The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Day Keene, birth name Gunard Hjertstedt (1904–1969), was born on the south side of Chicago. As a young man he became active as an actor and playwright in repertory theater with such friends as Melvyn Douglas and Barton McClain. When they decided to go to Hollywood, Keene instead opted to become a full-time writer, mainly for radio soap operas. He became the head writer for the wildly successful Little Orphan Annie, which premiered on NBC’s Blue Network on April 6, 1931, and ran for nearly thirteen years, as well as the mystery series Kitty Keene, Incorporated, about a beautiful female private eye with a showgirl past; it began on the NBC Red Network on September 13, 1937, and ran for four years. Keene then abandoned radio to write mostly crime and mystery stories for the pulps, then for the newly popular world of paperback original novels, for which his dark, violent, and relentlessly fast-paced stories were perfectly suited, producing nearly fifty mysteries between 1949 and 1965. Among his best and most successful novels were his first, Framed in Guilt (1949), the recently reissued classic noir Home Is the Sailor (1952), Joy House (1954, filmed by MGM in 1964 and also released as The Love Cage, with Alain Delon, Jane Fonda, and Lola Albright), and Chautauqua (1960, written with Dwight Vincent, the pseudonym of mystery writer Dwight Babcock; it was filmed by MGM in 1969 and also released as The Trouble with Girls, starring Elvis Presley and Marlyn Mason).

“Sauce for the Gander,” the first of only two Keene Black Mask stories, ran in May 1943.

What did the puny little schoolmaster, Rheumatic Romeo John Cansdale, hide behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed bifocals? What sinister plan to bludgeon his wife to death? Careful, Cansdale! Take warning! Even a murder can be too perfect...

For thirty-five years, six months, and seven days, ten of them mildly happy married years, John Benton Cansdale, A.B., M.S., respected chemistry instructor of the Laurell Park Senior High School, had lived a moral, upright, almost ascetic existence. That had been two years before she had come into his life.

It was during breakfast on the morning after his return from the annual teachers’ convention in Detroit that he decided to kill his wife. It was strictly an economic move. Two years of playing hide-and-seek had proven conclusively to his modest savings that three cannot live as cheaply as two — especially when one of the three is demanding.

The decision sufficed for the moment. It would be a simple affair. Cansdale prided himself on being too intelligent a man to erect an elaborate structure for Homicide to tear down. Too many murderers had tried to be too clever. When the proper moment had arrived he would simply hit her with a hammer, or whatever might prove handy.

It had been a broken lock on the kitchen window and the headline in the morning paper that had given him his inspiration. His wife had asked him fifteen times to have the lock repaired. He had promised that he would. The headline in the morning paper stated in bold type: Killer Strikes Again.

Cansdale read the details with morbid interest. For months a moronic killer had preyed upon the city, his victims always women. The police had sought for him in vain. No living person had ever seen him. The details of his crimes were revolting. Cansdale noted them with care. Passion was a strange and fearful thing. It warped and twisted a man from what he was into another being.

He thought of the week just past, smiled grimly as his blood began to pound. The week had been most satisfactory. There could be no chance of scandal. He had been too circumspect. He was in love, but not a fool. He had read of too many carelessly conducted triangles that imprudence had turned into wreck-tangles leading to the divorce courts and the chair.

He and Evelyn had been discreet. Both had their positions with the school board and their reputation to maintain. Still, they had managed. And once Mazie was out of the way—

“Mazie.” He rolled the name on the tip of his tongue. It tasted bitter. Making full allowance for his youth, not to mention the ten-thousand-dollar dowry that she had brought him, most of which he had invested within the last two years in “little” things that Evelyn had wanted, Cansdale wondered why in the name of God he had ever married her.

She had no soul, no intellect, no fire. She had never read Balzac, Boccaccio, or Rabelais. He peered furtively around his paper at his wife. He was her superior in every way — still at times he had a feeling he bemused her.

She looked up as he peered at her. “More coffee, honey? Toast?”

Tiny, dark, languid, after twelve years of his superior association, she still spoke with the unaffected southern drawl of the hills where she was born.

