,” he said.

The skylight of a hardware store had been forced in the early hours of the morning, four-thirty or five. A .357 Magnum revolver and a box of shells were missing. The local police had checked for prints. It had taken them this long to identify them as Leon Poole’s. Poole was armed.

“The store’s in Tilden,” Brennan said. Lieutenant Snow’s breath hissed through stiff lips. Sam knew why. Tilden was only thirty miles away. The main roadblocks, the center of the search, had been beyond Tilden, closer to the prison. Poole had somehow got past them, he’d come a little more than halfway.

“Don’t ask me how,” Brennan said. “Nobody knows.” He looked at Lieutenant Snow, of the state patrol. “Keep your shirt on,” he said. “Your lads are doing a good job. And they’ve doubled everything now, this side of Tilden. Poole’s still got half the way to go. The tough half.”

Snow said, “They’ll get him.”

“Sure they will,” Brennan said.

“Three-five-seven Magnum,” Sam said. “A nice gun.”

“Very nice,” Brennan said. “Do for elephants.” He looked at Sam. “We’ve got a crew in the railroad yards, checking the incoming trains. Why don’t you and Chris hop out there and give them a hand?” The telephone was ringing again. “And keep in touch,” Brennan said.

The radio called Sam and Chris back to headquarters within the hour. Now the third-floor hall was crowded — reporters, photographers, uniformed state patrol, uniformed city police, plainclothes, and strangers. Brennan’s office was crowded. Sam saw a captain of the state patrol, the chief of city traffic, the vice squad second in command. Brennan’s office had become a headquarters, that was obvious. Sam felt a tightening inside himself as he approached Brennan’s desk.

“Bad news, Sam,” Brennan said.

“Yes, chief?”

“Poole’s in town somewhere.”

A farmer’s dog had found a man slugged, stripped to his shorts, tied and gagged and dumped in a cutover corn field north of Tilden. The dog’s barking had brought the farmer. Pure luck the man had been found at all — side road, open country.

“Victim’s name is Asa Smith,” Brennan said. “Lives in Tilden, works here in town. Got his car out of his garage this morning, drove a block to a stop street. Poole opened the door and got in with him. Made him drive toward Prosser. Slugged him, stripped him, took the car.”

“Rough,” Sam said.

“It gets rougher,” Brennan said. “Smith wouldn’t do for Poole’s twin, but he’d pass for his brother. Weight, height, hair, eyes — all about the same. Y’see? Poole matches Smith’s driver’s license and fits his clothes. The name on the driver’s license matches the car registration. That’s all Poole needed to get past the blockades.”

The captain of the state patrol said, “We can’t arrest everybody we stop. If they can identify themselves, we have to let them through.”

Brennan gave him a level stare. “Nobody blames you, captain. I’d’ve let him through myself.” He looked at Sam. “Smith gave us the license number of his car. Traffic found it parked on Jefferson Street twenty minutes ago. A good piece of work. Fast. But the bird had flown.”

Sam said, “Smith had money in his wallet, I suppose?”

“Twenty-five or thirty bucks.”

“All Poole will need,” Sam said, “if this is as far as he wants to go.”

“This is it.” Brennan’s eyes were steady. “He could have gone in a half-dozen directions, all easier than the one he picked. But he came here, straight here. He wants a shot at your wife, Sam. You’ve got to believe that.”

“What about her?” Sam asked.

“She’s safe. I’ve loaded the neighborhood. And the house. He couldn’t get to her with a tank.”

“How’s she taking it?”

“Not good. Worried stiff about you.”

“Me?” Sam said. “You didn’t tell her?”

“Not yet,” Brennan said. “She thinks the police are in the house in case Poole shows up, looking for you. We’re letting it ride like that. Anything else is up to you.”

Sam bit his lips. “My job, I guess.”

“You know what she can take,” Brennan agreed. “The problem now is to grab Poole. Any suggestions?”

Sam looked at the map of the city that hung on the wall. It was a big city. Poole could be anywhere. Downtown, in the residential districts, or in one of the outlying communities. A two-bit bus ride would reach them all.

“He wouldn’t be in a hotel,” Sam said. “Or a rooming house, or a boardinghouse, or a transient apartment. Too easy to find.”

“We’re looking,” Brennan said.

“A first offender, he hasn’t a lot of connections. He couldn’t buy a hideout. Not enough money. And he’s too hot.”

“Right again.”

“A friend wouldn’t take him in.”

“I doubt it, but we’re checking.”

Sam said, “He couldn’t walk the streets or hide in the brush. Somebody’d spot him. He’d know he’d have to get in under a roof somewhere.”

“Whose roof?”

“Anybody’s,” Sam said.

He looked at the map again. There were thousands of homes in the residential areas, more thousands close by. Families in each one. Kids, grownups, old people. A man with a gun could walk into any home. He could take this one or that one of the family as a hostage. The others would dance to his tune. Everyone would know he had killed a guard. They would know they’d die as the guard had died unless they walked a very careful line. And if one of them was foolishly brave? If Poole became nervous, impatient, frightened?

Sam said, “It’s a tough proposition.”

“Very tough,” Brennan said. “And we haven’t got forever. He’ll kill again if we don’t get him soon. I’ve put it on the radio and in the papers — everybody check their neighbor. If they see anything unusual or different, they’re to call us on the quiet. It’s something, but not much.”

“Not enough,” Sam said.

Brennan looked at him steadily. And Sam was conscious, then, of the weight of every other eye in the room. They were looking at him quietly, waiting. Waiting for what? And then Sam knew why he’d been called in, why Brennan had asked him for a suggestion.

“Poole doesn’t know, does he?” Sam said. “I mean, that we know he’s after Lila?”

“How could he?” There was a gleam in Brennan’s eyes. “He didn’t hear the tape. He doesn’t know what his cell mates told the warden.”

“He’ll scout my place,” Sam said. “If he finds the neighborhood loaded with cops, he’ll go back under cover and stay as long as he has to. A week, two weeks, three weeks.”

Brennan nodded.

“But if it looks normal around there — no cops, me going to work, coming home — he might make his try.” He saw the light growing in Brennan’s eyes. “He’ll know I’m there, at least. He’ll know he can settle for me, if he can’t find Lila.”

“And he’ll buy it,” Brennan said.

Sam saw Brennan’s eyes move to the other men in the room. Besides the light in his eyes, now there was a faint smile on his heavy face. The smile said, “You see?” Bob Brennan’s eyes came back to Sam.

“We talked it over before you came in, Sam,” he said. “We had the same idea. It was your pick, of course. I knew you’d make it. And we’ve got a couple of things to add. Time’s short. We want him to move now — this afternoon, tonight. And I think we can persuade him to do it.”

“How?”

“A diversion,” Brennan said. “We’ll get out a bulletin — radio, newspapers, TV — saying we have him cornered in the Kretlow Hills. Identification positive. That’s rough country out there, take a couple of days to cover it all. And we’ll cover it — planes, roadblocks, bloodhounds, the works. Poole will call it a fine piece of luck. He’ll grab the chance.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said.

“Who do you want to run the show at your place?” Brennan asked. “You can’t do it. You’re the bait.”

“Chris suits me.”

“Fine. And your wife?”

“I’ll move her out,” Sam said. “If she’s not at our phone-book address, she’s on the moon as far as he’s concerned. He won’t know where to look.”

“Take her to my place,” Chris said. “I’ll call the wife and tell her you’re on the way.”

“Can do,” Sam said.

Leon Poole walked east in the rain on Holly Road. The city was a thirty-minute bus ride behind him. This was suburban country: mailboxes standing beside black pavement, small homes, young orchards shivering in the November wind. There was little traffic at ten o’clock in the morning. He was certain that none in the passing cars would note or remember him.

His hat was too small. It rode oddly high on his head. He wore a blue suit, a transparent slicker, and carried a brown brief case. He was cold and hungry and very tired. Never strong, the past hours, the strain, the miles he’d traveled had left his knees shaking with weakness. He forced himself to walk firmly, head erect — an insurance salesman making a morning call or a real-estate agent out to inspect property. He read the names stenciled on the mailboxes as he went along.

The house he sought stood well away from the road, a neat, shingled structure, square and small. The shades were drawn and no smoke came from the chimney. A small sedan was parked on the gravel drive.

He went past the car to the back porch. The blinds here were up. He could see a stove, a table and the white bulk of a refrigerator. He set the brief case beside the door and lifted the skirt of the slicker to put his hand on the gun in his coat pocket. The door was not locked. Leon Poole opened it slowly and carefully and walked into the quiet room.

He went through the house, moving on tiptoe. A living room, dining room. Gray light seeped through the drawn blinds. An inner hall gave upon the bedroom and bath. Poole opened the bedroom door carefully and slowly. A muscle quivered in his cheek. He found the light switch and flicked it up with nervous haste. He stayed in the doorway, a plump, frightened man, wrapped in a dripping slicker. Across the room, a woman sat up in bed, blinking, surprise in her face. Beside her, a man slept with his cheek pillowed on his hands.

“Please don’t scream,” Poole said.

“Who are you?” The woman’s voice was thin. She stared at him, the covers clutched at her breast. “What do you want?”

“Will you wake your husband?” Poole said.

The man was awake, pushing himself up. He was not frightened. A faint grin, almost derisive, turned the corners of his wide mouth.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Poole. Leon Poole.”

“Yes,” Poole said. “Get up. Get dressed.”

The name of the man in bed was Otto Flanders. He’d been an Army first sergeant, and now, sitting up, naked to the waist, he still had the look of one. Hard and confident. Leon Poole had been a corporal in his company — Signal Corps, Calcutta — and Otto Flanders could think of him as nothing else. He sat on the bed, arms around his knees, and grinned at Corporal Poole.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “I will be damned. When I heard you helped yourself to the bank’s cash and got thrown in the can, I said to myself, ‘It can’t be. Not Corporal Poole. Not Fat Boy.’ ”

Leon Poole took the heavy revolver from his pocket. He pointed it at Otto Flanders’s bare chest.

“Get up,” he said.

Flanders’s face hardened. “That’s a lot of ordnance.”

“I know how to use it,” Poole said. “You taught me, remember.”

Flanders stared at him. “How come you’re loose?”

His wife said, “Otto, maybe you’d better—”

“Relax.” Flanders grinned at Poole. “Well?”

“Don’t you read a paper or listen to the radio?”

“Not on my day off. I’m sleepin’ in, or was.” He put brown hands on his knees. “You tryin’ to say you broke out?”

“I escaped,” Poole said. “Late yesterday. I killed a guard. The police everywhere are looking for me.”

“You killed a guard?”

“Yes,” Poole said. “Now will you get up?”

“Oh, Otto—” the woman whispered.

Otto Flanders’s eyes were steady on Poole’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll get up. Take it easy.” To his wife, he said, “You too. Take it easy. I’ll handle this.”

Poole said, “Be careful.”

“Always careful. Careful Otto, that’s me.”

He got up without haste, without nervousness or fear — with care. His eyes never left the gray face of Leon Poole. He found shorts and jeans and put them on. He put his fists on his hips — six feet of lean brown man, hard and capable.

“Now what d’we do?”

“We’ll go out in the kitchen,” Poole said. “Your wife will get up and get me something to eat. I’ll kill one of you if the other tries anything. Don’t scream, don’t try to telephone, don’t try to get away.”

Flanders said, “Do what he says, hon.”

Poole backed through the door into the living room. Flanders followed him. He turned his back on the gun and went into the kitchen. He made preparations for coffee — kettle on the stove, coffee in the drip pot. He didn’t look at Poole, but he was very much aware of him. Poole had shed the slicker and hat. He was standing where he could look into the small kitchen, a soft-looking man, gray with fatigue, who held a heavy revolver in his pudgy hand. Flanders’s wife came in, a rough bathrobe thrown over her nightdress.

“Easy does it,” Otto Flanders said.

His wife, Grace Flanders, was a big woman in her middle thirties. Her face was the color of sand now, and her eyes held fear that was almost anguish. She clattered a frying pan on the range.

“You’re scaring hell outa my wife,” Flanders said.

Poole said, “That can’t be helped.”

“What’d you come here for?”

“No one knows I know you,” Poole said. “In Calcutta you talked a lot about this place. It’s near the city, you have no close neighbors.” The plump shoulders moved in a tired shrug. “I didn’t have a lot of choice,” he said, “or a lot of time.”

“So you picked me.” Flanders came out of the kitchen to stand with his bare back against the door frame. “You’re nuts,” he said. “Y’can’t get away with this. All the cops in the country lookin’ for you — they’ll find you.”

“I know that,” Poole said. “I expect it. But I’ll have time to kill the woman I want to kill before they find me.”

“Gimme that again?”

“The man who sent me to prison killed a woman I loved more than anything in the world. More than life, much more.” Poole’s voice was faint, almost listless, but still matter-of-fact. “It was murder. I think he should suffer the way I suffered. Then they can do what they want with me.”

Flanders stared at him. A line of white came to rim his tight lips.

Slowly he said, “I guess you mean that.”

“I most certainly do.”

Flanders waited a moment. “You’ll never make it.”

“I think I will,” Poole said.

“Unh-uh,” Flanders said. “And I’ll tell you why. You’re tired. I can see yuh shakin’. You got to rest sometime, you got to sleep, don’t you? How’re you goin’ to do it? Tie me up? Tie my wife up? You can do that — maybe. But I’ve handled some real tough characters in my time. You’ll make a mistake. When you do, I’ll take you. And I won’t leave enough of you to send home for cat food.”

“You’re strong,” Poole said. “I know that.”

“Want a piece of advice?” Flanders held out a big hand, palm up. “Give me that gun now and I’ll treat you gentle.”

“No,” Poole said.

Flanders’s voice took a rough edge. “Think I can’t take you, gun or no gun? Think you aren’t goin’ to make a mistake, sooner or later? Turn your head a minute, take your eyes offa me one second — that’s all I need. I’m not kiddin’!”

“I know you’re not,” Poole said. His round face seemed to sag even more, his large brown eyes held something close to tears. “You’re quick,” he said. “I’m tired and not very sharp. It wouldn’t be hard. You could throw something—”

“O.K.,” Flanders said. “How about it?”

Poole shot Flanders through the chest. The gun was big — one shot was all that was needed. The sound of it crashed enormously in the room. Poole saw Flanders punched backward against the door frame, saw him turn slowly and fall. Beyond the door, in the kitchen, Grace Flanders stood motionless before the range, then closed her eyes and crumpled to the floor. She hadn’t screamed. Poole went to a chair and sat down. He stared at Otto Flanders and his wife.

“I’m not sorry,” he said. “I had to do it.”

Sam Wagner drove through the rain-swept streets with care. He watched the traffic behind him, the oncoming traffic and the traffic beside him, with particular attention to cars driven by men alone. Now and then he glanced at Lila.

She was sitting beside him, hands clasped in her lap, watching the beating windshield wipers. She was grimly silent, her lips set and her chin firm. Her silence was a protest. A uniformed officer had let Sam through his own front door. He’d found two plainclothes men in the living room with Lila. There’d been squad cars in the street as they’d driven away. Her silence was a protest against all this, and with Lila silence was far more grim than any words.

“No questions?” he asked.

“One,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“Gillespie’s,” Sam said. “You’re going to stay with Mary until we get our hands on Poole.”

He hadn’t told Lila it was her life Poole wanted. And now, thinking about it again, he decided that this was still not the time. She was keyed, he knew, to the breaking point. Nothing could be gained by frightening her more. After the thing was done, after Poole was dead or behind bars, would be time enough.

She said, “This is not the way to Gillespie’s.”

“A roundabout way,” he said.

“Why roundabout?”

Sam set his narrow jaw. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? The guy’s loose somewhere in town. He might have picked up another car. He might have been waiting and spotted me when I drove away. Not likely, but possible. We’re not taking any chances, Lila.”

She turned on the seat to watch the traffic behind them. After Sam had made two more turns, she said, “Sam, there is a car following us.”

“Black sedan?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a maroon sedan ahead of us, too,” Sam said. “Cops in both of them. They’re clearing us, Lila.”

Lila turned to stare through the windshield again. Silent again, grim again. Sam knew there was an explosion on the way. She couldn’t hold that much anger, that much resentment long without letting it go. When the explosion came Sam knew it would be big. He wondered if their marriage, or any marriage, could be strong enough to stand against it.

Mary Gillespie met them at the door. She kissed Lila and took her coat. Her dark eyes questioned Sam. “Does she know?” Sam shook his head. Mary bit her lips. She didn’t know whether it was right or not.

Sam said, “This is a lot of trouble.”

“Idiot!” Mary said. “If you’d gone to anyone else, you’d have had trouble. I mean real trouble. What good am I, if I can’t help?”

Sam was looking at Lila. She’d gone into the living room, she was standing with her back to him. He looked at Mary Gillespie and shook his head again. Mary knew how Lila felt about police and police work. And she understood clearly what this business of Poole meant.

Sam said, “Lila, I’ll keep in touch.”

She turned. “Sam, why am I here?”

“I told you,” Sam said. “A precaution. We’re not taking any chances. And you’re safe here. All Poole’s got is our phone-book address. If you’re not there, you’re on the moon as far as he’s concerned. He can’t find you.”

“Why should he want to?”

Sam lied a little. “He’s a psycho. I explained that. You never know what a psycho might do. If he can’t find me, he might settle for you.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Going back to the house, Lila,” Sam said. “We’ve got a trap rigged for him. An army of cops out of sight. If things look normal around there—”

“You’re the bait for the trap?”

“In a sense, I suppose. I—”

“You are, Sam.” Her face was white now. “Don’t try to avoid the truth. You’re using yourself as bait. That’s very noble and brave. But it seems to me you have other responsibilities.”

“What would you have me do?”

“If he can’t find me here, he can’t find you here. Or anywhere we care to go. You and I can drive down to the beach, can’t we? And stay at a motel until this is over?”

“No, we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you why.”

And he told her. Not gently. There was anger in him too. His voice was slow, implacable, and cold. Every cop hunting Poole, he said, was laying his life on the line. He was not going to run out on them. More than that, he said, his life and the lives of the other police were not the only ones at stake. He told her where they thought Poole was hiding — in someone’s home, holding them hostage — and that Poole would certainly kill again, unless they caught him soon.

“I’m a member of the human race,” he said. “It seems to me I owe my fellow members something. And I’m not taking any big risk. I’ll be covered. He won’t get through.”

“He won’t get through!” Lila said. “He came from Winston here, didn’t he? An escaped convict, on foot, without a friend — he got through half the police in the state, didn’t he? You said he couldn’t, but he did! He’s smarter than you think. He knows all your tricks. He’ll be watching for them. And you try to tell me there’s no risk.” Her voice turned hoarse. “Go on! Tell me again! Lie to me!”

“I won’t lie to you,” Sam said. “There is risk.”

She covered her face with her hands. She stood that way for a long moment, and when she took her hands away, Sam knew the final time had come. Her face was taut and white.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “I’d go stark raving mad if I tried to. You think your duty lies with your work. I think it lies with me — us. I’m not going to argue. I’m not going to fight. I love you, Sam. Perhaps too much. But I can’t go on wondering if the next footstep I hear will be a man come to tell me you’ve been killed. It will be easier to forget you than to live a nightmare.” Her hands were locked behind her. “Either we drive to the beach now, or we’re through.”

Quietly Sam asked, “Is that final, Lila?”

Mary said, “Sam! Lila! For the love of heaven—”

Lila said, “That’s final, Sam.”

“We’ve had it, then,” Sam said. “Good luck, girl.”

A radio spoke quietly in the living room of the house on Holly Road. In a statement made at five P.M., the radio said, Lieutenant Snow, of the state patrol, had reaffirmed his positive belief that escaped convict-murderer Leon Poole was within the police cordon surrounding the Kretlow Hills. Bad weather and difficult terrain had slowed the search. It would continue, however, throughout the night. Every available man and means was being used. Capture was expected at any hour.

Leon Poole said, “True or false?”

No one answered him, for he was alone in the room. He got out of his chair and turned off the radio. He had slept most of the day, and the rest had done much for him. He looked well and felt well.

He stood for a moment, lips pursed. The body of Otto Flanders lay where it had fallen, blanket-covered. Leon Poole didn’t see it. He listened to the rain slatting against the windows. A night like this would be a good night, he thought. Everyone hurrying through the storm, heads down, collars up.

He thought about the radio announcement. It could be a trick, but it could be the truth too. The police might make a mistake like that. If they had made a mistake, it would be the best thing in the world for him. “I’m tempted,” he said. But still he had to think it through carefully. He thought the odds against him were very high. But hadn’t they always been? Would they ever be better than they were now? No. Every hour, every day increased the odds against him.

“Well, then,” he said, “now is the time.”

He went past the body. The bedroom door was open. He found the light switch. Grace Flanders was lying on the bed beneath a comforter. There was adhesive tape across her mouth. More tape bound her wrists and ankles. Shock had made her face vacantly ugly; her eyes were dull and puffed with weeping. Leon Poole did not look at her. He went around the bed to open the closet door.

He needed a dress, something plain and dark. Fit was no problem; Grace Flanders was a big woman, her hands and feet were large. He needed a coat with a full collar — fur, if the woman owned one. He needed shoes, a hat and an umbrella. He pawed through the dresses on the closet rack. The blue wool, he decided, would do nicely.

Sam Wagner was at home. The blinds were up, the living room was well lighted. Sam sat beneath a reading lamp, a magazine in his lap. His eyes went to the clock. Eight-fifteen. Outside, the storm still whipped the trees and threw rain in bursts against the windows. It had been a long afternoon and a long evening.

The compact two-way short-wave radio on the floor beside Sam’s chair spoke softly. A man on foot had entered the area. He was watched, checked from one post to another until he entered a house a block away, a family man home from work. A sedan, driven by a woman, turned onto Montgomery from a main east-west artery, moving slowly. It was tracked past Sam’s house almost to Van Brocklin, another main artery, where it turned again, out of the area. A pair of high-school kids ran past Sam’s house, heads down in the rain. Another car, a woman driver, another car, a man driver — checked in, checked out. It had been like that all afternoon and evening. Every approach was covered. Any man who even came close to the description of Leon Poole was followed by a dozen guns.

“A woman,” the radio said. “Fat, middle-aged, carrying an umbrella on Thirty-Fifth.”

“O.K.,” Chris Gillespie said. “Don’t scare her.”

He was in the house directly across the street from Wagner’s. He’d commandeered an upstairs bedroom. The searchlight was there, ready for use. Two riflemen stood behind darkened windows. Gillespie was the center of the radio net, every movement in the neighborhood was plotted and charted in the room where he sat. Brennan, at headquarters, was the center of a net that covered the city.

“Black coupé on Montgomery,” the radio said crisply. “Looks like a high-school kid driving.”

The black coupé was tracked and cleared.

Sam wondered if it would comfort the woman on Thirty-Fifth to know that never in her life would she be safer on a dark street than she was right now. She really had protection.

The radio again, Gillespie’s voice, “Sam, come in.”

Sam opened his microphone. “Sam speaking, Chris.”

“We’ve lost Lila,” Chris said.

“What d’you mean, lost her?”

“She’s not at my house. She walked out.”

“Why?” Sam said. “When?”

“That wife of mine,” Chris said. “She’s good people, all heart, but she can’t keep her nose out of things. She’s Mrs. Fixit, y’know. She’s got to help. She couldn’t stand Lila bein’ mad at you. I’m goin’ to paddle her for this, I promise you that. Sam, she told Lila the score, and I’m afraid she was rough about it. She told Lila you were sitting in for her, playing pigeon in Lila’s place.”

“How long ago did Lila leave?”

“Twenty or thirty minutes ago,” Chris said. “Hard to say exactly. Mary thought she was napping. She looked in the bedroom to check and Lila was gone. Sorry, Sam.” The radio was silent for a moment, then, “Any idea where she’d go? Her sister’s, maybe? Some other relative?”

Sam thought of Lila alone in Gillespie’s bedroom. Knowing now that she was Poole’s target, remembering the words she’d hurled at him. Sam found his hands were suddenly shaking. His voice was oddly thick.

“She’s coming home, Chris,” he said.

“Home?” Chris said. “What makes you think so?”

“She’s my wife, Chris. She’d want to be here.”

“Oh.” Again Chris was silent for a moment. “I think you’re right,” he said. “Lila would, with the chips down.”

Sam said, “Keep an eye out for her.”

“Check,” Chris said. “Will do.”

Lila Wagner was tired. She was sitting behind the driver, on the first seat of the Van Brocklin Street bus, her hands clenched in her lap. She was cold, wet, and she couldn’t remember another time when her head had ached so blindingly. She rubbed mist from the window and peered out into the rain-lashed night. Oak Street. Harrison next. Then the long climb up to Montgomery and she was home. Almost.

She didn’t want to think of the walk from the bus stop to the house — four blocks, and most of it in the thick dark beneath huge and ancient trees. She thought, instead, of Mary Gillespie, a white-faced, big-eyed Mary. She heard again Mary’s hurt and shaking voice.

“Hate me, if you will,” she’d said, “but I can’t wait any longer. You’re being a coward, Lila. A thoughtless, selfish coward.” Blazing anger hadn’t stopped her. “Sam puts his work before you, does he? Risks his life for strangers? Doesn’t care what happens to you? Well, here’s the truth. He’ll trade his life for yours any time. He’s offering to do it now. It isn’t Sam that Poole wants to kill. It’s you!”

There’d been more. And when Mary had left her, closing the bedroom door, there’d been a half hour in the darkness. A long look at Lila Wagner. Yes, she was a coward — that was her only clear decision. But somehow out of it had come the knowledge that she had to go home. Sam was taking her place, and that was wrong. His life was more important than her own. She couldn’t reason why. She knew it because her heart had told her so.

“Harrison,” the bus driver said.

A boulevard stop. The bus halted and a man and woman got aboard. Lila Wagner’s heart lurched. The man was short and fat, wrapped in a sodden trench coat. He dropped his fare in the box and turned. The man was not Poole; he was sixty or sixty-five. He wore a bristling gray mustache, a gray tuft of beard. But Lila, finding she’d held her breath, knew she’d been very much afraid.

“Montgomery next,” the driver said.

The bus crawled up the hill, buffeted by wind and rain. Lila watched the landmarks pass: the haloed neon of David Drug, the Thirty-Mart, the theatre and barbershop. Three blocks to go. Now waves of fear began to flow through her. The man with the beard had started them. Her mind filled with images of Poole — dark, liquid eyes, sodden face. He had stabbed a man in the throat, he was waiting somewhere for her. She looked out the window. Two blocks to go. One block. Now she found she didn’t want to ring the bell. She couldn’t face that dark and dripping tunnel beneath the trees. Not yet.

Her hand went up and pulled the cord.

The bus swung over to the curb, the door sighed open. I can’t get off. Sam, I can’t, I can’t. She was on her feet, going past the driver and down the steps. In a moment, the bus was gone. The service station and garage here were dark. The corner arc light bounced on the wind and long shadows raced across the pavement, clawing at her legs.

She looked down Montgomery Street toward home. Hedges and dripping trees and the wet shining of light on a parked car. Four blocks — four blocks was such an enormous distance. All that darkness, all those shadows, all those trees. A man, a dozen men, could be hidden along here. She couldn’t do it. No matter what the cost, she hadn’t the strength or the courage. And yet she did do it. She crossed the paved service-station lot and went into the dark beneath the trees.

Don’t think, she told herself. Just walk — fast.

Water spilled down the street to roar into the storm drains. At the intersection she had to wade in water ankle-deep. Then she was under the trees that roofed the walk again. “Only three blocks to go,” she whispered. “Just three.”

She saw the lumpy figure then. A woman standing against a hedge. A fat, middle-aged woman holding an umbrella. Not moving, not doing anything, just standing there. Lila glanced at her. There was darkness and shadow, but light enough to see a wet and pallid face above a coat collar of thin, wet fur. The woman wore a hat, shapeless, mashed and somehow — wrong! A silent shriek of warning rang in Lila’s mind. No woman would ever wear a hat like that. She looked again and saw eyes that were dark, liquid and staring. She knew those eyes.

Leon Poole, she told herself.

She heard his step on the walk behind her. She didn’t look back. She couldn’t look back. She walked steadily down the hill, shocked and numbed with terror. His footfalls exactly matched her own. He didn’t gain, he didn’t lag. The flesh of her back crawled with the waiting — waiting for the impact of a bullet or a sudden overpowering rush. Neither came. A half block and still nothing. Why? He had seen her face. He was following her, he must know who she was.

Then a cold clarity came to her mind. He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seen her since the courtroom more than three years ago. She had changed, she’d lost weight, her face was thinner, her clothes were different. He wasn’t sure enough to cut her down. He was waiting for her to reach home. He knew the address. The moment she turned up the walk—

But she didn’t have to turn; she realized that suddenly. She could go past the house. The moment she did, she would be any woman in the world but Lila Wagner. Poole would let her go. He would turn to the house, to the lighted windows. The police were waiting for a man. Poole, in a woman’s clothes, would have time enough to reach a window, to find Sam, to lift his gun and shoot.

“Oh, God,” Lila whispered.

Again she measured her strength, her resolve, the cost. She’d found strength enough to leave Mary Gillespie, to ride the bus and leave the bus. She’d had enough to come this far. But this was the end. She couldn’t turn up the walk toward the house. It was beyond her, hopelessly beyond her.

“Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “I can’t do it.”

The short-wave radio beside Sam Wagner’s chair had been jammed with voices the past few minutes. The watch in the dark service station at Van Brocklin and Montgomery had seen a woman get off the bus. The woman might be Lila Wagner. The man in the service station did not know her; he could not be sure.

“Tall?” Sam said. “Gray coat, gray fur hat?”

“Check,” the radio said.

“A bus, for the luvva Mike!” This was Chris Gillespie’s voice. “Why not a cab right to her door?”

“She’s a frugal woman,” Sam said. “She hates cabs. A cab wouldn’t enter her mind.”

“Let’s pick her up,” Chris said.

“This’s Five,” a new voice said. “There’re two women now. The other’s the one we had on Thirty-Fifth. The fat job with the umbrella. She’s behind Mrs. Wagner.”

“Watch her!” Sam said. And then a new thought flashed in his mind. “Chris! Is the fat one a woman?”

Chris said, “Come in, anybody. Is that fat one a woman? Make damn sure. Poole’s fat, and he could wear a fat woman’s clothes. Sufferin’ Joe, come in, somebody! Come in!”

Several voices spoke at once. Then a new voice came in clearly. “Had a look at her under the light at Thirty-Fourth. I wouldn’t bet she’s a woman. Under the umbrella, it’s hard to tell. But the way she walks, it’s not right.”

Chris said, “Let’s move in!”

“Stand fast!” Sam’s voice was harsh. “If that’s Poole, why’s he waiting? He’s not sure it’s Lila. He’s waiting to see if she comes here. If we move in, he’d know we’ve got him boxed and he’ll start shooting. Lila first.”

“Too late,” a voice said. “They’ve crossed.”

Another voice said, “I can stop him with a rifle. He won’t do any shooting after a slug hits him.”

“And if the fat one is a woman?” Sam asked.

Chris said, “You call it, Sam. We’ll do it.”

Leon Poole held the umbrella in his left hand. His right hand was in the pocket of Mrs. Flanders’s coat, holding tight to the butt of the heavy revolver. He was a dozen paces behind the tall, slender woman, walking carefully, trying to remember a woman’s stride was short and clipped. If he broke stride, the sound would frighten the woman. He didn’t want to frighten her. He wanted her to go on, unworried, to turn or not turn when she reached the Wagner residence.

“Not that I can hope she will,” he said.

Granted things could break for him, as well as against him. But too much good luck was suspicious. The wild-goose chase in the Kretlow Hills was all a man could really hope for. Then, after all the struggle and fight and risk, to have Lila Wagner pass within arm’s reach, alone, on a dark and deserted street — that was beyond all bounds of reason.

Her description fitted, yes. He’d often thought the face he’d seen in the courtroom could never change so much that he wouldn’t recognize it anywhere, any time, at a glance. And he’d been certain in the first brief moment. She was thinner, but she was the woman. Then reason had asserted itself. It was more luck than he could hope for. And if he killed the wrong woman here, so close to Wagner’s, the police would know what he intended and guard her well, and his last hope of seeing justice done would vanish.

“I can wait,” he said, “a little longer.”

Lila Wagner would go into the Wagner house. Another woman would continue on. As simple as that. When she turned, if she turned, he would have time — perhaps as she climbed the front steps, perhaps as she opened the door. If she didn’t turn, then he could try the windows. The house had been well lighted when he’d driven by a little while ago. There was someone home. Surely he would be able to find Lila Wagner through one of the windows. If not the woman, then Sam Wagner. He would have to take what he could get now; he was sure he would never get this close again.

He carefully matched his stride with that of the woman ahead, step for step. He felt like a man walking a very high wire, danger on every hand, the goal almost within his reach. And he was confident. He would reach the goal. The Wagner walk was only a few steps away.

The woman ahead faltered. A catch in her stride, a half stumble. Poole’s hand closed tightly on the gun. His every sense became alert. Two more strides and the woman faltered again. Her head was bent, one hand seemed to be at her face. The Wagner walk was only a step or two ahead of her. She straightened to walk firmly, determinedly. She was going past the Wagner house, Poole knew that suddenly and certainly. He cursed softly. This was not the woman.

A stride beyond the walk, Lila turned. She’d met a barrier she couldn’t pass. A barrier within herself. She turned suddenly, glad that she had to turn, glad that she could turn and run, bent low and screaming, toward the front porch. She heard the roar of a gun and fell.

Her sudden movement had surprised Poole. Sure she was going on, he’d relaxed for a moment. Then he’d drawn the gun and fired hurriedly at the bent, fast-moving figure. He missed. He knew he’d missed. He lifted the gun for another shot. It was a shot he never fired.

A wild man vaulted the hedge between Poole and the Wagner walk. A man in shirt sleeves who planted himself on widespread legs, facing Poole, gun in hand. Brilliant light burst upon them both; glaring light. Poole tried to shift his gun for a shot at the man in front of him. Again, too late. Sam Wagner fired first. At ten feet, in bright light, he did not miss. Nor did the others. Rifles boomed across the street, revolvers barked and a submachine gun tore the night with chattering sound. Leon Poole was dead before his body struck the walk.

The night passed. A long night for Lila. A confused night. A night in which her husband proved himself a hard-fisted, swearing, unreasonable tyrant. She remembered him lunging up the front lawn, scooping her up in his arms and slamming into the house with her. She remembered him bellowing, “A doctor! Get a doctor fast!” He’d thrown her on the bed so hard she bounced; he’d petted her until she was black and blue. Had she cried? Of course, she’d cried. She’d been half out of her mind, crying about a dozen things.

“Sam, for the love of Pete!” Chris Gillespie’s voice. “Will you stop pounding on her? She’ll be all right. Do something useful, bar the door. There’s a howling mob out there, and more coming all the time.”

Police, reporters, photographers, curious — hundreds, by the sound of them. She’d heard Sam’s voice roaring above the clamor. “No! No pictures, no stories! Tomorrow, or next week, or never! But not now!”

The doctor, then, “No harm done, Mr. Wagner. Your child will be along on schedule. Your wife’s a strong woman.”

And Sam: “You’re telling me?”

A wonderful thing to sleep on, a wonderful thing to wake up to. And now, in the quiet of her bedroom in the morning, something wonderfully warm to hold in her heart. She’d been afraid, terribly afraid. But still she’d been the wife Sam needed and wanted and had to have. She was grateful that she had, proud that she had. And she was sure, now, that she could always be that kind of wife. Worth it? A hundred times worth it. He was out in the kitchen, a whistling, happy man. In a moment he came into the bedroom with a breakfast tray. When he looked at her, his pale blue eyes were shining.

“What d’you say, sweet? Hungry?”

“Like a horse,” she said. “Both of us. We’re hungry as a team of horses.”

Face Work CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Black Mask, October 1937, as by William Irish; first collected in Six Nights of Mystery by William Irish (New York, Popular Library, 1950). Note: The title was changed to “One Night in New York” for its first book publication.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) wrote some of the darkest, most despairing, most heartbreaking noir fiction in the history of American crime literature. The lives he portrayed as sad and hopeless was the life he lived, though without the murders.

Born in New York City, he grew up in Latin America and New York, and was educated at Columbia University, to which he left his literary estate. A sad and lonely man, he was so friendless and isolated that he desperately dedicated books to his typewriter and to his hotel room. Woolrich was almost certainly a closeted homosexual (his marriage was terminated almost immediately) and an alcoholic, so antisocial and reclusive that he refused to leave his hotel room when his leg became infected, ultimately resulting in its amputation.

The majority of his work has an overwhelming darkness and few of his characters, whether good or evil, have much hope for happiness — or even justice. No twentieth-century author equaled Woolrich’s ability to create suspense, and Hollywood producers recognized it early on. Few writers have had as many films based on their work as Woolrich, beginning with Convicted (1938), based on “Face Work,” which starred a very young Rita Hayworth.

“Face Work” is a story that appears to have been particularly close to Woolrich’s heart and is one of his most anthologized. He wrote a similar plotline in “Murder in Wax,” which was first published in the March 1, 1935, issue of Dime Detective, which he rewrote and changed the title of in order to be able to sell it to Black Mask. He continued to like it so much that he expanded it to become one of his most successful novels, The Black Angel (1943), which inspired its own motion picture, Black Angel (1946), which starred Dan Duryea, Peter Lorre, and June Vincent.

Title: Convicted, 1938

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: Leon Barsha

Screenwriter: Edgar Edwards

Producer: Kenneth J. Bishop (uncredited)

• Charles Quigley (Police Detective Burns)

• Rita Hayworth (Jerry Wheeler)

• Marc Lawrence (Milton Militis)

An unusually short film (fifty-eight minutes), its brevity allows it to closely adhere to the central element of Woolrich’s outstanding short story.

A man, Chick Wheeler (played by Edgar Edwards, the writer of the screenplay), has been framed for a murder and Jerry Wheeler, his sister, a nightclub entertainer known as “the Mistress of the Rhumba,” played by the gorgeous nineteen-year-old Rita Hayworth, tries to prove his innocence. Convinced that the real killer is the owner of a nightclub, she gets a job there to try to find evidence but he soon realizes what she is doing and plans to dispose of her.

Although he arrested and helped convict Chick, the cop on the case comes to believe he’s arrested the wrong man and tries to help Jerry free her brother. He also tries to help himself by coming on to Jerry, calling her “Angel Face.” Who can blame him?

FACE WORK Cornell Woolrich

I had on my best hat and my warpaint when I dug into her bell. You’ve heard makeup called that a thousand times, but this is one time it rated it; it was just that — warpaint.

I caught Ruby Rose Reading at breakfast time — hers, not mine. Quarter to three in the afternoon. Breakfast was a pink soda-fountain mess, a tomato-and-lettuce — both untouched — and an empty glass of Bromo Seltzer, which had evidently had first claim on her. There were a pair of swell ski slides under her eyes — she was reading Gladys Glad’s beauty column to try to figure out how to get rid of them before she went out that night and got a couple more. A maid had opened the door and given me a yellowed optic. “Yes, ma’am, who do you wish to see?”

“I see her already,” I said, “so skip the Morse code.” I went in up to Ruby Rose’s ten-yard line. “Wheeler’s the name,” I said. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Should it?” She was dark and Salome-ish. She was mean. She was bad medicine. I could see his finish right there, in her eyes. And it hadn’t been any fun to dance at Texas Guinan’s or Larry Fay’s when I was sixteen, to keep him out of the orphan asylum or the reformatory. I hadn’t spent most of my young girlhood in a tinseled G-string to have her take apart what I’d built up just to see what made him tick.

I said, “I don’t mind coming right out with it in front of your maid — if you don’t.”

But evidently she did.

She hit her with the tomato-and-lettuce in the left eye as preamble to the request: “Whaddo I pay you for, anyway? Take Foo-Too around the block a couple of times.”

“I took him once already, and he was a good boy” was the weather report she got on this.

“Well, take him again. Maybe you can kid him it’s tomorrow already.”

The maid fastened something that looked like the business end of a floor mop to a leash and went out shaking her head. “You sure didn’t enjoy yourself last night. That Stork Club never agrees with you.”

As soon as the gallery was out of the way I said, “You lay off my brother!”

She lit a cigarette and nosed the smoke at me. “Well, Gracie Allen, you’ve come to the wrong place looking for your brother. And, just for the record, what am I supposed to have done to him, cured him of wiping his nose on his sleeve or something?”

“He’s been spending dough like wild, dough that doesn’t come out of his salary.”

“Then where does it come from?” she asked.

“I haven’t found out. I hope his firm never does, either.” I shifted gears, went into low — like when I used to sing “Poor Butterfly” for the customers — but money couldn’t have dragged this performance out of me, it came from the heart, without pay.

“There’s a little girl on our street — oh, not much to look at, thinks twelve o’clock’s the middle of the night and storks leave babies, but she’s ready to take up where I leave off, pinch pennies and squeeze nickels along with him, build him into something, get him somewhere, not spread him all over the landscape. He’s just a man who doesn’t know what’s good for him, doesn’t know his bass from his oboe. I can’t stand by and watch her chew her heart up. Give her a break, and him, and me. Pick on someone your own size, someone who can take it. Have your fun and more power to you — but not with all I’ve got!”

She banged her cigarette to death against a tray. “Okay, is the screen test about over? Now, will you get out of here, you ham actress, and lemme get my massage?”

She went over and got the door ready for me. Gave a traffic-cop signal over her shoulder with one thumb. “I’ve heard of wives pulling this act, and even mothers, and in a pitcher I saw only lately — Camilly, it was called — it was the old man. Now it’s a sister!” She gave the ceiling the once-over. “What’ll they think of next? Send grandma around tomorrow — next week East Lynne. Come on, make it snappy!” she invited, and hitched her elbow at me. If she’d touched me, I think I’d have murdered her.

“If you feel I’m poison, why don’t you put it up to your brother?” she signed off. And very low, just before she walloped the door after me: “And see how far you get!”

She was right.

I said, “Chick, you’re not going to chuck your job, you’re not going to Chicago with that dame, are you?”

He looked at me funny and he said, “How did you know?”

“I saw your valise all packed when I wanted to send one of your suits to the cleaners.”

“You ought to be a detective,” he said, and he wasn’t pally. “Okay, now that you mention it,” and he went in and he got it to show me the back of it going out the door.

But I got over to the door before he did and pulled a Custer’s Last Stand. I skipped the verse and went into the patter chorus. And, boy, did I sell it, without a spot and without a muted trumpet solo, either! At the El-Fay in the old days they would have been crying into their gin and wiring home to mother.

“I’m not asking anything for myself. I’m older than you, Chick, and when a girl says that you’ve got her down to bedrock. I’ve been around plenty, and ‘around’ wasn’t pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so... so— Oh, I didn’t know why myself sometimes — just so you wouldn’t turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharp-shooter, a bum like the rest of them. Chick, you’re just a punk of twenty-four, but as far as I’m concerned the sun rises and sets across your shoulders. Me and little Mary Allen, we’ve been rooting for you all along. What’s the matter with her, Chick? Just because her face don’t come out of boxes and she doesn’t know the right grips, don’t pass her by for something that ought to be shampooed out of your hair with gasoline.”

But he didn’t have an ear for music. The siren song had got to him like Ulysses. And once they hear that—

“Get away from the door,” he said, way down low. “I never raised a hand to you in my life, I don’t want to now.”

The last I saw of him he was passing the back of his hand slowly up and down his side, like he was ashamed of it. The valise was in the other one. I picked myself up from the opposite side of the foyer where he’d sent me, the place all buckling around me like seen through a sheet of water. I called out after him through the open door: “Don’t go, Chick! You’re heading straight for the eight-ball! Don’t go to her, Chick!” The acoustics were swell — every door in the hall opened to get an earful.

He stood there a split-second without looking back at me, yellow light gushing out at him through the porthole of the elevator. He straightened his hat, which my chin against his duke had dislodged — and no more Chick.

At about four that morning, I was still sniveling into the gin he’d left behind him and talking to him across the table from me — without getting any answer — when the doorbell rang. I thought it was him for a minute, but it was two other guys. They didn’t ask if they could come in, they just went way around to the other side of me and showed me a couple of tin-heeled palms. So I did the coming in after them. I lived there, after all.

They looked the place over like they were prospective tenants being shown an apartment. I didn’t go for that; detectives belong in the books you read in bed, not in your apartment at four bells, big as life. “Three closets,” I mentioned, “and you get a month’s concession. I’m not keeping you gentlemen up, am I?”

One of them was kind of posh-looking. I mean, he’d washed his face lately, and if he’d been the last man in the world, well, all right, maybe I could have overlooked the fact he was a bloodhound on two legs. The other one had a face like one of those cobblestones they dug up off Eighth Avenue when they removed the trolley tracks.

“You’re Jerry Wheeler, aren’t you?” the first one told me.

“I’ve known that for twenty-seven years,” I said. “What brought the subject up?”

Cobblestone-face said, “Chick Wheeler’s sister, that right?”

“I’ve got a brother and I call him Chick,” I consented. “Any ordinance against that?”

The younger one said, “Don’t be so hard to handle. You’re going to talk to us and like it.” He sat down in a chair and cushioned his hands behind his dome. “What time did he leave here this evening?”

Something warned me, Don’t answer that. I said, “I really couldn’t say. I’m not a train-dispatcher.”

“He was going to Chicago with a dame named Ruby Rose Reading — you knew that, didn’t you?”

I thought, I hit the nail on the head — he did help himself to his firm’s money. Wonder how much he took? Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to work again at one of the hot spots. Maybe I can square it for him, pay back a little each week. I kept my face steady.

I said, “Now, why would he go anywhere with anyone with a name like that? It sounds like it came off a bottle of nailpolish. Come to the point, gentlemen — yes, I mean you two. What’s he supposed to have done?”

“There’s no supposition about what he’s done. He went to the Alcazar Arms at eight-fifteen tonight and throttled Ruby Rose Reading to death, Angel Face.”

And that was the first time I heard myself called that. I also heard the good-looking one remonstrate: “Aw, don’t give it to her that sudden, Coley — she’s a girl, after all,” but it came from way far away. I was down around their feet somewhere sniffling into the carpet.

The good-looking one picked me up and straightened me out in a chair. Cobblestone said, “Don’t let her fool you, Burnsie, they all pull that collapsible-concertina act when they wanna get out of answering questions.” He went into the bedroom and I could hear him pulling out bureau drawers and rummaging around.

I got up on one elbow. I said, “Burns, he didn’t do it! Please — he didn’t do it! All right, I did know about her. He was sold on her. That’s why he couldn’t have done it. You don’t kill someone you love!”

He just kind of looked at me. He said, “I’ve been on the squad eight years now. We never in all that time caught a guy as dead to rights as your brother. He showed up with his valise in the foyer of the Alcazar at exactly twelve minutes past eight tonight. He said to the doorman, ‘What time is it? Did Miss Reading send her baggage down yet? We’ve got to make a train.’ Well, she had sent her baggage down, and then she’d changed her mind, she’d had it all taken back upstairs again. There’s your motive right there. The doorman rang her apartment and said through the announcer, ‘Mr. Wheeler’s here.’ And she gave a dirty laugh and sang out, ‘I can hardly wait.’

“So at thirteen past eight she was still alive. He went up, and he’d no sooner got there than her apartment began to signal the doorman frantically. No one answered his hail over the announcer, so he chased up and he found your brother crouched over her, shaking her, and she was dead. At fifteen minutes past eight o’clock. Is that a case or is that a case?”

I said, “How do you know somebody else wasn’t in that apartment and strangled her just before Chick showed up? It’s got to be that!”

He said, “What d’you suppose they’re paying that doorman seventy-five a month for? The only other caller she had that whole day was you yourself, at three that afternoon, five full hours before. And she’d only been dead fifteen to twenty minutes by the time the assistant medical examiner got to her.”

I said, “Does Chick say he did it?”

“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you’d have their heads examined if any of them ever admitted doing anything. Oh, no-o, of course he didn’t do it. He says he was crouched over her, shaking her, trying to restore her.”

I took a deep breath. I said, “Gimme a swallow of that gin.”

He did. “Thanks.” I put the tumbler down again. I looked him right in the eye. “All right, I did it! Now how d’you like that? I begged him not to throw his life away on her. Anyway, when he walked out, I beat him to her place in a taxi, got there first, and gave her one last chance to lay off him. She wouldn’t take it. She was all soft and squashy and I just took a grip and pushed hard.”

