The Dancing Detective

Two Fellows in a Furnished Room

I can’t say I took a shine to the idea of clearing out and turning the place over to him like that on a Monday night. If it’d been any other night but Monday. Monday I always did my studying-up for the night class I went to once a week, on Tuesday night. He knew that by now. We’d been rooming together long enough.

But he went ahead and asked it anyway. “—And I got a ring from her just before I left work. She said it’s very important, she’s got to see me right tonight, and it’s got to be someplace where we can talk. Now you know I can’t go over to her place on account of the way her family feels about me. So I told her to come up here, and I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind—” And then he ended up, “Just this once. I won’t ask anything like this of you again, Red.”

I thought: Darned right you won’t, because you’ll get turned down flat if you do. But what could I do? Refuse point-blank to his face? That wouldn’t have made for very pleasant living together afterwards. And after all, he did have half-rights in the place.

I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been a half-decent night. But there was one of those fine needle rains oozing; the kind that doesn’t fall, that you don’t even see in the air, but that just shows by wetting the surface of the street and tickling the back of your neck. It was no use going to the library and doing my stuff there; that closed at nine and I would have been only about half-through by then. I saw where I’d have to let it go altogether tonight, try to cram it all in just before class the following evening. Just roam around for tonight and try to find someplace to hang out in, out of the mist.

“All right,” I gave in, “what time does curfew go into effect?”

“Now you don’t have to dodge meeting her, I don’t mean that,” he protested. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her and me. This isn’t a date, there’s nothing underhanded about it. She said it’s something that concerns both our futures, and it’s just that there isn’t anyplace else we can talk in privacy. And with the three of us around here at the same time, you wouldn’t be able to get your studying done and we wouldn’t be able to talk freely. You don’t have to duck out before she comes; I just thought I’d explain the situation to you ahead of time, to avoid embarrassment. She said she’d be here around eight-thirty or a little after.”

“It’s nearly that now.” I reached for my hat, edged up my coat-collar. “Maybe I can find some kind of a show,” I suggested half-heartedly.

He followed me to the door. “Now don’t be peeved about this, will you, Red?”

What was the use of being a grouch about it? As long as I was doing it I might as well do it obligingly, I figured. My disposition matches my hair; I can get sore, but I can’t hold it. “Forget it,” I squinted at him. He closed and I went down.

I met her coming up. I’d never seen her before, but I’d heard him talk enough about her to know it was she. She had on a raincoat made of green cellophone. I’m quick to judge. She was a nice girl. So nice she could have brought an overnight-case here with her, and you’d know just by looking at her there was nothing shady about it.

I edged over to give her room. She knew who I was too, I guess, from him. She smiled sociably. “I hope he didn’t chase you out on my account?” she said.

I didn’t know if he wanted her to know he had or not, so I said: “No, that’s all right, I was going out anyway.”

There wasn’t very much more than that for us to say; we didn’t know each other after all. “Well, goodnight,” she said, and went on up. “Goodnight,” I said, and tipped my hat and went on down.

I heard him come out to the door and let her in, just before I quitted the bottom of the staircase. She hadn’t knocked or anything, he must have seen her from the window. “Hello, Estelle,” I heard him say. His greeting sounded a little grave, a little troubled, I thought.

I thought about the two of them intermittently during the next few hours, but only because of the inconvenience they were putting me to. I had a hard time of it. Man is a creature of habit. My habit was to study for night class on Monday evenings, and because that had been disrupted I found myself at a complete loss for something to do. I couldn’t find a show that suited me. Then before I could make up my mind, it was already too late for one, so that took care of that. I’m not a solitary drinker, never have been, so that excluded taprooms. I finally compromised by sitting down at a little coffee counter somewhere and poring slowly through a tabloid I’d bought. For the first and last times in my life I found myself doing anagrams and acrostics by the time I’d worked my way to the back of it.

When the clock hands started inching into the last half-hour before midnight, I finally chucked it, started back. I’d given them three hours together. That should have been enough, they should have been able to settle the destiny of the world in three hours. I didn’t feel obliging now any more. If she was still up there chewing the rag with him, then she was going to clear out and give me a chance to get these wet shoes off. On the up-and-up or not, it wouldn’t look right if she stayed very much later than this, and the two of them ought to have sense enough to realize that without being told.

I took a look up at our room windows from the other side of the street first, before I crossed over. They were brightly lit up, and as I looked I saw his shadow flit across one of them. No sign of her, though. “Here I come, ready or not,” I grunted. I’d absorbed so much moisture into my shoes by this time they made a little squirting sound every time I pressed them down.

I crossed over, let myself in the street door, and trudged up the stairs. I took off my hat and beat it out against the rail as I went up, to get the spray off it.

I listened outside the room-door a minute to see if I could still hear her voice in there. Not that I wasn’t going in. I could hear him moving around quite plainly but I couldn’t hear anything said, so she must have left. He sounded very active, almost hurried. In the brief moment I stood there I heard him pass back and forth across the room three times. He might have been just pacing though, not doing anything.

I rapped. There was a sudden silence, movement stopped dead, but he didn’t come over to the door. I had to rap a second time.

He opened it, looked out at me, skin pulled back tight around his eyes. Then it relaxed again. He’d been holding it defensively a minute, at a narrow width. When he saw it was me he opened it wide, but I’d caught the hesitation.

“What’d you do that for?” he said a little sharply, as though it had rattled him. “Didn’t you have your key?”

“What’s matter, you nervous?” I said. “Sure I had my key. Why should I go dredging into my damp pockets, as long as you were in here?” I came in, glanced around. “Girl-friend gone?”

“Yeah, just before you got here.”

“You’re some guy. You mean you let her go alone, didn’t even take her home, on a night like this?”

“I put her in a taxi at the door.” He’d flung himself into a chair which happened to be facing my way. He made the mistake of crossing his ankles out at full leg length from his body. That way the soles of his shoes were tipped-up from the floor. I could see both of them; they were dust white, bone-dry. I’d never yet heard of anyone putting a girl into a taxi by staying back within the shelter of the doorway and letting her cross the wet sidewalk to the curb by herself.

He was lying. He’d made that up on the spur of the moment, because he was ashamed to have me think he hadn’t been more considerate of her. I didn’t call him on it. Why should I have a row with him, it wasn’t any of my business. I had my own lamentable condition to occupy me. I peeled off one sock, then the other, took a twist in them, drops of water oozed out. I meant it as an indirect way of rubbing it in, but he seemed too preoccupied to get the point.

I knew him well enough by now to know something was getting him. No chatter, like when he’d been out with her of an evening and I had to listen to all about how wonderful she was. On the other hand, no fretting and complaining either, like when the mother’s campaign to separate them had first started in. Not a word. His face was a mask of some deep emotion or other, frozen fast, caked on him. I couldn’t name what it was, I’m no soul doctor.

He stayed in that chair where he’d first dropped into when I came in, made no move about getting to bed. Finally, coming to the bedroom-opening and looking out at him, buttoning my pajama coat, I said: “What’s matter, did you have a row?”

He didn’t give me a direct answer. “Why should we have a row?” was the way he put it.

It wasn’t any of my business, I’m no cupid.

He got up suddenly, as though a spring had been uncoiled under him, went over to the cupboard where we usually kept a bottle of liquor in reserve. He brought it out, held it to the light. “This all gone?” he said disappointedly, and let his arm trail down again with it.

I’d been the one had supplied it, and it hadn’t been the last time I’d seen it, so someone must have helped himself to it liberally, fairly recently — maybe within the past hour or so.

“I’m going down to the corner a minute and get a quick one,” he said.

“What d’you want a drink for at this hour?” We weren’t either one of us topers. We weren’t goody-goods that didn’t touch drink, but we usually only went in for it when we were out celebrating on a Saturday night or something like that. This nightcap business was something new. I felt like saying, I was the one was out in the wet, you weren’t, I ought to need one if anyone does. But I let it go by. I noticed he didn’t ask me if I wanted to come with him. But then after all, that might have been because he saw me already half-into my pajamas, I figured. I wouldn’t have gone even if he’d asked me to, anyway.

“I’m going to bed,” I warned him. “Better take your own key with you.”

“I’m coming right back,” he assured me. “I’m going to bed too.”

He closed the door after him and I quit thinking about him.

I had to cross the room in my bare feet to put out the light, which he’d forgotten to do. No sense subsidizing the Edison Company.

Something bit into my unprotected sole, and I snatched it up, held it with both hands for a minute. I looked to see what it was, and it was a little metal clamp or clasp, with a little wisp of green cellophone still thrust through it. His girl-friend had lost one of the fasteners of her raincoat. But it hadn’t just loosened and dropped off, they were patented not to; the tatter of green adhering to it showed it had been torn off bodily. Maybe she had caught it on something. I wondered why she hadn’t taken it with her, to try to have it reattached in some way; they must be hard to match up, if you lost one of them.

I put it aside where it wouldn’t be mislaid and went to bed.

It always took me three complete turns to get in position, about five minutes between each one. And once I was in position I didn’t want to get out of it for anybody.

Just as I got into it, and was set for the night, the phone had to start ringing. I kept my eyes closed and tried to ignore it. I was sure it was a wrong number; what else could it be at this hour of the night? I kept hoping he’d come in just at that minute, and answer it and save me the trouble of getting up. Or else it would quit of its own accord.

Neither thing happened. He didn’t come in, and it kept on. It kept on long after the usual length of signaling, as though the party were urging the operator not to desist. I had to give in finally. I got out of position, put on my bathrobe, and went over to it with a good sour face. I answered it in the dark, I knew where it was by heart.