Cansdale shuddered at the eager smile on her half-parted, too-full lips. He wanted it over with, wanted her dead.

“No,” he told her curtly, “thanks. I’ll just make my first class as it is.” He folded his paper neatly and put it in his pocket so she wouldn’t see the headline.

“I’ll get your hat and coat,” she offered.

He watched her leave the room, her slim hips swaying beneath the outrageously tight dressing-gown that she affected because she believed it made her look like some movie actress or other. Confession magazines, the movies, bridge, they were her life. She had been a pretty girl. In a way, she still possessed a certain charm at thirty.

“You’ll be home early t’night, honey?” she asked as she helped him with his coat.

He wished that she wouldn’t call him “honey.” She called everybody “honey,” from shopgirls to the milkman.

“No,” he told her primly as he took his hat. “You know that I always work on my book on Friday nights.”

The book had been an inspiration. He had thought of it just after the school convention at which he and Evelyn had met. It was to be a new text book on modern chemistry that of necessity entailed a lot of research. Each Wednesday and each Friday afternoon he went directly downtown after school, asked for and received several weighty volumes, then promptly proceeded to lose himself among the shabby homeless and earnest students who always crowded the great reading-rooms. Five minutes before the closing hour he would return the volumes. What neither his wife nor the librarian could know was that he had slipped quietly out of the library to spend the intervening hours in a more pleasant study of human chemistry as applied to anatomical research.

Mazie opened the hall door and raised her lips to be kissed. “It’s just that I don’t like to be alone,” she told him.

Cansdale told her not to be a little fool. But he was pleased. Her fear of being alone had become a phobia that fitted perfectly into his plans. Her fear was well known to the neighbors. On the nights he was away from home she double-locked and barred both the front and the rear doors of their first floor apartment. On several occasions, when she had fallen asleep awaiting his return, he had been put to no little inconvenience trying to wake her up to let him in.

“Perhaps I won’t work on the book next Wednesday night,” he relented.

His wife seemed pleased. She smiled, almost shyly. “I do get so frightened here all alone.”

Cansdale stooped to kiss her, paused to view his reflection in the hall glass. It wasn’t bad, he decided. With his new-grown wisp of mustache he looked something like Ronald Colman might have looked if he had been a little man and wore horn-rimmed, thick-lensed, bifocal glasses. He tried to read murder in his eyes and failed. His decision didn’t show. He, John Cansdale, had resolved to kill his wife and he looked no different than he looked on any other morning.

The adjoining hall door opened and Cansdale kissed his wife full on the lips with more feeling than he had shown in months. It would be the last time that he would ever have to kiss her.

Sergeant Mack, the detective sergeant who lived in the next apartment with his aged and widowed mother and who was just emerging from their door, apologized. “I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Cansdale blushed. Cansdale smiled. “Not at all. We shouldn’t have been kissing in the doorway.”

He kissed Mrs. Cansdale again, closed the apartment door, and opened the outer hall door for the sergeant. He had never liked his neighbor. The policeman was as stupid as his wife, and of a type. He was uncouth, common, vulgar. Still, Cansdale accepted the chance meeting as an omen. He could envision the sergeant’s testimony at the inquest...

“... yeah. Yeah. Sure. Perfectly happy as far as I know. Why, he was kissing and hugging her goodbye when I stepped out in the hall this morning.”

The little teacher walked beside the big detective to their cars parked at the curb, pointing to the headline in his paper. “Terrible, isn’t it,” he demanded primly, “that such a fiend should be at large?” He snapped his fingers as in sudden recollection. “I must remind the janitor again to fix that lock on the kitchen window.” He explained, his hand on his car door, “I worry so about Mrs. Cansdale when she’s alone.”

The big detective seemed embarrassed. “Yeah, yeah. Sure. I can imagine.” He climbed into his car and swung out into traffic.

The little chemistry teacher smirked smugly. “The man is a moron,” he thought. “He was afraid that I was going to ask him why the police haven’t caught the killer.”

