Richard Deming

Hit and Run

For

The Bureau of Internal Revenue

1

By two thirty A.M. the custom at the Haufbrau had been reduced to three patrons at the bar and four couples in booths. The bartender, a lean, angular man with narrow cheekbones and a high forehead, surveyed the house, decided no one would want drinks during the next few moments, and relaxed with his elbows on the bar across from the big man seated at its end.

“Nightcap, Barney?” he asked. “On the house, I mean.”

Barney Calhoun shook his head. He was a powerfully built man in his early thirties, with square features and thick, dusty-blond hair. Despite his size there was a suggestion of litheness about him, as though he could move with amazing speed if he had to. There was an aura of recklessness about him, too, only partly tempered by the deep cynicism that showed in his eyes. He was the sort of man all women would give at least a second glance, and many couldn’t take their eyes off. At the moment his expression was morose as he stared at the nearly empty glass with which he was making circles on the bar.

“What’s your trouble, buddy boy?” the barkeep asked. “Women?”

“Money,” the big man said. “Always money, Joe.”

“Need a fin or two?”

Calhoun gave him a brief smile. “It’s not that bad, pal. No pressing bills. It’s just the whole goddam bleak future. I can’t see anything but hamburgers in the next ten years.”

Joe poured a shot of bourbon in the big man’s glass despite the previous refusal, added ice and soda. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left the force,” he suggested.

Barney Calhoun snorted. “How many cops you see eating steak? I’m no worse off.”

Joe leaned his elbows on the bar again. “Maybe you play it too straight, Barney. Some private eyes clean up. If they’re willing to shoot angles.”

Barney took a sip of his drink. “Don’t fret about my ethics, Joe,” he said cynically. “Show me an angle and I’ll shoot it.”

“Yeah?” Joe said. He eyed the big man speculatively. “How far will you go?”

Calhoun’s eyes narrowed. He said dryly, “I should have suspected a drink on the house. What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing in particular. Just occurred to me, I see a lot of stuff going on on the other side of the bar. You got a license, know how to investigate things and so on. We might make a team.”

“Doing what?”

Joe shrugged. “Different stuff. I give you a steer. You follow it up. We split the take.”

Calhoun circled his glass a time or two. “Give me a for instance,” he said finally.

The bartender dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “See the couple in the corner booth?”

The big man didn’t turn. He searched out the reflection of the indicated couple in the bar mirror. The man was about forty, tall and sleek and handsome, with prematurely gray hair and a small gray mustache. The woman was ten years his junior, a slim, lovely, perfectly groomed brunette. Raven-black hair outlined a pale, delicate face whose skin was so clear it was nearly translucent.

“Uh huh,” Barney said.

“Harry Cushman,” Joe said.

Calhoun looked thoughtful. “The café society Harry Cushman?”

“Yeah. Two million dollars, two ex-wives. The doll with him isn’t either ex.”

“Sor?”

“She’s wearing a wedding ring.”

Calhoun took a sip of his drink. “Maybe she’s number three.”

The barkeep shook his head. “It would have been in the gossip columns. The saloon-beat boys stick to his tail like hounds after a fox. She’s somebody else’s ever-loving.”

The big man shrugged. “About half of them stray, according to Kinsey.”

“Look at her again,” Joe suggested.

Calhoun studied the woman’s reflection in the mirror. Aside from her wedding band and an engagement ring that looked like a small emerald, she wore no jewelry. Her plain blue dress was of conservative cut. Yet she somehow managed to convey an impression of wealth. A certain poise, and the unconscious grace of her movements in doing so simple a thing as picking up her drink or leaning across the table for a cigarette light, stamped her as a woman of breeding as well as wealth.

“Ummm,” Calhoun said. “Expensive.”

“You’re not fooling,” Joe said. “That’s no chorus cutie. I’ve looked across this bar at too many phonies not to know the real thing when I see it. That’s class. There’s as much money behind that dame as there is behind Cushman.”

“Maybe,” Calhoun conceded, and gave the barkeep an inquiring look.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Joe asked. “There’s a guy who’s loaded, out with a married gal who’s probably loaded. Find out who she is. Somebody ought to be willing to pay off for something — Cushman to protect the gal, the gal to protect her happy home, or her husband for a tip that she’s straying.”

The big man wrinkled his nose. “I haven’t sunk to blackmail yet. I might nudge the cue ball to get a better shot, but I don’t batten on people’s troubles.”

Joe straightened up and poured another shot. “Well, you asked for an angle.”

“Try another one.”

Joe shrugged. “Mostly what I had in mind was stuff like that. You’d be surprised how many guys I spot in here playing footsies with other guys’ wives. Think it over.”

He moved up the bar to tend to one of the two other remaining bar customers. Calhoun thoughtfully studied the corner-booth couple in the bar mirror.

Cushman and the woman rose from the booth as he watched them; the man dropped a bill on the table and helped the woman into a light coat that had been hanging on a hook next to the booth. They headed toward the rear door of the barroom, which gave onto a parking lot in back of the building.

Calhoun glanced sidewise as they passed the end of the bar, within two feet of him. The woman’s figure was as beautiful as her face, he noted. But there was no warmth to her beauty. Her lovely features were absolutely expressionless. The absence of any lines of any sort in her smooth face-even the tiny laughter lines that the most well-preserved woman of thirty is likely to have developed at the corners of her eyes — suggested that if she ever felt an emotion, she wasn’t accustomed to showing it by facial expression.

Her gaze briefly touched Calhoun as she passed, but there was no reaction. He was used to women noticing him, but she showed about as much interest in him as she might in a piece of cooked salami. On impulse he deliberately looked her up and down.

Again there was no reaction. She looked neither pleased nor offended by his obvious admiration. She merely ignored him.

As the couple passed through the rear door, Calhoun rose from his bar stool, scooped up his change, leaving a quarter tip, and raised one hand in a casual salute of good-by to the bartender. Joe glanced at the door by which the couple had left, then raised his eyebrows questioningly. With a slight shake of his head, Calhoun went out the street door.

Outside, he turned right without hurry. But as soon as he was beyond the range of Joe’s vision through the plate-glass front window, he increased his pace to a rapid walk. A half block up the street he slid under the wheel of a four-year-old Plymouth club coupe and settled back to wait.

He knew the car containing Cushman and his woman companion would have to pass where he was waiting. The exit from the Haufbrau’s parking lot came out on Court Street, which was one-way here. They would have to turn right, pass the barroom’s front door, and drive past Calhoun’s parked car and at least as far as the next intersection.

In the rear-view mirror he saw headlights swing from the parking-lot exit and turn toward him. Apparently the driver believed in a fast getaway, for the motor began to roar as soon as the car reached the street. Calhoun had barely had time to switch on his engine when a green Buick convertible swished by him at a speed of at least fifty miles an hour.

At two thirty in the morning there are usually few people on the streets of Buffalo. With only a half hour left until curfew, most people don’t want to waste drinking time walking from one bar to another, even when a bar is crowded. And tonight was a quiet night. The only person in sight was an elderly and rather shabbily dressed man who was just starting to cross the street a few yards beyond Calhoun. And the only moving vehicle in sight was the green Buick convertible, which streaked past Calhoun down the left lane of the one-way street, just in time to catch the elderly man with its left front fender as he stepped from between two parked cars.

The old man flew back between the cars he had just walked between to land in a heap on the sidewalk. With a screech of brakes, the green convertible swerved right clear across the street and sideswiped two parked cars.

The crash was more terrific than the damage. Metal screamed in agony as a front fender was torn from the first parked car and a rear fender half ripped from the second. The convertible caromed to the center of the street, hesitated, then gunned off as though it were on the Indianapolis Speedway.

But not before Calhoun had seen all he needed to see. The neon signs of taverns along Court Street, combined with the regular street lighting, made the street as bright as day. With the convertible’s top down, he could see the occupants clearly.

The woman was driving, her shoulder-length raven-black hair flowing behind her. If there were any doubt as to the couple’s identity, her companion dispelled it by turning in the seat to stare back over his shoulder at the motionless figure on the sidewalk, giving Calhoun a full-face view of him. It was Harry Cushman.

Automatically Calhoun noted the license number of the Buick convertible was 9I-3836. It was a New York State plate.

The crash brought people pouring from doorways all along the block. A yell of rage from up the street, followed by a steady stream of swearing, told Calhoun that at least one of the damaged cars’ owners had arrived at the scene.

“Anybody see it?” he heard someone nearby ask.

Then somebody discovered the old man lying on the sidewalk. Calhoun waited until the crowd began to gather around the injured man, then unobtrusively slipped from his car. Instead of crossing the street to join the crowd, he walked up to look over the two damaged cars.

Beyond a ruined fender on each, neither seemed particularly harmed. One was a new Dodge and the other a two-year-old Ford. He filed the license numbers of each in his mind, along with the Buick’s.

Apparently someone in the crowd had thought to call an ambulance and the police, for a few minutes later they arrived simultaneously. Calhoun crossed the street and stood on the edge of the crowd as the police cleared a path for the Emergency Hospital interne who had come in the ambulance. The interne bent over the injured man.

The man wasn’t dead. Calhoun could hear him answering the interne’s questions in a weak voice. He couldn’t make out what they said, but after a few moments the interne rose and spoke in a louder voice to one of the police officers.

“He may have a fractured hip. Can’t tell for sure without X rays. I don’t think anything else is broken.”

Under the interne’s instructions, two attendants got the old man on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance.

“I didn’t get the guy’s name,” one of the policemen complained.

“John Lischer,” the interne said. “You can get his address later. His address for a while will be Emergency Hospital.”

When the ambulance pulled away, Calhoun faded back from the crowd to stand in the light of a neon sign. He took an envelope from his pocket, wrote down the three license numbers and the name John Lischer.

He stood musing, then recrossed the street and returned to the Haufbrau. It was five minutes of three when he entered the bar. The place was now deserted except for Joe, the bartender, who was cleaning up.

“Thought you called it a night,” Joe greeted him.

“Got sidetracked by an accident up the street,” Calhoun said. He laid a half dollar on the bar. “How about a nightcap?”

Joe leaned his broom against the bar, then went behind it and mixed a bourbon and soda. “I heard the crash and looked out,” he said. “Couldn’t see much from here. Anybody hurt?”

“One guy, I guess.”

“You see it happen?”

The big man shook his head. “Just heard it and wandered up to rubberneck.”

Joe rang up the half dollar. “Couple of cars, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Calhoun said. “Couple of banged-up cars were there, but they were parked at the curb. And the injured guy was on the opposite side of the street. Looked to me like maybe a hit-and-runner clipped a pedestrian and then sides wiped the two cars.”

“Oh? Too bad you didn’t see it.”

“Yeah,” Calhoun said.

Without seeming to, he studied Joe’s expression carefully. There was no indication on the bartender’s face that he suspected Calhoun of holding anything back.

Calhoun was satisfied. He had returned to the bar solely to fix it in Joe’s mind that he hadn’t taken his tip and followed Harry Cushman and his companion.

There was no point in cutting Joe in if he didn’t have to.

2

By noon the next day Calhoun had learned from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles records that license 9I-3836 was registered to a Mrs. Lawrence Powers of an upper Delaware Avenue address. The address pleased him, because most of the residents of that section weren’t merely well off, they were in the top financial bracket.

He also checked the licenses of the Dodge and the Ford, learning their respective owners were a James Talmadge on Fillmore and a Henry Taft on Ferry. Then he called Emergency Hospital and asked about the condition of John Lischer.

The switchboard operator informed him that it was listed as fair.

Calhoun waited another twenty-four hours before calling on Mrs. Lawrence Powers. He picked two P.M. as the best time to arrive.

The Powers home was a huge rose-granite affair of at least fourteen rooms, surrounded by fifty feet of perfect lawn in all four directions. A colored maid came to the door.

“Mrs. Powers, please,” Calhoun said, handing the maid a card reading, Bernard Calhoun, Confidential Investigations.

She let him into a small foyer, left him standing there while she went off with the card. In a few minutes, she came back with a dubious expression on her face.

