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

The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl STUART PALMER

Original publication: Mystery, November, 1933; first collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Stories (Norfolk, VA, Crippen & Landru, 2002). Note: The book has Riddles on the dust jacket but Stories on the title page.

One of the primary characteristics of the golden age of the detective story (1920s–1940s) was the series protagonist, and Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer (1905–1968) wrote one of the most popular series of stories and novels of the era about Hildegarde Withers, a schoolteacher who retires during the series, largely to devote her time to helping Inspector Oscar Piper (of the New York City Police Department) to solve murder cases. Miss Withers, infamous for her choice of odd, even eccentric, hats, was based partially on Palmer’s high school English teacher, Miss Fern Hackett, and partially on his father. Palmer, a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, wrote to Frederic Dannay (half of the Ellery Queen collaboration and the editor of the magazine) about the way in which Miss Withers came to be such a significant character:

Although Miss Withers retires at some point during the series, she is still teaching when she makes her debut in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), having taken a class of third-graders on a field trip to the New York Aquarium. A thief has attempted to steal a purse from a woman and is making his escape when she throws her omnipresent umbrella in his path to trip him.

She appears to be fearless, pragmatic, no-nonsense, helpful. She retains her unchanging personality throughout a series that ran for eighteen books: fourteen novels and four short story collections, notably The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), which Ellery Queen selected for his landmark work, Queen’s Quorum, a bibliography of the one hundred six greatest short story collections in the history of detective fiction.

Title: The Plot Thickens, 1936

Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

Director: Ben Holmes

Screenwriters: Jack Townley, Clarence Upson Young

Producers: Samuel J. Briskin (executive producer, uncredited), William Sistrom (associate producer)

• Zasu Pitts (Hildegarde Withers)

• James Gleason (Oscar Piper)

• Owen Davis Jr. (Robert “Bob” Wilkins)

• Louise Latimer (Alice Stevens)

Some elements of the original story remain in the film script, though precious few. Both involve the theft of the priceless Cellini Cup. The screenplay provides a different motive for the murder, different suspects, and a different murderer, though it retains the comic tone of the original story and, indeed, the entire series.

The unfortunate casting of Zasu Pitts entirely changes the character of Hildegarde Withers, who had been so admirably played in previous films by Edna May Oliver. In order to accommodate the ditzy, fluttery style of Pitts, Miss Withers is transformed from Palmer’s bright, acerbic, poised schoolteacher to a loon who makes it difficult to share Piper’s confidence in her abilities as a rational, clear-thinking sleuth.

This is the fifth film in the Hildegarde Withers series and it had the working title The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl during production.

THE RIDDLE OF THE DANGLING PEARL Stuart Palmer

Rushing through the wide doors of the Cosmopolitan Museum of Art came Miss Hildegarde Withers, out of the blinding sunlight of Fifth Avenue in August into a hushed, dim world. Pausing for a moment to sniff the musty odors which cling to the vast treasure house wherein men have gathered together the objects saved from vandal Time, the angular school teacher went on, sailing serenely past the checkroom to be halted by a gray-uniformed guard at the turnstile.

“Have to check your umbrella, ma’am.”

“Young man,” she advised him sharply, “can’t you see that I need it?” She leaned on the umbrella heavily, and the guard, with a shrug of his shoulders, let her through. She was not lying, even by implication, for this day she was to need her only weapon as never before in all her assiduous, if amateur, efforts at crime detection.

It had been some months since Miss Withers had last found occasion to visit the museum, and today there seemed to be fewer guards and more visitors, particularly juvenile visitors, than formerly. She threaded her resolute way through the crowd, entering the Hall of Sculpture and pushing on toward the staircase at the rear of the building. In this hall the visitors were fewer, and only a solitary art student here and there was copying a painting, lost to the rest of the world.

“You’ll find Professor Carter somewhere in the Florentine Wing,” the Inspector had told her over the telephone. “You can’t miss him, he’s a tall, dried-up old fossil with a big round head bald as an egg.” But at this moment Miss Withers had no idea how, and where, she was to find Professor Carter, associate curator of the Cosmopolitan. For all her haste, she paused for a moment beside a crouching marble nude labeled “Nymph — by Hebilly West.” Using her dampened handkerchief, Miss Withers frowningly removed a penciled mustache from the classic stone face, shaking her head at the laxity of the guards. Then suddenly she looked up.

From somewhere came the patter of light footsteps — the quick steps of a small man or perhaps a woman — fading away down some distant corridor. As they passed, she heard a hoarse masculine scream, thin with surprise, which set a thousand echoes ringing in the vaulted halls. After the school teacher turned and ran on down the hall, turning toward the stairs, she stopped short.

A man was coming, slowly and horribly, down the hundred marble steps — a man whose hoarse scream had almost become a bellow, and who clutched unavailingly at thin air. His body was bent forward almost parallel with the slope of the steep steps...

Miss Withers was frozen with horror, for at the foot of the stairs loomed a gigantic statuary group upon a granite base. As she watched, powerless to move, the plunging man collided headlong with the base of the statue, and his screaming stopped.

There was no doubt in Miss Withers’s mind as to the identity of this man. Inspector Oscar Piper had told her that Carter, the man she had come to see, was a tall and dried-up “fossil” with a head like an egg. And like an egg the round hairless skull of Professor Carter had cracked against the implacable stone.

Almost instantly the hall was filled with gasping, curious onlookers. Here and there a guard began to push his way through. But Miss Withers turned swiftly away, and moved up the stairs. She was looking for something, and when she reached the top step she found it. Then, and not until then, did she rejoin the murmuring, excited group at the base of the stairs.

A small, almost dandyish man in morning clothes was approaching from the opposite corridor, and the guards made a path for him. Miss Withers heard one of them whisper — “It’s the curator!”

Willard Robbins, chief curator of the museum, resembled a young and bustling businessman more than the custodian of a large share of the world’s art treasures. He was not one to waste time upon adjectives. “Quick, Dugan — the canvas and stretcher.” He looked around, through the crowd, for a uniformed figure which was not there. “Burton! How did this happen? Where is Burton?”

“Probably studying art again,” said one of the uniformed men, softly.

But the curator went on. “Please move back, everybody. Back, out of the hallway. Everybody...”

Miss Hildegarde Withers stood her ground. “Young man, I want a word with you!”

Curator Robbins looked annoyed. Then one of his men whispered something to him. His face cleared. “So you’re the lady who saw the accident? Won’t you step this way, to my office?”

They faced each other across a bare mahogany desk. “Well?” said the curator.

“It wasn’t an accident,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Someone tied this” — she produced a loose ball of twine — “across the top step. That was murder.”

“Impossible,” gasped Robbins. He handled the string gingerly. “And you mean to tell me that poor Carter stumbled over this, and plunged to his death — you expect me to believe that?”

“I expect you to believe what I say,” she told him tartly. “Because the police will, if you don’t. You may not know that Professor Carter was afraid of something like this. He telephoned Inspector Piper at Headquarters this morning, asking for police help. The Inspector was busy, so he called me and asked me to drop in, because I live just across the Park, and I’ve been of service to him at times in the past. Now do you believe me?”

Robbins nodded slowly. “All except that Carter phoned for police protection for himself. The old man never thought of his own safety. He lived for the Cellini Cup, which as you perhaps know is the most valuable single art object in the world. He was always dithering for fear bandits would grab it, although we have a burglar-proof system here to protect it. He’d been reading reports from France that a gang of super crooks stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, substituting a copy. Why, he even used to spend most of his time in the Florentine Wing, watching over his Cup...”

Miss Withers nodded. “Then there was some reason behind his dithering!”

But the curator shook his head. “Carter had outlived his usefulness here. He had ceased to distinguish between major and minor matters. Indeed, his chief worry was that small boys would do some harm to the Cellini. He used to drive them away from the Florentine Wing religiously, and in turn they teased him...”

The curator smashed his fist against the desk. “That’s it! This was no murder plot. Anyone wanting Carter out of the way could have managed it without going to this extreme. Don’t you see? It was only a thoughtless prank on the part of some of the little hoodlums who play about here on free days. They tied the cord there to give him a bad fall, as a joke, never dreaming of the possible consequence...”

Miss Withers remembered the light, running footsteps. Yet she was somehow surprised that she could not agree with the curator’s easy explanation. Perhaps — yet it was too pat.

“I’m going to find Burton, the guard who was supposed to be stationed near the head of that staircase,” explained Robbins. “Then we’ll have every child in the building searched to find the rest of that string. It was probably taken off a kite string.”

“Probably,” agreed Miss Withers. “I have two favors to ask. First, please don’t let anybody know that I’m anything but a visitor here. Second, let me go in search of this Burton. I think I can guess where he is.”

Robbins bowed, twice. “You’ll probably find Joel Burton around a skirt,” he advised her. “He’s a new guard but highly recommended. Only has this one vice...”

“That you know of,” said the school teacher. “What does he look like?”

Tall, blue-eyed, and Irish as a thatched roof, Joel Burton stood near the end of the second floor corridor which leads to the Florentine Wing of the museum.

“Sure I ought to be getting back to my post,” he was saying. But he kept on obediently squirting water from an atomizer upon the clay figure which was beginning to take shape under the slim, deft fingers of the girl.

“Then go,” said Dagmar. Her voice was slow and rich and throaty. She looked at the young and handsome guard through lashes as tawny-yellow as her hair. All the same, he knew that she didn’t want him to go. It had been five weeks now since Dagmar, one of a dozen art students permitted to copy in the halls, had been at work on her version of Rodin’s “Satyr,” and for four and a half weeks of that time he had been her slave. The slave of hair and eyes and hands and the tall, smooth body...

She tweaked a clay ear into pert life. “That’s enough water,” she said. “Do you want to drown it? Now you can go back to your work.”

But Burton lingered. “Just the one trick I’m going to show you,” he said. From Dagmar’s fingers he took the braided bit of wire with which she cut the damp clay. Then with all his strength he flung it down the corridor. The girl heard it strike tinklingly against a distant window. Then Burton leaned over and neatly extracted it from her curving ear.

She clapped her hands excitedly. “Wonderful!”

Burton persisted. “That’s nothing. See this. I used to wow them with this when I was on Pantages time.” From his pocket he took a small roll of string, and handed it to her. “Take hold of the end, and pull.” He took back the ball, and Dagmar pulled. She pulled until the floor around her was a tangle of string, and then, from his cupped hands, came half a dozen silken flags of the Entente, knotted to the cord, followed by a birdcage containing two celluloid canaries.

Dagmar laughed, and clapped her hands again. The applause was echoed from behind them, and the young couple suddenly became aware of their situation, and sprang apart. Peering benevolently at them was an angular, school teacherish person in a Queen Mary hat. “Splendid, young man!” said Miss Withers. “You’ve missed your vocation.” She came closer.

“If you don’t mind an old woman’s butting in, you’ve also missed something else. There’s been an accident on the main staircase and unless I miss my guess, the curator is looking for you. You’d better start thinking up an excuse...”

“Huh? Thanks!” muttered Joel Burton, fervently. He scooped up his string and the rest of his props and flew.

“That was a kind-hearted thing to do,” said Dagmar, coolly, after there had been a moment’s silence.

Miss Withers stared at the lovely art student. “I’m not so old but that I can remember when I was young,” she said. She waved a thin yet graceful arm. “Romance...”

Dagmar flushed a little, and bent over her modeling. But Miss Hildegarde Withers was not to be got rid of so easily. “You have talent,” she observed, critically. “That’s an excellent copy you’re doing. The flair, the feeling of the original — and something added...”

Dagmar bowed, almost formally. Then she looked up and faced the intruder with a complete change of subject. “He really isn’t meant for this sort of thing, you know.” Her tone was almost defiant. “He may be only a museum guard, but he belongs in a different place from this.”

Miss Withers cleared her throat. Then — “I’m inclined to agree with you,” she said. If her tone was grim, the girl did not sense it. “Then you didn’t hear the noise a few minutes ago, either of you?”

Dagmar shook her head. “Oh, yes — I heard a man shouting. But the echoes distort sounds here so much that I didn’t pay much attention. I don’t know if Joel heard it or not — he was—”

“Oh, he wasn’t with you all the time?” Miss Withers noticed the pail of fresh water beside Dagmar’s stool. “Did he go on an errand?”

But the girl was quick. “Joel was with me for the last half hour,” she announced. “If it makes any difference...”

“It might — who can tell?” said Miss Withers softly, and then withdrew.

There was a guard outside the door of the curator’s office. “You can’t go in there,” he told Miss Withers.

“I can and I may,” she retorted, and plunged through, umbrella clutched firmly in her hand. Inside she found Robbins, flustered somewhat, facing fifteen or twenty youngsters of ages assorted from six to twelve.

“I want the boy who did this wicked thing to come forward and confess!” the curator was thundering. Behind him stood a perspiring and bulky guard. The urchins scratched and shrugged and kept their silence.

“Perhaps,” suggested a voice from the doorway — “perhaps you’d let me help, Mr. Curator. I’m used to boys of this age in my own classes...”

But Robbins was out of temper. “Thank you madam,” he said, shortly, “but I’m confident that one of these hooligans caused the death of Professor Carter, and I’m going to find out which one it was. Search them, Cassidy.”

Miss Withers stood back and watched the process, which was not without its difficulty. “Put everything out of yer pockets here on the table,” ordered Cassidy.

One boy hesitated, and Robbins leaped forward. “There! In that pocket. What have you got hidden there?”

He inserted his well-manicured hand swiftly, and withdrew it holding a gummy mass of old butterscotch. The guard continued the search, bringing to light several balls of kite string, but none which matched the sinister cord which lay across the curator’s desk. He stepped back, his face perplexed.

Then there came a knock at the door. It opened, and in came Joel Burton, clinging to the arm of a resisting red-headed gamin who had been discovered, he said, lurking in Armour Hall. “This is the last of them,” he announced.

The urchin grinned widely, showing the lack of a front tooth. His head was a mass of red curls, and his dress consisted of a ragged sweater and worn overalls. “Leave me alone,” the lad insisted. “I done nothing.”

“Search him, Cassidy, and see if you find any cord to match this,” ordered the curator.

The prisoner submitted without resistance, his hard, young-old face defiant. But Miss Withers was not watching the boy. Her keen eyes were upon Joel Burton, who stood by the door with his eyes upon the cord which lay on Robbins’s table. Automatically his hand went to his side pocket — closed around something—

“What have you there, if I may ask?” said Miss Withers swiftly. All eyes turned on her, and then on the guard.

He never blinked an eye. “Nothing at all,” he said. The muscles of his wrist flickered, and then he extended his open palm. “What would I have?”

Miss Withers remembered the exhibition in the hallway. “Never mind,” she said. And the search went on, with the result which Miss Withers had known would occur. The boys were released, with a general warning to behave themselves for the good of their souls, and poured out of the office, the red-haired lad in the lead. Miss Withers and the curator looked after them.

“I told you so,” said that lady. “No child planned that diabolical scheme.” Robbins did not answer. He was smiling at the red-headed urchin, who was walking fast down the hall, away from the others, with his cap perched on one side of his curly poll and his feet turned out, Charlie Chaplin fashion.

“Fathers of men,” observed the curator, sententiously.

“Fathers of men and sons of Belial,” Miss Withers told him, from bitter experience. Then she faced Robbins. “I still feel that this mystery, if it is a mystery, has something to do with the Cellini Cup you spoke of. I wonder if you’d send one of the guards with me to look at it — preferably one of those whose duty it is to watch it.”

The curator hesitated. “That would be Joel Burton. From his post at the head of the stairs he commands a view, down the long corridor, of the Rodin Hall and the Florentine Wing which holds the Cellini. The Cellini case is placed beneath a skylight, so that he could check on it every minute — when he is at his post. He’s wandered away once too often, so I’ve demoted him to the checkroom downstairs, and put Cassidy in his place. Will he do?”

“Splendidly,” said Hildegarde Withers. A few moments later she was following the broad gray back of Cassidy down the hall, past the Rodin statues and the pale-haired girl who worked busily in her corner with the mobile clay, and on into a large, airy room whose walls were lined with glass cabinets filled with glittering gold-encrusted glass.

But she had no eyes for the walls. Set squarely in the center of the room, upon a solid metal pedestal, was a square case of heavy glass. Its base was a polished mirror, and upon the mirror rested an object at once so beautiful and so decadent, so opulent in its color and design, that Miss Withers almost shuddered.

It was small, this Cellini Cup — not more than eight inches in diameter and perhaps seven inches high. But she knew it to be worth the ransom of seven kings.

Its base, resting on the mirror, was a turtle — the legendary tortoise who holds the world upon his back, according to mythology. But this turtle was of crusted gold. Upon the turtle rested a winged dragon of shimmering green and yellow and red enamel, and upon the wings and neck and tail of the dragon rested a wide and richly curving sea-shell of hammered gold.

Crouching on the lip of the shell was a sphinx, with the head of a lovely woman modeled in pure gold, and a serpentine, animalistic body of ardent, opulent greens, blues, whites, and yellows. From the ears of the sphinx depended two miniature pearls, and from her breast, hanging over the bowl in which the Princes of Rospigliosi were wont to keep their salt, hung a great white pearl larger than a pear. This pearl swung back and forth, back and forth, endlessly.

“Vibration of the building,” said Cassidy, the guard. “Professor Carter used to say it showed perfect balance.”

Miss Withers nodded. “And this cup is left here, protected only by a glass case?”

Cassidy laughed, and then turned to make sure that they were alone. “Not on your life, ma’am. The Professor used to hang about all the time, but he didn’t need to. This case is safer than a vault. Look down the hall where we came. See the stair? Well, that’s where one of us is always stationed. Now look this way, toward the other end of the Florentine Wing. See Schultz watching us? One or the other of them has his eyes on this case every minute. But that ain’t all. Come here.”

With a thick finger he traced out the almost invisible wires which ran through the glass. “If one of them is broken, it sets off all the alarms. Instanter, every door and window in the place is double-locked. This wing has no doors and no fire escapes leading out — and the only exit is back through the Rodin Hall to the main stair. What chance do you think a burglar would have, even if the guards did slip? The police would get the alarm direct, and surround the place in two minutes...” He beamed at Miss Withers, proudly.

She was forced to admit that the protection of the priceless treasure did seem thorough. But hadn’t she read somewhere that anything one man devised could be out-done by some other man?

Miss Withers thanked Cassidy, and returned to the stair, pausing on her way to note the slow but steady progress of Dagmar’s satyr. She found, on reaching the main hall, that she was just in time to have missed the undertakers as they removed the body of Professor Carter, canvas and all. Full well she knew that it was her duty to telephone Inspector Piper that this was a job for the whole homicide squad. But that was one of the advantages of having no official standing. She could do exactly as she saw fit, as long as the results justified the means. For the time being she was content to have the death put down as simple misadventure.

She was surprised to notice that the building was gradually emptying — not because of the “accident” but because it was time for lunch. Thoughts of a sandwich began to fill Miss Withers’s busy mind, until she started down the main staircase and saw two white-clad porters mopping the floor around the statuary group at the foot of the stair, and she lost her appetite.

Hildegarde Withers would never have counted this minor loss as an evidence of the good luck which more often than not attended her amateurish efforts as a detective. Yet otherwise she might have stepped out of the building, and missed one of the most exciting hours of her life.

She was sitting on a stone bench in the vast main hall of the lower floor when it happened, trying unavailingly to put in their proper positions the various characters in this mad drama. But she leaped to her feet as there came, from somewhere on the second floor, an unmistakable shot followed by two more in rapid succession.

The few straggling visitors who remained within sight milled about like cattle, but Hildegarde Withers was going up the stairs three steps at a time. She passed Curator Robbins near the top, and both of them went galloping down the hall toward the American Wing, from which sounds of a scuffle were arising. All the alarms went off hideously.

In the doorway they came upon brawny Cassidy and two other guards, a wiry, swarthy little man grasped firmly in their thick red hands. He was mouthing incoherent cries, and making efforts to regain the cheap nickel-plated revolver which Cassidy had taken from him.

“Nobody hurt, Mr. Robbins,” announced Cassidy. “Just a bloody anarchist who wants to destroy the paintings that Mr. Morgan loaned us. All he did was to crack a molding.”

The curator drew a long breath. “Good Lord! I thought it was — well, something worse. This day has been a nightmare. Take him downstairs and turn him over to the cop on the beat. I’ll prefer drunk and disorderly charges against him later.”

Robbins walked back toward the head of the stair with Miss Withers, who was thinking fast. “Funny how things happen all at once,” he observed. “Six months go by, and this is the sleepiest place in town. Then in one day we have a fatal accident and an anarchist. I hope this is the end.”

But Miss Withers did not answer him. She was standing stock-still. “Prepare yourself,” she advised him. “This is far from the end of things.”

Somehow she had known all along that this would happen. She was staring down the Rodin Hall, toward the distant showcase which stood beneath the skylight. Even from that distance, both could see that the light glinted on smashed glass, and that the brilliant, jeweled setting of the showcase was gone.

“Come on,” shouted Robbins, unnecessarily, and began to sprint.

Miss Withers followed, but this time she did not run. She walked slowly, staring at the floor. It was too late to hurry. This was the time to be sure and careful. Half way down the Rodin Hall she paused, finding the clue, the discrepancy, for which she was looking.

She could hear the agonized voice of the curator as he came face to face with the shattered case which had held the Cellini. But Miss Withers was bending over the sprawled body of a tall girl in a black smock, a girl who tried weakly to sit up as the school teacher grasped her shoulder.

At least this wasn’t another corpse. Dagmar pushed aside the proffered aid and stared down the corridor. “Where did he go?”

“Where did who go?”

“The man in the trench-coat, blast him!” Dagmar’s red lips curled in anger. “Slamming into me that way, and knocking me headlong. And look — look what he did to my model!” The satyr did show signs of maltreatment.

Hastily the girl smoothed the profaned clay. “Five weeks work — ruined!”

“It’s not ruined beyond repair, child,” said Miss Withers. “But this man. Did you see his face?” The curator was coming back, and she beckoned to him. “We have a witness, Mr. Robbins.”

“Of course I saw his face,” said Dagmar. “It was — well, just a face. No whiskers or anything. About thirty, or maybe forty. He had his mouth open. And he wore a cap, or maybe it was a hat. Anyway, he had on a trench-coat.”

“Good enough,” the curator told her. “The doors and windows locked instantly when the case was broken. All we have to do is to round up the fellow...”

That was all. It was easy enough. Three men of early middle age were apprehended without difficulty in the lower halls carrying trench-coats. One wore a cap, the other two had hats. Each gave as his only reference the particular relief organization which happened to be maintaining him among the ranks of the unemployed, and none possessed any string or any sign of the Cellini Cup.

Worst of all, Dagmar, when confronted with the trio, was unable to point out any one of them as the man who had crashed into her in the hallway. They all looked familiar, but she couldn’t be sure. She tried, desperately, to remember. But, after all, she had got only the briefest glance of the man on his mad flight, and the subsequent crash and its resulting dizziness had erased everything but the memory of the trench-coat. Dagmar thought that the man of mystery had been holding something bulky beneath the coat, but even this was hazy.

Even now the tall, blond girl clung to her satyr, and as soon as Robbins permitted her, she went resolutely back at smoothing out the signs of its rude handling as the vandal rushed by. Miss Withers gave her a long mark for pluckiness.

Outside, the police were already hammering at the double-locked doors to be let in. Three carloads of the burglary squad and four cops from the local precinct station were admitted, and then the doors made fast again.