It was a woman’s voice. It had three elements in it, they were unmistakable from the very opening phrase. Some voices can be eloquent that way. The three tonal components were a deep-seated, cold hostility; the sort of hostility that has been borne over a considerable period of time; and a heated resentment, newer, brought on by the occasion itself, kept in leash only with difficulty; and lastly, less discernible than the other two, there was a thread of fear stitching through it.

The voice didn’t address by name or give any opening salutation. “Will you please put my daughter on?” it began without prelude. “Now she promised me to have a definite understanding with you once and for all, and to come right back. Those were the conditions under which I let her go to see you tonight, and if you think that you’ll get anywhere by trying to influence her until all hours of the—” Then she stopped short and said, “This is Mr. Dixon, isn’t it?” She hated even to have to pronounce the name. I suppose she called him “that young man” to the girl.

I’d been trying to say that it wasn’t all along. “No, this is Stewart Carr, his roommate; I expect him back any minute.”

The cold hostility and the resentment immediately veered off, since they weren’t meant for me personally; only the thread of fear remained. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “Well I presume she’s left, then. If he was a gentleman, he would have seen to it that she reached home before now, he wouldn’t have kept her there until this hour, on such a rainy night, until I had to phone to remind—”

I tried to be reassuring about it. “She left over three-quarters of an hour ago, she ought to be there any minute now, Mrs.—” I didn’t even know their last name. That should have been about right; I’d been in at least that long myself, and Dixon had said she’d left just before I—

I’d evidently said the wrong thing; fear took over the voice, crowding everything else out. “Three-quarters of an hour ago! Then why isn’t she back here by now? It’s only six blocks to her own door, from there. It shouldn’t take her that long, for such a short distance.”

It shouldn’t have, if that was all it was. And he’d said he’d put her in a cab, which should have cut the time it would take her down to next to nothing. I had sense enough not to mention that detail.

“It would be just like him to keep her loitering along the way, on a wet night like this!” the voice went on bitterly. She was assuming that Dixon was bringing her back, I could see. I didn’t know whether I ought to disabuse her on this point or not. It would probably add fuel to her disquiet, to hear he’d let her make her own way back. And since the girl was bound to reach there any minute, what difference did it make anyway? Let her find out from the girl herself what had caused the delay; why did I have to be roused in the middle of the night about it?

“She’ll probably be there in no time now,” I tried to calm her.

“I sincerely hope so,” she fretted. And then on a note of taut warning, “If she isn’t back here soon I’ll—” She didn’t finish it; she’d hung up.

I did too. I gave the oblivious door a dirty look. Why didn’t he come up here and answer his own tracer-calls? I had to get some sleep, I had to get up in the morning.

I climbed back in and went through the triple gear shift again. I dropped off. Then sleep smashed apart, like an electric-light bulb that you pop, and the damn phone was ringing away again in the middle of the fragments.

I went back to it in a sort of blur, too groggy even to be sore this time. It woke me right up, like a filch of cold water in the face. It was the same woman. You wouldn’t have known it by the voice. The voice was husky this time with out-and-out terror. No more genteel indignation and trepidation. Stark fright, maternal, unreasoning, straining at the leash of self-possession. “I demand to speak with John Dixon! I demand to know what’s become of my daughter!”

“She isn’t back yet?”

My futile surprise went unnoticed. “What has he done with her? Why isn’t she here? My Estelle wouldn’t stay out until this hour of her own accord. I know her better than that! I’ve been pacing the floor here until I can’t stand it any more; I’ve even been down to the corner three times in all the rain to see if I could see her coming— Do you know what time it is?”

I hadn’t until then. I thought maybe this was twenty minutes later. “Just a minute.” I reached for the switch with my free hand, put on the light, looked at the clock. Horrified incredulity sparked from the look. Quarter to three in the morning. He’d been gone himself nearly three hours. She was supposed to have left for home over three-and-a-half hours ago — and she only lived six blocks away.

I didn’t know what to say. “He... he stepped down to the corner and he hasn’t come back yet—” I faltered. But I’d told her that hours ago.

The voice was repressing hysteria only with the greatest difficulty. It was all shredded and coming apart. “Why does he refuse to come to the phone himself and face me like a man? What does he think he’ll gain by avoiding me like this? He can’t do this to me. I warned her, I told her all along if she kept on seeing him, something would happen sooner or later—”

I didn’t say anything this time; what was there I could say any more?

The voice was utterly beyond control now, had disintegrated. It was awful to have to stand there and listen to it — harrowing; it went right through you. “I want my little girl back! What’s he done with her? I’m going to notify the police. They’ll help me, they’ll find out why she doesn’t come home—”

Suddenly she had hung up, there was silence.

And then, just a minute too late, his key dialed the lock and he came in, looking haunted.

“Well, it’s about time!” I said wrathfully. “Where the hell have you been? You go down for just one drink and you stay down half the night — and let me do your dirty work for you up here!”

Something electric flickered over his face, I couldn’t tell what it was. “What’s up?”

“You’re in trouble, that’s what’s up. Your girl never got home from here tonight. Her mother’s phoned twice since you’ve been gone, and the last time she said she was going to notify the police. You better get over there fast and find out what’s happened—”

I waited. He waited too. He just stood there looking at me, without moving.

“Well, don’t you think you’d better at least call her back?”

“She wouldn’t listen to me, she wouldn’t give a chance to— She hates me, she’s been trying to break us up. If anything’s happened — this is my finish.”

“That’s no kind of a reason. The girl was over here and she knows it; at least get in touch with the woman. If you don’t, she’s liable to think the worst.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you; she does already. No matter what I’d do, she’d—”

I didn’t know what to do against a line of reasoning like that; it was all haywire. It was going to lead him into trouble, if he wasn’t in it already.

I shut up for awhile and watched him. Didn’t stare at him, I mean, but just studied him offside. He wasn’t drunk. He’d been down drinking for three solid hours — supposedly — and yet he wasn’t drunk. I thought I’d like to find out about that. “Where were you, at McGinnis’s?” I asked offhandedly.

He nodded dully, looking at the floor.

That was the place on our corner. I’d been in there with him often enough. They had bowlfuls of these oyster crackers sitting at each end of the long bar. Unless it was very crowded — and it wouldn’t be at three in the morning on a rainy Monday — you’d take your stand somewhere along the midsection. When you went down for crackers, you’d bring back a few at a time with you, to save yourself making the trip down and back too often. I’d never been in there with him yet but what he hadn’t had a few left over in his pocket when he came away.

He’d hung his coat off the northeast corner of his chair. “Got a cigarette?” I said, and went over to it and reached down into the flap pocket. A solitary oyster cracker came up in my hand.

“You didn’t get much of an edge,” I said, taking one of my own cigarettes instead, without letting him see me. He could have been in there five minutes and still put that cracker in his pocket. Two-and-a-half. And then what had become of the other two hours and fifty-five?

“I didn’t even finish the one drink I bought, just sat there moping. I didn’t realize how time passed. There are times you feel too low even to—”

I was standing by the window with my back to him, looking down at the patent-leather finish the rain had given the street. I stiffened my back at one point. That was the only indication to show I was seeing anything. I thought I’d better give it to him ahead of time, though, let him get ready. I said without turning my head: “A cop just got out and came in here. I saw the glint of his visor disk.”

“Red, you’ve got to stick by me.”

This time I did turn my head, fast. “What do you mean I’ve got to stick by you?”

He clutched at the hack of his neck, groped for the answer. “If they come here and ask you if — if you saw her leave, tell them you did. Tell them you came along just in time to see me come down to the street door with her and put her in a taxi.”

“But I didn’t.” My tone was flat as an 1890 dime.

“I know you didn’t, but if you’d been five minutes sooner you would have. Don’t you see, the way it is now, no one saw her leave here. She ends here. If I can at least produce someone that’ll say they saw her leave here— That five minutes makes all the difference.”

I remembered the dry soles of his shoes. I had to be sure of what I was doing. I thought: I’ll give him one more chance on that. If he gives me a second wrong answer, he can go to blazes. “But which’ll I be doing?” I said. “Describing something I just missed seeing, or describing something that — didn’t happen for anyone to see? Are you sure you took her down to the door and put her in a cab?”

I don’t know if my steely look warned him off, or he just thought better of it himself. His luck was he gave the right answer this time. “N-no,” he corrected himself, “I didn’t take her down to the door myself. But you can be sure she left here, and you can be sure she left here in a taxi—”

“The first time, you told me you took her down and put her in the taxi.”

“I know; it wasn’t this serious yet, it didn’t seem to matter much one way or another then. I was ashamed to let you think I was heel enough not to see her off right. We parted on the outs, she just walked out. Then I heard her whistling up a taxi from the doorway downstairs. I could hear it plainly through the windows. I heard one drive up, she darted out and climbed into it, and—”

“Wait a minute. You saw her get into it?”

He gave me a harried look. “I got over to the window a minute too late. Her figure had just crouched in. Her hand was still on the doorcatch, pulling it to after her. What the hell. Who else could it have been? She had just left the room up here a minute before. I stayed on there at the window after the cab drove off, brooding down into the rain for a good five minutes or more, and no one else came out of the house. That must have been she in the cab. Now is it going to hurt you to say you saw that too, from down at the corner? All I’m asking, Red, is—”

Before I could answer, the knock had already sounded on the door. The knock we’d both been expecting from one minute to the next, held back like a Chinese water-drop torture. I jerked my thumb toward the sound, as much as to say: “There’s your party now.”

Even then he found time to make his plea once more, in a husky, anxious whisper, as he edged reluctantly across the room: “Are you with me, Red? How about it, are you with me?”

He sure needed moral support bad. I couldn’t help wondering why he should. Why wasn’t his own sense of innocence backing-up enough?

