The Bride Wore Black

I The Woman

It wasn’t a well-attended exhibition, even as one-man shows go. Perhaps he hadn’t made enough of a name yet. Or perhaps he had already made too much of a name — in the wrong direction. For his work was not only to be met with here, in this gallery; you could also find it on every subway newsstand in town, nearly any day in the month, hanging diagonally downward from a little clip. For twenty-five cents you could take it home with you, and get not only the cover but a whole magazine full of reading matter behind it. And that, almost anyone in attendance at the gallery would have told you, was certainly success in the wrong direction.

But there were a few who came just the same, not so much because it was his work as because it was an art exhibition. They were the usual types who never missed an art exhibition, no matter whose, no matter where. A scattering of the dilettantes, or, as they would have preferred to be known, the cognoscenti, were drifting superciliously around, simply to have something to chatter about over their next party cocktails. A stray dealer or two was on hand, just to be on the safe side if there was any interest shown in this particular talent. A couple of second-string critics were there, because of their jobs. The exhibit would get only a half column in tomorrow’s papers. Encouragingly phrased, perhaps, but only a half column.

Then there were the two visiting ladies from Keokuk who had come to this because they were starting back home tomorrow night and it was the only one available in the time left to them and they had to take in at least one art exhibit while they were in the city. Anyway, his name was a nice American name, easy to remember and tell “the girls” about back home when they attended their next Ladies’ Thursday.

And then there was the professional art student. You could spot her in a minute just by looking at her. Here taking notes or something. The same type that sits down and copies Old Masters in the art museums. Intensely serious, a hungry look on her face, horn-rimmed glasses, lank bobbed hair under a dowdy tam-o’-shanter, oblivious of her surroundings, moving raptly from canvas to canvas, every once in a while jotting down some mystic abracadabra of her own in a cheap little ten-cent ruled notebook.

She seemed to have some inchoate critical canons of her own; she passed by still lifes, landscapes and groups with the merest of glances. It was only the portrait heads that drew her conscientious memorandums. Or perhaps that just came under the head of specialization; she was already too far advanced in her studies for fruit and sunsets.

She crept mouselike from room to room, standing back whenever somebody wanted to get a comprehensive look at one of the same subjects she had chosen. No one even looked twice at her. To begin with, the cognoscenti were so very audible that it was hard to be aware of anyone else while they were around. They saw to that.

“Auch. His pictures are photographs, I tell you! It might as well be 1900. There might as well have never been Picasso. His trees are simply trees. They don’t belong in a frame, they belong out in the woods with the other trees. What is remarkable about a tree that looks like a tree?”

“How right you are, Herbert! Doesn’t it turn your stomach?”

“Photographs!” repeated the male cognoscente belligerently, glancing around to make sure he was overheard.

“Snapshots,” contributed the female as they strode on, outraged.

One lady from Keokuk who was slightly hard of hearing asked her companion, “What’re they mad at, Grace?”

“They’re mad because you can recognize what the pictures are about,” the other one whispered informatively.

The art student sidled inconspicuously by, without pausing before the scorned trees — which should have been shriveled and sere by now, after the blast they’d received.

The cognoscenti had stopped and taken out their scalpels again, this time before a portrait.

“Isn’t that too pathetic for words? He shows the part in her hair, the very shadow cast by her lower lip. Why bother doing a picture at all? Why doesn’t he just take a living girl and stand her up there behind an empty frame? Realism!”

“Or why not just hang up a mirror and call it Portrait of the Passer-by? Naturalism! Bah!”

The art student came up in their wake and this time jotted down a note. Or rather, a pothook. The little lined blank book she was carrying bore four scribbled notations: “Black,” “blond,” “red” and “intermediate.” Under “black” was a long perpendicular column of pothooks. Under “blond” there were only two. Under the other two classifications none at all, so far. She was evidently spending her afternoon taking a census of the types of hair coloration to be found in a cross section of this particular exhibitor! Strange are the ways of art students.

The gallery was closing for the afternoon now. The stray dealer or two had gone long ago; there was nothing here for them. Good enough stuff, but why load up on it? The few remaining bitter-enders came straggling out. The cognoscenti emerged, still loudly complaining. “What a waste of time! I told you we should have gone to see that new foreign film instead.” It was noticeable, however, that they had remained as long as there was anyone at all around to hear their pontifications.

The visiting ladies from Keokuk came out with a grim air of having done their duty. “Well, we kept our word,” one consoled the other. “It’s sure hard on your feet though, isn’t it?”

The art student was the last one of all to leave. The notations in her little blank book now stood: black — 15; blond — 2; red — 0; intermediate — 1. Out of a total of eighteen portrait heads he had displayed, one conclusion was possible: the artist had a penchant for dark-haired subjects.

At any rate, she alone of all the visitors had an air of having put in a thoroughly satisfactory afternoon, of having accomplished just what she had set out to do.

She buttoned her shabby coat close up under her chin and trudged up the darkening street, back into the anonymity from which she had emerged.

II Ferguson

Ferguson had just finished arranging his easel and canvas when the knock on the door came. “Be right with you,” he said, and started laying out his oil tubes.

He didn’t look like a painter. Maybe because they don’t any more. He didn’t have a beard, or a beret, or a smock, or velvet pants. He knocked down a thousand a magazine cover. But in between he liked to do serious stuff, “for himself,” as he put it. One whole side of the studio was glass — the essential northern light. But that side didn’t rise up straight like the other three walls; it slanted in at an angle, so that it was a cross between an upright wall and a skylight.

He went over to the door and opened it. “You the new model?” he said. “Come over here by the light and let me look at you. I don’t know whether I can use you or not. I told the agency I wanted a—”

He stopped faultfinding and held his breath. He had her over in the full glare of the skylight wall by now. “Sa-ay,” he exhaled finally, between a long-drawn whistle and a reverent hiss. “Where have you been keeping yourself? Turn around a little, that’s it. Maybe you don^ fit the specifications for the ginger-ale spread, but, baby, I’m using you all right! You’re just what I had in mind for that Diana-the-huntress thing, for myself. I think I’ll begin that, now that you’ve here, and the commercial can wait.”

She was raven haired, creamy skinned, and her eyes seemed violet behind the imperceptible shadow line she had drawn around them.

“Who’d you work for last?”

“Terry Kaufmann.”

“What’s he trying to do, hog you all to himself?”

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“Sure I know the bum,” he said jocularly.

She dropped her eyes momentarily, caught her lip between her teeth. Then she looked up at him with renewed confidence.

He was rubbing his hands exuberantly, overjoyed at this unexpected find. “Now, there could be only one possible catch. How’s the figure?”

“O.K. I guess,” she said demurely.

“Y’better let me see for myself. You can go in the dressing room there and hang up your things. You’ll find the stuff I want you to put on all laid out in there. The gold bangle goes on the left arm, and hook the leopard-skin kilt so that the opening’s at the side; your thigh shows through.”

