The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

A Matter of Public Notice

… the victim, Mrs. Mary Philips, was the estranged wife of Clement Philips of this city who is now being sought by the police for questioning…»

Nancy Fox reread the sentence. It was from the «Rockland, Minnesota Gazette,» reporting the latest of three murders to occur in the city within a month. "Estranged wife" was the phrase that gave her pause. Common newspaper parlance it might be, but for her it held a special meaning: for all its commonplaceness, it most often signals the tragic story of a woman suddenly alone-a story that she, Nancy Fox, could tell. Oh, how very well she could tell it!-being now an estranged wife herself.

How, she wondered, had Mary Philips taken her estrangement from a husband she probably once adored? Did he drink? Gamble? Was he unfaithful? Reason enough-any one of them-for some women. Or was it a cruelty surprised in him that had started the falling away of love, piece by piece, like the petals from a wasting flower?

Had the making of the final decision consumed Mary Philips's every thought for months and had the moment of telling it been too terrible to remember? And did it recur, fragmenting the peace it was supposed to have brought? Did the sudden aloneness leave her with the feeling that part of her was missing, that she might never again be a whole person?

Idle questions, surely, to ask now of Mrs. Philips. Mary Philips, age thirty-nine, occupation beauty operator, was dead-strangled at the rear of her shop with an electric cord at the hands of an unknown assailant. And Clement Philips was being sought by the police-in point of fact, by Captain Edward Allan Fox of the Rockland force, which was why Nancy Fox had read the story so interestedly in the first place.

Clement Philips was sought, found, and dismissed, having been two thousand miles from Rockland at the time of Mary Philips's murder. Several others, picked up after each of the three murders, were also dismissed. It was only natural that these suspects were getting testy, talking about their rights.

The chief of police was getting testy also. His was a long history of political survival in Rockland. Only in recent years had his work appeared worthy of public confidence, and that was due to the addition, since the war, of Captain Fox to the force. Fox knew it. No one knew his own worth better than 'The Fox' did. And he knew how many years past retirement the old chief had stretched his tenure.

The chief paced back and forth before Captain Fox's desk, grinding one hand into the other behind his back. "I never thought the day would come when we'd turn up such a maniac in this town! He doesn't belong here, Fox!"

"Ah, but he does-by right of conquest," Fox said with the quiet sort of provocation he knew grated on the old man.

The chief whirled on him. "You never had such a good time in your life, did you?"

Fox sighed. He was accustomed to the bombast, the show of wrath that made his superior seem almost a caricature. He did not have to take it: the last of the chief's whipping boys was the custodian now of the city morgue. "Once or twice before, sir," Fox said, his eyes unwavering before the chief's.

The old man gave ground. He knew who was running the force, and he was not discontented. He had correctly estimated Fox's ambition: what Fox had of power, he had only with the old man's sanction. "In this morning's brief for me and the mayor, you made quite a thing of the fact that all three victims were separated from their husbands. Now I'm not very deep in this psychology business-and the missus and I haven't ever been separated more than the weekend it took to bury her sister-so you're going to have to explain what you meant. Does this separation from their husbands make 'em more-ah-attractive? Is that what you're getting at? More willing?"

Fox could feel a sudden pulse-throb at his temple. It was a lecher's picture the old man had conjured with his words and gestures, and his reference to Fox's own vulnerability-Nancy having left him-stirred him to a fury a weaker man would not have been able to control.

But he managed it, saying, "Only more available-and therefore more susceptible to the advances of their assailant."

The old man pulled at the loose skin of his throat. "It's interesting, Fox, how you got at it from the woman's point of view. The mayor says it makes damn good reading."

"Thank you, sir," Fox said for something that obviously was not intended as a compliment. "Do you remember Thomas Coyne?"

"Thomas Coyne," the chief repeated.

"The carpenter-the friend of Elsie Troy's husband," Fox prompted. Elsie Troy had been the first of the three victims. "We've picked him up again. No better alibi this time than last-this time, his landlady. I think he's too damned smug to have the conscience most men live with, so I've set a little trap for him. I thought maybe you'd like to be there."

