The Good Old Stuff

She Cannot Die (aka The Tin Suitcase, as Peter Reed)

He was working in the far corner of the yard, sorting the jumbled shipment of aluminum sheet which had arrived in the morning, working hard and fast because the November wind was cold. He caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye and straightened up, saw Stella Galloway hurrying across the yard toward him, picking her way around the sorted piles. He saw her smile, saw the papers in her hand, and felt the familiar embarrassment as he realized that she could have sent one of the men out with the orders but preferred to come herself.

As protection against the chill wind, she had slung her gray coat around her shoulders. He smiled at her, anxious to see her, knowing that somehow she had become a necessary part of this new life.

The wind diluted the flat, smashing noise of the shot. As she hurried toward him, something drove her ahead as though she had been hit with a club. Falling, she half turned, landed heavily on a pile of jagged copper scrap, rebounded, lay still on the damp packed earth of the yard. The wind took the papers from her hand and whipped them away.

Jud Brock stood stupidly, unable to move. He looked at the office building seventy feet away. A window was flung up and one of the male clerks looked out, openmouthed. Jud ran to her. Her cheek was against the earth, and a dark red stain spread in the fabric of the gray coat. Her eyes were open, and there was an odd frown of surprise on her face. The saliva ran from her half-open mouth and her trim left leg twitched, in that muscular spasm that happens sometimes as sleep comes.

He ripped his canvas work glove off, dug blunt fingers into her wrist, and felt the weak fluttering. A girl ran from the side door of the office, paused, and looked uncertainly toward him as he knelt beside Stella.

“Ambulance! Doctor!” he yelled, his voice oddly shrill in his ears. The girl turned and darted back into the office.

Jud took the coat gently from her shoulders, took his knife out with fumbling haste, and slit the white blouse from the nape of her neck to the waist. He tore it across the shoulders and peeled it tenderly away from her white back. Her right shoulder was oddly misshapen, the thick blood oozing freely from a large-caliber hole in the bluish-white skin. He wadded a piece of the white blouse, jammed it against the hole in her back, and held it there with the palm of his left hand, the fingers of his right hand seeking the faint, irregular pulse, his ears straining for the distant sound of a siren...

When the ambulance backed into the yard, he could still feel the pulse, but it was much weaker. The numb eyes had rolled so that only the whites were visible, and her face had a greenish-blue pallor.

They taped a wad of gauze against the hole in her back, lifted her gently onto the stretcher, and slid her into the back of the ambulance. He noticed with annoyance that a lock of her hair had fallen across her face and knew that she wouldn’t like that and felt an absurd desire to run to her, to smooth her hair back with his fingers.

As the ambulance drove away he suddenly became conscious of the babble of voices, of questions, saw that almost the entire working force was gathered around him, the women hugging themselves against the chill wind, the eyes of the men bright and excited. He noticed that even the heavy thudding of the big baler had stopped, noticed that Karkoff, the operator, was standing with the others.

Walter Brasher, owner and manager of the Brasher Scrap Metal Company, Incorporated, was prancing through the group, saying, “Come on, now. It’s all over. Back to work. Come on, now. All of you.” Brasher was a stocky little man with a shining bald head and a pitted face on which the features were gathered in a muddy little clump.

He continually roared and made fierce noises, but every employee knew that inside he was soft and weak and had never fired an employee. He always asked someone else to break the bad news.

Karkoff spat, turned, and walked back toward the shop, back toward the baler which took the loose jangling heaps of scrap and turned them into small, neat, heavy bales. The girls turned and, walking with short steps, their shoulders hunched from the cold, hurried back to the warmth of the office.

Walter Brasher scowled up into Jud Brock’s face. “What happened to her?” he demanded. “What happened to Miss Galloway?”

“She was shot in the back with maybe a forty-five. Something heavy. She was coming out with orders for me.”

Brasher turned pale under the mud color of his skin. “Why? Why should somebody shoot one of my girls?”

Jud looked down at the man with quick irritation. “How the hell should I know? The cops are probably on the way.”

“You get back to work.”

Jud saw the gray coat, half on the ground, half on the pile of copper scrap. He bent and picked it up, looked at the small hole in the fabric. He held the coat and said to Brasher, “No, I don’t want to work. After the cops talk to me, I’m going to the hospital.”

Brasher frowned, turned on his heel, and walked with an attempt at dignity back toward the office. Jud followed him slowly, fancying that in the coat he held in his hand he could still detect the faint warmth of her body.

He hurried and caught Brasher at the door. He said, “Make sure that no one has left since it happened. Don’t let anybody leave.”

Brasher didn’t answer. Jud climbed the stairs to the main office, walked across to a group of girls who stood by the window, looking down at the yard where Stella had fallen. Jane Tarrance, a vivid dark girl with a wide, mobile mouth, Stella’s roommate, turned quickly and said, “She was shot, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said, heavily, hearing the others gasp. He held the coat out. Jane took it quickly, her mouth twisted as she saw the bloodstain. She folded it, folded the stain inside.

At that moment Boris Howe, the accountant, a slow man with a wrestler’s body and the lean, myopic face of an introvert, walked over to him and said, “Uh... Brock, Mr. Brasher said for me to tell you that after the cops are through, you draw your pay and get out.”

Jud ignored him. He turned and looked toward Brasher’s glassed-in office, saw the gleaming top of Brasher’s bald head. He brushed by Howe, walked to the door of the office, opened it, and stood in front of Brasher’s desk until the man glanced up.

Brasher scowled, but his voice quavered as he said, “Well?”

Brock sat down, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. “I got your message, Brasher.”

The voice was shrill. “To you I am Mr. Brasher!”

“You knew when you hired me that I had been a cop.”

“Certainly I knew it. And I knew that you had the shakes so bad that you could only work a little.”

“I’m over that now. I’ve gotten all I need out of this place. I’m ready to quit.”

“I fired you, Brock,” the plump little man said with surprising firmness.

“No, you did not. You’re about to change your mind. I’m staying on here until I find out why that girl was shot and who did it.”

“That is police business. You’re through here. You refused a direct order.”

“She’s my friend. It’s my business too. I want to stay on the payroll at a dollar a week until I find out why she was shot. I want the run of the place, and I want all employees told that I can ask any questions I wish to ask. You can call me the company cop if you want, but I’m staying.”

“You’re not staying.”

Brock reached quickly across the desk and grabbed Brasher’s wrist. His wrists and arms were like iron from the eight months of handling scrap. He clamped down on the wrist, and Brasher squealed. “Maybe you don’t understand me, Mr. Brasher,” Brock said heavily. “Unless you change your mind, I will find a chance to catch you on the street. When I do, I promise you that I will break both your fat arms like sticks.”

