The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

For Money Received

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1964.

The rain came straight down into the alley, and I sat with my back to my desk and watched the rain. It was not an afternoon for being out and doing something. Besides, I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. If I had somewhere to go more often, and something to do when I got there, I would be able to watch the rain come down past a front window instead of a back, into a street instead of an alley. Provided, of course, that I went where I went and did what I did for clients who paid me a great deal more than my clients usually paid.

My name is Percy Hand, and I’m a private detective. My privacy is rarely invaded. This makes the rent a problem, but it gives me plenty of time to watch the rain come down into the alley on rainy days.

Someone was coming down the hall. My ears are big and my hearing is acute, so I tried to establish certain facts, just for fun, about the person approaching. It was apparent from the sharp, quick rhythm of the steps that the person was a woman, probably young. I decided from a more esoteric suggestion in the sound that this woman, whoever she was exactly, was a woman of pride and even arrogance. In her purse, moreover, was a checkbook in which she could write, if she chose, a withdrawal of six figures. To the left, I mean, of the decimal point. These last two deductions were wholly unwarranted by the evidence, and probably explain why I am not the best detective in the world, although not the worst. They assumed, that is, that poor women cannot be proud, which is palpably untrue. Anyhow, if she was rich, chances were a hundred to one that she was not coming to see me.

But I was wrong. My reception room door from the hall opened and closed, releasing between the opening and the closing a brief, angry exclamation from a buzzer. The buzzer is cheaper than a receptionist, even though it is not as amusing, especially on rainy days. I got around my desk and out there in a hurry, before this client had time to walk out.

She was wearing a belted raincoat and holding in one hand a matching hat. Her hair was black and short and curling in the damp. She could look over a short man’s head and a tall man’s shoulder, excluding basketball players. At the end of nice legs was a pair of sensible brown shoes with flat heels. Inasmuch as I had heard her clearly in the hall, the shoes had to have leather heels.

“Are you Mr. Percy Hand?” she asked.

Her voice was modulated and musical, now with a quality of calculated coolness that could instantly change, I suspected, to calculated warmth or coldness as the occasion required.

After admitting that I was Percy Hand, I asked, “What can I do for you?” I scrutinized her curiously.

“I’m not certain.” She looked around the shabby little room with obvious reservations. “I expected something different. Do all private detectives have offices like this?”

“Some do, some don’t. It depends on how much money they make.”

“I don’t know that I like that. It must mean that you don’t have many clients, and there is surely a reason. Why aren’t you more successful?” She pointedly questioned.

“Happiness comes before success, I always say.”

“It’s a nice philosophy if you can afford it. On the other hand, you may be unsuccessful because you’re honest. I have a notion that private detectives, in general, are not very reliable. Can you tell me if that is so?”

“Professional ethics prevents my answering.”

“I heard that about you. That you’re honest. Someone told me.”

“My thanks to someone. Who, precisely?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell you. It doesn’t matter. A woman I know for whom you did something. She said that you were perfectly reliable, although not brilliant.”

“My thanks is now qualified. I maintain that, properly motivated, I can be brilliant for short periods.”

“Well, I’m not especially concerned about that. What I need is someone, on whose discretion I can rely, to do a simple job.”

“I’m your man. Simple, discreet jobs are those at which I’m best.”

“In that case, I’d better stay and tell you about it.”

She began to unbuckle her belt, and I stepped forward, like a discreet and reliable gentleman, to help her off with her raincoat. Then I gestured toward the door to my office, and she went through the door ahead of me and helped herself to the chair at the end of the desk. She was wearing a simple brown wool dress that verified my intuitive conclusion that she was, if not actually rich, at least substantially endowed. She crossed her legs and showed her knees, and I saw, just before sinking into my own chair behind the desk, that the knees were good.

“And now,” I asked, “what is it that you want me to do, discreetly and simply?”

“First, I’d better tell you who I am. I haven’t told you, have I?”

“You haven’t.”

“I’m Mrs. Benedict Coon. The third. My Christian name is Dulce, if it matters.”

“It doesn’t. Not yet. Chances are, it never will.”

“My husband and I live at 15 Corning Place. Do you know who the Coons are?”

“Canned food for dogs and cats?”

“They’re the ones. Isn’t it absurd?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m very hesitant about criticizing anything so profitable.”

“Well, never mind. It’s true that too much money, from whatever source, can cause one to do foolish things and get one into a great deal of trouble. That’s why I’m here. My husband has been seeing another woman, and I want you to find out who she is and where she lives.”

“Excuse me.” I was already parting sadly from a fee that might have been fat. “I don’t do divorce work. I can refer you to another operator, if you like.”

She laughed softly. “Such admirable scruples! No wonder you’re so poor. But you misunderstand me. I have no wish for a divorce. I’m far too fond of being Mrs. Benedict Coon III. Do you think for a moment that I would voluntarily give up my position because of a ridiculous peccadillo on the part of my husband?”

I relaxed and recovered hope. The fat fee again became feasible.

“All right. Tell me exactly what you want me to do.”

“I’m trying to, if you will only quit being difficult about things. Benedict is being blackmailed by the woman he has been seeing. I don’t know why exactly, but I want you to find a way to stop it. That will be your job.”

“What’s this woman’s name?”

“I heard him call her Myrna. That’s all I know.”

“You heard him? You mean you’ve seen him with her?”

“No, no. Nothing of the sort. I heard him talking with her on the telephone. I just happened to come home unexpectedly and pick up the downstairs extension while they were talking. That’s how I know about the meeting tomorrow.”

“What meeting? When? Where?”

“You know, I’m beginning to think you may be more capable than you seemed at first. From the way you go directly after the pertinent facts, I mean. Well, anyhow, they arranged to meet at three o’clock tomorrow in the Normandy Lounge. That’s in the Hotel Stafford.”

“I know where it is. What’s the purpose of the meeting?” I asked.

“I’m coming to that as fast as I can. She has something that he wants to get back. Neither he nor she said what. Whatever it is, however, it’s the reason he’s been paying her money. Quite a lot of money, I gather. Now he wants to pay her a much larger amount for its final return, to end things once and for all. She agreed to meet him and talk about it.”

“At the Normandy Lounge?”

“They’ll meet there. Probably they’ll go on to somewhere else.”

“At three o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Why not let him pay the amount, however much, and get the blackmail gimmick back, whatever it is? He can afford it.”

“Of course he can. If it works out that way, I’m prepared to forget the whole thing. But how can I be sure that it will? If it falls through, if she’s up to more tricks, I want to know who she is and where she lives, and how I can get Benedict free of her.”

“Have you discussed this with your husband?”

“Oh, no! Certainly not! That would never do. He’d go all to pieces and spoil the chances of doing anything whatever. He’s weak, you see, besides being a hopeless liar.”

“You want me to be at the lounge and follow them if they leave?”

“Or follow her if she leaves without him. Will you do it?”

“Why not? Divorce is one thing, blackmail another.”

“It’s settled, then.” She dug into her purse again and came out with a thin packet of lovely treasury notes which she laid on my desk, and which I picked up at once just to get the feel of them. “There’s five hundred dollars there, a fair fee for an afternoon’s work. If there’s more work later, there will be more money. We’ll discuss it if there is.”

“How will I recognize your husband?”

