The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Forrest Rosaire (1902-77), who also wrote under the name J.J. des Ormeaux, is little remembered today. Originally in the oil industry, he settled in California from Chicago in the 1930s and turned to writing. He appeared regularly in both the pulps and slick magazines producing a number of high quality crime or suspense stories. He continued writing until the 1950s but did not make the transition fully to the book market. He published only three books, East of Midnight (1945), Uneasy Years (1950) and White Night (1956), the last his only straight suspense novel in book form. He is another of those writers whose talents have been forgotten. The following, which betrays some of the pulp stereotypes of the day, is nevertheless ingeniously plotted and keeps you guessing to the end.

I

All kinds of people came into the welfare office, and Sandra Grey was so well versed in the diverse aspects of human misery that nothing much surprised her. But this visitor did. Both physically and by contrast. She had closed up her desk and was putting on her hat after a long day when his voice from the doorway made her jump.

“I say, is this where I’m to leave this?”

Sandra turned and saw a big-shouldered, floridly handsome man in an expensive raglan topcoat. He was holding in his arms a tiny ragged child – awkwardly, in the way men do who do not know how to handle babies.

Sandra stared at him. For a second she was completely at a loss – his appearance, the child, the request. In his turn the man stared at her. Sandra was enough to take any man aback. He looked jerkily around, as if he could not connect the drab office, with its heaps of cast-off clothing, boxes of canned goods, bushel baskets of shoes, with this radiant, slim, smart girl, whose wide brown eyes were like deep velvet.

He said uncertainly: “This is the welfare office, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Sandra. “What’s the trouble?”

He nodded his big florid face at the child. “I found this boy down in the building entry with a note on him. I stopped in at the clinic downstairs and they said to bring him up here, or to call the police.”

“Oh!” said Sandra.

She stepped quickly across, took the boy from him. He was a little, laughing, curly-headed fellow, no more than three at the most. He reached up a chubby hand, experimentally took hold of the end of Sandra’s nose.

“What a darling!” Sandra sat him down on her desk. He had wide gentian-colored eyes, bright with a baby’s mischief. He began chuckling to himself, exploring in a tall basket of shoes beside the desk. Sandra’s eyes flashed up to the stranger. “A note! You mean-”

“He’s abandoned.”

“Oh, how terrible!” Sandra had found the note by now, sewed into the ragged collar of his thin blouse. It read simply, in crude printing: “Be good to him.”

Sandra felt compassion well up, an ache in her heart. “How could anyone abandon such a darling?”

The man shook his head. He had an abrupt, awkward manner, entirely out of keeping with his air of breeding, his expensively tailored clothes, his big, impressive handsomeness. He said gruffly:

“What will you do with him?”

Sandra shook her head. “Take him to the orphanage, I suppose.” She took her slip-over sweater from a chair, began to roll it up. “I’ll drop him off on my way home. Thank you for bringing him up, Mr-”

“Gawdy.”

“Mr Gawdy.” Sandra decided the name aptly described his type of handsomeness. His ruddy face was too high-colored, his eyes too brightly blue, his topcoat too brilliantly golden.

She slipped the sweater over the boy’s head. A sudden, curiously sharp feeling of fear caught her. She realized afterward it was an intuition: if she had only caught up the child, sweater and all, rushed away with him, out of the office, away, away, anywhere-she might have avoided the horrible event looming so close at hand. Instead she went on pulling the chubby little hands through the knitted sleeves. The big man cleared his throat.

“I’d kind of like to give something, to give him a help along.” He was fishing in a shark-skin billfold.

“Oh, thank you,” said Sandra. “That’s generous of you. I’ll see that it-”

There was a knock on the jamb of the open door.

Sandra turned. A Chinese stood there, young, moon faced, bland, dressed in a loud herringbone suit with a snap-brimmed hat jauntily on the back of his head. He immediately started to back out.

“So sorry. You are busy.”

“No, no, come in; don’t mind me,” said the big man. He sat down, as if interested to observe the workings of a welfare office.

The Chinese came in. He had a squat and powerful body, that rippled with the same smooth blandness, the same easy suavity, as his voice.

“You are Miss Sandra Grey?”

“Yes.”

The Chinese creased his almond eyes. “I have come to beg your indulgence, Miss Grey. A very great favor. Having heard of your generosity, which is indeed a byword in the neighborhood” – he creased his eyes still more – “I have come to ask your help in a distressing family matter.”

His English was perfect, impeccable, as smooth as oil. He gestured slightly with two squat fingers, between which was an unlighted gold-tipped cigarette.

“I am here in behalf of my uncle, an old man who speaks only Cantonese. The matter concerns his daughter-my cousin – a young lady who has disappeared after a violent family quarrel. I have come to ask if you, Miss Grey, will find her.”

Sandra blinked. “You want me to find your cousin?”

The Chinese lifted his squat shoulders, dropped them. His bland smile was sad. “You are our last hope.”

“Won’t you sit down, Mr-”

“Dow.”

Mr Dow did not sit down, but lighted the gold-tipped cigarette, which emitted a rank odor of violet. “The old man is heartbroken. If he could only get this message to her, asking her to return, he would be happy.” He took from his pocket a bamboo tube, gave it to Sandra. “In this, after the Cantonese fashion, is the individual plea of every member of the family. If you could get it to her, you would make an old man happy, reunite a family.”

Sandra turned over the tube. It was about ten inches long and sealed elaborately at one end with red sealing wax, in which a gold cord was embedded to break the wax. She said uncertainly:

“I don’t know how I could locate her.”

“I believe she has taken a job through an employment agency called the Acme. Unfortunately she has left instructions not to tell her whereabouts to any of her race, so my efforts with the Acme are fruitless. I believe she has a job as housemaid; and for you, Miss Grey, I am sure the Acme-”

The big figure of Gawdy showed a sudden interest. “What’s that? I have some friends who have a Chinese housemaid.”

“Indeed.” Dow’s round face turned in polite surprise.

“Their name is Delaunay.” Gawdy spelled it. “I can give you their address.”

“Thank you.” Dow’s smile was faintly deprecatory. “There are, of course, many Chinese girls in service. But the Acme could verify it for you, Miss Grey.”

“What is your cousin’s name?”

“Helen Ying.”

“I’ll try to locate her for you, Mr Dow.”

“The lady is as generous as she is lovely.” Dow’s creased eyes inclined over his cigarette. “I will stop in myself, tomorrow, to learn if you have any success. Permit me to depart in the American manner.”

He extended his hand, and as Sandra took it, she felt he was palming something in it. She looked down at her hand in surprise, and as she looked up again, the Chinese was gone. Gawdy was staring after him.

“Queer customer,” he said. “See here. I’m going by the Delaunays’ and-”

“What on earth-” Sandra was staring at what Dow had left in her hand. It was a compact, compressed, folded square of paper. She unfolded it, saw a rice-paper envelope, carefully sealed. On it was typed:

Give this to her employer.

Sandra red lips parted. “Give this to her employer!” Her eyes flashed to Gawdy. “Look. He gave me this. He must mean, give it to his cousin’s employer!”

Gawdy was staring at it. “He gave that to you?”

“Yes, slipped it in my hand as he was going out!”

“Well, I’ll be-” Gawdy got up. “See here. He looked shady to me. Open it, see what it says!”

A piercing scream rent their ears.

They whirled. The little boy had picked up the bamboo tube, hammered it on the desk, knocked the sealing wax loose. Liquid, spurting from it like a geyser, sprayed over his knees and feet, fuming, bubbling, viscous liquid.

“Great God!” cried Sandra. “Acid!”

It was a moment that would remain stamped on her soul as long as she lived. She saw his creamy flesh, his little knees, quivering, contracting, under that searing, slow-crawling flood. She caught his little body in her arms, bucking, wild, convulsive, screaming as only a child can in unendurable pain. Sandra hardly knew what she was doing. She heard Gawdy yell, “Get that Chinaman!” and dash out the door like a bull. She ran headlong at the glass water cooler, plunged the boy’s feet and knees into the deluge of water. The choking fumes caught at her, throat-tearing, strangling. She whirled, burst through the door, went like an arrow downstairs toward the clinic one flight below.