It was just the curtain raiser, this first time. Just routine, just a uniformed patrolman sent around to check. No question of foul play yet, Missing Persons didn’t even have it yet. Just the complaint of the crazed mother.

For that very reason I couldn’t help wondering, as I saw that shield coming in the door, that openly worn shield that usually forecast little more than a ticket for parking overtime or a warning to “Cut out that noise up here now,” why Dixon should be so ready to expect the worst beforehand, why he should seem so — how’ll I put it? — ahead of the game. He seemed rushing to meet the worst possible conclusion before anyone else was, including the authorities themselves. Always excepting the mother. And mothers — are they gifted with special foresight or are they blinded by lack of it?

It went off very smoothly, without a hitch. The cop jotted in a notebook, Dixon answered what he asked him... About quarter to twelve... No, I offered to, but she wouldn’t let me, she said she had a raincoat, and she’d get a cab right from the door... (Distorting what he’d told me, that they’d parted “on the outs.”)

That reminded me of something. I looked over at the table where I’d put that ripped-off raincoat clasp I’d trodden on. It wasn’t there any more. I looked at Dixon. He looked down his cheeks.

The cop only asked me one thing. “Were you here?”

I answered the one thing with only one word, “No.” That was the extent of my participation. The problem in ethics Dixon had posed for me hadn’t even come up — yet.

The cop left. We went to bed. It was four by that time. He was still awake when I went to sleep. He was awake again — or yet — when I woke up. We didn’t talk about it. I was in too much of a hurry and too half-slept to be able to give a thought to anything but getting down on time. I tore out of the place without a word, kiting my coat after me by one-quarter of one sleeve length.

He wasn’t there when I got back. Someone else was. I put the key to the door and came in and found a man making himself at home in our easy-chair, pretending to read a newspaper. You could tell he’d just picked it up when he heard me at the door. One edge of the carpet was a little rippled, as though it had been turned over, then flung back.

We’d had the curtain raiser. Now this was the First Act.

I said “What goes on?” without too much cordiality.

He showed a badge, said: “Super let me in to wait for you boys. You Carr? You the other fellow that lives here with Dixon?”

“That’s who.”

“A girl named Estelle Mitchell came here last night, didn’t she?”

“Okay if I sit down? I had to stand all the way home.” I sat.

“Well?”

“Yes,” I said coolly, “there was a girl dropped in here last night, and I believe her name was Mitchell.”

“What time’d she get here?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“You saw her come in?”

“I met her on the stairs, on my way out.”

“What time’d you get back yourself?”

“Close to twelve.”

“Was she still here then?”

“She’d just left.”

“How’d you know she just left? Did your friend tell you that, or did you see her leave?”

The problem in ethics had come up. It wasn’t my own skin I gave a rap about. If I could have been sure of him, Dixon, I would have gladly said I took her back to her own door myself, and the hell with this dick and all other dicks. But I wasn’t as sure of him as... well, as I would have liked to be. “I as good as saw her leave.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“As I turned the corner and came in sight of the house here, I saw a cab standing waiting to take on someone at the door. I saw a figure run out and get in it, and I saw my friend standing up at the window looking down—”

“You’re positive it was she?”

“That isn’t what I said.” I was willing to step as far over the line for him as I possibly could, but not all the way — until I was surer. I have a funny conscience, awfully inelastic, practically no give to it at all. “I’m positive it was a girl. But the night was too murky and I was too far away to be able to recognize her face. When I got upstairs a minute later, he told me she’d just left. Draw your own conclusions.”

“Had you ever seen this Mitchell girl before?”

“No, last night on the stairs was the first time I met her.”

That inclined him to leniency in my favor, I could see. I mean, about this figure-in-the-doorway angle. How could I be expected to recognize her from a distance, in a needle rain? “What time does he get back as a rule?”

He was always back before now other nights. I wasn’t going to give him away on that. “Oh, he’s not very punctual,” I said carelessly. “He may have stopped off at the Mitchells’ to see if they’ve had any word.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll wait,” he said doggedly.

“Is it all right if I step out and feed? I’ve been running on a malted milk since noon.”

He made a reassuring hand pass toward me. “You go ahead, Carr.”

I didn’t like the way that sounded. As much as to say, It’s not you we’re after.

I gave him a look, but I got up and went. I headed for a place around the corner. The tire of a parked car went out with a sharp hiss just before I rounded it. Only it was on the wrong side of me, where there were doorways instead of a roadway. He was standing there in one of them. I stopped short, veered in. “Well, I’ll be blamed! What’re you doing in there, playing hide-and-seek?”

“My shoelace came undone, I had to step in here and fasten it.” Then he said, “Has anyone been around?”

“There’s a dick up there right now waiting to talk to you.”

Even so, he shouldn’t have flinched the way he did. I waited for him to make a move; he didn’t.

“Well, why don’t you go up and get it over with?”

He just looked at me, like I was asking him to go into a den with a man-eating lion.

“Have you been around to the Mitchells’?”

He shook his head, looked down.

“Haven’t you even called up to find out? You mean you haven’t once gotten in touch with them since last night?”

“The old lady hates me, I tell you. She’ll fly off the handle, scream all kinds of things at me. I can’t face it, now less than ever.”

“Look, Dixon,” I tried to point out, “you’re doing all the wrong things, all the way through this. Now don’t start off on the wrong foot, there’s no reason why you should. I know how it is, you’re nervous and jumpy — but you didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance, why should you dodge her mother or the dicks or any guard-dam one else?”

“Even you,” he said bitterly, “you ought to see your eyes when you say that. There’s a sort of steely stare in them, like you weren’t sure yourself.”

I hadn’t meant to let him see that, it must have shown without my knowing it. I figured the best — and kindest — way to cover that up was to ignore the accusation altogether. “You better go on up to the place, Dixon,” I advised him crisply. “Your shoelace is fastened now.”

I walked away thinking, “He’s not the type this should have happened to, he’s going to make a mess of it before he’s through.” If it had happened to me, for instance, me with my red hair, I would have been hanging around Headquarters day and night, getting in their way, cursing them out for not finding her quicker. He seemed to sort of skulk and act suspicious.

I ate and then I went back. He was out again. And this time the dick was too. He came in about forty minutes afterwards. He almost seemed to reel in. He looked all drained of blood; he’d turned so white that it wouldn’t wear off. And when he took off his coat and vest, there was a regular dark stain down the back of his shirt, he’d sweated so.

“They had me down at Headquarters to question me,” he said. He slumped into a chair, pulled the knot of his tie loose as though it were choking him, took a long shuddering breath in different wave lengths. “I thought they weren’t going to let me go, at one time, but in the end they did.”

I pitched up my shoulders. “Why shouldn’t they let you go?”

He didn’t say. “Gee, I can’t stand much more of this.”

“I dunno, you never seemed particularly sensitive until now,” I let him know. “Why should you let it get you like this? They gotta ask questions, don’t they? There’s nothing personal in it—”

He gave a bitter laugh. “They made it seem pretty personal, down there just now.”

I thought, “If you acted down there like you’re acting up here, you didn’t do yourself any too much good!” If he wouldn’t help himself, somebody ought to at least try to put an oar in for him, and I supposed that left it up to me. I walked around the room awhile. Finally I stopped by him, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, for your own sake, I want you to do something for me. Call up the mother and at least say something to her, don’t just lie low like this. At least find out if anything’s been heard.”

He shied, right away. “I keep telling you, in her mind I’m already responsible for whatever’s happened, and there’s nothing I can do or say—”

I took another few turns around the room. “Did the girl mean anything to you at all?” I spat curtly.

That caught him off guard. “Red, I was crazy about her, I was mad about her, I’da done anything rather than lose her. I’da rather seen her dead than have her go to him—” He realized too late how that sounded, bit it off short.

Everything wrong; he said and did everything wrong.

“Well, that’s a crack I wouldn’t make twice,” I advised astringently. I picked up the phone.

“What’re you going to do?”

“What’s their number? What’s the number of her house?”

He gave it to me. I called it for him. A man answered first. For some reason I got the idea he was a detective, over there talking to them. “Mrs. Mitchell, please.”

“Who is this wants her?”

“Dixon wants to speak to her,” I said noncommittally.

Sure, he must have been a detective. There was too long a wait. They must have been talking it over— Suddenly I heard her say distinctly, within a foot of the phone, to someone else: “You shouldn’t make me, you shouldn’t ask me to.”

I hitched my head at him commandingly. “Come on, I’ve got her for you.” Even now, I could only get him to come halfway toward it; I brought it the other halfway, shoved it into his hands, left it there.

Gee he sounded lame. I couldn’t help thinking that myself while I listened. “Mrs. Mitchell, any word of Estelle yet—?”

That was as far as he got. She cut in with something, I could hear the rasping against the transmitter. His face got as white as though a whip had creased it. He let go of the thing and it hit the floor like a shot.

I picked it up and put it to my own ear. She was uncontrollable. She was just saying one thing over and over. “Murderer!” She spaced it for emphasis. “Mur-derer! MUR-derer!”

I hung up. I didn’t blame him for getting white.

He was taking a drink when I looked around. He’d brought a new bottle in with him when he came back from Headquarters. I couldn’t blame him for that either. I would have wanted something to wash down a word like that myself, if it had been jammed into my craw.

“Now you see?” I expostulated. “If you’da shot straight over there after she phoned last night like I advised you to, the thing wouldn’t have gotten to this stage. Your play was to notify the cops right along with her as soon as you heard the girl hadn’t shown up home; to take part in the thing, not stay out of it and let them turn it against you.”

