The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Dwight V(incent) Babcock (1909–1979) was born in Ida Grove, Iowa, but lived in Southern California from childhood. Before becoming a full-time writer, Babcock worked as a banjo player, piano tuner, vice president of a grape juice company, and owner of a service station.

His first stories were sold to pulp magazines, including Black Mask when it was published by Joseph Shaw, who then became Babcock’s agent. He wrote three novels, all of which were about Joe Kirby, as ordinary as his name, and Hannah Van Doren, who was anything but ordinary. A feature writer for crime magazines, she searches for stories, “the gorier the better, and with a sex angle if possible,” and is known as “the Gorgeous Ghoul.” She has the face of an angel but drinks “like a fish.” The three novels about “Homicide Hannah” are A Homicide for Hannah (1941), The Gorgeous Ghoul (1941), and Hannah Says Foul Play (1946).

Having achieved only moderate success with his novels, Babcock turned to screenwriting and became a prolific author of motion pictures, including Road to Alcatraz (1945), The Corpse Came C.O.D. (1947), and several low-budget horror films, and an active TV writer, with scripts for scores of popular programs to his credit, including The Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, The Adventures of Kit Carson, The Roy Rogers Show, Racket Squad, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Adventures of Superman, and Hawaii Five-0.

“Murder on the Gayway” was published in the October 1939 issue.

A knifer mingled in the crowd at Treasure Island’s Nude Ranch. Guess who it was before Beek does!

My dogs were killing me when I reached the car. I’d have bet I walked a hundred miles, seeing the Fair in one day. I climbed into my coupé, unlaced my shoes, kicked them off and sat back wiggling my toes, sighing with the ecstasy of relief. After that I got a cigarette going and settled down to wait for Mac.

It was a little after midnight and there was a balmy summer breeze blowing in from the Golden Gate. My Zephyr was in the parking space at the north end of Treasure Island, and from where I sat in it I could see the lights of San Francisco across the water to my right and the lights of Berkeley and Oakland twinkling off to my left.

Most of Treasure Island was still lighted up too, and at night like that, with the buildings bathed in all the different colors, it looked like fairyland — though about all I could see of it from this dark end of the island was the tall spire of the Tower of the Sun. The exhibit halls had all closed at ten p.m., but the Gayway was still going strong, its lights and its noise reaching back here from a distance.

What was left of the crowd was on the Gayway. It didn’t look as if there were many cars remaining on the lot, but that was because they had thinned out, were sprinkled far and wide over the approximate hundred acres of parking grounds. Two men and a girl had come from the direction of the Gayway into the parking grounds, and having nothing better to do I watched them approach.

One of the men was so fat he waddled, and the girl was between him and the other guy. They each had hold of one of her arms and were walking her along as if she’d had one too many and wasn’t able to navigate without help. It wasn’t till they passed right in front of the Zephyr that I caught on there was more to it than that.

I heard the girl say in a fierce whisper, “Let me go!” and realized she was struggling against the grip the two had on her arms. I acted instinctively, leaned forward and switched on the headlights. Caught in the glare, the men’s heads jerked up and around and their stride faltered.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, sticking my head out the side window — and my nose into something that probably wasn’t any of my business, a bad habit of mine.

“Nothing,” the nearest one answered in an annoyed tone, and I recognized his face as the light hit it.

He wasn’t the fat one, and his name was Art Vogelsang. I’d run into him off and on when I’d worked the police beat for the Tribune in past years. He’d been a runner for a crooked shyster then, until the lawyer got himself disbarred. Then he’d worked for a bail-bond broker who was later tried and convicted as a fence. Vogelsang had slipped out from under both times, and I didn’t know what he was doing now. But I did know he was a smoothie, an opportunist who worked on the shady side of the law.

“Hold it,” I said. “I’ve got a gun here. Are you sure everything’s all right, miss?”

I didn’t have a gun, but they stopped just within the beam of light and the girl cried: “No... no, everything’s not all right! These two men are forcing me to go with them!”

She was a tiny trick in a dark tailored suit, a rakish hat with a feather stuck in it at a jaunty angle. She had a round baby face and a turned-up nose. Her eyes were large and glistening in the headlight glare, but she seemed more angry than afraid. The fat man jerked her arm, growled in a deep bass:

“Shut up, you!” He squinted into the light. “She’s drunk. She don’t know what she’s saying. Come on.”

His eyes were almost hidden in his moon face and he had wet blubbery lips. He was built like a gigantic egg. I’d never seen him before that I remembered, and if I had I would have remembered anyone his size.

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t think the girl wants to go with you, fatty. Let go of her. Or would you rather I called some of the Exposition cops?”

Fatty looked at Vogelsang and Vogelsang’s teeth made a white glitter as he smiled. He wore tweeds — a lean, sharp-faced blond man with expressionless blue eyes and a clipped mustache. His voice was oily as he said:

“This is all a mistake, brother. The little lady is slightly tipsy. We’re going to see that she gets home safely.”

“I’m not tight,” the girl denied, and stamped one foot indignantly. “Let me go! I don’t want to go with you. Please,” she said, addressing her appeal to me, “make them let me go!”

“O.K.,” I said, and got my teeth into the words. “Let the little lady go. I’ll see that she gets home safely. She don’t seem tight to me, and I’ll take her word against yours anytime, Vogelsang, you cheap chiseler.”

His mouth and eyes tightened down and he tried to see me through the light glare. “Who are you?”

“Never mind that,” I bit out. “Let the girl go or I’m going to start squeezing lead and noise out of this heater and draw a swarm of cops around here.”

He hesitated a moment, standing very tense and still, then tossed his jaw at the fat man and they let go of the girl’s arms. She moved away from them, straightening her jacket with a disdainful jerk of her shoulders.

“Let that be a lesson to you, you heels,” she told them scornfully. “Picking on a lady!”

Vogelsang was still glaring in my direction, but I was pretty sure he couldn’t see me. “You’ll regret this, brother,” he lipped tightly.

“So I’ll regret it,” I said cheerfully. “Scram, you and your fat stooge. Get in your car and highball out of here. If you’re not off the Island in two minutes, I’ll get some law on your tail. Molesting a girl — and she looks like a minor at that. Go on, beat it.”

Vogelsang swung away without another word and, trailed by the waddling fat man, strode off toward a light sedan about twenty yards away. The girl moved around to the right side of my coupé and watched them as they got in their car. The sedan’s motor came to life with a sputtering roar, its lights blinked on and it jerked forward, wheeled around and charged straight at the left side of my Zephyr. Headlight beams caught me in the face and I ducked back. The sedan veered off, went by the tail of the Zephyr in a rush that raised a miniature whirlwind, headed for the outlet along the west edge of the island which led across Yerba Buena to the Bay Bridge.

I watched it go, knowing Vogelsang and his fat partner had seen me and now knew who I was. And I had a feeling in my bones the guy hadn’t been fooling when he’d told me I’d regret interfering.

Swearing at and to myself for the impulse that had made me stick my neck out again, I turned to the girl. She was standing by the open right-hand window and I flicked on the dome light so I could see her. She was pert and doll-faced with large doll-like eyes and hair the color of pine shavings. She looked about seventeen and spoke with the suggestion of a lisp.

“Thanks,” she said, blinking long lashes at me and smiling shyly. “I... I don’t know how to thank you, Mr...”

“Beeker,” I told her. “Just call me Beek. So what’s your name and who are you and how did it happen those two lugs—”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head in wide-eyed wonder. “I never saw them before in my life. I... I got separated from my... my friend in the crowd on the Gayway, and those men accosted me and drew me down a dark passageway and made me come out here. I don’t know where they were taking me.”

“Why didn’t you scream?” I asked skeptically.

Her doll-like eyes got even wider. “But I couldn’t! The fat one had a black-jack and he said he’d hit me with it if I let out a peep.”

She was either very dumb, or putting on an act. I reluctantly pulled my shoes back on my aching feet, slid over to her side of the car and got out to stand beside her. “Maybe we’d better go report this at the Exposition Police Headquarters.”

“No!” She said it quickly, almost too quickly, as though a swift stab of fear had forced it out of her. She sent a quick look swinging around the parking area. “I’ll be all right now, I think.”

“Well,” I said, “at least I can help you find your friend. Who is he and where did you get separated from him?”

“In front of the Greenwich Village. I stopped to look at the dancing girls out in front and when I looked around Johnny was gone. He just seemed to have disappeared.”

“Johnny who?” I asked patiently.

“Johnny Foster,” she told me, gazing over toward the Gayway.

The name clicked. “Not the Johnny Foster who’s heir to the Foster sugar millions?”

She looked at me, batting her eyelids. “I... I don’t know. You see, I don’t know him very well.”

“Oh,” I said. “And now, just to get the record more or less complete, suppose you tell me your name.”

She hesitated before answering, glancing around again. “Daisy,” she said then. “Daisy May Huggins. Who’s that coming?”

Her hand had tightened on my arm and she was staring toward the dark back of the Gayway, at a figure who was coming toward us in a fast slouching shuffle.

“That looks like little Mac. Don’t worry, he’s a pal of mine.” I looked down at her. “Daisy May Huggins,” I said. “That’s a pretty name.”