The morning was warm with spring. It was pleasant to be alive. The weather forecast prophesied fair and rising temperature. The moon wouldn’t rise until ten. It would be a lovely night for murder.

Scuffing of feet, and the scratch of chalk on the school board, were the only sounds in the classroom as the students worked out the problems that Cansdale had given them, in order to work out his own.

Having a late-shift program, his last class would be over at five. Cansdale wrote the figure on a piece of paper after making certain that there was no other sheet beneath it and that the hard surface of the marble laboratory slab retained no impression.

At five thirty he could be in the Loop eating in the little one-armed restaurant near the main library on Wabash. By five forty-five he would have received and signed for his books at the library desk. By six he could be lost in the north-bound, rush-hour traffic on the outer drive.

He made a neat time-table of the figures.

By six thirty, six forty-five at the latest, just when the evening dusk was blackest, he could be on his own back porch opening the window with the broken lock.

By seven his wife would be dead, her head battered in with some handy object and her nude body tossed on the bed to simulate an attack by the moronic killer. The absence of strange fingerprints wouldn’t be a stumbling block. The killer always wore gloves. Both doors of his apartment would still be double-locked and barred if he left in the same manner as he entered.

He doubted if Mazie would scream when she saw him. She would be pleased. She could have no idea what he had come for. He continued with the writing of his schedule.

By seven thirty his car would be parked back on Wabash Avenue and he would be in the crowded library reading-room, perhaps exchanging his volume on chemistry for others, to call attention to himself. Shortly after the closing hour of nine he would return to his apartment to find both front and rear doors double-locked and barred. The police, perhaps the stupid fool next door, would help him batter down the door and find the body.

His alibi would be perfect. The thin-lipped, prim, old-maid librarian from whom he always got his books would swear he had been there between the hours of five thirty and nine. She had no reason to doubt it. But no suspicion would be attached to him. He was, in the public eye, a dutiful, loving husband. He had no known motive for wanting Mazie dead. He and Evelyn had been too circumspect. But for the convention week just past he had never seen her oftener than twice a week. They had never appeared in public together. In school they merely nodded and exchanged an innocuous morning note disguised as division business.

The little man’s pulse began to pound as he allowed his thoughts to dwell on the charms of the blue-eyed, blond history teacher. She was a greedy little piece of baggage, combining intelligence with fire. But she was worth the sacrifice, if it could be called a sacrifice, that he was making. With Mazie’s insurance, rings, and furs, there would be enough to satisfy even Evelyn’s capricious tastes for quite some time.

Cansdale stroked his wisp of a mustache and smiled. Most murderers were fools. A lesser man with his knowledge of chemistry would undoubtedly have poisoned his wife and have wound up in the chair. The very manner of the murder he had planned would serve to divert suspicion from him.

Well pleased with his own intelligence the little man memorized the table of figures that he had drawn up, touched the paper to a Bunsen burner, watched it crumple into ash, then sat grinding it to pieces with a pestle.

Unknown to him, as he sat smirking, pleased with himself, one of his student seniors at the rear board wrote in tiny letters beside the table of elements that she was compiling: Our romantic Romeo and his mental strip-tease Juliet must have phffttt. He isn’t going to send her his morning sonnet disguised as “Where was Johnny Jones of your division as of last period? Worried!”

The boy beside her sniggered, then wrote, as she erased her words: Who do they think they’re fooling? The whole school knows that he’s carrying a torch.

The girl added: Chlorine — C1 — 35,457 — 17, to her list of elements, symbols, and atomic weights and numbers, then wrote beside them in small letters as before: He’s carrying a torch but she isn’t. She’s just taking him for whatever she can get. She was out at the Hi-Ho Club with the new football coach last night — and were they high and howling.

Yeah? The boy underscored the word before erasing it.

Yeah, the girl answered him with chalk. They — jiggers! The old dodo’s coming out of his trance.