"Think you can make a case against him?"

Fox rose arid took the reports from where the old man had put them. "Chief," he said then, "there are perhaps a half dozen men in Rockland against whom a case could be made… including myself."

The old man's jaw sagged. A lot of other people were also unsure of Ed Fox-of the working mechanism they suspected ran him instead of a heart. "Let's see this Coyne fellow," the chief said. "I don't have much taste for humour at a time like this."

"I was only pointing up, sir, that our killer's mania is not apparent to either friends or victims-until it is too late."

The old man grunted and thrust his bent shoulders as far back as they would go-in subconscious imitation of The Fox's military bearing. On the way to the 'Sun Room'-so called because of the brilliance of its lighting-where Thomas Coyne was waiting, the chief paused and asked, "Is it safe to say for sure now that Elsie Troy was the first victim? That we don't have a transient killer with Rockland just one stop on his itinerary?"

There had been several indications of such a possibility.

"I think we may assume that Elsie Troy was the beginning," Fox said. "I think now that her murder was a random business, unpremeditated. She was killed at night-in her bedroom, with the lights on and the window shades up. She was fully dressed, unmolested. It wasn't a setup for murder. It was pure luck that someone didn't see it happening.

"But having walked out of Elsie Troy's house a free man, her assailant got a new sense of power-a thrill he'd never had in his life. And then there began in him what amounted to a craving for murder. How he chooses victims, I don't know. That's why I called attention to the… the state of suspension in the marriages of the victims." Fox shrugged. "At least, that's my reconstruction of the pattern."

"You make it sound like you were there," the old man said.

"Yes," Fox said, "I suppose I do." He watched the old man bull his neck and plow down the hall ahead of him, contemplating the bit of sadism in himself-in, he suspected, all policemen. It was their devil, as was avarice the plague of merchants, conceit the foe of actors, complacency the doctor's demon, pride the clergyman's. He believed firmly that man's worst enemy was within himself. His own, Fox thought grimly, had cost him a wife, and beyond that, God Almighty knew what else. There were times since Nancy's going when he felt the very structure of his being tremble. There was no joy without her, only the sometimes bitter pleasure of enduring pain.

Coyne sat in the bright light, as Fox had expected, with the serenity of a religious mendicant. His arms folded, he could wait out eternity by his manner. It was unnatural behaviour for any man under police inquisition. Fox was himself very casual. "Well, Tom, it's about time for us to start all over again. You know the chief?"

Coyne made a gesture of recognition. The chief merely glared down at him, his face a wrinkled mask of distaste.

"April twenty-ninth," Fox led. "That was the night you decided finally that you had time to fix Mrs. Troy's back steps."

"Afternoon," Coyne corrected. "I was home at night."

"What do you call the dividing line between afternoon and night?"

"Dark-at night it gets dark… sir."

"And you want it understood that you were home before dark?"

"I was home before dark," Coyne said calmly.

There had never been reference in the newspaper to the hour of Elsie Troy's death, partly because the medical examiner could put it no closer than between seven and nine. The month being April, darkness fell by seven.

"Suppose you tell the chief just what happened while you were there."

"Nothing happened. I went there on my way home from work. I fixed the steps. Then I called in to her that the job was done. She came out and said, That's fine, Tom. I'll pay you next week.' I never did get paid, but I guess that don't matter now."

Told by melancholy rote, Fox thought, having heard even the philosophic ending before. But then, most people repeated themselves under normal circumstances, especially about grievances they never expected to be righted.

"What I can't understand, Tom, is why you decided to fix the steps that day, and not, say, the week before?"

Coyne shrugged. "I just had the time then, I guess."

"She hadn't called you?"

"No, sir," he said with emphasis.

"You say that as though she would not have called you under any circumstances."

Coyne merely shrugged again.