She didn’t know who was there, whom she plunged through. She saw the white blot of a doctor’s apron.

“Acid! Acid! He’s burned!”

Strong hands took the boy from her. Other hands guided her, made her sit down. She was blinded, choking and coughing from the fumes. For a time she could only gag, try to catch her breath, listen to that unendurable screaming. A nurse she knew had her by both shoulders.

“Sandra! Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes.” The screaming had stopped. She saw the doctor’s white form, caught at him. “Will he live? Will he-”

“Yes. You got him in water; best thing you could do.” The doctor’s eyes were tight. “I’ve given him morphine. It was sulphuric acid. How did it ever get on the child?”

Sandra heard herself trying to explain. It sounded garbled, impossible. Her mind was still stunned, uncollected. Acid was in that tube the bland, suave Dow had given her. Her brain was a maze of horror.

The doctor was aghast. “He was sending sulphuric acid – by you – to a girl?”

“Yes, yes. A Chinese housemaid who-”

For the first time she opened her clenched right hand, saw the rice-paper envelope still clutched in it. It acted on her like an electric shock. “Give this to her employer.”

She sprang up, so abruptly she almost pushed the nurse over. Her eyes were not like velvet now, but like tawny flame.

“Ellen, lock up upstairs for me, will you? Call the police; tell them to talk to that man Gawdy!” She was already at the door. “I’ll be back, I don’t know when!”

The Delaunay house sat stately and brooding among twilight shadows when Sandra rang the bell under its aristocratic portico. The lank, grave face of a butler answered the soft sound of its triple door chime. Sandra burst out:

“Do you have a housemaid here named Helen Ying?”

The butler stared. “Why, yes, miss.”

“Let me speak to Mr Delaunay.”

The butler blinked. “Who shall I say is-”

A deep voice said from behind: “Who is it, Sanders?”

Sandra pushed in. “You’re Mr Delaunay?”

“I’m John Delaunay, yes.”

He was an old man, as thin as a grasshopper, leaning on a thick blackthorn cane. His mild and benignant face was filled with wrinkles like transparent wax paper that has been crumpled and then flattened out.

“I’m Sandra Grey. I run the welfare office for St. Luke’s charities. Something terrible has happened, and if I could speak to you a moment-”

“Of course. Of course.”

He guided her into the paneled entrance of a library. The first thing Sandra saw as she came in the room was a man on a sofa with his arms around a girl trying to kiss her. They both sprang up; Sandra backed out; the old man gently impelled her in again and snapped on the wall switch.

“Well, bless me,” he said mildly, “I didn’t know you two were in here Miss Grey, this is my daughter Marceline.”

Marceline was a flashily pretty brunette with brilliant black eyes. The brilliant eyes glared at Sandra. She did not say anything. She sat down at the extreme end of the sofa and gave her whole attention to a bowl of goldfish. The man was sitting in an armchair leafing through the pages of a book. He was hawk-faced, olive-cheeked, with a Vandyke beard cupping his chin like a spearhead. It was a ridiculous and awkward second for Sandra. She turned to speak to Mr Delaunay, but the old man was puttering forward to take the Vandyked man by the arm.

“This is Miss Grey. Miss Grey, this is Rupert de Saules, a long-lost distant relative.”

De Saules rose, bowed with the greatest aplomb.

“Delighted.”

He had cool, sly eyes, that traveled over Sandra with insolent appreciation. Sandra hardly looked at him. She sat down, burst at once into an account of what had happened. The old man sat down, looked at her agape. De Saules’ hawklike head came forward sharply. Even Marceline turned from her preoccupation with the goldfish.

The old man gasped: “Acid! To the Chinese maid! How frightful!” He tugged a bell pull. “We’ll have her in here.” The butler put in his lank head. “Send the Chinese maid in at once.”

Sandra was taking the rice-paper envelope from her bag. “The Chinese, Dow, gave me this surreptitiously. It’s for you, Mr Delaunay.”

“For me!” The astounded old man took it with a blue-veined hand.” ‘Give this to her employer’ – you’re right.” He set it in his lap, unsnapped a spectacles case, set his glasses on his nose.

A Chinese girl stood in the door.

“You sent for me, sir?”

“Ah… oh… yes.”

Sandra sprang up.

“You’re Helen Ying?” she asked.

The girl turned her oval face to her. She was comely, with jetblack, long-lashed, modest eyes. She curtseyed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know who would try to send acid to you?”

“Acid!” The girl’s eyes went wide. “To me! No, ma’am!”

“A Chinese man just came to my office and tried to get me to bring you a bamboo tube filled with sulphuric acid. It was fixed so that if you held it toward you, the natural way to open it, the acid would have spurted all over your face and throat.”

The girl clutched at herself, aghast. Her eyes were like saucers.

“He said his name was Dow. He claimed to be your cousin. Do you know him?”

The girl shook her head dumbly. Sandra searched the wide jet-black eyes. They were as candid as her own.

“A young, flashily dressed man, very well educated, smoked gold-tipped cigarettes. Have you any idea who he was?”

“No, ma’am. None… none at all.”

The Vandyked De Saules asked with a sly smile: “No love affairs, or anything like that?”

“No, sir.” The girl did not raise her eyes. “I do not know any men here in the city at all.”

“My dear girl, don’t lie.” De Saules fingered his point of beard. “You must know him, otherwise there’d be no point-”

“Suppose we hear what this says,” said old Mr Delaunay, ripping open the rice-paper envelope. He took out a typed sheet of paper, read in a slow, loud voice:

Mr John Delaunay:

You are about to die.

The acid sent to the maid is merely a subordinate matter.

Do not stay alone by yourself.

Do not eat or drink anything.

This is the only way to show that your death is not suicide, but murder.

No human agency can prevent your death.

“What’s this?” For an instant the old man’s tongue moved speechlessly in his open mouth. “Me! My death! What infernal madness is this?”

His daughter Marceline gasped: “It’s a death threat!”

De Saules cried to Sandra: “This Chinaman, this Dow, gave that to you?”

“Yes! Yes!” Sandra was stunned, bewildered. “Dow – Dow, the same one that gave me the acid tube!”

“Who would dare do such a thing!” With the quick irascibility of age the old man flew into a rage. His mild eyes flashed, he banged his cane on the floor, he ground his teeth, flung the note down and stamped on it. “Call the police! I’ll have that scoundrel if it’s the last thing-”

He lurched suddenly sideways. It was not a step; it was as though he had been struck from the side. The blackthorn cane flew from him. He screamed out:

“My tongue! My throat!”

Sandra could only see his face, twisted, demoniac. He was tearing at his mouth in a frenzy. Then he fell backward in a frightful spasm, struck a floor lamp, plunged like a senseless blind hammer to the floor.

II

It was so horrible and swift it left them riveted. Sandra felt only a jar in both shoulder blades, as though she had been driven back in her chair. Then De Saules was plunging at the body.

“Mr Delaunay! Mr Delaunay!”

He had one arm beneath the old man’s neck, lifting his head. He froze. It was when the head came into the glare of the overturned lamp. The multitudinously wrinkled face lolled at them, eyeballs bulging, staring, glazed. It was not that which cut the breath in their throats; not the hideous grimace on his face – not even the fact of his death.

The old man’s tongue protruded from his lips. It was the color of paper. It had a coarse, pitted texture; it looked like a spongy head of swollen fungus, plugged like a stopper between his lips.

The butler was there. The maid was rocking back and forth like someone on the edge of a precipice. The bell was ringing its triple musical chime. Nobody paid any attention to it.

Marceline reeled against Sandra, clutched her arm with hands that almost tore the muscle out.

“Poisoned!” the girl gasped. “He’s poisoned!”

“Poisoned!” De Saules whipped to her. “You’re mad! How could he be?”

“The note!” Marceline screamed the words. “The note! It said he would die!”

Sandra grabbed the butler by the arm. It was like shaking a wooden image.

“Call the police! The police!”

“They’re” – the butler waved one arm wildly; he was trying, to indicate the door – “coming up-”

Sandra flashed by him, darted down the hall. Men were hammering at the door. She saw two detectives, behind them the gold bulk of Gawdy’s topcoat, his florid handsome face. She snatched open the door; the hard-eyed man in the lead touched his hat.