John Cansdale took another sheet of paper, wrote:

He changed his mind and touched the paper to the burner. Evelyn had thought that he was joking when he told her what he planned to do. It might be best if she knew nothing of the matter until the entire affair was over. Perhaps he would never tell her. It might be best to let her think, as the police would think, that it had been the killer who killed Mazie. He watched the hour hand of the clock creep around the dial. The day, it seemed, would never end.

The warmth of the day had disappeared with the setting of the sun. A cold wind blew off the lake. John Cansdale considered a drink as he parked his car against the Wabash Avenue curb and then decided against it. Drink muddled the mind and he must keep his clear. He checked back, as he had checked a dozen times, and could find no flaw in his plan. Still his throat was suddenly dry and his hands had begun to tremble. Perhaps murder wouldn’t prove as simple as he thought.

“This is silly,” he reproved himself. “In two more hours she will be dead and I’ll be free.”

He bought a paper from a boy before entering the lunchroom and read it thoroughly while toying with his poached egg, corn-beef hash, and toast. The one detail that might possibly invalidate his plan had not occurred. The police, as yet, had not apprehended the killer. Rumor was rife as to when and where he might strike again.

He forced himself to eat. He must above all else impress himself upon everyone connected with his alibi as normal. He must show no trace of nervousness or fear.

“Nice supper,” he complimented the cashier when he had finished. He turned up the collar of his coat and pushed out through the swinging-door repeating: “Yes, sir. A very nice supper indeed.”

“What the hell!”

The cashier started out from behind his cage, stopped as the manager of the lunchroom shook his head.

“But he didn’t pay his check, sir,” the cashier protested.

The manager shrugged. “Skip it. He’ll pay next Wednesday night. He comes in here twice a week as regular as clock-work. He’s probably worried or something tonight, you know, got something on his mind.”

The cashier subsided, grumbling.

Out on the street John Cansdale scowled at his reflection in the window of a hat store. So far, so good. He was following his bi-weekly routine. Only tonight the hours that usually were filled with Evelyn in the snugness of her near north side apartment would rid him of his wife forever.

He thought of Mazie with disgust as he hurried up the great flat steps of the main library. The little fool was probably even now smearing her face with lotions, listening to the love-lorn programs on the radio, trying, in her common little mind, to figure out some way of winning back his love.

The thought gave him sadistic pleasure. She didn’t know the meaning of love. They had never been physically, mentally, morally, or spiritually suited to each other. Still, he wondered why she smiled at him, at times, so very strangely.

The thought gave him pause as he checked through the library file cards for a certain book on the contributions of chemistry to human welfare. Women at times, some women, were very difficult to understand.

The librarian greeted him cordially. “Good evening, Mr. Cansdale. The book is coming nicely?”

“Nicely,” he assured her, smiling. “In fact, it’s almost finished.”

His hat in his hand and the volume under his arm he turned away from the desk to scan the crowded reading-room, ostensibly looking for a place to sit.

“Crowded, very crowded tonight,” he murmured as he moved away from the desk. There were, he estimated, perhaps five hundred persons in the several reading-rooms that comprised almost the entire top floor of the building. There were constant arrivals and departures. It was small wonder he was never missed. Miss Roby, the thin-lipped, prim, spinster librarian, would swear that he had been there since the time his card was stamped. He turned out into the corridor leading to the other reading-room and to the stairs.

Behind him, at the desk, Miss Roby adjusted her pince-nez as she stared after him, then turned to an assistant.

“I suppose,” she said, “I should report him. I would if he wasn’t a school employee. He always chooses a volume that isn’t supposed to leave the library. But he always brings them back.”

“But where does he go?” her assistant puzzled.

The librarian shrugged her thin shoulders. “Lord knows. He’s supposed to be writing a book. I wonder. He’s been coming in here at five forty-five, choosing a volume on chemistry, and then disappearing until nine for two years.”

Her assistant laughed: “Meow.”

“I wouldn’t,” Miss Roby sniffed, “be at all surprised.”

In the corridor Cansdale waited until a good-sized group of youngsters had started down the marble stairs, and then joined them. The volume was under his coat. It was an unneeded precaution. The aged attendant in the foyer never even bothered to look up.

