The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich (1903–1968) was born in New York City, grew up in South America and New York, and was educated at Columbia University, to which he left his literary estate. A sad and lonely man who desperately dedicated his books to his typewriter and to his hotel room, Woolrich was almost certainly a closeted homosexual (his marriage was terminated in short order) and an alcoholic, so antisocial and reclusive that he refused to leave his hotel room when his leg became infected, ultimately resulting in its amputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the majority of his work has an overwhelming darkness, and few of his characters, whether good or evil, have much hope for happiness — or even justice. No twentieth-century author equaled Woolrich’s ability to create suspense, and Hollywood producers recognized it early on. Few writers have had as many films based on their work as Woolrich, beginning with Convicted (1938), based on “Angel Face,” starring Rita Hayworth, and continuing with Street of Chance (1942), on The Black Curtain, with Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor; The Leopard Man (1943), on Black Alibi, with Dennis O’Keefe and Jean Brooks; Phantom Lady (1944), on the novel, with Ella Raines and Alan Curtis; The Mark of the Whistler (1944), on “Chance,” with Richard Dix and Janis Carter; Deadline at Dawn (1946), on the novel, with Susan Hayward; Rear Window (1954), on “It Had to Be Murder,” with Grace Kelly and James Stewart; and fifteen others.

“Borrowed Crime” was published in the July 1939 issue.

The doctor lowered his stethoscope with an irritable gesture. “No improvement at all,” he snapped. “He’s losing ground, if anything, staying here!”

The kid’s ribs were sticking out like a fish’s backbone. The doctor turned to him and spoke more gently than he had to the man and woman. “Put on your shirt, sonny; don’t catch cold.” He eyed the row of medicine bottles ranged above the bed, swept his arm at them impatiently. “Throw them out; they’re not doing the boy a bit of good! I gave you my diagnosis over two months ago. He’s got to be taken out West, where the air’s dry and the sun’s hot. I can’t do anything for him; you’re just wasting your time and mine by sending for me.”

The woman had begun to cry soundlessly into her apron, with the terrible resignation of the poor. The doctor banged his instrument case shut, stalked ill-humoredly out of the room.

Swanson slouched dejectedly after him. “But, Doc, I ain’t got—” He faltered.

The doctor stopped short in the outer doorway, looked around at him short-temperedly. “I know,” he said, “you haven’t got the money! That’s the hell of it. It’ll take a thousand dollars.”

The boy had started to cough again in the room they’d just come from. The woman closed the door, but it came through anyway.

It seemed to infuriate the doctor even more. Maybe he was a conscientious man, hated the feeling of helplessness a case like this gave him. “Hear that?” he exclaimed. “You better find some way of getting that kid out of here, or you won’t have to hear it very much longer!”

Swanson kept staring at him helplessly. “If there was only some way...”

The doctor looked him squarely in the eye. “If it was my child, I’d find a way; you bet your bottom dollar!” he said wrathfully. “Go out and hit somebody over the head for it! Hold up a bank! I don’t care where you get it, but see that you get it!”

He went stomping down the tenement stairs outside, swearing audibly all the way down. His bad temper didn’t mislead Swanson any; he knew he was a sympathetic, honest man.

He closed the door and went in again, hanging his head. The kid had stopped coughing now — until the next time. His wife came out of the room, carrying a cloth half-hidden so he wouldn’t see it. He knew those cloths, knew what color they were apt to show if you unfolded them.

He sat down at the table in the shabby room, held his head in both hands, staring down at nothing; at the soiled oilcloth and the newspaper resting on it. He had no chance of borrowing; money was only loaned to those who already had something, who could offer security. Even a loan-shark wouldn’t have considered him a worthwhile risk — he had no job that could be milked later on.

Even the doctor’s sinister suggestion, although it had only been angry rhetoric, was beyond his scope. Bank robbery was an organized business nowadays; what chance had a solitary, unarmed amateur against all their guards and tear bombs and alarm systems? And you didn’t find a thousand dollars on the first man you held up on the streets these days.

The paper had been there under his eyes the whole time. It was no use looking at the Help Wanteds any more. He’d tried too long and hard, broken his heart, smashed his head against the stone wall of conditions as they were. Besides, even if by a miracle he could land something tomorrow, what hope had he of getting anything that would pay a thousand dollars even in a year’s time? He flung it tormentedly away from him, with its black scarehead: No Clue Yet in Ranger Slaying.

Some murder case or other. What was it to him? Let the whole world murder and be murdered; he only cared about his kid and Helen. The front page furled over with the fling he had given the paper, and bared the page beneath, and after a while he became conscious of a dollar sign peering up at him from it. Next to it there was a one, and then a comma, and then three naughts. Funny, he must have been thinking so hard of one thousand dollars that he thought he was seeing it staring up at him from the printed page.

He drew the paper back toward him again. It was in a little box down at the foot, in heavier type than the rest. “Reward,” it said, and then underneath: “The Daily Reflector, in a spirit of cooperation with the police, is prepared to pay the sum of $1,000 to anyone furnishing information leading to the identification and capture of the murderer of Robert J. Ranger. Members of police force not eligible. Information must be legitimate. No telephone calls. Apply City Desk, Daily Reflector, 205 East, etc, etc.”

He turned back to the first page. He took a deep breath, pulled his chair up closer, and started to read his way through from the beginning, shading his eyes from the naked light overhead with one hand across them.

When he’d finished, he got up, went into the kitchen, and brought the previous night’s paper back with him. They kept their back-number papers to start the fire with. He read that one exhaustively too. There was a photograph in it, of someone he had never seen before. “Robert J. Ranger,” it said under it. He studied it carefully, then he closed his eyes a minute, as though he were etching it into his memory.

When he’d finally finished his recapitulation, there were three back numbers of the paper littered about the table before him, and he had obtained a composite and sketchy outline of what the whole thing was about:

A prosperous investment broker named Robert J. Ranger had been found murdered by hammer blows in the living-room of his home, in the smart suburb of Northchester, the previous Wednesday — that is to say, four days before. There were signs of a terrific struggle, and it was obvious that the man had sold his life dearly. A priceless blue porcelain Ming vase standing near the door was shattered, tables and chairs were overturned, the carpet was furrowed into corrugated ridges by the two pairs of feet that had scuffled back and forth over it.

It was fairly obvious to the police (they declared in print) that it had been committed by an intruder, someone unknown to Ranger. A nominal sum of money that had been on his person was missing, but a far larger sum within easy access had been overlooked. The intruder had apparently become terror-stricken at the sight of his own crime and fled the house without pursuing his search any further.

Ranger had had an engagement to go to dinner and the theater with his wife, had already bought the tickets (Stars in Your Eyes, Row C), and then at the last minute had been prevented from going by a vicious headache. Not wishing to disappoint Mrs. Ranger, he had arranged to have his business partner, Allen Cochrane, escort her in his place, had phoned him to meet her at a restaurant in town.

Mrs. Ranger had left shortly after dark, and distinctly remembered that the door of her car had been opened for her, unasked, by a seedy-looking individual of the type who performs that service for a pittance. It was highly probable, she thought (also in print) that this was the man who had later forced his way into the house under the mistaken impression that no one was home — Ranger had put all the lights out and lain down in the dark to ease his head — and murdered her husband when discovered ransacking it.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Ranger was unable to furnish a very exact description of this man. The fact that she was wearing most of her jewelry, and his accosting her by her car like that, made her nervous, had caused her to start the car quickly and drive off without looking closely at him.