“Mrs. Powers is right filled up with appointments this afternoon, Mr. Calhoun. She wants to know have you got some particular business?”

He said, “Tell her it’s about an auto accident.”

The colored maid disappeared again, but returned almost immediately.

“Just follow me, please, sir,” she said.

She led him through a living room about thirty feet long, whose furnishings probably had cost a year of the average man’s income, through an equally expensive dining room, and onto a large, sunflooded sun porch at the side of the house.

Mrs. Lawrence Powers reclined at full length in a canvas deck chair, wearing brief red shorts and a similarly colored scarf. She wasn’t exactly wearing the scarf. It was draped loosely across her full bosom. She wore nothing else, not even shoes. Obviously she had been sun bathing in the shorts only, and had covered her bosom but a moment before Calhoun and the maid entered.

The maid left them alone, and Calhoun examined Mrs. Powers at the same time she was studying him. She was the same woman who had been with Harry Cushman at the Haufbrau. Under bright sunlight and nearly unclothed, she was even lovelier than she had been under artificial lighting. Not only was her body perfectly contoured, but her flesh was a smooth cream so satiny in texture that Calhoun had to control an impulse to reach out and test if it were real. She was beautiful clear from the tip of her delicately shaped little nose to the tips of her small toes. Even her feet were lovely.

But her face didn’t have any more expression than a billiard ball.

She calmly rose from her deck chair, turned her back, and said, “Tie me up, please.” Her voice was pleasantly husky, but there was a curious flatness to it.

She had folded the scarf into a triangle and now held the two ends behind her for Calhoun to tie together. Taking them, he crossed them in the middle of her back. The touch of her bare back against his knuckles sent an unexpected tremor up his arms, and he had an idiotic impulse to lean down and press his mouth against the smooth shoulder immediately in front of him.

Killing the impulse, he asked, “Tight enough?”

“It’ll do.”

He tied a square knot.

She turned around right where she was, which put her face an inch in front of his and about six inches below. She was a tall woman, about five feet eight, because Calhoun stood six feet two.

Looking up at him without expression, she said in a toneless voice, “You’re a big man, Mr. Calhoun.”

He stared down at her, not even thinking. He wasn’t used to having scantily clad women push themselves so close to him on first meeting, and wasn’t sure how to take her. Then he decided she probably wasn’t used to having strange men walk into her house, take one look at her, and grab her and kiss her. Probably, despite her seeming provocativeness, she’d scream for her maid.

Or perhaps, suspecting his mission, she was deliberately trying to put him at a disadvantage.

He said, “Two-ten in my bare skin,” backed away, and took a deck chair similar to hers. Gracefully Mrs. Powers sank back onto her own.

“You’re a private detective, Mr. Calhoun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And you wanted to see me about some accident?”

“The one night before last. Involving a green Buick convertible with license 9I-3836, a parked Dodge belonging to a man named James Talmadge, a parked Ford belonging to a man named Henry Taft, and a pedestrian named John Lischer, who’s currently at Emergency Hospital in fair condition. A hit-and-run accident.”

She was silent. Then she merely said, “I see.”

“I happened to be sitting in my car only a few yards away when the accident took place,” Calhoun said. “I was the only person in the block who was outdoors at the time, aside from John Lischer, and I’m sure I was the only witness. I got a good look at both the driver of the Buick and the passenger. Good enough to recognize both. You were the driver and Harry Cushman was the passenger.”

Again she said, “I see.” Then, after studying him without expression, a faint flicker of recognition appeared in her eyes. “You were seated at the end of the bar at the Haufbrau. You looked at me as I went by.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I’m flattered that you noticed me. Lots of men must look at you.”

Ignoring the compliment, she asked, “What do you want?”

“Have you reported the accident?”

When she looked thoughtful, he said, “I can easily check at headquarters. I haven’t yet because I don’t want to be questioned.”

“I see. No, I haven’t reported it.”

“What does your husband do, Mrs. Powers?”

A momentary frown marred the smoothness of her brow, but it was gone almost instantly. “He’s president of Haver National Bank.”

“Then you haven’t told your husband about the accident, either.” He made it a statement instead of a question.

She regarded him thoughtfully. “Why do you assume that?”

“Because I don’t think the president of Haver National Bank would let an accident his wife was involved in go unreported for thirty-six hours. Particularly where no one was seriously hurt. You undoubtedly have liability insurance, and the worst you could expect if you turned yourself in voluntarily would be a fine and temporary suspension of your driver’s license. He’d know the charge against you would be much more serious if the police had to track you down than if you turned yourself in voluntarily, even at this late date.”

Her face remained deadpan. “It’s only a misdemeanor even if I’m caught. No one was killed.”

Calhoun said dryly, “You’ve been listening to Cushman. Sure, it’s only a misdemeanor. But one they usually put people in jail for. You eager to spend thirty to ninety days in jail?”

She shook her head. In a toneless voice she asked, “So?”

“So I think the reason you didn’t stop, and the reason you don’t intend to report the accident, isn’t that you lost your head. You don’t impress me as the panicky type. I think the reason you didn’t stop is that you can’t afford to let your husband find out you were out with Harry Cushman at two thirty in the morning.”

When she said nothing at all, Calhoun asked, “Have you tried to have your car fixed?”

She shook her head again.

“Where is it?”

“In the garage out back.”

“How come your husband hasn’t noticed the damage?”

“It’s all on the right side,” she said tonelessly. “A smashed front fender, bent bumper, and dented door. Nothing was knocked loose. We have a three-car garage, and my stall is the far right one. I parked it close to the wall so no one could walk on that side of it. The station wagon’s between my car and my husband’s Packard, so there isn’t much likelihood of his noticing the damage.”

“You say nothing was knocked loose? Was your headlight broken?”

“No. I don’t believe I left any clues at the scene of the crime.”

Calhoun leaned back and put the tips of his fingers together. In a conversational tone he said, “You must have left some green paint on the two cars you hit. By now the police have alerted every repair garage within a fifty-mile radius to watch for a green car. Have you thought of that?”

“Yes.”

“How you plan to get around it?”

“I haven’t yet solved the problem.”

“Would you be interested in some advice?”

“What advice?” she asked.

Calhoun said, “Hire a private detective to get you out of your jam.”

For a long time she looked at him, her expression completely blank. When she spoke, there was the slightest touch of mockery in her voice.

“I was frightened when Alice said you wanted to see me about an auto accident, Mr. Calhoun. But almost from the moment you walked through the door, I’ve known you didn’t come to investigate me on behalf of that old man or either of the two car owners. I’m a pretty good judge of character. Out of the four people involved, how did you happen to pick me as your potential client?”

“I doubted that any of the others could stand my fee.”

Her face grew thoughtful. “I see. What kind of service do you offer?”

“I offer to arrange a quiet payment of damages to the owners of the other two cars, so you won’t have to worry about eventual suits if they ever find out who sideswiped them. With a bonus tossed in to keep them from telling the cops there’s been a contact. And to make the same kind of arrangement with John Lischer. I warn you that part will cost plenty, because on top of whatever damages I can get him to agree to, he’ll have to be paid to keep it from the cops that there’s been a settlement. I’ll also take care of having your car repaired safely.”

“Why can’t you just do the last part?” she asked. “If no one ever discovers it was my car, why should we risk contacting the other people?”

“I’m thinking of your interests,” Calhoun said. “Once there’s a settlement, even a secret one, none of the other parties will press charges in the event the police ever catch up with you. Because I’ll get quitclaim agreements from all of them. Then if you do get caught, the probability is the cops won’t press charges on their own. And even if they do, proof that you made cash settlements with all the injured parties will be an extenuating circumstance. I doubt that any judge would give you more than a token fine and suspend your driver’s license. But without settling, you’re in for a jail sentence if you’re ever caught.”

“I see.” Her brow puckered in a slight frown. “And you say you can get my car repaired safely?”

“Safely,” he assured her.

“How? I wouldn’t care to have some shady repairman work on it. All he’d have to do is check the license plates like you did, and he’d be all set for a little blackmail.”

“I said safely. Does your husband ever go out of town?”

“He flies to New York this coming Monday. A bankers’ convention. He’ll be gone a full week.”

“What time does he leave?”

“Sometime in the afternoon. I don’t remember the exact flight time. I’ll be driving him to the airport.”

“Fine,” Calhoun said. “You’ll be home by dark, then?”

“Oh, yes. Long before that.”

He said, “As soon as it’s dark Monday night, I’ll pick up the car and drive it to Rochester. I’ll switch plates and take it to a garage where I can get fast service. By the time your husband gets back from New York, your car will be back in your garage as good as new. Meantime, between now and Monday, I’ll arrange settlements with John Lischer and the other two car owners.”

She thought it over. Finally she said, “What is your fee?”

“Five thousand dollars,” Calhoun said.

She didn’t even blink. “I see. You’re a rather expensive man, Mr. Calhoun.”

He shrugged.

“And if I refuse to engage you?”

He said, “I have my duty as a citizen.”

“How would you explain to the police keeping silent thirty-six hours?”

“I’d phone and ask why they haven’t acknowledged my letter,” he said blandly. “I was quite drunk that night. Too drunk for it to occur to me I ought to tell the police at the scene I had seen your license number. But the very next morning I wrote them a letter. Letters can get lost in the mail.”

She nodded slightly. “I guess you’re in a pretty good bargaining position, Mr. Calhoun. But I have one more question. Suppose this John Lischer insists on as much as a five-thousand-dollar settlement? With your fee, that would run the amount up to ten thousand. Plus perhaps five hundred apiece for the other two car owners. Where do you suggest I get that much money?”

Calhoun looked at her in surprise. “With this home and with three cars in the garage, I assume you’re not exactly a pauper.”

“No,” she admitted. “My husband is quite wealthy. And I can have all the money I want for any purpose I want just by asking. The only catch is I have to tell what it’s for. I haven’t a cent of my own except a checking account that currently contains about five hundred dollars. I could get the money by telling my husband what it’s for, but if I did that, I wouldn’t need your services. I’m not afraid of the police. The sole reason I’m willing to engage you is to prevent my husband from finding out I wasn’t home in bed at the time of the accident.”

“Think up some other excuse. A charity donation, for instance.”

She shook her head. “My husband handles all our charity donations. There simply isn’t any excuse I could give him. If I told him I wanted a ten-thousand-dollar yacht, he’d tell me to order it and have the company bill him. He wouldn’t give me the money for it. I’ve never in my life asked him for more than a couple of hundred dollars in cash.”

Calhoun said, “Then hit your boy friend. Harry Cushman’s got a couple of odd million lying around, last I heard, and nothing to spend it on except nightclubbing and alimony.”

She looked thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose that would work. Harry wouldn’t want publicity any more than I would. Shall I ask him for a check?” “Cash,” Calhoun said.

“I’ll phone him as soon as you leave. Suppose you come back about this same time tomorrow?”

“Fine,” Calhoun said. It sounded like a dismissal, so he got to his feet.

She gave him an impersonal nod of good-by. She was leaning forward and reaching behind her back to untie the square knot when he walked out of the room.

3

After the private detective had departed, Helena Powers struggled for some time with the square knot he had tied in her scarf. It was too tightly drawn for her to get loose.

Giving up, she rose from the deck chair and pressed a button set in the wall. When the maid appeared, she said, “Bring me a phone, will you please, Alice?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said.

She went away and returned with a plug-in phone extension. She inserted the plug into a wall outlet, then set the phone on an end table and looked inquiringly at her mistress.

“Thank you,” Helena said. “That’s all.”

When the maid had disappeared, Helena sat on the deck chair and dialed a number. A male voice answered.

“Harry?” she said. “I have to see you right away. Can you come at once?”

“There?” he asked. “It’s nearly two thirty. Your husband will be home in an hour.”

“You’ll be gone again before that. Have the taxi drop you on the back street and come in by the sun porch. I’ll be there.”

“This is foolishness,” he protested. “Suppose he comes home early? Can’t we wait until tonight?”

“Lawrence and I are going out together tonight,” she said in a patient tone. “It has to be right now. It’s important.”

“Why? What’s up?”

“There was a witness, Harry.”

He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Be there in fifteen minutes.”