“Hullo, Miss Grey. We’re following up that acid business-”

Sandra caught him by the arm. “Captain Corrigan! There’s a dead man in here! Come on!”

The hard-eyed detective captain went by her in two strides. He turned long enough to snap to his companion: “Get the M.E. He’s in the car.”

Gawdy got Sandra by the arm. His bright-blue eyes were wide.

“What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

“Mr Delaunay’s dead! Murdered! That note Dow gave me – it said he would die!”

Gawdy’s high-colored features blanched. He said only one word: “Marceline!” He plunged by Sandra into the library.

The library was a scene of confusion. Marceline was screaming; the loud, continuous screams of hysteria. De Saules was ineffectually shouting at her, pleading with her. Captain Corrigan took one look out of his hard eyes, walked up and slapped her across the face.

“Shut up!” he said. “Sit down.”

It acted like magic. Marceline fell onto the sofa, stopped screaming. The room jolted into calm as if ice water had been sluiced through it.

Captain Corrigan turned around, looked at the dead man. Sandra saw even the scalp on his blunt bullet head move with surprise as he observed that outthrust paper – white tongue.

“When’d this happen?” His hard eyes swiveled like turret guns at De Saules.

“Just now, not two minutes ago!”

“What had he been drinking?”

“Drinking!” De Saules’ point of beard jabbed up and down with the irregular movement of his jaw. “Nothing! He was reading that note – that note that prophesied his death!” He darted across, picked up the crumpled rice paper from the rug. “Here! This!”

Corrigan read it. A little man with a black bag bustled in and kneeled down by the corpse, but Corrigan paid no attention. The mouth in his blunt face opened with a jerk as he looked up at De Saules.

“Where’d this come from?”

“I brought it!” Sandra’s eyes were like vivid stars. “It’s from that Chinese, Dow – the one that gave me the acid tube!”

“What!” The difference in tone as Corrigan spoke to Sandra was noticeable. “That Chinaman who brought you the acid tube! You mean he’s mixed up in this?”

“Yes! Yes! Mr Delaunay had just read it. He got very angry. He jumped up and-” She groped for words. “He simply fell over, crying out something about his tongue! That was all! He didn’t take anything; he didn’t drink anything; we all saw him!”

Corrigan looked from her to De Saules to Marceline. He looked at the note. His hard eyes had an expression as if he were surrounded by a group of lunatics. His voice reflected it. “He’s dead of a corrosive poison. He must have swallowed it right in front of you.”

“Perfectly correct.” The medical examiner’s voice was as precise as an icicle. “Absolutely typical reaction – the white tongue, the serrated mucous membrane. The throat shows the same bleaching, all the way to the head of the pharynx. It’s oxalic acid, the quickest-acting of the common poisons.”

Corrigan’s eyes shot to the group. “The quickest-acting! You hear that?” His glance swung back to the doctor. “Could it be used for murder?”

“Impossible.” The doctor pursed his lips flatly. “Not unless one of them fed it to him a moment before he fell dead. He’s a feeble old man. The reaction was instantaneous.”

Marceline burst in. It sounded for a moment as if her hysteria were about to recur. “But we saw him! We saw him! He didn’t take anything! He didn’t!”

“Yes!” De Saules’ hawklike head jabbed out. “Two, three, four of us saw it! Are you telling us we’re all mad?”

Corrigan’s eyes looked jarred in their hard depths. This weight of testimony was beginning to tell on him. His glance shot to the doctor.

“Could he have held it in his mouth?”

The doctor gave an incredulous thin snort. “My dear man, this is a corrosive acid. It serrates the mucous membrane. The first touch of it would erode his tongue.”

“But this is impossible! Impossible!” Corrigan’s eyes battered everyone in savage bewilderment. “Do you realize this is not a poison like arsenic – that’s tasteless, that you can take an hour or so before it acts – this is a corrosive, it acts instantly! He couldn’t have held it in his mouth! He couldn’t! Yet you say he didn’t take anything! How did he get it?”

“The only possibility is a capsule,” said the doctor’s thin, piercing voice. He was primly polishing a pair of half-moon glasses. “Suppose – an absurdity even on the face of it – that in some manner a capsule had been lodged in his mouth. With the swelling of the tongue, the membranes, the capsule would still be there. There is no capsule. I have examined his mouth and throat thoroughly.”

There was entire silence. Captain Corrigan sat down on the table, a slow, jarring movement. The manifest impossibility of what was before them locked them all in a kind of mental blankness. A man had been killed, before the eyes of four witnesses, in a perfectly obvious way – he had swallowed a corrosive poison – yet the thing was as impossible as that a railroad tie could be put into the mouth of a milk bottle.

Into the silence a man stumbled, executing an unsteady semicircle through the library door like the reel of a dervish. A dressing gown made a disheveled scarlet circle around him. He came up at sight of the corpse, grabbing hold of a chair and staring down with haggard, puffy eyes.

“Who’s this?” snapped Corrigan.

Marceline spoke rapidly. “He’s a guest. His name’s Lonnie Wyatt. He’s been asleep all afternoon.”

“A guest!”

Corrigan stared at Wyatt. Mud splattered his patent leather shoes, the black serge bottoms of his Tuxedo trousers. The stale fumes of liquor reeked from him; his weakly boyish face, puffed with dissipation, gave a series of jerks as though he were about to fall headlong over the body. The plain-clothes man accompanying Corrigan grabbed hold of Wyatt, shoved him in a chair. Marceline’s voice cut in with the same quick rapidity. There was no hint of hysteria in it now.

“It’s a little difficult to explain. We found him lying outside our entry in this condition this morning. I… we… took him in and took care of him because he’s a friend.”

The singularity of this explanation, along with the singularity of the man’s appearance, caused Captain Corrigan to look, not at the drunken Wyatt, but at Marceline. A slight movement of his head indicated the corpse.

“You’re his daughter?”

“Yes. I was legally adopted at seventeen.”

Corrigan narrowed his hard eyes slightly. “Oh.” He switched his glance to the Vandyked De Saules.

“You’re a relative, too?”

“A very distant one.” De Saules stopped fingering his beard to make a deprecating gesture. “I met Mr Delaunay for the first time yesterday.”

“I see.” Corrigan’s head shot around. “Where’s that Chinese maid?”

The butler bustled out hurriedly into the hall. Sandra sat down quietly in a corner chair, pressed her hands to her temples. It was useless to question the maid. Captain Corrigan was making random gestures like a man who has run into a brick wall. Events still whirled, a mad patchwork, in her own mind. Tags of them flared out at her. Dow’s bland yellow face smiling over his cigarette; the feel of the note in her hand; the old man’s tongue gaping speechlessly in his mouth as he read it; his frightful plunge headlong into the lamp to the floor. She shuddered. What vicious, horrible enigma, spurting flashes of bizarre color like some enigmatic jewel, was here?

She looked at Gawdy, sitting with his big florid face outthrust, his eyes like robins’ eggs. He had seen part of it, the others another part, but only she had seen it all. Gropingly she tried to reconstruct events.

Dow – that incomprehensible Chinese, with his suave, creased eyes, his impeccable English, his violet-perfumed cigarette – had come up to her office, given her the bamboo tube and the note. The tube contained a horrible fate for the Delaunay maid, the note a prophecy of Mr Delaunay’s death. She had carried the note to Mr Delaunay; the old man had no more than read it, when, as if by conjunction of cause and effect, he had screamed up to his feet, plunged down dead. Dead by a corrosive poison – oxalic acid – which seared, burned, bleached his mouth, whose action was instantaneous, which no one had administered to him!

It was impossible. It was incredible. Only the evidence of her eyes assured her of something as impossible as witchcraft. Dow – the squat, suave Dow – knew this! Knew Mr Delaunay was to die! Warned him of it! Why? How did Dow know about it? What was Dow to that secluded old man? Why, if Dow were behind the attempt, should he warn the very object of the crime? Was the Chinese merely a tool in the hands of-

She stared at the others. Her eyes roamed over Marceline, with her flashy brunet prettiness, heightened now by a kind of feverish acuteness, her eyes as brilliant as black jewels. She looked at De Saules, fingering his spike of beard, the sly eyes in his hawklike olive face retracted, withdrawn. She looked at the drunken Wyatt, sprawled backward, breathing stertorously, his puffy weak young face already sinking into the coma of sleep. What parts did they play in this hideous, incredible puzzle?