“He’s medium height, has blond hair. Not particularly distinctive, so you’d better know exactly what he’ll be wearing. I’ll be watching when he leaves the house, and I’ll call immediately and give you a description. Will you be in your office?”

“I’ll make a point of it.”

She stood up and headed for the door. I followed her into the reception room and helped her on with her raincoat. When the hall door had closed behind her, I stood and listened with my big, acute ears to the sound of her receding footsteps. Then I returned to my office and stood at the window and looked through the rain, still falling, at the brick wall across the alley from me.

What order of events, I thought, had sent Dulce Coon here? What strange chance had put into my hands more money than they had held at once for a long, long time?

There were two approaches to the Normandy Lounge; one was directly from the street, an inducement to susceptible pedestrians, and the other was through the lobby of the Hotel Stafford and down a shallow flight of stairs. I entered from the street, filled with bright light after a gray day, and stopped just inside, while the door swung shut behind me with a soft pneumatic whisper. I waited until my pupils had dilated in adjustment to thick, scented darkness that was pricked here and there by points of light, and then I navigated slowly between tiny tables to an upholstered seat against the wall. Above the bar and behind the bartender was the illuminated dial of an electric clock. I ordered a glass of beer from a waitress who came to see what I wanted.

The clock said ten minutes till three. A canary was singing softly in a juke box, and the canary was so in love. Two men and a woman were lined up on stools at the bar. The woman was between the men, but she only talked with the one on her right, and the one on her left just sat and stared at his shadow in the mirror. Half a dozen men and women were scattered one to one at tables, holding hands and rubbing knees, and the murmur of their voices made a kind of choral accompaniment to the love-sick canary. Trade was slow, but the time was wrong. In a couple of hours, with the closing of offices and shops, things would pick up. The waitress delivered my glass of beer, and I began to nurse it.

He was wearing, Dulce Coon had said, a brown plaid jacket and brown slacks. His shirt was white, button-down collar, and his tie was fashionably narrow. He was medium height and his hair was blond, and so was the mustache that I might miss unless my eyes were as good as my ears. I couldn’t miss him, she said, but I begged to differ. Jacket and slacks and all the rest were not distinctive and might apply to someone else. Not likely, she said, to someone else who would appear at three or shortly before. Not at all likely, she added, to someone else who would be joined in the lounge by a woman. I conceded, and here I was, Percy Hand on the alert, and there he was, sure enough, coming down the steps from the lobby at exactly two minutes till three by the clock.

He crawled onto a stool near the lobby entrance and ordered something in water, probably scotch or bourbon. I could see only his back, with a glancing shot at his profile now and then as his head turned. I tried to focus on the mirror for a better look, but there were bottles and glasses in the way, and faces there, besides, were only shadows. He was the one, though. No question about it. It was evident in his subtle suggestion of tense expectancy, his too-frequent references to the clock as the two minutes till three went to ten minutes past. His right hand held his glass. His left hand kept moving out to a bowl of salted peanuts on the bar. He was Benedict Coon III, and he was waiting for a woman named Myrna who was also, by informal indictment, a blackmailer. It was another drink and a quarter of a pound of peanuts later before she came. But then there she was, all at once, beside him.

She was onto the next stool before I was aware of her. Once aware, however, I was aware in spades, and if Benedict had been indiscreet with Myrna, I was not the one to blame him. You didn’t even have to see her face to know that inciting indiscretions was, with her, a natural effect of observable causes. A little taller than average, she possessed, without going into censorable details, a full inventory of quality stock. Her hair, just short of her shoulders, was pale blond, almost white, and I would have sworn that it was natural, although it is impossible to tell, actually, in these days of superior artifice. She was wearing a dark red suit with a tight and narrow skirt, and the skirt rode well above her knees on nylon as she perched on the stool and crossed her legs. Suffice it to say that even the vital juices of Percy Hand came instantly to a simmer.

I preferred the scenery from where I was, but I had a job to do with priority over pleasure, and I had a bank account of five hundred dollars, minus pocket money, to remind me of it. So, ethical if nothing else, I moved with my glass to the bar. Leaving a pair of stools between me and them, I ordered another beer and cocked an acute ear, but I might as well have been wearing plugs. They said little to each other, and what they said, was said too softly to be understood. Naturally, I thought. They were scarcely on terms of innocent and amiable conversation, and nothing that was to pass between them could be passed openly in a public cocktail lounge. I wanted to turn my head and look at them directly, but I didn’t think I’d better. I tried from closer range to see her clearly in the mirror, but I could only see enough of her face to know that the rest of her had no cause to be ashamed of it.

She was holding in her left hand, I saw sidewise, a pair of dark glasses that she had removed in the shadowy lounge — the Hollywood touch. She had ordered a martini, and she drank the martini slowly and ate the olive afterward. He said something to her, and she said something to him, and suddenly, in unison, they slipped off their stools and went up the shallow flight of stairs into the lobby. When I got there after them, they were headed directly for the doors on the far side. Her high, thin heels tapped out a brisk cadence as they crossed a border of terrazzo beyond a thick rug.

Outside, they crossed the street at an angle in the middle of the block, and I assumed that they were going to a garage, convenient to the hotel, where he must have left his car. My own, such as it was, was down the block in the opposite direction, occupying a slot at the curb that I had found by luck. I went down to it, got in and started the engine, and waited. They would have to come past me, I knew, because it was a one-way street. In a few minutes they came, in a gray sedan. I swung in behind it and tagged along.

They were in no hurry, scrupulously minding the posted limits. They never got separated from me by more than an intruding car or two, and I was able to make all the lights that they made, although I had to run a couple on the yellow. We passed through the congested downtown area, turning east after a while onto an east-west boulevard.

Their car picked up speed, moving briskly down a gauntlet of fancy apartment buildings. I had a notion that one of them might be the sedan’s destination, but I was wrong in my notion, which is not rare. It ran the gauntlet without stopping or turning, and it came pretty soon to an oblique intersection with a northeast-southwest thoroughfare. A red light held it there in the left-turn lane, and I waited behind it in the same lane. Between us were two cars that had slipped into the traffic along the way.

I kept watching the light, which was a long one, and I thought it would never change. At last it did, and the traffic in the other lanes began to move. Not ours. The sedan sat, and we all sat behind it. Drivers in cars ahead and behind began to lean on their horns in a demonstration of annoyance, but the gray car ignored the demonstrators with impervious arrogance. It simply waited and waited until it was ready to move, and it wasn’t ready until the instant the light went yellow. Then it shot into the intersection, wheeled left with whining tires, and was gone down the thoroughfare before I could curse or cry or even cluck.

Other drivers, no doubt, wondered what had promoted this deliberate outrage. Not I. I knew that old Percy had been neatly slipped, and I wondered why. I wondered, that is, why the pair in the gray sedan should even have been aware of my presence on earth, let alone on their collective tail. Was I guilty of glaring error? Had, perhaps, my ears flapped at the bar when I strained to hear their conversation, what little there had been? Did even ethical private detectives have a distinctive smell of which they were unaware? And, grim reflection, was I now entitled to keep all of the five C’s that I had been paid to do a simple job that I had simply failed to do? It was true that no conditions had been attached to the fee, but it was equally true that I hadn’t earned it, or even enough of it to buy a hamburger sandwich. In fact, I conceded bitterly, I ought to pay damages.