Helena was lying full-length on the deck chair when Harry Cushman stepped in through one of the open French doors. He wore gray slacks and a powder-blue sport shirt open at the neck to expose the upper part of a bronzed chest. With his flat stomach and well-developed arms, he looked extremely fit. He also looked extremely nervous.

Helena glanced up at him, rose, and casually offered her lips for a kiss.

After a hurried peck, he said nervously, “What’s this about a witness?”

“Untie me first,” she requested, turning her back.

“What?” he said. “Why?”

“The knot’s too tight. It’s uncomfortable.”

“Oh.” His fingers fumbled with the knot for some seconds before he managed to get it loose. Then he recrossed the two ends. “This lax enough?”

“Never mind retying it,” she said, pulling the scarf free and carelessly draping it over the phone. “I’m not finished sun bathing.”

She lay back on the deck chair, her firm, sun-tanned breasts exposed to the sunlight.

“My God!” Cushman said. “You can’t lie around like that with me here.”

“Don’t be a prude,” she said. “You’ve seen me totally naked.”

“Not practically in public. Suppose your maid walked in? Or worse yet, your husband?”

“Lawrence never left the bank before three P.M. in his life. And we’d hear Alice coming. The dining-room floor is tile. Sit down and relax.”

“You’re practically outdoors here on the porch,” he insisted. “People can see right in.”

Anxiously he scanned the outdoors through the screens on three sides of the sun porch. Noting how far it was to the street and to the nearest house, he was a little reassured, but not much.

“You can’t see indoors through screens when the sun hits them,” she said calmly. “I often lie out here without a stitch on. Are you going to sit down and listen to me, or waste time fussing about my nudity?”

Seeing he had no hope of winning the argument, Cushman took the only defensive action he could. He crossed to the table containing the phone extension, lifted the scarf, and hovered over her, ready to drop it across her bosom at the slightest sound from the dining room.

“All right,” he said fretfully. “Go ahead, so I can get out of here.”

“A private detective was here just before I phoned you,” she said. “His card’s lying next to the phone.”

Cushman picked up the card and studied it. “Bernard Calhoun. What did he want?”

“He said he was sitting in his car on Court Street only a few yards from the accident. He knows I was driving and you were with me. He knows the names of the injured man and the owners of the two damaged cars. That old man wasn’t seriously hurt, incidentally.”

The last sentence didn’t seem to relieve Harry Cushman any. “Blackmail?” he asked on a high note.

She shook her head. “He offered to help us. To make secret settlements with all the injured parties and to get the car repaired safely.”

Cushman asked suspiciously, “For how much?”

“Five thousand dollars,” she said casually. “Plus whatever arrangements cost.”

“Five thousand dollars!” he squeaked. “It is blackmail!”

She shook her head again. “I doubt that you could call Mr. Calhoun a legitimate businessman, but he is not a blackmailer. He is simply offering a rather illegal service for a quite legitimate price. He impressed me as not honest, but probably trustworthy.”

“How can you judge that?” Cushman asked querulously. “You don’t know a thing about him.”

“Simple logic, Harry. If he were merely a blackmailer, he would just have asked for money to keep quiet. He impressed me as the sort of man whose ethics are rather loose but who has to justify what he does to himself. By rendering us a service for pay, he can convince himself he is not taking advantage of our misfortune, but helping us over it.”

“You’re banking on your supposed ability to judge character again,” Cushman accused. “You always think you can pigeonhole people at first meeting.”

“I usually can,” she said serenely.

“Suppose you’re wrong? Suppose he decides to bleed us dry?”

“He won’t,” she assured him. “He’ll perform exactly the service he offered for exactly the fee he stated. I let him believe I considered the fee exorbitant, but actually I think it’s quite reasonable. Without Mr. Calhoun’s help, just how do you suggest we get out of this jam?”

Nervously fingering his small mustache, Cushman paced across the sun porch, thinking deeply. Then, realizing he was carrying the scarf dangerously far from its owner, in the event of a sudden emergency, he returned to hover over the deck chair.

“I can’t get any money from Lawrence, of course,” Helena said without expression. “He’d insist on knowing what it was for. I’m afraid you’ll have to bear the full expense.”

Cushman made an impatient gesture. “The money’s nothing. If it’s sure to stop there. I just don’t want to set myself up for permanent blackmail. Maybe we’d be smarter to turn ourselves in to the police and face the music.”

She said coolly, “You know how Lawrence feels about infidelity, Harry. He’d divorce me without alimony. And name you as corespondent.”

“Even that might be cheaper in the long run,” he muttered. “As my wife you wouldn’t need alimony.”

“I like the status quo,” she said. “You’re a much more satisfactory lover than you would be husband. As long as other men’s wives attract you so much, I prefer to stay another man’s wife.”

Stretching her arms over her head, she gave a kittenish yawn. The movement arched her full but firm breasts upward, drawing the skin so tight that their pink tips jutted out like a teen-ager’s. Cushman stared down at her, his tongue flicking out to caress the bottom edge of his mustache.

Glancing fearfully over his shoulder at the door to the dining room, he said weakly, “Don’t do that. I’m not made of iron.”

Maintaining the stretched-out position, she looked up at him without expression. “Mr. Calhoun will be here again at two P.M. tomorrow. You’ll bring the money in the morning?”

Gazing down at her again, he lifted his shoulders in a shrug of acquiescence. “We’ll try it this way,” he said. “And hope your character analysis is correct.”

4

The next day was Thursday. At noon Barney Calhoun phoned Emergency Hospital and learned John Lischer’s condition was charted as unchanged. Two hours later the colored maid Alice again let him into the foyer of the Powers home.

This time, instead of making him wait while she checked with her mistress, she merely said, “Mrs. Powers is expecting you, sir,” walked off, and let him find his own way to the sun porch.

Though the living room was thickly carpeted, the dining-room floor was inlaid tile. Calhoun’s summer loafers were crepe-soled, and made no noise on the hard floor. He stopped in the open doorway to the sun porch.

If Mrs. Powers was expecting him, as the maid had said, apparently she was also expecting the maid to announce his arrival, because she wasn’t dressed for company. Like yesterday she was stretched out in one of the deck chairs with sun flooding her body. Her eyes were closed, though she didn’t seem to be asleep, and she wore nothing but a pair of yellow shorts as brief as the red ones she had worn the day before.

Calhoun stood for some time just looking. Presently, as though sensing another presence, she slowly opened her eyes and turned her head in his direction. She looked at him for a long moment, neither surprise nor embarrassment on her face. It bemused him that she didn’t make the instinctive feminine gesture of covering her bare bosom with her arms.

“It’s obvious that you’ve never had any children,” he said a little huskily.

Without hurry she rose from the deck chair and lifted a scarf the same color as her yellow shorts from an end table. Silently she turned her back, folded the scarf across her breasts, and held the two ends beneath her arms for him to tie. Equally in silence he crossed them and tied a square knot.

“You pulled it too tight yesterday,” she said in her curiously flat voice. “Please leave it so that I can undo it without help.”

He loosened the knot a little. He was sweating when he finished.

She turned around, just as she had yesterday, without first moving an inch away. Again he found himself looking down into her upturned face at uncomfortably close range.

“Why is it obvious I’ve never had any children?” she asked. “Pregnancy doesn’t necessarily make a woman sag.”

“No,” he said in a voice even huskier. “But it turns the pink to brown. You still have a little-girl body.”

“Thank you,” she said without expression.

A man can stand only so much temptation. When she merely continued to look up at him, making no attempt to move away, he dropped a hand on each of her smooth shoulders, pulled her against his chest, and kissed her.

She made no resistance, but she made no response, either. She just stood there, her lips soft but unmoving, and her eyes wide open. After a moment he pushed her away.

“Was your mother frightened by an ice cube?” he growled at her.

She turned, then padded across the screened-in porch on bare feet to a small table against the inner wall. “Maybe you’re just not the man to melt the ice, Mr. Calhoun,” she said over her shoulder.

A brightly colored straw bag lay on the table, and she removed a banded sheaf of currency from it.

“Your fee,” she said, returning and handing him the money. “One hundred fifties.”

“How about the settlements?”

“We don’t know what they’re going to amount to, do we?” she said. “Harry wants to see the agreements releasing me from further claims in writing before he pays any more money. When you bring me those, I’ll see that you get whatever money the agreements call for.”

“Harry is smarter than I thought he was,” Calhoun remarked.

He riffled through the bills enough to make sure they were all fifties, then stuffed them into a pocket without counting them. “I’ll pay my personal expenses and the car repairs out of this, and you can pay me back when it’s all over.”

Without comment she returned to her deck chair.

“I’ll try to have all three agreements drawn up by tomorrow,” Calhoun said. “Is it all right if I take them directly to Cushman for approval instead of bringing them here?”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I’d like to get that part of it settled before I take off with the car. So I won’t be in quite so much of a jam in case I get picked up driving it. By the time I deliver the agreements to you, you relay them on to Cushman, and I call to get them back again, it will already be Monday.”

After reflecting, she said, “I suppose that will be all right. I’ll phone Harry to expect you sometime tomorrow. You know where he lives?”

“I looked it up in the phone book. I’ll pick up your car just after dark Monday night. Around nine thirty. Leave the garage unlocked and the keys in the car if you’re not going to be home.”

“Hadn’t I better phone you first?” she asked. “Suppose Lawrence changes his mind at the last minute and doesn’t go?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you better.” He gave her his home number.

Calhoun’s plan was to contact the injured John Lischer before he got in touch with either of the other two men, as there would be no point in trying to settle with the others if Lischer refused to cooperate. But before doing even that, he decided, it would be wise to find out just how much of an interest the police were taking in the case.

After leaving the Powers home, Calhoun drove straight to Police Headquarters. He found Captain Ben Simmons alone in his office, morosely going over a stack of case records.

The head of the Accident Investigation Bureau was a big man, nearly as big as Calhoun, with an air of restrained energy about him. He hated desk work, which made up a good part of his job, and usually was glad of any excuse to postpone it. Although he and Calhoun were friendly enough, they had never been intimate. But because the private detective’s arrival gave him an excuse to push aside his case records, he looked up at Calhoun almost with relief.

“Hi, Barney,” he said. “Pull up a cigarette and sit down. I was just getting ready to take a break.”

Calhoun slid a chair over to one side of the desk, produced a pack, offered Simmons a cigarette, and flipped another in his own mouth. The captain furnished lights.

Simmons leaned back in his chair and blew an appreciative shaft of smoke across the desk. “If you came in to report an accident, walk right out again. We’re up to our necks now.”

“Just killing time,” Calhoun said. “Thought maybe I could dig up a client from among your cases. I haven’t had a job in five weeks.”

The captain laughed. Calhoun reflected that policemen always seemed to enjoy hearing that a private investigator wasn’t doing so well.

“You should have stayed on the force,” Simmons said. “Probably you’d be a sergeant by now.”

“Probably I’d still be pounding a beat. Anything stirring that I might get a finger in?”

“Like what?” the captain inquired. “People involved in auto accidents hire lawyers, not private eyes.”

“I was thinking of hit-and-runs,” Calhoun said. “Maybe somebody’d pay to have a hit-and-runner tracked down.”

“We have a Hit-and-Run Squad attached to the Accident Investigation Bureau,” Captain Simmons said with a shade less friendliness.

“I know. But you guys are always screaming about being understaffed. You ought to welcome a helping hand at no expense to the taxpayer. Besides, I really need a case, Ben. Give me a break.”

Simmons said gruffly, “Sorry, Barney. There’s only one unsolved hit-and-run on the books, and there wouldn’t be anything in it for you.”

“Any insurance companies involved?”

“Not for the dead guy,” Simmons said. “He didn’t have any insurance. There was a little property damage covered by insurance, but not enough to pay the insurance company to hire a private eye to track down the hit-and-runner.”

Apparently he was talking about a different case, Calhoun decided. John Lischer had been neither dead nor in immediate danger of dying when Calhoun had checked with Emergency Hospital at noon.

He said, “You’ve only got one unsolved hit-and-run?”