"As a matter of fact, it was the husband-when they were still together-who asked you to repair the steps, wasn't it, Tom?"

"I guess it was."

"And you happened to remember it on the day she was about to be murdered."

"I didn't plan it that way," Coyne said, the words insolent, but his manner still serene. He tilted his chair back.

"It's a funny thing, Chief," Fox said. "Here's a man commissioned to do a job on a friend's house. He doesn't get around to it until the home has broken up. If it was me, I'd have forgotten all about the job under those circumstances-never done it at all."

"So would I," the chief said, "unless I was looking for an excuse to go there."

"Exactly," Fox said, still in a casual voice.

"It wouldn't be on account of you they broke up, would it, Coyne?" the chief suggested.

Coyne seemed to suppress a laugh. It was the first time his effort at control showed. "No, sir."

"Don't you like women?" the chief snapped.

"I'm living with one now," Coyne said.

"Mrs. Turtle?" said Fox, naming Coyne's landlady.

"What's wrong with that? She's a widow."

Fox did not say what was wrong with it. But Mr. Thomas Coyne was not going to have it both ways: he had alibied himself with Mrs. Tuttle for the hours of all three murders. A paramour was not the most believable of witnesses. But then, from what Fox had seen of Mrs. Tuttle, he would not have called her the most believable of paramours, either.

With deliberate ease Fox then led Coyne through an account of his activities on the nights of the two subsequent murders. By the suspect's telling they brought Coyne nowhere near the scenes.

Finally Fox exchanged glances with the old man. He had had more than enough of Coyne by now and very little confidence that the carpenter had been worth bringing in again. "You can go now, Tom," Fox said, "but don't leave town." He nodded at the uniformed policeman by the door. And then, after a pause, "By the way, Tom, when was the last time you went swimming?"

"Oh, two or three weeks ago."

"Where?"

"Baker's Beach," Coyne said, naming the public park.

Fox nodded, held the door for the chief, and then closed it behind them.

"That guy should go on the radio," the old man said. "He knows all the answers."

"Seems like it," Fox said.

The second victim, Jane Mullins, had been strangled on the beach. But if Tom Coyne, as he said, had gone swimming two or three weeks ago, that would account for the sand found in Coyne's room.

Sand and a stack of newspapers-the only clues to Thomas Coyne's interests… and a clue also to the personality of his landlady; Mrs. Tuttle was a very careless housekeeper to leave sand and old newspapers lying around for weeks. She might be as careless with time-even with the truth.

Three strangulations-all of women who lived alone-within a month. It was enough to set the whole of a city the size of Rockland-population 110,000-on edge. As the Gazette editorialised: "When murder can match statistics with traffic deaths, it is time to investigate the investigators."

Knowing Ed Fox so well, Nancy wondered if he had not planted that line with the Gazette; it had The Fox's bite. It would be like him, if he was not getting all the cooperation he wanted from his superiors.

She looked at the clock and poured herself another cup of coffee. She was due at the radio station at eleven. Her broadcast time was noon: 'The Woman's Way.'

How cynical she had become about him, and through him about so many things. As much as anything, that cynicism had enabled her to make the break: the realisation that she was turning into a bitter woman with a slant on the world that made her see first the propensity for evil in a man, and only incidentally his struggle against it. This philosophy might make Ed a good policeman, but it made her a poor educator. And she considered herself an educator despite his belittlement of her work. A radio commentator was responsible to her audience to teach them a little truth. Why just a little? Ed had always said to that.

She wondered if Ed thought about her at all these days, when she could scarcely think of anything except him. It was as though she bore his heelmark on her soul. A cruel image-oh, she had them. For a month she had lived apart from him, yet the morbid trauma of their life together still hung about her. If she could not banish the memories, she must find psychiatric help. That would greatly amuse Ed-one more useless occupation by his reckoning. Worse than useless, the enemy of justice: his hardest catch could escape the punishment that fit his crime by a psychiatrist's testimony.

Nancy folded the morning paper and rinsed her coffee cup.