“A cup worth at least several millions of dollars has been stolen,” announced Robbins. “It’s here, in the building. Find it.”

From a polite distance, Hildegarde Withers watched, for two hours, while every person in the building was searched, every nook and cranny and corner pried into. Mummy cases were opened, vases plumbed, fountains drained. Bundles of towels were turned out in the wash-rooms. Stew from the building cafeteria was poured out into the sink, and garbage sorted on newspapers. All to no avail.

Robbins and his guards took the lead in the search, but the actual fine-toothing was done by the officers under the leadership of Captain Malone of Centre Street. He recognized Miss Withers, and would have passed her up, but she requested quickly that the matron search her as well as the rest. “The quarry is too important for you to consider persons and personalities,” she told him.

But after all, the search finished where it had begun. A snarling, incoherent anarchist languished in handcuffs, loudly advocating the destruction of the paintings which Mr. Morgan had loaned to the museum for an indefinite showing. Three sad, bleary men holding trench-coats over their arms waited hopelessly and patiently in Robbins’s office, also handcuffed. But the Cellini Cup, the only remaining creation of the roistering genius of the Sixteenth Century, Signor Benvenuto Cellini, had vanished as if into thin air.

Robbins gave up in disgust and spent twenty minutes in browbeating Cassidy and Schultz, the two guards whose duty it had been to keep the Cellini in view all the time, and who had been lured away by the decoy shots. The police promised to get something out of the self-styled anarchist, but it was Miss Withers’s private opinion that he had been hired for the job by an intermediary, and would have little enough to tell, even in a third degree. The crowd clamored to be released; the art students took down their easels and their modeling stands and also demanded their freedom, and still the blond Dagmar smoothed and worked and patted at her satyr. Miss Withers shrewdly guessed that the girl had no intention of leaving until she had seen her young man.

It was at this stage of the game that Inspector Oscar Piper came battering upon the main doors of the museum until he was admitted. The wiry, gray little man, a dead cigar clenched, as always, in his teeth, made straight for Miss Withers.

“Hildegarde — I sent you here to calm down a fussy old man, and you’ve set off plenty of fireworks. What’s comin’ off?”

The spinster who had almost married him once now transfixed him with an icy eye. She told him. Not everything, but almost everything. “That’s how matters stand,” she finished. “And the Cup has vanished like morning dew.”

“Vanished my eye,” said Piper, ungallantly. He whirled around and stared toward the checkroom, where poor Joel Burton still stood, with nothing to do. Then the Inspector smashed his right fist into his left palm. “Blundering idiotic numbskulls,” he accused, genially. He spoke loudly enough, so that not only the police captain but also Curator Robbins approached.

With his cigar the Inspector indicated the checkroom. “Anybody look there for this wandering soup-plate of yours?”

“But Inspector,” protested Robbins. “The checkroom is outside the turnstile. Nobody but a magician could get down from upstairs, cross the wide lobby, and hide a package there without somebody seeing him.”

But Piper was already vaulting the barrier. Miss Withers tagged along behind, feeling unnecessary.

“It wouldn’t be hidden, it would be in plain view,” said the Inspector. He poked at a top-coat or two, tore open a bundle which contained nine packages of flea soap for dogs — Miss Withers often wondered why, afterward — and finally came to a square package, neatly wrapped and sealed, at the end of the package shelf.

It bore the seals of a mid-town drug store, and a label — “Medicines — breakable.” A check attached bore the number “41.”

He turned on Joel Burton. “When was this box checked?”

Burton shrugged. “It was here when I came to duty at about eleven. Ask Bruce, the regular checkroom man.”

Bruce, easily discovered, admitted that the package had been checked early that morning by a man whom he did not remember.

“Rats,” said the Inspector. “Are you all blind? This package was checked like fun. One resembling it was brought in here, and while you were all gawping at this so-called anarchist, the Cellini Cup was wrapped up, brought here, and substituted. Maybe the other box was crumpled up as waste paper. Anyway, the thieves planned on your being too stupid to put two and two together — and by heavens, you were!”

“Nobody could have substituted boxes without my knowing it,” cut in Joel Burton.

The Inspector stared at him. “That’s what I was thinking,” he said, gratingly.

The police and guards crowded around as the Inspector took out his pocket knife, carefully lifted off the seals, and opened the box. There was a quantity of tissue paper — and then, to Miss Withers’s utter amazement and chagrin, the delicately enamelled sphinx came into view. Beneath were the glowing curves of the shell, the dragon, and the turtle. There were excited cries from the crowd inside the gates.

Curator Robbins exhaled noisily. But the Inspector lifted out the glowing chalice and stared at it. Then he whirled on the curator.

“This the missing cup? Sure of it?” Miss Withers found herself nodding eagerly.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Robbins. “There couldn’t be two like it in the world. Of course, I don’t know the piece as thoroughly as poor old Carter, but it seems genuine to me.”

“We’ll make sure,” said Piper. He beckoned to Captain Malone. “Got anybody here from the Jewel Squad?”

“I was on it for two years,” said that worthy. Piper indicated the masterpiece, and Captain Malone bent over it. He tapped the shell. “Twenty-one carat, at least,” he said. He ticked at the enamel. “True-blue,” he decided. “They don’t mix colors like that today.” Last of all, he bent over the pendant pearl which hung from the breasts of the sphinx, and looked up, grinning. “First water, and a real honey,” he gave as his final verdict.

“Okay,” said the Inspector. He handed the Cellini Cup back to the curator. “Now hang on to it,” he said. “As for me, I’ll hang on to him.”

Moving cat-like across the floor, he suddenly pinioned the arms of the guard, Joel Burton. “And this washes up our case.”

But Hildegarde Withers did not join in the congratulations. “It was easy as falling off a log,” Piper told her as they moved toward the stair. “I’ll check over this sculptress’s testimony just to make sure which one of the three dopes with the trench-coats was hired to play messenger and deliver the Cup to Burton at the checkroom. Then we’re through.”

“Easy as falling off a log,” Miss Withers repeated. That was just the trouble. Something in the back of her mind clamored for attention, but she could not reach it. Something—

“I’d like to know what that fool of a guard thought he could do with the thing if he did get away with it,” Piper was saying. “Melted down it wouldn’t bring more than a thousand or two. It’s the craftsmanship and the associations that make it so valuable. And it would be unsalable. I guess the poor guy just went nuts looking at it day after day.”

“Nuts enough to kill poor Professor Carter when it wasn’t necessary?” Miss Withers wanted to know. She stopped suddenly. Suppose — suppose it was necessary?

“Wait,” she said. “You’re holding Burton downstairs until you all leave, aren’t you? May I have a word with him?”

“All you want,” Piper promised her. He was glowing with achievement. So it was that Hildegarde Withers faced a sullen, handcuffed man across a desk in an anteroom, with a policeman looking out of the window and another at the door.

She wasted no time in beating around bushes. “You’re in serious trouble, young man. Attempted grand larceny is one thing, but murder is another. Were you with Miss Dagmar whatever her name is when Carter plunged to his death?”

Burton stared at her, and shook his head. “I was getting a pail of water for her,” he said. “But you won’t believe me.”

“I won’t — until you tell me what happened to the ball of string,” Miss Withers ventured. But Joel Burton only turned his face away, and refused to answer. There Miss Withers left him.

The Inspector and Robbins were waiting. “Before you go,” said the latter, “I’d like to show you something. The electricians have been busy — and the new showcase has been brought up from the basement and installed.” He led them up the stairs and through the Rodin to the Florentine Wing. Dagmar had finally given up work, and sat sadly surveying her clay satyr.

She caught Miss Withers’s eyes. “I’m going home,” the girl announced. “And I’m never coming back. I hate this place and everybody in it!” She bent her sensitive face above her work. This had been a hard day for Dagmar.

As they came into the room containing the Cellini, an urchin or two disappeared through the far door. “Tell the cops that those kids can be released,” Robbins ordered a nearby guard. Miss Withers recognized with some amusement the curly red head of the little fellow with the ancient overalls and the toed-out, Chaplinesque feet. This must have been a memorable day in that lad’s life.

The Cellini Cup, restored to its rightful place, shimmered as brightly as ever. The turtle held his everlasting burden as cheerfully, the winged dragon hovered as balefully, and the golden lady whose body was that of a reptile smiled forever. Only the pearl which hung from her breast was still.

“This is not the first time that murder has been done for the possession of that Cup,” said Robbins. But the Inspector cut him short in his lecture.

“Come on, Hildegarde. A word with the little sculptress outside, and then we’ll write finis to this.”

“Finis” was very nearly written to another history as the three of them lingered beside the modelling stand in the hall. As Piper questioned the girl in regard to the mysterious man in the trench-coat, and as Miss Withers idly rubbed her fingers against the cool wet clay of the sculptured satyr, a globule of lead came twisting past her head to clip away a strand or two of brown hair and flatten itself against the wall. It happened so simply, and with so little noise, that the four of them stood aghast for nearly a minute before they could move.

There was only one direction from which the shot could have been fired, and to Robbins’s eternal credit let it be written that the dapper curator was abreast of the Inspector in the race down the corridor.

Robbins shouted to guards at the stair-head, and in a moment the entire wing was blocked off. From that time on it was only a matter of steady advance until every human being in the Florentine Wing was corralled.

The captives consisted of five little boys, most of whom Miss Withers remembered having seen here and there throughout the building during the hectic day. One of them was the grinning lad with the red hair and the Chaplin feet.

Two of the boys had been found playing with an automatic pistol equipped with a Maxim silencer, though they stoutly denied having fired it at all. They had found it underneath a showcase, they maintained, but a moment before.

“Hold these two, and let the others go,” decided the Inspector. But Miss Withers gripped his arm.

“I want to speak to that one,” she said. “The little boy with the red hair. Oscar, I’ve taught thousands of children, but while many of them toe in, I never saw one before that habitually toed out!”

She stepped forward, and suddenly the gamin wheeled and started to run. Miss Withers’s lunge missed his shoulder by a fraction of an inch, but caught at his curly red hair. She screamed a little as it came away in her hand, leaving a shiny bald head.

The running figure turned, disclosing the mature, seamed face of a grown man. “Lord Almighty,” said Piper. At last he saw the reason for the oddly turned feet. What they had thought was a child of nine or ten was a midget — and a midget whose face was now a mask of hate and defiance! The loose overalls had hidden the bowed legs.

Miss Withers turned away, acutely ill, as the abortive escape was halted and the hideous, frustrated creature dragged back by guards and police.

“Let me go, you canaille,” screamed the creature. “Take your hands from Alexius! I would have succeeded but for the fault of that worthless gun. But still you are fools, fools!” Spitting, cursing, the midget was dragged away. His eerie laughter echoed through the place for minutes after he was gone.

The Inspector returned and faced Miss Withers. “The shoe is on the other foot,” he said. “I knew there was a master-mind behind this, but it was you who saw through his disguise. I’ve heard of Alexius — the police of Budapest dubbed him ‘the Gnome.’ There were rumors that a mad dwarf was the brains of a gang operating in the large cities of Europe and stealing art treasures by sheer black magic, but I thought it was newspaper talk.”

Robbins nodded. “I heard the rumors, and evidently so did poor Carter. He feared that the gang were after his pet treasure, and so they were. But why they had to kill him—”

“I can answer that,” said Hildegarde Withers. She turned to stare, almost compassionately, at the tall girl who stood behind them. “But, by the way, I think here is a young lady who would very much like to go home, now that she knows her boy friend is innocent of wrong-doing.”

“But is he?” cut in Piper. “How about the checkroom?”

Miss Withers hushed him. “Is it all right for Dagmar here to leave, and take her copy in clay?”

“Of course,” said Robbins. “By all means.”

Gratefully, the girl began to throw wet clothes around the statue. But Miss Withers was quick and cruel.

She wheeled, so that almost by accident, the sharp point of her umbrella slashed into the soft clay. Dagmar cried out, but Miss Withers pointed like an avenging figure of justice. “Look!”

They all looked — and saw, beneath the concealing clay the gold and enamel of the true Cellini! Quickly Miss Withers laid more of the treasure bare.

“It might have been hidden there when I was knocked over...” began Dagmar wildly, but she stopped, for she saw that no one believed her. Her greenish eyes turned a flaring yellow, and she reached for a palette knife, but the Inspector gripped her in time. Silently, like a condemned Juno, she was led away after her master, the dwarf.

“You see,” explained Miss Withers later, “I knew that there must have been a real reason for killing Carter. He was the one man who could tell the true Cellini from the copy which had been made by some unknown but marvelous craftsman. The thieves were willing to pay the price of offering a substitute made of genuine gold, jewels, and enamel, in order to have the genuine Cellini. It fooled everybody — even myself — until I saw that the pearl in the spurious cup did not swing back and forth. It wasn’t balanced exactly as in the original.

“Carter was trapped. The midget found that the Professor had been annoyed by small boys, so he tied the cord across the stair and then lured the old man into chasing him for some minor infraction of the rules. That got him out of the way. Dagmar, at the time, was taking care that Burton, the guard at the stairhead, was out of the way. She even found opportunity to snip a length of the cord which he carried about with him to do magic tricks with, to further incriminate him.”

“The spurious cup, then, was checked in the checkroom and left to be found, just as I found it?” Piper was crestfallen.

Miss Withers nodded. “Exactly, if we hadn’t found it, a hint would have been dropped somehow. Alexius, in his role of urchin, kept tabs on that. Then at noon, when the place was nearly deserted, he planted a fake anarchist in the American wing, and while the alarm was on, smashed the showcase, lifted the Cellini, and immediately slipped it into the yawning statue of clay which Dagmar had ready just outside the door. She was thrown flat on the floor to cover her failure to identify the man properly — and probably she noticed the men with trench-coats and gave us that as a blind.”

“Then, with the Cup supposedly found, there’d be no difficulty in her getting out with the genuine one?”

“Not at all,” Miss Withers continued. “The only danger was that someone would get inquisitive about the girl’s statue. The midget lurked nearby, saw me touch it, and lost his nerve and fired.”

“I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me where he got the gun?” Piper wanted to know. “Remember, the midget has been twice searched — and the building, too.”

“Elementary,” quoted Miss Withers smilingly. “The gun was waiting in the receptacle provided under the clay for the Cup. Just in case something went wrong. As something did. He picked up the gun when everything was clear. And very nearly sent me to Kingdom Come with it, too.”

They were sitting on a marble bench in the main hall. The three men with trench-coats were being released, and hopelessly shambled out into the sunlight again. Joel Burton stood unhappily staring after the figure of Dagmar, the girl whose talent had been turned to such strange uses, as she was led away between two buxom police-women. She never glanced in his direction.

Then Robbins rushed up to Miss Withers. “My dear lady,” he beamed. “I have just consulted with our Board, and to show our appreciation we would like to give you as a souvenir of this day the imitation Cellini, provided the police do not want it to try and check up on its artisan...”

“I hope I never see it again,” said Oscar Piper fervently.

“Nor I,” said Hildegarde Withers.

“Instead, I wonder if you’d grant me just one thing — let me have the remains of the clay satyr which Dagmar copied so painstakingly from the original Rodin?”

That crumbling clay satyr leers today from Miss Withers’s living room table, the marks of her umbrella still gouged deep in the smoothly molded body. Strangely enough, the thing has about its eyes and mouth something of the twisted malevolence of Alexius, the red gnome.

The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls STUART PALMER

Original publication: Mystery, July 1934; first collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Stories (Norfolk, VA, Crippen & Landru, 2002). Note: The book has Riddles on the dust jacket but Stories on the title page.

Few mystery writers of his era received more popular and critical praise than Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer (1905–1968). In his introduction to the anthology Maiden Murders (1952), John Dickson Carr wrote: “Here are the old craftsmen, the serpents, the great masters of the game: Mr. Ellery Queen, Mr. Stuart Palmer, M. Georges Simenon.” Frederic Dannay (the editor and historian half of the Ellery Queen writing duo) ranked Palmer with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The leading mystery critic of the era, Anthony Boucher, cited Palmer as among the greatest of the puzzle story writers, along with Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr.

Although the Hildegarde Withers character was instantly successful and remained so for as long he penned books and stories in the series, he also wrote other non-Withers novels (including two about Howard Rook, a newspaperman who decides to become a private eye), short stories (two featuring Sherlock Holmes), poetry (he was an aficionado of limericks), fantasy, science fiction, true crime, how-to-write instructional manuals, and nonfiction articles. He took the position that he was a writer rather than a novelist. According to his widow, Jennifer Venola, he often said, “I’ll write anything for money except poison pen letters and ransom notes.”

Palmer also had a successful career in Hollywood, writing thirty-seven feature films, all of which were B mysteries in such popular series as The Lone Wolf, Bulldog Drummond, and The Falcon, as well as such original screenplays as Hollywood Stadium Mystery (1938), Halfway to Shanghai (1942), and Step by Step (1946).

In 1954 his fellow authors elected Palmer president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Title: Forty Naughty Girls, 1937

Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

Director: Edward F. Cline

Screenwriter: John Grey

Producer: William Sistrom

• Zasu Pitts (Hildegarde Withers)

• James Gleason (Oscar Piper)

• Marjorie Lord (June Preston)

• George Shelley (Bert)

There is a very good mystery presented in the story that translates well to this screen version when what appears to be the most airtight possible alibi may not have escaped Hildegarde Withers’s scrutiny. In the short story, the action takes place at a burlesque theater, hence the title that refers to the advertised forty scantily clad young women (though, as wittily pointed out by Palmer, there really were only twenty-four, telling readers all they needed to know about the show and its owner). In the film, Hildegarde and Piper are attending the opening of a Broadway show called Forty Naughty Girls.

Noticing the immediate and potential popularity of the Hildegarde Withers series, it hadn’t taken Hollywood long to make a motion picture based on the first Miss Withers book, The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), one year after the book’s release.

In what turned out to be fortuitous casting, Edna May Oliver took the role of the spinsterish sleuth and James Gleason played Inspector Piper. Gleason was well suited to play the crusty, unrefined cop who forms an uneasy alliance with the dry, reserved schoolmarm. Piper is a bachelor, accustomed to having things his own way, which was difficult with the intractable Miss Withers on the scene; the comic badinage and the hints of middle-age romance that occur in the books and occasionally in the films give the series a great deal of charm.

Though Gleason played Piper in all six films in the series, Oliver wanted to do other things, left RKO, the studio under which she had been under contract, and retired after three, being replaced first by Helen Broderick for one and Zasu Pitts for the final two movies.

The working title for the film during production was The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls. It is the last film in the series.

THE RIDDLE OF THE FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS Stuart Palmer

As the screen went dark, the twelve men who had just crept into the orchestra pit struck up a few bars of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and then without pausing broke into “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?”

Footlights flared on, and the audience roused itself. All through the picture, which filled in between shows at the Diana, they had been drifting in by ones and twos. But the several hundred — mostly masculine — who made up the audience had not left the garish lights of Forty-Second Street and paid their half dollars at the box office to see a movie.

It was the first day of a new show at the Diana Burlesque — its title was one of those Rabelaisian affairs designed to catch the masculine eye. Last week it had been something equally raucous, although except for the change in the big electric sign outside, few could tell the difference. Dapper Max Durkin, who acted as house manager of the Diana, often thought that the long hours he spent working out new gag titles was a waste of time.

He wasn’t wasting his time now, though he lounged in the wings and idly watched the “Forty Naughty Paris Girlies” as they rollicked onto the stage in their opening dance number. He leaned forward and caught a ribbon which formed an essential part of the costume of a handsome, red-haired girl who was waiting for a cue.

It was the ribbon which, if tugged hard enough, would leave Janey Vere de Vere attired in little more than what she had first worn into the world. She whirled suddenly, drawing the ribbon from his fingers, and frowned.

“How about dinner and a little bottle of gin after the show?” he asked.

“Oh — it’s you. Ask me later, will you? I — something’s happened.”

He saw that the big brown eyes were glazed with fear. “What? Spill it, girlie.”

She came closer. “You’ve got to get me a new lock for my dressing-room door, Durkin. I tell you—”

“Lock? Say, what have you got that anybody could steal?”

“If you want to know, somebody got into my dressing room while I was out to dinner and stole a gun I kept in my trunk, and that’s what!”

Still Durkin didn’t see anything in this to upset her. “I’ll buy you a dozen pop guns if that’s all you’re worrying about. Now listen, baby—”

His fingers caught the soft flesh of her upper arm. Then came an inopportune interruption. “Say, boss, what lighting goes with the cafe scene?”

The hulking, ape-like form of Roscoe, stage electrician, came between them. Durkin stared into the little pig-like eyes and wished for the tenth time that he had enough on this gorilla to fire him. “You know damn well it gets amber foots and a pair of baby spots from up above, why come busting—”

But Janey Vere de Vere was going out on the stage, as all twenty-four of the Forty Naughty Paris Girlies kicked their way off. Her hand was on her hip, and her throaty contralto voice picked up her song.

There was a little smattering of applause from the darkened house, for Janey was possessed of charms notable even among strip-artists, and she was a newcomer to the Wheel. She went into a slow hip dance as a purple spotlight struck her, body twisting, wide hips surging back and forth beneath the wispy evening gown of revealing black lace — one of those slashed affairs especially designed for dancing.

As the cash customers agreed later, Janey was at her best that night. Which showed that she was a real trouper, for the people backstage knew that she had something on her mind.

“What’s eating Vere de Vere?” Durkin demanded of Murphy, a slapstick comic who approached in a costume composed of a silk hat and a long flannel nightshirt. “She looks scared of something.”

“Her?” The comic grinned. “Must be she’s scared of you, you sheik. Janey ain’t used to this racket yet. She’s been accustomed to better things, says she.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And she moves with a classy crowd, Maxie old thing. Why last week out in Brooklyn there was a dude in a tuxedo came into a box every night, just to see her act.” The comic peered through the wings, past Janey’s gyrating body on the stage, and squinted. “Say, it looks like the same guy — see him, alone in the right front box? Maybe it’s him that she’s scared of.”

Max Durkin took a long greenish-brown cigar from among the half dozen which graced his vest pocket. Murphy also helped himself. “Thanks,” he said. But the manager wasn’t listening.

“So,” he said. “Vere de Vere has got herself mixed up with the Park Avenue crowd. Somebody ought to do something about that.”

“Maybe somebody will,” agreed the comedian. “Me, I’d do anything short of arson if it would get me to first base with her.”

He stared admiringly out onto the stage. Janey’s song was only four minutes long, and at the first encore, when stage lights flared on, her costume was due to go off.

Durkin turned and went through the door, placed just beside Roscoe’s switchboard, which led to the left side aisle and the front of the house.

At that moment Janey Vere de Vere, without breaking the pagan rhythm of her dance, began to fumble with the ribbon at the rear of her costume. A round knee and thigh began to disclose themselves. She was still singing — “...he may have the manners of a country lout, but who wants politeness when the lights are out?... he’s my—”

But that was all anybody was to see of Janey Vere de Vere’s knee that night. Her song was interrupted by a tremendous bang! and a burst of flame which came from the left front box.

A woman screamed somewhere in the audience, and the acrid smell of powder drifted out over the house.

From somewhere came Max Durkin’s voice. “Hit the lights!”

Then the crowd knew that this was not meant to be part of the show. “Roscoe, hit ’em!” shouted Durkin, from the aisle. “Everybody keep their seats!”

