The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

WE ARE ALL DEAD Bruno Fischer

The caper went off without a hitch except that Wally Garden got plugged.

There were five of us. My idea had been that three would be enough, figuring the less there were the bigger the cut for each. But Oscar Trotter made the decisions.

Looking at Oscar, you might take him for a college professor – one of those lean, rangy characters with amused, intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. He sounded like one, too, when he didn’t feel like sounding like somebody else. Maybe he’d been one once, among all the other things he’d ever been.

But there was no question of what he was now. He could give the toughest hood the jitters by smiling at him a certain way, and he could organize and carry out a caper better than any man I knew.

He spent a couple of weeks casing this job and then said five men would be needed, no more and no less. So there were four of us going in soon after the payroll arrived on a Friday afternoon. The fifth, Wally Garden, was cruising outside in a stolen heap.

Wally was far and away the youngest of us, around twenty-three, and he wasn’t a regular. I didn’t know where Oscar had picked him up; somebody had recommended him, he’d said. It must have been somebody Oscar had a lot of confidence in because Oscar was a mighty careful guy. Wally was supposed to be very good with a car, but I think what made Oscar pick him was that he was moon-faced and clear-eyed and looked like he was always helping old ladies across streets.

Protective coloration, Oscar called it. Have one appearance during the job and another while making the getaway.

So there was the kid, and Oscar Trotter who could pass for a professor, and Georgie Ross who had a wife and two children and made like a respectable citizen except for a few days a year, and Tiny who was an old-time Chicago gorilla but could have been your kindly gray-haired Uncle Tim.

As for me, I’d been around a long, long time in thirty-four years of living. I’d almost been a lawyer, once. I’d almost married a decent woman, once. I’d almost . . .

Never mind. I was thirty-four years old and had all my features in the right places, and whenever Oscar Trotter had a job I was there at his side.

Wally Garden’s part was to swipe a car early in the afternoon and pick us up on a country road and drop us off at the factory and drive slowly for five hundred feet and make a U-turn and drive slowly back. He picked out a nice car – a shiny big Buick.

The factory manufactured plastic pipe. It was in New Jersey, on the outskirts of Coast City where real estate was cheap. The office of the large, low, sprawling plant was in a wing off by itself. From that wing a side door opened directly out to a two-lane blacktop road that had little traffic. There was an armed guard who arrived with the payroll and stayed until it was distributed, but he was an old man who was given that job because he couldn’t work at anything else.

Oscar decided it would be a cinch. And it was.

We were in and out in seventy seconds – five seconds under the schedule Oscar had worked out. We barged in wearing caps and T-shirts and denim work pants, and we had Halloween masks on our faces and guns in our hands. Tiny had the guard’s gun before the sluggish old man knew what was up. Seven or eight others were in the office, men and women, but they were too scared to cause trouble. Which was just as well. We weren’t after hurting anybody if we could help it. We were after dough, and there it was on a long table in an adjoining room, in several hundred little yellow envelopes.

Seventy seconds – and we were coming out through the side door with two satchels holding the payroll, pulling off our masks and sticking away our guns before we stepped into the open air, then striding to the Buick Wally Garden was rolling over to us.

Some hero in the office got hold of a gun and started to fire it.

The newspapers next day said it was a bookkeeper who had it in his desk. One thing was sure – he didn’t know a lot about how to use it. He stood at a window and let fly wildly.

None of the slugs came near us. Anyway, not at the four of us out in the open he was firing at. But he got Wally, who was still a good twenty feet away. Got him through the car window as if he’d been an innocent bystander.

The car jerked as his foot slipped off the throttle and it stalled and stopped after rolling a few more feet. Through the windshield we saw Wally slump over the wheel.

Oscar yelled something to me, but I knew what to do. Sometimes I could think for myself. I ran around to the left front door.

The shooting had stopped. No more bullets, I supposed.

Wally turned a pale, agonized face to me as I yanked open the car door. “I’m hit,” he moaned.

“Shove over,” I said.

He remained bowed over the wheel. I pushed him. Oscar got into the car through the opposite door and pulled him. Groaning, Wally slid along the seat. Georgie and Tiny were piling into the back seat with the satchels. There was plenty of screaming now in the office, but nobody was coming out, not even the hero. I took Wally’s place and got the stalled engine started and away we went.

Sagging between Oscar and me on the front seat, Wally started to cough, shaking all over.

“Where’s it hurt, son?” Oscar asked gently.

Wally pushed his face against Oscar’s shoulder, the way a frightened child would against his mother’s bosom.

He gasped, “I feel . . . it stabs . . . my insides . . . bleeding.”

He was the only one of us wearing a jacket. Oscar unbuttoned it and pulled it back. I glanced sideways and saw blood soaking a jagged splotch on the right side of his shirt. It looked bad.

Nobody said anything.

Tiny sat twisted around on the back seat watching through the rear window. It wasn’t what was behind us we had to worry about as much as what was ahead. Pretty soon there would be roadblocks.

We traveled three and two-tenths miles on that road, according to plan. Then I swung the Buick left, off blacktop and onto an oiled country road running through fields and woods.

It was a bright spring afternoon, the kind of day on which you took deep breaths and felt it was good to be alive. Beside me Wally Garden started to claw at his right side. Oscar had to hold his hand to keep him from making the wound worse than it was.

Again I made a left turn. This time there was no road to turn onto but only an open field. Wally screamed between clenched teeth as the rough ground jounced the car.

Beyond the field were woods – big stuff, mostly, oaks and maples, with a fringe of high shrubs. Two cars, a Ford and a Nash, were where we’d left them this morning behind the shrubs. I rolled the hot car, the Buick, quite a way in among the trees.

It was dim in there, and cool and quiet. Wally’s eyes were closed; he’d stopped squirming in agony. He would have toppled over if Oscar hadn’t been holding him.

“Passed out?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Oscar said.

Getting out of the car, he eased Wally’s head and shoulder down on the seat. Wally lay on his side twitching and moaning and unconscious.

The Buick was going to be left right here – after, of course, we’d wiped off all our prints. The way we planned it, we’d hang around for two–three hours before starting back to New York in the two other cars. Until then we had plenty of time on our hands. We used some of it to make a quick count of the loot in the two satchels.

When Oscar Trotter had cased the job, he’d estimated that the take would be between forty and fifty grand. Actually it was around twenty-two grand.

What the hell! After a while you get to be part realist and part cynic, if the two aren’t the same thing in this rotten racket. Nothing is ever as good as you plan or hope or dream. You’re doing all right if you get fifty percent, and don’t lose your life or freedom while doing it.

Every now and then I’d leave the others to go over for a look at Wally. The third time I did his eyes were open.

“How d’you feel, kid?”

He had trouble speaking. He managed to let me know he was thirsty.

There wasn’t any water, but Georgie had a pint of rye. Wally, lying cramped on that car seat, gulped and coughed and gulped and pushed the bottle away. I thought it probably did him more harm than good.

“I’m burning up,” he moaned.

I felt his brow. He sure was.

I went over to where Oscar and Georgie and Tiny were changing their clothes beside the Nash. This would be an important part of our protective coloration – completely different and respectable clothes.

The alarm was out for five men in a Buick, at least four of whom had been seen wearing caps and T-shirts and denim pants. I felt kind of sorry for anybody within a hundred miles who would be in T-shirts and denim pants. But we wouldn’t be. We’d be wearing conservative business suits and shirts and neckties, and we’d be driving two in a Ford Georgie owned legally and three in a Nash Oscar owned legally, and why would any cop at a roadblock or toll gate waste time on such honest-looking citizens?

Except that in one of the cars there would be a wounded man. This was one contingency Oscar hadn’t foreseen.

I said to Tiny who was standing in his underwear, “Give me a hand with the kid. He’ll be more comfortable on the ground.”

