The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

1

It started off just like any other Friday night. I left my office in the Emcee Publishing Company building on Forty-Sixth Street at five-oh-five. I went across the street to the quiet, dim little bar in the Hotel Marlo where every Friday night for the past year or so, I’d been stopping off after work for a dry Manhattan. I felt good. I had that Friday-payday glow of satisfaction that you get when you’ve got a good tough week’s work behind you, money in your pocket and two free days at home with Fran and the kids ahead of you.

I wasn’t looking for any trouble. I would have the one drink, leave the Marlo and make the five thirty-seven Express bus to Jersey. I’d meet Johnny Haggard on the bus, and we’d bull it all the way home about our jobs and what we were going to do about the crab grass on our so-called lawns. Johnny lives next door to me in Greenacres, a new development just outside of Wildwood in North Jersey. There are plenty of acres there, but not much of it green, what with the thin layer of topsoil the builders used over all that fill. Anyhow.

No trouble. No excitement. Nothing different. Everything the same as usual. That’s what I thought . . . But a couple of things happened.

The Marlo is a small, old, side-street residential hotel. The bar is tiny, very dimly lighted, quiet, with no jukebox and usually not very crowded. Sometimes I’m the only one in there having a drink at five-ten. But not tonight. There was a girl there, all alone at the bar when I came in.

There was nothing special about her at first glance. And that’s all I did, at first, was glance at her. Believe me. Listen, I’ve been married ten years and I appreciate a good-looking woman the same as the next guy. I kid with the guys and sometimes with Fran, just to needle her a little, about stepping out and fooling around. You know. But you also know it’s talk with most of us guys. After all, a man’s got a swell wife, a couple of fine kids, a nice home. You can’t have everything. So you make up your mind to that and forget about the things you don’t have.

Herb, the tall, gloomy-looking bartender at the Marlo, saw me come in the door and had my Manhattan half made by the time I got onto one of the leather barstools. I sat there, savoring the first lemon-peel-tart smooth burn of the drink in my mouth, trickling down my throat, and looked at myself in the backbar mirror. I was not the only one. The girl at the other end of the bar was looking at my reflection, too. Our eyes met. She let them hold for a moment and then dropped her gaze, almost shyly.

Some girls can do a lot with their eyes. This one could. I don’t know how to explain it. Her eyes were very dark, extremely widely set, kind of intense and brooding-looking. With that one look she seemed to say: “You seem interesting to me. I think I could get to like you. If you study me closely I think you’ll feel the same way. And if you spoke to me, if you did it nicely, not in a wise-guy way, I wouldn’t brush you off. But you’ll have to make the approach. I wouldn’t dare.” You know what I mean?

So using the backbar mirror, I looked her over more carefully. She wasn’t well dressed. She was wearing a trench coat, with the back of the collar turned up and no hat. Her hair was thick and blonde and hung gracefully about her shoulders but that’s all you could say about it. Her nose was a little too broad and her mouth too wide and full-lipped, but somehow those features seemed to fit just right with the dark, brooding eyes and although she wasn’t striking, she was a damned attractive girl. The quiet type. The kind who wouldn’t want a lot of money spent on her, who would be content to just sit and have a couple of drinks with a guy and talk and maybe go to a movie or something . . . You can see the way my mind was working.

I’d almost finished the Manhattan when our eyes met in the mirror again and this time, they held longer and I got the feeling that both of us were trying to tear our gaze away and couldn’t. It was as though we were looking very deep into each other, hungrily. And then when she finally yanked her gaze away, I felt shaken and a little giddy, as though this was my third Manhattan instead of my first.

I glanced sideways at her and she had her legs angled off the stool and crossed. She was wearing high heels, not extreme, but enough to give her naturally gracefully curved legs what seemed like extra length and sleekness. I suddenly realized that my heart was pounding too hard, and so were the pulses in my wrist.

Herb the bartender went down to the girl, seeing she’d finished her drink. He asked her if she’d like another. She hesitated and then caught my glance in the backbar mirror again and turned quickly away and said, “Yes, please.” Her voice was soft, husky, almost a whisper.

I knew then that I’d better get out of there, fast. All kinds of crazy thoughts and ideas were going through my head. I drained my glass, started to get up and somebody swatted me on the back. I wheeled angrily to look into Ronny Chernow’s handsome, grinning face.

“Hi, Kip,” he said. “Living dangerously, I see. Sitting in a cozy little bar, drinking cocktails and flirting with a pretty girl! Ah, you sly old dogs, you quiet ones, you never can tell about your type.”

I got very red. I started to tell Chernow that in the first place I wasn’t flirting, in the second place I was only thirty-one years old, at least a couple of years younger than he was. But he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at the girl at the end of the bar and smiling at her. He was looking at her the way guys like Ronny Chernow always look at girls, as though she wasn’t wearing anything; patronizingly, as though he was thinking: You’re not too bad, Baby. Maybe I’ll give you a great big break and go after you!

But the girl wasn’t paying any attention to him. Chernow turned back to me. He took hold of my arm. “Hey, you’re not running off so soon. Have another drink with me. Or will Momma spank you if you miss that first bus home?”

What can you say to a remark like this? If you deny it, then go, you make it sound true, anyhow. I thought about the girl at the bar. She was listening to this. The loud way Chernow always talked, she couldn’t help it.

I knew what Ronnie Chernow really thought about me: I was stuffy, not a sport, a guy who never had any fun, was regimented, never varied his routine – a man on a treadmill, going like hell but never getting anywhere. I didn’t care what Chernow thought about me. But I cared what I thought. And suddenly, crazily, I wondered if he was right. I had to prove that he wasn’t.

“Okay, Ronny,” I said. “If you’re buying. I hear you’re a tight man with a buck.”

That got him. Chernow was always talking about how much money he made and spent. “Me?” he said. “What are you talking about? Why, I spend more in one—” Then he stopped and grinned, realizing I’d turned the needle around on him. “Okay, Kip,” he said.

While Herb made the second Manhattan, I looked at the clock. It was five-twenty. By now, I should have been a block away, on my way home, on the way to that five-thirty-seven Express. I knew now that I was going to miss it. It was the damnedest feeling. Maybe it was silly, but I felt a little sick and scared, apprehensive. In the five years we’d been living in Wildwood, I hadn’t missed that bus. I’d never stayed in town one night, even. Now that I realized that, it seemed a little ridiculous. At the same time I felt a slight exultation, a sort of breaking loose feeling, of strange freedom. I drained half of the Manhattan at one gulp. I looked at Ronny Chernow in the mirror behind the bar.

He was big, handsome, in a red-faced, square-jawed sort of way. His carefully tousled, boyishly curly hair made him look younger than he was. A lot of the girls in our office were crazy about him. He was the vigorous, aggressive, breezy type and he was always kidding around with the girls and always letting hints drop to other guys in the place that he’d dated a number of them and found them vulnerable.

He was the business manager of Emcee Publications and I don’t know what he made, but it must have been somewhere around ten thousand a year. But he spent and dressed as though his salary was three times that. Being single, though, with nobody else’s way to pay through life but his own, I guess he could do that.

It was hard to like the man. He was big-mouthed and overpowering. But it was just as hard not to admire him. He was everything that I was not and I thought about that, sitting here. At least Ronny Chernow had color. I was drab. His kind of life was excitement. Mine was boredom, monotony. Men like Chernow felt sorry for worms like me.

I began to rebel against that. I told myself: I’m going to have a little change. I deserve it. I’m way overdue. I’ll show this big, handsome jerk next to me that I can have fun, too. I’ll call Fran and tell her I won’t be home until late. I’ll stay here, have another drink or two and then go someplace for dinner. Later, I’ll go to the fights at the Garden.

“Ronny,” I said. “You’re a real round-town boy. Where’s a good place to have dinner? I’m staying in town tonight.”

His thick handsome brows rose as though I’d said I was going out to stick up a bank. “What!” he said. “You’re finally going to break away from Momma’s apron strings? Congratulations, kid. I’d just about given you up. Maybe you are human, after all.” He slapped me on the back again. “Where you going? Got a date?”

I began to enjoy this. I wanted it to last a little longer. I began to almost like Chernow. “Now, look,” I said and winked at him. “Have I asked you where you’re going tonight, who you’re going to be with? Does Gimbels tell Macy’s. It’s none of my business. Maybe this isn’t any of yours.”

He looked dubious but didn’t press the point. We finished our drinks and Chernow said: “Well, since you don’t have to run, let’s do this again.” He flipped his empty glass with the back of his forefinger.

I didn’t answer. I looked at the clock. It was five-thirty. I should call Fran. Somehow I dreaded that. That would be the final break with my routine. I hated to make it. Yet I had to call her. Then I remembered that she wouldn’t be expecting me until six-thirty. She wouldn’t leave to meet the bus at Wildwood until six-twenty. I still had plenty of time for that call. I watched Herb make two more drinks. Then I looked toward the glass and saw the girl at the end of the bar staring at me again. Chernow noticed, too.

“Hey!” he said. “That baby is giving you the eye. If she even half looked at me like that, I’d be down there sitting on her lap by now.”

“Well,” I said, sarcastically, “you’re the Casanova type, anyhow.”

He missed the sarcasm. “Listen,” he said. His eyes appraised me. “You could do all right, too, if you’d give yourself half a chance. You’re a good-looking guy – a little on the slim side, but not bad. You’re too timid, though. Women like aggressive guys. You gotta go after them. You—”

“Hey!” I broke in. He was beginning to embarrass me. “Not to change the subject, but did you find out from the advertising department how come we lost that second cover ad?”

“They’ve switched to the Tripub Comics group for the next six months. But they’ll be back as soon as Tri’s circulation drops and you can goose ours up again. How about getting on the ball and doing that, huh, kid?”

“Sure,” I began to burn a little. As editor of Emcee’s Comic magazine group, I was responsible for circulation. “That’s easy. Just get the old man to allow me five bucks a page more for the artists and a dollar a page more for the writers. Better art and better stories are what the kids are buying. I do the best I can on the lousy budget I got.”

“I suppose,” Chernow finished his drink, swung around on his stool. He was looking at the legs of the girl at the end of the bar. He made a whistling sound. “Man, look at those legs!” he said. “Kip, kid, if you don’t make that before you leave here, I’ll disown you . . . Well, I got to run. Have a good time, boy. Live dangerously!”