Still Roscoe fumbled with his switches, so that instead of casting a flood of brilliance over the auditorium, even the red exit lights went dark. Only the purple spotlight remained, slanting down from the film booth in the balcony. Janey Vere de Vere, her red mouth open wide, stood frozen in the center of the stage. The orchestra died away in a confusion of strings and brass.

Then the spotlight left the girl on the stage, sliding eerily past the white frightened faces of the girls who were crowding into the wings, sliding over the orchestra and the people in the front rows, and finally pouring its soft brilliance into the box from which the shot had come. But it stood empty and bare.

“House lights,” roared Durkin again. This time the house lights came on. The audience straggled into the aisle, staring at each other and muttering questions. There was a long moment of this, and then the forgotten girl on the stage made a throaty, whimpering noise. She pointed — and then suddenly collapsed like a sack. But she had been staring at the right front box — the box in which a little man in a white shirt front was sitting, slumped down in his chair.

He was staring at the stage, but his stare was sightless — for everyone in the audience could see that there was a small round hole in the center of his forehead.

“Hell, on my first night off duty in three weeks,” complained a bulky man who sat in the middle of the house. He forced his way to the aisle and ran back toward the rear of the house. “Leave nobody out!” he commanded as he ran past the ticket-taker. Then he went down the side aisle toward where Max Durkin stood. “I’m Fogarty, Eleventh Precinct!” he said. One hand was fingering his service gun. “How do you get into that box?”

There was a short flight of stairs opening from the aisle. Up these steps the two men plunged.

Except for four chairs and a litter of cigar and cigarette butts the box was empty. Patrolman John Fogarty bit his tongue as he saw, on the floor, a small calibre target pistol, with a long and wicked barrel. This he swiftly picked up with his handkerchief, and dropped into his pocket.

Then he whirled on Durkin. “You the manager? Who sat in this box tonight?”

Max Durkin shook his head. “Nobody. We don’t have many customers for these dollar seats.”

Fogarty was staring across the auditorium, in which the crowd still muttered and milled about, to where the man in the dinner jacket sat slumped in his chair with a hole in his forehead. “Well, you had one customer, while he lasted,” said Fogarty grimly. “Come on.”

They crossed the house. “None of you gets out of here, so you might just as well sit quiet,” Fogarty told them. He climbed to the right front box, an exact duplicate of the one opposite, and bent briefly over the man in the tuxedo. He was a small, flabby man of perhaps forty, and there was no doubt at all that he would never grow any older.

“Croaked deader’n a codfish,” pronounced Fogarty. That ended his sleuthing. He folded his arms and became a bulwark of the law. “You get to a phone and notify Headquarters,” he commanded. “Scram, now.” Max Durkin scrammed.

In a wide attic room at Centre Street, a sergeant leaned over a vast and glass-topped map of the city of New York. He chose a brass tag, read its number aloud, and turned it upside down to show that the car it represented was on a call.

Across the room another sergeant snapped a switch, and the place began to hum. “Calling car eleven seventeen, car eleven seventeen,” he said. “Go to Diana Burlesque, Forty-Second near Eighth, Forty-Second near Eighth, code number five, code number five, that is all.”

That was enough. The wheels of the world’s second most famous murder machine had begun to turn.

Oscar Piper, gray and grizzled inspector of the Homicide Squad, climbed out of a green roadster perhaps twenty minutes later, and stared up with distaste at the flaring sign on the Diana facade. Then he stalked toward the theater entrance.

Inspector Piper was prepared for almost anything, knowing the setting. But he was not prepared to see the angular figure of Miss Hildegarde Withers before him. The meddlesome school teacher was engaged in a furious argument with the uniformed officer at the door.

“I tell you the show’s over for tonight!” he was protesting.

“Young man, the show hasn’t even begun!” Then Miss Withers saw the inspector, and brightened. Which was more than can be said for Oscar Piper.

“Hildegarde — how in blazes—?”

“Don’t be profane, Oscar! I guess I can own a short wave radio set just like anybody else — and it was you yourself who told me what code number five means.” She pointed to the brass buttons. “But this man won’t let me in.”

The inspector smiled wearily. “It’s all right, she’s my secretary,” he told the guardian of the portal. That was the old fiction which had served so many times to cover the old maid school-teacher’s meddling in crime investigation. They passed into the lobby, and Miss Withers wrinkled her nose at the mingled odors of humanity and stale tobacco.

Piper paused. “Now see here, Hildegarde—”

“I know. This is no place for a woman.” Miss Withers pointed with the handle of her umbrella toward the stage, where were grouped most of the scantily-clad ladies of the ensemble. “All the same, there are a number of women here beside myself. Perhaps I’m not dressed for the party, but—”

The inspector was already half-way toward the right lower box, where detectives and photographers were grouped around the assistant medical examiner and his grim piece de resistance. Taking his silence for passive permission, Miss Withers hurried in his wake.

“Hello, folks,” Dr. Levin greeted them. “Nice business, this. You can move him whenever you like.” He scribbled an order. “Nice shot — smack on the frontal ridge. Slug is still in him — we’ll find that it came from the little .32 the boys found in the opposite box. He went out without knowing what hit him.”

Piper scrutinized the revolver, and Miss Withers peered over his shoulder. “Prints?”

“Not a print,” he was told. “One shot fired.”

The inspector broke the gun, and sniffed. “Old-fashioned black powder, eh? That ought to give us a line.” He dropped the gun into his pocket and leaned over the dead man. “Got any dope on who he is?”

Cards in the dead man’s pocket informed them that his name was David M. Jones, proprietor of the Loop Autosales Agency, Chicago. “I know that place,” cut in a sergeant. “A half block of show windows near Halstead Street. Probably in town for the auto dealers’ convention— Say, this is a bigger case ’n I thought.”

“Yeah,” agreed Piper. “Get the manager of this place up here.” He drew Miss Withers into the rear of the box, where hung a heavy pair of ancient red plush curtains. “Well, here’s a shot fired in front of several hundred people, and we can’t get a lead. The opposite box was empty — so anybody on that side of the audience could have sneaked up here and fired the shot, and then got back to his seat before the lights went on. Ditto, anybody backstage could have sneaked through the door and got back the same way—”

She nodded. “You’ve narrowed your suspects down to just about everybody who was here tonight, haven’t you?”

“Everybody but the girl who was wiggling on the stage when the shot was fired,” said Piper sadly. “And she’s—”

He broke off as Max Durkin appeared. “Look here, inspector,” began that worthy gentleman. “Isn’t there some way you can fix it to let the audience out of here? We can’t keep them here all night...”

“We can’t, but I can,” said Piper. “I’ve got something to ask you. Do you keep a gun in the theater?”

Max Durkin denied that the Diana Burlesque had ever needed such a protection.

“Well,” said Piper, “Anybody else in the theater pack a rod?”

Max Durkin shook his head. “As far as I know, nobody in the place ever owned a gun.” But Miss Withers’s noticed that his eyes blinked twice before he spoke. There were few better signs that a man was lying.

“Excuse me,” she cut in, “but from what I hear, Mr. Durkin was somewhere in the opposite aisle when the shot was fired from the box. You didn’t hear anyone pass you in the darkness?”

“I was practically in the front of the house,” cut in Durkin. “When I heard the shot I ran back. I thought — I thought somebody had shot the girl on the stage.”

“Did you?” smiled Miss Withers in her usual sweetly sarcastic tone.

The inspector, who had turned his back for a moment, held out his hand. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Durkin.”

Instead of a friendly grasp, the manager felt his wrist caught and held. A wet swab of cotton was pressed swiftly against his index finger. “What the hell—”

Piper smiled. “It’s all right. I just made sure that you hadn’t fired the shot yourself. A solution of sulphuric acid and waxed diphenylamine crystals brings out the nitrate flecks — if there are any. You don’t happen to have a pair of gloves here, do you?”

Durkin shook his head. “Search the place if you want to.”

“We did,” Piper told him. “Well, we’re right back where we started. You can go now.”

Max Durkin departed, and the inspector turned to Miss Withers. “Well, that’s that—” But he was all alone.

He caught sight of the resolute figure of the school teacher going up the aisle, and hurried after her. “Wait a moment — what do you know that I don’t?”

“Nothing — yet,” she snapped. “Suppose we have a look at the box from which the shot was fired.”

Together they climbed the stairs, and Miss Withers turned up her nose at the untidy condition of the box. “Sherlock Holmes would have told you the middle name of the killer just from one flash at those cigarette butts,” said Piper. “And ten to one they mean nothing more than that the boys up above in the gallery use this as a target. Come on, let’s get backstage. I haven’t had a talk with the cootch dancer yet, and you’d better come along as a chaperone.”

They descended to the aisle and walked forward through the little door which led past the switchboard. “Hm,” observed Miss Withers. “If anybody from among the performers did the murder they’d have had to walk right past the electrician.”

The inspector nodded. “But it’s no help, unfortunately. Because he admits that, being soft on this Vere de Vere dame, he was watching her strip-number from the wings instead of being at his board.”

“And that’s why he was so long in putting on the house lights?”

The inspector shook his head. “He claims that somebody screwed up his switchboard by dropping a piece of tin behind it and shorting the wires. It took him time to get his flashlight and lift it out.”

Miss Withers digested this as they walked through the weary crowd of show girls — in temporary guard of two delighted detectives — and down to the basement dressing rooms.

There was a cop on duty outside the door. “She’s still under,” he informed them. “Must have been a terrible shock to her.”

“Yeah?” Piper pushed open the door. The dressing room was small and stuffy, holding little more than a stool, a bench, a mirror, and a coat rack. The voluptuous figure of Janey Vere de Vere lay stretched out on the bench, which had been padded with her coat. Beside her sat the ministering figure of Murphy, the comic, still attired in his nightshirt costume, over which he had thrown a topcoat. He held a glass which was half full of something which looked like water and smelled like juniper juice.

“You’re the guy who caught her when she fainted on the stage?”

The comic nodded. “Ran out from the wings. Y’see, we’re engaged to get married, and I got a right here.”

“Yeah? Well, did she say anything as she fainted? Did she cry out?”

Murphy shook his head. “Nothing...”

“Except what?” prompted Miss Withers, on a hunch.

“Except she said something, sort of mumbling, about — ‘My husband!’ ” He put down the glass. “But that don’t mean anything, because she’s been divorced for years.”

Piper leaned over the prone figure. “Out cold, eh? Well, she certainly can’t help us any...”

“Neither can Mr. Murphy, right now,” suggested Miss Withers. The inspector took the hint. “Outside,” he ordered. The comedian went out.

“It’s more than an hour since the shot was fired,” Miss Withers pointed out. “It’s a long faint that lasts an hour.”

Piper snapped his fingers. “Right! Say, that’s one of the reasons we knew Ruth Snyder was lying. She claimed to have stayed in a faint all night. You think—”

“She’s either dead, or—” Miss Withers took up the glass of gin, and suffered a few drops to trickle down the arched nostril of the girl on the bench.

Janey Vere de Vere was not dead. She sat up, coughing and gasping wildly. “What — where am I?”

“You’re in a bad spot — unless you tell us plenty,” said Piper gruffly. “What do you know about this?”

Janey Vere de Vere blinked. “About — about the shooting? I only know that I used to be married to him. I mean Davey. I still am, I guess, because they tell me those correspondence Mexican divorces aren’t legal. But I hadn’t seen him for four years until I saw him with that black hole in his forehead — I mean, not seen him really—”

Miss Withers gave her the gin. “Steady, young woman,” she advised.

“I’ll talk,” the girl hurried on. “I’ll tell you everything. I walked out on Davey, and I wrote him that I had a divorce. Then I found that it was a phony, and the lawyer took my money and didn’t even register the papers in Mexico City. So I wrote Davey, and he was sore. He came to New York and all last week he sat every night in a box and just stared at me — I was afraid of him, and I got a gun that I’d had for years, and kept it in my dressing room. Tonight while I was out to dinner it was stolen—”

“This the gun?” Piper showed her the .32. She nodded, without being able to speak. “Got a permit?” She pointed toward her handbag.

“You usually go to dinner while the moving picture is being run?” inquired Miss Withers. Janey Vere de Vere nodded.

“Who do you think might have known that you kept a gun here?” She shook her head. “The lock on my dressing room door is broken. I told Durkin about it tonight, when I told him the gun was gone. But he didn’t—”

Miss Withers and the inspector exchanged a glance.

“Well, we’ve got to be getting on with it,” said Piper. “You better stick around, young woman. Don’t leave town. By the way, you haven’t any idea of any enemies your late husband had — anybody who might have wanted to see him bumped off?”

“Nobody in the world,” said Janey Vere de Vere. But she looked intently at the buttons of the inspector’s vest when she said it, and Miss Withers made another mental note.

They went out of there. Piper called his myrmidons. “As soon as you finish searching the audience and get the house cleared out, go backstage and give everybody the nitrate test — on both hands. We ought to get a positive reaction or two.”

To Miss Withers: “Funny about the old-fashioned black-powder cartridges in that gat. They haven’t been on sale since smokeless powder caught on. Looks like the girl had been sitting on that gun for years and years.”

“She didn’t sit on it quite long enough,” Miss Withers told him. There were sounds of violent trouble behind them, and both ran across the stage. An ape-like figure in overalls, with long swinging arms, collided suddenly with the inspector, and both went down.

“Got you!” cried Piper. He rose with a hammer-lock on Roscoe, the stage electrician. Miss Withers looked surprised.

The man ceased to struggle, and stared at his forefinger. It was rimmed with black. He gasped and muttered.

Detectives surrounded them, and someone slapped handcuffs on Roscoe. “A positive, the first crack out of the box,” somebody said. “Here’s the rat that fired the gun. He hit McMann over the head with a slug...”

“I tell you I went to a shootin’ gallary during the dinner hour tonight!” Roscoe was insisting. “I only shot at the brass ducks—”

Nobody listened to him. The detectives had torn from his pocket the “blackjack” with which he had sent into unconsciousness the sergeant who daubed diphenylamine on his finger. It happened to be a neo-Maxim silencer.

“Well, for the love of—” Inspector Oscar Piper straightened his tie. “There’s our case, boys. Roscoe what’s-his-name — sweet on the cootch dancer — bumped off her husband when he got the idea that she might go back to the guy. He’d probably hopped — but he was smart enough to have a silencer handy in case things didn’t work out right for popping the guy otherwise. Take him away.”

He turned to Miss Withers. “As easy as that!” he said. But the look on her face sobered his joy.

“Suppose,” she said softly, “suppose that Roscoe is telling the truth?” Suppose he spent his dinner hour at the shooting gallery across the street? Where’s your case?”

“Suppose the moon is made of Camembert?” retorted Piper. All the same he turned to his men. “Go on, give the nitrate test to the rest of the performers. Just in case somebody asks. But it’s the ape, all right.”

He saw that she frowned. “Well, why else should he have a silencer? They don’t carry them for pocket luck-pieces, you know.”

“I know,” said Hildegarde Withers.

“He was going to use the silencer, and then he got a better idea. He’d shoot Jones from the box, with the house lights off, and then get back to his board and give himself a swell alibi, see?”

“I see,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I see, said the blind man, I see clearly. By the way, Oscar, where’s the stage door?”

They discovered that the Diana, like many theaters on crowded and alley-less Manhattan Island, had no regular stage door. The performers left and entered the place through the side aisle down to the front of the house.

A few minutes later Sergeant Twist reported that the performers had a clean bill of health as far as the nitrate test was concerned. None of them had fired a gun within forty-eight hours. “We even tested the dame who’s downstairs in the dressing room,” Twist reported.

“See? I told you so,” said Inspector Piper. Miss Withers nodded.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. She hurried downstairs and knocked on Janey Vere de Vere’s dressing room. The girl was smoking a cigarette, having dressed for the street. “I just thought,” said Miss Withers. “Wasn’t it in an act — a dancing act — at the Palace that I saw you?”

Janey Vere de Vere confessed that she had never risen in vaudeville to the heights of the Palace. “More likely the Hippodrome,” she said.

“It must have been two other fellows,” Miss Withers agreed, and took her departure. She came out on the stage fired with a new energy. “Shall we leave, Oscar?”

“See you out front,” he said. “I’ve got to have a word with the manager if I can find him. I want some more information about this electrician.”

But it was Miss Withers who found Max Durkin. He was sitting in his office, which opened off the foyer, glaring morosely at his smouldering cigar.

“Bad for business, this sort of thing,” he told her.

“I’ve got just one question,” she told him. “About the gun. You’re sure that you never saw it before, and that you never knew of anyone in the theater owning one — or losing one?”

“Positive!” said Max Durkin. “And if anybody says anything different they’re lying.”

“Thank you so much,” said Hildegarde Withers, and left. Durkin stared at his empty ash-tray, and then at the floor.

“Hey!” he began, but the school teacher was gone. Max Durkin shook his head. “That woman is either nuts, or else—”

Then the inspector arrived to tell him that his presence would be required at headquarters next morning. Durkin agreed with a willing smile. “But I still don’t see why poor old Roscoe would run wild—”

“You can’t fool the nitrate test,” Piper told him. Then he was gone.

Janey Vere de Vere came up the aisle beside Murphy, in the center of a crowd of relieved and still excited girls. She saw Durkin in the office door.

“Wait outside, will you?” she asked the comic. He protested, and finally drew away a little. The red-haired girl, looking a little bulky and big in her street clothes, crossed to where Durkin waited.

“How about dinner and a bottle of gin?” he asked, grinning.

“Max! After all that’s happened—”

“It’s over, and you’re well out of it,” he said. “Never mind Murphy. You’ve got eight more weeks of the Wheel to eat with him, but you’re only here till Sunday.”

“Yes,” said Janey Vere de Vere. “But—” She wore one glove, and dug in the pocket of her modish sport coat for the other. “Say! I’ve dropped a glove somewhere...”

Durkin stared at her. “It’s probably the old dame who hunts with John Law,” he said lightly. “She just hooked one of my cigars — a lighted one. I figure her for a souvenir-hunter. Did she get any fillings out of your teeth?”

But Janey Vere de Vere wasn’t listening. “See you tomorrow, Max,” she told him, and hurried out. Max Durkin lit another cigar, and then he too left the darkened theater to its guardian cops. He had no appetite for his usual late supper that night, for an idea had just begun to occur to him... an idea which spoiled the taste of his cigar.

Miss Hildegarde Withers rode northward in a taxi which she shared with the inspector. “A pleasant and illuminating evening,” she said, as they drew up to her door. It was barely eleven o’clock.

“If you’re not too tired, Oscar,” she continued, “I wish you’d do something for me. You have your travelling laboratory kit at home, have you not?” She handed him a parcel wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. “Suppose you give this your famous nitrate test, and let me know how it comes out?”

“What? Why, of course, but—”

Miss Withers slammed the door and went up the stairs. “If that doesn’t put a bee in his bonnet nothing will,” she said to herself. Lighting the lamp above her study table, she proceeded to arrange upon it a surprisingly incongruous exhibit consisting of half a dozen cigar butts.

For a long time she stared at them. They ought to make sense, but they didn’t. At the extreme right she placed the fresh green-brown cigar, its tip barely burned away, which she had stolen from Max Durkin’s ashtray.

The relics which had been left in the littered theater box she one by one discarded. Only one of them showed any trace of dampness where it had been chewed by the smoker. Surprisingly enough this one — like Durkin’s — had been cut, rather than bitten off, and it was rolled of the same green brown tobacco as the first.

Yet there was little more than a quarter of the cigar remaining — instead of ash on its end there were only shreds of blackened and acrid smelling tobacco.

“In the best tradition of sleuthdom,” she told herself. “Sherlock Holmes could spot a Trichinopoly miles away, and he published a monograph on heaven knows how many kinds of cigar ash. Now I wonder what Holmes would deduce from this?”

For nearly an hour she puzzled over the two remnants of cigars, all the time listening with one ear for the buzz of the telephone. If Oscar Piper found what she expected him to find, he would lose no time in communicating with her. His case was going to be sent sky-high, or else she was very much mistaken. All the same it was still a mystery to her how a person could manage to be in two places at the same time.

The night was a hot one, and Miss Withers mopped her face. Through the open window little black gnats came to buzz around her lamp. Though a fly swatter and an insect-gun stood nearby on the sideboard, the lean and worried school teacher pored over her booty and let the gnats buzz.

“I wonder why Oscar hasn’t let me know how he came out with his nitrate test?” she finally asked herself.

It was at that moment that her bell rang — three long impatient rings.

Miss Hildegarde Withers lived at that time in an old-fashioned brown stone on West Seventy-Fourth Street, remodelled from one of the mansions of the eighties. She hurried to the door and pressed the buzzer which unlatched the downstairs door. There were hurried steps on the stair — and she nodded to herself. The Inspector had come instead of phoning.

“He’s found it!” she cried...

When Oscar Piper arrived, shortly before one o’clock, at Miss Withers’s apartment he peered eagerly from the taxi window. Yes, her light was on and he could bring her the news without being inopportune. He hurried into the lobby, pressed the bell beneath her name, and finding the door ajar, ran up the stairs.

He knocked excitedly on the door. “It’s me, Hildegarde!”

There was a long pause, and he knocked again. Miss Hildegarde Withers, her long Bostonian face unusually grave, swung open the door. He displayed “exhibit A,” and then stopped short as he entered the room and saw that a handsome red-haired girl was sitting in a chair near the window.

“Miss Vere de Vere—” he began.

“Nobody else,” she said evenly. “I believe you have my glove.”

He was holding it in his hand. “I—”

“Oscar,” said Miss Withers quickly. “I’m afraid you and I have been making a grave mistake about Miss Vere de Vere. Circumstances—”

“Circumstances fiddlesticks,” said the inspector, bracing his feet. “I gave this glove the nitrate test for powder marks — and look at it.” There was nothing to look at until he turned the glove inside out, and then the forefinger bore a telltale brown stain.

“You fired a gun in the last forty-eight hours,” he accused the girl who watched him so calmly. “Fired it while wearing your glove inside out. Never figured we’d be smart enough to try it both ways — even though you had read of this nitrate test.”

“You’re crazy,” said Janey Vere de Vere. “I’ve got five hundred witnesses that I was doing a dance on the stage when my husband got bumped off. You can’t bust that...”

Piper thought he could try. But he suddenly realized that the red-haired girl was covering him with a gun which peeped over the arm of her chair. He suddenly understood Miss Withers’s hesitancy in opening the door, and the look on her face...

“You can’t get by with this,” he said.

“One way or another,” said the girl. “Don’t forget I learned to shoot in a Wild West show, and I can cut the buttons off your vest. I came here to get my glove. It’s my property.”

“And the cigar — you’d like that, too?” Miss Withers hazarded. She nearly got a bullet through her mouth.

“You’ll clown once too often,” said the girl. She had risen in her chair. “I’ll bargain — that glove for both your damn lives. How about it?”

“Clowning!” repeated Miss Withers, foolishly. “Clowning. That’s it! That’s—”

“Shut up!” snarled the red-haired girl. She looked her age now. “Sure I killed Dave Jones. He was a rotten husband, and I left him because I wanted to show him I could get somewheres in show-business. I got into the Follies, too — and then times got bad and I had to take this burlesque job. He found out about it, and came to New York just to sit in a box and give me the ha-ha. But it wasn’t his auto business nor his lousy insurance I wanted, see?”

She left off her hysterical outburst, and her mouth closed like a trap. “I take that glove with me, or I leave two more stiffs here,” she said. “Without it you’ll never pin anything on me. Not with my alibi anyhow.”

Piper was waiting his chance, poised on his toes. But the hard brown eyes never wavered, and the gun still swung between the two of them.