She moistened her lips. One hand went helplessly up toward her shoulder. “Is that all?”

“That’s all; it’s a semi-nude. Why? You’ve posed before, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, face impassive, and went unhesitatingly into the dressing room.

She came out again, as unhesitatingly, but with her face held rigidly half-averted, in about five minutes’ time. Her bare feet made no sound on the floor.

“Beautiful!” he said fervently. “Too bad those things don’t last. In two years it’ll be gone, as soon as they start dragging you around to cocktail parties. What’s your name?”

“Christine Bell,” she said.

“All right, now get up there and I’ll show you how I want you. It’s going to be a very tough pose to hold, but we’ll take it in easy shifts. Crouch forward now, dead center toward the canvas, one leg out behind you. I want her to seem to be coming right out of the frame at them when they look at the picture. Right arm bent out in front of you, grasping something, like this. Left arm drawn back, past your shoulder. That’s it. Freeze. Steady, now, steady. You’re supposed to be stalking something, about to let fly an arrow at it. I’ll put the bow in later; you obviously couldn’t pose for any length of time holding it stretched taut, the strain would be unendurable.”

He didn’t speak any more once he had begun to work. At the end of thirty minutes she moaned slightly. “All right, let’s knock off for five minutes,” he said casually. He picked up a crumpled package of cigarettes, took one out, tossed the package lightly over to her on the stand.

She let it fall to the floor. Her face was white with anguish when he turned to look at her. His eyes narrowed speculatively. “Are you as experienced as you say?”

“Oh, yes, I—”

Before she could go ahead there was a sudden knock at the door. “Busy working, come back later,” he called. The knock repeated itself. The girl on the stand made a supplicating gesture, said hurriedly, “Mr. Ferguson, I need the money so bad; give me a chance, won’t you? That’s probably the model from the agency—”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I was hanging around there trying to get taken on, but they won’t take you on, they’ve got a waiting list this long, and I heard them telephoning to her to report over here to you, so I went downstairs and called her back from a public booth and let her think it was still the agency. I told her it was an error, she wasn’t wanted after all, and I came over in her place; but I guess she’s found out since. Won’t you try me at last, won’t I do?” The pleading look on her face would have melted a heart of stone, much less an artist’s susceptible one, always touched by beauty.

“Tell you better in a minute.” He seemed to be having a hard time keeping a straight face. “Get back out of sight,” he whispered conspiratorially. “We’ll give it the old Judgment of Paris workout.”

He went to the door, held it open narrowly, staring intently outside with critical appraisal. Once he turned his head and glanced over at the first candidate, cowering against the wall, arms crossed over her bosom with unconscious — or was it unconscious — artistry. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a crumpled bill, handed it through the door. “Here’s your carfare, kid; I won’t need you,” he said gruffly.

He went back to the easel with a suppressed grin struggling to free itself at the corners of his mouth. “There’s even muscling-in in this racket,” he chuckled. The grin overspread his features unhampered. “Okay, Diana, up and at ’em!”

He poised his brush again.

Corey, highball glass in hand, paused before the easel in the course of his aimless wandering about the studio, fingered the burlap carelessly flung over it. “What’s this, the latest masterpiece? Mind if I take a look?”

“No, stay away from that. I don’t like anyone to see my pieces before they’re finished,” Ferguson answered above the hiss of the seltzer water.

“You don’t have to be bashful with me, I’m not a competitor. What I don’t know about art would—” The sacking had gone up and he was standing there rooted to the spot.

Ferguson turned his head at the continuing silence. “Well, if it takes your breath away like that before it’s even finished,” he said hopefully, “imagine what it’ll do after the fixative’s gone on.”

Corey shook his head vaguely. “No, I’m trying to think. There’s something vaguely familiar about that girl’s face.”

“Oh, sure, I expected that,” Ferguson said dryly. “Well, you don’t get her phone number out of me, not till after this picture’s finished, if that’s what you’re—”

“No, I mean it. It hit me like a flash when I first lifted the sacking. Now I’ve lost it again. Like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue and can’t bring it out. Where the devil have I seen those ice-cold eyes before and that warm, kissable mouth? What’s her name?”

“Christine Bell.”

“I don’t know her by name, at any rate. Have you ever used her before? Maybe I’ve seen her on some of your covers.”

“No, she’s brand-new. I’m just breaking her in, so you haven’t.”

“There’s just enough familiarity about the eyes and mouth to tease my memory. There isn’t enough about the whole head in general, the hair for instance, to help me place her definitely. Damn it, Ferg, I know I’ve seen that girl somewhere before!”

Ferguson dropped the protective sacking over the canvas once more, somewhat like a jealous hen guarding its chick. They both moved away.

But Corey came back to the subject again later, just before he left, as though it had lain uppermost in his mind all the while. “I won’t get any sleep now until I get straightened out on that.” He went out, casting troubled backward glances at the covered canvas to the very last, until the door had closed after him.

She winced delicately as Ferguson notched the arrow into the bowstring, fitted the integrated weapon into the formalized pose of her hands. “Wasn’t that horrible, the way that snapped through my fingers yesterday? I almost hate to touch it, after that!”

He laughed good-naturedly. “It wasn’t horrible, but it sure could have been — if my neck had been two inches farther back, where it belonged and where it had been a minute before! What saved me was I happened to bend my head toward the canvas just then to concentrate on a detail I was working on. I felt this streak of air shoot past the nape of my neck and the next thing I knew the arrow was wobbling in the wooden frame between two of the skylight panes over there.”

“But it could have killed you, couldn’t it?” she lamented, wide-eyed.

“If it had happened to hit me in the right place — the jugular vein or dead center to the heart — I suppose so. But it didn’t, so why worry about it?”

“But wouldn’t it be better if I used one with a guard, a protective knob on the end of it?”

“No, no, I’m nothing if not realistic; I go flat when I fake things, even such a simple thing as an arrowhead. Don’t be nervous now. It was just one of those hundred-to-one shots. Most likely you were unconsciously pulling it tighter and tighter as the tension of posing grew on you, and then without realizing it you let your muscles relax to try to ease them, and the damn thing sprang! Just remember not to pull it all the way back. Pull it only enough so that the bowstring isn’t relaxed, forms a straight line to the arrow cleft; that’s all you’ve got to do.”

When they had taken time out and the cigarette package had passed between them on the fly, as a hand cloth does between gymnasts, she remarked, “Strange that you should become a painter.”

“Why?”

“You always think of them as sort of gentle people. At least, I always did until now.”

“I am gentle. What makes you think I’m not?”

She murmured, so low he could barely hear her, “Maybe you are now. You weren’t always so gentle.”

Then afterward, when she was back on the stand, bow stretched toward him in shooting position, she said: “Ferguson, you bring happiness to many people. Did you ever — bring death to anyone?”