“And the doorman?” he said with a smile.

“His back was turned. He was out at the curb seeing some people into a cab. When I left, I took the stairs down. When Chick signaled from her apartment and the doorman left his post, I just walked out. It was a pushover.”

His smile was a grin. “Well, if you killed her, you killed her.” He called in to the other room, “Hey, Coley, she says she killed her!”

Coley came back, flapped his hand at me disgustedly, and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here, there’s nothing doing around here.”

He opened the door and went out into the hall. I said, “Well, aren’t you going to take me with you? Aren’t you going to let him go and hold me instead?”

“Who the hell wants you?” came back through the open door.

Burns, as he got up to follow him, said offhandedly, “And what was she wearing when you killed her?” But he kept walking toward the door without waiting for the answer. I swallowed hard. “I... I was too steamed up to notice colors or anything, but she had on her coat and hat, ready to leave.”

He turned around at the door and looked at me. His grin was sort of sympathetic, understanding. “Sure,” he said softly. “I guess she took ’em off, though, after she found out she was dead and wasn’t going anywhere, after all. We found her in pajamas. Write us a nice long letter about it tomorrow, Angel Face. We’ll see you at the trial, no doubt.”

There was a glass cigarette-box at my elbow. I grabbed it and heaved, berserk. “You rotten, lowdown — detective, you! Going around snooping, framing innocent people to death! Get out of here — I hope I never see your face again!”

It missed his head, crashed and tinkled against the door-frame to one side of him. He didn’t cringe — he just gave a long drawn-out whistle. “Maybe you did do it at that,” he said, “maybe I’m underestimating you,” and he touched his hatbrim and closed the door after him.

The courtroom was unnaturally still. A big blue fly was buzzing on the inside of the window-pane nearest me, trying to find its way out. The jurists came filing in like ghosts and slowly filled the double row of chairs in the box. All you could hear was a slight rustle of clothing as they seated themselves. I kept thinking of the Inquisition and wondered why they didn’t have black hoods over their heads.

“Will the foreman of the jury please stand?”

I spaded both my hands down past my hips and grabbed the edges of my seat. My handkerchief fell on the floor and the man next to me picked it up and handed it back to me. I tried to thank him but my jaws wouldn’t unlock.

“Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

“We have, your honor.”

“Gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?”

My heart stopped banging. Even the fly stopped buzzing. The whole works stood still.

“We find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”

Some woman screamed out “No!” at the top of her lungs. They were all turning their heads to look around at me. The next thing I knew I was outside in the corridor and a lot of people were standing around me. Everything looked blurred. Someone said, “Give her air, stand back.” Another voice said, “His sister. She was on the stand earlier in the week.” Ammonia fumes kept tickling the membranes of my nostrils. The first voice said, “Take her home. Where does she live? Anybody know where she lives?”

“I know where she lives. I’ll take care of her.”

Somebody put an arm around my waist and walked me to the creaky courthouse elevator, led me out to the street, got in a taxi after me. I looked, and it was that dick, Burns. I climbed to the corner of the cab, put my feet on the seat, and shuffled them at him. “Get away from me, you devil! You railroaded him, you butcher!”

“Attagirl,” he said gently. He gave the old address, where Chick and I had lived. The cab started and I felt too low even to fight any more.

“Not there,” I said sullenly. “I’m holed up in a furnished room off Second Avenue now. I’ve hocked everything I own, down to my vaccination mark. How d’you suppose I got that lawyer Schlesinger for him? And a lot of good it did him. What a washout he turned out to be.”

“Don’t blame him,” he said. “He couldn’t buck that case we turned over to the State — Darrow himself couldn’t have. What he should have done was let him plead guilty to second-degree, then he wouldn’t be in line for short-circuiting. That was his big mistake.”

“No! He wanted to do that, but Chick and I wouldn’t hear of it! Why should he plead guilty to anything, when he’s innocent? That’s a guilty man’s dodge, not an innocent man’s. He hasn’t got half an hour’s detention rightfully coming to him — why should he lie down and accept twenty years? He didn’t lay a hand on Ruby Reading.”

“Eleven million people and the mighty State of New York say he did.”

When the cab drew to the curb, I got out and went in the grubby entrance between a delicatessen and a Chinese laundry. “Don’t come in with me, I don’t want to see any more of you!” I said over my shoulder to Burns. “If I was a man I’d knock you down and beat the living hell out of you!”

He came in, though — and upstairs he closed the door behind him, pushing me out of the way to get in. He said, “You need help, Angel Face, and I’m crying to give it to you.”

“Oh, biting the hand that feeds you, turning into a double-crosser—”

“No,” he said, “no,” and sort of held out his hands as if asking me for something. “Sell me, won’t you?” he almost pleaded. “Sell me that he’s innocent and I’ll work my fingers raw to back you up. I didn’t frame your brother, I only did my job. I was sent there by my superiors in answer to the patrolman’s call that night, questioned Chick, put him under arrest. You heard me answering their questions on the stand. Did I distort the facts any? All I told them was what I saw with my own eyes, what I found when I got to Reading’s apartment. Don’t hold that against me, Angel Face. Sell me — convince me he didn’t do it and I’m with you up to the hilt.”

“Why?” I said cynically. “Why this sudden yearning to undo the damage you’ve already done?”

He opened the door to go. “Look in the mirror sometime and find out. You can reach me at Centre Street — Nick Burns.” He held out his hand uncertainly, probably expecting me to slap it aside.

I took it instead. “Okay, Flatfoot.” I sighed wearily. “No use holding it against you that you’re a detective, you probably don’t know any better. Before you go, gimme the address of that maid of hers, Mandy Leroy. I’ve got an idea she didn’t tell all she knew.”

“She went home at five that day. How can she help you?”

“I bet she was greased plenty to softpedal the one right name that belongs in this case. She may not have been there, but she knew who to expect around. She may even have tipped him off that Ruby Rose was throwing him over. It takes a woman to see through a woman.”

“Better watch yourself going up there alone,” he warned me. He took out a notebook. “Here it is, One Eighteenth, just off Lenox,” I jotted it down. “If she was paid off like you think, how are you going to restore her memory? It’ll take heavy sugar.” He fumbled in his pocket, looked at me like he was a little scared of me, then finally took out something and shoved it out of sight on the bureau. “Try your luck with that,” he said. “Use it where it’ll do the most good. Try a little intimidation with it, it may work.”

I grabbed it up and he ducked out in a hurry, the big coward. A hundred and fifty bucks! I ran out to the stairs after him. “Hey,” I yelled, “aren’t you married or anything?”

“Naw,” he called back. “I can always get it back anyway, if it does the trick.” And then he added, “I always did want to have something on you, Angel Face.”

I went back into my cubbyhole again. I hadn’t cried in court when Chick got the ax, just yelled out. But now my eyes got all wet.

“Mandy don’t live here no more,” the janitor of the 118th Street tenement told me.

“Where’d she go? And don’t tell me you don’t know, because it won’t work.”

“She moved to a mighty presumptuous neighborhood all of a sudden. To Edgecomb Ave.”

Edgecomb Avenue is nothing to be ashamed of in any man’s town. Every one of the trim modern apartment buildings had a glossy private car or two parked in front of the door. I went to the address the janitor had given me and thought they were having a housewarming at first. They were singing inside and it sounded like a revival meeting.

A fat old lady came to the door in a black silk dress, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m her mother, honey,” she said softly in answer to what I told her, “and you done come at an evil hour. My lamb was run over on the street, right outside this building, only yesterday, first day we moved here. She’s in there dead now, honey. The Lawd give and the Lawd has took away again.”

I did a little thinking. Why her, when she held the key to the Reading murder? “How did it happen to her, did they tell you?”

“Two white men in a car,” she mourned. “Appeared almost like they run her down purposely. She was walking along the sidewalk, folks tell me, nowhere near the gutter, and it swung right up on the sidewalk after her, went over her, then looped out in the middle again and light away without never stopping!”

I went away saying to myself, That girl was murdered as sure as I’m born, to shut her mouth. First she was bribed, then when the trial was safely over she was put out of the way for good!

Somebody big was behind all this. And what did I have to fight that somebody with? A borrowed hundred and fifty bucks, an offer of cooperation from a susceptible detective, and a face.

I went around to the building Ruby Rose had lived in and struck the wrong shift. “Charlie Baker doesn’t come on until six, eh?” I asked the doorman. “Where does he live? I want to talk to him.”

“He don’t come on at all any more. He quit his job, as soon as that—” he tilted his head to the ceiling “—mess we had upstairs was over with and he didn’t have to appear in court no more.”

“Well, where’s he working now?”

“He ain’t working at all, lady. He don’t have to any more. I understand a relative of his died in the old country, left him quite a bit, and him and his wife and three kids have gone back to England to live.”

So he’d been paid off heavily, too. It looked like I was up against Wall Street itself. No wonder everything had gone so smoothly. No wonder even a man like Schlesinger hadn’t been able to make a dent in the case.

But I’m not licked yet, I said to myself, back in my room. I’ve still got this face. It ought to be good for something. If I only knew where to push it, who to flash it on.

Burns showed up that night, to find out how I was making out. “Here’s your hundred and fifty back,” I told him bitterly. “I’m up against a stone wall every way I turn. But is it a coincidence that the minute the case is in the bag, their two chief witnesses are permanently disposed of, one by exportation, the other by hit-and-run? They’re not taking any chances on anything backfiring later.”

He said, “You’re beginning to sell me. It smells like rain.”

I sat down on the floor (there was only one chair in the dump) and took a dejected half-Nelson around my own ankles. “Look, it goes like this. Some guy did it. Some guy that was sold on her. Plenty of names were spilled by Mandy and Baker, but not the right one. The ones that were brought out didn’t lead anywhere, you saw that yourself. The mechanics of the thing don’t trouble me a bit, the how and why could be cleared up easy enough — even by you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s the who that has me buffaloed. There’s a gap there I can’t jump across to the other side. From there on, I could handle it beautifully. But I’ve got to close that gap, that who, or I might as well put in the order for Chick’s headstone right now.”

He took out a folded newspaper and whacked himself disgustedly across the shins with it. “Tough going, kid,” he agreed.

“I’ll make it,” I said. “You can’t keep a good girl down. The right guy is in this town. And so am I in this town. I’ll connect with him yet, if I’ve got to use a ouija board!”

He said, “You haven’t got all winter. He comes up for sentence Wednesday.” He opened the door. “I’m on your side,” he let me know in that quiet way of his.

He left the paper behind him on the chair. I sat down and opened it. I wasn’t going to do any reading, but I wanted to think behind it. And then I saw her name. The papers had been full of her name for weeks, but this was different; this was just a little boxed ad off at the side.

I dove at the window, rammed it up, leaned halfway out. I caught him just coming out of the door. “Burns!” I screeched at the top of my voice. “Hey, Burns! Bring that hundred and fifty back up here! I’ve changed my mind!”

The place was jammed to the gills with curiosity-mongers and bargain-hunters — and probably professional dealers, too, although they were supposed to be excluded. There were about two dozen of those 100-watt blue-white bulbs in the ceiling that auction rooms go in for and the bleach of light was intolerable, worse than on a sunny beach at high noon.

I was down front, in the second row on the aisle. I’d gotten there early. I wasn’t interested in her diamonds or her furs or her thissas or her thattas. I was hoping something would come up that would give me some kind of a clue, but what I expected it to be I didn’t know myself. An inscription on a cigarette case maybe. I knew how little chance there was of anything like that. The D.A.’s office had sifted through her things pretty thoroughly before Chick’s trial, and what they’d turned up hadn’t amounted to a row of pins. She’d been pretty cagey that way, hadn’t left much around. All bills had been addressed to her personally, just like she’d paid her rent with her own personal checks, and fed the account herself. Where the funds originated in the first place was never explained. I suppose she took in washing.

They started off with minor articles first, to warm the customers up. A cocktail shaker that played a tune, a makeup mirror with a light behind it, a ship’s model, things like that. They got around to her clothes next, and the women customers started ohing and ahing and foaming at the mouth. By the looks of most of them, that was probably the closest they’d ever get to real sin, bidding for its hand-me-downs.

The furniture came next, and they started to talk real money now. This out of the way, her ice came on. Brother, she’d made them say it with diamonds, and they’d all spoken above a whisper, too! When the last of it went, that washed up the sale — there was nothing else left to dispose of but the little rosewood jewel case she’d kept them in. About ten by twelve by ten inches deep, with a little gilt key and lock. Not worth a damn, but there it was. However, if you think an auctioneer passes up anything, you don’t know your auctioneers.

“What am I offered for this?” he said almost apologetically. “Lovely little trinket box — give it to your best girl or your wife or your mother to keep her ornaments or old love letters in.” He knocked the veneer with his knuckles, held it outward to show us the satin lining. Nothing in it, like in a vaudeville magician’s act. “Do I hear fifty cents, just to clear the stand?”

Most of them were getting up and going already. An overdressed guy in my same row across the aisle spoke up. “You hear a buck.”

I took a look at him and I took a look at the box. If you want it, I want it, too, I decided suddenly. A guy splurged up like that don’t hand a plain wooden box like that to any woman he knows. I opened my mouth for the first time since I’d come in. “You hear a dollar and a quarter.”

“Dollar-fifty.”

“Two dollars.”

“Five.” The way he snapped it out, he meant business.

I’d never had such a strong hunch in my life before, but now I wanted that box, had to have it. I felt it would do me some good. Maybe this overdressed monkey had given it to her, maybe Burns could trace where it had been bought.

“Seven-fifty.”

“Ten.”

“Twelve.”

The auctioneer was in seventh heaven. You’re giving yourself away, brother, you’re giving yourself away! I warned my competitor silently.

We leaned forward out of our seats and sized each other up. If he was giving himself away, I suppose I was, too. I could see a sort of shrewd speculation in his snaky eyes. They screwed up into slits, seeming to say, What’s your racket? Something cold went down my back, hot as it was under all those mazdas.

“Twenty-five dollars,” he said inexorably.

I thought, I’m going to get that thing if I spend every cent of the money Burns loaned me!

“Thirty,” I said.

With that, to my surprise, he stood up, flopped his hand at it disgustedly, and walked out.

When I came out five minutes later with the box wrapped up under my arm, I saw him sitting in a young dreadnaught with another man a few yards down the street.

So I’m going to be followed home, I said to myself, to find out who I am. That didn’t worry me any. I’d rented the room under my old stage name of Honey Sebastian (my idea of a classy tag at sixteen) to escape the notoriety attendant on Chick’s trial. I turned up the other way and hopped down into the subway, which is about the best bet when the following is to be done from a car. As far as I could make out, no one came after me.

I watched the street from a corner of the window after I got home, and no one going by stopped or looked at the house or did anything but mind his own business. And if it had been that flashy guy on my tail, you could have heard him coming from a block away. I turned to the wrapped box and broke the string.

Burns’ knock at my door at five that afternoon was a tattoo of anxious impatience. “God, you took long to get here!” I blurted out. “I phoned you three times since noon.”

“Lady,” he protested, “I’ve been busy, I was out on something else. I only just got back to Headquarters ten minutes ago. Boy, you threw a fright into me.”

I didn’t stoop to asking him why he should be so worried something had happened to me — he might have given me the right answer. “Well,” I said, “I’ve got him.” And I passed him the rosewood jewel case.

“Got who?”

“The guy that Chick’s been made a patsy for.”

He opened it, looked in, looked under it. “What’s this?”

“Hers. I had a hunch, and I bought it. He must have had a hunch, too, only his agent — and it must have been his agent, he wouldn’t show up himself — didn’t follow it through, wasn’t sure enough. Stick your thumb under the little lock — not over it, down below it — and press hard on the wood.”

He did, and something clicked — and the satin bottom flapped up, like it had with me.

“Fake bottom, eh?” he said.

“Read that top letter out loud. That was the last one she got, the very day it happened.”

“ ‘You know, baby,’ ” Burns read, “ ‘I think too much of you to ever let you go. And if you ever tired of me and tried to leave me, I’d kill you first, and then you could go wherever you want. They tell me you’ve been seen going around a lot lately with some young punk. Now, baby, I hope for his sake — and yours, too — that when I come back day after tomorrow I find it isn’t so, just some more of my boys’ lies. They like to rib me sometimes, see if I can take it or not.’ ”

“He gave her a bum steer there on purpose,” I pointed out. “He came back ‘tomorrow’ and not the ‘day after,’ and caught her with the goods.”

“ ‘Milt,’ ” Burns read from the bottom of the page. And then he looked at me, and didn’t see me for once.

“Militis, of course,” I said, “the Greek nightclub king. Milton, as he calls himself. Everyone on Broadway knows him. And yet, do you notice how that name stayed out of the trial? Not a whisper from beginning to end. That’s the missing name, all right!”

“It reads that way, I know,” he said undecidedly, “but she knew her traffic signals. Why would she chuck away the banana and hang onto the skin? In other words, Milton spells real dough, your brother wasn’t even carfare.”

“But Militis had her branded—”

“Sure, but—”

“No. I’m not talking slang now. I mean actually, physically. It’s mentioned in one of these letters. The autopsy report had it, too, remember? Only they mistook it for an operation scar or scald. Well, when a guy does that, anyone would have looked good to her, and Chick was probably a godsend. The branding was probably not the half of it, either. It’s fairly well known that Milton likes to play rough with his women.”

“All right, kid,” he said, “but I’ve got bad news for you. This evidence isn’t strong enough to have the verdict set aside and a new trial called. A clever mouthpiece could blow this whole pack of letters out the window with one breath. Ardent Greek temperament and that kind of thing, you know. You remember how Schlesinger dragged it out of Mandy that she’d overheard more than one guy make the same kind of jealous threats. Did it do any good?”

“This is the McCoy, though. He came through, this one, Militis.”

“But, baby, you’re telling it to me, and I convince easy from you. You’re not telling it to the grand jury.”

I shoved the letters at him. “Just the same, have ’em photostated, every last one of them, and put ’em in a cool, dry place. I’m going to dig up something a little more convincing to go with them, if that’s what’s needed. What clubs does he own?”

“What clubs doesn’t he? There’s Hell’s Bells—” He stopped short, looked at me. “You stay out of there.”

“One word from you—” I purred, and closed the door after him.

“A little higher,” the manager said. “Don’t be afraid, we’ve seen it all before.”

I took another hitch in my hoisted skirt and gave him a look. “If it’s my appendix you want to size up, say so. It’s easier to uncover the other way around, from up to down. I just sing and dance — I don’t bathe for the customers.”

“I like ’em like that.” He nodded approvingly to his yes-man. “Give her a chord, Mike,” he said to his pianist.

“ ‘The Man I Love,’ ” I said. “I do dusties, not new ones.”

After a few bars, “Good tonsils,” he said. “Give her a dance chorus, Mike.”

Mike said disgustedly, “Why d’ya wanna waste your time? Even if she was paralyzed from the waist down and had a voice like a frog, ain’t you got eyes? Get a load of her face, will you?”

“You’re in,” the manager said. “Thirty-five, and buy yourself some up-to-date lyrics. Come around at eight and get fitted for some duds. What’s your name?”

“Bill me as Angel Face,” I said, “and have your electrician give me an amber spot. They take the padlocks off their wallets when I come out in an amber spot.”

He shook his head almost sorrowfully. “Hang onto that face, girlie. It ain’t gonna happen again in a long time.”

Burns was holding up my locked door with one shoulder when I got back. “Here’s your letters back. I’ve got the photostats tucked away in a safe place. Where’d you disappear to?”

“I’ve landed a job at Hell’s Bells. I’m going to get that guy and get him good. If that’s the way I’ve got to get the evidence, that’s the way. After all, if he was sold on her I’ll have him cutting out paper dolls before two weeks are out. What’d she have that I haven’t got? Now, you stay out of there. Somebody might know your face and you’ll only queer everything.”

“Watch yourself, will you, Angel Face? You’re playing a dangerous game. That Milton is nobody’s fool. If you need me in a hurry, you know where to reach me. I’m right at your shoulder, all the way through.”

I went in and stuck the letters back in the fake bottom of the case. I had an idea I was going to have a visitor fairly soon, and wasn’t going to tip my hand. I stood it on the dresser top and threw in a few pins and glass beads for luck.

The timing was eerie. The knock came inside of ten minutes. I’d known it was due, but not that quick. It was my competitor from the auction room, flashy as ever — he’d changed flowers, that was all.

“Miss Sebastian,” he said, “isn’t it? I’d like very much to buy that jewel case you got.”

“I noticed that this morning.”

He went over and squinted into it.

“That all you wanted it for, just to keep junk like that in it?”

“What’d you expect to find, the Hope diamond?”

“You seemed willing to pay a good deal.”

“I lose my head easy in auction rooms. But, for that matter, you seemed to be willing to go pretty high yourself.”

“I still am,” he said. He turned it over, emptied my stuff out, tucked it under his arm, put something down on the dresser. “There’s a hundred dollars. Buy yourself a real good one.”

Through the window, I watched the dreadnaught drift away again. Just a little bit too late in getting here, I smiled after it. The cat’s out of the bag now and a bulldog will probably chase it.

The silver dress fit me like a wet compress. It was one of those things that break up homes. The manager flagged me in the passageway leading back.

“Did you notice that man all by himself at a ringside table? You know who he is, don’t you?”

If I hadn’t, why had I bothered turning on all my current his way? “No,” I said, round-eyed, “who?”

“Milton. He owns the works. The reason I’m telling you is that you’ve got a date with a bottle of champagne at his table, starting in right now. Get on in there.”

We walked on back.

“Mr. Milton, this is Angel Face,” the manager said. “She won’t give us her right name — just walked in off Fifty-Second Street last Tuesday.”

“And I waited until tonight to drop around here!” he laughed. “What you paying her, Berger?” Then, before the other guy could get a word out, “Triple it! And now get out of here.”

The night ticked on. He’d look at me, then he’d suddenly throw up his hands as though to ward off a dazzling glare. “Turn it off, it hurts my eyes.”

I smiled a little and took out my mirror. I saw my eyes in it, and in each iris there was a little electric chair with Chick sitting strapped in it. Three weeks from now, sometime during that week. Boy, how they were rushing him! It made it a lot easier to go ahead.

I went back to what we’d been talking about — and what are any two people talking about, more or less, in a nightclub at four in the morning? “Maybe,” I said, “who can tell? Some night I might just feel like changing the scenery around me, but I couldn’t tell you about it, I’m not that kind.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” he said. He fooled with something below table level, then passed his hand to me. I took it and knotted my handkerchief around the latch-key he’d left in it. Burns had been right, it was a dangerous game, and bridges were blazing and collapsing behind me...

The doorman covered a yawn with a white kid glove, said, “Who shall I announce?”

“That’s all been taken care of,” I said, “so you can go back to your beauty sleep.”

He caught on, said insinuatingly, “It’s Mr. Milton, isn’t it? He’s out of town tonight.”

You’re telling me, I thought. I’d sent him the wire that fixed that, signed the name of the manager of his Philly club. “You’ve been reading my mail,” I said, and closed the elevator in his face.

The key worked, and the light-switch worked, and his Filipino had the night off, so the rest was up to me. The clock in his two-story living room said four-fifteen. I went to the second floor of the penthouse and started in on the bedroom. He was using Ruby Rose Reading’s jewel case to hold his collar buttons in, hadn’t thrown it out. I opened the fake bottom to see if he’d found what he was after, and the letters were gone — probably burned.

I located his wall safe but couldn’t crack it. While I was still working at it, the phone downstairs started to ring. I jumped as though a pin had been stuck into me, and started shaking like I was still doing one of my routines at the club. He had two phones, one downstairs, and one in the bedroom, which was an unlisted number. I snapped out the lights, ran downstairs, and picked it up. I didn’t answer, just held it.

Burns’s voice said, “Angel Face?”

I exhaled. “You sure frightened me!”

“Better get out of there. He just came back — must have tumbled to the wire. A spotter at Hell’s Bells tipped me off he was just there asking for you.”

“I can’t now,” I wailed. “I woke his damn doorman up getting in just now and I’m in that silver dress I do my numbers in! He’ll tell him I was here. I’ll have to play it dumb.”

“Did you get anything?”

“Nothing, only that jewel case. I couldn’t get the safe open, but he’s probably burned everything connecting him to her long ago.”

“Please get out of there, kid,” he pleaded. “You don’t know that guy. He’s going to pin you down on the mat if he finds you there.”

“I’m staying,” I said. “I’ve got to break him down tonight, it’s my last chance. Chick eats chickens and ice cream tomorrow night at six. Oh, Burns, pray for me, will you?”

“I’m going to do more than that,” he growled. “I’m going to give a wrong-number call there in half an hour. It’s four-thirty now. Five that’ll be. If you’re doing all right, I’ll lie low. If not, I’m not going to wait. I’ll break in with some of the guys and we’ll use the little we have — the photostats of the letters and the jewel case. I think Schlesinger can at least get Chick a reprieve on them, if not a new trial. If we can’t get Milton, we can’t get him, that’s all.”

“We’ve got to get him,” I said, “and we’re going to! He’s even been close to breaking down and admitting it to me, at times, when we’re alone together. Then at the last minute he gets leery. I’m convinced he’s guilty. So help me, if I lose Chick tomorrow night, I’m going to shoot Milton with my own hands!”

“Remember, half an hour. If everything’s under control, cough. If you can get anywhere near the phone, cough! If I don’t hear you cough, I’m pulling the place.”

I hung up and ran up the stairs tearing at the silver cloth. I jerked open a closet door, found the cobwebby negligee he’d always told me was waiting for me there whenever I felt like breaking it in, and chased back downstairs again in it, more like Godiva than anyone else, grabbed up a cigarette, flopped back full length on the handiest divan, and did a Cleopatra just as the outside door opened and he and two other guys came in.

Milton had a face full of stormclouds — until he saw me. Then it cleared, the sun came up in it. “Finally!” he crooned. “Finally you wanted a change of scenery! And just tonight somebody had to play a practical joke on me, start me on a fool’s errand to Philly! Have you been here long?”

I was still trying to get my breath back after the quick-change act, but I managed a vampish smile.

He turned to the two guys. “Get out, you two. Can’t you see I have company?”

I’d recognized the one who’d contacted me for the jewel case and knew what was coming.

“Why, that’s the dame I told you about, Milt,” he said, “that walked off with that little box the other day!”

“Oh, hello,” I sang out innocently. “I didn’t know you knew Mr. Milton.”

Milton flared, “You, Rocco! Don’t call my lady friends dames! Now scram! You think we need four for bridge?”

“All right, boss, all right,” he said soothingly. But he went over to a framed still of me that Milton had brought home from Hell’s Bells and stood thoughtfully in front of it for a minute. Then he and the other guy left. It was only after the elevator light had flashed out that I looked over and saw the frame was empty.

“Hey!” I complained. “Your friend Rocco swiped my picture, right under your nose!”

All he saw was a bowl of cream in front of him. “Who can blame him? You’re so lovely to look at.”

He spent some time working on the theory that I’d finally found him irresistible. After what seemed years of that, I got off the divan just in time.

He was good and peeved. “Are you giving me the runaround? What did you come here for, anyway?”

“Because she’s double-crossing you!” a voice said from the foyer. “Because she came here to frame you, chief!”

The other two had come back. Rocco pulled my picture out of his pocket. “I traced that dummy wire you got, sending you to Philly. The clerk at the telegraph office identified her as the sender from this picture. Ask her why she wanted to get you out of town and come up here and case your layout! Ask her why she was willing to pay thirty bucks for a little wood box when she was living in a seven-buck furnished room! Ask her who she is! You weren’t at the Reading trial, were you? Well, I was! You’re riding for a fall, chief, she’s a stoolie!”

Milton turned on me. “Who are you? What does he mean?”

What was the good of answering? It was five to five on the clock. I needed Burns bad.

The other one snarled, “She’s Chick Wheeler’s sister. I saw her on the stand with my own eyes.”

Milton’s face screwed up into a sort of despairing agony — I’d never seen anything like it before. He whimpered, “You’re so beautiful to have to be killed.”

I hugged the negligee around me and looked down at the floor. “Then don’t have me killed,” I said softly. It was two to five now.

He said with comic sadness, “I got to if you’re that guy’s sister.”

“I say I’m nobody’s sister, just Angel Face that dances at your club. I say I only came here because — I like soft carpets.”

“Why did you send that telegram to get me out of town?”

He had me there. I thought fast. “If I’m a stoolie I get killed, right? But what happens if I’m the other kind of a double-crosser — a two-timer? Do I still get killed?”

“No,” he said. “Your option hadn’t been taken up yet.”

“That’s the answer, then, I was going to use your place to meet my steady — that’s why I sent the fake wire.”

Rocco’s voice was as cracked as a megaphone after a football rally. “She’s Wheeler’s sister, chief. Don’t let her ki—”

“Shut up!” Milton said.

Rocco shrugged, lit a cigarette. “You’ll find out.”

The phone rang. “Get that,” Milton ordered. “That’s her guy now. Keep him on the wire.” He turned and went running up the stairs to the other phone.

Rocco took out a gun, fanned it vaguely in my direction, and sauntered over. “Don’t try nothing while that line’s open. You may be fooling Milton, you’re not fooling us any. He was always a sucker for a twist.”

Rocco’s buddy said, “Hello?”

Rocco, still holding the gun on me, took a lopsided drag on his cigarette with his left hand and blew smoke vertically. Some of it caught in his throat and he started to cough like a seal. You could hear it all over the place.

I could feel all the blood draining out of my face.

The third guy was purring, “No, you tell me what number you want first, then I’ll tell you what number this is. That’s the way it’s done, pal.” He turned a blank face. “Hung up on me!”

Rocco was still hacking away. I felt sick all over. Sold out by Burns’ own signal that everything was under control!

There was a sound like dry leaves on the stairs and Milton came whisking down again. “Some guy wanted an all-night delicatess—” the spokesman started to say.

Milton cut his hand at him viciously. “That was Centre Street — police headquarters. I had it traced! Put some clothes on her, she’s going to her funeral!”

They forced me back into the silver dress and Milton came over with a flagon of brandy and dashed it all over me. “If she lets out a peep, she’s fighting drunk.”

They had to hold me up between them to get me to move. Rocco had his gun buried in the silver folds of my dress. The other had a big handkerchief under my face, as though I were nauseated — but really to squelch any scream.

Milton followed behind us. “You shouldn’t mix your drinks,” he was saying, “and you shouldn’t help yourself to my private stock without permission.”

The doorman was asleep again on his bench, like when I’d come in. This time he didn’t wake up. His eyelids just flickered a little as the four of us went by.

They saw to it that I got in the car first, like a lady should. The ride was one of those things you take to your grave with you. My whole past life flashed before me. I didn’t mind dying so terribly much, but I hated to go without being able to do anything for Chick. But it was the way the cards had fallen, that was all.

The house was on the Sound. By the looks of it, Milton lived in it quite a bit. His houseboy let us in.

“Build a fire, Juan, it’s chilly,” he grinned. And to me, “Sit down, Angel Face, and let me look at you before you go.” The other two threw me into a corner of a big sofa, and I just stayed that way, limp like a rag doll. He just stared and stared.

Rocco said, “What’re we waiting for? It’s broad daylight already.”

Milton was idly holding something into the fire, a long poker of some kind. “She’s going,” he said, “but she’s going out as my property. Show the other angels this when you get up there so they’ll know who you belong to.” He came over to me with the end of the thing glowing dull red. It was flattened into some kind of an ornamental design or cipher. “Knock her out,” he said. “I’m not that much of a brute.”

Something exploded off the side of my head and I lost my senses. Then he was wiping my mouth with a handkerchief soaked in whiskey, and my side burned just above the hip, where they’d found that mark on Ruby Rose Reading.

“All right, Rocco,” Milton said.

Rocco took out his gun again, but he shoved it at the third guy, who held it level at me and took the safety off. His face was sort of green and wet with sweat. I looked him straight in the eyes.

The gun went down like a drooping lily. “I can’t, boss,” he groaned. “She’s got the face of an angel. How can you expect me to shoot her?”

Milton pulled it away from him. “She double-crossed me! Any dame that double-crosses me gets what I gave Reading!”

A voice said softly, “That’s all I wanted to know.”

The gun went off, and I wondered why I didn’t feel anything. Then I saw that the smoke was coming from the doorway and not from Milton’s gun at all. He went down at my feet, like he wanted to apologize for what he’d done to me, but he didn’t say anything and he didn’t get up. There was blood running down the part in his hair in back.

Burns was in the room, with more guys in uniform than I’d ever seen outside of a police parade. One of them was the doorman from Milton’s place, or at least the dick that Burns had substituted for him to keep an eye on me while I was up there. Burns told me about that later and about how they followed Milt’s little party but hadn’t been able to get in in time to keep me from getting branded.

I sat holding my side and sucking in my breath. “It was a swell finish,” I panted to Burns, “but what’d you drill him for? Now we’ll never get the proof that’ll save Chick.”

He was at the phone asking to be put through to Schlesinger in the city. “We’ve got it already, Angel Face,” he said ruefully. “It’s right on you, where you’re holding your side. Just where it was on Reading. We all heard what he said before he nose-dived. I only wish I hadn’t shot him,” he glowered, “then I’d have the pleasure of doing it all over again.”

Dormant Account CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Black Mask, May 1942, as by William Irish; first collected in Borrowed Crime by William Irish (New York, Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1946). Note: The title was changed to “Chance” for its first book publication.

Although the life of Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) is known to have been dark and lonely, his early years did not suggest that that was to be his future. He traveled extensively in Latin America with his father, a mining engineer, and enjoyed life in New York with his socialite mother. He spent a number of years in Mexico during the revolutions in the second decade of the twentieth century, enjoying the excitement of the fighting and the numerous school holidays declared when his town was taken alternatively by “Pancho” Villa and Venustiano Carranza.

While still an undergraduate at Columbia College, he was confined to six weeks in bed with a foot infection and wrote Cover Charge (1926), a well-received romantic novel. The following year, Children of the Ritz (1927), another romantic novel, won a $10,000 prize offered jointly by College Humor magazine and First National Pictures, which produced a film based on the book in 1929. While working on the film script, he married the producer’s daughter, who left him after only a few weeks, almost certainly because she discovered that he was homosexual. He returned to New York and wrote four more novels that earned favorable reviews, more than one comparing him to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Woolrich’s favorite writer).

He began to write mystery stories for the pulps in 1934 and never looked back.

“Dormant Account” is a nice variation on the plot of several books and films in which someone attempts to assume another person’s identity (see Stanley Ellin’s “The Best of Everything” in this collection and Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 book, The Talented Mr. Ripley). Here, a vagrant goes after the money in another man’s dormant bank account and becomes the target of a killer.

Title: The Mark of the Whistler, 1944

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: William Castle

Screenwriter: George Bricker

Producer: Rudolph C. Flothow

• Richard Dix (Lee Selfridge Nugent)

• Janis Carter (Patricia Henley)

• Porter Hall (Joe Sorsby)

• Paul Guilfoyle (“Limpy” Smith)

The Whistler was the title of a successful CBS radio series that ran from 1942 to 1955; it was regional to the West Coast for a time but still became popular nationally and had one of radio’s best-known mystery formats. Reminiscent of The Shadow, the even more popular radio series that preceded it, the show had a “man of mystery” as its host, beginning each broadcast with what can only be described as the voice of fate, fighting for justice with malevolent glee:

Columbia Pictures decided to make a film based on the character. Titled The Whistler (1944), it began in the same manner as the radio series, with the shadowy figure whistling a haunting tune, introducing himself and then introducing the story. When the film drew to its close, he would return to describe the fate of the protagonist.

Although it had not been planned as a series, the reviews and audience response to The Whistler were so positive that seven additional films were produced. Woolrich’s dark stories were perfect for the foggy, chilling motion picture, and “Dormant Account” became the second film in the series. Later, another of his stories, “All at Once, No Alice,” also in this collection, was adapted as The Return of the Whistler (1948), the final entry in the series.

DORMANT ACCOUNT Cornell Woolrich

He Looked Like Murder CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Detective Fiction Weekly, February 8, 1941, as by William Irish; first collected in The Dancing Detective by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1946). Note: The story was retitled “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room” for its first book publication.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) was the very definition of a tortured soul, undoubtedly attributable to some degree to his father’s abandonment of his wife and son when he was still young. He felt himself an outsider most of his life, shy and distant, and an unusually large percentage of his characters have assumed that aura. He lived with his mother for many years and, when she died, he was truly alone in the world. Although a highly successful author, he had been so reclusive that his funeral was attended by exactly five people.

In Woolrich’s prolific fiction output of twenty-four novels and more than two hundred short stories and novellas, it is a rare character indeed who is not merely doomed but already knows it. Doomed, yes — not necessarily to death, but to a life of grinding hopelessness. No writer who ever lived could write noir fiction so convincingly, so viciously, or so poignantly because, you see, it was essentially autobiographical. Not the stories, not the murders, but the worldview that shrouded almost all the helpless souls who had the misfortune to find themselves in his stories.

“He Looked Like Murder” is narrated by Stewart “Red” Carr, who lives with his best friend, Johnny Dixon, who asks him to leave the apartment so that he can be alone with Estelle, his girlfriend, for a private conversation. As Carr leaves, he sees Estelle go into the apartment. When Carr returns, Dixon appears nervous and Estelle is nowhere to be seen. When she appears to have gone missing, the police come to investigate and find her body stuffed into the incinerator chute, her neck broken. When suspicion falls on Dixon, he proclaims his innocence, telling Carr that another woman he saw that night can clear him, and flees. Carr believes his friend and begins to search for the woman but can find no trace of her, or any evidence that she ever existed.

Readers of suspense fiction in general, and Woolrich in particular, will recognize the similarity of the situation to that in his novel Phantom Lady (1942).

“He Looked Like Murder” was submitted to the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly with the title “The Fellow I Live With,” but after its initial publication it was retitled to its better-known title, “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room.”

The names of the two characters, Johnny Dixon and Carr, are an obvious tribute to Woolrich’s fellow mystery writer John Dickson Carr.

Title: The Guilty, 1947

Studio: Monogram Pictures

Director: John Reinhardt

Screenwriter: Robert Presnell

Producer: Jack Wrather

• Bonita Granville (Estelle Mitchell/Linda Mitchell)

• Don Castle (Mike Carr)

• Regis Toomey (Detective Heller)

• John Litel (Alex Tremholt)

• Wally Cassell (Johnny Dixon)

Coincidentally, the film version of Woolrich’s excellent suspense story was being filmed at the Monogram Pictures lot at exactly the same time that Fall Guy (1947), based on Woolrich’s story “C-Jag,” was being shot. And, as with that low-budget B picture, the storyline of The Guilty begins with Woolrich’s premise, then deviates sharply in a successful attempt to throw in every cliché of noir films of the era while retaining some of the story’s elements.

Clichés? How about Dixon being transformed into a shell-shocked, mentally disturbed war veteran? How about having Estelle turned into identical twins — naturally, one good, one evil? Finally, how about having the best friend, the one who has so obviously been out there helping the suspected killer, turn out to be the murderer?

The very attractive Bonita Granville was cast in the dual role by the producer, Jack Wrather, who happened to be married to her. She was most famous for her exuberant sweetness as a young actress, playing Nancy Drew in four films, among other good-girl roles, but she does a credible job as the bad twin (as well as an excellent job as the nice one). Wrather was less famous as a filmmaker than he was as part of President Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” as well as running the company that produced such television series as The Lone Ranger and Lassie.

An amusing moment for the careful viewer: In their struggle, Carr knocks Dixon out cold. When he tries to revive him by throwing a glass of water in his face, he misses it completely!

HE LOOKED LIKE MURDER Cornell Woolrich

I can’t say I took a shine to the idea of clearing out and turning the place over to him like that on a Monday night. If it’d been any other night but Monday. Monday I always did my studying-up for the night class I went to once a week, on Tuesday night. He knew that by now. We’d been rooming together long enough.

But he went ahead and asked it anyway. “—And I got a ring from her just before I left work. She said it’s very important, she’s got to see me right tonight, and it’s got to be someplace where we can talk. Now you know I can’t go over to her place on account of the way her family feels about me. So I told her to come up here, and I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind—” And then he ended up, “Just this once. I won’t ask anything like this of you again, Red.”

I thought: Darned right you won’t, because you’ll get turned down flat if you do. But what could I do? Refuse point-blank to his face? That wouldn’t have made for very pleasant living together afterwards. And after all, he did have half-rights in the place.

I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been a half-decent night. But there was one of those fine needle rains oozing; the kind that doesn’t fall, that you don’t even see in the air, but that just shows by wetting the surface of the street and tickling the back of your neck. It was no use going to the library and doing my stuff there; that closed at nine and I would have been only about half-through by then. I saw where I’d have to let it go altogether tonight, try to cram it all in just before class the following evening. Just roam around for tonight and try to find someplace to hang out in, out of the mist.

“All right,” I gave in, “what time does curfew go into effect?”

“Now you don’t have to dodge meeting her, I don’t mean that,” he protested. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her and me. This isn’t a date, there’s nothing underhanded about it. She said it’s something that concerns both our futures, and it’s just that there isn’t anyplace else we can talk in privacy. And with the three of us around here at the same time, you wouldn’t be able to get your studying done and we wouldn’t be able to talk freely. You don’t have to duck out before she comes; I just thought I’d explain the situation to you ahead of time, to avoid embarrassment. She said she’d be here around eight-thirty or a little after.”

“It’s nearly that now.” I reached for my hat, edged up my coat-collar. “Maybe I can find some kind of a show,” I suggested half-heartedly.

He followed me to the door. “Now don’t be peeved about this, will you, Red?”

What was the use of being a grouch about it? As long as I was doing it I might as well do it obligingly, I figured. My disposition matches my hair; I can get sore, but I can’t hold it. “Forget it,” I squinted at him. He closed and I went down.

I met her coming up. I’d never seen her before, but I’d heard him talk enough about her to know it was she. She had on a raincoat made of green cellophane. I’m quick to judge. She was a nice girl. So nice she could have brought an overnight-case here with her, and you’d know just by looking at her there was nothing shady about it.

I edged over to give her room. She knew who I was too, I guess, from him. She smiled sociably. “I hope he didn’t chase you out on my account?” she said.

I didn’t know if he wanted her to know he had or not, so I said: “No, that’s all right, I was going out anyway.”

There wasn’t very much more than that for us to say; we didn’t know each other after all. “Well, goodnight,” she said, and went on up. “Goodnight,” I said, and tipped my hat and went on down.

I heard him come out to the door and let her in, just before I quitted the bottom of the staircase. She hadn’t knocked or anything, he must have seen her from the window. “Hello, Estelle,” I heard him say. His greeting sounded a little grave, a little troubled, I thought.

I thought about the two of them intermittently during the next few hours, but only because of the inconvenience they were putting me to. I had a hard time of it. Man is a creature of habit. My habit was to study for night class on Monday evenings, and because that had been disrupted I found myself at a complete loss for something to do. I couldn’t find a show that suited me. Then before I could make up my mind, it was already too late for one, so that took care of that. I’m not a solitary drinker, never have been, so that excluded taprooms. I finally compromised by sitting down at a little coffee counter somewhere and poring slowly through a tabloid I’d bought. For the first and last times in my life I found myself doing anagrams and acrostics by the time I’d worked my way to the back of it.

When the clock hands started inching into the last half-hour before midnight, I finally chucked it, started back. I’d given them three hours together. That should have been enough, they should have been able to settle the destiny of the world in three hours. I didn’t feel obliging now any more. If she was still up there chewing the rag with him, then she was going to clear out and give me a chance to get these wet shoes off. On the up-and-up or not, it wouldn’t look right if she stayed very much later than this, and the two of them ought to have sense enough to realize that without being told.

I took a look up at our room windows from the other side of the street first, before I crossed over. They were brightly lit up, and as I looked I saw his shadow flit across one of them. No sign of her, though. “Here I come, ready or not,” I grunted. I’d absorbed so much moisture into my shoes by this time they made a little squirting sound every time I pressed them down.

I crossed over, let myself in the street door, and trudged up the stairs. I took off my hat and beat it out against the rail as I went up, to get the spray off it.

I listened outside the room-door a minute to see if I could still hear her voice in there. Not that I wasn’t going in. I could hear him moving around quite plainly but I couldn’t hear anything said, so she must have left. He sounded very active, almost hurried. In the brief moment I stood there I heard him pass back and forth across the room three times. He might have been just pacing though, not doing anything.

I rapped. There was a sudden silence, movement stopped dead, but he didn’t come over to the door. I had to rap a second time.

He opened it, looked out at me, skin pulled back tight around his eyes. Then it relaxed again. He’d been holding it defensively a minute, at a narrow width. When he saw it was me he opened it wide, but I’d caught the hesitation.

“What’d you do that for?” he said a little sharply, as though it had rattled him. “Didn’t you have your key?”

“What’s matter, you nervous?” I said. “Sure I had my key. Why should I go dredging into my damp pockets, as long as you were in here?” I came in, glanced around. “Girl-friend gone?”

“Yeah, just before you got here.”

“You’re some guy. You mean you let her go alone, didn’t even take her home, on a night like this?”

“I put her in a taxi at the door.” He’d flung himself into a chair which happened to be facing my way. He made the mistake of crossing his ankles out at full leg length from his body. That way the soles of his shoes were tipped-up from the floor. I could see both of them; they were dust white, bone-dry. I’d never yet heard of anyone putting a girl into a taxi by staying back within the shelter of the doorway and letting her cross the wet sidewalk to the curb by herself.

He was lying. He’d made that up on the spur of the moment, because he was ashamed to have me think he hadn’t been more considerate of her. I didn’t call him on it. Why should I have a row with him, it wasn’t any of my business. I had my own lamentable condition to occupy me. I peeled off one sock, then the other, took a twist in them, drops of water oozed out. I meant it as an indirect way of rubbing it in, but he seemed too preoccupied to get the point.

I knew him well enough by now to know something was getting him. No chatter, like when he’d been out with her of an evening and I had to listen to all about how wonderful she was. On the other hand, no fretting and complaining either, like when the mother’s campaign to separate them had first started in. Not a word. His face was a mask of some deep emotion or other, frozen fast, caked on him. I couldn’t name what it was, I’m no soul doctor.

He stayed in that chair where he’d first dropped into when I came in, made no move about getting to bed. Finally, coming to the bedroom-opening and looking out at him, buttoning my pajama coat, I said: “What’s matter, did you have a row?”

He didn’t give me a direct answer. “Why should we have a row?” was the way he put it.

It wasn’t any of my business, I’m no cupid.

He got up suddenly, as though a spring had been uncoiled under him, went over to the cupboard where we usually kept a bottle of liquor in reserve. He brought it out, held it to the light. “This all gone?” he said disappointedly, and let his arm trail down again with it.

I’d been the one had supplied it, and it hadn’t been the last time I’d seen it, so someone must have helped himself to it liberally, fairly recently — maybe within the past hour or so.

“I’m going down to the corner a minute and get a quick one,” he said.

“What d’you want a drink for at this hour?” We weren’t either one of us topers. We weren’t goody-goods that didn’t touch drink, but we usually only went in for it when we were out celebrating on a Saturday night or something like that. This nightcap business was something new. I felt like saying, I was the one was out in the wet, you weren’t, I ought to need one if anyone does. But I let it go by. I noticed he didn’t ask me if I wanted to come with him. But then after all, that might have been because he saw me already half-into my pajamas, I figured. I wouldn’t have gone even if he’d asked me to, anyway.

“I’m going to bed,” I warned him. “Better take your own key with you.”

“I’m coming right back,” he assured me. “I’m going to bed too.”

He closed the door after him and I quit thinking about him.

I had to cross the room in my bare feet to put out the light, which he’d forgotten to do. No sense subsidizing the Edison Company.

Something bit into my unprotected sole, and I snatched it up, held it with both hands for a minute. I looked to see what it was, and it was a little metal clamp or clasp, with a little wisp of green cellophane still thrust through it. His girl-friend had lost one of the fasteners of her raincoat. But it hadn’t just loosened and dropped off, they were patented not to; the tatter of green adhering to it showed it had been torn off bodily. Maybe she had caught it on something. I wondered why she hadn’t taken it with her, to try to have it reattached in some way; they must be hard to match up, if you lost one of them.

I put it aside where it wouldn’t be mislaid and went to bed.

It always took me three complete turns to get in position, about five minutes between each one. And once I was in position I didn’t want to get out of it for anybody.