I waved and in the bar mirror, watched him breeze out of the place. I told myself to hell with him. The next time I caught the eye of the girl at the end of the bar, I smiled. She looked frightened and turned her eyes right away.

“Herb,” I said. He came toward me, wiping his hands on his bar apron, his amber eyes doleful. “Herb, ask the lady if she’ll have a drink on me. At the end of the bar there.”

The bartender’s dolorous voice said: “You sure you want to do that, Mr Morgan? I mean, I know it’s none of my business, but . . .” He broke off, half apologetically.

Something like a bell of warning seemed to toll inside my head. But I was looking at myself in the bar. Like Chernow had said, I wasn’t a bad-looking guy. And that third Manhattan had hit home. I wasn’t drunk but I was feeling – well – aggressive, cocky.

“Don’t be silly, Herb,” I said. “See if the lady’d like a drink.”

He ambled down to the other end of the bar, spoke to the girl. I watched her in the mirror. She registered a little surprise, a little confusion, just the right amount of each, very cutely. I didn’t hear what she said, but saw Herb start to mix a martini, then take it down to her. She looked at me in the bar mirror, raised the glass and formed the words, “Here’s luck,” with her full lips.

I said: “Herb, make me another drink. I’ve got to make a phone call.” It was a quarter to six, now. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I went through into the lobby to the phone booths. I called Fran, told her I’d been detained at the office, but was leaving now.

“I haven’t looked at the schedule yet, Baby,” I said. “So I don’t know which bus I’ll be able to get at this time. I’ll call you from Wildwood and you can run out. Okay?”

“Kip,” Fran said. “Are you all right?”

My heart skipped a couple of beats for no reason at all. “Sure. Of course I’m all right. What do you mean?”

“You haven’t been drinking?”

I didn’t answer for several seconds. Then I said: “Well, I stopped off and had a couple with Ronny Chernow. Why, I don’t sound drunk, do I?”

She giggled. “No, silly. But you never call me ‘Baby’. It sounded funny, coming from you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’ll see you later.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, Baby!” She hung up.

I realized as soon as I left the phone booth that the instant I’d spoken to Fran, I’d forgotten all about my resolve to stay in town for dinner and the fights. At the sound of her voice I’d instinctively reverted to my role of the faithful home-loving husband. Routine had won out. I shrugged. It was probably just as well. Away from the dim lighting of the bar and the sight of the girl sitting there all alone, I realized that I just wasn’t cut out for that sort of thing, let’s face it. I would go back, finish that last drink I’d ordered and take off for the bus terminal.

Back in the Marlo bar, as I passed behind the girl at the end, she half turned, said, huskily: “Thanks for the drink. Why don’t you bring yours over here? I mean, it’s silly for the two of us not to talk.”

I got kind of choked up. My heart felt too big and thick inside my chest; I was sure she could hear it. I was suddenly glad that I’d made that mistake on the phone and committed myself about going home, now. If I hadn’t, I’d probably take this girl up on her invitation. The way the sound of her voice hit me, the impact her eyes had upon me – well – a guy is only human.

I said: “Uh – thanks – but I’ve got to run, now. Some other time.”

I went to my own end of the bar, gulped down the Manhattan, gagging on it a little. When I set the empty glass down, I misjudged the distance, set it down a little too hard. I knew then that I was a little tight. I knew when I got outside it was going to hit me. I turned away from the bar and the girl spoke again:

“How about letting me buy you one, before you go? I mean, I don’t want to be obligated. Please? Pretty please?”

This time her voice didn’t get under my skin. It even annoyed me a little. She seemed suddenly overanxious and the soft huskiness had become harsh with the almost desperation tone of her voice now. And that repeated ‘I mean’ business grated, too. I was glad this was almost over and I’d had sense enough to get out from under before it was too late.

I had to pass her again to go out through the lobby exit. I said, almost abruptly: “No. No thank you. Next time. Good night.” She half swung around on the stool as I started past and I had a nervous intuition that she was going to jump off the stool, confront me, block my exit, try to stop me from leaving. But she didn’t.

I got out into the lobby and she must have been moving on tiptoe because I wasn’t aware that she’d followed me out until she was right up beside me. She hooked her left arm through mine. At the same time I felt something hard being jammed against my right ribs. The arm hooked in mine pulled me forcibly to a stop. I looked at her. Out here in the bright light of the small hotel lobby, she didn’t look so good. Her eyes were still beautiful but now their intensity, their broodingness looked sullen, almost angry. Lipstick was too thick on her wide mouth. Under the powder and rouge, her skin was coarse, grainy. But she was smiling up at me, invitingly. At least it would look that way to somebody else. But it didn’t to me. Her face was too tight. The smile was too forced.

“Just a min—”

“Shut up, stupid,” she cut me off. She was whispering, through her teeth, without breaking the smile. “I’ve got a gun in your ribs and if you make me, I’ll use it right here. I could get away before anyone even realized what happened. Understand? Do as I say.”

I wanted to laugh and at the same time a chill ran all over me. This was ridiculous. I was Kip Morgan, managing editor of the Comic Magazine Group at Emcee Publications, Inc., right across the street. I had never been arrested in my life. I bad never known any woman like this before. All my friends were respectable. And this was New York City, at the dinner hour. This was the Hotel Marlo, right in the public lobby, with the desk clerk and a bellhop only a few yards away and a portly old gentleman sitting in a lobby chair only a few feet away. This was all crazy.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You . . .” I let my voice trail off. I was looking down at her other hand and it was thrust inside the trenchcoat where nobody could see it. The hand that was holding a gun, she said, against my ribs. I began to know, right then, that she wasn’t kidding.

“Just walk with me slowly, toward the elevator. Don’t say anything. Don’t make any commotion or try to signal anyone. Don’t try to break away. Behave yourself and you won’t get hurt. I promise.”

Sickness suddenly twisted at my stomach. I knew what it was, now. This was payday. It was a Friday and the Fifteenth. Payday for almost everybody in New York City. This was some kind of a new holdup gimmick. I thought of the hundred and twenty-five dollars in cash I had in my pocket. A full week’s take-home. A whole week of getting up every morning at six-thirty and not getting home until almost seven at night. A week of deadliness and cajoling artists and script writers into getting their stuff in on time, of making out vouchers, and editing scripts and going over silverprints and a million other little chores and details.

A hundred and twenty-five bucks. And a mortgage payment due on the house. And food money next week for Fran. The new suit for young Stevie. The party dress for little June.

Fury seared through me. And shame. Fury because this girl was going to try and steal my money, that money that meant so many things to so many people. Shame because she was obviously cheap and vicious and I’d almost let myself be led on into taking her out. Because I hadn’t gone home at the usual time, like someone sensible, because I’d let myself be jived into an extra drink.

I started to wrench violently away from her, then to grab her and howl for help. But she must have felt me tense. We were in front of the elevator, now. The gun ground deep into my ribs, hurting. She whispered. “You’d die, instantly. You wouldn’t have a chance. Don’t be a jerk. Be good for just a few more minutes and you’ll be alive tomorrow.”

The violent anger faded. Losing the money wouldn’t hurt Fran and the kids half as much as it would their losing me. “Okay,” I said. “But I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m broke. I deposited my money in the bank this noon.” It was a last desperate play. It didn’t work.

The elevator door opened and she whispered: “Be quiet, now.”

We got in the elevator. The operator hardly glanced at us. A guy and a gal, arm in arm, getting into an elevator. What was that to get excited about? The girl, undoubtedly, was registered here. So she was taking a friend to her room. It was early in the evening. What was wrong with that?

Neither of us spoke after she said, “Fourteen” to the operator.

I remembered, crazily, that the fourteenth floor in all hotels is really the thirteenth. It’s supposed to be less unlucky that way. It wasn’t for me.

We got out and she guided me to the left, down the corridor. I heard the elevator door slam shut behind us. There was no sound in the whole hotel. Even our footsteps were muffled on the carpeting. I began to get really scared. The hollow of my spine got wet with sweat and my shirt stuck back there. Perspiration trickled coldly down my ribs, too. I thought once again, desperately, of yanking away, making a break. But at the same instant I realized that the girl would be even less likely to hesitate about killing me up here, with no witnesses. No . . . My chance was gone. If there’d ever been any chance.

2. The Patsy

She stopped in front of 1409 and still holding that gun in my ribs, she crossed her other hand over to the right side pocket and extracted the hotel key. The door opened easily and she unhooked my arm, pulled the gun out from under her coat and shoved me inside. There was a short hallway and the room at the other end was lighted. The gun at my spine forced me along, into that room.

There was a man sitting there. I had never seen him before in my life. But he seemed to know me. He said: “Hello, Morgan.”

He was slouched in a green, leather-covered easy chair. A cigarette dangled from one of his slim, pale, long-fingered hands. Streamers of smoke went straight up. He was small and very thin, but not gangsterish-looking. Not in the movie tradition, anyhow. His hair was crew-cropped, a mousy brown color. His ears looked too large for his narrow, bony skull. He had level, gray, intelligent-looking eyes and they weren’t shifty at all. They held my gaze, almost amusedly. But his mouth was what told me I was in for a hard time. It was tiny and pursed tightly as though he was mad at somebody and all tense and strung-up, even though he was sitting there so at ease and relaxed.

Still looking at me, he said to the girl: “What the hell took you so long, Viv?”

She stood off to one side still holding the gun. “Brother!” she said. “What a Sunday-school boy. I did everything. Everything but go over and sit on his lap. I would have done that, but that spaniel-faced old barkeep didn’t seem too crazy about what I was up to. Anyhow, I couldn’t get him to bite. He was running right out on me and I had to practically kidnap him, right in the lobby. And brother, don’t think that didn’t make me nervous!”

That was funny. I’d never even given a thought to the fact that she’d probably been just as scared as I was down there. I said, suddenly: “Look, what’s this all about? If you want my money, I’ll give it to you. You’d take it, anyhow. But, please take it easy. I – I’ve got a wife and kids.” My voice broke and I felt sick, ashamed, pleading, begging with these people. But I’d have gotten down on my knees to them, right then, if it would have helped me get out of there any faster.