His brush halted in mid-air, but he didn’t turn to look at her. He stared before him as though seeing something in the past. “Yes, I have,” he said in a subdued voice. His head inclined a little. Then he straightened it, went ahead retouching. “Don’t talk to me while I’m working,” he reminded her evenly.

She didn’t, any more after that. There wasn’t a sound in the studio, and scarcely a motion. Only two things moved: the long slender stem of the paintbrush between his deft fingers; the retreating steel-tipped head of the arrow as it slipped slowly back upon the shaft to the position of uttermost tension the cord was capable of. A third thing there was that moved: a shadow played back and forth across the hollow of her left arm, as the white flesh contracted, as the tendons below it strained. Only those three things were not still, in the vibrant, supercharged silence.

Then suddenly there was a rain of jovial blows against the studio door, and a bevy of voices called, “Come on, Ferg, let us in. Union hours, you know!”

The arrowhead edged unnoticeably forward again, past the staff, as the strain was let out of the cord, degree by degree. She exhaled in such a peculiar, exhausted way that he turned to ask: “Matter, can’t you take it?”

She shrugged, threw him a glazed smile, “Sure, but... too bad we couldn’t have finished it, while we were at it.”

She had never dressed under such difficulties before. The dressing-room door had no lock, and after the first inadvertent discovery that she was in there, they kept purposely trying to break in on her every few minutes, to tease her. Even Ferguson added his voice to the good-natured clamor. “Come on out, Diana, don’t be modest — you’re among friends.”

Once the critical moment of transition from the leopard kilt to nothing to her own underthings was safely past, the worst was over. She effected this by wedging herself against the door — it opened inward — and blocking it with her body while she struggled into her things. Every moment or two it flounced against her, forcing her forward a little; then she would flatten it behind her again and go ahead with her dressing. She had never put on stockings that way before; it was an acrobatic feat.

Judging from the sounds going on in the studio proper, the party was no temporary intrusion. It was going to be an all-night affair, one of those snowball things that kept rolling up more people as it went along. Twice already the outer door had stormed open and new voices had come screaming in. “So this is where you are! I went looking for you at Mario’s and when you weren’t there—”

Once she heard Ferguson at the phone bawling his lungs out above the bedlam: “Hello, Tony? Send over some one-gallon jugs of Spanish red. That monthly hurricane has just hit here again. Yeah, you know the one.”

There were shrieks of protest. “What that man makes on commercials alone, and the best he can offer us is Spanish red!”

“Champagne! Champagne! Champagne, or we’ll all go home!”

“All right, go home!”

“Just for that we won’t! Ble-e-eh!”

Dressed, she stroked the side of her own face uncertainly, looked around. There was no other way out of here than through the studio. She turned, opened the door narrowly and peered out. They were already thick as bees out there — or seemed to be, the restless way they kept moiling around. Somebody had brought in some sort of stringed instrument — as bohemians, they evidently wanted no part of mechanical music — and was plucking vigorously if not too expertly at it. A girl was dancing on the model’s platform.

She watched her chance, and when the line of escape from dressing room to studio door was least populous, she slipped out, threaded her way diagonally across that comer of the vast room and tried to make her exit unobserved — or at least unquestioned.

It was an attempt that was foredoomed to failure. Somebody shouted, “Look, Diana!” There was a concerted rush over toward her, and she was swept into their midst as if by a maelstrom. They were unhampered by conventional formality.

“How beautiful! Oh, just look, how beautiful!”

“And trembling like a frightened gazelle. Ah, Sonya, why don’t you tremble for me like that any more?”

“I do, darling, I still do; but with laughter now, every time I look at you.”

When the first effusion of appraisal and praise was over, she managed to draw Ferguson aside. “I have to go—”

“But why?”

“I don’t want all these people to — to see me — I’m not used to it—”

He misunderstood. “On account of the picture, you mean? Because it’s a semi-nude?” He found this so charming, he promptly repeated it to the whole assemblage at the top of his voice.

They found it charming, too; it was that thing they were always looking for, the unusual. This brought on another group formation around her. The girl named Sonya seized her hand, clasped it protectively between her two, blew upon it as if to cherish some impalpable virtue it possessed. “Ah, she’s still so innocent!” she condoled, no sarcasm intended. “Never mind, dear. Just spend ten minutes in my Gil’s company and you’ll get over it.”

“Did you?” somebody asked her.

“No,” she shrugged. “He spent five minutes in my company and he got it.”

They meant well. Ferguson backed the canvas to the wall. “Nobody look at that picture. Nobody so much as think about it!”

“She ends below the shoulders!” somebody else proclaimed.

“She is a bust,” Sonya added fervently. Then with a quick clutch at her arm, “Not in the slang sense, dear.”

If her unease had stemmed from the cause they ascribed it to, she could not have helped but overcome it; they all tried so heartily to make her feel at home. Since it didn’t, it persisted. She finally acquiesced to the extent of sitting on the floor against the far wall, a cup of untasted red wine on one side of her, an intense young man reciting some of his own blank verse on the other. She sat there passively, but her eyes kept calculatingly measuring the distance between herself and the studio door. Her hands suddenly clenched spasmodically on the floor, slowly opened out again.

“Ah!” the blank-verse poet exulted. “That last line struck home. Its beauty pierced your heart. I could tell by the change that came over your face.”

He was wrong.

Corey had just turned up across the room from her, was standing there over by the entrance — drawn as unerringly by a party, any party, even one going on all the way across town from him, as a bloodhound is by the scent he has been set to track down.

Seconds hung like moments in the air, moments hung like quarter hours. Her eyes, which had sought refuge on the floor, slowly, unwillingly traveled the ascending arc of the figure that had come to halt directly before her.

“Wait, let him finish first,” she had said in a smothered voice. The intense young man’s blank verse had never been as highly appreciated before as at this moment, would never be again.

Thick soles with welt edges. Heavy brown brogues with punctured scrollwork on their toes. Ten-dollar shoes. Then long legs, in trousers of a fuzzy tweed mixture. The hands — they’d tell, wouldn’t they? Still unflexed. One hooked onto a side coat pocket by its thumb, the other negligently holding a cigarette just a little above hip level. Signet ring on its little finger. Golden glint of hair on its back, visible only by indirection. Two-button jacket, top one left open. The face was coming, the face was coming, couldn’t be dodged any longer. The tie, the collar, the chin. The face at last. The two looks, fusing just as the last line of blank verse died into silence.

Then Ferguson’s jovial voice, somewhere close beside them: “Now call his bluff, Diana!”

She got up slowly, at bay against the wall, working her back against it a little to aid her legs. “I can’t,” she said to where the voice had come from, without looking that way, “until you tell me what it is — and until you introduce me.”

“There you are, there’s your answer!” Ferguson jeered at him.