And even now, if it had been me, I would have gone tearing over there and raised holy cain with her, whether she was grief crazed or not, for having the nerve to— But it wasn’t me, it was he. I was just the fellow he lived with. And far to the back of my mind, there was this suppressed thought struggling to come clear: I would, that is, assuming that I was innocent. If I was guilty, if the shoe fitted, how did I know but what I wouldn’t act just about like — he was?

I kept that thought pushed back. I let it squirm, but I kept it down. I left him up there in the place, went out. I could tell by the way he acted, kept edging up slantwise to the window, that he was worried they’d already posted someone down there to watch him, tail him if he went in or out. For my part, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had. And it still didn’t have to mean anything much; whether he let it hamper him or not all depended on what was in his own mind.

“You coming back soon?” he asked.

Other nights he didn’t give a rap whether I came back soon or late. I knew what he was dying to ask me — but didn’t have the nerve to: “See if you notice anyone hanging around watching the house.”

“I’ll be back,” I said indefinitely. I had a couple things on my mind I wanted to attend to.

If there was a spotter, the spotter knew his business; I couldn’t spot him for love nor money.

This McGinnis was a monkish-looking Celt with a bald crown; you kept looking for the hood and tasseled girdle, and all you ever got was a big imperfect perfecto. He knew Dixon and me, both, like his right arm. And as I said before, by that I don’t mean we were bar-flies or tanks. But anytime we had stepped in anywhere for a drink, for over eight months now, it was to his place.

“Was my pal in here last night?” I wanted to find out about those missing three hours.

“Dixon?” he said. “That he was. And what was the matter with him? He left half his drink behind.”

He’d told me that himself. “I was looking high and low for him,” I said, to cover it up so it wouldn’t sound like a check-up. “How long was he in here, about? Can you remember?”

“He was in here till a good thray o’clock. He held the fort, that he did; there wasn’t another soul—”

That was just the time he’d got back to the flat. I felt relieved. I even dunked my upper lip into the beer I didn’t want, in order not to offend his professional pride like Dixon had about his drink last night.

“Is he feeling any better today?” he went on.

I thought he meant on account of the unfinished drink, or because he’d been noticeably downcast. I would have let it go at that.

“The best thing to do for an upset stomach is just lave it alone—” he rambled.

I brought my scattered thoughts up short. Upset stomach? He had his symptoms crossed. Or did he? I didn’t ask him. There was only one way he could have arrived at such a mistaken diagnosis.

I waited a minute or two, then I said: “Be with you,” and went back to it and inside. I’d probably been in the washroom once or twice before, but it hadn’t been vital to notice it closely until now. There was just a rather unclean washstand, and then a cabinet behind a slatted half-door. It was very small and very uncertainly lighted.

The window — I remembered that there was one in here only now that I saw it again — was chink-narrow and very long. The glass was of a double opacity, whitewashed, and then filmed with accumulated dust. It was open a little from the top, for ventilation. It seemed humanly impossible for an adult to squeeze out through it. More important still, he’d only come in here to McGinnis’s after. What would he have gained by establishing an alibi after? It wasn’t like me to start suspecting him. Well, dammit, then why didn’t his behavior give me a chance to stand up for him?

I got up on the edge of the washstand with one foot and peered out through the top of the window. Its already prohibitive narrowness was still further bisected by a vertical iron bar. Furthermore, the light coming from behind me mushroomed out against blank brickwork only four feet in front of my face. The window just looked out on an air shaft bored down into the building, no way of getting up, no way of getting down. The iron bar was just gratuitous, or maybe one of the cubed walls was a later addition, sealing up what had until then been a three-sided indentation.

I got down, opened the dust-caked pane from the bottom, not without a good deal of difficulty. I wanted to see if I could make out the bottom of the shaft. I could; it ended only a few feet below the window. I looked at it a very long time, forehead grazing the rust-flaked iron bar. I have very good eyes, and I gave them the workout of their life.

I didn’t take their word for it; I pulled my head in again and gave them a little help. I happened to have a newspaper furled up in my side pocket. I took it out, struck a match, and set the end of it on fire. Then I stuck it, burning, through the window and held it out above the shaft floor. It played it up to a dusky orange, plenty bright enough. I pulled the improvised torch in again before it got out of control, stamped it out on the floor. It had done the trick, shown me what my eyes had only been able to hazard at.

I tried with my arm first, but it couldn’t get anywhere near the shaft floor, the damn perpendicular bar held my shoulder joint too far back. I never chewed gum. I went out there now and bought a penny package from his machine and mashed it up. I didn’t want to have to ask McGinnis for anything, he probably wouldn’t have had anything the right length anyway. He didn’t even notice me come out and then go in again, he’d gotten a batch of new customers just then and was busy taking their orders.

I went to work on one of the slats of the cabinet door, wrenched it out of its socket at both ends and used that. They were all dilapidated and half-loose anyway. It was the same principle kids use in dredging up coins through a sidewalk grating. I stuck the gum on the end of the slat, poked it through the window, stabbed the shaft floor, and each time came back with something I had seen before — and I don’t mean just now winking faintly in the gloom at the shaft bottom either. They were the two mates to the patented raincoat fastener I had trodden on up at our place. And if there was any doubt in my mind that they were mates, the tatter of green cellophane clinging to each one settled that.

That accounted for three of them. Three out of a possible four, at the very most. And to lose that many fasteners, that raincoat had been subjected to the roughest sort of treatment, must have been wrenched-at and pulled around unmercifully (with its wearer inside it). Even so, it wasn’t the patent that had failed to meet the test, the fabric around it was what had given way under the strain.

Even the implication of inordinate violence didn’t make me as creepy as the attempt at concealment. The washroom window must have been open only from the top, as I had found it myself, and perhaps he didn’t realize the floor of the shaft was as accessible to the washroom as it turned out to have been. I held open the cabinet door I had victimized, struck a match, stared intently. There were no traces left. But after all, a fabric like that must be highly combustible. Or if not, it was just a matter of severing it into small enough pieces to pass through the drain. And as for smuggling it in here unseen, how do people who swipe hotel towels for souvenirs, for instance, get away with them? By folding them flat underneath their vests and buttoning their coats over them. A pliable raincoat like that must fold into very nearly handkerchief size.

I didn’t feel so jolly. After I had cleaned the gum off the two fasteners, I wrapped them in a bit of paper, thrust them in my pocket to be retained against further decision. I was in a blue funk when I came out of McGinnis’s. The best I could muster was a half-hearted, “Keep an open mind, now, as long as you can. Don’t jump to too-hasty conclusions. Give the guy the benefit of the doubt, you’d want it given to you in his place.” It was already like swimming upstream.

If I hadn’t known I was going to wind up at the Mitchells’ until then, there wasn’t much doubt of it by the time I came out of McGinnis’s with those two raincoat fasteners in my pocket. Where else could I go? Back to him? He’d made the third one I’d already retrieved once at our place disappear a second time. To the police? Not at this stage of the game. Maybe not at any stage of the game. When you watch a guy going down in a quicksand before your eyes — if he doesn’t deserve to — you give him a hand out; if he does, maybe you fold your arms and let him go. But at least you don’t shovel rocks on his head to make him go down faster. I don’t, anyway.

I had to look it up in a phone directory, I had no idea where it was. There was a half-column of Mitchells, but I had no trouble separating the appropriate one, he’d already given me the phone number that paired with it. Mrs. Fanny A. It was only about six blocks from our place, as she’d said last night; almost too short a distance for any anonymous harm to have befallen the girl; it made it seem more likely than ever it had been a personally directed, intentional harm, meant for her alone by someone who knew her.

It was an outworn apartment house, when I got there, that just managed to maintain itself above tenement status, more through its cleanliness than anything else. The mother evidently lived on her income, and a very tenuous one at that. It was on the ground floor, and after I’d already located it I had an attack of last-minute qualms about going in. I wondered if I was being a hypocrite by coming here like this, with two of the very fasteners from her raincoat packaged in my pocket at the moment, and yet no intention of turning them over to them. It was a hell of a thing to do; either I was on their side or I was on his.

I poised my finger toward the doorbell. Then I dropped it again. I started to walk back and forth undecidedly, crosswise across the lobby. This kept carrying me to and fro in front of the elevator-grate. The car itself was somewhere out of sight the whole time, bedded in the basement most likely, as often occurs in those run-down poorly serviced houses. Without being aware of it I was accidentally giving the impression of someone whose business was on one of the upper floors, not down here at all, waiting to be taken up.

I still hadn’t been able to make up my mind, when I heard the street door open, and as I turned my head, two cops came in carrying a sort of hamper between them. They had newspapers spread loosely over the top of it. I heard one ask the other, “Why didn’t they have her come down, instead of us bringing it up here?”

“I dunno, I guess she couldn’t make it or somep’n.”

They started diagonally across the lobby to the door on the left. Then when they got halfway to it the leader said, “Naw, it’s the one on this side,” and abruptly changed directions. They ended up before the one I had just been hesitating outside of myself a moment ago. But the swerve was violent enough to dislodge part of the newspaper covering on top of what they were carrying. It drifted off, and the rear carrier had to stop a minute and replace it.

It was just a fluke that I happened to be standing right there in the same apartment lobby with them at that moment. They didn’t try to hide the momentary glimpse I was afforded of what was in the hamper. They didn’t look twice at me, I was just someone waiting to be taken up to one of the higher floors. They didn’t think the tattered, grimy, green-cellophane raincoat lying spread on top of other maltreated garments would have any particular meaning to me, or that I could transmit the knowledge to the one place they didn’t want it to go until they were ready for it.

I didn’t get out fast enough. I couldn’t bolt right in front of them; I had to wait until they were admitted first. The mother must have been somewhere close at hand near the apartment door. They just about got in with it, took the newspapers off, when her scream slashed through it like a knife through cheesecloth. That was identification, complete, devastating, final — that harried scream that ended in a soft thump on wood.