He released Brasher’s arm suddenly. With the pressure gone, Brasher’s chair rolled a few feet away from his desk.

Brock said softly, “And when I find out, I’ll leave here.”

Brasher smiled with his lips alone, said heartily, “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it, Brock. I... I’ll be glad to have your help.”

Brock looked woodenly at him for several seconds, turned, and left the office. He stopped just outside the door as he saw Detective Lieutenant John Maclaren and Sergeant Joe Horowitz reach the top of the front stairs and look curiously around the office. John Maclaren saw Brock first, nudged Horowitz, and said something in a low tone. They both came toward him, grinning unpleasantly.

“Hello, John,” Brock said.

Maclaren turned to Horowitz. “Since when does a lush get to call a police officer by his first name?”

“Maybe it’s a new custom, Johnny,” Horowitz said. “Maybe it says he can on the back of his union card.”

The girls were back at their desks and they smiled with bright curiosity at the police, making no attempt to work. Maclaren glanced at them and then turned back to Brock. “We got it a girl was shot here. Accident?”

“Intentional. It looked to me like it might be a fatal wound. Maybe you better alert Homicide to keep a check on her condition.”

“Horowitz,” Johnny Maclaren said, “listen to the guy give orders!” He turned to Brock. “Just where do you fit?” he said in a flat tone.

Brock heard Brasher come out of his office, knew that he was a few feet behind him. He said loudly, “I’m representing the company in the investigation.” He turned around. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Brasher?”

Brasher coughed and licked his lips. He gave one startled glance at Brock’s eyes and said, “Yes. Yes, that’s right. I’m the manager here. Mr. Brock is handling it for us.”

Maclaren glanced at Brock’s dirty coveralls, at his reinforced shoes, sneered, and said, “You ought to dress your key personnel a little better, Brasher. Let me use your phone.” Without waiting for an answer he went into Brasher’s office, called the hospital, and asked for a report. When he got it, he called headquarters, got hold of Captain Davis of Homicide, and said, “A girl was shot in the back at Brasher Scrap Metal twenty minutes ago. The intern says she’s in bad shape. Maybe you want one of your people to cover this with me just in case... Okay, I’ll brief him when he gets here.”

He walked around the desk and sat in Brasher’s chair. He flapped a hand at Brasher. “Shut the door on your way out.”

Brock leaned on the wall near the window. Horowitz sat on the edge of Brasher’s desk.

Because of Brock’s background, little time was wasted. In ten minutes, Maclaren knew that because of the danger of theft there were only two ways in and out of the grounds, the main entrance and the truck gate. There was a guard at the truck gate and a receptionist at the lower hall at the main entrance. The fence around the property was a nine-foot hurricane fence with three strands of barbed wire at the top. No one had left the area since the shooting.

The property was roughly square, with the office building running along one side at right angles to the road. The shop was in the back, parallel to the road, forming an L with the office building. The truck gate was at the other end of the front and was wide enough to include the spur track. A magnet crane was located near the loading platform. The entire center of the area was filled with mounds of scrap, some over twenty feet high.

Throughout the questioning both Horowitz and Maclaren treated Brock with amused contempt. Brock ground his fingers into the palms of his hands and managed to keep all expression off his heavy-boned face.

Cantrelle of Homicide arrived just as Maclaren had started to question Brock about the girl. Maclaren stopped and briefed Cantrelle on the information so far and then continued with Brock.

“How well did you know this Miss Stella Galloway?”

“I’ve been out with her several times.”

“Girl friend, eh?”

“Not exactly. A friend. She roomed with Jane Tarrance, that dark girl in the far corner of the office. Miss Galloway was a quiet girl, well-educated. She left here and worked for three years in Washington, D.C. She came back to Louisavale and got her job here a month later. She had been here over a year when I started work. She... she took an interest in me. Her parents are dead. She has a married brother in California and a married sister in Toronto. She has a very small income from her father’s estate. I don’t know of any enemies, or any reason why she should be shot.” Jud Brock had managed to keep his voice low, his tone calm and unhurried.

Cantrelle snickered. “You have bad luck with your women, don’t you, Brock?”

Brock started across the office toward Cantrelle, his chin lowered on his chest, his fists clenched. Maclaren grabbed Brock’s shoulder and spun him around. “Try anything funny, Brock, and I’ll gun-whip you.”

Brock stood perfectly still and tried to force the anger to run out of his big, raw-boned body. At last he shrugged and stepped back against the wall, the anger still with him but changed to a small hot glow deep inside of him.

It was bad because they all knew about it. They all knew the story of Jud Brock. He had put in six years with the Louisavale police, going on the force directly from college. He had advanced rapidly, had been transferred to Homicide, where he worked under Captain Davis. He was looked on as one of the bright young men in the department. Since Louisavale was a city of two hundred thousand, he could plan on merit promotions to the point where he would make a good living and have a responsible position. He was popular and he liked his work and he was good at it.

During his sixth year on the force he became engaged to Caree Ames. She was a slender, enchanting blonde, the only daughter of the city manager.

They were engaged for just two months before they were married. She seemed pleasantly but curiously anxious to be married, as though it would be some sort of haven for her.

Five weeks after the wedding and three weeks after they had returned from their Bermuda honeymoon, he came home to their new suburban house to find that a man with whom Caree had been intimate before he had ever met her had broken into the house, shot her twice in the skull, and then shot himself. She was dead. The man was still breathing. She had died almost within reach of the telephone. The man lived in a coma for five days before he too died.

He could not get that kitchen scene out of his mind, the two of them on the vinyl pattern he and Caree had selected, both face down in the pattern of a grotesque T, the still-breathing man lying across her dead legs.

Later he found out that quite a few people had known of her affair with the man who killed her. Her father had been anxious for her to be married. The man was demonstrably unstable, potentially dangerous.

For two months after the funeral he had continued his duties, walking through each day like a mechanical man. He had found he could not forget that scene; it was inextricably mixed somehow with some of the bloodier episodes which had happened during his years of police duty before he had met Caree.

During those two months, all the reality of the world around him took place dimly behind the shining screen of memory, and at last he had discovered that alcohol would dim the memories. At first he had been suspended for a month and had managed to get himself in shape to go back to duty at the end of the month. The second suspension was for six months.

After a long period of forgetfulness, he had walked into headquarters, his broken shoes flapping on his feet, his gray face dirty and whiskered, and found out that his suspension had been up for over three weeks and that he had been suspended indefinitely.

The period after that was impossible to remember. There were vague memories of a ward and of people strapping him down while he fought to get away from the incredibly slimy things that were creeping across the floor toward his bed.