Swanson read this passage through twice, tracing his finger under it.

At any rate, the crime did not occur for some time after her departure. She had telephoned from the Majestic Theater at 8:25, just before the curtain went up, to find out how her husband was, and he had spoken to her himself and said he felt much better. Then when she returned at midnight...

Swanson stopped reading.

“Helen!” he said. “Helen!”

She came to the door and looked out at him hopelessly.

“Get the kid ready,” he said. “Start packing your own things, too. You’re taking him with you to Tucson — right tonight.”

“But how are you ever going to clear yourself again, once you get into their clutches?” she said, when he’d finally beaten down her objections. “It isn’t just a case of spending a little time in jail for contempt of court or taking money under false pretenses. I mean, you’ll be in so deep by that time that you’ll never be able to explain your way out of it. They’ll go ahead and convict you, and — and maybe even execute you for it, Jerry. It’s too risky. Don’t do it, don’t do it!”

“That’s where you come in. You’re my living alibi. You know I wasn’t anywhere near Northchester last Wednesday night, that I was sitting here in the flat with you and the kid the whole time. Now here’s what you do: You take the boy out there and board him with someone. Then you sit tight and wait until you hear from me. When I need you I’ll send you a wire. Leave the kid out there — he’s got to have his chance — and you come on back and do your stuff.”

“But I’m your wife; suppose they won’t believe me?”

“Well, if worse comes to worst, I still have the doc to fall back on. He was up here, too, last Wednesday, treating the kid. He knows I wasn’t out murdering anyone. After all, look at it this way, Helen: All that connects me with the crime is my own say-so. That is, one person’s word. On the other hand I have two people’s words to clear me, in a pinch. One against two, those are fair enough odds. What more could anyone ask?

“Another thing, the real murderer may be turned up long before they’re ready to try me, and I won’t even have to have any help getting out of it. The kid has to have his break. I’m willing to do a short jail stretch to see that he gets it, and that’s all that’s involved. So put out the lights and let’s get started.”

He kissed them both good-by on the streetcar riding downtown, the kid bundled up in a blanket, his wife with a heavy suit-case beside her. “Now you wait there in the bus terminal until I send the money over to you. As soon as it reaches you, buy your tickets and take the next bus out; don’t stick around.”

He swung down and the streetcar went rumbling past. He walked east until he came to a chunky-looking office building, rode up on an express elevator, stepped off it and went into a reception room. “I want to see the city editor,” he told the girl at the switchboard.

“Another.” She sighed wearily. “All right, sit down over there with the rest of them.” She pointed to where three or four nondescript-looking people were ranged uncomfortably along the wall on hard wooden chairs.

A blown-glass door in the three-quarters partition that walled the reception room opened and a woman came out, forcibly escorted by an office boy. “I did so see him, I tell ye!” she declared indignantly over her shoulder. “I saw him plain as day! I was on me way to get a pail of beer and—”

A male voice came booming out after her above the clatter of typewriters: “Well, go back and get another pail; then you’ll see him twice!”

The office boy said, “He ain’t wasting his time on any more of you false alarms, so give them chairs a breath of fresh air!”

The sitters got up and drifted sheepishly out, with an air of “We didn’t think we’d get away with it, but no harm in trying anyway.”

Swanson got up, too, but he went the other way, toward the inner door. “Take me in with you,” he said. “I’m no fake.”

The office boy looked at him for a minute; there must have been something convincing about his taut manner. He hitched his head, led him across a great open barn of a place, subdivided by innumerable wooden rails and buzzing with typewriters, into a cubicle at the opposite end with City Editor blacked on the door.

A disheveled-looking man was sitting in there, hair awry, coat off, elastics holding up his shirt sleeves. He swung his arm wearily. “Get out. Every crack-pot in town—” But Swanson’s silent tenseness got to him too. “Well, what d’you think you know?” he said impatiently. “You seen him? You know who he is?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” was the tight-lipped answer.

“Well, d’you know where he is?” He wanted to save his paper a thousand bucks if he could. It had been his idea, after all.

Swanson tapped a fingernail on the desk. “I know where he is at this very minute.”

The editor jack-knifed his hands closed, then open again, in a grasping gesture. “Well, let me have it quick! If it’s any good we can still make the midnight final with it!”

“Wait a minute. Just when, and in what form, do I get the thousand?”

“Our check will be mailed to you just as soon as we’ve verified the information — and if it has resulted in the arrest of this guy.”

Swanson narrowed his eyes. “I thought that was coming. Trying to welsh out of it, eh? Nope, I want it in cash, I want it right here and now while I’m in the office with you, I want a bonded messenger standing outside the door to deliver it to a certain place, and I also want your word that where it was delivered won’t be revealed to the police afterwards.”

“I can’t do that. How do I know your information is valid? Our terms are the guy has to be apprehended first be—”

“You’ll know how valid it is as soon as you hear it. You don’t have to worry about verifying it, it’s self-verifying. The whole works is bound up in it automatically, whereabouts, identity, and apprehension. Now take it or leave it. Because I can go across the street to the Daily Views office and get as much or more for it.”

The disheveled one got even more disheveled than before, if possible, at this last threat. He did a good deal of hectic telephoning, to the managing editor at his home, to the treasurer, to the press room in the basement.

Fifteen minutes later twenty fifty-dollar bills lay on his desk in a manila envelope, a messenger’s form was silhouetted outside the glass of the door, and the typewriters were breathlessly holding their fire all over the place as though esoterically aware something momentous was in the air.

“This better be good.” The editor heaved an exhausted sigh. “O.K., O.K., now spill it! Where is this Ranger murderer at the present time?”

“He’s standing right across your desk looking square at you,” said Swanson calmly.

“Wha-at? Y-y-you mean you?” The editor jolted his chair back, partly in surprise, partly in sudden precautionary retreat.

“I’m turning myself over to you. Here I am. Now come on with your money.”

The editor dazedly picked up the manila envelope, partly extended it toward him. But he held on to a corner of it tightly without letting go. “Where you been hiding out since then?”

“Movie shows from morning to midnight, the subways from midnight to morning. If I gotta read another cough-drop ad I’ll go wacky!”

“Well, just a minute, I gotta be sure; what was on the left side of the living-room doorway up at the Ranger place, as you went in?”

“A big blue vase; I knocked it over and busted it in the scrap.”

“What’d you do with the hammer?”

“I slanted it against the curb about a block away from their place. Then I jumped on it and snapped the handle off short with my foot. I shoved the wooden part down a sewer opening; it must be floating outside the harbor by now. I carried the hammer head around in my clothing for a while, wrapped in a piece of paper so — you know, it wouldn’t leave any stains. I finally got rid of that in a refuse can on one of the subway platforms. Don’t ask me which one. I’ve got a headful of arithmetic from watching them tick past the last few days.”

“I guess you’re the ticket, all right,” the editor said ruefully. “But why did you do it?”

“For dough. What else? Didn’t get much, though.” Swanson jerked the envelope out of his reluctant grasp. “Call the messenger in here. Is he bonded?”

“Don’t worry about him, he’s O.K.”

Swanson sealed the gummed flap of the envelope. He drew the messenger aside out of earshot, said in a low voice: “Take this down to the Transcontinental Bus Terminal. There’ll be a woman in the waiting-room, with a kid wrapped up in a blanket. Give it to her. That’s all. Don’t talk to her; come right back.”