And the baby! The boy! That tiny waif of humanity, caught up in the meshes of this horrible thing, his little body an innocent sacrifice to its hideous aim! Every time she closed her eyes, she heard him screaming. She gripped her hands until her nails pierced her palms. In some way she felt responsible for him; she could not get the sight of him off her mind, the load of him off her heart.

She stared at the Chinese maid. Corrigan was jabbing questions at her; the girl’s sloe-black eyes were pitiful in terror. Sandra was sure the girl was as innocent, as ignorant of all this, as she herself. Corrigan grabbed up the note. He was reading out the part of it that said: “The acid sent to the maid is merely a subordinate matter.” De Saules suddenly shoved out his hawklike head, a sharp hand.

“Look. There’s something written on the other side of that!”

“What?” Corrigan whipped the paper over. He stared at a single typed sentence, read in a loud voice: “The murderer will attempt to conceal the means of murder in the garage.”

“In the-” Corrigan gaped round.

“The garage! What kind of-”

The butler plunged into the room. His eyes were bulging like duck eggs.

“Sir,” he shouted, “the garage is on fire!”

There was a simultaneous rush that way. Sandra went, too, as far as the kitchen entry, when a kind of jolt, an inner hunch, brought her up. It was an intuition of the same sort she had had about the baby in the office. This time she obeyed it. The others had poured out of the house. She turned and darted back to the library.

Immediately she was in the doorway a nameless fear clutched her. The lights were out. That long window had not been open, plunging a bar of moonlight across the floor.

She whirled, drawing in air for a shout, when someone slammed her against the wall, jabbed a gun into her warm throat.

“Be perfectly quiet.”

She was staring into the yellow face of Dow!

The scream froze in her throat. She could no more have cried out than a block of stone. His oblique eyes were very close, creased as they had been in the office, but glittering with a lethal quality like the button eyes of an adder. He was breathing very hard. Sweat made a saffron sheen on his round face. But his voice, quicker perhaps, more hissing, had still the oily blandness of the office.

“Sit down. Here.”

He forced her into a chair. She was cold, paralyzed. Not three feet from her came the stertorous breathing of the drunken Wyatt; there before her was that yellow face, coolly talking.

“Do not move, Miss Grey. If you do, I shall most certainly kill you. A little diversion – the garage fire – to get everyone out. One moment, and your utter silence, are all I need.”

He was gone from her, dragging something on the floor. At first she thought it was the stupefied Wyatt; then she realized it was the corpse. His voice was once more at her elbow.

“I will be right here, very close, so if you move, I can shoot at once.” He touched her with the cold barrel. Then he was crouching, busy beside the chair.

Her mind was sick, spinning. Her eyes crawled sideways. She saw, vaguely in the dark, his squat body kneeling on the corpse, saw his shoulders working, saw the dead head move up in answer to his movements. Her soul swooned in the nadir of horror. He was doing something – doing something to the body! Her frozen mind could only picture, snatched from some long-lost childhood book, the sight of ghouls – ghouls hunched so over dead bodies, their talons busy with dead flesh.

He had not stopped talking. His voice flowed on with the same oily suaveness, only a flooding together of the sibilants showing his tremendous haste. There was even a fleering, mocking note in it, as though, in spite of the desperate jeopardy of his position, whatever horrible game he was playing, he was playing it with imperturbable coolness, even bravado.

“One moment. One short moment, Miss Grey. Am I the murderer? No, dear lady. I would not be so insanely rash as to be here if I were.” She heard the thud of his knees on the floor. “The murderer is, shall we say, a friend – a mutual friend, Miss Grey.”

There was the tinkle on the floor as of some metallic instrument.

“What am I here for? What is my object?” His voice had a hideous relish. “A simple thing. Profit. I did not want this taken for suicide. That was his aim, Miss Grey. Mine is absolutely different. And now it is accomplished.”

He was past her, a squat powerful figure, as soft-footed as a cat. He was silhouetted for one second in the moonlit window, gone.

Sandra found that scream then. It was piercing, wild, full-bodied, all her healthy young lungs could do. Feet crashed in the back, Corrigan’s yell: “Who is it?”

The house was alive with noise. Corrigan was in the room; the lights went on.

She could only gasp: “Dow… Dow! He’s gone… through that window!”

Corrigan was already plunging through the open casement.

Sandra turned. She was beside the corpse. She could feel it, sense it there beside her left foot. Her hands were over her face. Something stronger than shuddering reaction, an irresistible, horrible attraction drew her like a magnet. She took her hands away.

The glazed eyes in that staring white face looked up at her. Just the same – but not the same. In that gaping mouth the hammer-headed, fungously white plug was missing.

Dow had cut out the corpse’s tongue!

III

Sunlight through the Venetian blinds of Captain Corrigtan’s office made bars of light and shade over the heap of police photographs on his desk, over Sandra’s slim hands, leafing through them. As she dropped each photograph, Gawdy picked it up, scrutinizing it with his big florid face outthrust, his blue eyes sharp. Captain Corrigan paced up and down the office. The floor creaked under his heavy step. His bullet head looked jammed between his shoulders, his hard eyes as if he had not slept all night. De Saules, incessantly fingering his spike of beard, sat a little removed, his cool eyes flitting, not over the photographs of Captain Corrigan, but over Sandra’s trim body, her velvety absorbed eyes, the color in her young cheeks.

Sandra tossed aside the last photograph of a Chinese with a criminal record.

“I can’t find him, Captain Corrigan. He’s just not here.”

Captain Corrigan looked at Gawdy as if here were his last hope.

Gawdy shook his head. “He’s none of these.”

Corrigan came up. His voice was like an explosion. “We’ve got to find out! We’ve ransacked the Chinese quarter, combed the city all night!” His jaws clicked shut, worked. “There was nothing in the old man’s mouth to take out! Nothing! What was he after? The tongue was cut – cut by a scalpel – sliced out at the roots! Why? Why?”

His eyes raged at all three. Gawdy’s handsome face was blank. De Saules took his hand from his beard, smoothed his brows, shook his head. Sandra bit her lip. She was thinking: “They’re stumped. The police. They can’t get anywhere. How could they? They know even less than I do.”

Corrigan slapped the fingers of one hand on the palm of the other. “That yellow devil put that sentence on the back of the note – about the garage – merely to make us rush out pell-mell when he started the fire. He was hiding, watching the house, slipped in when we swallowed the bait. But what for? Why did he cut out the tongue? Why?”

It was as though the repetition might batter the answer out of thin air. He jabbed both hands downward with a slicing motion. “The M.E.’s made a complete autopsy on the head. There’s nothing – nothing out of the ordinary, nothing abnormal. But there was nothing there when he examined the mouth before the tongue was cut out!”

He was glaring at De Saules. De Saules’ eyes drifted by him as he said:

“The maid’s the only link.”

Corrigan swore. “The maid’s only been here from San Francisco a month. Her record’s spotless. We’ve grilled her for hours. I’m convinced she doesn’t know Dow.”

Gawdy said in his abrupt, gruff voice: “She must.”

Corrigan did not deign to reply. He seemed to be hoarsely talking to himself. “There’s only one way to figure it. The Chink helped – helped in some way. The acid was to get the maid for something she may not even realize she knows. Dow’s double-crossing his confederate, playing some game of his own. But what is it? What is it? Why send the acid to the maid – help his confederate on one hand, harm him on the other?”

That was what did it. At first it was only a shock in Sandra’s mind, a kind of blankness. Corrigan’s voice hammered on:

“Motive! Where’s the motive? Dow has no motive. The old man didn’t even know him. Hardly knew anybody. A secluded, parsimonious, harmless old man, rich as Midas. Didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

Sandra was sitting bolt upright, her hands in a tight ball in her lap, looking nowhere.

De Saules’ eyes met Corrigan’s coolly. “You mean, that puts the motive squarely in the family?”