“At the moment. The thing happened about two thirty A.M. Tuesday, and the guy’s condition was listed as fair up until one P.M. today. Then he suddenly conked out. The Hit-and-Run Squad just got the call an hour ago.”

Calhoun felt his insides turn cold. Forcing his tone to sound only politely interested, he asked, “Who was he?”

“Old fellow named John Lischer. All he had was a fractured hip, but he was pushing eighty and I guess he couldn’t stand the shock. His heart gave out.”

Calhoun calmly puffed his cigarette, but his mind was racing. Up to that moment his actions hadn’t been exactly ethical, but the most he had been risking was his license. Once he had arrived at settlements with the three injured parties, there would have been little likelihood of his getting into serious trouble for not reporting what he knew to the police, even if the whole story eventually came out.

But the unexpected death of John Lischer changed the whole picture. Suddenly, instead of merely being guilty of somewhat unethical practice, he was an accessory to criminal negligence, or possibly, if the district attorney decided to make an example of the case, even to manslaughter.

Both were felonies.

He asked casually, “Got any leads on the case?”

“A little green paint and a bumper guard. Enough to identify the car as a green Buick.”

That did it, Calhoun thought. So much for Mrs. Powers’ assurance that she’d left no clues at the scene of the crime. With the case now a felony instead of merely a misdemeanor, there’d be a state-wide alert for a damaged green Buick. Even Rochester wouldn’t be safe.

Somehow Calhoun managed to get through another five minutes of idle conversation with Ben Simmons. Then he pushed himself erect with simulated laziness.

“Guess I won’t pick up any nickels here,” he said. “See you around.”

“Sure,” the captain said. “Drop in any time.”

It was nearly three thirty when Calhoun left Headquarters. He debated returning to the Powers home at once, then decided it was too close to the time Mr. Powers would be getting home from the bank. Instead he phoned from a pay station.

The colored maid Alice answered the phone, but Mrs. Powers came on almost immediately.

“Barney Calhoun,” he said. “There’s been a development. I have to see both you and Cushman at once.”

“Now?” she asked. “I expect my husband home within minutes.”

“Arrange some excuse with Alice. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t urgent. Can you get in touch with Cushman?”

“I suppose.”

“Then both of you come to my place as soon as you can get there.” He gave her his lower Pearl Street address. “West side of the sheet, just right of the alley. Lower right flat. Got it?”

“Lower Pearl Street,” she said with a slight sniff. “That isn’t a very nice neighborhood.”

“I’m not a very nice person,” Calhoun told her, and hung up.

5

Buffalo’s lower Pearl Street is a neighborhood of dusty shops, second-rate taverns, and low-rent apartment buildings. It is not a slum section, but neither is it a very good residential area.

Barney Calhoun lived in a four-unit apartment building flanked by a hand laundry on one side and a tavern on the other. The two upper flats were occupied by the family of the Chinese man who operated the laundry and by a man who operated a hand book. The flat across from Calhoun was rented by a pair of streetwalkers who used it for business purposes.

Harry Cushman arrived first, coming by taxi shortly after four P.M.

When Calhoun opened the door, Cushman inquired curtly, “You’re Bernard Calhoun?”

“Yeah,” the private detective said. “Come on in.”

Cushman didn’t offer his hand. He followed Calhoun into a small and not particularly well-furnished front room, looked around superciliously, and finally chose a straight-backed chair as the piece of furniture least likely to be contaminated.

“Helena said it was urgent,” he said. “I hope you can make it fast. I have a five-thirty cocktail date.”

It was the first time Calhoun had heard Mrs. Powers’ first name. Helena Powers. Somehow the name seemed to suit her calm and expressionless beauty.

He said, “Depends on how fast Helena gets here. What I have to say won’t take long.”

The buzzer sounded at that moment and Calhoun went to let Helena Powers in. Glancing past her at the curb, he saw she had come in the station wagon.

Harry Cushman rose when she came into the room, crossed and bent to kiss her. She turned her cheek, then moved away from him and sank into an easy chair that had a broken spring. She was wearing a bright sun dress that left her shoulders bare, open-toed pumps, and no stockings. Her jet-black hair was tied back with a red ribbon, and she looked about sixteen years old.

Cushman returned to his chair.

Without preliminary Calhoun said, “John Lischer’s dead.”

Cushman stared at him with his mouth open. As usual, Helena Powers’ face showed no expression.

“But you told Helena you’d been checking the hospital and his condition was listed as fair,” Cushman said stupidly.

“His heart gave out. All he had was a fractured hip, but he was nearly eighty.”

Helena asked in a calm voice, “How does this affect our arrangements?”

“It changes the whole picture,” Calhoun told her. “You can’t settle with a dead man. If you get caught now, you may be charged with criminal negligence. Possibly even manslaughter.”

Harry Cushman’s face was gray. “Listen,” he said. “I know a little bit about the law. The fact that it was hit-and-run doesn’t have any bearing on a criminal-negligence or manslaughter charge. There’d be two separate charges. And a hit-and-run charge is only a misdemeanor no matter how many people get killed.”

“Sure,” Calhoun told him. “But you can bank on it that with a death resulting from the accident, the judge will give the maximum possible sentence for hit-and-run. And while under the law, the mere act of running isn’t supposed to be considered a factor in a charge of criminal negligence or manslaughter, juries do consider it despite judicial instructions to disregard it. Theoretically the prosecution has to prove blatant disregard on the part of the driver for the safety of the injured person. But believe me, it’s a lot easier to convince a jury that excessive speed and reckless driving constitute ‘blatant disregard’ in a hit-and-run case than in one where the driver stopped and tried to help the injured party. My opinion is that after all this time Mrs. Powers would be charged with at least criminal negligence even if she voluntarily turned herself in now.”

Harry Cushman ran his tongue over the underside of his mustache. “What are we going to do?” he asked. “I can’t afford to be accessory to a felony charge.”

“You already are,” Calhoun informed him. “You were in the car that killed Lischer. If you didn’t want to be an accessory, you should have reported to the cops at once.” He let a little contempt creep into his voice. “Of course if you go to them right now, they’ll probably let you off the hook because they’ll be more interested in the driver. Mrs. Powers will take the rap — up to five years and a thousand-dollar fine if she’s convicted of criminal negligence, up to fifteen years and a fine if they make it manslaughter — and all you’ll get is a little bad publicity.”

Cushman licked at his mustache again and flicked his eyes at Helena, who stared back at him expressionlessly.

“Naturally we have to protect Helena,” he said with an effort to sound protective. “What’s your suggestion?”

“They know it was a green Buick.” Calhoun looked at Helena. “Your belief that you hadn’t knocked anything loose was a little wrong. You left a bumper guard at the accident scene.”

He turned his attention back to Harry Cushman. “Now that it’s classified as a felony instead of just a misdemeanor, every repair garage in the state, in upper Pennsylvania, and halfway across Canada will be alerted. The risk of getting the car fixed has at least tripled. And so has my fee. I want another ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand!” Cushman squeaked. “You agreed to five!”

“Not to help cover a felony, I didn’t. Make up your mind fast. Either it’s fifteen grand or nothing. If you don’t want to play, I’ll hand back your five right now and call the police.”

Both of them stared at him, Cushman with petulant belligerence and Helena with mild curiosity, as she might have examined an interesting bug on a flower.

Finally Helena’s husky voice said, “I don’t see what there is to argue about, Harry. Mr. Calhoun seems to be in a perfect bargaining position. He always seems to be in a perfect bargaining position.”

“You said he wouldn’t ask for any more,” Cushman accused her. “You said he’d perform exactly the service he agreed to for exactly the fee he agreed to. You and your ability to judge character. I told you we’d end up paying blackmail.”

Calhoun’s face became very still. With a lithe movement that was startling in so big a man, he stepped forward, gathered a handful of Cushman’s shirt front, and effortlessly lifted him to his feet. The dangerous glitter in his eyes caused Cushman to raise both palms defensively.

After a moment in which the private detective teetered on the brink of violence, the anger in his eyes faded to contempt. Almost with indifference he thrust Cushman back into his chair. Then he swung around, crossed the room to a stationery desk, and unlocked a small drawer. He lifted from it the banded sheaf of fifties he had received from Helena only a few hours previously, and tossed it into Cushman’s lap.

“Blackmail’s a word I don’t like,” he growled. “Get the hell out of here while you can still walk.”

Cushman gaped up at the bigger man. In a shaken voice he said, “Now wait a minute, Calhoun. You can’t leave us in this spot.”

“I said get out,” Calhoun rasped. He started toward Cushman’s chair again.

“Hold it,” Cushman said, raising one hand, palm out. “I’ll withdraw the word and apologize, if you’re so touchy. Don’t go off half-cocked. We need your help.”

Calhoun stopped before the chair and looked down coldly at the seated man. “Then pay for it. The fee is fifteen grand, and I don’t haggle. Take it or leave it.”

“We’re going to take it,” Cushman said in a placating tone. “You can’t blame a man for fussing a little over an extra ten thousand. I’ll bring it here at noon tomorrow.”

Tentatively he held up the sheaf of fifties. After staring down at him for a moment, Calhoun ungraciously jerked it from his hand and returned it to the desk drawer.

Cushman looked relieved. After his original reaction, the man’s expression of relief bemused Calhoun. He wondered why Cushman had put up such a fuss in the first place. The amount couldn’t be important to him; he had been left more money than he could possibly spend in a lifetime. Glancing at the beautiful Helena, Calhoun suspected the man was beginning to wish he’d never heard of her. He could tell by the way Cushman looked at her that she held a terrific fascination for him, but his expression suggested he was beginning to wonder if she was worth the complications she was bringing into his life.

The private detective didn’t care what the man thought so long as he came up with an additional ten thousand dollars.

Cushman and Helena left a few moments later. Helena offered Cushman a lift, and he said she could drop him at the Statler Hotel.

The Statler was only a few blocks from Calhoun’s apartment. The private detective wondered if that was Cushman’s real destination. Or had he picked it because it was the nearest taxi stand, and at the moment he wasn’t anxious for his mistress’s company any longer than necessary?

6

It was nearly five P.M. when Helena Powers drove the station wagon into the garage. She got out and studied the Buick convertible parked close against the wall. Although she knew the damaged right side couldn’t be seen with the car parked as it was, she couldn’t resist checking each time she entered the garage.

Alice was in the kitchen preparing dinner. When Helena came in the back door, the maid said, “Mr. Powers is in the front room, ma’am. I told him what you said.”

“What did he say?” Helena asked.

“Nothing. Just sort of frowned, like he does.”

Helena pursed her lips. Lawrence Powers was an indulgent husband in some ways, but a difficult one in others. He had an even, though rather cold disposition, and was rarely guilty of anger. In financial matters he was generous, never refusing his wife anything she desired, yet at the same time he required an exact accounting of everything she spent. Similarly he was generous in allowing her to spend her time as she saw fit, but insisted on her plans being orderly. Provided she gave him advance notice before he left for the bank in the morning, and explained just what her plans for the day were, he never objected to her not being home when he returned from work. But he was a creature of habit, and surprises upset him. He liked to find his wife home when he expected her there. He was somewhat of an indulgent tyrant. Though he rarely objected to anything Helena did if she had mentioned it in advance, he almost automatically disapproved of anything she did without at least his tacit blessing.

Helena had left the message with Alice that one of her friends had phoned that a dress she particularly wanted was on display at Herrod’s, and that she had run downtown to get it. She expected her husband to be a bit sulky about this departure from routine, but she’d had to leave some excuse and this one had the double virtue of being both plausible and uncheckable.

Lawrence Powers was pouring a Manhattan from a cocktail shaker when she entered the front room. He was a tall, slim man with the beginnings of a paunch, a full head of graying hair, and a hairline mustache of the same color. He had a round, not handsome but not unpleasant face, and wore steel-rimmed glasses. He was twenty years his wife’s senior.

Helena gave him a wifely kiss, which he accepted rather coolly, and said, “Sorry I wasn’t here when you got home, dear, but I was afraid the dress would be gone. As a matter of fact, it was.”

“Couldn’t you have phoned the store and asked them to hold it till tomorrow?” he inquired.

