The Dancing Detective

Leg Man

He had it all lined up ahead of him, like a flight of steps. First step would be a by-line over his piece. Over all his pieces. “By Clint Burgess.” Maybe in a year. Maybe even in six months. Next, a feature of his own, with a little boxed photo of him at the top. By the time he was in his thirties. Next, the city desk, where Herrick hung out now. By the time he was in his forties. Then managing editor. And then the top step — owner of the whole rag. He’d be old by then, fifty, but he wouldn’t raise a belly like the present old man, and he wouldn’t make a fool of himself on the links, and he’d treat his staff human, and—

“Burgess!”

He bounced all the way down the steps, owner, managing editor, city desk, feature, by-line — and there he was down at the bottom again. Just a leg man. A guy that dug ’em up and phoned ’em in, didn’t even write his own stories.

Herrick said dryly when he came over to the desk: “Yeah, I know you’re not appreciated, and I know you could do much better in this chair than I’m doing — saw you looking wistfully over at it just now — but in the meantime let’s keep it to ourselves just a mite longer.” The big sea-lion actually went coy on him, laid a finger across his lips and went: “Sh! And while we’re getting ready to turn over the paper to you, and while they’re painting your name on the old man’s door in there, suppose you haul your moss-grown behind outa here and earn the thirty-five bucks blackmail you’re shaking us down for every Saturday!”

The last couple of couplets boomed out like something over a loud-speaker. A copy-boy snorted somewhere in the background.

Burgess said: “All right! All right! If a guy busted an arm covering an assignment for you, he’d still be a lazy bum ’cause he didn’t bust both arms.”

“Naw,” said Herrick dryly, “he’d just be damn careless, that’s all. Now, to be more specific, chase over to a place called Mike’s Tavern, I think it’s somewhere along Blake Street. A tip just came into the office a few minutes ago that there’s been somebody killed over there. Find out what there is to be found out. Nothing fancy. Just facts, I want, facts. Get ’em straight and keep ’em straight. It’s probably just another dime-a-dozen bar hold-up and killing, so it’s worth maybe a paragraph on the second page, if nothing better turns up. It just happened, so lift your feet. In fact, if you were any kind of a leg man at all, you would have been over there already before it happened and not have to be sent around after it’s over by your hard-working editor.”

“Gee, what is a guy supposed to be, a mind-reader?” grumbled Burgess as he closed the door after him, to the accompaniment of another snicker from the copy-boy.

Herrick buckled his arms threateningly at the latter. “He’s a better newspaperman than you’ll ever be, brat. He’s got it in him. The only guys I insult around here are the guys I like.” Then he added threateningly: “You go back and tell him that and I’ll break your neck!”

“Ghee!” said the kid, ducking out, “I guess you must like me too.”

Burgess, meanwhile, was stemming his way to his assignment, muttering to himself every once in awhile: “Just facts he wants. All right, just facts he’ll get.”

Mike’s Tavern, at nine-thirty in the morning, wasn’t very convivial-looking. In fact, it wouldn’t have been very inviting even apart from the fact that a murder had just taken place in it. There was a detective squad car in front of it, and the unmistakable and slightly repellent shape of a morgue ambulance drawn up alongside that, with a stretcher partly protruding from it like an avaricious tongue. There was a very thin crowd, not large at all, with a single harness cop to keep it divided in two with a wide swath through it from curb to doorway. At that, its interest was only half-hearted. Even as he arrived it was already beginning to melt away. People had to work at that hour.

A second cop stopped him just inside the tavern entrance. Burgess showed his press card and the cop still kept on stopping him. “How’s chances?” Burgess wheedled.

“I’ll see what he says,” the cop condescended.

He dipped his head and one shoulder inside, pulled them out again. “He says all right,” he said.

Burgess went inside. It looked as dim and depressing as only the inside of such a place can look at such an hour. There were plenty of men there, but they weren’t drinking and their presence did nothing to liven it up any. Small leaded panes of colored glass, red, blue, and green, made the bright morning outside seem like twilight. They had a pair of high-powered lights rigged up now, but without them it would have been impossible to look in from the street and see anything. A large clock high on the wall over the bar said 9:32. A small tab sticking up in the indicator of the cash-register said “20¢.” A detective said: “All right, stand back and let him take those glasses now!”

There were two glasses standing in lonely abandonment on the bar, on the customers’ side of it and fairly close together, as though the vanished drinkers had stood elbow to elbow. There was also a man groveling bodily atop the bar, like a monkey, on his knees and forearms, sighting some sort of a camera apparatus down into the narrow well between counter and wall. A bright blue flash went off, and then he turned around and jumped down, on the outside. He sighted at the glasses next, dipping down so that he’d be on a level with them. Another blue flash went off. Then he straightened up and departed, brushing by Burgess and mumbling something as he went that sounded like: “That’s all the pretty pitchers for today.”

Two men came in with a morgue basket between them. They went around behind the bar, through a little opening at the far end, where it joined the wall. After that, you could only see them from about the ribs up. They had a hard time doing whatever it was they were doing. The first one rose a little, then went down again, as though he had scissored his legs widely to step over something. Then he turned and faced the other way, back toward his stretcher-mate. Then they both looked down and scratched their heads, as though faced with a problem in hydraulics.

“Put it down on top of him and then turn ’em both over together — that’s the only way to get him in,” one remarked to the other.

They both dipped down below the bar and stayed out of sight for several moments.

When they bobbed up again, they were both roundshouldered, as though borne down by considerable weight.

There was a slight concussion against the shelves caused by some inadvertent movement of theirs, and a bottle of Jamaica rum that had been standing too close to the edge toppled over and went down.

All the onlookers jumped a little with nervousness, Burgess included, but the shattering crash that they were expecting never came. The bottle never struck the floor. A moment later it had reappeared, still intact, and was replaced in its former position on the shelf. “Right in the breadbasket,” one of the transport agents commented to the other.

They maneuvered their way around the end of the bar out into the open again and proceeded rapidly to the street, carrying something covered-over between them, that was rounded in the middle like a shaky plate of jelly. A pair of shoe-tips stuck up at one end. Burgess didn’t try to uncover it and look as it went by. He was willing to take their word for it the man was dead.