“Money,” the man in the chair said. He laughed. It was a quick, sputtering sound. “Sure, we’ll take your money. Throw me your wallet.”

I reached inside my jacket pocket and took out the wallet, tossed it to him. “I’d like the wallet back.”

He took out the sheaf of bills, riffled through them. He tossed the wallet back to me. “Over a hundred bucks more,” he said to the girl, “Vivian, I’ve got the papers all ready. You keep that gun on him. But if there’s any trouble, watch what you’re doing. Don’t shoot me by mistake.”

He reached down to the armchair-side old-fashioned radio, and I saw that it was already lit up, turned on. He twisted the volume knob slowly and an orchestra playing a popular song grew louder and louder until it was almost deafening in the room. He said to Vivian:

“Now, if you have to shoot, it won’t be so noticeable. Nor when he hollers. I think he’ll holler real good.”

With the racket of the radio, I could only half hear what he said. But my mind filled in the rest of it. I was suddenly confused and I felt cold and ill the way you do when you’ve got a fever and you have to get up out of bed at night. I was weak as a child.

I tried to figure what this was all about but I couldn’t make it.

I looked toward the hotel room desk and saw that it was covered with papers. The man got up out of the chair. He said: “Vivian, get behind him with that shooter and ease him over to the desk.”

She jabbed the muzzle of the gun against my spine and I stepped toward the desk. “Morgan,” the man said. His voice got taut, his words clipped. “Morgan, I’m going to ask you to sign something. I hope you refuse. I hope you try to give us trouble. Because then we’ll have to make you sign it. And that’s what I’d like to have to do.”

I looked at him and he held his hand out toward me, his skinny, white, long-fingered hands. In the pinkish palms he held two rolls of nickels. He closed his fingers around them. His knuckles stood out sharply. With the weight of those nickels in them, those knuckles would make his fists like gnarled clubs. There was suddenly a roaring in my ears and my heart seemed to be up and choking in my throat. I hadn’t been in a fight, been hit by a fist, since I was a kid. And only twice, then. I’d always hated fist fights. I’d avoided them. It made me ill to hit somebody else and to feel another’s fist making that sickly smack noise against my own face was worse.

Turning away from him, I looked down at the top paper on the desk. It was a letter on Emcee Publishing Company letterhead stationery. My eyes seemed to ache and I had trouble reading. I kept wiping the flat of my hands up and down my trousers but they still stayed slick with sweat. The letter was dated today. It said:

To Whom It May Concern:

For the past year I have steadily and regularly been embezzling company funds. All told, I have taken nearly $50,000. This was done with the aid and connivance of Miss Elizabeth Tremayne, of the Business Department. How, will be obvious, Monday, when the books are examined.

The money has all been spent on gambling on horses and in bad stock market investments. I’d hoped to win or earn the money back and prevent eventual discovery, but this did not work out.

For all the trouble and disillusion this is going to cause, I am truly sorry.

I herewith, also append a list of the dozen or more different signatures I used on the company checks, to remove any doubt that I’ve been the culprit.

(Signed)

Under this was a list of signatures, names I didn’t even recognize. But as I looked at this letter, it flashed through my mind what this was all about. Emcee Publication’s fiscal year started on Monday. A complete auditing would be made. Whoever had been embezzling knew their time was up and they couldn’t avoid discovery. I was going to be the fall guy – in advance.

Something hit me in the cheek and for a moment I didn’t feel any pain. Only shock and a slight dizziness. But the blow whirled me around. Something hit me in the stomach. I bent way over, took a stumbling step forward, my legs apart, and almost fell. I’d never felt so sick to my stomach. Yet all I could do was make gagging sounds. I couldn’t seem to get any breath. As though from a great distance, down a long, wind-rushing tunnel I heard someone say: “Sign that letter.”

The sickness left. I straightened up. The girl behind me said: “Give him a chance, Smitty. Don’t bang up his face.”

I stood there sucking in breath, trying to focus my eyes. I leaned on the desk, with both hands, looked down at that letter. That letter! I couldn’t sign that, no matter what they did to me. I couldn’t take the rap for somebody else’s crookedness.

I thought of the whispering and sniggering there’d be at the Emcee offices, Monday, after news of that letter spread around . . . “That Kip Morgan,” they’d say. “Who’d ever have thought it? But they say those quiet guys are the ones you’ve got to watch out for. Listen, I’ll bet some dame got plenty of that dough, too!” . . . I could see the newspaper headlines, especially in the Wildwood Press:

LOCAL MAN CONFESSES $50,000 THEFT!

I thought of my neighbours, of my kids going to school and the other kids pointing at them, whispering. I knew how cruel kids could be about things like that.

I wouldn’t do it. To hell with them. I wasn’t going to sign it.

Smitty hit me again. His weighted, sharp-knuckled fist caught me in the kidney. I went twisting over to one side like a stagger-drunk. Pain ran all through me in little flashes of fire, then ran all together in a balled-up flame of aching agony all up my left side and back. I felt tears hot and blurry in my eyes, then running down my cheeks. I looked at Smitty. His wide-set gray eyes were crinkled at the corners as though he was grinning. But his little kewpie doll mouth stayed the same; it showed no expression.

“You’re a real hero, aren’t you?” he said. “That’s beautiful. I like heroes.”

He came toward me. And I suddenly didn’t care about the girl with the gun behind me. Let her shoot me. Let them kill me. At least the pain would be over. Then they could never make me sign that letter. I swung at him with every ounce of strength I had left. He picked the blow off with his left arm like a lovetap. He took hold of me with his left hand, by the shirt front. His right hand whip-snapped back and forth across my cheeks and mouth, stinging hard. I felt the salty blood in my mouth.

Then his balled, weighted fist hit me in the stomach again. I don’t remember falling. But I was on the floor, staring down at the green wall-to-wall rug. I saw Smitty’s feet in front of me. He wore patent leather shoes, like dancing pumps, with small black leather bows on them. Then his feet disappeared. There was pain – vast, searing pain all through my ribs as he kicked me.

I cursed. I called him every filthy word I’d ever heard. I was crying, sobbing with rage and pain. I said: “Why are you doing this to me? Why, why? I never did anything to you! Stop it! Please, please stop!”

“For a thousand bucks we’re doing it,” Smitty said. I could hear him quite plainly in the momentary lull between the end of a song on the radio and the commercial. “For a grand I’d kick hell out of my own mother. So it’s nothing personal, understand. But you’d better sign that letter.”

The radio music blasted out again. I felt somebody grab me under the arms, lift me. Somehow I got my feet together under me and stood. But not for long. My knees seemed to have no bones in them. I fell backward and sat down on the edge of the bed. I leaned over and put my face in my hands, then looked at the smear of blood on my fingers.

There was suddenly a terrible noise and excruciating pain in my ear. It wasn’t until later that I realized he’d slapped me over the ear with his cupped hand. For a moment, I couldn’t even hear the radio. I rocked in agony and blubbered. I called to Fran to help me. I kept calling her name. It didn’t do any good. Smitty kept slapping and cuffing me and when I’d fall over on my side onto the bed, his fist would wallop into my ribs or kidneys.

After a while there was just a void of pain. I got numb all over, didn’t think, didn’t react. And then I realized he wasn’t hitting me any more. I looked up through tear-fogged eyes at him and knew that as long as I didn’t react he’d ease up on me. At the same time, sharp thoughts seemed to flash suddenly through my brain. I felt filled with cunning. I told myself: “I can outsmart this guy. I can be crooked, too. I can double-deal him! Okay, I’ll sign their damned letter. I’ve been stupid. What difference does it make? This is only Friday night and I’ve got my office keys. I’ve got until Monday morning. I can prove my innocence. What good is that piece of paper? I can show my cuts and bruises, prove that I was forced to sign it. I’ll go right to the police and I’ll help them find out who it was really stole that money.

Leering at Smitty and Vivian, I got up from the bed. I reached out toward the desk. “All – all right,” I said. “I’ll sign.”

I started to walk toward the desk but my legs gave out. Smitty had to put his arm around me, hold me up until I got to the desk, could lean on it with one hand. I picked up the pen. I signed their confession for them. I had hardly put the pen down when Smitty hit me in the temple. There was an explosion of multicolored lights. There was darkness. Then blinding light again. On and off. On and off.

I wasn’t completely out. I was aware of being dragged along the floor by hands under my armpits. I could hear voices. I could hear that the radio had been turned off. But I couldn’t move. There was a tingling all through my arms and legs the same as you get when you lie on one arm and it goes numb. I heard Smitty swear. He said: “Shut the window again, Viv. We can’t do it, now. There’s a damn cop standing in that doorway right across the street.”

“So what?” she said. “He isn’t looking up here. We can get him dumped out and the cop won’t know anything about it until he hits the pavement. We’ll be gone by then.”

“Don’t be stupid. Suppose he does just happen to glance up while we’re easing him out the window. We’d never get out of the hotel.”

Oh, yes, I’d been very clever, very cunning, to sign that confession for them. So clever, so brilliant – so stupified with pain, I hadn’t realized they couldn’t let me live. I was going to be a “suicide”. That would tie in beautifully with the confession. How could they let me live to contest the thing?

Some of the numbness left my arms and legs. I realized I was huddled in a heap against the wall under the hotel-room window. I thought of the way it would look out that window, down fourteen – no thirteen – flights. I thought about air rushing past me, taking my breath away as I’d fall, wheeling, turning, over and over. I thought of the sound I’d make, hitting the pavement down there.

“Why doesn’t the fat fool go, get out of that doorway?” Vivian said. “Of all the fool places for a cop to stand around and kill time!”

Please, I begged, Please, God, don’t let him move. Don’t let him move, make him stay there. Right there!

“Listen,” Vivian said. “Turn the radio on again. You can shoot him. Make it look like he did it, himself. I’m getting nervous. I want to get this over with and get out of here.”

“Oh, sure,” Smitty said. “With this gun. It can be traced, you goon. That’s no good. There’s got to be some other way. That damned cop looks like he’s settled for the night over there.”

There was silence for a moment. I felt my leg twitch and jerk, uncontrollably. Vivian said: “Hurry up. He’s coming to, again.”

I lay very still. I got cramped from the huddled position they’d let my limp figure fall into. But I didn’t move again.