She glanced up sharply, to see if I was kidding her, and I knew she wasn’t as dumb as she was acting. I kept a straight face for her benefit, and then Mac was on us, croaking excitedly:

“Hey, Beek! I found her! I found her!”

“You found who?” I said.

He was a little guy with an oversize Adam’s apple and a thin and crooked face. His moist eyes were usually sad as a setter’s, but now they were lit up and glowing. He waved the newspaper he had clutched in one hand and his Adam’s apple bobbled with excitement.

“The missing Ingraham babe,” he said. “Take a swivel at this.”

He snapped the paper open and thrust it into my hands. In the glow that fell out from the dome light I could see it was a bulldog edition of the Morning Tribune, and a head in midpage read:

I’d read the story before. Hildegarde Ingraham, daughter of a wealthy Chicago meat-packer, had disappeared from her home in the Windy City about ten days ago. At first a kidnaping had been suspected, but no ransom notes had been received, and the father had finally offered a reward for her return unharmed, or information as to her whereabouts.

Now, it had been ascertained — on good authority, according to the writeup — that a girl answering Hildegarde’s description had left a trail that led to San Francisco after evidently just running away from home. There was no art with the story; due to an eccentricity of her parents and a fear of kidnapers, they had never allowed her photograph to be taken, either by reporters or in a studio. There was a description of the girl, a brunette of eighteen years.

I looked up and saw that Daisy May had drawn away a little and was watching me silently. I grinned at Mac.

“So what gives, pal?”

“So there’s a reward. And I know where she is! She’s one of the girls in the Nude Ranch. We can put the arm on her and cop off the reward.”

His full name was Adelbert McGillicuddy and he was a former small-time crook with a record, on parole now and trying to go straight. Being sorry for him and not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I’d done him a favor in the past. In return he’d saved my life and attached himself to me like a porous plaster.

He was all right except when temptation was put in his path, and then he weakened very easily. I had a time watching him and keeping him fairly honest. He was a pest sometimes, but he meant well, and I couldn’t get rid of him without hurting his feelings. Besides, I’d learned to really like the little twerp and I owed him something for saving my life, though that couldn’t be worth a hell of a lot.

“So that’s where you’ve been all this time — in the Nude Ranch,” I said, and couldn’t help laughing. “Nuts! What would a gal like this Ingraham kid be doing exhibiting herself in a place like that?”

“But she is!” Mac was very earnest, his crooked face screwed up into prunelike wrinkles, gesturing volubly with his hands. “Maybe she is one of these here now exhibitionists by nature. Or maybe she run out of dough and had to take this job. This twist is different than the rest. She’s not bad, if I do say so myself, and she’s got something the others ain’t — class and stuff like that there. And she’s young, a brunette, and with a mole on her left upper arm, just like that description in the paper. It’s her, honest to Gawd, Beek. I know it!”

I sighed, shook my head. “Ever since we happened to be lucky enough to knock off that reward for recovering some letters for a gal, you seem to think we’re in the dick business. Every time you read about a reward being offered for something, you start getting ants in your pants. You’re driving me nuts. Drop wise, Mac. This girl isn’t—”

“But, criminy, Beek.” He looked hurt and his voice was wistful. “Five grand, this reward is! And I tell you honest that this is the girl. It wouldn’t hurt none just to take a swivel at her, would it?”

“O.K.,” I agreed, just to humor him. “We’ll take a look. We’ve got to go back that way anyway and help Miss Huggins here find her escort. She got separated from him in the crowd.”

“Oh!” He stared at her as if he hadn’t realized she was there before. He doffed his hat and bobbed his head. “Pleased to meetcha, miss.”

Daisy May smiled at him and I said, “Come on. We’ll see if we can find Johnny and then take a look at this gal in the Nude Ranch.”

The throng was thinning out along the Gayway and the blare and glitter were dying a slow death due to the lateness of the hour. We made one trip up and down its length to see if we could spot Daisy May’s friend Johnny Foster, but it was no dice, so to satisfy Mac and get it over with we turned in at the Nude Ranch.

The Nude Ranch was a long, low building with a rustic, Spanish-type front. In the heart of the Gayway and its most popular attraction, the barkers out front were made up like copies of the Lone Ranger and didn’t have to work very hard to lure customers inside at two bits a crack. The exhibit was coining money.

Daisy May seemed to want to stick close to us as long as we couldn’t find Johnny, and now that we had her I didn’t know what to do about it, so I shelled out six bits and we all went through the turnstile.

Inside, the building was divided into two sections by a glass screen that ran down the center. The audience, mostly of men, was on one side of the glass behind a railing, and the Nude Ranch girls were on the other side of the glass under lights in a simulated outdoor setting.

As you came in, you walked the length of the building along an aisle formed by the glass on your left and the railing on your right. Then you went around and stood behind the railing and could stay as long as you liked. I’d been in there an hour or so before and I’ll swear I recognized some of the same faces lining the rail now, where the lights from the other side of the glass hit them.

The place was pretty well filled even if it was getting late, and we found a place at the rail near the far end, where McGillicuddy pointed out the girl he thought was the missing Hildegarde Ingraham, whispering hoarsely: “That’s her!”

She was small and brunette and she was playing Ping-Pong at a table close to the glass screen. Other girls were playing horseshoes and badminton, practicing on an archery range, twirling lariats and taking turns riding a burro. They all wore bandannas knotted loosely around their necks, G-strings, boots, cartridge belts and holsters containing imitation six-shooters. Some wore sombreros and some didn’t. Some were only passable, but most were built very nicely, the brunette with the large mole on her left arm included in the last category.

But she was different than the others in more ways than one, I had to admit that. In the first place, where all the other girls allowed their bandannas to hang down the back where they would be out of the way, she kept the triangle of the bandanna at the front, an inherent modesty apparently at work on her. She seemed to be acutely conscious of the many watching eyes while pointedly ignoring them.

She had an air of breeding about her, a way of carrying her head, and her face had a genteel intelligence that was out of place here. Her skin was like smooth ivory. Small-boned, almost dainty, she had a youthful, boyish figure, with slender hips and small budding breasts that the bandanna did not quite hide. It was a fact that she didn’t look more than eighteen — the Ingraham girl’s age.

“What’d I tell you, boss?” Mac breathed eagerly in my ear.

“It’s screwy,” I muttered, keeping my gaze on the girl as she and her partner batted the little white ball back and forth. “But could be. Could be.”

We couldn’t hear the girls on the other side of the glass when they spoke to each other, and they couldn’t hear any of the conversation that went on among the customers. The glass screen was enough to deaden ordinary sounds.

I swung away at a sudden disturbance in the audience. Someone had grunted explosively above the murmuring voices, as though he’d been hit in the belly with a fist. A rough voice growled, “Hey, quit shoving!”

When I turned my head to look I realized that Daisy May wasn’t with us any more, and I couldn’t recall when she’d left us. There was a surging scuffle in the thickest part of the crowd up along the rail, but I couldn’t see what it was all about at first because the only lights in the place were on the other side of the glass and they were like footlights, focused on the girls. The only illumination on the audience side was the back-glow and that didn’t amount to much.

Someone said disgustedly, “Just another drunk.”

The crowd parted, falling back away from a stocky, middle-sized man so that I could see him. He was almost chubby and he wore a gray fedora. He was staggering, lurching about with his hands pawing for support and his mouth working; but only senseless glugging sounds came from his throat.

He fell against a little guy with an ugly battered face and the little guy snarled, pushed him away viciously. The man tripped over his own feet, went down, with those in the way scrambling to get out from under.

“Migawd!” the one who’d shoved him squawked sharply. “The guy’s all bloody!”

He was holding up the hand that he’d pushed the man with, staring bug-eyed at the glistening red stain across it that looked like a bright splash of fresh scarlet paint.

“Jeepers!” McGillicuddy croaked at my side, and just then overhead lights flared on.

The girls behind the glass had stopped their desultory game playing and were staring out at the audience for a change. Two of the barker guys in the Lone Ranger outfits were coming from the door, one shouting above the sudden babble:

“What’s the matter? What goes on here?”

Slapping a quick look over the audience, which was pressing back in a ring away from the man on the floor, I still didn’t see Daisy May. There were only a few women in the audience, and one of these screamed:

“He’s been stabbed! Look!” Then she keeled over too and the guy with her caught her.

“Where’s the girl that was with us?” I asked Mac, and he shook his head, his mouth hanging open loosely.

“I dunno. I ain’t seen her since we came in here. Cripes, what’s happened to that guy? Let’s broom outa here!”

“Nix,” I said and shoved forward, fighting my way through to the front part of the ring. The stocky man was on his back on the floor, one of the cowboys kneeling beside him. The other one was bellowing:

“Get back! Get back! Give this guy air.”

“He needs a doctor more than anything else,” I yelled, grabbing his arm. “Get one and some cops in here.”

He looked at me, then nodded and shoved off. The man on the floor had the long bone handle of a clasp knife protruding downward from just under his wishbone. At its base, his vest was sodden with a slowly spreading stain of blood. The blade, at least six inches long judging from the handle, was slanted inward and up toward the heart, had been driven in that way by an underhand blow that had at first knocked the wind out of the man.

