The Impossible Godiva

Brother, it was fine. I’d been in love with Ellicia Hunter a long time. I’d even run around with her crowd a little. I made dough as ranking chemical engineer in her father’s outfit and took her out when I could spare the sleep. But I had never asked her to marry me. You know why. She was a rich gal, and, comparatively, the dough I had earned was so much peanuts.

But don’t think I’m sounding noble. All the time I’d had ace in the hole, a honey of a new process I’d been working on. Then came the day that I sold the process to old man Hunter for a quarter-of-a-million dollars, plus royalties, plus a few hundred shares in the corporation. I held out for those shares right to the very last. It was sort of the finishing touch.

When the meeting of the board of directors broke up in the walnut-panelled room with its long conference table, the well-fed members of the board let their eyes soften and pounded me on the back. They said as how my process was going to revolutionize the manufacture of plastics and how the corporation was going to make millions out of it.

It was after that I followed old man Hunter into his private office.

He was a gimlet-eyed little guy who’d started in life with nothing flat. If he was born with any kind of spoon in his mouth, it was brass. I marched up to his desk, which looked half an acre big, and said: “Mr. Hunter, I’d like to have your permission to marry Ellicia.”

He blinked his eyes fast, a dozen times maybe and said, “Well, well, well. When did you pop the question?”

“I haven’t, yet.”

He grinned. “If you need any help, phone me. She still obeys her old man.”

“Thanks, Mr…”

“But one thing,” he broke in. “Once you marry her, she’s your problem. Never let her get the best of you, Rick. I know, I know. You think you know Ellicia like you… like you know your chemistry. But all the qualitative and quantitative analyses in the world wouldn’t reveal every ingredient contained in Ellicia.”

“That’s what I like about her, sir. You always discover something new, every time you see her. You…”

“Son-in-law, you don’t know the half of it! She’s spoiled rotten!” He chuckled fondly. There was nothing to be said at the moment, so I left his office. I chuckled a little fondly, too. Nice old guy- But he certainly didn’t know his daughter. Why, there wasn’t a self-centered bone in her lovely body!

The wedding came off okay. The church very solemn, the banked flowers filling the air with a heady perfume, the soprano singing O, Perfect Love. Well, it was perfect. Ellicia was small and precious in her white veil with her soft, dark hair tumbling to her shoulders. Oh, so demure!

There I was, hard-working young man who’d made good and married the boss’s daughter. We made our wedding trip short, two weeks in the majesty of the Smoky Mountains, because I was needed to get the new process going.

At first the only acid in the equation that was going to produce murder eventually was Perry Lance. You know Perry. Yale and Oxford; a background of ancestors whose blood was so blue they could have sliced a vein and gone in the ink business.

Perry was always so veddy, veddy correct; but when the wedding was over, he marched up to Ellicia in his cut-away and striped trousers, every shaggy blond hair so nicely in place, and said, “May I wish you many happy returns of the day?”

“Hell, no,” I said in no uncertain tones. I wanted Perry to get things straight right from the start. “She’s married for keeps, so there’ll be no returns of this day for Ellicia.”

He murdered me a couple hundred times with his pale blue eyes under their shaggy brows. Ellicia yanked the fuse from the dynamite keg with a laugh. “You boys mustn’t fight over me. Ever!” I didn’t like the little trill in her laugh. A trill is too closely related to a thrill.

Anyway, I let Perry ride for the moment. When Ellicia and I got in the groove of living, I began to see what J. P., as I now called him, had meant about his daughter.

She was sweet, choice, grand. She was worth a couple of right arms. But you direct a person’s life in certain channels for twenty-one years and its hard for him or her to reach port. J. P. had spoiled her, all right. In some ways, he had damn near ruined her.

The Jean Darlan incident, for example. Jean was one of the crowd, chattering and sipping cocktails, that always seemed to be underfoot no matter how much I wanted to put my arms about my wife and ruin her lipstick. Jean had ancestors of her own. They were on the Mayflower — so Jean said — and I secretly suspected she was still living on their reputation. Nothing definite, just idle gossip Ellicia would drop to me in private about how certain of the better stores and shops had sent those well known account-badly-overdue notices to Jean.