One morning he had stopped and looked at the reflection of himself in the plate glass of a store window. He had frowned at it for a long time, trying to see in the watery eyes and hollow cheeks of the reflection something familiar — something of Judson Brock. There were coins in his pocket, and he waited until the bars opened. He bought a beer and held the first swallow in his mouth, looking across and seeing in the mirror of the back bar the same face that had looked back at him from the store window. Then he had spewed the beer onto the floor, turned, and left.

He had scrubbed his body with harsh yellow soap at the mission and put on the suit and shoes from the Salvation Army. There was no money in the bank. The house had been sold, the money spent.

Two days later, in spite of his weakness, Brasher had hired him, sensing that here was a man whose spirit was so far gone that he would accept without question the long hours and the small pay.

He had gone to work in the yard, learning dully what was expected of him. The heavy sheets and plates cut into his soft flesh through the canvas gloves, and he could work for only an hour at a time before weakness hit him.

Brasher had given him an advance, and with it he rented a cheap room and bought food his stomach could retain.

At the end of a month his eyes were clearer and the moments of weakness came less often. During the second month he began to fill out, and with a thick, stubborn pride in the strength that had come back to him, he punished his body, working at high tempo so that at the end of the day he could fall exhausted into bed, into dreamless sleep.

For a time one of the office men brought his orders into the yard, copies of the material shipped in and the manner in which it should be sorted. Gradually he became conscious of the fact that it was a girl who came out with the orders, and that each time she came she smiled at him and that he liked the way she walked and smiled.

No longer could he completely exhaust his body with the day’s work, and in order to fill his evenings, to keep from remembering, he went to dull movies, sat in his room, and read books, fighting against the face of Caree that threatened to come between his eyes and the printed page.

One night he grew tired of fighting, and when the face came before his eyes he saw that it wasn’t the face of Caree, but the face of the girl who brought the orders out to him as he worked in the yard.

The next day he asked her clumsily to have dinner with him, and to his relief she acted neither coy nor haughty. She accepted with pleasure, and later, as they sat over coffee and she told him about herself, he realized that at last he had begun to heal.

He found out that she knew all about him from one of the girls in the office whose brother worked in Identification at headquarters. He had tried to tell her one night, and she had stopped him and said that she knew about it and it was probably better if he didn’t talk about it until some day when it would be easier.

She became a habit, and more than a habit. She became as necessary to him as warmth and food and shelter. And yet he was awkward and uncertain with her. He felt as though somehow, in the past, his soul had been dug out of him with a hasty spoon and the bits and fragments of it left inside him were too few to offer to anyone.

And, as he was gradually coming back to life, as each night he managed to be more cheerful, less strained, she walked out of the doorway and moments later the wind plucked the orders out of her limp hand, danced them over the piles of scrap, and plastered them flat against the wire mesh of the fence.

Brock said, “I was standing in this exact spot. Here is the sheet that I had picked up when I saw her coming. I was going to carry it over and lay it on that pile over there, but when I saw her coming, I put it down and waited. John, you’re standing exactly where she was when the slug hit her. She came toward me, her head tilted back with the force of the blow, her right side turning half toward me. She landed on her side on that pile of copper scrap and bounced off. She lay with her cheek against the dirt, her face turned away from the scrap pile.”

“How was she facing when it hit her?”

“I couldn’t be sure. You see, with the junk about here, she didn’t come on a straight line but sort of picked her way through on a zigzag. If I had to guess, I’d say that she was heading almost directly at me, turned maybe a little to her left.”

Maclaren took off his soft felt hat and scratched his thinning hair. He looked back at the direction from which the slug, and Stella Galloway, had come. He said, “What happened to your head, Jud? That shot was fired either from the back end of the office building, the far end of the shop, or from behind one of the piles of scrap. If you’d been on your toes...”

Brock managed a tight grin. “Since when does a police officer get to call a lush by his first name?”

Maclaren looked angry for a moment and then sighed. “The hell with scrapping, Brock. Did the shot seem far away?”

“Somewhere between maybe sixty and a hundred feet from me. Not much farther. You can’t hit anything with a forty-five much farther than that. I figure that because she was between me and the pistol, or whatever it was, if it had been much over a hundred feet, I’d have seen her lurch before I heard the shot. As it was, the two things happened at the same instant.”

Horowitz said softly, “That makes sense.” He drifted over to Maclaren and whispered in his ear.

Maclaren stared at Brock for a few moments. He said, “Any chance that somebody was gunning for you and hit the young lady by mistake?”

It was a new thought. Brock said, “Could be, but somehow I don’t think so. I haven’t made any enemies lately, and if somebody wanted to knock me off for old stuff, they could have had me while I was... on the town.”

“Maybe somebody didn’t like the girl being friendly with you and wanted to knock you off and hit her instead. She mention any ex-boyfriend?”

“Told me of a few locals who had made passes. One guy works here that she used to know. Fellow named Hodge Oliver.”

“Where was he when Galloway was shot?”

“You’ll have to get the stories on that. I haven’t had a chance to check on anybody.”

Maclaren walked close to him and looked full into his eyes. “Okay, Brock,” he said gently. “I don’t know your angle, but Brasher says you represent the company in this so we’ll deal with you, even if I don’t like it. Just get one thing clear in your mind. When you were on the force you liked to bang off on angles of your own. Don’t try it this time. Don’t get in our way, and do just what we ask you to do. Understand?”

“You need me for anything right now?” Brock asked.

Maclaren shook his head. Brock went to his locker, changed into street clothes, and took a taxi to the hospital.

The intern said, “Galloway? Doing very nicely. Very nicely.”

“Don’t give me customer talk, friend, I represent the company, private investigation. I asked you how she is.”

The intern shrugged. “She’s all chopped to hell inside. The slug hit flat against her shoulder blade and smashed it. The lead split into two hunks. One went up through the top of her right lung and stopped just under the skin. The other hunk sliced down through her lung and belly, perforated her intestines twice, and came out just above the left hip. A hunk of the shoulder blade was driven over against her spinal cord, and we don’t know what damage that did. She just came out of the operating room ten minutes ago. We gave her two transfusions, and she’ll probably need another. Providing there’s no spinal injury, she’s in bad enough shock so that she’s got maybe one chance in ten of lasting through the next twelve hours. There’s a cop in her room with her just in case she comes out of it. I just gave a full report of her condition to Police Headquarters.”

“Did she recover consciousness in the ambulance or before the anesthetic?”

“No. You want to look at her?”

“Sure.”

The elderly patrolman who sat next to the bed with a notebook and pencil in his hand and a bored look on his face changed the look to quick recognition and then distaste when Jud Brock walked in.