“I don’t have an account at Herrod’s,” she said. “Besides, I didn’t think of it.”

“How did you happen to take the station wagon instead of your convertible?” he asked. “I bought it for you to use.”

When in a fault-finding mood, Lawrence Powers had a tendency to make any departure from normal routine sound like a major sin. His tone was almost accusing. For an instant Helena thought he had discovered the damage to the Buick, but a quick look at his face reassured her. He was merely enumerating her errors one at a time.

She asked equably, “Is there another drink in that shaker?”

Unsmilingly he poured her a drink. Picking it up, she said, “Please don’t be angry with me, Lawrence. All day I wait for you to come home, and when you do I like things to be pleasant. The dress was important to me.”

“I’m not angry,” he said. “But I don’t make many demands on you. One of the few is that I like a cocktail waiting when I get home from work.”

Helena raised her brows. “I told Alice to fix a shaker as soon as you got home.”

“Oh, she made the Manhattans,” Powers said a bit petulantly. “But you know I don’t like to drink alone.”

This wasn’t true. If he had known in advance that Helena wouldn’t be home, he would have cheerfully had a lone drink while he waited for her to return. She knew that his displeasure stemmed solely from not having been consulted. She was too wise, however, to point out that she frequently wasn’t there to mix him an afternoon drink.

She merely said, “I’m sorry, dear. I won’t disappoint you again.”

He thawed a little then, having made his point and having extracted an admission of fault from his wife. By dinner time he was completely over his sulk.

After dinner they repaired to the front room, as usual, for coffee. The ritual was always the same. Mornings, over his coffee, Lawrence Powers read the Courier Express from front to back, skipping nothing but the ads, the comics, and the sports section. Over his dinner coffee he read the Buffalo Evening News with equal thoroughness, and Helena was expected not to speak until he was finished. He didn’t restrict himself to silence, however. He carried on a running commentary about the items in the paper. Helena rarely looked at a newspaper. She didn’t have to. She got most of the news merely by listening to her husband.

He was on an inner page when he announced, “See that hit-and-run victim died today.”

Helena’s breath stopped. Then she inquired in a tone of only polite interest, “Who was that, dear?”

“Old fellow named John Lischer. Paper says he was seventy-nine. Run down on Court Street early Tuesday morning by a speeder who didn’t stop. Drunk, I imagine. I must have read you the item at the time.”

“I don’t recall it, dear.”

Powers grunted. “Catch him eventually, of course. They know what kind of car he drove. Sideswiped a couple of parked cars and left some paint and a bumper guard. It was a green Buick.” There was a pause, then he repeated, “Green Buick,” and looked up with a slight grin. “You have an alibi for two thirty A.M. Tuesday, Helena?”

“You tucked me in at eleven P.M. Monday night, dear,” she said in a calm tone. “Remember?”

“Sure, but how do I know you went to sleep after I went to my room? Did you?”

Her husband’s attempts at humor never convulsed Helena. His present attempt made it difficult for her even to summon a dutiful smile. Her rare smiles were never more than slight liftings of the lip corners. This one was hardly visible.

“Perhaps I sneaked out to meet a lover after you went to sleep,” she said. “You do sleep soundly, you know.”

And it was convenient that he did, she thought. Like all his habits, Lawrence Powers’ habits of sleep were regular. He slept from eleven P.M. to seven A.M. every night of the year, including weekends and vacations. He slept heavily, without stirring, and almost nothing could waken him, not even alarm clocks. It was one of Helena’s few marital duties to get her husband up mornings.

His sound sleeping gave her considerable freedom to go where she pleased after midnight. She could be fairly sure even a ringing phone wouldn’t awaken him, and she never even had to exercise much caution in leaving the house or returning. For nearly four months she had been meeting Harry Cushman after midnight two or three times a week, and as yet hadn’t even come close to getting caught.

Powers chuckled at the unlikely thought of Helena’s having a lover. Turning the page, he said, “Well, they’ll catch whoever it was, of course. Hope they give him the limit. I haven’t much sympathy for a hit-and-runner.” He read in silence, then said, “Well, well. Old Grombsy has retired from the school board finally. About time. He’s been in his dotage for years.”

Helena said, “I think I’d like a brandy with my coffee, dear. May I pour you one?”

Powers looked up in surprise. Helena rarely suggested a drink, though she was usually agreeable if the suggestion came from him.

“All right,” he said. He studied her more closely. “You’ve lost a little color, my dear. Aren’t you feeling well?”

“Quite well,” she said, rising and moving to the liquor cabinet. “It’s just the heat, I think. My blood thins out.”

She poured two thimbles of brandy and carried one to him. As soon as his face was buried in the paper again, she quickly tossed hers off, quietly poured another, and set it on the end table next to her chair. Absorbed in the paper, Powers didn’t notice.

The weekend passed slowly for Helena. On Friday Harry Cushman phoned to report that he had delivered the additional money to Calhoun. She had no opportunity to see Cushman over the weekend, however, and time always dragged heavily when she had to spend a long period in the company of her husband.

On Monday Lawrence Powers went to the bank in the morning despite the fact he was scheduled to leave for New York City in the afternoon. He told Helena to expect him home for lunch. This gave her an opportunity to phone Calhoun to make sure plans were unchanged. The private detective assured her that they were the same, and that he would pick up the car after dark that night.

Lawrence Powers was one of those men who arrive everywhere early. Although his plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until three thirty and it was only a twenty-minute drive to the airport, he was packed and ready to depart by one thirty.

From previous experience Helena should have been on guard against what happened. But she was too busy mentally rehearsing her explanation for driving her husband to the airport in the station wagon instead of the convertible for it to occur to her that she might have to sidetrack his officious helpfulness. She was first aware of danger when he strode in the back door just as she entered the kitchen from the front part of the house.

He announced cheerfully, “I pulled the car out for you. Ready to go?”

She subdued her first impulse — to dart to the kitchen window and stare out. With apparent unconcern she walked to it and gave the car in the driveway a seemingly casual glance. She didn’t even blink when she saw it was the green Buick. Powers had swung it sidewise to the rear of the house, so its damaged side couldn’t be seen from the kitchen window. Apparently he had both entered and got out of the car by the lefthand door, and hadn’t noticed the damage.

In a calm voice Helena said, “I meant to take the station wagon, dear. The convertible has a funny ping in the motor.”

Powers raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t notice it.”

“It doesn’t start until you reach about thirty miles an hour. I didn’t want to bother you with it. I meant to take it into the garage tomorrow, after you were gone.”

Picking up her bag from the kitchen table, she started toward the door. When her husband followed, she opened her bag as though searching for keys, then stopped in the doorway, blocking his way.

“I don’t seem to have a handkerchief, Lawrence,” she said over her shoulder. “Will you get one from my bureau while I put the convertible away and pull out the station wagon? Alice is upstairs, and can show you where I keep them.”

With a husbandly grumble, Powers turned to perform the chore. Helena went on out the back door and slipped under the wheel of the convertible.

She was slipping the key into the ignition lock when her husband’s impatient voice called from above, “Helena!”

Glancing up, she saw that he was leaning from an upstairs window. She said nothing, merely waiting to see what he wanted.

“Which kind of handkerchief?” he inquired in a loud voice. “One of those fancy ones, or one you can blow your nose on?”

“A plain one, dear,” she called.

She started the engine, her gaze still upturned. She knew that from his elevated position he could see right across the car, and she hoped that by keeping her gaze fixed on him she could keep his fixed on her face. But as the car began to move, his expression suddenly changed. At first his eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed again in shock and understanding.

Dropping her gaze, she drove the convertible back into the garage.

She had climbed from the car and was waiting quietly between it and the station wagon when Powers stormed into the garage. He was carrying his grip in one hand and a small plain handkerchief in the other. He dropped the grip on the garage floor, walked around behind the convertible, and squeezed into the narrow space between it and the wall. After staring at the damaged side for a moment, he backed out and rounded the car again to confront his wife.

In a horrified voice he said, “Helena, you killed that old man!”

Without inflection Helena said, “There are lots of green Buicks.”

With his eyes fixed on his wife’s face in shocked wonder, Powers slowly shook his head.

“Someone must have stolen the car and brought it back after the accident,” she said. “You know I was in bed at eleven that night.”

Slowly he shook his head again.

“I thought perhaps one of Alice’s boy friends did it,” she said. “I was afraid to mention it to you, because I knew you’d insist on firing her and calling the police. And she’s too good a maid to lose. I was going to have it fixed while you were gone.”

Powers’ shoulders slumped. In a weary voice he said, “You don’t even have imagination enough to think up a good story. What have you been doing? Cruising the bars alone after I’m asleep? Or meeting a lover?”

She said nothing, merely continuing to gaze at him without expression.

“Don’t you have any emotion at all?” he asked, violence in his tone for the first time she remembered. “God knows there’s never been any passion in you. But you might at least look sorry for taking a human life.”

She continued silent.

“Or do you have passion for other men?” he inquired bitterly. “Do you find men who can stir you on the streets at two thirty in the morning? Is that what you were doing?”

When she still made no reply, he brushed past her to the bench at the rear of the garage. The Powerses had five phone extensions, and one was in the garage. He picked up the phone.

Moving behind him, Helena said, “What are you doing, dear?”

“Phoning the police,” he said, and dialed 0.

Helena didn’t argue or plead with him. She knew her husband well enough to realize it would be useless. Having a direct mind, she took direct action.

She lifted a heavy wrench from an assortment of tools lying on the bench and brought it down on the back of her husband’s head. He fell to his knees, tried to support himself by grasping the edge of the bench, then lost his grip and collapsed face down.

Helena lifted the dangling phone and replaced it in the cradle. Carefully she laid the wrench back exactly where it had been. She walked without hurry to the door of the garage and ran her gaze over all the rear windows of the house to make sure Alice wasn’t watching from one of them. Satisfied that she wasn’t, Helena pulled closed the sliding door on one side until it blocked Powers’ prone body from view.

Then she returned to her husband and stooped over him. He was unconscious but breathing regularly, and she judged that he was not seriously hurt. She also judged, by the lump already forming on the back of his head, that he would stay unconscious for a time.

She rose, took a cigarette from her bag, lit it, and contemplated the unconscious man moodily. For ten minutes she stood without moving, thinking steadily. Then she carefully stepped out the cigarette butt and bent over him again.

She had decided what to do. Lawrence Powers had been wrong when he accused her of having no imagination. What she planned might be considered illogical, but it certainly didn’t lack imagination.

7

Harry Cushman maintained a seven-room apartment on Elm-wood Avenue. When his doorbell rang at two thirty in the afternoon, he was surprised to find Helena standing in the hall.

“What’s the matter?” he asked worriedly. “I thought you were driving your husband to the airport this afternoon.”

She moved past him into the apartment, waited until he closed the door, then offered her lips for a kiss. He gave her a preoccupied peck and repeated, “What’s the matter?”

“Lawrence discovered the car damage,” she said calmly. “He knows my car killed that old man.”

Cushman’s jaw dropped. In a stupefied voice he said, “Good God! Does he know I was with you?”

Helena’s lip corners lifted ever so slightly. It wasn’t a smile so much as an expression of mockery. “Is that your only worry?” she asked.

He had the grace to look a little abashed. “Of course not,” he said. “You know my first concern is you. Has he called the police?”

She shook her head. “He can’t. He’s too tied up at the moment.”

“Tied up? With what?”

“Clothesline,” Helena said. “I mean he’s literally tied up. He’s in our basement.”

Unsteadily, Cushman crossed to an easy chair and sank into it. “I think I’d better hear this sitting down,” he said. “Just what happened?”

“I knocked him unconscious with a wrench,” Helena said serenely. “I didn’t have any choice. He had the phone in his hand to call the police, and I needed time to think. After I thought out what to do, I phoned Mr. Calhoun.”

Cushman only stared at her, too stupefied to make any comment.

“Mr. Calhoun came over at once,” she continued, in the same tone she might have used to give a woman friend a recipe. “Meantime I had tied and gagged Lawrence, and had made an excuse to send Alice home. We were in the garage when it happened, you see, so Alice doesn’t know anything about it.”