I got outside to the street fast. The six lengthwise blocks, that were all the margin of lead I had, streamed by under me; I can’t remember now any more whether I actually ran or just hiked fast. I kept thinking, “What’ll I do about this?”

I slowed when I got to our corner. They might have someone watching the place already. They must have. If there was, I couldn’t see him. But then if I could have, he wouldn’t have been any good to them. I only walked slow up to the door. Once inside, I ran up the stairs again. I keyed the door open and closed it behind me again with camera-shutter rapidity.

The room was dark, at first I thought he was out. But he was lying on the bed. Not like you lie on it to sleep on it, the other way, across it from side to side, head down, face buried in a tragic nest he’d made out of his arms. Heartbreak, I suppose; I don’t know. He reared his head when he heard me come in, but I’d already had time to glimpse him the way he was first.

“That you, Red?”

“Yeah, it’s Red.” I stood in the doorway looking at him.

He got up off the bed, slowly, one limb at a time. He tried not to show he could feel me looking at him. Finally he couldn’t help it any more. “What d’you keep looking at me for?”

“You better get ready for a long pull. Your girl’s dead.”

His face shifted gears. I thought he was going to cry, but if he did, it didn’t come to the top. He said, “Are they sure?”

“They were just bringing her things into the flat when I was outside it just now. I recognized the raincoat—”

I heard him draw his breath in, deep. Then suddenly he shot past me. I went after him. “I’m going to get out of here,” he said in a smothered voice. The panic was on him. Maybe so, but I was running out of excuses.

I slapped the flat door shut again before he’d gotten it far enough out to get through it. “Now wait a minute, don’t lose your head; you’re doing the worst possible thing.”

“I’m getting out! I saw how they acted about it tonight at Headquarters the first time already. They only let me go because they didn’t have anything on me then.”

He kept trying to get it open, I kept trying to hold it back.

“Did you come back here to hold me for them, so I’d be here when they get here?”

“No — I came back to tip you off ahead of time, I guess—” I took one arm down off the door.

“Then lemme get out. Red, gimme a chance at least!”

“Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re as good as admitting the fact you did something to her, you’re advertising it.”

He was past reasoning with. “It’s easy for you to talk, isn’t it? It’s not your freedom, is it? It’s not your neck, your life. I should stay here and let them bag me, and never have a fighting chance from then on!”

He couldn’t get out past me, he couldn’t get me out of the way. He had to give up finally, he was all winded and — although we hadn’t come to blows, principally because he’d known enough not to strike the first one — a wrestling match can tire you as much as a fist fight. He flopped back into a chair, stayed there inert, tongue out — metaphorically speaking, anyway. I stayed there by the door, also breathing hard.

“My own friend,” he said finally.

Maybe that did the trick, I don’t know. If he’d kept on trying to edge me aside, force his way out, I suppose I’d have kept blocking him. It was when he quit trying, slumped down like that, that it got to me. “I don’t think you can make it any more,” I side-stepped grudgingly. I took a look from the window. Nothing yet. He didn’t try to make a break for the door, even after I’d left it; maybe I had him cowed, or he was resigned now.

I picked up the coat and hat I’d just had on me, threw them over at him. “All right, there’s your chance, take it if you want it,” I relented. “They’ve seen me in this outfit two or three times already, you may get away with it. You’d better not try the street, they must have been watching it long ago. Go out through the back yard and maybe you can get through to the next one over, like I did that night when that instalment collector was on my tail. And if you do make it, walk like I do, long slouchy strides — not snappy ones like you take. Keep your left hand in your trouser pocket the whole time. That’s me. Wear the hat down forward like I do, almost over the bridge of your nose. Until you get — wherever you’re going.”

He opened the door. I was soft, I was molasses.

“Here, d’you need dough? You better take this with you—” I shoved some into his hand.

He tried to shake mine, but mine wasn’t there any more. “Where’ll I get in touch with you, Red?”

“D’you want to?” I couldn’t help asking pointedly.

“Sure, I... I’ve got to find out what happens — I’ll find some way; it won’t be here or at the place you work.” He turned and went out.

There went a foolish guy. He had to have his chance, I supposed. You’d give a dog his chance. I watched him down the first flight. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me or not, because I couldn’t tell what I looked like. He didn’t look like himself, to me, in that hat and coat, so maybe that was enough.

I listened until he got the rest of the way down. The stairs must have been clear yet, I heard him get the yard door open and go out through there. I rapped once against the wooden doorframe beside me, for luck. His luck. Then I closed the door and went in.

“Now, what’d I do that for?” I wondered, shaking my head.

It took them a little while to make their arrangements, I guess, or maybe they’d had to wait for orders from higher up. They had no inkling that there was any hurry about it, that I’d accidentally tapped a wire, so to speak, or they would have been over a lot sooner. The knock on the door, of course, was an indication in itself that he’d made it.

There were two of them. The man in the lead slanted me aside as if I were just an extension panel on the door, strode through. “Come on out, Dixon, don’t make us go in after you.”

“He’s not in here,” I said innocently.

The other one was the same one had been installed up here when I got home earlier tonight — Hiller I heard his teammate call him. “He’s skipped the gutter, Hiller. Here’s his hat and coat.”

Hiller took a look. He caught on fast. “Where are yours?” he said, coming back to me.

“On the third hook from the left, in the closet,” I stalled.

“You mean he walked out in ’em.” He was trying to get me for being an accessory. “Now what were you doing while this was going on?”

“I was in there shaving; how’d I know he was going to take a duster?”

He went in the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and tested the bristle of my brush. Then he dried-off the tips of his fingers on a towel. Even that didn’t satisfy him; he reached up and felt the side of my face. His fingers skidded on it like an ice-skating rink. Sure I’d shaved. I always shaved at nights. I’d had nearly fifteen minutes to shave, between the time Dixon left and they got here.

Hiller narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you sure you weren’t in on this?”

“What would I get out of it either way, whether he stayed or went?”

I had him there so beautifully that he failed to notice I’d answered his question by asking him one of my own. “No use waiting,” he said to his partner. “He won’t be back — not here anyway. You better come down with us, Carr; I think we’d like to ask you a few, this time.”

I had to go without my hat and coat, my friend had mine. Hiller even suggested I put on his. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, for some strange reason; call it superstition if you like. I still wasn’t positive they hadn’t last been worn by someone who had taken a life.

They pegged away at me down there quite a bit, but it didn’t get them anywhere. Whether you’re telling a lie or telling the truth, the whole art of it lies in simplicity; stick to something simple and don’t ball yourself up. I’d seen the figure of a woman get in a cab at my doorway, through the mist; I didn’t claim it was Estelle Mitchell, I never had. That was the whole gist and burden of my story. How could anyone trip on anything as short and uncomplicated as that? Well — detectives like this Hiller get thirty-six-hundred a year, I think. I was now about to find out why.

They didn’t let on that I’d fallen face-flat, so to speak. Hiller just mumbled, “Ask you to go up to Mrs. Mitchell’s with us for a few minutes,” and we were on our way again.

It was a typical early-century interior; gloomy hall going back for miles, with doors opening all the way down it. A man that I at first thought was a teammate of theirs, working at this end, admitted us. He was up in his late thirties, I should say, or even higher than that. Hiller said, “Hello, Tremholt; we’d like Mrs. Mitchell to come out and hear something, a minute.”

He cranked his head kind of dubiously. “The doctor was with her until now; he just about got her quieted down. Go easy, will you, fellows?” But he went down the hall to one of the end doors. So by that I caught on he wasn’t a bureau man but some relative or member of the family. Meanwhile we’d detoured into an old-fashioned parlor, cluttered up with junk. The girl’s late father, in a photographic enlargement, looked down from one wall, the mother from the other. As she had once been.

She came in a minute later, on the arm of this Tremholt, and made the picture out a liar. The thing had turned her inside out. Her eyes were lost in deep skull pits. She had a wet compress pasted across her brows, and it adhered of its own saturation. She could only hate now, thirst for vengeance, that was all that was left to her. She hated well. For the first time I could understand Dixon’s peculiar skittishness about facing her.

Tremholt led her to a chair, arm solicitously about her, said, “Sit down, Mom.” I couldn’t figure him the girl’s brother, he must have been a half-brother. Then he stood attentively behind her, hand resting on the back of her chair. I could see it over her shoulder. He’d taken out his own anxiety and grief in a much simpler form: nail-biting. I’d never seen such nails; they were down to the quick, and even past it. The indentations were still left-to show how much of them had been gnawed away. A poodle, which had a sort of wistful air, like it missed her too, had trailed into the room after the two of them.

Hiller said, “Now just once more, in Mrs. Mitchell’s presence.”

“Why, simply,” I began uneasily, “that I saw a woman’s figure enter a cab—” I ran through it once again. I could sense something had come up, but couldn’t get what it was. Which is liable to happen when you horse around with detectives.

“I’m not calling you on that,” he said quietly. “What I want to know is, did you hear the signal given, the hail, that brought the cab down the street that far, to your doorway, for her?” And then, for bait, “There must have been one; no cabdriver’s attention could have been attracted if she’d just waved an arm, in that kind of visibility.”

I could sense the trap. He wanted to drive a wedge between my version and Dixon’s, in order to knock the support from Dixon’s, demolish it. I only had a split second in which to make up my mind, with three pairs of eyes boring into me. If I denied hearing her summon the cab, that would shake the credibility of Dixon’s version, wouldn’t it? How had he been able to hear it, through a closed window, if I hadn’t, right out there in the open? There was also a trap within a trap. He was decoying me by using the terms signal, hail. He wasn’t going to trip me up on that. Dixon had said unmistakably that she’d whistled for one. I’d hooked my story onto his. He’d assured me that I wasn’t backstopping a lie, but simply bridging a five-minute time difference; in other words, corroborating something that had actually occurred, only just too soon for me to eye- and ear-witness it. If his whole story was a lie, that was my tough luck. But you can’t corroborate a thing like that in parts, you either corroborate it all the way or not at all.