“His wrists,” Vivian said, “We can break a glass. A sharp piece of glass and cut the veins in his wrists.”

Smitty thought about that. I got afraid they would hear the thunder of my heart, know I was listening. Then Smitty said: “No. First place, the police would wonder about him being all bruised up. Going out the window, that wouldn’t have been noticed or thought anything of. Besides, the bleeding would take too long. We’ll wait. That cop’s got to leave sometime.”

It came to me quite clearly, then, what I had to do. I didn’t like the idea. I wasn’t brave about it. I just didn’t have any choice. It came to me that as far as they were concerned, I was already dead. There was no question but what they were going to kill me, by one method or another, sooner or later. They had to.

Knowing that I was going to die, anyhow, I suddenly knew that I’d make it as tough as possible for them, at least make a fight for it. Being shot wouldn’t be any worse than being tossed out that window. I braced both hands against the wall and lunged away from it, scrabbled to my feet, staggering back away from them. I was weak and trembling. Both Vivian and Smitty looked at me in surprise. Vivian still held the gun.

“Well,” Smitty said. “Snookums woke up.” He put his hands in his pockets, took out the rolls of nickels. “I’ll have to rock him off to sleep again.”

I started backing away, slowly, toward the door. I saw Vivian raise the revolver, saw her fingers tighten, whiten, around it. I heard Smitty say: “Don’t use that gun. We don’t have to. The radio’s off. They’d hear a shot all through the hotel. And there’d be no powder burns. It wouldn’t look like suicide. I’ll take care of him.”

He came at me fast, half running. I whirled and got to the corner of the room where it turned into the hall leading to the door. I stopped and swung around again. He was almost on me and his own momentum was too much for him to stop. I hit him. I swung with all my might, from the knees. The blow smashed into his cheeks. But nothing happened. He just swayed and looked at me with a sort of puzzled look in those wide-set, level gray eyes. I knew then that I was too weak to hurt him much.

I knew then that this was going to be like a dream I often had, where I was fighting somebody and I kept hitting them, hitting them, but nothing happened and they didn’t seem to be hurt. They’d keep laughing at me. This was going to be like that. For one crazy moment I thought that maybe all this was just part of some nightmare. Maybe I’d awaken any moment and find myself at home in bed, with Fran curled up warmly beside me.

Then I heard Vivian say: “Get out of the way, Smitty. I’ve got to shoot him. We can’t let him get away!” She sounded hysterical.

That was when I swung again. This time my fist hit Smitty on the point of the jaw and he staggered backward until his legs hit the edge of the bed and he sat down on it. I went down the hall toward the door, sprinting. I got the door open and looked back and saw Vivian turn the corner of the room and level the gun at me. The door slammed shut, blocking off the picture of that snarling, feline face of hers. I didn’t think of direction. I just turned to the left and ran and turned a corner of the hall and saw ahead of me on the right a door marked Fire Exit. I went through it and stopped. If they came after me, they’d assume that I’d gone down the stairs. So I went up. I went up two flights, three steps at a time, on my tiptoes, making as little noise as possible. At the top, I sprawled, exhausted, against the wall and listened. There was no sound from the fire stairs at all. Only the sound of my own labored breathing.

I went through into the sixteenth floor hallway, made my way to the elevator, rang the bell. It seemed like hours before the indicator crawled up to fourteen. I held my breath to see if it would stop there. It didn’t. It came on up to sixteen. The elevator operator, a middle-aged man with a hawk nose and glasses, peered at me curiously as I got in.

“Listen,” I said. “If you get a buzz at the fourteenth floor, don’t stop. Please. It – it’s a matter of life and death.”

I looked at the indicator bank and so did he. We both saw there was no signal to stop at fourteen. I leaned against the wall of the elevator and for the first time became really aware of the throbbing aches in my ribs and kidneys and at my left temple. There was a welt there from Smitty’s knuckles. I took out a handkerchief and wet it with my tongue, wiped some of the blood away from my lips. There wasn’t much. My lip was cut on the inside, was a little puffy.

“What happened?” the operator asked. He looked at me with that curious but unemotional expression that spectators at an accident always have.

“I–I had some trouble, that’s all,” I said. Sure. Just some trouble. Beaten up, almost thrown out of a window, but for the intervention of some kind providence. I got to trembling again, thinking about it.

The elevator reached the main floor and I walked, wobbledy-legged, across the lobby to the desk. The clerk, a needle-thin man with great horned-framed glasses and a pointed nose said, “Yes, sir?” without hardly looking at me.

I took a deep breath. Down here in the brightly lighted, rather ancient and shoddy austerity of this hotel lobby, what I was going to have to say would sound melodramatic, ridiculous. I said. “You’d better send the house officer up to room fourteen-o-nine. I just escaped from there after being beaten up and robbed and almost killed. I—”

I stopped. A sickening shock went through me. I had forgotten that letter of confession I’d signed. Smitty and Vivian still had that. I looked up at the desk clerk again. He was peering at me as though I’d just crawled out of the woodwork. “Are you – uh – sure, sir?” he said.

“Look.” I took out my blood-smeared handkerchief and showed it to him. I curled back my upper lip with one finger so he could see the cut there. I pointed to my temple and the lump right in front of my ear. I said: “A girl accosted me here in the lobby and forced me up to her room at gunpoint. There was a man there and he—”

“Here in this lobby?” the clerk cut in. “What room was this, sir?”

I told him. I got sore. “Are you going to send the house dick up there or do I have to call outside police? I want you to hurry. They’ve probably left that room already as it is. But check it anyhow. And they can’t get out of this hotel without my seeing them. I’ll stay here with a cop until they do try to get out.”

The desk clerk was looking over his file card. “Room fourteen-o-nine,” he said. “We don’t have a girl registered for that room. It – well – I suppose it could be a girl. The name is K. Morgan. No baggage. Paid one day, in advance.”

“Morgan,” I repeated after him. “That’s my name. Let me see the registry.”

He showed it to me. The signature was a reasonable facsimile of my own.

They hadn’t made any mistake. They’d registered the room in my name. It would look like I’d taken it with the express purpose of leaping fom the window, killing myself. At the same time I realized that they probably had another room of their own, on the same floor, that they could flee to, hide out in, if anything went wrong.

“Do you remember what the person looked like who registered for that room?” I said.

The clerk shook his head, looked at the registration. “Whoever it was, signed in at noon. I didn’t come on until four P.M.”

I watched the clerk pick up a desk phone, heard him ask for 1409. He waited quite a while, then hung up. “Nobody answers,” he said.

“Of course not. They’ve gone.”

But they were still in the hotel. I thought: I’ll have them call the police. We’ll go to every room on the fourteenth floor. If we don’t find them, we’ll go through every room in the hotel. We’ll get them.

Then I realized that wasn’t bright. Supposing I did find them. I couldn’t prove anything. There were two of them, their words against mine. Even Herb, the bartender, recognizing that the girl was the one who’d been in the bar with me, left when I did, wouldn’t prove anything. That was out.

I got a better idea. I told the clerk: “Never mind. Skip it. I’ll handle it myself.”

I turned away from the desk and went out onto the street. I crossed the street and got into a darkened doorway over there, where I could watch the hotel exit. I stood there. This would be better. One or both of them would have to leave the hotel sometime. They would have to report to whoever had hired them to do this to me. I’d follow, find out who it was. Then I’d really have something to work on. But maybe they wouldn’t go to their boss. They might telephone him or her and report on what had happened. Well, that was a chance I’d have to take.

While I waited, I went over the whole thing in my mind. I got the setup pretty clearly. They were trying to frame me for the embezzlement, so it must’ve been worked in a way that would have been possible for me to accomplish. There was only one way that was possible. I didn’t actually handle any company cash. But I got the checks for other people and mailed them to them. To our artists and writers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in checks.

The procedure was this. I had to voucher for a script or art work when it was turned in, as managing editor of the comics magazine group. The business office made out checks for those vouchers and the individual checks in turn were given back to me to mail to the artists and writers. The average writer’s check for a single script was sixty to seventy dollars. The average artist’s check was for twenty dollars a comic-book page, which meant their checks averaged about one hundred and sixty dollars. We paid editorial bills twice a week. It would be a comparatively simple thing for me, in connivance with somebody in the business office, to make out vouchers to phoney names, for scripts and/or art work that hadn’t even been done, a couple of times a week. Then, when I got the checks, to sign them with the name they were made out to, then double-endorse them with another phoney name, with which I’d already established a bank account, and deposit them to that account.

Liz Tremayne, the bookkeeper, if working with me on this deal, could easily cover for me on the books, until the end of the fiscal year when the regular annual auditing took place.

I had never thought of this possibility to defraud Emcee Publications out of thousands of dollars before. But I thought of it now. Plenty. The more I thought of it, the more I realized how badly that confession would make things look for me.

But since I hadn’t done this, I had to figure out who had. Nobody but me handled checks and vouchers in the editorial department. Almost anybody in the business office could have worked the deal. All they had to do was get hold of a stack of editorial voucher forms from the stock room, learn to forge my handwriting, and – working with Liz Tremayne, who kept books and made out the checks – they wouldn’t even have to be too clever with that. But how about the people who signed the checks? Wouldn’t they get suspicious over a couple of extra checks being there twice a week?

The checks bore two signatures, M. C. Malkom’s, the president’s, and the authorized counter-signature, which would be Ronny Chernow’s, as head of the Business Office. Chernow! Since Emcee Publications put out other books besides comics – Confession magazines and a string of pulps – there would probably be twenty or thirty checks to be signed twice a week.

Mr Malkom probably never even looked at them, but went through them and signed them one right after the other as fast as he could. Especially since the checks always went up for his final signature close to five o’clock in the afternoon. But Chernow wouldn’t rush through those checks, signing them, without examining them. That was part of his job, to double check on things like that, make sure a mistake hadn’t been made and two checks made out in error for the same material.

That did it. I knew then that Ronny Chernow was the one who had been working this embezzlement deal, who had decided to frame me for it. It all stacked up. Chernow, himself, gambled, played the market a lot. I’d seen the newspapers on his desk, turned to the racing entries and the market listings, many times. This was the answer to how he lived a life that would seem to take three times his salary.