The messenger hurried out. The editor looked after him longingly. “Your moll — er, sweetheart, that who’s getting it? Gee, that would make a swell human-interest angle.”

“The agreement was that’s to be kept from the police and out of the paper,” Swanson said harshly. “I haven’t got any girl; I’m a lone wolf. I’ll tell you as a man, but not as an editor, just so you won’t think there’s any mystery about it. It’s — it’s a conscience fund, to try to make amends before I take my medicine. I told him to give it to the first needy-looking mother and child he came across at a certain place. Now go ahead, bring on your cops, I’m ready.”

“Whoa!” The editor semaphored alarmedly, both arms in air. “We want an exclusive on this first, we can’t keep you to ourselves forever.” He grabbed up a phone, barked into it: “Rip out your first page down there! Get ready for an extra. I’m sending you down a slue of pictures!” He jumped over to the door, bawled out: “Rewrite man! Pix! Tearjerker! All of you! Everybody in here! I’ve got the Ranger murderer with me in my office!”

The small office was suddenly gorged with people, jostling, staring over one another’s shoulders, banked solidly around Swanson, who was passively seated now in a chair. They were all talking at once to him, elbowing one another aside, jockeying to get next to him.

“Quiet, everybody! What is your name, we haven’t even got that yet.”

“Jerome Swanson.”

“All right, let’s get going. The presses are waiting. Stand back and give him air. Let’s have it, Swanson.”

Swanson’s eyes sought the ceiling, which was the only clear space there was in the cubicle, in search of fluency. “Last Wednesday night, about six p.m. in the evening...” he began, and a sudden reverent hush fell on the yapping pack.

Policemen came in with a fine authoritative surge at about two in the morning, streaming across the newspaper office like a tide that has been held back past its time. Two plainclothesmen in the lead pounced on a haggard unshaven reporter by mistake, first of all.

“No, no, no!” wailed the city editor. “That’s one of my feature writers. Him — over there.”

They desisted and came on at Swanson, but not without a backward look of suspicion at their first objective. Swanson was the only calm person in the place, still sitting there on the chair, smoking quietly, one ankle hoisted to the opposite knee.

“So this is the guy, eh?”

They all said it in turn, with slight variations. A manacle clicked and fastened itself around his wrist. He looked down at it fascinatedly, changed the impeded cigarette he was holding over to his other hand.

He was jerked to his feet by the man on the other end of the manacle, with a proprietary “Come on, baby!” They formed themselves into a phalanx around him, one on each side, one leading the way, one behind him.

The Reflector staff followed them in a body as far as the elevator bank. He looked around, and a scrub woman had climbed up on one of the desks to look over everybody’s heads at him. His last impression was of the long lines of luminous white bowls in the ceiling converging toward a distant point.

They took him far down below the lighted theatrical and night-life district to a gloomy, castellated silhouette on a dark, lifeless street, and in through various shabby rooms and along bleak corridors, where the few denizens to be met with were all uniformed. The surreptitious excitement among them in his wake was only less than up at the newspaper office; policemen turned to stare after him, sergeants at desks leaned out across them to get a better look as he went by.

The momentum of the arrest finally came to a stop in some sort of a back room, with windows that hadn’t been washed in years and a green-shaded light throwing the upper half of it into dismal shadow. The handcuff was detached, and he was deposited on a chair under the circle of light like a package that has been brought in.

Finally the disconnected activities crystallized once more, and he found himself again at their center. A high official, hastily summoned from bed and non-uniformed, came in and seated himself before him, but outside the radius of light. Other figures, some new, some already familiar, ranged themselves about. The atmosphere became charged with impending drama, gathered to a head, and finally dissolved into a downpour of questions.

His complete lack of reticence, his willingness — even overanxiety — to answer them all to the best of his ability, threw them off-key time and again. That is to say, they would gather themselves up to batter into denial, contradiction, and then flounder when nothing met them in opposition.

His rehearsal in the newspaper office stood him in good stead, but even so he got into a number of uncomfortably tight places. Such as when one of them asked him, although in a minor key immediately after a far more leading question, “But if you spent all that time riding the subways, how is it your clothes ain’t more rumpled than they are?”

Helen had always worked hard to keep this one suit of his in as good shape as she could. He got good and frightened for a minute, held his breath while the whole structure he’d laboriously built threatened to come toppling down around his ears.

“Well, you see, I didn’t lie down and sleep in the cars, I was afraid I’d attract the guards’ attention if I did; I rode them sitting up. It was the movie houses where I slept, and they’ve got upholstered seats, not as hard on the clothes.”

“Why’d you kill him?”

“I went in to rob him. He caught me at it, put up a battle. I had to. And all for a few lousy bucks!”

All in all, he was glad when it was over, as glad as a man attempting to prove his innocence instead of his guilt would have been. A police stenographer came in and they ran through the whole thing again, with his help. When he went astray once or twice, they put it down to fatigue. Then there was a wait while it was being typed. It was brought in and read back to him, and a few final polishing touches were added, in which he again cooperated. Finally he was brought forward to sign it.

They took him out now and stood him up before one of the desks, and he had to give his name and address. He took the precaution of not giving the one he and Helen had been living at until tonight. He gave the one they’d been dispossessed from three months before. “My last address,” he qualified it; let them think he’d been homeless since then.

That seemed to conclude the formalities for the time being, and he was taken into an adjoining building, which communicated with the first but where the floors were at a different level, and led into a cell, where he was asked if he would like a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

So many things had happened all night long that he hadn’t had time to notice until now whether he was hungry or not, but he remembered that Helen and he had had one of their usual scanty suppers, and it was now nearly his usual breakfast time, so he assented gladly.

They were brought in to him, and they were excellent; the coffee was a much better quality than they could afford at the flat. They also provided him with a whole pack of cigarettes, without the usual obligation he felt under to ration himself on them for days on end. And the bunk, when he stretched out on it, was definitely no harder than that broken-down iron bedstead of theirs at home.

The bus must be way out by now, way out beyond recall, he thought contentedly. He fell effortlessly into a deep tranquil sleep.

“What’re they going to do to me now?” he asked, riding out to the re-enactment several hours later with four officials in the car around him, a second car following, and an escort of two motorcycle policemen.

“Make you do it over in front of the cameras, so you can’t welsh out of it afterwards,” one of his escorts said in answer to his whispered question.

When they finally arrived there, he was given terse instructions to do exactly as he had done Wednesday night, retrace his steps and repeat his movements. One of the detectives was to substitute for the vanished Ranger.

Suddenly, as the ice-green lights flared up around him, he knew stage fright in its worst form. This was going to be far worse than the questioning last night at Headquarters had been; that, by comparison, had been confined to generalities; this permitted no slightest deviation.

One of them passed him a hammer which had abruptly materialized from nowhere, but he accepted it unhesitatingly instead of shrinking away from it, and that, he could see, left them non-plussed once more. He thrust it absently into his inner coat-pocket, head-downward, as though it were no more than a fountain pen. He had to keep up the pretense a while longer, he reasoned. Suppose the messenger boy was followed; suppose they got his wife back before she settled the boy out there... The screen test commenced. He “felt” his way along, step by step, mentally consulting the newspaper texts he had absorbed, like a cheating Latin student with a pony concealed behind his Caesar.

The encounter with the synthetic Ranger was not particularly abhorrent to him; he certainly felt no qualms about it. It was mostly a matter of jockeying him into position so that he would fall in the right place. The papers had been accommodatingly explicit about this, even publishing diagrams marked with large X’s to keep their readers geographically informed.

