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

Originally published in Detective Story Magazine, May 1953.

Chapter 1

It was quiet in the big room. The full wall of windows at the west end caught the pale, slanting light of the sun in descent, and the light splashed in across deep carpeting and rich furniture to give the ivory painted concert grand at the east end a delicate old-world coloring. Behind the grand, Terence Pope fingered from memory a few old tunes, looking into the warm wash of light and feeling within himself a kind of frail peace that took its substance from the hour and, like the hour, wouldn’t last.

He didn’t see the girl called Liza Gray who stood in the arched entrance to the room looking at him, but he was thinking about her. And when she crossed the room silently and leaned against the piano, it seemed like something that ought to happen about that time and was no surprise whatever.

“Hello, Terry. I didn’t know you could play.”

He looked up at her with a smile restricted to careful friendliness, and he broke out of the tune he was playing into the soft ascension of a scale. The light gathered in her pale gold hair, dispersing along the clean lines of her face and throat, and in his heart the transient peace succumbed to pain that was almost adolescent in its intensity. Underlying the change, adult and reasoned, was the grim foreknowledge of everything coming to a bad end.

“I can pick out a tune, baby, if you call that playing.”

“You’re a strange guy. Full of little things no one would suspect.”

“We’re all like that. Full of surprises, I mean. If you keep looking long enough, you begin to find them.”

“Me, too?”

He laughed softly, his fingers searching adroitly for the beginning of another tune. “You, baby? You’ve got more surprises than Pandora’s box.”

“That was the box with all the world’s troubles in it, wasn’t it?”

“That’s the one.”

“You think I’m full of trouble, Terry?”

“For me, you are. For me, you’re trouble in spades. That ought to be obvious. Because you’re a lovely, lovely hunk of stuff, and you’re Guy Sebastian’s. Guy doesn’t like the hired help feeling possessive about his property.”

“You afraid of Guy?”

He laughed again, shortly. “I’m supposed to say no? I’m supposed to push out my chest like a Rover Boy? You know the right answer. Hell, yes, I’m afraid of Guy! I’m afraid of him the same way you’re afraid of him. The same way any little guy is afraid of any big guy with money and power and the ruthlessness to throw them around.”

She slipped around the curve of the grand piano and sat on the bench beside him. “Little guys grow.”

His fingers moved out of one tune, into another. “There’s something else, baby. There’s the fact that Guy’s been a pretty good friend.”

“Don’t be a fool, Terry. Guy doesn’t have friends. Like you said, he has property. I don’t get it, Terry. A bright guy like you, with a big chunk of education. What are you doing here?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m Guy Sebastian’s secretary.”

“Don’t play, coy with me.” Her mouth sagged at the corners, losing for a moment its beautiful lines. “You’re no more a secretary than I am. You’re a deluxe errand boy. Pleasant presence and fancy talk. We’re both the same. Figure a name for me, and we’ll share it.”

His fingers went on with the thin, tinsel tune. Hadn’t the knowledge been a sickness in his soul for the eight long months past? He shrugged. “Regrets, Liza?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it depends on you. You haven’t answered my question.”

“Why I’m here? I could ask the same of you.”

“If you did, I’d tell you.”

“I’m a lazy guy with no special ambition and no incentive to make big stuff of his little talents... And, well — all tyrants have guys like me around, Liza. Hitler had one to play the piano and tell jokes...”

“As simple as that?”

“That’s right. And now it’s your turn.”

“It’s a matter of values, I guess,” she said slowly. “It’s a matter of overestimating the things you’re born without. Things like mink and money and all this. You want them, you go after them. You work the only way you can — by investing natural assets. For a long time after you get them, you think they’re good enough. But then something comes along to let you know they’re not. Something, or someone. Can you play My Desire, Terry?”

His brain said no, but his fingers wouldn’t listen. They ran a scale and worked back down into the tune.

“It’s for you and me, that tune. You know it’s for you and me,” she said softly. He let the tune die, and turned on the bench to face her. Her pale blond hair fell forward from a low side part, to cast her face in shadow.

He saw again the perfect structure of bone beneath perfect skin, and he told himself again, for the thousandth time, not to be a fool.

“Don’t say it, baby. Even to say it means the end of luck.”

“Maybe not. Maybe we could get Guy to see it our way.”

“He’d crucify us and you know it. He’d nail us on the wall and celebrate with a wake.”