Corey wouldn’t take his eyes off her. She couldn’t take hers off him, as though afraid to trust him out of their sight a single instant. He said, “All kidding aside, haven’t I met you before?”

Even if she’d given an answer, even if she’d wanted to, it would have been drowned in the howl of friendly derision that went up.

“Look, there are moths flying around from that one!”

“You should oil up that technique.”

“Is that the best the Great Lover can get off?”

Sonya squalled informatively to someone, with that dead-earnest mannerism of hers, “Yes, didn’t you know? That’s how they make girls in the upper-middle classes. A friend of mine who went uptown once told me. She had it said to her three times in one night.”

Corey was laughing with them at his own expense, shoulders shaking, facial muscles working, everything humorously attuned except those coldly speculative eyes that wouldn’t leave hers.

The girl they held pressed to the wall with their stabbing stare shook her head slightly, smiled a little in regretful negation. She stood there a moment, then maneuvered her way out of the comer pocket he had her backed into, sauntered across the room, conscious his head had turned to look after her, conscious his eyes were following her every aimless step of the way.

She found refuge on the other side of the studio for a while, took shelter with almost the entire personnel of the party between them for a buffer. In fifteen minutes he had marked her down again, came bringing a cup of red wine over, for an excuse.

She seemed to grow rigid when she saw what he was bringing her, swallowed hard, as though there lay some danger in the imminent courtesy itself, apart from the fact of his approach.

He reached her finally, held it out to her, and the pupils of her eyes dilated. She seemed afraid to accept it and equally afraid to refuse it, afraid to drink it and equally afraid to set it aside untasted — as though anything she did with it bore a penalty of flashing recollection. She took it finally, touched it toward her lips, then held it behind her with one hand, safely out of sight.

He said, blinking troubledly: “I nearly had it for a minute when I handed you that just then, and then I lost it again.”

“You’re torturing the hell out of me, quit it!” she flared with unexpected savagery. She turned away from him and went into the dressing room.

He followed her even in there after a decent interval of ten minutes or so. There was no impropriety in it, the room was open to the party now.

She began busily tapping at her nose with a puff before the mirror the instant that she saw him nearing the outside of the doorway. Until then—

He came up behind her. She saw him in the glass but didn’t seem to. Standing at her shoulder he placed his hands one at each side of her face, as if trying to obliterate the dark luxuriant masses of hair that framed it.

She stood motionless under the ministration, without breathing. “What’ve you doing that for?” She didn’t pretend to misunderstand it as a caress.

He sighed and his hands fell away. He hadn’t been able to cover her entire head with them after all.

She turned partly aside from him, folded her arms, chafed their upper parts uncomfortably, bent her head downward. It was a pose strangely suggestive of penitence. She wasn’t thinking in terms of penitence. She was seeing in her mind’s eye a sharp little paint-scraping knife of Ferguson’s that was somewhere about the place. She was seeing in her mind’s eye the masses of people there were in the adjoining room. Perhaps, too, the diagonal line of escape that led from this dressing room to the outside studio door.

He’d finished lighting a cigarette. He spoke through smoke. “It wouldn’t bother me like this if it weren’t so.”

“It isn’t so,” she said dully. With dangerous dullness, still looking down.

“I’ll get it eventually. It’ll suddenly come to me when I least expect it. Maybe five minutes from now. Maybe later on tonight, before the party’s over. Maybe not for days. What’s the matter? You’re looking a little pale.”

“It’s so stuffy in here. And that red wine, I’m not used to it — especially on an empty stomach, you know.”

“You haven’t eaten?” he said with extravagant concern.

“No, I was posing, you know, when they broke in on us, and I haven’t been able to get away since. He doesn’t seem to feel it, but I haven’t had anything since ten this morning.”

“Well, er, how about coming out and having something with me now? Even though I don’t exactly seem to have made a hit—”

“Why shouldn’t I go with you? I have nothing against you. All contributions gratefully accepted.”

“Don’t say anything to the rest of them or they’ll gang up on us.”

“No,” she agreed, “it would be better if we’re not seen leaving—”

“Have you got everything? I had a hat out there somewhere in that pile. I’ll see if I can dredge it up on the q.t. Meet me over by the door; we’ll make a break and run for it.”

Their crafty preparations for impending departure did not go as unnoticed as they had hoped. Sonya chugged past at random, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke after her like a straining locomotive on an upgrade.

“Watch yourself with him,” she said curtly over her shoulder.

The overshadowed figure behind her murmured with a gleam of eyes, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t get very far past just telling me where it is he thinks he saw me before.”

“And just in case your hands slip off the throttle, here — take down my address. You can come around and have a nice long cry at my place tomorrow. There’s nothing like a good stiff cry for washing down a seduction. And I’ll make you some of my own special borscht.”

“I’ll watch out,”

Sonya wasn’t being flippant, far from it. “No, the reason I warn you is he’s got such a direct approach that no one ever takes it seriously — until it’s over. A girl I used to go around with — she laughed her head off at him all night long at a party one night. She only let him take her as far as her door. Then the next day she came around and ate borscht.”

She went chugging off again billowing plumes of smoke. You almost expected to hear a train whistle blow.

They’d got as far as the foot of the outside stairs when they were stopped again. There was a thundering stampede behind them that sounded like six people in pursuit. It was only Ferguson.

“Say, will you do your foraging someplace else? I need her for a picture.”

“Do you own her soul?”

“Yes!”

“Fine. Well, then, it’s just the body I’m taking with me. You’ll find her soul up there on the canvas.”

Ferguson straightened his tie determinedly. “Well, then, we’re both going with the body.”

They weren’t openly truculent about it, but both were in that mercurial state of mind where there is no longer much of a borderline between horseplay and hostility.

The girl surreptitiously sliced her hand against the side of Corey’s arm, as if asking him to leave this to her, drew Ferguson a few steps away, out of earshot.

“I’m going with him — to get rid of him. This is the simplest way there is. See if you can clear the rest of them out up there; I’ll come back later and we’ll finish the picture. Or have you had too much to drink?”

“This red ink? This isn’t drink.”

“Well, don’t drink any more then. I’ll be back in an hour — in an hour and a half at the latest. Be sure you have them out by then. Wait up there for me.”

“Is that a promise?”

“That’s more than a promise, it’s a dedication.”

He turned and, without another word, tramped stolidly up the stairs.

Corey prodded a wall switch, and a small apartment living room lit up. “After you,” he said with mock gallantry.

She took two bored steps forward into the place and let her eyes stray halfheartedly around, without any real interest. “Well, now what do we do here?” she asked abruptly.

He shied his hat off someplace where there was nothing to catch it. “You don’t seem to get the hang of things very easily, do you?” he said, thin lipped with annoyance. “Do you have to have outline drawings?”

She turned her face aside to her shoulder an instant. “Don’t. I hate that word.”

She moved ahead toward a dark opening. “What’s in there?”