Now he lay with his head supported on the arm of the attendant, his chubby face beaded with sweat and convulsed with pain as he gasped for breath. He was a middle-aged, nondescript man with hair beginning to gray. He opened his eyes and stared upward, looking around almost desperately. His jaws opened and closed. He gasped something that sounded to me like, “Hilda-glug Ing—” and then the blood came, thick and frothy, pouring from his mouth.

It ended in a liquid rattling in his throat as he relaxed and died.

My insides turned over and I retched, swung away to keep from being sick. The hush that had fallen over the crowd was broken by one of the women with a shrill, hysterical scream. And there was a sudden stampede for the door, that was met and stopped by a couple of special cops in their fancy Fair uniforms.

But I was staring at the girls behind the glass then, wondering if the man had been trying to say, “Hildegarde Ingraham” as he died.

The girls were huddled together just opposite me, staring out. All but one — the brunette with the mole on her left upper arm. She stood aloof and alone, at one end of the Ping-Pong table, half leaning on it for support with one arm. Her patrician face was unnaturally white and strained, and her knees were bent a little as if they were about to give way and she might collapse.

The cops were forcing the audience back into the room, gradually restoring some semblance of order out of the chaos. Uneasy and murmuring, some frankly sick, the customers were being lined up between the railing and the glass. And all backs were turned to the glass now; the almost nude girls behind it had ceased to be the main attraction. I made sure again that little Daisy May wasn’t among those present, worked my way to the side of the cowboy who had been on duty at the door.

“Did anyone go out of here,” I asked him, “just before this happened?”

He was tall and pale and thin, all the sap knocked out of him by what he’d seen. He shook his head in a half-dazed way. “Judas Priest, I don’t know. I came in here to see what was wrong, and anybody could have slipped out behind me then.”

“That makes it just swell,” I muttered, “for the killer.”

A doctor came first and shook his head over the corpse, pronounced it dead. Then more Fair cops, and plainclothes men stationed on the grounds. Finally the coroner and homicide squad from San Francisco.

From papers and identification in his pockets, the corpse was found to be one Rufus Moore, a Swinnerton operative from Chicago. Swinnerton Investigation Service has offices in every large city, is one of the largest private dick agencies in the world. But Rufus Moore had come all the way here from Chi, and I thought I knew why: The Swinnerton agency had been hired to trace Hildegarde Ingraham by her father in Chicago, and Moore had come here on her trail.

I didn’t tell the cops that, though. For some reason I kept it to myself when we were all herded into a back room and taken aside singly for questioning. I knew white-haired Chauncey O’Toole, the inspector in charge, from my old days on the Trib, and so I got off pretty easy, furnishing McGillicuddy with a straight alibi.

The cops had found a blood-stained, plain linen handkerchief on the floor under Moore, and figured it had been used to hold the knife when the killer used it. So I was pretty sure there weren’t any fingerprints on the knife handle, though they didn’t say, and an expert was working on it. But a funny thing about the handkerchief — it was the small size used and carried by girls and women of all ages, and not by any of the kind of men I know.

No one of the audience could name the killer. It had been too dark for them to notice, and practically everyone had come in to get his money’s worth, so was concentrating his attention on the Nude Ranch gals. The cops held the little guy with the ugly battered face who had pushed Moore and got blood on his hand, and three other known petty crooks who were in the audience, took names and addresses and let the rest of us go, one by one.

It was almost two a.m. when Mac and I got out of the place. The Nude Ranch had closed down, of course, but there was a mob hanging around out front, being kept back by a squad of the Exposition cops. None of the other attractions on the Gayway was getting any kind of a play. Word had got around about the killing, and practically everyone left on the Fair grounds had gathered here.

We were collared by a bunch of newshounds, my old pals of the fourth estate, who wanted to know who, what, where, why and how. I told them we didn’t know from nothing but not to quote me and, fickle characters that they are, they left us to swoop down upon the next guy the dicks had let out of the place. I lit a cigarette and we were moving out of the limelight to become part of the crowd, when a voice said in my ear:

“I beg your pardon, but do you know if the police are keeping a girl inside — a blond girl?”

“Who!” I said, twisting my head to look at the man at my side.

His face was young and clean-cut and worried. He smiled apologetically. “I’ve been looking all over for her. We became separated earlier in the crowd and I can’t find her anywhere. She isn’t outside here now, so she must be inside. I saw you coming out and I thought maybe you could tell me if she’s in there.”

I lifted my brows at him, took the cigarette from my mouth and said slowly: “You mean as a customer, and not as one of the — uh, attractions?”

“Of course.” He wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but he was well built and you could tell he was wearing quality clothes. He looked like money, but there was nothing flashy about him. He had a good jaw, a cleft chin, crisp dark hair. “She’s small and blond,” he said, “and is wearing a dark suit, a hat with a feather in it.” He used a gesture to illustrate the length of the feather.

“Her name wouldn’t be Daisy May Huggins, would it?” I said.

He hesitated a moment before nodding his head and answering yes. There was an odd questioning gleam in his eyes.

“She isn’t in there,” I told him. “She was, but she’s not there now.” Then I explained how I happened to know her name and told him about Vogelsang and his fat stooge trying to take her with them.

Mixed thoughts and emotions were chasing themselves all over the kid’s good-looking face. “My God,” he breathed. “Maybe they’ve got her again!”

“They could have come back,” I admitted, realizing that one of them might have followed us into the Nude Ranch, and slipped out with the girl in the confusion just after Moore had been stabbed. I added, “You’re Johnny Foster, aren’t you?”

He looked at me in a blank, startled way; then his face got very expressionless. “No,” he said shortly, turned on his heel and walked off, shouldering through the crowd.

He hadn’t even bothered to thank me. He was too worried for that, and I was beginning to get an idea about Daisy May. On impulse, I fished out my car keys, shoved them at Mac, who had been standing silently beside me.

“Tail that guy, keed,” I told him. “He’s heading for the parking grounds, so that means he has a car. I’ll ride a cab into town. Phone me at Ricopetti’s as soon as he lights.”

Mac looked puzzled when he grabbed the keys, but he didn’t ask any questions. He said, “Right, boss. But you keep an eye out for that girl, huh?” Then he was gone, after the kid who had denied being Johnny Foster.

I was becoming more and more interested in the missing Hildegarde Ingraham and the possibility of knocking off a hunk of that five-grand reward. The Swinnerton dick getting knifed out and gasping what sounded to me like her name couldn’t be just coincidence. And any part of the reward would come in very handy indeed in keeping the wolf from my door, as I did not have any particular prospects of a job and did not particularly relish the idea of work anyway since I’d got used to a life of ease and trailer tramping. Five thousand clackers was something worth gambling for, and what could I lose?

Right then I was really more worried about what had happened to Daisy May, but while on the spot I thought I ought to find out what I could about the dark-haired gal in the Nude Ranch that McGillicuddy had pointed out to me. The gals were still inside. The cops were questioning them too, to see if any of them had noticed anything in the audience at the time of the killing that might help them to tab the killer. They weren’t off duty till two anyway, so I planned to hang around until they came out.

There was a back door and chances were they’d use that. I had to go up to the corner and around the building that held the Incubator Babies, and cut back along behind the row of buildings. It was darker back here and there wasn’t as much of a crowd, only a scatter of the curious who were watching the building from the rear. I took up a position against the wall near the rear door, got another cigarette going and settled down to wait.

It wasn’t long before the door opened and the gals started to drift out, mostly in pairs or groups chattering about the murder. There was a single bulb burning above the door, so when the one I was waiting for came out under it I spotted her without any trouble. She was alone and she was hatless and she was wearing a coat of dark sleek fur that matched her hair. That was something — a thirty-five-dollar-a-week nudist wearing a fur coat in mid-summer, a coat that looked like kolinsky, and you can’t get kolinsky for peanuts.

She sent a quick searching glance from side to side as she passed under the light, then started to walk past me. I stepped up even with her and touched her arm.

“Pardon me, miss. May I speak with you a minute?”

She shied away from me like a frightened filly, her delicate face white and strained.

“Don’t be afraid,” I told her easily. “I’m harmless. I’m not going to hurt you. All I want is to ask you a couple of questions.”

She was pressed against the wall of the building, staring at me. “What — who are you?”

She spoke in a whisper and I kept my voice down too. “I’m curious,” I said. “I saw you inside and you don’t belong in a place like this. What are you doing here?”

“That,” she said tensely, “happens to be my business.”

“Maybe I can get you a better job,” I lied. “Would you mind telling me your name?”

The fear had gone suddenly out of her and she straightened up away from the wall, tilting her chin. “I most certainly would.”

Behind me a rough voice said, “Who is dis slug?”

I turned and looked at a hard-faced mug with a barrel chest who was fully six-feet-four and built like Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom. The red knot of his necktie was on a level with my eyes and I had to look up to see his face, and even then his chin was in the way so I couldn’t see most of it. His jaw stuck out like the prow of a battleship, and he had big black shaggy eyebrows that seemed to hang down over his eyes. He had been one of the customers in the Nude Ranch before and after the killing.