“You’ve got to believe in luck...”

“We’d never get away with it. Never in the world,” he said.

“We could talk to Guy together...”

He took her by the shoulders and pushed her roughly away. Getting up from the bench, he moved around the piano and stood with his back to her.

After a while, he turned and went back to her and found that she was standing waiting quietly.

He said harshly, “Forget it, Liza.”

She moved against him.

“Tell me how, Terry. Tell me how to forget.”

He couldn’t, because he didn’t know, and suddenly his right hand moved up into her hair against the back of her skull, mashing her mouth upon his with hungry brutality.

She whispered, “Terry, Terry...”

He tore her mouth away, pressing her head forward and down against his shoulder.

“So you don’t forget, baby. So you just remember how it might have been if things were different.”

Her head turned, her lips moving against his neck. “You always call me baby. Call me darling, Terry. Just once, call me darling.”

His voice was distorted with harshness, wrenched from his throat in the anger that comes with frustration. “Darling’s a word. It’s as cheap as ten thousand others. Darling Liza. Darling, darling, darling. Is that enough to pay you for the way we’ll die if Guy Sebastian gets any idea of this?”

She slipped away from him.

“You make him sound pretty grim, Terry. Guy. I mean.”

He laughed again without humor and took shoulders in his two hands.

“You trying to kid yourself, baby? If you are, you’d better quit. Guy Sebastian’s strictly a no-limit operator. How do you think he got all this fancy stuff you and I have been living with? Why do you think things happen when he says a word? Because he plays a horse now and then? Because he puts something on the books when the odds are right? You know better than that. These things are just to pass the time.

“He knows a lot of people in a lot of places. It might surprise you, the places those people are. It might surprise you even more to know where the big profits come from. You and I, we’re nothing. If we don’t watch out, we’ll be two stiffs in an alley, and no questions asked.”

“What does that make us, Terry?” she asked. “If Guy’s a louse, what does that make us? Funny that I never wondered before.”

“It makes us two parasites on a louse,” he said quietly, releasing her shoulders. “It’s getting late. Pretty soon this place will be swarming with people looking for drinks. You’d better get yourself sharp. Guy likes you to be a credit to him, you know.”

“I know.” She went back to the piano and picked up the purse she’d deposited when she came in. “When are you going to be on the level with me? When are you going to tell me why you’re really here?” The sudden desire to tell her the truth was an almost irresistible temptation. And he wanted to tell her to start running. But he only said, “I told you. I’m an educated flunkey. Self-made big shots always like to have one around. It keeps their egos fat.” Signifying defeat by the slight sag of her mouth, she rounded the piano and went out a door beyond it into the hall.

He stood without moving, hearing the receding tap of her high heels on asphalt tile, and when the sound was gone, he went down to the west windows and stood looking out across a wide terrace to the ragged skyline.

He was still there five minutes later when one of Guy Sebastian’s stony-faced servants materialized soundlessly at his elbow. Without moving, Terry angled a look over the corner of his shoulder into eyes as flat and depthless as metal disks.

“The boss wants you. In his office.”

“Okay.” Terry returned his gaze to the skyline, now darkening and grim.

The stony-faced servant said, “Now.”

Terry shrugged and went down the long room. In the hall, he took the stairs that ascended in a broad sweep to the second floor. Continuing on the level, he knocked on a door at the rear of the hall and the voice of Guy Sebastian invited him to come in. It was a peculiar voice, distorted and coarse and strangely modulated, as if its softness was intended to minimize its ugliness.

Terry responded to the invitation.

The man who stood in the center of the room to receive him was no more than average height, but he managed to give the impression of added inches. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit that was tailored to fit his body, not to disguise it. His hair was faded brown, wiry in texture, cropped close to a round skull. The face was aggressive, thrusting itself boldly in the lines of nose and jaw.

The distorted voice said, “Hello, Terry. Find a chair.”

Terry sank into foam rubber and waited. Sebastian, balanced catlike on the balls of feet slightly spread, lifted in a slight gesture the glass he held.

“Drink, boy?”

“No, thanks. I’ll have too many before the night’s over.”

“Sure. You’re smart not to let them get ahead of you.” Sebastian turned and crossed to an immense bleached oak desk. Leaning against it, tilting his glass against his mouth, he looked at Terry over an arc of rim. The eyes were casual. “How long have you been around, Terry?”