Strange, the occupations of the three victims: Mary Philips had operated a beauty parlour, Elsie Troy had run a nursery school. She could hear Ed lecture on that: why have children if you pushed them out of the house in rompers? And poor Jane Mullins had written advertising copy-to Ed, perhaps the most useless nonsense of all. Well, that would give Ed something in common with the murderer-contempt for his victims. Ed always liked to have a little sympathy for the murderer: it made him easier to find. And no man ever suffered such anguish of soul as did Ed Fox at the hour of his man's execution.

There, surely, was the worst moment in all her five years of marriage to him: the night Mort Simmons was executed. Simmons had shot a man and Ed had made the arrest and got the confession. Nancy had known her husband was suffering, and she had ventured to console him with some not very original remarks about his having only done his duty, and that doubts were perfectly natural at such an hour.

"Doubts!" he had screamed at her. "I have no more doubt about his guilt than the devil waiting for him at the gates of hell!"

She had thought a long time about that. Slowly then the realisation had come to her that Ed Fox suffered when such a man died because, in the pursuit and capture of him, Ed identified himself with the criminal. And fast upon that realisation the thought had taken hold of her that never in their marriage had she been that close to him.

Nancy opened her hand and saw the marks of her nails in the palm.

She looked at her nails. They needed polish. A beauty operator, Mary Philips. If Nancy had been in the habit of having her hair done by a professional, she might possibly have known Mrs. Philips. The shop was in the neighbourhood where she and Ed had lived, where Ed still lived…

She caught up her purse and brief case and forced her thoughts onto a recipe for which she had no appetite. Ed was not troubled that way in his work…

"Damn it, Fox, give them something! They're riding my back like a cartload of monkeys." This was the old man's complaint on the third day after Mary Philips's murder. Reporters were coming into Rockland from all over the country. The mayor had turned over the facilities of his own office to them.

So Captain Fox sat down and composed a description of a man who might have been the slayer. He did it aware of his cynicism.

The state police laboratory had been unable to bring out any really pertinent physical evidence in any of the cases. The murderer was a wily one-a maniac or a genius… except in the instance of Elsie Troy. Fox could not help but dwell on that random start to so successful a career.

The detective stood over the stenographer while she typed the description-twenty copies on the electric machine. He then dictated a few lines calculated to counteract the description, to placate the rising hysteria of all the lonely women in Rockland. So many lonely women, whether or not they lived alone… Did Nancy feel alarmed, he wondered? If she did, she had not called on him for reassurance. But then she would not. There was that streak of stubborn pride in her that made her run like a wounded animal from the hand most willing to help.

"Forty-eight complaints have already been investigated, twenty-one suspects questioned…" Give them statistics, Fox thought. Nowadays they mean more to people than words. Maybe figures didn't lie, but they made a convincing camouflage for the truth.

He handed out the release over the chief of police's name, and found himself free once more to do the proper work of a detective, something unrelated to public relations. Suspect Number 22 had been waiting for over an hour in the Sun Room.

It gave Fox a degree of satisfaction to know that he was there-'Deacon' Alvin Rugg. Rugg with two g's. G as in God, he thought. The young man was a religious fanatic-either a fanatic or a charlatan, possibly both, in Fox's mind. And he was The Fox's own special catch, having been flushed out in the policeman's persistent search for something the three women might have had in common besides the shedding of their husbands. All three-Elsie Troy, Jane Mullins, and Mary Philips-were interested in a revivalist sect called 'Church of the Morning.'

On his way to the Sun Room, Fox changed his mind about tackling the suspect there. Why not treat him as if he were only a witness?-the better to disarm him. He had no police record, young Mr. Rugg, except for a violation of the peace ordinance in a nearby town: the complaint had been filed against his father and himself-their zeal had simply begat too large a crowd.

Fox had the young man brought to the office, and there he offered him the most comfortable chair in the room. Rugg chose a straight one instead. Fox thought he might prove rugged, Rugg.