Just as I got into it, and was set for the night, the phone had to start ringing. I kept my eyes closed and tried to ignore it. I was sure it was a wrong number; what else could it be at this hour of the night? I kept hoping he’d come in just at that minute, and answer it and save me the trouble of getting up. Or else it would quit of its own accord.

Neither thing happened. He didn’t come in, and it kept on. It kept on long after the usual length of signaling, as though the party were urging the operator not to desist. I had to give in finally. I got out of position, put on my bathrobe, and went over to it with a good sour face. I answered it in the dark, I knew where it was by heart.

It was a woman’s voice. It had three elements in it, they were unmistakable from the very opening phrase. Some voices can be eloquent that way. The three tonal components were a deep-seated, cold hostility; the sort of hostility that has been borne over a considerable period of time; and a heated resentment, newer, brought on by the occasion itself, kept in leash only with difficulty; and lastly, less discernible than the other two, there was a thread of fear stitching through it.

The voice didn’t address by name or give any opening salutation. “Will you please put my daughter on?” it began without prelude. “Now she promised me to have a definite understanding with you once and for all, and to come right back. Those were the conditions under which I let her go to see you tonight, and if you think that you’ll get anywhere by trying to influence her until all hours of the—” Then she stopped short and said, “This is Mr. Dixon, isn’t it?” She hated even to have to pronounce the name. I suppose she called him “that young man” to the girl.

I’d been trying to say that it wasn’t all along. “No, this is Stewart Carr, his roommate; I expect him back any minute.”

The cold hostility and the resentment immediately veered off, since they weren’t meant for me personally; only the thread of fear remained. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “Well I presume she’s left, then. If he was a gentleman, he would have seen to it that she reached home before now, he wouldn’t have kept her there until this hour, on such a rainy night, until I had to phone to remind—”

I tried to be reassuring about it. “She left over three-quarters of an hour ago, she ought to be there any minute now, Mrs. — ” I didn’t even know their last name. That should have been about right; I’d been in at least that long myself, and Dixon had said she’d left just before I—

I’d evidently said the wrong thing; fear took over the voice, crowding everything else out. “Three-quarters of an hour ago! Then why isn’t she back here by now? It’s only six blocks to her own door, from there. It shouldn’t take her that long, for such a short distance.”

It shouldn’t have, if that was all it was. And he’d said he’d put her in a cab, which should have cut the time it would take her down to next to nothing. I had sense enough not to mention that detail.

“It would be just like him to keep her loitering along the way, on a wet night like this!” the voice went on bitterly. She was assuming that Dixon was bringing her back, I could see. I didn’t know whether I ought to disabuse her on this point or not. It would probably add fuel to her disquiet, to hear he’d let her make her own way back. And since the girl was bound to reach there any minute, what difference did it make anyway? Let her find out from the girl herself what had caused the delay; why did I have to be roused in the middle of the night about it?

“She’ll probably be there in no time now,” I tried to calm her.

“I sincerely hope so,” she fretted. And then on a note of taut warning, “If she isn’t back here soon I’ll—” She didn’t finish it; she’d hung up.

I did too. I gave the oblivious door a dirty look. Why didn’t he come up here and answer his own tracer-calls? I had to get some sleep, I had to get up in the morning.

I climbed back in and went through the triple gear shift again. I dropped off. Then sleep smashed apart, like an electric-light bulb that you pop, and the damn phone was ringing away again in the middle of the fragments.

I went back to it in a sort of blur, too groggy even to be sore this time. It woke me right up, like a filch of cold water in the face. It was the same woman. You wouldn’t have known it by the voice. The voice was husky this time with out-and-out terror. No more genteel indignation and trepidation. Stark fright, maternal, unreasoning, straining at the leash of self-possession. “I demand to speak with John Dixon! I demand to know what’s become of my daughter!”

“She isn’t back yet?”

My futile surprise went unnoticed. “What has he done with her? Why isn’t she here? My Estelle wouldn’t stay out until this hour of her own accord. I know her better than that! I’ve been pacing the floor here until I can’t stand it any more; I’ve even been down to the corner three times in all the rain to see if I could see her coming— Do you know what time it is?”

I hadn’t until then. I thought maybe this was twenty minutes later. “Just a minute.” I reached for the switch with my free hand, put on the light, looked at the clock. Horrified incredulity sparked from the look. Quarter to three in the morning. He’d been gone himself nearly three hours. She was supposed to have left for home over three-and-a-half hours ago — and she only lived six blocks away.

I didn’t know what to say. “He... he stepped down to the corner and he hasn’t come back yet—” I faltered. But I’d told her that hours ago.

The voice was repressing hysteria only with the greatest difficulty. It was all shredded and coming apart. “Why does he refuse to come to the phone himself and face me like a man? What does he think he’ll gain by avoiding me like this? He can’t do this to me. I warned her, I told her all along if she kept on seeing him, something would happen sooner or later—”

I didn’t say anything this time; what was there I could say any more?

The voice was utterly beyond control now, had disintegrated. It was awful to have to stand there and listen to it — harrowing; it went right through you. “I want my little girl back! What’s he done with her? I’m going to notify the police. They’ll help me, they’ll find out why she doesn’t come home—”

Suddenly she had hung up, there was silence.

And then, just a minute too late, his key dialed the lock and he came in, looking haunted.

“Well, it’s about time!” I said wrathfully. “Where the hell have you been? You go down for just one drink and you stay down half the night — and let me do your dirty work for you up here!”

Something electric flickered over his face, I couldn’t tell what it was. “What’s up?”

“You’re in trouble, that’s what’s up. Your girl never got home from here tonight. Her mother’s phoned twice since you’ve been gone, and the last time she said she was going to notify the police. You better get over there fast and find out what’s happened—”

I waited. He waited too. He just stood there looking at me, without moving.

“Well, don’t you think you’d better at least call her back?”

“She wouldn’t listen to me, she wouldn’t give a chance to— She hates me, she’s been trying to break us up. If anything’s happened — this is my finish.”

“That’s no kind of a reason. The girl was over here and she knows it; at least get in touch with the woman. If you don’t, she’s liable to think the worst.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you; she does already. No matter what I’d do, she’d—”

I didn’t know what to do against a line of reasoning like that; it was all haywire. It was going to lead him into trouble, if he wasn’t in it already.

I shut up for awhile and watched him. Didn’t stare at him, I mean, but just studied him offside. He wasn’t drunk. He’d been down drinking for three solid hours — supposedly — and yet he wasn’t drunk. I thought I’d like to find out about that. “Where were you, at McGinnis’s?” I asked offhandedly.

He nodded dully, looking at the floor.

That was the place on our corner. I’d been in there with him often enough. They had bowlfuls of these oyster crackers sitting at each end of the long bar. Unless it was very crowded — and it wouldn’t be at three in the morning on a rainy Monday — you’d take your stand somewhere along the midsection. When you went down for crackers, you’d bring back a few at a time with you, to save yourself making the trip down and back too often. I’d never been in there with him yet but what he hadn’t had a few left over in his pocket when he came away.

He’d hung his coat off the northeast corner of his chair. “Got a cigarette?” I said, and went over to it and reached down into the flap pocket. A solitary oyster cracker came up in my hand.

“You didn’t get much of an edge,” I said, taking one of my own cigarettes instead, without letting him see me. He could have been in there five minutes and still put that cracker in his pocket. Two-and-a-half. And then what had become of the other two hours and fifty-five?

“I didn’t even finish the one drink I bought, just sat there moping. I didn’t realize how time passed. There are times you feel too low even to—”

I was standing by the window with my back to him, looking down at the patent-leather finish the rain had given the street. I stiffened my back at one point. That was the only indication to show I was seeing anything. I thought I’d better give it to him ahead of time, though, let him get ready. I said without turning my head: “A cop just got out and came in here. I saw the glint of his visor disk.”

“Red, you’ve got to stick by me.”

This time I did turn my head, fast. “What do you mean I’ve got to stick by you?”

He clutched at the back of his neck, groped for the answer. “If they come here and ask you if — if you saw her leave, tell them you did. Tell them you came along just in time to see me come down to the street door with her and put her in a taxi.”

“But I didn’t.” My tone was flat as an 1890 dime.

“I know you didn’t, but if you’d been five minutes sooner you would have. Don’t you see, the way it is now, no one saw her leave here. She ends here. If I can at least produce someone that’ll say they saw her leave here — That five minutes makes all the difference.”

I remembered the dry soles of his shoes. I had to be sure of what I was doing. I thought: I’ll give him one more chance on that. If he gives me a second wrong answer, he can go to blazes. “But which’ll I be doing?” I said. “Describing something I just missed seeing, or describing something that — didn’t happen for anyone to see? Are you sure you took her down to the door and put her in a cab?”

I don’t know if my steely look warned him off, or he just thought better of it himself. His luck was he gave the right answer this time. “N-no,” he corrected himself, “I didn’t take her down to the door myself. But you can be sure she left here, and you can be sure she left here in a taxi—”

“The first time, you told me you took her down and put her in the taxi.”

“I know; it wasn’t this serious yet, it didn’t seem to matter much one way or another then. I was ashamed to let you think I was heel enough not to see her off right. We parted on the outs, she just walked out. Then I heard her whistling up a taxi from the doorway downstairs. I could hear it plainly through the windows. I heard one drive up, she darted out and climbed into it, and—”

“Wait a minute. You saw her get into it?”

He gave me a harried look. “I got over to the window a minute too late. Her figure had just crouched in. Her hand was still on the doorcatch, pulling it to after her. What the hell. Who else could it have been? She had just left the room up here a minute before. I stayed on there at the window after the cab drove off, brooding down into the rain for a good five minutes or more, and no one else came out of the house. That must have been she in the cab. Now is it going to hurt you to say you saw that too, from down at the corner? All I’m asking, Red, is—”

Before I could answer, the knock had already sounded on the door. The knock we’d both been expecting from one minute to the next, held back like a Chinese water-drop torture. I jerked my thumb toward the sound, as much as to say: “There’s your party now.”

Even then he found time to make his plea once more, in a husky, anxious whisper, as he edged reluctantly across the room: “Are you with me, Red? How about it, are you with me?”

He sure needed moral support bad. I couldn’t help wondering why he should. Why wasn’t his own sense of innocence backing-up enough?

It was just the curtain raiser, this first time. Just routine, just a uniformed patrolman sent around to check. No question of foul play yet, Missing Persons didn’t even have it yet. Just the complaint of the crazed mother.

For that very reason I couldn’t help wondering, as I saw that shield coming in the door, that openly worn shield that usually forecast little more than a ticket for parking overtime or a warning to “Cut out that noise up here now,” why Dixon should be so ready to expect the worst beforehand, why he should seem so — how’ll I put it? — ahead of the game. He seemed rushing to meet the worst possible conclusion before anyone else was, including the authorities themselves. Always excepting the mother. And mothers — are they gifted with special foresight or are they blinded by lack of it?

It went off very smoothly, without a hitch. The cop jotted in a notebook, Dixon answered what he asked him. “...About quarter to twelve... No, I offered to, but she wouldn’t let me, she said she had a raincoat, and she’d get a cab right from the door...” (Distorting what he’d told me, that they’d parted “on the outs.”)

That reminded me of something. I looked over at the table where I’d put that ripped-off raincoat clasp I’d trodden on. It wasn’t there any more. I looked at Dixon. He looked down his cheeks.

The cop only asked me one thing. “Were you here?”

I answered the one thing with only one word, “No.” That was the extent of my participation. The problem in ethics Dixon had posed for me hadn’t even come up — yet.

The cop left. We went to bed. It was four by that time. He was still awake when I went to sleep. He was awake again — or yet — when I woke up. We didn’t talk about it. I was in too much of a hurry and too half-slept to be able to give a thought to anything but getting down on time. I tore out of the place without a word, kiting my coat after me by one-quarter of one sleeve length.

He wasn’t there when I got back. Someone else was. I put the key to the door and came in and found a man making himself at home in our easy-chair, pretending to read a newspaper. You could tell he’d just picked it up when he heard me at the door. One edge of the carpet was a little rippled, as though it had been turned over, then flung back.

We’d had the curtain raiser. Now this was the First Act.

I said “What goes on?” without too much cordiality.

He showed a badge, said: “Super let me in to wait for you boys. You Carr? You the other fellow that lives here with Dixon?”

“That’s who.”

“A girl named Estelle Mitchell came here last night, didn’t she?”

“Okay if I sit down? I had to stand all the way home.” I sat.

“Well?”

“Yes,” I said coolly, “there was a girl dropped in here last night, and I believe her name was Mitchell.”

“What time’d she get here?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“You saw her come in?”

“I met her on the stairs, on my way out.”

“What time’d you get back yourself?”

“Close to twelve.”

“Was she still here then?”

“She’d just left.”

“How’d you know she just left? Did your friend tell you that, or did you see her leave?”

The problem in ethics had come up. It wasn’t my own skin I gave a rap about. If I could have been sure of him, Dixon. I would have gladly said I took her back to her own door myself, and the hell with this dick and all other dicks. But I wasn’t as sure of him as — well, as I would have liked to be. “I as good as saw her leave.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“As I turned the corner and came in sight of the house here, I saw a cab standing waiting to take on someone at the door. I saw a figure run out and get in it, and I saw my friend standing up at the window looking down—”

“You’re positive it was she?”

“That isn’t what I said.” I was willing to step as far over the line for him as I possibly could, but not all the way — until I was surer. I have a funny conscience, awfully inelastic, practically no give to it at all. “I’m positive it was a girl. But the night was too murky and I was too far away to be able to recognize her face. When I got upstairs a minute later, he told me she’d just left. Draw your own conclusions.”

“Had you ever seen this Mitchell girl before?”

“No, last night on the stairs was the first time I met her.”

That inclined him to leniency in my favor, I could see. I mean, about this figure-in-the-doorway angle. How could I be expected to recognize her from a distance, in a needle rain? “What time does he get back as a rule?”

He was always back before now other nights. I wasn’t going to give him away on that. “Oh, he’s not very punctual,” I said carelessly. “He may have stopped off at the Mitchells’ to see if they’ve had any word.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll wait,” he said doggedly.

“Is it all right if I step out and feed? I’ve been running on a malted milk since noon.”

He made a reassuring hand pass toward me. “You go ahead, Carr.”

I didn’t like the way that sounded. As much as to say, It’s not you we’re after.

I gave him a look, but I got up and went. I headed for a place around the corner. The tire of a parked car went out with a sharp hiss just before I rounded it. Only it was on the wrong side of me, where there were doorways instead of a roadway. He was standing there in one of them. I stopped short, veered in. “Well, I’ll be blamed! What’re you doing in there, playing hide-and-seek?”

“My shoelace came undone, I had to step in here and fasten it.” Then he said, “Has anyone been around?”

“There’s a dick up there right now waiting to talk to you.”

Even so, he shouldn’t have flinched the way he did. I waited for him to make a move; he didn’t.

“Well, why don’t you go up and get it over with?”

He just looked at me, like I was asking him to go into a den with a man-eating lion.

“Have you been around to the Mitchells’?”

He shook his head, looked down.

“Haven’t you even called up to find out? You mean you haven’t once gotten in touch with them since last night?”

“The old lady hates me, I tell you. She’ll fly off the handle, scream all kinds of things at me. I can’t face it, now less than ever.”

“Look, Dixon,” I tried to point out, “you’re doing all the wrong things, all the way through this. Now don’t start off on the wrong foot, there’s no reason why you should. I know how it is, you’re nervous and jumpy — but you didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance, why should you dodge her mother or the dicks or any guard-dam one else?”

“Even you,” he said bitterly, “you ought to see your eyes when you say that. There’s a sort of steely stare in them, like you weren’t sure yourself.”

I hadn’t meant to let him see that, it must have shown without my knowing it. I figured the best — and kindest — way to cover that up was to ignore the accusation altogether. “You better go on up to the place, Dixon,” I advised him crisply. “Your shoelace is fastened now.”

I walked away thinking, “He’s not the type this should have happened to, he’s going to make a mess of it before he’s through.” If it had happened to me, for instance, me with my red hair, I would have been hanging around Headquarters day and night, getting in their way, cursing them out for not finding her quicker. He seemed to sort of skulk and act suspicious.

I ate and then I went back. He was out again. And this time the dick was too. He came in about forty minutes afterwards. He almost seemed to reel in. He looked all drained of blood; he’d turned so white that it wouldn’t wear off. And when he took off his coat and vest, there was a regular dark stain down the back of his shirt, he’d sweated so.

“They had me down at Headquarters to question me,” he said. He slumped into a chair, pulled the knot of his tie loose as though it were choking him, took a long shuddering breath in different wave lengths. “I thought they weren’t going to let me go, at one time, but in the end they did.”

I pitched up my shoulders. “Why shouldn’t they let you go?”

He didn’t say. “Gee, I can’t stand much more of this.”

“I dunno, you never seemed particularly sensitive until now,” I let him know. “Why should you let it get you like this? They gotta ask questions, don’t they? There’s nothing personal in it—”

He gave a bitter laugh. “They made it seem pretty personal, down there just now.”

I thought, “If you acted down there like you’re acting up here, you didn’t do yourself any too much good!” If he wouldn’t help himself, somebody ought to at least try to put an oar in for him, and I supposed that left it up to me. I walked around the room awhile. Finally I stopped by him, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, for your own sake, I want you to do something for me. Call up the mother and at least say something to her, don’t just lie low like this. At least find out if anything’s been heard.”

He shied, right away. “I keep telling you, in her mind I’m already responsible for whatever’s happened, and there’s nothing I can do or say—”

I took another few turns around the room. “Did the girl mean anything to you at all?” I spat curtly.

That caught him off guard. “Red, I was crazy about her, I was mad about her, I’da done anything rather than lose her. I’da rather seen her dead than have her go to him—” He realized too late how that sounded, bit it off short.

Everything wrong; he said and did everything wrong.

“Well, that’s a crack I wouldn’t make twice,” I advised astringently. I picked up the phone.

“What’re you going to do?”

“What’s their number? What’s the number of her house?”

He gave it to me. I called it for him. A man answered first. For some reason I got the idea he was a detective, over there talking to them. “Mrs. Mitchell, please.”

“Who is this wants her?”

“Dixon wants to speak to her,” I said noncommittally.

Sure, he must have been a detective. There was too long a wait. They must have been talking it over — Suddenly I heard her say distinctly, within a foot of the phone, to someone else, “You shouldn’t make me, you shouldn’t ask me to.”

I hitched my head at him commandingly. “Come on, I’ve got her for you.” Even now, I could only get him to come halfway toward it; I brought it the other halfway, shoved it into his hands, left it there.

Gee he sounded lame. I couldn’t help thinking that myself while I listened. “Mrs. Mitchell, any word of Estelle yet—?”

That was as far as he got. She cut in with something, I could hear the rasping against the transmitter. His face got as white as though a whip had creased it. He let go of the thing and it hit the floor like a shot.

I picked it up and put it to my own ear. She was uncontrollable. She was just saying one thing over and over. “Murderer!” She spaced it for emphasis. “Mur-derer! MUR-derer!”

I hung up. I didn’t blame him for getting white.

He was taking a drink when I looked around. He’d brought a new bottle in with him when he came back from Headquarters. I couldn’t blame him for that either. I would have wanted something to wash down a word like that myself, if it had been jammed into my craw.

“Now you see?” I expostulated. “If you’da shot straight over there after she phoned last night like I advised you to, the thing wouldn’t have gotten to this stage. Your play was to notify the cops right along with her as soon as you heard the girl hadn’t shown up home; to take part in the thing, not stay out of it and let them turn it against you.”

And even now, if it had been me, I would have gone tearing over there and raised holy cain with her, whether she was grief crazed or not, for having the nerve to — But it wasn’t me, it was he. I was just the fellow he lived with. And far to the back of my mind, there was this suppressed thought struggling to come clear: I would, that is, assuming that I was innocent. If I was guilty, if the shoe fitted, how did I know but what I wouldn’t act just about like — he was?

I kept that thought pushed back. I let it squirm, but I kept it down. I left him up there in the place, went out. I could tell by the way he acted, kept edging up slantwise to the window, that he was worried they’d already posted someone down there to watch him, tail him if he went in or out. For my part, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had. And it still didn’t have to mean anything much; whether he let it hamper him or not all depended on what was in his own mind.

“You coming back soon?” he asked.

Other nights he didn’t give a rap whether I came back soon or late. I knew what he was dying to ask me — but didn’t have the nerve to: “See if you notice anyone hanging around watching the house.”

“I’ll be back,” I said indefinitely. I had a couple things on my mind I wanted to attend to.

If there was a spotter, the spotter knew his business; I couldn’t spot him for love nor money.

This McGinnis was a monkish-looking Celt with a bald crown; you kept looking for the hood and tasseled girdle, and all you ever got was a big imperfect perfecto. He knew Dixon and me, both, like his right arm. And as I said before, by that I don’t mean we were bar-flies or tanks. But anytime we had stepped in anywhere for a drink, for over eight months now it was to his place.

“Was my pal in here last night?” I wanted to find out about those missing three hours.

“Dixon?” he said. “That he was. And what was the matter with him? He left half his drink behind.”

He’d told me that himself. “I was looking high and low for him,” I said, to cover it up so it wouldn’t sound like a check-up. “How long was he in here, about? Can you remember?”

“He was in here till a good thray o’clock. He held the fort that he did; there wasn’t another soul—”

That was just the time he’d got back to the flat. I felt relieved. I even dunked my upper lip into the beer I didn’t want, in order not to offend his professional pride like Dixon had about his drink last night.

“Is he feeling any better today?” he went on.

I thought he meant on account of the unfinished drink, or because he’d been noticeably downcast. I would have let it go at that.

“The best thing to do for an upset stomach is just lave it alone—” he rambled.

I brought my scattered thoughts up short. Upset stomach? He had his symptoms crossed. Or did he? I didn’t ask him. There was only one way he could have arrived at such a mistaken diagnosis.

I waited a minute or two, then I said: “Be with you,” and went back to it and inside. I’d probably been in the washroom once or twice before, but it hadn’t been vital to notice it closely until now. There was just a rather unclean washstand, and then a cabinet behind a slatted half-door. It was very small and very uncertainly lighted.

The window — I remembered that there was one in here only now that I saw it again — was chink-narrow and very long. The glass was of a double opacity, whitewashed, and then filmed with accumulated dust. It was open a little from the top, for ventilation. It seemed humanly impossible for an adult to squeeze out through it. More important still, he’d only come in here to McGinnis’s after. What would he have gained by establishing an alibi after? It wasn’t like me to start suspecting him. Well, dammit, then why didn’t his behavior give me a chance to stand up for him?

I got up on the edge of the washstand with one foot and peered out through the top of the window. Its already prohibitive narrowness was still further bisected by a vertical iron bar. Furthermore, the light coming from behind me mushroomed out against blank brickwork only four feet in front of my face. The window just looked out on an air shaft bored down into the building, no way of getting up, no way of getting down. The iron bar was just gratuitous, or maybe one of the cubed walls was a later addition, sealing up what had until then been a three-sided indentation.

I got down, opened the dust-caked pane from the bottom, not without a good deal of difficulty. I wanted to see if I could make out the bottom of the shaft. I could; it ended only a few feet below the window. I looked at it a very long time, forehead grazing the rust-flaked iron bar. I have very good eyes, and I gave them the workout of their life.

I didn’t take their word for it; I pulled my head in again and gave them a little help. I happened to have a newspaper furled up in my side pocket. I took it out, struck a match, and set the end of it on fire. Then I stuck it, burning, through the window and held it out above the shaft floor. It played it up to a dusky orange, plenty bright enough. I pulled the improvised torch in again before it got out of control, stamped it out on the floor. It had done the trick, shown me what my eyes had only been able to hazard at.

I tried with my arm first, but it couldn’t get anywhere near the shaft floor, the damn perpendicular bar held my shoulder joint too far back. I never chewed gum. I went out there now and bought a penny package from his machine and mashed it up. I didn’t want to have to ask McGinnis for anything, he probably wouldn’t have had anything the right length anyway. He didn’t even notice me come out and then go in again, he’d gotten a batch of new customers just then and was busy taking their orders.

I went to work on one of the slats of the cabinet door, wrenched it out of its socket at both ends and used that. They were all dilapidated and half-loose anyway. It was the same principle kids use in dredging up coins through a sidewalk grating. I stuck the gum on the end of the slat, poked it through the window, stabbed the shaft floor, and each time came back with something I had seen before — and I don’t mean just now winking faintly in the gloom at the shaft bottom either. They were the two mates to the patented raincoat fastener I had trodden on up at our place. And if there was any doubt in my mind that they were mates, the tatter of green cellophane clinging to each one settled that.

That accounted for three of them. Three out of a possible four, at the very most. And to lose that many fasteners, that raincoat had been subjected to the roughest sort of treatment, must have been wrenched-at and pulled around unmercifully (with its wearer inside it). Even so, it wasn’t the patent that had failed to meet the test, the fabric around it was what had given way under the strain.

Even the implication of inordinate violence didn’t make me as creepy as the attempt at concealment. The washroom window must have been open only from the top, as I had found it myself, and perhaps he didn’t realize the floor of the shaft was as accessible to the washroom as it turned out to have been. I held open the cabinet door I had victimized, struck a match, stared intently. There were no traces left. But after all, a fabric like that must be highly combustible. Or if not, it was just a matter of severing it into small enough pieces to pass through the drain. And as for smuggling it in here unseen, how do people who swipe hotel towels for souvenirs, for instance, get away with them? By folding them flat underneath their vests and buttoning their coats over them. A pliable raincoat like that must fold into very nearly handkerchief size.

I didn’t feel so jolly. After I had cleaned the gum off the two fasteners, I wrapped them in a bit of paper, thrust them in my pocket to be retained against further decision. I was in a blue funk when I came out of McGinnis’s. The best I could muster was a half-hearted, “Keep an open mind, now, as long as you can. Don’t jump to too-hasty conclusions. Give the guy the benefit of the doubt, you’d want it given to you in his place.” It was already like swimming upstream.

If I hadn’t known I was going to wind up at the Mitchells’ until then, there wasn’t much doubt of it by the time I came out of McGinnis’s with those two raincoat fasteners in my pocket. Where else could I go? Back to him? He’d made the third one I’d already retrieved once at our place disappear a second time. To the police? Not at this stage of the game. Maybe not at any stage of the game. When you watch a guy going down in a quicksand before your eyes — if he doesn’t deserve to — you give him a hand out; if he does, maybe you fold your arms and let him go. But at least you don’t shovel rocks on his head to make him go down faster. I don’t, anyway.

I had to look it up in a phone directory, I had no idea where it was. There was a half-column of Mitchells, but I had no trouble separating the appropriate one, he’d already given me the phone number that paired with it. Mrs. Fanny A. It was only about six blocks from our place, as she’d said last night; almost too short a distance for any anonymous harm to have befallen the girl; it made it seem more likely than ever it had been a personally directed, intentional harm, meant for her alone by someone who knew her.

It was an outworn apartment house, when I got there, that just managed to maintain itself above tenement status, more through its cleanliness than anything else. The mother evidently lived on her income, and a very tenuous one at that. It was on the ground floor, and after I’d already located it I had an attack of last-minute qualms about going in. I wondered if I was being a hypocrite by coming here like this, with two of the very fasteners from her raincoat packaged in my pocket at the moment, and yet no intention of turning them over to them. It was a hell of a thing to do; either I was on their side or I was on his.

I poised my finger toward the doorbell. Then I dropped it again. I started to walk back and forth undecidedly, crosswise across the lobby. This kept carrying me to and fro in front of the elevator-grate. The car itself was somewhere out of sight the whole time, bedded in the basement most likely, as often occurs in those run-down poorly serviced houses. Without being aware of it I was accidentally giving the impression of someone whose business was on one of the upper floors, not down here at all, waiting to be taken up.

I still hadn’t been able to make up my mind, when I heard the street door open, and as I turned my head, two cops came in carrying a sort of hamper between them. They had newspapers spread loosely over the top of it. I heard one ask the other, “Why didn’t they have her come down, instead of us bringing it up here?”

“I dunno, I guess she couldn’t make it or somep’n.”

They started diagonally across the lobby to the door on the left. Then when they got halfway to it the leader said, “Naw, it’s the one on this side,” and abruptly changed directions. They ended up before the one I had just been hesitating outside of myself a moment ago. But the swerve was violent enough to dislodge part of the newspaper covering on top of what they were carrying. It drifted off, and the rear carrier had to stop a minute and replace it.

It was just a fluke that I happened to be standing right there in the same apartment lobby with them at that moment. They didn’t try to hide the momentary glimpse I was afforded of what was in the hamper. They didn’t look twice at me, I was just someone waiting to be taken up to one of the higher floors. They didn’t think the tattered, grimy, green-cellophane raincoat lying spread on top of other maltreated garments would have any particular meaning to me, or that I could transmit the knowledge to the one place they didn’t want it to go until they were ready for it.

I didn’t get out fast enough. I couldn’t bolt right in front of them; I had to wait until they were admitted first. The mother must have been somewhere close at hand near the apartment door. They just about got in with it, took the newspapers off, when her scream slashed through it like a knife through cheesecloth. That was identification, complete, devastating, final — that harried scream that ended in a soft thump on wood.

I got outside to the street fast. The six lengthwise blocks, that were all the margin of lead I had, streamed by under me; I can’t remember now any more whether I actually ran or just hiked fast. I kept thinking, “What’ll I do about this?”

I slowed when I got to our corner. They might have someone watching the place already. They must have. If there was, I couldn’t see him. But then if I could have, he wouldn’t have been any good to them. I only walked slow up to the door. Once inside, I ran up the stairs again. I keyed the door open and closed it behind me again with camera-shutter rapidity.

The room was dark, at first I thought he was out. But he was lying on the bed. Not like you lie on it to sleep on it, the other way, across it from side to side, head down, face buried in a tragic nest he’d made out of his arms. Heartbreak, I suppose; I don’t know. He reared his head when he heard me come in, but I’d already had time to glimpse him the way he was first.

“That you, Red?”

“Yeah, it’s Red.” I stood in the doorway looking at him.

He got up off the bed, slowly, one limb at a time. He tried not to show he could feel me looking at him. Finally he couldn’t help it any more. “What d’you keep looking at me for?”

“You better get ready for a long pull. Your girl’s dead.”

His face shifted gears. I thought he was going to cry, but if he did, it didn’t come to the top. He said, “Are they sure?”

“They were just bringing her things into the flat when I was outside it just now. I recognized the raincoat—”

I heard him draw his breath in, deep. Then suddenly he shot past me. I went after him. “I’m going to get out of here,” he said in a smothered voice. The panic was on him. Maybe so; but I was running out of excuses.

I slapped the flat door shut again before he’d gotten it far enough out to get through it. “Now wait a minute, don’t lose your head; you’re doing the worst possible thing.”

“I’m getting out! I saw how they acted about it tonight at Headquarters the first time already. They only let me go because they didn’t have anything on me then.”

He kept trying to get it open, I kept trying to hold it back.

“Did you come back here to hold me for them, so I’d be here when they get here?”

“No — I came back to tip you off ahead of time, I guess—” I took one arm down off the door.

“Then lemme get out. Red, gimme a chance at least!”

“Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re as good as admitting the fact you did something to her, you’re advertising it.”

He was past reasoning with. “It’s easy for you to talk, isn’t it? It’s not your freedom, is it? It’s not your neck, your life. I should stay here and let them bag me, and never have a fighting chance from then on!”

He couldn’t get out past me, he couldn’t get me out of the way. He had to give up finally, he was all winded and — although we hadn’t come to blows, principally because he’d known enough not to strike the first one — a wrestling match can tire you as much as a fist fight. He flopped back into a chair, stayed there inert, tongue out — metaphorically speaking, anyway. I stayed there by the door, also breathing hard.

“My own friend,” he said finally.

Maybe that did the trick, I don’t know. If he’d kept on trying to edge me aside, force his way out, I suppose I’d have kept blocking him. It was when he quit trying, slumped down like that, that it got to me. “I don’t think you can make it any more,” I side-stepped grudgingly. I took a look from the window. Nothing yet. He didn’t try to make a break for the door, even after I’d left it; maybe I had him cowed, or he was resigned now.

I picked up the coat and hat I’d just had on me, threw them over at him. “All right, there’s your chance, take it if you want it,” I relented. “They’ve seen me in this outfit two or three times already, you may get away with it. You’d better not try the street, they must have been watching it long ago. Go out through the back yard and maybe you can get through to the next one over, like I did that night when that instalment collector was on my tail. And if you do make it, walk like I do, long slouchy strides — not snappy ones like you take. Keep your left hand in your trouser pocket the whole time. That’s me. Wear the hat down forward like I do, almost over the bridge of your nose. Until you get — wherever you’re going.”

He opened the door. I was soft, I was molasses.

“Here, d’you need dough? You better take this with you—” I shoved some into his hand.

He tried to shake mine, but mine wasn’t there any more. “Where’ll I get in touch with you, Red?”

“D’you want to?” I couldn’t help asking pointedly.

“Sure, I... I’ve got to find out what happens — I’ll find some way; it won’t be here or at the place you work.” He turned and went out.

There went a foolish guy. He had to have his chance, I supposed. You’d give a dog his chance. I watched him down the first flight. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me or not, because I couldn’t tell what I looked like. He didn’t look like himself, to me, in that hat and coat, so maybe that was enough.

I listened until he got the rest of the way down. The stairs must have been clear yet, I heard him get the yard door open and go out through there. I rapped once against the wooden doorframe beside me, for luck. His luck. Then I closed the door and went in.

“Now, what’d I do that for?” I wondered, shaking my head.

It took them a little while to make their arrangements, I guess, or maybe they’d had to wait for orders from higher up. They had no inkling that there was any hurry about it, that I’d accidentally tapped a wire, so to speak, or they would have been over a lot sooner. The knock on the door, of course, was an indication in itself that he’d made it.

There were two of them. The man in the lead slanted me aside as if I were just an extension panel on the door, strode through. “Come on out, Dixon, don’t make us go in after you.”

“He’s not in here,” I said innocently.

The other one was the same one had been installed up here when I got home earlier tonight — Hiller I heard his teammate call him. “He’s skipped the gutter, Hiller. Here’s his hat and coat.”

Hiller took a look. He caught on fast. “Where are yours?” he said, coming back to me.

“On the third hook from the left, in the closet,” I stalled.

“You mean he walked out in ’em.” He was trying to get me for being an accessory. “Now what were you doing while this was going on?”

“I was in there shaving; how’d I know he was going to take a duster?”

He went in the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and tested the bristle of my brush. Then he dried-off the tips of his fingers on a towel. Even that didn’t satisfy him; he reached up and felt the side of my face. His fingers skidded on it like an ice-skating rink. Sure I’d shaved. I always shaved at nights. I’d had nearly fifteen minutes to shave, between the time Dixon left and they got here.

Hiller narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you sure you weren’t in on this?”

“What would I get out of it either way, whether he stayed or went?”

I had him there so beautifully that he failed to notice I’d answered his question by asking him one of my own. “No use waiting,” he said to his partner. “He won’t be back — not here anyway. You better come down with us, Carr; I think we’d like to ask you a few, this time.”

I had to go without my hat and coat, my friend had mine. Hiller even suggested I put on his. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, for some strange reason; call it superstition if you like, I still wasn’t positive they hadn’t last been worn by someone who had taken a life.

They pegged away at me down there quite a bit, but it didn’t get them anywhere. Whether you’re telling a lie or telling the truth, the whole art of it lies in simplicity; stick to something simple and don’t ball yourself up. I’d seen the figure of a woman get in a cab at my doorway, through the mist; I didn’t claim it was Estelle Mitchell, I never had. That was the whole gist and burden of my story. How could anyone trip on anything as short and uncomplicated as that? Well — detectives like this Hiller get thirty-six-hundred a year, I think. I was now about to find out why.

They didn’t let on that I’d fallen face-flat, so to speak. Hiller just mumbled, “Ask you to go up to Mrs. Mitchell’s with us for a few minutes,” and we were on our way again.

It was a typical early-century interior; gloomy hall going back for miles, with doors opening all the way down it. A man that I at first thought was a teammate of theirs, working at this end, admitted us. He was up in his late thirties, I should say, or even higher than that. Hiller said, “Hello, Tremholt; we’d like Mrs. Mitchell to come out and hear something, a minute.”

He cranked his head kind of dubiously. “The doctor was with her until now; he just about got her quieted down. Go easy, will you, fellows?” But he went down the hall to one of the end doors. So by that I caught on he wasn’t a bureau man but some relative or member of the family. Meanwhile we’d detoured into an old-fashioned parlor, cluttered up with junk. The girl’s late father, in a photographic enlargement, looked down from one wall, the mother from the other. As she had once been.

She came in a minute later, on the arm of this Tremholt, and made the picture out a liar. The thing had turned her inside out. Her eyes were lost in deep skull pits. She had a wet compress pasted across her brows, and it adhered of its own saturation. She could only hate now, thirst for vengeance, that was all that was left to her. She hated well. For the first time I could understand Dixon’s peculiar skittishness about facing her.

Tremholt led her to a chair, arm solicitously about her, said, “Sit down, Mom.” I couldn’t figure him the girl’s brother, he must have been a half-brother. Then he stood attentively behind her, hand resting on the back of her chair. I could see it over her shoulder. He’d taken out his own anxiety and grief in a much simpler form: nail-biting. I’d never seen such nails; they were down to the quick, and even past it. The indentations were still left to show how much of them had been gnawed away. A poodle, which had a sort of wistful air, like it missed her too, had trailed into the room after the two of them.

Hiller said, “Now just once more, in Mrs. Mitchell’s presence.”

“Why, simply,” I began uneasily, “that I saw a woman’s figure enter a cab—” I ran through it once again. I could sense something had come up, but couldn’t get what it was. Which is liable to happen when you horse around with detectives.

“I’m not calling you on that,” he said quietly. “What I want to know is, did you hear the signal given, the hail, that brought the cab down the street that far, to your doorway, for her?” And then, for bait, “There must have been one; no cabdriver’s attention could have been attracted if she’d just waved an arm, in that kind of visibility.”

I could sense the trap. He wanted to drive a wedge between my version and Dixon’s, in order to knock the support from Dixon’s, demolish it. I only had a split second in which to make up my mind, with three pairs of eyes boring into me. If I denied hearing her summon the cab, that would shake the credibility of Dixon’s version, wouldn’t it? How had he been able to hear it, through a closed window, if I hadn’t, right out there in the open? There was also a trap within a trap. He was decoying me by using the terms signal, hail. He wasn’t going to trip me up on that. Dixon had said unmistakably that she’d whistled for one. I’d hooked my story onto his. He’d assured me that I wasn’t backstopping a lie, but simply bridging a five-minute time difference; in other words, corroborating something that had actually occurred, only just too soon for me to eye- and ear-witness it. If his whole story was a lie, that was my tough luck. But you can’t corroborate a thing like that in parts, you either corroborate it all the way or not at all.

“There was no hail given,” I said. “There was a whistle given. I heard it.”

No one said anything. They seemed to be waiting for Mrs. Mitchell to speak, as though they already knew something I didn’t. Tremholt looked down at her from behind her chair. Hiller looked across the room at her.

She spoke at last, in a deathly low voice. “My daughter couldn’t whistle. Not a note. It was an absolute limitation, some kink in her tongue maybe. Many’s the time we heard her try it, all she could do was make a soundless breath, like someone blowing soap bubbles. When she had this dog out with her, the only way she could call him was by clicking her tongue or speaking his name.”

She’d been addressing Hiller until now. Now she turned on me, as Tremholt started to lead her out of the room. “So if you heard a woman in your doorway whistling for a cab, it was not my daughter. You did not see my daughter leave that house!” And then from further down the hall, out of sight: “And no one else did either!”

Hiller just sat there looking at me, and I just sat looking at my own innermost thoughts. They were a glowing red, and they kept repeating a single phrase over and over again: “The dirty liar! The dirty liar!” And I didn’t mean the dick, either.

I went back with him to Headquarters from there. I still wasn’t turning stool pigeon. I couldn’t have anyway, even if I’d wanted to, in the only way that would have done them any good. But even if I could have, I knew I wouldn’t have. I didn’t know where he’d gone. And if — and when — I found out, I considered that a little personal matter between him and me. I wasn’t doing their work for them.

They wore out finally. The lieutenant or whoever he was in charge suggested, “Why don’t you boys take him over and let him see for himself what this precious friend of his has done? Then maybe he’ll feel a little differently about it.”

That was the first I knew that the body had been found.

They took me over to the Morgue with them. They drew out a sort of drawer or lateral cupboard they had her in and whisked back the covering. It would have been tough enough to take even without the way they stood around me and rubbed in it.

Her neck had been broken in some God-awful way; I’d never seen anything like it in my life before. The whole head was twisted out of line with the body. As though her neck had been caught under someone’s arm in a viselike grip, and then the killer had twisted his own whole upper body around out of joint, to accomplish the fracture. Even then I still couldn’t understand how anyone of less than abnormal strength could—

They took pains not to leave me in the dark on this point. “Take a good look, Carr. This girl was twenty-two years old, think of that. Do you want to know just what happened to her, with accompanying blueprints? She went to this skunk-friend of yours to tell him they were through; that she was giving in to the old lady and marrying Tremholt—”

“Marrying Tremholt?” I’d thought he was her brother until then.

“He’s boarded with the Mitchells for years and he’s been crazy about her ever since she was in grade school. The understanding always was that he was to marry her when she was old enough. He’s practically subsidized the mother for years, she could never repay the amounts she owes him. But that was all right, it was supposed to be all in the family. The girl thought he was pretty swell herself, until Dixon came along. She wasn’t coerced into giving him up; Dixon’s glamor started to wear thin and she finally saw things her mother’s way.

“All right, so she told him that night. The old lady was a fool to let her go there alone, and Tremholt didn’t know about it. The girl gave your pal the brush-off and walked out on him. He got his second wind, ran after her, caught up with her on the next landing, and started to drag her back, throttling her so she couldn’t scream. He didn’t kill her then, but she’d lost consciousness and he thought he had. He lost his head, dragged her on up a flight above his own door, and secreted himself in the incinerator closet on that floor, maybe because he’d heard somebody come out below.

“You know those incinerator closets in your building, Carr. A metal flap that you pull down gives onto the perpendicular chute that carries the refuse down to the basement to be burned. Now listen to this if you can stand it — and remember we can show you the scientific evidence for every one of these steps, it’s not just a theoretical reconstruction. He pulled down the flap and tried to unload her body — and she was still alive, see? — down the chute, headfirst, toward the basement and eventual incineration. It was just a panic-reflex. The flap opening wasn’t wide enough, any more than the chute backing it would have been; but there was evidently someone coming up or down out on the stairs at that moment and he was crazed. He wedged her in, then when he tried to extricate her again, after the immediate danger had receded and he could think more clearly, the head and the one shoulder that he had managed to insert, jammed. You can see what happened by looking—”

“Cut it out,” I said sickly, “cut it out.”

“He finally heaved her out, but in doing so he broke her neck against the angle of the chute, wrenched her head nearly all the way around back to front. The only consolation is she didn’t feel anything, was unconscious at the time. That guy has been sleeping on the same mattress with you, Carr; keying the same door.”

I took out a handkerchief and patted it around my mouth.

“When the coast was clear, he hauled her on up the rest of the way to the roof. He went over the communicating roofs as far as he could — four buildings away, toward Demarest Street, and found a barrel there. They’d recently retarred and regraveled that roof, and the barrel was left over. He put her in that, first emptying the gravel that remained, then covering her lightly with it. The workmen who carried it away got it all the way downstairs before they realized what made it weigh so much and found out what was in it.

“It’s the prettiest case we’ve had in years.” And they didn’t mean pretty.

“Now, d’you still want to go to bat for a guy that did anything like that? Tell us where you think he’s gone, you must have some idea.”

I took the handkerchief away from my mouth, and looked at them a long time, and said slowly, “Gents, I only wish I did have.” And did I mean it!

And on that note they let me go home. They knew I was on ice now, they knew I’d keep. They knew, they could tell just by the look in my eyes.

I didn’t sleep so good that night. I threw the mattress on the floor and slept on the naked bed frame. I kept seeing her before me. She spoke to me like she had on the stairs. “He didn’t chase you out on my account, did he?” Only her head was twisted around so that it practically faced forward across her own shoulder.

She was buried next day. I went to the services. I sent flowers with a card that said: “From someone who should have stayed home.” Meaning it wouldn’t have happened that night if I’d been there. The mother was there, and Tremholt, sitting close to her, looking after her, as usual. It must have been tough on him. He was under a strain, you could see. He kept breaking up wooden matchsticks between his fingers, sitting there in the pew with her. Afterwards, when the few of us filed out, I glanced down and the floor was covered with them around where he’d been sitting.

Monday came around again, and I had to do my studying for my Tuesday night class. I had to change textbooks first, we’d finished Volume One the week before, and were going to start in on Volume Two this time. They were standard textbooks, Dixon knew them well, the way I’d had the first one kicking around the place, on renewels, for about six weeks straight. I’d mentioned to him, I think, that we would be about ready to tackle Volume Two in another week’s time, and I could remember his kidding answer: “My, my, you’re getting to be a big boy now!” He probably thought this self-improvement stuff was the bunk.

Anyway, on my way home from the job, I dropped off at the library, turned in Volume One, and picked up Volume Two, which I’d made sure would be there waiting for me on the shelf. I holed-up for the evening, rolled up my shirt sleeves, sat down at the table with pencil, blank paper and book in front of me, and got ready to cram improvement into my skull.

I didn’t see it until I’d gotten well into the second theorem, and had to turn a page. Somebody’d been working out one of the problems on the margin of the page. People often did that, I’d noticed, with textbooks of this kind, too lazy to get their own scratch paper or somethi—

I thought I was seeing things. It was my own name, or part of it anyway, staring up at me from the page. “Red— Call me from Mallam’s ten sharp night you get this out.” Just a hurried pencil scribble, as cramped as possible in order to be inconspicuous, but I recognized the writing. Dixon — the murderer. He must have slipped into the library sometime earlier in the day, located the reference book he knew I was sure to take out next, and taken a chance on contacting me in this way.

Well, that was his big mistake. I was fresh out of sympathy with lousy girl killers. I closed the book with a sound like a firecracker going off, and I shoved my fists back through the sleeves of my coat — fists this time, not open hands. He didn’t know when he was well-off. I picked up the phone, hesitated, put it down again. No, Hiller and his side-kicks could come and get him from here, take up where they’d left off the night I’d so misguidedly abetted his running out. I’d bring him back to his original starting point alone and unaided. That was the least I could do in the way of making amends.

Mallam’s was a big drugstore we both knew well and often patronized. He hadn’t given any number, so how I was to call him I couldn’t figure, but he’d mentioned an hour, ten sharp, so it behooved me to be at the right place at the right time and leave the method up to him.

The method was simple. I was hanging around by the cigarette-counter when the phone in the middle booth started to ring. The counterman started for it, but I stepped in ahead of him. “That’s probably for me,” I said.

It was. I knew his voice. He’d simply called me, instead of having me call him; a lot safer. “You saw it,” he said.

“Yeah, I saw it.” I tried to keep my voice neutral; I was still at his mercy, he could cut himself off.

“Are you alone there? Are you sure no one’s following you or anything?”

“Dead sure,” I said grimly.

“I gotta see you, I gotta know where I stand; it’s not in the papers any more. You’re the only friend I have, Red—” (Wrong tense, I thought to myself, you should have used the past tense.) “—I don’t know who else to turn to. I’m going crazy — and I’m strapped, I can’t even get out of this place I’m in if I want to—”

“I’ll take care of that,” I promised. I wasn’t kidding by a long shot.

He said, speaking quickly, probably to override his own misgivings, “Take the Laurel Avenue bus line, to the Whitegate part of town. Get off at Borough Lane stop. There’s a rooming house there, 305, with a tailor shop below. Go up one flight. Harris is the name.” Then he caught his breath, said, “And whatever you do, if you notice anyone following you—”

“They’ve given me up as a hopeless case long ago. Don’t worry, everything’ll be under control.”

He hung up without waiting for any more. That was all right; now I had him.

He looked bad when he finally let me into the place, after all the usual rigamarole of casing the stairs to make sure no one was at my heels. He looked like he hadn’t slept decently since he’d left our own place. It was a cheesy-looking little hole, about the best a guy wanted by the police could hope to get for himself. Judging by the litter, he’d been doing most of his eating out of cracker boxes and tomato cans, and smoking himself to death.