“In the organization, eight months,” he said. “Here in your apartment, about six.”

“Not mine. Ours. I told you when I moved you in that you were to use it like it was your own. You remember that?”

“Sure, Guy, I remember it. You know I appreciate it.”

The thin shadow of a smile flickered beneath the bold nose. “You know why I had you move in? Because I liked you. You’re a smooth, easy-to-like guy. It gives me kicks to have you around. I’ve got big plans for you a little later. In the meantime, though, maybe you misunderstood me a little. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I meant just the use of the apartment. I didn’t mean everything in it. You straight now, boy?”

He was straight, all right. He was straight enough to understand that he and Liza had been spotted in the clinch.

He closed his eyes and said, “She’s a beautiful gal, Guy. Beautiful enough to entitle anybody to one mistake.”

He sat there with his eyes closed, wondering if it had been the right response. And after a while he heard a soft sigh from Guy Sebastian, and he knew that it had been right.

“I’ve been a good friend, haven’t I, Terry? It’d be a shame to change it. Like you say, one mistake. Just one.”

Terry opened his eyes. He was amazed to learn that a man could, without physical exertion, become completely exhausted in a couple of minutes.

Chapter 2

A few days later, Terry was thinking over all this in a bar around the corner from a burlesque theater. On the wall behind him were dozens of slick stills: the cuties who took it off for a living. Someone crawled onto the stool on his right and said, “Mine’s better, Terry. My chassis, I mean.”

He set his glass down carefully on the bar. “I’ll bet it is,” he said. “What I’ve seen of it, I admire. I admire it very much. But I like it living, not dead. Incidentally, I like my own, such as it is, the same way. Now go away, please, Liza.”

“That isn’t a very nice welcome.”

“Look, baby, I’ve told you. I’ve spelled it out so a kid could get it. Listen carefully, and I’ll try again. After our little interlude the other day, Guy Sebastian had me in for a drink and a lesson in manners.”

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“Oh, sure. Famous last words. For your information, there isn’t a hell of a lot that Guy Sebastian doesn’t know. About the things that concern him personally, there isn’t anything at all be doesn’t know. Besides, what about me? What about the things I’d know? I don’t usually object to sharing what I have, but some things I like to keep private. I’m greedy that way.”

“You’re a proud guy, Terry. Me, I’ve got no pride left. I want you any way I can get you. Even on shares.”

His voice was defensively harsh. “Look. I’m just a so-so guy. Not even so-so, really. A parasite on a louse, I think we decided. I don’t rate a grand passion. On me, it looks funny. Now be a good girl and peddle your fleshpots to the guy who buys the mink.”

“I’d give it all back, Terry. He can have it all back and welcome — the mink, the diamonds, all the fancy junk together. I’m leveling, Terry. For maybe the first time in my life, I’m honest-to-God leveling. I followed you here to this dump just to tell you. Just to try to get you to see it. We could run, dear, if we had to. It’s a great big wide world, and Guy Sebastian can’t be everywhere in it.”

“Anywhere he’s not, he can damn soon get.” He turned away from her, looking into his empty glass through the drying traces of stale scum. Then he spun back to face her. “I’ve tried to be nice about it. I’ve tried to be a little gentleman. Now let’s get straight for good. You’ve got plenty of attractive stuff to offer. Ordinarily the possibilities for fun would be overwhelming. Ordinarily, I’d be eager to play. But not the way things are now.”

She slipped off the stool and stood silently beside him. He returned his eyes to the glass and waited for her to leave. After a long time, he felt her hand on his arm. Her voice was a hoarse whisper.

“You mean it? You really mean it?”

“I mean it. If you want, you can make me sweat for it. If you want, you can foul me up with Guy. If it comes to liquidation, there’s not much question about whether it’d be you or me.”

She backed off a couple of steps. “You believe I’d do it. Frame you with Guy just to salve the wounds you’ve made in my precious pride? I told you I didn’t have any pride left. And anyway, I’d never do you any harm if I could help it. I’d never do it, Terry.”

Then she turned and went out, and he pushed the empty glass across the bar and said. “Draw another.”

The bartender filled his glass and raked off suds with the back of a knife. He slid the glass down the wet surface deftly.