“Thank God for little favors, anyway,” Cushman breathed.

“Do you love me?” Helena asked in her normally flat tone.

Cushman stared at her. “You certainly pick odd times for romance.”

“It’s important,” she said. “Do you still want to marry me? There’s no point in continuing this conversation if you don’t.”

He regarded her curiously for several silent seconds, as though trying to decipher some meaning in the strange tangent at which the conversation had suddenly gone off. As he studied her, some of the puzzlement and worry disappeared from his face and her beauty again began to penetrate his consciousness. If his eventual nod wasn’t enthusiastic, it was definitely affirmative.

“You do still want to marry me?” she persisted.

“Of course,” he said. “You know I’m crazy about you. But I thought you wanted the status quo.”

“That’s hardly possible now, is it? The minute I untie Lawrence, he’ll head for a lawyer. Do you want to marry me enough to go to a little trouble?”

“Haven’t I already?” he asked. “Fifteen thousand bucks isn’t exactly peanuts. Not to mention the mental strain.”

“You’ll have to do a little more now, Harry. If you really want me. I want you to help me get a divorce.”

“How?” he asked. “Anyway, aren’t you a little confused? The important thing is to get you out of a felony charge. If we manage that, your husband will probably take care of the divorce. You just said the first place he’ll go when you untie him is to a lawyer.”

“My plan will free me of possible criminal charges at the same time it gives me a ground for divorce,” she said. “I don’t want Lawrence to get a divorce. I want to get it.”

He said dubiously, “Are you aware that the only divorce ground in New York is adultery?”

“It isn’t in Reno. Insanity is one of the grounds there.”

He looked at her blankly. “Insanity?”

“It’s quite simple,” she said. “I won’t have a bit of trouble proving Lawrence insane enough for commitment if you’ll cooperate in the plan. All you have to do is take his place on the plane to New York. It leaves in less than an hour.”

While he gaped at her, she drew a plane-ticket envelope from her bag and handed it to him. Then she handed him a pair of steel-rimmed glasses and said, “Here. Put these on. They’re Lawrence’s.”

Holding the glasses gingerly, he continued to gape at her.

“You’re almost exactly Lawrence’s height,” Helena said. “With a couple of towels padding your stomach, you’d be almost exactly his build. He has ten years on you, but you both have a full head of graying hair and a small gray mustache. With those glasses, you’d match his description perfectly. All you have to do is fly to New York in his place, then remove your disguise and fly back under another name on the next plane.”

He stared at the glasses, then back at her again. “But we don’t look a thing alike in the face,” he said stupidly.

“You don’t have to, so long as the descriptions match. The flight stewardesses won’t know either of you. Lawrence flies to Washington occasionally, but he hasn’t flown to New York in three years. You never fly anywhere. By the time the police make a routine check, several days will have passed and the stewardesses will all but have forgotten you. Even if they’re shown a photograph, it’s unlikely—”

“The police!” Cushman interrupted in a squeaking voice.

“Of course,” Helena said patiently. “The plan is this: Mr. Calhoun has agreed to hold Lawrence captive until the car is fixed — at no additional charge, incidentally. Then, after the car is back in the garage, he’ll transport Lawrence to New York City in a private plane owned by a friend of his. He’ll turn him loose in the city unshaven and in dirty clothes. What do you think Lawrence will do?”

“Head for the nearest police station and spill the whole story,” Cushman said promptly.

“Exactly. And how do you think the police will receive it?”

After considering this, Cushman said reflectively, “It won’t sound very plausible to them, I guess. They’ll probably do some checking before taking any action.”

Helena gave him the sort of nod teachers award to bright students. “And after checking, they’ll be convinced he’s crazy. The flight list will show he flew to New York as scheduled, and the stewardesses will verify his description. The assumption will be that he was in New York all the time, and his appearance will suggest that he spent his time getting drunk. When the police come to check my car, they’ll find it undamaged. Then I’ll announce that my husband has been suffering delusions about me for some time, and request his commitment to Gowanda. I doubt that under the circumstances I’ll have much trouble getting the commitment.”

“Maybe not for a period of observation,” Cushman said slowly. “But it’s hard to fool psychiatrists for very long.”

Helena almost smiled. “They’re as human as other people, Harry. What would your reaction be if you were a psychiatrist and one of your patients insisted a delusion was fact, when you had a police report stating it wasn’t fact. It will work, believe me. And the minute he’s declared insane, I’ll be off to Reno for a quick divorce.”

Thoughtfully rubbing his chin, Cushman sat with a frown on his face. From his expression, Helena couldn’t tell whether she had convinced him or not.

She was relieved when he said” in a contemplative tone, “You know, your plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

“Of course it will,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “Plane time is only forty minutes off. You won’t need a bag, Harry. Lawrence’s is in the car, all packed. You can check it in a coin locker at New York and leave it there. It will add just that much more proof of Lawrence’s arrival, if they ever check that deeply. You won’t need clothes of your own because you’ll be coming back tonight. Just stuff some towels under your belt and we’ll get started.”

Rising, he said, “I’d better check these glasses. Suppose I can’t see with them on?”

Putting them on he went to look at himself in a wall mirror.

“I can see fine,” he said in a pleased voice. “Things are just barely fuzzy.”

He made a tentative trip across the room, carefully avoiding furniture. He managed it without mishap.

“Now try some towel padding,” she suggested.

By now he was caught up with the idea of disguise. He entered the bathroom almost with enthusiasm and began pulling towels from a cabinet.

Helena hoped she could maintain his enthusiasm long enough to get him on the plane. Fortunately time was too short for him to give the plan more careful consideration. If he thought about it deeply enough, it might occur to him to look up Nevada’s divorce laws in an almanac, as she had done just before she left her house.

She doubted that he would go through with the plan if he discovered that a spouse had to be proved insane for a period of two years before there was ground for divorce under Nevada law.

It also wouldn’t do for him to begin wondering why Bernard Calhoun had undertaken this additional risk at no additional fee; after all, the private detective had previously shown no tendency to perform his services gratis. Helena had taken a calculated risk. She had balanced the implausibility of her story against the certainty that Cushman would object to another fee increase. For she couldn’t risk a possible phone call by Cushman to the private detective to haggle over a new price.

Because Barney Calhoun was as yet unaware that Helena had additional duties marked out for him. Helena believed in taking things as they came. The most important factor in her plan was to get Harry Cushman in her husband’s place on the New York flight. And it didn’t bother her at all that she had been less than truthful with her lover to accomplish that.

Now she could work on Calhoun at her leisure.

8

Barney Calhoun spent a very quiet weekend. At noon on Friday Harry Cushman brought him two more sheafs of fifty-dollar bills. Calhoun took them and the original packet down to his bank vault, after transferring a thousand dollars to his wallet for expenses.

Then he relaxed for the remainder of the weekend, in expectation of not getting any sleep at all Monday night.

Monday morning Helena Powers disturbed his rest by phoning to make sure his plans were still in order. He was unable to get back to sleep.

At seven o’clock Monday evening she phoned again to tell him her husband had caught his plane and the way was clear for him to pick up the Buick.

“The keys in the car?” he asked.

“No. Stop at the house for them. Alice isn’t here and I’m all alone. No one will see you.”

“All right,” he said. “Expect me about an hour after it gets dark.”

In mid-July the sun didn’t set until after eight thirty, and it stayed light for another half hour after that. It didn’t get fully dark until nearly ten. Calhoun arrived at the Powers home at ten thirty P.M.

Helena Powers opened the front door to his ring. She was wearing a plain street dress and a pert little straw hat, and she carried a light jacket over her arm. Silently she locked the door behind him, then led him back to the kitchen, switching off lights as they passed through each room. On the kitchen table stood a small suitcase.

“You going somewhere?” Calhoun asked.

“With you,” she said. Her face revealed nothing.

Setting down his own bag, he looked at her in astonishment. “Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“I’ll be gone nearly a week.”

“I’ve made arrangements with Alice,” she said. “She thinks I’m driving up to my sister’s in Utica. I gave her a week off.”

“Suppose your husband tries to phone long distance and doesn’t get any answer?”

“He never phones. He just writes a card every day when he’s gone. And I never write back.”

Calhoun shrugged. “It’s your car. I guess you can ride in it if you want.”

He picked up her bag and his own, waited while she flicked out the lights and opened the back door for him. Then he waited again while she locked the door behind them.

In the garage he set down the bags and asked for her car keys. Silently she handed him a leather key case.

“Which is the trunk key?” he asked.

She pointed to one.

He slid it into the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. He tried it upside down, but it wouldn’t go in.

“The lock’s jammed,” he said.

Helena tried it with no more success. Finally she said, “I’m sure it’s the right key,” and looked puzzled.

“The devil with it,” he said. “We haven’t got that much luggage anyway.”

He tossed the two bags on the floor of the small back seat. The top of the convertible was still down, as it had been on the night of the accident. Calhoun put it up.

Apparently the only damage the car had suffered was to the body, because it drove perfectly. Calhoun noted with satisfaction that the gas tank registered three-fourths full; that should take them the two hundred miles to their destination without refueling.

The private detective didn’t anticipate much risk of their being stopped even in Buffalo by some cruising patrol car, because it was now six days since the accident and four days since John Lischer had died. A routine order would have been issued to all cars to look for a damaged green Buick, Calhoun knew, but he had ridden enough patrol back in his police days to be aware that by now this order would be filed away at the back of the minds of most cruising officers. They wouldn’t be out searching for the hit-and-run car to the extent of carefully looking over every green Buick they saw. Even if he and Helena ran into a police car and the officers noticed the damage, there was a good chance it wouldn’t register on them immediately that the car was green or that it was a Buick.

It also helped that it was now dark and that the damage was all on the right side. Simply by keeping in the righthand lane, Calhoun could prevent any cars passing in the same direction from noticing it. The only real danger was in meeting a squad car coming from the opposite direction; the front bumper was badly bent and the front right fender was crushed all out of shape.

To increase their odds, Calhoun stayed off the main streets as much as possible. His immediate destination was the Buffalo Skyway, which would spill them onto Route Five at the very southwest edge of town, and the quickest way to it was straight down Delaware from Helena’s house. Instead, Calhoun took an intricate course along the darkest sidestreets he could find.

Puzzled by the southwesterly direction of this maneuvering, Helena said, “I thought we were going to Rochester.”

“That was before I was accessory to a felony,” Calhoun said. “We’re going to Cleveland.”

“Cleveland! That’s two hundred miles!”

“Rochester garages will be looking for a bent Buick. Cleveland garages won’t. We should be there by four in the morning.”

Helena said, “You’ll need gas to drive that far. Is it safe to pull into a filling station?”

Calhoun glanced at the gauge again. “It’s nearly three-quarters full. We’ll make it.”

“The gauge doesn’t work properly,” she said. “I believe there’s only a little over five gallons in the tank.”

Calhoun slowed to a stop and looked sidewise at her in exasperation. “You might have mentioned that before we started. We could have drained some gas from the other cars.”

“You might have mentioned that we weren’t going to Rochester,” she countered with logic. “You have enough gas to make that.”

In silence he started the car again. After a moment she asked, “What are you going to do? Take a chance on buying some?”

He shook his head and continued driving. Helena said, “Now aren’t you glad I came along?”

“Why?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t have known about the fuel gauge. You’d have run out of gas on the highway somewhere.”

Calhoun made no answer.

He continued maneuvering southwest. Finally, after skirting the downtown section, he drove along lower Pearl Street and parked.

“Isn’t this where you live?” Helena asked, peering out.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

He left her in the car while he went inside. He returned almost immediately with a red-painted one-gallon gasoline can and a short length of rubber tubing. He tossed them on the back floor, then climbed back under the wheel and started the car.

“That can sounded empty,” Helena said.

“It was,” he said tersely.

Deciding he wasn’t in a conversational mood, she lapsed into silence.

They were now only a block from the Skyway entrance. They made it without incident, and Calhoun breathed a sigh of relief. With traffic from the other direction widely separated from them, there was virtually no chance of anyone spotting their car damage while they were on the bridge. And once off of it, they would be nearly out of town.