I thought, then, too, about Liz Tremayne, the bookkeeper. She was a girl you could not figure. She was tall and neat, but you could never tell much about her figure. She always wore loose-fitting dresses or severely tailored suits. She wore double-lensed glasses and little if any makeup. She wore her brown hair pulled back into a severe bun. I remembered that she had nice features, but the way she dressed and wore her hair, you’d never notice that. She impressed everyone as being a very plain, unattractive girl. No sex appeal at all.

Yet, I also remember now, a long time ago, hearing Ronny Chernow, standing with a bunch of other men from the office by the water cooler one day, watching Liz Tremayne go past. Ronny had said: “You see all that protective coloration? But it doesn’t fool me. Put some makeup on that baby, fix her hair right, get her into the right dresses and take those horrible glasses off and I’ll bet she’d knock your eyes out. And that kind – once you break through that icy surface – man, oh, man!”

We’d all thought Ronny was crazy, then. But I saw now where he could be right. And that tied in with Liz helping him out with this deal. The quiet, plain, bookish type like that often went crazy for a man who was a complete opposite like Chernow. Especially once he’d started paying a lot of attention to her, began softening her up. And a woman in love with a man, often would do anything for him.

So there it was. Now what was I going to do with it? Chernow was my man. He knew I stopped in at the Marlo bar for a cocktail every Friday night. He’d hired Vivian and Smitty to do a job on me. He’d had her planted in the bar, then came in, himself, to put the finger on me, so she wouldn’t make any mistake and get the wrong guy. He’d even suckered me into staying for another drink, when I was ready to leave, tried to plant the idea in my mind of making a play for Vivian. It all tied in, nicely.

3. Ugly Duckling

ACROSS the street was a barber shop, with a clock in the window. The time was 8:10. It hardly seemed possible that all this had happened in only a couple of hours. It seemed like I’d been up half the night, already. And then I remembered Fran. She’d be expecting me home. I should have been there, even, before this. She’d get upset, worried. I had to call her. But I wondered what I could tell her. The truth would drive her crazy with anxiety. I’d have to make up something to tell her.

I decided not to wait any longer for Vivian and Smitty to leave the hotel. Now I knew who was behind all this, I didn’t necessarily need them; I walked down to the corner, entered a cigar store and called Fran. While I was waiting for her to answer, I counted the money I had in my pocket. I’d taken a five-dollar bill from my pay, this noontime, put that in my pocket and placed the rest of my cash in my wallet. Smitty had gotten that. Lunch and the drinks tonight had left me with a dollar bill and a few cents change from the five.

Fran came on and sounded relieved at hearing from me. I told her that as I was leaving the bar with Chernow, we’d bumped into a couple of other men from the office. They were going to the fights at the Garden, I told her and one of them had an extra ticket, so I decided to go along. I said I hadn’t been able to get to a phone before. I hoped she wouldn’t mind.

“Of course not, darling,” Fran said. “Just don’t be too late. And have fun!”

I hung up and sat there for a moment. Yeah. Have fun. I was going to have a lot of fun.

I left the cigar store and stood out on the street in front of it. I looked down Forty-Sixth Street toward Broadway. It was a long alley of flickering neon lights. I hadn’t been in New York at night like this for years. But if I saw it every night, I think it would have affected me the same way. New York, even the Times Square area, is a business world by day. It’s speed, turmoil, excitement. But it’s in black and white. After dark the whole thing changes.

The pace doesn’t slow, but now it’s in full color and the moving neon lights heighten the effect of continual action. Reality, ugliness, is gone. You don’t notice the dirt-littered gutters, the unpainted buildings, the grimy bricks and windows. Manhattan by day is a businesswoman, crisp, efficient, an executive, stern, no time for anything but making money: a salesman, loud, swaggering, confident. By night the town’s an exciting, painted woman of the evening; a young girl out on her first New York date; an actor between performances, out on the street in costume and greasepaint.

You stand in a midtown side street at night and all your values change. The pulsing nightlife around you gets into your own bloodstream. Obligations, duties, ideals, slip away. Life is a carnival. Perspectives change. Nothing counts, suddenly, but laughing, singing, drinking, dancing. You need a pretty girl, to look at the promise in her eyes, to watch her tongue moisten her red lips, to watch her teeth shine in the saying; you want to feel that girl in your arms as the chrome-like polish and smoothness of a name band stirs the rhythm in you both; you want to get drunk, where all is beautiful, all gaiety, fast funny talk, and none of it will ever end and there will be no morning, no hangover, no regret.

In spite of what I’d been through this evening, and the jam I was still in, I felt all that, for a moment. I could imagine what it would do to some people, living in all that, going out into it night after night. Because you weren’t a part of it – and little of it was for nothing, you had to buy it – unless you had money in your pockets. Lots of money. I could imagine that this was what had happened to Ronny Chernow and perhaps Liz Tremayne, too.

But I forced all that out of my mind. I had to get this evening over with. I had to get Ronny Chernow, get that signed statement of confession back and get him arrested for all he’d done. That was a big order.

What would happen if I went straight to Chernow, now, confronted him with the whole thing? He’d laugh at me, deny it, say I was drunk. Or possibly he would kill me. Or Vivian and Smitty, his hired help would either be there, or get there after I arrived. No. That was out. I had to learn more, first, at least.

I remembered that the confession I’d been forced to sign implicated Liz Tremayne. I didn’t doubt but what she’d been in on all this with Chernow. But I could not figure his mentioning her in the confession. Monday, when the whole thing came out, she’d be on the spot, too. She certainly wouldn’t protect Chernow, then. There was only one answer to that. She’d been killed, probably, with another note and with the murder made to look like suicide, also. That would round it out nicely for Chernow. If that hadn’t happened yet, it would soon. If it hadn’t happened yet, I could save Liz’s life. Once she saw the way her partner was double-crossing her, she’d turn on him, substantiate my story. If she was still alive.

I went back into the cigar store, called Liz Tremayne. There was no answer. But I had to find out whether she was dead yet or not. Her address was on West End Avenue and I took a subway up there. It was an old, run-down apartment building, still bearing some trace of its glory days in the faded and torn canopy over the front and in the fat, whiskey-flushed doorman in his soiled uniform. There was no switchboard, but I learned from the mailboxes that Miss Elizabeth Tremayne lived in Apartment 3 M.

There had been no police cars in front of the place, no sign of excitement. I figured I’d gotten a break, that she was still alive. I rang the bell outside of her apartment. There was the click of high heels across the floor inside and the door cracked open. Then it was thrown wide. The girl who stood there didn’t look like the Liz Tremayne of Emcee Publications, Inc. Business Office. In fact, for a flashing second I didn’t even recognize her.

The hair that was always pulled into a tight, unattractive bun at the back, now flowed softly, silkily about her shoulders. It had been just washed and treated with some kind of light rinse and it looked alive and all full of shiny highlights. It was a honey color, instead of just brown.

Liz was wearing makeup, tonight. Her lips were smoothly painted and glistening. There were artfully blended touches of color at her high cheekbones. Without glasses, her eyes were beautiful. They were a flame-blue, in striking contrast to the thick, black, spiky lashes and the thin, dark, neatly formed arch of the brows above them.

She was wearing a blace lace and silk negligée, trimmed with what looked to me like pink angora. It was just held together by a belt in the front. She had everything necessary to wear something like that. What Ronny Chernow had said about her that day long ago, was true in spades. This Liz Tremayne knocked you out, all right. I couldn’t get my breath that first moment of looking at her.

“Kip!” she said. She didn’t even sound like the same girl I’d seen around the office for several years. When she’d changed her appearance she’d apparently altered her whole personality. “Kip Morgan, what are you doing here?”

I’d wanted to see what emotions registered in her eyes when she first recognized me. But it didn’t work out. I wasn’t looking at her eyes. When my gaze did finally rise to her face, she was smiling, puzzled.

“Something’s happened,” I said. “I – we’d better not talk out here.”

“Of course,” she said. “Come on in.”

She stepped aside and I moved past her, down a short hallway and into the living room. The room was large, high-ceilinged. It was furnished more like a studio than an apartment. Instead of a sofa there was a studio conch. There was no matching furniture, no upholstered chairs. There were two leather-covered lounge chairs and several straight-backed ones. There were scatter rugs on the floor and prints of good paintings decorated the blue-tinted walls. Between two enormous windows was a ceiling-high bookcase, with every other shelf decorated with knick-knacks, instead of books. I turned to Liz Tremayne.

“How well do you know Ronny Chernow?” I demanded.

She blinked. The color on her cheekbones seemed to darken. She held her hands clasped in front of her. Her voice was distant, cool, when she said: “What’s this all about? You have no right to come barging in here, uninvited, questioning me about my private life!”

“All right,” I said. I gave it to her right between the eyes. “Chernow has been embezzling Emcee Publications out of thousands of dollars for a full year. You’ve been his accomplice. I have proof, so don’t try to deny it.”

She fell back away from me as though I’d slapped her. She went deadly pale and now the spots of rouge on her cheeks stood out like red poker chips. Her hands clenched together until the knuckles stood out whitely.

“You must be insane!” she said. “Making an accusation like that! What in the world’s the matter with you, Kip? What’s made you say – or even think a thing like – embezzling funds? How?” She glanced toward the door of another room, a reflex action, but then caught it and turned her gaze quickly back to me again.

I got a crawling feeling up my spine. Supposing Ronny Chernow, when he heard from his gun-goons – Vivian and Smitty – that I’d escaped, had anticipated me, come straight here. He could be hiding in that room, right now, waiting to kill me himself, not trusting to hirelings this time.

I took a big, gulping breath and without waiting, or giving myself a chance to get really scared, I whirled around Liz Tremayne and walked to that room. While I was fumbling inside the door for the light switch, Liz leaped at me, tried to yank me away. But she was too late. My fingers found the wall switch and the room flooded with light. Liz stood trying to pull me away from the doorway.

It was a bedroom, furnished with cheap maple furniture. There was nobody hiding there. But on the bed were two expensive alligator leather suitcases and a woman’s purse. I started toward them and Liz grabbed my shoulder, wheeled me around, got in front of me, blocking me off.

“You have no right!” she half screamed. “This is my apartment. Get out of here! Get out! I’ll call the police – have you thrown out!”