A thin man in a loose cord suit had claimed the stool on Terry’s left. He was wearing a soiled panama hat that looked too big for his head, and the skin of his face had the same loose look as his suit. The skin was tinged with yellow, almost jaundiced in appearance. The man ordered a beer and waited until the bartender had moved out of hearing range.

“Who’s the dame?” he said.

“Her name’s Liza Gray. Guy Sebastian’s fiancée.”

“How come she was here?”

“Followed me, I guess.”

The man said, “Oh?” He swallowed beer and waited.

Terry shrugged angrily. “I guess you listened in. You heard what she said.”

“I heard, all right. You think she’s straight?”

“Maybe.”

“She suspect anything?”

“I don’t think so. At any rate, nothing like the truth.”

“You think she could have been set onto you by Sebastian?”

“No.”

“We’ve been building this up for a long time, Terry. Too long to have it wrecked by a dame.”

“I know how long it’s been. No one knows better.”

“Sure. You’ve done a neat job. You any farther along with Sebastian? Any indication of letting you inside?”

“No. I’m strictly for kicks. I run errands and stuff. Most of all I jazz up the great ego. I pick up information, however.”

“I know, I know. It’s been tough. Now it’ll be tougher. We’ll have to do it the hard way. Before the night’s over, if things go right, you ought to be out of it. Anything changed?”

“No. The plane will land at Municipal Terminal at midnight. The courier’s on it. I know the guy by sight. As I told you, he’s medium height, getting bald, and has a thin black mustache and a slight limp in his left leg.”

“It still checks. Ever since you put us onto the guy, we’ve had him under observation. We could’ve grabbed him then, of course. If we had, we’d have small fry. We’d have a lousy courier in the can, with his lips buttoned and the big shot gone free. Guy Sebastian’s the boy we want. We want him real bad.”

The thin man in the panama waved the bartender over and passed his glass. When it was full again, he sat hunched over the bar, talking into the beer.

“Here’s the routine. This courier has the junk in a brown traveling bag. According to you, he’ll get a locker at the terminal and deposit the bag. That’s as far as he goes with it, because it’s Guy Sebastian’s method not to have anyone go too far in the process. He passes the locker key to someone else, and this guy gets the bag and moves it along. Only this time he won’t. Because he’ll never get the key. We’ll grab the courier and the bag. From there on, it’s your show. It’s up to you to take the bag into Guy Sebastian’s apartment. Take it right in the front entrance, so the men we’ll have stationed there can spot you and follow you up. They’ll finish the job. Which means the finish of Mr. Sebastian.”

“A frame,” Terry said. “A beautiful frame.”

“So it’s a frame. Guy Sebastian’s made a fortune peddling dope without ever touching a grain. He directs operations, and he reaps the fat profit, but he never touches the stuff. He’s too smart for that. He keeps himself clear all the way. If we plant it on him, it’s nothing more than he’s got coming.”

“I wasn’t questioning the justice. I was just admiring the beauty.”

The contact looked down through suds into his amber beer, and his lips curved in a soft smile.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, all right. We’ve been yearning for Guy Sebastian for a long time. He’s a sleek, arrogant wholesaler of every kind of vice. Now, thanks to you, we’ll get him.”

He finished his beer fast, and slipped off the stool. A step away, he turned.

“Don’t louse it up, Terry. Not for any woman... not for anything on earth.”

He went away without waiting for reassurance. Terry listened to his light, fast footsteps until they were gone, and then he spun his glass down the bar. The bartender rinsed it, filled it, and sent it back.

And at precisely that moment the stools on both sides of Terry were suddenly occupied.

A voice said, “You’re a naughty boy. Terence!”

The words were facetious, and the tone was facetious, but somehow the net effect was not facetious at all. The net effect was a kind of deadly and irrational levity. Turning. Terry looked at the face behind the words. Round as a dime, the color of olive oil. Full lips so red they looked rouged, not quite meeting over prominent teeth. Large, liquid, swimming eyes.

It was a face Terry had seen in and out of Sebastian’s place. There was a name that went with it. Sulla, it was. There was also an odor. A heavy and nauseous sweetness, like death three days old.

In Terry’s heart there was an icy, pervading fear. He felt spiritually naked and more than a little stupid... Eight months of servile degradation in the house of a louse, and nothing to show for it, in the end, but the final degradation of an ugly death... In the end, they’d trailed him to his last contact as easily as trailing a kid from a jam pot... By the exercise of tremendous effort, he managed to keep his voice casual, just a little bored.