“How much did they take the place for?” he asked the detective in charge of the case, whom he’d overheard them calling Lyons.

“It wasn’t a cash-killing,” the latter said, relighting a cigar that he’d allowed to expire under pressure of his duties. “There’s no take in a bar-till at this hour of the day. We figure it for a grudge-killing. They knew his habits, knew they could get him alone in the place right after he opened up.”

“Any idea—?”

“Nobody saw them come, nobody saw them go. The barman came in and found him lying there like that, still warm, with a slug in his back, around behind the bar where he couldn’t be seen from the street.”

“I thought he was the barman — who was he?”

“Naw, he was the owner. Mike Oliver. Used to come in and open up himself every day. That’s the barman standing over there.”

Burgess went to work on him next. He’d taken him to be a third-grade detective breaking in at his first murder-case, until now. He’d had that air of trying to be helpful but not knowing exactly what to do that such a novice would have had.

Burgess used an old one that had never yet failed to work, human nature being what it is. “I don’t suppose you mind if I mention you,” he said deferentially. “This is for the papers.”

The barman thawed. In fact he even turned into a gushing stream of garrulity.

“What sort of a guy was he?” Burgess suggested.

The barman glanced around toward the now-vacant aisle behind the bar, screened the side of his mouth with the flat of his hand, as though his late employer was still somewhere around likely to overhear him. “He was a very unpopular guy. Hardly anybody got along with him at all. He had these ways, y’know, that don’t take with customers. He wouldn’t carry anyone on the cuff. He was tight like this.” He packed a close fist and showed it to Burgess. “Any time I tried to pass out a round on the house, he’d give me a dirty look that would take all the good spirit out of it. Customers are quick to notice a thing like that, y’know. And worst of all, he had a very bad habit of collecting for the drinks right as he put them down, instead of waiting until after. He’d stand there with his hand out, and if they didn’t shell out, he’d mention the amount and make sure they did before they had a chance to hoist them.”

“A guy like that must have made plenty of enemies,” Burgess acquiesced.

His informant nodded vigorously. “I remember one night, only about a month ago, he had a terrible row with a guy in here, that only started about some little thing like that. No first-time stranger, either, but a good steady customer that had been coming in here regular for years past. The guy handed him a ten-dollar bill. There was a big rush on that night, they were lined up three deep, and in his hurry the boss didn’t look at it close enough. He only gave him back change for a five. The guy kicked, and the boss called him a liar to his face. I saw what was going to happen, and I tried to take him aside and reason with him. I said: ‘He’s been coming in steady for years. Even if he’s wrong about it, his trade’s worth more than five dollars to you, boss. Give it to him.’ But he wouldn’t listen to me. The guy called him a crook, so the boss jumped over the counter then and there and threw him out. He was a big, husky guy, you know. The guy picked himself up off the street and came back as far as the door and hollered in, ‘I’m going to get you for this! I’m going to get you if it’s the last thing I do!’ Everyone in the place heard him. Then he went off. I thought sure he was coming back with the cops any minute, but he never showed up again.”

“So then when he didn’t, the boss says to me with a knowing grin: ‘That proves he was lying, and he knows it himself! If he was really gypped out of five dollars, he would have been back here with a cop.’ I said to him: ‘I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

Burgess looked thoughtful. “I’m not so sure about it either,” he murmured. “There are other ways.”

“So the punch-line on it is this,” the barman went ahead. “That night when we tallied up, we found we were five dollars ahead of the register. There was an extra five in the till that wasn’t accounted for. The boss didn’t give a rap. All he did was shrug and say to me: ‘If he shows up again, give it back to him.’ But he never did. He’s never been here again from that night on.”

“Did you tell them that?” Burgess asked, dropping his voice a little and hitching his head toward the detectives in the background.

“I had to,” the bartender said uncomfortably. “You can’t keep anything back from them guys when they start asking you things. I had to tell them his name too. We’d gotten to know him by name, he’d been coming in here so long. Chuck Hastings was his name. I had to tell them that and what he looked like.” He drew a deep breath. “They wanted to know.”

Burgess saw him down at headquarters later on the same day. They were just bringing him fresh out of Lyons’ office but he looked pretty wilted. He was a very badly frightened guy. Burgess couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. He looked as though he’d been severely mauled and even more severely grilled. He was question-drunk. Somebody’d already passed the word to Burgess who he was, that was how he knew him.

A minute or two later the door opened again and Mike’s bartender came out. Evidently an identification had taken place in there. He went by without recognizing Burgess and the latter didn’t tip himself off to him.

Lyons let him come in after that, while he was catching his breath between more important things he had to do.

“I see you’ve got yourself a suspect already,” Burgess began.

“Nope.” Lyons crumpled a paper cup and threw it away under the water-cooler. He shook his head decisively. “We’ve got the culprit. Solid. He’s cooked, washed and bottled. His prints were taken and they match those on the death-glass left on the bar. And that, I might add, was practically tapestried with them.”

Burgess put a pencil to the back of an envelope, which was just a mannerism with him. He didn’t jot anything. “Has he got any kind of an alibi?” he asked.

“Don’t they all? Only his is deaf and dumb, can’t even talk for him. His bed. Claims he was in it all morning. He was still letting on like he was asleep in it when we went for him.”

“Who was behind the second glass?”

Lyons smiled bleakly. “You can’t expect him to admit he knows that, when he’s denying he himself was behind the first. At least not right off. But we’ll get that out of him. If we don’t today, we will tomorrow. If we don’t tomorrow, we will Thursday.” He picked up an unsigned confession lying on his desk, flourished it, dropped it again. “He’ll change his mind about signing this too, before were through. We got lot of time. We’re not in any hurry. But those are just odds and ends left over. The case is closed. He goes up before the Grand Jury end of next week.” He tipped from his eyebrow to Burgess. “Be seeing you, reporter.”

Burgess opened the door, and then hung around it.