“I don’t know,” the girl told him. “I’ve never seen him before. I didn’t see you when I came out and he stopped me and started talking to me, tried to find out my name.”

“One of them kind of guys, huh,” the gorilla growled. “What’s da idea, slug, annoying a lady? I oughta hang one on you. Beat it, before I pop you one. On your way, on your way!”

He was pointing a thumb like a sausage over one shoulder, jiggling it. He was one of those the cops had questioned and let go, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t made a mistake in letting him go, seeing as how he knew this girl. If she were actually Hildegarde Ingraham... I remembered he’d been standing close to the spot where Rufus Moore had fallen with the knife in him, and he’d been the one who’d told Moore to stop shoving, before the man had dropped.

“Don’t scare me like that,” I told him, getting ready to jump — the other way. “Who are you to order me around?”

I thought that might make him tell me who he was, but it didn’t. And when he put his slab of jaw down on his big chest and started for me with his long arms swinging, I knew I’d met my Waterloo. I retreated and got out of his way. He didn’t follow, just stopped and snorted, sneering at me. Then he swung back to the girl, said, “Come on, babe. Let’s go.”

She let him take her arm and they strode off, looking almost comical together like that, due to their difference in size. I let them go, as I didn’t want to ask her any questions anyhow with the gorilla around to overhear. That would just be inviting mayhem, and I have a very well-developed instinct for self-preservation.

I’d been going at things the wrong way. If I’d been smart, I wouldn’t have stopped the girl at all, but would have followed her home, where I could pick my time and see her alone. Another single girl had come out through the door and was walking past me.

“Hello,” I said.

She looked at me blankly. She had a heart-shaped painted face and was wearing a miniature straw hat on top of glittering platinum hair. She had on a white sweater that clung to her full breasts, and a pleated skirt. I didn’t remember her as one of the Nude Ranch girls, but maybe she looked different with her clothes off, and she suddenly smiled at me.

“Hello,” she said. “Do I know you?”

She said it hopefully and I told her, “Sure, but we ought to get better acquainted.” I was standing close to her. I nodded up in the direction where the gal in the fur coat and her gorilla boyfriend were walking away. “Who’s that screwy girl that just came out — wearing a fur coat in weather like this?”

They were still in sight when the painted blonde took a slant at them, but she would have known who I meant anyway because of the fur coat. She sniffed. “That’s Louise Madden. She just wears that coat to show off. She’s only been working here a few days and she thinks she’s better than the rest of us girls.”

“Yeah?” I said. “And who’s that missing link with her?”

“Oh, that’s her brother. Or so she says.”

“The hell it is,” I said. “Well, thanks.”

I tipped my hat and backed away and she looked startled, said disappointedly: “But I thought—”

“Some other time, baby,” I promised, turned and walked away.

The gorilla drove the girl over the bridge into San Francisco in a small and ancient coupé. I followed in a cab. The coupé swung off the bridge approach and went out Mission two or three miles, turned into a district of old frame apartment buildings. There wasn’t much traffic at that hour, but I took a chance on being spotted and had the driver take the cab into the side street after the coupé.

The side street was dark and deserted, except for the coupé, parked at the curb in mid-block with its lights burning. As we went by it, the lights blacked out and, looking back, I saw the gorilla and the girl getting out before a dark three-story apartment building. I told the driver to turn left at the next corner and stop, where I paid him off.

When he drove away, I went back to the corner, peered around. It was even more dark and silent and deserted than before. Somewhere down on Mission a truck was making a grinding racket, but the rest of the world seemed sound asleep. I stepped into the side street, moving along it on the opposite side from the coupé.

Nothing stirred in the deep shadow of the recessed apartment house doorway as I passed it. I didn’t pause, but went on up to the corner, crossed over and came back. I had some idea of examining the cards on the mail boxes outside the door to see if two Maddens were listed — if the two did live together as brother and sister, or if I could count on the gorilla going away and leaving the girl alone.

But when I came even with the building, the coupé door swung open and the gorilla came out and up from the floorboards, where he’d been crouched, waiting for me; he and the girl had got back in the car when I was up around the corner. I just had time to swing around and set myself when he was on top of me. I didn’t have a chance to duck or dodge. He got a big fistful of the front of my vest and jerked me toward him, growled:

“What’s da idea, tailing us?”

I was suddenly mad, not at him but at myself for being so dumb and careless. They’d spotted me tailing them and had suckered me neatly into a trap. I pulled back one foot and aimed a kick at his shin. It connected and he said, “O-ow!” in a very surprised and hurt tone of voice, at the same time flinching back and giving ground. As he stepped back I let go with my right fist and buried it in his solar plexus.

Delivered right, a punch like that can bend a man double and paralyze him for a minute or so. I guess my delivery was wrong, because he only grunted and my fist bounced back as if his belly muscles were made of spring steel. He didn’t even let go of me and give me a chance to high-tail it away from there.

Instead, he muttered, “You ast for it, slug, now take it.”

Then he hit me. His fist felt like a cannon-ball when it slammed into my jaw. It jarred me down to my toes and from the coupé I heard the girl cry out: “Buck, don’t! Buck!”

And the sidewalk came up and kissed me. The last thing I remembered was the dim roar of the coupé’s motor, which got fainter and fainter in the distance. I don’t know how long the knockout lasted, but when I came out of it I was all alone and Buck and the girl were gone.

Ricopetti’s is a hole-in-the-wall bar and restaurant on Columbus in the old Barbary Coast district. They know me there — too well. There was a phone message waiting there for me when I arrived — from Mac, telling me where to meet him, which was at the corner of Kearney and Jackson, only two or three blocks away.

A bruise was blossoming on my jaw and it was sore as a boil. My head was also giving me merry hell. I needed a drink, but it was after two a.m. and the bar was closed. So I talked the night man, a pal of mine, into slipping a shot of brandy into the cup of coffee I ordered, and also got him to lend me his gun. I needed an equalizer in case I ran up against the gorilla again, as I didn’t want to take another dose of the sample he’d given me.

When I left Ricopetti’s I was feeling better, but I was still sore. I walked up to Kearney and over to Jackson through empty and lifeless streets, and Mac went, “Hiss-hiss!” at me from a dark doorway on the corner.

“What gives?” I asked as I joined him in the doorway. “Where is our boy friend you were supposed to be tailing?”

He jabbed a thumb out and down Jackson Street. “He’s down there in that bail-bond office. That’s his hoopie out in front of it. He drove straight here and went in about half an hour ago and I ain’t seen him come out.”

Jackson was a dark and narrow street here and the bail-bond broker’s office was in mid-block at street level, inner light making a glowing square of its shaded first-floor window. Staring at it, trying to make out the letters stenciled on the glass, I stepped out of the doorway and thumbed back my hat.

“Whose office is it?” I asked.

“It’s run by a fat tub of lard named Jonathan Kline,” Mac told me. “He is not a big shot, but I would not be too surprised if he did a little fencing of stolen articles such as hot ice on the side.”

“Oh-oh,” I breathed, thinking of Vogelsang’s fat stooge. I was pretty sure who Mr. Kline would turn out to be.

“Criminy, Beek!” Mac blurted suddenly. “What’s the matter with your puss? You look like you’d happened to an accident.”

Light from the corner street lamp had got under my hat brim. “I did,” I admitted, palming my sore jaw. “You wouldn’t happen to know a big gorilla by the name of Buck Madden, would you?”

Mac knew most of the small-time crooks and chiselers in town by sight, name or reputation anyway. He blinked, scowling thoughtfully. “That moniker sounds familiar.” Then he snapped his fingers. “I think a bruiser by that name used to do some strong-arm work for Art Vogelsang, but I ain’t heard of him for a long time. Why?”

There it was — Art Vogelsang again. Everything seemed to be tying up together. “The guy bopped me,” I muttered, still smarting. “That Nude Ranch gal you think is Hildegarde Ingraham is supposed to be his sister — Louise Madden. I was tailing them and the so-and-so laid for me and then got away. We could find out for sure where they live by greasing someone at the Nude Ranch, but I had to try and play it smart and get my face pushed in for my trouble.” I sighed.

“I don’t know whether fooling around like this is going to get us anything or not; I don’t know just how I happened to get sucked into it in the first place, but now that I’m in I’m going to stay, and find out what’s what. I owe somebody something for this clout on the jaw. I’ve either got to get paid for taking it or else get hunk some other way.”

Little Mac clucked sympathetically. “You and me should of stuck together, boss. Together we ought to be able to take the big heel, huh? Let’s get him, huh? The big bully!”

“Not now,” I said, grinning. “Later, maybe.”

“But what’re we gonna do here?”

“I’ve got a hunch,” I explained. “Moore, that Swinnerton op who was knifed in the Nude Ranch, was on the trail of Hildegarde Ingraham, I think. It sounded to me like the last thing he tried to say was her name, only no one else seemed to get it. Art Vogelsang and his fat stooge were after Daisy May, and you know the kind of guy Vogelsang is. Also, Daisy May was in the Nude Ranch with us just before the killing, then disappeared. All that is either a hell of a lot of coincidence, or else Daisy May is Hildegarde Ingraham.”