“You think so? Just for having a couple beers with all these strippers?”

Sulla laid a soft hand on his arm. The hand was perfectly smooth, except for a tuft of long black hairs about an inch above the base of the little finger. The fingers dug gently into the muscle of Terry’s arm.

“It’s not the strippers. It’s not the beer. And it’s too late to play it innocent, Terence. You been the fair-haired boy. You been the baby brother who got all the breaks without working for them. You should’ve taken care of yourself.”

His first reaction was one of vast relief.

He’d been tailed, all right, but not because he was suspected of high treason. It was because of Liza. Because the great Guy Sebastian had an average, gray little soul like any average citizen — and was simply jealous.

Terry wanted to laugh.

The desire ended abruptly with his consciousness of hard steel digging into his ribs. Even with a layer of cloth over it, the steel was recognizable as the snout of a gun. He remembered with sudden renewal of the cold wash of fear that treason and philandering would come, in this case, to the same end. Either would come, in some quiet place, to the same ugly death. And worst of all, maybe, Terence Pope would not be at the Municipal Terminal at midnight, where he was supposed to be.

Out of the near past, repeating themselves in his mind, were words he remembered vividly: “I’d never do you any harm if I could help it. I’d never do it, Terry.” And, in another voice: “Don’t louse it up, Terry. Not for any woman.”

Bright red lips curled back off white, protuberant teeth.

“Let’s go, Terence. Just nice and quiet, like a good boy.”

Chapter 3

He lay on a hard bed in the bedroom of a two-room apartment in an old brick house on the lower south side of town. It had been light in the room when he came, but now it had been dark for a long time. There was no exit from the room, other than the one out through the living room, unless he wanted to jump three stories into a brick-paved court. There was a small bathroom off the bedroom, but there was no exit from the bathroom, either.

Through the partially open door to the living room, weak yellow light sliced a wedge from the darkness. Out in the living room, tilted against the wall by the hall door, the liquid-eyed man with bright red lips whose name was Sulla sat in a straight chair and cleaned his nails with a shiv. A gun lay handy in his lap. His nails didn’t really need cleaning, but apparently he liked the nice, cold feel of the shiv in his hands.

Terry couldn’t actually see Sulla from the bed, but he knew he was doing these things because he had been doing them steadily for hours. He didn’t seem to tire from his position on the hard, straight chair. No doubt his fat hips and buttocks were adequate cushioning, making him impervious to discomfort in the area.

After a while, Terry got up from the bed and swept an arm in circles above his head in the darkness until his hand contacted a hanging string. He pulled the string, and a 60-watt bulb came to feeble life near the ceiling. Moving to the open door, he looked across the living room to the tilted Sulla. Red lips parted wetly over gleaming teeth. The shiv held still, arrested in its useless work.

“It’s eleven o’clock,” Terry said. “This going to be a formal execution, maybe? Death at dawn and all that stuff?”

Sulla shook with silent laughter, his belly bouncing above the handy gun.

“Nothing so nice, Terence, boy. You don’t rate any ceremony. Like I said, the boss is busy, and he wants to see you before you go. I think maybe he wants to see that you don’t go too fast. I think maybe he wants to see that you stay around awhile to enjoy things.”

Terry turned back out of the doorway and crossed the bedroom to the bath. Above the lavatory, a bulb was screwed into a tarnished brass socket projecting from the wall. He pulled the short chain hanging from the socket, heard the crackle of a faulty connection, saw a brief flurry of sparks preceding the diffusion of light. Looking at the reflection of his face for a moment in the mirror, he wondered what was in it to make a gal like Liza go off the deep end. He tried immediately to close his mind to the thought, because the thought of Liza was now an added burden of pain for which he had no heart.

Turning, he stood leaning against the lavatory and looking at the old-fashioned water heater at the foot of the bathtub. He let his eyes drift up and along a string clothesline that someone had stretched back and forth between the walls above the tub. After a minute, he knelt beside the heater and turned the tap on the gas ring, which emitted a soft hissing and an acrid odor.

He closed the tap and went back into the bedroom. Stripping the bed of a dirty sheet, he carried the sheet into the bathroom and began tearing it into strips. Some of the strips he stuffed into the cracks around the frame of the small window above the tub.