Anyway, I felt a subconscious faint chill around Jean. You looked at her and she was tall, blonde and lovely. But you looked at her eyes and sometimes you’d catch something cold and calculating in them before she’d smile. Or maybe she was just so sophisticated, it scared me.

This night I am talking about, she was a trifle toxic from too many parts of alcohol to so many parts of blood. She got me over in a corner and told me all about how she admired me, and next thing I knew she’d kissed me.

Maybe I looked silly when I wiped her lipstick from my lips. She giggled. That didn’t bother me. Across the room, Archie Satler, the orchestra leader, who was very much that way about Jean, glared daggers. That didn’t bother me, either. Ellicia, leaning on the concert grand with a little group about her, saw me wiping Jean’s lipstick off. She just smiled, sweetly, demurely. She’d never been really touched by the ugliness of life, and she simply took this for granted. I was her husband, wasn’t I? Sure, dear Rick, the devoted Rick. Dammit, she wasn’t even jealous. That bothered me a hell of a lot.

Archie Satler strolled over. He was sleek and dark, with a thin mustache that would have suffered if wax had been rationed. His black, glittering eyes made dire threats against me as he offered Jean his arm. To hell with him. He was just a phony who made a living drooling sweet music six nights a week — every night except Monday — at Club Mananita. If this hadn’t been a Monday night, he’d have been working right then, and Jean Darlan would have been at Club Mananita at a ringside table, drooling at him while he played his sweet music. No kidding, everybody said she was nuts about him and was even going to open a club for him one of these days; I knew Jean wouldn’t have risked arousing his ire by kissing me, even in fun, if she hadn’t been tight.

Ellicia never mentioned the Jean Darlan incident, it meant so little to her. That jarred me, and in the next few days I woke up. Ellicia, as I say, loved me. I never doubted that. But she’d always lived on the surface of plush and velvet, never feeling anything deeply, and it was impossible for her to start feeling deeply now, even love. She was still living her own life, engrossed in her own activities; I wasn’t one hundred per cent essential, but I wanted to be.

So I dragged out Godiva Hoffman. Back in my college days, some fellows were sprawled in my room one night and to pass a minute they began kidding about the woman they didn’t want to marry. They named all sorts of bad traits and worse items of appearance, and my roommate, who wasn’t a bad hand at a sketch, drew us a rough portrait of this imaginary creature who repulsed all men, snag-toothed, half bald, with a crooked nose. Somebody labelled the drawing “Godiva Hoffman” and after that a particularly sour date caused us to say “I was out with Godiva last night.”

I changed Godiva all around when I rented the frilly three-room apartment, however. I gave her new teeth like pearls, flowing blonde tresses, a tip-tilted nose.

It was a screwball idea from the very first, but I saw no reason why it shouldn’t work. Anyway, I definitely did not care for an affair with anyone other than Godiva. I had Ellicia — or part of her — and I had to be one hundred per cent essential.

You see what I was driving at. I would quietly establish Godiva’s presence in the apartment by little gestures such as rumpling the bed and tossing a few feminine things about for the house maid to see. The fact that no one ever actually saw Godiva coming and going would lend. I thought, spice to the affair.

I would write a few notes, and at the proper time place them where Ellicia would find them. I would come home from work that day and when she confronted me with the notes, I would tell her that there was nothing serious, as yet, between Godiva and myself, that Godiva was just an understanding creature who would listen to my small talk of the office, drink coffee with only the kitchen table between us, all alone. I would say that I was sorry Ellicia had found out but that Godiva’s place never contained a crowd of magpies swizzling champagne while I’d just come from a nerve-wracking day.

I knew that Ellicia, thinking Godiva a flesh and blood female, would recognize the danger of that sort of affair and chase the crowd away and threaten to tear my eyes out if I ever saw Godiva again.