He saw them shake their heads slightly at his cold-blooded lack of emotion. Unfortunately, he swung the hammer in an entirely wrong arc, having no past experience in homicidal attacks, and when this was pointed out to him he nearly blew up altogether.

“He must have turned the other way, I guess, to get away from me,” he said after a bad moment. “Everything gets blurred when you’re seeing red.”

The crime safely on celluloid, as if to prove unarguably to everyone’s satisfaction that there had actually been one, he was whisked back down again downtown.

In the afternoon he was taken over to the adjoining building again and made to confront a personable blond young woman seated in the midst of detectives and officials in one of the rooms over there.

They looked at one another. There was, for a fleeting moment, an equally detached, impersonal curiosity on both sides. Then she quickly took refuge in a balled-up handkerchief at hand.

“Is this the man you saw outside your house the night of the murder?”

“Yes, that’s the man. I positively identify him.”

She took a deep breath into her handkerchief, as though nerving herself for something she felt obliged to do but would have preferred not to. Then she jumped suddenly from her chair, ran out at him.

“Why did you do it? Why did you take my husband from me?” she screamed tinnily. She made flailing motions toward his unprotected face; she was quickly restrained, drawn back by the men around her. But something had been faulty about the timing of the scene. She had had ample time to get in at least one good raking claw down his cheeks, and she hadn’t; she had just held her magenta-lacquered nails poised in clawing position, as if waiting for them to be restrained.

“She’s not sore at me,” Swanson said to himself with sudden deep-seated inner conviction; “she’s glad he’s gone. She’s play-acting just as much as — I am.”

And more than that, he even had a fleeting impression that she was afraid of him. Like someone is when you both know something that no one else does, and one of you is afraid the other will give it away.

She was led out with her head stiffly averted, as though she couldn’t get away quickly enough. Well, the whole thing was too involved and deep for his mental processes to be able to cope with.

The next day he had a visitor in his cell. He was a rather awe-inspiring man, with a short, neat graying beard and spectacles on a black cord.

“I’m Markovitz,” he said bluntly. “I’ve been appointed by the state to defend you.” He rested a paternal hand on Swanson’s bony shoulder. “You should not have taken a life; you know that, don’t you? But I am going to do the best I can for you. We must be practical. In a case like this we must use whatever weapons are put into our hands.” He removed his glasses, polished them, pointed toward the hypnotized Swanson.

“Insanity, of course,” he stated bluntly.

His client sprang to his feet, stood there white to the gills, shaking from head to foot in a sudden ungovernable horror. Like many ignorant people, he had dreadful formalized visions of strait jackets, straw pallets, and clinking chains, in connection with mental derangement of any sort. “Oh, don’t do that to me!” he wailed. “Don’t! Don’t put me in one of those places, I’ll never get out alive again! I will go insane!”

“You committed murder,” the lawyer reminded him coldly. He stood up. “I’ll petition to have you examined by alienists, as the first step toward entering a plea of insanity for you.” He left abruptly, all smiling encouragement.

As soon as he was gone, Swanson began to rattle the bars desperately, to call the guard back again. The latter, when he finally came, was surprised to see this erstwhile phlegmatic, untroubled prisoner suddenly turned into a white-faced, panic-stricken hysteric.

“Malloy,” he panted. “Oh, for the love of heaven, get me a piece of paper and a pencil right away, will you? I’ve got to send a wire!”

And when the guard had acceded to his request, this is what he handed back to him through the cell grate:

“Send this right off for me, will you, Malloy?” he pleaded.

“What’s the matter, what’s come over you all of a sudden?” asked the guard, trying to calm him down. “Here, want to read the paper? Here’s today’s paper.” He thrust it through the bars at him, turned to go and get permission to file the message. He had hardly reached the end of the corridor when a deep groan sounded in the cell he had just left. He turned and went trotting back again.

Swanson was sitting where he had left him, white as chalk and shaking uncontrollably from head to foot. The paper that he had just opened across his knees had fallen to the floor and he was staring with glazed, horrified eyes at the blank cell wall opposite him.

The guard, alarmed, unlocked the grate and let himself in to find out what was the matter with him. He picked up the paper and read: “Seven Dead in Arizona Bus Crash.” And under that a list of casualties!

The boy had escaped injury; his name was among the survivors. Swanson was on his feet, pawing pathetically at the guard’s uniform. “Lemme out of here! What am I doing in here now? My kid’s alone in the world. I’ve got to get out of here! I didn’t do it, I tell you, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it!”

“Did you want to see me, Swanson?” the dick named Butler asked gruffly, as he entered the cell.

“Any one of you fellows, I don’t care which one. They told me you were the most human of the lot; that’s why I asked for you.”

“Most human, eh?” The detective grunted. “What was I supposed to be, chromium-plated? I feel a favor coming up.” He grunted again.

“If your kid was dying by inches under your eyes, if your wife was starving, and you were broke and had no job, and you read in a paper that you could get a thousand bucks just by telling them you killed someone, what would you do?”

“A man can’t answer that truthfully until he’s been in that same fix,” Butler told him gravely. “And I haven’t, so I can’t say. Are you trying to tell me that’s why you’re in here?”

“Trying is right.”

The dick fanned his hand scornfully between their faces. “The attempt is unsuccessful.”

“I figured it would be,” Swanson said desolately, biting the tips of both thumbs at once. “But that isn’t why I asked to see you. I’ve got to have a chance to talk to Mrs. Ranger again.”

“What do you want from her?”

“Mister, I know what I know. I don’t ask you or anyone else to believe me. Mrs. Ranger is mistaken about my coming up to her outside her house when she was leaving for the theater that night. She may have been excited, high-sterical; just because she saw me handcuffed in front of her, she thought it was me. In fairness to me, won’t you let her give it another try? She may be ashamed, in front of all of you, to admit she was wrong the first time. Won’t you let me see her alone, without any of you guys around? Won’t you give me that one chance? It’s my only one. That’s all I’m asking; I won’t ask another thing.”

Butler got up and went toward the cell door to be let out, left Swanson hanging on his delayed answer. He didn’t give it to him until after he was already outside in the corridor. “See what I can do for you.” Which meant yes.

Mrs. Ranger came into the room with one of the other dicks, not Butler. At sight of Swanson, she turned to her escort displeased. “I didn’t know I’d have to face this — this criminal again. It’s very painful for me. I was under the impression I was simply wanted down here to—” Then as she saw the guard with Swanson about to withdraw: “You’re not going to leave me alone in here with him, are you? Why, this man’s dangerous; he’s liable to—”

“There’ll be somebody within call, Mrs. Ranger, just a few steps down the hall. He’s asked to be permitted to speak to you alone. It may be to your interest to hear what he has to say.”

“I still don’t like the idea at all,” she complained querulously. The dick and Swanson’s guard strolled out of the room without seeming to hear her, softly closed the door after them.

She sat down as far across the room from him as she could get. “Well, what is it you want of me, murderer?” she said brittlely, lighting a cigarette. “Make it snappy.”

“Mrs. Ranger.” Swanson faltered. “Please take another look at me. Look closely. Look good. Look at my height when I’m standing straight like this. Look at the shape of my face. Look at the distance between my eyes. I know there are plenty of people that look like somebody else, but can’t you see I’m not that man that came up to your car outside your house that night? You know I’m not.”

“Do I?” she said mockingly.

“This is just between us—”

“Is it?”

“We’re alone now by ourselves, there isn’t anyone in here with us.”