For all the inspector’s poised readiness, it was Miss Withers who acted. She suddenly broke into shrill, high-pitched laughter. Head thrown back, eyes wild, she screamed mirthlessly.

“Shut up, or I’ll—” Janey Vere de Vere backed away from the inspector, watching his every move. “If she goes nutty I’ll have to knock her out...”

Miss Hildegarde Withers gave every evidence of having gone completely insane under the strain. Her laughter choked off, and her eyes followed a single black gnat which circled around the overhead lamp.

“Hildegarde!” cried the inspector. He knew that her brain had snapped, for she had picked up the flit-gun from the sideboard, and was threatening the gnat with it.

“Go away, you nasty thing!” Then more hysterical laughter...

“By God,” cried the amazed girl who held them at bay, “I’ll—”

She said no more, for a stream of murky white liquid struck her full in the face. The revolver fell from her fingers as she clawed at her eyes in agony.

The inspector snatched it up. But Miss Withers still pumped the flit-gun.

“Ammonia,” she told the inspector. “Think she’s had enough?”

Janey Vere de Vere’s voluptuous big body was huddled in a shuddering heap on the floor. The room was thick with the strong astringent.

“Cease firing,” said Oscar Piper.

It was hours later, and dawn brightened in the sky over Brooklyn, when they finally were alone again. The inspector was still weak in the knees, and Miss Withers was halfway between tears and laughter — genuine laughter this time.

“I’m a rotten actress,” she confessed. “But the Vere de Vere woman had her attention divided between us.”

“Bother that,” said Piper. “Start at the beginning. I’m hours behind you.”

“Nice of you to admit it,” said the school teacher. “Only you’re weeks, not hours. You see, Janey was ashamed of her job in burlesque, even though she was good at it. It was particularly tough for her, in spite of the admiration she got from the men who recognized something better in her than the usual strip-artist, when she saw that her husband, from whom she had separated but not legally divorced, had come to give her the laugh. She suddenly remembered that he had property and insurance — and she wanted to get out of the racket she was in.

“Well, she started in a Wild West show, you know. She must have clung to one — no, two — of the guns she’d used in a shooting act. She got a silencer, and attached it to her .32, which was still loaded with ammunition of the old type. Last night she came back from dinner, saw that her husband as usual was alone in an opposite box, and shot him through the forehead during the wind-up of the gangster picture. There was noise enough then so nobody would notice the tiny spat that a silenced gun makes. She took the silencer off the gun, still wearing her gloves inside out as an extra-smart precaution, and left the gun in the box. That was to make it look as if someone had planted it to point to her.”

“But the second shot—”

“Wait. The house was dark for the movie — but she was a crack shot. The dead man slumped in his seat, and wasn’t noticed by anyone. Just as she’d planned. She hurried backstage, dropped the silencer behind the switchboard — that was the ‘piece of tin’ that poor Roscoe removed and put in his pocket — and after changing into her costume came upstairs again and planted with Durkin the story of her gun’s having been stolen.

“She knew the gun could be traced to her. She wanted to be involved — because she knew her perfect alibi would free her. She didn’t mean the silencer to be found, but then she was ignorant of the switchboard. It all worked out better than she had planned, and while she was in her dance, the audience heard the sound of a shot in the box from which she had already killed a man. That puzzled me for a long time, Oscar. I brought home a cigar stub trying to find out if perhaps Durkin had not, after all, fired the shot and accidentally dropped a cigar butt, incriminating himself. There was a cigar butt in the box, still damp, which matched his. But he had not left it there. Just as I stole out from his office, Janey Vere de Vere got hold of one he’d smoked. I saw the whole thing when she accused me of ‘clowning’! Don’t you see — practical jokers and would-be clowns have used exploding cigars for years.”

“You mean she left a trick cigar burning in the box?”

Miss Withers nodded. “She must have timed it by trying experiments at home. She put in a much bigger load than the usual trick cigar has. Probably she used powder from her old cartridges, for the cigar butt smelled faintly of it. The cigar went off, the lights went on, and she pointed at the box to make sure that the fake shot and the dead man would be connected. No medical examiner in the world can set a death closer than twenty minutes or so, and it was certain the stunt would take in the doctor and the police.

“Thus, when the ‘shot’ went off, she was under the spotlight. She had to have an alibi like that, because she was the natural person to be suspected and she knew it. There would be nothing left to show in the box except the cigar butt — and I suspect that she had sense enough to strew several there so it would not stand out.”

Piper nodded slowly. “Then Roscoe was an accomplice? Because he must have seen her come through the door after she fired the real shot.”

“Not a bit of it. It was during the movie, when he was off duty. When he was across the street at the shooting gallery, as a matter-of-fact. The cigar burned quietly for ten or fifteen minutes — it wouldn’t go out, particularly if she had remembered to sprinkle a faint bit of powder in with the tobacco when she rewrapped it.”

The Inspector heaved a sigh. “Good heavens, what a woman!” He was not praising Miss Withers. “One thing,” he asked finally. “Why did Max Durkin deny that she had mentioned her gun’s being stolen?”

Miss Withers smiled. “Simple,” she said. “Durkin was sweet on her, and only trying out of loyalty to keep her name out of it. He was positive, like everybody else, that she was innocent because of that perfect, cast-iron alibi. The alibi was so cast-iron I couldn’t resist trying to crack it.”

“You nearly cracked me with that scene in your apartment,” he admitted. “I thought you had gone clean crazy with the flit-gun...”

“An invention of my own,” she admitted proudly. “Heaven knows I need some protection now that I’m mixing myself up continually in other people’s business. And I can’t abide guns. I didn’t get my start in a Wild West show, you see.”

The Inspector was thinking of Janey Vere de Vere. Miss Withers stared at him, coldly. “Oscar! Don’t start admiring the woman. It will make it all the harder for you to send her to the electric chair.”

He smiled. “The chair? With her brains and her looks? You don’t know juries, my dear Hildegarde. They’ll never give her a death sentence.”

But a chill March evening, nine months and five days later, showed Miss Withers was right, as usual.

The Making of O’Malley GERALD BEAUMONT

Original publication: The Red Book Magazine, October 1924

Gerald Beaumont (1880?–1926) was born in London and had a remarkably prolific writing career for the short time that he was active. He wrote scores of short stories for The Red Book Magazine, all between 1920 and 1926, when he died.

He wrote at least two books, the first of which, Hearts and the Diamond (1921), is a short story collection that provides an inside look at the world of professional baseball. His second, Riders Up! (1922), also a collection of stories, centered around characters at the racetrack, received exceptionally positive reviews. It was also published in England and, ironically, the only caveat came from the (London) Times when it cautioned, “This book contains much American slang which is unintelligible to English readers,” perhaps unexpected from a British-born author. It is not known when Beaumont came to the United States. He died in Hollywood at the age of forty-six.

His career in the motion picture industry was remarkably prolific as well, with approximately fifty of his stories serving as the basis for films, mostly silent, with nineteen released in 1924 alone.

Beaumont’s story “The Making of O’Malley” had such a heartwarming quality that it was filmed twice, first in 1925 as a silent and then again in 1937. It is the story of a policeman who believes in the letter of the law but feels guilty when his strict interpretation of it results in a decent man being sent to prison.

Title: The Great O’Malley, 1937

Studio: Warner Brothers Pictures

Director: William Dieterle

Screenwriters: Milton Krims, Tom Reed

Producers: Hal B. Wallis (executive), Jack L. Warner (executive), Harry Joe Brown (associate) — all uncredited

• Pat O’Brien (James Aloysius O’Malley)

• Sybil Jason (Barbara Phillips)

• Humphrey Bogart (John Phillips)

• Ann Sheridan (Judy Nolan)

• Frieda Inescourt (Mrs. Phillips)

• Donald Crisp (Captain Cromwell)

The film version follows Beaumont’s story religiously, tugging at the heartstrings when a desperate man commits a robbery in order to take care of his wife and disabled child. The strictly by-the-book cop, O’Malley, sends him to prison but, guilt-ridden, befriends the family.

The Making of O’Malley had a surprisingly all-star cast for such a relatively low-budget film.

O’Brien’s long and successful Hollywood career was essentially based on his screen image of being a warm, kindly Irishman, often in roles as a policeman or Catholic cleric, though he was born and raised in America. He was without accent in real life but often put on a believable brogue in films.

Sybil Jason (born Jacobson in South Africa) received credit above Bogart, as she was enormously talented and Warner Brothers had expected her to be a star. A precocious child performer (she reportedly did a remarkably accurate imitation of Maurice Chevalier at the age of five), she had been put under contract to compete with Shirley Temple, who was one of the biggest box office attractions in America in the 1930s. She did not enjoy similar success and, by 1940, her career was over.

Bogart, as one of Hollywood’s all-time icons, played in twenty-eight films between 1936 and 1940, almost always as a gangster, although clearly John Phillips did not fit the description. Bogart’s success began with his role as escaped convict Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), a role he had played on Broadway.

First National Pictures had previously made a silent version of Beaumont’s story, titled The Making of O’Malley, in 1925. It was directed by Lambert Hillyer, with a screenplay by Eugene Clifford, and starring Milton Sills, Dorothy Mackaill, and Helen Rowland.

THE MAKING OF O’MALLEY Gerald Beaumont

“Wherefore it is the judgment of the Court in compliance with the law that you be confined in the State’s prison at Greenbow for a period of five years.”

A woman screamed. The courtroom buzzed. Police Officer O’Malley had scored again!

No more would the historic confines of Tar Flat resound to the turbulent clamor of battle, the tinkle of broken glass and the Saturday night slogan of Danny the Dude: “Follow me, boys, and you’ll see action!”

Gone was the glory of the Tar Flat gang, smashed by the brilliant single-handed campaign of a cop from Killarney! The battle was over now. Danny was going up to join his defeated pals. Tar Flat had caught a Tartar in James Patrick O’Malley. Deliberately they had set out to get him; and instead their scalps now adorned his belt, and their bruised ears still rang to the roar of Erin go Bragh!

Danny the Dude had boasted that he would beat the case. Him go up! Not a chance! But this was one time when public opinion offset the District’s political pressure. Nor did the presence of Danny’s wife and baby avail him anything. O’Malley had prepared his case well. He was too honest to be “squared,” and too stubborn in his testimony to be shaken. Arrest and conviction were both his work.

“Five years in Greenbow!”

Danny the Dude, slim and sartorially elegant, bade a nonchalant farewell to his family and sauntered from the courtroom in the custody of a deputy jailer. On the way out, he brushed shoulders with the arresting officer, and for the space of a second looked deep into the latter’s eyes.

“I’ll — see — you — later!” said Danny, and there was no mistaking what lay behind the promise.

Officer O’Malley, who feared neither God, man, nor devil, answered quietly: “Fine, my boy — I’ll be right on my beat waiting for you.”

Thus was born the seed of future reckoning. Young Danny, who was not old enough to have learned discretion, marched off, determined by good behavior to cut down considerably the time in which Police Officer O’Malley had yet to live. As for the latter, he hitched at his belt, patted his gun and ’cuffs, and strolled back to the station conscious of a duty well performed, and eager now to maintain his reputation as an arresting officer.

O’Malley was a harness bull if there ever was one! Heavy of hand and foot, slow of thought, and very red of face, he considered that day lost whose low descending sun saw no man imprisoned and no battle won! His mother, having given one husky son to the priesthood and another to the police force, considered she had done her duty by God and the community.

Captain Collins, kindly, gray-haired veteran of the Central Station, was not so sure that the community had been blessed by the acquisition of Patrolman O’Malley; and as time went on, he became more and more dubious.

“The breaking up of the Tar Flat gang was a feather in Jim’s bonnet,” admitted Captain Collins, “but now the lad wants an Indian headdress. Sergeant, how many men did he bring in yesterday?”

“ ’Twas bargain day,” said Sergeant Patterson. “He found a Chink lottery on his beat and grabbed forty-four. He was displeased because three got away.”

“Tomorrow it will be something else,” sighed the Captain. “Since we gave him a day beat, he goes to bed with a copy of the city ordinances, and he knows ’em all from the time they ruled the first cow off the street. Give him time, and he’ll have half the city behind bars. You see what publicity does to a young cop!”

Captain Collins was right. It is a bad thing for a patrolman to see his name in the papers too frequently, or to be held long in a district where he is called upon to use his stick and ’cuffs to any great extent. He is like a horse that once attuned to the clang of fire-bells or the smell of gunpowder is satisfied thereafter with nothing else.

Even a discreet officer, and the departments are full of them, has a hard enough time making friends. For the statute-books are full of unpopular and obnoxious laws, passed by inexperienced and impractical commissioners. The poor patrolman is always between the slippery curb and the chasm. If he enforces the ordinances as they are written, he is a pest; if he doesn’t, he is a grafter. To retain both prestige and popularity, he must combine the qualities of Solomon, Chesterfield, and Sherlock Holmes.

O’Malley was far from being discreet. He did his duty as he saw it, but he saw it too frequently for his own good. Honest, sober, conscientious, he was none the less an irritating influence in the community, the type of man who can do more harm than good to the department. “To call that man a peace officer,” sighed his superior, “is to make sad misuse of the English language.”

Nine times he was hauled upon the carpet for being overzealous in the performance of his duty.

“Listen to me, you big man,” said Captain Collins. “If Justice is supposed to be blind, a cop can afford to be nearsighted when the occasion requires. You’ve got too much blood in your head, and your fists are too big. Will you turn in your star now, or must I break you?”

O’Malley’s heavy shoulders drooped, and dumb helplessness was written in his blue eyes. He shifted from one big foot to the other, unable to say a word in his own defense.

Captain Collins’s eyes wandered to a printed motto on the wall, the Christmas sermon of Robert Louis Stevenson.

He unpinned the card and held it out to O’Malley. “I’ll give you one more chance, Jim. Read that, and see if you can get it through your thick head. ’Tis my conception of an officer’s code. On your way, now, and the next time you open your police manual, consider that card Page One.”

O’Malley departed for his beat, which was a long way off. He made the journey by street-car, hunched in a corner, hands gripping Captain Collins’s present, and his lips mumbling the message, “To be honest, to be kind; to earn a little, to spend a little less... to make on the whole a family happier for my presence.”

Men are not usually cured by the mere reading of sermons. By all the rules of logic, the Central Station would have lost a good man and this story would never have been written, had it not been for Miss Sadie Smith, who had just as much courage as Officer O’Malley and a great deal more sense.

Sadie was a product of Tar Flat, which only goes to show that the law of compensation is a wonderful thing. Bright and blonde as a canary, and not much larger, Sadie was principal of the Hillside Park Grammar School and the kindergarten that adjoined it, having qualified for the job by successfully rearing five little brothers and sisters without the aid of the police.

But Sadie wanted police protection now, and what she wanted she usually got. Fifteen minutes after Miss Smith swept into the Central Station, armed with facts and figures and resolutions from mothers’ clubs, Captain Collins threw up his hands and agreed to do the impossible.

“I’ll give you one, Sadie,” said he, “if for no other reason than that I used to dandle you on my knee once; but God knows where I’m going to find him. We’ve got one third of the force on traffic-duty now, and the council won’t increase the budget. Crime grows — the city grows — everything grows but police salaries.”

“Don’t fool yourself,” said Miss Smith. “I’m intrusted with the training of six hundred future citizens, and I’m paid no better than the cop on the beat.”

“Shake!” said Captain Collins. “We represent the two most responsible professions in the commonwealth, and the two poorest paid. Now show me on the map just where you want a man stationed, and he’ll be there in the morning.”

So Sadie stuck a glass-headed pin right in the center of Hillside Park Boulevard, where cross-streets and traction-lines branched out like the points of a police star. A small park was on one side, the school a half-block distant on the other. In between, owing to the peculiar curve of park and streets, there were six corners on which children could gather for the dash across.

“Good night!” said Captain Collins. “Whoever gets that post will have to put mirrors on his ears. Even then, he’ll get cockeyed. How many children did you say there were?”

“Six hundred,” said Sadie, “and none of them are older than twelve — some are as young as five. They come streaming in from all directions in the morning, at the very hour when people are hurrying to work in their machines. Most of them go home at noon, return to school, and then are dismissed at various hours in the afternoon. That means four crossings for each child. And if the children are late, they’re running, and they don’t look—”

“Enough!” pleaded Captain Collins. “You’ve got the cold shivers coming down my back now. ’Tis my idea of a fine job for a man who’s looking for trouble. Sergeant, who have we got on the discipline list that needs soft-boiling? I want one of these brave club-swingin’ buckos who... who... oh, wait a minute! Never mind, Sergeant; I’ve got just the man. That glass-headed pin is officer James Patrick O’Malley, and may God have mercy on his soul! He’ll be there at eight o’clock in the morning, Miss Smith.”

Sadie smiled her thanks. “I think it would be wise for him to come up to the assembly-room at ten o’clock and make a short speech to the children at that hour. I’ll get them all together. That way they’ll know him, and he can impress upon them the importance of obeying his signals.”

Captain Collins’s eyes twinkled. “A speech?” said he. “You want him to get up and talk to six hundred children? Oh, fine! Make him stand with his heels together and bow politely before he starts. I’d give my back teeth to be a kid again in your classroom. Good-by, Miss Smith; I’m glad you called.”

The little teacher went out the door, and Sergeant Patterson grinned at his superior. “Jim will turn in his badge on next pay-day,” he predicted.

Captain Collins looked at the vacant spot on the wall where once an embossed card had hung, and his eyes grew dreamy and reflective. “You’re wrong,” said he. “Big fists and little hands go well together, and Sadie Smith’s kids will be the making of O’Malley.”

Patterson thought differently.

“I owe you ten dollars,” said the Sergeant. “If you’re right, I’ll owe you twenty, but if O’Malley resigns, I don’t owe you nothin’.”

“What kind of frenzied finance is that?” demanded the Captain. “All the same, I’ll go you this once.”

Pay-day came and went, and Sergeant Patterson lost his bet; nor did he ever try to renew it, for by that time every man on the force was aware of what was going on in the Hillside Park District. The captains told the sergeants, who in turn passed it on to the street men, who went home and told their wives, and everybody laughed except James Patrick O’Malley, who was in the process of being made.

The big harness bull who did not know the meaning of fear was racked wide open the first day. The first avalanche of youngsters that answered his nervous orders, trusting their hands to his clasp and their lives to his keeping, shattered all his assurance. The necessity of making his first public address completed his downfall.

No timid tyro mounting the rostrum to recite, “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,” had anything on Police Officer O’Malley as he faced the six hundred youngsters who overflowed the seating capacity of the room, and heard Miss Smith say at his elbow: “Now, children, this is the good, kind police officer who has been detailed to take care of you at the crossing. He is going to say a few words to you on the subject of safety, and I want you all to listen very carefully.”

She smiled encouragingly at the speaker, who bowed, cleared his throat, and ran a huge finger around his wilted collar. He had stayed up half the night preparing for this moment, but now he could not recall a line of what he had written.

“Ladies and gentleman—” he stammered. “I mean, boys and girls! It gives me great pleasure to appear before you, and — and—”

His eyes began to glaze. He half-turned toward the girl teacher. “What — what’ll I say?” he whispered.

“Tell them who you are,” she prompted, comprehending his distress and realizing when all else fails a man can usually talk about himself.

“I’m James Patrick O’Malley,” he announced. “Officer Four Hundred and Forty-four.” He would probably have given his age and physical measurements, but at that moment his panic-stricken eyes were caught and held by a little girl in the front row who smiled up at him with such friendly encouragement that it was as though she were saying aloud: “Don’t be scared, Jimmy; I’m your friend.”

The solemn lines on O’Malley’s face melted. He smiled at the little girl in the front row. His smile grew wider. So did hers. She tittered, and the titter spread over the room, swelling into a gale of delighted laughter that was led heartily by an officer of the law and ably seconded by a young school principal. The ice was broken forever.

“Say, listen,” said O’Malley, hitching at his belt and holding up his hand as the nearer children crowded around him — with the single exception of the little girl in the front row. She still smiled at him, but she made no move to arise. “My name is Jim, and I’m your friend. Let’s all be good kids, and love our teacher, and be very careful in crossing the street. How ’bout it? Are you with me?”

The walls rang with their answer.

“Three cheers for Officer Jim!” shrilled a youngster at the back of the room, and they were given with a will.

That was the way Officer Jim came into his inheritance, a trust that broadened and deepened as the days went by, until it was the talk of the whole neighborhood. Dignified business men would pass up street-car after street-car just for the pleasure of standing on a corner and watching a blue-coated shepherd at his morning devotions. He seldom crossed the street without ten children hanging to either arm, and a dozen more clinging to his coat-tails and trampling all the polish off his shoes. They clustered on the six corners waiting for him to suspend traffic from first one direction and then the other. At his cheery cry “Here y’are!” accompanied by a beckoning hand, they left the safety of the curb and headed for their protector as fast as they could leg it. His customary procedure was to stand in the center of the boulevard until he had collected a full consignment from three-corners; then he headed for the other shore, entirely surrounded by chattering youngsters.

Not always did they obey his signals promptly. Sometimes a tiny lass in pinafore, more timid than the others, would turn back after she had got halfway, and then tie up traffic while she stood on the curb and tried to make up her mind whether it was safe to go or not. About the time that Officer Jim would decide to wave the traffic on, the small lady at the curb would take it into her head to go. He was always in hot water, and not infrequently his anguished roar could be distinguished for three blocks.

“Whoa! Whoa!... All right, come ahead!... Well, then go back! Come on, everybody! No, no! Not you! Stand where you are! Stop! Go ahead! Whoa! Whoa! Holy mackerel!”

There was really not much danger, for most motorists knew that crossing by now and approached it cautiously. Even so, Officer Jim, with the perspiration beading his forehead, fluttered back and forth with all the exaggerated anxiety of a clucking hen, and the boulevard was smudged with long black marks.

“Damn’ right, I make ’em burn their brakes,” he told the sergeant. “God pity the man that bumps one of my kids.”

By this time, you see, he really considered himself the daddy of the district, and not without cause. Mothers brought their little ones as far as the boulevard and introduced them to the guardian of the crossing with the solemn injunction: “Now if I’m late in calling for you this afternoon, don’t you dare leave Officer Jim until I come.”

Then they went downtown to do their shopping, and were nearly always late in getting back, so that he found frequently as many as twenty youngsters parked with him long after he was supposed to be off duty. Thus he learned their names and became acquainted with their respective problems.

Very small ones, going to school for the first time, were presented by older brothers and sisters.

“Jim, this is my kid sister Ethel. Shake hands with Jim, sis. And this kid is Billy Dugan’s brother. He just got over the measles. Him and me walk home together. His name’s Tommy. That’s his dog.”

He met others during the lunch-hour, when he sat on a bench in the park munching at a sandwich and exchanging confidences with his small admirers. The little girls brought him flowers in the morning and decked him out in defiance of all the rules and regulations. For that matter, Officer Jim had forgotten all about the once highly treasured volume of the city ordinances. The youngsters were riding bicycles on the sidewalks and whirring past on their roller skates, and playing ball in the park. All that he cared about was seeing that no one interfered with their happiness. When childish ailments kept one of his little friends away longer than seemed normal, he made inquiries, and these were usually followed by his appearance at the child’s home, cap in one hand and a bag of lollypops in the other.

“Just wanted to see how little Johnny was getting along,” he apologized.