“Yeah, I brought some dough,” I answered his question. I didn’t bother passing it to him, because he wasn’t going to need it anyway.

“Are they still hot for me?”

“I don’t know. The last I saw Hiller was the day of the funeral, standing over in the shadows at the back of the church. I guess he was hoping that — the guy that did it would show up, out of curiosity or something. I didn’t let on I recognized him.”

He took quick steps back and forth, raking at his hair. “It’s not fair! Through no fault of my own, I’m suddenly hunted down like a mad dog — for something I didn’t do! I suddenly find myself in a position where there’s only one guy left that’s still willing to believe I didn’t.”

“No,” I said, quietly but succinctly.

That brought him up short. His lips formed the question without sounding it.

“You better make that unanimous,” I went on. “What do you expect? What choice have I got?” He tottered backward, crumpled onto the sagging, unmade cot, reached down and gripped the mattress edge with one hand as if to steady himself. I went over the whole thing again, step by step, but as much for my own benefit as for his. “I came back that night, and instead of taking it easy reading like other nights, you were rushing around in there, as if you were straightening things up. I heard you through the door.”

“Sure, I was pounding distractedly back and forth; you would be too if you’d just lost your girl.”

“I knocked instead of using my key, and the knock frightened you. You only opened on a crack until you saw who it was—”

“That was just a reflex; I didn’t want to see anyone, I had too much on my mind—”

“You told me you’d just put her in a taxi at the door. The sidewalk was wet, but the soles of your shoes were dry.”

“Yes, that was an outright lie, but an innocent one. I didn’t want you to think I was heel enough to let her go down by herself.”

“You told me you heard her whistling up a cab, you let me lie to the cops about that. Her mother says she couldn’t whistle a note.”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that.”

The edges of my mouth curled. “She was your girl and you didn’t know she couldn’t whistle?”

“She never happened to tell me; the occasion never arose. I heard someone whistle—”

“A little bird, no doubt.” I went ahead. “You left me at twelve, to go down for a quick pick-up. McGinnis told me you didn’t show up in his place until two. What were you doing before you went in there?”

“Walking around in the rain,” he said dully, “like you do when, you’ve lost something.”

“Was this what you lost?” I gave the two raincoat fasteners I’d been carrying around on me all week a careless pitch over toward him. They landed on the cot beside him. “There was a third one, that you overlooked. I stepped on it up at our place, while you were out that night ‘walking around in the rain.’ I put it on the table, and the next I knew it had disappeared; you hid it from that first cop that came around to question you.”

“Yes, I did.” He lowered his head. “She was already missing, it already looked bad enough for me, without him picking a thing like that up. I was starting to get nervous by that time. When she was trying to leave, I’d tried to hang on to her, get her to stay, but not in a murderous way. She had to wrench her raincoat from my pleading grip, and the fasteners came off. I thought it might save me a lot of unnecessary trouble if that cop just didn’t see that third one lying there on the table right as he was checking the description of what she’d been wearing. Sure it was foolish to conceal it, but everyone does foolish things at times, why should mine be made to count so heavily against me?”

“And then you threw the other two — those, over there next to you — out the washroom window at McGinnis’s.”

“That was just a rebellious gesture. I’d lost her, I was hurt and bitter. I did that like a man picks up a pebble or a stick and chucks it away from him, as a vent to his inner feelings. And Red, be logical; if I did it for concealment, why wouldn’t I have done it sooner, the whole two hours I was roaming around in the rain, why did I have to wait until I got in there?”

“Maybe you only recalled you had them on you after you got in there, maybe you didn’t remember them while you were still outside.” I shook my head at him slowly. “It’s no use, Dixon. Do you blame me, after all that, for thinking you did kill her? Would you blame anyone for thinking it?”

“So you’re going back to them now and tell them where I am. Tell them where they can come and find me.”

I shook my head quietly.

“Then where are you going?”

“Just back to our place—” I looked him straight in the eye. “And you’re coming with me.”

“That’s what you think.” His hand, the right, had been clutching the mattress edge all this while. I’d mistakenly thought for balance, for moral support. He withdrew it now, and a gun came slithering out in its grip. He must have bought it in some pawnshop with the money I’d staked him to; he hadn’t taken one with him the night he left. He pointed it square at me and said, lethally, “You’re never going to leave here alive again. I can’t afford it, I’m fighting for my life now. Well if it’s got to be me or you, then it’s going to be you. If you were my own blood-brother standing before me—”

“Now at last,” I told him, “you’ve put the finishing touch to your own admission of guilt. A man who’s capable of murdering his own best friend in cold blood, like you’re about to, is certainly capable of murdering his sweetheart. If you didn’t kill her, why would you be so afraid to go back with me—?”

I didn’t know just when he was going to pull the trigger; he was going to any second, I could tell that just by looking at the expression in his eyes. The cot was a decrepit iron affair, one of those so-called portable things with legs that folded back under it. One hadn’t been opened fully, or else had slipped back a little from the repeated vibration of his getting on and off the cot twenty times a day, like he must have. I’d noticed long before this came up that it didn’t hit the floor perpendicular, but leaned in a little, letting the other three do most of the work for it.

I was sitting close enough to it, but that was the trouble — I was so close that any move my foot made was sure to catch his eye. I said, “All right, Johnny, let’s have it and get it over with,” and I clasped my hands at the nape of my neck and leaned my head and shoulders back in the chair, as if at defiant ease. That attracted his dangerously twinkling eyes to the upper part of my body, and the very act of stretching backward from the waist up brought my legs unnoticeably further out in the opposite direction. I felt my shoe graze the cot support. I swung my foot out, like when you tee-off. Then I chopped it back. The support snapped up flat against the frame, and that corner of the cot came down.

The shot was jolted out of him by the sudden slide. It tore straight through at heart level, but the shift over carried it under my left arm pit, and the elbow was up, so it didn’t do anything. I dove over on top of him before another one could come out, slapped the gun hand down against the mattress, and ground my knee into it.

The beating I gave him brought the other cot support down, and we rolled down to the floor together, in a mixture of soiled sheets, gun-smoke, and dust from the mattress. As he’d said, it was him or me, and he had a gun; I didn’t pull my punches, although my usual way of fighting is not to hit a guy when he’s down under you.

I quit when he stopped fighting back, and pocketed the gun. He went out a little from my jaw and face blows. No one seemed to have heard the shot, or if they did, it was the kind of a place where they believed in minding their own business. I threw water in his face to revive him, and before his head had altogether cleared he was already down below on the street with me, rocky but standing on his own legs. I got him into a cab, and before he knew it I had him over at our place, had closed the door on the two of us, and flung him back into his own favorite chair — only from about five yards away.

He just cowered there, didn’t say anything, didn’t move. His eyes kept following me around, mutely pleading. “Don’t look at me like that,” I told him finally, wincing from the touch of the iodine stopped on my open knuckles. I didn’t offer him any because for all I knew he might have swallowed it. “D’you think this is fun for me? D’you think this is my idea of how we should wind up, you and me?” I picked up the phone.

He spoke, for the first and last time since we’d come away from the hide-out. He didn’t call me Red any more. “Carr,” he said, “you’re not human at all!”

“Gimme Police Headquarters,” I answered that.

A whistle sounded somewhere under our windows. A woman’s voice called, “Yoo-hoo! Taxi!” Then the whistle sounded again, a fine full-bodied thing a man needn’t have been ashamed of. Gears meshed faintly somewhere in the distance and a machine came slithering up, braked directly outside. I heard a door crack open.

I put the phone down, open the way it was, streaked across the room, threw the window up. I was just a minute too late. I could see the cab roof, but the whistler had just finished getting in. Her hand reached out, pulled the cab door to with a slam.

I emptied my lungs out. “Driver! Hey you down there! Hold it — stay where you are!”

He looked out and up at me. “I got a fare al—”

I backed my lapel at him; all there was behind it was a little dust, but he couldn’t tell from that distance. “Police business!” I said warningly, and hauled my head in.

I put the phone together on an increasingly annoyed voice that was saying: “Police Headquarters! Who is this?” evidently for the fourth or fifth time, with an abrupt “Sorry, wrong number.” I changed the key around to the outside of the door and locked Dixon in behind me. There was no fire escape to our window, so his only other way out was to come down four stories on the top of his head.

The woman in the cab was about thirty-six, very blonde; she stuck her head out at me inquiringly as I came skidding up to the cab door.

“D’you live here in this house?” If she had, I’d never seen her before.

“Yeah, 2-C, second-floor rear. I been a tenant here three weeks now.”

“Last Monday night, that’s a week ago tonight, near twelve, this same time — did you call a cab to this door, by whistling for it like you did just now? It was raining—”

“Sure,” she said readily. “I call a cab to the door every night, rain or shine, so I must’ve that night too. It’s the only way I’d get to work on time. I do a specialty at 12:05 each night, at the Carioca Club. And why wouldn’t I whistle for it, that’s my special talent. Leonora, that’s me. I imitate birdcalls. The customers call ’em out and I give ’em. Anything from an oriole to a—”

Then he’d told the truth. He had heard someone whistle for a cab; he had seen one standing below; he had — as I had myself — just missed seeing her get in. And maybe it shouldn’t have, but for some reason that made the whole thing look different. The same facts remained, but I saw them in a different light now. Not bathed in glaring suspicion any more, but just unfortunate coincidences that had damned him. Yes, even to his pitching the raincoat fasteners through the washroom window in the bar; that became just a gesture of frustration, of ill temper at having lost her, such as anyone might have made.

The blonde was saying, “Well, mister, I gotta go, I go on in about ten minutes. If I been disturbing people by whistling for a cab every night, I’ll tone it down—”

“No,” I said gratefully, “you haven’t disturbed anyone; you’ve saved a man’s life. I want to see you when you get back from work; Carr, fourth-floor front.”

I went chasing upstairs again. He hadn’t even tried to bust down the locked door with a table or chair or anything while I was gone; he must have been resigned by now.

“You’re in the clear as far as I’m concerned,” I flung at him abruptly when I came in.

He just looked at me dazedly; the change was too sudden for him.

“Hiller told me they’ve established Estelle got as far as the landing below your door, and then someone jumped on her, stifled her cries, choked her senseless then and there. A moment later this Leonora, this professional performer, must have come out on her way to work, a landing below that. The girl wasn’t dead yet, but he thought she was. He lost his head, thought he was trapped, picked her up in his arms and carried her up past this floor to the incinerator closet on the one above this. He actually killed her in there without knowing it, trying to get rid of her. Meanwhile you’d heard the whistle from below, got to the window just too late, mistakenly thought you’d seen Estelle go off in a cab.

“The thing is, who was the guy? It wasn’t just a stray, a loiterer. He would have waited until she got out into the dark street; there was no robbery motive, she didn’t even have her handbag with her. It was someone who knew her, someone who had followed her here to your place, who had been lurking around outside your door the whole time she was in there, who put the worst possible construction on her visit to you.”

He nodded dismally. “She kept saying all the way through that she loved me. Even after she’d already opened the door and wrenched herself away from me by main force, she came back a step and kissed me goodbye and said, ‘Nobody can ever take your place, Johnny—’ ”

“Then he heard that; it only added fuel to his smouldering jealousy. He was too yellow to tackle you personally; he waited until you’d gone in, caught up with her on her way down, leaped on her in a jealous rage.”

We didn’t mention anyone’s name; we didn’t need to, now that we’d gone this far. I guess we both had the same name in mind. But knowing was one thing, tacking it on another. We were both stopped for awhile.

I paced around smoking like a chimney. He sat there biting his nails. He’d always been inclined to do that when he was keyed up. After awhile he noticed himself doing it, said mournfully: “I’ve backslid. She’d broken me of this habit, like girls usually try to break the fellows they go around with of little habits they don’t approve of. Here I am doing it again, because she’s not around to see me.” I didn’t say anything. “That was the one thing I ever heard her say in his favor: ‘Tremholt never bites his, why do you have to bite yours—?’ ”

I stopped short, whirled on him so suddenly, he edged away from me in the chair. “He doesn’t, huh? I saw his hand, resting on the back of Mrs. Mitchell’s chair, when Hiller took me over there, and he practically had no nails left, they were down to the raw. Then again, at the services, when he was nervous, he didn’t gnaw them, he kept breaking matchsticks instead, I watched him. If he was a nailbiter he would have bitten them then of all times. That shows he wasn’t, Estelle was right. Then why’d he bite them — or more likely file them down to the quick — right around the time she met her death?” I answered that myself. “Because he got something on them. Probably tar from that barrel of gravel on the roof when he finally — I wonder if we could get him on that?”

“How?” he said forlornly. “The nails are gone now — and the tar with them, if that’s what it was.”

“Maybe it wasn’t that.” Something else came to me. “Wait a minute, didn’t I hear the janitor say something about repainting those incinerator closets, around that time? I think I met him in the hall a day or two before, lugging a brush and paint can around with him. I’m going up and take a look. You stay here, someone might recognize you out on the stairs—”

I went up by myself and inspected the one she had been dragged into. It was just a little dugout at the end of the hall. As you opened the door a light went on automatically, so the tenants could see where to dump their refuse.

I could tell by the clean look and shiny finish to the walls it had been recently repainted. Those places get pretty crummy in no time at all. He’d done a pretty good job for an amateur. Light-green. The important thing was, had the repainting been done before the night the killer dragged the girl in here, or only afterwards? If it had only been done since, then obviously he couldn’t have gotten fresh paint under his nails.

I took my own thumbnail to it and tested it by scraping a little nick in it. It was pretty fresh; that didn’t look so good. He’d only given it one coat, and my nail dug through that and laid bare the old coat beneath: a faded beige.

I looked him up in the basement and asked him about it. He gave me the answer I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “Naw, I didn’t get to that one until after it happened. I’d gotten up as high as your floor the day of the murder, that was a Monday. I only had the one on the fifth left, I was going to finish that one up the first thing the next morning. He couldn’t get into the one on the fourth with her, because I’d locked it overnight, to keep the tenants out and give the paint a chance to dry. So he took her to the one above. As a result, I didn’t get a chance to paint that until them cops were all finished with it. They made me leave it like it was until late Wednesday afternoon.”

So whatever the reason was for his destroying his nails, it certainly wasn’t because of the adhesion of fresh paint particles. The paint hadn’t been applied until nearly forty-eight hours after Estelle Mitchell’s death. Probably tar from the rim of the barrel he’d hidden the remains in. And as Dixon had said, as long as the nails were gone anyway, what good was that.

I went back to him in the flat, spread my hands dejectedly. And then suddenly, in the very act of giving up hope like that, a way occurred to me. It comes to you as unexpectedly as that, sometimes. I looked at him narrowly, said, “Can you tell me offhand what color the walls of that closet were before they were repainted?”

“Hell no,” he admitted. “When did I ever go in there?”

“See, and you live right here in the house. I couldn’t have either, until I scraped below the top layer just now. I’m going to try to get him on that! It’s just a trick, but it’s about all we have left now.”

He looked at me puzzled.

“It was still beige the night it happened. Gus, the janitor, wasn’t allowed to do it over until after the cops were through with it. But if this guy didn’t go in there with her that night, he’s not supposed to know that.”

I was at the phone. He looked worried when he heard me say, “Headquarters.” I said, “Not you this time, Dixon.” When I got through to Hiller, I just said, “Will you meet me at the Mitchell place? I’ve got something I want you to hear.” I left Dixon in the apartment, told him to lie low, not put on any lights. “Stay here now, will you? When I come back maybe I’ll have good news for you.”

Outside the Mitchell door I had to talk like a trooper to get Hiller to cooperate with me — even as a test. His mind was already made up and he wasn’t unmaking it, not for any murderer’s ex-roommate. “I don’t ask you to open your mouth and say a word. All I ask you to do is not contradict what you hear me say, act as though it were official. And just listen to what he says. You’re sure he wasn’t allowed in that closet anytime during the following day, while you men were working on it?”

“No one was.”

“That’s all I want you to remember.” I rang the bell, Tremholt came to the door, and the dick and I went in together. I was shaking all over — inside where it couldn’t be detected. It was such a threadlike little thing to hang anything on. Hiller just looked inscrutable. Tremholt looked calm and self-possessed. His nails were starting to grow out again, I noticed, proving that that had been an emergency removal, he wasn’t a chronic biter.

The thing to do was to get him rattled, so he’d lose his head for a minute, wouldn’t be able to think quickly enough. I built up to it carefully, increasing the tempo as I went along. My insinuations became broader every minute, until they’d crossed the line, become outright accusations. “Sure it was you, we’ve all known that all along!” I was scared stiff Hiller would butt in, contradict me. He kept to the agreement, sat there impassive. He was just the audience.

“Yeah, I know you were supposed to be in your room here all evening. What does that amount to? Your room’s down near the front door, Mrs. Mitchell’s is all the way at the back of the hall. You have your own latchkey, you could have slipped in and out unnoticed a dozen times over between the time she first saw you come in at eight and the time she knocked to tell you she was getting worried about the girl not returning!”

I figured he was ripe enough now. Outwardly he was still imperturbable. But he was idly shredding a paper-folder of matches, and that was a giveaway. I gave him the punch-line. “And why did you feel you had to clip or file down your fingernails to the quick?” I didn’t give him time to shock-absorb that one. “I’ll tell you why, Hiller! Because he got pale-blue paint under his nails, from the incinerator closet where he dragged her—!”

He was still calm, derisive — outwardly, anyway. “Listen to that, will you? That’s a good one. The incinerator closet wasn’t even light-blue in the first place, it was tan, so how could I—”

I quit talking, I didn’t have to talk any more.

All Hiller said, very softly, almost purringly, was: “You weren’t suppose to know that, baby-boy,” and he started to get up from the chair he’d been in until now.

It was nearly dawn by the time I got back for Dixon. “Come on,” I said, “I’ve got to bring you down to Headquarters with me.”

The old fright came back again, that had done him so much damage.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of any more,” I insisted. “The thing’s unraveling beautifully. They’ve had Tremholt down there with them for hours, and he’s getting in deeper by the minute. His alibi wasn’t worth a damn, you know, once they gave it a really good shaking. I promised to produce you, and you’re coming with me. You can’t be cleared by proxy, you know.” And on the way down there I couldn’t resist remarking, “He may have had you darn near framed, but it wasn’t him alone, don’t forget.”

“Who else was in it with him?” he asked, wide-eyed.

“You yourself. I never saw a guy help to frame himself like you did.”

I don’t live with Dixon any more. I’ve moved out since. It’s hard to explain just why. He didn’t kill her. He did try to kill me, but it isn’t that either.

I run into him now and then, and we’re on the best of terms, but we never prolong the encounters, we’re never completely at ease. There’s a self-consciousness between us. You don’t want to be reminded of a murder every time you look at a guy.

The Lodger MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

Original publication: McClure’s Magazine, January 1911

A prolific author of historical, romantic, and crime fiction and plays, Marie Belloc Adelaide Lowndes (1868–1947) based most of her work on historical events. Although highly successful across several genres, only her short story “The Lodger,” and the 1913 novel that it inspired, are widely read today. Based on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, they are an accurate illustration of the area in which the crimes were committed, as well as an excellent portrayal of the fear and paranoia that infected London’s population as the police seemed helpless to stop the carnage.

In Lowndes’s classic suspense tale, Mr. Sleuth, a gentle man and a gentleman, takes rooms in Mr. and Mrs. Bunting’s lodging house. Mrs. Bunting becomes more and more terrified of him as the series of brutal Ripper murders continues to horrify London, fearing that Red Jack may be the strange lodger in her house.

Title: The Lodger, 1944

Studio: Twentieth Century-Fox

Director: John Brahm

Screenwriter: Barré Lyndon

Producer: Robert Bassler

• Merle Oberon (Kitty Langley)

• George Sanders (Inspector John Warwick)

• Laird Cregar (Mr. Slade)

• Cedrick Hardwicke (Robert Bonting)

• Sara Allgood (Ellen Bonting)

A remake of The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, the famous 1927 silent film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, this suspenseful classic has such obvious similarities to its predecessor as plot and setting, though it has an ending entirely different from the earlier motion picture. Its cinematography leans so heavily on the Hitchcock version that many people have the impression that he directed the sound film as well. Dark and atmospherically brooding, cast with actors that Hitchcock had frequently used in other films, it seemed to need only Hitch’s famous cameo appearance to make it a full-fledged Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Although the leading credits went to Merle Oberon and George Sanders, the film belongs to Laird Cregar, the quiet giant in the titular role. He is such a frightening presence, and his actions point to his guilt so clearly, one can only wonder why more of the film’s characters could not identify him immediately as Jack the Ripper, the man brutally murdering the prostitutes for whom he had an outspoken hatred.

Cregar, incidentally, at six feet, three inches in height, easily weighed three hundred pounds. Sensitive about his weight, he began a severe diet and underwent surgery in an attempt to become thinner. Things went badly and he died around thirty, appearing in only one film after The Lodger.

The cast of the Hitchcock-directed silent film included Marie Ault (the landlady), Arthur Chesney (the landlord), June Tripp (a model), Malcolm Keen (Joe, a policeman), and Ivor Novello (the lodger). Eliot Stannard wrote the screenplay for the Gainsborough Pictures release.

The Lowndes story also served as the inspiration for the largely forgotten 1932 first sound version, also titled The Lodger, directed by Maurice Elvey, that again starred Ivor Novello (the lodger, named Michael Angeloff). It was released in an abridged version in the United States in 1935 with the understated title The Phantom Fiend; it fared just as poorly as the English version.

An evidently endless inspiration to filmmakers, “The Lodger” surfaced in 1953 with the title Man in the Attic, directed by Hugo Fragonese with a screenplay by Robert Presnell Jr. and Barré Lyndon; it starred Jack Palance as the menacing lodger, Slade.

Most recently, David Ondaatje wrote and directed a film titled The Lodger (2009) starring Alfred Molina (the detective) and Simon Baker (the lodger) that drew its inspiration from the Lowndes story but added so many disparate elements (a neurotic landlady, an even more neurotic policeman, not to mention a setting in West Hollywood) that it would have been difficult to recognize had it lacked its iconic title.

THE LODGER Marie Belloc Lowndes

“There he is at last, and I’m glad of it, Ellen. ’Tain’t a night you would wish a dog to be out in.”

Mr. Bunting’s voice was full of unmistakable relief. He was close to the fire, sitting back in a deep leather armchair — a clean-shaven, dapper man, still in outward appearance what he had been so long, and now no longer was — a self-respecting butler.

“You needn’t feel so nervous about him; Mr. Sleuth can look out for himself, all right.” Mrs. Bunting spoke in a dry, rather tart tone. She was less emotional, better balanced, than was her husband. On her the marks of past servitude were less apparent, but they were there all the same — especially in her neat black stuff dress and scrupulously clean, plain collar and cuffs. Mrs. Bunting, as a single woman, had been for long years what is known as a useful maid.

“I can’t think why he wants to go out in such weather. He did it in last week’s fog, too,” Bunting went on complainingly.

“Well, it’s none of your business — now, is it?”

“No; that’s true enough. Still, ’twould be a very bad thing for us if anything happened to him. This lodger’s the first bit of luck we’ve had for a very long time.”

Mrs. Bunting made no answer to this remark. It was too obviously true to be worth answering. Also she was listening — following in imagination her lodger’s quick, singularly quiet — “stealthy,” she called it to herself — progress through the dark, fog-filled hall and up the staircase.

“It isn’t safe for decent folk to be out in such weather — not unless they have something to do that won’t wait till tomorrow.” Bunting had at last turned round. He was now looking straight into his wife’s narrow, colorless face; he was an obstinate man, and liked to prove himself right. “I read you out the accidents in Lloyd’s yesterday — shocking, they were, and all brought about by the fog! And then, that ’orrid monster at his work again—”

“Monster?” repeated Mrs. Bunting absently. She was trying to hear the lodger’s footsteps overhead; but her husband went on as if there had been no interruption:

“It wouldn’t be very pleasant to run up against such a party as that in the fog, eh?”

“What stuff you do talk!” she said sharply; and then she got up suddenly. Her husband’s remark had disturbed her. She hated to think of such things as the terrible series of murders that were just then horrifying and exciting the nether world of London. Though she enjoyed pathos and sentiment — Mrs. Bunting would listen with mild amusement to the details of a breach-of-promise action — she shrank from stories of either immorality or physical violence.

Mrs. Bunting got up from the straight-backed chair on which she had been sitting. It would soon be time for supper.

She moved about the sitting-room, flecking off an imperceptible touch of dust here, straightening a piece of furniture there.

Bunting looked around once or twice. He would have liked to ask Ellen to leave off fidgeting, but he was mild and fond of peace, so he refrained. However, she soon gave over what irritated him of her own accord. But even then Mrs. Bunting did not at once go down to the cold kitchen, where everything was in readiness for her simple cooking. Instead, she opened the door leading into the bedroom behind, and there, closing the door quietly, stepped back into the darkness and stood motionless, listening.

At first she heard nothing, but gradually there came the sound of someone moving about in the room just overhead; try as she might, however, it was impossible for her to guess what her lodger was doing. At last she heard him open the door leading out to the landing. That meant that he would spend the rest of the evening in the rather cheerless room above the drawing-room floor — oddly enough, he liked sitting there best, though the only warmth obtainable was from a gas-stove fed by a shilling-in-the-slot arrangement.

It was indeed true that Mr. Sleuth had brought the Buntings luck, for at the time he had taken their rooms it had been touch and go with them.

After having each separately led the sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, the financially easy existence that is the compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of domestic service, these two, butler and useful maid, had suddenly, in middle age, determined to join their fortunes and savings.

Bunting was a widower; he had one pretty daughter, a girl of seventeen, who now lived, as had been the case ever since the death of her mother, with a prosperous aunt. His second wife had been reared in the Foundling Hospital, but she had gradually worked her way up into the higher ranks of the servant class and as a useful maid she had saved quite a tidy sum of money.

Unluckily, misfortune had dogged Mr. and Mrs. Bunting from the very first. The seaside place where they had begun by taking a lodging-house became the scene of an epidemic. Then had followed a business experiment which had proved disastrous. But before going back into service, either together or separately, they had made up their minds to make one last effort, and, with the little money that remained to them, they had taken over the lease of a small house in the Marylebone Road.

Bunting, whose appearance was very good, had retained a connection with old employers and their friends, so he occasionally got a good job as waiter. During this last month his jobs had perceptibly increased in number and in profit; Mrs. Bunting was not superstitious, but it seemed that in this matter, as in everything else, Mr. Sleuth, their new lodger, had brought them luck.

As she stood there, still listening intently in the darkness of the bedroom, she told herself, not for the first time, what Mr. Sleuth’s departure would mean to her and Bunting. It would almost certainly mean ruin.

Luckily, the lodger seemed entirely pleased both with the rooms and with his landlady. There was really no reason why he should ever leave such nice lodgings. Mrs. Bunting shook off her vague sense of apprehension and unease. She turned round, took a step forward, and, feeling for the handle of the door giving into the passage, she opened it, and went down with light, firm steps into the kitchen.

She lit the gas and put a frying-pan on the stove, and then once more her mind reverted, as if in spite of herself, to her lodger, and there came back to Mrs. Bunting, very vividly, the memory of all that had happened the day Mr. Sleuth had taken her rooms.

The date of this excellent lodger’s coming had been the twenty-ninth of December, and the time late afternoon. She and Bunting had been sitting, gloomily enough, over their small banked-up fire. They had dined in the middle of the day — he on a couple of sausages, she on a little cold ham. They were utterly out of heart, each trying to pluck up courage to tell the other that it was no use trying any more. The two had also had a little tiff on that dreary afternoon. A newspaper-seller had come yelling down the Marylebone Road, shouting out, “ ’Orrible murder in Whitechapel!” and just because Bunting had an old uncle living in the East End he had gone and bought a paper, and at a time, too, when every penny, nay, every half-penny, had its full value! Mrs. Bunting remembered the circumstances because that murder in Whitechapel had been the first of these terrible crimes — there had been four since — which she would never allow Bunting to discuss in her presence, and yet which had of late begun to interest curiously, uncomfortably, even her refined mind.

But, to return to the lodger. It was then, on that dreary afternoon, that suddenly there had come to the front door a tremulous, uncertain double knock.

Bunting ought to have got up, but he had gone on reading the paper; and so Mrs. Bunting, with the woman’s greater courage, had gone out into the passage, turned up the gas, and opened the door to see who it could be. She remembered, as if it were yesterday instead of nigh on a month ago, Mr. Sleuth’s peculiar appearance. Tall, dark, lanky, an old-fashioned top hat concealing his high bald forehead, he had stood there, an odd figure of a man, blinking at her.

“I believe — is it not a fact that you let lodgings?” he had asked in a hesitating, whistling voice, a voice that she had known in a moment to be that of an educated man — of a gentleman. As he had stepped into the hall, she had noticed that in his right hand he held a narrow bag — a quite new bag of strong brown leather.

Everything had been settled in less than a quarter of an hour. Mr. Sleuth had at once “taken” to the drawing-room floor, and then, as Mrs. Bunting eagerly lit the gas in the front room above, he had looked around him and said, rubbing his hands with a nervous movement, “Capital — capital! This is just what I’ve been looking for!”

The sink had specially pleased him — the sink and the gas-stove. “This is quite first-rate!” he had exclaimed, “for I make all sorts of experiments. I am, you must understand, Mrs. — er — Bunting, a man of science.” Then he had sat down — suddenly. “I’m very tired,” he had said in a low tone, “very tired indeed! I have been walking about all day.”

From the very first the lodger’s manner had been odd, sometimes distant and abrupt, and then, for no reason at all that she could see, confidential and plaintively confiding. But Mrs. Bunting was aware that eccentricity has always been a perquisite, as it were the special luxury, of the well born and well educated. Scholars and such-like are never quite like other people.

And then, this particular gentleman had proved himself so eminently satisfactory as to the one thing that really matters to those who let lodgings. “My name is Sleuth,” he said. “S-l-e-u-t-h. Think of a hound, Mrs. Bunting, and you’ll never forget my name. I could give you references,” he had added, giving her, as she now remembered, a funny sidewise look, “but I prefer to dispense with them. How much did you say? Twenty-three shillings a week, with attendance? Yes, that will suit me perfectly; and I’ll begin by paying my first month’s rent in advance. Now, four times twenty-three shillings is” — he looked at Mrs. Bunting, and for the first time he smiled, a queer, wry smile — “ninety-two shillings.”

He had taken a handful of sovereigns out of his pocket and put them down on the table. “Look here,” he had said, “there’s five pounds; and you can keep the change, for I shall want you to do a little shopping for me tomorrow.”

After he had been in the house about an hour, the bell had rung, and the new lodger had asked Mrs. Bunting if she could oblige him with the loan of a Bible. She brought up to him her best Bible, the one that had been given to her as a wedding present by a lady with whose mother she had lived for several years. This Bible and one other book, of which the odd name was Cruden’s Concordance, formed Mr. Sleuth’s only reading; he spent hours each day poring over the Old Testament and over the volume which Mrs. Bunting had at last decided to be a queer kind of index to the Book.

However, to return to the lodger’s first arrival. He had had no luggage with him, barring the small brown bag, but very soon parcels had begun to arrive addressed to Mr. Sleuth, and it was then that Mrs. Bunting first became curious. These parcels were full of clothes; but it was quite clear to the landlady’s feminine eye that none of those clothes had been made for Mr. Sleuth. They were, in fact, second-hand clothes, bought at good second-hand places, each marked, when marked at all, with a different name. And the really extraordinary thing was that occasionally a complete suit disappeared — became, as it were, obliterated from the lodger’s wardrobe.

As for the bag he had brought with him, Mrs. Bunting had never caught sight of it again. And this also was certainly very strange.

Mrs. Bunting thought a great deal about that bag. She often wondered what had been in it; not a nightshirt and comb and brush, as she had at first supposed, for Mr. Sleuth had asked her to go out and buy him a brush and comb and tooth-brush the morning after his arrival. That fact was specially impressed on her memory, for at the little shop, a barber’s, where she had purchased the brush and comb, the foreigner who had served her had insisted on telling her some of the horrible details of the murder that had taken place the day before in Whitechapel, and it had upset her very much.

As to where the bag was now, it was probably locked up in the lower part of a chiffonnier in the front sitting-room. Mr. Sleuth evidently always carried the key of the little cupboard on his person, for Mrs. Bunting, though she looked well for it, had never been able to find it.

And yet, never was there a more confiding or trusting gentleman. The first four days that he had been with them he had allowed his money — the considerable sum of one hundred and eighty-four pounds in gold — to lie about wrapped up in pieces of paper on his dressing-table. This was a very foolish, indeed a wrong thing to do, as she had allowed herself respectfully to point out to him; but as only answer he had laughed, a loud, discordant shout of laughter.

Mr. Sleuth had many other odd ways; but Mrs. Bunting, a true woman in spite of her prim manner and love of order, had an infinite patience with masculine vagaries.

On the first morning of Mr. Sleuth’s stay in the Buntings’ house, while Mrs. Bunting was out buying things for him, the new lodger had turned most of the pictures and photographs hanging in his sitting-room with their faces to the wall! But this queer action on Mr. Sleuth’s part had not surprised Mrs. Bunting as much as it might have done; it recalled an incident of her long-past youth — something that had happened a matter of twenty years ago, at a time when Mrs. Bunting, then the still youthful Ellen Cottrell, had been maid to an old lady. The old lady had a favorite nephew, a bright, jolly young gentleman who had been learning to paint animals in Paris; and it was he who had had the impudence, early one summer morning, to turn to the wall six beautiful engravings of paintings done by the famous Mr. Landseer! The old lady thought the world of these pictures, but her nephew, as the only excuse for the extraordinary thing he had done, had observed that “they put his eye out.”

Mr. Sleuth’s excuse had been much the same; for, when Mrs. Bunting had come into his sitting-room and found all her pictures, or at any rate all those of her pictures that happened to be portraits of ladies, with their faces to the wall, he had offered as only explanation, “Those women’s eyes follow me about.”

Mrs. Bunting had gradually become aware that Mr. Sleuth had a fear and dislike of women. When she was “doing” the staircase and landing, she often heard him reading bits of the Bible aloud to himself, and in the majority of instances the texts he chose contained uncomplimentary reference to her own sex. Only today she had stopped and listened while he uttered threateningly the awful words, “A strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men.” There had been a pause, and then had come, in a high singsong, “Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.” It had made Mrs. Bunting feel quite queer.

The lodger’s daily habits were also peculiar. He stayed in bed all the morning, and sometimes part of the afternoon, and he never went out before the street lamps were alight. Then, there was his dislike of an open fire; he generally sat in the top front room, and while there he always used the large gas-stove, not only for his experiments, which he carried on at night, but also in the daytime, for warmth.

But there! Where was the use of worrying about the lodger’s funny ways? Of course, Mr. Sleuth was eccentric; if he hadn’t been “just a leetle ‘touched’ upstairs” — as Bunting had once described it — he wouldn’t be their lodger now; he would be living in a quite different sort of way with some of his relations, or with a friend of his own class.

Mrs. Bunting, while these thoughts galloped disconnectedly through her brain, went on with her cooking, doing everything with a certain delicate and cleanly precision.

While in the middle of making the toast on which was to be poured some melted cheese, she suddenly heard a noise, or rather a series of noises. Shuffling, hesitating steps were creaking down the house above. She looked up and listened. Surely Mr. Sleuth was not going out again into the cold, foggy night? But no; for the sounds did not continue down the passage leading to the front door.

The heavy steps were coming slowly down the kitchen stairs. Nearer and nearer came the thudding sounds, and Mrs. Bunting’s heart began to beat as if in response. She put out the gas-stove, unheedful of the fact that the cheese would stiffen and spoil in the cold air; and then she turned and faced the door. There was a fumbling at the handle, and a moment later the door opened and revealed, as she had known it would, her lodger.

Mr. Sleuth was clad in a plaid dressing-gown, and in his hand was a candle. When he saw the lit-up kitchen, and the woman standing in it, he looked inexplicably taken aback, almost aghast.

“Yes, sir? What can I do for you, sir? I hope you didn’t ring, sir?” Mrs. Bunting did not come forward to meet her lodger; instead, she held her ground in front of the stove. Mr. Sleuth had no business to come down like this into her kitchen.

“No, I... I didn’t ring,” he stammered; “I didn’t know you were down here, Mrs. Bunting. Please excuse my costume. The truth is, my gas-stove has gone wrong, or, rather, that shilling-in-the-slot arrangement has done so. I came down to see if you had a gas-stove. I am going to ask leave to use it to-night for an experiment I want to make.”

Mrs. Bunting felt troubled — oddly, unnaturally troubled. Why couldn’t the lodger’s experiment wait till tomorrow? “Oh, certainly, sir; but you will find it very cold down here.” She looked round her dubiously.

“It seems most pleasantly warm,” he observed, “warm and cozy after my cold room upstairs.”

“Won’t you let me make you a fire?” Mrs. Bunting’s housewifely instincts were roused. “Do let me make you a fire in your bedroom, sir; I’m sure you ought to have one there these cold nights.”

“By no means — I mean, I would prefer not. I do not like an open fire, Mrs. Bunting.” He frowned, and still stood, a strange-looking figure, just inside the kitchen door.

“Do you want to use this stove now, sir? Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“No, not now — thank you all the same, Mrs. Bunting. I shall come down later, altogether later — probably after you and your husband have gone to bed. But I should be much obliged if you would see that the gas people come tomorrow and put my stove in order.”

“Perhaps Bunting could put it right for you sir. I’ll ask him to go up.”

“No, no — I don’t want anything of that sort done tonight. Besides, he couldn’t put it right. The cause of the trouble is quite simple. The machine is choked up with shillings: a foolish plan, so I have always felt it to be.”

Mr. Sleuth spoke very pettishly, with far more heat than he was wont to speak; but Mrs. Bunting sympathized with him. She had always suspected those slot-machines to be as dishonest as if they were human. It was dreadful, the way they swallowed up the shillings!

As if he were divining her thoughts, Mr. Sleuth, walking forward, stared up at the kitchen slot-machine. “Is it nearly full?” he asked abruptly. “I expect my experiment will take some time, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Oh, no, sir; there’s plenty of room for shillings there still. We don’t use our stove as much as you do yours, sir. I’m never in the kitchen a minute longer than I can help in this cold weather.”

And then, with him preceding her, Mrs. Bunting and her lodger made a low progress to the ground floor. There Mr. Sleuth courteously bade his landlady good night, and proceeded upstairs to his own apartments.

Mrs. Bunting again went down into her kitchen, again she lit the stove, and again she cooked the toasted cheese. But she felt unnerved, afraid of she knew not what. The place seemed to her alive with alien presences, and once she caught herself listening, which was absurd, for of course she could not hope to hear what her lodger was doing two, if not three, flights upstairs. She had never been able to discover what Mr. Sleuth’s experiments really were; all she knew was that they required a very high degree of heat.

The Buntings went to bed early that night. But Mrs. Bunting intended to stay awake. She wanted to know at what hour of the night her lodger would come down into the kitchen, and, above all, she was anxious as to how long he would stay there. But she had had a long day, and presently she fell asleep.

The church clock hard by struck two in the morning, and suddenly Mrs. Bunting awoke. She felt sharply annoyed with herself. How could she have dropped off like that? Mr. Sleuth must have been down and up again hours ago.

Then, gradually, she became aware of a faint acrid odor; elusive, almost intangible, it yet seemed to encompass her and the snoring man by her side almost as a vapor might have done.

Mrs. Bunting sat up in bed and sniffed; and then, in spite of the cold, she quietly crept out of the nice, warm bedclothes and crawled along to the bottom of the bed. There Mr. Sleuth’s landlady did a very curious thing; she leaned over the brass rail and put her face close to the hinge of the door. Yes, it was from there that this strange, horrible odor was coming; the smell must be very strong in the passage. Mrs. Bunting thought she knew now what became of these suits of clothes of Mr. Sleuth’s that disappeared.

As she crept back, shivering, under the bed-clothes, she longed to give her sleeping husband a good shake, and in fancy she heard herself saying: “Bunting, get up! There is something strange going on downstairs that we ought to know about.”

But Mr. Sleuth’s landlady, as she lay by her husband’s side, listening with painful intentness, knew very well that she would do nothing of the sort. The lodger had a right to destroy his clothes by burning if the fancy took him. What if he did make a certain amount of mess, a certain amount of smell, in her nice kitchen? Was he not — was he not such a good lodger! If they did anything to upset him, where could they ever hope to get another like him?

Three o’clock struck before Mrs. Bunting heard slow, heavy steps creaking up her kitchen stairs. But Mr. Sleuth did not go straight up to his own quarters, as she expected him to do. Instead, he went to the front door, and opening it, put it on the chain. At the end of ten minutes or so he closed the front door, and by that time Mrs. Bunting had divined why the lodger had behaved in this strange fashion — it must have been to get the strong acrid smell of burning wool out of the passage. But Mrs. Bunting felt as if she herself would never get rid of the horrible odor. She felt herself to be all smell.

At last the unhappy woman fell into a deep, troubled sleep; and then she dreamed a most terrible and unnatural dream; hoarse voices seemed to be shouting in her ear, “ ’Orrible murder off the Edgeware Road!” Then three words, indistinctly uttered, followed by “—at his work again! Awful details!”

Even in her dream Mrs. Bunting felt angered and impatient; she knew so well why she was being disturbed by this horrid nightmare. It was because of Bunting — Bunting, who insisted on talking to her of those frightful murders, in which only morbid, vulgar-minded people took any interest. Why, even now, in her dream, she could hear her husband speaking to her about it.

“Ellen,” — so she heard Bunting say in her ear — “Ellen, my dear, I am just going to get up to get a paper. It’s after seven o’clock.”

Mrs. Bunting sat up in bed. The shouting, nay, worse, the sound of tramping, hurrying feet smote on her ears. It had been no nightmare, then, but something infinitely worse — reality. Why couldn’t Bunting have lain quietly in bed awhile longer, and let his poor wife go on dreaming? The most awful dream would have been easier to bear than this awakening.

She heard her husband go to the front door, and, as he bought the paper, exchange a few excited words with the newspaper boy. Then he came back and began silently moving about the room.

“Well!” she cried. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I thought you’d rather not hear.”

“Of course I like to know what happens close to our own front door!” she snapped out.

And then he read out a piece of the newspaper — only a few lines, after all — telling in brief, unemotional language that the body of woman, apparently done to death in a peculiarly atrocious fashion some hours before, had been found in a passage leading to a disused warehouse off the Marylebone Road.

“It serves that sort of hussy right!” was Mrs. Bunting’s only comment.

When Mrs. Bunting went down into the kitchen, everything there looked just as she had left it, and there was no trace of the acrid smell she had expected to find there. Instead, the cavernous whitewashed room was full of fog, and she noticed that, though the shutters were bolted and barred as she had left them, the windows behind them had been widely opened to the air. She, of course, had left them shut.

She stooped and flung open the oven door of her gas-stove. Yes, it was as she had expected; a fierce heat had been generated there since she had last used the oven and a mass of black, gluey soot had fallen through to the stone floor below.

Mrs. Bunting took the ham and eggs that she had bought the previous day for her own and Bunting’s breakfast, and broiled them over the gas-ring in their sitting-room. Her husband watched her in surprised silence. She had never done such a thing before.

“I couldn’t stay down there,” she said, “it was so cold and foggy. I thought I’d make breakfast up here, just for to-day.”

“Yes,” he said kindly; “that’s quite right, Ellen. I think you’ve done quite right, my dear.”

But, when it came to the point, his wife could not eat any of the nice breakfast she had got ready; she only had another cup of tea.

“Are you ill?” Bunting asked solicitously.

“No,” she said shortly; “of course I’m not ill. Don’t be silly! The thought of that horrible thing happening so close by has upset me. Just hark to them, now!”

Through their closed windows penetrated the sound of scurrying feet and loud, ribald laughter. A crowd, nay, a mob, hastened to and from the scene of the murder.

Mrs. Bunting made her husband lock the front gate. “I don’t want any of those ghouls in here!” she exclaimed angrily. And then, “What a lot of idle people there must be in the world,” she said.

The coming and going went on all day. Mrs. Bunting stayed indoors; Bunting went out. After all, the ex-butler was human — it was natural that he should feel thrilled and excited. All their neighbors were the same. His wife wasn’t reasonable about such things. She quarreled with him when he didn’t tell her anything, and yet he was sure she would have been angry with him if he had said very much about it.

The lodger’s bell rang about two o’clock, and Mrs. Bunting prepared the simple luncheon that was also his breakfast. As she rested the tray a minute on the drawing-room floor landing, she heard Mr. Sleuth’s high, quavering voice reading aloud the words:

“She saith to him, Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”

The landlady turned the handle of the door and walked in with the tray. Mr. Sleuth was sitting close by the window, and Mrs. Bunting’s Bible lay open before him. As she came in he hastily closed the Bible and looked down at the crowd walking along the Marylebone Road.

“There seem a great many people out today,” he observed, without looking round.

“Yes, sir, there do.” Mrs. Bunting said nothing more, and offered no other explanation; and the lodger, as he at last turned to his landlady, smiled pleasantly. He had acquired a great liking and respect for this well-behaved, taciturn woman; she was the first person for whom he had felt any such feeling for many years past.

He took a half sovereign out of his waistcoat pocket; Mrs. Bunting noticed that it was not the same waistcoat Mr. Sleuth had been wearing the day before. “Will you please accept this half sovereign for the use of your kitchen last night?” he said. “I made as little mess as I could, but I was carrying on a rather elaborate experiment.”

She held out her hand, hesitated, and then took the coin.

As she walked down the stairs, the winter sun, a yellow ball hanging in the smoky sky, glinted in on Mrs. Bunting, and lent blood-red gleams, or so it seemed to her, to the piece of gold she was holding in her hand.

It was a very cold night — so cold, so windy, so snowladen the atmosphere, that every one who could do so stayed indoors. Bunting, however, was on his way home from what had proved a very pleasant job; he had been acting as waiter at a young lady’s birthday party, and a remarkable piece of luck had come his way. The young lady had come into a fortune that day, and she had had the gracious, the surprising thought of presenting each of the hired waiters with a sovereign.

This birthday treat had put him in mind of another birthday. His daughter Daisy would be eighteen the following Saturday. Why shouldn’t he send her a postal order for half a sovereign, so that she might come up and spend her birthday in London?

Having Daisy for three or four days would cheer up Ellen. Mr. Bunting, slackening his footsteps, began to think with puzzled concern of how queer his wife had seemed lately. She had become so nervous, so “jumpy,” that he didn’t know what to make of her sometimes. She had never been a really good-tempered woman — your capable, self-respecting woman seldom is — but she had never been like what she was now. Of late she sometimes got quite hysterical; he had let fall a sharp word to her the other day, and she had sat down on a chair, thrown her black apron over her face, and burst out sobbing violently.

During the last ten days Ellen had taken to talking in her sleep. “No, no, no!” she had cried out, only the night before. “It isn’t true! I won’t have it said! It’s a lie!” And there had been a wail of horrible fear and revolt in her usually quiet, mincing voice. Yes, it would certainly be a good thing for her to have Daisy’s company for a bit. Whew! It was cold; and Bunting had stupidly forgotten his gloves. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them warm.

Suddenly he became aware that Mr. Sleuth, the lodger who seemed to have “turned their luck,” as it were, was walking along on the opposite side of the solitary street.

Mr. Sleuth’s tall, thin figure was rather bowed, his head bent toward the ground. His right arm was thrust into his long Inverness cape; the other occasionally sawed the air, doubtless in order to help him keep warm. He was walking rather quickly. It was clear that he had not yet become aware of the proximity of his landlord.

Bunting felt pleased to see his lodger; it increased his feeling of general satisfaction. Strange, was it not, that that odd, peculiar-looking figure should have made all the difference to his (Bunting’s) and Mrs. Bunting’s happiness and comfort in life?

Naturally, Bunting saw far less of the lodger than did Mrs. Bunting. Their gentleman had made it very clear that he did not like either the husband or wife to come up to his rooms without being definitely asked to do so, and Bunting had been up there only once since Mr. Sleuth’s arrival five weeks before. This seemed to be a good opportunity for a little genial conversation.

Bunting, still an active man for his years, crossed the road, and, stepping briskly forward, tried to overtake Mr. Sleuth; but the more he hurried, the more the other hastened, and that without even turning to see whose steps he heard echoing behind him on the now freezing pavement.