Well, no good in crying. No good, either, in trying to run down the other car. I had been slipped, and that was that. The only thing to do was to find a phone and call Dulce Coon and make a full and abject confession of professional idiocy. I crossed the intersection, found a turn, and made my way downtown again by another route. The only telephone I could think of that wouldn’t cost me a dime was the one in my office. I went there and sat at my desk backwards and looked at the brick wall across the alley. I thought about what had happened, and how I could explain it in a way that would salvage at least some of my dignity, if none of my fee.

Something had gone wrong, that was clear, and it didn’t take a better brain than mine to know what. I had been expected and spotted and duped, that was what. But how? And why? And just when? The best explanation, so far as I could see, was that Dulce Coon, sometime between yesterday and today, had somehow given the business away. For that matter, it was possible that she had been followed through the rain to my office. If so, she was partly responsible for my fiasco, and didn’t that give me a legitimate claim to my fee? Well, there was a way to find out. The way was at hand, and there was no point in waiting any longer to take it. Turning around to my desk in my swivel, I consulted the directory and dialed a number, and somewhere in the house at 15 Corning Place a telephone was answered by someone that I assumed to be a maid.

Was Mrs. Coon at home?

Sorry. Mrs. Coon wasn’t. Who was calling, please?

Mr. Percy Hand was calling. When was Mrs. Coon expected?

That wasn’t known. Would Mr. Hand care to leave a message?

Mr. Hand wouldn’t.

I tried again an hour later, after five o’clock. Still no luck. The same maid gave me the same answers. This time, I asked her to have Mrs. Coon call Mr. Hand immediately upon her return home. The maid agreed, but the tone of her voice implied a polite skepticism of Mrs. Coon’s compliance.

I went downstairs to a lunchroom and bought a couple of corned beef sandwiches and a pint of coffee in a cardboard container. I carried the sandwiches and the coffee back to my office and had my dinner, pardon the expression, at my desk. I had what was left of the coffee with a couple of cigarettes. The container was drained and the second butt stubbed when the telephone began to ring, and it was Dulce Coon at last.

“I had word to call you,” she said. “What do you want?”

“I tried twice before to get you, but you weren’t home. I thought you’d want a report.”

“Go ahead and report. Did you see Benedict and the woman?”

“I saw them. They met at the bar in the Normandy Lounge, just as you said they would.”

“Did they leave together?”

“They did, two highballs and a martini later. They walked from the hotel to a garage and drove off in a gray sedan.”

“That’s Benedict’s car. Did you follow them?”

“After a fashion.”

“What do you mean by that? Either you did or you didn’t. Where did they go?”

“Briefly, I lost them. Or, to put it more accurately, they lost me. They ran a yellow and left a long line of traffic, including me, sitting on a red.”

“Why should they do that?”

“A good question. I was about to ask it myself. That tricky business at the light was planned. They did it to shake a tail, and I’d like to know how they knew they had one. Did you give it away?”

“Certainly not.”

“Somehow or other, he must have got onto it. Are you sure you weren’t followed to my office yesterday?”

“There was no reason why I should have been.”

“You said you overheard his conversation with the woman on an extension. Maybe he knew you were listening.”

“That’s absurd. If he had heard me lift the receiver, he’d have quit talking, and I didn’t hang up until after he did.”

“Nevertheless, he knew. Somehow he knew he was being tailed.”

“Obviously. Aren’t you, perhaps, just trying to make an excuse for yourself? You must have bungled the job by making yourself conspicuous or something. I thought following people was a kind of basic thing that detectives learned from their primer. It seems to me that any good one ought to know how to do it.”

“All right. So I’ll have to go back to kindergarten. Don’t worry, though. I’ll see that most of the fee is returned to you.”

“That won’t be necessary. I offered the fee without conditions.”

“It’s a lot of money for practically nothing.”

“I’ve spent more for less. I can afford it. Besides, this may not be the end of it. If there’s something very simple that you can do for me later, I’ll get in touch.”

“In the meanwhile,” I said, “I’ll be studying my primer.”

She hung up, and I hung up, and we left it at that. I tried to think of something simple to do with the evening, and the simplest thing I could think of was to go home and sleep, something which is even pre-primer in its simplicity. So I bought a pint of bourbon and took it to bed with me. Sometime after ten I went to sleep, and slept until almost seven the next morning.

At my office, I read a morning paper. Then I had a client who had a minor job to offer, and the job, which doesn’t matter, took me away for the rest of the morning. After a businessman’s special, I returned to the office and found the reception room full of Detective-Lieutenant Brady Baldwin, who tends to accumulate excessive fat around the belt buckle but none whatever between the ears. My relationship with Brady was good. Indeed, my relationship with all the city’s official guardians was good. The reason, I think, was that we shared roughly the same brackets on the income-tax schedule. No class war where we were concerned.

“Hello, Brady,” I said. “What brings you here?”

“Nothing brings me,” he said. “Someone sent me.”

“That’s what comes from being discreet and efficient. You build a reputation. I’ve got a million references, Brady.”

“Well, that wasn’t quite the way this particular reference was. I’ve been talking with Mrs. Benedict Coon III.”

“You can’t please everybody. She didn’t have to sic the cops on me, though. I offered to return most of the fee.”

“I don’t know anything about fees. Myself, I work on a salary. Someday I may get a pension. Invite me in, Percy. I’ve got a question or two.”

“Sure. Come on in.”

We went into the office, and Brady uncovered his naked skull and put the lid on a corner of my desk. He took a cigar out of the breast pocket of his coat, looked at it a moment and put it back.

“Mrs. Coon,” he said, “gave you a job yesterday.”

“The job was yesterday. She gave it to me the day before.”

“Picking up her husband and a woman in the Normandy Lounge, and following them wherever they went.”

“That was the job.”

“She says you lost them.”

“I didn’t lose them. They lost me. No matter, though. The result was the same.”

“Whichever way, it’s too bad. You might have seen something interesting.”

“I doubt it. You can’t just invade privacy for something entertaining to look at.”

“True. I’m glad you recognize your limitations, Percy. But murder, however entertaining, has no right to privacy.”

“Murder!” I thought for a second that he was merely making an academic observation, but I should have known better. Brady wasn’t given to them. “Are you telling me that he killed her?”

“Not he her. She him.”

“Damn it, Brady, that doesn’t figure. She was blackmailing him. Why the devil should she eliminate her source of income?”

“I’ve been asking myself that. There are a few good answers, when you stop to think about it. The best one, for my money, is based on the old chestnut that the worm sometimes turns. Say he’d decided to come clean, at whatever cost to himself, and to see that she got what was coming to her. It’s not hard to find a motive there.”

“If that were true, why did he meet her? Why didn’t he call in the cops and be done with it once and for all?”

“Maybe he didn’t make up his mind until the last minute. Worms do a lot of squirming on the hook, you know.”

“Sure. So she shot him. Just like that. She had a gun in her purse, of course. Nothing odd in that. All women carry them.”

“Not all. Some. Especially the ones who play around with blackmail. I wish you wouldn’t indulge in sarcasm, Percy. It doesn’t suit you. Besides, who said he was shot?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I guess I might as well confess. I’ve read about murderers giving themselves away like this, but I never thought it would happen to me. The guilty knowledge was just too much for me.”