Of course he had his favorite. Uniformed monarchs always do. Her name was Margie, and she was the same little Miss Sunshine whose encouraging smile had restored his composure on that opening day in school. He knew now why she had kept her seat, while all the others were standing. Margie was on crutches.

The last remnant of roughness was squeezed from his huge bulk by this crippled youngster who weighed scarcely sixty pounds. She alone could not take his hand in crossing, because of her crutches, but whenever he beheld her at the curb, he brought the whole world to a standstill and hurried forward.

They made a picture that everyone loved to watch: golden-haired Margie, swinging gayly to school on crutches, and big Jim O’Malley tiptoeing awkwardly behind her with both arms wide-stretched in a protecting shield. When they had crossed to safety, there was always a momentary pause, while he held her crutches and she put both arms around his neck in a childish embrace. That morning commendation inspired Officer O’Malley.

He made bold to seek the aid of Dr. Commerford, a distinguished surgeon who lived in the neighborhood, and who had both a skilled hand and a very big heart. “The poor little thing,” he explained, “tells me it’s something wrong in her kneecaps. She had a fall. Her mother is away workin’, and her father’s dead, I guess, because she says he’s gone to the North Pole. Her aunt takes care of her. I don’t think they have any money, but I could lay fifty a month aside—”

“Oh, you could, could you?” said Dr. Commerford. “Well, go ahead and do it, you big fool! Put it in the bank, and don’t let me or anybody else take it away from you. Where does your little friend live?”

Jim told him. Not long afterward surgical genius triumphed. Margie discarded her crutches and began to walk unaided. Complete recovery came gradually of course, but eventually she was able to beat all the others in a race for Officer Jim and to spring like a cat into his arms with a happy shriek of “Catch me, Jimmy!”

His cup of joy was almost complete. He would not have traded his job for that of Captain Collins, nor even that of the Chief. The youngsters showed him their report-cards each month, and those that had fallen from grace and failed to win promotion were loud in their insistence that he arrest their teacher. Some of them offered him candy and then demanded: “What’s the capital of Cleveland?” “Hey, Jim, where was Lincoln born?” “Is this the way you make a capital H?”

Because his own education had been sadly neglected and he desired to retain the respect of those that were learning fast, he showed up at the school after hours one afternoon, and made his humble plea to Miss Sadie Smith.

“I’m ashamed to go to a night-school,” he confessed, “but if you could spare me twenty minutes at your convenience, Miss Smith, ’twould be a great favor and I’ll be glad to make it worth your while.”

So Miss Smith gained another pupil. The maiden mother and the bachelor daddy of six hundred children confronted each other in a private classroom every afternoon. Officer Jim struggled manfully with the problems of algebra; Sadie got chalk all over her nose; and the winged god of love sat in a far corner, heels on a desk, chuckling as he watched them.

O’Malley’s romance deepened in two directions. In the evenings, he now went out with Miss Smith. In the daytime Margie claimed him for her own. He learned why little Miss Sunshine was so glad she could run and why she was so anxious to save all her report-cards that had “Excellent” written upon them.

“It’s for my real daddy,” she explained. “When he comes back from the North Pole, I’m going to run to meet him, and show him all my cards.”

“That’s a fine idea,” he told her, “but you mustn’t be too disappointed if your daddy doesn’t come home right away, darlin’. The North Pole’s a long way off, you know.”

“I know,” she nodded soberly. “But Auntie says Santa Claus is going to surely bring him when I’m seven years old, and I’m almost six now!” She screwed up her face and looked at him with an expression that seemed oddly familiar, but just why he could not tell.

“Well,” he sighed, “let’s hope Santa Claus won’t forget. In the meantime, remember that Jim loves you, and if there’s anything your little heart wants, just come to me.”

Later it occurred to him that her father might be alive after all, for Margie insisted that he was coming back and that her mother wouldn’t then have to work any more. “We’re going to have our own home, Jimmy, and I’m going to invite you to dinner the first thing. You see if I don’t.”

Then one afternoon she hurried up to him, her cheeks aglow with eagerness. “See, Jim,” she cried, “here’s Daddy’s picture. I took it off Auntie’s dresser just to show you.”

He was sitting down at the time, which was just as well, since the picture that was thrust so eagerly into his hands proved to be a cheap postcard portrait of young Danny the Dude. The blood drained from O’Malley’s face. His heavy fingers trembled. So, the North Pole was Greenbow! And he himself was responsible for little Margie’s long wait! He wondered what the little one would say if she knew. His mind reverted to the Christmas Sermon, folded in the flyleaf of his police manual, and to one line in particular:

“To make on the whole a family happier for my presence.”

Heavily he achieved his feet, handed back the picture, and with one clumsy finger caressed ever so lightly a dimpled cheek.

“You did the right thing, darlin’, in showing me Daddy’s picture. The North Pole ain’t as far away as I thought, and who knows but what the Police Department might have a little influence with Santa Claus!”

That night Officer O’Malley passed up his date with Sadie Smith, and called instead on various public officials, including Superior Judge Humphrey, District Attorney Taylor, and Captain Collins.

“Jim,” said his veteran superior, “I’m not much in favor of paroling a man that’s sent up for gun-play. The habit is hard to break. But I know the little girl you speak of, and I think you’re right in sayin’ she’ll do Danny as much good as Greenbow. Anyway, they’re pretty crowded up there. When are you goin’ to get married?”

“Me?” said Jim, turning a dull crimson. “Me?”

Captain Collins laughed. “Do you think I got all these stripes on my arm for bein’ blind? I held Sadie on my knee, and I knew her twenty years ago, and I’ll do it again if you don’t look out. Go on with you now, and conduct yourself as becomes a courageous man.”

June came, the month of roses and romance and reckoning. School commencement exercises were but a few days off. Margie scampered up with the unbelievable news that her father was coming home the next morning. Her radiancy well repaid Officer Jim for all his efforts.

“Well, well, well,” he commented, “that’s fine! You want to be extra cautious now, crossing the street. I’ve taken care of you this long — you mustn’t let anything happen to you at the last minute. Take my hand, darlin’, and we’ll cross together.”

Margie was excused a half-hour earlier the next morning in order that she could hurry home to meet her father. Fate, which operates in ways that are beyond all human understanding, saw to it that a coal-oil stove exploded in a house on upper Hillside. Far down the boulevard a shrill siren began its wail, and Officer O’Malley, strolling leisurely toward his noonday post, quickened his pace. When he reached the cross-street, he saw Margie starting toward him from the opposite corner. He held up a warning hand, but she mistook it for a friendly greeting, and ignoring the siren that was growing louder every second, sprang forward to meet him. At the same instant Battalion Chief Powell’s red car swept into sight, traveling fifty miles an hour. Powell had every reason to expect a clear street at that time of day. Instead a little girl fluttered into his path, saw her danger, and instead of standing still, turned first one way and then the other.

Brakes shrieked on a swerving car. There was a wild yell from the driver, and Officer O’Malley left the curb in a headlong leap. Streak of red, flash of blue — bump — and on!

Careening on two wheels, the fire-car missed a telegraph-pole by inches, mounted the sidewalk, regained the street and came jerkily to a stop. Chief Powell looked back. A bare-headed cop, covered with dust and with his right coat-sleeve torn off, had regained his feet, and in his arms he held the limp figure of Danny’s daughter.

“All right!” bellowed Officer Jim. “Go on! She’s just fainted — you didn’t touch her!”

“Thank God!” said Chief Powell. “Well, that’s one cigar I owe big Jim. — Step on it, son!”

Margie had been shocked into a swoon. Her house was not so far away, and O’Malley walked there straight as a bee travels, but he had no recollection of it afterward. The terrific fall had stunned him. He felt no pain at all from a fractured collarbone. He had but one blind instinct — to get this child to her home, and then go to his own cottage and lie down. He did not even remember turning little Miss Sunshine over to her mother, nor of starting to descend the narrow stairs that led to the street. But what happened immediately thereafter penetrated his torpor. Halfway down the stairs he came across his handcuffs where they had fallen from his pocket, and he bent mechanically to pick them up. The effort told on him, and for a moment he drooped against the wall, half crouched in the shadows with the steel bracelets in his hands and his heavy features contorted with pain.

This was the picture presented to young Danny the Dude, as he ran lightly up the steps of his home expecting to greet his wife and child. The door was unlatched and he pushed straight in! The two men looked into each other’s eyes, and they were as close as they had been that day in the courtroom when the threat was uttered and answered.

To young Danny, chastened and hopeful, but fresh from Greenbow, Officer O’Malley’s presence in his home meant but one thing. The handcuffs confirmed it! All the stories which he had heard from fellow-prisoners and only half believed were true. The police were persecutors! They weren’t going to let him even see his family. His release was a frame-up. Red madness engulfed him.

“You dirty hound o’ hell!” he shrieked, and leaped barehanded for O’Malley’s throat. The big man, protesting feebly, went down under the attack. The police gun slipped from his holster, and fell within reach of a slim hand. Bang!

A moment later Danny the Dude fled down the front steps. After him reeled an officer of the law, blood streaming from a wound in the shoulder, and calling desperately as he went. “Danny — Danny — for God’s sake don’t run!... It’s all right, I tell you. Danny, come back here!”

But the fugitive fled on. O’Malley hailed a passing machine.

“Gosh!” said the startled driver. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’,” he answered. “Take me home.” He gave his address and fell into the back of the car.

That night Inspector Foley and two plainclothes men, having heard part of the story and halfway suspecting the rest, stood at O’Malley’s bedside and tried unsuccessfully to worm the truth from him. The papers had it that Officer Jim had been hurt saving a schoolchild from certain death. Chief Powell had made that part of it plain. The rest was still a police secret.

“You say,” questioned the Inspector, “that as you were coming down the stairs, your gun fell out and exploded. Is that it, Jim?”

“Yes,” confirmed O’Malley. “It’s only a flesh-wound. I’ll be all right in a few days.”

“I believe that part of it,” said Foley. “But I’d like you to tell me how the top of your shoulder is all powder-burned if the shot was fired as you say?”

O’Malley remained silent.

“And you couldn’t by any possible chance tell us who belongs to this soft black hat we found on the staircase? Nor who it was that ran out of the house just ahead of you?”

O’Malley shook his head.

“That’s all,” said the Inspector. “Let’s go, boys! My mind’s working better than Jim’s.”

At eleven o’clock the next morning, just as the commencement exercises of the Highland Park School were drawing to a close, a police car drew up at O’Malley’s humble domicile. Captain Collins, who had risen from a sickbed, was in the front seat, and in the rear, handcuffed to Inspector Foley, sat Danny the Dude. Old Mother O’Malley, blessing herself nervously, ushered them into the sickroom.

The injured officer tried to flash a message to the prisoner, but it was of no avail. Danny figured the game was up. He drew back with a snarl, “Aw, what’s the use of this foolin’ around. Sure I plugged him, and I’m sorry I didn’t bump him off.”

O’Malley groaned and turned his face to the wall.

“So you admit you shot him,” said Captain Collins. “Well, my lad, you know what that means, don’t you? ’Twill be more like forty years now instead of four. You might at least have given your little girl a kiss first.”

Suddenly, Danny the Dude’s composure broke. He fell into a chair, buried his face in manacled hands, and sobbed out his version of the shooting of O’Malley. Bitter curses punctuated the recital. “There he was, layin’ for me with the ’cuffs in his hand! Wasn’t even going to let me upstairs to see my kid — my kid! I tell you I was goin’ straight. I was — I was! He waited for me just as he said he would. Waited right in my house with the ’cuffs, and my kid upstairs.”

O’Malley propped himself up. “ ’Twas because of your little girl,” said he, “that I was there. The ’cuffs fell out of my pocket and I was picking them up.”

“You lie!” raved Danny the Dude. “What license have you got to be thinkin’ about my kid? You dirty—”

“Help me up, boys,” pleaded O’Malley. “I’ll bust him right in the nose—”

Captain Collins raised his hand. “Shut up, both of you! I’ll tell the story now as it ought to be told. As my old woman used to say, ‘Anybody can see through a door after somebody bores a hole in it.’ Listen to me, Danny, and I’ll tell you why Jim happened to be in your house.”

The gray-haired apostle of the Central Station was not an orator. He spoke simply and as one man to another, but more than once his voice wavered and he looked out the big window. He loved his men and his work, and he knew the value to the community of teaching little children to run to an officer instead of away from them. The story was long in the telling, for Captain Collins omitted little and supplied much that O’Malley had thought was a secret of his own. Certain chapters brought a dull red to the cheeks of Officer Jim.

“So, you see,” concluded the Captain, “to sum it all up, ‘police protection’ is a pretty broad term. This harness bull that you took such pleasure in wingin’ is the one who made it possible for your little girl to walk, who guarded her from all harm while you were away, and who headed the petition for your parole. If you hadn’t found him in your home, bruised and out of his head, it would have been because you’d have later found your baby stretched out under a sheet at the City Morgue — God help you then, lad! We’d have been powerless!”

Through most of the recital Danny the Dude had listened with tight lips and challenging eyes, but gradually the hard lines had softened, incredulity had been replaced by amazement; and now his youthful features twitched with the reaction. He drew a deep breath and looked up at Collins. “As God’s my witness,” said he, “if I believed one-half of that was true—” He hesitated.

“You’d do what?” prompted Captain Collins.

“I was brought up to hate cops,” said Danny, “but if you ain’t lying, I’ll get down on my knees and kiss all the polish off that guy’s shoes!”

There was a moment of silence.

“Faith,” chuckled the Captain. “I’d hate to have that sentence passed on me. Jim’s got the biggest shoes in the department. Now, let’s see—”

Mother O’Malley appeared in the doorway, visibly excited.

“Parade,” she called. “Parade, an’ it’s comin’ this way! All the kids in the world and a brass band! Hear it?”

They all heard it then: the Hillside Park School Band, trying its best to master the mysteries of the official police anthem, “Fearless and True.” The music grew louder.

Captain Collins went to the front window. A battalion of school children, six hundred strong, was coming up the street, little girls in stiff white dresses escorted by little boys carrying school colors and American flags. At their head marched Miss Sadie Smith, holding by the hand the daughter of Danny the Dude. The parade came to a stop outside the O’Malley residence. A youthful yell-leader mounted the steps, faced the assemblage, and waved his arms. The enthusiastic response rang throughout the neighborhood.

O’Malley’s crimson face disappeared under the bedclothes, whence came a muffled voice: “For the love o’ Pete! They ain’t comin’ in here, are they? You talk to them, Captain! Tell ’em I’m much obliged.”

Captain Collins returned from the window. “Better take the ’cuffs off your man, Inspector. Danny, you wanted evidence, did you? Well, stand back in that corner, and you’ll get it.” He prodded the shrouded figure that represented O’Malley. “Stick your head out, you big turtle! You’re a hell of a hero! Quick, now — both your girls are comin’ in here with candy and flowers.”

He spoke just in time. O’Malley looked up to see Danny’s small daughter standing in the doorway, her arms filled with flowers. Behind her was Miss Sadie Smith. Margie, made timid by the presence of strangers, hesitated a moment. Then she saw the welcoming light in blue eyes, and forgot all else, even the carefully prepared speech which she had been elected to deliver. Hurrying across the room, Danny’s daughter dropped to her knees by O’Malley’s bed. The flowers fell unheeded to the floor. Small arms went around his neck.

“Thank you for saving me, Officer Jim, and I hope you’re not hurt bad, and... and—” her voice wavered, and the hot tears of childish grief descended. “Oh, J-Jimmy,” she sobbed, “he came, and I missed him! Mamma says he’s gone back to the North P-Pole, and now I’ll have to wait all over again. It wasn’t any use s-saving me at all.”

She buried her face in the bedclothes and sobbed bitterly.

“There, there!” comforted O’Malley. “Your mother might be mistaken, darlin’.” He looked up at Captain Collins, and the latter with a wave of one hand relegated all authority to his subordinate. O’Malley patted the head of his favorite. “Kiss big Jim,” he whispered, “and I’ll tell you some grand news. Your daddy didn’t go back to the North Pole. He came down to see his little girl, and he lost his way, so he had to come to us. All people who are lost do that, you know. He’s in this room, darlin’. Dry your eyes now, and see if you can pick him out. They wanted me to identify him, but somehow I couldn’t seem to do it.”

Margie didn’t have much trouble, for as she turned swiftly around, young Danny the Dude crumpled to his knees and held out his arms. With a sharp cry Margie covered the distance between them.

“Take him home, sweetheart,” said Captain Collins, “and see that he don’t lose his way again. Inspector, I guess you and I might as well be goin’.”

They paused a moment on the porch to acknowledge the cheers of the children in the street.

“Look at that, will you!” said Captain Collins. “There’s the finest testimonial ever given an officer in the history of the Department. We’ll have no trouble with that crop of citizens.”

Sadie appeared in the doorway, her eyes moist and her lips trembling.

“Where do you think you’re goin’?” said the head of the Central Station. “We came out on the porch to give you and Jim a chance.”

The pink deepened in Miss Smith’s cheeks. “I... I’ve got to march the children back to the yard before I can dismiss them.”

“Me and the Inspector will do that,” said the Captain. “Go on back and give a deserving officer the decoration that’s comin’ to him.”

“Orders are orders,” said Sadie, turning back...

Captain Collins descended the stairs and consulted with the leader of the band. “Do you know the Wedding March? Well, you better learn it! All right, kids, fall in! About face! Squads right! Forward march! Heads up, everybody! Shoulders back! Eyes straight ahead! Ah, that’s fine! Watch your step! Hay foot, straw foot, belly full of bean soup. Hay foot—”

The band played “Freedom Forever,” and down the street marched Sadie Smith’s kids, four abreast, and led by two veteran upholders of the law. Captain Collins’s head moved jauntily to the beat of the drums, and his countenance was serene. He rightly guessed that in the cottage on the hill behind them, a blushing young schoolteacher was at that moment applying the finishing touches to the making of O’Malley!

Once Upon a Train STUART PALMER & CRAIG RICE

Original publication: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1950; first collected in People Vs. Withers & Malone by Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1963)

The authors who cowrote this story were friends who also collaborated on several screenplays and enough stories to fill a collection titled People Vs. Withers & Malone (1963). Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer (1905–1968) and Craig Rice (1908–1957) were two of the most beloved and successful mystery writers in America from the 1930s to the 1960s — Palmer for the books and stories featuring his schoolteacher sleuth Hildegarde Withers and Rice for the zany humor she brought to her mystery novels.

It seems that Palmer occasionally found collaboration with Rice a tricky, even frustrating, business. She had become an alcoholic, so her dedication to meeting deadlines had diminished in later years. Still, they were a good partnership, each of them blessed with a robust sense of humor.

Born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, Rice’s real-life mysteries were a match for her fiction. Because of her enormous popularity in the 1940s and 1950s (she was the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine), she was often interviewed but was as forthcoming as a deep-cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. How her pseudonym was created is a question that remains unanswered sixty years after her premature death. Equally murky are the questions about her marriages, the number of which remain a subject of conjecture. She was married a minimum of four times, and it is possible the number reached seven; that she had numerous affairs is not in dispute. She had three children.

Born in Chicago, where she spent much of her life, her parents took off for Europe when she was quite young, so she was raised by various family members. She worked in radio and public relations but sought a career in music and writing poetry and general novels, with which she had no success, so she turned to writing detective novels with spectacular results.

Rice is perhaps best known for the Malone series, though the character’s fictional career began as a friend of a madcap couple, the handsome but dim press agent Jake Justus and his socially prominent bride-to-be, Helene Brand. Malone’s “Personal File” usually contains a bottle of rye. Despite his seeming irresponsibility, Malone inspired great loyalty among his friends, including the Justuses, Maggie Cassidy, his long-suffering and seldom-paid secretary, and Captain Daniel von Flanagan of the Chicago homicide squad. The series began with Eight Faces at Three in 1939 and ran for a dozen novels.

“Once Upon a Train” begins when a crook for whom Malone got an acquittal fails to show up for the celebratory party as he takes off with $100,000 in cash. He boards a train from Chicago to New York, with Malone in pursuit — and he’s not alone. Naturally, as these things always seem to happen to the old schoolteacher, Miss Withers finds his body.

The story has a charming moment in which a character is identified as Horace Lee Randolph, a nod to one of Rice’s birth names, and another reminds Malone of Miss Hackett — the teacher on whom Palmer largely based Hildegarde Withers.

Title: Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone, 1950

Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Director: Norman Taurog

Screenwriter: William Bowers

Producer: William H. Wright

• Marjorie Main (Harriet “Hattie” O’Malley)

• James Whitmore (John J. Malone)

• Ann Dvorak (Connie Kepplar)

• Phyllis Kirk (Kay)

• Fred Clark (Inspector Tim Marino)

• Dorothy Malone (Lola Gillway)

There is some resemblance between “Once Upon a Train” and Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone, but not much. The action in both takes place on a train, and John J. Malone is aboard with a crook who owes him money.

However, Hildegarde Withers is nowhere to be found in the film, and the central character of the film, Mrs. Hattie O’Malley, does not make even a cameo appearance in the story, and is a total creation of the screenwriter.

Steve Kepplar, a crook, has just been released from jail. The $100,000 from the bank embezzlement that sent him to the slammer has never been recovered and his lawyer, Malone, is chasing him to collect his $10,000 fee. Also on board is Mrs. O’Malley, on her way to New York to collect a $50,000 prize in a radio contest; the recently divorced Connie Kepplar, who wants some of the loot because of alimony she’s owed; Lola Gillway, the girlfriend of Kepplar’s associate, who wouldn’t mind some of the cash; and Tim Marino, a police detective who wants to recoup the swag — all of it. It is not long before Kepplar is murdered, someone is trying to frame Malone, and a plethora of sleuths try to find the murderer: the cop, Malone, and Mrs. O’Malley, who has read too many mystery stories and figures she can solve the case as well as anyone.

This was planned as the first of a series of humorous detective movies starring Marjorie Main and James Whitmore, but it was not a box office success, so the notion of sequels was scuttled.

The working title for the film during production was The Loco Motive, far snappier than its eventual title.

The opening scene shows the radio program that Mrs. O’Malley won. It is hosted by Jack Bailey, who became a famous television personality soon after, when he hosted the hugely popular television series Queen for a Day.

To let audiences know that they were about to see a movie that was more comedy than mystery, a humorous prologue appears in the onscreen credits: “The producers of this picture feel that the attorney depicted herein should be disbarred and strongly suggest that the American Bar Association do something about it.”

ONCE UPON A TRAIN Stuart Palmer & Craig Rice

“It was nothing, really,” said John J. Malone with weary modesty. “After all, I never lost a client yet.”

The party in Chicago’s famed Pump Room was being held to celebrate the miraculous acquittal of Stephen Larsen, a machine politician accused of dipping some thirty thousand dollars out of the municipal till. Malone had proved to the jury and to himself that his client was innocent — at least, innocent of that particular charge.

It was going to be a nice party, the little lawyer kept telling himself. By the way Larsen’s so-called friends were bending their elbows, the tab would be colossal. Malone hoped fervently that his fee for services rendered would be taken care of today, before Larsen’s guests bankrupted him. Because there was the matter of two months’ back office rent...

“Thank you, I will,” Malone said, as the waiter picked up his empty glass. He wondered how he could meet the redhead at the next table, who looked sultry and bored in the midst of a dull family party. As soon as he got his money from Larsen he would start a rescue operation. The quickest way to make friends, he always said, was to break a hundred-dollar bill in a bar, and that applied even to curvaceous redheads in Fath models.