Lyons looked up from the desk at which he’d sat down and busied himself once more. “What’s the matter, the hinges need oiling?” he suggested pointedly.

“Don’t you think it’s funny about the second glass not having any prints on it at all? It was standing there emptied out, so somebody must have lifted it. It’s all right about the second guy having gloves, but then Mike Oliver’s own fingerprints would have still been left on it. He must have set it down on the bar, it didn’t fly down by itself. If it didn’t have any prints on it at all, then it looks as if it must have been wiped clean on purpose. Well, then, if one of the death-glasses was wiped clean, why wasn’t that done to the other too?”

“One of the two guys had more presence of mind than the other. One remembered to, one forgot — showing which of the two it was who fired the shot. The guy who forgot to. Now close the door.”

A cop stepped over and did it for him, swinging it so that it ended up an inch from Burgess’ face.

“Well, if he said you can see the pictures, you can see them,” the custodian of the police photographic files said wearily. “I’ll just get his O.K. on it.” He reached for the phone.

“No, don’t bother him about it now,” Burgess said hastily. “He’s busy, that’s why he sent me around to you myself. I was just in his office, I only left it this minute. Not the body, you understand. Just the background shots, the bar itself.”

The attendant wearily took down a large folder, opened it. “You was in the place yourself this morning, what d’you want to look at pictures of it for? Why don’t you just go back there and take another look at it instead?”

“I want to see it like it was, not like it is now. I thought I saw something then, and I want to see if I was right, and it’s still on the pictures the way I thought I saw it at the time.”

The custodian watched him bend down close to the prints, poring over them with his face an inch away as if he were nearsighted. “Well, are you? Is it?” he demanded at last.

“Yeah,” Burgess said excitedly, straightening up. “I am! It is!”

“Well, what is it?” the man in charge asked, letting curiosity get the better of him for a minute.

“Thanks a lot,” Burgess called back, and let the door swing closed after him.

He used one of the public telephones right there in the corridor of the headquarters building to call his office.

Herrick was wroth. “It’s about time!” he barked. “You’ve only been out all morning and half the afternoon! I could have written the history of Rome in that time. What d’you think were doing down here, piece-work? Half the working day for every two lines that gets tucked in where a column winds up short!”

“Yeah, but it’s not over yet.”

“All right, four words takes care of that. ‘An arrest is expected.’ You don’t have to stay out and wait for it to happen!”

“The arrest has been made already,” Burgess faltered. “They made it at eleven this morning, but—”

“Well, is it the guy that did it?”

“They say it is, but—”

Herrick rumbled like a volcano. “Well, do they say it’s over?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Then who says it isn’t over?”

Burgess swallowed hard. “I do.”

He could hear Herrick leave his creaky swivel-chair and then hit it again. It took him a minute to get his larynx hooked up again. “Why? Because he hasn’t been executed and buried yet? We’re running a daily newspaper, not an annual. Listen, I didn’t send you out to solve detective cases, I sent you out to get facts. If the police say he did it, then it’s over! I’ll give you ten minutes to get back here and get to work!”

“But listen, boss, if you’ll only give me time to explain what I noticed, something I’ve found out that I think they missed seeing themselves, you’ll understand why I think they’re holding the wrong guy—”

A feminine voice cut in at this point. “Ti-yum is up. Deposit another nickel, pal-lease.”

Burgess began to grub desperately at the linings of his various pockets with one hand, hanging onto the receiver with the other. Pennies turned up, quarters turned up, even a half-dollar turned up, but no nickel. “Hey, wait, don’t cut—” he pleaded.

Herrick’s voice was fading away like distant, rolling thunder. “Remember, ten minutes, or you don’t need to come back at all!” Something went clunk and the connection was cut.

Burgess hung up and used both hands to go over himself this time. He stepped outside the booth, where there was more elbow-room. Suddenly it turned up, the lone Jefferson-head that he’d known he had somewhere or other all along.

He tossed it up and down in his hand a couple of times, pondering. Then he shook his head, put it back again where he’d just found it. “I better act like I didn’t have one anyway,” he muttered to himself. “If I call him again he’ll only tell me to come back, and I can’t — not just yet, not till this thing is over.”

He went back to Mike’s Tavern. It was still open for business, surprisingly enough, either going along under sheer momentum or because it would take a few weeks to dispose of the lease and the stock on hand. But it wasn’t doing well, no one was in the place. People evidently didn’t feel at ease hanging around premises where there had been a violent death so recently.

“Gimme two fingers,” Burgess said.

“You’re the newspaper guy from this morning,” the barman recalled. “I thought I seen you before.”

Burgess held up his glass as though he were scanning the drink. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t, he was scrutinizing what held it in. “Do you keep count of how many glasses like this you have in stock?” he asked idly.

“Oh, sure. I got it right at the end of my fingertips. You have to in this business. We got in three dozen of ’em only a couple weeks ago.”

“Lost any through breakage since then?”

“No, I’m pretty careful. You have to be, working for a guy like Mike.”

“Then you ought to have thirty-five, not counting that one the police impounded, that right?”

“Thirty-five, and eighteen that we were down to before we reordered, that makes it fifty-three.”

Burgess reached into his pocket. “I’m not one of these betting guys,” he said, “but I got nothing to do right now, and you got nothing. Here’s a dollar bill says you haven’t got fifty-three in stock right now. Fade me.”

“That’s an easy way to double my money,” the barman said scornfully. He put down one of his own. He picked up a flat stick used to scrape the head off beer. “I’ll hit ’em so they sing out, you can keep count with me as I go along. They’re all lined up here even, except that one in front of you.”

The stick started to sound off flutelike little musical notes, ting, ting, ting, while Burgess kept score out loud. “Fifty-one.” Ting. “Fifty-two.” Ting. “Fifty-three.”

There was a pause. Then the stick went ting one last time.

They both said it together. “Fifty-four!”

The barman straightened up. He scratched his head. “There’s one over. I musta miscounted.”

“No, you didn’t miscount,” Burgess said, without explaining further. He split the kitty up again. “Keep your dollar, I don’t want it.” He pocketed his own. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Sure,” said the barman, relieved at not having to forfeit his share of the ante. “What’ll it be?”