She pronounced each word with the slow clarity of a death sentence. “You are the man I saw!”

“But I know I couldn’t be, because I wasn’t there where you say you saw me that night. Don’t you see you must be mistaken?” In his despair he groped for any argument that might possibly convince her, blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “There’s a doctor somewhere in this town will tell you—” He stopped suddenly, checked himself.

“Will tell me what?” She held her cigarette poised half-way to her lips.

He finished it, as long as he’d gone that far. “Will tell you I couldn’t have been there at the time, because he was up at my flat, my wife’s and my flat, that Wednesday night working over our kid, from nine until nearly midnight, and I was up there with him the whole time. He’ll tell you more, he put the idea into my head—”

She was staring at him with fixed intensity, but that wasn’t unnatural. “He put the idea into your head of going out and killing my husband?”

“No, no. He first put the idea into my head of getting the money in any way I could, by hook or crook. But he’ll remember that he was up there, he must keep a record of his calls.”

“A likely story!” she sneered, but her eyes, hard, glittering, calculating, kept roving the room, along its baseboards and its ceiling joints.

“It’s true, I tell you!” Swanson burst out helplessly. “Meredith is his name, Dr. Bradley Meredith. Please! You call him up for me. You ask him! He’ll tell you I wasn’t out that night. Then you can tell the cops you were mistaken. Please call him!”

Again she stared at him inscrutably. “Dr. Bradley Meredith,” she repeated mechanically. Then she let the cigarette fall out of her hand, put the tip of her shoe over it, stood up. She adjusted the silver fox piece over her shoulder. “I will do no such thing! I still say I saw you, and” — very low, almost inaudibly as she moved toward the door — “it’s my word against yours.”

Then suddenly anger seemed to strike at her, as though held in leash until now. As though she had not thought it worthwhile to waste it on just one onlooker, desired a larger audience. She flung the door open and stormed indignantly out. Her raised voice filled the corridor with angry remonstrance.

“I won’t be subjected to such an experience again! It’s outrageous and inconsiderate! I wouldn’t have agreed to come down here in the first place if I’d known that was what was wanted of me! It’s an imposition!”

Butler clicked off the dictaphone in the adjoining room, straightened up, with a lopsided mouth. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” he murmured pensively. “She only got sore after she was outside in the hall where she could be heard.”

He picked up a phone on the desk, said to the Headquarters operator: “Get me the office address of a Dr. Meredith, Bradley Meredith.” It rang back shortly and he jotted something down, said, “Thanks.” He started to pick it up a second time, then thought better of it, put on his hat instead and went out of the room.

He had to travel a considerable distance uptown to reach his destination. The doctor’s office turned out to be his home too. He wasn’t, judging by the appearance of the McKinley-era apartment building it was located in, prospering. That, reflected Butler, pushing the bell of the ground-floor rear flat, was nothing against a man these days.

A young housewife opened the door after a wait of several minutes; Meredith couldn’t even afford an office assistant, evidently.

“Dr. Bradley Meredith?”

“You just missed him!” she said regretfully. “He was called away, stepped out only a minute or two before you got here. It was an emergency call, but I don’t believe he’ll be gone long. Would you care to come in and wait?” She motioned him into a forlorn little waiting-room, snapped on a bleak light that didn’t dress it up much. “Did you have an appointment?” she asked. “The doctor’s without an assistant right now and — er, sometimes things get a little mixed up.”

“I’m not a patient,” he said, to ease her embarrassment. He didn’t tell her he was from Headquarters either, in order not to frighten her unnecessarily. “But as long as I’m here, I wonder if you could tell me whether he had a patient by the name of Jerome Swanson? I want to make sure I’ve come to the right man.”

“I’ll look among the unpaid bills; that’s the quickest way of finding out. Most of them are un—” She didn’t finish it, but she didn’t have to.

There must have been an awful lot of unpaid bills to wade through; it took her a good five or ten minutes to riffle through them. Finally she came out again, said, “Yes, there’s a Jerome Swanson down among his patients. I can’t find any record of his calls, though.” She sniffed the air suspiciously. “Oh, the doctor’s supper!” she wailed. “Excuse me!” and ran down a long inner hall to the back.

Butler shook his head pityingly. This Meredith couldn’t be anything but a square-shooter, to let his patients get away with their bills the way he seemed to. He killed time thumbing through a number of 1935 magazines strewn about the waiting-room. Fifteen minutes went by. Half an hour. Not once did the phone ring, nor the doorbell.

The little housewife ventured back again finally, anxiously twisting her apron. “Didn’t he come back yet? I can’t understand it. He told me he’d be back in five or ten minutes at the most. These are supposed to be his office hours, and I know he wouldn’t stay out at this time of the day if he could possibly avoid it.”

Butler was beginning to have an uneasy feeling himself, that he couldn’t understand and at the same time couldn’t quite shake off. “Was the call from one of his usual patients?” he asked her.

“I don’t believe so, or he would have mentioned the name to me. He simply said it was some woman whose child had swallowed something; it simply needed to be stood on its head and spanked. He took the call himself; I was in the back.”

“Where was he to go? Take a look, will you, and see if he jotted it down on his pad.”

She came back with it in her hand. “The pad’s blank. He must have torn off the top leaf and stuffed it in his pocket, to make sure of not forgetting the address.”

The uneasy feeling was deepening in Butler minute by minute. “Let me have that pad a minute just as it is. Can you get me a pinch of coal dust or soot of some kind from your kitchen, any dark substance?”

She came hurrying back with a little held in the hollow of a torn scrap of paper. He took it from her, sifted it over the top of the pad, then breathed on that very lightly, barely enough to clear it off again. It remained seamed in the identations left by the doctor’s pencil point pressing down on the leaf above. A gray tracery, faint but not too indistinguishable to be read, was the result.

“Karpus,” he said, squinting closely at it, “270 Hanson Road. That’s a little far out, isn’t it, for an emergency call to an unknown doctor? Does he use a car when he goes out on calls?”

“Yes. It’s not much of one, but it gets him there.”

“Then all the more reason why he should have been back by now. Let me have its license number.” He got to his feet and started for the door. “I’m going out there myself and see what’s what. If I miss him and he comes back while I’m gone, have him wait here for me. But—” He felt like saying, “But something tells me he won’t come back,” but he didn’t; she was badly enough frightened already without that.

He flagged a cab, said: “Get me out to 270 Hanson Road, and get me there fast; this is police business!”

They drew a motorcycle cop presently, by the rate at which they were bulleting along, but Butler changed him into an escort by a flash of his badge and a shout of explanation from the cab window.

It was way out, in a half-built-up, weed-grown sector. “Somebody’s handed you a bum steer, guv’nor,” said the driver, tapering off uncertainly and pointing.

Butler had already seen the vacancy sign tacked up on the door-frame, himself, and noted the decrepit condition of the place. “Yeah, it was a bum steer, all right,” he said, “but it wasn’t me it was handed to.”

The cop had circled and come back. “That place is vacant,” he called out unnecessarily, from the opposite side of the dirt-surfaced street.

Butler got out and started through the ankle-high weeds toward the door. “I only wish it was,” he hollered back. “Put in a call for me from the nearest box. Then scout around until you dig up a second-hand car; here’s the license number. It ought to be around here somewhere not very far away.”

He climbed the two creaky wooden steps of the frame place, tried the door. The knob promptly came off in his hand, and he was able to get the rest of it out of the way with one good, swift kick.