“The other room,” he said disgruntledly. “Go ahead in and see it by yourself if you want to. I’m warning you, you’re rushing things. That doesn’t come for about another ten minutes yet.”

It lighted up and she passed from sight. It darkened and she came in again to where he was. He was swirling a coil of rye around in the bottom of a glass. “Aren’t you terrified?” he sneered. “It was a bedroom!”

A scornful catch sounded in her throat. “You’re the one seems to be terrified. What do you have to do, build up your courage with that stuff?”

“Well take that up in a few minutes — if you’ve got breath enough left to ask it.”

She went over to a kneehole desk, shot open a drawer or two. “Desk,” he said scathingly. “You know, four legs, something you write on.”

He put his glass down. “Lemme get something straight, just for the record. What was your idea was going to happen when you O.K.’ed coming up here with me? You were willing enough when I first put it up to you.”

“Because you were too willing to see me back to my place otherwise. My willingness beat yours to the punch, that was all.”

“And what’s over at your place that you’re leery of?”

She shot open a third drawer, shot it closed again. “You name it. My dear old mother. A six-month-old kid that I support by my modeling. Or maybe it’s just that the washbasin is cracked.”

He loosened his collar so abruptly the button flew off. “Well, the hell with your background, I’m going to give you a future. This is the works — now.”

She shot open a fourth drawer, looked down, smiled a little. “I knew there was one someplace around here. I saw a box of the cartridges in the bureau drawer inside.” She came up with an automatic.

He kept coming on over, necktie cockeyed. “Put that down! D’ya want to have an accident?”

“I don’t have accidents,” she murmured placidly. She measured the weapon lengthwise in the flat of one hand, thumbed the trigger.

“It’s loaded, you damn nitwit!”

“Then don’t try jerking it away from me, that’s what always sets them off. The safety’s down now, too.” She laid it down on the desk before her, but without taking her finger out of the trigger scabbard. He was in a state of mind where an antiaircraft gun wouldn’t have been able to do much with him. He caught her from behind in a double-furled embrace and hid her face under his own. Her hand stayed motionless on the desk, hooked in the gun, the whole time.

His face got out of the way finally — he had to breathe himself — and hers came into view again.

She drew her free hand across it with a grimace that wasn’t calculated to do his ego any good. “Don’t kiss me, you fool. I’m not out for love.”

“What are you out for then?”

“Nothing — as far as you’re concerned. You have nothing that I want, you have nothing that — is coming to me.

Her attitude shriveled him like a June bug in a match flame. He rammed his hands into his pockets with force enough to drive them in almost up to his elbows.

The gun slid off” the desk top, and she sauntered casually over toward the outside door, with it dangling from her one hooked finger.

“Come back here with that. Where do you think you’re going with it?”

“Only as far as the front door. I don’t know anything about you. I want to be sure that I get out of here. I’ll leave it just inside the door sill.”

His voice shook with masculine outrage. “Go ahead if you want to go that badly. I’m not that hard up.”

He heard the door open, and when he took a quick step out into the little entryway, the gun was lying there mockingly on the threshold. He could hear her going down the stairs — but with deliberation, not with hate. Even that concession to his injured self-esteem was lacking.

“I’ll get who you are yet!” he called down after her wrathfully.

Her answer came back from a floor below. “Better be thankful that you haven’t.”

The walloping slam he gave his door stunned the house like a shrapnel explosion. He picked up his empty whiskey glass and smashed it all the way across the room. He picked up a pottery ashtray and smashed that, too.

He called her every name under the sun but murderer; he didn’t happen to think of that one.

He called her every name but the right one.

Less than an hour later the light flashed on in the pitch-black bedroom with explosive suddenness, like a flashlight photograph, revealing Corey in blazer-striped pajamas, lying in a trough of tortured bed coverings, hand outstretched to the switch of the bedside lamp. He squinted protectively, unable to bear the brightness after the long hours of lying there in the dark. His hair was a briery mass that bespoke repeated digital massaging. A pyramid of cigarette butts topped the tray next to him, and he added one last one to the accumulation with a triumphant downward stab that showed it had finally brought results. “Damn it, I knew I’d seen her someplace be—” he muttered disjointedly.

The clock said 3:20.

Then, as the implications of the discovery hit him fully, his eyes opened to their full extent and he swung his legs to the floor. “The girl that was with Bliss that night! She’s already killed a man! I’m going to warn him right now to look out!”

He pounded outside in bare feet, came back again bringing the telephone directory from the hall, sat down on the bed with it, ran his finger down the column of F’s, stopped at Ferguson.

Then he looked at the clock again: 3:23. “He’ll think I’m nuts,” he murmured undecidedly. “The first thing in the morning’ll be time enough. I wonder if it really is the same girl; the other one was yellow as a buttercup, this one’s dark as a raven.”

Then, with a renewed stiffening of resolution, “I was never yet wrong in my life about a thing like this. He’s got to be told, I don’t care what time of night it is!” He flung the directory aside, barefooted it back to the hall and began dialing the number of Ferguson’s studio.

The call signal at the other end went on interminably; no one came to the phone to answer. He hung up finally, massaged his hair a couple more times. The party must be over by this time. Maybe Ferguson didn’t sleep there in the studio at nights. Sure he did, he must; Corey remembered seeing a bed in one of the rooms.

Well, he’d gone on someplace else then with the rest of them. It would have to wait until morning. He got back in bed, snapped out the light.

Two minutes later it had flashed on again, and he was struggling into his trousers. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he tried to reason with himself, “but I can’t sleep until I get in touch with that guy.” He shrugged on his coat, spliced the two ends of his necktie in a sketchy knot, closed the door after him. He went downstairs, drummed up a cab, gave Ferguson’s address.

Rationally, there was no basis whatever for his behavior, he had to admit. He was going to be made the laughingstock of everyone who knew him; their kindest explanation would be that he was drunk and suffering a mild case of the d.t.’s. Chasing down in the middle of the night to tell a guy, “Look out, your model’s going to kill you!” But he was in the grip of something irrational, he couldn’t explain what it was himself. A hunch, a premonition, a sense of impending danger. If Ferguson was out, he’d leave a note under the door: “She’s the girl who was with Bliss the night he died, I remember now. Keep your eye on her.” At least give the guy a chance to defend himself.

A knock at the studio door, when he stood before it presently, brought no more results than the phone call had. He noticed something that confirmed his hunch: Ferguson not only worked here but lived here, as well. A small thing, a slight thing — an empty milk bottle standing to one side of the door.

That finished it. Milk bottles are not put out before you go, but after you come back. He was in there, he was almost certainly in there. Corey had a premonition of doom now that wouldn’t be dispelled.

He went downstairs and roused the building superintendent, unconcerned at the wrathful reception that greeted him.

“Yeah, he sleeps up there in the studio. But he might be out. Them artist fellows are up all night sometimes. What’s all the excitement for?”