He remembered with a start as he unlocked his car that he hadn’t phoned Evelyn and told her that he wouldn’t call tonight. Perhaps it was just as well. She didn’t need to know until it was all over. She might even try to dissuade him because of the risk he ran. He stroked his thin wisp of a mustache and stepped on the starter button.

He ran no risk — or did he? His self-confidence oozed slightly as he swung his car down Randolph Street and waited at Michigan Boulevard for the green arrow. He must, above all else, drive carefully. Even a slight accident or a ticket could destroy his well-laid plans. The thought made him even more nervous as he recalled Robert Burns’ immortal lines:

In his nervousness he killed his motor as the light changed and was bumped soundly by the cab behind him. He was glad it was a cab. Cab drivers took little notice of such matters. They were inferior, boisterous persons, always bumping someone. He joined the stream of traffic pouring north.

In the yellow cab in back of him an earnest youth, his first night behind the wheel, jotted the numbers 905–754 down carefully on the margin of his report sheet. The car ahead hadn’t stopped. He doubted if there was any damage done, but when a man had been out of work for months, he couldn’t be too careful. It might be just as well to report the incident when he checked in.

The Bridge, Chicago Avenue, Oak Street, and the juncture of the Outer and the Inner Drive. Cansdale chose the Inner Drive, his self-confidence returning. In another fifteen minutes, a half-hour at the most, it would be over and he would be returning to the Loop. Lincoln Park was dark and bleakly naked except for her necklaces of yellow gems strung in rows around her ample body.

The lights reminded him of Mazie’s yellow diamonds. They would look well on Evelyn. But he must manage to show grief, perhaps even offer a reward for the killer. He would be safe enough in that. The thought amused him and he laughed, only to find the hoarse burst from his throat had frightened him. He realized that his hands and his body were shaking as with some inner palsy. The night was no longer cool. His collar had become too tight, his overcoat too heavy. Despite the cool wind blowing in the open window of the car he was perspiring freely.

“I’m acting the fool,” he said aloud. “There’s nothing at all to fear. I’ve been too circumspect. I’ve planned too well.”

Cansdale wondered suddenly if he had planned well. He wished he had read a few of the trashy detective magazines that Mazie was always buying. There might, perhaps, have been a plot in one of them that would have suited his purpose better. But he couldn’t imagine what it would be. The plot he had conceived was simplicity itself. No one would ever suspect a middle-aged, respectable high-school instructor of bludgeoning his wife to death.

He began to lash himself into a fury against Mazie to prepare himself for the actual deed. She stood in his way of complete happiness. She was stupid, insipid. But his mind could find no other flaws. She was as young, if not younger, than Evelyn. In her dark, southern way she was pretty. She had never denied him herself. Until he had met Evelyn they had been mildly happy. Even during the last two years she had been unsuspicious, undemanding. Her only other flaw, if it could be called a flaw, was the phobia she couldn’t help, her dislike of being alone.

She would be, Cansdale thought, as he turned off of Sheridan Road onto the side street on which he lived, alone for a long time. He parked his car a full three blocks from his house and, turning up the collar of his coat so that it almost touched his hat-brim, slunk through the shadows of the alley paralleling the street on which he lived.

Only four persons saw him. One was the delicatessen owner’s wife who caught a glimpse of his face in a lamp light as he crossed a street intersection. Another was the newsboy who happened to be late. A third was a neighbor emptying garbage who had chanced to pause a moment for a breath of air in the blackness by the alley gate. The fourth was a man named Kelly who was unlocking the side-door of his garage. Of the four he was the only one who wondered at the time why Cansdale was walking down the alley.

“He shouldn’t ought to short-cut through the alley,” Kelly thought ungrammatically. “What with all the stickups now-a-days he’s likely to get robbed.”

Cansdale saw none of them. His mind was intent on his business. He wanted it over with. The pounding of his heart was choking him. The actual act of murder was not as simple as it seemed. He paused at his own alley gate, almost tempted to go back.

“Well, of course, if you don’t love me enough to give me the things that a man who loves a woman usually gives her—”

Evelyn’s words hung suspended in the air just as she had left them.