She was strong. She kept pushing me back toward the doorway to the living room, away from those bags on the bed. She was so strong, she kept throwing me off balance, gradually forcing me out of the room. It was no time to be gentlemanly. I grabbed her by the wrists and flung her with every bit of strength in me, away from me. She went spinning and hit the wall with her back, jarring her, so that hair fell down over one eye. She leaned back against the wall, her head forward and lowered a little, her beautiful eyes, frightened, angry, blurred with tears, looking up at me through the thick black lashes. She was half sobbing.

“Call the police?” I said. “Go ahead. I’m going to do it, anyhow, when I get through here. Now, stay away from me. If you interfere, I’ll have to knock you out.” Big, tough Kip Morgan, a real rough cookie – when he was up against an unarmed girl. But I had to do it.

I went over to the bed and snapped open one of the suitcases. It was filled with women’s clothing. On the top, lying face down, was a framed photograph. I turned it over and looked down into a portrait of smirking, handsome Ronny Chernow, dressed like Mr John K. Rockabilt. I put it back down, shut the suitcase. I picked up the purse, opened it. Along with all the usual feminine junk, there was an airlines envelope, containing two one-way flight tickets to Mexico City. I put them back, then tossed the purse back onto the bed.

“You and Ronny were running out on the whole thing, eh?” I said. “To Mexico.”

She was still leaning against the wall. The tears had finally squeezed out of her eyes and were running down her cheeks. She pushed the hair back from her forehead and shook her head. Her gaze dropped away from mine, fell to the floor.

“How did you find out about it, Kip? We – we thought we had plenty of time. Until Monday, at least, maybe longer. Where’s Ronny? Have the police got him?”

She could have been acting, but I didn’t think so. There was a whipped tone to her voice. And the packed bags and the airline tickets told of her innocence. She was getting the big double-deal from Chernow and didn’t even know it. Yet. She was being made a patsy, too, right along with me.

“I don’t know where Ronny is!” I told her. “How’d I find out about this? Because Chernow paid a guy and a girl to lure me to a hotel room. They beat me into signing a confession that I’d been the one taking the money, pulling that phoney check racket for the past year. Then they were going to throw me out of the window. It would look as though I’d committed suicide. You and Ronny Chernow would have been beautifully cleared. Neither of you would have had a thing to worry about Monday morning.”

Her eyes widened. “But – but I don’t understand. Why didn’t Ronny tell me about all this? He told me that because I was implicated there wasn’t any way of framing it on anyone else. We – we talked about that. We discussed trying to put it all onto you. Kip. But Ronny said we couldn’t – not and keep in the clear. He still had over five thousand left when he sold out what was left of his stocks. He said with just a few thousand we could live well for a few months in Mexico and that he had some connections down there, that there was plenty of money to be made down there for a man with brains and looks and personality. So we were going to run for it. By now, I didn’t care. I–I was just glad that it was over . . . I–I guess he must have made a last minute change in plans and figured some way to put it onto you and still keep me in the—”

“No,” I cut in on her. “He didn’t. He planned it this way right from the beginning, Liz. I forgot to tell you. Your name was mentioned in that confession letter I was forced to sign. It fully implicated you. The only one Ronny Chernow kept in the clear was himself. The way he was going to do that was to kill you, too. Another suicide. That would tie it all up.”

She shook her head violently from side to side. Her mouth was slack, her eyes wild, trapped-looking. “No!” she cried. “You’re wrong! It couldn’t be that. Ronny wouldn’t do that to me!” Her voice broke. “He loves me. We were going to be married in Mexico! You’re wrong, wrong, all wrong!”

“He never loved you,” I told her. “Or he wouldn’t have gotten you into this in the first place. A guy like Chernow isn’t capable of love, not real love. He liked you – he went for you – big, maybe. But not any more, Liz. He got tired of you. He was through with you. He wanted to get rid of you. This gave him an out on that, too.”

She had her face in her hands, now. Her soft, silky, honey-colored hair hung over her hands as she bent her head. I couldn’t hear her sobbing but I could see her shoulders shaking. I could see a vein standing out in her throat. She was pitiful. I felt a little sorry for her.

“Liz,” I said softly. “How could you get mixed up in a thing like this – with a big-mouthed, phoney louse like Chernow? How do these things happen?”

After a moment she got control of herself. She looked at me, her eyes raw-red from crying, her makeup smeared. “How?” she said. Her voice was ragged, bitter. “All right, I’ll tell you how. Maybe you’ll feel sorry for me. Maybe you’ll figure some way to give me a break.”

She told me. The beginning was an old story. Ronny Chernow was her boss. They worked late together a couple of nights. He bought her dinner. They had some drinks. It went on from there. She’d never known a man like Chernow, before. She was impressed, awed, overwhelmed by the way he dressed and the way he spent money, the places he took her.

“Places girls who work for a living, who are drab and plain, dream about, see in the movies, read about in the papers and that’s all,” she said. “The most expensive nightclubs. The clubhouse at Belmont. Flashy gambling places over in New Jersey. And Ronny – he was so smart about everything. He taught me how to fix myself up, how to dress. He made me – pretty! So that I felt as good as any of the women in those places. He drove me around in a Cadillac – a Caddy, Kip!”

“Didn’t you wonder where he got the money, how he did all that on his salary?” I asked.

“He told me he was very lucky at gambling and played the market shrewdly,” she said. “Listen, every night I was in such a dream world, I didn’t think, didn’t care how it was happening. Do you question miracles? Of course, in the daytime, at the office, I’d go back to my old personality. Ronny said it would be better that way, wouldn’t cause any talk.”

Then she told me how he trapped her. They went to Atlantic City for a weekend. He took a fifty-dollar-a-day hotel suite. He lost several hundred dollars at the race track there. When it was all over, he told her about the four fake artist’s checks that he’d put through and held out and cashed, how it was a plan he’d long had in mind. He told Liz Tremayne that she was going to have to cover for him.

At first she refused. She was horrified, sick over it. But he cajoled and threatened. He said if she didn’t cooperate with him and he got caught, he’d involve her, anyhow. He told her that it would just be this once and there was no possible way of it being found out for nearly a year. She gave in, then. She covered for him. Then she was trapped and it became a regular thing.

“I knew we were going to have to face the music at the end,” she finished. “But by then I didn’t care, Kip. I didn’t care. I was so damned in love with the man that I didn’t care about anything. Do you understand, Kip . . . But now he’s – done this – to me!”

She started to cry again, but suddenly jerked convulsively all over. She cut off the weeping. She forced a little half-smile around her mouth. The negligée was half falling away from one shoulder but she didn’t do anything about it, even though she was conscious of the way I was staring. I couldn’t help it. Even now, after all this, she was still breathtakingly beautiful.

“Kip,” she said. She started slowly toward me. “Kip, I–I can’t go to prison. I–I just can’t! Kip, I never noticed before, but you’re handsome, too. And you’re clever. You’ve got personality, too, Ronny Chernow isn’t the only one. You’d make out fine in Mexico, too. I’d help you, Kip; help you a lot! We’d make a striking couple!”

“Don’t be crazy, Liz,” I said. “I’ve got a wife, a family. Are you out of your mind? Stay away from me. It’s no good, Liz.”

But she kept walking, slowly, provocatively, her hands running down over her own hips, pulling the negligée tautly over them, lowering it from the shoulder some more. Watching her, little electric shocks started shooting all through me. My breath seemed to catch and hurt in my chest. Her eyes had cleared from the crying spell, now. Her teeth were very white and even against the red lips as she smiled.

“Mexico, Kip,” she whispered. “You must’ve had dreams, too. I – I’ve got five hundred dollars in cash in my purse. That’s worth a lot more in Mexico. We’ve already got the ticket. The plane leaves at seven in the morning. You’re going with me, Kip. We’ll both put all the past behind us – all of it. We’ll start over.”

I tried to back away from her, but my legs bumped against the bed. She came right up close against me. The faintly musky scent of her filled my nostrils, my whole head. I began to tremble. She pressed against me and her long, carmine-nailed fingers grasped my lapels.

“Just you and me, Kip,” she said, her voice so low and throaty I couldn’t have heard it if her lips hadn’t been only an inch or so away from mine.

Her hands slid from my lapels up around my neck, then to the back of my head. They pulled my head toward her. Her mouth burned against mine and the lights in the room seemed to pinwheel. All thought, all reason went up in a burst of flame in my brain.

I found myself holding onto her by the upper arms, my fingers digging into their soft flesh.

And then the whole thing exploded. It was a muffled explosion, like clapping two thickly gloved hands together hard. Liz Tremayne went limp and, still gripping her upper arms, I was half pulled over with her. I looked at her face. Her eyes stared up at me, wide open and completely blank and horrible.

Her mouth hung slack and wet. I looked over her head toward the doorway.

Ronny Chernow was standing there. He was holding one of the pillows from the studio couch bent over double across one of his hands. For a second I wondered what he was doing with it. Then I saw the smoke wisping out from under the folded pillow. I couldn’t see the gun at all but I knew it was there.

My hands eased from Liz Tremayne’s arms and she went down to her knees and then toppled over onto one side. There was a very tiny black hole in the back of the negligée, near the left shoulder blade. Red shiny stuff was beginning to ooze out of it onto the floor.

“She’s quite a gal, eh, Morgan,” Chernow said. “She can really turn it on, can’t she? She was giving you full voltage. I taught her that stuff, Morgan. And all you jerks in the office thought she was such a pot, not worth a play. How wrong can you get?”

“Very,” I said. “Very wrong, Chernow. As wrong as you’ve gotten. Now, you’ve just committed murder on top of everything else.”

Ronny Chernow’s thick, masculine brows raised. His hair was still curly and tousled, boyishly. He was still the expensively dressed, handsome, arrogant man-about-town. If you didn’t look too closely. But now I could see the glassy gleam in his eyes, and there was a brutal twist to his thin, well-shaped lips. There was a nervous tic at one corner of his mouth. Maybe he didn’t realize yet but this was all having an effect on him.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he said. He gave a quiet, confident laugh. “I haven’t killed anybody. I didn’t embezzle all that money. I didn’t sign that confession that’s in the mail right now, will be in old Malkom’s hands, Monday morning. I didn’t come here and shoot Liz . . . You did all those things, Morgan. Don’t you see the way it is?”