But where was Steve Larsen? Lolly was here, wearing her most angelic expression and a slinky gown which she overflowed considerably at the top. She was hinting that the party also celebrated a reconciliation between herself and Stevie; that the divorce was off. She had hocked her bracelet again, and Malone remembered hearing that her last show had closed after six performances. If she got her hand back into Steve’s pocket, Malone reflected, goodbye to his fee of three grand.

He’d made elaborate plans for that money. They not only included the trip to Bermuda which he’d been promising himself for twenty years, but also the redhead he’d been promising himself for twenty minutes.

Others at the table were worrying too. “Steve is late, even for him!” spoke up Allen Roth suddenly.

Malone glanced at the porcine paving contractor who was rumored to be Larsen’s secret partner, and murmured, “Maybe he got his dates mixed.”

“He’d better show,” Roth said, in a voice as cold as a grave-digger’s shovel.

The little lawyer shivered, and realized that he wasn’t the only guest who had come here to make a collection. But he simply had to have that money. $3,000 — $30,000. He wondered, half musing, if he shouldn’t have made his contingent fee, say, $2,995. This way it almost looked like...

“What did you say about ten per cent, counselor?” Bert Glick spoke up wisely.

Malone recovered himself. “You misunderstood me. I merely said, ‘When on pleasure bent, never muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.’ I mean rye.” He turned to look for the waiter, not solely from thirst. The little lawyer would often have been very glad to buy back his introduction to Bert Glick.

True, the City Hall hanger-on had been helpful during the trial. In fact, it had been his testimony as a prosecution witness that had clinched the acquittal, for he had made a surprise switch on several moot points of the indictment. Glick was a private detective turned bail-bondsman, clever at tapping wires and dipping his spoon into any gravy that was being passed.

Glick slapped Malone on the back and said, “If you knew what I know, you wouldn’t be looking at your watch all the time. Because this ain’t a coming out party, it’s a surprise party. And the surprise is that the host ain’t gonna be here!”

Malone went cold — as cold as Allen Roth’s gray eyes across the table. “Keep talking,” he said, adding in a whisper a few facts which Glick might not care to have brought to the attention of the district attorney.

“You don’t need to be so nasty,” Glick said. He rose suddenly to his feet, lifting his glass. “A toast! A toast to good ol’ Stevie, our pal, who’s taking the Super-Century for New York tonight, next stop Paris or Rio. And with him, my fine feathered friends, he’s taking the dough he owes most of us, and a lot more too. Bon voyage!” The man absorbed the contents of his glass and slowly collapsed in his chair.

There was a sudden hullabaloo around the table. Malone closed his eyes for just five seconds, resigning himself to the certainty that his worst suspicions were true. When he opened his eyes again, the redhead was gone. He looked at his watch. There was still a chance of catching that New York train, with a quick stop at Joe the Angel’s bar to borrow the price of a ticket. Malone rushed out of the place, wasting no time in farewells. Everybody else was leaving too, so that finally Glick was left alone with the waiter and with the check.

As Malone had expected, Joe the Angel took a very dim view of the project, pointing out that it was probably only throwing good money after bad. But he handed over enough for a round trip, plus Pullman. By the time his cab had dumped him at the I.C. station, Malone had decided to settle for one way. He needed spending money for the trip. There were poker games on trains.

Suddenly he saw the redhead! She was jammed in a crowd at the gate, crushed between old ladies, noisy sailors, and a bearded patriarch in the robes of the Greek Orthodox Church. She struggled with a mink coat, a yowling cat in a traveling case, and a caged parrot.

Malone leaped gallantly to her rescue, and for a brief moment was allowed to hold the menagerie, before a Redcap took over. The moment was just long enough for the lawyer to have his hand clawed by the irate cat, and for him and the parrot to develop a lifelong dislike. But he did hear the girl say, “Compartment B in Car 10, please.” And her warm grateful smile sent him racing off in search of the Pullman conductor.

Considerable eloquence, some trifling liberties with the truth, and a ten-dollar bill got him possession of the drawing room next to a certain compartment. That settled, he paused to make a quick deal with a roving Western Union boy, and more money changed hands. When he finally swung aboard the already moving train, he felt fairly confident that the trip would be pleasant and eventful. And lucrative, of course. The minute he got his hands on Steve Larsen...

Once established in the drawing room, Malone studied himself in the mirror, whistling a few bars of “The Wabash Cannonball.” For the moment the primary target could wait. He was glad he was wearing his favorite Finchley suit, and his new green-and-lavender Sulka tie.

“A man of distinction,” he thought. True, his hair was slightly mussed, a few cigar ashes peppered his vest, and the Sulka tie was beginning to creep toward one ear, but the total effect was good. Inspired, he sat down to compose a note to Operation Redhead, in the next compartment. He knew it was the right compartment, for the parrot was already giving out with imitations of a boiler factory, assisted by the cat.

He wrote:

He poked the note under the connecting door, rapped lightly, and waited.

After a long moment the note came back, with an addition in a surprisingly precise hand.

Undaunted, Malone whistled another bar of the song. Just getting any answer at all was half the battle. So she’d noticed him in the Pump Room! He sat down and wrote swiftly:

This time the answer was:

But the little lawyer thought he heard sounds of feminine laughter, though of course it might have been the parrot. He sat back, lighted a fresh cigar, and waited. They were almost to Gary now, and if the telegram had got through...

It had, and a messenger finally came aboard with an armful of luscious Gruss von Teplitz roses. Malone intercepted him long enough to add a note which really should be the clincher.

That was the way, he told himself happily. Don’t give her a chance to say No again.

After a long and somewhat bruising trip through lurching Pullman cars, made longer still because he first headed fore instead of aft, Malone finally sank into a chair in the club-car lounge, facing the door. Of course, she would take time to arrange the roses, make a corsage out of a couple of buds, and probably shift into an even more startling gown. It might be quite a wait. He waved at the bar steward and said, “Rye, please, with a rye chaser.”

“You mean rye with a beer chaser, Mr. Malone?”

“If you know my name, you know enough not to confuse me. I mean beer with a rye chaser!” When the drink arrived Malone put it where it would do the most good, and then for lack of anything better to do fell to staring in awed fascination at the lady who had just settled down across the aisle.

She was a tall, angular person who somehow suggested a fairly well-dressed scarecrow. Her face seemed faintly familiar, and Malone wondered if they’d met before. Then he decided that she reminded him of a three-year-old who had winked at him in the paddock at Washington Park one Saturday and then run out of the money.

Topping the face — as if anything could — was an incredible headpiece consisting of a grass-green crown surrounded by a brim of nodding flowers, wreaths and ivy. All it seemed to need was a nice marble tombstone.

She looked up suddenly from her magazine. “Pardon me, but did you say something about a well-kept grave?” Her voice reminded Malone of a certain Miss Hackett who had talked him out of quitting second-year high school. Somehow he found himself strangely unable to lie to her.

“Madam, do you read minds?”

“Not minds, Mr. Malone. Lips, sometimes.” She smiled. “Are you really the John J. Malone?”

He blinked. “How in the — oh, of course! The magazine! Those fact-detective stories will keep writing up my old cases. Are you a crime-story fan, Mrs. — ?”

“Miss. Hildegarde Withers, schoolteacher by profession and meddlesome old snoop by avocation, at least according to the police. Yes, I’ve read about you. You solve crimes and right wrongs, but usually by pure accident while chasing through saloons after some young woman who is no better than she should be. Are you on a case now?”

“Working my way through the second bottle,” he muttered, suddenly desperate. It would never do for the redhead to come in and find him tied up with this character.

“I didn’t mean that kind of a case,” Miss Withers explained. “I gather that even though you’ve never lost a client, you have mislaid one at the moment?”

Malone shivered. The woman had second sight, at least. He decided that it would be better if he went back through the train and met the Rose of Tralee, who must certainly be on her way here by this time. He could also keep an eye open for Steve Larsen. With a hasty apology he got out of the club car, pausing only to purchase a handy pint of rye from the bar steward, and started on a long slow prowl of mile after mile of wobbling, jerking cars. The rye, blending not unpleasantly with the champagne he had taken on earlier, made everything a little hazy and unreal. He kept getting turned around and blundering into the long-deserted diner. Two or three times he bumped into the Greek Orthodox priest with the whiskers, and similarly kept interrupting four sailors shooting craps in a men’s lounge.

But — no redhead. And no Larsen. Finally the train stopped — could it be Toledo already? Malone dashed to the vestibule and hung over the step, to make sure that Steve didn’t disembark. When they were moving again he resumed his pilgrimage, though by this time he had resigned himself to the fact that he was being stood up by the Rose of Tralee. At last, he turned mournfully back toward where his own lonesome cubicle ought to be — and then suddenly found himself back in the club car!

No redheaded Rose. Even The Hat had departed, taking her copy of Official Fact Detective Stories with her. The car was deserted except for a bridge game going on in one corner and a sailor — obviously half-seas over — who was drowsing in a big chair with a newspaper over his face.

The pint was empty. Malone told the steward to have it buried with full military honors, and to fetch him a cheese on rye. “On second thought, skip the cheese and make it just straight rye, please.”

The drink arrived, and with it a whispered message. There was a lady waiting down the corridor.

Malone emptied his glass and followed the steward, trying to slip him five dollars. It slipped right back. “Thanks, Mr. Malone, but I can’t take money from an old classmate. Remember, we went through the last two years of Kent College of Law together?”

Malone gasped. “Class of ’45. And you’re Homer — no, Horace Lee Randolph. But—”

“What am I doing here? The old story. Didn’t know my place, and got into Chicago Southside politics. Bumped up against the machine, and got disbarred on a phony charge of subornation of perjury. It could have been squared by handing a grand to a certain sharper at City Hall, but I didn’t have the money.” Horace shrugged. “This pays better than law, anyway. For instance, that lady handed me five dollars just to unlock the private lounge and tell you she’s waiting to see you there.”

The little lawyer winced. “She — was she a queer old maid in a hat that looked like she’d made it herself?”

“Oh, no. No hat.”

Malone breathed easier. “Was she young and lovely?”

“My weakness is the numbers game, but I should say the description is accurate.”

Humming “But ’twas not her beauty alone that won me; oh, no, ’twas the truth...” Malone straightened his tie and opened the door.

Lolly Larsen exploded in his face with all the power of a firecracker under a tin can. She grabbed his lapels and yelped: “Well, where is the dirty—?”

“Be more specific. Which dirty—?” Malone said, pulling himself loose.

“Steve, of course!”

“I don’t know, but I still hope he’s somewhere on this train. You joining me in the search? Nice to have your pretty face among us.”

Lolly had the face of a homesick angel. Her hair was exactly the color of a twist of lemon peel in a glass of champagne brut, her mouth was an overripe strawberry, and her figure might have inspired the French bathing suit, but her eyes were cold and strange as a mermaid’s. “Are you in this with Steve?” she demanded.

Malone said, “In simple, one-syllable words that even you can understand — No!”

Lolly suddenly relaxed, swaying against him so that he got a good whiff of brandy, nail polish, and Chanel Number 5. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just upset. I feel so terribly helpless—”

For Malone’s money, she was as helpless as an eight-button rattlesnake. “You see,” Lolly murmured, “I’m partly to blame for Steve’s running away. I should have stood by him at the trial, but I hadn’t the courage. Even afterward — I didn’t actually promise to come back to him, I just said I’d come to his party. I meant to tell him — in the Pump Room. So, please, please help me find him — so I can make him see how much we really need each other!”

Malone said, “Try it again, and flick the eyelashes a little bit more when you come to ‘need each other.’ ”

Lolly jerked away and called him a number of things, of which “dirty little shyster” was the most complimentary. “All right,” she finally said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Steve’s carrying a hundred grand, and you can guess how he got it. I happen to know — Glick isn’t the only one who’s been spying on him since he got out of jail yesterday. I don’t want Steve back, but I do want a fat slice for keeping my mouth shut. One word from me to the D.A. or the papers, and not even you can get him off.”

“Go on,” Malone said wearily. “But you interest me in less ways than one.”

“Find Steve!” she told him. “Make a deal and I’ll give you ten per cent of the take. But work fast, because we’re not the only ones looking for him. Steve double-crossed everybody who was at that party this afternoon. He’s somewhere on this train, but he’s probably shaved off his mustache, or put on a fright-wig, or—”

Malone yawned and said, “Where can I get in touch with you?”

“I couldn’t get a reservation of any kind.” Her strange eyes warmed hopefully. “But I hear you have a drawing room?”

“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice,” Malone said hastily. “Besides, I snore. Maybe there’ll be something available for you at the next stop.”

He was out of there and back in the club car before Lolly could turn on any more of the charm. He decided to have one for the road — the New York Central Road, and one for the Pennsy too. The sensible thing was to find Steve Larsen, collect his own hard-earned fee, and leave Lolly alone. Her offer of ten per cent of the blackmail take touched on a sore spot.

Malone began to work his way through the train again, this time desperately questioning porters. The worst of it was, there was nothing remarkable about Larsen’s appearance except curly hair, which he’d probably had straightened and dyed, a mustache that could have been shaved off, and a briefcase full of money, which he’d probably hidden. In fact, the man was undoubtedly laughing at everybody from behind a false set of whiskers.

Such were Malone’s thoughts as he suddenly came face to face again with the Greek Orthodox priest, who stared past him through thick, tinted spectacles. The little lawyer hesitated and was lost. Throwing caution to the winds, he yanked vigorously at the beard. But it was an orthodox beard, attached in the orthodox manner. Its owner let loose a blast which just possibly might have been an orthodox Greek blessing. Malone didn’t wait to find out.

His ears were still burning when he stepped into a vestibule and ran head on into Miss Hildegarde Withers. He nodded coldly and started past her.

“Ah, go soak your fat head!”

Malone gasped.

“It’s the parrot,” Miss Withers explained, holding up the caged monstrosity. “It’s been making such a racket that I’m taking it to the baggage car for the night.”

“Where — where did you get that — bird?” Malone asked weakly.

“Why, Sinbad is a legacy from the aunt whose funeral I just went back to attend. I’m taking him back to New York with me.”

“New York!” Malone moaned. “We’ll be there before I find that—”

“You mean that Mr. Larsen?” As he stood speechless, she went briskly on. “You see, I happened to be at a family farewell party at the table next to yours in the Pump Room, and my hearing is very acute. So, for that matter, is my eyesight. Has it occurred to you that Larsen may be wearing a disguise of some sort?”

“That it has,” admitted Malone sadly, thinking of the Greek priest.

The schoolteacher lowered her voice. “You remember that when we had our little chat in the club car some time ago, there was an obviously inebriated sailor dozing behind a newspaper?”

“There’s one on every train,” Malone said. “One or more.”

“Exactly. Like Chesterton’s postman, you never notice them. But somehow that particular sailor managed to stay intoxicated without ordering a single drink or nipping at a private bottle. More than that, when you suddenly left he poked his head out from behind the paper and stared after you with a very odd expression, rather as if he suspected you had leprosy. I couldn’t help noticing—”

“Madam, I love you,” the lawyer said fervently. “I love you because you remind me of Miss Hackett back in Dorchester High, and because of your hat, and because you are sharper than a tack.”

Miss Withers sniffed, but it was a mollified sniff. “Sorry to interrupt, but that same sailor entered our car just as I left it with the parrot. I just happened to look back, and I rather think he was trying the door of your drawing room.”

Malone clasped her hand fondly. Unfortunately it was the hand that held the cage, and the parrot took advantage of the long-awaited opportunity to nip viciously at his thumb. “Thank you so very much — some day I’ll wring your silly neck” was Malone’s sincere but somewhat garbled exit line.

“Go boil your head in lard!” the bird screamed after him.

The maiden schoolteacher sighed. “Come on, Sinbad, you’re going into durance vile. And I’m going to retire to my lonely couch, drat it all.” She looked wistfully over her shoulder. “Some people have all the fun!”

But twelve cars, ten minutes, and four drinks later, Malone was lost again. A worried porter was saying, “If you could only remember your car number, sah?” A much harassed Pullman conductor added, “If you’d just show us your ticket stub, we’d locate you.”

“You don’t need to locate me,” Malone insisted. “I’m right here.”

“Maybe you haven’t got a stub.”

“I have so a stub. It’s in my hatband.” Crafty as an Indian guide, Malone backtracked them unerringly to his drawing room. “Here’s the stub — now where am I?”

The porter looked out the window and said, “Just coming into Altoona, sah.”

“They lay in the wreck when they found them, They had died when the engine had fell...” sang Malone happily. But the conductor winced and said they’d be going.

“You might as well,” Malone told him. “If neither one of you can sing baritone.”

The door closed behind them, and a moment later a soft voice called, “Mr. Malone?”

He stared at the connecting door. The Rose of Tralee, Malone told himself happily. He adjusted his tie, and tried the door. Miraculously, it opened. Then he saw that it was Miss Hildegarde Withers, looking very worried, who stared back at him.

Malone said, “What have you done with my redhead?”

“If you refer to my niece Joannie,” the schoolteacher said sharply, “she only helped me get my stuff aboard and rode as far as Englewood. But never mind that now. I’m in trouble.”

“I knew there couldn’t be two parrots like that on one train,” Malone groaned. “Or even in one world.”

“There’s worse than parrots on this train,” snapped Miss Withers. “This man Larsen for whom you were looking so anxiously—”

The little lawyer’s eyes narrowed. “Just what is your interest in Larsen?”

“None whatever, except that he’s here in my compartment. It’s very embarrassing, because he’s not only dead, he’s undressed!”

“Holy St. Vitus!” gulped Malone. “Quiet! Keep calm. Lock your door and don’t talk!”

“My door is locked, and who’s talking?” The schoolteacher stepped aside and Malone peered gingerly past her. The speed with which he was sobering up probably established a new record. It was Larsen, all right. He was face down on the floor, dressed only in black shoes, blue socks, and a suit of long underwear. There was also a moderate amount of blood.

At last Malone said hoarsely, “I suspect foul play!”

“Knife job,” said Miss Withers with professional coolness. “From the back, through the latissimus dorsi. Within the last twenty minutes, I’d say. If I hadn’t had some difficulty in convincing the baggage men that Sinbad should be theirs for the night, I might have walked in on the murderer at work.” She gave Malone a searching glance. “It wasn’t you, by any chance?”

“Do you think I’d murder a man who owed me three thousand dollars?” Malone demanded indignantly. He scowled. “But a lot of people are going to jump to that conclusion. Nice of you not to raise an alarm.”

She sniffed. “You didn’t think I’d care to have a man — even a dead man — found in my room in this state of undress? Obviously, he hasn’t your money on his person. So — what is to be done about it?”

“I’ll defend you for nothing,” John J. Malone promised. “Justifiable homicide. Besides, you were framed. He burst in upon you and you stabbed him in defense of your honor...”

“Just a minute! The corpse was your client. You’ve been publicly asking for him all through the train. I’m only an innocent bystander.” She paused. “In my opinion, Larsen was lured to your room purposely by someone who had penetrated his disguise. He was stabbed, and dumped here. Very clever, because if the body had been left in your room, you could have got rid of it or claimed that you were framed. But this way, to the police mind at least, it would be obvious that you did the job and then tried to palm it off on the nearest neighbor.”

Malone sagged weakly against the berth. His hand brushed against the leather case, and something slashed viciously at his fingers. “But I thought you got rid of that parrot!” he cried.

“I did,” Miss Withers assured him. “That’s Precious in his case. A twenty-pound Siamese, also part of my recent legacy. Don’t get too close, the creature dislikes train travel and is in a foul temper.”

Malone stared through the wire window and said, “Its father must have been either a bobcat or a buzz saw.”

“My aunt left me her mink coat, on condition that I take both her pets,” Miss Withers explained wearily. “But I’m beginning to think it would be better to shiver through these cold winters. And speaking of cold — I’m a patient woman, but not very. You have one minute, Mr. Malone, to get your dead friend out of here!”

“He’s no friend of mine, dead or alive,” Malone began. “And I suggest—”

There was a heavy knocking on the corridor door. “Open up in there!”

“Say something!” whispered Malone. “Say you’re undressed!”

“You’re undressed — I mean, I’m undressed,” she cried obediently.

“Sorry, ma’am,” a masculine voice said on the other side of the door. “But we’re searching this train for a fugitive from justice. Hurry, please.”

“Just a minute,” sang out the schoolteacher, making frantic gestures at Malone.

The little lawyer shuddered, then grabbed the late Steve Larsen and tugged him through the connecting door into his drawing room. Meanwhile, Miss Withers cast aside maidenly modesty and tore pins from her hair, the dress from her shoulders. Clutching a robe around her, she opened the door a crack and announced, “This is an outrage!”

The train conductor, a Pullman conductor, and two Altoona police detectives crowded in, ignoring her protest. They pawed through the wardrobe, peered into every nook and cranny.

Miss Withers stood rooted to the spot, in more ways than one. There was a damp brownish-red spot on the carpet, and she had one foot firmly holding it down. At last the delegation backed out, with apologies. Then she heard a feeble, imploring tapping on the connecting door, and John J. Malone’s voice whispering “Help!”

The maiden schoolteacher stuck her head out into the corridor again, where the search party was already waiting for Malone to open up. “Oh, officer!” she cried tremulously. “Is there any danger?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Was the man you’re looking for a burly, dark-complexioned cutthroat with dark glasses and a pronounced limp in the left leg?”

“No, lady. Get lost, please, lady.”

“Because on my way back from the diner I saw a man like that. He leered, and then followed me through three cars.”

“The man we’re looking for is an embezzler, not a mental case.” They hammered on Malone’s door again. “Open up in there!”

Over her shoulder Miss Withers could see the pale, perspiring face of John J. Malone as he dragged Steve Larsen back into her compartment again.

“But, officer,” she improvised desperately, “I’m sure that the awful dark man who followed me was a distinct criminal type—” There was a reassuring whisper of “Okay” from behind her, and the sound of a softly closing door. Miss Withers backed into her compartment, closed and locked the connecting door, and then sank down on the edge of her berth, trying to avoid the blankly staring eyes of the dead man.

Next door there was a rumble of voices, and then suddenly Malone’s high tenor doing rough justice to “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?” The schoolteacher heard no more than the first line of the chorus before the Jello in her knees melted completely. When she opened her eyes again, she saw Malone holding a dagger before her, and she very nearly fainted again.

“You were so right,” the little lawyer told her admiringly. “It was a frame-up all right — but meant for me. This was tucked into the upholstery of my room. I sat on it while they were searching, and had to burst into song to cover my howl of anguish.”

“Oh, dear!” said Miss Withers.

He sat down beside her, patted her comfortingly on the shoulder, and said, “Maybe I can shove the body out the window!”

“We’re still in the station,” she reminded him crisply. “And from what experience I’ve had with train windows, it would be easier to solve the murder than open one. Why don’t we start searching for clues?”

Malone stood up so quickly that he rapped his head on the bottom of the upper berth. “Never mind clues. Let’s just find the murderer!”

“Just as easy as that?”

“Look,” he said. “This train was searched at the request of the Chicago police because somebody — probably Bert Glick — tipped them off that Larsen and a lot of stolen money were on board. The word has got around. Obviously, somebody else knew — somebody who caught the train and did the dirty work. It’s reasonable to assume that whoever has the money is the killer.”

There was a new glint in Miss Withers’s blue-gray eyes. “Go on.”