Burgess groped around, eyes vacant, as if in search of a topic. “I suppose you knew the ins and outs of your boss s personal affairs pretty much.”

“Better than my own. I been working for him for fifteen years.”

“Everybody makes enemies. Who hated him pretty much?”

“Who didn’t?” was the succinct answer.

“Pretty long list, huh? Well, now this is just rambling talk, but who out of the many would you say hated him enough to kill him?”

The barman scraped his chin. “First off, this guy Chuck Hastings, I’d say.”

That, Burgess knew, was auto-suggestion pure and simple. Hastings was already being held for the murder, therefore his name was the first to occur to the Solon of the lager schooners. “Who else, after him?” he encouraged. He poised pencil to one of his reliable envelope-backs. “Let’s see if we can’t rig up a sort of list, between the two of us. Something like this: if Hastings hadn’t been the one to kill him, who would have been the one likeliest after him to do it?”

“This is good,” the barman chuckled. “It’s kind of like a crossword puzzle.”

“Kind of like,” Burgess assented.

It took time. Time and patience and dexterity. But when he came out of there, six drinks, two gift-cigars, and ninety minutes later, he had this list on the back of his envelope (he hadn’t bothered transcribing motives, just names):

Herrick had been just on the point of leaving the office on his way home. Burgess could tell that by the length of time it took him to come back to his desk and answer the phone. He was usually sitting right beside it.

“Listen, boss,” Burgess began ebulliently. “I’ve found out there’s one glass too many at the tavern where the shooting—”

That was as far as he got. Herrick could be surgically cutting when he wanted to be. He was now. “Who’re you?” he asked, puzzled.

“Aw, boss, don’t. This is Burgess, you know who—”

“There’s no one by that name on the staff now.”

“At least give me a rewrite man, if you won’t listen to me yourself,” Burgess pleaded.

Herrick was regretfully polite. “Only guys on the payroll are entitled to rewrite men. I can’t give strangers rewrite men.”

“But boss, I’ve got a list of five possible suspects, and one of them—”

“I thought the police already had the guy that did it, and that it was finished.”

“Naw, because he didn’t do it.”

“Sorry, but it’s never been our policy to accept tips from outsiders. And you were fired, as of two hours and twenty minutes ago,” said Herrick with unimpeachable logic.

There never was a newspaperman yet, who when fired, didn’t take it out in drink. And Burgess immediately set about running true to form. He went from the telephone straight out into the opening stages of what had all the earmarks of being a progressive, night-long binge. But the similarity ended there. The average person will stay in one place until he gets a good edge on. Burgess, on the contrary, didn’t even give himself a chance to get warmed up in any one place. He kept moving from bar to bar, at a ratio of one short drink to a spot. Furthermore, he hardly took more than a sip of each individual drink. He just dipped his gums once each time and called it a slug. He seemed to have a sort of geographic formula for getting high, as though he were following a roadmap. He drank his way down the left side of Sycamore Avenue. Then back along the right side. Then he moved over one block, and drank his way down the left side of Central Avenue. Then back along the right. Then he moved over one block, and did the same thing on the next thoroughfare.

In each place he’d ask a question. Just one. “Was a jigger like this taken from your bar within the last few nights?” He kept getting no’s and shakes of the head, shrugs and stares. “Who would take a thing like that? Are you kidding, mister?” He’d turn around and walk out again without pursuing the subject any further. He had a lot of ground to cover and only a limited time at his disposal.

At about the third place on the right side of the third avenue, with time running close to midnight and his mouth flaming from the dry cleaning it was getting, there was a sudden variation in the result. He got a double-take from the bartender, after he’d already gotten the usual no and had started over toward the door on his way out. “Hey, wait, mister, what was that you just asked me?”

He repeated it. “I said was one of these jiggers swiped from your bar here within the last couple of nights?”

The barman nodded. Slow at first, then faster. “Yeah. Come to think of it, one was.” Then the man’s mouth opened into an oval of mystification, stayed that way. “But how did you know that? Who told you?”

Burgess closed in again, avidly. “Got any idea who took it?”

“I don’t know who he was, if that’s what you mean.”

“But you did see him?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

Burgess went up on his toes a little, palms to bar-edge. “What did he look like? Gimme an idea, quick.”

“He was medium height, on the slender side. Let’s see now. Dark hair, and skin a little bit sunburned, he was peeling up around the forehead.”

“A cast in one eye?”

“Yeah, one eye a little squinty, like there was something the matter with it.”

Burgess had sunk back to dead floor-level even before he’d heard the answer. His shoulders slumped over frustratedly. The description was that of Chuck Hastings, whom they had for the murder anyway.

“You didn’t see him take it, actually, though, did you?” he asked dispiritedly.

“No, I didn’t. But it was his jigger, so he must have. When he walked out, I went over to where he’d been standing, to clean up, and there was no glass there to put back. His chaser-glass was still there big as life, but no jigger. I couldn’t figure it. I even leaned over and looked down on the outside to see if it had tumbled off, but there was nothing on the floor, either broken or whole. I couldn’t get over it. It’s a thing that never happens, you know. They’re not worth a damn, them little things.”

They’re not worth anything in money, Burgess reflected without answering, but they can cost a life.

Lyons looked at him as though he thought he was crazy. “Why should I let you go in and talk to him? What do you think this is, Old Home Week in the detention cells? The guy’s being held on murder charges. People can’t just walk in off the street and visit with him.”

“I only want to get a little of his background, for a human interest story I’ve been commissioned to write. How can that hurt any?”

“Well, go get your background out in front of the building someplace.”

“What, are you afraid if I talk to him a couple minutes I’m liable to find out the guy’s innocent and you’re holding the wrong party? You must have a pretty shaky case.”

“Why, you—!” Lyons half-rose from his desk, shot his sleeves back as though he meditated taking a swing at him. “I ought to...” Then he changed his mind, sank down again. “I suppose if I don’t, you’ll write it up your own way, make us out like heels,” he growled. “I know you guys.” He called someone in. “Take Pencil-Happy back and give him five minutes with Hastings. He wants to hold hands with him or something. Vacuum him good first.”