“I can’t. I won’t give her up,” the little teacher thought in panic. “I’ve a right to happiness.”

He stared at the back windows of his apartment. Both the kitchen and the dining-room were dark. A light burned in the bedroom briefly, then it too winked out, leaving only a faint glow streaming out of the living-room into the hall.

Cansdale opened the gate and went in, groping in the darkness near the garbage can for the weapon he had decided he would use. The half brick was where he had thought that he had seen it. The inspiration had come to him during his last class. A half brick was the killer’s favorite weapon.

The garbage can, balanced precariously upon three bricks instead of four, toppled over slowly and the tin lid clattered on the walk forcing open a basement window in the janitor’s apartment.

“Scatt! Gott damn dogs! There should ought to be a law!”

Cansdale stood frozen where he was, half up the back steps to his porch until the clatter and profanity had ceased. Then the basement window closed and he began to breathe again. He wanted to retreat but didn’t dare. The janitor might hear him. He continued to the porch.

He had never known the night to be so full of sounds and smells. The detective’s mother in the next apartment was frying steak and onions against her son’s return. The couple in the flat above were fighting. Through the closed windows of his own apartment he could hear their radio blaring out the news. Mazie always kept it tuned so high it was a wonder the neighbors didn’t complain.

He remembered, tardily, that he had forgotten to put on his gloves. He laid the half brick on the window sill and did so, meanwhile listening to the news.

The foreign situation covered, the newscaster turned to the local pages, beginning with: “... While the police as yet have failed to apprehend the moronic killer who has preyed upon the housewives of Chicago for these last several months, the department is expending every effort to bring about his capture. Meanwhile housewives are warned not to open their doors to any suspicious strangers and to make certain that all first-floor windows, and windows leading off of fire escapes are locked...”

Cansdale cautiously tried the window with the broken lock that led from the porch to the kitchen. It slid up easily. Now that the actual moment had arrived his self-confidence was oozing back and he sniffed contemptuously. Mazie was a fool. She had no right to be so stupid and live. She was afraid to be alone. A moronic killer was at large. Yet she lay on a sofa in the living room listening to a newscast with a perfect entrance open to the killer.

He straddled the open window cautiously, the half brick in his hand. In the faint light streaming down the hall he could see that the back door was locked and bolted. He stepped into the kitchen making no noise, leaving the window open behind him.

The newscaster had finished by now and there was a blare of transcribed music from the front room. And, as usual, Mazie had two stations on at once. Back of the hi-de-hi-de-hi, ho-de-ho-de-ho of a boogie-woogie program, some woman heroine of one of the soap-chip operas to which Mazie was addicted was telling someone she called “honey” in no uncertain terms how much she loved him.

The man’s voice was gruff but eager and insistent. Sudden suspicion gleaming in his eyes, the little teacher paused in the center of the kitchen floor and listened closely. But either the program had signed off or the brass of the transcribed band had drowned it out. He smiled painfully with a guilty conscience.

“She hasn’t fire, or soul, or brains enough,” he thought. “I wish she had. I wouldn’t have to kill her then.”

The smile faded from his twisted lips as he thought of her insurance. He had to have the money. With the double indemnity clause, on which she herself had insisted, Mazie’s death would pay him twenty thousand dollars. He and Evelyn could take sabbaticals on that. They could spend the year in travel, live in the best hotels. In California, perhaps, they would be married. Or perhaps in romantic Old Mexico or Hawaii. The police would never suspect the insurance money as a motive. He carried even more insurance in her name.

The half brick clutched tightly in his hand, he stole quietly past the open doors of the dining-room and the bedroom to the front of the apartment.

“She’ll cry ‘John’ when she sees me,” he thought, “and run to me. Then I’ll hit her with the sharp edge of the brick and drag her into the bedroom just like the killer would do.”