Mr. Sleuth’s own footsteps were quite inaudible — an odd circumstance, when you came to think of it, as Bunting did think of it later, lying awake by Ellen’s side in the pitch-darkness. What it meant was, of course, that the lodger had rubber soles on his shoes.

The two men, the pursued and the pursuer, at last turned into the Marylebone Road. They were now within a hundred yards of home; and so, plucking up courage, Bunting called out, his voice echoing freshly on the still air:

“Mr. Sleuth, sir! Mr. Sleuth!”

The lodger stopped and turned round. He had been walking so quickly, and he was in so poor a physical condition, that the sweat was pouring down his face.

“Ah! So it’s you, Mr. Bunting? I heard footsteps behind me, and I hurried on. I wish I’d known that it was only you; there are so many queer characters about at night in London.”

“Not on a night like this, sir. Only honest folk who have business out of doors would be out such a night as this. It is cold, sir!” And then into Bunting’s slow and honest mind there suddenly crept the query as to what Mr. Sleuth’s own business out could be on this cold, bitter night.

“Cold?” the lodger repeated. “I can’t say that I find it cold, Mr. Bunting. When the snow falls the air always becomes milder.”

“Yes, sir; but tonight there’s such a sharp east wind. Why, it freezes the very marrow in one’s bones!”

Bunting noticed that Mr. Sleuth kept his distance in a rather strange way: he walked at the edge of the pavement, leaving the rest of it, on the wall side, to his landlord.

“I lost my way,” he said abruptly. “I’ve been over Primrose Hill to see a friend of mine, and then, coming back, I lost my way.”

Bunting could well believe that, for when he had first noticed Mr. Sleuth he was coming from the east, and not, as he should have done if walking home from Primrose Hill, from the north.

They had now reached the little gate that gave on to the shabby, paved court in front of the house. Mr. Sleuth was walking up the flagged path, when, with a “By your leave, sir,” the ex-butler, stepping aside, slipped in front of his lodger, in order to open the front door for him.

As he passed by Mr. Sleuth, the back of Bunting’s bare left hand brushed lightly against the long Inverness cape the other man was wearing, and, to his surprise, the stretch of cloth against which his hand lay for a moment was not only damp, damp from the flakes of snow that had settled upon it, but wet — wet and gluey. Bunting thrust his left hand into his pocket; it was with the other that he placed the key in the lock of the door.

The two men passed into the hall together. The house seemed blackly dark in comparison with the lighted-up road outside; and then, quite suddenly, there came over Bunting a feeling of mortal terror, an instinctive knowledge that some terrible and immediate danger was near him. A voice — the voice of his first wife, the long-dead girl to whom his mind so seldom reverted nowadays — uttered in his ear the words, “Take care!”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Bunting, that you must have felt something dirty, foul, on my coat? It’s too long a story to tell you now, but I brushed up against a dead animal — a dead rabbit lying across a bench on Primrose Hill.”

Mr. Sleuth spoke in a very quiet voice, almost in a whisper.

“No, sir; no, I didn’t notice nothing. I scarcely touched you, sir.” It seemed as if a power outside himself compelled Bunting to utter these lying words. “And now, sir, I’ll be saying good night to you,” he added.

He waited until the lodger had gone upstairs, and then he turned into his own sitting-room. There he sat down, for he felt very queer. He did not draw his left hand out of his pocket till he heard the other man moving about in the room above. Then he lit the gas and held up his left hand; he put it close to his face. It was flecked, streaked with blood.

He took off his boots, and then, very quietly, he went into the room where his wife lay asleep. Stealthily he walked across to the toilet-table, and dipped his hand into the water-jug.

The next morning Mr. Sleuth’s landlord awoke with a start; he felt curiously heavy about the limbs and tired about the eyes.

Drawing his watch from under his pillow, he saw that it was nearly nine o’clock. He and Ellen had overslept. Without waking her, he got out of bed and pulled up the blind. It was snowing heavily, and, as is the way when it snows, even in London, it was strangely, curiously still.

After he had dressed he went out into the passage. A newspaper and a letter were lying on the mat. Fancy having slept through the postman’s knock! He picked them both up and went into the sitting-room; then he carefully shut the door behind him, and, tossing the letter aside, spread the newspaper wide open on the table and bent over it.

As Bunting at last looked up and straightened himself, a look of inexpressible relief shone upon his stolid face. The item of news he had felt certain would be there, printed in big type on the middle sheet, was not there.

He folded the paper and laid it on a chair, and then eagerly took up his letter.

Bunting felt amazingly light-hearted; and, as he walked into the next room, he smiled broadly.

“Ellen,” he cried out, “here’s news! Daisy’s coming today. There’s scarlet fever in their house, and Martha thinks she had better come away for a few days. She’ll be here for her birthday!”

Mrs. Bunting listened in silence; she did not even open her eyes. “I can’t have the girl here just now,” she said shortly: “I’ve got just as much as I can manage to do.”

But Bunting felt pugnacious, and so cheerful as to be almost light-headed. Deep down in his heart he looked back to last night with a feeling of shame and self-rebuke. Whatever had made such horrible thoughts and suspicions come into his head?

“Of course Daisy will come here,” he said shortly. “If it comes to that, she’ll be able to help you with the work, and she’ll brisk us both up a bit.”

Rather to his surprise, Mrs. Bunting said nothing in answer to this, and he changed the subject abruptly. “The lodger and me came in together last night,” he observed. “He’s certainly a funny kind of gentleman. It wasn’t the sort of night one would choose to go for a walk over Primrose Hill, and yet that was what he had been doing — so he said.”

It stopped snowing about ten o’clock, and the morning wore itself away.

Just as twelve was striking, a four-wheeler drew up to the gate. It was Daisy — pink-cheeked, excited, laughing-eyed Daisy, a sight to gladden any father’s heart. “Aunt said I was to have a cab if the weather was bad,” she said.

There was a bit of a wrangle over the fare. King’s Cross, as all the world knows, is nothing like two miles from the Marylebone Road, but the man clamored for one-and-sixpence, and hinted darkly that he had done the young lady a favor in bringing her at all.

While he and Bunting were having words, Daisy, leaving them to it, walked up the path to the door where her stepmother was awaiting her.

Suddenly there fell loud shouts on the still air. They sounded strangely eerie, breaking sharply across the muffled, snowy air.

“What’s that?” said Bunting, with a look of startled fear. “Why, whatever’s that?”

The cabman lowered his voice: “Them are crying out that ’orrible affair at King’s Cross. He’s done for two of ’em this time! That’s what I meant when I said I might have got a better fare; I wouldn’t say anything before Missy there, but folk ’ave been coming from all over London — like a fire; plenty of toffs, too. But there — there’s nothing to see now!”

“What! Another woman murdered last night?” Bunting felt and looked convulsed with horror.

The cabman stared at him, surprised. “Two of ’em, I tell yer — within a few yards of one another. He ’ave got a nerve—”

“Have they caught him?” asked Bunting perfunctorily.

“Lord, no! They’ll never catch ’im! It must ’ave happened hours and hours ago — they was both stone-cold. One each end of an archway. That’s why they didn’t see ’em before.”

The hoarse cries were coming nearer and nearer — two news-venders trying to outshout each other.

“ ’Orrible discovery near King’s Cross!” they yelled exultantly. And as Bunting, with his daughter’s bag in his hand, hurried up the path and passed through his front door, the words pursued him like a dreadful threat.

Angrily he shut out the hoarse, insistent cries. No, he had no wish to buy a paper. That kind of crime wasn’t fit reading for a young girl, such a girl as was his Daisy, brought up as carefully as if she had been a young lady by her strict Methody aunt.

As he stood in his little hall, trying to feel “all right” again, he could hear Daisy’s voice — high, voluble, excited — giving her stepmother a long account of the scarlet-fever case to which she owed her presence in London. But, as Bunting pushed open the door of the sitting-room, there came a note of sharp alarm in his daughter’s voice, and he heard her say: “Why Ellen! Whatever is the matter? You do look bad!” and his wife’s muffled answer: “Open the window — do.”

Rushing across the room, Bunting pushed up the sash. The newspaper-sellers were now just outside the house. “Horrible discovery near King’s Cross — a clue to the murderer!” they yelled. And then, helplessly, Mrs. Bunting began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed, rocking herself to and fro as if in an ecstasy of mirth.

“Why, father, whatever’s the matter with her?” Daisy looked quite scared.

“She’s in ’sterics — that’s what it is,” he said shortly. “I’ll just get the water-jug. Wait a minute.”

Bunting felt very put out, and yet glad, too, for this queer seizure of Ellen’s almost made him forget the sick terror with which he had been possessed a moment before. That he and his wife should be obsessed by the same fear, the same terror, never crossed his simple, slow-working mind.

The lodger’s bell rang. That, or the threat of the water-jug, had a magical effect on Mrs. Bunting. She rose to her feet, still trembling, but composed.

As Mrs. Bunting went upstairs she felt her legs trembling under her, and put out a shaking hand to clutch at the bannister for support. She waited a few minutes on the landing, and then knocked at the door of her lodger’s parlor.

But Mr. Sleuth’s voice answered her from the bedroom. “I’m not well,” he called out querulously; “I think I caught a chill going out to see a friend last night. I’d be obliged if you’ll bring me up a cup of tea and put it outside my door, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Very well, sir.”

Mrs. Bunting went downstairs and made her lodger a cup of tea over the gas-ring, Bunting watching her the while in heavy silence.

During their midday dinner the husband and wife had a little discussion as to where Daisy should sleep. It had already been settled that a bed should be made up for her in the sitting-room, but Bunting saw reason to change this plan. As the two women were clearing away the dishes, he looked up and said shortly: “I think ’twould be better if Daisy were to sleep with you, Ellen, and I were to sleep in the sitting-room.”

Ellen acquiesced quietly.

Daisy was a good-natured girl; she liked London, and wanted to make herself useful to her stepmother. “I’ll wash up; don’t you bother to come downstairs,” she said.

Bunting began to walk up and down the room. His wife gave him a furtive glance; she wondered what he was thinking about.

“Didn’t you get a paper?” she said at last.

“There’s the paper,” he said crossly, “the paper we always do take in, the Telegraph.” His look challenged her to a further question.

“I thought they was shouting something in the street — I mean just before I was took bad.”

But he made no answer; instead, he went to the top of the staircase and called out sharply: “Daisy! Daisy, child, are you there?”

“Yes, father,” she answered from below.

“Better come upstairs out of that cold kitchen.”

He came back into the sitting-room again.

“Ellen, is the lodger in? I haven’t heard him moving about. I don’t want Daisy to be mixed up with him.”

“Mr. Sleuth is not well today,” his wife answered; “he is remaining in bed a bit. Daisy needn’t have anything to do with him. She’ll have her work cut out looking after things down here. That’s where I want her to help me.”

“Agreed,” he said.

When it grew dark, Bunting went out and bought an evening paper. He read it out of doors in the biting cold, standing beneath a street lamp. He wanted to see what was the clue to the murderer.

The clue proved to be a very slender one — merely the imprint in the snowy slush of a half-worn rubber sole; and it was, of course, by no means certain that the sole belonged to the boot or shoe of the murderer of the two doomed women who had met so swift and awful a death in the arch near King’s Cross station. The paper’s special investigator pointed out that there were thousands of such soles being worn in London. Bunting found comfort in that obvious fact. He felt grateful to the special investigator for having stated it so clearly.

As he approached his house, he heard curious sounds coming from the inner side of the low wall that shut off the courtyard from the pavement. Under ordinary circumstances Bunting would have gone at once to drive whoever was there out into the roadway. Now he stayed outside, sick with suspense and anxiety. Was it possible that their place was being watched — already?

But it was only Mr. Sleuth. To Bunting’s astonishment, the lodger suddenly stepped forward from behind the wall on to the flagged path. He was carrying a brown-paper parcel, and, as he walked along, the new boots he was wearing creaked and the tap-tap of wooden heels rang out on the stones.

Bunting, still hidden outside the gate, suddenly understood what his lodger had been doing on the other side of the wall. Mr. Sleuth had been out to buy himself a pair of boots, and had gone inside the gate to put them on, placing his old footgear in the paper in which the new boots had been wrapped.

Bunting waited until Mr. Sleuth had let himself into the house; then he also walked up the flagged pathway, and put his latch-key in the door.

In the next three days each of Bunting’s waking hours held its meed of aching fear and suspense. From his point of view, almost any alternative would be preferable to that which to most people would have seemed the only one open to him. He told himself that it would be ruin for him and for his Ellen to be mixed up publicly in such a terrible affair. It would track them to their dying day.

Bunting was also always debating within himself as to whether he should tell Ellen of his frightful suspicion. He could not believe that what had become so plain to himself could long be concealed from all the world, and yet he did not credit his wife with the same intelligence. He did not even notice that, although she waited on Mr. Sleuth as assiduously as ever, Mrs. Bunting never mentioned the lodger.

Mr. Sleuth, meanwhile, kept upstairs; he had given up going out altogether. He still felt, so he assured his landlady, far from well.

Daisy was another complication, the more so that the girl, whom her father longed to send away and whom he would hardly let out of his sight, showed herself inconveniently inquisitive concerning the lodger.

“Whatever does he do with himself all day?” she asked her stepmother.

“Well, just now he’s reading the Bible,” Mrs. Bunting had answered, very shortly and dryly.

“Well, I never! That’s a funny thing for a gentleman to do!” Such had been Daisy’s pert remark, and her stepmother had snubbed her well for it.

Daisy’s eighteenth birthday dawned uneventfully. Her father gave her what he had always promised she should have on her eighteenth birthday — a watch. It was a pretty little silver watch, which Bunting had bought second-hand on the last day he had been happy; it seemed a long time ago now.

Mrs. Bunting thought a silver watch a very extravagant present, but she had always had the good sense not to interfere between her husband and his child. Besides, her mind was now full of other things. She was beginning to fear that Bunting suspected something, and she was filled with watchful anxiety and unease. What if he were to do anything silly — mix them up with the police, for instance? It certainly would be ruination to them both. But there — one never knew, with men! Her husband, however, kept his own counsel absolutely.

Daisy’s birthday was on Saturday. In the middle of the morning Ellen and Daisy went down into the kitchen. Bunting didn’t like the feeling that there was only one flight of stairs between Mr. Sleuth and himself, so he quietly slipped out of the house and went to buy himself an ounce of tobacco.

In the last four days Bunting had avoided his usual haunts. But today the unfortunate man had a curious longing for human companionship — companionship, that is, other than that of Ellen and Daisy. This feeling led him into a small, populous thoroughfare hard by the Edgeware Road. There were more people there than usual, for the housewives of the neighborhood were doing their marketing for Sunday.

Bunting passed the time of day with the tobacconist, and the two fell into desultory talk. To the ex-butler’s surprise, the man said nothing at all to him on the subject of which all the neighborhood must still be talking.

And then, quite suddenly, while still standing by the counter, and before he had paid for the packet of tobacco he held in his hand, Bunting, through the open door, saw, with horrified surprise, that his wife was standing outside a green-grocer’s shop just opposite. Muttering a word of apology, he rushed out of the shop and across the road.

“Ellen!” he gasped hoarsely. “You’ve never gone and left my little girl alone in the house?”

Mrs. Bunting’s face went chalky white. “I thought you were indoors,” she said. “You were indoors. Whatever made you come out for, without first making sure I was there?”

Bunting made no answer; but, as they stared at each other in exasperated silence, each knew that the other knew.

They turned and scurried down the street.

“Don’t run,” he said suddenly; “we shall get there just as quickly if we walk fast. People are noticing you, Ellen. Don’t run.”

He spoke breathlessly, but it was breathlessness induced by fear and excitement, not by the quick pace at which they were walking.

At last they reached their own gate. Bunting pushed past in front of his wife. After all, Daisy was his child — Ellen couldn’t know how he was feeling. He made the path almost in one leap, and fumbled for a moment with his latch-key. The door opened.

“Daisy!” he called out in a wailing voice. “Daisy, my dear, where are you?”

“Here I am, father; what is it?”

“She’s all right!” Bunting turned his gray face to his wife. “She’s all right, Ellen!” Then he waited a moment, leaning against the wall of the passage. “It did give me a turn,” he said; and then, warningly, “Don’t frighten the girl, Ellen.”

Daisy was standing before the fire in the sitting-room, admiring herself in the glass. “Oh, father,” she said, without turning round, “I’ve seen the lodger! He’s quite a nice gentleman — though, to be sure, he does look a cure! He came down to ask Ellen for something, and we had quite a nice little chat. I told him it was my birthday, and he asked me to go to Madame Tussaud’s with him this afternoon.” She laughed a little self-consciously. “Of course I could see he was ’centric, and then at first he spoke so funnily. ‘And who be you?’ he says, threatening-like. And I says to him, ‘I’m Mr. Bunting’s daughter, sir.’ ‘Then you’re a very fortunate girl’ — that’s what he said, Ellen — ‘to ’ave such a nice stepmother as you’ve got. That’s why,’ he says, ‘you look such a good innocent girl.’ And then he quoted a bit of the prayer-book at me. ‘Keep innocency,’ he says, wagging his head at me. Lor’! It made me feel as if I was with aunt again.”

“I won’t have you going out with the lodger — that’s flat.” He was wiping his forehead with one hand, while with the other he mechanically squeezed the little packet of tobacco, for which, as he now remembered, he had forgotten to pay.

Daisy pouted. “Oh, father, I think you might let me have a treat on my birthday! I told him Saturday wasn’t a very good day — at least, so I’d heard — for Madame Tussaud’s. Then he said we could go early, while the fine folk are still having their dinners. He wants you to come, too.” She turned to her stepmother, then giggled happily. “The lodger has a wonderful fancy for you, Ellen; if I was father, I’d feel quite jealous!”

Her last words were cut across by a loud knock on the door. Bunting and his wife looked at each other apprehensively.

Both felt a curious thrill of relief when they saw that it was only Mr. Sleuth — Mr. Sleuth dressed to go out: the tall hat he had worn when he first came to them was in his hand, and he was wearing a heavy overcoat.

“I saw you had come in,” — he addressed Mrs. Bunting in his high, whistling, hesitating voice — “and so I’ve come down to ask if you and Miss Bunting will come to Madame Tussaud’s now. I have never seen these famous waxworks, though I’ve heard of the place all my life.”

As Bunting forced himself to look fixedly at his lodger, a sudden doubt, bringing with it a sense of immeasurable relief, came to him. Surely it was inconceivable that this gentle, mild-mannered gentleman could be the monster of cruelty and cunning that Bunting had but a moment ago believed him to be!

“You’re very kind, sir, I’m sure.” He tried to catch his wife’s eye, but Mrs. Bunting was looking away, staring into vacancy. She still, of course, wore the bonnet and cloak in which she had just been out to do her marketing. Daisy was already putting on her hat and coat.

Madame Tussaud’s had hitherto held pleasant memories for Mrs. Bunting. In the days when she and Bunting were courting they often spent part of their “afternoon out” there. The butler had an acquaintance, a man named Hopkins, who was one of the waxworks’ staff, and this man had sometimes given him passes for “self and lady.” But this was the first time Mrs. Bunting had been inside the place since she had come to live almost next door, as it were, to the big building.

The ill-sorted trio walked up the great staircase and into the first gallery; and there Mr. Sleuth suddenly stopped short. The presence of those curious, still figures, suggesting death in life, seemed to surprise and affright him.

Daisy took quick advantage of the lodger’s hesitation and unease.

“Oh, Ellen,” she cried, “do let us begin by going into the Chamber of Horrors! I’ve never been in there. Aunt made father promise he wouldn’t take me, the only time I’ve ever been here. But now that I’m eighteen I can do just as I like; besides, aunt will never know!”

Mr. Sleuth looked down at her.

“Yes,” he said, “let us go into the Chamber of Horrors; that’s a good idea, Miss Bunting.”

They turned into the great room in which the Napoleonic relics are kept, and which leads into the curious, vaultlike chamber where waxen effigies of dead criminals stand grouped in wooden docks. Mrs. Bunting was at once disturbed and relieved to see her husband’s old acquaintance, Mr. Hopkins, in charge of the turnstile admitting the public to the Chamber of Horrors.

“Well, you are a stranger,” the man observed genially. “I do believe this is the very first time I’ve seen you in here, Mrs. Bunting, since you married!”

“Yes,” she said; “that is so. And this is my husband’s daughter, Daisy; I expect you’ve heard of her, Mr. Hopkins. And this” — she hesitated a moment — “is our lodger, Mr. Sleuth.”

But Mr. Sleuth frowned and shuffled away. Daisy, leaving her stepmother’s side, joined him.

Mrs. Bunting put down three sixpences.

“Wait a minute,” said Hopkins; “you can’t go into the Chamber of Horrors just yet. But you won’t have to wait more than four or five minutes, Mrs. Bunting. It’s this way, you see; our boss is in there, showing a party round.” He lowered his voice. “It’s Sir John Burney — I suppose you know who Sir John Burney is?”

“No,” she answered indifferently; “I don’t know that I ever heard of him.” She felt slightly — oh, very slightly — uneasy about Daisy. She would like her stepdaughter to keep well within sight and sound. Mr. Sleuth was taking the girl to the other end of the room.

“Well, I hope you never will know him — not in any personal sense, Mrs. Bunting.” The man chuckled. “He’s the Head Commissioner of Police — that’s what Sir John Burney is. One of the gentlemen he’s showing round our place is the Paris Prefect of Police, whose job is on all fours, so to speak, with Sir John’s. The Frenchy has brought his daughter with him, and there are several other ladies. Ladies always like ’orrors, Mrs. Bunting; that’s our experience here. ‘Oh, take me to the Chamber of ’Orrors!’ — that’s what they say the minute they gets into the building.”

A group of people, all talking and laughing together, were advancing from within toward the turnstile.

Mrs. Bunting stared at them nervously. She wondered which of them was the gentleman with whom Mr. Hopkins had hoped she would never be brought into personal contact. She quickly picked him out. He was a tall, powerful, nice-looking gentleman with a commanding manner. Just now he was smiling down into the face of a young lady. “Monsieur Barberoux is quite right,” he was saying; “the English law is too kind to the criminal, especially to the murderer. If we conducted our trials in the French fashion, the place we have just left would be very much fuller than it is today! A man of whose guilt we are absolutely assured is oftener than not acquitted, and then the public taunt us with ‘another undiscovered crime’!”

“D’you mean, Sir John, that murderers sometimes escape scot-free? Take the man who has been committing all those awful murders this last month. Of course, I don’t know much about it, for father won’t let me read about it, but I can’t help being interested!” Her girlish voice rang out, and Mrs. Bunting heard every word distinctly.

The party gathered round, listening eagerly to hear what the Head Commissioner would say next.

“Yes.” He spoke very deliberately. “I think we may say — now, don’t give me away to a newspaper fellow, Miss Rose — that we do know perfectly well who the murderer in question is—”

Several of those standing near by uttered expressions of surprise and incredulity.

“Then why don’t you catch him?” cried the girl indignantly.

“I didn’t say we know where he is; I only said we know who he is; or, rather, perhaps I ought to say that we have a very strong suspicion of his identity.”

Sir John’s French colleague looked up quickly. “The Hamburg and Liverpool man?” he said interrogatively.

The other nodded. “Yes; I suppose you’ve had the case turned up?”

Then, speaking very quickly, as if he wished to dismiss the subject from his own mind and from that of his auditors, he went on:

“Two murders of the kind were committed eight years ago — one in Hamburg, the other just afterward in Liverpool, and there were certain peculiarities connected with the crimes which made it clear they were committed by the same hand. The perpetrator was caught, fortunately for us red-handed, just as he was leaving the house of his victim, for in Liverpool the murder was committed in a house. I myself saw the unhappy man — I say unhappy, for there is no doubt at all that he was mad,” — he hesitated, and added in a lower tone — “suffering from an acute form of religious mania. I myself saw him, at some length. But now comes the really interesting point. Just a month ago this criminal lunatic, as we must regard him, made his escape from the asylum where he was confined. He arranged the whole thing with extraordinary cunning and intelligence, and we should probably have caught him long ago were it not that he managed, when on his way out of the place, to annex a considerable sum of money in gold with which the wages of the staff were about to be paid.”

The Frenchman again spoke. “Why have you not circulated a description?” he asked.

“We did that at once,” — Sir John Burney smiled a little grimly — “but only among our own people. We dare not circulate the man’s description among the general public. You see, we may be mistaken, after all.”

“That is not very probable!” The Frenchman smiled a satirical little smile.

A moment later the party were walking in Indian file through the turnstile, Sir John Burney leading the way.

Mrs. Bunting looked straight before her. Even had she wished to do so, she had neither time nor power to warn her lodger of his danger.

Daisy and her companion were now coming down the room, bearing straight for the Head Commissioner of Police. In another moment Mr. Sleuth and Sir John Burney would be face to face.

Suddenly Mr. Sleuth swerved to one side. A terrible change came over his pale, narrow face; it became discomposed, livid with rage and terror.

But, to Mrs. Bunting’s relief — yes, to her inexpressible relief — Sir John Burney and his friends swept on. They passed by Mr. Sleuth unconcernedly, unaware, or so it seemed to her, that there was anyone else in the room but themselves.

“Hurry up, Mrs. Bunting,” said the turnstile-keeper; “you and your friends will have the place all to yourselves.” From an official he had become a man, and it was the man in Mr. Hopkins that gallantly addressed pretty Daisy Bunting. “It seems strange that a young lady like you should want to go in and see all those ’orrible frights,” he said jestingly.

“Mrs. Bunting, may I trouble you to come over here for a moment?” The words were hissed rather than spoken by Mr. Sleuth’s lips.

His landlady took a doubtful step forward.

“A last word with you, Mrs. Bunting.” The lodger’s face was still distorted with fear and passion. “Do you think to escape the consequences of your hideous treachery? I trusted you, Mrs. Bunting, and you betrayed me! But I am protected by a higher power, for I still have work to do. Your end will be bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Your feet shall go down to death, and your steps take hold on hell.” Even while Mr. Sleuth was uttering these strange, dreadful words, he was looking around, his eyes glancing this way and that, seeking a way of escape.

At last his eyes became fixed on a small placard placed about a curtain. “Emergency Exit” was written there. Leaving his landlady’s side, he walked over to the turnstile. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, and then touched the man on the arm. “I feel ill,” he said, speaking very rapidly; “very ill indeed! It’s the atmosphere of this place. I want you to let me out by the quickest way. It would be a pity for me to faint here — especially with ladies about.” His left hand shot out and placed what he had been fumbling for in his pocket on the other’s bare palm. “I see there’s an emergency exit over there. Would it be possible for me to get out that way?”

“Well, yes, sir; I think so.” The man hesitated; he felt a slight, a very slight, feeling of misgiving. He looked at Daisy, flushed and smiling, happy and unconcerned, and then at Mrs. Bunting. She was very pale; but surely her lodger’s sudden seizure was enough to make her feel worried. Hopkins felt the half sovereign pleasantly tickling his palm. The Prefect of Police had given him only half a crown — mean, shabby foreigner!

“Yes, I can let you out that way,” he said at last, “and perhaps when you’re standing out in the air on the iron balcony you’ll feel better. But then, you know, sir, you’ll have to come round to the front if you want to come in again, for those emergency doors only open outward.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Sleuth hurriedly; “I quite understand! If I feel better I’ll come in by the front way, and pay another shilling — that’s only fair.”

“You needn’t do that if you’ll just explain what happened here.”

The man went and pulled the curtain aside, and put his shoulder against the door. It burst open, and the light for a moment blinded Mr. Sleuth. He passed his hand over his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said; “thank you. I shall get all right here.”

Five days later Bunting identified the body of a man found drowned in the Regent’s Canal as that of his late lodger; and, the morning following, a gardener working in the Regent’s Park found a newspaper in which were wrapped, together with a half-worn pair of rubber-soled shoes, two surgical knives. This fact was not chronicled in any newspaper; but a very pretty and picturesque paragraph went the round of the press, about the same time, concerning a small box filled with sovereigns which had been forwarded anonymously to the Governor of the Foundling Hospital.

Mr. and Mrs. Bunting are now in the service of an old lady, by whom they are feared as well as respected, and whom they make very comfortable.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? JOYCE CAROL OATES

Original publication: Epoch, Fall 1966; first collected in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Stories of Young America by Joyce Carol Oates (Greenwich, CT, Fawcett, 1974)

Arguably the greatest living writer in the world to have not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (she has been regarded as a favorite by readers, critics, and bookies for more than three decades), Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) has enjoyed a career known for its excellence, popularity, and prolificacy.

Born in Lockport, New York, in the northwestern part of the state, she began to write as a young child, attended Syracuse University on scholarship, and won a Mademoiselle magazine short story award at nineteen. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), has been followed by more than a hundred books, including novels, short story collections, children’s books, young adult novels, volumes of poetry, collections of essays and criticism, and volumes of plays; eleven of her novels of suspense were released under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Laura Kelly. An overwhelming number of her novels and short stories feature such subjects as violence, sexual abuse, murder, racial tensions, and class conflicts. Many of her fictional works have been based on real-life incidents, including violent crimes.

As prolific as her writing career has been, so, too, has been the extraordinary number of major literary prizes and honors awarded to her, including a National Book Award for them (1969), as well as five other nominations, five Pulitzer Prize nominations, two O. Henry Awards for short stories (twenty-nine nominations), and a National Humanities Medal. Among her bestselling books are We Were the Mulvaneys (1996; released on film in 2002 with Beau Bridges and Blythe Danner), and Blonde (2000–2001 miniseries with Poppy Montgomery), a novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. The 1996 film Foxfire (starring Cathy Moriarty, Hedy Burress, and Angelina Jolie) was an adaptation of Oates’s 1993 novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a coming-of-age story that in the hands of Oates adds a layer of difficulty and complexity to an already confusing time for young adults.

Bestselling writer Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, described “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” as the story that most influenced her writing. “I’d never had that experience where my blood changed temperature in my veins. I’ve probably reread it a hundred times since then and still can’t figure out how it’s done.”

Title: Smooth Talk, 1985

Studio: American Playhouse, Goldcrest Films

Director: Joyce Chopra

Screenwriter: Tom Cole

Producer: Martin Rosen

• Treat Williams (Arnold Friend)

• Laura Dern (Connie)

• Mary Kay Place (Katherine)

Few authors can create suspense as effectively as Joyce Carol Oates, and this is true in her original story, just as it is in the film inspired by it, which closely follows the story except for a very different ending, which was probably needed for the cinematic version. It should be noted that in much of Oates’s fiction, the terror comes slowly, not suddenly, as events slowly gyre out of control.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was loosely based on the real-life murders committed by Charles Schmid in Tucson in 1964 and 1965. Known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson” because his charm and charisma were attractive to so many friends and young women, he was a smooth talker who had several girlfriends. He decided to kill a high school student just to know how it felt to kill someone. He later confessed the crime to a girlfriend but, when he broke up with her, she threatened to tell on him, so he killed her, too, as well as her sister.

Schmid inspired the creation of Arnold Friend — remove the letter r from his names for a definition of the character.

In the story and in the film, a teenager is experiencing a burgeoning sexuality and flirts with boys until she ambiguously rejects in a flirty manner an older man who is not so easily put off.

Smooth Talk won the Grand Jury Prize Dramatic at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Joyce Carol Oates

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous, giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. “Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?” she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

“Why don’t you keep your room clean like your sister? How’ve you got your hair fixed — what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don’t see your sister using that junk.”

Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t bad enough — with her in the same building — she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother’s sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn’t bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie’s mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. “She makes me want to throw up sometimes,” she complained to her friends. She had a high, breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.

There was one good thing: June went places with girlfriends of hers, girls who were just as plain and steady as she, and so when Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections. The father of Connie’s best girlfriend drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.

They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if someone passed who amused or interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that drew anyone’s eye to it, and she wore part of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home — “Ha, ha, very funny” — but highpitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.

Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they didn’t like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards on his stool, turning himself jerkily around in semicircles and then stopping and turning back again, and after a while he asked Connie if she would like something to eat. She said she would and so she tapped her friend’s arm on her way out — her friend pulled her face up into a brave, droll look — and Connie said she would meet her at eleven, across the way. “I just hate to leave her like that,” Connie said earnestly, but the boy said that she wouldn’t be alone for long. So they went out to his car, and on the way Connie couldn’t help but let her eyes wander over the windshields and faces all around her, her face gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music. She drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn’t help glancing back and there he was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, “Gonna get you, baby,” and Connie turned away again without Eddie noticing anything.

She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at the plaza. Her girlfriend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls smiled at each other and Connie said, “How was the movie?” and the girl said, “You should know.” They rode off with the girl’s father, sleepy and pleased, and Connie couldn’t help but look back at the darkened shopping plaza with its big empty parking lot and its signs that were faded and ghostly now, and over at the drive-in restaurant where cars were still circling tirelessly. She couldn’t hear the music at this distance.

Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, “So-so.”

She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house — it was summer vacation — getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July. Connie’s mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or saying suddenly, “What’s this about the Pettinger girl?”

And Connie would say nervously, “Oh, her. That dope.” She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kind enough to believe it. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so much. Her mother went scuffling around the house in old bedroom slippers and complained over the telephone to one sister about the other, then the other called up and the two of them complained about the third one. If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s tone was approving, and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them. Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends, but something would come up — some vexation that was like a fly buzzing suddenly around their heads — and their faces went hard with contempt.

One Sunday Connie got up at eleven — none of them bothered with church — and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in the sun. Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt’s house and Connie said no, she wasn’t interested, rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it. “Stay home alone then,” her mother said sharply. Connie sat out back in a lawn chair and watched them drive away, her father quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out, her mother with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through the windshield, and in the back seat poor old June, all dressed up as if she didn’t know what a barbecue was, with all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the backyard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still. The asbestos “ranch house” that was now three years old startled her — it looked small. She shook her head as if to get awake.

It was too hot. She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from “Bobby King”: “An’ look here, you girls at Napoleon’s — Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!”

And Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.

After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. She sat up at once, startled, because it couldn’t be her father so soon. The gravel kept crunching all the way in from the road — the driveway was long — and Connie ran to the window. It was a car she didn’t know. It was an open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely. Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered, “Christ, Christ,” wondering how bad she looked. The car came to a stop at the side door and the horn sounded four short taps, as if this were a signal Connie knew.

She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step. There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he was grinning at her.

“I ain’t late, am I?” he said.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Connie said.

“Toldja I’d be out, didn’t I?”

“I don’t even know who you are.”

She spoke sullenly, careful to show no interest or pleasure, and he spoke in a fast, bright monotone. Connie looked past him to the other boy, taking her time. He had fair brown hair, with a lock that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce, embarrassed look, but so far he hadn’t even bothered to glance at her. Both boys wore sunglasses. The driver’s glasses were metallic and mirrored everything in miniature.

“You wanta come for a ride?” he said.

Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder.

“Don’tcha like my car? New paint job,” he said. “Hey.”

“What?”

“You’re cute.”

She pretended to fidget, chasing flies away from the door.

“Don’tcha believe me, or what?” he said.

“Look, I don’t even know who you are,” Connie said in disgust.

“Hey, Ellie’s got a radio, see. Mine broke down.” He lifted his friend’s arm and showed her the little transistor radio the boy was holding, and now Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house.

“Bobby King?” she said.

“I listen to him all the time. I think he’s great.”

“He’s kind of great,” Connie said reluctantly.

“Listen, that guy’s great. He knows where the action is.”

Connie blushed a little, because the glasses made it impossible for her to see just what this boy was looking at. She couldn’t decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn’t come down or go back inside. She said, “What’s all that stuff painted on your car?”

“Can’tcha read it?” He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatin hardening, and in the midst of it Connie’s bright green blouse. “This here is my name, to begin with,” he said. ARNOLD FRIEND was written in tarlike black letters on the side, with a drawing of a round, grinning face that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore sunglasses. “I wanta introduce myself, I’m Arnold Friend and that’s my real name and I’m gonna be your friend, honey, and inside the car’s Ellie Oscar, he’s kinda shy.” Ellie brought his transistor radio up to his shoulder and balanced it there. “Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,” Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn’t think much of it. The left rear fender had been smashed and around it was written, on the gleaming gold background: DONE BY CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. Connie had to laugh at that. Arnold Friend was pleased at her laughter and looked up at her. “Around the other side’s a lot more — you wanta come and see them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

“Don’tcha wanta see what’s on the car? Don’tcha wanta go for a ride?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“I got things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Things.”

He laughed as if she had said something funny. He slapped his thighs. He was standing in a strange way, leaning back against the car as if he were balancing himself. He wasn’t tall, only an inch or so taller than she would be if she came down to him. Connie liked the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them dressed: tight faded jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that pulled his waist in and showed how lean he was, and a white pull-over shirt that was a little soiled and showed the hard small muscles of his arms and shoulders. He looked as if he probably did hard work, lifting and carrying things. Even his neck looked muscular. And his face was a familiar face, somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn’t shaved for a day or two, and the nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke.

“Connie, you ain’t telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and you know it,” he said, still laughing. The way he straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been all fake.

“How do you know what my name is?” she said suspiciously.

“It’s Connie.”

“Maybe and maybe not.”

“I know my Connie,” he said, wagging his finger. Now she remembered him even better, back at the restaurant, and her cheeks warmed at the thought of how she had sucked in her breath just at the moment she passed him — how she must have looked to him. And he had remembered her. “Ellie and I come out here especially for you,” he said. “Ellie can sit in back. How about it?”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where’re we going?”

He looked at her. He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in light. His eyes were like chips of broken glass that catch the light in an amiable way. He smiled. It was as if the idea of going for a ride somewhere, to someplace, was a new idea to him.

“Just for a ride, Connie sweetheart.”

“I never said my name was Connie,” she said.

“But I know what it is. I know your name and all about you, lots of things,” Arnold Friend said. He had not moved yet but stood still leaning back against the side of his jalopy. “I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl, and found out all about you — like I know your parents and sister are gone somewheres and I know where and how long they’re going to be gone, and I know who you were with last night, and your best girl friend’s name is Betty. Right?”

He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song. His smile assured her that everything was fine. In the car Ellie turned up the volume on his radio and did not bother to look around at them.

“Ellie can sit in the back seat,” Arnold Friend said. He indicated his friend with a casual jerk of his chin, as if Ellie did not count and she should not bother with him.

“How’d you find out all that stuff?” Connie said.

“Listen: Betty Schultz and Tony Fitch and Jimmy Pettinger and Nancy Pettinger,” he said in a chant. “Raymond Stanley and Bob Hutter—”

“Do you know all those kids?”

“I know everybody.”

“Look, you’re kidding. You’re not from around here.”

“Sure.”

“But — how come we never saw you before?”

“Sure you saw me before,” he said. He looked down at his boots, as if he were a little offended. “You just don’t remember.”

“I guess I’d remember you,” Connie said.

“Yeah?” He looked up at this, beaming. He was pleased. He began to mark time with the music from Ellie’s radio, tapping his fists lightly together. Connie looked away from his smile to the car, which was painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. She looked at that name, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front fender was an expression that was familiar — MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the year before but didn’t use this year. She looked at it for a while as if the words meant something to her that she did not yet know.

“What’re you thinking about? Huh?” Arnold Friend demanded. “Not worried about your hair blowing around in the car, are you?”

“No.”

“Think I maybe can’t drive good?”

“How do I know?”

“You’re a hard girl to handle. How come?” he said. “Don’t you know I’m your friend? Didn’t you see me put my sign in the air when you walked by?”

“What sign?”

“My sign.” And he drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her. They were maybe ten feet apart. After his hand fell back to his side the X was still in the air, almost visible. Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it, listening to the music from her radio and the boy’s blend together. She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed, with one hand idly on the door handle as if he were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again. She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn’t want to put into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy, and she recognized the way he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him. But all these things did not come together.

She said suddenly, “Hey, how old are you?”

His smile faded. She could see then that he wasn’t a kid, he was much older — thirty, maybe more. At this knowledge her heart began to pound faster.

“That’s a crazy thing to ask. Can’tcha see I’m your own age?”

“Like hell you are.”

“Or maybe a coupla years older. I’m eighteen.”

“Eighteen?” she said doubtfully.

He grinned to reassure her and lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were big and white. He grinned so broadly his eyes became slits and she saw how thick the lashes were, thick and black as if painted with a black tarlike material. Then, abruptly, he seemed to become embarrassed and looked over his shoulder at Ellie. “Him, he’s crazy,” he said. “Ain’t he a riot? He’s a nut, a real character.” Ellie was still listening to the music. His sunglasses told nothing about what he was thinking. He wore a bright orange shirt unbuttoned halfway to show his chest, which was a pale, bluish chest and not muscular like Arnold Friend’s. His shirt collar was turned up all around and the very tips of the collar pointed out past his chin as if they were protecting him. He was pressing the transistor radio up against his ear and sat there in a kind of daze, right in the sun.

“He’s kinda strange,” Connie said.

“Hey, she says you’re kinda strange! Kinda strange!” Arnold Friend cried. He pounded on the car to get Ellie’s attention. Ellie turned for the first time and Connie saw with shock that he wasn’t a kid either — he had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as if the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin, the face of a forty-year-old baby. Connie felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again. Ellie’s lips kept shaping words, mumbling along with the words blasting in his ear.

“Maybe you two better go away,” Connie said faintly.

“What? How come?” Arnold Friend cried. “We come out here to take you for a ride. It’s Sunday.” He had the voice of the man on the radio now. It was the same voice, Connie thought. “Don’tcha know it’s Sunday all day? And honey, no matter who you were with last night, today you’re with Arnold Friend and don’t you forget it! Maybe you better step out here,” he said, and this last was in a different voice. It was a little flatter, as if the heat was finally getting to him.

“No. I got things to do.”

“Hey.”

“You two better leave.”

“We ain’t leaving until you come with us.”

“Like hell I am—”

“Connie, don’t fool around with me. I mean — I mean, don’t fool around,” he said, shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig, and brought the stems down behind his ears. Connie stared at him, another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a moment he wasn’t even in focus but was just a blur standing there against his gold car, and she had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even about the music that was so familiar to her was only half real.

“If my father comes and sees you—”

“He ain’t coming. He’s at a barbecue.”

“How do you know that?”

“Aunt Tillie’s. Right now they’re — uh — they’re drinking. Sitting around,” he said vaguely, squinting as if he were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie’s backyard. Then the vision seemed to get clear and he nodded energetically. “Yeah. Sitting around. There’s your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the poor sad bitch — nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother’s helping some fat woman with the corn, they’re cleaning the corn — husking the corn—”

“What fat woman?” Connie cried.

“How do I know what fat woman, I don’t know every goddamn fat woman in the world!” Arnold Friend laughed.

“Oh, that’s Mrs. Hornsby... Who invited her?” Connie said. She felt a little lightheaded. Her breath was coming quickly.

“She’s too fat. I don’t like them fat. I like them the way you are, honey,” he said, smiling sleepily at her. They stared at each other for a while through the screen door. He said softly, “Now, what you’re going to do is this: you’re going to come out that door. You’re going to sit up front with me and Ellie’s going to sit in the back, the hell with Ellie, right? This isn’t Ellie’s date. You’re my date. I’m your lover, honey.”

“What? You’re crazy—”

“Yes, I’m your lover. You don’t know what that is but you will,” he said. “I know that too. I know all about you. But look: it’s real nice and you couldn’t ask for nobody better than me, or more polite. I always keep my word. I’ll tell you how it is, I’m always nice at first, the first time. I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t. And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me—”

“Shut up! You’re crazy!” Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her hands up against her ears as if she’d heard something terrible, something not meant for her. “People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy,” she muttered. Her heart was almost too big now for her chest and its pumping made sweat break out all over her. She looked out to see Arnold Friend pause and then take a step toward the porch, lurching. He almost fell. But, like a clever drunken man, he managed to catch his balance. He wobbled in his high boots and grabbed hold of one of the porch posts.

“Honey?” he said. “You still listening?”

“Get the hell out of here!”

“Be nice, honey. Listen.”

“I’m going to call the police—”

He wobbled again and out of the side of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an aside not meant for her to hear. But even this “Christ!” sounded forced. Then he began to smile again. She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat but then running out as if he had plastered make-up on his face but had forgotten about his throat.

“Honey—? Listen, here’s how it is. I always tell the truth and I promise you this: I ain’t coming in that house after you.”

“You better not! I’m going to call the police if you — if you don’t—”

“Honey,” he said, talking right through her voice, “honey, I’m not coming in there but you are coming out here. You know why?”

She was panting. The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before, some room she had run inside but that wasn’t good enough, wasn’t going to help her. The kitchen window had never had a curtain, after three years, and there were dishes in the sink for her to do — probably — and if you ran your hand across the table you’d probably feel something sticky there.

“You listening, honey? Hey?”

“—going to call the police—”

“Soon as you touch the phone I don’t need to keep my promise and can come inside. You won’t want that.”

She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. “But why lock it,” Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. “It’s just a screen door. It’s just nothing.” One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. “I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you’d come runnin’ out into my arms, right into my arms an’ safe at home — like you knew I was your lover and’d stopped fooling around. I don’t mind a nice shy girl but I don’t like no fooling around.” Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized them — the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boyfriend’s arms and coming home again—

Connie stood barefoot on the linoleum floor, staring at him. “What do you want?” she whispered.

“I want you,” he said.

“What?”

“Seen you that night and thought, that’s the one, yes sir. I never needed to look anymore.”

“But my father’s coming back. He’s coming to get me. I had to wash my hair first—” She spoke in a dry, rapid voice, hardly raising it for him to hear.

“No, your daddy is not coming and yes, you had to wash your hair and you washed it for me. It’s nice and shining and all for me. I thank you sweetheart,” he said with a mock bow, but again he almost lost his balance. He had to bend and adjust his boots. Evidently his feet did not go all the way down; the boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller. Connie stared out at him and behind him at Ellie in the car, who seemed to be looking off toward Connie’s right, into nothing. This Ellie said, pulling the words out of the air one after another as if he were just discovering them, “You want me to pull out the phone?”

“Shut your mouth and keep it shut,” Arnold Friend said, his face red from bending over or maybe from embarrassment because Connie had seen his boots. “This ain’t none of your business.”

“What — what are you doing? What do you want?” Connie said. “If I call the police they’ll get you, they’ll arrest you—”

“Promise was not to come in unless you touch that phone, and I’ll keep that promise,” he said. He resumed his erect position and tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded like a hero in a movie, declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it was as if he were speaking to someone behind Connie. “I ain’t made plans for coming in that house where I don’t belong but just for you to come out to me, the way you should. Don’t you know who I am?”

“You’re crazy,” she whispered. She backed away from the door but did not want to go into another part of the house, as if this would give him permission to come through the door. “What do you... you’re crazy, you...”

“Huh? What’re you saying, honey?”

Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room.

“This is how it is, honey: you come out and we’ll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don’t come out we’re gonna wait till your people come home and then they’re all going to get it.”

“You want that telephone pulled out?” Ellie said. He held the radio away from his ear and grimaced, as if without the radio the air was too much for him.

“I toldja shut up, Ellie,” Arnold Friend said, “you’re deaf, get a hearing aid, right? Fix yourself up. This little girl’s no trouble and’s gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to yourself, this ain’t your date — right? Don’t hem in on me, don’t hog, don’t crush, don’t bird dog, don’t trail me,” he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through all the expressions he’d learned but was no longer sure which of them was in style, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. “Don’t crawl under my fence, don’t squeeze in my chipmunk hole, don’t sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep your own greasy fingers on yourself!” He shaded his eyes and peered in at Connie, who was backed against the kitchen table. “Don’t mind him, honey, he’s just a creep. He’s a dope. Right? I’m the boy for you and like I said, you come out here nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring them in this?”

“Leave me alone,” Connie whispered.

“Hey, you know that old woman down the road, the one with the chickens and stuff — you know her?”

“She’s dead!”

“Dead? What? You know her?” Arnold Friend said.

“She’s dead—”

“Don’t you like her?”

“She’s dead — she’s — she isn’t here anymore—”

“But don’t you like her, I mean, you got something against her? Some grudge or something?” Then his voice dipped as if he were conscious of a rudeness. He touched the sunglasses perched up on top of his head as if to make sure they were still there. “Now, you be a good girl.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just two things, or maybe three,” Arnold Friend said. “But I promise it won’t last long and you’ll like me the way you get to like people you’re close to. You will. It’s all over for you here, so come on out. You don’t want your people in any trouble, do you?”