“You open that door for me,” Corey panted in a voice that brooked no argument. “I’ll take the responsibility if I’m wrong. But I’m not getting out of here until you come up and open that door for me, understand?”

The super grumblingly preceded him up the stairs, jangled keys, knocked uselessly before fitting one to the door. Corey knew where the switch was, reached around him backhand and plugged it on. The two of them stood there looking down the long vista of light to the far end where the black skylight panes slanted down and the outside night began.

All Corey said, in a strangely anticlimactic, almost subdued voice, was, “I knew it.”

Ferguson was lying face down before the easel. The wicked steel sliver of the arrowhead protruded from his back, over the heart, forced through by the fall itself to that additional penetration. In front, when they turned him over, the feathered end of it had been splintered by the fall, was at right angles to the rest of the shaft. He must have turned full face toward the stand at the instant it winged at him to receive it dead center to the heart like that.

Above him brooded Diana the huntress, Diana the killer — faceless now. The features that had tormented Corey were gone. An oval hole in the canvas, cut by a paint-scraping knife, occupied their place. The bow, cord slack now, balanced mockingly across one corner of the modeling stand.

Corey brooded, “I didn’t tumble in time, she beat me to it. He must have posed her late at night, to finish it up.”

“What d’ya suppose it was?” the super breathed, awestruck, after they’d put in the call and stood there in the open doorway, waiting for the police. “Her grip on the bowstring accidentally slipped and the arrow flew out?”

“No,” Corey murmured. “No. Diana the huntress came to life.”

III Post-Mortem on Ferguson

“Then she moved over here like this.” Corey was warming up to his reenactment as he went along, as any good actor does when he has a sympathetic audience and is enjoying his role. A cigarette hanging from the comer of his mouth vibrated with animation whenever he spoke. He was in his shirt sleeves, vest unbuttoned. A string of hair had come down over his forehead with the ardor of his movements.

“Go on,” Wanger nodded.

“Then she starts casing the drawers one by one like this, slap — slap — slap. Hell, I didn’t get it. I figured she was just stalling, giving herself something to do with her hands, you know; killing time like they do until the clinch caught up with her. So then she hits the one it’s in and comes up with it—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute—” Wanger started from his chair, made a hasty gesture of dissuasion. “Don’t touch it. We may still be able to get her prints off it. Have you handled it much yourself since she picked it up?”

Corey’s arrested hand hung like a claw over it. “No, only to put it back in. But I haven’t finished telling you what she did with it afterward—”

“All right, but first let me wrap it up. I want to have it checked — with your permission.”

“Help yourself.” He stood aside while Wanger took out a handkerchief, dipped into the drawer with it and transferred it to his pocket.

“I’ll see that you get it back,” Wanger promised.

“No hurry. Only too glad to be of some help.” The performance resumed. “So then, she doodles around with it. I go over and give her the old branding iron and” — he looked genuinely outraged all over again, even though this was only a recapitulation — “it didn’t take.”

Wanger nodded with masculine understanding. “She wasn’t having any.”

“She wasn’t having any. She says, ‘I don’t want love, I don’t want kisses,’ and she goes over to the door, gun and all. I follow her, and she’s left it lying there inside the sill, and she’s already halfway down the stairs. So I called down after her that I’d figure out who she was if it took me all the rest of the night, and she calls up to me, ‘Better be thankful you haven’t.’ ”

He got white around the mouth with virtuous indignation. “The little so-and-so, I’d like to give her a biff across the snout! I don’t mind a jane standing you off as long as she’s scared about it. But one thing gripes me is a jane standing you off and being fresh about it at the same time!”

Wanger could see his point perfectly. He’d been led on for some reason best known to herself by the murderous little trickster and then dished out of what he had a right to expect was coming to him. As far as Wanger’s personal feelings entered into it — and they didn’t at all — he liked this guy.

He drummed nails on the chair arm. “As I see it, there are three possible explanations for her coming up here with you like she did, before going back and killing the guy she had in mind to all along. One, she intended getting rid of you first, before you had a chance to warn Ferguson and throw a monkey wrench into the main business at hand. After she got here with you, you still hadn’t remembered who she was, so she changed her mind. She’d got you away from the party, and that was the most important thing. She figured she’d have time enough to get back there and finish up before it finally dawned on you where you’d seen her before. Two, she came up only to get the weapon and use it on him. No, that won’t hold up. My brain’s hitting on two cylinders. She left it behind her, inside the door. Well, three is you were pestering her at the party and she was afraid you would stay on after the others and gum the works up, so she took the easiest way of eliminating you. Gave you a tease treatment and then left you flat.”

Corey looked as though this last suggestion didn’t do his self-esteem any too much good, but he swallowed it.

“I think a combination of one and three is as close as we can get to it at the first sitting,” Wanger went on, getting ready to leave. “She came up here with you because you were getting in her hair. She intended giving you the gun if you came through with who she was, but if you didn’t, she was going to let you go. You didn’t, and she let you go. Come in tomorrow, will you? I want to go over the whole thing with you again. Just ask for me, Wanger’s the name.”

Day was breaking when he got back to headquarters, and daybreak wasn’t lovely around headquarters, inside or out. He was tired, and it was the hour when human vitality is at its lowest. He went into his superior’s untenanted office, slumped into a chair at the desk and let his head plop into his pronged fingers.

“Why the hell did that woman have to be born?” he groaned softly.

After a while he raised his head, took out the gun she’d handled at Corey’s place, put it in a manila folder, sealed the flap, scrawled across it almost illegibly: “See if you can get anything on this for me. Wanger, — the Precinct Div.”

He picked up the phone. “Send me in a messenger, will you?”

“There’s no one around out here right now,” the desk sergeant answered.

“Try to find someone, anyone’ll do.”

The rookie that showed up about ten minutes later was green enough to have fooled a grazing cow.

Wanger remarked, “Where’d they dig you up from?” But he said it well under his breath. After all, everyone has feelings.

“What took you so long?”

“I got in a couple of the wrong rooms. This building’s kind of tricky.”

Wanger looked at him through blurred eyes. “Take this over and give it in for me. It’s a gun. They’ll know what to do.” Then, with a touch of misgiving, “Will you be able to get there, d’you think?”

The rookie beamed proudly. “Oh, sure, I been sent over there twice already since I been detailed around here.”

He turned, came up against the wrong side of the door, where there was no knob, only hinges, looked up and down the seam as though it had played a dirty trick on him. Then he got what the trouble was, shifted over to where the knob was, grabbed it and still couldn’t get out right.

“Get your feet out of the way,” Wanger coached him with angelic patience. “They’re holding it up.”

He was too tired even to get sore about it.

“You’re still sure of what you told me the other night?” Wanger began, on his second and more detailed questioning of Corey, at headquarters forty-eight hours later.