But just as they drove off the far end of the bridge, they had a bad break. Up to this point they hadn’t seen a single radio car, but now, only a few blocks from the city limits and relative safety, one suddenly appeared coming toward them. As it cruised by, it blinked on its highway lights, then lowered them again.

With his heart in his mouth, Calhoun wondered if the two patrolmen in the car had noticed the damaged right front. In the rear-view mirror he saw them swing in a U-turn and start back. He had been traveling at twenty-five, but he risked increasing the speed to thirty.

A siren ground out a summons to halt.

For a wild moment Calhoun contemplated pushing the accelerator to the floor and racing it out. Then he realized there wasn’t any safe place to run. Straight ahead Route Five had only one turnoff, and it would spill them right into the most congested part of town. Past the turnoff the road ran like an arrow, without a curve or an intersection, clear to Lackawanna. If they tried that, the police would simply radio Lackawanna and a roadblock would be set up long before the Buick could get there.

Calhoun pulled over to the side of the road.

When the police car pulled up next to them, neither officer got out. The one on the right said, “Haven’t you got any dimmers on that thing, mister?”

At first his words failed to penetrate, because Calhoun was expecting some question about the smashed fender. Then he flicked his eyes at the dashboard and saw the small red light that indicated the highway. lights were on. His left foot felt for the floor switch and pressed it down.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t notice I had the brights on.”

The officer nodded peremptorily, and the radio car swung in another U-turn to resume its course.

With shaking fingers Calhoun lighted a cigarette before starting on.

He maintained a speed of thirty-five, five miles less than the limit, through Lackawanna and down to the circle where Route Five met Seventy-five. He took Seventy-five the few miles to where it crossed Twenty.

Five and Twenty ran parallel clear from Buffalo to Erie, Pennsylvania, occasionally joining each other and becoming one road for short stretches. Calhoun chose Twenty at this point because Five ran along the lake through numerous small towns, while Twenty was relatively unpopulated for the next twenty-five miles. He could have saved considerable time by entering the Thruway at this point and taking it as far as the Pennsylvania border, but this would have entailed stopping at a brightly lighted toll gate on both entering and leaving the Thruway. Calhoun didn’t choose to risk having some sharp-eyed gatekeeper notice the damaged fender and perhaps recall that an alert was out for a green Buick.

He kept to a sedate fifty miles an hour for the next hour, joining Five again just before Irving and staying on it. At Westfield, some sixty miles from Buffalo, he slowed and drove aimlessly up and down several side streets.

“What are you doing now?” Helena asked.

“We have to get gas.”

“We passed a station right in the center of town.”

“I know,” Calhoun said. “But we can’t leave any record of a banged-up Buick stopping anywhere for gas here. The alert won’t reach as far as Cleveland, but it’s sure to have gone this far.”

Finally he found what he wanted: a car parked in a side-street where all the houses were dark. He parked behind it, facing the wrong direction, so that the rear of the Buick backed up against the rear of the other car, and switched off the lights. Getting out of the car, he lifted the gas can and rubber tubing from the rear floor.

“Slide over under the wheel,” he ordered.

She stared at him for a moment, then she obeyed. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Steal some gas. And we can’t afford to get caught. If anybody challenges us, be ready to take off fast. If I have time to get in, fine. If I don’t, take off without me. I can beat a gas-stealing rap, but we’re dead if the police get a good look at this car.”

“Where would I go?”

“Straight on to the next town. Ripley, I think it is. Wait for me at the village limits on this side of town, on Route Twenty. If I don’t show within a few hours, check into the first motel you come to the other side of Ripley and wait until I do.”

She said, “You think of everything, don’t you? I’m beginning to think you earn your money, Mr. Calhoun.”

“Why so formal?” he asked. “My name’s Barney.”

In the darkness he could see her looking at him, and could just make out her expressionless face. “All right, Barney,” she said after a moment.

Calhoun glanced up and down the street, then unscrewed the gas cap of the car behind them. He siphoned off a gallon of gas and emptied it into the Buick’s tank. He repeated the process three times.

He was siphoning off a fifth gallon when a large-lensed flashlight suddenly blinked on from the side of the house the two cars were parked in front of. The light wasn’t fifteen feet away.

“Got you this time!” a triumphant voice cracked out. “Hold it right there, or I’ll shoot!”

The long muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun protruded from behind the flashlight.

9

From the corner of his mouth Calhoun said, “Take off. Fast.” At the same moment he dropped the rubber tubing and elevated his arms.

The Buick’s engine roared and the car spurted away, its lights still out. Apparently in the darkness the man with the shotgun hadn’t realized there was anyone in the car, for the move caught him by surprise. The shotgun muzzle started to swing in the direction of the Buick, but the light remained fixed on Calhoun. The car was out of sight in the darkness before the man could possibly get its license number or, probably, even identify its make.

The muzzle swung back to center on Calhoun.

“Let him go,” the voice from beyond the flashlight said grimly. “The fellers at the State Police barracks can find out from you who he is.”

He advanced until the uptilted muzzle almost touched Calhoun’s chest. With the light directly in his eyes, Calhoun could get only a dim impression of the man holding it. He couldn’t see the face at all, but the figure seemed lean and spry. By the man’s voice Calhoun judged him to be elderly.

“How long you fellers think you could get away with this?” the man demanded. “Three times in one week is plain dumb. You might of knowed I’d set a trap if you kept it up.”

Calhoun said nothing. The man’s face came into view as he thrust it beyond the source of light to peer up at Calhoun’s. It was the lined, weathered face of a man in his late sixties who has spent most of his life outdoors. Calhoun guessed him to be a retired farmer.

“You’re no local feller,” the man said. “Where you from, boy?”

“Syracuse,” Calhoun said. “I was just hitchhiking through. May I take my hands down?”

“You keep ’em up there,” the elderly man said. “Hitchhiking, you say?”

“Yes, sir,” Calhoun said. “I don’t know who the guy driving was. You caught the wrong man. The other guy has your gas.

The man with the gun grunted. “How come you was stealing gas for him?”

“He was running out. I had a choice of going along with it when he suggested it, or walking. I didn’t figure I could find another ride this time of night.”

There was another grunt. “Easy conscience you got, boy. Me, I’d of walked. Well, all we can do is let you describe him and the car to the state police. Know the license number?”

Calhoun shook his head. “I don’t even know the make of car. I can’t tell one car from another. And I didn’t see his face very well. It was dark in the car.”

The elderly man chuckled dryly. “Maybe your memory will improve after you talk to the law.”

“Why can’t we settle it out of court?” Calhoun inquired. “It’s only four gallons of gas, and you gained a can and a hose. Would five bucks fix it?”

“If you got money,” the old man said shrewdly, “why didn’t you offer to buy your friend gas, ‘stead of stealing it?”

Calhoun shrugged. “Easy conscience, like you said, I guess. How about it? Will you take five and call it even?”

“Don’t believe I will, mister. Think I’d rather catch the feller’s been stealing my gas. And I think maybe you’d remember who he is after a while in jail.”

“I couldn’t describe him if I rotted in jail,” Calhoun said earnestly. “If you turn me in, you’ll get nothing for your trouble. I’ll make it ten.”

“Hmm. Going up, huh? Well, now, I like a horse trade. What you say to fifty?”

Calhoun felt relieved enough to accept the terms on the spot. But he sensed that immediate capitulation would only bring a further jump in price.

“Twenty,” he temporized.

“Nope,” the man with the gun said. “Guess we’d better phone the police barracks.” After a pause, he said. “Make it forty-five.”

They haggled for another five minutes, and settled for thirty-five. Agreement reached, Calhoun slowly lowered his arms, careful to make no sudden movements. He drew out his wallet and counted out the money. The elderly man kept him covered throughout.

After backing up and checking the denominations of the bills by flashlight, the elderly man said, “Okay, boy, guess you can go. Next time just remember that crime don’t pay.”

“It certainly doesn’t,” Calhoun muttered as he walked off.

He wasn’t far from the west edge of town. He made his way to Route Twenty, and trudged along it toward the village line, intending to take up position there and try to hitch a truck ride to Ripley.

As he neared the village-line marker, he saw the taillights of a car parked just beyond it. As he drew nearer, he recognized it as the Buick.

Coming alongside, he found Helena calmly smoking a cigarette.

“I told you the next town,” he greeted her in a growling voice.

“I knew you’d get away,” she said serenely. “I have full confidence in your ingenuity. I thought you might need a getaway car, though. Are the police after you?”

“No,” he said. “I bought him off. It’ll be on the expense account.”

He walked to the back of the car and replaced the gas cap, which had been hanging by its chain when Helena drove off. Then Helena slid over and he slipped under the wheel.

“We may just about make it,” he said as he started the car. “Let’s hope your estimate of how much gas we had when we started was conservative. If we had two gallons more than that, we should make Cleveland if this thing gets any kind of mileage.”

“It gets fine mileage,” she assured him. “But why take the chance of running out of gas? Can’t we try the same trick again? It’s a pretty remote chance that we’d run into another trap.”

“No hose,” he said. “Our friend kept it and the can as part of the deal.”

The delay in Westfield had consumed nearly an hour. At their conservative speed they had averaged only thirty miles an hour since leaving Helena’s house. It was now past one thirty in the morning, with approximately a hundred and thirty-five miles still to go.

They didn’t stop again until they hit the outskirts of Cleveland. Ordinarily Calhoun would have driven the remaining distance in three hours at most, but now he took no chances of being stopped for anything at all. On the open highway he stayed well below fifty; in the towns he kept five miles below the posted speed limits. It was just six P.M. when Calhoun drove the Buick into a truck stop at the edge of Cleveland.

Helena said, “What do we want here?”

“Breakfast,” Calhoun told her.

“Shouldn’t we rent a couple of cabins before we do anything else?”

“No,” he said. “We’ve got several more important things to do first.”

They finished breakfast by seven, but Calhoun insisted on dawdling over his coffee for another full hour. When Helena exhibited signs of impatience at the delay, all he said was, “There’s no point in going into town until places open.”

It was eight when they left the truck stop, and by the time they got far enough into town to pass small neighborhood businesses, barber shops were open. Calhoun accomplished the second of the more important things he had mentioned by getting a shave.

“Couldn’t that have waited?” Helena complained when he rejoined her.

“I have to look respectable for the next stop,” he told her.

Heading in the general direction of downtown, he drove until he spotted a sign reading CAR RENTALS. He parked half a block beyond it.

“Just wait here,” he instructed Helena. “When I come by in another car, follow me.”

As usual she showed no surprise. As he got out of the car, she slid over into the driver’s seat.

The car-rental place didn’t have exactly what Calhoun wanted, but it was close enough. He would have preferred a Buick coupe or convertible the same color as Helena’s, but the rental service didn’t have any Buicks. He settled for a green Dodge coupe a shade darker than the convertible. The rate was nine dollars a day plus eight cents a mile, and he told the proprietor he wanted the car for a week. He gave the name Henry Draves, a Detroit address, and left a hundred-dollar deposit.

Only minutes after Calhoun had left her, he pulled up alongside Helena in the Dodge, honked the horn, and pulled away again. In the rear-view mirror he saw her pull out to follow.

He led her back to the eastern edge of town, found a street which seemed relatively deserted, and parked. Helena parked behind him.

In the trunk of the rented car Calhoun found a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Helena watched with her customary lack of expression as he switched plates on the two cars.

Then she said, “I don’t think I understand.”

“Probably an unnecessary precaution,” he said. “I’m sure repair garages this far from Buffalo won’t be watching for a green Buick. But here a New York plate stands out more than an Ohio one. Now when I take this thing in to be fixed, it’ll be just another local car. And on the off chance that there’s ever a check to find out who it belonged to, the license won’t lead anywhere except to a car-rental outfit and a nonexistent guy named Henry Draves of Detroit.”

Her lip corners quirked ever so slightly. “As I’ve mentioned before, you think of everything, don’t you, Barney?”

“I try to,” he told her. “I’ll drive the Buick now, and you follow me in the Dodge. Next stop is a repair garage.”