I saw. There was only one way it could be, now. He was going to kill me, too. When Liz and I were found, coupled with the letter of confession, it would be a fairly simple thing for the police to figure. They’d find the plane tickets, figure we’d planned to skip, together. But at the last minute we’d had an argument, a fight about something. I’d killed Liz, then shot myself. That was the way the whole thing was going to figure.

4. Smitty Pays a Visit

I watched Ronny Chernow start toward me. He looked terribly big. Much bigger than he’d ever seemed to me before. He kept holding the couch pillow folded over the gun in his hand.

“Stand still, Morgan,” he said. The smile was gone from his face. His lips were flattened against his teeth. The tic at the corner of his mouth was leaping crazily.

Sure, I thought, stand still so that you can get close enough so that there’ll be powder burns on my shirt front. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move. I felt frozen, carved out of stone. I looked down on Liz Tremayne, sprawled there, her legs twisted under her awkwardly. She looked like a broken rag doll. I wondered if she was having any of those dreams now.

There it is, I told myself. There’s that other life you missed by getting married and settling down. There’s Miss Manhattan At Night-time. There’s your glittering, crowded smoky hotspots and the throbbing, pulsing music and riding through the night in an open Caddy convertible, with a beautiful girl beside you. There’s the easy, crazy, enticing, live-for-the-moment way. Lying there dead with a bullet in her back . . . And coming toward you, a killer, with all those turning, tossing, conscience-stricken nights behind him, with the cruel desperation etched into his face, with fear like little maggots in his brain all the time.

He had all that stuff. He didn’t settle for your life, the drudgery, monotony, the bills, the skipping the new suits and the beautiful shirts and ties because there was another baby coming, the long bus trip back and forth, kids squalling or sick or worrisome in some other way. But look at him. On the ragged edge of mania. He can’t keep killing and killing.

“That’s right,” Chernow said in the quietest voice I’d ever heard him use. “Stand nice and still. Nice – and – still . . .”

I had to stop watching him come toward me. My eyes swiveled to an electric clock on the dresser. I watched the second hand sweep around, knocking off the remaining seconds of my life. It was quarter to ten. I wondered what Fran was doing. The kids would be in bed. Fran would be out in the kitchen probably, ironing. Or else she’d be watching television in the living room, remembering things about the programs to tell me about when I got home. Or maybe she was over at the Haggards next door, gabbing with Helene, or playing Canasta. When I got home, she’d have the latest community gossip, and she’d brag about how much she’d won from the Haggards . . . When I got home?

Ronny Chernow was only a step away from me, now. Quicksilver seemed to run all through me. The freeze left me. I screamed it: “I’m not going to die! I won’t! I won’t!”

I lunged toward him, slammed into him, knocked him off balance. There was a clicking sound. It wasn’t until long later that I realized the gun had jammed on him, that possibly material of the cushion had caught the hammer or something. Right now I only wondered why didn’t he shoot – get it over with. Why didn’t I hear that muffled clap of sound again and feel the hurt and burn of the bullet striking me, the flood of pain or the nothingness or whatever it was happened when a bullet pumps into your heart and you die.

At the same time, I got halfway past him before he wrenched the gun – from the cushion, tossed the cushion to the floor. I could hear someone shouting, screaming, cursing. For a second I didn’t even realize it was my own voice. Then, as I started toward the door, I looked back. Chernow was right behind me. He had the gun raised. It was a small, nickel-plated revolver. He caught me with the barrel right across the top of the forehead. I went off balance and staggered, crashed against the wall and went down. My eyes wouldn’t focus. The walls and ceiling of the room were tilting, tipping, rolling lazily around and around my head.

As though from a great distance, I heard someone pounding fiercely on the door and rattling the knob. I tried to get to my feet to hold onto the wall. But it kept wheeling away from me. Finally it slowed and stopped. I leaned against that wall, sort of crawled up it and got to my feet. I shook my head, looked around. Liz Tremayne was still on the floor, dead. The nickel-plated revolver was lying near her feet. There was now a terrible thumping, shattering noise coming from the door, outside, leading to the hallway. I looked for Chernow but he wasn’t there.

I walked over and picked up the revolver from the floor. I didn’t have any clear idea why. I was still dazed. But I must have reasoned that I was in danger, needed protection. A gun was protection. Still holding it, I staggered out into the living room, just as the front door of the apartment crashed open and a man half fell inside.

He was short and bull-shouldered. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of wrinkled, soiled slacks. His arms were thick and muscular and black with hair. His square-jawed, beetle-browed face looked nervous, hesitant.

“What’s going on in here?” he said. “I heard screaming and before that what sounded like a shot. I live next door. Where’s Miss Tremayne?”

I started to jerk my thumb toward the bedroom, to say, “In there – dead.” But something stopped me. This thing was getting worse instead of better. Sure, Ronny Chernow had fouled-up on killing me. I was still alive. But there was still that confession he had mailed, there was still a dead woman – the one mentioned in the confession – in that other room, dead by the gun which I held in my hand. Chernow was gone. He was out of it. There was only me. And the neighbor from next door to testify to the police about breaking in and finding me with the murder gun in my hand.

I said. “You back up, feller and get the hell out of here, quick!” I jerked the gun toward him. He turned and squeezed back out past that half broken-in door like a snake slithering out of a trap.

I knew he’d go back to his own flat, call the police. I could hear other doors opening along the hall, voices questioning about the commotion. I jammed the revolver into my pocket, headed for the open window that Chernow had gone through. I went out and down the fire escape the same way as he had. I dropped from the bottom rung into an alley, my feet stinging. I ran out into the side street and kept running until I reached Broadway and a subway kiosk.

The people standing on the subway platform, waiting for a train, quieted me a little, helped me to calm down, to think. They all looked so normal, so bored and average. Just regular people, with regular everyday troubles. No murders for them, no beautiful girls, nobody trying to kill them, no thrills, excitement. Maybe some of them were worried about debts, or somebody sick, or how they would break down Mr So-and-so’s sales resistance. Stuff like that. Once I must have looked that way, too. But not any more.

I caught some of the people staring at me. I stepped over to a gum machine, stared into the mirror. There was a dull red, swollen welt across my forehead just below the hairline, where the gun barrel had struck me. My upper lip still looked puffed. But it was really the expression in my eyes that had made people stare at me. My eyes looked harrassed, desperate, almost wild. They were deeply ringed underneath and bloodshot.

I turned away and tried to figure what I had to do, what would be best. There didn’t seem to be any best. It was all bad. If I went to the police, told them the whole story, they’d hold me. They’d get Ronny Chernow. He’d deny everything. They’d hold me until Monday morning, at least. The news would get out. The story would break in the newspapers. Fran would go crazy with fear and doubt and worry. Monday morning they’d go over the books and the phoney vouchers that Chernow had made out, to get his checks eyery week. Those vouchers he’d have had to keep, to jibe with the regular monthly check of the books by old man Lesvich in the accounting department. They—

Those vouchers! They were my way out! Handwriting experts could prove they were forged, that I hadn’t written them. It struck me like a jolt of white-hot lightning. Those vouchers would clear me of this whole thing.

But then I realized that after failing to kill me, Ronny Chernow would realize that, too. Chernow was as smart, if not smarter, than I. He’d go and get those vouchers – if he didn’t already have them. Chances were, he did not. With me dead, he wouldn’t have needed them. I stuck my hand into my pocket, feeling for the office keys. They weren’t there. They were gone. I realized that Smitty and Vivian must have taken them, after they’d knocked me cold up in the hotel room.

A subway train roared in and I got on. It seemed to crawl down to Fiftieth Street. When it finally got there and I started running down toward Forty-Sixth and working over toward Sixth Avenue, it seemed that I wasn’t really running at all. Again it was like a nightmare – the one where your feet are glued in mud, or for some other reason you’re running like crazy, but not making any progress. But then I was there. I was pounding on the locked glass front door of our building. Inside, I could see the night register stand and the padded chair where Floyd, the night elevator man and watchman, always sat. He wasn’t there. I kept pounding and rattling on the door, going crazy, sweat beginning to roll along my ribs.

This went on for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only two or three. Then I saw bent old Floyd and his bushy white hair ambling jerkily along the hallway toward the door. When he opened it, I pushed inside. He looked at me, half curiously, half resentfully, for all the racket I’d caused and for disturbing him. His eyes were still full of sleep.

“Has anyone else been here in the last hour or so, Floyd?” I asked. “Mr Chernow. You know, the big red-faced man, with curly hair, always well dressed. Was he here?”

Floyd looked up at the ceiling. He dug through this thick shock of white hair and scratched at his head. Then he looked at me again. He yawned. “Wouldn’t rightly know, son,” he said. “Not if he had his keys, anyhow. I ain’t let nobody in since seven o’clock, but you. But, then, I was down cellar just now – uh – fixing up things, so I wouldn’t know.”

What he’d been fixing down cellar was his ear. He’d been pounding it. I’d seen the old couch he had down there. But I didn’t say anything. I pushed past him toward the elevator. At night they run the freight elevator, which is self-operating. I stopped before boarding it. I said:

“Floyd, this is important. Get it straight. If Mr Chernow, the man I just described, comes here while I’m upstairs, you phone up there and let me know. Then call the police.”

Floyd said: “Sure thing. I – the police?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You do as I say and don’t ask any questions. This is important.”

I got into the cold elevator, worked the cable until it brought me up to the business offices on the fifth floor. I got off. It was pitch-dark up there. I switched the reception-room light on, walked to the inner office door. It was unlocked. I walked inside and switched on the overhead lights there. I stood for a moment, looking around at the empty desks and covered-up typewriters. It looked strange at night like this, the office unoccupied. There was a musty smell to the place with all the windows closed.

I looked at the desk where Liz Tremayne sat and I got kind of choked up. For a second I seemed to see her sitting there, her hair pulled back in that tight, ugly bun, those double-lensed glasses on her, as she bent over her ledgers. The girl with the dreams – the Jekyll-Hyde girl. Dead now at the city morgue. On a slab, with an assistant coroner probing for the greasy hunk of lead in her back.

Yeah, and with every cop in the city looking for a man answering my description, to pin that killing onto me. I had to get going.