Removing the string, he tied one end to the end of the chain hanging from the old socket above the lavatory. And then he turned on the gas full force under the heater and went out, quickly threading the string through the keyhole of the door and closing the door behind him. The remainder of the strips he stuffed in the crack around the door.

Sitting on the bed, he waited fifteen minutes, checking the time by the watch on his wrist. When the time had passed, he was beginning to smell, in spite of the stuffing, the faint odor of gas. Getting up, he took the mattress from the bed and dropped it against the living room wall. He returned, taking the loose end of the string, and went over to the wall. He lay down between the wall and the mattress, then, saying something like a prayer, he pulled the string.

There was a great, cushioned puff, as if the air itself had flown apart into its elements, and the bathroom door was suddenly hanging by one hinge. The concussion rolled against Terry like a hard wave, plastering him to the wall, and he fought to gather and retain his senses in a siege of silence which seemed, after the explosion, vast and eternal. Actually, it lasted a few seconds only, and then the flabby but feline Sulla was coming through the door in a crouch, gun ready.

Pushing out from the wall, using the hard edge of his hand like a hatchet, Terry hacked down viciously into the fatty base of Sulla’s neck. The gun clattered to the floor, and the fat hood sagged to his knees. Crowding the advantage, Terry got a handful of oily hair and jerked back until the round, olive face was parallel to the ceiling at the end of spinal tension.

Then, using the heel of his hand, he smashed down and skullward upon Sulla’s nose. He felt the bones splinter, forced back and upward toward the brain, and he let Sulla twist slowly off his knees and flop. If the hood was not dead, death would be soon, and Terry, without checking, retrieved the gun from the floor and went out.

Below, on a dark, narrow street illuminated inadequately in spots by old lamps, he turned toward the heart of the city and began to walk. Time seemed to move faster, flowing past him with a rush, so after a few minutes he began to trot to keep up. Ten minutes later, on a broader, brighter thoroughfare, he found a cruising cab and crawled in. It was then twenty minutes to twelve.

“Municipal Air Terminal,” he said. “You win a bonus if we’re there by midnight.”

By flouting a couple of red lights, the cabbie won the bonus. Terry made it a fin, and when he went through the wide glass doors of the main terminal entrance into the high, light waiting room, it was just thirty seconds before the hour. An amplified voice was announcing the arrival of the flight that carried the courier. Passengers would enter through gate six, the voice said.

Terry found the gate and saw, beyond it, leaning indolently against the wall, the thin man in the loose cord suit. His eyes moved over Terry indifferently. Lazily, he shook a cigarette from a pack and struck fire from a gopher.

Turning away, Terry moved to a magazine stand and bought a newspaper. He stood leaning against the counter with the paper unfolded before him. Now and then he looked up at the thin, indolent figure beyond the gate.

Passengers were emerging from the gate. A fat woman wearing silver fox, walking stiffly. A long-legged looker with red hair, eyes lighting like lamps as a young guy broke forward to meet her. A heavy man with jowls looking important in imported tweeds. And then the one. A man of medium height, carrying a brown cowhide bag. He had a thin black mustache, and he walked with a slight limp in his left leg. He turned right toward a wall of public lockers. Behind him, the thin man in cords dropped his cigarette on the floor and moved in lazy pursuit. Another man, nondescript, separated from the group outside the gate and moved in time with the thin man, parallel and a little to the rear.

The man with the limp stopped in front of the lockers, setting the cowhide bag on the floor at his feet and digging into a pocket for a coin. Behind him, the thin man and the nondescript man moved in, converging. From his place at the magazine stand, Terry could see the three of them standing suddenly immobile, frozen in a strange and lifeless tableau.

Folding his newspaper, he laid it on the counter and walked swiftly toward them. As he moved, the thin man stooped and picked up the cowhide bag. Passing them, without slowing or speaking, Terry took the bag from the thin man’s hand and went on out a side entrance into a drive that served the parking lot.

A black Oldsmobile was purring at the exit. A man was sitting under the wheel of the Olds. When Terry came out, the man opened the door, stepped out into the drive, and Terry moved into his place, depositing the bag on the seat beside him.

“Luck, Terry,” the man said, and Terry lifted a hand from the wheel in brief acknowledgment, setting the automatic transmission in action with the pressure of his foot on the accelerator.