Oscar stopped buttoning a freshly laundered white shirt. “Leave him where he is.”

“For how long?” I said.

There was a silence. I’d put our plight into words. This was as good a time as any to face it.

Oscar tossed me a smile. About the worst thing he did was smile. It was twisted and almost never mirthful.

“Until,” he said, “somebody blunders into these woods and finds him.” He tucked his shirt-tail into his pants and added hopefully, “It might take days.”

Wally was nobody to me. But I said, “We can’t do that.”

“Have you a better idea, Johnny?” Oscar said.

“You’re the big brain,” I said.

“Very well then.” Oscar, standing among us tall and slightly stooped, took off his horn-rimmed glasses. “Gentlemen, let us consider the situation.”

This was his professorial manner. He could put it on like a coat, and when he did you knew he was either going to show how bright he was or pull something dirty.

“The odds are highly favorable,” he drawled, “that before midnight we four will be out of New Jersey and in New York and each safe and snug at home. But not if we’re burdened by a wounded and probably dying man. We’ll never make it. If by chance we do make it, what do we do with him? At the least he needs a doctor. A doctor finds the bullet wound and calls in the police. Perhaps Wally wouldn’t talk. Perhaps he will. He may be delirious and not know he’s talking.” Oscar’s smile broadened. “There’s no question, gentlemen, that we’d deserve to have our heads chopped off if we stuck our necks out so far.”

Tiny said uneasily, “Yeah, but we can’t just leave him here to die.”

“Certainly not.” Oscar’s eyeglasses swung gently from his fingers. “He might die too slowly or scream and attract a passing car. There is, I’m afraid, only one alternative.”

All right, but why did he have to say it in that mocking, lecturing manner, and why did he have to keep smiling all the time?

Georgie was down on one knee lacing his shoes so he wouldn’t have to look at anybody. Tiny was scratching his hairy chest unhappily. I was a little sick to my stomach. And Oscar Trotter smiled.

“Tiny, your knife, please,” Oscar drawled. “A gun would be too noisy.”

Tiny dug his switchblade knife out of a pair of pants draped over the hood of the Nash. Oscar took it from him and moved to the Buick as if taking a stroll through the woods.

I turned away. I couldn’t stop him, and if I could I wouldn’t have. I’d seen that kid only twice in my life before today, the first time less than a week ago. I didn’t know a thing about him except his name. He was nobody at all to me. But I turned away and my hands shook as I set fire to a cigarette.

Then Oscar was coming back.

“Well, Johnny,” he taunted me, “from the first you wanted less men to cut in on the loot, didn’t you?”

I had an impulse to take a swing at him. But of course I didn’t.

Much of the next three days I watched Stella jiggle about Oscar’s apartment. She was a bit on the buxom side, but in a cozy-looking, cuddly-looking way. She went in for sheer, tight sweaters and little else, and she had what to jiggle with. She belonged to Oscar.

I didn’t know what the dames saw in him. He was no longer young and you couldn’t call him handsome by a long shot, but he always had a woman around who had both youth and looks. Like Stella, who was merely the current one. She was also a fine cook.

I was staying with them in Oscar’s two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive. I’d come down from Boston for that New Jersey caper, and afterward there was nothing to take me back to Boston. Oscar was letting me use the spare room while I was making up my mind whether to stay in New York or push on to wherever the spirit moved me.

On that third day Oscar and I went up to the Polo Grounds to take in a ball game. When Stella heard us at the door, she came out to meet us in the foyer.

“There’s a friend of yours in the living room,” she told Oscar. “A Mr Brant. He’s been waiting over an hour.”

I stepped to the end of the foyer and looked into the living room. The meaty man sitting on the sofa and sucking a pipe was definitely no friend of Oscar’s. Or of mine. He was Bill Brant, a city detective attached to the DA’s office, which meant he was a kind of free-wheeling copper.

Oscar touched my arm. “I expected this. Merely the MO. I’ll do the talking.” He turned to Stella. “Go do your work in the kitchen.”

“I haven’t any. Dinner’s cooking.”

“Go find something to do in the kitchen,” he snapped.

She flounced away, wiggling almost as much as she jiggled. But the thing is that she obeyed.

Oscar trained his women right. She was used to being sent out of the room or sometimes clear out of the apartment when business was being discussed. She was no innocent, of course, but in his book the less any woman knew the better. It might be all right to trust Stella today, but who knew what the situation would be tomorrow? So she went into the kitchen and we went into the living room.

“Well, what d’you know!” Bill Brant beamed at me. “Johnny Worth too! Another piece fits into the picture. I guess you came to town for the Jersey stickup.”

“I did?” I said and went over to the portable bar for a drink. I didn’t offer the cop any.

“What’s this about New Jersey?” Oscar was asking.

“We’re cooperating with the police over there. You’re a local resident. So was Wallace Garden who was found dead in the Buick.”

“You misunderstood my question.” Oscar was using his mocking drawl. “I’m not interested in the jurisdictional problems of the police. I’m simply curious as to the reason for your visit.”

“Come off it,” Brant said. “That payroll stickup has all your earmarks.”

I helped myself to another drink. I hadn’t been very much worried, but now I felt better. That, as Oscar had guessed, was all they seemed to have – the MO, the modus operandi, the well-planned, perfectly timed and executed armed robbery that cops identified with Oscar.

“Earmarks!” Oscar snorted. “Do they arrest citizens for that these days?”

“No, but it helps us look in the right direction.” Brant sucked on his pipe. “That killing too. It’s like you not to leave loose ends, even if it means sticking a knife into one of your own boys.” He twisted his head around to me. “Or did he have you do the dirty work, Johnny?”

That was one thing about Oscar, I thought – he did his own dirty work. Maybe because he enjoyed it.

Aloud I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Brant sighed. What had he expected, that we’d up and confess all as soon as he told us he had a suspicion? We knew as well as he did that he didn’t even have enough to take us to headquarters and sweat us, and likely never would have. But he was paid to try, and he hung around another ten minutes, trying. That got him nothing, not even a drink.

After he was gone, Stella came in from the kitchen and said dinner would be ready soon.

Another day passed and another. I was on edge, restless. I took walks along the Drive, I dropped in on friends, I went to the movies. Then I’d come back to Oscar’s apartment and there would be Stella jiggling.

Understand me. I didn’t particularly hanker for her – certainly not enough to risk fooling around with anything of Oscar Trotter’s. Besides, I doubted that she would play. She seemed to like me, but strictly as her husband’s friend. She was completely devoted to him.

No, it was just that any juicy dame within constant eyesight made my restlessness so much harder to take.

We were playing Scrabble on the cardtable, Oscar and Stella and I, when the doorbell rang.

It was evening, around eight-thirty. Oscar, of course, was way ahead; he was unbeatable at any game that required brains. Stella was way behind. I was in the middle, where I usually found myself in everything. As it was Stella’s turn to play, I went to answer the doorbell.

A girl stood in the hall – a fair-haired, blue-eyed girl in a simple gray dress and a crazy little gray hat.

“Mr Trotter?” she said.

“You’re right, I’m not,” I said. “He’s inside.”

Without being invited in, she stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind her. “Please tell him Mrs Garden would like to see him.”

“Sure.” I started to turn and stopped. “Garden?” I said. “Any relative of—”

I caught myself. In my racket you became cautious about naming certain names under certain circumstances, especially when you weren’t supposed to know them. There were all kinds of traps.

Gravely she said, “I was Wally’s wife.” She put her head back. “You must be Johnny. Wally told me about you.”

I gawked at her. Standing primly and trimly in the foyer, she made me think of golden fields and cool streams and the dreams of youth.