Corrigan stared at him bluntly. “Since you ask it, yes. But since he died without a will, it puts it squarely at one person – his sole heir, his daughter Marceline.”

Sandra had moved to the window. She had the phone book in her hands. With quivering fingers she whipped through it. There was the page – the column – the name. The tiny black type seemed to throb and dance before her eyes.

Slowly she closed the book. She looked out at the street below. The moving traffic seemed blinded out from her sight as by a sunburst.

No! It was impossible! Could it be? Could it be? She felt her heart hammering wildly. There, in that tiny black type, was the address, the name, everything, as plain as a pikestaff, for anyone to read.

Suite 405-406 Mohican Building.

She- No, she couldn’t breathe even in her own heart that she had the answer! It was too wild, too crazy. Suite 405-406 Mohican Building! Tell Captain Corrigan? He would laugh! It was preposterous! Ridiculous! And yet-

Already a plan had leaped like a wild javelin into her brain. Her eyes had the same tawny fire as when she sprang bolt upright from the clinic chair. Her lips were parted, hot.

They can’t get anywhere. Maybe I can.

Heavy lowering clouds, lighted by the afterglow, dappled and dull, hung over the Mohican Building. It was the end of day, when every building roundabout was pouring its outflow of bus-bound stenographers into the street. Sandra slipped into the little drugstore in the Mohican’s lobby, approached the clerk at the back.

“A small bottle of concentrated ammonia, please.”

With the bottle she slipped into the phone booth, loaded the only weapon she ever owned. It was an old double compact, with a flat rubber sac in the back, which she filled from the bottle like a fountain pen. She adjusted the rubber neck to fit the hole in the compact, slipped it into her bag.

The foyer of the Mohican was noisy, swarming. The elevators had just disgorged a load of heel-clicking, chattering secretaries, gum-chewing office boys. Drifting salesmen, toothpick in mouth, gave Sandra the eye, coughed, stared after her. Sandra did not take the elevator. She walked up to the third floor, toured it rapidly, got its general layout. Particularly she noted the women’s washroom at the far end of the corridor where the stairs angled up.

She could almost feel, like a living, ominous presence upstairs, those two rooms, Suite 405-406.

The women’s washroom door was locked. This she hadn’t counted on. She wondered, with a quick swallow, if the cold chisel in her bag would force a door.

She saw a beauty shop around the bend of the corridor, walked into it. The woman proprietor was just putting her hat on.

“I’m so sorry.” Sandra turned on the utmost persuasiveness of her velvety eyes. “Can you give me a manicure? It’s something special.”

The woman sighed, took off her hat. Sandra was hardly seated at the little table when she reeled irregularly, clutched her head.

“I’m awfully dizzy. I don’t – Could I-”

“Here, dearie, here’s the key to the washroom.”

Sandra went out, unlocked it, shot the bolt in the door. She left it that way, came back looking considerably refreshed, and had her manicure. When it was over, she went directly to the washroom, went in, reversed the bolt so as to lock herself in. Then she waited. She heard the woman fussing around to close up, the jingle of her keys in the door, her echoing steps toward the elevator.

Sandra composed herself for a long wait. Dusk faded into night and the fire escape outlined outside the washroom window blotted into the general blackness. Little by little all sounds in the building diminished, spaced themselves farther and farther apart, died away entirely.

In the darkness the whole hideous affair seemed to throb in pulsing outline in her head. It was so clear! So perfectly clear! That one revealing move – done right in front of her – that one act that gave everything away! How had she missed it at the time? Now it seemed to stand out like a headlight. Her racing mind thought back to that sentence of Captain Corrigan’s that had jarred realization to her. Yes, why did Dow help the murderer with one hand, harm him with the other? Because he had to! That had flashed the truth to her – the truth at least in her own mind, the answer that she had leaped to arrow-swift, with a woman’s cut – the-corners rapidity, complete disregard of details. The old man had been murdered. By oxalic acid – by a corrosive poison that he didn’t take-by an inexplicable means! Yet it was so fantastically simple! But what a chance the murderer had taken! Except that of course it would be taken for suicide, normally, for the old man would have been found dead, alone somewhere by himself. When Dow had come up to the office the preparations had been set, ready, the murder an inevitable, imminent fact – and Dow had coolly thrown a monkey wrench into them. He was playing a game of his own, playing a gambit against the murderer; and she – her breath came quick-she was playing a gambit against them both.

Why? Her brown eyes rolled sideways. It wasn’t too late to go back. It was absolute, mad folly, what she was doing. She could still slip down out of the building, tell the watchman-

No. She shook her head. What was she doing it for? For a feverish little waif lying in pain in a clinic, a little laughing-eyed boy who had no part in anything, who had been thrown under this murder juggernaut, crushed beneath it.

Upstairs – she sank her teeth hard in her lip-in Suite 405-406, was the crux of the whole thing. It must be. In there, in those two rooms, something must remain, perhaps a bottle of oxalic acid, perhaps- She didn’t know. If she could get in, get out, in five minutes she might have the evidence in her hand.

Down the corridor she heard a new, ascending, plodding step. She heard the loud clearing of an old throat, the snap of light switches. That would be the watchman. Motionless, guarding her breath, she heard his raspings and hawkings make the tour of the whole building, return with the creaking yawn of the elevator to the lobby. She heard him drag a chair along the floor, settle himself before the door.

Then, and only then, Sandra groped out of the washroom. The hall was pitch-black. She slipped the catch, let the washroom door softly close. Quietly, gliding like a wraith, she went up the rear stairway. She knew where Rooms 405-406 were, by her preliminary tour. They were hardly twenty feet from the stairhead, on a corner, one room on each side. But as she turned the stairhead, she stopped abruptly. Light was coming through the door of 405.

Someone was there! This cut the ground from under her feet. On the glass oblong she could see the words: “Private-Entrance 406.” She stood motionless. Who was there? What was-

She heard the echoing scrape of a chair, the booming sound of the watchman’s voice. He was talking to someone below. Their conversation was too distorted by echo to follow.

The elevator began its yawning ascent. Sandra flattened to the wall, immersed in shadow by the stairway as in a well. The door clanged open; she saw a fan of light, the watchman’s face, a figure emerging. It stepped very quickly out, but Sandra recognized the brilliant black eyes, the flashy brunet prettiness, of Marceline!

Marceline! Coming up to Suite 405-406! Sandra felt a kind of explosion in her mind. What had she bagged here? Almost before she caught her breath, Marceline was inside, not by the entrance door, but by the very door marked “Private”. Sandra was watching. Voices began immediately inside. Loud, excited-one of them. The other – Sandra froze – was the bland, oily tone of Dow!

Dow – with Marceline! Sandra’s pulse clipped off for an instant, began going like a trip hammer. The door clanged, the elevator began its yawning descent. It was now or never. Sandra slipped out, darted to the door, listened.

Marceline’s voice came very clear. It was passionate, savage.

“What does this mean to me?”

“Much, dear lady.” Dow’s voice had that mocking silkiness that made leap into the mind his moon-round face, his slit-creased, almond eyes. “Why did you come here? Why did you come, for a telephone call merely naming this place? I see you are well acquainted here. Too well acquainted. Do not blanch so, dear lady. I understand. I understand completely. Come, calm yourself, please sit down, let us talk.”

Sandra could not detect the quality of Marceline’s voice. It was too low. “What do you want?”

“First let us look calmly at what I hold in my hand. It is very old-fashioned. Perhaps you do not recognize it. But I see you do. It has been among your father’s possessions a long time; you have seen it many times over many years. Only, dear lady, I turn it over slightly, and you see it is not quite the same. Not the original. A beautiful copy.” His voice fleered. “Why not? I made it myself. Now you understand, perhaps, a certain reckless action of mine last evening.”

Marceline’s voice was like a physical shudder.

“You horrible fiend.”