Mac’s crooked thin face was screwed up in a scowl of concentration. “But Hildegarde is a brunette.”

“She could have dyed her hair,” I pointed out. “Probably would have if she really wanted to avoid recognition. Anyway, why would a chiseler like Vogelsang be after a gal like Daisy May, unless there was some dough in it? And if I’m wrong we can always go back to the other gal; I’ll admit she intrigues me, pal.”

Mac was thinking it over, mumbling in his beard: “The dick said her name before he kicked off...” He looked up brightly. “Maybe this Daisy May is Hildegarde and she knifed him, huh, because she didn’t want to be caught? Maybe the dick was trying to name his killer!”

“Maybe,” I said. “But whether she’s a murderess or not, there’s still a five-grand reward offered for her, and the thing for us to do now is to find her. At first she was with this kid you followed, who I think is Johnny Foster, and he was looking for her too. He came here, so—”

“So what?” Mac said, puzzled.

“So we’re going to find out what. Something very squirrelly is going on, and there just might be a chance that we could pull that five-grand reward out of the fire yet.”

“Five grand — boy!” He smacked his lips. “What do we do?”

“We pay a call on Mr. Jonathan Kline first and see what goes on. I think Mr. Kline is Vogelsang’s fat pal, but I don’t know just what we’ll be walking into, so let’s sort of take it easy. I’ll go in first and you wait outside. If I get in a jam, I’ll holler or something and you can get help if we need it.”

I nodded back along Kearney past where the Zephyr was parked, toward Portsmouth Square and the gray pile of stone across from it that was the Hall of Justice. “The police station’s only a couple of blocks away, but don’t call a copper unless you have to. We don’t want to have to split that reward with anyone, in case there is a chance of getting it. If we get too many cops in here, they’ll ace us out entirely.”

“I get it, boss,” Mac said. “Are you heeled?”

“Yeah.” I touched the short-barreled police special in my coat pocket that I’d got from my pal in Ricopetti’s. “Wait here until after I’m inside.”

“Take it easy, boss,” little Mac warned pleadingly as I moved off into Jackson.

From the glow that filtered out through the shaded windows, I noticed that the kid’s car was a low Packard convertible and carried Nevada plates. That wasn’t odd, because Nevada is a taxpayer’s haven and plenty of wealthy people maintain their residence there. I moved on and up to the office door, and had my right hand on the gun in my pocket. I put out my other for the door handle, and paused.

Thumping sounds were coming from inside, the scrape of furniture being pushed back, a splintering crash that sounded like a chair hitting the floor. On either side of me the window shades were tightly drawn. There was no crack or slit through which I might see.

Thumping sounds from within continued. I let my hand close on the door handle, thumbed down the latch. The door was unlocked and I pushed it open a little, so that I could see inside.

A railing bisected the room, and behind the railing were Art Vogelsang and the kid I’d tabbed as Johnny Foster, but they didn’t notice me in the doorway. They were busy, completely wrapped up in each other, engaged in a slug fest that was a furious exchange of lefts and rights. They were viciously in earnest, going at it hammer and tongs, and the room was filled with grunting sounds and the thudding impacts of fists against flesh.

Battling back and forth, the kid’s dark hair was hanging down in his eyes and his coat was ripped. Sweat and blood streaked Vogelsang’s sharp face. The kid was boring into him like a buzz-saw, forcing the taller man to give ground. As I watched, the kid brought up his right in a pretty uppercut and Vogelsang’s head jumped and he slammed back against a roll-top desk, started to slide down it to the floor.

The kid stood over him, panting, and behind the kid a bulky shape that I hadn’t noticed there rose up from the floor — the fat man, Kline. I stepped inside, heeled the door shut behind me, said:

“Hold it!” The heater was out in my fist, but either I spoke too late or Kline didn’t hear me anyway.

He swung the metal wastebasket he’d brought with him up from the floor. It arced over his head, bonged on the back of the kid’s skull. The kid staggered forward, went to his knees.

“Kline!” I bit out. “Drop it!”

He looked at me, his moon face dull, blubbery lower lip hanging slackly. Sweat glistened under the lights on the dome of his almost totally bald head. There was a threat of blood from one corner of his mouth, and his clothes were dusty from the floor. The kid had evidently got in at least one good punch on him before going to work on Vogelsang. He’d really been cleaning house.

Kline’s eyes glinted, almost hidden in deep folds of flesh. He let the wastebasket drop from his hand to the floor, stood breathing harshly, his bulging torso expanding and contracting. The kid had only been knocked to his knees, catching himself there and holding his head in his hands. His coat sleeves had worked back along his arms and one shirt cuff was stained darkly with blood. His clothing was practically ruined, but he didn’t seem to be marked up much physically.

Now he sobbed, “You—!” and came up swinging, going for Kline. “Where is she?” he gritted.

“Hold it!” I said sharply, moving to the railing. “What goes on?”

He jerked his head around and stared at me as if he hadn’t known I was there before. Behind the railing, a chair and a typewriter table had been knocked to the floor. Vogelsang had his back propped against the desk, was holding his jaw in one hand and looking up from the floor with dazed, glassy eyes. All three men were puffing, and the sound of their breathing was very loud.

“They’ve got the girl!” the kid blurted. “And they won’t tell me where they’ve got her. They’re holding her. They’re keeping her against her will.”

“What girl?” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to mean Hildegarde Ingraham, by any chance?”

His head jerked in a nod. “Yes. They... they’ve kidnaped her.”

“Then,” I said slowly, “Daisy May is really Hildegarde.”

An uncertain light flickered in his eyes, as if he realized he’d spoken out of turn, revealing a confidence, and now regretted it. Then he murmured resignedly, “Well, it’s out now. Yes.”

“Then these mutts must have kidnaped her right out of the Nude Ranch,” I said.

“I don’t know.” His eyes were harried and he spoke heatedly. “But I know they’ve got her.”

I pointed the heater at Kline. “Where is she, fat boy? Give.”

His face was stupidly sullen and he didn’t answer.

“Nuts!” Vogelsang said, and I looked down at him. The glassiness had gone out of his eyes, leaving them blue chips of hard sharpness. His thin, blood-streaked face was sneering. “We should tell you! So you can hijack her and collect that reward. You—! You took her away from us once and now you’re sticking your nose in again.”

“The hell with the reward,” the kid sobbed, quivering. His jaw was set in a rigid white line. “I don’t care about the reward. I want to know where she is. You two aren’t just after the reward. You’re going to try to hold her for ransom or something, at least try to chisel more than the five thousand out of her father. Otherwise you wouldn’t have hidden her somewhere.”

Vogelsang looked up at him with his mouth tight and hard and unveiled hate showing in his cold eyes. Knowing him, I had a hunch the kid was right. Vogelsang would be up to something very crooked, something very tricky, though I didn’t think he’d go so far as to take a chance on a kidnaping rap.

“Listen,” I said. “A private dick was killed in the Nude Ranch at the Fair tonight. He was on Hildegarde’s trail. You two mutts were there; you had to be, because you came back for the gal. Either you tell where she is now, or I’m going to call in some cops.”

Kline’s wet lips sagged at the corners. He looked suddenly sick, gazed questioningly down at Vogelsang. Vogelsang flicked a quick glance at him and then his eyes got very thin and expressionless.

“We don’t know anything about that!” he lipped resentfully. His voice had a thickness to it, as though it hurt him to move his jaw, but he suddenly changed his tone. “Now, be reasonable, for Pete’s sake. We can all get a cut in this reward.”

“I don’t trust you, Vogelsang,” I told him. “You’re trying to ease out from under something. But I’ll be reasonable. You tell us where you’ve got the girl, the kid and I will go get her, I’ll collect the reward and we’ll split it — unless it turns out that one of you two lovely personalities knifed that Swinnerton dick.”

“Hell, we didn’t have nothing to do with that,” Kline said in his deep petulant voice. “What’re you planning to do — frame us?”

“No,” I told him. “But you had to be near there at the time — you had to follow us back to the Fair grounds to get the girl.”

The fat man’s grunt was a surly sound and his eyes receded into their pockets of flesh. Vogelsang was looking thoughtful, a cunning cast to his face.

“O.K.,” he said reluctantly. “I don’t like murder. We don’t want to get mixed up in it, so we’ll tell you. But you better play square with us and see that we get our cut after the reward is paid. You, one-third — we, two-thirds.”

“How about the kid?” I asked.

“I don’t give a damn about the reward,” the kid gritted.

“Sure,” Vogelsang said. “All he wants is the girl. He can have her.”

“He can have her after she’s returned to her father,” I said. “But the split is fifty-fifty. I’ve got a pal working with me. Where is she?”

“She’s out in the Sunset District,” Vogelsang admitted cheerfully, as if we were pals now. “Staying with some friends of mine. It’s the last house on Noriega Street where it runs into the sand dunes going west. We’ll go with you.”

“No, you don’t,” I told him. “You’re staying here.”

I moved through the gate in the railing, lifted my chin at the kid. “See if you can find something to use so we can tie these two mutts up.”