“There was no hail given,” I said. “There was a whistle given. I heard it.”

No one said anything. They seemed to be waiting for Mrs. Mitchell to speak, as though they already knew something I didn’t. Tremholt looked down at her from behind her chair. Hiller looked across the room at her.

She spoke at last, in a deathly low voice. “My daughter couldn’t whistle. Not a note. It was an absolute limitation, some kink in her tongue maybe. Many’s the time we heard her try it, all she could do was make a soundless breath, like someone blowing soap bubbles. When she had this dog out with her, the only way she could call him was by clicking her tongue or speaking his name.”

She’d been addressing Hiller until now. Now she turned on me, as Tremholt started to lead her out of the room. “So if you heard a woman in your doorway whistling for a cab, it was not my daughter. You did not see my daughter leave that house!” And then from further down the hall, out of sight: “And no one else did either!”

Hiller just sat there looking at me, and I just sat looking at my own innermost thoughts. They were a glowing red, and they kept repeating a single phrase over and over again: “The dirty liar! The dirty liar!” And I didn’t mean the dick, either.

I went back with him to Headquarters from there. I still wasn’t turning stool pigeon. I couldn’t have anyway, even if I’d wanted to, in the only way that would have done them any good. But even if I could have, I knew I wouldn’t have. I didn’t know where he’d gone. And if — and when — I found out, I considered that a little personal matter between him and me. I wasn’t doing their work for them.

They wore out finally. The lieutenant or whoever he was in charge suggested, “Why don’t you boys take him over and let him see for himself what this precious friend of his has done? Then maybe he’ll feel a little differently about it.”

That was the first I knew that the body had been found.

They took me over to the Morgue with them. They drew out a sort of drawer or lateral cupboard they had her in and whisked back the covering. It would have been tough enough to take even without the way they stood around me and rubbed in it.

Her neck had been broken in some God-awful way; I’d never seen anything like it in my life before. The whole head was twisted out of line with the body. As though her neck had been caught under someone’s arm in a viselike grip, and then the killer had twisted his own whole upper body around out of joint, to accomplish the fracture. Even then I still couldn’t understand how anyone of less than abnormal strength could—

They took pains not to leave me in the dark on this point. “Take a good look, Carr. This girl was twenty-two years old, think of that. Do you want to know just what happened to her, with accompanying blueprints? She went to this skunk-friend of yours to tell him they were through; that she was giving in to the old lady and marrying Tremholt—”

“Marrying Tremholt?” I’d thought he was her brother until then.

“He’s boarded with the Mitchells for years and he’s been crazy about her ever since she was in grade school. The understanding always was that he was to marry her when she was old enough. He’s practically subsidized the mother for years, she could never repay the amounts she owes him. But that was all right, it was supposed to be all in the family. The girl thought he was pretty swell herself, until Dixon came along. She wasn’t coerced into giving him up; Dixon’s glamor started to wear thin and she finally saw things her mother’s way.

“All right, so she told him that night. The old lady was a fool to let her go there alone, and Tremholt didn’t know about it. The girl gave your pal the brush-off and walked out on him. He got his second wind, ran after her, caught up with her on the next landing, and started to drag her back, throttling her so she couldn’t scream. He didn’t kill her then, but she’d lost consciousness and he thought he had. He lost his head, dragged her on up a flight above his own door, and secreted himself in the incinerator closet on that floor, maybe because he’d heard somebody come out below.

“You know those incinerator closets in your building, Carr. A metal flap that you pull down gives onto the perpendicular chute that carries the refuse down to the basement to be burned. Now listen to this if you can stand it — and remember we can show you the scientific evidence for every one of these steps, it’s not just a theoretical reconstruction. He pulled down the flap and tried to unload her body — and she was still alive, see? — down the chute, headfirst, toward the basement and eventual incineration. It was just a panic-reflex. The flap opening wasn’t wide enough, any more than the chute backing it would have been; but there was evidently someone coming up or down out on the stairs at that moment and he was crazed. He wedged her in, then when he tried to extricate her again, after the immediate danger had receded and he could think more clearly, the head and the one shoulder that he had managed to insert, jammed. You can see what happened by looking—”

“Cut it out,” I said sickly, “cut it out.”

“He finally heaved her out, but in doing so he broke her neck against the angle of the chute, wrenched her head nearly all the way around back to front. The only consolation is she didn’t feel anything, was unconscious at the time. That guy has been sleeping on the same mattress with you, Carr; keying the same door.”

I took out a handkerchief and patted it around my mouth.

“When the coast was clear, he hauled her on up the rest of the way to the roof. He went over the communicating roofs as far as he could — four buildings away, toward Demarest Street, and found a barrel there. They’d recently retarred and regraveled that roof, and the barrel was left over. He put her in that, first emptying the gravel that remained, then covering her lightly with it. The workmen who carried it away got it all the way downstairs before they realized what made it weigh so much and found out what was in it.

“It’s the prettiest case we’ve had in years.” And they didn’t mean pretty.

“Now, d’you still want to go to bat for a guy that did anything like that? Tell us where you think he’s gone, you must have some idea.”

I took the handkerchief away from my mouth, and looked at them a long time, and said slowly, “Gents, I only wish I did have.” And did I mean it!

And on that note they let me go home. They knew I was on ice now, they knew I’d keep. They knew, they could tell just by the look in my eyes.

I didn’t sleep so good that night. I threw the mattress on the floor and slept on die naked bed frame. I kept seeing her before me. She spoke to me like she had on the stairs. “He didn’t chase you out on my account, did he?” Only her head was twisted around so that it practically faced forward across her own shoulder.

She was buried next day. I went to the services. I sent flowers with a card that said: “From someone who should have stayed home.” Meaning it wouldn’t have happened that night if I’d been there. The mother was there, and Tremholt, sitting close to her, looking after her, as usual. It must have been tough on him. He was under a strain, you could see. He kept breaking up wooden matchsticks between his fingers, sitting there in the pew with her. Afterwards, when the few of us filed out, I glanced down and the floor was covered with them around where he’d been sitting.

Monday came around again, and I had to do my studying for my Tuesday night class. I had to change textbooks first, we’d finished Volume One the week before, and were going to start in on Volume Two this time. They were standard textbooks, Dixon knew them well, the way I’d had the first one kicking around the place, on renewels, for about six weeks straight. I’d mentioned to him, I think, that we would be about ready to tackle Volume Two in another week’s time, and I could remember his kidding answer: “My, my, you’re getting to be a big boy now!” He probably thought this self-improvement stuff was the bunk.

Anyway, on my way home from the job, I dropped off at the library, turned in Volume One, and picked up Volume Two, which I’d made sure would be there waiting for me on the shelf. I holed-up for the evening, rolled up my shirt sleeves, sat down at the table with pencil, blank paper and book in front of me, and got ready to cram improvement into my skull.

I didn’t see it until I’d gotten well into the second theorem, and had to turn a page. Somebody’d been working out one of the problems on the margin of the page. People often did that, I’d noticed, with textbooks of this kind, too lazy to get their own scratch paper or somethi—

I thought I was seeing things. It was my own name, or part of it anyway, staring up at me from the page. “Red— Call me from Mallam’s ten sharp night you get this out.” Just a hurried pencil scribble, as cramped as possible in order to be inconspicuous, but I recognized the writing. Dixon — the murderer. He must have slipped into the library sometime earlier in the day, located the reference book he knew I was sure to take out next, and taken a chance on contacting me in this way.

Well, that was his big mistake. I was fresh out of sympathy with lousy girl killers. I closed the book with a sound like a firecracker going off, and I shoved my fists back through the sleeves of my coat — fists this time, not open hands. He didn’t know when he was well-off. I picked up the phone, hesitated, put it down again. No, Hiller and his side-kicks could come and get him from here, take up where they’d left off the night I’d so misguidedly abetted his running out. I’d bring him back to his original starting point alone and unaided. That was the least I could do in the way of making amends.

Mallam’s was a big drugstore we both knew well and often patronized. He hadn’t given any number, so how I was to call him I couldn’t figure, but he’d mentioned an hour, ten sharp, so it behooved me to be at the right place at the right time and leave the method up to him.

The method was simple. I was hanging around by the cigarette-counter when the phone in the middle booth started to ring. The counterman started for it, but I stepped in ahead of him. “That’s probably for me,” I said.

It was. I knew his voice. He’d simply called me, instead of having me call him; a lot safer. “You saw it,” he said.

“Yeah, I saw it.” I tried to keep my voice neutral; I was still at his mercy, he could cut himself off.

“Are you alone there? Are you sure no one’s following you or anything?”

“Dead sure,” I said grimly.

“I gotta see you, I gotta know where I stand; it’s not in the papers any more. You’re the only friend I have, Red—” (Wrong tense, I thought to myself, you should have used the past tense.) “—I don’t know who else to turn to. I’m going crazy — and I’m strapped, I can’t even get out of this place I’m in if I want to—”

“I’ll take care of that,” I promised. I wasn’t kidding by a long shot.

He said, speaking quickly, probably to override his own misgivings, “Take the Laurel Avenue bus line, to the Whitegate part of town. Get off at Borough Lane stop. There’s a rooming house there, 305, with a tailor shop below. Go up one flight. Harris is the name.” Then he caught his breath, said, “And whatever you do, if you notice anyone following you—”

“They’ve given me up as a hopeless case long ago. Don’t worry, everything’ll be under control.”