“Positive. She had the same eyes, mouth, everything, in fact, but the hair, of that girl in black who was at Marjorie Elliott’s engagement party the night Bliss met his death two years ago. I could swear it was the same one!”

“Your testimony’s doubly welcome to me; it’s not only important in itself but it bears out what my own private theory has been in these cases all along: that the woman is one and the same. A theory that, I might add, isn’t shared by anyone else.”

Corey clenched his fist, bounced it on the tabletop. “If I’d only gotten it sooner, figured out who it was the portrait reminded me of! But I didn’t get it in time.”

“Undoubtedly you could have saved his life if you’d only made the discovery even an hour earlier that same night. But the breaks fell her way. As it was, you only succeeded in hurrying the thing up, bringing it on all the faster, by insisting you’d seen her somewhere before. She identified you and recognized the danger, realized she had a deadline to work against. And made it — maybe only minutes ahead of your first warning phone call! He died at twenty-one past three in the morning; his wrist-watch stopped with the fall.”

“And I phoned him at 3:22 or 3:23; I saw the time there in my room!” Corey grimaced anguishedly. “The arrow must have been still vibrating through his heart, he hadn’t even toppled to the floor yet!”

“Don’t let it get you.” The detective tried to brace him up. “It’s over now and it’s too late. What interests me is that you can be invaluable to me; you’re what I’ve been crying for all along in this, and now I’ve got it. At last there’s a link between two of these four men. You didn’t know Mitchell, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Moran?”

“Him, either.”

“But at least you did know two of them, if not the others. You’re the first witness of any sort we’ve turned up who is in that position, who overlaps two of these episodes, bridges them. Don’t y’see what you can mean to us?”

Corey looked doubtful. “But I didn’t know the two of them concurrently. I only met Ferguson about eight months ago, at a cocktail party. Bliss was already dead by that time.”

Wanger’s face dropped. “So that even through you, any connection between the two of them will have to come by hearsay, at secondhand.”

“I’m afraid so. Even Bliss I only knew the last year or two of his life. He and Ferguson had sort of drifted apart, got out of each other’s orbit, by then.”

“Any trouble between them?” Wanger asked alertly.

“No. Different worlds, that was all. Divergent occupations and hence divergent interests; brokerage and art. No points of contact left after they once started to harden into their molds.”

“Did either of them mention Mitchell?”

“No, never that I can recall.”

“Moran?”

“No.”

“Well, Mitchell and Moran are in it somewhere,” Wanger said doggedly. “But we’ll let them ride for the present, take the two we’ve got. Now, here’s what I want you to do for me: I want you to burrow back in your memory, rake up every particular mention each of those two made of the other — Bliss of Ferguson and Ferguson of Bliss — and try to recall in just what connection the reference was made, just what subject or topic it had to do with. Women, horses, money, whatever it was. Is that clear? My theory is there is some point at which these four lives cross — maybe other lives, as well. But since I don’t know who the others are, I’ll have to confine myself to the four I do know of so far. Once I find that point, I may be able to trace the woman forward, from there on, since I haven’t been able to trace her or her motive backward, from the crimes themselves.”

Wanger to superior:

“As a matter of fact, to clear the decks I’m going to do what will probably seem to you suicidal, fatal. I’m going to eliminate the woman from my calculations entirely, leave her out of it as completely as though she didn’t exist. She only clouds the thing up, anyway. I’m going to concentrate on the four men. Once I can put my finger on the connecting link there is between them, shell reenter the thing automatically, probably dragging her motive into view.”

His superior shook his head dubiously. “It’s sort of an inverted technique, to say the least. She commits the murders, so instead of concentrating on her, you concentrate on the victims.”

“In self-defense. Shell hold us up forever, like she’s already held us up for nearly two solid years. When you can’t get in one door, get in another. Even if they don’t lead to the same rooms, at least you’re in.”

“Well, try to get in, even if it’s by a chimney,” his superior urged plaintively. “The only thing that keeps this from being a big stink is that no one inside or out of the department seems to share your conviction that the four cases have any relation to one another. Presumably to be outwitted by four separate criminals on four different occasions is less of a reflection on us than to be outwitted by the same criminal four times running.”

Wanger was coming down the steps at headquarters when he bumped into Corey on his way up them. Corey grabbed him by the arm. “Hold on, you’re just the man I want to see.”

“What brings you around here at this unearthly hour? I was just on my way home.”

“I was playing cards until now, and listen, remember those ^mentions’ you asked me to recall if I could — Bliss of Ferguson, and vice versa? Well, one of them popped into my head, so I left the game flat then and there.”

“Swell. Come on in and let’s hear it.” They turned and went up the steps together. Wanger led him into an unoccupied room at the back, snapped on a light. “I get the hell bawled out of me whether I get home late or early,” he confessed ruefully, “so half an hour more won’t matter.”

“Now, I don’t know if this is what you want or not, but at least I got something. I wanted to get it to you right away, before I lose it again. Association of ideas brought something back to me. We were playing stud tonight and somebody shoved a stack of chips across the table, said, ‘Can’t take ’em with you.’ That brought Ferguson back to me. We were playing poker down at his studio one night, and I remember him shoving a stack across the table with the same remark. Then that in turn brought back a reference he made at the time to Ken Bliss — and that was what you told me the other day you wanted.

“See how it works? Association of ideas, once removed. He said, ‘I haven’t had a hand like this since I used to belong to the Friday-Night Fiends.’ I said, ‘What were the Friday-Night Fiends?’ He said. ‘Ken Bliss and I and a couple of others were banded together in a sort of informal card-playing club. No dues or charter or anything like that; we’d just meet every other Friday — payday for most of us — for a stud session, each time at a different guy’s room. Then we’d all pile into a car we owned shares in, half-soused, and go joyriding through the town, raising cain.’ ”

“That was all he said, just in the space of time it took the dealer to fill up discards around the board. Now is that worth anything to you?”

Wanger whacked him behind the shoulder, so hard that Corey had to grab the table to keep an even balance. “It’s the first break I’ve had!”

Wanger to superior:

“They belonged to a card club together, Bliss and Ferguson. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it’s what I’ve said I wanted, so I’m not kicking: the point at which their two lives crossed.”

“What does that give you?”

“One thread by itself is not much good. Two crossed threads are that much stronger. Cross a few more together at the same place, and you’re beginning to get something that’ll hold weight. It’s the way nets are made.

“Now I’ve got to do a lot of plodding. I’ve got to find out the date, that is the year, on which this little amateur social club was banded together. I’ve got to find out others who were in it, along with Bliss and Ferguson. I’ve got to find out the dates of the month of the particular Fridays on which they got together. When I have, I’ve got to check those dates carefully to see if I can find just what they were up to when, as Ferguson expressed it; they went tearing around half-stewed. It may show up in the blotter of some out-of-the-way police station.