The lithe youth wore his hair crested around his head a little like a brushed-up halo, for it was almost the colour of gold. His eyes were large, blue, and vacuous, though no doubt some would call them deep.

'Church of the Morning,' Fox started, trying without much success to keep the cynicism from his voice. "When did you join up?"

"I was called at birth," Alvin replied with a rotish piety.

He was older than he looked, Fox realised, and a sure phoney. "How old are you, Rugg?"

"Twenty."

"Let's see your draft registration. This is no newspaper interview."

"Thirty-two," Rugg amended, wistful as a woman.

"What do you do for a living?"

"Odd jobs. I'm a handyman when I'm not doing the Lord's work."

"How do you get these… these odd jobs?"

"My father recommends me."

"That would be the Reverend Rugg?"

The young man nodded-there was scarcely the shadow of a beard on his face. Fox was trying to calculate how the women to whom his father recommended him would feel about Alvin of the halo. Fox himself would have had more feeling for a goldfish, but then he was not a lonely woman. He must look up some of them, those still among the living. Fox had gone to the revival tent the night before-he and one-tenth the population of Rockland, almost 12,000 people. It did not seem so extraordinary then that all three victims had chanced to catch the fervour of the Church of the Morning.

"I suppose you talk religion with your employers?"

"That is why I am for hire, Captain."

The arrogance of an angel on its way to hell, Fox thought. "Who was your mother?" he snapped, on the chance that this was the young man's point of vulnerability.

"A Magdalen," Rugg said. "I have never asked further. My father is a holy man."

Fox muttered a vulgarity beneath his breath. He was a believer in orthodoxy, himself. Revivalists were not for him, especially one like Reverend Rugg whom he had heard last night speak of this boy, this golden lad, as sent to him like a pure spirit, a reward-this golden lad… of thirty-two.

"The reason I asked you to come in, Alvin," Fox said, forcing amiability upon himself, and quite as though he had not sent two officers to pick Rugg up, "I thought you might be able to help us on these murders. You've heard about them?"

"I… I had thought of coming in myself," Rugg said.

"When did that thought occur to you?"

"Well, two or three weeks ago at least-the first time, I mean. You see, I worked for that Mrs. Troy-cleaned her windows, things like that. Her husband was a bitter, vengeful man. He doesn't have the spiritual consolation his wife had."

A nice distinction of the present and past tenses, Fox thought. But what Troy did have was an unbreakable alibi: five witnesses to his continuous presence at a poker table on the night Elsie Troy was slain.

"She told you that about him?" Fox prompted cheerfully.

"Well, not exactly. She wanted to make a donation to the church but she couldn't. He had their bank account tied up… she said."

The hesitation before the last two words was marked by Fox. Either the Ruggs had investigated Elsie Troy's finances, he thought, or Alvin was covering up an intimacy he feared the detective suspected, or had evidence of.

"But Mrs. Troy ran a nursery school," Fox said blandly. "I don't suppose she took the little ones in out of charity, do you?"

"Her husband had put up the money for the school. He insisted his investment should be paid back to him first."

"I wouldn't call that unreasonable, would you, Alvin? A trifle un-chivalrous, perhaps, but not unreasonable?"

A vivid dislike came into the boy's, the man's, eyes. He had suddenly made an enemy of him, Fox thought with grim satisfaction. He would soon provoke the unguarded word. "Didn't you and Mrs. Troy talk about anything besides money?"

"We talked about faith," Rugg said, and then clamped his lips tight.

"Did you also do chores for Mrs. Mullins?"

"No. But she offered once to get me a messenger's job at the advertising company where she worked. Said I could do a lot of good there."

"I'll bet," Fox said. "And how about Mary Philips? What was she going to do for you?" He resisted the temptation to refer to the beauty shop.

"Nothing. She was a very nice woman."