“I had a hard time getting in here,” Burgess began without preamble as soon as the gratings had clashed closed on the three of them.

“I didn’t,” Hastings said gloomily, without looking up from the bunk.

“And they’re not giving me much time, so I’ve got to talk to you fast.” He speared his thumb at the cop glaring down watchfully at the two of them with his back to the grating. “Never mind him, I’m not going to ask you anything that it can hurt for them to hear. Only, please answer me straight, will you? That’s the only way I can help you.”

“What d’ya want to know?” Hastings answered surlily.

“Who’d you shake hands with last night?”

Hastings straightened up a little on his elbow, looked at him askance. “What are you, a little dippy or something?”

“Who’d you shake hands with last night? That’s what I said. Who’d you shake hands with in a bar, the night before you were arrested for the killing?”

Hastings brushed his hand thoughtfully across his mouth, eyed him vacantly. “I don’t — I didn’t meet anyone I knew, any friend, all that night. I was by myself the whole time.”

“Wait a minute. You were in a place called Sullivan’s, on Union Avenue. That much is right, isn’t it?”

Hastings nodded. “Yeah. But I went in alone, and I came out alone. I wasn’t in there over ten, fifteen minutes at the most.”

“You didn’t shake hands with anyone while you were in there? Think, man, will you?”

Hastings came perfectly erect at last. “Wait a minute. I didn’t shake hands with anyone of my own accord. But somebody did grab my mitt and pump it at one time, I remember that now. There was one of these souses next to me. You know the kind — the whole world was his long-lost brother. The kind you can’t get rid of, once they fasten on you. First he apologized for slopping over against me. Then he wanted to buy me a drink. I told him no thanks, I was checking out as soon as I finished the one I had in front of me. Then he said, ‘No hard feelings,’ and reached down and pumped my hand about sixteen times. After that, he didn’t pester me any more. That what you wanted?”

Burgess gave a grim duck of his head to show it was. “Did you notice your hands when you got home last night?”

“What d’you mean?” Hastings said impatiently. “They were still with me, I didn’t leave ’em nowhere.”

“No, no, I mean did you wash them before you turned in, did you happen to look them over? Was there anything on them?”

Hastings stopped short, took a hitch in his breathing. “What are you, psychic? There was something! There was a couple of spots of grease on them. On one, the right. Axle-grease or something, stuff that was hard to get off. That lush I told you about must’ve been working around a car or in a machine-shop.”

Burgess suddenly slammed him hard across the chest with the back of his hand. “I’m on the right track!” he exclaimed jubilantly.

He leaned forward intently. “Was he anyone you ever saw before?”

“Naw, I never saw him before in my life. He was a big, bulky guy, from what I can remember. I didn’t look at him very close. I think he had on dungarees and an oiler’s cap, but I’m not sure. He was just some stray lush.”

“He wasn’t stray and he was no lush, but never mind about that now.” He got out his old standby, the envelope and pencil. “Hastings, who hates you pretty much?”

“The whole world, the way it looks tonight.”

“I don’t, and I’m asking you. What do I get out of it? I’m only trying to help you. Who hates you enough to frame you for a murder?”

“How you going to tell about that?” was the disgruntled answer. “Sometimes you don’t know it when they do.”

“You usually have a pretty fair idea.”

When he left him he had this list:

He sat down on a bench on his way back to Lyon’s office, took out the other one, the list he’d obtained from the bartender at Mike’s Tavern, and held the two side by side. Then he took his pencil and drew a line through each name that appeared only once on the two.

When he got through, he had this, on both:

“Throw the guy out,” Lyons said wearily. “You give these newspaper guys an inch and they take thirty-six miles.”

Burgess ducked in under the arm of the cop as the latter turned his way to throw him out.

“Look, I admit I’m not a detective and I’m not trying to be,” he said, straining forward while the cop tried to drag him out by the back of the collar and the slack of the coat. “I’m just trying to get the facts in this case. I’ve got who did it.”

“Let him alone, O’Keefe,” Lyons said contemptuously. “I want to hear this. It ought to do me good. I haven’t laughed all week.”

He made a steeple of his hands, leaned comfortably back in his chair. “Well, where is he?” he asked, pretending to scan the hallway in back of Burgess.

“I don’t know where he is, I haven’t got him with me! But I do know who he is. He’s a guy named Edge. He’s in the wholesale liquor business. But that’s just a front for what amounts to a big ring putting on the squeeze-play pretty much as the old bootleg rings did in the prohibition days. The only difference is that they can distribute openly now, it’s not against the law. But the squeeze is pretty much the same. If the retailer gets tired of paying what they soak him, and tries to switch to some other distributor — well, it’s just too bad for him. And according to Mike Oliver’s barman, Mike cancelled his orders several months back and refused to continue letting Edge’s outfit supply him.”

“Very interesting,” said Lyons sarcastically. “What does he look like?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen him in my life.”

Lyons addressed the cop. “He doesn’t know where he is, he’s never even seen him, but he’s sure he killed Oliver. That s what I call a strong circumstantial case.”

“You’re convicting Hastings just on the strength of that one glass, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, and you’re trying to get us to convict Edge just by pulling his name out of a hat. We got fingerprints on the glass at least. You got nothing.”

Burgess rushed on: “There’s also a revenge-motive there, I mean on Edge’s part against Hastings. Edge used to operate a speakeasy in the prohibition days, and Hastings was an employe of his at that time, worked for him. They were raided and federally tried. A lot of inside evidence turned up mysteriously from somewhere, that helped convict Edge, as though somebody had ratted, made an arrangement with the authorities. He was never able to find out where it came from, but there was one thing noticeable when the trial ended. He got a stiff sentence, and Hastings, for some peculiar reason, got off with a remarkably light one.”

“Prohibition ended in 1933,” Lyons said dryly, “and he waits until 1943 to get even with him.” He hiccoughed scornfully. “Good snappy work.”

“Motives are one thing that never grow stale.”