“Relax, Jones,” Brock said. “I just want a look at her.”

He stood by the bed and looked down. There was a faint trace of color in her greenish cheeks, but she was breathing shallowly, rapidly. Her eyes were shut and seemed to have sunk farther back into her head. The nostrils looked pinched, and her hair had turned brittle and dead. Her lips were dry. She breathed rapidly through her mouth, and he could see the tip of her tongue protruding slightly beyond the even lower teeth.

As he looked down at her, he wondered if the slug had been meant for him, and he knew suddenly that he would soon be face to face with whoever had fired the shot. Whether Stella Galloway lived or died, he would stand face to face with someone, and with the new strength that corded his arms and shoulders he would smash that face with a fist like a rock.

Jones had been watching him. The elderly patrolman said, “You look good, Brock. You off the bottle?”

Brock transferred the anger that burned him. “What’s it to you?”

“Nothing, boy. Nothing at all.”

Stella Galloway’s lower jaw dropped and she began to breathe more hoarsely. Jones glanced at her and hitched his chair closer. “Miss Galloway! Stella!” he said insistently.

She didn’t answer. Brock turned and left the room.

At five they let the ones go who had been searched and interviewed. Captain Davis, acting on the report from the hospital, had assigned more men, and, while Brock had been over at the hospital, Inspector Durea had looked in for a few minutes.

The investigation had narrowed to three angles. One: Where had each person been when the shot was fired? Two: What had happened to the weapon? Three: Had the shot been fired at Galloway or Brock — and why?

At six only Brasher, the watchman, and Brock were left of the working force. Everyone else had been interviewed and dismissed with a warning to stay in town. Brock saw that Maclaren was weary, but he felt no weariness himself. He felt no hunger. He stood, solid and impassive, and listened to Maclaren, Horowitz, Cantrelle, and the others discuss the case, and he knew that, as for himself, he could keep going for an unknown period before exhaustion finally beat his strong body.

The trucks arrived with the floodlights, and the watchman let them into the yard. Lights were thrown across the piles of scrap, and everybody except Brasher and the watchman began to hunt for the pistol. Two men with a metal detector were left back in the office building, covering all the desks and closets and other possible hiding places.

Brock marked off the piles in which the assailant would have had no chance to hide the weapon. Horowitz looked at the other piles of scrap and groaned. “Give me a nice simple needle-and-haystack proposition any day.”

Brock searched along beside Horowitz and found out that of the working force of sixty-three there were fourteen who could not substantiate their location at the time the shot was fired. Eliminating the possibility that two or more had been in on it, they were left with fourteen suspects. Among those were Walter Brasher, Karkoff, Jane Tarrance, Hodge Oliver, and Pennworthy, the guard. The other nine included the receptionist in the lower front hallway; a stenographer named Nudens, who claimed she was in the women’s room; the operator of the indoor crane in the baling shop, who claimed he was out for a smoke; Brasher’s office boy, who couldn’t remember where he was; Boris Howe, the accountant, who said he was at the water fountain on the stair landing; two laborers in the back end of the yard near the loading platform; and two men who were off-loading aluminum scrap from a railroad car.

At ten o’clock a new batch of men reported, and many of the searchers went off duty. Maclaren sent Horowitz home for some sleep and looked as if he could use some himself.

At three in the morning there were no places left to search. The piles of scrap in which the gun could have been hidden were dismantled and restacked in new locations, piece by piece. The men stood around and inspected their bruised hands and wrists, felt gingerly of the small of their backs.

Brasher had gone home at midnight. Maclaren sent the rest of the men home except for one at the front door. The harsh lights were on in Brasher’s office. Maclaren, his face pale and lined, sat behind Brasher’s desk and drew red pencil marks on a small scale floor plan of the plant. Brock sat woodenly in one of the straight chairs, staring at the far wall.

Maclaren finished marking the plan and shoved it over to Brock. Brock said, “You sure you’re asking me for my opinion, John?”

“I’ve got no time to fight with you, Jud. We were good friends once.”

“That’s right. Until I was down and out. We were swell friends.”

Maclaren smiled at him. “Sure, kid. And one night I found you on Water Street in the gutter, and I took you home and got you cleaned up. You were still in bed when I went on duty in the morning. You got up, dressed, and left with my three shotguns. I had to pay eighty-eight dollars to get them out of hock. The next time you took the electric clock and the wife’s solid silver. Two hundred it cost the second time. I couldn’t afford it, kid.”

Brock waited a full thirty seconds, his face changing slowly. “I can’t even remember it, John. I’m sorry. I’ll pay back that money. I’ve got it in savings. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it. Look at the floor plan here. It shows the yard, shop and all. See the fourteen red circles? Those are where the ones say they were who can’t account for where they were at the time of the shot. The X shows where she fell, and the great big circle shows where somebody had to be to shoot her — whether they were aiming at you or not. Now look. This floor plan shows how it would have been impossible for Jane Tarrance, the guard, the receptionist, the girl in the can, Boris Howe, or the two guys unloading the aluminum to have gone over into the area from which the shot was fired. They would have been seen going and coming.

“That leaves us seven. Brasher and his office boy, Hodge Oliver, Karkoff, the two guys in the yard, and the crane operator.”

“You can take off Karkoff. The baler didn’t stop until long after the shot was fired. It won’t work without an operator.”

“Good work! On my own hook I’m taking out the office boy. That kid is too dopey to know which end of a gun to hold onto. Now we’re down to five: Brasher, Hodge Oliver, Lavery the crane operator, and the two guys in the yard. Let me see: Howard Barnes and Duke Schortz. Brasher, Oliver, Lavery, Barnes, or Schortz. Of course if more than one was in on it, we’re way out of line and we’ll have to start all over. Now we need the gun and the motive.”

“Could the gun have been tossed over the fence out into the weeds to be picked up later?”

“I thought of that and made a thorough check. Superman couldn’t have thrown it any farther than we looked.”

“Then it’s still on the place?”

“Unless either my boys or the matrons missed any spots on the people big enough to hide a forty-five. And my money says they didn’t.”

“How about the gun being tossed out of one of the front windows into a moving vehicle?”

Maclaren thought it over. “Boy, that booze didn’t soften your head any. I’ll have to consider that as a possibility.”

“Another thing, John. That slug split up when it went in. It had to have some encouragement. My guess is that somebody sliced it good before they loaded it. That means they wanted whoever they hit to stay dead, right?”

“Go on.”

“Okay, then. You put a deep notch in a forty-five slug and you spoil the ballistics. I figure that a guy who would know enough to notch it would know about it shortening his effective range. The slug hit her in the back while she was still forty feet from me. The odds are that he couldn’t have hit me with anything but an unmarked slug. That means it was aimed at her, not me, and you can look for motives for her death, not for mine.”