That, Fox thought, was a revelatory answer. It had peace of soul in it. The captain then proceeded to turn the heat on 'Deacon' Rugg, and before half an hour was over he got from the golden boy the admission that both Elsie Troy and Jane Mullins had made amatory advances. Seeking more than religion, the self-widowed starvelings! They kicked out husbands and then welcomed any quack in trousers. Lady breadwinners! Fox could feel the explosion of his own anger; it spiced his powers of inquisition.

Alvin Rugg was then given such mental punishment as might have made a less vulnerable sinner threaten suit against the city. But while 'The Deacon' lacked airtight alibis for the nights of the 29th of April, the 16th of May, and June 2nd, he had been seen about his father's tent by many people, and he maintained his innocence through sweat and tears, finally sobbing his protestations on his knees.

The extent of The Fox's mercy was to leave Rugg alone to compose himself and find his own way to the street.

"Until tomorrow then, this is Nancy Fox going 'The Woman's Way.'"

Nancy gathered her papers so as not to make a sound the microphone could pick up. The newscaster took over. The next instant Nancy was listening with all the concentration of her being.

"… a man about forty, quick of movement, near six feet tall, a hundred and sixty pounds, extremely agile; he probably dresses conservatively and speaks softly. One of his victims is thought to have been describing him when she told a friend, 'You never know when he is going to smile or when he isn't-he changes moods so quickly…'"

Nancy pressed her lips together and leaned far away from the table. Her breathing was loud enough to carry into the mike. That was her own husband the newscaster was describing-Ed Fox himself right down to the unpredictable smile! Actually, it could be any of a dozen men, she tried to tell herself. Of course. Any of a hundred! What nonsense to put such a description over the air!

She had regained her composure by the time the reporter had finished his newscast. Then she had coffee with him, as she often did. But what a fantastic experience! Fantasy-that was the only word for it. The description had been part of a release from the office of the chief of police, which meant it had Ed's own approval.

"But now I'm going to tell you what it sounded like to me," the newsman said. "Like somebody-maybe on the inside-deliberately muddying up the tracks. I tell you somebody down there knows more than we're getting in these handouts."

"What a strange idea!" Nancy cried, and gave a deprecating laugh as hollow as the clink of her dime on the counter.

She spent the next couple of hours in the municipal library, trying to learn something about water rights. A bill on the water supply was before the city council. Two years of research would have been more adequate to the subject, she discovered. Once more she had dived into something only to crack her head in the shallows of her own ignorance.

Then she drove out to the county fairgrounds to judge the cake contest of the Grange women. She fled the conversational suggestion that the murderer might be scouting there. Some women squealed with a sort of ecstatic terror.

A feeling of deepening urgency pursued her from one chore to the next: there was something she ought to do, something she must return to and attend to. And yet the specific identity of this duty did not reveal itself. Sometimes she seemed on the brink of comprehension… but she escaped. Oh, yes, that much of herself she knew: she was fleeing it, not it fleeing her.

With that admission she cornered herself beyond flight. There was a question hanging in the dark reaches of her mind, unasked now even as it was five years ago. Since the night Mort Simmons died in the electric chair, it clung like monstrous fungi at the end of every cavern through which she fled. And by leaving her husband's house she had not escaped it.

Ask it now, she demanded-ask it now!

She drove off the pavement and braked the car to a shrieking halt. "All right!" she cried aloud. "I ask it before God-is Ed Fox capable of…" But she could not finish the sentence. She bent her head over the wheel and sobbed, "Eddie, oh, Eddie dear, forgive me…"

Without food, without rest, she drove herself until the day was spent, and with it most of her energy. Only her nerves remained taut. She returned just before dark to the apartment she had subleased from a friend. It was in no way her home: she had changed nothing in it, not even the leaf on the calendar. And so the place gave her no message when she entered-neither warning nor welcome.

She left the hall door ajar while she groped her way to the table where the lamp stood, and at the moment of switching on the light she sensed that someone had followed her into the apartment. Before she could fully see him, he caught her into his arms.

"Don't, please don't!" she cried. Her struggling but made him tighten his grip.

"For God's sake, Nancy, it's me!"