“Oh, come off, Percy. It was a natural enough assumption. It’s pretty obvious that she couldn’t poison him in an automobile, and it would have taken an Amazon to choke him to death. He wasn’t any muscle man, but he could at least have fought off a woman.”

“She could have stabbed him or cracked his skull.”

“Maybe. But she didn’t. She was carrying a .25 caliber gun, and she shot him with it — in the back of the head.”

“That’s crazy. What kind of man turns his back on a blackmailer?”

“He was careless, I guess. Why worry about figuring these things out, when you only have to ask. As soon as we find the woman, that is.”

“You haven’t found her yet?”

“We don’t even know her full name, or what she looks like. That’s where you come in. Mrs. Coon says you can give us a description.”

“That I can, and you couldn’t be shot in the head by a choicer piece. Fairly tall. Custom built. None of your assembly line jobs. Pale blond hair, almost shoulder length. When I saw her, she was wearing a dark red suit with a skirt that showed off her legs, and they deserved it.”

“Chassis can be disguised. Hair can be cut and dyed. It would be helpful if you had spent more time looking at her face.”

“Have you been in the Normandy Lounge lately? I can tell you that it’s just a little lighter than a cave. I tried to get a good look at her face, even in the mirror behind the bar, but all I can tell you is that it went well with the rest of her.”

“You followed them, didn’t you? It must have been lighter outside.”

“As you say, I followed them. They were ahead, and I was behind. Would you care for an accurate and detailed description of her stern?”

“No thanks. I wouldn’t want you to go poetic on me.” Brady reached for his hat and slapped it on his head, a seasoned veteran of many a year. If the reference is ambiguous, take your choice. “Thanks for trying, Percy. Next time I’ve got a few minutes to waste, I’ll look you up.”

“Wait a minute, Brady. So maybe I blew the job. We all have our bad days. At least you can fill me in on what I missed. From what you said, I assume that Coon was shot in the car that he was driving.”

“You assume right. It was parked on a dead-end road northeast of town. They’d apparently stopped there to wind up their business, whatever it was. Well, she wound it up, all right. Permanently. He was found early this morning, behind the wheel, with a hole in his head, slumped over against the door. It’s really a county job, but we’re lending a hand. Chances are, most of the investigation will have to be done in the city.”

“Any leads at all on the woman?”

“Why, sure. You just gave us a couple. She’s got blond hair and pretty legs.”

After which rather caustic remark, he heaved himself afoot and took himself off. I turned a hundred eighty degrees in my chair, looked into the alley, and wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to jump out the window. With my luck, however, I would probably suffer no more than bruises and abrasions.

I’ll not deny that I was feeling better. Somehow or other, my own fault or not, Benedict Coon III and his blonde charmer had spotted old Percy and played him for a chump, and Percy was hurt. He wanted to try again and do better.

Benedict was out of it, of course. He was lying in the morgue with a hole in his head. My job was done, or not done, and there was nothing left to do. Unless, perhaps, Dulce Coon would care to have me earn my fee by trying to find the elusive charmer who had killed her husband. That was, I thought, at least a possibility. I might not do any good, but chances were I wouldn’t do any harm, either, and it was, after all, already paid for.

I decided that I would run out to 15 Corning Place and apply for the job. I put on my hat and went.

Corning Place was a long ellipse with an end cut off. The street entered at one side of the truncated end and came out the other side of the same end. In the center of the ellipse was a wide area of lush grass and evergreen shrubs, and here and there a stone bench. Outside the ellipse, forming an elegant perimeter, were the deep lawns and fancy houses of the people who could afford to live there.

Number fifteen was as fancy as any, two and a half stories of gray stone, with a wide portico protecting a section of the drive on the south end. I drove my clunker boldly up the drive and left it, without apology, under the portico. Farther back, I could see, the drive flared out in a wide concrete apron in front of a garage big enough for four cars below, and a servant or two in quarters above. I went up shallow steps from the portico and along a wide veranda to the front door. I rang and waited. Pretty soon the door was opened by a maid who asked me what I wanted.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Benedict Coon III,” I said. “Mr. Percy Hand calling.”

The maid was sorry, but Mrs. Benedict Coon III was seeing no one. She was lying down.

“It’s very important,” I said, exaggerating a little. “It’s urgent that I see Mrs. Coon at once.”

The maid hesitated, her expression indicating polite skepticism. It was evident that she had never seen anything important come wrapped in wilted worsted with frayed cuffs. There was always, however, an outside chance that I was legitimate. The maid finally said she would inquire, which was all the concession I could expect. I was permitted to stand in the hall with my hat in my hands while she went up a wide flight of stairs, elegantly curving, to make the inquiry.

The house was still. In the stillness, a stern citizen in oils looked down upon me with hard blue eyes. Benedict I or II, I guessed. I took two steps forward, and he was still looking at me. I backed up, and the eyes followed. Annoyed by my evasive maneuvers, the eyes were frigidly critical. The maid came down the stairs, fortunately, and rescued me.

Mrs. Coon had consented to see me. Would I please wait in the library?

I would, and I did, after the maid had shown me where it was. I waited in the midst of a dozen high windows, most of them draped, and several thousand shelved books, most of them, judging by their orderly arrangement against the walls, seldom or never read. A blond head appeared suddenly around the high, winged back of a chair near a window. The head was followed into view by a body, and they both belonged, head and body, to a young man wearing glasses, and holding a book folded over an index finger. With his free hand, the young man removed his glasses, and examined me curiously.

“Who are you?” he asked, as if he found me somehow incredible.

“Percy Hand,” I said. “Mrs. Coon asked me to wait for her in here.”

“Really? I didn’t think Dulce was seeing anyone. The police have been here, you know. They took her downtown to identify old Benny. A grim business. Very exhausting.”

“I know. I won’t disturb her very long.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. Dulce’s taking it calmly enough, but you never know how close she may be to breaking. A remarkable woman, Dulce. You know what happened?”

“Yes. As you said, a grim business.”

“Well, old Benny asked for it, I guess. He who dances and all that. Whoever would have dreamed that he was playing around? My name is Martin Farmer, by the way. I’m a kind of shirttail cousin. Remotely related.”

I said I was glad to know him, which was a polite way of saying that I didn’t give a damn one way or another. The hall door opened, and Dulce Coon came in. She was wearing a simple black dress and had slipped her feet into soft-soled flats for comfort. Her dark hair, presumably just off the pillow, was still slightly tousled, as if she had done no more to repair it than comb it with her fingers. She didn’t offer me her hand, but neither did she seem to hold a grudge.

“How are you, Mr. Hand?” she said. “Marty, what are you doing here? I thought you had gone out.”

“I’ve been reading.” Martin Farmer lifted the book, still marked at his place with an index finger, as evidence. “Are you feeling better, Dulce?”

“Somewhat. Don’t worry about me, Marty. I’ll be all right.” She turned back to me. “I assume that you two have met.”

“Yes, we have.”

“In that case, what can I do for you? I thought that our business was ended.”

“Not very satisfactorily, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. One can’t be called to account for every mistake. Did you come here just to apologize?”

“Partly. Not entirely.”

“Why, then?”

“You paid me a large fee for something I didn’t do. An excessive fee. If there’s anything I can do, I’d like to earn it.”

“There’s nothing to be done. Nothing at all.”