“Also, Larsen’s ex-wife — or do I mean ex-widow? — is aboard. I saw her. She is a lovely girl whose many friends agree that she would eat her young or sell her old mother down the river into slavery for a fast buck.” He took out a cigar. “I’ll go next door and have a smoke while you change, and then we’ll go look for Lolly Larsen.”

“I’m practically ready now,” the schoolteacher agreed. “But take that with you!”

Malone hesitated, and then with a deep sigh reached down and took a firm grasp of all that was mortal of his late client. “Here we go again!”

A few minutes later Miss Hildegarde Withers was following Malone through the now-darkened train. The fact that this was somebody else’s problem never occurred to her. Murder, according to her tenets, was everybody’s business.

Malone touched her arm as they came at last to the door of the club car. “Here is where I saw Lolly last,” he whispered. “She only got aboard at the last minute, and didn’t have a reservation.” He pointed down the corridor. “See that door, just this side of the pantry? It’s a private lounge, used only for railroad officials or big-shots like governors or senators. Lolly bribed the steward to let her use it when she wanted to have a private talk with me. It just occurred to me that she might have talked him into letting her have it for the rest of the night. If she’s still there—”

“Say no more,” Miss Withers cut in. “I am a fellow passenger, also without a berth, seeking only a place to rest my weary head. After all, I have as much right in there as she has. But you will be within call, won’t you?”

“If you need help, just holler,” he promised. Malone watched as the schoolteacher marched down the corridor, tried the lounge door gently, and then knocked. The door opened and she vanished inside.

The little lawyer had an argument with his conscience. It wasn’t just that she reminded him of Miss Hackett, it was that she had become a sort of partner. Besides, he was getting almost fond of that equine face.

Oh, well, he’d be within earshot. And if there was anything in the inspiration which had just come to him, she wasn’t in any real danger anyway. He went on into the bar. It was half-dark and empty now, except for a little group of men in Navy uniforms at the far end, who were sleeping sprawled and entangled like a litter of puppies.

“Sorry, Mr. Malone, but the bar is closed,” a voice spoke up behind him. It was Horace Lee Randolph, looking drawn and exhausted. He caught Malone’s glance toward the sleeping sailors and added, “Against the rules, but the conductor said don’t bother ’em.”

Malone nodded, and then said, “Horace, we’re old friends and classmates. You know me of old, and you know you can trust me. Where did you hide it?”

“Where did I hide what?”

“You know what!” Malone fixed the man with the cold and baleful eye he used on prosecution witnesses. “Let me have it before it’s too late, and I’ll do my best for you.”

The eyes rolled. “Oh, Lawdy! I knew I shouldn’t a done it, Mista Malone! I’ll show you!” Horace hurried on down through the car and unlocked a small closet filled with mops and brooms. From a box labeled Soap Flakes he came up with a paper sack. It was a very small sack to hold a hundred thousand dollars, Malone thought, even if the money was in big bills. Horace fumbled inside the sack.

“What’s that?” Malone demanded.

“What would it be but the bottle of gin I sneaked from the bar? Join me?”

The breath went out of John J. Malone like air out of a busted balloon. He caught the doorknob for support, swaying like an aspen in the wind. It was just at that moment that they both heard the screams.

The rush of self-confidence with which Miss Hildegarde Withers had pushed her way into the lounge ebbed somewhat as she came face to face with Lolly Larsen. Appeals to sympathy, as from one supposedly stranded fellow passenger to another, failed utterly. It was not until the schoolteacher played her last card, reminding Lolly sharply that if there was any commotion the Pullman conductor would undoubtedly have them both evicted, that she succeeded in getting a toehold.

“Oh, all right!” snarled Lolly ungraciously. “Only shut up and go to sleep.”

During the few minutes before the room went dark again, Miss Withers made a mental snapshot of everything in it. No toilet, no wardrobe, no closet. A small suitcase, a coat, and a handbag were on the only chair. The money must be somewhere in this room, the schoolteacher thought. There was a way to find out.

As the train flashed through the moonlit night, Miss Withers busily wriggled out of her petticoat and ripped it into shreds. Using a bit of paper from her handbag for tinder — and inwardly praying it wasn’t a ten-dollar bill — she did what had to be done. A few minutes later she burst out into the corridor, holding her handkerchief to her mouth.

She almost bumped into one of the sailors who came lurching toward her along the narrow passage, and gasped, “What do you want?”

He stared at her with heavy eyes. “If it’s any of your business, I’m looking for the latrine,” he said dryly.

When he was out of sight, Miss Withers turned and peeked back into the lounge. A burst of acrid smoke struck her in the face. Now was the time. “Fire!” she shrieked.

Thick billows of greasy smoke flooded out through the half-open door. Inside, little tongues of red flame ran greedily along the edge of the seat where Miss Withers had tucked the burning rags and paper.

Down the corridor came Malone and Horace Lee Randolph, and a couple of startled bluejackets appeared from the other direction. Somebody tore an extinguisher from the wall.

Miss Withers grabbed Malone’s arm. “Watch her! She’ll go for the money—”

The fire extinguisher sent a stream of foaming chemicals into the doorway just as Lolly Larsen burst out. Her mascara streaked down her face, already blackened by smoke, and her yellow hair was plastered unflatteringly to her skull. But she clutched a small leather case.

Somehow she tripped over Miss Withers’s outstretched foot. The leather case flew across the corridor to smash against the wall, where it flew open, disclosing a multitude of creams, oils, and tiny bottles — a portable beauty parlor.

“She must have gone to sleep smoking a cigarette!” put in Miss Withers in loud clear tones. “A lucky thing I was there to smell the smoke and give the alarm—”

But John J. Malone seized her firmly by the arm and propelled her back through the train. “It was a good try, but you can stop acting now. She doesn’t have the money.” Back in her own compartment he confessed about Horace. “I had a wonderful idea, but it didn’t pay off. The poor guy’s career as a lawyer was busted by a City Hall chiseler. If Larsen was the one, Horace might have spotted him on the train and decided to get even.”

“You were holding out on me,” said Miss Withers, slightly miffed.

Malone unwrapped a cigar and said, “If anybody finds that money, I want it to be me. Because I’ve got to get my fee out of it or I can’t even get back to Chicago.”

“Perhaps you’ll learn to like Manhattan,” she told him brightly.

Malone said grimly, “If something isn’t done soon, I’m going to see New York through those cold iron bars.”

“We’re in the same boat. Except,” she added honestly, “that I don’t think the Inspector would go so far as to lock me up. But he does take a dim view of anybody who finds a body and doesn’t report it.” She sighed. “Do you think we could get one of these windows open?”

Malone smothered a yawn and said, “Not in my present condition of exhaustion.”

“Let’s begin at the beginning,” the schoolteacher said. “Larsen invited a number of people to a party he didn’t plan to attend. He sneaked on this train, presumably disguised in a Navy enlisted man’s uniform. How he got hold of it—”

“He was in the service for a while,” said the little lawyer.

“The murderer made a date to meet his victim in your drawing room, hoping to set you up as the goat. He stuck a knife in him and then stripped him, looking for a money-belt or something.”

“You don’t have to undress a man to find a money-belt,” Malone murmured.

“Really? I wouldn’t know.” Miss Withers sniffed. “The knife was then hidden in your room, but the body was moved in here. The money—” She paused and studied him searchingly. “Mr. Malone, are you sure you didn’t—?”

“We plead not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity,” Malone muttered. He closed his eyes for just five seconds’ much-needed rest, and when he opened them a dirty-looking dawn was glaring in at him through the window.

“Good morning,” Miss Withers greeted him, entirely too cheerfully. “Did you get any ideas while you were in dreamland?” She put away her toothbrush and added, “You know, I’ve sometimes found that if a problem seems insoluble, you can sleep on it and sometimes your subconscious comes up with the answer. Sometimes it’s even happened to me in a dream.”

“It does? It has?” Malone sat up suddenly. “Okay. Burglars can’t be choosers. Sleep and the world sleeps — I mean, I’ll just stand watch for a while and you try taking a nap. Maybe you can dream up an answer out of your subconscious. But dream fast, lady, because we get in about two hours from now.”

But when Miss Withers had finally been comfortably settled against the pillows, she found that her eyelids stubbornly refused to stay shut.

“Try once more,” John J. Malone said soothingly. She closed her eyes obediently, and his high, whispering tenor filled the little compartment, singing a fine old song. It was probably the first time in history, Miss Withers thought, that anyone had tried to use “Throw Him Down, McCluskey” as a lullaby, but she found herself drifting off...

Malone passed the time by trying to imagine what he would do with a hundred grand if he were the murderer. There must have been a desperate need for haste — at any moment, someone might come back to the murder room. The money would have to be put somewhere handy — some obvious place where nobody would ever think of looking, and where it could be quickly and easily retrieved when all was clear.

There was an angry growl from Precious in his cage. “If you could only say something besides ‘Meeerow’ and ‘Fssst’!” Malone murmured wistfully. “Because you’re the only witness. Now if it had been the parrot...”

At last he touched Miss Withers apologetically on the shoulder. “Wake up, ma’am, we’re coming into New York. Quick, what did you dream?”

She blinked, sniffed, and came wide awake. “My dream? Why — I was buying a hat, a darling little sailor hat, only it had to be exchanged because the ribbon was yellow. But first I wore it out to dinner with Inspector Piper, who took me to a Greek restaurant, and the proprietor was so glad to see us that he said dinner was on the house. But naturally we didn’t eat anything because you have to beware of the Greeks when they come bearing gifts. His name was Mr. Roberts. That’s all I remember.”

“Oh, brother!” said John J. Malone.

“And there wasn’t anyone named Roberts mixed up in this case, or anyone of Greek extraction, was there?” She sighed. “Pure nonsense. I guess a watched subconscious never boils.”

The train was crawling laboriously up an elevated platform. “A drowning man will grasp at a strawberry,” Malone said suddenly. “I’ve got a sort of an idea. Greeks bearing gifts — that means look out for somebody who wants to give you something for nothing. And that something could include gratuitous information.”

She nodded. “Perhaps someone planned to murder Larsen aboard this train and wanted you aboard to be the obvious suspect.”

The train shuddered to a stop. Malone leaped up, startled, but the schoolteacher told him it was only 125th Street. “Perhaps we should check and see who gets off.” She glanced out the window and said, “On second thought, let’s not. The platform is swarming with police.”

They were interrupted by the porter, who brushed off Miss Withers, accepted a dollar from the gallant Malone, and then lugged her suitcases and the pet container down to the vestibule. “He’ll be in your room next,” she whispered to Malone. “What do we do now?”

“We think fast,” Malone said. “The rest of your dream! The sailor hat with the wrong ribbon! And Mr. Roberts—”

The door burst open and suddenly they were surrounded by detectives, led by a grizzled sergeant in plain clothes. Lolly Larsen was with them. She had removed most of the traces of the holocaust, her face was lovely and her hair was gleaming, but her mood was that of a dyspeptic cobra. She breathlessly accused Miss Withers of assaulting her and trying to burn her alive, and Malone of engineering Steve Larsen’s successful disappearance.

“So,” said Malone. “You wired ahead from Albany, crying copper?”

“Maybe she did,” said the sergeant. “But we’d already been contacted by the Chicago police. Somebody out there swore out a warrant for Steve Larsen’s arrest...”

“Glick, maybe?”

“A Mr. Allen Roth, according to the teletype. Now, folks—”

But Malone was trying to pretend that Lolly, the sergeant, and the whole police department didn’t exist. He faced Miss Withers and said, “About that dream! It must mean a sailor under false colors. We already know that Larsen was disguised in Navy uniform...”

“Shaddap!” said the sergeant. “Maybe you don’t know, mister, that helping an embezzler to escape makes you an assessory after the fact.”

“Accessory,” corrected Miss Withers firmly.

“If you want Larsen,” Malone said easily, “he’s next door in my drawing room, wrapped up in the blankets.”

“Sure, sure,” said the sergeant, mopping his face. “Wise guy, eh?”

“Somebody helped Larsen escape — escape out of this world, with a shiv through the — through the—?” Malone looked hopefully at Miss Withers.

“The latissimus dorsi,” she prompted.

The sergeant barked, “Never mind the double-talk. Where is this Larsen?”

Then Lolly, who had pushed open the connecting door, let out a thin scream like tearing silk. “It is Steve!” she cried. “It’s Steve, and he’s dead!”

Momentarily the attention of the law was drawn elsewhere. “Now or never,” said Miss Withers coolly. “About the Mr. Roberts thing — I just remembered that there was a play by that name a while back. All about sailors in the last war. I saw it, and was somewhat shocked at certain scenes. Their language — but anyway, I ran into a sailor just after I started that fire, and he said he was looking for the latrine. Sailors don’t use Army talk — in Mister Roberts they called it the head!”

Suddenly the law was back, very direct and grim about everything. Miss Withers gasped with indignation as she found herself suddenly handcuffed to John J. Malone. But stone walls do not a prison make, as she pointed out to her companion-in-crime. “And don’t you see? It means—”

“Madam, I am ahead of you. There was a wrong sailor aboard this train even after Larsen got his. The murderer must have taken a plane from Chicago and caught this train at Toledo. I was watching to see who got off, not who got on. The man penetrated Larsen’s disguise—”

“In more ways than one,” the schoolteacher put in grimly.

“And then after he’d murdered his victim, he took Larsen’s sailor suit and got rid of his own clothes, realizing that nobody notices a sailor on a train! Madam, I salute your subconscious!” Malone waved his hand, magnificent even in chains. “The defense rests! Officer, call a cop!”

The train was crawling into one of the tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, and the harried sergeant was beside himself. “You listen to Mr. Malone,” Miss Withers told their captor firmly, “or I’ll hint to my old friend Inspector Oscar Piper that you would look well on a bicycle beat way out in Brooklyn!”

“Oh, no!” the unhappy officer moaned. “Not that Miss Withers!”

“That Miss Withers,” she snapped. “My good man, all we ask is that you find the real murderer, who must still be on this train. He’s wearing a Navy uniform...”

“Lady,” the sergeant said sincerely, “you ask the impossible. The train is full of sailors. Grand Central is full of sailors.”

“But this particular sailor,” Malone put in, “is wearing the uniform of the man he killed. There will be a slit in the back of the jumper — just under the shoulder blade!”

“Where the knife went in,” Miss Withers added. “Hurry, man! The train is stopping.”

It might still have been a lost cause had not Lolly put in her five cents. “Don’t listen to that old witch!” she cried. “Officer, you do your duty!”

The sergeant disliked being yelled at, even by blondes. “Hold all of ’em — her too,” he ordered, and leaped out on the platform. He seized upon a railroad dick, who listened and then grabbed a telephone attached to a nearby pillar. Somewhere far off an alarm began to ring, and an emotionless voice spoke over the public address system...

In less than two minutes the vast labyrinth of Grand Central was alerted, and men in Navy uniforms were suddenly intercepted by polite but firm railroad detectives who sprang up out of nowhere. Only one of the sailors, a somewhat older man who was lugging a pet container that wasn’t his, had any real difficulty. He alone had a narrow slit in the back of his jumper.

Bert Glick flung the leather case down the track and tried vainly to run, but there was no place to go. The container flew open, and Precious scooted. Only a dumb Siamese cat, as Malone commented later, would have abandoned a lair that had a hundred grand tucked under its carpet of old newspapers.

“And to think that I spent the night within reach of that dough, and didn’t grab my fee!” said Malone.

But it developed that there was a comfortable reward for the apprehension of Steve Larsen, alive or dead. Before John J. Malone took off for Chicago, he accepted an invitation for dinner at Miss Withers’s modest little apartment on West 74th Street, arriving with four dozen roses. It was a good dinner, and Malone cheerfully put up with the screamed insults of Sinbad and the well-meant attentions of Talley, the apricot poodle. “Just as long as the cat stays lost!” he said.

“Yes, isn’t it odd that nobody has seen hide nor hair of Precious! It’s my idea that he’s waxing fat in the caverns beneath Grand Central, preying on the rats who are rumored to flourish there. Would you care for another piece of pie, Mr. Malone?”

“All I really want,” said the little lawyer hopefully, is an introduction to your redheaded niece.”

“Oh, yes, Joannie. Her husband played guard for Southern California, and he even made All-American,” Miss Withers tactfully explained.

“On second thought, I’ll settle for coffee,” said John J. Malone.

Miss Withers sniffed, not unsympathetically.

Brother Orchid RICHARD CONNELL

Original publication: Collier’s, May 21, 1938

Although best known for his exciting adventure/suspense story “The Most Dangerous Game,” one of the most anthologized stories ever written, the majority of Richard Edward Connell Jr.’s (1893–1949) work was comedic and romantic — exactly what the reading public of the 1920s and 1930s wanted from such hugely popular fiction magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and The Red Book Magazine, among many other magazines for which he wrote prolifically after his World War I service.

Connell also had a successful career in Hollywood, having written the original story for Meet John Doe (1941), which starred Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck and for which he received a nomination for an Academy Award. Other films on which he worked include writing the screenplay for Booth Tarkington’s Presenting Lily Mars (1943), starring Judy Garland and Van Heflin; cowriting the original screenplay for Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), with Van Johnson, June Allyson, and Gloria DeHaven; and cowriting the screenplay for Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945) with Hedy Lamarr, Robert Walker, and June Allyson.

“Brother Orchid” is typical of Connell’s stories in that it has a quiet charm and humor that doesn’t throw a pie in the face. It is about a gangster who has been released from the slammer and attempts to take back his position as the leader of a gang. When a rival decides to get rid of him, he is shot but manages to escape by climbing over the wall of a monastery, where he recovers in a safe hideout, slowly and surprisingly acclimating to the life of a monk.

Title: Brother Orchid, 1940

Studio: Warner Bros.

Director: Lloyd Bacon

Screenwriter: Earl Baldwin

Producers: Hal B. Wallis (executive), Mark Hellinger (associate)

• Edward G. Robinson (Little John Sarto)

• Ann Sothern (Flo Addams)

• Humphrey Bogart (Jack Buck)

• Donald Crisp (Brother Superior)

The film is as faithful as a Hollywood movie can be to a short story. The notion of a tough gangster finding the light in a monastery remains intact in the film, though a girlfriend has been added to Connell’s tale to provide humor and a little (very little) romance.

Ann Sothern does her usual excellent job as a moll who is none too bright — but, then, neither is Little John Sarto. In one exchange, Flo is pasting travel stickers inside his trunks.

“Look, Johnny, don’t it look elegant?”

Sarto replies, “Yeah, it’s got class all right. Look, you dumb cluck, you got it pasted on the inside.”

“Sure,” she says, “it gets scratched on the outside. Anybody’s smart enough to know that!”

“Flo,” an exasperated Sarto replies, “sometimes you got me guessin’ whether you’re even a nitwit.”

Casting the usually hard-boiled Robinson in the role seemed like an excellent idea, and it was, as he was perfect in the part. The studio’s first choice, however, had been the other tough-guy star of the era, James Cagney. Robinson had pretty much become typecast as a gangster and he was smart enough to know that would eventually kill his career, so he agreed to play the role in this humorous film in exchange for a promise to be cast as the star of a historical drama, A Dispatch from Reuters (1940).

Not to give too much away, but in the five films in which Robinson and Humphrey Bogart appeared together, Brother Orchid is the only one in which neither dies. In the first three, Bullets or Ballots (1936), Kid Galahad (1937), and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), Robinson had either killed or dominated Bogart. By the time they appeared in Key Largo (1948), Bogart had become a bigger star and turned the tables on Robinson.

BROTHER ORCHID Richard Connell

“Be smart,” the warden said. “Go straight.”

A grin creased the leather face of Little John Sarto.

“I am goin’ straight,” he said. “Straight to Chi.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you, Sarto.”

“Why not? I owned that burg once. I’ll own it again.”

“Things have changed in ten years.”

“But not me,” said Little John. “I still got what it takes to be on top.”

“You didn’t stay there,” the warden observed.

“I got framed,” Sarto said. “Imagine shovin’ me on the rock on a sissy income tax rap!”

“It was the only charge they could make stick,” the warden said. “You were always pretty slick, Sarto.”

“I was, and I am,” said Little John.

The warden frowned. “Now look here, Sarto. When a man has done his time and I’m turning him loose, I’m supposed to give him some friendly advice. I do it, though I know that in most cases it’s a farce. You’d think men who’d done a stretch here in Alcatraz ought to have a sneaking notion that crime does not pay, but while I’m preaching my little sermon I see a faraway look in their eyes and I know they’re figuring out their next bank job or snatch.”

“Don’t class me with them small-time heisters and petty-larceny yeggs,” said Little John. “I’m a born big shot.”

“You’re apt to die the same way,” said the warden dryly.

“That’s okay, net, by me,” said Little John. “When I peg out I want to go with fireworks, flowers, and bands; but you’ll have a beard to your knees before they get out the last extra on Little John Sarto. I got a lot of livin’ to do first: I got to wash out the taste of slum with a lakeful of champagne, and it’ll take half the blondes in the Loop to make me forget them nights in solitary. But most of all I got to be myself again, not just a number. For every order I’ve took here on the rock, I’m goin’ to give two. I’m goin’ to see guys shiver and jump when I speak. I’ve played mouse long enough. Watch me be a lion again.”

The warden sighed. “Sarto,” he said, “why don’t you play it safe? Stay away from Chicago. Settle in some new part of the country. Go into business. You’ve got brains and a real gift for organization. You ran a big business once—”

“Million a month, net,” put in Sarto.

“And you’re only forty-six and full of health,” the warden went on. “You can still make a fresh start.”

“Using what for wampum?” asked Little John.

“You’ve got plenty salted away.”

Sarto laughed a wry laugh.

“I got the ten bucks, and the ticket back to Chi, and this frowsy suit the prison gimme, and that’s all I got,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you’re broke!”

“Flat as a mat,” said Little John. “I spent it like I made it — fast. A king’s got to live like a king, ain’t he? When I give a dame flowers, it was always orchids. My free-chow bill ran to a grand a week. They called me a public enemy but they treated me like a year-round Sandy Claws... But I ain’t worryin’. I was born broke. I got over it.”

A prison guard came in to say that the launch was ready to take Sarto to the mainland.

“Well, goodbye, Warden,” said Sarto jauntily. “If you ever get to Chi gimme a buzz. I’ll throw a party for you.”

“Wait a minute,” said the warden. “I can’t let you go till I make one last attempt to start you on the right track. I know a man who’ll give you a job. He runs a big truck farm and—”

He stopped, for Sarto was shaking with hoarse laughter.

“Me a rube?” Little John got out. “Me a bodyguard to squashes? Warden, the stir-bugs has got you.”

“It’s a chance to make an honest living.”

“Save it for some cluck that would feel right at home livin’ with turnips,” Sarto said. “I got other plans.”

The siren on the launch gave an impatient belch.

“So long, Warden,” said Little John. “I won’t be seein’ you.”

“You’re right there,” the warden said.

Sarto’s face darkened at the words.

“Meanin’ Chi might be bad for my health?”

“I’ve heard rumors to that effect,” replied the warden.

“I’ve heard ’em for years,” said Little John. “They’re a lotta rat spit. Plenty guys has talked about what they was goin’ to do to me. I always sent flowers to their funerals — you heard about that.”

He chuckled.

“A big heart of forget-me-nots with ‘Sorry, Pal’ in white orchids on it.”

“All right, wise guy,” the warden said. “Go to Chicago. The sooner you get rubbed out, the better for everybody. You’re no good and you never will be.”

“Atta clown,” said Little John Sarto. “Always leave ’em laughin’ when you say goodbye.”

Laughing, he started out toward the big gray gate.