He hung up without waiting for any more. That was all right; now I had him.

He looked bad when he finally let me into the place, after all the usual rigamarole of casing the stairs to make sure no one was at my heels. He looked like he hadn’t slept decently since he’d left our own place. It was a cheesy-looking little hole, about the best a guy wanted by the police could hope to get for himself. Judging by the litter, he’d been doing most of his eating out of cracker boxes and tomato cans, and smoking himself to death.

“Yeah, I brought some dough,” I answered his question. I didn’t bother passing it to him, because he wasn’t going to need it anyway.

“Are they still hot for me?”

“I don’t know. The last I saw Hiller was the day of the funeral, standing over in the shadows at the back of the church. I guess he was hoping that — the guy that did it would show up, out of curiosity or something. I didn’t let on I recognized him.”

He took quick steps back and forth, raking at his hair. “It’s not fair! Through no fault of my own, I’m suddenly hunted down like a mad dog — for something I didn’t do! I suddenly find myself in a position where there’s only one guy left that’s still willing to believe I didn’t.”

“No,” I said, quietly but succinctly.

That brought him up short. His lips formed the question without sounding it.

“You better make that unanimous,” I went on. “What do you expect? What choice have I got?” He tottered backward, crumpled onto the sagging, unmade cot, reached down and gripped the mattress edge with one hand as if to steady himself. I went over the whole thing again, step by step, but as much for my own benefit as for his. “I came back that night, and instead of taking it easy reading like other nights, you were rushing around in there, as if you were straightening things up. I heard you through the door.”

“Sure, I was pounding distractedly back and forth; you would be too if you’d just lost your girl.”

“I knocked instead of using my key, and the knock frightened you. You only opened on a crack until you saw who it was—”

“That was just a reflex; I didn’t want to see anyone, I had too much on my mind—”

“You told me you’d just put her in a taxi at the door. The sidewalk was wet, but the soles of your shoes were dry.”

“Yes, that was an outright lie, but an innocent one. I didn’t want you to think I was heel enough to let her go down by herself.”

“You told me you heard her whistling up a cab, you let me lie to the cops about that. Her mother says she couldn’t whistle a note.”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that.”

The edges of my mouth curled. “She was your girl and you didn’t know she couldn’t whistle?”

“She never happened to tell me; the occasion never arose. I heard someone whistle—”

“A little bird, no doubt.” I went ahead. “You left me at twelve, to go down for a quick pick-up. McGinnis told me you didn’t show up in his place until two. What were you doing before you went in there?”

“Walking around in the rain,” he said dully, “like you do when you’ve lost something.”

“Was this what you lost?” I gave the two raincoat fasteners I’d been carrying around on me all week a careless pitch over toward him. They landed on the cot beside him. “There was a third one, that you overlooked. I stepped on it up at our place, while you were out that night ‘walking around in the rain.’ I put it on the table, and the next I knew it had disappeared; you hid it from that first cop that came around to question you.”

“Yes, I did.” He lowered his head. “She was already missing, it already looked bad enough for me, without him picking a thing like that up. I was starting to get nervous by that time. When she was trying to leave, I’d tried to hang onto her, get her to stay, but not in a murderous way. She had to wrench her raincoat from my pleading grip, and the fasteners came off. I thought it might save me a lot of unnecessary trouble if that cop just didn’t see that third one lying there on the table right as he was checking the description of what she’d been wearing. Sure it was foolish to conceal it, but everyone does foolish things at times, why should mine be made to count so heavily against me?”

“And then you threw the other two — those, over there next to you — out the washroom window at McGinnis’.”

“That was just a rebellious gesture. I’d lost her, I was hurt and bitter. I did that like a man picks up a pebble or a stick and chucks it away from him, as a vent to his inner feelings. And Red, be logical; if I did it for concealment, why wouldn’t I have done it sooner, the whole two hours I was roaming around in the rain, why did I have to wait until I got in there?”

“Maybe you only recalled you had them on you after you got in there, maybe you didn’t remember them while you were still outside.” I shook my head at him slowly. “It’s no use, Dixon. Do you blame me, after all that, for thinking you did kill her? Would you blame anyone for thinking it?”

“So you’re going back to them now and tell them where I am. Tell them where they can come and find me.”

I shook my head quietly.

“Then where are you going?”

“Just back to our place—” I looked him straight in the eye. “And you’re coming with me.”

“That’s what you think.” His hand, the right, had been clutching the mattress edge all this while. I’d mistakenly thought for balance, for moral support. He withdrew it now, and a gun came slithering out in its grip. He must have bought it in some pawnshop with the money I’d staked him to; he hadn’t taken one with him the night he left. He pointed it square at me and said, lethally, “You’re never going to leave here alive again. I can’t afford it, I’m fighting for my life now. Well if it’s got to be me or you, then it’s going to be you. If you were my own blood-brother standing before me—”

“Now at last,” I told him, “you’ve put the finishing touch to your own admission of guilt. A man who’s capable of murdering his own best friend in cold blood, like you’re about to, is certainly capable of murdering his sweetheart. If you didn’t kill her, why would you be so afraid to go back with me—?”

I didn’t know just when he was going to pull the trigger; he was going to any second, I could tell that just by looking at the expression in his eyes. The cot was a decrepit iron affair, one of those so-called portable things with legs that folded back under it. One hadn’t been opened fully, or else had slipped back a little from the repeated vibration of his getting on and off the cot twenty times a day, like he must have. I’d noticed long before this came up that it didn’t hit the floor perpendicular, but leaned in a little, letting the other three do most of the work for it.

I was sitting close enough to it, but that was the trouble — I was so close that any move my foot made was sure to catch his eye. I said, “All right, Johnny, let’s have it and get it over with,” and I clasped my hands at the nape of my neck and leaned my head and shoulders back in the chair, as if at defiant ease. That attracted his dangerously twinkling eyes to the upper part of my body, and the very act of stretching backward from the waist up brought my legs unnoticeably further out in the opposite direction. I felt my shoe graze the cot support. I swung my foot out, like when you tee-off. Then I chopped it back. The support snapped up flat against the frame, and that corner of the cot came down.

The shot was jolted out of him by the sudden slide. It tore straight through at heart level, but the shift over carried it under my left arm pit, and the elbow was up, so it didn’t do anything. I dove over on top of him before another one could come out, slapped the gun hand down against the mattress, and ground my knee into it.

The beating I gave him brought the other cot support down, and we rolled down to the floor together, in a mixture of soiled sheets, gun-smoke and dust from the mattress. As he’d said, it was him or me, and he had a gun; I didn’t pull my punches, although my usual way of fighting is not to hit a guy when he’s down under you.

I quit when he stopped fighting back, and pocketed the gun. He went out a little from my jaw and face blows. No one seemed to have heard the shot, or if they did, it was the kind of a place where they believed in minding their own business. I threw water in his face to revive him, and before his head had altogether cleared he was already down below on the street with me, rocky but standing on his own legs. I got him into a cab, and before he knew it I had him over at our place, had closed the door on the two of us, and flung him back into his own favorite chair — only from about five yards away.

He just cowered there, didn’t say anything, didn’t move. His eyes kept following me around, mutely pleading. “Don’t look at me like that,” I told him finally, wincing from the touch of the iodine stopped on my open knuckles. I didn’t offer him any because for all I knew he might have swallowed it. “D’you think this is fun for me? D’you think this is my idea of how we should wind up, you and me?” I picked up the phone.

He spoke, for the first and last time since we’d come away from the hide-out. He didn’t call me Red any more. “Carr,” he said, “you’re not human at all!”

“Gimme Police Headquarters,” I answered that.

A whistle sounded somewhere under our windows. A woman’s voice called, “Yoo-hoo! Taxi!” Then the whistle sounded again, a fine full-bodied thing a man needn’t have been ashamed of. Gears meshed faintly somewhere in the distance and a machine came slithering up, braked directly outside. I heard a door crack open.

I put the phone down, open the way it was, streaked across the room, threw the window up. I was just a minute too late. I could see the cab roof, but the whistler had just finished getting in. Her hand reached out, pulled the cab door to with a slam.

I emptied my lungs out. “Driver! Hey you down there! Hold it — stay where you are!”

He looked out and up at me. “I got a fare al—”

I backed my lapel at him; all there was behind it was a little dust, but he couldn’t tell from that distance. “Police business!” I said warningly, and hauled my head in.

I put the phone together on an increasingly annoyed voice that was saying: “Police Headquarters! Who is this?” evidently for the fourth or fifth time, with an abrupt “Sorry, wrong number.” I changed the key around to the outside of the door and locked Dixon in behind me. There was no fire escape to our window, so his only other way out was to come down four stories on the top of his head.

The woman in the cab was about thirty-six, very blonde; she stuck her head out at me inquiringly as I came skidding up to the cab door.

“D’you live here in this house?” If she had, I’d never seen her before.

“Yeah, 2-C, second-floor rear. I been a tenant here three weeks now.”

“Last Monday night, that’s a week ago tonight, near twelve, this same time — did you call a cab to this door, by whistling for it like you did just now? It was raining—”

“Sure,” she said readily. “I call a cab to the door every night, rain or shine, so I must’ve that night too. It’s the only way I’d get to work on time. I do a specialty at 12.05 each night, at the Carioca Club. And why wouldn’t I whistle for it, that’s my special talent. Leonora, that’s me. I imitate birdcalls. The customers call ’em out and I give ’em. Anything from an oriole to a—”

Then he’d told the truth. He had heard someone whistle for a cab; he had seen one standing below; he had — as I had myself — just missed seeing her get in. And maybe it shouldn’t have, but for some reason that made the whole thing look different. The same facts remained, but I saw them in a different light now. Not bathed in glaring suspicion any more, but just unfortunate coincidences that had damned him. Yes, even to his pitching the raincoat fasteners through the washroom window in the bar; that became just a gesture of frustration, of ill temper at having lost her, such as anyone might have made.