Maclaren chewed his lip. “Pretty damn slim, Jud, but we’ll go along. We’ll check into her before we check you.”

“How about Hodge Oliver? As far as I know he’s the only guy who knew her in the past.”

“I don’t think so, Jud. He’s a clean-looking kid with a good record. He worked in Washington too. At the Pentagon. He says that he knew Galloway as one of the girls who worked in a nearby office. She was a stenographer for a while, and then she was in charge of the filing of blueprints and specifications. He was upset about her being shot. You could see that. He doesn’t owe any dough, he’s got a steady gal, and he got a raise two weeks ago. I got all this from him and from others. Of course, I’ll check it, but I’ve got a hunch it’ll all be true.”

“Personally I don’t think Brasher’s got the guts to shoot anybody.”

“Don’t low-rate those nasty little soft guys who can only talk big. Force them into a corner and you can’t tell what they’ll do. I could see from the way he acted that you moved in on him in this investigation. In a way, I don’t blame you. After all, she was knocked off on her way to see you.” Brock felt quick alarm and a feeling of loss at the easy way Maclaren made the assumption that Stella was already dead. “Suppose that this Brasher made a pass at Galloway and she pushed him off in a way that hurt his pride and then, when he saw her falling for you, he couldn’t take it. After all, the woman who turned him down getting chummy with... well, with unskilled labor. Did you notice anything about him, any way he might have looked at Galloway in the past?”

Brock stared down at his clenched knuckles. “John, I’ve been in a fog for a long time. I haven’t paid much attention to what has been going on around me.”

“Sure, kid. I see what you mean. But you’re out of the fog now?”

“Way out. Brasher’s line is plugged open on the switchboard, John. I’m going to see about Stella. Mind if I use your name?”

After Brock had identified himself as Lieutenant Maclaren, the night intern came on the phone and said, “Condition unchanged, sir. She’s had two more plasma transfusions, but she’s losing fluids so fast that she’ll be due for another one soon.” Brock thanked him and hung up, told Maclaren the score.

“You tired, Jud?” Maclaren asked.

“Not yet.”

“Here’s Hodge Oliver’s address. An apartment on Quenton Street. I’ve got to follow the book or they’ll yank my badge. Maybe you could”

“Kick him around and see if anything drops out?”

“Something like that. But you’re on your own. I’m going over and have another talk with Brasher.”

Hodge Oliver’s eyes were puffed with sleep. He blinked in the hall light and said, “Oh, it’s you, Brock. What do you want?”

Brock pushed in, found the switch, clicked the lights on, and closed the door.

Oliver said, “Now wait a minute! Can’t you—”

Brock planted a big palm against Oliver’s chest and sent him sprawling across the living room couch. Oliver braced himself on his elbows and stared at Brock. “I’m going to toss you out of here,” he said quietly. He was lean and rangy, with brush-cut blond hair, a strong-looking neck, and knobby knuckles.

He came off the bed fast, charging in. Brock caught a wild right in the palm of his left hand and blocked a left hook with his elbow. As Oliver planted a second right high on Brock’s cheek, he was caught right on the point of the chin with a gentle right. It made a noise as though a clod of wet mud had been thrown against a brick wall. Brock caught him and laid him gently on the couch.

Oliver’s papers were in the second drawer of his bureau. Not much to go on. A file of personal letters. An address book listing people in Washington, Louisavale, and Detroit — plus a few other people scattered across the country. On the bureau was a large picture of a very lovely girl with blond hair. She looked something like Caree had once looked... Brock, realizing that, was surprised to find how little pain there was in the thought — as though Caree had been married to someone else, a different Judson Brock. A younger, softer Judson Brock.

He pulled a chair up beside the couch. A few minutes later Oliver opened his eyes wide and groaned. He tried to sit up. Brock reached out a hand and pushed him back down. “Take it easy, boy,” he said.

Oliver felt of his chin and gave Brock a twisted grin. “What did you hit me with, a city bus?”

“I was afraid you’d be sore. As you know, I’m handling the company end of the investigation of Miss Galloway’s injury. She will probably die without regaining consciousness. You knew her in Washington. What’s the angle? Anything you can say to give us a reason?”

Oliver hoisted himself up and reached for his cigarettes on the coffee table. He gave Brock one, and Brock lit the two of them. “Look, Brock. I just knew her in Washington. She happened to be in the same section, that’s all. Ordnance procurement. I had lunch with her a few times, and a few times we went to the cola bar in the Pentagon in the middle of the afternoon. She was very nice in a quiet way, very tidy and polite. She seemed to know her job well. That’s all I know about her. I’ve got a girl of my own, man. That’s her picture over there.”

“Did you know her friends in Washington?”

“I saw her with the women she worked with, of course. And I remember seeing her once at a hotel. She was dancing with someone, but I haven’t any memory of what he looked like. I remember thinking he was too short for her, and that’s all.”

Brock leaned back in the chair, shook his head, and sighed. “Sorry I had to pop you, Oliver.”

He shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t give you much choice. No hard feelings.”

Brock stared at the far wall of the room for a few moments, and then at the glowing end of the cigarette he held. “Where are you from, Oliver?”

“Detroit, originally. Before I tried the civil service job, I had a two-bit position working in the mechanical drawing department of one of the independent auto-parts makers.”

“You’ve got family there?”

“Sure, but I don’t want to go back. They try to run my life. My mother is a very domineering woman. I’ve been around some, and I like the looks of it here. It suits me. I’m not sorry I stayed. I wouldn’t have met Alice if I hadn’t found a job here.”

“Like your work?”

“Well enough. The money is medium okay. Enough to get married on, at least. Hey, maybe I shouldn’t ask. You sound like a man with education. I’ve wondered about you off and on. What are you doing out in that yard as a common laborer handling all that heavy scrap?”

Brock didn’t smile. “You might call it a health course.”

“Oh.”

Brock stood up. “Go on back to sleep, boy. You’ll have a little mark on that chin in the morning.”

Brock was sitting in Brasher’s office when the puffy little man walked in that morning. He marched up to Brock and said, “A fine thing! A very fine thing! You force me to put you in charge of the company end of the investigation, and then you let that Maclaren hoodlum get me out of bed at three thirty in the morning to ask a lot of insane questions leading to nothing. The kids woke up. My wife got a headache. You aren’t worth the dollar a week you asked for.”

Brock saw Maclaren when he came in. Brock said, “No dice on Oliver; how about Brasher?”