I said, “Wait here,” and went into the living room. Stella was scowling at the Scrabble board and Oscar was telling her irritably to do something or pass. I beckoned to him. He rose from the cardtable and came over to me.

“Wally’s wife is in the foyer,” I said.

Oscar took off his eyeglasses, a sign that he was disturbed. “He never mentioned a wife to me.”

“To me either. He wasn’t much of a talker.”

“What does she want?”

“Seems to me,” I said, “our worry is what does she know. If Wally—”

And then she was in the living room. Having waited maybe thirty seconds in the foyer, she wasn’t waiting any longer. She headed straight for Oscar.

“You must be Mr Trotter,” she said. “I’m Abby Garden.”

Abby, I thought – exactly the name for a lovely girl of twenty, if she was that old.

Oscar put his glasses back on to stare at her. He seemed as startled as I’d been that such a dish could have been the moon-faced kid’s wife. But he didn’t say anything to her. In fact, his nod was rather curt. Then he looked across the room at Stella.

Stella was twisted around on her chair, giving Abby Garden that feminine once-over which in a moment took in age, weight, figure, clothes, make-up. Stella didn’t look enthusiastic. Which was natural enough, considering that whatever she had the other girl had better.

“Baby,” Oscar said to Stella, “take a walk to Broadway and buy a pack of cigarettes.”

There were cigarettes all over the apartment. At another time he might have given her the order in one word, “Blow!” but this evening he was being polite about it in front of a guest. It amounted to the same thing. Stella undulated up the length of the room, and on the way her eyes never left the girl. No doubt she didn’t care for being chased out for her. But she left, all right.

Me, whenever I told a dame to do anything, she either kicked up a fuss or ignored me. What did Oscar have?

I fixed drinks for the three of us. Abby wanted a rye highball without too much ginger ale. Her hand brushed mine as she took the glass from me. That was sheer accident, but all the same my fingers tingled.

“Now then, Mrs Garden,” Oscar said. His long legs stretched from the armchair in which he lounged. “What’s your business with me?”

She rolled her glass between her palms. “Wally told me his share would come to thousands of dollars.”

“And who,” he said, “might Wally be?”

“Please, Mr Trotter.” Abby leaned forward. “We can be open and above board. Wally had no secrets from me. I didn’t like it when he told me he was going in on that – that robbery. He’d already done one stretch. Six months for stealing cars. Before I met him.” She bit her lower lip. “I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Oscar looked utterly disgusted. He had no use for a man who blabbered to anybody, including his wife. Wally may very well have endangered us all.

“So?” Oscar said.

“Oh, you needn’t worry I told the police. They asked me, of course. They questioned me for hours after they found poor Wally. But I told them I knew nothing about any holdup or who was in it.” She gave him a piece of a small smile. “You see, I didn’t want to get into trouble. After all, if I’d known beforehand, I was a kind of accessory, wasn’t I?”

“So?” Oscar said again.

“There was one detective especially – a fat man named Brant. He kept asking me if I knew you.” She looked Oscar straight in the eye. “He said you killed Wally.”

“Now why would I do any such thing?”

“Brant said Wally was wounded during the getaway and then you or one of the others killed him with a knife to get him out of the way.”

“My dear,” Oscar said, more in sorrow than in anger, “can it be possible you fell for that line?”

“Is it a line? That’s what I want to know.”

Oscar sighed. “I see you’re not familiar with police tricks. This is a particularly shabby one. Don’t you see they made up this story to induce you to talk?”

“Then he wasn’t killed with a knife?”

“No, my dear. The bullet killed him. He died in my arms. Wasn’t that so, Johnny?”

“Yes,” I said.

That word was my first contribution to the conversation, and my last for another while. Nursing a Scotch-on-the-rocks, I sat on the hassock near Abby’s legs. They were beautifully turned legs. I looked up at her face. She was drinking her highball, and over the rim of the glass her wide blue eyes were fixed with rapt attention on Oscar, who was, now, being a salesman.

He was as good at that as at anything else. His honeyed voice was hypnotic, telling her how he’d loved Wally like a son, how he would have given his right arm to have saved him after that dastardly bookkeeper had plugged him, how the conniving, heartless coppers were out to make her hate him and thus betray him with that fantastic yarn that he, Oscar Trotter, would either have harmed or permitted anybody else to have harmed a hair of one of his own men.

He was good, and on top of that she apparently wasn’t too bright. He sold her and she bought.

“Wally always warned me not to trust a cop.” She split a very warm smile between both of us. “You look like such nice men. So much nicer than that fat detective.”

Oscar purred, “Then I take it we’re friends, Abby?”

“Oh, yes.” She put her highball glass down on the coffee table. “And in a way we’re partners, aren’t we? When will I get my share?”

Suddenly there was frost in the room. The cheekbones ridged Oscar’s lean face.

“What share?” he said softly.

“Why, Wally’s share. He earned it, didn’t he?” She was completely relaxed; she was free and easy and charming. “I read in the papers that there were twenty-two thousand dollars. One-fifth of that—”

“Young lady,” Oscar cut in, “are you trying to blackmail me?”

“Not at all. I simply ask for what I’m entitled to. If money is owed to a man who dies, it goes to his wife.”

She said that wide-eyed and innocent-faced, her earnest manner holding no hint of threat – merely a young and probably destitute widow wanting to clean up financial matters after her husband’s untimely demise.

Huh! A few minutes ago I’d thought she wasn’t so bright. Now I changed my mind.

I spoke up. “She’s got something there, Oscar.”

“You keep out of this.”

“Not this time,” I said. “I suggest we each give her five hundred bucks.”

Oscar pushed his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes. Then he nodded. He had no choice. We’d be in a bad way if she were to chirp to the cops.

“How much will that come to?” Abby asked me.

“Two grand. Wally wouldn’t have gotten a fifth anyway. He was only the driver. Believe me, we’re being more than fair.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said, and gave me a smile.

This was why I’d jumped in to negotiate – to get some such smile out of her, a smile of sheer joyous gratitude. A man has already gone quite a distance with a dame who thinks she’s beholden to him for money. And with this one I was after going on and on and maybe never stopping.

“Just a minute,” Oscar said.

Abby and I shifted our attention from each other to him.

“Prove you’re Wally’s wife,” he said.

“But I am.”

Oscar looked stern. “I know every switch on every con game. We don’t even know Wally had a wife. If he did, we don’t know you were the one. Prove it.”

“Why, of course,” she said. “I have my marriage license and other things at home. If you want me to bring—”

“I’ve a better idea,” I said. I wasn’t one to pass up any chance when I was on the make. I got off the hassock so quickly I almost spilled what was left in my glass. “I’ll go with you right now and look over whatever you have.”

“That’s so good of you,” she said so sweetly that my heart did a complete flip.

Oscar nodded and closed his eyes. When we left, he appeared to have fallen asleep in the armchair.

According to the marriage license, they’d been married seven months ago by the county clerk here in New York.

I sat in the only decent chair in the place. Nearby a train rumbled on the Third Avenue El. She didn’t quite live in a slum, but the difference wasn’t great. There wasn’t much to this room, and there was less to the bedroom and kitchen and bathroom. They were all undersized and falling apart.

Wally’s cut of the loot would have meant a lot to him and her, if he’d lived through it.

I handed the marriage license back to Abby. She fed me other stuff out of the shoebox on her lap – snapshots of her and Wally, his discharge papers from the army, the deposit book of a joint savings account containing less than fifty dollars, a letter from her mother from somewhere in Iowa complaining because she’d gone and married a man named Wallace Garden whom none of the family had met.

“Good enough,” I said.

“How soon will I get the money?”

“Soon as I collect it from the others. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Two thousand dollars,” she reminded me.

“That’s right,” I said.