“You’ve got from nothing,” Lyons told him. “All you’ve got is a couple of say-so’s, second-hand. A guy that’s already under arrest himself — and you know how they’ll grab at any straw — remembers a guy that didn’t like him ten years ago. And a barman, who admits his boss was unpopular with everyone in general, remembers someone who didn’t like him. So that’s enough for you. You’ve got the guy who did it, right away. Bertillon wasted his time inventing the system of fingerprints.” And he cinched it with what on the face of it was an insuperable argument. “Just let me point out something. I don’t like you, at this minute. In fact, I dislike you so intensely that I am yearning to throttle you with my own bare hands. But that don’t mean I’m going to murder you. Far from it. See the difference?”

Burgess scrubbed the back of his neck in exasperation. “What do I have to do to convince you?” he asked.

“Get the guy to break down and confess out of his own mouth,” Lyons jeered. “Then maybe I’ll pay some attention.”

“I don’t even know where to reach him,” Burgess murmured in a helpless undertone.

“Go ahead, O’Keefe, you can finish throwing him out now,” Lyons said. “That was funny enough to last me the rest of the week.”

Burgess took the furled directory from the bar into the phone-booth with him, keeping his finger on the name he’d found, to make sure of not losing his place again. He dropped a nickel in and asked for the number. A man’s voice answered. “I want to speak to Joseph Edge,” Burgess said.

“Who is it and what about?” the voice said inhospitably.

“He doesn’t know me, and it’s strictly personal.”

Another voice got on, a little suaver than the first.

Burgess said: “Is this the Joseph Edge who is in the liquor distributing business?” He’d already tried two who weren’t.

“This is Joe Edge, and that’s my ra— my occupation. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I figured maybe there was something I could do for you.” He waited a minute. “You were in Mike’s Tavern early this morning, around nine, nine-fifteen,” he said flatly.

The voice showed no dismay. Only bland interest. “Mike’s Tavern? Where’s that?”

“That’s where the shooting was. Where you were when the shooting took place.”

The voice was silken, unruffled. “I don’t get you.”

“I’ll explain. I was the first customer in there this morning. I went in a minute or two after the place was opened up, almost at the heels of the owner. I went back to the men’s washroom, right after I entered. I was in there when you came in. I saw the whole thing through the crack of the door. You didn’t think to look in there. That was your mistake.”

“Don’t waste my time. Tell it to the marines.”

“The only drawback is, they don’t pay you.”

“Oh, a shake, is that it?” The voice was amused.

“I haven’t got any job or anything. I’m pretty well broke. Matter of fact, I been saving this for a rainy day. Well, it’s pouring cats and dogs right now.”

The voice laughed heartily. The voice was very sure of itself. “Hate to disappoint you, but it’s dry and sunny at this end.”

“You don’t believe I was in there, do you? I’ll draw you a picture. There was another guy with you, two of you came in. You stood up against the bar on the right-hand side, as you come in. He stood on the left. After the shooting, one glass was wiped off clean. The other...” He dropped his voice a little, spoke close to the phone. “Now is it clouding up a little at your end?”

There was a pause at the other end. Burgess knew what the cause of it was. It wasn’t due to fear, nor loss of presence of mind. It was due to a momentary muffling of the phone, while an order was being given in the background: “See where this is coming from.”

The voice came back again. “Who’s in on this with you?” it asked, almost affably. Burgess could tell it was playing for time. He didn’t mind playing along with it, he was a willing dupe.

“Nobody. Just me by myself.”

“Maybe you did see that. You sound convincing enough. But how do you know I’m the same person you saw in there?”

“I made it my business to find out. What d’you suppose I’ve been doing all day?”

There was another pause. The call had been traced. Probably a slip of paper had been thrust before the speaker, for him to read.

“So you’re in this by yourself,” the voice resumed. “Well, your proposition interests me. About how large an umbrella would it take to keep you dry?”

“About a five hundred dollar one.”

“That’s a pretty large umbrella.”

“This is a pretty heavy rainstorm.”

“All right,” the voice acquiesced. “No harm in getting together and talking it over. I usually get shaved the first thing in the morning at a barbershop called the Empire. It’s on Central Avenue, you can’t miss it. It has a pole out front, on the sidewalk. You be standing up alongside that, about nine o’clock. Have you got that, now?”

“I’ve got it,” Burgess said. He didn’t bother jotting it down. He knew it was an appointment that would never be kept. It couldn’t be, for it was an appointment between the living and the dead. One party to it wouldn’t be alive any more by that time.

He hung up. He consulted his watch, then he retrieved the directory, once more traced his finger down it until he had located Edge’s number. This time it was the street-address given with it that interested him, though. “About ten minutes to get here,” he murmured under his breath. He fished out one of his ubiquitous envelope-backs and jotted something on it. Then he folded it over small and stuck it back in his pocket.

He came out of the booth and moved back to the bar again.

“What time do you close up?” he asked the man behind the counter.

“Four o’clock, the usual time.”

“About twenty minutes to go,” Burgess murmured.

The place was emptying out by degrees. He stayed by himself at the far end of it. In ten minutes he looked at his watch again. Then he turned his head slowly and eyed the door. Nothing happened. No one came in. He packed a fist and swung it low toward the bar, under cover of his body, then pulled it short — as though his calculations had gone wrong, and he felt like taking it out on somebody.

The barman started putting out some of the lights. The last of the other customers had drifted out by now, there was no one at all in the place but Burgess. The barman came back toward him to give him the hint. “Care for a nightcap before I put the corks back in for the night?”

Burgess nodded. He took out a bill and put it into the barman’s hand. “No change,” he said.

“Gee, thanks,” the barman beamed. Then he started to look down into his own palm.

“Don’t look at it, just take it over to the register with you,” Burgess said out of the comer of his mouth.

The barman went over to the register, stole a look of curiosity back toward him as he stood there before it.

Burgess got up and walked slowly toward the front entrance. He stood there a minute and buttoned up his coat tight. He shivered a little, as if he found it chilly-looking outside from where he was standing.

“Goodnight,” the barman called after him.