“I think he’s clean. I got to Lavery last night, too. Rather, at five this morning. I think that angle is okay too. I found out that this Karkoff had told Lavery to knock off and grab himself a smoke. The way it works, the crane that Lavery runs gets ahead of the baler once in a while, and then Karkoff gives him the sign to climb down and go out in the end of the shop to the can where he can smoke. If Lavery was the one, it would mean that he’d have to depend on Karkoff giving him the sign at just the right time for him to slip out, plug the girl, and get back. It’s too thin. I saw Karkoff and he backed the guy up. By the way, this Karkoff has a record. Yeah. Did a year back in 1973. Grand theft auto. Been straight ever since — he says. You sure that baler was working all the time?”

“It makes a hell of a racket. It stopped after she was down and I had my fingers on her pulse. You have to have a guy on it to keep it running.”

By noon they had worked on Barnes and Schortz for an hour apiece and gotten nowhere. Brasher complained that they were slowing down operations and wasting time. At noon, Brock took Jane Tarrance down to the lunch wagon down the street.

He could see that she had been crying, and she told him that she had phoned the hospital just before noon and they had said there was no change in Miss Galloway’s condition.

“Jane, you lived with her, roomed with her. Have you got any hunches? Did she act differently the last few days?”

Jane sipped her coffee. “I... I think so. She was dressing last Tuesday night. You were coming to pick her up, remember? She was looking in her mirror, and I looked at her and she seemed to be miles away. I asked her if it was an old boyfriend and she said no. She said that there was something she was going to try to remember, and that if it didn’t come back, she was going to phone an old friend of hers and he’d help her remember. I tried to tease it out of her, but she just smiled sort of mysteriously and said that I could sit back and watch the fireworks. Those are the words she used.”

Brock stirred his coffee, said, “You realize, of course, that if she had told you, you’d now know the reason why she was shot.”

Jane’s eyes went wide. “You think so?”

“Elimination. It is the only clue to motive that we have. Therefore, it must be the clue. Did she make the phone call she talked about?”

“No. The next night she came back from the date with you. She was happy as a lark. She woke me up and told me that she had remembered that little thing she was thinking of on Tuesday night, but that before she jumped she’d have to make certain that she wasn’t being tangled up in a coincidence that would just make her look silly.”

“Jane, please try to remember her exact words on each occasion. Tell me what you said too, and I’ll write them down. They may be the answer.”

Back at the plant he met Maclaren, who said that he was going home and get some sleep and the hell with it. Maclaren said that it didn’t look like it could be any one of the five and yet he felt it had to be. He said that he’d feel clearer in the head if he got some sleep, and he advised Brock to do the same. Brock felt the weariness in his back and legs, and his eyes felt as though there was grit in them, but he knew that he could keep going. He knew that if he went back to his bed it would be impossible to sleep.

He didn’t tell Maclaren about the conversation with Jane. He had cautioned Jane to be silent, knowing that sooner or later Maclaren or one of his men would come around to her. The information he had was too vague to go on. He took the notebook out of his pocket and stood by the water cooler, reading the conversation.

Oliver came down the stairs, grinned at him, and said, “Did you hear the peeling I just got?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, this whole mess has got little Walter into a foul humor, and he’s been taking it out on me. I am no longer his fair-haired boy. Now I’m a dope who wasted forty thousand bucks of the firm’s money.”

Hodge Oliver leaned over the fountain and drank. As he straightened up, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, Brock said, “I don’t get it.”

“Heck, Brock, I talked myself into this job on the basis of some mechanical engineering background. You see, the old idea was that Brasher bid on miscellaneous mixed scrap, performed the sorting and baling, if necessary, with cheap labor, and then resold the clean scrap for enough to cover his costs and make himself a profit. I sold him on the idea that I could go around and buy junk equipment whenever I could find a good price and felt certain that, with the dismantling of it, we could get our dough back plus a profit. He sent me around to auctions and sales, and now he doesn’t like the last forty thousand I spent. I was working on the stuff at the time Stella was shot.”

“What is the stuff?”

“Oh, two thousand gimmicks that were Vietnam surplus. I got ’em for twenty bucks apiece. Sort of a computing gadget. They’re all out in the back end of the shop. I’m certain that I can rig them around some way so that we can unload them at a profit, but now little Walter thinks I’m nuts and he’s sorry he ever got off the straight, semifabricated, and unfabricated scrap business.”

Once again Brock stood by her bed and looked down at the face, darkening with the shadow of death. He stood, large and brooding, looking at her dry lips, at the painful slightness of her under the hospital blankets — and for a long time he thought.

From the lower corridor of the hospital, he phoned Maclaren, who was back on duty. Maclaren objected at first, but at last he listened to Brock’s plan.

Brock went back to the plant and went into Brasher’s office, managing to smile. “The doctors just told me that Miss Galloway will be okay. She’ll be able to talk tomorrow.”

He also told Jane and Karkoff and Oliver and the switchboard girl and the guard and the office boy. Every one of them looked pleased. Everyone told him that it was swell, that Galloway was a good kid.

Horowitz and Maclaren sat in Brasher’s office and the overhead light shone out across the shadowy expanse of desks, across the hooded typewriters. Brock stepped over to the desk and reached for Maclaren’s cigarettes. He missed the pack, staggered slightly, and got it with his second grasp. Maclaren looked up at him suddenly. “When have you slept, Jud?”

“Not for quite a while.”

“Go to bed. We’ll take care of this.”

“I couldn’t sleep if I did, John. I’m okay.”

“All we can do is wait,” Horowitz said.

“Have we got good men on Galloway?” Brock asked. Neither of the two seemed to notice the use of the word “we.” Somehow Brock had gained acceptance.

“The best,” Horowitz said. “Plus good guys on each of the others. The only one we don’t have to fret about is Oliver. He’s over in the shop working on something. I guess he fouled up and he’s trying to redeem himself with the boss.”

The minutes passed in silent monotony while the three men smoked and glanced at the phone. Maclaren sent a man out for coffee and more cigarettes.

Maclaren snatched the phone when it rang. “Yeah? What! Sure. Grab him. Don’t lose him. Bring him right back here. Thanks.” He hung up.

He looked puzzled. He said, “For the hell of it, just to play safe, I stuck guys at the bus station, railroad station, and on the two bridges. I figured that if any of the tails slipped up, we’d have a second line of defense. Walker, over on the Anders Avenue Bridge, has picked up Karkoff in his jalopy headed out of town. He’s bringing him over. Hell, we didn’t even have a tail on that boy. According to the noise of that baler, he couldn’t have done it.”

Brock felt a lot of his weariness disappear, felt the muscles bunch along his thick arms as he clenched his hard hands. This was a start. Maybe this was it.