Abby put the lid on the shoebox and carried it into the bedroom. She didn’t jiggle and wiggle like Stella. Her tight, slender figure in that trim gray dress seemed to flow when in motion.

I wanted her as I hadn’t wanted anybody or anything in a very long time.

Take it easy, I warned myself while waiting for her to return. I could mark myself lousy in her book by rushing. All right, she’d been married to that round-faced kid, who’d been what he’d been, meaning no better than I, and she hadn’t acted particularly upset over his death. But I didn’t yet know what made her tick. I only knew that she looked like moonlight and roses and that it would be wise to handle her accordingly. She was already grateful to me. She’d be a lot more grateful when I brought her the two grand. Then would be time enough to take the next step – a big step or small step, depending on how she responded.

So I was a perfect little gentleman that evening. She put up a pot of coffee and we sat opposite each other at the table and she was as pleasant to talk to as to look at. She spoke of her folks’ farm in Iowa and I spoke of my folks’ farm in Indiana.

When I was leaving, she went to the door with me and put her hand in mine. And she said, “I’ll see you soon, Johnny.”

“Do you want to see me or the money?”

“Both,” she said and squeezed my hand holding hers.

I walked on a cloud clear across town and then a couple of miles uptown to Oscar’s apartment. I hadn’t as much as kissed her good-night, or tried to, but what of that? My hand still tingled from the feel of hers.

I laughed at myself. Johnny Worth, the cynical hard guy, acting like a love-sick schoolboy! But I laughed at myself happily.

Oscar and Stella were in bed when I let myself in. Oscar heard me and came out of his bedroom in a bath-robe.

“She was Wally’s wife all right,” I told him. “Tomorrow I’ll go collect the dough from Georgie and Tiny.”

“You seem anxious,” he said with an amused twist to his mouth.

I shrugged. “We promised her.”

“I can read you like a book, Johnny.” He nudged my ribs with his elbow. “Make much headway with her?”

I shrugged again.

“I guess not if you’re back so early,” Oscar said, leering amiably. “I can’t imagine what she saw in that punk Wally. She has class. Well, good hunting.”

“Good-night,” I said and went into my room.

Next afternoon I set forth to make the collection for Abby. Oscar had given me his five hundred in the morning, and of course I had my own, so that left Georgie and Tiny to go.

Georgie Ross lived out in Queens, in a neat frame house with a patch of lawn in front. His wife and two teenaged daughters hadn’t any notion of how he picked up extra money to support them. His regular job, as a traveling salesman in housewares, didn’t keep him very busy or bring in much income. He had time on a weekday afternoon to be mowing his lawn.

He stopped mowing when he saw me come up the street. He stood middle-aged and pot-bellied.

“For God’s sake,” he complained when I reached him, “you know better than to come here.”

“Relax. You can say I’m a bill collector.”

“Just don’t come around, that’s all I ask. What d’you want?”

“To collect a bill. Five C’s for Wally Garden’s widow.”

His eyes bugged out. “You’re kidding,” he said. Meaning, if I knew him, not about the widow but about the money.

I told him I wasn’t kidding and I told him about Abby’s visit last evening.

“Listen,” Georgie said, taking out a handkerchief and wiping his suddenly sweaty face, “I’m not shelling out that kind of dough for anybody’s wife. I have my own family to think of. My God, do you know what my two girls cost me? Just their clothes! And my oldest, Dinah, is starting college next year. Is that expensive! I got to hang onto every penny.”

“Some of those pennies were supposed to have gone to Wally.”

“It’s his tough luck he wasn’t around to collect.” He leaned against the handle of the mower. “I tell you this: we give her two grand now, she thinks she has us over a barrel and keeps coming back for more. Oscar ought to handle her different.”

“How?”

“Well, he handled her husband,” Georgie said.

That was a quiet, genteel street, and he fitted into it, by looking at him, the way anybody else in sight did. He resumed mowing his lawn.

I tagged after him. “Use your head, Georgie.”

“You don’t get one damn penny out of me.”

I knew I was licked. I’d ask Oscar to try. He could persuade him if anybody could. I left Georgie plodding stolidly behind the mower.

Tiny was harder to find. He was like me, without anywhere to stay put. He was paying rent on a mangy room he’d sublet downtown, but he only slept in it. I made the rounds of the neighboring ginmills. What with lingering in this place and that and shooting the breeze with guys I knew, I didn’t come across Tiny until after nine o’clock.

He was sitting wide-shouldered and gray-haired at the bar, drinking beer. He was always drinking beer.

He said, “Gee, am I glad to see you.” Picking up his glass, he slid off the stool and we went to an isolated table. “I’ve been trying to get Oscar on the phone,” he said, “but he ain’t in. Stella says she don’t know where he went.” He glanced around. “Johnny, there’s been a city dick asking me questions this afternoon. A fat guy.”

“Brant?”

“Yeah, that’s the name. He’s got it, Johnny. He knows who was in on it and what happened to Wally and all.”

I thought of Abby.

“Go on,” I said.

“Remember last Wednesday when the five of us went over the route in Oscar’s car? It was hot and when we came back through the Holland Tunnel from Jersey we stopped for beer on Tenth Avenue. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Somebody that knew us saw the five of us sitting in that booth together.”

I let out my breath. Not Abby.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Search me. This Brant, he wasn’t telling. Some goddamn stoolie. He knew four of us – me and you, Oscar and Georgie. The one break is he hadn’t never seen Wally before. Brant is one cagy cookie, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I figure they showed the stoolie Wally’s picture, but he wasn’t sure. If he’d been sure, they’d be piling on us.”

“That’s right,” I said. “The cops can’t make any move officially unless they can link us to Wally. I saw Georgie this afternoon and he didn’t mention being questioned.”

“He’s been by now, I guess. The way I figure, this stoolie didn’t spill till today.” Tiny took a slug of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But I don’t get it, Johnny. A stoolie sees four of us and a strange guy in a beer joint. What makes this Brant so all-fired smart he can tell from that Wally was the strange guy and we was the ones did the job way over in Jersey a couple days later?”

“Because Oscar is too good.”

“Come again?”

“The caper bore the marks of genius,” I said, “and Oscar is a genius. Then Brant drops into Oscar’s apartment a few days ago and finds me staying there, so he’s got two of us tagged. Then he learns we two plus you and Georgie were drinking beer with a fifth guy who could’ve been Wally Garden, and he’s got us all.”

“The hell he has! All he’s got is thoughts running in his head. He needs evidence. How’ll he get it if we sit tight?”

“He won’t,” I said.

This was a good time to tell him about Abby. I told him.

When I finished, Tiny complained, “What’s the matter with Oscar these days? First he lets us all be seen together in a beer joint—”

“I don’t remember any of us objected. In fact, I remember it was your idea we stop off.”

“Sure, but Oscar should know better. He’s supposed to have the brains. Then he don’t know the kid had a wife and would blab every damn thing to her. Where’d he pick up Wally, anyway?”

“He never told me,” I said. “But there’s the widow and we promised her two grand. I want five C’s from you.”

Tiny thought about it, and he came up with what, I had to concede, was a good question. “You said you saw Georgie this afternoon. Did he shell out?”

“Not yet.”

“Expect him to?”

“Sure.”

“Bet he don’t?”

“Look, Oscar will get it out of him. I’m asking you.”

Tiny said cheerfully. “Tell you what I’ll do, Johnny. When Georgie shells out, I’ll shell out.”

And he looked mighty pleased with himself. He had confidence in Georgie’s passion for hanging onto a buck.

So after chasing around for hours I had only the thousand I’d started out with. Well, that wasn’t hay and the evening was young. I could bring the thousand to Abby and tell her it was part payment. She would be grateful. She would thank me. One thing could lead to another – and perhaps tonight would be the night, the beginning.

I took a hack to her place.