“Then when I’ve got all that built up, I can start looking for this woman from that point on. I’ll have a fulcrum. I won’t be suspended in midair the way I am now.”

“Outside of all that,” commiserated his superior, but strictly off the record, “you’ve got practically nothing to do. How you going to spend your spare time?”

Ten days later:

“Get anywhere yet?”

“Yeah, like a snail. I’ve got the year date and I’ve got the names of the other two members of the Friday-Night Fiends. But there’s a blind spot has developed in it that I don’t like the looks of. It may make the whole line of investigation worthless if I can’t clear it up pretty soon.”

“What is it?”

“No Mitchell. He wasn’t a member of the card club; his name wasn’t among them. I went checking back through dusty police blotters, and I finally hit something, like I figured I might. Four men in a car were pinched on a Friday for drunken and disorderly conduct, reckless driving, smashing a plate-glass window by throwing an empty liquor bottle at it as they went by and finally knocking over a fire hydrant. They spent sixty days apiece in the workhouse, had to pay the damages, and of course their license was taken away from them. Now, three of the names down on the blotter were Bliss, Moran and Ferguson. They gave their right ones, too, thank God. The fourth is a new one, Honeyweather. Also, I got their addresses — at that time — off the blotter. I’ll have an easier time now tracing this Honeyweather, the other member, from there on. But if Mitchell had been a member of the card club, he’d have been in the jam along with them, and he’s one of the four she’s killed. So I’m scared stiff that the card club has nothing to do with the killings and I’m barking up the wrong tree.”

“Mitchell may have been ill that particular night, or he’d passed out and been dropped off at his home before they got into all that trouble, or he may have been out of town. I wouldn’t give up yet; I’d keep on with it like you are. At least it’s a positive line of approach; it’s better than nothing at all.”

A week later:

“How are you coming now, Wanger?”

“Do you see this look on my face? It’s that of a man about to jump off a bridge.”

“Fair enough! Only first clean up these Unknown-Woman Murders. Then I’ll drive you as far as the bridge approach myself and even pay the toll for you.”

“All kidding aside, chief, it’s ghastly. I’ve finished building the thing up since my last report. I’ve got it all complete now, not a thing left out. I even filled in the Mitchell blind spot. And now that I’m through — it has no meaning, it doesn’t help us at all! It has the same drawback to it that each of these murders in itself has had: there isn’t any motive there, from beginning to end, to incite to murder. Nothing they did was criminal enough, injurious enough to anyone, to precipitate a deferred-payment blood feud.”

“It may be present but you haven’t identified it yet. Let me hear your report anyway.”

“I tried to trace this Honeyweather, the fourth member, from the address he gave that night of their quadruple arraignment. And I’ve lost him entirely. Gone from the face of the earth. I was able to keep up with his movements for about a year afterward — and God knows he moved around plenty! Then he seems to have dropped from sight, vanished as completely as this woman herself has — only without the subsequent reappearances she makes!”

“What line was he in?”

“Seems to have been chronically unemployed. He sat in his room all day pecking away at a typewriter, from what his last landlady tells me. Then he left there and never showed up anywhere else.”

“Wait a minute, maybe I can give you a lift on that,” his superior said. “Unemployed — pecking away at a typewriter; maybe he was trying to be a writer. They sometimes change their names, don’t they? Have you got a pretty recognizable description?”

“Yes, fairly accurate.”

“Take it around to the various publishing houses, see if it fits anyone you know. Now, what about Mitchell? You said you cleared that up.”

“Yes. He was the bartender of a place they frequented at that time. They took him with them in the car more than once. Chiefly, I gather, because he chiseled liquor from his employer’s shelves and brought it along with him each time. So that although he was not a member of the card club itself, he was very much present when they went skylarking around afterward. Which at least keeps my whole line of investigation from collapsing, the way I was afraid it was going to; those Friday-night tears in the car are still the point at which all their lives intercross. But the main difficulty still remains: they don’t seem to have been guilty of anything that would warrant bringing this on, what we’re up against now.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“As far as all police records go, anywhere within the city limits during that period; and I’ve even covered the nearby outlying communities.”

“But don’t you realize that it was bound to be something that escaped police attention at the time, otherwise they wouldn’t still be at large today? It must have been a crime that was never attributed to them on the official records.”

“More than that,” Wanger said thoughtfully. “It just occurs to me — it may have been a crime that they didn’t even realize they committed themselves. Well, I’ve got a way of finding that out, too! I’m going to sift through the back files of every newspaper that came out, on the particular dates of their get-togethers. It must be in one of them somewhere, hidden, tucked away, not seeming to have anything to do with him. That’s what libraries are for. That’s where I’ll be from now on. The tougher it gets, the harder to lick I get!”

Wanger to Fingerprint Department, by telephone:

“Well, what the hell happened to that gun? D’ya lose it? I’m still waiting for a report.”

“What gun? You never sent us any gun, whadaya talking about?”

Incoherent squeak, as when a tenor voice goes suddenly falsetto. Then: “I never what? I sent you a gun to be checked over God knows how many weeks ago and not a peep out of you since! I’m still waiting! It wasn’t supposed to be a Christmas present, y’know! What kind of a place are you running there, anyway? It’s up to you guys to get it back to me, or didn’t you know that? You’re a fine bunch of crumbs!”

“Listen, thunder voice, we don’t needa be told our job by anyone. Who the hell do you think you are, the police commissioner? If y’da sent us a gun to be tested, we’da sent it back to ya! How we gonna get something back to you we never got from you in the first place?”

“Listen, don’t get tough with me, whoever you are. I got a gun coming to me and I want it!”

“Aw, look up your assignment and see if that’s where you left it!”

Clopp!

City home of a popular and successful writer, three weeks later:

“Mr. Holmes, there’s a gentleman in the outside room who insists on seeing you. He won’t be put off.”

“You know better than to do this! How long have you been working for me?”

“I told him you were dictating into the machine, but he says it simply cannot wait. He threatened, if I didn’t come in and inform you, to come in himself.”

“Where’s Sam? Call Sam and have him thrown out! If he gives you any trouble, call the police!”

“But, Mr. Holmes, he is the police. That’s why I thought I’d better come in and let you—”

“Police be damned! I suppose I parked too long by a fireplug or something! Right while I’m in the middle of the biggest scene in the whole book, too! D’you realize this whole interruption has gone into the machine, that I’ll have to start over again from the end of the last record? I’m sorry to do this. Miss Truslow, but you’ve broken one of my first and most inflexible rules that was impressed on you over and over when you were first taken on to help me with my work. No intrusion while I’m creating, not even if the building is burning down around me! I’m afraid I won’t need you any more after today. You finish up the typing that you have on hand, and Sam will give you your check when you’re ready to go home.

“Is this the man? Just what do you mean by forcing yourself in here and creating a disturbance like this? What is it you want to speak to me about?”

Wanger (softly): “Your life.”