“Good-bye,” Burgess answered. He had a feeling that that was the right word to use. He pushed out into the eerie blackness of the street, pulled his hat down low, started to trudge away. It was now four o’clock in the morning. He wouldn’t have taken even odds on his chances of seeing five roll around, like he’d given the barman at Mike’s on the extra jigger.

Rubber whispered insidiously up alongside him before he’d moved half-a-dozen feet away, and a hooded car was there, slowly pacing him. A voice spoke from it. “Buddy, could we trouble you for a light?”

His breathing changed, but he didn’t give any other sign of knowing what this was. He reached in his pocket, then turned aside and went over to it.

He still couldn’t see anyone, it was like a coffin on wheels. They must have had the shades drawn. A hand reached out and took the matches, but they weren’t used, the flare from inside never came.

“Say something, buddy,” the voice urged.

“What d’you want me to say?”

“Just that, that’ll do nicely.” A second voice spoke from the depths of the car. “That’s him. I know him by his voice. He’s the one.”

“Here’s your matches back, buddy.”

Burgess looked down at where the hand had come slightly forward through the door-gap again. “That’s a gun you’ve got there,” he remarked calmly.

“It says ‘get in and make yourself comfortable.’ ”

A second door opened rearward to the first and he got in. Both doors closed tight and the wheels started to pick up pace.

It was pitch-black. He could feel someone on each side of him, but they were just formless masses of darkness, without faces or anything else. A voice spoke to his left. “You called up a certain party about a certain matter, a little earlier tonight, didn’t you?”

“Every call is to a party, about a matter,” Burgess parried.

“You don’t have to be afraid, buddy. There’s a nice umbrella in it for you. All we gotta do first is find out if you’re a phony or on the up.”

“Where we going to do that?” Burgess asked quietly.

“To a warehouse where they store liquor. Was you ever to a warehouse where they store liquor? It’s very instructive.”

“You’ll frighten the guy,” a voice on the other side of him remonstrated with mock solicitude.

“No, the guy isn’t frightened,” Burgess answered imperturbably. He had to quirk his neck to get the words out freely, but they didn’t see that in the dark.

“Oh, the guy’s brave, huh?” was the jeering reply.

Something white showed up in the blackness in front of him, and he instinctively shied away from it. “Just hold steady, buddy, this goes around your eyes.” The nudge of a tubular gun-muzzle into the cleft between two of his ribs added a note of persuasion. A blindfold was pulled tight around him, fastened at the back of his head.

“What for? I can’t see anything even without it.”

“Well, with it you can’t see. twice as good, that’s what for.”

The car ran up some sort of a trucking ramp, then gave off a hollow, echoing sound, as though it had entered some sort of a vast enclosed place. Then it stopped, the doors latched open, and he could hear them getting out.

“All right, buddy, end of the line. Down you come.”

He missed the car-step, and flopped inertly against someone. He was shoved back, then steadied, gripped by both arms, and hustled forward, to the accompaniment of a small battery of other footfalls all around him, striking on wooden planking. “You stay out there with the car, Muggsy,” a voice ordered. The rest kept going.

Presently it spoke again. “Are we all in? Turn on some lights.” A thin line of yellow showed up along the bottom of Burgess’ blindfold. “Take the blinkers off him.”

The bandage was whipped off. He blinked helplessly a couple of times before he could get his eyes into focus. He was in some sort of a huge cavernous place, its ceiling so high it was completely ought of sight in the gloom. A shaded light brooded down on the floor, and on the four men around him, none of whom he had ever seen before. There was a shadowy background of packing cases dimly discernible, with aisles left through them here and there.

Four pairs of eyes stared at him with flinty inflexibility. One of their owners spoke at last. “Now there’s four of us here. You say you saw two guys come into Mike’s Tavern and shoot him, yesterday morning. All right, pick out the two you say you saw.”

He knew his life depended on the answer. “Give me a minute’s time,” he stalled. “Give my eyes a chance to get used to the light. I had a couple drinks back there, and I want to be sure what I’m doing.”

“Yeah,” the spokesman echoed mordantly. “You want to be sure what you’re doing.”

Burgess stared hard at the first one, on his left. The man stared back at him, evil eyed and granite-faced. He passed on to the next, stared at him. The man tiled to stare back. His jaw twitched a little. His eyes dropped momentarily, then he recovered, went ahead staring.

“Come on,” somebody said. “Either you do know or you don’t!”

“I do know. I want to figure out what it’s best for me to say.”

The fourth man took out a sheaf of bills, left them lying in front of him on a corner of the packing case, without saying a word. There must have been at least a thousand dollars worth in the crumpled mass.

Burgess took a deep breath. “The two guys I saw come into Mike’s Tavern and shoot Mike Oliver were you, the second guy, and you, the fourth,” he said quietly.

Nothing happened for a minute. Then the man who had produced the money emitted a soft sigh of regret in the silence. He smiled a little with it. “That was the wrong answer.”

“You two were the ones that were there, what’s wrong about it?”

“Sure we were. And that’s why it’s the wrong answer. If you’d picked the wrong two, we’d have known you were guessing. You would have probably walked out of here alive. You picked the right two, so we know now you were really there. Too bad, but you’ll have to take your five hundred in capsule form now.”

A gun came up in his hand. “Move him out a little,” he instructed. “It’s liable to go into one of the cases, and that’s my best four-star stock you’ve got him standing in front of.”

Two of them grabbed Burgess each by an arm and started to swing him out further into the aisle.

“And put that down yourself,” an authoritative voice suddenly bellowed from further back in the shadows, “or it’s liable to go into something else besides that!”

Edge swung around to face in the new direction, and hitched the gun up to shoot. The crash, however, came from the other end of the target-line, and he went slapping back into one of the cases with a wooden thud.

Inspector Lyons came forward, wallowing through the haze of his own shot. “You should always do as you’re told the first time,” he said grimly, “when it’s a police order.” He plucked the gun out of his hand, and Edge went sidling down to the floor, leaving a thin red streak across the stenciled signs on the packing-cases that said: “Edge’s Four-Star Bond.”