Through her door I heard music going full blast. I knocked. No answer, which wasn’t surprising considering all the row a hot dance band was making. I knocked louder. Same result. I turned the knob and found the door unlocked.

Abby wasn’t in the living room. The bedroom and the bathroom doors were both closed. The band music, coming from a tiny table radio, stopped and a disc jockey’s voice drooled. In the comparative quiet I heard a shower running in the bathroom. I sat down to wait for her to come out.

The music started up again. It was too raucous; my mood was for sweet stuff. I reached over the table to turn off the radio, and my hand brushed a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses. She hadn’t worn them when I’d seen her, but women were vain about such things. Probably only reading glasses.

She’d stopped showering. Now with the radio off, there was no sound in the apartment. Suddenly it occurred to me that I ought to let her know she had a visitor. Thinking she was alone, she might come trotting out without anything on. I wouldn’t mind, but she might, and I was still on the perfect little gentleman technique.

I went to the bathroom door and said, “Abby.”

“I’ll be right out.”

I hadn’t time to wonder why she hadn’t sounded surprised to hear a man in her apartment and why at the least she hadn’t asked who I was. The explanation came almost at once – from the bedroom.

“What did you say, baby?” a man called.

“I’ll be right out,” she repeated.

Then it was quiet again except for the thumping of my heart.

I knew that man’s voice. If there was any doubt about it, there were those eyeglasses on the table. A minute ago I’d given them hardly a glance because I hadn’t any reason then to take a good look to see if they were a woman’s style and size. They seemed massive now, with a thick, dark frame.

The bathroom doorknob was turning. I moved away from there until the table stopped me, and Abby came out. She was wearing a skimpy towel held around her middle and not another thing.

Her body was very beautiful. But it was a bitter thing for me to see now.

She took two or three steps into the room, flowing with that wonderful grace of hers, before she realized that the man standing by the table wasn’t the one who had just spoken to her from the bedroom – wasn’t the one for whom she didn’t at all mind coming out like this. It was only I – I who had been dreaming dreams. Her free hand yanked up and across her breasts in that age-old gesture of women, and rage blazed in her blue eyes.

“You have a nerve!” she said harshly.

Again he heard her in the bedroom and again he thought she was speaking to him. He called, “What?” and the bedroom door opened, and he said, “With this door closed I can’t hear a—” and he saw me.

Oscar Trotter was without jacket and shirt, as well as without his glasses.

I had to say something. I muttered, “The radio was so loud you didn’t hear me knock. I came in.” I watched Abby sidling along the wall toward the bedroom, clinging to that towel and keeping her arm pressed in front of her, making a show of modesty before me, the intruder, the third man. “I didn’t expect she was having this kind of company,” I added.

He shrugged.

A door slammed viciously. She had ducked into the bedroom where her clothes would be. He picked up his glasses from the table and put them on.

There was nothing to keep me here. I started to leave.

“Just a minute, Johnny. I trust you’re not sore.”

I turned. “What do you expect me to be?”

“After all, you had no prior claim on her.” Oscar smiled smugly. “We both saw her at the same time.”

He stood lean and slightly stooped and considerably older than I, and dully I wondered why everything came so easily to him – even this.

“Next time,” I said, “remember to lock the door.”

“I didn’t especially plan this. I asked her out to dinner. My intention was chiefly business. Chiefly, I say, for I must confess she had – ah – impressed me last night.”

This was his high-hat manner, the great man talking down to a lesser being. Some day, I thought wearily, I’d beat him up and then he’d kill me, unless I killed him first.

“You understand,” he was drawling, “that I was far from convinced that our problem with her would be solved by giving her two thousand dollars. I had to learn more about her. After dinner we came up here for a drink.” That smug smile again. “One thing led to another. You know how it is.”

I knew how it was – how I’d hoped it would be with me. And I knew that he had never for one single moment made the mistake of acting the little gentleman with her.

I had forgotten about the money in my pocket. I took it out and dropped it on the table.

“Georgie and Tiny weren’t keen about contributing,” I told him. “There’s just this thousand. You’ve earned the right to worry about the balance.”

“I doubt that it will be necessary to give her anything now. You see, I’ll be paying all her bills. She’s moving in with me.”

“How nice,” I said between my teeth. “I’ll be out of there as soon as I pack my bags.”

His head was bent over the money. “Take your time,” he said as he counted it into two piles. “I still have to tell Stella. Any time tomorrow will do.” He pushed one pile across the table. “Here’s yours.”

So I had my five hundred bucks back, and that was all I had. Before I was quite out of the apartment, Oscar, in his eagerness, was already going into the bedroom where Abby was.

I went out quietly.

That night I slept in a hotel. I stayed in bed most of the morning, smoking cigarettes and looking up at the ceiling. Then I shaved and dressed and had lunch and went to Oscar’s apartment for my clothes.

I found Stella all packed and about to leave. She was alone in the apartment. I could guess where Oscar was.

“Hello, Johnny,” she said. “I’m leaving for good.”

She wasn’t as upset as I’d expected. She was sitting in the living room with her legs crossed and taking a final drink of Oscar’s liquor.

“I know,” I said. “When’s she moving in?”

“Tonight, I guess.” She looked into her glass. “You know, the minute she walked into this room the other night I had a feeling. Something in the way Oscar looked at her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shrugged. “I’m not sure I am. He was too damn bossy.”

I went into the guest bedroom and packed my two bags. When I came out, Stella was still there.

“Johnny,” she said, “have you any plans?”

“No.”

“I called up a woman I know. She owns a rooming house off Columbus Avenue. She says she has a nice furnished apartment to let on the second floor, with kitchenette and bath. She says the room is large and airy and nicely furnished. A young married couple just moved out.”

“Are you taking it?”

“I think I will.” She uncrossed her knees and pulled her skirt over them. “Two people can be very comfortable.”

I looked at her sitting there rather primly with eyes lowered – a placid, cozy, cuddly woman with a bosom made for a man to rest his weary head on. She wasn’t Abby, but Abby was a ruined dream, and Stella was real.

“You and me?” I murmured.

“If you want to, Johnny.”

I picked up my bags. “Well, why not?” I said.

Stella was very nice. We weren’t in love with each other, but we liked each other and got along, which was more than could be said of a lot of couples living together.

We weren’t settled a week in the rooming house near Columbus Avenue when Oscar phoned. Stella answered and spoke to him. I dipped the newspaper I was reading and listened to her say we’d be glad to come over for a drink that evening.

I said, “Wait a minute.”

She waved me silent and told Oscar we’d be there by nine. When she hung up, she dropped on my lap, cuddling the way only she could.

“Honey, I want to go just to show I don’t care for him any more and am not jealous of that Abby. You’re sweeter than he ever was. Why shouldn’t we all still be friends?”

“All right,” I said.

Oscar answered the doorbell when we got there. Heartily he shook Stella’s hand and then mine and said Abby was in the kitchen and would be out in a minute. Stella went into the kitchen to give Abby a hand and Oscar, with a hand on my shoulder, took me into the living room.

Georgie and Tiny were there. Georgie hadn’t brought his wife, of course; he kept her strictly away from this kind of social circle. They were drinking cocktails, even Tiny who was mostly a beer man.

“Looks like a caper reunion,” I commented dryly. “Except that there’s one missing. Though I guess we could consider that his widow represents him.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Then Oscar said pleasantly, “Here, sour-puss, maybe this will cheer you up,” and thrust a cocktail at me.

I took it and sipped.

Then Abby came in, bearing a plate of chopped liver in one hand and a plate of crackers in the other. She had a warm smile for me – the impersonal greeting of a gracious hostess. Stella came behind her with potato chips and pretzels, and all of a sudden Stella’s jiggling irritated me no end.