So I rented the apartment, sneaked in a few feminine things, skipped dinner at home four or five times with the old, suspicious excuse of working late, and saw four or five shows to keep me out longer than any sort of dinner should have taken. When I considered the time ripe, I disguised my handwriting well enough, penned a few mush notes, one of which thanked me profusely for the Wardmore Arms apartment, and slipped the notes in the pocket of a suit which I asked Ellicia to send to the cleaners for me when I phoned her that afternoon.

I sat back and waited — and went through the unpleasant process of having my stomach turn over a sixteenth of an inch at a time. Ellicia didn’t phone. I knew she’d found those notes where I had apparently forgotten them. But all afternoon she didn’t phone.

I wanted to get away early that afternoon and see what was giving. I was low with the thought that Ellicia had found the notes and simply laughed at them. But some cluck in the control lab let a tanker of sulphuric acid slip past him loaded with nitrogen. I decided to see to it myself, and early darkness had come before I finally left the plant.

Ellicia was at her dressing table, brushing her tumbling dark hair, when I opened the door. “Hello, Rick.” I heard the cracking of icicles. Well, well, so she had seen the notes and the chemical reaction was bubbling to a head.

I put my hands on her shoulders, our gazes met in the mirror, and her mouth twisted up. I watched a tear gather in the corner of each eye. “Rick! How could you do such a thing? That Godiva creature…!”

I went into my song and dance. Nonchalant, you know. “Well, as vet, there is nothing between…”

“Nothing between! Rick! To think you’ve been seeing such a horrid woman. Why, I… I…”

“Easy now, hon. Godiva isn’t so bad. She’s…”

“…She’s a witch! She’s an old crone. I know. I went to her apartment and saw her!”

The hush was so deep my voice sounded like the squeaking of a mouse in the Grand Canyon. “You did which?”

“I saw her, talked to her — the tramp! Those notes in your pocket — in one of them she thanked you for the Wardmore Arms apartment. It wasn’t hard to locate her.”

Somebody was nuts. Sure, I bad mentioned the apartment house in one of the mush notes I’d written. I had done that so Ellicia could get a sort of intangible verification of the existence of Godiva Hoffman by calling the Wardmore Arms and learning that a woman by that name had — supposedly — rented an apartment there. But not a verification of this sort. I had tried to manufacture putty and somehow it had turned into dynamite.

I didn’t know I was gripping Ellicia’s shoulders so hard until she wiggled out of my grasp. I said, “Ellicia, you’ve got to believe me. This thing was a joke. I… It… Godiva Hoffman is a nonesuch.”

“It’s not a joke, Rick Hershey! But she is a nonesuch! There’s not another such creature like her in all the world. Rick, where are you going?”

“I’m going to get acquainted with a hallucination,” I said. I turned quickly, kissed her hard. “This is important, hon. I’ll explain everything when I get back. Everything, so help me!”

“Rick!” The word almost floored me at the door. “If you ever see that Godiva creature again… If you so much as…” There it was, the fierce, possessive love of womankind that’s echoed through the ages from mother Eve. I had it, I was one hundred per cent. But before I could enjoy it I had to see about this hallucination.

I opened the door of the apartment in the Wardmore Arms and slipped inside. The place looked just as I had left it. But my nose tingled. There was the odor, faintly, of cooking, the ranker odor of cigar smoke.

I stood in the small living room, gulping. I looked all around the cozy room with its big chair. Nothing. No movement anywhere. I tiptoed to the door of the bedroom, intending to go on through to the kitchenette to see what had been cooked. But Godiva Hoffman was on the bed, eyes closed, one arm behind her head.

She was a crone, all right. Big flabby face that shrieked a tale of acute alcoholism, pouchy eyes that were probably bleary when open, matted, dead-looking, mouse-colored hair. Her soiled print dress was twisted, as if she’d staggered into the bedroom and passed out. But she hadn’t passed out. She’d been shot half an inch above the ear and had bled a lot. Her head and the side of her face were a mess.

On the floor near the bed was a thirty-eight revolver. Beside it lay a powder-blackened rended pillow. Somebody had wrapped the gun in the pillow, pointed it at Godiva’s head and pulled the trigger, all nice and silent and messy.