“Not at all. Such a pretty thing, to me, for example. What is it, so small, so bright, that I turn thus in my palm and let the light fall upon? Why, it is the whole murder. I turn it so; you look where I point to-”

His voice stopped on a rising note. There was an instant’s silence, then his voice flowed on. “Control yourself, dear lady. It is a shock. I see you understand. You clutch your throat, you look around, you see how the preparations were made. It was very simple. There, in that very chair, he sat. Yesterday there was no assistant, or, shall we say, I was the assistant. I held it, so. I passed it across, saying: ‘What a beautiful repair!’ And it is done, so, in the twinkling of an eye, without noise or fanfare, a simple, innocent-”

A low sound came from Marceline like the cry of an animal. There was a rush, a scuffling, a gasped: “Give it to me!”

“Not quite so fast, dear lady.” Dow’s oily voice hardly faltered. “It is my whole purpose to give it to you – for a price.”

“What price?”

The bland voice was like honey. “Now that you are a rich woman, much money is accessible to you. Ten thousand dollars will not be too much. You will have a certified check for that amount tomorrow at nine thirty. On your discretion I can count. There is so much I know, you see, so much you did not tell the police.”

Marceline said in a terribly altered voice: “Is that all?”

“That is all, dear lady, until the morning.”

Marceline came out so precipitately she almost smashed the door into Sandra’s face. Sandra reeled flat to the wall. Marceline didn’t look back. She went down the corridor almost at a run.

The lights went out. Dow was coming out. Sandra started back toward the staircase, froze. She saw, vague in the darkness, a blank bulk standing at the head of the stairs.

Sandra’s heart seemed to leap out of her mouth like a jackrabbit. Pure primordial instinct, the kind that freezes animals into replicas of posts, of weed clumps, glued her like an integral part of the darkness to the wall. She might have been a piece of the fire extinguisher whose bulging cylinder touched her forehead. A man, waiting there – for what? For her? Had he seen her?

Her eyes swung wildly. She was caught between two fires. Already Dow was coming out; she heard the pad of his feet, the door closing.

It was an interminable moment, a moment that seemed to scream in the silence with all the voices of pandemonium. Behind her was Dow, his hand on the knob; ahead was that shape, looming silent, waiting.

A voice from the stairhead said: “Dow.”

Dow whirled around. Flame roared in a blasting streak across the dark. She saw Dow leap completely across the corridor like a chimpanzee. The dark was a wild havoc of noise. The man was plunging this way. Sandra had only one way to go. She flung down the fire extinguisher, fled like an antelope over its deafening crash. She made the stairhead, flew down the staircase like a streak in blackness. She twisted into the washroom, flung up the window, and darted down the fire escape.

IV

The sunlight gilded De Saules’ hawklike head, his back, the black spike of his beard, as he stood in the apartment lobby. His narrow eyes shifted down the line of bells, read the card opposite one: “Miss Sandra Grey.” The odor of breakfast drifted down to him through the open lobby door, muted morning noises. De Saules did not ring the bell. He lifted the topcoat on his left arm, glanced once at the bulb-like swelling, the thin tubular nose that extended one pocket. He went rapidly up the carpeted steps to Sandra’s apartment.

Sandra herself opened the door. She was ready to go out. The morning light made a halo around her trim little shako hat, touched the freshness of her face, made her eyes vividly brown, her lips as red as cyclamen. De Saules’ hat was in his hand.

“Good morning, Miss Grey. You’ll pardon such an early call? You’re going out, but may I have just a moment?”

“Of course.” Sandra’s eyes widened as she let him in. De Saules did not sit down. He stood in the center of the living room, immaculate in dove-gray tweed, perfectly poised, his cool eyes mild and disarming.

“This is rather abrupt, Miss Grey, but I am a busy man and have not much time. This will only take a moment. I have been so impressed by your splendid welfare work that I wish to make a donation to it.”

Sandra sat down. She stared at the smiling olive face, so freshly barbered, almost purringly soft. De Saules stepped across the rug. He sat very close to Sandra. It was a confidential, gliding movement.

“The size of the donation depends only upon yourself.”

Sandra was very still. It was curious, what that simple statement did to the room. One moment the air was calm, relaxed; the next bristling with tension as though electricity crackled through it.

Sandra opened her mouth. “Oh,” she said. “I understand.”

“There is only one stipulation.” De Saules’ cool eyes were very close. “That is, that you devote your attention to welfare work from now on.”

“From now on?”

The cool eyes inclined forward.

“That means, from this morning on?”

De Saules’ eyebrows rose, fell. “We understand each other perfectly, Miss Grey.”

Sandra ran her tongue between her lips. She was a fool ever to have closed the apartment door. She felt the blood pound, racing in her ears.

“And if I do not accept this – contribution?”

De Saules studied her. His eyes narrowed very slightly, as though he thought there might be some misunderstanding between them.

“Perhaps you have not seen the morning papers?”

“No.”

De Saules unfolded an edition from his pocket. The headline screamed in blackface:

COMPLETE REVERSAL OF TESTIMONY

Three Witnesses Admit Delaunay

Took Poison in their Presence

Sandra’s mind went blank. A reversal of testimony! It was impossible! Impossible! Admitted he took the poison! What on-

De Saules’ voice cut across her stupefaction. “It happened late last night. Captain Corrigan is extremely bewildered, but he will be obliged to accept the fact.”

Sandra gasped: “All… all of you… you and Marceline-”

“Precisely.”

“The Chinese maid, too?”

De Saules smiled with his eyes. “In her position it is, shall we say, difficult to get another job if discharged under suspicion of murder. She is a very level-headed girl.”

Sandra managed to get the words out of her mouth.

“You want me to corroborate this absurd lie?”

“Not at all, Miss Grey.” De Saules’ tone was unruffled. “The gift – I mean the settlement gift, of course-will enable you to study conditions abroad very comfortably, even luxuriously, provided you take the boat that leaves at noon. There are excellent airplane connections which I have already arranged.”

Sandra sprang up. She was already at the telephone before De Saules cried:

“What are you doing?”

“I will call up Captain Corrigan at once.”

De Saules was across like the crack of a whip. He snatched the telephone from her.

“No. I do not think so.” His voice was low, staccato. “If you do not make it easy for me, you will make it hard. If you will not go as I suggest, you will stay – here – and see no one.”

Sandra hurled the words in his face. “Until after the appointment at half past nine, is that it?”

“Perhaps.” His eyes were very narrow. “Perhaps much longer.”

Sandra laughed in his face. “How will you keep me?”

There was nothing cool or composed about De Saules’ face now. Everything had been wiped off it but the elementals – a savage locked bleakness like a bird of prey. “You are dealing with someone much more intelligent than you, Miss Grey. One who has thought of every contingency. I would hardly have come up here without being prepared for your refusal.”

Sandra should have screamed then. The next moment she could not. One supple movement and his arm snaked under hers, a grip had her by the neck such as she had never felt before in her life. It was like two points of fire-freezing fire at the base of her brain-two closing, clamping points of a vice that flooded paralysis through her whole muscular system. She knew then. The man was a jujitsu expert. She felt herself crumpling, as weak as a doll. His topcoat was half over her head. From it his free hand had snatched a glass atomizer with a long, thin nose.

His breath was close to her ear. “Cycloprophane is a relatively new anesthetic. Mixed with oxygen, it induces a very sound sleep. You will rest very quietly, quietly be carried downstairs, out of the house.”

He had her over the chair back, crushing her down, the coat tented over her head. Fumes were pouring in her face, sickening, suffocating fumes. She tried to hit, kick, whirl, felt the strength suck out of her with each gasp of that sickening flood. The cold nose of the atomizer was between her teeth. He had to shift his hand for that. His thumb slued down across her mouth, keeping her lips open. With every last ounce of strength she bit his thumb. He gave a cry, dropped the atomizer on the front of her dress. She snatched it, blind, wild, smashed it into his face. She saw the bulb burst, the contents splash starwise over his face.

It was like the long, slow, incredibly endless movements of a nightmare. The room was reeling around her; the space to the door seemed to stretch out to infinity. He was there on the floor, gasping, clawing weakly, no longer able to make coordinated movements. She blundered into the table, sent it crashing. Her bag was there on the floor, spinning like a top before the door. She caught it up, plunged sobbing, gasping, through the door.

The taxi driver stared at Sandra. She was very pale.

“You feel all right, lady?”

“Yes! Yes!” She gasped out the Delaunay address. “Please hurry! Hurry!”