Abby hadn’t changed. There was no reason why I had expected she would. She still made me think of golden fields and cool streams, as she had the first time I’d laid eyes on her.

I refilled my glass from the cocktail shaker and walked to a window and looked out at the Hudson River sparkling under the sinking sun.

“Now that was the way to handle her,” Georgie said. He had come up beside me; he was stuffing into his mouth a cracker smeared with liver. “Better than paying her off. Not only saves us dough. This way we’re sure of her.”

“That’s not why he did it.”

“Guess not. Who needs a reason to want a looker like that in his bed? But the result’s the same. And you got yourself Stella, so everybody’s happy.”

Everybody was happy and everybody was gay and got gayer as the whiskey flowed. But I wasn’t happy and the more I drank the less gay I acted. Long ago I’d learned that there was nowhere a man could be lonelier than at a party. I’d known it would be a mistake to come, and it was.

Suddenly Georgie’s face turned green and he made a dash for the bathroom. Oscar sneered that he’d never been able to hold his liquor and Tiny grumbled that the only drink fit for humans was beer and I pulled Stella aside and told her I wanted to go home.

She was not only willing; she was anxious. “Fact is, I don’t feel so good,” she said. “I need air.”

We said our goodbyes except to Georgie whom we could hear having a bad time in the bathroom. An empty hack approached when we reached the sidewalk and I whistled. In the hack, she clung to me, shivering, and complained, “My throat’s burning like I swallowed fire. My God, his whiskey wasn’t that bad!”

“You must be coming down with a cold,” I said.

She wobbled when we got out of the hack and she held her throat. I had to half carry her up the steps of the brownstone house and into our room. As I turned from her to switch on the light, she moaned, “Johnny!” and she was doubled over, clutching at her stomach.

For the next hour I had my hands full with her. She seemed to be having quite an attack of indigestion. I undressed her and put her to bed and piled blankets on her because she couldn’t stop shivering. I found baking soda in the kitchen and fed her a spoonful and made tea for her. The cramps tapered off and so did the burning in her throat.

“Something I ate,” she said as she lay huddled under the blankets. “But what? We didn’t have anything for dinner that could hurt us. How do you feel, honey?”

“Fine.”

“I don’t understand it. That Abby didn’t serve anything to speak of. Nothing but some chopped liver and—” She paused. “Honey, did you have the liver?”

“No. I can’t stand the stuff.”

“Then it was the liver. Something wrong with it. Call up Oscar and see if the others are all right.”

I dialed his number. Oscar answered after the bell had rung for some time. His voice sounded weak.

“How are you over there?” I asked.

“Terrible. All four of us sick as dogs. And you?”

“I’m all right, but Stella has indigestion. We figure it was the chopped liver because that was the one thing she ate that I didn’t.”

“Could be,” Oscar said. “Georgie seems to be in the worst shape; he’s sleeping it off in the spare room. Tiny left a short time ago. Abby’s in bed, and that’s where I’ll be in another minute. What bothers me most is a burning in my throat.”

“Stella complained of the same thing. First I ever heard of indigestion making your throat burn.”

“All I know,” Oscar said, “is that whatever it is I have plenty of company in my misery. Abby is calling me.”

He hung up.

I told Stella what he’d said. “The liver,” she murmured and turned on her side.

That was at around one o’clock. At three-thirty a bell jarred me awake. I slipped out of bed and staggered across the room to the phone.

“I need you at once,” Oscar said over the wire.

“Do you feel worse?”

“About the same. But Georgie has become a problem.”

“Is he that bad?”

“Uh-huh. He went and died on my hands. I need your help, Johnny.”

Georgie lay face-down on the bed in the guest room. He was fully dressed except for his shoes.

“Tiny took him in here before he left,” Oscar told me. “After that I didn’t hear a sound out of Georgie. I assumed he was asleep. Probably he went into a coma and slipped off without waking. When I touched him half an hour ago, he was already cold.”

Oscar’s face was the color of old putty. He could hardly stand without clinging to the dresser. Abby hadn’t come out of the other bedroom.

I said, “Died of a bellyache? And so quickly?”

“I agree it must have been the chopped liver, which would make it ptomaine poisoning. But only Georgie ate enough of the liver to kill him. Abby says she remembers he gorged himself on it.” Oscar held his head. “One thing’s sure – he mustn’t be found here. Brant is enough trouble already.”

“This is plainly an accidental death.”

“Even so, the police will use it as an excuse to get as tough as they like with us. We can’t afford that, Johnny, so soon after the Coast City job. Best to get the body out.”

I looked him over. He didn’t seem in much better condition than the man on the bed.

“I can’t do it alone,” I said.

He dug his teeth into his lower lip and then fought to draw in his breath. “I’ll help you.”

But most of it had to fall on me. I fished car keys out of Georgie’s pocket and went looking for his Ford. I found it a block and a half up Riverside Drive and drove it around to the service entrance of the apartment building. At that late hour it was possible to park near where you wanted to.

Oscar was waiting for me on the living-room sofa. He roused himself and together we got that inanimate weight that had been pot-bellied Georgie Ross down the three flights of fire stairs and, like a couple of men supporting a drunk, walked it between us out of the building and across the terribly open stretch of sidewalk and shoved it into the Ford. For all we could tell, nobody was around to see us.

That was about as far as Oscar could make it. He was practically out on his feet. I told him to go back upstairs and I got behind the wheel and drove off with Georgie slumped beside me like a man asleep.

On a street of dark warehouses over on the east side, I pulled the car over to the curb and got out and walked away.

Stella was up when I let myself in. She asked me if I’d gone to Oscar’s.

“I was worried about them,” I told her. “Tiny and Georgie left. Oscar and Abby are about in your shape. How’re you?”

“Better, though my stomach is very queasy.”

I lay in bed wondering what the odds were on chopped liver becoming contaminated and if a burning throat could possibly be a symptom of ptomaine poisoning. I watched daylight trickle into the room and listened to the sounds of traffic building up in the street, and I was scared the way one is in a nightmare, without quite knowing of what.

Eventually I slept. It was past noon when I woke and Stella was bustling about in the kitchen. She was pretty much recovered.

Toward evening I went out for a newspaper. When I returned, Brant was coming down the stoop. Being a cop, he wouldn’t have had trouble finding out where I’d moved to.

“Nice arrangement,” he commented. “You shack up with Oscar’s woman and Oscar with Wally Garden’s widow. This way nobody gets left out in the cold.”

“You running a gossip column now?” I growled.

“If I were, I’d print an item like this: How come Johnny Worth’s pals are getting themselves murdered one by one?”

I held onto myself. All I did was raise an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“Haven’t you heard? George Ross was found dead this morning in his car parked near the East River Drive.”

He had already spoken to Stella, but I didn’t have to worry that she’d told him about last night’s party and who’d been there. She wouldn’t tell a cop anything about anything.

I said, “That’s too bad. Heart attack?”

“Arsenic.”

I wasn’t startled. Maybe, after all, it was no surprise to me. Arsenic, it seemed, was a poison that made your throat burn.

I lit a cigarette. Brant watched my hands. They were steady. I blew smoke at him. “Suicide, I suppose.”

“Why suicide?”

“It goes with poison.”

“Why would he want to die?”

“I hardly knew the guy,” I said.

“You’ve been seeing him. You were in a beer joint with him a week ago Wednesday.”

“Was I? Come to think of it, I dropped in for a beer and there were some guys I knew and I joined them.”

Brant took his pipe out of his fat face. “Two days later you and he were both in on that Coast City stickup.”

“Who says?”

A cop who was merely following a hunch didn’t bother me. We sparred with words, and at the end he sauntered off by himself. He hadn’t anything. He couldn’t even be sure that Georgie hadn’t been a suicide.

But I knew, didn’t I? I knew who had murdered him and had tried to murder all of us.