I picked up the gun. It felt too familiar. It had come from the desk in my study at home.

On top of all that a flat voice said behind me, “You’re covered, bud,” and for a second I thought I was going to die right then and there.

I turned around. A paunchy man with a cigar in his face was in the doorway. He held a gun on me without a tremor. He flipped back his lapel, and I got an eyeful of policeman’s badge. “Drop the gun,” he said. I dropped the gun.

“Well, well,” he said. “A ducky little love nest killing, eh? You get tired of the bag, let her pass out on the bed and shoot her.” He clucked his tongue. “Bub, you ain’t the killer type. Or you wouldn’t have got panicky, left the gun and then tried to come back. Your hands wouldn’t have rattled the key in the lock so long and hard when you were letting yourself in just a minute ago.”

“How did you get here?”

“How do we ever get here? Somebody phoned headquarters and said they thought they’d heard a smothered shot in this apartment. Now let’s me and you get chummy. What’s your history?”

It took several long, hard breaths to rejuvenate my stricken corpuscles. “This is all a mistake, officer. A bad mistake. There’s no such person as Godiva Hoffman. Back in my college days we made her up. She doesn’t exist, you understand?”

“Now, look; your lawyer’ll have to decide whether or not you’re going to make an insanity plea. But with me you can be frank, eh? Just give with the personal history.”

I looked at Godiva Hoffman. She was still there, real as death. At least I knew I wasn’t nuts. I was just here with a corpse and a cop, that’s all. “My name Is Rick Hershey,” I croaked, “thirty-two years old, five feet eleven, weight a hundred and seventy. Chemical engineer, I like my coffee with cream, but no sugar. Did a six months’ hitch in the army early in the war, never been arrested, never…”

“No record, eh?”

“None”

“Well, it’s the nice ones that let a dame ruin ’em. We’ll retire to the living room where there’s a phone, bub.”

We retired to the living room, and he picked up the phone. He kept well away from me, his gun on me, but he had to flick one glance at the phone to dial headquarters.

I didn’t tell you I played baseball in college? Well, the cop didn’t know it either. The toss would have warmed the heart of Lefty Grove. The cop never saw the lamp I scooped off the end table. The lamp was heavy metal. It hit him on the side of the jaw, and his head hit the carpet before his heels did. I was shaking so hard I could hardly right the phone stand he’d knocked over and replace the phone.

I crouched in the snowball bush on the terraced lawn and watched them come and go. The brick house up at the head of the lawn was the one I’d rented for Ellicia and me. The rent was paid, so it was mine. But you’d never know that from their actions. They went up and down the lawn from the couple of squad cars at the curb. There was two press cars at the curb, too. I was beginning to realize I was an important man in this town. This killing rated. It wasn’t any satisfaction.

Along about ten o’clock they left. The house stayed lighted. Old J. P.’s car was still on the gravelled drive as I moved across the lawn to the side door that entered in the library.

J. P. and Ellicia were in the living room. She’d been crying hard. He was walking back and forth in front of the fireplace, his face drawn. I took a deep breath and said, “Hsssst!”

They both went rigid. I said from my dark corner of the hallway, “Are they gone? All of them?”

Through the open door I saw Ellicia bound out of her chair, old J. P. stride toward the door. Ellicia said, “Rick!” It was a moan. Old J. P. said, “Come in here!” It was a command.

I took a breath and faced it. Ellicia threw her arms around my neck when I got inside the doorway, “Rick, what have you done?”

“Yes,” J. P. said, “what have you done, son-in-law?”

“I haven’t done anything,” I said.

J. P. snorted and speared me with his gaze. “I ought to bean you with the fireplace poker, Rick, and yell for the police.” But he didn’t do it, and I was able to drag a breath lower than my larynx.

Ellicia kissed me and said, “It’ll be all right, Rick. We’ll hire the best lawyers in the state. We’ll beat ’em, Rick!”

Old J. P. snorted again, and I looked at him like he was looking at me. “Just one thing, J. P. And let’s get it straight. I didn’t kill Godiva Hoffman. I never saw her before tonight in my life.”