“This woman your husband was with. Myrna, you called her. I’ve been thinking that I might help to find her.”

“Surely the police have far greater facilities for that than you have. Let the police find her.”

“I have one advantage. I’ve seen her. I might recognize her if I saw her again.”

“It’s doubtful that you will see her again. It’s probable that she has run away. If so, the police will follow her, or have her picked up and returned, if they can find her trail. I don’t want to commit myself to anything that might interfere with their job.”

“The police and I have worked together before.”

“Please do as I say, Mr. Hand. I sent the police to you, and when you told them what you knew, you did all that was necessary. Now stay out of it.”

“Right. Thanks, anyhow, for seeing me.”

“Not at all. And now you must excuse me. I’ve had a difficult day, and I need to rest. Marty will show you out.”

She turned away and left the room, and Marty, minding the manners of a shirttail cousin, showed me out. He said goodbye at the front door, and I crossed the veranda and got into my car. I drove forward to the concrete apron, U-turned and came back down the drive, around the ellipse, and out the exit.

On the way downtown I decided that I might as well spend some time, just for luck, in the Normandy Lounge. I went there and crawled onto a stool at the bar. I ordered a beer from the same bartender who had drawn my beer yesterday. A television set on a high shelf behind the bar was alight and alive with the organized antics of a couple of college football teams, reminding me that it was Saturday. The teams took turns trying to move the ball, but the only time they moved it very far was when they kicked it.

“Another beer,” I said. The bartender drew it and served it. Bored by the game, his services temporarily unclaimed, he was ready for an ear to bend. Mine, being conspicuous, seemed to attract him.

“You been in the fight game?” he asked.

“Not I,” I said. “Things are rough enough.”

“Seems like I seen you before. A picture or something. Somewhere.”

“Maybe it was yesterday. I was in here.”

“Oh, sure. I knew I’d seen you somewhere. A guy don’t forget a face like yours. You’re no beauty, Mister. No offense meant.”

“None taken. I guess it’s true you remember the extremes. The uglies and the lovelies. Like that platinum-headed honey a couple of stools down.”

“Where? What lovely? Mister, you’re seeing things.”

“Not now. Yesterday.”

“Oh. That one. A doll. A sexpot. Plenty of class, though. You can always tell the ones with class.”

“That’s right. I could go for a woman like that. If I knew who she was I could work out a strategy.”

“Mister, if you don’t mind my saying so, you ain’t exactly the type.”

“You never know. Lots of lovelies go for uglies. You know her name?”

“Nix. We didn’t introduce ourselves.”

“She come in here often?”

“Never seen her before. Probably a guest in the hotel. Just someone passing through.”

“How about the man she was with?”

“Was she with a man? I never noticed.”

A customer down the bar held up his empty glass, and the bartender went to fill it. I helped myself to a handful of salted peanuts and left. Outside on the sidewalk, I ate the peanuts one by one while I tried to make up my mind if I should quit or give it one more try. One more try, I decided. Asking questions was a harmless diversion, unless I began to get some significant answers, and I had in mind the person to ask who would be most likely to have the answers.

I found her hunched over a typewriter in a blue fog, a cigarette, dripping smoke, hanging from a corner of her mouth. A pair of goggles was clinging to the end of her nose, and her red hair looked like it had recently been combed with an egg beater. She was wearing a sweater that fit her like a sweat shirt, and a skirt that she must have picked up at a rummage sale. I couldn’t see her legs, but it was ten to one that her seams were crooked. It would be a mistake, however, to jump to any rash conclusion.

If you looked behind the goggles, you could see a face worth looking for. Inside the ragbag were a hundred and ten pounds of pleasant surprises. If you wonder how I knew, you are free to speculate. I will only say that she was a lovely, however disguised, who had no aversion to uglies. When she chose to make the effort, after hours, she could knock your eye out. Her name was Henrietta Savage, Hetty for short, and she wrote a column concerning things about town. You know the kind of stuff. Mostly about the fun spots, and who’s doing what, where. It was innocuous enough, the kind of gossip that never goes to court, but in the process of gathering it Hetty had become a veritable morgue of interesting and enlightening items that had never seen print. She peered up at me over her goggles without appreciable enthusiasm, and the limp cigarette assumed a belligerent position.

“Don’t bother to sit down, Percy,” she said. “Go away. I’ll meet you in the bar across the street after five.”

“You’re an avaricious female,” I said. “How did you know I just got paid a fat fee?”

“Thanks for the confession. In that case, we’ll have dinner later and a night on the town.”

“Not unless you renovate yourself. I’ve got my reputation as a playboy to consider. Do you sleep in those clothes?”

“There’s a possibility that you may find out. In the meanwhile, goodbye. Go away. Wait for me in the bar.”

“I’m going, and I’ll wait. Right after you answer a couple of questions for me. Come on, Hetty. Dinner and the town for a couple of answers?”

“Maybe lobster?”

“Pick him out of the tank yourself.”

“What questions?”

“You know Benedict Coon III? That’s just preliminary. It doesn’t count.”

“Your tense is wrong. He’s dead. You’ll find the story on page one. Anyhow, I knew him, and make the next one count.”

“All right. Who was the blond he was playing footsie with?”

“Benny? Playing footsie? Percy, you’re libeling the dead.”

“Not I. I believe in ghosts. I saw them together only yesterday, in the Normandy Lounge. Just barely, of course. You have to strike a match in that place to see your watch.”

“You can buy a girl a drink without playing footsie. Maybe she was a cousin, or an old schoolmate or something.”

“I have other evidence. From the best of sources. Never mind that, though. The thing is, I can’t get any lead on her. I don’t know who she is, or even how to start looking for her.”

“Well, you won’t learn from me. Who asked you to look?”

“No one, I’m just practicing.”

“Go practice somewhere else. Damn it, Percy, I’m busy.”

“Her first name was Myrna. That much I know.”

“You know more than I. If there was another woman, I never saw her or heard of her. Benny must have been pretty cute about it.”

“What sort of fellow was he?”

“Solid citizen. Something of a do-gooder. Bit of a prude, as a matter of fact, which helps to account for my skepticism. I can’t quite imagine Benny among the primroses.”

“Oh, can it. Hasn’t anyone ever told you about the deacon and the soprano?”

“Tell me at dinner. Before you leave, however, here’s something else that makes me scoff. Benny had been taking very good care of himself for the past year or so. Bum heart. Hospitalized after an attack. Strict diet, early to bed — the routine. Benny’s hide was important to him. Gymnastics with a blond just doesn’t fit.”

“You never saw this blond. I did. The earlier to bed, the better.”

“Blonds are deceptive. Anyone can tell you that redheads are superior. Get lost, Percy. Go wait in the bar.”

I thought it would be worth a lobster, so I went and waited, and it was.

Who was Myrna? What was she? A blackmailer, presumably. A spook, apparently.

Whoever and whatever she was, where in the devil had she gone, and where was she now? So far as I could discover, she had simply disappeared like a puff of smoke. No one knew her full name, no one knew her address, no one could remember her in association with Benedict Coon, and no one except me and a bartender could remember her at all. It was frustrating, it was uncanny, and moreover, it was incredible. A woman like that was a woman to remember. The bartender had said so, and I say so.