Karkoff slouched in the straight chair and said, “I tell you, you guys are on the wrong track. Sure, I got a record. That was a hell of a long time ago and I’ve been straight ever since. But that don’t do me no good when it comes to a thing like this. I figured that if you guys couldn’t find out who did it, you’d pin it on me somehow. I was skipping out of town, sure. But I don’t know anything about it.”

Brock stepped over to the chair, clubbed Karkoff in the side of the head with a clenched fist, picked him up off the floor, and jammed him back into the chair.

Karkoff shook the mist out of his eyes and said, “That stuff won’t do you no good, pal. I got nothing to tell you.”

Brock glanced at Maclaren. Maclaren shook his head slowly. Horowitz was kneeling on the floor, going through Karkoff’s luggage. He straightened up. “Nothing here, John. A mess of tools and wire and clothes. One hundred bucks in a tin box along with some pictures of some lush women.”

“You guys going to book me?” Karkoff said.

“Sure. Maybe we haven’t got anything to go on, but we’ll find something,” Maclaren said with a tight smile.

“Okay. I don’t mind. But there’s no sense in carting all this stuff of mine down to your game rooms. Let me drop it off at my room and pick out some clothes when you take me down.”

Something restless stirred in the back of Brock’s mind. Something wasn’t right. Why should Karkoff be concerned about such a trivial thing? It didn’t make good sense. The man was too casual. He glanced at Maclaren. Apparently John felt nothing wrong. Neither did Horowitz. Brock wondered if the lack of sleep was harming his mental processes.

He stepped over the tin suitcase and looked down. Wrenches, a battered micrometer. Some spools of fine, white wire. This was the stuff that Karkoff wanted to leave in his room.

Suddenly a lot of things made sense. He felt the quick thud of his pulse. He went over it again in his mind. It still checked. Maclaren said sharply, “What is it, Jud? I’ve seen you look like this before.”

Brock said, “I can’t tell you... yet. Play along with me, John. Just a little while. Hold Karkoff here. I want to go down into the shop.”

He heard the scream of boards ripped loose as he stepped into the shop. Oliver was prying open a small case. Against the far wall was a pile of empty cases. Oliver, a smudge on his cheek, grinned up at Brock. “A little night work, Brock. Got to get all this stuff uncrated so we can see what we’ve got. If I don’t unload it soon, Brasher is going to take the forty thousand out of my pay.”

Just beyond Oliver was a bulging burlap sack. Brock kicked it. “What have you got here?”

“Oh, some damn wire that’s fastened to each unit. No good to me. Thought I might as well peel it off as I uncrated the stuff.”

Brock grinned. “Don’t work too hard, Oliver.” He walked back to the office. He didn’t answer Maclaren’s questioning look. He picked up the phone, dialed the operator, and asked to speak to the President of the Stoeffer Corporation of Birmingham, Alabama. The operator said she’d call back. He hung up.

Horowitz said, “Have you gone nuts? Alabama! What goes on?”

“Leave him alone,” Maclaren said. “Take a look at Karkoff.”

The man had slouched further in his chair and his face was white, his lips compressed.

A Mr. Stoeffer got on the line and Brock asked him a few questions. Stoeffer said, “I’m afraid that I don’t have the detailed knowledge to answer that question. My production head was a man named James Beeson. He’s no longer with me, but he’s still here in town. Try phoning him.”

Beeson came on the line in a few minutes and Brock heard him yawn into the phone. Brock snapped him out of it by saying, “This is police business, Mr. Beeson. You worked for the Stoeffer Corporation on government contract W-one-eighteen — ORD-three-two-five-five?”

“I guess so, but I can’t remember them by number. What sort of an item was it?”

“Computer, M-eighteen. Do you remember it?”

“Yeah, I remember it, but what’s the tieup with police business?”

“How big a contract was it?”

“Two thousand units at a price of eighteen hundred a unit. Three million six hundred thousand. That was what they called an experimental quantity. They were for the Artillery Section of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance. You can tell that by the ORD in the contract number. We made those... let me see, now... about four years ago. Then we found out that some other device had made them obsolete anyway.”

“Suppose somebody managed to buy the whole lot at twenty bucks a copy?”

Beeson laughed. “I don’t know what the hell they’d do with them. Maybe they’ve got a—” He stopped, and Brock, his heart pounding, heard the man gasp. Beeson’s voice was shrill. “Hey! Wait a minute. Our unit price was only eight hundred bucks, and the reason it became eighteen hundred was when we found out that the damn specifications called for a lot of platinum wire for each one. About a thousand bucks’ worth, if I remember rightly.”

Brock thanked him, hung up, and stooped over the metal suitcase. He picked out the reels of white wire and put them on the desk in front of Maclaren. “This stuff is platinum,” he said.

As Maclaren picked up one of the reels, Karkoff jumped for the doorway. It was unexpected. Horowitz made a grab for him that missed and then yanked the Positive from his hip holster. There was no point in shooting. Karkoff had disappeared into the shadows. He thumped down the side stairs.

As the three of them, hearing Karkoff clatter against a pile of scrap, spread out and followed him across the yard, the light in the shop went out suddenly.

Brock realized he was without a gun. He fumbled in the darkness and found a two-foot length of one-inch bar stock. It fitted his hand snugly.

Their eyes were getting used to the darkness. The glow of the city against the low-hanging clouds faintly illuminated the yard. Following Maclaren, Brock drifted out to the side, hurrying around the far end of the shop. A dark figure was struggling against the fence, drawing himself up. Maclaren aimed carefully and fired. The figure screamed like a woman and dropped heavily to the ground. A dark shape ran back into the shop.

Horowitz took the main entrance and Brock and Maclaren covered the back door through which the figure had run.

“Where are the lights?” Maclaren whispered.

“I think there’s a set just inside the door on the left. Let me try.”

“Okay. But stand back when they go on. He might have a gun.”

His fingers found the switch, and the sudden glare of light threw the shop into sharp illumination. The massive baler, hydraulic plungers silent, stretched squat and powerful along one side of the shop. The crane hook dangled without motion.

Maclaren bellowed, “Come on out!”

Gun ready, Maclaren walked into the shop. Brock saw Horowitz standing framed in the main door, his gun in his hand.

The shop seemed to be empty. The three of them stood stupidly. Brock caught a glimpse of movement high overhead, hissed, “Up there! On the catwalk!”

A shadowy figure ran quickly along the catwalk to a skylight. Brock knew then what the plan was. Smash through the skylight and run down the sloping roof. From the edge of the high roof, an active man could jump the fence.