The blonde was saying, “Well, mister, I gotta go, I go on in about ten minutes. If I been disturbing people by whistling for a cab every night, I’ll tone it down—”

“No,” I said gratefully, “you haven’t disturbed anyone; you’ve saved a man’s life. I want to see you when you get back from work; Carr, fourth-floor front.”

I went chasing upstairs again. He hadn’t even tried to bust down the locked door with a table or chair or anything while I was gone; he must have been resigned by now.

“You’re in the clear as far as I’m concerned,” I flung at him abruptly when I came in.

He just looked at me dazedly; the change was too sudden for him.

“Hiller told me they’ve established Estelle got as far as the landing below your door, and then someone jumped on her, stifled her cries, choked her senseless then and there. A moment later this Leonora, this professional performer, must have come out on her way to work, a landing below that. The girl wasn’t dead yet, but he thought she was. He lost his head, thought he was trapped, picked her up in his arms and carried her up past this floor to the incinerator closet on the one above this. He actually killed her in there without knowing it, trying to get rid of her. Meanwhile you’d heard the whistle from below, got to the window just too late, mistakenly thought you’d seen Estelle go off in a cab.

“The thing is, who was the guy? It wasn’t just a stray, a loiterer. He would have waited until she got out into the dark street; there was no robbery motive, she didn’t even have her handbag with her. It was someone who knew her, someone who had followed her here to your place, who had been lurking around outside your door the whole time she was in there, who put the worst possible construction on her visit to you.”

He nodded dismally. “She kept saying all the way through that she loved me. Even after she’d already opened the door and wrenched herself away from me by main force, she came back a step and kissed me goodbye and said, ‘Nobody can ever take your place, Johnny—’ ”

“Then he heard that; it only added fuel to his smouldering jealousy. He was too yellow to tackle you personally; he waited until you’d gone in, caught up with her on her way down, leaped on her in a jealous rage.”

We didn’t mention anyone’s name; we didn’t need to, now that we’d gone this far. I guess we both had the same name in mind. But knowing was one thing, tacking it on another. We were both stopped for awhile.

I paced around smoking like a chimney. He sat there biting his nails. He’d always been inclined to do that when he was keyed up. After awhile he noticed himself doing it, said mournfully: “I’ve backslid. She’d broken me of this habit, like girls usually try to break the fellows they go around with of little habits they don’t approve of. Here I am doing it again, because she’s not around to see me.” I didn’t say anything. “That was the one thing I ever heard her say in his favor: ‘Tremholt never bites his, why do you have to bite yours—?’ ”

I stopped short, whirled on him so suddenly, he edged away from me in the chair. “He doesn’t, huh? I saw his hand, resting on the back of Mrs. Mitchell’s chair, when Hiller took me over there, and he practically had no nails left, they were down to the raw. Then again, at the services, when he was nervous, he didn’t gnaw them, he kept breaking matchsticks instead, I watched him. If he was a nailbiter he would have bitten them then of all times. That shows he wasn’t, Estelle was right. Then why’d he bite them — or more likely file them down to the quick — right around the time she met her death?” I answered that myself. “Because he got something on them. Probably tar from that barrel of gravel on the roof when he finally — I wonder if we could get him on that?”

“How?” he said forlornly. “The nails are gone now — and the tar with them, if that’s what it was.”

“Maybe it wasn’t that.” Something else came to me. “Wait a minute, didn’t I hear the janitor say something about repainting those incinerator closets, around that time? I think I met him in the hall a day or two before, lugging a brush and paint can around with him. I’m going up and take a look. You stay here, someone might recognize you out on the stairs—”

I went up by myself and inspected the one she had been dragged into. It was just a little dugout at the end of the hall. As you opened the door a light went on automatically, so the tenants could see where to dump their refuse.

I could tell by the clean look and shiny finish to the walls it had been recently repainted. Those places get pretty crummy in no time at all. He’d done a pretty good job for an amateur. Light-green. The important thing was, had the repainting been done before the night the killer dragged the girl in here, or only afterwards? If it had only been done since, then obviously he couldn’t have gotten fresh paint under his nails.

I took my own thumbnail to it and tested it by scraping a little nick in it. It was pretty fresh; that didn’t look so good. He’d only given it one coat, and my nail dug through that and laid bare the old coat beneath: a faded beige.

I looked him up in the basement and asked him about it. He gave me the answer I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “Naw, I didn’t get to that one until after it happened. I’d gotten up as high as your floor the day of the murder, that was a Monday. I only had the one on the fifth left, I was going to finish that one up the first thing the next morning. He couldn’t get into the one on the fourth with her, because I’d locked it overnight, to keep the tenants out and give the paint a chance to dry. So he took her to the one above. As a result, I didn’t get a chance to paint that until them cops were all finished with it. They made me leave it like it was until late Wednesday afternoon.”

So whatever the reason was for his destroying his nails, it certainly wasn’t because of the adhesion of fresh paint particles. The paint hadn’t been applied until nearly forty-eight hours after Estelle Mitchell’s death. Probably tar from the rim of the barrel he’d hidden the remains in. And as Dixon had said, as long as the nails were gone anyway, what good was that.

I went back to him in the flat, spread my hands dejectedly. And then suddenly, in the very act of giving up hope like that, a way occurred to me. It comes to you as unexpectedly as that, sometimes. I looked at him narrowly, said, “Can you tell me offhand what color the walls of that closet were before they were repainted?”

“Hell no,” he admitted. “When did I ever go in there?”

“See, and you live right here in the house. I couldn’t have either, until I scraped below the top layer just now. I’m going to try to get him on that! It’s just a trick, but it’s about all we have left now.”

He looked at me puzzled.

“It was still beige the night it happened. Gus, the janitor, wasn’t allowed to do it over until after the cops were through with it. But if this guy didn’t go in there with her that night, he’s not supposed to know that.”

I was at the phone. He looked worried when he heard me say, “Headquarters.” I said, “Not you this time, Dixon.” When I got through to Hiller, I just said, “Will you meet me at the Mitchell place? I’ve got something I want you to hear.” I left Dixon in the apartment, told him to lie low, not put on any lights. “Stay here now, will you? When I come back maybe I’ll have good news for you.”

Outside the Mitchell door I had to talk like a trooper to get Hiller to cooperate with me — even as a test. His mind was already made up and he wasn’t unmaking it, not for any murderer’s exroommate. “I don’t ask you to open your mouth and say a word. All I ask you to do is not contradict what you hear me say, act as though it were official. And just listen to what he says. You’re sure he wasn’t allowed in that closet anytime during the following day, while you men were working on it?”

“No one was.”

“That’s all I want you to remember.” I rang the bell, Tremholt came to the door, and the dick and I went in together. I was shaking all over — inside where it couldn’t be detected. It was such a threadlike little thing to hang anything on. Hiller just looked inscrutable. Tremholt looked calm and self-possessed. His nails were starting to grow out again, I noticed, proving that that had been an emergency removal, he wasn’t a chronic biter.

The thing to do was to get him rattled, so he’d lose his head for a minute, wouldn’t be able to think quickly enough. I built up to it carefully, increasing the tempo as I went along. My insinuations became broader every minute, until they’d crossed the line, become outright accusations. Sure it was you, we’ve all known that all along! I was scared stiff Hiller would butt in, contradict me. He kept to the agreement, sat there impassive. He was just the audience.

“Yeah, I know you were supposed to be in your room here all evening. What does that amount to? Your room’s down near the front door, Mrs. Mitchell’s is all the way at the back of the hall. You have your own latchkey, you could have slipped in and out unnoticed a dozen times over between the time she first saw you come in at eight and the time she knocked to tell you she was getting worried about the girl not returning!”

I figured he was ripe enough now. Outwardly he was still imperturbable. But he was idly shredding a paper-folder of matches, and that was a giveaway. I gave him the punch-line. “And why did you feel you had to clip or file down your fingernails to the quick?” I didn’t give him time to shock-absorb that one. “I’ll tell you why, Hiller! Because he got pale-blue paint under his nails, from the incinerator closet where he dragged her—!”

He was still calm, derisive — outwardly, anyway. “Listen to that, will you? That’s a good one. The incinerator closet wasn’t even light-blue in the first place, it was tan, so how could I—”

I quit talking, I didn’t have to talk any more.

All Hiller said, very softly, almost purringly, was: “You weren’t suppose to know that, baby-boy,” and he started to get up from the chair he’d been in until now.

It was nearly dawn by the time I got back for Dixon. “Come on,” I said, “I’ve got to bring you down to Headquarters with me.”

The old fright came back again, that had done him so much damage.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of any more,” I insisted. “The thing’s unraveling beautifully. They’ve had Tremholt down there with them for hours, and he’s getting in deeper by the minute. His alibi wasn’t worth a damn, you know, once they gave it a really good shaking. I promised to produce you, and you’re coming with me. You can’t be cleared by proxy, you know.” And on the way down there I couldn’t resist remarking, “He may have had you darn near framed, but it wasn’t him alone, don’t forget.”

“Who else was in it with him?” he asked, wide-eyed.

“You yourself. I never saw a guy help to frame himself like you did.”

I don’t live with Dixon any more. I’ve moved out since. It’s hard to explain just why. He didn’t kill her. He did try to kill me, but it isn’t that either.

I run into him now and then, and we’re on the best of terms, but we never prolong the encounters, we’re never completely at ease. There’s a self-consciousness between us. You don’t want to be reminded of a murder every time you look at a guy.