They both waited. The room waited. I tried to think where to start and I knew it was going to sound crazy as hell. If I told the truth, they’d say: “This is the most fantastic excuse, Rick, that a diseased mind could imagine!” Ellicia was willing to face the fact of murder and tell me that together we’d beat ’em. I had better not destroy that faith. So I said, “Did you tell the police about the mash notes?”

She said no, that she’d told the police just as little as she could. Old J. P. said, “Mash notes? What mash notes?”

I let him hang for an answer. I said to Ellicia, “Those notes are the thing that’ll hang me. My gun was used on Godiva, but I took it when I left the Wardmore Arms apartment. It’s at the river bottom now. The only real evidence left against me is the package of mash notes.”

“What the devil is this?” J. P. demanded. “Ellicia, why haven’t you told me everything?”

She let him wait for an answer, too. She said to me, “You want the notes? You want to destroy them?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Then,” she said, “you’ll tell them that Godiva was simply a friend, a very casual friend, who was having trouble finding an apartment. You merely did her a slight favor when you saw the vacancy at the Ward-more Arms. With the gun and notes gone, there’ll be no positive evidence against you whatsoever.”

“That’s the idea again. The D.A. can yell murder all he wants. The jury can believe that I’m as guilty as sin — but it takes evidence to convict a man of a crime — especially murder. With those notes destroyed, we can hang a jury till doomsday, but with those notes in the hands of the police, I’d be hanging!”

“Rick! Don’t say such things. The notes are right over here in the desk.”

J. P. and I watched her as she crossed to the desk. I was feeling better. They might try me, but they were going to have one tough time hanging me.

Then Ellicia turned from the desk, her face white as cotton. She didn’t speak. She held up her hands, and they were empty.

I fell in a chair. “Well,” I said. “This is just ducky. Are you sure the cops didn’t find the notes?”

“I’m positive,” Ellicia said. “I watched them. They didn’t search the desk. They didn’t question me, either, and they’d have done that if they had found the notes.”

“Then somebody else has the notes.” I got out of the chair. “Who, Ellicia? Who had access to the desk?”

She wrinkled her creamy forehead, touched a tapered finger against her lips. “Let’s check the time element, Kick. The police said Godiva was killed between six and six-thirty.”

“Which, of course, skyrocketed the value of the notes. All right. I was found by the cop in the Wardmore Arms apartment about seven or shortly after. Now what?”

J. P. looked from one to the other of us. “From what I gather, there were some notes. They were worth little or nothing to an outsider until Godiva Hoffman was killed, if I follow your statements correctly.”

“You’re on the beam, J. P.,” I said. “Those notes will now warm the chair for your son-in-law.”

“Which means,” Ellicia chimed in, “that the notes were stolen from here for one of two purposes. To make us pay plenty to keep them from falling into the hands of the police or to… or to send you to the…”

“…Hot squat,” I croaked. “But that still isn’t saying who.”

“No, it isn’t, is it? Well, the seven-thirty newscast carried the news of the murder. The police arrived here at eight.”

“And who was here between seven-thirty and eight?”

“Three people,” Ellicia said. “Perry Lance came by to say he’d heard of the murder on the newscast with your name mixed in, Rick. He offered me his sympathy.”

“Dear Perry,” I said, “he would do that.”

“Perry had been here about five minutes,” Ellicia went on, “when Jean Darlan and Archie Satler dropped in on their way to Club Mananita. They offered their sympathy too.”

“Dear Jean and Archie,” I said, “they would do it too. Too damn many of your friends, Ellicia, probably take their milk from a saucer in the corner.”

Club Mananita was one of those ultra-ultra little joints where they soak you a buck-and-a-half for a four-bit drink. The headwaiter didn’t like my entering without being in a dinner jacket, but I’d spent several sizable wads in the place, and I told him I was going to be inside only a minute.