There was a man’s huddled body lying just a couple of yards away from where he was standing, just far in enough to let the door swing past.

Butler just nodded his head as he crouched down by him, turned him over on his back. The blood hadn’t altogether coagulated yet from the three bullet wounds he counted, it had been so recently done. His instrument case was a little further on, where it had fallen from his hand.

He noticed an ordinary watchman’s oil lamp, that had probably been appropriated from some street excavation, hanging from a nail on the wall. He tested the chimney with his knuckles, and the glass was still faintly warm, as though that, too, had only recently been in use. He went outside and inspected the vacancy sign. It wasn’t nailed down fast, just punched on over a nail in the door-frame.

“So that’s how it was worked,” he murmured. “Took the sign down temporarily and let him see a glimmer of light coming from inside. Probably the woman who put in the call met him outside on the street somewhere and steered him in, to distract his attention. He needed patients too bad, poor devil, to turn down anything that came his way. Someone must have been waiting for him right behind the door, didn’t even let him get down two steps inside the house. Took his car and ditched it somewhere afterwards.”

He went inside again, stood looking down the beam of his light at what had been Dr. Bradley Meredith. “Somebody hasn’t been so clever about this,” he said aloud. “Planting conviction where there wasn’t even suspicion before.”

He was shown into Swanson’s cell at the unholy hour of three that same night, or the following morning rather. Swanson was a huddled cylinder, asleep under a gray blanket on the iron cot that was let down broadside from the wall like a slab on chains. “I’ll call you back when I’m ready to go,” he said, to get rid of the guard.

The reclosing of the cell gate partly roused the sleeper. He stirred; then as he made out the detective’s outline against the dim corridor-light outside the bars, he shot upright on his shelf. “Who is it?” he gasped frightenedly.

“Me,” said the dick. “I want to talk to you. Keep your voice down. Here’s something to smoke. Now, are you awake?”

Swanson swung his legs down to the floor, crouched low over his own knees. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“If you’re not, here’s something that ought to do it. Your friend, Doc Meredith, was murdered early last evening.”

Swanson jolted ruler-straight, then buckled over again, held his head. “Oh, now I am hooked!” he groaned. “First my wife, now the doctor. They were the only two who could have proved — Now there’s no one who’ll believe me! I’ll never get out of it now; I’m finished!”

“All right, quit wailing through your adenoids,” Butler told him impatiently. “You’re a lot better off than you were while Meredith was still alive.”

Swanson blinked at him stupidly in the cell twilight. “How do you mean, how could I be?”

“What his murder has managed to do is start me to thinking there may be something to your story after all. It looks too much as though someone didn’t want anyone to be able to clear you, now that you’re conveniently under indictment and the wheels have something to feed on. What happened to Meredith may just be a coincidence. The fact remains that he was lured out on a fake call, that robbery wasn’t the motive, and that he had no personal enemies of his own; the way he never pressed his patients to pay their bills is the best guarantee of that.

“Add to this the fact that his name was never spoken by you until this afternoon, to my knowledge; that it was mentioned to only one person — Ranger’s widow — and that his murder followed within a few hours, and the coincidence becomes a little too wobbly for my liking.

“You stuck your neck out,” the dick went on, “and you’re not going to be allowed to pull it in again, even if a second or third murder has to be piled on top of the original one. That’s one line of reasoning we could take — just to see where it gets us.” He stopped, thought it over. “Yeah, that’s our play: A second or third murder. Given the same circumstances, if it comes through again, it’s our pay-off.”

He took a quick turn around the cell. “That’s what I looked you up at this ungodly hour for. Isn’t there someone else who could go to bat for you like Meredith could have if he had stayed alive enough?”

“No, no one,” said Swanson mournfully. “Only the doc was up there that Wednesday night with us, and he’s dead now.”

Butler didn’t seem to be listening. “How about a guy named—” He stroked his chin thoughtfully as he went along. “Lindquist, let’s say.”

“But I don’t know anyone named Lindquist; I never did!” exclaimed Swanson in surprise.

“Oh, yes, you do!” he purred with slow emphasis. “Now get this and see that you hang onto it tight; it’s your only chance to keep from being railroaded into the hot seat or a bughouse.

“Your last possible remaining alibi is a guy named Lindquist, a doctor like the other one was. Dr. Carl Lindquist, we’ll call him. He also happens to be an old friend of yours as well; Swedish ancestry like you, and all that.

“Now Meredith called him in that Wednesday night of the murder in consultation, at you and your wife’s urgent request, because you wanted a second opinion on your boy. You’re sure he’ll remember the date, be able to vouch for you. He hasn’t come forward until now because, you understand, he moved his practice out to St. Paul soon afterwards, probably hasn’t heard about the case. Does all his reading in Swedish-language papers. You’re sure a wire from you will bring him back again, though.

“Now you tell all this to one of the other men in the department; any of ’em, it don’t matter which. I’ll arrange it so that you’re given a chance to do your pleading in that same office in the next building where you were the last time.

“Plead to be allowed to send this wire for help. Here’s what this Dr. Lindquist looks like: He’s an elderly guy, sort of a country fogey, doesn’t know his way around so good. Got a big corporation and dresses sloppy in clothes that fit him like a tent. Wears thick-lensed glasses and a little white goatee on the end of his chin. Be sure to tell whichever dick you’re talking to all that, whether he asks you or not.

“Now, have you got all that? I hope you have for your own sake, because you won’t be seeing me around much from now on.”

“Would you mind waiting in here a few moments?” the detective who had ushered her in asked Mrs. Ranger politely. “They’ll be ready for you in the D.A.’s office in just a minute or two.” He drew out a chair for her.

She sat down in it with a poor grace. “You know, this is really becoming a nuisance. I don’t mind cooperating all I can, but this is the third time I’ve been sent for by you people.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ranger,” the detective said deferentially. “I’m sure this is the last time you’ll be troubled, before the case goes to court.” He moved toward the door. “You don’t mind if I ask you not to touch that little lever there on the table in front of you while you’re in here — it’s a dictaphone leading into the next room, where suspects are sometimes interviewed. I’m not supposed to bring anyone in here, but seeing it’s you, Mrs. Ranger...”

She smiled faintly, mollified. He closed the door discreetly after him and she could hear his heavy tread recede down the corridor outside.

She reached out and snapped the lever defiantly, as if to say: “Just for that, I will!” A faint buzzing, like a fly trapped in a bottle, sounded. She picked up the head-set and gingerly brought it around to the back of her head, careful not to disturb her modish hat.

A gruff voice said in her ears: “What do you want now, Swanson? You have been beefin’ all week long to be let in here to talk to me. All right, out with it.”

Mrs. Ranger changed her original intention of immediately discarding the head-set; brought it in closer around the base of her skull.

“There is still one person who can tell you I was in my own flat that Wednesday night Ranger was killed. Please let me get in touch with him, that’s all I ask you!”

“Yeah? Who is he?”

“He’s an old friend of my wife and mine, an old Swedish doctor named Carl Lindquist. He was up there that night; we asked Dr. Meredith to call him in in consultation, just to make sure there was no mistake about the kid’s condition. We’ve known Lindquist so long, we knew if he told us, it must be true.”

“Yeah? Well, then, why didn’t he show up before now and speak up for you, if he’s such a good friend of yours?”