There was a cop or detective standing at each of the four aisles converging on the open place where Burgess’ execution had been slated to take place, blocking it off. The remaining three profited by the demonstration they had just been given. They obeyed the order the first time it was given, and showed their empty palms.

Lyons came over to where Burgess was hanging onto the edge of one of the cases by the backs of his elbows for support. “Are you O.K.?” he asked him.

“I’m all right,” Burgess answered, mopping his forehead. “My legs are just kind of rubbery, that’s all. Did you hear him? Were you close enough to hear him? You said if he convicted himself out of his own mouth—”

“I heard him, all right!” Lyons assured him. “And so did the whole squad I brought with me.”

“Then that’s all that matters. I guess I’ll sit down now.”

Burgess let himself down to the floor, knees reared. “Give us a cigarette,” he said limply. “I’m no hero.”

“No?” answered the inspector dryly. “You just gave an imitation good enough to fool me.”

Burgess struggled to his feet again. “I gambled heavy,” he explained. “I didn’t know if the bartender would take me seriously or not. I didn’t want to phone you before anything happened, because I had a hunch you wouldn’t pay any attention.”

“Guess I wouldn’t’ve,” Lyons admitted sheepishly.

“I couldn’t talk to him across the bar, for all I knew they were watching me from outside. So I scribbled on the back of an envelope for him to call you as soon as I left and tell you it was Edge, and that if I turned up croaked to blame it on him.”

“He did better than that. He got so curious after reading what was on it that he followed you to the door and watched you go — with the lights out behind him, of course. He saw the car pick you up and he even got a look at its number. He phoned that in to me. I sent it right out on the radio and a prowl-car spotted it on the way and tailed it here. Then all we had to do later was come where they’d told us.”

He went over and supervised the removal of Edge, prone on a stretcher, came back again.

“Is he dead?” Burgess asked.

“Naw. He’ll live to cost the state money on its electric bill. He thinks he’s dying, though, and he just admitted he did it, a second time over. Then in a couple days he’ll go into the second stage they all pass through, retract it again. That’s all right, we’re used to that. Let’s get back now, I want to sapolio the rest of these guys.”

On the way over to headquarters he remarked: “Those must have been a tough few minutes there, when they put you to the test.”

“Sure they were, but not in the way you think. The tough part was to guess the right ‘wrong answer,’ as he put it. I knew I could save my skin by guessing wrong, but that wasn’t what I was after. I’d never seen any of the four of them before. What I was scared of was picking the two that hadn’t been there, and getting let off instead of being given the works.

“You see how it was worked now, don’t you?” he went on. “It was a case of two birds with one stone. Or I guess you should say, one bar-glass. Edge had a long-standing grudge against Hastings. And a more recent and even hotter one against Mike Oliver for daring to stand up to his liquor-distributing ring and refusing to be hijacked by it any more. So he figured one murder should be enough to take care of the both. He had one of his men, with grease on his hand, put on a souse-act and follow Hastings into a bar the night before. He shook hands with him, and Hastings printed his own tips all over the glass he was using, without knowing it. Then the would-be souse swiped it and brought it to Edge, probably wrapped up in a cloth or something. Edge took it in to Mike’s with him, and switched glasses, left it behind there to damn Hastings, and carried his own out and threw it away. The guy with him wiped his own off clean before they left, but that one wasn’t touched. The gun, I suppose, was taken apart and scattered all over the landscape. I tried to tell you about an extra glass turning up in the stock at the Tavern, but you wouldn’t listen—”

Afterwards, back at his own office, the preliminary dry-cleaning of the suspects concluded for the time being, Lyons said to him: “The mechanics of the thing is clear enough, the switch of glasses and all that, but there’s one thing I’d like to know. One thing that we missed up on and that you evidently didn’t. What was it first started you off thinking the glass was a plant, and there was something phony about the whole set-up? There must have been something you caught that we didn’t.”

“That was a small thing. I didn’t even bother mentioning it to you, because I was sure you’d seen it for yourselves. Edge, as often happens in such cases, in spite of the fact that he’s dealt in liquor all his life and made all his money out of it, is not a whiskey-drinker himself, never touches it. So he went in there and ordered. He made one little slip. He didn’t think it mattered what that last order was, that death-order. He already had Hastings’ glass in his pocket, ready to leave behind him there. And he was taking his own out with him, no one would ever see it. So he must have figured what difference did it make whether he ordered champagne or vodka or whatever it was? So habit reasserted itself, and he ordered beer. And the monkey with him, acting under the sort of auto-suggestion that often crops up at such times, seconded his order. But Mike Oliver had a peculiar habit of insisting on payment first, his own barman told me that, and he beat the bullets into the cash-register with the coins they’d given him. The evidence was still there when I came into the place, half an hour later. And to make sure I wasn’t mistaken, I looked it up on your own police photographs and I saw it over again. There was a whiskey-jigger and a beer-glass standing on the counter, and yet the indicator over the cash-box said ‘20¢.’ You can’t break that down into a whiskey and a beer. There’s no whiskey in town that sells for ten cents a slug. Even arguing that the beer was just a chaser for the whiskey — and it wasn’t, because they were both on an even line at the edge of the bar, and two customers’ width away from one another — the price for the cheapest brand that Oliver’s place carried in stock would have been twenty-five cents for one shot.”

Lyons drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. “Do you know of a good optician?” he said. “There’s a few of the men detailed to me I’m thinking of sending around to one. And it wouldn’t hurt for me to go myself.”

He had it all lined up ahead of him. He’d just been given a by-line over his piece, so that was one step accomplished. Next a feature of his own. Then the city desk. Then managing ed—

“Burgess!”

He bounced all the way down the steps, and there he was at the bottom again.

“Suppose you haul your petrified person out of here and earn the fifty bucks blackmail you’re shaking us down for every week! Now to be more specific, I understand there’s a woman on a window-ledge over on Franklin Street, threatening to jump—”

Burgess slammed the door on the stentorian tirade. “Well, at least I got a fifteen-buck raise out of it,” he grumbled.