A Latin dance team was doing a tango. Except for the spot on them and the low lights on the small tables the place was fairly dark. I wondered how many faces I would recognize, how many of the faces would see me, and how many had heard the newscasts tonight. The Latin team finished, Archie Satler’s band swung into a slow tune and the floor crowded with dancing couples. I spotted Jean Darlan’s lovely blonde head at a table alone. I threaded my way to her and sat down.

All the blood drained from her face when she saw me. I had my hand in my coat pocket, and I jabbed her in the ribs with my thumb. It was reasonable enough facsimile of a gun. She gulped, touched her lips with her tongue. “What do you want, Rick?”

“A little palaver with you and the boy friend.”

On the bandstand, Archie spotted me. His dark, sleek form stiffened. As soon as the dance number was over, he signaled to his pianist for a chaser. He left the stand, nodding at this person, smiling at that one, without his cold, dark eyes ever leaving me.

He came up to the table and I said, “Sit down, Archie.”

“He… He’s got a gun on me, Archie,” Jean said. Archie sat down. “This is going hard with you, Rick.”

“Not half as hard as it’s going with you, chum. Which of you snitched that packet of notes from my house tonight?”

They looked at each other blankly. “Notes?” they said.

“I didn’t stutter, and both of you hear quite well. You know they’re hunting me for murder?”

“We know it,” they said.

“So you think I’d hesitate to spill Jean’s liver all over the next table?”

She grimaced and Archie’s knuckles went white against the table cloth. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said.

“Just try me. Brother, just try me. Now which of you got those notes? Just tell me that, give me the notes, and we’ll forget the whole incident and I’ll apologize for talking to Jean the way I have.”

“That’s a promise?” they breathed.

“As sure as my name’s Rick Hershey! Where are the notes?”

Jean looked at him and said, “Archie, do you know what he’s talking about?”

He said, “No. Do you?”

They looked at me and said: “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Rick.”

“Okay,” I growled. “If that’s the way…” I caught Archie’s gesture. Just a slow falling of one of his lids over his dark eye and a lifting of a forefinger to the tip of his nose. Orchestra leaders have a set of signals all their own. I glanced over my shoulder. Two hulking lads were moving out from the farther wall, shoulders humped, glassy eyes dead on me. Rather than have the bouncers throw me out and maybe attract police attention, I got to my feet. I promised Jean and Archie that I’d be seeing them and got out of Club Mananita maybe a yard-and-a-half ahead of the pair of bouncers.

That left me with Perry Lance. In a drugstore down the block from Club Mananita I called his parents’ mansion. He wasn’t there. I called his club. He wasn’t there, either. So he was either out gadding or in his apartment uptown. I decided not to tip him off by calling the apartment. I left the drugstore and whistled for a cab.

I nodded a thanks to the elevator starter, walked down the hallway to the door of Perry Lance’s bachelor apartment. I opened the door, peeped in the snug sitting room. It was empty. I could hear Perry whistling softly back in the bedroom. When he came out of the bedroom, I was standing in the middle of the sitting room, waiting for him.

He took three steps into the sitting room, saw me, and took two back. “Well, I must say, Rick, you’ve got your own share of gall, coming in here this way!”

He seemed suddenly to need to do something with his hands. He walked over to the antique Dutch cabinet, got a bottle and poured himself a jigger of rum. He didn’t offer me one, drinking his own while watching me down his nose.

“Where are the notes, Perry?”

From the way he jolted I knew I had it. Tingles raced over me. Actually getting the notes was the next thing.

He stammered, “Notes? Notes…?”

“That’s right. The notes you took from my desk earlier this evening.”

“Rick, I was just going out. I haven’t time for jokes or…”

“The notes, chum.” I selected a nice book end of beaten brass and walked toward him. He dropped his rum glass, backed against the wall. “I don’t…” he began. Until he looked at my eyes; then he said, “The notes are there in the secretary.”

“Get ’em!”

He divided his attention between me and the secretary. Then it was all on the secretary and he was scratching like a dog digging for a bone. He turned, pressed back against the secretary. “They’re gone, Rick! I took them from your house, yes, when I heard the newscast. I went by your place, and happened to see Godiva Hoffman’s signature on the notes on the desk.”