The file cabinets stood in a row against the wall, over by the glass-enclosed office with the lettering on the door that said: RONALD CHERNOW, Business Manager. I went quickly through two or three files, before I came to the right one. It was labeled: Editorial Vouchers. It took me another five minutes or so to wade through batches of vouchers from the Pulp, Confession and Comics Group section, before I found the ones I wanted. Or where they should have been. They were gone.

Panic-stricken, my hands tore through the whole file again. Then once more slowly. All the vouchers for the past year were gone. Gone. The realization that I was too late slid over me like a weighted wet blanket. I half fell against the filing cabinet, my stomach banging the drawer back in.

I recognized the voice right away, even though it was subdued for Ronny Chernow. He said: “I didn’t hit you hard enough, did I? I thought the police would have you by now.”

I spun around. He was over by the receptionist’s switchboard. A bulky briefcase with his initials on it rested on the floor next to the switchboard. Chernow had another gun in his hand. This one was an automatic, bluish-black, snubnose, ugly-looking.

“I heard the elevator coming up,” he said. “I switched off all the lights. I thought it was probably Floyd making a check of the building. I never thought you’d be bright enough – or is it dumb enough – to come here.”

I looked down at his briefcase. “You have the vouchers in there, don’t you? With me in the hands of the police, come Monday morning, and nobody could prove a thing against you, could they? It would be my story against yours. With my signature on a confession, and those airplane tickets in Liz’s purse, making your story look much better.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Now you’re going with me, Morgan. We’ll go down in the elevator, and leave by the back way so Floyd doesn’t see us, through the cellar. Come on, Morgan. Let’s go.”

The only thing I could figure by that was that he still had it in mind to kill me in some way to make it look like a suicide. Perhaps push me in front of a subway train, something like that. Perhaps he no longer even planned to kill me at all, but just wanted to make sure I didn’t interfere with him getting out of the building with those vouchers. Outside, perhaps, he would let me go, knowing that eventually the police would pick me up. I didn’t know. But I couldn’t take any chances on any of that. I was sick of this whole thing. I was up to the ears with it. I wanted it to be over and I wanted out.

He apparently had no idea I was armed. When he bent to pick up the briefcase, he took his eyes off me for a moment. My hand dug into the right jacket pocket, pulled out the revolver. I pointed it right at him and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. It was still jammed. I swore and threw the gun at him.

Then there was the shot. It echoed thunderingly loud in the empty office. I stiffened all over. I waited for the flood of pain that I knew was going to come. Instinctively I balled my fist and jammed it into my stomach. I sucked my lips between my teeth and started to bite on them. But the hurting didn’t come. I’d once heard that when you get shot badly, you don’t feel it the first instant. You’re numbed with shock. I figured that was the truth.

And then I noticed that I was down on my knees. What felt like a cherry-hot poker went through my shoulder. I clamped a hand up there, just over the right breast and felt the hole in my suit as I went over onto my face. But I didn’t black out. I lay very still, waiting for the second shot that would finish me. It came – louder, more choking, more deafening than the first. I didn’t feel that one, either. Then I heard a voice and I knew why I wouldn’t ever feel that second bullet. I hadn’t gotten it.

I was sprawled on my side, to one side of a desk. I could look under the desk and I saw that Ronny Chernow was on the floor, too. He was on his belly, and inching himself along, clawing his way with both hands, dragging himself toward a pair of black patent-leather shoes with tiny, shiny black bows on the toes. I heard the man called Smitty say:

“You can’t renege on me, Chernow, you big overdressed punk!” Smitty piled a gutter name on top of that. “When I called you and told you what happened, you said that was tough. Me and Vivian wouldn’t get our fee for botching the job. I started to tell you we’d better, that we did half the job anyhow, got that guy to sign the confession for you and put it in the mail. But you didn’t give me a chance. You hung up on me, after telling me where I could go for my grand. You didn’t think there was anything we could do about it, did you? You don’t know me very well. Chernow. I don’t like welchers.”

Chernow, crawling along the office floor, almost got to Smitty’s patent-leather shiny shoes. He reached for them. Smitty stepped inside the reach and kicked Chernow in the face.

“You were just driving off in that big Caddy of yours when I got to your apartment, Chernow,” Smitty said. “I followed you. I followed you every place. Even here. I got in with the keys I took from that other guy, that Morgan guy’s pocket. I’ve been waiting for a nice quiet place to do this to you. No witnesses or nothing. I was just going to do it when you heard the elevator and put the lights out. So I waited.”

Under the desk, I watched Smitty bend over Chernow and when Chernow reached for his throat, Smitty slammed him across the temple with his gun butt. It made a sickening sound. I gagged and covered my mouth with my hand, praying Smitty wouldn’t hear me. I didn’t move. I watched Smitty take Chernow’s wallet from inside his jacket pocket. He pulled out a thick sheaf of bills, thumbed through them.

“Nice,” he said. “What a break. Nearly five thousand, all in hundreds and fifties. This is a much better fee than you promised, Mister Chernow. It looks like Vivian and me are going to take a nice little trip. Florida, maybe. We’ve always wanted to go to Florida, even in the spring.”

He kicked Chernow again and when the other man didn’t move, Smitty walked out of the office into the reception room, slamming the door behind him. I heard the old freight elevator wheezing and clanking as he went down.

I tried to get up, now. I got hold of a corner of the desk and tried to pull myself up. I didn’t make it. I got freezing cold and sweat poured from me. I shook like a bird dog. Knife-shoots of pain stabbed through my shoulder and the feel of the sticky, wet blood there turned my stomach.

I kept trying to pull myself to my feet and not making it. Finally, I got smart. I saw a telephone cord looped down from the desk. I grabbed it, yanked the instrument down clattering to the floor. I dialed the O and when the operator came on, I said: “Police!”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She kept repeating: “Operator! Operator!” I must have said “Police!” a dozen times before I realized that no sound was coming through my lips.

Then I tried to shout at the top of my lungs. The words came out in a hoarse, rasping whisper. But she heard me. She heard me give her the address and the floor number. But I didn’t hear what she said. I was suddenly swimming in a sea of inky blackness.

When the lights came on again, I was in a hospital bed. I started to sit up, but there was a mule-kick of pain through my shoulder that stopped me. I fell back on the pillow. One of the men was tall, spare-built. He had a bald head, except for a thin rim of iron-gray hair just around the ears.

“Take it easy, Morgan,” he said. “Everything’s all right. We caught Smitty Smithers and Vivian Engles at the airport. They were going to Florida. But if Chernow dies they’ll be going to a hotter place. And his chances aren’t good. All we want from you is a few statements, right now, Morgan. Can you talk for a while?”

I grinned up at him. “I could talk forever,” I said. “And probably will. Go ahead. Shoot.”

There were a lot of questions. They’d gotten most of the story from Smitty and Vivian and the dying Chernow. But I was able to fill in a lot for them, to explain how the embezzlement had been handled. When they were through, I found I was so weak I could hardly talk. And I felt sleepy again. They said they’d see me again in the morning. I smiled weakly, mumbled: “Somebody – call – my wife.”

They said that somebody already had and I dozed off. When I awakened again, Fran was there. She was sitting beside the bed, holding my hand. She smiled and said: “How do you feel, Kip?”

“Oh, boy!” I said. “Like a million. Let’s jump rope or climb trees or something.” I felt all scooped out. My shoulder was throbbing and my head was keeping time with it and every one of my nerve ends seemed to be jangling.

A middle-aged nurse came in, smiled at both of us and said: “I’m sorry. It’s time for his medicine.” She handed me two pills and a glass of water. I swallowed them and washed them down. The water tasted brackish. But in a few moments the throbbing in my shoulder and head eased. The nerves stopped jangling.

“Kip,” Fran said. “I’ve heard the whole story several times already, but I still can’t – can’t hardly believe it. You, Kip!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me! Were you worried about me, Fran?”

“No,” she said. “I was over at Haggards. Helene cheated as usual, but I ended up winning. I won—”

“Two dollars and eighty cents,” I finished. Fran always won or lost that amount, to within a few pennies. It was really phenomenal.

“Two sixty-seven,” she corrected.

I looked at her and grinned. She was wearing a plain, round little piece of blue felt that looked like a beany and had cost eight dollars. I remembered how I’d beefed about it. She needed a permanent but still her hair was pretty. It was just plain brown, with some strands of gray in it, but it was nice. She had her lipstick on a little crooked and there was a faint tracery of lines in her face and she looked very tired, but still cute. She was wearing her powder-blue suit and for a woman with two children, I had to admit she still had one helluva figure.

“You know, Kip,” she was saying, “in spite of what happened tonight, I think it would be a good idea for you to take a night off once in a while. I thought about it after you called the last time and said you were staying in town. I realized how awfully tiresome and monotonous it must be for you never to have a night off away from me and the kids.”

I started to protest vehemently until I saw the twinkle in her eyes.

“Kip,” she said, softly. “Those girls you got mixed up with, tonight. Were they very pretty – very young and pretty?”

“Good God, no!” I told her. “They were hags, both of them.” I knew that was what she wanted me to tell her. I grinned.

Another nurse came into the room and went around to the foot of the bed to look at my chart. She was a young bleached blonde, and beautiful, a little doll, with her big blue eyes and a shape that even the crisp white uniform couldn’t hide. She smiled over the chart at me and winked. I closed my eyes and rubbed the sight of her out of my brain.

“She was very attractive,” Fran said in a moment and I knew the blonde nurse was gone.

“Nah!” I whispered. I was getting terribly sleepy again. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “She was a mess, a horror! Besides, after tonight, I hate pretty women.”

“Is that so, Kip Morgan?” Fran said. “Where does that leave me? What am I, just a dowdy little housewife?”

I looked up at her. It was funny, the sleepier I got and the more I looked at Fran, the prettier she became. I mean really pretty. You know, from inside of her, like. I reached out and took her hand. I said. “They must’ve given me sump’n. Can’t – stay – awake . . . You goin’ – stay here – with me . . . Right here?”

“Yes, darling,” she said. “All right. Helene Haggard is staying over at the house.”

Her voice droned on and I wanted to tell her thanks for coming and for staying here with me and for being so pretty and being my wife and all, but I guess I went to sleep instead.