"I know!" she said, and leaped away as Ed gave up his grasp of her. She could taste the retch of fear. She whirled and looked at him as if she were measuring the distance between them.

"You knew?" he said incredulously. "You knew that it was me and yet you acted like that?"

She could only stare at him and nod in giddy acknowledgment of the truth.

His hands fell limp to his sides. "My God," he murmured.

A world of revelation opened to her in that mute gesture, in the simple dropping of his hands.

Neither of them moved. She felt the ache that comes with unshed tears gathering in her throat as the bitter taste of fear now ran out. It was a long moment until the tears were loosed and welled into her eyes, a moment in which they measured each other in the other's understanding-or in the other's misunderstanding.

"I thought I might surprise an old love-if I surprised you," he said flatly. "And then when I realised you were afraid, it seemed so crazy-so inconsiderate a thing to do, with a maniac abroad." He stood, self-pilloried and miserable-immobile, lest one move of his start up the fear in her again.

At last she managed the words: "Eddie, I do love you."

Fox raised his arms and held them out to her and she ran to him with utter abandon.

Presently he asked. "How long have you been afraid of me?"

"I think since the night Mort Simmons was executed," she said, and then clinging to him again, "Oh, my dear, my beloved husband."

He nodded and lifted her fingers to his lips. "How did you conceal it? Fear kills love. They say like that." He snapped his fingers.

"I never called it fear," she said, lifting her chin-and that, she thought, that inward courage was what he mistook for pride-"not until…" She bit her lip against the confession of the final truth.

"Until the murder of one, two, three women," Fox said evenly, "with whose lives you knew I'd have no sympathy."

"I didn't know that exactly," she said. "I only knew your prejudices."

"Pride and Prejudice," he mused. He pushed her gently an arm's distance from him. "Take another look at my prejudices, Nancy, and see who suffers most by them."

"May I come home now, Eddie?"

"Soon, darling. Very soon." He picked up his hat from where it had fallen in their struggle. "But you must let me tell you when."

He should have known it, really, Fox thought, closing the apartment door behind him. He was so alert to it in others, he should have seen the fear grow in her since the night she caught him naked-souled, suffering the death of Mort Simmons. Suppose that night he had tried to explain what had happened to him? How could he have said that it was not Mort Simmons's guilt he doubted, but his own innocence? How tell her that at the hour of his death, Mort Simmons was in a very special way the victim of Ed Fox?

Fox drove to within a block of Thomas Coyne's boarding house. He parked the car and walked up the street to where the tail he had put on Coyne was sitting, a newspaper before him, in a nondescript Ford. Fox slipped in beside him.

"Coyne's in there," the other detective said. "Been there since he came home from work. Ten minutes ago he went down to the corner for a paper. Came right back."

Fox decided to talk first with Mrs. Tuttle. He approached her by way of the kitchen door, identified himself, and got a cup of warmed-over coffee at the table. A voluble, lusty, good-natured woman, she responded easily to his question-whether she was interested in the Church of the Morning. She shook her head. Fox described 'Deacon' Alvin Rugg and his relationship to the murdered women.

Mrs. Tuttle clucked disapproval and admitted she had heard of him, but where she could not remember. To the captain's direct question as to whether she had ever seen the golden boy, she shook her head again. "I tell you, Mr. Fox, I like my men and my whiskey 100 proof, and my religion in a church with a stone foundation."

Fox laughed. "Anybody in the house here interested in the Revival?"

"What you want to know," she said, looking at him sidewide, "is if it was Tom Coyne who told me about him. Isn't that it?"

Fox admitted to the bush he had been beating around. "I'd like to know if Coyne has shown any interest in the sect."

"I don't know for sure. He takes sudden fancies, that one does."

"I understand he has a very deep fancy for you," Fox said bluntly.

Mrs. Tuttle frowned, the good nature fleeing her face. She took his cup and saucer to the sink and clattered it into the dish basin.