Oscar didn’t say hello to me. He opened the door of his apartment and just stood there holding onto the doorknob, and his eyes were sick and dull behind his glasses. Though it was after six o’clock, he was still in his pajamas. His robe was tied sloppily, hanging crooked and twisted on his long, lean body. He needed a shave. He looked, to put it mildly, like hell.

I stepped into the foyer and moved on past him into the living room. He shambled after me.

I said, “I suppose Brant came to see you before he did me.”

“Yes.”

“So you know what killed Georgie.”

He nodded tiredly.

“Abby still in bed?” I asked.

“I made her dress and go to a doctor when I learned it was arsenic. Don’t want him coming here, not with the cops snooping. Whatever he gives her for it, I’ll take too.”

“Better not,” I said. “Likely she’ll mix more arsenic with it.”

Oscar took off his eyeglasses. “Explain that, Johnny.”

“I don’t have to. You know as well as I do why she put arsenic in the chopped liver.”

He stood swinging his glasses and saying nothing. He was not the man I had known up until the time I had left the party last night, and it was not so much because he was ill. It was as if a fire had burned out in him.

“Boy, did she sucker you!” I said. “Me too, I admit. But it was mostly our own fault. We knew she didn’t fall for your line that you hadn’t killed Wally. We kidded ourselves she’d be willing to forgive and forget if we paid her off. We wanted to believe that because we wanted her. Both of us did. Well, you got her. Or the other way around – she got you. She got you to bring her to live here where she could get all of us together and feed us arsenic.”

“No,” he mumbled. He looked up. “She ate the liver too. She’s been sick all night and all day. She’s still in a bad way even though she managed to get out of bed and dressed.”

“Huh! She had to put on an act.”

“No, I can tell. And she wouldn’t poison me. Look what she’d give up – this nice home, plenty of money. Why? For a stupid revenge? No. And she’s fond of me. Loves me, I’m sure. Always affectionate. A wonderful girl. Never knew anybody like her. So beautiful and warm.”

He was babbling. He was sick with something worse than poison, or with a different kind of poison. It was the sickness of sex or love or whatever you cared to call it, and it had clouded that brain that always before had known all the answers.

“Try to think,” I said. “Somebody put arsenic in the chopped liver. Who but Abby would have reason?”

“Somebody else.” That old twisted smile, which was not really a smile at all, appeared on his thin lips. “You, for instance,” he said softly.

“Me?”

“You,” he repeated. “You hate my guts for having gotten Abby. You hate her for being mine instead of yours.”

I said, “Does it make sense that I’d want to kill Georgie and Tiny and Stella also?”

“There was a guy put a time bomb on an airplane and blew a lot of people to hell because he wanted to murder his wife who was on the plane. Last night was your first chance to get at Abby and me – and what did you care what happened to the others?”

“My God, you’re so crazy over her you’d rather believe anything but the truth.”

“The truth?” he said and kept smiling that mirthless smile. “The truth is you’re the only one didn’t eat the liver.” He put on his glasses. “Now get out before I kill you.”

“Are you sure she’ll let you live that long?”

“Get out!”

I left. There was no use arguing with a mind in that state, and with Oscar it could be mighty dangerous besides.

The usual wind was sweeping up Riverside Drive. I stood on the sidewalk and thought of going home to eat and then I thought of Tiny. What had happened to him since he had left Oscar’s apartment last night and had dragged himself to his lonely little room? At the least I ought to look in on him.

I walked over to Broadway and took the subway downtown. I climbed two flights of narrow, smelly stairs in a tenement and pushed in an unlocked door. There was just that one crummy room and the narrow bed against the wall and Tiny lying in it on his back with a knife sticking out of his throat.

I must have expected something like this, which was why I’d come. There had been four of us involved in the killing of Wally Garden. Now only two of us were left.

I touched him. He wasn’t long dead; rigor mortis had not yet begun to set in. She had left her apartment on the excuse that she was going to a doctor and had come here instead.

There was no sign of a struggle. Tiny wouldn’t have suspected anything. Lying here sick and alone, he’d been glad to see her – to see anybody who would minister to him, but especially the boss’s lovely lady. She had bent over him to ask how he felt, and he must have been smiling up at that clean fresh young face when she had pushed the knife into his throat, and then she had quickly stepped back to avoid the spurting blood.

That was a switchblade knife, probably Tiny’s own, the knife Oscar had borrowed from him to kill Wally Garden. Which would make it grim justice, if you cared for that kind of justice when you also were slated to be on the receiving end.

I got out of there.

When I was in the street, I saw Brant. He was making the rounds of Georgie’s pals and he was up to Tiny. It was twilight and I managed to step into a doorway before he could spot me. He turned into the tenement I had just left.

I went into a ginmill for the drink I needed and had many drinks. But I didn’t get drunk. When I left a couple of hours later, my head was clear and the fear was still jittering in the pit of my stomach.

I’d never been much afraid of anybody, not even of Oscar, but I was afraid of Abby.

It was her life or ours. I had to convince Oscar of that. Likely he would see the light now that Tiny had been murdered too, because who but Abby had motive? If he refused to strangle her, I would, and be glad to do it, squeezing that lilywhite throat until the clear blue eyes bulged and the sweet face contorted.

I got out of a hack on Riverside Drive. The wind was still there. I huddled against it a moment and then went up to the apartment.

Abby answered the door. She wore a sleazy housecoat hugging that slender body of hers. She looked limp and haggard and upset.

“Johnny,” she said, touching my arm, “I’m glad you’re here. The police took Oscar away.”

“That so?” I stepped into the apartment.

She closed the door and tagged after me. “They wouldn’t tell why they took him away. Was it because of Georgie?”

“No. I guess they’re going to ask him how Tiny got a knife in his throat.”

Abby clutched her bosom – the kind of gesture an actress would make, and she was acting. “It couldn’t have been Oscar. He wasn’t out of the house.”

“But you were, weren’t you?” I grinned at her. “You got only one of us with the arsenic, so you’re using other methods, other weapons. Have you anything special planned for my death?”

She backed away from me. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You blame all four of us for Wally’s death. You’re out to make us pay for it.”

“Listen, Johnny!” She put out a hand to ward me off. “I didn’t care very much for Wally. When I married him, yes, but after a while he bored me. He was such a kid. He didn’t tell me a thing about the holdup. Not a word. All I found out about it was from the police, when they questioned me later. I heard your name and Oscar’s from that detective, Brant. So I tried to make some money on it. That’s all I was after – a little money.”

“You didn’t take the money. Instead you worked it so Oscar would bring you to live with him where you could get at all of us.”

“I like Oscar. Honest.”

“Don’t you mind sleeping with the man who killed your husband?”

She tossed her blonde hair. “I don’t believe he did. He’s so sweet. So kind.”

I hit her. I pushed my fist into her lying face. She’d meant death for Georgie and Tiny, and she would mean death for me unless I stopped her.

She bounced off a chair and fell to the floor and blood trickled from her mouth. I hadn’t come to hit her but to strangle her. But something beside fear possessed me. Maybe, heaven help me, I was still jealous of Oscar. I swooped down on her and grabbed her by her housecoat and yanked her up to her feet. The housecoat came open. I shook her and her breasts bobbed crazily and I slapped her face until blood poured from her nose as well as her mouth.

Suddenly I let go of her. She sank to the floor, holding her bloody face and moaning. At no time had she screamed. Even while I was beating her, she’d had enough self-possession not to want to bring neighbors in on us. She started to sob.

I’d come to do more to her, to stop her once and for all. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I looked down at her sobbing at my feet, lying there slim and fair-haired, battered and bleeding, feminine and forlorn, and there was nothing but emptiness left in me.