“Hey, what’s the idea?” Vogelsang muttered tightly, trying to get his feet under him so he could stand up.

I let the heater point his way. “Stay where you are. We just want to be sure you’ll be safe and sound while we’re gone. Your friends will be guarding the girl in that house, and I don’t want you to phone and warn them before we get there. I’d have you phone them now and tell them we’re coming and to turn her over to us, only I don’t trust you; you might let something slip over the phone and they’d broom out with the girl before we could get there.”

Kline had been standing, sullen and silent, his moon face set stupidly. For the moment, while speaking to Vogelsang, I’d looked away from him. That was a mistake. Maybe he got the signal from Vogelsang, but if he did I didn’t see it. He moved with sudden abruptness. I sensed it, started to whirl.

The kid yelled, “Look out!”

And from where he was on his haunches on the floor, Vogelsang rocked backward, kicked out and up with one foot. His toe cracked into my right wrist, and at the same instant Kline’s big fist jarred against the side of my neck. It knocked me sideways as the gun flew out of my hand.

The kid dived for it, but Vogelsang fell on it first, rolled, came up and caught the kid on the temple with the revolver. Turning, I took a swing at Kline’s fat face, but was stumbling and off balance and missed. The kid had thudded limply to the floor. Vogelsang flicked the gun up at me and rapped:

“All right, wise boy! Freeze!”

There was an icy glitter in his eyes, and his face was sharp and dangerous-looking. I froze, but Kline didn’t. His moon face was no longer dull and stupid, but alive with hate. He crowded close to me, bumped me with his huge paunch and swung his fist again. It was sort of a one-two punch — first the paunch, and then his fist. The first set me up in just the right position, and the second sent me to the floor. For a fat man, he was good. He may not have been fast, but he knew how to get all his weight behind a blow.

Bells were ringing and the room and everything in it was going round and round in blurred circles. I heard Vogelsang say, “Come on, let’s get out of here,” and their feet moved on the floor.

I wasn’t completely out; some instinct urged me to be up and after them, but I couldn’t move. The gate in the railing squeaked open and clicked shut. The front door opened. They were getting away!

And then a familiar voice croaked shrilly: “Hands up! Halt or I’ll shoot! Get back inside and turn around before I blow you apart.”

I knew that was Mac’s voice and I think I tensed, expecting to hear the blast of the gun Vogelsang had taken from me. But instead there was a muttered curse, the shuffle of feet as they backed inside and turned. Mac’s voice wavered and almost cracked as he ordered:

“Drop the roscoe, bo.”

I heard it hit the floor; then there was a faint swish and a hollow thunk of impact, and another greater weight hit the floor like a dropped sack of potatoes.

“Hey!” Kline’s deep voice protested. “What the—”

“Don’t move!” Mac warned. “Let this be a lesson to you, fatty. Crime don’t pay.”

There was another smacking sound, like someone thumping a ripe watermelon. The floor shook as Kline dropped. Then little Mac was at my side, pulling me up, saying:

“Hey, Beek, what is it? What’s the matter? Come on, snap out of it!”

I was sitting up, but I was still dizzy. Everything kept wavering in and out of focus. Little Mac was crouching over me, his funny crooked face twisted with worry.

“I can’t take it,” I told him, and my tongue was thick as an overstuffed frankfurter. “Fatso pushed me and I fell down.”

“Tsk, tsk,” he clucked sympathetically, and went on: “I gave those bimbos what for. I didn’t know what they’d done to you, but when they tried to bust out of here alone, I knew something was wrong.”

The room was settling down and things were clearing up. Even the ache in my jaw was getting more acute. “Thanks, pal,” I said. “But how’d you stop them? I thought you never packed a rod.”

“I don’t,” he answered piously, and looked down at the gun in his left hand. A black-jack dangled by its thong from his right wrist. “This here roscoe is the one Vogelsang had. But I just happened to have along my sleep inducer for pertection, and when Vogelsang stepped out the door I jabbed him in the ribs with the small end and he don’t know the difference. Then when I get them back in here I just let them have it on account of I don’t want them to find out how I have deceived them.”

The black-jack — his sleep inducer — was small and harmless-looking, but Mac was very proficient in its use, as I’d learned from past experience. He was looking sideways at the kid.

“What’s the matter with him?”

The kid was sitting up, looking around and blinking.

“Vogelsang clipped him with the gun,” I said, “but it looks like he’s all right now. How’s it, fella?”

He pressed one palm against the swelling on his temple, squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them slowly. “What happened?”

I said, “Those two mutts took us, and then my little pal here took them. So that makes it even.”

His eyes sharpened with comprehension. “Yeah? Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s get out of here!”

He surged to his feet, reeled sideways and caught himself against the railing.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I said, but he didn’t pay any attention.

He found the gate, was through it, making a bee-line for the street door. He tripped over one of the prone bodies on the floor, brought up against the door, jerked it open and was outside.

“Come on,” I rapped at Mac, and lunged to my feet. But the floor tilted up at a crazy angle and I almost went straight over onto my kisser. Mac caught and steadied me, and after a moment the floor bent down to where it was supposed to be.

About then, from out in front we heard the starting roar of a motor. Gears clashed and tires spun on the pavement as a car — I knew it was the kid’s car — shot away from the curb. I plowed forward. It was tough going for a while, but with Mac pushing I finally got through the gate in the railing and made it around Vogelsang and Kline, who were out cold on the floor.

The cool night air felt good on my face and in my lungs when we reached the street. Mac had switched off the inside lights and pulled the door closed behind us, and the street was just as empty and deserted as before — except for the taillights of the kid’s car, which was scooting away up the hill toward Chinatown.

I knew where he was headed — to the house on Noriega Street where Vogelsang had said the girl was being held — and we had to get there before he could get away with the girl. The night air had cleared most of the dizziness out of my skull and we pounded up to the corner and around it to where Mac had left the Zephyr. I piled in behind the wheel, jabbed the starter button and gunned the motor to life, took out after the kid as Mac fell in beside me.

The other car was out of sight by now, but I knew the approximate location of Noriega Street; the Sunset District was clear across town toward the Pacific Ocean. I pointed the Zephyr’s nose in that direction and toed down on the throttle.

About half a mile south of Golden Gate Park and a mile east of the ocean, right in the center of the Sunset District, is a section of sand dunes where streets do not run through. Bleak and bare, it is a lonesome area at night, with only a few houses spotted here and there across the dunes.

The house we wanted was where Noriega Street dead-ended, running westward into this waste space of rolling sand. We spotted it as we passed the nearest other house, more than a block away and clustered about a corner street lamp as if for protection from the night. It stood by itself, inner light making glowing squares of its windows, a low stucco bungalow. There was a dark shape squatting out in front — the kid’s car. We’d made good time, but he’d got here before us.

I braked the Zephyr to a stop behind the convertible, and jumped out. The kid was on the porch at the front door, his shoulder jammed against it, arguing with someone who was trying to close it in his face. Mac was right behind me when I skidded up onto the porch, and the short-barreled police special was out in my hand.

Looking back over his shoulder, the kid half sobbed: “He won’t let me in!”

I saw he had one foot stuck in the door, and above and behind the white blob of his face I could see the outline of Buck Madden’s gorilla head, silhouetted by the inner light. I was sure no one else had a head like that, and I wasn’t particularly surprised to find him here.

“Stand back, Madden,” I told him. “I’ve got a gun here and we’re coming in.”

“Oh, you again, huh?” he growled.

“Yeah, me.” I let the police special glitter in the wedge of light that fell out through the opening. “Stand back.”

He stood back and the kid rammed through the door and on inside. I followed more cautiously. The gorilla tried to jump me from the side as I came in. I was remembering the clout on the jaw he’d handed me before and was expecting something, and maybe that made me lean on the gun heavier than I might have as I laid it against the side of his skull. Anyway, he went down, falling loosely to the carpet.

“That makes us even, slug,” I said, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even move. He’d taken a quick trip to dreamland, stretched out peacefully on the rug.

There was a short, anguished cry in the room. I looked up. The small aristocratic-looking brunette from the Nude Ranch — Louise Madden — was standing in an arched doorway wearing a quilted black robe. Her eyes were wide and stricken with shocked horror. She cried in a strained voice:

“What have you done to him? Who are you? What do you want?”

“We want the girl you’re holding here,” I said.

“Oh!” Her eyes jerked as she recognized me, then she came running across the room and went to her knees at the gorilla’s side, held his head up to her breast. She looked up at me again. “Take her. I didn’t want Buck to keep her here anyway, but they made him. She’s in the back bedroom and she hasn’t been hurt.”

We were in a small, low-ceilinged living-room that was neat, but looked bare, it contained so few pieces of furniture. The kid was across the room at another doorway, had stopped there when this girl had appeared. Now he plunged through the doorway, toward the back of the house, and I nodded to Mac to follow him. Mac had come in behind me and closed the front door, and when he was gone after the kid, I asked the girl:

“Who made you keep her?”

Her delicate face was marred by a deep and bitter shadow of anxiety. “A man named Art Vogelsang, and Jonathan Kline. I’ve been trying to keep Buck going straight, but they have something on him and they try to use him when they can.”

“Then he’s really your brother,” I said.