"I'm sorry to be clumsy about a delicate matter," Fox said, getting up from the table and following to where he could see her face. Shame or wrath he wondered? Perhaps both. "It was very necessary to Coyne that he confide that information to the police," he elaborated, in subtle quest of further information.

"Was it?" she said. "Then maybe it was necessary for him to come to me in the first place. Can you tell me that, mister?"

"If you tell me when it was he first came to you-in that sense, I mean," Fox said.

"A couple of nights ago," she said. "Till then it was just… well, we were pals, that's all."

Fox examined his own fingernails. "He didn't take very long to tell about it, did he?"

"Now answer my question to you," she said. "Did he come just so he could tell you him and me were-like that?"

Fox ventured to lay his hand on her arm. She pulled away from his touch as though it were fire. Her shame was deep, her affair shallow, he thought. "Just stay in the kitchen," he said. She would have her answer soon enough.

He moved through the hall and alerted the detective on watch at the front. Then he went upstairs. Thomas Coyne was sitting in his room, the newspaper open on the table before him, a pencil in his hand. He had been caught in the obviously pleasurable act of marking an item in the paper, and he gathered himself up on seeing Fox-like a bather surprised in the nude.

It gave an ironic sequence to the pretence on which Fox had come. "I wanted to see your swim trunks," Captain Fox said.

Coyne was still gaping. Slowly he uncoiled himself and then pointed to the dresser drawer.

"You get them," Fox said. "I don't like to invade your privacy." He turned partially away, in fact, to suggest that he was unaware of the newspaper over which he had surprised the man. He waited until Coyne reached the dresser, and then moved toward the table, but even there Fox pointed to the picture on the wall beyond it, and remarked that he remembered its like from his school days. A similar print, he said, had hung in the study hall. On and on he talked, and if Coyne was aware of the detective's quick scrutiny of his marked newspaper, it was less fearful for the man to pretend he had not seen it.

"My wife, Ellen, having left my bed and board, I am no longer responsible…"

Fox had seen it. So, likely, had the husbands of Mary Philips and Jane Mullins and Elsie Troy given public notice sometime or other. The decision he needed to reach instantly was whether he had sufficient evidence to indict Tom Coyne: it was so tempting to let him now pursue the pattern once more-up to its dire culmination.

The detective stood, his arms folded, while Coyne brought the swim trunks. "Here you are, Captain," he said.

"Haven't worn them much," Fox said, not touching them.

"It's early," Coyne said.

"So it is," Fox said, "The fifth of June. Baker's Beach just opened Memorial Day, didn't it?"

There was no serenity in Coyne now. He realised the trap into which he had betrayed himself while under questioning by Fox and the chief of police. So many things he had made seem right-even an affair with Mrs. Tuttle; and now that one little thing, by Fox's prompting, was 'Wrong'. He would not have been allowed in the waters of Baker's Beach before the thirtieth of May. In order to account for the sand in his room following the murder of Jane Mullins, he had said he had gone swimming at Baker's Beach two or three weeks before.

Before midnight Coyne confessed to the three homicides, the last two premeditated. He had not intended to kill Elsie Troy. But he had been watching her behaviour with young Alvin Rugg, and as her husband's friend he had taken the excuse of fixing her steps to gain her company and reproach her. She had called him "a nasty little man," and where matters had gone from that, he said, he could not clearly remember… except that he killed her. He was sure because of the wonderful exhilaration it gave him after he had done it-so wonderful it had to be repeated.

The chief had pride in his eyes, commending Captain Fox for so fine a job. They went upstairs together to see the mayor, and there the chief took major credit as his due. He announced, however, that this would be his last case before retirement, and he put his arm about Captain Fox as the reporters were invited in. Fox asked to be excused.

"Damn it, man, you've got to do the talking," the chief protested.

"Yes, sir, if you say so," Fox said. "But first I want to call my wife."

"By all means," the chief said. "Here, use the mayor's phone."

Nancy answered on the first ring.

"Will you pick me up tonight, my dear, on your way home?" Fox said.