“You were planning to see that I got the electric chair. You were planning to remove me and do a little courting with Ellicia, huh, chum?”

“I… I think a lot of Ellicia…”

“That was a hell of a nasty way to show it. All right, you snitched the notes. Then what?”

“I brought them here. I was out only half an hour or so after nine-thirty to get a sandwich. I came back, got dressed, you came, and now…” He spread his hands.

I mulled that over. All the time Perry had been edging toward the door. He yanked the knob, shot out in the hall. He yelled bloody murder as I made a dive for him and missed. A few doors began popping open. Perry kept right on yelling. The joint was unhealthy.

I lammed for a window at the end of the hallway. The whole place was coming alive, malignantly, what with Perry’s yelling. A fat man between me and the window tried to get his hands on me. I buried my fist in three hundred pounds of lard. The fat man sat down, minus his breath. The way I went out that window and down the fire escape was a panic.

I walked the streets for maybe an hour. I came to the numbing conclusion that as a detective I was a lousy bust. But I had this thing. I knew I had it. It was as simple as the formula for hydrochloric acid. From a pool room I phoned the house. Ellicia sounded panicky, and I told her to calm down. “You’re going to have a party,” I said.

“A party, Rick? At this hour? Rather late to start, isn’t it?”

“Just tell them you’ve got some extra special champagne. That’ll bring them out.”

“Who’ll I invite?”

“Anybody you can round up. The usual crowd of magpies. You’ll find them in this joint and that one, where at the moment they’re having to pay for their drinks. Just be sure that Perry Lance, Jean Darlan, and Archie Satler are there.”

“Oh… You mean that one of them…”

“One of them made a corpse of the woman who wasn’t there. If one of them doesn’t show up, he’ll be the party with murder on his conscience!”

But they all showed up. I walked in and the room got as quiet as if a snake had entered. I looked around the room at the deadbeats and parasites and bluenoses. The last chords of the piano hung in the air. Archie Satler was turned toward me on the piano bench. Jean was standing near him, a slug of Scotch and soda halfway to her lips. Perry and Ellicia were near the bookcase; old J. P. sat before the fireplace and waited. The rest of the parasites and bluenoses didn’t matter.

I said a pleasant hello; nobody answered. Ellicia came over and gave my arm a squeeze. I said, “Well, we might as well get to the brass in the tacks, huh?” I walked forward in the room. “Somebody here is a lad with bright ideas. A lad who suspected that I was up to something when my wife happened to mention casually that I’d had dinner out four or five times and had come in late afterward. A lad who nosed around and found out that I’d rented an apartment for one Codiva Hoffman in the Wardmore Arms.

“That much is simple enough, isn’t it? This nosy person then watched the apartment, seeing a nice blackmail angle, and discovered there evidently was no such person as Godiva Hoffman. This person tumbled then to my real motive in renting the apartment, knowing me and my wife well. Knowing that I’ve never made any bones about crowds of chattering magpies and wanting to be one-hundred per cent essential with my wife.”

I shrugged their gazes off. “It’s still simple enough, isn’t it? Our nosy lad sees the sweet set-up, makes a little trip down to a cheap bar, finds a woebegone female barfly, installs her in the apartment as Godiva Hoffman. That leaves me with a real Godiva on my hands — I am to be confronted with this flesh and blood Godiva and told that I’ll either pay off heavy sugar or have my wife find out. That’s simple too, isn’t it? Nasty and simple.

“But Ellicia herself throws a bug in the deal by going to the Wardmore Arms apartment and talking with this Godiva. So Godiva turns on the person who hired her when this person tries to tell Godiva that the deal is off, now that my wife knows. Godiva is having none of this being brushed off. She’s been hired by a person who’s supposed to have plenty of sugar himself. Godiva threatens to reveal the whole mess, even if she does go to jail for it. Our nosy character who hired Godiva visions the publicity, the wreckage of his life. He is having none of that; but he can’t pay off to keep Godiva quiet about this nasty deal this so-called reputable character has engineered. So my gun is swiped and Codiva is murdered. That’s the only out, for our nosy friend. He plans to make the kill clean by planting it on me. Or summing the whole thing up, our nosy friend has engineered a scheme of blackmail. It’s blown up in his face, degenerated to the point that the tables are turned and our plotter kills and switches the murder on me, since I had a ready made motive, out of sheer self-protection. Still simple, eh?”