Horowitz fired, but the figure didn’t stop. There was a smash and tinkle of breaking glass. As Maclaren fired, Brock turned and ran out the back door, along the side of the building. He heard the pound of running steps on the roof.

He drew back the heavy bar in his hand. The figure appeared and seemed to hesitate, balanced on the very edge of the roof. With all his strength, Brock threw the bar, leading the figure outlined against the glow in the sky by a few feet.

There was a thud as the figure jumped into midair. A hoarse cry. It fell against the barbed wire, clawed for a moment, and then dropped inside the fence. There was a small bubbling noise, and then silence.

Maclaren squatted beside the body of Hodge Oliver and lit a match. Brock looked down.

“Hitting him in midair like that put him off balance, I guess,” Maclaren said calmly. “Or maybe he wouldn’t have made it anyway. That barbed wire caught him right in the throat and ripped it wide open. He was probably dead ten seconds after he hit the ground.”

Captain Davis, lean, gray, and quiet, shoved the pack of cigarettes across the desk to Jud Brock. Horowitz sat by the window. Maclaren leaned against the closed door, his face relaxed.

“Better tell me the whole thing from the beginning, Brock,” Davis said.

“I got onto it because a lot of little things all of a sudden added up. She was shot by one of the people we narrowed it down to. Oliver was working in the rear end of the shop. He could go outside and shoot her and go back in in seconds. Her roommate said that Stella was trying to remember something long ago and far away. That pointed to Washington. Oliver was in Washington. But the disposal of the gun had me licked. Also the motive. Oliver came and told me his private difficulties with Brasher. Oliver was a gambler. He was afraid I might have overheard the argument, and he wanted to kill off my suspicions by telling me himself. He was too eager. Also he was too nice about it when I slapped him around in his room.

“Stella was shot with a forty-five. He wanted the girl dead. He notched the slug to make certain of it, knowing that if he missed a vital spot when he fired, the slug would spread and smash her all to hell inside. The problem began to shape itself up. The motive had some connection with Washington.

“I pulled the cornball play, the old gimmick about her recovering, and Maclaren covered all the angles. Karkoff started to run. We grabbed him. I knew that he couldn’t have done it, but he must have started to run because he had helped somehow. I remember his baler. It looked as though maybe Karkoff had been paid off for not noticing when Oliver came back into the shop and tossed the gun into the scrap that Karkoff was baling. That tied in with Karkoff’s telling Lavery to go get a smoke. He couldn’t chance having Lavery, up on the crane, see Oliver toss the gun into the scrap, see Karkoff compress the batch of scrap into a neat little bundle with the gun in the middle.

“Even if it had happened that way, I couldn’t see how Karkoff had been paid off for his help. It didn’t make sense. Then Karkoff wanted to drop his stuff off at his room. That indicated that maybe Horowitz hadn’t seen something of value in the stuff.

“As I looked down at the suitcase, a lot of things popped into place in my mind. Both Oliver and Stella Galloway worked in a procurement section. Oliver had told me that he had bought some war-surplus stuff that Brasher couldn’t see any value in. Maybe that war surplus was the angle.

“I went out into the shop and got the contract number and company name off the cases. Oliver was out there working. I realized that he was out there because he had heard that on the next day Stella would be able to talk and she would point the finger right at him. It didn’t make sense to have Oliver opening all of the cases. Hell, if the things were all alike, he could just unpack one. He was filling a bag with wire. Karkoff had wire in his suitcase. I went back and phoned the company who made the stuff and found out that Oliver was stripping a thousand bucks’ worth of platinum wire off each one. I guess he intended to get as much as he could and try to clear out of town at dawn before Stella could pop off about him.

“Karkoff heard the phone call and knew that was the end of the road because he was carrying five thousand bucks’ worth of the wire in his suitcase. He made a break, tipped off Oliver, and they tried to go over the fence. Maclaren smashed Karkoff’s knee, and Oliver killed himself when he jumped short and hit the barbed wire.”

Captain Davis sat in thoughtful silence for a time and then said, nodding, “I can see how it was. A civil servant in military procurement, a man with some mechanical and electronic engineering background, discovered that these computer gadgets with two millions’ worth of platinum wire in them had become surplus. Maybe Miss Galloway happened to mention it to Oliver, in an ironic way. It would intrigue anyone, that much platinum in an obsolete device. Oliver quit and found work with a scrap company which could bid on the devices, because he didn’t have the forty thousand. It was his rotten luck that he picked a scrap outfit in the city of Louisavale, Miss Galloway’s home town. Maybe she said nice things about our city. His terrible luck was compounded when she came back and went to work at the same place.

“He must have prayed she would never remember what had probably been a very casual conversation over coffee, after Brasher made such a loud stink over the waste of forty thousand dollars. But she did. She must have confronted him, then foolishly gave him time to think it over. He knew that she brought your orders out into the yard, Brock. He bribed Karkoff, shot her, and tossed the weapon into the baler. He must have felt pretty safe. In the vast, confusing picture of military procurement, he must have thought that his motive would be hidden.” He paused. “Two million dollars is a great deal of money, gentlemen.”

Brock stood up, stubbed out his cigarette. The weariness was fogging his brain and he knew that at last he could sleep. “Do you need me for anything?” he asked.

Davis looked at Maclaren and then at Horowitz. Both men nodded briefly. “Yes, Jud. We need you for something. We need you to walk a beat for six months or a year. At the end of that time, if you’re still in line, we need you back in here.”

Brock couldn’t answer. His mouth was dry and his eyes stung. He said, hoarsely, “Thanks,” turned, and left the small room.

The intern said, “We can’t tell yet, Mr. Brock. She’s done well lasting until now. Respiration is a little deeper, but”

With one hand, Brock smoothed the dry, dead hair back from her damp forehead. Her eyelids fluttered and opened, and she stared up at the ceiling, unseeing.

He leaned close to her and said thickly, “Don’t go away! I need you.”

She turned her head the barest fraction of an inch, and he caught the flicker of recognition in her eyes before they closed once more.

He got up and slid the chair back. The intern said, “That’s what they need. They need to be given the will to fight. I hope she heard you.”

“She heard me.”

The intern said wistfully, “She must have been a lovely girl.”

Brock looked at him, staring heavily. “Just for the hell of it, son, let’s say that she is a lovely girl.”

The intern stood outside the door to the private room and watched Judson Brock walk down the corridor toward the exit. Something of almost frightening intensity had looked out of the big man’s eyes when he had spoken. The intern noticed that he walked with a step of infinite, dogged weariness.

As Brock stepped out into the dawn, the intern turned and looked back into the room. He said softly, “Something tells me, lady, that you better get well. I don’t want to have to face that guy if you don’t.”