“He went to St. Paul right after that; he probably hasn’t heard about it out there. He only reads Swedish newspapers, anyway. He’s slow and kind of old-fashioned, you know; dresses sloppy in baggy clothes; can’t see so good any more, wears thick glasses; and he’s got a little white billy-goat beard stuck on the point of his chin. But I know that if he hears I’m in trouble he’ll take the first train east and do all he can to square me. He’ll tell you; he’ll be able to tell you that I was home minding my business that night. He even stayed on with us, after Doc Meredith left, talking over ways in which I might be able to raise the money to help my youngster.”

“All right, all right, can the sob stuff. So what do you want us to do?”

“Just let me send him a wire; that’s all I ask.”

The heavy tread was returning along the corridor once more. Mrs. Ranger deftly replaced the head-set on the table before her, pushed the lever down.

The door opened and the detective who had originally shown her in said, “They’re ready for you at the D.A.’s office now, Mrs. Ranger. Sorry you had to wait like this.”

“That’s all right,” she said vaguely, as though she were thinking of something else entirely.

“Hundred and Twanny-fif’ Strit!” the conductor whined dolefully down the aisle of the lounge car from the vestibule entrance. The nearsighted old doctor with the white goatee and thick-lensed spectacles glanced up indifferently as the Twentieth Century began to slow up, flush with the upper stories of the below-track-level Park Avenue tenements that marked its next-to-last stop — 125th Street. Then he resumed peering at the St. Paul Swedish newspaper he had been occupied with ever since he had got aboard — one stop before, at Harmon-on-the-Hudson, where inbound trains halt to change from coal-burning to electricity-driven locomotives.

The train came to a full halt. It seemed to linger a little longer than usual at this penultimate stop. Then a darky porter from one of the Pullmans appeared in the vestibule, pointed to the old doctor reading the Swedish newspaper. A well-dressed heavy-set man in his late thirties pushed past him with a muttered “Thanks a lot,” came on down the aisle, stopped opposite the reader’s seat. He had to tap him on the shoulder to attract his attention.

“Are you Dr. Carl Lindquist, of St. Paul, Minnesota?”

The old fossil peered at him over the tops of his glasses. “Yuss. Vhy, who are you?”

The intruder tactfully lowered his voice so that it would not reach the others in the car. “I’m from Police Headquarters. I was sent to meet you at the train, ask you to get off here with me, instead of riding on down to Grand Central.”

The old Swedish doctor looked innocently apprehensive. “I am not under arrest, no?”

The detective laughed outright at this. “No, no, nothing like that. The D.A. would like to question you privately, that’s all. I’m just delegated as sort of an escort to take you to him. By leaving the train here, there won’t be any unwelcome publicity to your arrival, no nosy newspapermen to buck. I have an official car waiting for us downstairs. Better get your things, if you don’t mind; they’re holding up the train for us.”

“All right, I yust as soon,” Lindquist said willingly. “I ache all over from riding on this train so long, anyway.” He struggled to his feet, pulled down a ponderous, battered-looking case from the rack overhead. The detective obligingly took it from him, started down the aisle with it, swaying from its weight. Lindquist waddled flat-footedly after him.

As he passed the Pullman porter who had pointed him out to the official envoy, he slipped something into his hand, as though this service had been prearranged between them. He alighted on the station platform beside his escort.

“Now, no offense,” the Headquarters man said, “but have you got some proof of your identity on you; can you show me some credentials, before we go any further? Your name and description tally, but still I don’t want to show up with the wrong man; it might cost me my job.”

The doctor fumbled about his balloon-like clothes. “I ain’t got much,” he said, pursing his lips. “Just a couple of unpaid bills, maybe. Vait, here’s the telegram from my friend, vhat brought me back here.” He stripped it out of the envelope, passed it to him.

The detective unfolded it, read:

He nodded approvingly. “That’s fine; that’s all that’s necessary.” He led the way down the station stairs to street-level, still carrying the doctor’s bag for him. The official car he had mentioned was standing several blocks away, inconspicuously parked under one of the granite arches of the elevated structure that carried the railroad.

There was no official sticker or designation on its windshield, but this too might have been a precautionary measure to avoid attracting the newspaper publicity that the D.A. seemed to detest so. In any case, the shaggy old doctor was hardly the type who could be expected to notice a thing like that, unfamiliar as he was with the metropolitan police system.

There was no one else waiting in it; the detective evidently intended to do his own driving. He shoved his protégé’s bag in the back and got in under the wheel. “Sit in front with me, Doc,” he suggested friendly. “Keep me company getting there; we’ve got quite a ride ahead of us.”

They started off. The detective made little attempt at conversation, in spite of what he had said about wanting to be kept company; the doctor made even less.

“Have a hard trip?” he asked his charge after a while.

“It cost so much,” lamented the doctor. “And I ain’t doing so well out there, neider. If it wasn’t that Swanson is an old friend of mine...” He wagged his head. “Nothing but trouble that poor fellow’s had. How did he get mixed oop in such a t’ing?”

“Sorry,” said the detective pleasantly but firmly. “I’m under orders not to discuss the case with you beforehand, until you’ve been questioned.” He switched back to their former topic, which seemed to interest him more. “So you’re not so well off, eh, Doc?” he suggested understandingly.

“Who iss?” sighed Lindquist, folding his hands mournfully across his vibrating middle.

“Ever think of going back to the old country, to try your hand at building up a practice there?” the detective went on, apparently at random.

The pupils behind the doctor’s bulgy lenses flicked sidewise toward him, then back to center again. Then he showed postponed enthusiasm. Like Mrs. Ranger’s anger at the time of her interview with Swanson, the timing was a little slow. But then, maybe his mental processes weren’t so quick on the trigger.

“Yah!” he agreed vehemently. “Now you talking! But you know vhat it cost to make the trip over there? Vhere vould I get the money?”

“I guess it does come high,” said the man at the wheel, and the discussion was allowed to languish for the time being.

They drew up finally before what, for a District Attorney’s residence, was a singularly isolated and poorly kept little bungalow, on a remote, wooded Northchester lane far from all the main highways and any neighboring habitation. To make it even more uninviting it was rapidly growing dusk.

“In here?” said Lindquist, as the dick threw the car door open.

“Yeah, get out,” was the taut answer. The detective’s hand slithered from the wheel down toward his own hip joint, as if he expected opposition, but Lindquist was evidently a trustful sort; he struggled acquiescently out without further ado. The detective followed him, again carrying his bag, and they went up toward the entrance together.

The detective opened the door, motioned him through, closed it after them. He set the bag down, led him down the hall toward a room at the back. “Just wait in here,” he said tersely.

“He issn’t here yet?” asked Lindquist.

“No, he’ll be here in a few minutes.” He closed the door on him, left him in there alone.

Lindquist moved toward the closed door with surprising agility and stealth for anyone so bulky; tried the knob. It was locked. That didn’t seem to disturb him particularly. He touched his hip bone, then crouched, put one eye to the keyhole, tilting his glasses out of the way. The key blocked the hole effectively.

He straightened, put his ear to the door-seam instead. Voices came through, from one of the other rooms near-by. One was a woman’s, sharply recriminatory. “What’d you bring him here for? Now you’ll only have to take him out with you again, do it somewhere else!”

“I’m going to try it another way first,” he heard the man who had met him at the train say. “I think I can fix it without having to do what we did last time.”

Lindquist was seated in a large wing-chair at the far side of the room, patiently steepling his fingers together, when the lock clicked and the door reopened. The detective came back in alone, closed it behind him.

“He didn’t come yet?” asked the doctor ruefully.