I was like a kid with a riddle in his head. I couldn’t get it out, and I couldn’t solve it. I worked at it when I didn’t have something else to do, and I took it to bed with me at night, and I got nowhere from nothing.

Was it possible that Benedict Coon had killed her and disposed of her body, later killing himself in despair and fear and hopelessness? I was lying in bed when I had the thought, and it brought me straight up in the darkness. Then, jeering at myself silently, I lay down again. There is no suicide on record, so far as I know, who has shot himself in the back of the head and disposed of the gun afterward.

Perhaps the police had the answers. Perhaps, with all their facilities, they had gone somewhere while I was going nowhere. For the sake of my mental health, I decided to find out. The next day I went to police headquarters and found Brady Baldwin at a desk in a cubbyhole that may have covered a few more square feet than my reception room. If he was not exactly happy to see me, he was at least amiable.

“Sit down, Percy,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Myrna,” I said.

“Mine, too.”

“You mean you haven’t got any leads yet?”

“Not a one.” He rubbed his naked skull and looked at me with an expression that was slightly sour. “As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to suspect that in your mind is the only place she ever was. How many martinis had you drunk, Percy?”

“I hadn’t drunk any. I had a couple of beers. Brady, I saw her. She was there. She met Benedict Coon, and she left with him.”

“All right, Percy, all right.” He spread his hands and raised his brows. “But where is she now?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“You sure you’ve checked all possibilities?”

“All stations. Air, train, bus. Hotels, motels, apartment houses. The county boys have run all over the area trying to find someone who saw her walking, gave her a lift, anything at all. We can’t go everywhere and check everything and ask everyone, but there’s more. Shall I go on?”

“Sorry, Brady. I’m just frustrated. How far out was the car when it was found?”

“Not far; just far enough to put it in county jurisdiction. The state troopers are giving an assist out there. Benedict Coon, like I told you, was behind the wheel. Slumped against the door. His head had fallen forward. He hadn’t bled much, a little seepage into his hair around the wound, that’s all. This has been in the papers, Percy.”

“I know. I just want it from you. When was he killed?”

“It must have been pretty soon after you lost them. The coroner says sometime between two and five. You know how those guys are. Try to box them into an hour, say, and they’re slippery as a meteorologist. Thanks to you, we know that it was well after three. Probably past four.”

“The paper said he was found by a real-estate agent.”

“True. He happens to own the land beyond that dead-end road. He plans to push the road on through and finance an addition. He and a contractor had gone out to look the situation over.”

“I can’t quite locate the place. Where will the road come out when it’s finished?”

“It won’t actually come out anywhere. It’ll dead-end again, against the rear of the Cedarvale Country Club golf course. The addition’s projected for the upper brackets. As a matter of fact, Benedict Coon was a member of that club. Mrs. Coon was there the afternoon he was killed. She’d gone out to play golf with Martin Farmer, a family connection, and they stayed on for drinks and dinner in the bar. It was a clear day, you’ll remember, after a rainy one.”

“Is that where she was? I wondered. I tried to call her and couldn’t get her.”

“That’s where. We checked it out just as a matter of routine. They were seen on the course and in the bar, and Farmer’s car was seen in the parking area. It’s a late model. There’s a kid who works around the area, trimming the shrubs and controlling the litter, and he remembers the car particularly, because it had a full house.”

“Full house?”

“Like in poker. On the license plate. This kid’s sort of simple, and he amuses himself by trying to find the highest hand on the plates. Farmer’s has three sixes and a pair of treys. It was his car, all right. Registry verifies it.”

“Well, that’s good work, neat and conclusive, but it doesn’t get us any closer to Myrna.”

“Forget Myrna, Percy. She’s our problem. We’re working on it, and we don’t need you getting in the way.”

“Thanks.” Knowing when I’d been dismissed, I stood up to leave.

I went away, and with the help of several distractions I was able to keep Myrna pretty well confined to a dark closet at the back of my mind until that night when I was home in bed. Then she got out and began to make a nuisance of herself. I tried deliberately to think of someone else in her place, namely Hetty, but it didn’t work. Lying on my back and staring up into the darkness, I let her prowl my mind without restrictions, and she began to repeat her performance in the Normandy Lounge, the whole sequence of action; I saw her crawl onto the stool, saw her lift a martini glass toward a face that was a shadow in a dark mirror, and then, all at once she was walking swiftly across the hotel lobby beside Benedict Coon, and I could see the back of her. No more.

No more? Well, not quite. I could also hear her. I could hear the staccato rhythm of her spike heels on terrazzo, and I could hear at the same time, like an echo, a fainter, farther sound. Not another sound, but the same sound at a different time, and in a different place. The different time was a rainy afternoon not long ago, and the different place was the hall outside my office. There is a distinctive quality to the rhythm and cadence of a person’s walk, if only you have the big sharp ears to pick it up, and I was ready to back my ears with odds that the person walking down the hall was the same person walking across the terrazzo floor.

Why? I asked myself the question with my breath caught in my throat and the short hair rising on the back of my neck. Why should Dulce Coon, wearing a blond wig and spike heels and Hollywood goggles and superimposed sex, meet her own husband in a downtown bar?

Well, that was easy enough to answer. Lots of wives met lots of husbands in various places for various reasons. As for the wig, women who could afford them were wearing them nowadays like hats. They changed hair with their mood and their dress.

What was more pertinent, why had she lied about a blackmailer who had probably never existed, and why had she deliberately arranged for a certain Percy Hand to witness a phony meeting in a shadowy lounge that had surely been carefully chosen for that reason?

That was a two-part question, and the answer to the first part was obvious even to me. She had simply wanted to plant a red herring, a blond bomb to divert suspicion from where it might otherwise have been directed. The answer to the second part was also clearly implied, and the implication was that Percy Hand, plying his trade in a side street with most of the trappings of failure and few of success, was a made-to-order sucker for a clever woman with murder on her mind. I didn’t like the idea, but there it was, and it annoyed me considerably.

But wait a minute. Dulce Coon had been at the Cedarvale Country Club. She had been playing golf and drinking drinks and eating early dinner with her shirttail cousin. There were witnesses who said so, and the witnesses had satisfied Brady Baldwin, who was a hard man to satisfy. Could I be wrong? Had old Percy’s big ears and little brain collaborated to lead him astray? Well, it was entirely possible. It had been done before. But still, lying there in bed and listening again to the sound of a woman walking, allowing for the differences in flats and spikes and wood and stone, I had a grim conviction that it was, in both times and places, no one but Dulce Coon.

Then another gorgeous idea bloomed all at once in my little hothouse brain. Not really an idea, though. It was more the remembrance of a minor observation that suddenly assumed a significant relationship to a scrap of information. Maybe it meant something, and maybe it didn’t. But it brought me up and reaching out into darkness for the phone, and I dialed in darkness a number that I knew by heart and touch. At the other end of the line, another phone rang and rang, and I kept hanging on and on. Eventually a blurred and cranky voice broke in.

“Wrong number,” the voice said. “Get off the line.”

“Wait a minute, Hetty,” I said. “Don’t hang up.”

“Who’s this? It sounds like Percy, but I don’t believe it.”

“Percy’s who.”

“Damn it, Percy, it’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

“Hetty, I just want to ask you a simple question.”

“The answer is no. I’m too young, and you’re too poor. It wouldn’t work out.”

“As you say. Now, will you answer my question?”