And now the hard part was supposed to be over. Supposedly all that remained was for the fair-haired boy in the house of Sebastian to carry a cowhide bag full of heroin into a place where he was welcome. The trouble was, the boy’s hair was no longer fair. Terence Pope was no longer welcome in the home of his benefactor...

Behind the wheel, driving steadily within the established speed limits, Terry laughed softly and without humor. For a moment he wondered what had happened to Liza, but it was a thought he didn’t want to face, and he put it away.

In front of the stone, steel and glass brick stack that housed Sebastian’s apartment, he got out, carrying the bag, and went through the entrance quickly into the lush lobby. Sitting on their necks in club chairs, blending with the background, two well-dressed men followed him with their eyes to the bank of elevators. No particular interest was apparent in their attitudes.

The elevator boy, resplendent in scarlet cloth and gold braid, said, “Good evening, Mr. Pope,” and Terry moved to the back of the elevator. He stood with his shoulders touching the steel back of the box, breathing deeply and regularly, fighting for control of his pulse. In his temples, there was a sharp, rhythmic hammering.

On Sebastian’s floor, he went down to the door that opened into the hall of the huge apartment and set the bag on the floor at his feet. For a minute, he stood there listening to the soft whine of the elevator descending in its shaft, and then he took Sulla’s gun from the inside pocket of his coat. Holding the gun in position for a quick chop, he put a thumb on the button beside the door and leaned his weight against it.

When the stony-faced servant opened the door, Terry shifted sideways as Sulla’s gun chopped down. The snout of the gun struck the servant a blow on the forehead, and he spun away, folding up quietly on the asphalt tile. Stooping, Terry picked up the bag and moved past him down the hall to the door of Sebastian’s office.

Standing, listening, he heard beyond the door the hoarse distortion of Sebastian’s voice, and after a while a husky response that was Liza’s. Without waiting longer, he pushed the door open in front of him and stepped into the room, the gun in one hand, the bag hanging from the other.

Across the room, standing behind his big desk, Sebastian turned his head to face him, the bold face beneath the cropped hair settling suddenly into lines of deadly stillness.

To his left and slightly beyond him, standing with one hand resting on the top of a liquor cabinet, Liza Gray sucked breath with a sharp, aspirate whistle. The flesh under one of her eyes had gone black, shading on the cheekbone to dark yellow. Her lips were swollen, and the left line of her jaw was also swollen, showing bruises.

At least, though, she’d been saved for possible repentance and future use.

Sebastian’s voice was soft, reflective. “Well, well. If it isn’t Terry. I wasn’t expecting you, boy. I’ll have to talk to someone about it.”

Terry laughed brutally, amazed at the swift violence of his response to the marks on Liza’s face.

“If you mean Sulla, it won’t do any good. Sulla’s dead. You’re dead, too, in a way, Sebastian. As a big shot, you’re a dead duck.” He swung the bag underhand, sending it in a high arc to land on the surface of the big desk. “This is your property, I think. A guy brought it in tonight from the South.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened, then narrowed. His strong, closed face suddenly cracked open in a wash of stark fear. Then, just as suddenly, the face closed again upon a look of relief, and at that moment Terry heard the flat voice behind him.

“Don’t move, sonny. Don’t move at all. And just let the gun drop.”

Cursing himself for not taking the time to check the results of a glancing blow, Terry let his fingers relax, felt the comforting touch of the gun slip down and away from them.

Over his shoulder, he saw the blood-smeared stone that was a servant’s face. Almost at the same time, catching the motion in the corner of his eye, he saw Liza reach for the neck of a bottle on the liquor cabinet. Following through, she burned it across the room in a sidearm delivery that really wasn’t half bad for a dame.

Terry dropped, and above him there was a blast of powder, and his head was wet with a bourbon shower. From the floor, he drove up and over the desk at Sebastian, leaving the hood-servant to bourbon and Liza and luck. And in his attack was all the leashed hate that was the product of eight servile months. Under his flailing fists, Sebastian’s face crumpled and altered in a red, wet sheen.

Turning from his completed job, he saw that Liza was in control. Sulla’s gun was in her hand, and the servant was quiet against the wall.

The man was clutching a hand from which blood welled brightly.

Across the space between them, which was really the space between the bad beginning long ago and the good beginning which might now be, Terry said softly, “Liza, baby!”

Her eyes closed on tears, and she said, “Terry, Terry...”

Outside the room, the hall door banged open, and feet pounded down the asphalt tile.