After all, hadn’t we killed her husband? Not only Oscar, but Georgie and Tiny and I as well were in a community of guilt.

I turned and walked out of the apartment. I kept walking to the brownstone house, and there in the room Stella and I shared a couple of plainclothes men were waiting for me.

They grabbed me, and Stella rose from a chair and flung herself at me.

“Honey, are you in trouble?”

I said dully, “Not much with the cops,” and went with them.

For the rest of that night they sweated me in the station house. No doubt they had Oscar there too, but we didn’t see each other. They kept us apart.

Sometimes Brant was there, sucking his pipe as he watched the regular cops give me the business. There was no more fooling around. They still had questions about Wally and about Georgie, but mostly they wanted to know about the murder of my pal Tiny.

Once, exhausted by their nagging, I sneered at them like a defiant low-grade mug, “You’ll never get us.”

Brant stepped forward and took his pipe out of his mouth. “Maybe we won’t get you,” he said gently, “but somebody else is doing it. Three of you already.”

After that I stopped sneering. I stopped saying anything. And by morning they let me go.

Before I left, I asked a question. I was told Oscar had been released a couple of hours before.

I made my way home and Stella was waiting and I reached for her.

But there was no rest for my weariness against her cuddly body. She told me Oscar had been here looking for me with a gun.

“When was this?”

“Half an hour ago,” she said. “He looked like a wild man. I’d never seen him like that. He was waving a gun. He said you’d beaten up Abby and he was going to kill you. Honey, did you really beat her up?”

I had taken my jacket off. I put it on.

Stella watched me wide-eyed. “If you’re running away, take me with you.”

“I’m not running,” I said.

“But you can’t stay. He said he’d be back.”

“Did he?” I said hollowly.

I got my gun from where I’d stashed it and checked the magazine and stuck the gun into my jacket pocket.

She ran to me. “What are you going to do? What’s going on? Why don’t you tell me anything?”

I said, “I don’t want to die,” and pushed her away from me.

I went only as far as the top of the stoop and waited there, leaning against the side of the doorway. I could watch both directions of the cheerful sun-washed street, and it wasn’t long before Oscar appeared.

He looked worse than he had yesterday afternoon. His unshaven face was like a skeleton head. There was a scarecrow limpness about his lean body. All that seemed to keep him going was his urge to kill me.

Maybe if I were living with Abby, had her to love and to hold, I wouldn’t give a damn what suspicions I had about her and what facts there were to back them up. I’d deny anything but my need for her body, and I’d be gunning for whoever had marred that lovely face.

I knew there was no use talking to him. I had seen Oscar Trotter in action before, and I knew there was only one thing that would stop him.

I walked down the steps with my right hand in my pocket. Oscar had both hands in his pockets. He didn’t check his stride. He said, “Johnny, I—”

I wasn’t listening to him. I was watching his right hand. When it came out of his pocket, so did mine. I shot him.

And now we are all dead.

There were five of us on that caper. Four are in their graves. I still have the breath of life in me, but the difference between me and the other four is only a matter of two days, when I will be burned in the chair.

It was a short trial. A dozen witnesses had seen me stand in the morning sunlight and shoot down Oscar Trotter. I couldn’t even plead self-defense because he’d had no gun on him. And telling the truth as I knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. The day after the trial began the jury found me guilty.

I sent for Stella. I didn’t expect her to come, but she did. Yesterday afternoon she was brought here to the death house to see me.

She didn’t jiggle. Something had happened to her – to her figure, to her face. Something seemed to have eaten away at her.

“Congratulations,” I said.

Stella’s voice had changed too. It was terribly tired. “Then you’ve guessed,” she said.

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Oscar didn’t have a gun on him. I know now what he was about to do when he took his hand out of his pocket. He was going to offer me his hand. He had started to say, ‘Johnny, I made a mistake.’ Something like that. Because he still had a brain. When he’d learned that Tiny had been knifed in bed, he’d realized I’d been right about Abby. But the irony is that I hadn’t been right. I’d been dead wrong.”

“Yes, Johnny, you were wrong,” she said listlessly.

“At the end you got yourself two birds with one stone. You told me a lie about Oscar gunning for me, and it turned out the way you hoped. I killed him and the state will kill me. I’ve had plenty of time to think back – how that night at Oscar’s, as soon as we arrived you hurried into the kitchen to give Abby a hand. Why so friendly so quickly with Abby who’d taken your man from you? I saw why. You’d gone into the kitchen to put arsenic in the chopped liver.”

“You can’t prove it, Johnny,” she whispered.

“No. And it wouldn’t save me. Well, I had my answer why you were so eager to take up with me the minute Oscar was through with you. You had to hang around his circle of friends, and you had to bide your time to work the killings so you wouldn’t be suspected. You succeeded perfectly, Stella. One thing took me a long time to understand, and that was why.”

“Wally,” she said.

I nodded. “It had to be. If you’d hated Oscar for throwing you over for Abby, you mightn’t have cared if you killed the others at that party as long as you got those two. But there was Tiny’s death – cold, deliberate, personal murder. The motive was the same as I’d thought was Abby’s. The same master plan – those who’d been in on Wally’s death must die. And so it had to be you and Wally.”

Stella moved closer to me. Her pretty face was taut with intensity.

“I loved him,” she said. “That wife of his, that Abby – she was a no-good louse. First time I ever saw her was when she came up to the apartment to see Oscar, but I knew all about her. From Wally. That marriage was a joke. You wouldn’t believe this – you were crazy over her yourself, like Oscar was – but she was after anything wore pants. That was all she gave a damn for, except maybe money.”

“I believe you,” I said. “You must have been the one who persuaded Oscar to take Wally in on the caper.”

“We fell for each other, Wally and I. One of those screwy, romantic pickups on a bus. We saw each other a few times and then planned to go away together. But we hadn’t a cent. I knew Oscar was planning a big job. He thought he kept me from knowing anything that was going on. But I knew. Always. And I was smarter. I got a guy who owed me a favor to bring Oscar and Wally together. Oscar took him in on it.” Her mouth went bitter. “How I hated the rackets! I wanted to get out of them. I hated Oscar. We had it all figured. We’d take Wally’s cut, the few thousand dollars, and go out west and live straight and clean. A little house somewhere and a decent job and children.” Her head drooped. “And Oscar killed him.”

“He might have died anyway from the bullet wound.”

“But not to give him at least a chance!” Stella hung onto her handbag with both hands. “You know why I came when you sent for me? To gloat. To tell you the truth if you didn’t know it already and laugh in your face.”

But she didn’t laugh. She didn’t gloat. She looked as sick and tired of it all as I was. She looked as if, like me, she no longer gave a damn about anything.

“It doesn’t give you much satisfaction, does it?” I said. “It doesn’t bring Wally back. It doesn’t make it easy to live with yourself.”

She swayed. “Oh, God! So much death and emptiness. And I can’t sleep, Johnny. I’ve had my revenge, but I can’t sleep.”

“Why don’t you try arsenic?” I said softly.

She looked at me. Her mouth started to work, but she didn’t say anything. Then she was gone.

That was yesterday. Today Bill Brant visited me and told me that Stella had taken poison and was dead.

“Arsenic?” I said.

“Yeah. The same way Georgie Ross died. What can you tell me about it?”

“Nothing, copper,” I said.

So that makes five of us dead, and very soon now I will join them, and we will all be dead. Except Abby, and she was never part of the picture.

Wasn’t she?

Stella was kidding herself by thinking she’d killed Oscar and me. Georgie and Tiny and finally herself, yes, but not us.

I needn’t have been so quick with my gun on the street outside the brownstone house. I could have waited another moment to make sure that it was actually his life or mine.

Now, writing this in my cell in the death house, I can face up to the truth. I had shot him down in the clear bright morning because he had Abby.