Deep in the woods in an out-of-the-world corner of Michigan, squat, unkempt Twin Pine Inn hides itself. It was silent that summer night, and dark save for a single window in the taproom. Behind the customerless bar, Fat Dutchy was drinking his fourth rock-and-rye.

“Stick ’em up. This is a heist.”

The voice, low and with a snarl in it came from the doorway behind him. Up went Fat Dutchy’s hands.

“Easy with the rod,” he whimpered. “There ain’t a sawbuck in the joint.”

“Not like the good old days,” the voice said.

Dutchy turned his head. Little John Sarto was standing there with nothing more lethal in his hand than a big cigar. Dutchy blinked and goggled.

“Well, greaseball, do I look funny?” Sarto demanded.

“No — no — boss, you ain’t changed a bit.”

“I don’t change,” Sarto said. “Gimme a slug of bourbon.”

Fat Dutchy sloshed four fingers of whisky into a glass. His hand trembled. Liquor splashed on the bar.

“What you got the jits about?” asked Sarto.

“You gimme a turn comin’ in like you was a ghost or sumpin’,” said Fat Dutchy. He wiped sweat from his mottled jowls with the bar rag. Sarto gulped his drink.

“Business bad, eh?”

“It ain’t even bad, boss. It just ain’t.”

“Cheer up, pig puss. You’ll soon be scoffin’ filly miggnons smothered with century notes,” Sarto said. “I’m back.”

Fat Dutchy rubbed his paunch and looked unhappily at the floor.

“Things is different,” he said.

Sarto banged his glass down on the bar.

“If one more lug tells me that, I’ll kick his gizzard out,” he said. “Now, listen. I’m holin’ up here till I get my bearin’s. Soon as I get things set, I’m goin’ to town. But first I gotta contact some of the boys.”

Fat Dutchy played nervously with the bar rag.

“Gimme another slug,” Sarto ordered. “I got a ten-year thirst.”

Fat Dutchy poured out the drink. Again his shaking hands made him spill some of it.

“Here’s to me,” said Sarto, and drank. “Now, listen: I want you to pass the office along to certain parties that I’m here and want to see ’em, pronto. For a starter, get in touch with Philly Powell, Ike Gelbert, Ouch O’Day, Willie the Knife, Benny Maletta, French Frank, Hop Latzo, Al Muller, and that fresh kid that was so handy with a tommy gun—”

“Jack Buck?”

“Yeah. I may need a torpedo. When I fell out, he had the makin’s of a good dropper. So get that phone workin’, lard head — you know where they hang out.”

“Sure,” said Fat Dutchy. He held up his hand and ticked off names on his thick fingers.

“Ike Gelbert and Al Muller is in the jug doin’ life jolts,” he said. “Philly Powell and French Frank was crossed out right at this bar. Ouch O’Day throwed an ing-bing and was took to the fit house; the G-boys filled Benny Maletta with slugs and sent Willie the Knife to the hot squat; I dunno just where Hop Latzo is but I’ve heard talk he’s at the bottom of Lake Mich in a barrel of concrete. So outa that lot there’s only Jack Buck left and I don’t guess you wanna see him—”

“Why not?”

“He’s growed up,” said Fat Dutchy. “He’s the loud noise now. What rackets there is, Jack Buck’s got ’em in his pocket.”

“I’ll whittle him down to his right size,” said Sarto.

“Jack’s in strong. He’s waitin’ for you, boss, and he ain’t foolin’. The boys tell me it’s worth three G’s to the guy that settles you.”

Sarto snorted. “Only three grand!” he said indignantly.

“That’s serious sugar nowadays,” said Fat Dutchy. “I’m tellin’ you times is sour. Jack Buck has cornered the few grafts that still pay. He’s got a mob of muzzlers that was in reform school when you was head man. You ain’t nothin’ fo’em but a name and a chance to earn three thousand fish.”

Sarto sipped his drink. Lines of thought furrowed his face.

“I’ll stay here till I figure out an angle,” he announced.

“Boss,” said Fat Dutchy, “I don’t wanna speak outa turn, but wouldn’t it be a smart play to take it on the lam for a while?”

“Where to?”

Fat Dutchy shrugged his stout shoulders.

“I wouldn’t know, boss,” he said. “When the heat’s on—”

“Yeah, I know,” cut in Sarto. “You’re smoked wherever you go.”

“What are you goin’ to do, boss?”

“I’m goin’ to hit the sheets and dream I’m out,” said Little John.

Dog-tired though he was, he could not get to sleep. His mind yanked him away from dreams, back to prison, to the death-house, where men were lying in the dark, as he was, trying to sleep.

“They got the bulge on me, at that,” he thought. “They know when they’re goin’ to get it.”

He felt like a man reading his own obituary, complete but for two facts: where and when.

He knew he was safe where he was, but not for long. They’d comb all the known hideouts. He tried to think of some friend he could trust to hide him. Name after name he considered and rejected. He had come to the ninety-sixth name and found no one he could count on when he fell asleep.

A light in his eyes and a voice in his ear jerked him awake.

A man was bending over him, smiling and saying:

“Wake up, dear. You’ll be late for school.”

He was a huge, soft-looking young man with a jovial freckled face. His suit was bottle-green and expensive. Sarto had never seen him before.

“Up, up, pet,” he said, and waved at Sarto a big blue-black automatic.

A second man watched from the other side of the bed. He was younger and smaller than the first man, and his flour-white face was perfectly blank. Sarto did not know him either.

Sarto sat up in bed.

“Listen, fellas,” he said, “if I get a break you get five grand.”

“Got it on you, darling?” asked the freckled man.

“Nope. But I can dig it up inside a week.”

“Sorry. We do a strictly cash business,” the freckled man said.

“I’ll make it ten grand,” said Little John. He addressed the pallid man. “Wadda you say, bud? Ten G’s.”

The freckled man chuckled.

“He’d say ‘no’ if he could say anything,” he said. “He doesn’t hear, either. His eyes are good, though. His name is Harold, but we call him Dummy.”

Sarto held his naked, flabby body very stiff and straight.

“Do your stuff,” he said.

Dummy took his hand from his pocket. There was a pistol in it. The freckled man brushed the gun aside.

“We don’t want to give this charming place a bad name,” he explained to Sarto. “For Dutchy’s sake.”

“So that fat rat tipped you,” said Sarto.

“Yes,” said the freckled man. “For a modest fee. Come along, baby.”

They were speeding through open farm country. The speedometer hit seventy-five. Sarto closed his mouth and his eyes.

“Praying?” asked the freckled man.

“Naw!”

“Better start, toots.”

“I know nuttin’ can help me.”

“That’s right,” said the freckled man cheerfully. “Nothing but a miracle. But you might pray for your soul.”

“Aw, go to hell.”

They turned into a rutty, weed-grown road. As they bumped along through a tunnel of trees, suddenly, silently Little John Sarto began to pray.

“Listen! This is Little John Sarto of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. I know I got no right to ask any favors. I guess I got a bad rep up there. Well, I ain’t goin’ to try to lie away my record. Everything on the blotter is true. I don’t claim I rate a break. All I say is I need one bad and I’ll pay for it. I don’t know how; but look me up in the big book. It ought to say that when I make a deal I never run out on it. If I’m talkin’ out of turn, forget it. But I won’t forget if—”

“Last stop. All out,” sang out the freckled man. He halted the car by a thicket of thigh-high brush.

Sarto got out of the car. Dummy got out, too. He kept his gun against Little John’s backbone.

“Goodbye, now,” said the freckled man, and lit a cigarette.

Dummy marched Sarto off the road and into the thicket. Abruptly, like a spotlight, the moon came out. Dummy spun Sarto around. Sarto could see his face. It held neither hate nor pity. Dummy raised his pistol. As he brought it up on a level with Sarto’s forehead, the breeze whipped a straggling branch of a wild rosebush across the back of his hand, and the thorns cut a wet, red line. For part of a second Dummy dropped his eyes to his bleeding hand. Sarto wheeled and dove into the underbrush. Dummy fired three quick shots. One missed. One raked across Sarto’s skull. One seared his shoulder. He staggered, but kept plunging on. Dummy darted after him. Then the moon went out.

As Sarto floundered on he could hear Dummy crashing through the brush behind him. But Dummy could not hear his quarry. Dizzy and weak, the wounded man fought his frantic way through tar-black brush. Thorns stabbed him, briers clawed. A low branch smashed him on the nose, and he reeled and nearly went down. Bending double, he churned on. Then his head hit something hard, and he dropped, stunned for a moment. He reached out an unsteady hand and felt an ivy-covered wall. No sound of pursuit came to his ears.

Painfully he dragged himself up to the top of the wall. Not a sob of breath was left in him. He straddled the wall and clung to it. Then he fainted.

In the monastery of the Floratines, today was like yesterday and yesterday was like a day in the ninth century when the order was founded. Neither time nor war nor the hate of kings had changed their humble habits or their simple creed. Over the door this creed was carved: “Be poor in purse, pure in heart, kind in word and deed, and beautify the lives of men with flowers.”

These were the words of the Blessed Edric, their founder, and, ever since his day, Floratines in every land had lived by them, harming no one, helping man, raising flowers.

When King Henry VIII set his face against other monks, he let no hostile hand be laid on the few Floratines.

“They do much good,” the monarch said, “and, in sooth, they have nothing worth the taking, these Little Brothers of the Flowers.”

They kept the name, and it gave rise to a custom. When a man left the world behind to enter their ranks, he left his name, too, and took the name of a flower.

In the first light of a new day they sat in their refectory, forty-four men in snuff-hued robes, most of them growing old. Their tonsured polls were brown from the sun, their faces serene from inner peace.

“Brother Geranium is late with the milk,” observed Brother Tulip, eying his dry porridge.

“Perhaps the cow kicked him,” suggested Brother Hollyhock.

“She wouldn’t. She’s fond of him,” said Brother Nasturtium. “I’ll go down to the dairy and see if anything has happened to him,” volunteered Brother Nasturtium. But as he rose from his bench, Brother Geranium, popeyed and panting, burst into the room.

“There’s a naked man lying in the petunia bed,” he gasped out. “I think he’s dead.”

Little John Sarto thought he was dead, too, when he opened his eyes in the infirmary and saw Abbot Jonquil and Brother Nasturtium at his bedside.

“I made it,” he exclaimed huskily. “I beat the rap.”

“Take it easy, son,” said the abbot. “You’ve been badly hurt.”

“But I ain’t in hell,” said Little John. Then he added, “Or if I am what are you guys doing here?”

“You’re alive and in a safe place.”

Sarto stared at him.

“Say, do you know who I am?” he asked.

“No.”

“You musta seen my mug in the papers.”

“We don’t see newspapers here,” the abbot said. “And we don’t ask who a man is if he needs help.”

Sarto touched his bandaged head.

“How long am I in for?” he inquired.

“Until you are well and strong again.”

“I got no money.”

“Neither have we,” said the abbot. “So that makes you one of us, doesn’t it?”

“That’s one for the book, mister,” said Little John.

“I’m Abbot Jonquil. This is Brother Nasturtium, your nurse. If you wish us to notify your friends—”

“I got no friends,” grunted Little John.

“You have now,” said the abbot.

“I tell you I’m broke.”

“You poor fellow,” said the abbot gently. “What a life you must have led!”

“I been round long enough to know you never get sumpin’ for nuttin’.”

“I think you have talked enough for the present,” the abbot said. “Try to rest and try not to worry — about anything. You may stay here as long as you wish, as our guest.”

He went to the door.

“I’ll look in again this evening,” the abbot said. “Meantime, if you need anything, tell Brother Nasturtium.”

His sandals shuffled softly away down the stone corridor.

Sarto squinted at the bulky monk.

“Get me a slug of bourbon, Nasty,” he said.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather be called Brother Nasturtium,” said the other mildly.

“Whatever you say, only gimme a snort.”

Brother Nasturtium brought him a glass of water.

“Try it,” he said. “ ’Twill give you strength.”

“Water?” said Sarto disdainfully.

“Look at lions and tigers,” said Brother Nasturtium.

As he drank the water, Little John studied the man. He noted the dented nose, gnarled ears, lumpy knuckles and the jaw like an anvil.

“You was a fighter, wasn’t you?” said Sarto.

“We don’t ask questions like that,” said Brother Nasturtium. “What we were, rich or poor, big or small, good or bad, does not matter here.”

“That’s double jake by me,” said Little John. “I think I’m going to like it here.”

“I hope so.”

“Say, tell me sumpin’, big boy. What’s your graft?”

Brother Nasturtium’s eyes twinkled.

“ ’Tis twenty years and more since I’ve heard such talk,” he said. “We raise flowers and sell them in the city.”

“There’s a good gelt in that,” said Sarto. “You boys must be cuttin’ up a nice profit.”

“What we clear, and it isn’t much, goes to the poor.”

“That’s a nutsy way to run a business,” observed Little John.

He closed his eyes. Presently he said:

“How does a guy join up with this outfit?”

“It’s fairly easy,” Brother Nasturtium told him, “if a man wants to be a lay brother—”

“A which?”

“Lay brother. I’m one. They don’t take holy orders. They have few religious duties, chiefly saying their prayers. They are not permitted to go outside the walls, and they must obey their superiors. The discipline is rather severe. Some men say it’s like being in prison—”

“They do, do they?” said Little John.

“Except that there are no bars.”

“That might make a slight difference,” conceded Little John. “What are the other catches?”

“Before a man can take his first vows as a lay brother, he must be on probation for a year. That means—”

“I know about probation,” said Little John. “Where do I sign?”

“You’ll have to talk to the abbot.”

“Shoo him in.”

“Lay brothers do not shoo abbots.”

“Then tell him I wanta proposition him.”

“If you’re in earnest about this,” Brother Nasturtium said, “you might be choosing the name we are to call you.”

“Just call me ‘Lucky.’ ”

“It must be the name of a flower.”

Little John thought a moment.

“I’ve picked my new tag,” he announced.

“What is it?”

“Brother Orchid.”

At dusk Brother Nasturtium left the sickroom to get his patient’s supper.

When he had gone, Little John began to laugh. It hurt him to laugh, but he couldn’t help it.

“Boy, oh, boy!” he said. “What a hideout!”

As he weeded the rose garden Brother Orchid sang softly:

He turned the tune deftly into “Abide with Me” as he saw Brother Nasturtium come out of the greenhouse and head toward him.

Three nights before he had taken the vows that made him a full-fledged lay brother. As he flicked a ladybug from a leaf, he reflected that it hadn’t been such a tough year. The routine didn’t bother him; he was used to one far more rigid; but he was not used to men like Abbot Jonquil, Brother Nasturtium, and the rest. At first he felt sure that some sly, dark purpose lay behind their kindness to him. He watched, warily, for the trap. No trap was sprung. Always they were thoughtful, patient, pleasant with him and with one another.

“Maybe I’ve got into a high-class whacky-house,” he thought.

Whatever it was, he decided, it was perfect for his plans. There he could bide his time, snug and safe, ready to strike. He was old enough to know the wonders time can work. And he was wise enough to know that while Jack Buck reigned as czar he must remain in exile. If he ventured back to his old kingdom now, he might just as well go straight to the morgue and book a slab. But czars slip, and czars fall, sometimes suddenly in this violent world. He’d wait and be ready.

“Well, Brother Orchid, your roses are doing well,” said Brother Nasturtium as he came up.

“Lay you three to one they bring more than your lilies,” said Brother Orchid.

“It’s a hundred to one they won’t bring anything,” said Brother Nasturtium, somberly. Brother Orchid looked up and saw that the face, usually so benign, was grave.

“What’s the gag?” he asked.

“Our market is gone.”

“How come?”

“They won’t handle our flowers.”

“Who won’t?”

“The wholesalers. We don’t belong to the association.”

“Why don’t we join it?”

“They won’t let us. Not a flower can be sold in the city that isn’t grown in their own nurseries.”

“I get it,” said Brother Orchid. “The old chisel. Who’s the wheels in this shakedown?”

“A man named Buck is behind it, I believe. So Abbot Jonquil learned when he was in town. He tried to see this Mr. Buck to plead with him not to take away our only means of livelihood. One of Buck’s ruffians kicked him downstairs.”

“I suppose the abbot was sucker enough to go to the coppers,” said Brother Orchid.

“He did go to the police.”

“What did they do — slug him?”

“No. They were polite enough. But they said that so far as they knew the Floral Protective Association was a legitimate business concern.”

“The bulls still know the answers,” said Brother Orchid. “And the D.A. said he’d like to do sumpin’, but his hands is tied, because you gotta have evidence, and all the witnesses is scared to talk.”

“You seem to know all about it.”

“I seen movies,” said Brother Orchid.

He weeded away, deep in thought.

“Have we got any jack in the old sock?” he asked suddenly.

“About four hundred dollars, the abbot told me.”

“Peanuts,” said Brother Orchid. “But enough for a couple of secondhand choppers. You and me could handle ’em. We’d need roscoes for the rest of the boys. But I know an armory that’s a soft touch. You and me and Geranium and Lilac could charge out tonight, hustle a hot short, and knock it off. Once we was heeled we could move in on Buck and his gorillas and—”

“Man alive, what sort of talk is that?” demanded the scandalized Brother Nasturtium.

“Forget it, pal,” said Brother Orchid. “I guess this sun has made me slap-happy. What are we goin’ to do?”

“Be patient and pray.”

“And eat what?”

“Heaven knows.”

“Yeah, and they claim it helps guys that help themselves.”

“Maybe Mr. Buck will see the light.”

Brother Orchid plucked up a clump of sour grass.

“Maybe this weed’ll turn into an American Beauty,” he said.

He wrung the weed’s neck and hurled it into his basket.

“That’s the only way to treat weed,” he said.

“But is it?” said Brother Nasturtium. “Wasn’t everything put into the world for some good use, if man had the sense to find out what that use is?”

“That’s a lot of words,” said Brother Orchid. “Weeds is weeds.”

“No,” said Brother Nasturtium, as he turned away, “weeds are flowers out of place.”

Hungry after their day of work, the Little Brothers of the Flowers waited in the refectory for their abbot to come in and say grace. They tried to make light talk of events in their small world. But there was a shadow over them.

Abbot Jonquil entered, walking slowly. It came to them for the first time that he was a very old man.

“I’m afraid I have more bad news,” he said. “Our funds have been taken from my safe. Of course none of us took them—”

He stopped and looked down the long table.

“Where is Brother Orchid?” he asked.

“Maybe he’s in his cell, praying,” said Brother Nasturtium. “Shall I fetch him?”

“Yes, please.”

Brother Nasturtium came back alone. His big ruddy face was twisted with trouble.

“Maybe I was wrong about weeds,” he said.

In his office, Thomas Jefferson Brownlow, special prosecutor of rackets, was talking to the press. The reporters liked him. He was so earnest and so green.

“Same old story, boys,” he said. “All I can tell you is that men are selfish animals, and that’s not news. I know Buck is back of all these new rackets. So do you. But I can’t prove it in a court of law. The men who can simply will not go before the grand jury and tell their stories. They put their skins before their civic duty. I’m not blaming them. But the fact remains I can’t force them to testify. They’re not afraid of me. I wish they were. That’s all today, gentlemen.”

The reporters filed out. Brownlow bent morosely over the indictment of a jobless man who had stolen a peck of potatoes.

Swerling, his assistant, bustled in. He was excited.

“Chief,” he said, “they’re back.”

“Who?”

“Those florists and laundrymen and fruit peddlers. And they’re ready to talk.”

“The devil you say!”

“Better grab ’em while they’re hot, Chief,” urged Swerling.

“But what’s got into ’em?”

“You have me there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Brownlow, “if they’ll talk. Send ’em in and lock all the doors.”

Once they started to talk Thomas Jefferson Brownlow had a hard job to stop them. The Grand Jury was back before its seats in the box had cooled off, and shortly thereafter Jack Buck and three of his top aides were passengers on a special train that would not stop till it had carried them to a station near a big, gray gate. Most of his lesser lieutenants also took trips, accompanied by large, official-looking men, who returned alone. A few escaped, some by taking to their heels, others by wriggling through loopholes in the law.

Mr. Brownlow was walking toward his office, debating whether he should run for governor or the Senate, when he bumped into Mr. Chris Poppadoppalous, emerging from the room where witnesses are paid their fees. Mr. Poppadoppalous beamed, bowed, and handed Mr. Brownlow a large box.

“Gardenias,” he said. “I brink dem for you.”

“Thanks,” said Brownlow. “And there’s one more thing you can do for me.”

“Anythink,” said Mr. Poppadoppalous with another bow.

“One day you boys were afraid to talk. The next day you talked. Why?”

“We were afraid not to,” said Mr. Poppadoppalous.

“Afraid of me?” asked Brownlow, rather pleased.

Mr. Poppadoppalous tittered apologetically.

“Oh, no, sir,” he said. “You’re a nice man. You don’t say, ‘Talk, you Greek so-and-so, or I’ll tear out your heart and eat it before your eyes.’ ”

“Did somebody say that to you?”

“Yes, sir. To all us boys.”

“Who?”

“The little fellow,” said Mr. Poppadoppalous, and bowed, and scurried away.

From his hotel window Little John Sarto looked out over the lighted city spread at his feet. Somebody knocked on his door.

“Come in,” said Sarto.

The freckled young man came in. He had on a new suit, moss-green this time, and he was still jovial.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said.

“Hello, Eddie,” said Sarto.

“You know why I’m here.”

“Sure,” said Sarto. “Have a drink?”

“Why not?” said Eddie, and poured out a drink from a bottle of bourbon on the table. Sarto took one, too.

“Nice going, boss,” said Eddie, raising his glass. “We’ll run this town right.”

“We?”

“You will, I mean,” said Eddie. “I’ll be glad to work under a man with your brains. Poor Jack didn’t have many. Nerve, yes. But he never looked ahead. You do. Well, what do you say, boss? Dummy and some of the boys are waiting downstairs for the answer. They’re solid for you, boss. Anything you say goes.”

Sarto didn’t say anything. He went to the window and looked out over the city.

“Of course, things are rather ragged right now,” said Eddie. “We’ll have to take it slow and easy for a while. But the boys are counting on you to work out some nice, new, juicy angles. The town’s yours.”

“I don’t want it,” said Little John.

“What do you mean?” Eddie was not jovial now.

“I got other plans.”

“You can’t run out on us.”

“I’m walking out,” said Sarto. “Right now.”

“The boys won’t like that.”

“I’m doing what I like.”

“That’s always expensive,” said Eddie.

“I know all about that.”

Eddie shrugged his shoulders.

“Okay,” he said, and sauntered out of the room.

Hurriedly, Little John Sarto began to strip off his loud, plaid suit.

“I’m right,” said the warden to the chaplain, laying down the morning paper. “You say all men have some good in them. I say some men are all bad and nothing can change them. Take this fellow, Sarto. Last night in Chicago, as he was getting on a bus, he was filled full of lead.”

“That hardly proves your point.” The chaplain smiled. “Bullets are very democratic. They’ll kill good men as well as bad, you know.”

“There was nothing good about Sarto. Just listen to this: ‘The police say Sarto plotted to return to power in the underworld. They are at a loss to explain why, at the time of his death, he was disguised as a monk.’ Why, the scheming wolf! Whether there’s any good whatsoever in such a man, I leave it to you to judge.”

“He does sound pretty bad, I grant you,” the chaplain said. “But, even so, I hate to condemn him or any man. I might be reversed by a higher Judge.”