She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into the back room and picked up the telephone. Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring, and she was so sick with fear that she could do nothing but listen to it — the telephone was clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it. She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house.

After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back against the wall.

Arnold Friend was saying from the door, “That’s a good girl. Put the phone back.”

She kicked the phone away from her.

“No, honey. Pick it up. Put it back right.”

She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped.

“That’s a good girl. Now, you come outside.”

She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. All that screaming had blasted it out of her. She sat, one leg cramped under her, and deep inside her brain was something like a pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her relax. She thought, I’m not going to see my mother again. She thought, I’m not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet.

Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, “The place where you came from ain’t there anymore, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now — inside your daddy’s house — is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?”

She thought, I have got to think. I have got to know what to do.

“We’ll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it’s sunny,” Arnold Friend said. “I’ll have my arms tight around you so you won’t need to try to get away and I’ll show you what love is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It looks solid all right,” he said. He ran a fingernail down the screen and the noise did not make Connie shiver, as it would have the day before. “Now, put your hand on your heart, honey. Feel that? That feels solid too but we know better. Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in? — and get away before her people come back?”

She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either.

“You don’t want them to get hurt,” Arnold Friend went on. “Now, get up, honey. Get up all by yourself.”

She stood.

“Now, turn this way. That’s right. Come over here to me — Ellie, put that away, didn’t I tell you? You dope. You miserable creepy dope,” Arnold Friend said. His words were not angry but only part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly. “Now, come out through the kitchen to me, honey, and let’s see a smile, try it, you’re a brave, sweet little girl and now they’re eating corn and hot dogs cooked to bursting over an outdoor fire, and they don’t know one thing about you and never did and honey, you’re better than them because not a one of them would have done this for you.”

Connie felt the linoleum under her feet; it was cool. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes. Arnold Friend let go of the post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn’t want to make her self-conscious.

She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.

“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him — so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.

C-Jag CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Black Mask, October 1940, as by William Irish; first published in book form in The Pocket Mystery Reader edited by Lee Wright (New York, Pocket Books, 1942). Note: The story was retitled “Cocaine” for its first book publication.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) had a prolific short story — writing career, with most of the stories published under his William Irish pseudonym. Lippincott, his publisher for most of the books published as by William Irish, was not afraid to release numerous volumes of his collected stories. Since publishers generally maintained the myth that short story collections don’t sell, the stories that had appeared under his own name were not released by the publishers of the majority of his novels but they found their way into “William Irish” collections.

It is uncommon to have short stories serve as the inspiration for motion pictures, but Woolrich was an exception with more than a dozen stories being adapted. Although some authors whose work had fallen into public domain had many of their short tales serve as the basis for films, including Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes character and Edgar Allan Poe with his famous stories of horror and the supernatural, rarely did they provide much more than a title or a kernel of the plot.

While it is inevitable that works in different media will have variations, it is evident that the films based on Woolrich’s stories were largely dedicated to following the author’s plotlines as authentically as possible — a tribute to Woolrich’s exceptional talent as a plotter and executioner of suspense fiction.

A common theme for Woolrich’s work is that its characters are enduring a living nightmare and “C-Jag” is among those tales. Tommy Cochrane, jobless and desperate, attempts to alleviate his hopelessness by taking cocaine. After passing out, he awakens from a nightmare convinced that he killed someone during his blackout. He’s living with his sister and Denny, her cop husband, and Tommy confesses to him. They begin to investigate, retracing Tommy’s steps from the previous night, when they discover a body in a closet, apparently sealing his fate. The true killers turn out to be some thuggish gangsters, who are tacked on at the end of the story and are dealt with in a shoot-out.

“C-Jag” was the first Woolrich story ever to appear in an anthology, undergoing a title change to the more familiar “Cocaine” in order to prevent confusion on the part of readers who may not have known the underworld argot. The editor of the anthology was Lee Wright, who was Woolrich’s editor at Simon & Schuster. The story was also reprinted with the titles “Dream of Death” and “Just Enough to Cover a Thumbnail.”

Title: Fall Guy, 1947

Studio: Monogram Pictures

Director: Reginald Le Borg

Screenwriters: Jerry Warner, John O’Dea

Producer: Walter Mirisch

• Clifford Penn (Leo Penn) (Tom Cochrane)

• Robert Armstrong (“Mac” McLaine)

• Teala Loring (Lois Walter)

• Elisha Cook Jr. (Joe)

The bones of the opening of the Woolrich story remain in place, with Tom waking from a cocaine-induced blackout, covered in blood, with no memory of the previous night. After that familiar (to Woolrich readers) premise, the story develops quite differently. In the film version, Tom is arrested but escapes and tries to learn the truth. He gets help from his girlfriend, who doesn’t think he could have hurt anyone, and his sister’s husband, a cop. They find Joe, the man who took Tom to a party the night before, and, when they go to the apartment where the party took place, they find a corpse in a closet in the apartment a flight up. Joe is murdered but Tom is cleared when they learn that he had been set up. No gangsters suddenly appear in the film version, their murderous presence replaced by an elaborate frame-up designed to eliminate a blackmailer.

Since the film was made by the “Poverty Row” studio Monogram Pictures, it is not surprising to find largely unknown actors with varying talent levels being directed by the Vienna-born Reginald Le Borg, who specialized in low-budget B movies for virtually his entire career.

An exception to the parade of second-rate actors in the film is Robert Armstrong, who became a star in King Kong (1933) and remained a working actor into the 1960s. He died of cancer in 1973 — curiously, within sixteen hours of the death of Merian Cooper, the coproducer and codirector of King Kong.

Another exception is Elisha Cook Jr., who may not have appeared in every B noir picture of the 1940s and 1950s (and some major films, too) but it would probably be easier to mention those in which he did not appear than to list his credits. He plays exactly the same sleazy, unctuous character every time and does it exceedingly well. There seems to have been a tacit agreement between him and every director and screenwriter in Hollywood that his character would never make it out of a movie alive.

After a short film and a trivial, uncredited role in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), this essentially was the screen debut of Leo Penn, credited here as Clifford Penn, who went on to a successful career as a television actor and, more significantly, as a director of such series as I Spy; Kojak; Columbo; Magnum, P.I.; and Star Trek. His refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in its investigation into the suspected infiltration of Communists in the film industry resulted in his being blacklisted and effectively ending his acting career in motion pictures. He was the father of actors Chris and Sean Penn.

The working title of the movie during production was One Way Street.

C-JAG Cornell Woolrich

I knew what it was like to wake up after being drunk the night before — everyone does, I guess — but that wasn’t in it compared to what this was like. This had all the same symptoms of the other, and then some new ones of its own. My mouth felt just as dry and my head felt just as heavy and my stomach felt just as bad. And then in addition, my eyes wouldn’t focus right; everything I looked at seemed to have rings around it; and my hands were cold and clammy, and my teeth were on edge, as though I’d been chewing lemons. But worse than anything else was the mental conditioning it had left behind it; I was afraid. I was as afraid as a seven-year-old kid in an old dark house. And when you’re afraid at one o’clock of a blazing bright afternoon, mister, you’re afraid.

And at that, the after-effects were nothing compared to what the symptoms had been like the night before, while I was still under it. I grabbed my eyes tight to shut out the recollection, and if I’d had an extra pair of hands I’d have stopped up my ears with them at the same time. But the images were inside, in my memory, where I couldn’t get at them. Blurred, but there.

He was a fellow I’d known slightly — so slightly that I didn’t even know his last name; just Joe. Joe said, “Aw, you need cheering up. Come on with me, I’m going somewhere that’ll cheer you up.” And then, probably an hour later, the parting hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy, be seeing you around, I’m blowing now.”

I remembered saying, “Well, just a sec, I’ll go with you; I came here with you after all.”

I remember the knowing wink he’d given me. “Naw, you better hang around awhile; I’m taking that girl in green home. You know how it is, two’s company—” Exit Joe, whoever he was.

So I stayed on there, like a fool, in a strange place with strangers.

The rest of it came crowding back on me, all mixed up like what they call montage in the movies. The man with the white scar on his jaw. I kept seeing that white scar, hearing disconnected things he’d said. “Just enough to cover your thumbnail. Always remember that and you can never go wrong; just enough to cover your thumbnail. Then you bring it up the long way, like you were going to wipe your nose.”... “Nice-looking place, isn’t it? You want it, you can have it. Listen, I’d give away anything tonight. Make yourself at home, I’ll be right back.”... “What’d you do, have some trouble in here while I was gone? Look at that, look at the blood all over your shirt!”... “No, you can’t get out that way! That’s a dead window, you fool! Can’t you see by looking at it? It’s nailed-down fast, it’s painted over. They built a house right up next to this, and the brick work sealed it up.”... “Aw, that’s nothing; you want that to go away? I’ll show you how to make that go away. Now hold steady. Just enough to cover your thumbnail. Watch and see how that makes it go away.”... “Don’t get excited, I’m not going anywhere. Just wait here for me, I’ll be right back—”...

And then it got worse and worse. At the end it was almost a frenzy, a delirium. Of fear and flight and pursuit. The very walls had seemed to whisper. “Look at him, sitting there waiting! They’ll get him, they’ll get him!” They seemed to sing, too. Music kept oozing out of them. Ghost-music. I could hear it so plain, I could even recognize some of the tunes, I could even remember them now! Alice Blue Gown, Out on a Limb, Oh, Johnny, Woodpecker Song. Those were some of the things my crazed, inflamed brain had distinctly heard those moaning, sobbing walls emit. And then the climactic madness, the straining, tugging trip to the closet along the floor; the frantic closing of the door; the locking of it, on what it held; the secreting of the key in my pocket; the piling-up and barricading of it with a table, a chair, anything and everything I could lay my hands on. Then flight, through the labyrinth of the city, hiding in doorways, sidling around corners, hugging the shadows. Flight that went on forever. From — where? To — where? Then kindly oblivion at last.

All of it a junk-dream, of course. But needles of cold sweat came out on my forehead even now, it was still so vivid, so haunting.

I didn’t know what to do for a hangover of this kind. But I figured water, lots of cold water inside and out, was good for almost anything under the sun, so it ought to be good for this too. At least it couldn’t hurt it any.

I staggered rubber-kneed into the bathroom and filled the washbowl up, and sloshed it into my eyes, and ducked my whole face in it, and strewed it across the back of my neck. After I got through doing that I felt a little better. Not a lot, though.

I went back to my room and combed my soaked hair and started to get dressed. If I’d had a job I would have been out of it by now, I’d overslept so long. But I didn’t have one anyway, so it didn’t make any difference.

Just after I’d got my shoes and trousers on, Mildred knocked on the door. She’d heard me moving around, I guess. I told her to come in. I was ashamed to look at her, but only I knew the real reason why, she didn’t. She looked in and said, “Hello, Tommy. I guess you had a drink or two too many last night.”

I thought, “I only wish it was that!” I was sorrier than ever the thing had happened.

“I understand how it is, it helps to take your mind off your troubles once in awhile.” Then she rested a hand on my arm for a minute, to show she didn’t mean it for criticism. “But don’t do too much of it, Tommy. It doesn’t make it any easier to get a job. I’ll fix you some coffee, that’ll brace you up.”

She was my older sister. She was swell. I was not only living with her, but she’d even been keeping me in pocket money since I’d been out of a job. She went out again, and I went ahead with my dressing.

First I was going to put on a clean shirt, but I thought I better not be too extravagant while I was out of work, so I decided I’d stick to the old one a day more. The way it was folded or rumpled must have hidden the stain. I only saw it after I had the shirt on, and tucked into my belt, and was buttoning it down in front of the glass. It was brown, a sort of splashy stain in front.

I stared at it in a sort of paralyzed horror. I don’t think I moved for about two minutes flat. Finally I touched it, and where it was brown it was stiff. Good and stiff. “What’d you do, have some trouble in here? Look at the blood all over your shirt!” It rang in my ears again. So that part of it was real at least, it hadn’t been just a snow-mirage.

All right, it was real. But it had to come from somewhere. It didn’t just appear from nowhere, like a miraculous stigmata. I pulled it up out of my belt, and hoisted my undershirt, and scanned my body, all around the lower ribs. There wasn’t a scratch on me anywhere. I looked higher up, on my chest. I even rolled up my sleeves and looked at both arms. There wasn’t a nick anywhere on my skin. And whatever had bled that much must have been a pretty good-sized gash.

So it had come from someone else.

I finished dressing. I kept talking it into myself that it meant nothing. “Somebody you were with cut himself on something. You don’t remember it, that’s all. How’d it get on me, then? Well, maybe you were lurching around. You leaned up against someone, or someone did against you. You better quit thinking about it. You want to hang onto your self-control, don’t you? Then quit thinking about it.”

Which was a lot easier said than done, but I finished up my dressing, put on my coat. The last stage of all was what everyone’s last stage usually is. To put my change, matches, keys, whatever loose accessories there were, back into my pockets where they belonged. Even in last night’s befogged condition, habit had been strong enough to assert itself. The stuff was dumped out on top of the bureau, the way I always found it every morning. I started collecting it item by item, dropping each category into the particular pocket where it belonged. Three nickels and a dime. (I’d started out with thirty-five cents last night, I distinctly remembered that, so I must have spent a dime sometime during the course of the night; I couldn’t remember doing it.) A withered package that contained one last cigarette — broken into two sections from pocket-pressure. I put one into my mouth, threw the other away. And last of all, my keys; one that Mildred and Denny had given me to the apartment here, and the other a little jigger that opened my valise.

This time I didn’t stand staring in frozen horror. The half-cigarette fell from my relaxed lips to the floor, and I lurched forward, steadied myself by gripping the front edge of the bureau. I stayed that way, sort of hunched-over, goggling down at it. There was one key too many there. There were three keys staring me in the face, and up to last night I had only had two. There was a strange key there mixed-up with my own two now, a key that didn’t belong to me, a key I’d never seen before. Or at least, only in a — snow-flurry.

It wasn’t one of these modern, brass, safety lock keys, it was an old-fashioned iron thing, dun-colored, with an elongated stem and two teeth at the end of it shaped like a buzzsaw. The kind of a key used in an old-fashioned house, that has old-fashioned rooms with old-fashioned doors.

It was an interior key. I mean, you could see it wasn’t for an outside door, a street door, but for some door on the inside of a house — a room door or a closet door.

That gave me a shot in the arm, that last word. I straightened up from my leap-frog position and did things around the room fast. First I gave it the benefit of the doubt — although I knew already as sure as I was born I’d never seen it before in my life, it didn’t belong around here. I went over to my own closet with it, to try it on that. It wouldn’t go in, because the closet’s own key was sticking out, blocking the keyhole. Then I went to my room-door with it, but there wasn’t anywhere on that to try it. It had no lock at all, it closed on a little horizontal bolt run into a hole. There wasn’t anyplace else for me to match it up with. That brass safety-lock key there was the one to the outside door.

It came from somewhere outside. Somewhere in a dope-dream.

Then the panic came on again from last night, only now it was worse, because this was broad daylight and now I was in my right senses. I swung out my valise and kicked the lid up. I didn’t have much to pack, so it didn’t take long. But everything there was to pack, I packed.

I’d gotten halfway down the short little hall with my bag in my hand when Mildred looked out at the back and saw me. She gave a little moaning protest, ran after me. “No, Tommy — what’re you doing?”

“I’ve got to go. Don’t stop me, I’ve got to get out of here.”

“No, Tommy — what is it?” She took the valise and set it down. I let her. I didn’t want to go myself, that was why I stood there undecided. But yet, I knew I couldn’t stay — now.

“I’ve got to, I tell you!”

“But why? Where? You have no money.” She took me by the arm and coaxed me into the kitchen. “At least drink a cup of coffee before you go, don’t leave like this; I just made it fresh.”

It was just a stall, she only wanted to gain time. I knew that, but I slumped into a chair anyway, and cradled my head, and leaned way over my own lap, staring down at the floor.

I heard her slip out to the phone when she thought I wasn’t noticing, but I didn’t try to interfere. I heard her saying in a guarded voice, “Denny, will you come home right away? See if you can get relieved from duty and come home right away — it’s very important.”

He was a detective. In one way, I wanted to talk to him very much. In another way, I didn’t.

I guess I must have wanted to more than I didn’t want to, because I was still sitting there when he showed up. He got there very quickly, not more than ten or fifteen minutes after she’d phoned him.

He came striding in looking worried, and shied his hat offside at the seat of a chair. He was a slow moving, even tempered guy as a rule, misleadingly genial on the surface, hard as nails inside. Mildred and I, of course, only saw him when he was off duty, we hadn’t had much chance to see the latter quality in him. I only suspected it was there, without being sure. I had him sized up for the kind of man would give you a break if you deserved one, crack down on you like granite if you didn’t.

He addressed himself to her first. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s Tommy,” she said. “He packed his things and wants to leave. You better talk to him, Denny. I’ll leave the two of you alone if you want me to.”

“No,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go in your room, Tom.” He brought the bag in with him, and he closed the door after the two of us.

He sat down on the edge of my bed and looked at me, waiting. I stayed up. Nothing came, so finally he said patiently, “What’s the matter, kid?”

I gave it to him right away. What was the good of paying it out slow? I said, “Last night I think I killed a man.”

He churned that around in his mind for a minute, without taking his eyes off me. Then he said, “You think? Listen, that’s a thing you usually can be pretty certain of. You either did or didn’t. Now which is it?”

“I was kind of fuzzy at the time.”

“Well who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You don’t know where or who or if—” He gave me a half-rebuking, half-whimsical look. “I don’t get it, Tom. You don’t look yourself today. You look a little funny. And you sure sound a whole lot that way.”

“Yes, that’s it,” I said bitterly. “I better start from the first and try to tell you as much as I can.”

“You better,” he agreed drily.

“There won’t be very much. At 11:30 last night I was standing on a corner waiting to cross with the light, when a guy I knew by sight happened along. I don’t know who he is or where I knew him from; just that I’d seen his face someplace before, fellow named Joe. I told him I was down in the dumps and he said I needed cheering up. He asked me to come with him and like a sap I went.

“I can remember that much clearly. He took me to some apartment where there was a big party going on. I don’t even know just where that was — down on one of the side streets off Kent Boulevard somewhere. I didn’t know anyone there, and I can’t remember that he bothered introducing me. They seemed a sort of free-and-easy bunch, no questions asked; it was almost like open house, new people kept showing up all the time and old ones leaving. He left, and when I tried to go with him, he gave me some excuse and shoved off alone, leaving me there.

“From then on it gets all woozy. It was late and there were fewer people left. The lights got dimmer and the place got quieter, people talking in whispers. There was some guy with a white scar along his jaw. I remember he seemed to be watching me for a long while. Finally he came over and offered me something—”

This was the part that was hardest to tell him, but I had to if he was to make any sense out of it.

“Offered you what?” he said when I stopped.

“I thought it was a headache powder first. He told me to stick my thumb out, and he sifted it onto the nail, from a little paper.”

He just asked the question with his eyes this time. I looked down at the floor. “Coke,” I murmured half-audibly.

“You damn fool,” he said bitterly. “You ought to have your head examined!”

“I was feeling low; I thought if it would make me forget my troubles for even half an hour it would be worth it. You don’t know what it’s like to be without a job for weeks and months, to mooch off your relatives—”

“Well, get drunk then, if you have to,” he said scathingly. “Get so pie-eyed you fall down flat on your face; I’ll pay your liquor bill myself! But if you ever go for that stuff again, I’ll break your jaw!”

Again was good. There didn’t have to be a next time, all the damage had been done the first time. I finished up the rest of it. It came easier once I’d gotten past that point. “—and I piled stuff up in front of it, and I beat it out of there, and I don’t remember getting home.”

He hinged his palm up and down on his knee once or twice before he said anything. “Well, whaddya expect if you go monkeying around like that,” he growled finally, “to dream of honeysuckle and roses? It’s a wonder you didn’t imagine you stuffed six dead guys into a closet instead of just one.”

“But do you think that’s what got me rattled?” I expostulated. I held my head tight between both hands. “I found the key on the bureau when I got dressed a little while ago! And his blood on my shirt!” I hauled it out and waved it at him. I pitched the key down and it went clunk! and bounced once and then lay still.

And his face showed me I’d made my point. He picked the key up first and turned it over and over. You could tell he wasn’t so much looking at it as thinking the whole thing over. Then he traced a fingernail back and forth across the stain once or twice. Also absent-mindedly. “A knife,” he murmured. “A bullet-wound wouldn’t have bled that much — not on you. Can you remember a knife? Can you remember holding one? Have you looked — around here?”

I shuddered. “Don’t tell me I brought that back here with me too!”

He flipped up both thumbs out of his entwined hands. “After all, you brought the key, didn’t you?”

He got up from the bed, I suppose to look for it around the room. And then he didn’t have to, it was there. His getting up unearthed it. The bedsprings he’d been pressing down twanged out, settled into place again. Something fell through to the floor with a small, soft thud as they did so. Something that had evidently been sheathed between them and the mattress all night. He picked up a scabbard of tightly folded newspaper, with a brown spot or two on it. He opened it and there it was. With one of those trick blades that spring out of the hilt. Not even cleaned off.

All he said was, “This don’t look so good, does it, Tom?”

I stared at it. “I don’t even remember slipping it under there. It isn’t mine, I never owned it, carried it—” I took a couple of crazy half-turns around the room without getting anywhere. “You haven’t told me yet what I’m going to do.”

“I’ll tell you what you’re not going to do; you’re not going to lam out. You’re going to stay right here until we find out just what this thing is.” He rewrapped the knife, this time in a large handkerchief of his own. “Here’s how it goes. There’s a possibility, and a damn good one, that there’s some guy stuffed in a closet, in some room of some house, somewhere in this city at this very minute — and that you killed him last night under the influence of cocaine. Now he’s going to be found sooner or later. From one hour to the next he’s going to be found. And we’ve got to find him first, do you get that? We’ve got to know ahead of time, before it breaks, whether you did kill him or not.” He stepped up and grabbed me hard by the shoulder. “Now if you did, you’re going to take the knock for it, I’m telling you that here and now. That’s the way I play. But if you didn’t—” he opened his hand and let my shoulder go; “we’ve got to get to him first, otherwise I’ll never be able to clear you.”

“I think I did, Denny,” I breathed low. “I think I did — but I’m not sure.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. And I’m pulling for you; for Mildred’s sake, and yours — and even my own. I don’t exactly hate you, you know.”

“Thanks, Denny.” I gripped hands with him for a minute. “If it turns out it was me, I’m game, I’m willing to—”

But he had no more time for loving-cups. He was on a case now. He took out an envelope and a pencil stub so worn down that the lead-point practically started right out of the eraser. He sat down, turned over one foot, and began to use the side of his shoe for a writing-board. He used the back of the envelope to jot on.

“What are you doing?” I asked, half-terrified in spite of myself by these preliminaries to police activity, even though they were still confined to my own bedroom.

“I always plot out my line of investigation ahead of time.” He showed me what he’d written.

“See the idea? One leads into the other consecutively. Interlocking steps. It’ll save a lot of time and energy. ‘Joe’ gives us the party-flat, the party-flat gives us the man with the scar, the man with the scar gives us the room with the singing walls. That gives us a closet with a dead man in it you either did or did not kill. A lot of dicks I know would try to jump straight from the starting point to the closet with the body in it. And land exactly in the middle of nowhere. My way may seem more roundabout, but it’s really the surer and quicker way.”

He put the envelope away. “Now we disregard everything else and concentrate on ‘Joe’ first. Until we’ve isolated ‘Joe,’ none of the other factors exist for us. Now sit down a minute and just think about ‘Joe,’ to the exclusion of everything else. His whole connection with it occurred before you were stupefied by that damnable stuff, so it shouldn’t be as hard as what comes later.”

It shouldn’t, but it was.

“You absolutely can’t place him, don’t know where you had seen him before?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Let me see if I can’t build him up for myself, then. What’d he talk about on the way over to this place? You didn’t just walk side by side in stony silence.”

“No.”

“Well gimme some of that. Maybe I can get a line on him from that.”

I dredged my mind futilely. Disconnected snatches were all that would come back, it hadn’t been an important conversation.

“He said, ‘Aw, don’t think you’re the only one has troubles. Look at me, I’m working but I might just as well not be. A lot I get out of it! Caged up all day, for a lousy fifteen a week.’ ”

“And didn’t you ask him what his job was?”

“No. He seemed to take it for granted I knew all about him, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by letting him see I hardly remembered him from Adam. Besides, I didn’t particularly care anyway, I had my own worries on my mind.”

“Well is that all he said the whole way over?”

“That’s all that amounted to anything. The rest were just irrelevant remarks that people make to one another strolling along the street, like ‘Did you see that blonde just passed?’ and ‘Boy, there’s a car I’d like to own!’ ”

“Let me decide whether they were irrelevant or not,” he said impatiently. “I never throw anything away.”

“I’ve given you about all there were. Then when we got to this place, I heard him say, ‘Well here we are,’ and he turned in. So I went in after him without particularly noticing where it was. The flat turned out to be on the second floor; it was an elevator building, but the car was in use or something. I remember him saying, ‘Come on, let’s take the stairs for a change,’ and he headed for them without waiting, like he was in a hurry to get up there, so I followed him.”

Denny drove fingernails into his hair. “Not much there, is there? Fifteen a week. Caged up all day. We’ll have to try to figure him out from those two chance remarks. Caged up all day. Bank-teller? They get more than that.”

“I’ve never had enough money on me at one time to go near a bank.”

“Cashier maybe, in some cafeteria or lunch-wagon where you’ve been going?” He answered that himself before I had a chance to. “No, you’ve been taking your meals home with us since you’re out of work. Not a ticket seller in a movie house, they use girls for that. And you never go to stage shows, where they use men in the box office.”

“No,” I agreed.

“Caged up all day.” He kept saying it over to himself, trying to make it click. “Change booth on the transportation system maybe, on the station you used to use going to work every day?”

“No, I know both the guys on shift there, Callahan and O’Donnell.”

“Pawnbroker’s clerk, maybe. You’ve been patronizing them pretty frequently of late, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but that’s Benny, I know him real well — by now.”

“I can see where this Joe’s going to be a tough nut to crack.” He mangled the pin-feathers at the back of his head, where the part ended. “It might have been just an idle expression, it don’t have to mean he’s actually in a cage, literally behind some sort of bars or wicket. But it’s the only lead you’ve given me on him so far, and I’m blamed if I’m going to pass it up! Are you sure you can’t dog me up something else, Tommy?”

I couldn’t have if my life depended on it. Well, it did in a way, and even so I couldn’t. I just eyed him helplessly.

He got tough. Tough with himself, I mean. I guess he always did, when something showed signs of getting the better of him. “Well, I’m gonna get it if I sit here in this room until cobwebs form all over me!” he snarled.

He raised his head alertly after a moment. “How’d they act at the door? What’d they say to him at the door?”

“Nothing. He thumped it, and I guess it was opened by whoever happened to be standing closest to it, a visitor there himself, just like we were. He didn’t say a word to us, and we didn’t say a word to him, just made our way in.”

“Pretty free and easy,” he grunted. He gnawed at it some more, like a dog with a bone. “You say he was kind of in a hurry to get up there?”

“No, not on the street he didn’t seem to be. We just ambled along, the two of us. He took plenty of time. He stopped and looked at some shirts in a window. Then another time he went in a minute and bought a pack of cigarettes.”

“But you said—”

“That was after we got in the entrance. Like I said, the elevator was in use, or at least on its way down to us. I remember the little red light over the shaft was lit up, and the indicator showed it was already down past the second floor. It would only have taken a minute more for it to reach us. But he didn’t seem to want to bother waiting, he said, ‘Come on, we’ll take the stairs for a change—’ ”

“That don’t make sense. On the street he’s not in a hurry, once in the building he’s in too much of a sweat to wait. Either a person’s in a hurry to get someplace the whole time, or not at all.”

Suddenly he uncoiled so suddenly I got kind of a fright myself and jumped back from him. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I got something out of that! See, I told you it never pays to throw away anything.” He stabbed his finger at me accusingly. “Your unknown friend ‘Joe’ is an elevator operator! I’m sure of it. Fifteen a week would be right for that. And he wasn’t in a hurry when he took the stairs inside that building! He was just sick of riding in elevators, glad for an excuse to walk up for a change.”

He looked at me hopefully, waiting for my reaction. “Well, does it do anything to you, does it mean anything to you, does it click? Now do you place him?” He could tell by my face. “Still don’t, eh?” He took a deep breath, settled down for some more digging. “Well, you’ve evidently ridden up and down in his car with him more than a few times, and he took that to be sufficient basis for an acquaintanceship. Some fellows are that way, without meaning any harm. Then again, some could be that way — meaning plenty of harm. Now: where have you gone more than once or twice where you’ve had occasion to use an elevator?”

I palmed my forehead hopelessly. “Gosh, I’ve been in so many office buildings all over town looking for a job, I don’t think I’ve missed being in one!”

Right away he made it seem less hopeless, at least trimmed it down. “But it would have to be a place where you were called back at least a second time, probably talked to him about it riding up to the interview. Were there any such?”

“Plenty,” I told him grimly.

“Well, here’s your part of the assignment — and take it fast, we haven’t got a hell of a lot of time, you know. You revisit every such place you can recall being at within the past few months, where you nearly got a job, had to go back two or three times. Meanwhile, I’m going to get to work on this knife, slip it in at Fingerprints as a personal, off the record favor, and see just what comes off it, how heavily it counts against you—” He took out a fountain pen, spattered a couple of drops of ink onto a piece of paper, and made an improvised ink-pad by having me stroke it with my fingertips. “Now press down hard on this clean piece, keep them steady. Homemade but effective. I’ll make the comparison myself while I’m down there, without letting anyone in on it — for the present. I’ll probably be back here before you are — I’m going to get sick-leave until we’ve broken this thing down. You call me back here at the house the minute you have any luck with this Joe. And don’t take too long, Tom; it’s almost mid-afternoon already. Any minute somebody’s liable to step up to a certain closet in a certain house, and try to open it, and do something about it when they find it’s locked—”

I flitted out, on that parting warning, with a face the color of a sheet that’s had too much blueing used on it. He stopped me a minute just as I got the door open, added: “Mildred’s out of this, get that straight.”

“I should hope so,” I said almost resentfully. What did he think I was?

I could remember most of the places I’d been around to fairly recently looking for openings. I mean the ones where I’d been told to come back, and then when I had, somebody else had walked off with the job anyway. I revisited them one by one. Some of them were old-fashioned buildings with just one rickety elevator; they were easy to cover. Others were tall modern structures serviced by triple and quadruple tiers of them, and a starter posted out front to give them the buzzer. In places like that I had to stand there where I could command all the car-doors and wait until they’d all opened to reveal the operators’ faces. And even then I wasn’t satisfied, I’d ask each starter: “Is there anyone named Joe working the cars here?” He might be home sick or he might be on another, later shift.

I always got: “Joe who?”

“Just Joe,” I’d have to say. “Joe Anybody.”

Once I got a Joe Marsala that way, but he turned out to be an under-sized, Latin-looking youth, not what I wanted. No sign of the vague, phantom Joe who had, voluntarily or involuntarily, led me into murder. At five to four, or nearly an hour after I’d left Denny, I finally ran out of places where I could remember having been job hunting. I knew there must have been others, so to make sure of getting them all I went back to the employment agency where I’d been registered for a time to see if a look at their files wouldn’t help my memory out. I figured they must keep a record of where they sent their applicants, even the unsuccessful ones.

I phoned Denny from there, from a little soft-drink parlor on the ground floor, all winded from excitement. “I got him! I got him! I came back here to the employment agency to get a record of more places where I was sent to — and he was here the whole time! He runs the car right in this building!”

“Has he seen you yet?” he asked briskly.

“No, I got a look at him first, and I figured I better tell you before I—”

“Wait there where you are,” he ordered. “Don’t let him see you until I get down there.” I gave him the address and he hung up.

I kept walking back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, to make sure he didn’t give me the slip before Denny got there. He couldn’t see me from where he was, the elevator was set pretty far back in the lobby. I was plenty steamed up. Kind of frightened too. We were a step nearer to murder. A murder it looked like I’d done. A murder I was pledged to take the rap for, if it turned out I had.

Denny came fast. “In here?” he said briefly.

“Y-yeah,” I stammered. “There’s only one car and he’s running it right now.”

“Stay out here,” he said curtly, “I’ll go in and get him.” I guess he wanted to catch Joe off guard, not tip his hand by letting him see me with him right at the beginning. Then with a comprehending look at my twitching face muscles, he threw at me: “Buck up, don’t go all to pieces, too early in the game for that yet.” And went in.

They came out together in about five minutes, after he’d asked the first few preliminary questions.

It was him all right. He was in livery now, and he looked pretty white and shaky. I guess the shock of the badge hadn’t worn off yet. Denny said: “This your acquaintance?”

“Yeah,” I said. I waited to see if he’d deny it. He didn’t deny it. He turned and said to me querulously, “What’d you do, get me in wrong? I didn’t mean nothing by taking you there with me last night. What happened after I left, was there something swiped from the place?”

Which was a pretty good out for himself, I didn’t have to be a detective to recognize that. In other words, he was just an innocent link in the chain of circumstances leading to murder.

If Denny felt that way about it, he didn’t show it. He gave him a shake that started at the shoulder and went rippling down him like a shimmy. “Cut out the baby-stuff, Fraser,” he said. “Now are you going to talk while we’re waiting for the van?” Which was just to throw a scare into him; I hadn’t seen him put in a call for any van since he’d gotten here; they only used that for a group of prisoners anyway, I’d always thought.

Denny took out an envelope with his free hand and showed me the back of it. “Sorrell — 795 — Alcazar, Ap’t 2-B,” he’d pencilled on it. He’d gotten the name and location of the party-flat out of Joe. I didn’t know what more he wanted with him. It seemed he just wanted to find out whether Joe’d been in on anything or not. “How many times had you been up there before last night?”

“Only once before.”

“How’d you happen to go up there in the first place?”

“My job before this, I was deliveryman for a liquor store near there. I was sent over with a caseful one night, and they were having a big blow-out, and they invited me in. They’re that kind of people, they’re sort of goofy. They used to be in vaudeville. Now they follow the races around from track to track. Half the time they’re broke, but every once in awhile they make a big killing on some long shot, and then they go on a spree, hold sort of open house. People take advantage of them, word gets around, don’t ask me how, and before they’re through they’ve got people they don’t even know crashing in on them.”

“But how’d you happen to know there was going to be a party just last night, when you took this fellow up there with you?”

“I didn’t for sure, I just took a chance on it. If there hadn’t been anything doing, I would have gone away again. But it turned out they had a bigger mob than ever in. They didn’t even remember me from the time before, but that didn’t make no difference, they told me to make myself at home anyway. They were both kind of stewed by that time.”

“You make fifteen a week chauffering that cracker-box in there, right? How much did they charge you up there?”

“I don’t get you,” Fraser faltered. “They didn’t charge me anything, it isn’t a place where you pay admission—”

Denny gave him a twist of the arm. “Come on, you knew what they were passing around up there. How were you able to afford it? Did you get yours free for steering newcomers?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister, honest I don’t,” he quavered.

“You didn’t know that was a dope-flat?” Denny slashed at him mercilessly.

Joe’s consternation was too evident to be anything but genuine. I think even Denny felt that. I thought he was going to cave in for a minute. I never saw a guy get so frightened in my life before. “Holy smoke—!” he exhaled. “I never noticed nothing like that — I saw this girl in green and I took a shine to her, and the two of us blew the place after about fifteen minutes—”

Denny only asked him one more question. “Who was the guy with the white scar?”

“What guy with what white scar? I didn’t see no guy with a scar. He musta come in after I left.”

Denny took his hand off Joe’s shoulder for the first time. He tapped his notebook meaningfully. “You may be telling the truth and you may not. You better pray you were. I know where you work and I’ve got your home address, and if you’ve been stringing me along, I’ll know where to find you. Now get back in there and keep your mouth shut!”

He turned and slunk back into the building, looking back mesmerized over his shoulder at Denny the whole way.

Exit Joe.

We got in a cab. Denny said, “I think he’s telling the truth, as far as you can be sure about those things. If he isn’t, I can always pick him up fast enough. If I did now, I’d have to book him, and that would bring the whole thing out down at Headquarters.”

“How’d — how’d the knife come out?” I asked apprehensively.

“Not good for you,” he let me know grimly. “Your mitts are all over it. And there’s not a sign of anyone else on it. It must have been cleaned off good before it was handed to you. It’s going to crack down on the back of your neck like a crowbar when I finally got to turn it in.”

The cab stopped and we were around the corner from the party-flat. We got out and headed straight for the entrance, without any preliminary casing or inquiring around. We had to. It was 4:30 by now, and the deadline was still on us — only it was shortening up all the time. It was a kind of flashy looking place, the kind that people who lived by horse betting would pick to live in.

I couldn’t help shuddering as we went in the entrance. We were now only two steps away from murder. There remained the man with the scar and the room with the musical walls. Getting closer all the time.

We didn’t have any trouble getting in. They seemed to expect anyone at any time of the day, and made no bones about opening up. An overripe blonde in a fluffy negligee, eyes still slitted from sleep and last night’s rouge still on her face, was standing waiting for us at the door when we got out of the self-service car. She was shoddy and cheap, yes, but there was something good natured and likeable about her at that, even at first sight.

“I never know who to expect any more,” she greeted us cheerfully. “Somebody parked their gum on the announcer a few weeks ago, and you can’t hear anything through it ever since, so I just take pot-luck—”

Denny flashed her the badge. She showed a peculiar sort of dismay at sight of it. It was dismay all right, but a resigned, fatalistic kind. She let her hands hang limply down like empty gloves. “Oh, I knew something like this was going to happen sooner or later!” she lamented. “I been telling Ed over and over we gotta cut out giving those parties and letting just anyone at all in. I already lost a valuable fur-piece that way last year—”

“Okay if we come in and talk to you?” He had to ask that, I guess, because he had no search warrant.

She stood back readily enough to let us through. The place was a wreck, they hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it up yet after the night before. “Is it pretty serious?” she asked nervously. “Who told you about us?”

Denny was trying to trap her, I could see. “Your friend with the scar on his jaw, know who I mean?”

She didn’t know, and she seemed on the level about it, just as on the level as Joe Fraser had been about not knowing there was dope peddled up here. “I can’t place anyone with a scar on his jaw—” She poised a finged at the corner of her mouth and looked around at various angles in search of inspiration.

“Are you denying there was a guy with a scar on his jaw up here last night?” Denny said truculently. He had my word for that, and I was sure of that part of it, if nothing else.

“No, there could have been ten guys with scars. All I’m saying is if there was I didn’t see him. The excitement was a little too much for me, and I retired about midnight.” She meant she’d passed out, I guess. “He may have come in after that. You’d better ask my husband.”

She went through the next room and spoke into the one beyond, we could hear her plainly where we were. He was asleep, I guess, and she had to talk loud; at least no attempt was made at off-stage prompting. “Ed, we’re in trouble. You better come out here and answer this man’s questions.”

Ed came out after her looking like a scarecrow in a dressing-gown. Interest in the races had kept him thin around the middle, if it hadn’t prevented his hair from falling out. Denny woke him up with the same question he’d just given her.

“No, I didn’t notice anyone with a scar here last night. He might have been here and just happened to have that side of his face turned away from me each time I got a look at him. But even so, he wasn’t anyone I know personally. I don’t know anyone with a scar.”

“Some guy got in here, and you not only didn’t know him but didn’t even see him the whole time he was in your place. What kind of people are you anyway?”

“Well, that’s the way we live, mister. We may be careless but we have a helluva good time.”

Denny scanned him for several uncomfortable minutes. Suddenly he said, “Mind if I look around?”

“N-no, go ahead.” They were both frightened, but in the vague way of people that don’t know what to expect next. It wasn’t a fear that had a definite focus.

I didn’t get what he was after for a minute. I trailed after him, and they trailed after me. In each room he went into, he only had eyes for the closet — when there was one. Or rather, the keyhole in the closet.

There was only one that didn’t have a key sticking out of it. We got to it finally. It was painted white. It was in a little room at the back, a sort of spare room. My heart started to pick up speed. It seemed to stand out from the walls, as if it was coated with luminous paint. My eyes almost seemed to be able to pierce it, as though they were X-rays, and make out, huddled on the inside — I looked around in cold, sick fear in the split second that we all stood there grouped in the doorway. That mission type table over there, didn’t it look like the very one I had upended against the locked closet? That window, with the dark shade drawn all the way down to the bottom — “No, you can’t get out that way, that’s a dead window, blocked with bricks.” I didn’t have the nerve to step over to it and raise the shade.

Denny had tightened up too, I could see. He didn’t take out the key I’d found on my bureau. Instead he said, “D’you mind unlocking that?”

Right away they both got flustered. They both looked at each other helplessly. She said to him, “Where’d we put it this time?”

He said, “I dunno, you were the one put it away. I told you to pick the same place each time; you keep changing the place, and then we can’t find it ourselves!”

They both started looking high and low. She explained to Denny, “We call that closet The Safe. When we feel one of these parties coming on, we gather up everything valuable and shove it all in there, and lock it up till it’s over.”

Denny didn’t look convinced or relenting. I was leaning against the door-frame, I needed support.

“It’s all our own stuff,” she added placatingly.

He gave her the stony eye.

The harder they looked, the more flustered they got. I kept wondering why he didn’t take out the key he had and fit it in, why did he have to torture me this way? My chest was pounding like a dynamo. Was he in there, whoever he was? Would he topple out on us when it was opened finally? But if they’d known about it, they would have smuggled him out long ago, wouldn’t they? Or else beat it away from here themselves, not lain asleep until evening. Or suppose they hadn’t known about it themselves, still didn’t? That wouldn’t make my guilt any the less flagrant.

The Sorrell woman suddenly gave a yelp of triumph, from the direction of the bedroom, where the ever-widening search had led her. She came running in with it, holding it up between her fingers. You could hardly distinguish what it was, it was all clotted with some white substance. “I hid it in my cold-cream tin, I remember now!” she exulted. “Luckily I stopped a minute to rub a little on—”

Denny wouldn’t let her get over to the keyhole with it; he took it over, inserted it himself, gave it a twist, and the door swung out. Furs, silverware, hand-luggage, everything that predatory guests might have made off with was piled up in it. But no dead bodies.

I had to sit down for a minute, I felt weak all over.

“It’s all our own stuff,” the woman said for the third or fourth time. “Did somebody tell you we had something in there didn’t belong to us?”

“No, just an idea of mine,” Denny said quietly. He handed the key back and turned away.

It was dusk when we left the Sorrell apartment. All day someone had lain murdered in a closet, and we were no nearer to knowing where. And now it was night again, the second night since it had happened. We stood down there on the street outside the place. Because we didn’t know where to go now. There was a gap. The first step had led into the second, but the second had led into a vacuum.

“Well, my way didn’t pay off,” he said glumly. “The thing’s broken in two.” He turned and looked up at the lighted windows behind us. “And I’m inclined to give the Sorrells the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think they really knew this man with the scar. I don’t think they really noticed him up there in their place last night. I don’t think they realized anyone had cocaine on him and passed some to you. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt — for the present. I can’t go after it the way I would ordinarily, have them watched, check their movements, track down as many people as I can who were at the party, in hopes of finally getting a line on him. We haven’t time. We’ll have to jump the gap blindfolded and try for the third foothold — the room with the singing walls.”

We passed a cigar store and Denny went in, stepped inside the phone booth. I figured it was to Headquarters, without his telling me so. It was. He came back, said: “Well our margin of safety still holds, they haven’t found him yet. I checked on all reported homicides, and there’s no one been turned up stabbed in a closet — as of 6:45 this evening.” He gave me a look. “But that don’t mean there’s no one in a closet still waiting to be turned up. We’ve got to hustle.”

Sure we did — but where?

“Can you remember leaving here at all?”

“No, there’s a complete blank. The next I knew was the room with the singing walls. Scarface reappeared in that sequence, so I must have left with him, he must have taken me there from here.”

“Obviously. But that don’t tell us where it is.” It was strangely topsy-turvy, this thing. Ordinarily they get the murdered remains first, have to go out and look for the murderer. In this case he had the murderer at hand from the beginning, and couldn’t find out where the remains were. Even the murderer couldn’t help him. “About those so-called singing walls. Was it a radio you heard through them? That’s the first thing occurs to me, of course.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. There wasn’t a scrap of human voice, of station announcement in between. If I was able to distinguish the tunes clearly enough to recognize them, I would have been able to hear the announcer too, wouldn’t I? And there’s at least a title given between numbers on any radio program.”

“You can’t remember how you got there? Not even the vaguest recollection? Whether it was on foot, or in a cab, or in a car with him, or by bus, or trolley?”

“No. Any more than I can remember how I got away afterw— Wait!” I broke off suddenly.

“What is it?” he pounced.

“I just remembered a little detail I didn’t tell you before; I wonder if it’s any good to you or not.”

“I told you I never throw anything away. Let me have it.”

“I either spent or lost ten cents sometime during the course of the night. When I met Fraser on the street, I had thirty-five cents in my pocket. I can remember standing there jingling it just before he came up to me. This morning there was only twenty-five cents on my bureau. I was out a dime. D’you think I spent it making my way home — from wherever this was?”

He liked that right away, I could see; he liked that a lot. “It could be a yardstick, to measure just how far out this place was, if nothing else. It don’t give us the direction, but it might give us the approximate distance. Can you remember making your way back at all?”

“Yeah, partly; only the opening stages, though. I remember slinking along, hugging walls and doorways, scared stiff. I don’t remember what part of town I was in, though. And then the curtain came down again, I don’t remember how I got back finally—”

“What kind of coins was this thirty-five cents in, when you had it last night, can you remember that?”

“Easily, I counted it over enough times. Three nickels and two dimes. And this morning there were only the three nickels and a dime left.”

“That’s important,” he said. “The fact that the three nickels were carried over eliminates the possibility that you paid a nickel fare or a fifteen cent fare. If you paid any fare at all, you paid an exact ten cents. It’s still possible you lost the dime, of course, but we can’t let that stop us. If you spent a dime fare, that eliminates trolleys — and of course taxis. Now the bus system here runs on a mileage basis, you know that. Five cents for a certain distance, then ten, then fifteen from there on, for as far as they carry you. This missing dime seems to show you boarded an inbound bus at some point within the ten cent zone and rode in toward our place.

“D’you see what I’m driving at, so far? We’re looking for someplace, in that ten cent bus ride zone, where there’s music playing late at night, until two or three in the morning. And not a radio, either a real band or a phonograph that changes its own records by automatic control. Some roadhouse or resort or pavilion, or even just a hole-in-the-wall taproom. And then we’re looking for a room right upstairs over it, or right next door to it, with a partition wall so thin it lets this music come whispering through. There’s our problem.”

“But it seemed to me I did a lot of this running away on foot first; my starting point might have been quite a distance off from this ten cent bus zone.”

“It seemed that way. I doubt you did in your condition. Narcotics distort your time sense, for one thing. Just down the block and around a couple of corners, to you, might have seemed like an endless flight that went on for hours. Then again, of course, you may be right about it; I wasn’t on your feet. The only way we’ll find out is to put it to the proof.”

There were two bus lines that passed the immediate neighborhood our own flat was in, the Fairview line and one that went out to the municipal beach at Duck Island. The routes were parallel this far in, they only diverged further out. The double route was two blocks over from our place.

“We’ll take whichever one comes along first,” he said while we stood waiting by the stop. “It’s a toss up between the two.”

A Fairview one hove into sight first, outward-bound of course. We got on and he said, “Two ten cent fares.” Then he stood there behind the driver’s back and, company regulations to the contrary, asked, “How many stops do you make in the ten cent zone?” They ran on fixed stops.

“Only three.” He gave us the intersection names. “After that, it jumps to fifteen.”

“Well, offhand, could you mention any inns or dance joints out that way, where the music plays late?”

“Try Dixie Trixie’s, that’s just outside the city limits—”

Denny cut him short. “No, I’m asking you about the ten cent zone, between Continental and Empire Road.”

“Naw, that’s a sweatshop district, I don’t think you’ll find many around there, one or two honkytonks maybe.”

“We’ll have to do our own scouting then,” Denny said to me. He led the way back to a seat. He swore bitterly under his breath, “We’ll be at it all night.”