“Forget about him,” said the dick curtly. “Now, Dr. Lindquist, just what form is this evidence in that your friend Swanson is so confident will clear him? Documentary, or just verbal?”

“Vell, partly one, partly the other. I got my little book here, in which I keep my calls written, with his name and the date and the hour. But mostly it should be enough I tell them I vas vith him the whole time that night; I ain’t never told a lie in my life—”

“Lemme see the written stuff,” said the dick. Lindquist placidly fumbled, brought out a dog-eared memorandum book.

The detective glanced at it, raised his eyes craftily. “This won’t do him much good; it could have been written afterwards. It’s not worth a damn. On the other hand, it could be worth a good deal — to you.”

“So?” said the doctor stupidly.

“How would you like to go back to Sweden, all expenses paid, and stay there?”

“Very mooch,” Lindquist admitted stolidly. “Who vould pay the expenses?”

“I would.” The other man took out a wallet, shuffled bills out of it, dealt them rapidly on the table before them like playing cards. “Two thousand bucks. Enough to set you up for life in Swensky money.”

Lindquist took it very matter-of-factly; nothing seemed able to surprise him. “Thank you very much.” He nodded. “So soon I see the D.A., find out vether I can do anything for this poor fellow Swanson, I take the next boat to Stockholm, you bet.”

A single note of harsh mirthless laughter rasped in the other man’s throat. “No, you take the next boat to Stockholm-you-bet, right away, without going near the D.A. or Swanson or anyone else — that’s what the whole proposition is. You also leave this little appointment book of yours with me, and keep your mouth closed over on the other side.”

Lindquist seemed to ponder the matter, took his time about answering. “But then if I don’t go and tell them vhat I know, Swanson might get the chair, and he’s an old friend of mine.” He looked up finally. “No, I can’t do it that vay,” he said imperturbably. “If I got to do vithout going back to Sweden, all right I got to, but I couldn’t turn my back on an innocent man.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“Yuss. I only give one answer, never two, to anyt’ing.”

“I told you so!” a voice said stridently from the doorway. A woman came slowly forward into the room. She was blond and might have been pretty ordinarily, but her face wasn’t pretty just then. “Now you see? You’ll have to!”

“I’m going to, don’t worry,” he said softly out of the corner of his mouth. “Just take it easy, will you? This place is in my name.”

He addressed Lindquist. “All right, Doc. Let’s forget the whole thing. Come on, get your bag; I’ll drive you back to town again, drop you off at a hotel. You better come too, Rose.”

Lindquist, whom nothing seemed to surprise, went with them out into the hall, picked up his heavy bag, and carried it out to the doorstep. The woman came out on one side of him, her two hands thrust into a small barrel-muff now, the man on the other.

“You sit in front, next to me, like before,” the detective said dryly.

“I put my bag in the back, yah?” the doctor said, and waddled over with it. He heaved it in, set it on the floor, fingered its latches and straps carefully as if to make sure it was securely fastened. Then he climbed in next to the detective. The woman got into the back from the opposite side of the car.

They started off, but instead of turning and going back the way they had come previously, they continued on up-country in the same direction as before.

“This is far enough, Allen,” the woman remarked finally. “No use taking all night!”

Reeling and scraping to a stop, the car turned off abruptly into an opening between the trees, climbing over half-hidden roots and spewing up dead leaves. The man at the wheel braked with a grim sound of finality, and there was a moment’s breathless silence after the car’s racket.

Lindquist’s voice broke it, in calm interrogation. “Vhy are you stopping here? Vhat are you going to do here?”

“Get out, you cold-blooded Swede, you’ll find out. I don’t want my car all messed up when I shoot you full of holes!”

Nothing seemed able to get a rise out of the doctor. “But vhy are you going to shoot me? I never saw you before until you met my train this afternoon.”

“Just to make sure you don’t horn into that Swanson case!”

The doctor was evidently the type of man who becomes garrulous during crises. “But vhy don’t you vant me to help Swanson? Vhat have you got against him?”

The man next to him had unleashed a gun. “Because he’s the guy that’s taking the rap for us, and we wanna make sure he takes it!”

“Oh, so that’s what you did to Dr. Meredith, too?” The doctor’s voice suddenly lost its Swedish accent.

“So you know that, do you?” The man’s face contorted violently. “Well, we’ll see that it doesn’t go any further!”

“Will you get him out and finish him?” the woman screeched wildly, standing up in back of them.

She swung the small pistol she had been carrying in her muff, backhand, brought it down butt-first toward his skull. But out of the corner of his eye he had seen the blow coming. He swerved his head aside and the reversed butt chopped down past his shoulder.

He caught the butt with both hands, dragged it forward, twisted it around, her hand still pinned to it, into the other man’s face.

“Now just drop that gun, Cochrane, or I’ll blow your pretty Greek nose off. If there’s going to be any shooting in this car, I’ll do it!”

The woman had the more courage of the two, the courage of despair. Dragged half across the top of the front seat, unable to extricate her own hand from the gun because of the intended victim’s stranglehold on it, she urged breathlessly: “Shoot him, Allen! Don’t be afraid of getting hurt! He’s some kind of a dick! Don’t you see it’s either him or us?”

Butler, alias Dr. Lindquist, who could see Cochrane nerving himself to pull the trigger even in the face of the bore pointed straight at his own face, fired first, tilting it a little to avoid killing him if possible. It tore a long crease up Cochrane’s scalp. The heavier weapon he was holding thundered out by reflex finger-action, harmlessly puncturing one of the air bladders Butler wore under his balloonish Lindquist clothes.

Cochrane fell over backwards across the front seat, with his head hanging down over the rim of the door, baying with the pain of the burning track across the top of his skull.

Butler, who was momentarily in danger of losing his eyesight from Mrs. Ranger’s flailing left hand, swung a pulled but powerful fist straight under her jaw, as the easiest solution, and knocked her limp and passive across the back seat.

“You’re too damned vivacious for a recently bereaved widow!” the detective grunted.

He detached the thick-lensed glasses, which were hanging from one ear by now, blew out his breath, leaned across the back of the seat, and switched off a little unobtrusive lever protruding from his bag.

“It’s got about everything on it I need now,” he remarked to the writhing Cochrane. “They won’t care to listen to how loud you can howl just from a little nick in your dome.”

He straightened him up by the shoulder. “So you were his friend — his business partner! I suppose you dipped into his money in the firm’s assets, played his wife, and then took the easiest way out of both predicaments. Came out and met her a block or two away from the house that night, instead of waiting for her in town; slipped inside and gave it to him.

“Then the two of you calmly went in to the theater and pretended to phone him to see how he was. Well, that’ll all come out at the end of a garden hose. Now, hold your little handy up and pull your cuff back out of the way; I’ve got something for you.”

“Is the paper going to bring charges against me for... for defrauding them?” Swanson asked apprehensively when he had been changed from the central figure of an impending murder trial to merely a second-string witness.

“Probably not,” Butler assured dryly. “From what I know about papers, the sooner the public at large forgets the little transaction the better they’ll like it. And the only reason all of us down here at Headquarters don’t take turns giving you a good swift kick in the pants is because in a way you really helped to break this case for us.

“If you hadn’t plumped yourself down in the middle of it and made them show their hands a couple of times more, it might still be unsolved. Y’better take my advice and don’t try anything like that again. Go out to your motherless kid in Arizona; he needs you. Leave crimes alone that don’t belong to you. There’s enough going around that have lost their rightful owners as it is.”

“I’ll go,” Swanson said.