“You haven’t asked it yet. How can I answer it if you won’t ask it?”

“Here it is. What kind of heart trouble did Benedict Coon have?”

“How would I know? Is there more than one kind?”

“According to the best authorities, there are several. Could you find out for me?”

“If properly motivated.”

“Bribed, you mean. What’s the tariff?”

“Another dinner?”

“In the immediate future.”

“Agreed. First thing in the morning. I’ve got connections at the hospital.”

“Call me at my office.”

“Just as soon as I know.”

She hung up, and so did I. I smoked three cigarettes and lay down again. I was wide awake, and it was three years till daylight. There was another phone call I wanted to make, but I decided I’d better wait. Brady Baldwin, waked in the night, would be even meaner than Hetty, and he was not, moreover, susceptible to bribes.

The next morning I was in my office with my feet up when the phone rang, and Hetty was back. True to her word, motivated by a steak, she had found my answer, and it was the answer I wanted. Luck, after running bad, was beginning to run good. It looked like the end of a long, dry spell.

I dialed police headquarters. After preliminaries with the switchboard, I got Brady Baldwin in Homicide.

“Hello, Percy,” he said. “No news.”

“I called to give, not to receive. It’s more blessed, supposedly. In brief, I’ve found her.”

The line hummed, and I listened to it hum. Brady was still there at the other end, but he wasn’t talking at the moment. I only hoped that I hadn’t talked too soon and too much.

“Excuse me, Percy. We must have a bad connection. I thought you said you’d found her.”

“I did, and I have.”

“Where?”

“Sitting in my lap.”

“Don’t be a cutie, Percy. Give it to me straight and quick.”

“Not now. Later.”

“Better not play games with your license. You might lose it.”

“No games, Brady. I could be wrong, and I have to be sure. Will you do me a favor?”

“Why should I?”

“You’ll be doing one for yourself, too.”

“That’s different. What favor?”

“Do you still have Benedict Coon’s car in custody?”

“We do, but we’re ready to release it.”

“What have you done to it?”

“The usual. We’ve taken photographs. We’ve lifted prints. We’ve vacuumed it and run tests. Nothing that’s got us much of anywhere.”

“Back seat, too?”

“Sure. We’re not dummies, Percy. Coon was shot in the back of the head. It could have been done by a third party hiding on the floor in the rear. It’s conceivable.”

“How about the trunk?”

“Why waste time? How could he have been shot from the trunk?”

“Run tests on the trunk, Brady. That’s the favor.”

“Maybe you’d better come clean with whatever’s in your mind.”

“I said later, Brady, and that’s when it’ll have to be. Goodbye, now.”

To avoid threats and recriminations and other forms of unpleasantry, I hung up, grabbed my hat, and got out of the office before he could call me back. I got in my clunker and headed east, and in due time I was rattling up the drive to the Cedarvale Country Club, which was not a place I ordinarily went or was welcome.

There were a dozen late vintage automobiles in the parking area. It was a clear day, chilly but still abnormally mild for the time of year, and I could see a few golf bugs scattered over the rolling course. In front of the clubhouse, using a pair of long-handled clippers on a juniper bush, was an angular specimen with an expression of contented idiocy on his face. He looked to me like the kind who might entertain himself by playing poker with license plates, so I wandered over and said that it was certainly a nice day, late in the year as it was, and he agreed. I said it was a good day for golf, and he didn’t deny it. I asked him if a lot of members were still playing, and he said there were quite a few.

“You a member?” he asked.

“No, I’m a cop.”

I didn’t bother to distinguish between cops private, and cops public, and he didn’t require me to make the distinction.

“There was a cop here the other day,” he said. “He was asking about Mrs. Coon and Mr. Farmer.”

“I know. You have to ask about things like that, just to keep the record straight. You know how it is with murder. It’s important to find out where everyone was at certain times.”

“Well, Mrs. Coon and Mr. Farmer were right here, and I said so.”

“Did you see them?”

“Not them. His car. It was parked up here, and I remember it because it had a full house. Highest hand in the lot at the time. I play poker with myself, sort of, with license plates.”

“So I’ve heard. Didn’t you see them when they left?”

“They didn’t leave. Not while I was here, I mean. Other people saw them, though. They came in off the course about four o’clock, something like that, and they hung around in the bar and had dinner before they left. I quit at five.”

“When did they arrive and park the car?”

“I wouldn’t exactly know. About eleven, I had to go down to the caretaker’s shed for a tool I needed, and the car was here when I got back.”

“How long did you stay at the caretaker’s shed?”

“Well, I got to talking with a fellow there, and it was quite awhile. Half an hour, at least. A lot of other cars had come in, and the lot was pretty well filled. There was a luncheon in the clubhouse that day.”

“I see. So the car was here soon after eleven, say. Mrs. Coon and Farmer came off the course about four. I’d call that a long game of golf.”

“They must have practiced before they started to play.”

“That,” I said, “is just what I’m thinking.”

I left him in his juniper patch and went away. I should have gone directly to police headquarters, but I didn’t, and the reason I didn’t had something to do with earning a fee, and something more to do with injured pride or vanity or what you will. I went, instead, to 15 Corning Place, and I was intercepted at the door by the same maid as before, who went, as before, to see if Mrs. Coon would see me.

I waited in the hall for the maid to come back, but she didn’t come. In her place, after awhile, Martin Farmer came, the shirttail cousin. He was superficially polite, but I could tell that I was considered a nuisance. Mrs. Coon, he said, wasn’t seeing anyone. Mrs. Coon wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t be disturbed.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Give my sympathy to Mrs. Coon, and tell her that Mr. Hand has important information that compels him to insist.”

“Oh? Perhaps, if you were to tell me, I could relay the information to Mrs. Coon later.”

It was a touchy point in our negotiations, and for a moment it seemed questionable whether I would get a concession or a polite bum’s rush. Martin Farmer hesitated, considering the alternatives, then he shrugged and conceded.

“I’ll see,” he said. “Please wait in the library. You know the way.”

I went to the library. I waited. After about five minutes had passed, Dulce Coon came into the library with her shirttail close behind her. Martin Farmer, that is. He stopped near the door. She came on and stopped a step or two away. This time she was wearing a white blouse and tight black pants. Her feet, bare, were thrust into flat sandals that were no more than thin soles with narrow straps attached. She was annoyed, to say the least, and she clearly was determined to make short work of me.

“Mr. Hand,” she said, “I thought I made it clear that our relationship had ended. Why have you come here again?”

“I’m here,” I said, “to tell you that I’ve found Myrna. I thought you’d want to know.”

There was a moment of silence in which no one moved or breathed. Then Martin Farmer stirred suddenly by the door, but I didn’t look at him. I kept looking at Dulce Coon. Crimson spots had begun to burn in her cheeks, and her eyes glittered behind heavy lashes. Her lips moved soundlessly and were quickly still, as if she had been about to protest an impossible claim, Myrna being a myth. But this would have been a bad mistake, and she caught the mistake in time.

“Where?” she said.

“Where I least expected her.”

“Don’t be evasive, Mr. Hand. Who is she?”

“You. You’re Myrna, Mrs. Coon.”

“And you’re insane.” She laughed harshly, and her voice dripped scorn. “It’s apparent that I made a mistake in coming to you in the first place.”