His gloved hand clutching the brick felt hot and sweaty. He must remember to leave the brick behind for the police to find. He stepped into the lighted front room. The radio was blaring cheerfully. The shades on the windows were drawn. A box of chocolates lay opened on a coffee table convenient to the sofa. Mazie’s outrageously tight dressing-gown lay crumpled in a silken pool upon the floor. But Mazie wasn’t there. The living-room was empty. From where he stood, Cansdale could see that the front door was locked and bolted.

He felt slightly cheated but relieved as he turned back towards the bedroom. This would make it even simpler. He could kill her while she slept. She would never even know that he had been there. She would die believing in him and loving him. On the several occasions he had returned to find her sleeping, and the doors bolted had resisted his key, he had had to pound on the door like a mad man to arouse her. Only Mazie could sleep with a radio blasting in her ear. Still, he supposed, she did get tired of reading trash and had to pass her time some way.

Halfway down the long hall to the bedroom, the program he had heard before began again. Only this time the man was speaking.

“Why don’t you leave him?” he demanded. “I make enough to support you and my mother, too. Just one good break and I’ll be a lieutenant and—”

The woman stopped him with a kiss, murmured with an unaffected passion. “It’s not the money, honey. It’s jes’ I don’t want to worry him now. He’s so little an’ funny-lookin’, an’ all he’s got is me. But once his book is finished an’ he’s famous like he says he’s goin’ to be—”

Cansdale turned slowly towards the front room. The band was still playing, muted now. But the voices came from the bedroom.

An unreasoning fury should have seized him, but it didn’t. The only emotion that he knew was fear, sudden and terrible. He had been so wrong. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that he could get away with murder. His eyes were suddenly open. The past two years rushed through his mind like the life of a drowning man. He remembered sly looks and glances that had failed to register at the time; smirks on the faces of his fellow teachers and his students. Even Miss Roby had looked strangely at him. He had forgotten to pay his supper check. There had been the matter of the cab. Perhaps someone had seen him enter. He hadn’t been intelligent, he had been dumb. Step by step, rung by rung, he had allowed his blind infatuation to be the nails in the ladder he had built — a ladder leading to the chair.

No woman, not even Evelyn, was worth that. He wanted to be out in the night with the cold of the wind against his burning cheeks. Mazie was suddenly lovely. He wanted her as he had never wanted any woman. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. She had loved him once. Perhaps she might again. She wasn’t guilty. He was. If he hadn’t neglected her, left her alone—

He tiptoed meekly down the hall towards the still open kitchen window. He would return at nine. He would never leave Mazie alone again. He would break with Evelyn in the morning. He would—

As he passed the opened door of the darkened bedroom a board squeaked beneath his feet. He tried to step more lightly, lost his balance, and the half brick scraped along the wall.

There was an answering scrape of springs from the bedroom as a man got suddenly to his feet. The little teacher turned instinctively. With his hat brim and his coat collar almost touching he formed a grotesque silhouette in the half light. The half brick raised above his head, in the hand flung out to keep his balance, looked like the squat barrel of an automatic.

“The killer! The moron!” Mazie’s scream from the blackness of the bedroom was pure terror.

“No,” Cansdale croaked, protesting from a throat so dry the single word rasped like a file. “I—”

He failed to finish the sentence. A blast of gun-fire lighted the room and the first of six soft-nosed .45 slugs pinned him to the far wall of the hallway. He hung there a moment pinned to the wall like a spitted butterfly, then crumpled slowly to the floor.

There had been not one but many flaws in his perfect murder. The worst of these, as Lieutenant Mack summed up the situation to his wife some twelve months later, had been: “So what can we do but keep our mouths shut? So what if he wasn’t the killer. He was trading on his name. He intended to kill you. If I hadn’t just ‘happened’ to be passing by, he’d a done it. The coroner’s inquest proved that. No. I tell you, Mazie, all we can do is keep our mouths shut. This was just one of them there cases where—”

The newly promoted lieutenant paused to wipe the perspiration from his forehead and make a mental vow.

Still the same eager smile on half-parted, too-full lips. “One of those cases where what, honey?”

“Well,” the former sergeant summed up the situation, “one of those cases where what was sauce for the goose turned out to be apple sauce for the gander.”