We got out at Continental, the first ten cent stop, and he did a little surveying before we moved off the bus right-of-way. The task before us wasn’t as bad as it had threatened to be at first sight. It was no cinch by any means, but at least he was able to put physical limits to the terrain we had to finecomb. The bus stops were an even eight blocks apart. A railroad embankment walled us off six blocks to the left, and a large park with a lake in it dead-ended the streets four blocks over the other way. He divided the difference between the two bus stops, multiplied it by ten crosswise blocks, and that gave us forty square blocks to canvass for each bus stop.

Naturally, it wasn’t a question of going into every doorway of every building along those forty blocks, that would have still been pretty much of a physical impossibility. A cop on the beat here, a storekeeper there, was able to speed us through by listing the places in his immediate vicinity that provided music late at night. That way we sometimes only had to make one stop in five or six blocks. We investigated several bars which had coin phonographs, but none had all four of the selections that I’d remembered hearing in their repertoire.

We went back and boarded the bus, rode one stop ahead, and started the whole thing over. Same lack of results. The closest we got to anything in this sector was when the harness cop told us there had been a lot of complaints about a Polish family playing their phonograph late at nights with all the stops out. But they didn’t own any of the records we were looking for.

We went back, caught another bus, got out at the third and last ten cent stop, and finished the chore out. That fizzled too. We limped aboard an in-bound bus and rode back to where the Duck Island line diverged from this one. The thought of going through the same routine all over again, on a new bus route, was more than we could face without a breathing spell. We dragged ourselves into the nearest resting place we could find, which happened to be a lunch wagon, when we left the bus and just sat there slumped over the counter, too tired even to hold our backs up straight, chins nearly dunked in our coffee cups, talking it over in low voices so the counterman wouldn’t overhear us.

“Even if I wanted to take you down with me and report it — and I don’t, God knows — I couldn’t until we’ve found out where it happened. They’d have to have that. And the longer it takes and the colder it gets, the harder it’s going to be to clear you.” He looked down at the wax-white, trembling hand I’d suddenly braked on his arm. “What is it?”

“Did you hear that, just then?”

He turned and looked over at the wire-mesh loudspeaker that looked like a framed fly swatter, set on a low shelf near the coffee boiler.

“They just got through playing Alice Blue Gown and now—”

He didn’t get me for a minute. “But this wagon’s in the middle of a vacant plot, you saw that when we came in. There aren’t any adjoining—”

“No, no, you haven’t been paying attention to the program, I have. They got through Blue Gown a minute or two ago; now they’ve gone into Out on a Limb. Listen, hear it? That’s the same order I heard them in last night — there.”

“That’s just a coincidence. There must be six thousand bands all over the country playing those two pieces day and night the last few weeks—”

“The third one’ll tell. The third one was Oh Johnny.” I could hardly wait for it to end; it never seemed to, it seemed to go on forever. I balled a fist and beat it into the hollow of my hand to hurry it up. He sat there straining his ears too; his back was held a little straighter now.

It wound up finally, there was a short pause. Then a nondescript introduction. Then the tune itself. I grabbed him with both hands this time, nearly toppled him off the tall stool he was perched on. “Oh Johnny! That’s not a coincidence any more. That’s the same sequence I heard them in last night. That’s the same band.”

“But I thought you said it wasn’t a broadcast, you heard no station announcements. This is.”

“But there are no station announcements on this either, it’s evidently a program that only makes one every five or six numbers. I still don’t think it was a broadcast; this isn’t the same hour I heard them, and they wouldn’t broadcast twice in one night. But I think it was the same band, I’m sure of it. Maybe they broadcast first, and then play in person somewhere later on—”

The Woodpecker Song had started in. I turned around to tell him that, not sure if he knew tunes by ear as well as I did. But he’d had enough; the stool next to me was empty and he was already over at the pay phone on the wall. His nickel chimed in along with the opening notes. “What station you tuned at?” he called out. The counterman read the dial, gave him some hick station I’d never heard of before. He got its studio number from Information. “Who’s that you got going out over the air now?” I heard him ask them. Then, “Bobby Leonard’s Band? Find out where they work from about one to three or four every night. Hurry it up, it’s important. No, I can’t wait until they’re through broadcasting, this is police business. Write the question on a slip of paper and hand it in right where they are now.” He had to wait a minute until the answer was relayed back, evidently scribbled on the same piece of paper. “The Silver Slipper, eh, out on Brandon Drive.” He hung up, bounced a coin on the counter, and ran out. We’d both stopped being tired, like magic.

“It’s all the way over on the other side of town,” he said to me in the cab. “God only knows how you found your way back to our place. It shows you what a wonderful thing the subconscious is, even under the influence of a drug.”

We got to it in about twenty minutes, paid off the cab, and stood there sizing it up. It was mostly glass, you could look in on three sides; it had a glass roof that could be pushed back in fine weather so they could dance under the open sky. The fourth wall was solid masonry. Only a scattered couple or two were dancing. They evidently used a radio to provide the incidental music, until this Leonard and his band came over and did a lick later on.

He snapped his head around to me. “Familiar?”

I shook mine. “Not a flicker of it comes back to me.”

On the fourth side it backed against two buildings, which in turn were set back to back, each one facing a different street. We cased them both, from their respective corners. One was a trim, two story cement garage, that looked as if it had only recently been put up. The other was a sort of run-down lodging-house, with a milky lighted globe pallidly shining down over its doorway. It was the obvious choice of the two; garages don’t have closets. Nor furniture to pile up in front of them either.

We went in.

It couldn’t have been dignified by the name hotel. The “desk” was just a hinged flap across an alcove, within which sat a man in shirt-sleeves reading a paper under a light.

One good thing, there was no question of a bell-boy showing you up and looking on. You paid your fifty cents, you got a key, and you found your own way up. We didn’t want any witnesses — if it was in here.

He didn’t even bother looking up at us, just heard the double tread come in, asked: “Two-in-one or two singles?”

Denny said, “How many rooms you got here that back up against that place next door? We like to fall asleep to music.”

Even that didn’t get a rise out of him; he expected anything and everything. “One on a floor, three floors, that makes three altogether. I’ve got someone in the one on the second, though.”

So that was the one. My stomach gave a sort of half-turn to the right, and then back again.

Denny said, “D’you have to sign when you get in here?”

“You got to put down something when you pick up your key, you can’t just walk in.” Meaning a place like this didn’t expect right names and didn’t care if it got them.

“Let’s see what was signed for that one you got taken on the second.”

“What’s all this to you?” But he was still too indifferent to be properly resentful about it.

“We might know the guy.”

We did. One of them anyway. It was a double entry. The cocaine had vibrated my handwriting like an earthquake but I could still recognize it. “Tom Cochrane, 22–28 Foster Street.” For once they’d gotten a right name and a right address. It was probably the only one in the whole ledger — and it had signed for murder! The second name, also in my handwriting, was “Ben Doyle.” No address given, just a wavy line. So I’d signed on for someone else too.

We just looked at each other. Then at him. Or rather, Denny did. I was afraid to.

“Were you here when this was signed?”

This time he did get annoyed, because the question touched him personally. “Naw, I go off at twelve, don’tcha think I gotta sleep sometime too?” That explained, at least, why he didn’t recognize me. But not why it hadn’t been found out yet.

“D’you give any kind of service here? Don’t you send someone in to clean these rooms in the daytime?”

He got more annoyed than ever. “What d’ya think this is, the Ritz? When a room’s vacated, the handyman goes in and straightens up the bed. Until it is we leave it alone, for as long as it’s been paid for.” I must have paid for this one for two days in advance, double occupancy; there was the entry “$2” after the two names. But I hadn’t had two dollars on me, I’d only had thirty-five cents.

“What’s all this talk about? Do you two guys want a room or don’t you?” We did, but we wanted that second-floor room that already had “someone” in it. Denny obviously didn’t want to use his badge to force him to open it up for us, that would have meant a witness to the revelation that was bound to follow immediately afterward, and automatic police notification before he had a chance to do anything for me — if there was anything he could do.

“Give us the third-floor one,” he said, and put down a dollar bill. The mentor of the establishment hitched down a key with a ponderous enamel tag from the rows where they hung. The one immediately below was missing. The “occupant” still had it. If I’d taken it away with me, I must have lost it in the course of that mad flight through the shadows; only the closet key had turned up at our place this morning.

Denny, with unconscious humor, scrawled “Smith Bros.” in the registry (he told me later he wasn’t trying to be funny), and we started up the narrow squeaky staircase. He turned aside when we got to the second floor, motioned me to keep on climbing. “Scuffle your feet heavy to cover me, I’m going to try to force the door open with something.”

I shuffled my way up step by step, trying to sound like two of us, while I heard him faintly tinkering at the lock with some implement. I unlocked the one we’d hired on the floor above, put on the light, looked in. Yes, there was something vaguely familiar about it; this was the end of the trail, all right. The closet in this one had a key in it, had been left slightly ajar by the last occupant.

I crept back to the stairs, listened. The tinkering had stopped, he must have forced the door. A curt “Sst!” sounded, meant for me. I eased down one flight, to where I’d left him. You could make them fairly soundless if you tried hard enough.

The light from inside was shining out across the grubby passage. A half-section of his face showed past the door-frame, waiting for me; then withdrew. I made my way down there, moving slow, breathing fast.

It was the room all right. He’d already taken down the stuff that I’d barricaded the closet door with, but it was still strewn around nearby. A table, a chair, even a mattress.

He signed to me and I closed the door behind me. He gave the closet key I’d turned over to him at our flat a fatalistic flip-up in the hollow of his hand. “Here goes,” he said. I got a grip on the back of a chair and hung on tight.

He turned and fitted it into the lock. It went in like silk, it turned the lock without a hitch. It couldn’t have worked easier. It belonged here. I said a fast prayer, that was all there was time for. “Make it turn out it was somebody else did it!”

Denny’s body gave a hitch and there was no more time for praying. He’d caught it against him as it swayed out with the closet door. It must have been semi-upright behind it the whole time. I hadn’t done a good job of propping, it must have shifted over against the door instead of staying against the wall behind it; and the way the knees were buckled kept it from toppling over sideways.

He let it down to the floor, out in the room. It stayed in a cockeyed position from the way it had been jammed in. It was stiff as tree-bark. He turned it over on its back, made me come over. “Remember him? Take a good look now. Remember him?”

“Yeah,” I said dry-lipped.

“Remember him alive, that’s what I mean.”

“No, no, I only remember him lying there, only not so shrivelled—” I backed away, nearly fell over a chair.

“Pull yourself together, kid,” he said. “This is something they would have put you through anyway. It’s a lot easier just with me alone in the room with you.”

He disarranged the clothing, peered down. “Sure, a knife did it,” he nodded. “Three bad gashes; one in the stomach, one between the ribs, and one that looks like it must have grazed the heart.” He looked at the belt-buckle. “B. D.,” he murmured. “What was that name down there — Ben Doyle?” He started going through pockets. “No, he’s been cleaned out; but the name checks with those initials, all right.” He drew back a little. I saw him scanning the corpse’s upturned soles. “He did a lot of walking, didn’t he?” The bottom layer of each was worn through in a round spot the size of a silver dollar. “But the heels are new, not worn down at all. What’d he do, walk around on tiptoes?” He took something from his pocket and started to reverse a small screw that protruded like a nail-head. Then he pulled and the whole heel came off. It was hollow. Three or four folded paper packets lay within it in an orderly row. He opened one into the shape of a little paper boat. I didn’t have to be told. I’d seen that white stuff before.

“He was a peddler,” he said. “But he wasn’t the guy that contacted you at the party. Where does he come in it? I wonder if the Narcotic Squad would have heard of this guy before, can give me anything on him. I’m going to check with Headquarters, ask them.” Before he went out, he crossed to the window, raised the dark shade that shrouded it. The pane behind it was also painted dark, a dark green. You could see the heads of heavy six inch nails studded all along the frame, riveting it down. Even so, he took that same screwdriver from his pocket and scraped away a tiny gash on the dried paint-surface. Then he held a lighted match close up to it. “Solid brick backed up to it,” he commented. He started for the door. “You’re down on their blotter for this room — and in your own handwriting — along with this dead guy. I want to find out if he was seen coming here with you. Or if it was the guy with the scar. Or both. Or neither. I gotta dig up that other slouch that was in charge of the key rack here from midnight to morning; he’s the only one can answer all those things.”

I started out after him. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t have stayed in there alone for a million dollars. “All right, go back and wait in the one over this, if it gets you,” he consented. He closed the door on the grisly sight within. “But keep your eyes and ears open, make sure no one gets in here until we’re ready to break it ourselves.” He went down and I went up.

I didn’t know how long to give him, but pretty soon it seemed to be taking longer than it should have. Pretty soon the room up here started to get me, just as bad as though I’d stayed down there. Try hanging around when you know there’s a dead body under your feet in the room below, a body you’re to blame for, and you’ll know what I mean. The band showed up for work next door while I was in there, and instead of making it better, that only made it worse. It nearly drove me nuts, that whispered music coming through the walls, it brought last night back too vividly again.

Finally I couldn’t stand it in there another minute, I had to get out, wait for him down below by the street entrance. I almost lunged for the door, a damn good cold panic on me. I got it open, poked the bilious light out. Then I saw something in the darkness behind me. Something that made me hold the door at half-closing point and stand there on the threshold.

It should have been pitch black behind me in there now. The place only had a dead window. It wasn’t. A late moon must have come up since we’d been in here. Three phantom silvery lines stood out around the drawn shade, like a faint tracing of phosphorus. There was moonlight backing it, only visible now that the room light was out.

My panic evaporated. I went back in again, leaving it dark. I crossed to the shade, shot it up. Moonlight flashed at me through the dust-filmed glass. There was no brickwork, no dark paint, blanking out the windows on this floor. Denny hadn’t been up here at all, or we might have found that out sooner. The garage was only two stories high, the rooming-house three, that was a detail that had escaped our attention until now.

The frame wasn’t nailed. I hitched it and it went up. The garage roof was a bare four feet below me, plenty accessible enough to— But the fact remained the body hadn’t been in this room, but in the one below, where the window was blocked. I scanned the roof; it looked like an expanse of gray sand under me. In the middle of it, though, there was dim light peering up through some sort of a skylight or ventilator.

I didn’t have any theory, I didn’t know what I thought I’d find out or what I hoped I’d find out, I just went ahead on instinct alone. I sidled across the sill and planted my legs on the graveled roof. I started to pick my way carefully over toward that skylight, trying not to sound the gravel.

I got to the perimeter of it, crouched down on hands and knees, peered over the edge and down. Nothing. Just the cement garage floor two stories below, and a mechanic in greasy overalls down there wiping off a car with a handful of waste. No way to get up, no way to get down — except head first.

I straightened up, skirted it; eased on. I took a look down over the front edge of the roof. Just the unbroken cement front of the garage, a fly couldn’t have managed it. I went around to the side, the one away from the Silver Slipper. There was a narrow chasm there, left between the garage and some taller warehouse next door. And midway down that there was something. A pale, watery, yellow reflection cast on the warehouse wall by some opening in the garage wall directly under me, at second-floor level. And more to the point still, a sort of rickety iron Jacob’s ladder leading down to it. I could only see this at its starting point, up where I was; the darkness swallowed the rest of it.

I swung out on it, tested it with one foot. Narrow rungs. It seemed firm enough. I started down very slow. It was like going down into a bottle of ink. The reflection of the lighted square came up and bathed my feet. The ladder didn’t go any lower, it ended in a level “stage” of iron slats, no wider than the window. I tucked my feet in under the last downward rung so they wouldn’t show in the light, leaned out above them, gripping a rung higher up backhand. It was a grotesque position. I slanted my head forward and peered into the lighted square.

It was an office connected with the garage. There were filing cabinets against the wall, a large flat-topped desk with a cone light over it. There was a man sitting there at it, talking to two others. Or rather going over some accounts with them. He was checking some sort of a list on a sheet of paper he held. There was money on the desk, lots of it; more money than any garage like this would take in in a month. It was separated into several stacks. As he finished checking one list, he’d riff through one stack, rapidly and deftly thumb-counting it; snap an elastic around it, and move it over from one side of him to the other. Then he’d begin on a second list.

There was something vaguely familiar about the shape of his head, even seen from the back, and the cut of his shoulders. The other two I’d never seen before, I was sure of that. One was sitting negligently on an outside corner of the desk, the other standing up against it, hands deep in pockets. They looked too well dressed to be hanging around the upstairs room of a garage.

I must have taken too much time to size them up. After all, a paring of a face is just as conspicuous against a blacked-out window as a full-face would be. I didn’t even see the signal passed, nor which of the two gave it. Suddenly the checkmaster had twirled around on his swivel-chair and was staring out at me eye-to-eye. That white cicatrice along the underside of his jaw stood out as visibly as a strip of tape or courtplaster. So there he was at last, the diabolus ex machina.

My position on the ladder was too complicated to make for a streamlined getaway, I had too many things to do simultaneously. I had to extricate my tucked-in feet, make a complete body turn to face the ladder, before I could start up. Even then, I missed a rung in my hurry, jolted down half a foot and hit my chin on one of the upper ones. By that time the window had flashed up and a powerful grip had me around the ankle. A second one cleaved to its mate.

I was torn off the ladder, dragged in feet first, and the only thing that saved my skull from cracking in the bounce from window-sill to floor was that it bedded against one of their bodies. I lay flat for a minute and their three faces glowered down at me, ringing me around. One of them backed a foot and found my ribs. The pain seemed to shoot all the way through to the other side.

Then I was dragged up again and stood on my own feet. One of them had a gun bared, brief as the onslaught had been.

The man with the scarred jaw rasped: “He’s the patsy I used last night, I toldje about!”

“There goes your whole set-up, Graz!” the third one spat disgustedly.

The man with the scar they called Graz looked at me vengefully. His whole face was so livid with rage it now matched the weal. “What the hell, it still holds good! He was one of Doyle’s customers, Doyle cut off his supply, so he knifed him!”

“Yeah, but he ain’t up there in the room with him any more.”

“All right, he come to, lammed out through a third-floor window — like he did. He’ll be found dead by his own hand in Woodside Park when morning comes. What’s the difference? It changes it a little, but not much. It’s still him all the way through. Him and Doyle took the room together to make a deal. He was seen going in where Doyle’ll be found. And you know how snowbirds act when they’ve got the crave on and are cut off. There’s a lake there in Woodside. We’re gonna dunk his head in it and hold it there until his troubles are over. Then throw the rest of him in. How they gonna tell the difference afterwards?”

“Suppose Doyle had already sang a note or two to the police, mentioning names, before you—”

“He didn’t sing nothing, I stopped him before he had a chance to; the minute I seen that narcotics dick beginning to cultivate him, I cut out his tonsils! An operation like that in time saves nine. Come on, let’s get started.” He gathered up the money and lists from the desk. “And another thing,” he added, “we’re giving this joint up, it’s no good to us any more, let the jaloppies have it all to themselves from now on. We’re coming back as soon as we ditch this punk and move out all them filing cabinets, right tonight!”

His two subordinates wedged me up between them, he put out the light behind us, and the four of us started down a cement inner stair to the main floor of the garage. “Run out the big black one, Joe,” one of them said to the grease-monkey I’d seen through the skylight, “we’re going out for a little air.”

He brought out a big, beetling sedan, climbed down and turned it over to them. He must have been one of them, used for a front on the main floor; they didn’t try to conceal my captivity from him.

They shoved me into it. It was like getting into a hearse. That’s what it was intended for, only it was taking me to the cemetery before death instead of after. I didn’t say a word. “Denny’ll come back to that room back there too late. He won’t know what happened to me; he’ll start looking for me all over town, and I’ll be lying at the bottom of the lake—”

Graz got in back with me and one of his two underlings, the other one took the wheel. We glided down the cement ramp toward the open street beyond. Just as our fenders cleared the garage entrance, a taxi came to a dead stop out at the curb directly before us, effectively walling us in. The way it had crept forward it seemed to have come from only a few yards away, as though it had been poised waiting there. I saw the driver jump down on the outside and run for his life, across the street and around the corner. The sedan’s furious horn-tattoo failed to halt his flight.

The big car they had me in was awkwardly stuck there for a minute, on the slant, just short of the entrance. It couldn’t go forward on account of the abandoned cab, it couldn’t detour around it on account of its own length of chassis, and the mechanic had sent down a sort of fireproof inner portcullis behind us, without waiting, keeping us from backing up.

They weren’t given much time for the implications of the predicament to dawn on them. Denny suddenly straightened up just outside the rear window on one side and balanced a gun over its rim. The district harness-cop did the same on the opposite side. They had them between a threat of cross-fire. It was a strategic gem. They must have sidled around the opposite sides of the garage entrance, bent over below window level and then suddenly straightened up in the narrow channel left between the car and the walls of the ramp.

Denny said, “Touch the ceiling with them and swing out, one on each side.”

But he and the cop couldn’t control the man at the wheel, he was a little too far forward and they were wedged in too close. I saw his shoulder give a slight warning dip against the dashboard-glow as he reached for something. I buckled one leg, knee to chin, and shot the flat of my shoe square against the back of his head. His face slammed down into the wheel. He didn’t want to reach for any more guns after that. He just wanted to reach for the loosened front teeth in his mouth.

It took a little while to marshal them back upstairs, and send in word to Headquarters, and clean out the files and all the other evidence around the garage. They found traces of blood on the cement inner stairs, showing where Doyle had been knifed as he was trying to escape from the death interview with Scarjaw, right name Graziani, kingpin of this particular little dope-ring, small but lucrative.

Denny said to me while we were waiting around up there: “A guy on the Narcotics Squad recognized this Doyle right away, even from the little I was able to give them over the phone. They’d picked him up several times already, and they were trying to dicker with him to get the names of the higher-ups he worked for. When I got back to the room that open window on the third tipped me off which way you’d gone. From what Officer Kelly here had just finished telling me a little while before, I figured there was something fishy about this garage. He’d seen people drive up at certain hours to try to have their cars serviced, and they’d be turned away. And yet it was never particularly full of cars on the inside. I figured the smart thing to do was arrange a little reception committee at the street entrance, where they weren’t expecting it.”

The final word, however, wasn’t said until several hours later. He came out of the back room at Headquarters, near daylight, came over to where I’d been waiting. “You didn’t do it, Tom. It’s official now, if that’ll make you feel any better. We’ve been questioning them in relays ever since we brought them in, and we just finished getting it all down on here.” He waved a set of typed sheets at me. “Here’s how it goes. Graziani and his two lieutenants killed Doyle in the garage about midnight last night, just around the time you were arriving at the Sorrells’ party with Fraser. That rooming-house had already come in handy to them once or twice — it’s got a vicious name on the police records — so they used it again, for a sort of dumping ground. Graziani sent one of his stooges around and had him put down fifty cents and take a room on the third floor, within easy access of the garage roof. That was just to obtain a convenient back way in. They smuggled the body across the roof and passed it in to the stooge through the window. But this stooge wasn’t supposed to take a murder rap, he was just acting as middleman. Graziani went out looking for the real stooge, the stooge for murder — that turned out to be you. He’d been to those dizzy parties of the Sorrells before, so he knew all about them. He went there last night, picked you out, got you higher than a kite, brought you over to the rooming-house in his car. He saw to it you were given a room on the second floor, directly under the one where the body lay waiting for transfer, where all the windows were walled up tight. Not only that, he had you sign for it for yourself and for Doyle, who was already dead. Doyle was supposed to be along in a minute or two. He got rid of the fellow in charge of the keys for that minute or two by sending him next door to the Silver Slipper for some coffee to ‘sober’ you up. By the time he got back with it, Doyle was already supposed to have shown up. The original stooge on the third floor spoke loudly to you to show there was somebody up there in the room with you. Graziani said, ‘His friend’s up there with him now, he’ll be all right, I’ll shove off.’ Doyle had shown up, but in a different way. They’d carried him down the stairs from the third-floor room to your room with the bricked-up window. They wiped off the knife handle and planted it on you; they smeared your shirt front with Doyle’s not yet quite congealed blood. You were dazed, in no condition to notice anything that went on around you. Graziani was careful to carry the coffee up only to the door, pass it in to you, come right down again, and leave. Doyle’s ‘voice’ still sounded up there with you in the room, for the fellow at the key-rack to hear.

“You were given another whiff of coke to hold you steady for awhile. Then the original stooge came down, presumably from the third floor, handed in his key and checked out as if he were dissatisfied, complaining about the vermin.

“You were left there drugged, with a murdered man in your room, his blood on your shirt, the knife that had been used concealed on your person in newspaper. You even helped the scheme out up to a point; you got the horrors, hid the body in the closet, locked it, piled everything movable you could lay your hands on up against the door. Then you fled for your life. You got a small break, that wouldn’t have helped out any in the end. The guy at the key-rack must have been either dozing or out of his alcove again. I spoke to him just now, and he never saw you leave. That postponed discovery, but wouldn’t have altered its emphasis any when it finally came.

“As I said, the subconscious is a great thing. In all your terror, and stupefied as you were, you somehow found your way back to where you lived. You didn’t wake up in the same room with the dead man, like they were counting on your doing, and raise an outcry, and thereby sew yourself up fast then and there. You had a chance to talk it over with me first; we had a chance to put our heads together on the outside, without you being in the middle of it.”

It was getting light when we got back to our own place together. The last thing I said to him, outside the door, was: “Tell the truth, Denny, up to the time it broke, did you really figure I did it?”

His answer surprised me more than anything else about the whole thing. “Hell, yes!” he said vigorously. “I could have eaten my hat you did!”

“I did too,” I had to admit. “In fact, I was sure of it!”

All at Once, No Alice CORNELL WOOLRICH

Original publication: Argosy, March 2, 1940, as by William Irish; first collected in Eyes That Watch You by William Irish (New York, Rinehart, 1952)

Although Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) was a prolific writer, mainly for the pulps, he helped ramp up his output by stealing from his own work, cannibalizing one short story to produce another, and then pulling essential material from his short fiction to produce novels.

He was not alone in this practice, of course, and one of the best at it was his fellow pulp writer Raymond Chandler, who gathered storylines, parts of characters, settings, and more from his magazine stories to construct his novels.

“All at Once, No Alice,” one of Woolrich’s best-known and most suspenseful stories, pulled many elements from “You’ll Never See Me Again,” published only four months earlier. Readers of both stories also will be reminded of Phantom Lady (1942), his most famous novel, which employs the central element of a person who has seemingly vanished from the planet — if she ever existed at all.

A familiar tale, “All at Once, No Alice” is a masterful retelling of an urban legend about a man who leaves his bride in a hotel room for a short time on his wedding night but, when he returns, there is no guest in the room, the hotel clerk and staff claim never to have seen her, her name is not on the register, and everyone with whom they had come in contact that day denies ever having seen her.

Title: The Return of the Whistler, 1948

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: D. Ross Lederman

Screenwriters: Edward Bock, Maurice Tombragel

Producer: Rudolph C. Flothow

• Michael Duane (Theodore Anthony “Ted” Nichols)

• Lenore Aubert (Alice Dupres Barkley)

• Richard Lane (Gaylord Traynor)

• James Cardwell (Barkley)

The Return of the Whistler, the eighth and final film in the series about the shadowy figure who introduces the story, is a good adaptation of Woolrich’s tale. Whistling a haunting tune, his shadow looms in the night while he tells the audience, “I am the whistler, I know many strange tales.”

The Whistler, the popular radio series that had been modeled after the enormously successful The Shadow, lasted for nearly seven hundred episodes from 1942 to 1954. The Shadow, meanwhile, ran from 1930 to 1954 and at its peak had an audience of more than fifteen million.

Created by J. Donald Wilson, the Whistler radio series told mainly dark stories, just as the movies did — providing an ideal market for Woolrich. After introducing the story, the titular character disappears until the end when his voice, filled with irony, describes what happens to the protagonist, chuckling with glee at the villain’s fate, just as the Shadow did. Wilson was hired to write the first Whistler film and established the template for those that followed.

Certain elements of Woolrich’s story were changed in The Return of the Whistler, most notably the ending (hint: the story is better) but the disappearance of the woman, the crux of the plot, remains intact, and the suspense, especially in the first half of the film, is intense.

A television series titled The Whistler aired on CBS in 1954–1955 and ran for thirty-nine episodes. The voice of the titular character was William Forman, who also provided narration.

ALL AT ONCE, NO ALICE Cornell Woolrich

It was over so quickly I almost thought something had been left out, but I guess he’d been doing it long enough to know his business. The only way I could tell for sure it was over was when I heard him say: “You may kiss the bride.” But then, I’d never gone through it before.

We turned and pecked at each other, a little bashful because they were watching us.

He and the motherly-looking woman who had been a witness — I guess she was his housekeeper — stood there smiling benevolently, and also a little tiredly. The clock said one fifteen. Then he shook hands with the two of us and said, “Good luck to both of you,” and she shook with us too and said, “I wish you a lot of happiness.”

We shifted from the living room, where it had taken place, out into the front hall, a little awkwardly. Then he held the screen door open and we moved from there out onto the porch.

On the porch step Alice nudged me and whispered, “You forgot something.”

I didn’t even know how much I was supposed to give him. I took out two singles and held them in one hand, then I took out a five and held that in the other. Then I went back toward him all flustered and said, “I... I guess you thought I was going to leave without remembering this.”

I reached my hand down to his and brought it back empty. He kept right on smiling, as if this happened nearly every time too, the bridegroom forgetting like that. It was only after I turned away and rejoined her that I glanced down at my other hand and saw which it was I’d given him. It was the five. That was all right; five thousand of them couldn’t have paid him for what he’d done for me, the way I felt about it.

We went down their front walk and got into the car. The lighted doorway outlined them both for a minute. They raised their arms and said, “Good night.”

“Good night, and much obliged,” I called back. “Wait’ll they go in,” I said in an undertone to Alice, without starting the engine right away.

As soon as the doorway had blacked out, we turned and melted together on the front seat, and this time we made it a real kiss. “Any regrets?” I whispered to her very softly.

“It must have been awful before I was married to you,” she whispered back. “How did I ever stand it so long?”

I don’t think we said a word all the way in to Michianopolis. We were both too happy. Just the wind and the stars and us. And a couple of cigarettes.

We got to the outskirts around two thirty, and by three were all the way in downtown. We shopped around for a block or two. “This looks like a nice hotel,” I said finally. I parked outside and we went in.

I think the first hotel was called the Commander. I noticed that the bellhops let us strictly alone; didn’t bustle out to bring in our bags or anything.

I said to the desk man, “We’d like one of your best rooms and bath.”

He gave me a sort of rueful smile, as if to say, “You should know better than that.”... “I only wish I had something to give you,” was the way he put it.

“All filled up?” I turned to her and murmured, “Well, we’ll have to try someplace else.”

He overheard me. “Excuse me, but did you come in without making reservations ahead?”

“Yes, we just drove in now. Why?”

He shook his head compassionately at my ignorance. “I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time finding a room in any of the hotels tonight.”

“Why? They can’t all be filled up.”

“There’s a three-day convention of the Knights of Balboa being held here. All the others started sending their overflow to us as far back as Monday evening, and our own last vacancy went yesterday noon.”

The second one was called the Stuyvesant, I think. “There must be something in a city this size,” I said when we came out of there. “We’ll keep looking until we find it.”

I didn’t bother noticing the names of the third and fourth. We couldn’t turn around and go all the way back to our original point of departure — it would have been midmorning before we reached it — and there was nothing that offered suitable accommodations between; just filling stations, roadside lunch-rooms, and detached farmsteads.

Besides she was beginning to tire. She refused to admit it, but it was easy to tell. It worried me.

The fifth place was called the Royal. It was already slightly less first-class than the previous ones had been; we were running out of them now. Nothing wrong with it, but just a little seedier and older.

I got the same answer at the desk, but this time I wouldn’t take it. The way her face drooped when she heard it was enough to make me persist. I took the night clerk aside out of her hearing.

“Listen, you’ve got to do something for me, I don’t care what it is,” I whispered fiercely. “We’ve just driven all the way from Lake City and my wife’s all in. I’m not going to drag her around to another place tonight.”

Then as his face continued impassive, “If you can’t accommodate both of us, find some way of putting her up at least. I’m willing to take my own chances, go out and sleep in the car or walk around the streets for the night.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, hooking his chin, “I think I could work out something like that for you. I just thought of something. There’s a little bit of a dinky room on the top floor. Ordinarily it’s not used as a guest room at all, just as a sort of storeroom. You couldn’t possibly both use it, because there’s only a single cot in it; but if you don’t think your wife would object, I’d be glad to let her have it, and I think you might still be able to find a room for yourself at the Y. They don’t admit women, and most of these Knights have brought their wives with them.”

I took a look at her pretty, drawn face. “Anything, anything,” I said gratefully.

He still had his doubts. “You’d better take her up and let her see it first.”

A colored boy came with us, with a passkey. On the way up I explained it to her. She gave me a rueful look, but I could see she was too tired even to object as much as she felt she should have. “Ah, that’s mean,” she murmured. “Our first night by ourselves.”

“It’s just for tonight. We’ll drive on right after breakfast. It’s important that you get some rest, hon. You can’t fool me, you can hardly keep your eyes open any more.”

She tucked her hand consolingly under my arm. “I don’t mind if you don’t. It’ll give me something to look forward to, seeing you in the morning.”

The bellboy led us along a quiet, green-carpeted hall, and around a turn, scanning numbers on the doors. He stopped three down from the turn, on the right-hand side, put his key in. “This is it here, sir.” The number was 1006.

The man at the desk hadn’t exaggerated. The room itself was little better than an alcove, long and narrow. I suppose two could have gotten into it; but it would have been a physical impossibility for two to sleep in it the way it was fitted up. It had a cot that was little wider than a shelf.

To give you an idea how narrow the room was, the window was narrower than average, and yet not more than a foot of wall-strip showed on either side of its frame. In other words it took up nearly the width of one entire side of the room.

I suppose I could have sat up in the single armchair all night and slept, or tried to, that way; but as long as there was a chance of getting a horizontal bed at the Y, why not be sensible about it? She agreed with me in this.

“Think you can go this, just until the morning?” I asked her, and the longing way she was eying that miserable cot gave me the answer. She was so tired, anything would have looked good to her right then.

We went down again and I told him I’d take it. I had the bellboy take her bag out of the car and bring it in, and the desk clerk turned the register around for her to sign.

She poised the inked pen and flashed me a tender look just as she was about to sign. “First time I’ve used it,” she breathed. I looked over her shoulder and watched her trace Mrs. James Cannon along the lined space. The last entry above hers was A. Krumbake, and wife. I noticed it because it was such a funny name.

The desk clerk had evidently decided by now that we were fairly desirable people. “I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t do more for you,” he said. “It’s just for this one night. By tomorrow morning a lot of them’ll be leaving.”

I went up with her a second time, to see that she was made as comfortable as she could be under the circumstances. But then there was nothing definitely wrong with the room except its tininess, and the only real hardship was our temporary separation.

I tipped the boy for bringing up her bag, and then I tipped him a second time for going and digging up a nice, fluffy quilt for her at my request — not to spread over her but to spread on top of the mattress and soften it up a little. Those cots aren’t as comfortable as regular beds by a darned sight. But she was so tired I was hoping she wouldn’t notice the difference.

Then after he’d thanked me for the double-header he’d gotten out of it, and left the room, I helped her off with her coat and hung it up for her, and even got down on my heels and undid the straps of her little sandals, so she wouldn’t have to bend over and go after them herself. Then we kissed a couple of times and told each other all about it, and I backed out the door.

The last I saw of her that night she was sitting on the edge of that cot in there, her shoeless feet partly tucked under her. She looked just like a little girl. She raised one hand, wriggled the fingers at me in good night as I reluctantly eased the door closed.

“Until tomorrow, sweetheart,” she called gently, when there was a crack of opening left.

“Until tomorrow.”

The night was as still around us as if it were holding its breath. The latch went cluck, and there we were on opposite sides of it.

The bellboy had taken the car down with him just now after he’d checked her in, and I had to wait out there a minute or two for him to bring it back up again at my ring. I stepped back to the turn in the hall while waiting, to look at the frosted glass transom over her door; and short as the time was, her light was already out. She must have just shrugged off her dress, fallen back flat, and pulled the coverings up over her.

Poor kid, I thought, with a commiserating shake of my head. The glass elevator panel flooded with light and I got in the car. The one bellhop doubled for liftman after twelve.

“I guess she’ll be comfortable,” he said.

“She was asleep before I left the floor,” I told him.

The desk man told me where the nearest branch of the Y was, and I took the car with me as the quickest way of getting over there at that hour. I had no trouble at all getting a room, and not a bad one at that for six bits.

I didn’t phone her before going up, to tell her I’d gotten something for myself, because I knew by the way I’d seen that light go out she was fast asleep already, and it would have been unnecessarily cruel to wake her again.

I woke up at eight and again I didn’t phone her, to find out how she was, because in the first place I was going right over there myself in a few more minutes, and in the second place I wanted her to get all the sleep she could before I got there.

I even took my time, showered and shaved, and drove over slowly, to make sure of not getting there any earlier than nine.

It was a beautiful day, with the sun as brand-new-looking as if it had never shone before; and I even stopped off and bought a gardenia for her to wear on the shoulder of her dress. I thought: I’ll check her out of that depressing dump. We’ll drive to the swellest restaurant in town, and she’ll sit having orange juice and toast while I sit looking at her face.

I braked in front of the Royal, got out, and went in, lighting up the whole lobby the way I was beaming.

A different man was at the desk now, on the day shift, but I knew the number of her room so I rode right up without stopping. I got out at the tenth, went down the hall the way we’d been led last night — still green-carpeted but a little less quiet now — and around the turn.

When I came to the third door down, on the right-hand side — the door that had 1006 on it — I stopped and listened a minute to see if I could tell whether she was up yet or not. If she wasn’t up yet, I was going back downstairs again, hang around in the lobby, and give her another half-hour of badly needed sleep.

But she was up already. I could hear a sound in there as if she were brushing out her dress or coat with a stiff-bristled brush — skish, skish, skish — so I knocked, easy and loving, on the door with just three knuckles.

The skish-skish-skish broke off a minute, but then went right on again. But the door hadn’t been tightly closed into the frame at all, and my knocking sent it drifting inward an inch or two. A whiff of turpentine or something like that nearly threw me over, but without stopping to distinguish what it was, I pushed the door the rest of the way in and walked in.

Then I pulled up short. I saw I had the wrong room.

There wasn’t anything in it — no furniture, that is. Just bare floorboards, walls and ceiling. Even the light fixture had been taken down, and two black wires stuck out of a hole, like insect feelers, where it had been.

A man in spotted white overalls and peaked cap was standing on a stepladder slapping a paint brush up and down the walls. Skish-skish-splop!

I grunted, “Guess I’ve got the wrong number,” and backed out.

“Guess you must have, bud,” he agreed, equally laconic, without even turning his head to see who I was.

I looked up at the door from the outside. Number 1006. But that was the number they’d given her, sure it was. I looked in a second time. Long and narrow, like an alcove. Not more than a foot of wall space on either side of the window frame.

Sure, this was the room, all right. They must have found out they had something better available after all, and changed her after I left last night. I said, “Where’d they put the lady that was in here, you got any idea?”

Skish-skish-skish. “I dunno, bud, you’ll have to find out at the desk. It was empty when I come here to work at seven.” Skish-skish-splop!

I went downstairs to the desk again, and I said, “Excuse me. What room have you got Mrs. Cannon in now?”

He looked up some chart or other they use, behind the scenes, then he came back and said, “We have no Mrs. Cannon here.”

I pulled my face back. Then I thrust it forward again. “What’s the matter with you?” I said curtly. “I came here with her myself last night. Better take another look.”

He did. A longer one. Then he came back and said, “I’m sorry, there’s no Mrs. Cannon registered here.”

I knew there was nothing to get excited about; it would probably be straightened out in a minute or two; but it was a pain in the neck. I was very patient. After all, this was the first morning of my honeymoon. “Your night man was on duty at the time. It was about three this morning. He gave her 1006.”

He looked that up too. “That’s not in use,” he said. “That’s down for redecorating. It’s been empty for—”

“I don’t care what it is. I tell you they checked my wife in there at three this morning, I went up with her myself! Will you quit arguing and find out what room she’s in, for me? I don’t want to stand here talking to you all day; I want to be with her.”

“But I’m telling you, mister, the chart shows no one by that name.”

“Then look in the register if you don’t believe me. I watched her sign it myself.”

People were standing around the lobby looking at me now, but I didn’t care.

“It would be on the chart,” he insisted. “It would have been transferred—” He ran the pad of his finger up the register page from bottom to top. Too fast, I couldn’t help noticing: without a hitch, as if there were nothing to impede it. Then he went back a page and ran it up that, in the same streamlined way.

“Give it to me,” I said impatiently. “I’ll find it for you in a minute.” I flung it around my way.

A. Krumbake, and wife stared at me. And then under that just a blank space all the way down to the bottom of the page. No more check-ins.

I could feel the pores of my face sort of closing up. That was what it felt like, anyway. Maybe it was just the process of getting pale. “She signed right under that name. It’s been rubbed out.”

“Oh, no, it hasn’t,” he told me firmly. “No one tampers with the register like that. People may leave, but their names stay on it.”

Dazedly, I traced the ball of my finger back and forth across the white paper under that name, Krumbake. Smooth and unrubbed, its semi-glossy finish unimpaired by erasure. I held the page up toward the light and tried to squint through it, to see whether it showed thinner there, either from rubbing or some other means of eradication. It was all of the same even opacity.

I spoke in a lower voice now; I wasn’t being impatient any more. “There’s something wrong. Something wrong about this. I can’t understand it. I saw her write it. I saw her sign it with my own eyes. I’ve known it was the right hotel all along, but even if I wasn’t sure, this other name, this name above, would prove it to me. Krumbake. I remember it from last night. Maybe they changed her without notifying you down here.”

“That wouldn’t be possible; it’s through me, down here, that all changes are made. It isn’t that I don’t know what room she’s in; it’s that there’s absolutely no record of any such person ever having been at the hotel, so you see you must be mis—”

“Call the manager for me,” I said hoarsely.

I stood there waiting by the onyx-topped desk until he came. I stood there very straight, very impassive, not touching the edge of the counter with my hands in any way, about an inch clear of it.

People were bustling back and forth, casually, normally, cheerily, behind me; plinking their keys down on the onyx; saying, “Any mail for me?”; saying, “I’ll be in the coffee shop if I’m called.” And something was already trying to make me feel a little cut off from them, a little set apart. As if a shadowy finger had drawn a ring around me where I stood, and mystic vapors were already beginning to rise from it, walling me off from my fellow men.

I wouldn’t let the feeling take hold of me — yet — but it was already there, trying to. I’d give an imperceptible shake of my head every once in a while and say to myself, “Things like this don’t happen in broad daylight. It’s just some kind of misunderstanding; it’ll be cleared up presently.”

The entrance, the lobby, had seemed so bright when I first came in, but I’d been mistaken. There were shadows lengthening in the far corners that only I could see. The gardenia I had for her was wilting.

The manager was no help at all. He tried to be, listened attentively, but then the most he could do was have the clerk repeat what he’d already done for me, look on the chart and look in the register. After all, details like that were in the hands of the staff. I simply got the same thing as before, only relayed through him now instead of direct from the desk man. “No, there hasn’t been any Mrs. Cannon here at any time.”

“Your night man will tell you,” I finally said in despair, “he’ll tell you I brought her here. Get hold of him, ask him. He’ll remember us.”

“I’ll call him down; he rooms right here in the house,” he said. But then with his hand on the phone he stopped to ask again, “Are you quite sure it was this hotel, Mr. Cannon? He was on duty until six this morning, and I hate to wake him up unless you—”

“Bring him down,” I said. “This is more important to me than his sleep. It’s got to be cleared up.” I wasn’t frightened yet, out-and-out scared; just baffled, highly worried, and with a peculiar lost feeling.

He came down inside of five minutes. I knew him right away, the minute he stepped out of the car, in spite of the fact that other passengers had come down with him. I was so sure he’d be able to straighten it out that I took a step toward him without waiting for him to join us. If they noticed that, which was a point in favor of my credibility — my knowing him at sight like that — they gave no sign.

I said, “You remember me, don’t you? You remember checking my wife into 1006 at three this morning, and telling me I’d have to go elsewhere?”

“No,” he said with polite regret. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

I could feel my face go white as if a soundless bombshell of flour or talcum had just burst all over it. I put one foot behind me and set the heel down and stayed that way.

The manager asked him, “Well, did the gentleman stop at the desk perhaps, just to inquire, and then go elsewhere? Do you remember him at all, Stevens?”

“No, I never saw him until now. It must have been some other hotel.”

“But look at me; look at my face,” I tried to say. But I guess I didn’t put any voice into it, it was just lip motion, because he didn’t seem to hear.

The manager shrugged amiably, as if to say, “Well, that’s all there is to it, as far as we’re concerned.”

I was breathing hard, fighting for self-control. “No. No, you can’t close this matter. I dem — I ask you to give me one more chance to prove that I... that I–Call the night porter, the night bellboy that carried up her bag for her.”

They were giving one another looks by now, as if I were some sort of crank.

“Listen, I’m in the full possession of my faculties, I’m not drunk, I wouldn’t come in here like this if I weren’t positive—”

The manager was going to try to pacify me and ease me out. “But don’t you see you must be mistaken, old man? There’s absolutely no record of it. We’re very strict about those things. If any of my men checked a guest in without entering it on the chart of available rooms, and in the register, I’d fire him on the spot. Was it the Palace? Was it the Commander, maybe? Try to think now, you’ll get it.”

And with each soothing syllable, he led me a step nearer the entrance.

I looked up suddenly, saw that the desk had already receded a considerable distance behind us, and balked. “No, don’t do this. This is no way to— Will you get that night-to-morning bellhop? Will you do that one more thing for me?”

He sighed, as if I were trying his patience sorely. “He’s probably home sleeping. Just a minute; I’ll find out.”

It turned out he wasn’t. They were so overcrowded and undermanned at the moment that instead of being at home he was sleeping right down in the basement, to save time coming and going. He came up in a couple of minutes, still buttoning the collar of his uniform. I knew him right away. He didn’t look straight at me at first, but at the manager.

“Do you remember seeing this gentleman come here with a lady, at three this morning? Do you remember carrying her bag up to 1006 for her?”

Then he did look straight at me — and didn’t seem to know me. “No, sir, Mr. DeGrasse.”

The shock wasn’t as great as the first time; it couldn’t have been, twice in succession.

“Don’t you remember that quilt you got for her, to spread over the mattress, and I gave you a second quarter for bringing it? You must remember that — dark blue, with little white flowers all over it—”

“No, sir, boss.”

“But I know your face! I remember that scar just over your eyebrow. And — part your lips a little — that gold cap in front that shows every time you grin.”

“No, sir, not me.”

My voice was curling up and dying inside my throat. “Then when you took me down alone with you, the last time, you even said, ‘I guess she’ll be comfortable’—” I squeezed his upper arm pleadingly. “Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember?”

“No, sir.” This time he said it so low you could hardly hear it, as if his training wouldn’t let him contradict me too emphatically, but on the other hand he felt obliged to stick to the facts.

I grabbed at the hem of my coat, bunched it up to emphasize the pattern and the color of the material. “Don’t you know me by this?” Then I let my fingers trail helplessly down the line of my jaw. “Don’t you know my face?”

He didn’t answer any more, just shook his head each time.

“What’re you doing this for? What’re you trying to do to me? All of you?” The invisible fumes from that necromancer’s ring, that seemed to cut me off from all the world, came swirling up thicker and thicker about me. My voice was strident with a strange new kind of fear, a fear I hadn’t known since I was ten.

“You’ve got me rocky now! You’ve got me down! Cut it out, I say!”

They were starting to draw back little by little away from me, prudently widen the tight knot they had formed around me. I turned from one to the other, from bellhop to night clerk, night clerk to day clerk, day clerk to manager, and each one as I turned to him retreated slightly.

There was a pause, while I fought against this other, lesser kind of death that was creeping over me — this death called strangeness, this snapping of all the customary little threads of cause and effect that are our moorings at other times. Slowly they all drew back from me step by step, until I was left there alone, cut off.

Then the tension exploded. My voice blasted the quiet of the lobby. “I want my wife!” I yelled shatteringly. “Tell me what’s become of her. What’ve you done with her? I came in here with her last night; you can’t tell me I didn’t...”