“And the notes, Rick?” Ellicia said.

“Three people had access to them, at the time they were of prime importance, which of course was after the murder. Once the murder was done, the notes could hang me or their absence save me. Perry Lance is the lad who swiped the notes in the first place.”

Two dozen pairs of eyes turned on Perry. His ice chattered in his glass. “But somebody stole them from me. I… I…”

“Sure,” I said. “You wanted the notes to put the final knot in the noose around my neck. You were afraid Ellicia would never turn the notes over to the cops, and that’s what you wanted to happen, when you spotted them on our desk. But another person spotted them. You heat the other person to them, but the other party didn’t give up, entered your apartment, got them.”

“Who was this other party?” Archie Satler inquired.

“It was Jean Darlan,” I said.

She gripped her glass tight. “You’ll never prove it.”

“Why not? It had to be you. Archie couldn’t have gone into Perry’s apartment tonight while Perry was out, after Perry got the notes, because Perry wasn’t out of his apartment until nine-thirty, and Archie was on a bandstand working then.

“You were going to cook me good, weren’t you, Jean? If the D.A. didn’t get enough evidence to got an indictment against me for the murder of Godiva Hoffman, those notes would be worth damn near every dime I own; if the D.A. did get an indictment on other evidence, you’d see that he got the notes, which would finish me and leave you in safety, with the Godiva Hoffman murder solved, as far as the law was concerned. You either had a prime blackmail weapon or safety, regardless of the way the dice fell.”

She sat down slowly on the piano bench. She looked from face to face. “You’ll never prove it,” she said again.

“Sure,” I said. “Godiva Hoffman was somebody. Human beings don’t just disappear without a trace. They’ll identify her, Jean, eventually. They’ll find who hired her; they’ll connect you with her, and those notes in your possession won’t help you any.”

“No,” she whispered, her face falling apart, “why would I do such a thing?”

“For money. You wanted a pile of money. Without money you could never keep your promise to Archie to open for him a club of his own. Once he found you didn’t have money, he’d drop you like a hot potatoe. You couldn’t stand that. You wanted Archie above all things, and to keep him you had to have money. The cops will see the motive easily enough, Jean, when they see some of those account-badly-overdue notices you’ve received from some of our better stores and shops.”

She hung her head and cried, and nobody said a word. Archie Satler moved away from her. He should have been punched in the jaw. She was a murderess, but she had done it for him, and now he wouldn’t even touch her. Tomorrow he’d be hunting another one to put on the string.

The cops came after awhile and took Jean away, and Ellicia told the hushed magpies to go home. They all shuffled out but Perry Lance.

Ellicia told him, “Perry, my husband and I would prefer to be alone.”

“But Ellicia, I’d like to apologize about those notes. I…”

I kept thinking he’d wanted to see me in the electric chair. I walked over and punched him in the nose and so help me, he didn’t bleed blue at all.

I told him I’d like to do it again, but Perry wasn’t having any. He jammed his linen handkerchief against his nose, got his hat and left.

Ellicia ran her finger along the piano. I looked around the room. Somehow even old J. P. had faded out. We were alone, Ellicia and I. “Rick,” she said, “I’ll have coffee on the kitchen table tomorrow night when you get home. Remember everything you do at the office tomorrow, so you can tell me all about it, will you?”

I said, “Sure.”

Her eyes changed a little and she put her arms around my neck and pulled my head down close to hers. Just before she kissed me, she said, “If you ever dream up another Godiva Hoffman, I’ll break a chair over your head. And if you should be foolish enough even to think of renting an apartment for a flesh and blood female, you know what I’d do to you then, don’t you?”

“I have an idea,” I sighed. Pity the poor guy married to a possessive, jealous dame!