“You made a mistake, all right, and your mistake was in taking me for more of a fool than I was. Once you had decided just how to kill your husband, you needed a witness to establish the existence of a murderess who didn’t exist. Someone not very clever. Not nearly as clever as you, for example. I don’t know just how you happened to pick on me, but I’m sorry that I couldn’t accommodate you.”

“Are you less of a fool than I thought? Clearly, you are even more of one.”

“Let him talk, Dulce.” The voice was Martin Farmer’s, coming from the door, and it possessed a quality of silken amusement that warned me, suddenly, that I was listening to a dangerous man. “Even a fool can recognize foolishness if he hears enough of it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the opportunity to hang myself. Never mind how I finally tumbled to the fact that you were Myrna, Mrs. Coon. It took me long enough, and I’m not proud of it. Spike heels for added height, being careful at all other times to let me see you only in flats. A blond wig which can, incidentally, be traced, now that we know it was yours. Not only did it have to be bought, it also had to be dressed, and it will be only a matter of time until the police learn who sold it and who dressed it. For the big performance, a calculated emphasis of sex, which for you was easy. More than all this, dark glasses and a dark lounge and every precaution to prevent my getting a good look at you. Your face was always in shadows and turned away. When you left, you left quickly, exposing only your back in the light outside. Unfortunately for you, my ears are better than my eyes.”

“What absurd thing is that supposed to mean?”

“Trade secret. I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind. Anyhow, once I knew it was you in the lounge, I could see that the whole show was phony. For example, you told me that you learned about Myrna by overhearing on an extension a conversation she had with your husband. In this house, there are surely several telephones, most of them without extensions. Why would your husband have received a call from a blackmailer on a phone which offered even the slightest opportunity for eavesdropping to a third person? I don’t think he would have.”

“This is really incredible. If it weren’t so libelous, I might find it amusing.” Her voice was still harsh, however soft, and the blood still burned in her cheeks. She was possessed, I thought, by a kind of unholy excitement. “Now that you have decided that I devised this elaborate hoax, perhaps you will tell me why I wanted to murder my husband.”

“You tell me. Money? That was part of it, I suspect. Money, and the man who helped you murder him.”

“So now there is a man involved. What man, please?”

“The man you met in the Normandy Lounge. Martin Farmer.”

“This is getting more and more absurd. You are insane, aren’t you? I thought all the time that I was presumed to have met my husband there.”

“That’s what I was expected to presume, that the man in the lounge was your husband. But he wasn’t. He was Martin Farmer. Your shirttail cousin. His term, not mine. He had only to exercise the same care that you did to get away with it. Wear the clothes you said your husband would wear. Keep his face obscured in the shadows. He has about the height, the right weight, the right color hair. Everything but the right name and the wife.”

“But my husband was murdered. Remember? Where, exactly does he fit in?”

“He fits in the trunk. The gray sedan’s trunk. He was killed here, in this house, sometime around two o’clock in the afternoon, late enough to satisfy the estimate of time of death, which allowed considerable latitude. After losing me in the traffic, you drove out, put him behind the wheel, and left him where he was later found.”

“You’re ignoring something, aren’t you?” It was Martin Farmer again, and I turned to look at him. There was an air of indolence about him, and he was smiling faintly, but his eyes were cold and wary. “Dulce and I were at the Country Club. We played golf and had drinks and dinner. We were seen by a dozen people who remember.”

“No.” I shook my head and began to wonder, now that I was almost finished, if I could ever get out alive. “Your alibi is the most precarious bit of all. To have a car handy, you drove your car out to the club before noon and left it in the parking area. But you didn’t stay. I imagine that Mrs. Coon followed you and brought you back here, where you had work to do, having arranged in advance for the necessary privacy in which to do it. You know the work I mean. Your golf bags were put into the sedan, along with a change of clothing. After parking Coon’s car on that dead-end road, it was a simple matter to change, and pack into the golf bags that you carried away with you the clothes you removed. It was only a matter of minutes to cross that undeveloped land between the end of the road and the back of the golf course. Risky, of course, but you were ready to take the risk, and you made it. Then you came on into the clubhouse, a pair of innocent golfers with a car to ride home in, and witnesses to testify for you. But I can’t remember anyone’s saying that you were seen before coming off the course. It was simply assumed that you had been playing. Brady Baldwin’s a smart cop, and he’ll be interested in that.”

“This is very interesting speculation,” Dulce Coon said. “Even rather clever. I advise you, however, not to repeat it. It’s actionable, you know, and you would have to account to my lawyer.”

“I predict that you will have to account to a lawyer yourself. The prosecuting attorney, I mean. Don’t forget that the gray sedan is still in custody. The police lab is working over the trunk right now, and you can lay odds that they’ll find something to show that your husband took a ride in it — a thread, a scraping of skin, a hair or two, a smear of blood, something. It’s miraculous, the things that can be done in labs these days. Brady will be along after awhile. You can depend on it. In the meanwhile, since you brought your lawyer into this, I’d recommend calling him early.”

I had started moving toward the door, and I kept on moving, and no one tried to stop me. I slipped past the shirttail cousin and out and away.

At least, I thought, I had finally earned my fee.

At dinner, we were three. I was there, and Hetty was there, and Brady Baldwin was there. Brady was included because he had finished the case and earned a dinner, and because I was feeling expansive. Three assorted fiddles and a piano made music, and it was, altogether, very fancy and satisfying. After dinner, Brady’s ulcer began to bother him a little.

“I’ve got to go home and take something,” he said, “and so I’d better humor you immediately and have it over with. I’ll admit you acted practically like a genius in this business, once you got going, but there’s one thing that must have been pure boneheaded luck, a wild guess, at best. How did you tumble to the fact that it was Martin Farmer that Dulce Coon met in that bar? Maybe it wasn’t even a guess, though. Maybe, when you met Farmer later, you simply recognized him.”

“Nothing of the sort. Brady, don’t try to belittle me. There was a strong resemblance between Farmer and Coon, and I never got a good enough look to see any difference. Farmer saw to it that I didn’t. So far as I knew, it was Benedict Coon at the bar, and Benedict Coon who left with his wife. It was only later that I learned something that convinced me that it was really someone else. Under the circumstances, the shirttail cousin, being suspiciously handy, was indicated.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What did you learn?”

“Thanks to Hetty, I learned that Benedict Coon had a serious heart condition. Not that he couldn’t have lived for a long time, too long to suit our Dulce, apparently. Especially since, according to reports, he stuck strictly to his diet and took damn good care of himself.”

“Come off it, Percy. You can’t tell that a man has heart trouble just by looking at him. You trying to tell me that the man at the bar looked like he didn’t have heart trouble?”

“It wasn’t how he looked. It was what he did. Hetty checked it out for me, and she reported that Benedict Coon’s specific heart condition was something called cardiorenal disease. People who have it are put on a very strict salt-free diet. And the man at the bar, all the time he was waiting, kept eating salted peanuts.”

Hetty was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, and looking at me through the smoke with a very promising expression.

“Isn’t he remarkable? You said it yourself, Brady. Practically a genius, you said. It makes me all over prickly just to know him.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Brady shoved back his chair and stood up and looked down at me sourly. “Good night, Hetty. Good night, Genius. Thanks for the dinner. I’m going home to bed.”

“In good time,” said Hetty, “so are we.”