They circled, maneuvered around me. I heard the manager say in a harried undertone, “I knew this was going to happen. I could have told you he was going to end up like this. George! Archer! Get him out of here fast!”

My arms were suddenly seized from behind and held. I threshed against the constriction, so violently both my legs flung up clear of the floor at one time, dropped back again, but I couldn’t break it. There must have been two of them behind me.

The manager had come in close again, now that I was safely pinioned, no doubt hoping that his nearness would succeed in soft-pedaling the disturbance. “Now will you leave here quietly, or do you want us to call the police and turn you over to them?”

“You’d better call them anyway, Mr. DeGrasse,” the day clerk put in. “I’ve run into this mental type before. He’ll only come back in again the very minute your back’s turned.”

“No, I’d rather not, unless he forces me to. It’s bad for the hotel. Look at the crowd collecting down here on the main floor already. Tchk! Tchk!”

He tried to reason with me. “Now listen, give me a break, will you? You don’t look like the kind of a man who— Won’t you please go quietly? If I have you turned loose outside, will you go away and promise not to come in here again?”

“Ali-i-i-i-ice!” I sent it baying harrowingly down the long vista of lobby, lounges, foyers. I’d been gathering it in me the last few seconds while he was speaking to me. I put my heart and soul into it. It should have shaken down the big old-fashioned chandeliers by the vibration it caused alone. My voice broke under the strain. A woman onlooker somewhere in the background bleated at the very intensity of it.

The manager hit himself between the eyes in consternation. “Oh, this is fierce! Hurry up, call an officer quick, get him out of here.”

“See, what did I tell you?” the clerk said knowingly.

I got another chestful of air in, tore loose with it. “Somebody help me! You people standing around looking, isn’t there one of you will help me? I brought my wife here last night; now she’s gone and they’re trying to tell me I never—”

A brown hand suddenly sealed my mouth, was as quickly withdrawn again at the manager’s panic-stricken admonition. “George! Archer! Don’t lay a hand on him. No rough stuff. Make us liable for damages afterwards, y’know.”

Then I heard him and the desk man both give a deep breath of relief. “At last!” And I knew a cop must have come in behind me.

The grip on my arms behind my back changed, became single instead of double, one arm instead of two. But I didn’t fight against it.

Suddenly I was very passive, unresistant. Because suddenly I had a dread of arrest, confinement. I wanted to preserve my freedom of movement more than all else, to try to find her again. If they threw me in a cell, or put me in a straitjacket, how could I look for her, how could I ever hope to get at the bottom of this mystery?

The police would never believe me. If the very people who had seen her denied her existence, how could I expect those who hadn’t to believe in it?

Docile, I let him lead me out to the sidewalk in front of the hotel. The manager came out after us, mopping his forehead, and the desk clerk, and a few of the bolder among the guests who had been watching.

They held a three-cornered consultation in which I took no part. I even let the manager’s version of what the trouble was pass unchallenged. Not that he distorted what had actually happened just now, but he made it seem as if I were mistaken about having brought her there last night.

Finally the harness cop asked, “Well, do you want to press charges against him for creating a disturbance in your lobby?”

The manager held his hands palms out, horrified. “I should say not. We’re having our biggest rush of the year right now; I can’t take time off to run down there and go through all that tommyrot. Just see that he doesn’t come in again and create any more scenes.”

“I’ll see to that all right,” the cop promised truculently.

They went inside again, the manager and the clerk and the gallery that had watched us from the front steps. Inside to the hotel that had swallowed her alive.

The cop read me a lecture, to which I listened in stony silence. Then he gave me a shove that sent me floundering, said, “Keep moving now, hear me?”

I pointed, and said, “That’s my car standing there. May I get in it?” He checked first to make sure it was, then he opened the door, said, “Yeah, get in it and get out of here.”

He’d made no slightest attempt to find out what was behind the whole thing, whether there was some truth to my story or not, or whether it was drink, drugs, or mental aberration. But then he was only a harness cop. That’s why I hadn’t wanted to tangle with him.

This strangeness that had risen up around me was nothing to be fought by an ordinary patrolman. I was going to them — the police — but I was going of my own free will and in my own way, not to be dragged in by the scruff of the neck and then put under observation for the next twenty-four hours.

Ten minutes or so later I got out in front of the first precinct house I came upon, and went in, and said to the desk sergeant, “I want to talk to the lieutenant in charge.”

He stared at me coldly.

“What about?”

“About my wife.”

I didn’t talk to him alone. Three of his men were present. They were just shapes in the background as far as I was concerned, sitting there very quietly, listening.

I told it simply, hoping against hope I could get them to believe me, feeling somehow I couldn’t even before I had started.

“I’m Jimmy Cannon, I’m twenty-five years old, and I’m from Lake City. Last evening after dark my girl and I — her name was Alice Brown — we left there in my car, and at 1:15 this morning we were married by a justice of the peace.

“I think his name was Hulskamp — anyway it’s a white house with morning glories all over the porch, about fifty miles this side of Lake City.

“We got in here at three, and they gave her a little room at the Royal Hotel. They couldn’t put me up, but they put her up alone. The number was 1006. I know that as well as I know I’m sitting here. This morning when I went over there, they were painting the room and I haven’t been able to find a trace of her since.

“I saw her sign the register, but her name isn’t on it any more. The night clerk says he never saw her. The bellboy says he never saw her. Now they’ve got me so I’m scared and shaky, like a little kid is of the dark. I want you men to help me. Won’t you men help me?”

“We’ll help you” — said the lieutenant in charge. Slowly, awfully slowly; I didn’t like that slowness — “if we’re able to.” And I knew what he meant; if we find any evidence that your story is true.

He turned his head toward one of the three shadowy listeners in the background, at random. The one nearest him. Then he changed his mind, shifted his gaze further along, to the one in the middle. “Ainslie, suppose you take a whack at this. Go over to this hotel and see what you can find out. Take him with you.”

So, as he stood up, I separated him from the blurred background for the first time. I was disappointed. He was just another man like me, maybe five years older, maybe an inch or two shorter. He could feel cold and hungry and tired, just as I could. He could believe a lie, just as I could. He couldn’t see around corners or through walls, or into hearts, any more than I could. What good was he going to be?

He looked as if he’d seen every rotten thing there was in the world. He looked as if he’d once expected to see other things beside that, but didn’t any more. He said, “Yes, sir,” and you couldn’t tell whether he was bored or interested, or liked the detail or resented it, or gave a rap.

On the way over I said, “You’ve got to find out what became of her. You’ve got to make them—”

“I’ll do what I can.” He couldn’t seem to get any emotion into his voice. After all, from his point of view, why should he?

“You’ll do what you can!” I gasped. “Didn’t you ever have a wife?”

He gave me a look, but you couldn’t tell what was in it.

We went straight back to the Royal. He was very businesslike, did a streamlined, competent job. Didn’t waste a question or a motion, but didn’t leave out a single relevant thing either.

I took back what I’d been worried about at first; he was good.

But he wasn’t good enough for this, whatever it was.

It went like this: “Let me see your register.” He took out a glass, went over the place I pointed out to him where she had signed. Evidently couldn’t find any marks of erasure any more than I had with my naked eye.

Then we went up to the room, 1006. The painter was working on the wood trim by now, had all four walls and the ceiling done. It was such a small cubbyhole it wasn’t even a half-day’s work. He said, “Where was the furniture when you came in here to work this morning? Still in the room, or had the room been cleared?”

“Still in the room; I cleared it myself. There wasn’t much; a chair, a scatter rug, a cot.”

“Was the cot made or unmade?”

“Made up.”

“Was the window opened or closed when you came in?”

“Closed tight.”

“Was the air in the room noticeably stale, as if it had been closed up that way all night, or not noticeably so, as if it had only been closed up shortly before?”

“Turrible, like it hadn’t been aired for a week. And believe me, when I notice a place is stuffy, you can bet it’s stuffy all right.”

“Were there any marks on the walls or floor or anywhere around the room that didn’t belong there?”

I knew he meant blood, and gnawed the lining of my cheek fearfully.

“Nothing except plain grime, that needed painting bad.”

We visited the housekeeper next. She took us to the linen room and showed us. “If there’re any dark blue quilts in use in this house, it’s the first I know about it. The bellboy could have come in here at that hour — but all he would have gotten are maroon ones. And here’s my supply list, every quilt accounted for. So it didn’t come from here.”

We visited the baggage room next. “Look around and see if there’s anything in here that resembles that bag of your wife’s.” I did, and there wasn’t. Wherever she had gone, whatever had become of her, her bag had gone with her.

About fifty minutes after we’d first gone in, we were back in my car outside the hotel again. He’d done a good, thorough job; and if I was willing to admit that, it must have been.

We sat there without moving a couple of minutes, me under the wheel. He kept looking at me steadily, sizing me up. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I threw my head back and started to look up the face of the building, story by story. I counted as my eyes rose, and when they’d come to the tenth floor I stopped them there, swung them around the corner of the building to the third window from the end, stopped them there for good. It was a skinnier window than the others. So small, so high up, to hold so much mystery. “Alice,” I whispered up to it, and it didn’t answer, didn’t hear.

His voice brought my gaze down from there again. “The burden of the proof has now fallen on you. It’s up to you to give me some evidence that she actually went in there. That she actually was with you. That she actually was. I wasn’t able to find a single person in that building who actually saw her.”

I just looked at him, the kind of a look you get from someone right after you stick a knife in his heart. Finally I said with quiet bitterness, “So now I have to prove I had a wife.”

The instant, remorseless way he answered that was brutal in itself. “Yes, you do. Can you?”

I pushed my hat off, raked my fingers through my hair, with one and the same gesture. “Could you, if someone asked you in the middle of the street? Could you?”

He peeled out a wallet, flipped it open. A tiny snapshot of a woman’s head and shoulders danced in front of my eyes for a split second. He folded it and put it away again. He briefly touched a gold band on his finger, token of that old custom that is starting to revive again, of husbands wearing marriage rings as well as wives.

“And a dozen other ways. You could call Tremont 4102. Or you could call the marriage clerk at the City Hall—”

“But we were just beginning,” I said bleakly. “I have no pictures. She was wearing the only ring we had. The certificate was to be mailed to us at Lake City in a few days. You could call this justice of the peace, Hulskamp, out near U.S. 9; he’ll tell you—”

“Okay, Cannon, I’ll do that. We’ll go back to headquarters, I’ll tell the lieutenant what I’ve gotten so far, and I’ll do it from there.”

Now at last it would be over, now at last it would be straightened out. He left me sitting in the room outside the lieutenant’s office, while he was in there reporting to him. He seemed to take a long time, so I knew he must be doing more than just reporting; they must be talking it over.

Finally Ainslie looked out at me, but only to say, “What was the name of that justice you say married you, again?”

“Hulskamp.”

He closed the door again. I had another long wait. Finally it opened a second time, he hitched his head at me to come in. The atmosphere, when I got in there, was one of hard, brittle curiosity, without any feeling to it. As when you look at somebody afflicted in a way you never heard of before, and wonder how he got that way.

I got that distinctly. Even from Ainslie, and it was fairly oozing from his lieutenant and the other men in the room. They looked and looked and looked at me.

The lieutenant did the talking. “You say a Justice Hulskamp married you. You still say that?”

“A white house sitting off the road, this side of Lake City, just before you get to U.S. 9—”

“Well, there is a Justice Hulskamp, and he does live out there. We just had him on the phone. He says he never married anyone named James Cannon to anyone named Alice Brown, last night or any other night. He hasn’t married anyone who looks like you, recently, to anyone who looks as you say she did. He didn’t marry anyone at all at any time last night—”

He was going off someplace while he talked to me, and his voice was going away after him. Ainslie filled a paper cup with water at the cooler in the corner, strewed it deftly across my face, once each way, as if I were some kind of a potted plant, and one of the other guys picked me up from the floor and put me back on the chair again.

The lieutenant’s voice came back again stronger, as if he hadn’t gone away after all. “Who were her people in Lake City?”

“She was an orphan.”

“Well, where did she work there?”

“At the house of a family named Beresford, at 20 New Hampshire Avenue. She was in service there, a maid; she lived with them—”

“Give me long distance. Give me Lake City. This is Michianopolis police headquarters. I want to talk to a party named Beresford, 20 New Hampshire Avenue.”

The ring came back fast. “We’re holding a man here who claims he married a maid working for you. A girl by the name of Alice Brown.”

He’d hung up before I even knew it was over. “There’s no maid employed there. They don’t know anything about any Alice Brown, never heard of her.”

I stayed on the chair this time. I just didn’t hear so clearly for a while, everything sort of fuzzy.

“...Hallucinations... And he’s in a semi-hysterical condition right now. Notice how jerky his reflexes are?” Someone was chopping the edge of his hand at my kneecaps. “Seems harmless. Let him go. It’ll probably wear off. I’ll give him a sedative.” Someone snapped a bag shut, left the room.

The lieutenant’s voice was as flat as it was deadly, and it brooked no argument. “You never had a wife, Cannon!”

I could see only Ainslie’s face in the welter before me. “You have, though, haven’t you?” I said, so low none of the others could catch it.

The lieutenant was still talking to me. “Now get out of here before we change our minds and call an ambulance to take you away. And don’t go back into any more hotels raising a row.”

I hung around outside; I wouldn’t go away. Where was there to go? One of the others came out, looked at me fleetingly in passing, said with humorous tolerance, “You better get out of here before the lieutenant catches you,” and went on about his business.

I waited until I saw Ainslie come out. Then I went up to him. “I’ve got to talk to you; you’ve got to listen to me—”

“Why? The matter’s closed. You heard the lieutenant.”

He went back to some sort of a locker room. I went after him.

“You’re not supposed to come back here. Now look, Cannon, I’m telling you for your own good, you’re looking for trouble if you keep this up.”

“Don’t turn me down,” I said hoarsely, tugging away at the seam of his sleeve. “Can’t you see the state I’m in? I’m like someone in a dark room, crying for a match. I’m like someone drowning, crying for a helping hand. I can’t make it alone anymore.”

There wasn’t anyone in the place but just the two of us. My pawing grip slipped down his sleeve to the hem of his coat, and I was looking up at him from my knees. What did I care? There was no such thing as pride or dignity anymore. I would have crawled flat along the floor on my belly, just to get a word of relief out of anyone.

“Forget you’re a detective, and I’m a case. I’m appealing to you as one human being to another. I’m appealing to you as one husband to another. Don’t turn your back on me like that, don’t pull my hands away from your coat. I don’t ask you to do anything for me any more; you don’t have to lift a finger. Just say, ‘Yes, you had a wife, Cannon.’ Just give me that one glimmer of light in the dark. Say it even if you don’t mean it, even if you don’t believe it, say it anyway. Oh, say it, will you—”

He drew the back of his hand slowly across his mouth, either in disgust at my abasement or in a sudden access of pity. Maybe a little of both. His voice was hoarse, as if he were sore at the spot I was putting him on.

“Give me anything,” he said, shaking me a little and jogging me to my feet, “the slightest thing, to show that she ever existed, to show that there ever was such a person outside of your own mind, and I’ll be with you to the bitter end. Give me a pin that she used to fasten her dress with. Give me a grain of powder, a stray hair; but prove that it was hers. But I can’t do it unless you do.”

“And I have nothing to show you. Not a pin, not a grain of powder.”

I took a few dragging steps toward the locker room door. “You’re doing something to me that I wouldn’t do to a dog,” I mumbled. “What you’re doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You’re locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You’re taking my mind away from me. You’re condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won’t happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year— Well, I guess that’s that.”

I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant’s desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.

I left my car there where it was. What did I want with it? I started to walk, without knowing where I was going. I walked a long time, and a good long distance.

Then all of a sudden I noticed a lighted drugstore — it was dark by now — across the way. I must have passed others before now, but this was the first one I noticed.

I crossed over and looked in the open doorway. It had telephone booths; I could see them at the back, to one side. I moved on a few steps, stopped, and felt in my pockets. I found a quill toothpick, and I dug the point of it good and hard down the back of my finger, ripped the skin open. Then I threw it away. I wrapped a handkerchief around the finger, and I turned around and went inside.

I said to the clerk, “Give me some iodine. My cat just scratched me and I don’t want to take any chances.”

He said, “Want me to put it on for you?”

I said, “No, gimme the whole bottle. I’ll take it home; we’re out of it.”

I paid him for it and moved over to one side and started to thumb through one of the directories in the rack. Just as he went back inside the prescription room, I found my number. I went into the end booth and pulled the slide closed. I took off my hat and hung it over the phone mouthpiece, sort of making myself at home.

Then I sat down and started to undo the paper he’d just wrapped around the bottle. When I had it off, I pulled the knot of my tie out a little further to give myself lots of room. Then I took the stopper out of the bottle and tilted my head back and braced myself.

Something that felt like a baseball bat came chopping down on the arm I was bringing up, and nearly broke it in two, and the iodine sprayed all over the side of the booth. Ainslie was standing there in the half-opened slide.

He said, “Come on outta there!” and gave me a pull by the collar of my coat that did it for me. He didn’t say anything more until we were out on the sidewalk in front of the place. Then he stopped and looked me over from head to foot as if I were some kind of a microbe. He said, “Well, it was worth coming all this way after you, at that!”

My car was standing there; I must have left the keys in it and he must have tailed me in that. He thumbed it, and I went over and climbed in and sat there limply. He stayed outside.

I said, “I can’t live with shadows, Ainslie. I’m frightened, too frightened to go on. You don’t know what the nights’ll be like from now on. And the days won’t be much better. I’d rather go now, fast. Show her to me on a slab at the morgue and I won’t whimper. Show her to me all cut up in small pieces and I won’t bat an eyelash. But don’t say she never was.”

“I guessed what was coming from the minute I saw you jab yourself with that toothpick.” He watched sardonically while I slowly unwound the handkerchief, that had stayed around my finger all this time. The scratch had hardly bled at all. Just a single hairline of red was on the handkerchief.

We both looked at that.

Then more of the handkerchief came open. We both looked at the initials in the corner. A.B. We both, most likely, smelled the faint sweetness that still came from it at the same time. Very faint, for it was such a small handkerchief.

We both looked at each other, and both our minds made the same discovery at the same time. I was the one who spoke it aloud. “It’s hers,” I said grimly; “the wife that didn’t exist.”

“This is a fine time to come out with it,” he said quietly. “Move over, I’ll drive.” That was his way of saying, “I’m in.”

I said, “I remember now. I got a cinder in my eye, during the drive in, and she lent me her handkerchief to take it out with; I didn’t have one of my own on me. I guess I forgot to give it back to her. And this — is it.” I looked at him rebukingly. “What a difference a few square inches of linen can make. Without it, I was a madman. With it, I’m a rational being who enlists your co-operation.”

“No. You didn’t turn it up when it would have done you the most good, back at the station house. You only turned it up several minutes after you were already supposed to have gulped a bottle of iodine. I could tell by your face you’d forgotten about it until then yourself. I think that does make a difference. To me it does, anyway.” He meshed gears.

“And what’re you going to do about it?”

“Since we don’t believe in the supernatural, our only possible premise is that there’s been some human agency at work.”

I noticed the direction he was taking. “Aren’t you going back to the Royal?”

“There’s no use bothering with the hotel. D’you see what I mean?”

“No, I don’t,” I said bluntly. “That was where she disappeared.”

“The focus for this wholesale case of astigmatism is elsewhere, outside the hotel. It’s true we could try to break them down, there at the hotel. But what about the justice, what about the Beresford house in Lake City? I think it’ll be simpler to try to find out the reason rather than the mechanics of the disappearance.

“And the reason lies elsewhere. Because you brought her to the hotel from the justice’s. And to the justice’s from Lake City. The hotel was the last stage. Find out why the justice denies he married you, and we don’t have to find out why the hotel staff denies having seen her. Find out why the Beresford house denies she was a maid there, and we don’t have to find out why the justice denies he married you.

“Find out, maybe, something else, and we don’t have to find out why the Beresford house denies she was a maid there. The time element keeps moving backward through the whole thing. Now talk to me. How long did you know her? How well? How much did you know about her?”

“Not long. Not well. Practically nothing. It was one of those story-book things. I met her a week ago last night. She was sitting on a bench in the park, as if she were lonely, didn’t have a friend in the world. I don’t make a habit of accosting girls on park benches, but she looked so dejected it got to me.

“Well, that’s how we met. I walked her home afterwards to where she said she lived. But when we got there — holy smoke, it was a mansion! I got nervous, said: ‘Gee, this is a pretty swell place for a guy like me to be bringing anyone home to, just a clerk in a store.’

“She laughed and said, ‘I’m only the maid. Disappointed?’ I said, ‘No, I would have been disappointed if you’d been anybody else, because then you wouldn’t be in my class.’ She seemed relieved after I said that. She said, ‘Gee, I’ve waited so long to find someone who’d like me for myself.’

“Well, to make a long story short, we made an appointment to meet at that same bench the next night. I waited there for two hours and she never showed up. Luckily I went back there the next night again — and there she was. She explained she hadn’t been able to get out the night before; the people where she worked were having company or something.

“When I took her home that night I asked her name, which I didn’t know yet, and that seemed to scare her. She got sort of flustered, and I saw her look at her handbag. It had the initials A.B. on it; I’d already noticed that the first night I met her. She said, ‘Alice Brown.’

“By the third time we met we were already nuts about each other. I asked her whether she’d take a chance and marry me. She said, ‘Is it possible someone wants to marry little Alice Brown, who hasn’t a friend in the world?’ I said yes, and that was all there was to it.

“Only, when I left her that night, she seemed kind of scared. First I thought she was scared I’d change my mind, back out, but it wasn’t that. She said, ‘Jimmy, let’s hurry up and do it, don’t let’s put it off. Let’s do it while — while we have the chance’; and she hung onto my sleeve tight with both hands.

“So the next day I asked for a week off, which I had coming to me from last summer anyway, and I waited for her with the car on the corner three blocks away from the house where she was in service. She came running as if the devil were behind her, but I thought that was because she didn’t want to keep me waiting. She just had that one little overnight bag with her.

“She jumped in, and her face looked kind of white, and she said, ‘Hurry, Jimmy, hurry!’ And away we went. And until we were outside of Lake City, she kept looking back every once in a while, as if she were afraid someone was coming after us.”

Ainslie didn’t say much after all that rigmarole I’d given him. Just five words, after we’d driven on for about ten minutes or so. “She was afraid of something.” And then in another ten minutes, “And whatever it was, it’s what’s caught up with her now.”

We stopped at the filling station where Alice and I had stopped for gas the night before. I looked over the attendants, said: “There’s the one serviced us.” Ainslie called him over, played a pocket light on my face.

“Do you remember servicing this man last night? This man, and a girl with him?”

“Nope, not me. Maybe one of the oth—”

Neither of us could see his hands at the moment; they were out of range below the car door. I said, “He’s got a white scar across the back of his right hand. I saw it last night.”

Ainslie said, “Hold it up.”

He did, and there was a white cicatrice across it, where stitches had been taken or something. Ainslie said, “Now whaddye say?”

It didn’t shake him in the least. “I still say no. Maybe he saw me at one time or another, but I’ve never seen him, to my knowledge, with or without a girl.” He waited a minute, then added: “Why should I deny it, if it was so?”

“We’ll be back, in a day or in a week or in a month,” Ainslie let him know grimly, “but we’ll be back — to find that out.”

We drove on. “Those few square inches of linen handkerchief will be wearing pretty thin, if this keeps up,” I muttered dejectedly after a while.

“Don’t let that worry you,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Once I’m sold, I don’t unsell easily.”

We crossed U.S. 9 a half-hour later. A little white house came skimming along out of the darkness. “This is where I was married to a ghost,” I said.

He braked, twisted the grip of the door latch. My hand shot down, stopped his arm.

“Wait; before you go in, listen to this. It may help out that handkerchief. There’ll be a round mirror in the hall, to the left of the door, with antlers over it for a hatrack. In their parlor, where he read the service, there’ll be an upright piano, with brass candle holders sticking out of the front of it, above the keyboard. It’s got a scarf on it that ends in a lot of little plush balls. And on the music rack, the top selection is a copy of Kiss Me Again. And on the wall there’s a painting of a lot of fruit rolling out of a basket. And this housekeeper, he calls her Dora.”

“That’s enough,” he said in that toneless voice of his. “I told you I was with you anyway, didn’t I?” He got out and went over and rang the bell. I went with him, of course.

They must have been asleep; they didn’t answer right away. Then the housekeeper opened the door and looked out at us. Before we could say anything, we heard the justice call down the stairs, “Who is it, Dora?”

Ainslie asked if we could come in and talk to him, and straightened his necktie in the round mirror to the left of the door, with antlers over it.

Hulskamp came down in a bathrobe, and Ainslie said: “You married this man to a girl named Alice Brown last night.” It wasn’t a question.

The justice said, “No. I’ve already been asked that once, over the phone, and I said I hadn’t. I’ve never seen this young man before.” He even put on his glasses to look at me better.

Ainslie didn’t argue the matter, almost seemed to take him at his word. “I won’t ask you to let me see your records,” he said drily, “because they’ll undoubtedly — bear out your word.”

He strolled as far as the parlor entrance, glanced in idly. I peered over his shoulder. There was an upright piano with brass candle sconces. A copy of Kiss Me Again was topmost on its rack. A painting of fruit rolling out of a basket daubed the wall.

“They certainly will!” snapped the justice resentfully.

The housekeeper put her oar in. “I’m a witness at all the marriages the justice performs, and I’m sure the young man’s mistaken. I don’t ever recall—”

Ainslie steadied me with one hand clasping my arm, and led me out without another word. We got in the car again. Their door closed, somewhat forcefully.

I pounded the rim of the wheel helplessly with my fist. I said, “What is it? Some sort of wholesale conspiracy? But why? She’s not important; I’m not important.”

He threw in the clutch, the little white house ebbed away in the night darkness behind us.

“It’s some sort of a conspiracy, all right,” he said. “We’ve got to get the reason for it. That’s the quickest, shortest way to clear it up. To take any of the weaker links, the bellboy at the hotel or that filling station attendant, and break them down, would not only take days, but in the end would only get us some anonymous individual who’d either threatened them or paid them to forget having seen your wife, and we wouldn’t be much further than before. If we can get the reason behind it all, the source, we don’t have to bother with any of these small fry. That’s why we’re heading back to Lake City instead of just concentrating on that hotel in Michianopolis.”

We made Lake City by one A.M. and I showed him the way to New Hampshire Avenue. Number 20 was a massive corner house, and we glided up to it from the back, along the side street; braked across the way from the service entrance I’d always brought her back to. Not a light was showing.

“Don’t get out yet,” he said. “When you brought her home nights, you brought her to this back door, right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, did you ever actually see her open it and go in, or did you just leave her here by it and walk off without waiting to see where she went?”

I felt myself get a little frightened again. This was something that hadn’t occurred to me until now. “I didn’t once actually see the door open and her go inside, now that I come to think of it. She seemed to — to want me to walk off without waiting. She didn’t say so, but I could tell. I thought maybe it was because she didn’t want her employers to catch on she was going around with anyone. I’d walk off, down that way—”

I pointed to the corner behind us, on the next avenue over. “Then when I got there, I’d look back from there each time. As anyone would. Each time I did, she wasn’t there anymore. I thought she’d gone in, but — it’s funny, I never saw her go in.”

He nodded gloomily. “Just about what I thought. For all you know, she didn’t even belong in that house, never went in there at all. A quick little dash, while your back was turned, would have taken her around the corner of the house and out of sight. And the city would have swallowed her up.”

“But why?” I said helplessly.

He didn’t answer that. We hadn’t had a good look at the front of the house yet. As I have said, we had approached from the rear, along the side street. He got out of the car now, and I followed suit. We walked down the few remaining yards to the corner, and turned and looked all up and down the front of it.

It was an expensive limestone building; it spelt real dough, even looking at it in the dark as we were. There was a light showing from the front, through one of the tall ground-floor windows — but a very dim one, almost like a night light. It didn’t send any shine outside; just peered wanly around the sides of the blind that had been drawn on the inside.

Something moved close up against the door-facing, stirred a little. If it hadn’t been white limestone, it wouldn’t have even been noticeable at all. We both saw it at once; I caught instinctively at Ainslie’s arm, and a cold knife of dull fear went through me — though why I couldn’t tell.

“Crepe on the front door,” he whispered. “Somebody’s dead in there. Whether she did go in here or didn’t, just the same I think we’d better have a look at the inside of this place.”

I took a step in the direction of the front door. He recalled me with a curt gesture. “And by that I don’t mean march up the front steps, ring the doorbell, and flash my badge.”

“Then how?”

Brakes ground somewhere along the side street behind us. We turned our heads and a lacquered sedan-truck had drawn up directly before the service door of 20 New Hampshire Avenue. “Just in time,” Ainslie said. “This is how.”

We started back toward it. The driver and a helper had gotten down, were unloading batches of camp chairs and stacking them up against the side of the truck, preparatory to taking them in.

“For the services tomorrow, I suppose,” Ainslie grunted. He said to the driver: “Who is it that died, bud?”

“Mean to say you ain’t heard? It’s in alla papers.”

“We’re from out of town.”

“Alma Beresford, the heiress. Richest gal in twenty-four states. She was an orphum, too. Pretty soft for her guardian; not another soul to get the cash but him.”

“What was it?” For the first time since I’d known him, you couldn’t have called Ainslie’s voice toneless; it was sort of springy like a rubber band that’s pulled too tight.

“Heart attack, I think.” The truckman snapped his fingers. “Like that. Shows you that rich or poor, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

Ainslie asked only one more question. “Why you bringing these setups at an hour like this? They’re not going to hold the services in the middle of the night, are they?”

“Nah, but first thing in the morning; so early there wouldn’t be a chance to get ’em over here unless we delivered ’em ahead of time.” He was suddenly staring fascinatedly at the silvery lining of Ainslie’s hand.

Ainslie’s voice was toneless again. “Tell you what you fellows are going to do. You’re going to save yourselves the trouble of hauling all those camp chairs inside, and you’re going to get paid for it in the bargain. Lend us those work aprons y’got on.”

He slipped them something apiece; I couldn’t see whether it was two dollars or five. “Gimme your delivery ticket; I’ll get it receipted for you. You two get back in the truck and lie low.”

We both doffed our hats and coats, put them in our own car, rolled our shirt sleeves, put on the work aprons, and rang the service bell. There was a short wait and then a wire-sheathed bulb over the entry glimmered pallidly as an indication someone was coming. The door opened and a gaunt-faced sandy-haired man looked out at us. It was hard to tell just how old he was. He looked like a butler, but he was dressed in a business suit.

“Camp chairs from the Thebes Funerary Chapel,” Ainslie said, reading from the delivery ticket.

“Follow me and I’ll show you where they’re to go,” he said in a hushed voice. “Be as quiet as you can. We’ve only just succeeded in getting Mr. Hastings to lie down and try to rest a little.” The guardian, I supposed. In which case this anemic-looking customer would be the guardian’s Man Friday.

We each grabbed up a double armful of the camp chairs and went in after him. They were corded together in batches of half a dozen. We could have cleared up the whole consignment at once — they were lightweight — but Ainslie gave me the eye not to; I guess he wanted to have an excuse to prolong our presence as much as possible.

You went down a short delivery passageway, then up a few steps into a brightly lighted kitchen.

A hatchet-faced woman in maid’s livery was sitting by a table crying away under one eye-shading hand, a teacup and a tumbler of gin before her. Judging by the redness of her nose, she’d been at it for hours. “My baby,” she’d mew every once in a while.

We followed him out at the other side, through a pantry, a gloomy-looking dining room, and finally into a huge cavernous front room, eerily suffused with flickering candlelight that did no more than heighten the shadows in its far corners. It was this wavering pallor that we must have seen from outside of the house.

An open coffin rested on a flower-massed bier at the upper end of the place, a lighted taper glimmering at each corner of it. A violet velvet pall had been spread over the top of it, concealing what lay within.

But a tiny peaked outline, that could have been made by an uptilted nose, was visible in the plush at one extremity of its length. That knife of dread gave an excruciating little twist in me, and again I didn’t know why — or refused to admit I did. It was as if I instinctively sensed the nearness of something familiar.

The rest of the room, before this monument to mortality, had been left clear, its original furniture moved aside or taken out. The man who had admitted us gave us our instructions.

“Arrange them in four rows, here in front of the bier. Leave an aisle through them. And be sure and leave enough space up ahead for the divine who will deliver the oration.” Then he retreated to the door and stood watching us for a moment.

Ainslie produced a knife from the pocket of his borrowed apron, began severing the cording that bound the frames of the camp chairs together. I opened them one at a time as he freed them and began setting them up in quadruple rows, being as slow about it as I could.

There was a slight sound and the factotum had tiptoed back toward the kitchen for a moment, perhaps for a sip of the comforting gin. Ainslie raised his head, caught my eye, speared his thumb at the bier imperatively. I was the nearer of us to it at the moment. I knew what he meant: look and see who it was.

I went cold all over, but I put down the camp chair I was fiddling with and edged over toward it on arched feet. The taper flames bent down flat as I approached them, and sort of hissed. Sweat needled out under the roots of my hair. I went around by the head, where that tiny little peak was, reached out, and gingerly took hold of the corners of the velvet pall, which fell loosely over the two sides of the coffin without quite meeting the headboard.

Just as my wrists flexed to tip it back, Ainslie coughed warningly. There was a whispered returning tread from beyond the doorway. I let go, took a quick side-jump back toward where I’d been.

I glanced around and the secretary fellow had come back again, was standing there with his eyes fixed on me. I pretended to be measuring off the distance for the pulpit with my foot.

“You men are rather slow about it,” he said, thin-lipped.

“You want ’em just so, don’t you?” Ainslie answered. He went out to get the second batch. I pretended one of the stools had jammed and I was having trouble getting it open, as an excuse to linger behind. The secretary was on his guard. He lingered too.

The dick took care of that. He waited until he was halfway back with his load of camp chairs, then dropped them all over the pantry floor with a clatter, to draw the watchdog off.

It worked. He gave a huff of annoyance, turned, and went in to bawl Ainslie out for the noise he had made. The minute the doorway cleared, I gave a cat-like spring back toward the velvet mound. This time I made it. I flung the pall back—

Then I let go of it, and the lighted candles started spinning around my head, faster and faster, until they made a comet-like track of fire. The still face staring up at me from the coffin was Alice’s.

I felt my knees hit something, and I was swaying back and forth on them there beside the bier. I could hear somebody coming back toward the room, but whether it was Ainslie or the other guy I didn’t know and didn’t care. Then an arm went around me and steadied me to my feet once more, so I knew it was Ainslie.

“It’s her,” I said brokenly. “Alice. I can’t understand it; she must — have — been this rich girl, Alma Beresford, all the time—”

He let go of me, took a quick step over to the coffin, flung the pall even further back than I had. He dipped his head, as if he were staring nearsightedly. Then he turned and I never felt my shoulder grabbed so hard before, or since. His fingers felt like steel claws that went in, and met in the middle. For a minute I didn’t know whether he was attacking me or not; and I was too dazed to care.

He was pointing at the coffin. “Look at that!” he demanded. I didn’t know what he meant. He shook me brutally, either to get me to understand or because he was so excited himself. “She’s not dead. Watch her chest cavern.”

I fixed my eyes on it. You could tell only by watching the line where the white satin of her burial gown met the violet quilting of the coffin lining. The white was faintly, but unmistakably and rhythmically, rising and falling.

“They’ve got her either drugged or in a coma—”

He broke off short, let go of me as if my shoulder were red-hot and burned his fingers. His hand flashed down and up again, and he’d drawn and sighted over my shoulder. “Put it down or I’ll let you have it right where you are!” he said.

Something thudded to the carpet. I turned and the secretary was standing there in the doorway, palms out, a fallen revolver lying at his feet.

“Go over and get that, Cannon,” Ainslie ordered. “This looks like the finale now. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

There was an arched opening behind him, leading out to the front entrance hall, I suppose, and the stairway to the upper floors. We’d come in from the rear, remember. Velvet drapes had been drawn closed over that arch, sealing it up, the whole time we’d been in there.

He must have come in through there. I bent down before the motionless secretary, and, with my fingers an inch away from the fallen gun at his feet, I heard the impact of a head blow and Ainslie gave the peculiar guttural groan of someone going down into unconsciousness.

The secretary’s foot snaked out and sped the gun skidding far across to the other side of the room. Then he dropped on my curved back like a dead weight and I went down flat under him, pushing my face into the parquet flooring.

He kept aiming blows at the side of my head from above, but he had only his fists to work with at the moment, and even the ones that landed weren’t as effective as whatever it was that had been used on Ainslie. I reached upward and over, caught the secretary by the shoulders of his coat, tugged and at the same time jerked my body out from under him in the opposite direction; and he came flying up in a backward somersault and landed sprawling a few feet away.

I got up and looked. Ainslie lay inert, face down on the floor to one side of the coffin, something gleaming wet down the part of his hair. There was a handsome but vicious-looking gray-haired man in a brocaded dressing gown standing behind him holding a gun on me, trying to cow me with it.

“Get him, Mr. Hastings,” panted the one I’d just flung off.

It would have taken more than a gun to hold me, after what I’d been through. I charged at him, around Ainslie’s form. He evidently didn’t want to fire, didn’t want the noise of a shot to be heard there in the house. Instead, he reversed his gun, swung the butt high up over his shoulder; and my own headfirst charge undid me. I couldn’t swerve or brake in time, plunged right in under it. A hissing, spark-shedding skyrocket seemed to tear through the top of my head, and I went down into nothingness as Ainslie had.

For an hour after I recovered consciousness I was in complete darkness. Such utter darkness that I couldn’t be sure the blow hadn’t affected my optic nerve.

I was in a sitting position, on something cold — stone flooring probably — with my hands lashed behind me, around something equally cold and sweating moisture, most likely a water pipe. My feet were tied too, and there was a gag over my mouth. My head blazed with pain.

After what seemed like an age, a smoky gray light began to dilute the blackness; so at least my eyesight wasn’t impaired. As the light strengthened it showed me first a barred grate high up on the wall through which the dawn was peering in. Next, a dingy basement around me, presumably that of the same New Hampshire Avenue house we had entered several hours ago.

And finally, if that was any consolation to me, Ainslie sitting facing me from across the way, in about the same fix I was. Hands and feet secured, sitting before another pipe, mouth also gagged. A dark stain down one side of his forehead, long since dried, marked the effect of the blow he had received.

We just stared at each other, unable to communicate. We could turn our heads. He shook his from side to side deprecatingly. I knew what he meant: “Fine spot we ended up in, didn’t we?” I nodded, meaning, “You said it.”

But we were enjoying perfect comfort and peace of mind, compared to what was to follow. It came within about half an hour at the most. Sounds of activity began to penetrate to where we were. First a desultory moving about sounded over our heads, as if someone were looking things over to make sure everything was in order. Then something heavy was set down: it might have been a table, a desk — or a pulpit.

This cellar compartment we were in seemed to be directly under that large front room where the coffin was and where the obsequies were to be held.

A dawning horror began to percolate through me. I looked at Ainslie and tried to make him understand what I was thinking. I didn’t need to, he was thinking the same thing.

She’d been alive when we’d last seen her, last night. Early this same morning, rather. What were they going to do — go ahead with it anyway?

A car door clashed faintly, somewhere off in the distance outside. It must have been at the main entrance of this very house we were in, for within a moment or two new footsteps sounded overhead, picking their way along, as down an aisle under guidance. Then something scraped slightly, like the leg rests of a camp chair straining under the weight of a body.

It repeated itself eight or ten times after that. The impact of a car door outside in the open, then the sedate footsteps over us — some the flat dull ones of men, some the sharp brittle ones of women — then the slight shift and click of the camp chairs. I didn’t have to be told its meaning; probably Ainslie didn’t either. The mourners were arriving for the services.

It was probably unintentional, our having been placed directly below like this; but it was the most diabolic torture that could ever have been devised. Was she dead yet, or wasn’t she? But she had to be before—

They couldn’t be that low. Maybe the drug she’d been under last night was timed to take fatal effect between then and now. But suppose it hadn’t?

The two of us were writhing there like maimed snakes. Ainslie kept trying to bring his knees up and meet them with his chin, and at first I couldn’t understand what his idea was. It was to snag the gag in the cleft between his two tightly pressed knees and pull it down, or at least dislodge it sufficiently to get some sound out. I immediately began trying the same thing myself.

Meanwhile an ominous silence had descended above us. No more car-door thuds, no more footsteps mincing down the aisle to their seats. The services were being held.

The lower half of my face was all numb by now from hitting my bony up-ended knees so many times. And still I couldn’t work it. Neither could he. The rounded structure of the kneecaps kept them from getting close enough to our lips to act as pincers. If only one of us could have made it. If we could hear them that clearly down here, they would have been able to hear us yell up there. And they couldn’t all be in on the plot, all those mourners, friends of the family or whoever they were.

Bad as the preliminaries had been, they were as nothing compared to the concluding stages that we now had to endure listening to. There was a sudden concerted mass shifting and scraping above, as if everyone had risen to his feet at one time.

Then a slow, single-file shuffling started in, going in one direction, returning in another. The mourners were filing around the coffin one by one for a last look at the departed. The departed who was still living.

After the last of them had gone out, and while the incessant cracking of car doors was still under way outside, marking the forming of the funeral cortege, there was a quick, businesslike converging of not more than two pairs of feet on one certain place — where the coffin was. A hurried shifting about for a moment or two, then a sharp hammering on wood penetrated to where we were, and nearly drove me crazy; they were fastening down the lid.

After a slight pause that might have been employed in reopening the closed room doors, more feet came in, all male, and moving toward that one certain place where the first two had preceded them. These must be the pallbearers, four or six of them. There was a brief scraping and jockeying about while they lifted the casket to their shoulders, and then the slow, measured tread with which they carried it outside to the waiting hearse.

I let my head fall inertly downward as far over as I could bend it, so Ainslie wouldn’t see the tears running out of my eyes.

Motion attracted me and I looked blurredly up again. He was shaking his head steadily back and forth. “Don’t give up, keep trying,” he meant to say. “It’s not too late yet.”

About five or ten minutes after the hearse had left, a door opened surreptitiously somewhere close at hand; and a stealthy, frightened tread began to descend toward us, evidently along some steps that were back of me.

Ainslie could see who it was — he was facing that way — but I couldn’t until the hatchet-faced maid we had seen crying in the kitchen the night before suddenly sidled out between us. She kept looking back in the direction from which she’d just come, as if scared of her life. She had an ordinary kitchen bread knife in her hand. She wasn’t in livery now, but black-hatted, coated and gloved, as if she had started out for the cemetery with the rest and then slipped back unnoticed.

She went for Ainslie’s bonds first, cackling terrifiedly the whole time she was sawing away at them. “Oh, if they ever find out I did this, I don’t know what they’ll do to me! I didn’t even know you were down here until I happened to overhear Mr. Hastings whisper to his secretary just now before they left, ‘Leave the other two where they are, we can attend to them when we come back.’ Which one of you is her Jimmy? She confided in me; I knew about it; I helped her slip in and out of the house that whole week. I took her place under the bedcovers, so that when he’d look in he’d think she was asleep in her room.

“They had no right to do this to you and your friend, Jimmy, even though you were the cause of her death. The excitement was too much for her, she’d been so carefully brought up. She got this heart attack and died. She was already unconscious when they brought her back — from wherever it was you ran off with her to.

“I don’t know why I’m helping you. You’re a reckless, bad, fortune-hunting scoundrel; Mr. Hastings says so. The marriage wouldn’t have been legal anyway; she didn’t use her right name. It cost him all kinds of money to hush everyone up about it and destroy the documents, so it wouldn’t be found out and you wouldn’t have a chance to blackmail her later.

“You killed my baby! But still he should have turned you over to the police, not kept you tied up all ni—”

At this point she finally got through, and Ainslie’s gag flew out of his mouth like one of those feathered darts kids shoot through a blow-tube. “I am the police!” he panted. “And your ‘baby’ has been murdered, or will be within the next few minutes, by Hastings himself, not this boy here! She was still alive in that coffin at two o’clock this morning.”

She gave a scream like the noon whistle of a factory. He kept her from fainting, or at any rate falling in a heap, by pinning her to the wall, took the knife away from her. He freed me in one-tenth of the time it had taken her to rid him of his own bonds. “No,” she was groaning hollowly through her hands, “her own family doctor, a lifelong friend of her father and mother, examined her after she was gone, made out the death certificate. He’s an honest man, he wouldn’t do that—”

“He’s old, I take it. Did he see her face?” Ainslie interrupted.

A look of almost stupid consternation froze on her own face. “No. I was at the bedside with him; it was covered. But only a moment before she’d been lying there in full view. The doctor and I both saw her from the door. Then Mr. Hastings had a fainting spell in the other room, and we ran to help him. When the doctor came in again to proceed with his examination, Mr. Chivers had covered her face — to spare Mr. Hastings’s feelings.

“Dr. Meade just examined her body. Mr. Hastings pleaded with him not to remove the covering, said he couldn’t bear it. And my pet was still wearing the little wrist watch her mother gave her before she died—”

“They substituted another body for hers, that’s all; I don’t care how many wrist watches it had on it,” Ainslie told her brutally. “Stole that of a young girl approximately her own age who had just died from heart failure or some other natural cause, most likely from one of the hospital morgues, and put it over on the doddering family doctor and you both.

“If you look, you’ll probably find something in the papers about a vanished corpse. The main thing is to stop that burial; I’m not positive enough on it to take a chance. It may be she in the coffin after all, and not the substitute. Where was the interment to be?”

“In the family plot, at Cypress Hill.”

“Come on, Cannon; got your circulation back yet?” He was at the top of the stairs already. “Get the local police and tell them to meet us out there.”

Ainslie’s badge was all that got us into the cemetery, which was private. The casket had already been lowered out of sight. They were throwing the first shovelsful of earth over it as we burst through the little ring of sedate, bowing mourners.

The last thing I saw was Ainslie snatching an implement from one of the cemetery workers and jumping down bodily into the opening, feet first.

The face of that silver-haired devil, her guardian Hastings, had focused in on my inflamed eyes.

A squad of Lake City police, arriving only minutes after us, were all that saved his life. It took three of them to pull me off him.

Ainslie’s voice was what brought me to, more than anything else. “It’s all right, Cannon,” he was yelling over and over from somewhere behind me. “It’s the substitute.”

I stumbled over to the lip of the grave between two of the cops and took a look down. It was the face of a stranger that was peering up at me through the shattered coffin lid. I turned away, and they made the mistake of letting go of me.

I went at the secretary this time; Hastings was still stretched out more dead than alive. “What’ve you done with her? Where’ve you got her?”

“That ain’t the way to make him answer,” Ainslie said, and for the second and last time throughout the whole affair his voice wasn’t toneless. “This is!”

Wham! We had to take about six steps forward to catch up with the secretary where he was now.

Ainslie’s method was all right at that. The secretary talked — fast.

Alice was safe; but she wouldn’t have been, much longer. After the mourners had had a last look at her in the coffin, Hastings and the secretary had locked her up for safekeeping — stupefied, of course — and substituted the other body for burial.

And Alice’s turn was to come later, when, under cover of night, she was to be spirited away to a hunting lodge in the hills — the lodge that had belonged to her father. There she could have been murdered at leisure.

When we’d flashed back to the New Hampshire Avenue house in a police car, and unlocked the door of the little den where she’d been secreted; and when the police physician who accompanied us brought her out of the opiate they’d kept her under — whose arms were the first to go around her?

“Jimmy” — She sighed a little, after we took time off from the clinches — “he showed up late that night with Chivers, in that dinky little room you left me in.

“They must have been right behind us all the way, paying all those people to say they’d never seen me.

“But he fooled me, pretended he wasn’t angry, said he didn’t mind if I married and left him. And I was so sleepy and off guard I believed him. Then he handed me a glass of salty-tasting water to drink, and said, ‘Come on down to the car. Jimmy’s down there waiting for you; we’ve got him with us.’ I staggered down there between them, that’s all I remember.”

Then she remembered something else and looked at me with fright in her eyes. “Jimmy, you didn’t mind marrying little Alice Brown, but I don’t suppose Alma Beresford would stand a show with you—?”

“You don’t-suppose right,” I told her gruffly, “because I’m marrying Alice Brown all over again — even if we’ve gotta change her name first.

“And this ugly-looking bloke standing up here, name of Ainslie, is going to be best man at our second wedding. Know why? Because he was the only one in the whole world believed there really was a you.”