“Yes.” She nodded with her face turned down toward his. She was jiggling his head, massaging the back of his neck. “Buck... Buck...!”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’ll be all right. You couldn’t hurt a mass of muscle like him.”

She was on the verge of tears as she glanced up, her fine mouth quivering. “I suppose he had it coming to him. I’m sorry he hit you when you were following us. Who is this girl you’re after?”

I felt my eyebrows go up in surprise. “You don’t know? She’s that missing Hildegarde Ingraham. You know, the runaway daughter of the Chicago meat-packer. For a while I thought you might be her; that’s why I was following you. That fur coat had me fooled, and you’ve got class, sister.”

She let go of a bitter little laugh, shook her head hopelessly. “You surely don’t think I’d be working at the kind of a job I have now if I were this Hildegarde Ingraham. The coat is just a relic of better days, the only thing I have to wear. The only reason we rent a place way out here is because it’s cheap. I... I hope we don’t get into any trouble over this. Buck has a record. He doesn’t like to live on what I make, but he can’t get an honest job. Nobody’ll trust him.”

“That’s tough,” I said, really feeling sorry for the kid. “But don’t worry. And maybe we can work it so he’ll get a split of the reward that’s offered for finding this Ingraham babe.”

She didn’t look up or answer. Her shoulders moved convulsively and I knew she was crying silently. For some reason I felt like a heel. I was actually sorry I’d hit her brother, because when he’d clouted me he’d probably thought he’d been protecting his sister or something. Just then Mac and the kid came back with the other girl.

Her doll-face was blank, and her big doll-eyes looked a little bit more dazed than usual. But she didn’t seem much the worse for wear. Somewhere along the route she had lost her hat with the feather in it, but she hadn’t been mussed up any. Under the lights I noticed at the part in her hair there was a dark line where the unbleached hair had grown out a little in its natural color.

The kid had his arm about her protectingly, was wearing a resentful scowl. “They had her tied to the bed!” he complained.

The girl had looked over the room, blinking her large blank eyes, and now gazed up worshipfully at the kid’s face. “Oh, Johnny!” she breathed ecstatically. “I knew you would come for me. You’re wonderful!”

She was giving him the needle. It was pretty sickening, but the kid went for it. His scowl smoothed out and he looked soulfully down into her eyes, said softly: “Come on, honey.”

They started for the front door. Little Mac blinked and his Adam’s apple raced up and down before he could get out a weak yelp of protest: “Hey!”

I stepped in front of the door. “Where do you think you’re going?”

The kid stared indignantly at me. “Out,” he said. “I’m going to take her away from here. She’s had all she can stand.”

I shook my head, smiling. “Oh, no, you’re not.”

His jaw crept forward and his brows came down. “Why not?” he asked belligerently.

“Because,” I explained. “This little lady is worth money in our kick and it’s share and share alike. We want to be sure we get ours. Besides that, there is a little matter of a murder to be cleared up. I want to find out where Hildegarde was when Rufus Moore was killed. The knife was held in a girl’s handkerchief.”

“Knife?” the girl said blankly, batting her eyelashes. “Who was killed?”

“A Swinnerton dick was killed in the Nude Ranch,” I said. “I think he was on your trail at the time, and right after the murder I looked around and you’d disappeared. You’d been there just a minute before, because you came in with us. A clasp knife with a six-inch blade sounds like kind of an unusual weapon for a girl, but it’s possible you could have used it. So suppose you just tell us where you were at the time.”

The kid was glowering at me, and the girl was suddenly pale and weak and stammering, floundering for words. She said, “But... but I wasn’t there! I went outside — before that. I didn’t know anything about it. Those men took me. That fat one and the other one, the same ones that you made release me before.”

I nodded. “They must have, because they brought you here, but it seems funny that they could come back and drag you away on a brightly lighted place like the Gayway. But maybe you wanted to go with them. Maybe you could use the fact that they abducted you as an alibi later. It’s very odd that you just happened to go outside at that time, after being so anxious to stay with us when we went in the Nude Ranch. Why?”

“I... I...” She shot a glance up at the kid’s face, seemed numb with fear. The kid growled:

“Leave her alone, and let us out of here.”

“In a minute,” I told him. “I want to get a few things cleared up before you take this gal off and marry her. I want to be sure she knows who you are.”

His eyes tightened and his face became very expressionless. The girl was batting her eyelashes at me again, looked as if she were gasping for breath.

“Where’d you meet this kid?” I asked her.

“In Reno.” She gulped. “He drove me here, last week.”

“And he told you he was Johnny Foster — the Johnny Foster, scion of the Foster sugar millions?”

She nodded dumbly, swallowing.

“Well, I don’t believe it,” I said. “I thought he was too, when I first saw him, but I stopped thinking so when it struck me as odd he knew just where to go after you when you disappeared — to Art Vogelsang and Jonathan Kline. He knew who they were, when I told him Vogelsang had been after you. He’s had some connection with them before, and it seems funny a guy like Johnny Foster would have anything to do with a couple of chiselers of their stripe.

“I think your boy friend here is an imposter, a gigolo, one of those guys who hang around Reno posing as wealthy playboys and preying on divorcées with dough. The way I’ve got it figured, he was looking for a catch and thought he’d found one when he discovered who you were, so he decided instead of turning you in for the five-grand reward to run away with you and talk you into marrying him. That way, even if the marriage were later annulled by your father, he’d be in a position to chisel a handsome settlement.

“Somehow when he got to town here he let it slip to Kline and Vogelsang, who must be old pals of his, who you were. He must have been bragging about the catch he’d made, counting his chickens before they’d hatched. But his two former pals decided to double-cross him and go after you for the reward.”

The girl was staring up at his face and trying to pull away from him, but he was holding her tightly and looking at me through slitted eyes. “You’re wet!” he said through his teeth, and somehow it sounded vicious, like a threat.

Mac was looking on, goggle-eyed, with his mouth hanging open. Louise Madden was listening too, but giving most of her attention to her brother, who was beginning to stir his arms and legs and mumble senselessly.

“So I’m wet,” I told the kid. Up to then I had been guessing, following a hunch. “But how about that blood on your right cuff?”

The kid was wearing a white shirt, and the starched cuffs extended about an inch below the sleeve of his torn jacket. The right cuff was stained with dark and crusted splatters of blood that I’d noticed before in Kline’s office. The kid glanced at it, stared up and said:

“So what? I got that in the fight with Vogelsang and Kline.”

I shook my head. “Oh, no. Those stains were dried and dark, just as they are now, when I saw you in Kline’s office. You’d got them before that. You got them when you stabbed Rufus Moore, that Swinnerton dick.”

“What do you mean?” he snarled. “I wasn’t in the Nude Ranch. I was outside.”

“You could have slipped outside in the confusion right afterwards,” I said. “When I mentioned the girl’s handkerchief and the clasp knife, Miss Ingraham here suddenly seemed very scared.” I switched my gaze to her. “Did you ever see a knife like that before, a clasp knife with a bone handle?”

She nodded fearfully, grimacing, choked out: “It was — his! I saw him in the Nude Ranch, left you and went over to where he was standing. I said, ‘Johnny!’ and he shushed me, then sent me outside to wait for him, told me he’d be right out. All the time he was talking he was looking over his shoulder and pushing me toward the door. I went out, and those other two came up and walked me away so fast I didn’t know what was happening.”

“Shut up!” the kid sobbed, gripping her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Are you crazy? You don’t know what you’re saying. I wasn’t there! What’s the matter with you?”

“Not much you weren’t there,” I said slowly. “You even tried to frame Miss Ingraham by swiping her handkerchief and using it to hold the knife and wipe the fingerprints off the handle, but that still didn’t stop his blood from getting on your cuff; the handkerchief was too small. You knew the Swinnerton dick was on your tail, knew he was after Hildegarde, and when she walked up to you, you knew the game was up unless you acted fast — a fortune was slipping out of your hands.

“So when he started to work his way toward you, you sent her outside, turned around and let him have it, covered by the gloom and the crowd who was all interested in the Nude Ranch gals. Probably the guy had been on your tail earlier in the evening at the Fair. You caught on he was following you, and deliberately lost the girl in the crowd and led him into the Nude Ranch, hoping to shake him there. But when she came in with us, that spoiled everything. You had to kill him. He must have been closing in for a showdown.”

The kid’s face was tight and white and murderous. He kept holding on to the girl’s shoulders, glaring at me. “Nuts!” he bit out. “That pack of wild guesses doesn’t prove a thing. What’re you trying to do, frame me so you can get the girl and the reward?”

“I don’t have to frame you,” I told him. “The girl’s testimony will send you to the gas chamber. The game’s up, bright boy, so relax. Let go of her.”

“Sure,” Buck Madden growled, sitting up on the floor in the arms of his sister. “Sure. I seen dat guy in the Nude Ranch, just before dat private eye was stuck wit’ da toad stabber. The eye was waltzing over to him and da guy just must of slipped him da shiv and then turned and ambled out.”

“That just about ties it,” I said. “Go call some cops.”

Madden did a double-take. “Who, me?”