The cab buzzed like a hornet through early morning traffic. Sandra sat in the window corner, gulped in great mouthfuls of fresh air. Her head was steadying; if the nausea would only subside- The appointment! Dow and Marceline! Sandra glanced for the twentieth time at her watch, watched the minutes crawl across the dial. 9:39… 9:40… Would she be too late? Too late?

The cab swung into the sweeping lawns, the rippling trees of the Delaunay street. She rapped hard on the glass partition.

“Pull over to the side behind those trees.”

She was out the door almost before the cab reached the curb. “Wait here!” She was gone between the massed shrubbery of the Delaunay drive.

Before her the big house stood quiet, dappled with sun and shade. She darted around the side, in the service door. Bulky packages from market were lying, still unretrieved, within – that told her Marceline had dismissed the servants. As Sandra’s feet sounded in the kitchen, she heard Marceline’s startled voice:

“Who’s there?”

Sandra whirled through the kitchen, down the hall, straight into the library.

Marceline was standing bolt upright against the very casement Dow had used for his ghoul’s visit. She was alone. In the blaze of yellow light behind her, her face looked extraordinarily white, her black eyes feverishly brilliant. Whatever movements she had had time to make between Sandra’s entrance and Sandra’s appearance in the library were few and brief. She wore an ornate house coat, whose gorgeous flowers of scarlet and gold emphasized her frightful pallor, the brilliance of her eyes. She let her hands drop from behind her back as she exclaimed:

“You!”

Then Sandra knew what she had been doing with her hands. She had been closing the casement. That told her the story; that and the faint but unmistakable reek of violet in the air. Dow had just gone; Sandra had caught her almost in the act of receiving what Dow had brought; she had not had time to dispose of it. The crisis of the whole affair swung like a pendulum in the quiet room. Sandra felt strangely cool, knife-hard. It was woman against woman, and it was going to be fought out with women’s weapons.

Her velvety eyes were as soft as Irish honey. “Why, darling, how upset you look! Did I frighten you by running in?”

Marceline sat down on the sofa. It was a quick, crouching movement. Sandra could see the pulse beat in her throat. Her voice was unkeyed.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve the most wonderful thing to tell you!” Sandra’s voice rippled with excitement. That wasn’t hard. Under that locked coolness she had never been so excited in her life. She crossed to the sofa, sat quickly by Marceline. “Mr de Saules has just made me the most wonderful gift for my welfare work!”

Marceline stared at her. It could be seen from her wild, uncollected eyes just how unready this sidelong shot caught her. Their brilliant depths had almost a stupid blankness. She was in the position of one who cannot estimate her antagonist, has no idea what she knows, and is so caught by the jeopardy of her own position that she cannot collect herself to fence. Sandra didn’t give her time to marshal herself. She burst out:

“I’m so excited, darling! I just had to rush over! May I have one of your cigarettes?”

With quick, hard hands she patted the pockets of Marceline’s house coat. It had only two pockets; its zippered length was otherwise unrelieved. The two pockets were empty.

“Oh, you’ve got them here, of course.” Sandra picked up Marceline’s bag, unsnapped it, raked inside. A compact, lipstick, gold pencil, rolled away beneath her fingers. Nothing else. Her eyes darted around the room. That damning bit of evidence was here somewhere. Where had she put it? Where? The room was singularly bare of places of quick concealment. The books lining three walls were packed solid, behind glass. There was only a cloisonne jar on the mantel, a tabouret with a red drawer, and the massive bulk of a combination radio and victrola.

Marceline said harshly: “What are you doing here, if you took the gift?”

Sandra crossed to the mantel. “I had to thank you.” She took the cover off the cloisonne jar. It was empty. That left only the tabouret drawer and the radio combination. Once she lifted the lid of the radio, the game was up.

“Thank me? What do you mean?”

“I knew it came from you.” Sandra snapped open the tabouret drawer, looked at blank red wood. Her voice rippled, flute-soft. “You do keep your cigarettes in the most outlandish places.” She crossed to the radio, lifted the lid, saw nothing inside whatever.

Marceline sprang up. The buttons were off the foils now. She cried:

“What are you doing?”

Then Sandra saw it. The sight gave her such a rush of relief she felt for an instant free and giddy as if swept into mountain air. She crossed, almost in a run, to the far end of the sofa. She knelt on the cushions. She leaned over the arm. She said, in the same dulcet, flute-soft voice:

“Why, darling, the fish are all dead.”

The goldfish in the bowl were floating bellies up. Around the little ornamental castle that had been their home the water was colorless, the green fernlike fronds of bladder-wort undisturbed. Only in the sand before the castle something half immersed was gleaming that might have been the polished side of a small shell.

Sandra murmured: “What could have killed them? Poison, do you suppose? Poison, on something that’s been dropped in?”

She lifted her hand to dip into the bowl. Marceline took two wild, darting movements toward a wing chair and came up with a gun from beneath the cushion.

“Put your hand in that bowl and I swear I’ll kill you.”

Her brilliant eyes were like a leopard’s. Sandra took one look at them and knew that she meant exactly what she said. Slowly she let her hand drop by her side, slowly sat down on the sofa.

“Marceline, the game’s up. You don’t think I took that bribe from De Saules, do you?” Sandra talked very rapidly. She held Marceline’s eyes, not letting that dilated gaze escape for a second. She didn’t dare. “I left him lying in my apartment. I called the police before I left the apartment lobby. You see, I was in the Mohican Building last night.”

It was hard to tell, from the wildness of those eyes, whether she heard or not. Sandra drove the words in hard.

“Do you love him very much?”

A quiver went over that face. The brilliant eyes seemed stricken to their depths. Sandra slipped her compact from her pocket. Now her voice was low, soothing, as one speaks to a child.

“Did your father have great hopes for you, Marceline? Would he have disinherited you if he knew what you had done? Is that why you kept the marriage a secret?”

Marceline began to shake. She could not control it. It was all over her body, from her lips to the elbow of the arm holding the gun. The words seemed to jerk out without her volition.

“Marriage? How did you know?”

“It had to be, Marceline. He had to be your husband to have a motive. I know how you feel. You love him. You want to protect him at all costs. He’s going to kill you, Marceline. He has to, now. Because you know. Marceline, he’s standing right behind you in the door.”

Marceline whirled. Sandra was across like a flash, smashed at the gun with her hand. It exploded point-blank into the floor; the recoil knocked it from Marceline’s hand.

Sandra snatched it up, flung it to the far end of the room. She whirled toward the fishbowl. She was too centered, going too headlong, to see the casement swing open. Even the fan of sunlight, leaping like a spear across her path, didn’t warm her. She was two steps from the bowl. She never reached it. Something crashed down on her head. That fan of sunlight seemed to leap up, swallow the whole room in a bursting yellow star.

It didn’t knock her out. She could thank her shako hat, her thick hair, for that. She felt herself hit the sofa, go headlong into its cushions. Strong hands twisted her on her back. Whipsaws of sound were whanging and snapping in her brain. She was staring as through the wrong end of a telescope at the yellow face of Dow.

“Very lucky, dear lady, I remained to overhear.” His voice poured like thin oil from far away. “It would do for the proper party to have it, but never for you. In that case I will take it back.”

She saw Marceline spring at him, a screaming, clawing form. She saw the yellow man tear her from him like a kitten, fling her across the room. He hardly stopped talking to Sandra.

“I see you are not the naïve, child-like little lady I took you for. It was you, then, who were in the Mohican Building last night. I made a mistake not to kill you the last time. This time I most certainly shall.”

Sandra tried to roll off the sofa. She could not. The fishbowl was above her. Dow was holding it, staring into it. She would always see his face, distorted through the curved glass like the flat, prodigiously wide face of a sting ray.

Then he dipped in his yellow hand, took out the bright object.

“So,” he said, “the little item returns to me. The little item that places the murder so exactly. This time it will not leave me.”

The shot seemed to come from nowhere. Dow was still holding the fishbowl. He jammed it into his own face with a convulsive jerk, smashing a great half-moon out of it. He whirled on his heels with a surprised look, cast the bowl like a shot-put at the floor. He kept revolving, his face a horrible gray and stretched with surprise, plunged headlong over Sandra on the sofa.