The kid let his shoulders slump in apparent defeat, then jerked Hildegarde over in front of him and shoved her, sent her lunging straight for me and the gun in my hand. I tried to duck out of the way and keep him under the gun, but she slammed into me, falling, her arms hooking around me for support, dragging my gun arm down.

The kid was right behind her, his face a tight grimace of desperation. I couldn’t swing the gun and fire it without danger of hitting the girl. She was hanging on like a drowning swimmer, throwing me off balance so that I had to stagger sideways and brace myself to keep on my feet.

Seeing the spot I was in, the kid actually grinned, closed in fast and straight-armed the girl again between the shoulder blades. That did it. She sobbed and her feet got tangled up with mine. I started to go down and she carried me to the floor, lit on top of me. Mac was coming up behind the kid on tiptoe, the black-jack swinging from his wrist. But the kid was at the door, jerking it open.

I couldn’t roll free from the girl, but I wrenched around and stuck out my foot, making a longer leg than I thought I had. I got my toe hooked in front of his instep, jerked it up and back, tripping him as he plunged out the door. He went onto the porch in a headlong dive. I scrambled around frantically, fighting to get untangled and on my feet. By the time I made it, Mac was at the door and on through. I followed him out.

The kid had picked himself up and made it to the bottom of the steps. Mac took off from the top step and landed on his back, carried the kid forward so they both spilled on the walk and rolled off, struggling. Mac had the black-jack, but otherwise was no match for the kid’s strength, and the kid in jerking around had got hold of Mac’s right wrist, was twisting it.

They rolled across the lawn, a squirming, fighting vortex of movement in which neither figure was distinguishable. It was comparatively dark out here anyway after the inner brightness. I jumped down off the porch, yelling:

“Hold it, Mac! I’ve got him covered.”

Then I jerked the trigger and let a couple of shots fly over their heads and out into the sand dunes. A bellowing voice echoed the reports: “Hey! Quit it!”

I almost jumped out of my skin. Someone was out there in the dark, and I might have hit him. During the momentary distraction, Mac had stopped fighting, going stiff and rigid to give me a chance at the kid. But the kid didn’t stick around. He left Mac like a shot and was bounding away like a jackrabbit, making for the dunes and the cover of darkness.

“Stop!” I yelped. “You damn fool, stop!”

I didn’t want to shoot the guy even if he was a murderer, and besides, there was someone else out there in the dark whom I might hit if I missed the kid, and I wasn’t such a good shot that I couldn’t miss.

The kid was fading fast into the night and I lowered the heater. Then I heard a smack and a grunt, as if he’d run headlong into something solid. There was a brief threshing and a crunching thud of sound, then silence. Mac was on his knees and we waited, staring.

A figure loomed up out of the dark, a tall lean man in a gray topcoat and hat, walking toward us and dragging something behind him. He had hold of the back of the kid’s collar with one hand, and the kid was a limp, dead weight. He dropped him on the grass, said:

“Here’s your man. He ran smack into me in the dark. He tried to fight so I tapped him one and put him to sleep.”

“That’s good,” I said. “He’s a killer and he was getting away. Who are you?”

The automatic in his hand had a dull black gleam. “The name is Daly. I’m a private investigator. You say this guy’s a killer?”

“Yeah.” A light had dawned. “You’re a Swinnerton dick.”

“How did you know?”

“I just guessed.” I jerked my chin down at the kid. “It’s lucky you stopped him. He’s the guy you want. He used that shiv on Rufus Moore.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” The man’s tone was hard. He turned and looked down at the still figure on the lawn. The kid was lying flat on his back with his face turned up to the stars, but right now he couldn’t see them. His face looked relaxed and young and handsome. Staring down at him, the dick let his gun drop to his side and he swore with a brief and bitter harshness, muttered: “If I’d known that for sure I’d have really put the slug to the lousy—. He must be Baby-face Blythe.”

“Baby-face Blythe?” I said.

He looked at me. He had a lean, haggard face. He nodded. “Rufe said the girl was with someone and he thought the guy was Baby-face Blythe. He’s wanted in Chi on a manslaughter charge. Or he was — until tonight. Now, California can have him for the murder of Rufe. He’s Baby-face Blythe, all right, the dirty son!”

I knew then that most of what I’d guessed before must be right. Blythe had recognized Moore and had to kill him if he wanted to stay free, whether he could marry the girl and her fortune or not.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

Daly said, “I just came from Kline’s office. Rufe and me were working together trying to locate Hildegarde Ingraham. He’d traced her here from Chicago, got a line on Blythe and was following him, hoping he’d lead him to the girl. Blythe spent some time with Kline and Art Vogelsang, and so when I heard Rufe had been knifed, I knew who’d done it and went to Kline’s office, looking for him. I found Vogelsang and Kline out on the floor and I shook ’em into admitting that Blythe had been there. They were sore at him and gave me this address.”

“When thieves fall out...” I breathed and looked up at the porch. The light had come on and all the others had come out of the house, were standing there, staring. A car was coming fast along the street, its headlights rushing toward us. From the porch, the girl we’d just rescued said in a voice brittle with a touch of hysteria:

“So — he was a crook and a chiseler all the time! He tried to deceive me, the lousy heel.” Her tone was scathing, contemptuous, in spite of its shrillness.

We turned to look at the car as its brakes squealed and it slewed to a stop before the house. Art Vogelsang dived out from behind the wheel, came dashing over, hammering words:

“Hey, don’t forget we get cut in on that reward! Don’t forget.”

He was blustering, coming up to me and the Swinnerton dick, with fat Kline waddling along behind. I told him:

“You’ll be damn lucky if you get off without being stuck with a kidnaping rap.”

“Nuts to that.” He gazed down coldly at the man on the lawn. “So you got him. We’re going to testify against Blythe, so we’ll be able to make a deal with the D.A. — don’t worry about that. Where’s the girl?”

I nodded toward the porch. “Right there.”

Vogelsang started for her, and she shrank behind Louise and Buck Madden.

“Wait a minute,” Daly’s voice clipped out.

Vogelsang stopped and looked back.

“Who’s that?” the dick asked, nodding toward the porch where the girl was trying to hide herself.

“That’s Hildegarde Ingraham, the gal you’re after,” I said.

For the first time, Daly smiled — a brief ironic twist of his lips. He pulled a folded newspaper from his topcoat pocket, snapped it open and passed it to me. It was an early morning edition, off the presses less than an hour.

“Read that,” he said, jabbing with one finger at a column on the front page.

By tilting the paper at just the right angle so that light from the porch hit it, I could make out the print. A head read:

I blinked and swallowed, feeling like a suddenly bursted balloon.

“What is it, Beek?” Mac croaked in my ear.

“We’ve been double-crossed, pal,” I told him weakly. “We don’t get any reward. This is the wrong gal.”

“Give me that!” Vogelsang snapped, and grabbed the paper out of my hands.

“Well, starch my diapers!” Mac said in a dazed tone. “Pardon me, I think I’ll go out and get measured for a straitjacket.”

He wandered away across the grass, mumbling to himself. I marched to the porch and up the steps, reached for the doll-faced gal with the dyed blond hair, jerked her out into the open.

“You’re not Hildegarde Ingraham — so who are you?”

“Me?” She blinked her eyes rapidly, looking up at me with an expression of injured innocence. “Why, I’m just Daisy May Huggins. Don’t you remember, I told you? Miss Ingraham hired me in Reno to impersonate her and lead the detectives she thought were on her trail away. I met that heel Blythe and he let me think he was Johnny Foster, so I just sort of played him along for the good time that was in it, when all this happened. I... gee, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry!” I said, and felt my jaw. “To think I took a beating and risked my neck to rescue someone who turns out to be a ringer! So I get left holding the sack again. Somebody kick me. I’ll bend over.”

A big hand slapped me on the back, and Buck Madden growled with true sympathy: “Gee, mister, dat’s tough. I’m sorry I busted ya one. I apologize.”

“Forget it,” I told him. “I made it even, didn’t I — and you and your sister had it tough enough without all this.”

The girl smiled at me tremulously, almost hopefully. Coming up to the porch, Daly, the Swinnerton dick, said:

“She had us fooled too. She led Rufe and me on a wild-goose chase” — his voice went harsh — “that got him killed. But anyway, you helped catch the killer and that’s the way things break sometimes.”

“Uh-huh,” I breathed resignedly, and looked out across the lawn, trying to forget about the reward that I’d thought was in the bag.

Daly had handcuffed Blythe, who was still dead to the world. Vogelsang and fat Kline had slunk away, back to their car, and as I looked it started up, wheeled around in a U-turn and went away very slowly. Little Mac was sitting on the curb holding his head in his hands. I sighed.

I said, “O.K. I’ll testify against Blythe. With the girl, that will be enough. But you’ve got to agree to keep the Maddens out of it. They’ve gone through enough.”

Daly nodded. “If you say so. All I’m interested in is to see that Blythe gets the death penalty.”

The sudden relief on Louise Madden’s face and her smile of thanks were almost enough to pay me for what I’d been through. I began to feel better.

“Well, that’s settled then,” I said. “But I still wish somebody would kick me.”

“I’d rather kiss you,” she said.