Sandra did not know if she was screaming or not. Her mind was like a black blind space riven by two forked bolts. One of them was: the murderer! The murderer was in the room! The other was: under the form quivering convulsively above her, the bright object was there on the cushions beside her!

It was a moment of such hideous chaos nothing seemed coherent – not the yellow head, batting blindly at the sofa back, not her own hand jammed into her face, not her frantic animal convulsions to throw off that shuddering body.

Then Marceline’s scream cut through everything.

“Oh, no! Not me! You’re not going to kill me!”

The gun crashed again. She heard Marceline’s scream. Sandra seemed sucked out of reality, her soul yawing and heeling over in blackness. She was free of that twitching form. She was half off the sofa. A new bedlam was awake – a bedlam that was not in her mind. Voices. Pounding feet. Batterings. Yells.

Captain Corrigan! The police!

She was on her knees. A hand got hold of her. It got her under the jaw from behind, a hand like a steel vice. It yanked her completely from the ground, a swooping arc that almost made her swoon. She saw the bright blaze of sunlight rushing toward her, felt her fierce propulsion across the rug. Then she knew – he was going to use her for a shield!

She was at the casement. He was behind her. She could feel the rigid strength of his body, the sharp pressure of his hip. His breath panted hoarsely in her hair. His left arm was clamped like a bar across her neck, both her wrists pinioned beneath it.

Outside were faces. They were picked out vivid against the green lawn, the brilliant sunshine. Captain Corrigan, his bullet head forward, his eyes like two slits of a knife, his hard jaw working. The policemen, the sun flashing from their shields, their guns half extended. The hawklike face of De Saules, his black spear point of beard jabbing up and down with irregular motions. All were staring at the face behind her, their faces etched alike with stunned, stark blankness.

They were looking into the face of the murderer – the face she could not see!

Then his coat sleeve brushed by her body as he raised his arm to fire. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t move her wrists. All she could do was turn over the compact in her hand. She couldn’t aim it. But her hand was jammed almost against his jaw. She got the hole in the metal cover around just as his arm swung down to shoot.

She squeezed the compact for all she was worth. The jet of ammonia shot like a cascade into his face. The contraction of his body threw her headfirst against the wall. But before she spun into blackness, before the rush through the window reached that floundering, gagging form, she caught one glimpse of his face – the too florid, too blue-eyed, too handsome face of Gawdy!

Captain Corrigan was beside her. She was sitting on the sofa. The rush, tumult and furor had all gone out, now, out of the room and out of the house, taking the gold-coated bulk of Gawdy with it. Out of her mind, too – she was once more clear and collected, her shako hat straight on her head, her face freshened, and except for the ache in her head, could even look back on things with a certain perspective.

Captain Corrigan’s head was lowered. He was leafing through a telephone book. He jabbed his thumb at a name.

“You’re right! There it is! A dentist! Dr Gawdy! Now why the devil didn’t I look the guy up? Is that all you did to find it?”

“That’s all.” Sandra put her slim forefinger beside his thumb. “There it was in the book – George Gawdy, D.D.S., Suite 405-406, Mohican Building. He was Mr Delaunay’s dentist – for how long I don’t know, but probably after he married Marceline.”

Corrigan had dropped the book and was staring at a bright object on the sofa flanked by two circular gold prongs. “An old-fashioned denture – a one-tooth removable bridge!” He turned it over. “And there, there’s the hole in it where it was filled with the pulverized crystals of oxalic acid!”

“Yes, and through the same hole the acid got out.” Sandra could not look at it without repulsion. “It’s a duplicate, made by the dental laboratory man Dow, to be slipped into Mr Delaunay’s mouth in place of the one he had. Under the guise of having it repaired, Gawdy got hold of it and had the hollow duplicate made.”

Corrigan began a curse, checked himself. “All Gawdy did was fill it with the pulverized crystals, and plug it with a little soluble cement, so the poison would come out when the cement did!”

“Of course. And that moment happened to be when Mr Delaunay got so angry over reading Dow’s warning note. He ground his teeth and dislodged the plug – and the acid poured into his mouth.”

Corrigan stared at her. His eyes went over her trim head, her vivid young cheeks, her wide brown eyes, in a kind of mystified stupefaction.

“How the devil did you ever happen to pick out Gawdy?”

“You helped me, Captain Corrigan.” Sandra’s brown eyes flashed a smile. “It was yesterday morning, in your office, when you said of Dow: ‘Why help his confederate on one hand, harm him on the other?’ Only because he had to. Women’s minds make strange quirks, Captain Corrigan, and that made mine flash back to when Dow, in the welfare office, had given me the note. It made me see what I had entirely overlooked – that Dow palmed the note he gave me. He hid it in his hand. Why? Why not hand me the note openly? It could only have been because of the presence of someone he didn’t want to see it – and the only other person there was Gawdy. That made it” – she gestured – “oh, so plain, it was just like a bombshell! So then I went and looked Gawdy up in the phone book, and there he was – a dentist. That almost proved it, at least to me. Of course the poison had to be something to do with his teeth! It was the only way it could get into his mouth! So you see, at the bottom of the crazy way a woman’s mind works, you really supplied the answer.”

Corrigan took his hat off. He almost blushed.

“There’s precious little credit in this for me. Go on. I’m listening. My hat’s off to you. I’ve got my mouth open.”

Sandra said with a gesture of both hands: “There wasn’t anything else. I had a wild idea there might be a dental chart of Mr Delaunay’s in Gawdy’s office. I went up to the Mohican Building – and found Dow selling the bridge to Marceline. Of course I didn’t know it was a bridge, but I knew it was something that looked like a tooth.”

A shadow crossed her face. “Maybe what kept me from thinking of Gawdy so long was the fact that he brought the baby up to my office. That was pure coincidence. He was coming up to see that Dow delivered the bamboo tube to me without any hitch, and finding the baby gave him a good excuse to come in.” She shook her head. “I can see what Dow’s whole aim was all through, to make the affair plainly a murder, so he could blackmail Gawdy’s secret bride. But I still don’t know why, Captain Corrigan, they sent the acid to the Chinese maid.”

Corrigan grunted. “You were still unconscious when Dow gasped that part out to us with what must have been his last gallon of breath. The maid was the one that overheard Gawdy talking to the old man, examining his bridge, and suggesting that he come up to the office and have it repaired.”

“So that’s it!” Sandra gave a breath of relief. “I’m so glad she’s cleared; I had a feeling she was honest all through.”

Corrigan gave his knee a vicious cut with his hat. “No wonder the M.E. or the autopsy didn’t find anything wrong with the old man’s mouth! When the M.E. first looked into it, the duplicate bridge was there; when the autopsy was conducted, his honest old original bridge was there!”

“Of course. And all Dow cut the tongue out for was to get at the poisoned bridge, remove it, and replace the original harmless one; and of course then there was not the slightest thing wrong with the old man’s mouth.”

Corrigan’s hard eyes flicked over the broken remnants of the goldfish bowl. “The young lady Marceline can consider herself damned lucky she only got a flesh wound. Gawdy was in here to clean up. He was going to get her and Dow and everyone he figured knew a solitary thing about it.”

Sandra’s eyes blazed. “And after what Marceline went through for him, did for him, out of pure, unadulterated love for him! She begged De Saules to reverse his testimony – probably at the cost of saying she herself was implicated – and De Saules, out of family loyalty and because he really was gone on her, agreed.” She broke off suddenly. She didn’t tell how De Saules had come up, tried to stop her with cycloprophane. Let bygones be bygones. She had a feeling the whole answer to Marceline’s shattered life lay in De Saules.

“By George! I wish I was ten years younger!” Captain Corrigan was staring at her with his widest-open look. He got up and stood with his blunt hands on his hips. “Think of it, a girl like you, smart as they make ’em, pretty as a little dream, running around loose!” His thundering voice broke off with a grin. “How come no man has appropriated you?”

“One has.” The smile in Sandra’s eyes was like the deepest velvet in the world. She picked up her bag. “I’m on the way to see him now, Captain Corrigan. He’s not very big, but he’s gone through a lot on my account. He’s waiting for me over at the clinic.”