She remained where she was. In her husky but slightly flat voice she said, “Let’s get settled in cabins first. I want a bath and a change of clothes.”

“It won’t take an hour to locate a garage and make arrangements,” he argued.

She shook her head. “We’ve been here over three hours now. I wanted a cabin at six, but I waited while you fed yourself, wasted an hour over coffee, got a shave, rented a car, and changed plates. I’m not waiting another minute.” She looked at him serenely and added, “Besides, they take your license number at tourist courts. We’ll have to drive in with the Buick.”

She was right, Calhoun realized. They should have signed in somewhere before he changed the plates. He didn’t want the New York plates now on the Dodge listed on even a tourist court’s records. Disconsolately he considered changing the plates back again, then decided it wasn’t necessary. There wasn’t much danger in some motel proprietor’s seeing the damaged Buick so long as it didn’t have its own plates on it.

“You win,” he said. “Follow me.”

Helena shook her head again. “You follow me this time. I saw just the court I want when we came in on Twenty. Maybe you’re smart on some things, but I prefer to trust my own judgment on a place to sleep.”

Shrugging, Calhoun climbed back in the Dodge and waited for her to start the procession.

10

Helena drove nearly ten miles east, back out of town, on Route Twenty, passing a half dozen motels that looked adequate to Calhoun before pulling off to the side of the road suddenly and parking.

“Lock it up,” she called back to him.

He wound the windows shut, got out, and locked the Dodge. When he slid into the Buick next to her, he said, “You must like to live dangerously. I’ve been expecting you to run out of gas for the last five miles.”

She glanced at the fuel gauge. “There’s probably still a gallon or two left. Enough to get us back into town.” She pointed through the windshield toward a large tourist court about a hundred yards ahead on the opposite side of the road. “That’s the one. Isn’t it nice?”

It didn’t look any different to Calhoun from the half dozen others they had passed, except that this one had open-front stalls for automobiles.

“It’s lovely,” he growled. “Let’s get it over with.”

The place was called the Starview Motor Court and advertised hot baths and steam heat. Since the temperature hovered around eighty, neither seemed like much of an inducement to Calhoun.

Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution this far from Buffalo, Calhoun had Helena swing the car so that the left side was toward the office.

With dozens of automobiles driving in and out of the court daily, it wasn’t likely the proprietor would notice that the green Buick convertible had changed to a green Dodge coupe a few hours after they checked in. But Calhoun saw no point in calling attention to their smashed fender. Just possibly it might catch the proprietor’s attention enough to make it register on him.

The proprietor was a sad-faced man in his fifties who had an equally sad-faced wife. They occupied quarters behind the small office. Both of them went along to show the cabins.

They were nice modern cabins, clean and airy and walled with knotty pine. The bathrooms were large, instead of the usual tiny affairs you find at most tourist courts, and contained bathtubs with showers.

“We’ll take two,” Calhoun told the proprietor. “We’ll be here a week, so I’ll pay the full week now. How much?”

The man said the normal rate was nine dollars a day, but as a weekly rate he would settle for fifty-six dollars each. “With another fifty cents a day knocked off if you do your own cleaning instead of having maid service,” he added.

Helena surprised Calhoun by saying she preferred to do the cleaning herself. The proprietor’s wife gave her a pleased smile. Apparently the wife constituted the maid service.

Helena stayed outside when Calhoun went back to the office to register. He signed as Howard Bliss and sister, Columbus, Ohio, and listed the Ohio license number registered to the Dodge. Then he paid the proprietor a hundred and five dollars.

The cabins were Numbers Six and Seven. When Calhoun got outside again, he discovered Helena had backed the Buick into the carport between their cabins while he was registering.

“You could have left it in front of the cabins,” he said to her. “We aren’t going to be here long.”

“We’ll be here at least a half hour. I told you I’m going to take a bath.”

“Several times,” he said wearily. “Which cabin do you want?”

She looked at both speculatively. The one on the right went with the carport they were using; a door near the rear wall of the port led into the cabin.

Helena said, “I’ll take the right one.”

He got her bag from the car, carried it into the righthand cabin via the carport door, and set it on the bed. Then he got his own bag from the car and went into his own cabin.

Inasmuch as he was going to have to kill a half hour anyway, Calhoun decided to take a cold shower. He took his time under the water, letting its coldness knock some of the tiredness out of his muscles and wash some of the sleepiness from his eyes. Twenty-five minutes later, refreshed and in clean clothes, he knocked at the next cabin door.

“Just a minute,” Helena called. “I’m still dressing.”

It was closer to ten minutes before she appeared, and meantime he stood out in the sun letting the heat wilt his collar and undo all the good a cold shower had done him. When Helena finally appeared, she was dressed in a white sun dress, low-heeled sandals that exposed bare, red-tipped toes, and no hat. Her long hair was pulled up in a pony tail.

Carefully she locked her cabin door behind her and dropped the key into a straw purse.

This time Calhoun drove the Buick. When they pulled up alongside the parked Dodge, he handed her the keys to it.

“Instead of my following you, suppose we arrange to meet somewhere?” Helena suggested. “I’d like to do a little shopping.”

“You know Cleveland?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then we’ll make it somewhere simple.” He looked at his watch, noting it was nearly ten A.M. “The Statler cocktail lounge at two P.M.?”

“All right.”

“Be careful you don’t get picked up for anything,” he cautioned. “Even a parking ticket would put us in the soup with that New York plate on the Dodge.”

“I’ll be careful.”

He drove off while she was unlocking the coupe door.

He was halfway back to town before it occurred to him that it would have been wiser for her to follow him in case the Buick finally ran out of gas. The gauge registered just below half full. If her estimate was correct that five gallons caused the gauge to show just under three-quarters full, fuel was running dangerously low. And even with the new plates on the car, he didn’t want to chance stopping for gas. The fewer people who noticed the damage to the car, the better.

He was nearly in the downtown section before he spotted a Buick service sign. He pulled through the open repair-garage doors just as the motor sputtered and died.

A cheerful-looking middle-aged man in coveralls came over to the driver’s side of the car and said, “Yes, sir?”

“Looks like I just ran out of gas,” Calhoun said, climbing out of the car.

The repairman raised his eyebrows. “We have a gas pump,” he said. “But wouldn’t it have been simpler to pull into a gas station?”

“I didn’t know I was low,” Calhoun explained. “The gauge has been acting up. It registers nearly half full. But I didn’t come in for gas. I need some body work.”

He led the man around to the other side of the car and pointed to the smashed fender, door, and bumper.

After carefully looking over the damage, the repairman asked, “What’s the other guy look like?”

“There wasn’t any other guy,” Calhoun told him. “My wife mistook a tree next to our drive for the garage.”

The repairman said he could do the whole job, including a check of wheel alignment, in three days for approximately three hundred dollars.

“That’s a rough estimate, you understand,” he said. “May vary a few bucks one way or the other.”

Calhoun gave him the name George Seward and a south Cleveland address a few miles from the repair garage. When the man asked for a phone number, Calhoun said he didn’t have a phone, and just to hold the car when it was finished until he picked it up.

“Might as well fix that gas gauge while you’re at it,” he said.

Calhoun’s business was completed by noon, and suddenly he was exhausted from lack of sleep and the strain of driving all night. He began to wish he had arranged to meet Helena at twelve thirty instead of two.

There was nothing to do but kill two hours, however. He took a taxi to the Statler, had lunch, and slowly sipped four highballs in the cocktail lounge while he waited for her. She showed up at ten after two.

“Want a drink?” he asked. “Or shall we go back to the court and collapse? I’m ready to fall on my face.”

She looked him over consideringly. “You do look tired,” she said. “We’ll pick up a couple of bottles of bourbon and some soda on the way, and I’ll have my drink at the court. Maybe we can get some ice from the proprietor.”

His four drinks had relaxed Calhoun just enough so that he had difficulty keeping his eyes open. He let Helena drive.

He was just beginning to drift off to sleep sitting up when the car braked to a stop, then backed into a parking place at the curb. He opened his eyes to see they were in front of a liquor store.

Reluctantly he climbed out of the car. “You say bourbon?” he asked Helena.

When she merely nodded, he went into the store. He bought two quarts of bourbon and a six-bottle carry-pack of soda.

Helena had filled the back seat with so many bundles that he decided to stow away his purchases in the trunk. When he raised the Dodge’s trunk lid, he was surprised to find the floor of the trunk soaking wet. There hadn’t been any water in it when he had searched the trunk for tools to change license plates.

But he was too sleepy to wonder about it much. He slammed the lid shut, climbed back into the car, and let himself sink back into a semicoma again. Helena had to shake him awake when they got back to the tourist court.

He climbed from the car and sleepily got the bourbon and soda from the trunk. “I think you’re going to have to drink alone,” he told Helena. “If I don’t lie down within the next thirty seconds, I’ll fall down. Want this stuff in your cabin?”

“I can carry it,” she said. “You go to bed.”

Taking it from him, she moved toward the door leading from the carport into her cabin. Over her shoulder she said, “I may not have a drink, either. I’m pretty tired, too. Maybe I’ll follow your example and just go to bed. Want me to get you up for dinner?”

“All right,” he said, and stumbled toward his own cabin.

Inside, he managed to get his shirt and his shoes off before falling onto the bed. He went to sleep instantly.

11

Calhoun slept straight through until eight o’clock that night. Apparently Helena did the same, for when he finally peered next door, her cabin was dark and the Dodge was still in its carport. She must have awakened about the same time he did, though, because she knocked at his door just as he finished dressing.

She was holding the two bottles of bourbon and the carry-pack of soda.

“I thought we’d have a drink before we went out to dinner,” she said.

Calhoun found two glasses in the bathroom, but the prospect of warm soda and bourbon didn’t appeal to him.

“I’ll see if I can get some ice at the office,” he said.

But the proprietor told him he was sorry, he had only enough ice for his personal needs. When Calhoun returned to the cabin, he suggested they have their before-dinner drink at the place they picked to eat.

“Maybe I can get some ice from him,” Helena said.

A drink didn’t mean that much to Calhoun, but since she seemed so set on one, he didn’t argue. From his open door he watched her move toward the office. The movement walking gave to her body was worth watching. It occurred to Calhoun that the motel proprietor would have to be made of ice himself to refuse her.

In a few moments she reappeared carrying a china water pitcher.

As she neared, he said to her, “You must have more sex appeal than I do.”

She came to a halt before her own cabin door and unlocked it. “Maybe you should have asked his wife,” she said. “Be with you in a minute.” She disappeared into her cabin.

What she wanted in the other cabin, Calhoun couldn’t decide, and when she reappeared a few moments later, she still carried nothing but the pitcher. Carefully she locked the door behind her, and came over to Calhoun’s door. When she handed him the pitcher, he saw it was full of cracked ice instead of cubes.

“What’s he have, an old-fashioned icebox?” Calhoun asked in surprise.

“I didn’t inquire,” Helena said. “I just asked for ice.”

They had two highballs before going out to hunt a place for dinner.

It was nine o’clock before they found one. It was a roadhouse called the White Swan, about a half mile from the tourist court, toward town. It was a big barn of a place, with booths lining two walls and tables spread over all the rest of the space except for a small dance floor at one end and the few feet in front of the bar at the other. A rather incompetent three-piece orchestra was playing pop music.

There was no head waiter or hostess. You found your own table and took your choice. The place wasn’t crowded, and Calhoun picked a table at the edge of the dance floor.

When a waitress came over, Calhoun looked inquiringly at Helena and asked, “Want a cocktail?”

“Just a bourbon and soda, I think,” she said. “I don’t like to mix my drinks.”

“Two bourbon and sodas, please,” he told the waitress. “And we’d like to order dinner.”

She left menus and went off for their drinks.

They ordered steaks, which turned out to be surprisingly good. It was nearly ten by the time they finished coffee, and the place had completely filled up. Only a few couples were dancing, though; most of them were sitting at tables or in booths with drinks. Calhoun noted that a large number of tables contained nothing but men.

“Wonder what the attraction is here,” he said. “It can’t be the music.”

They found out a few minutes later. The orchestra played an off-key introduction, the house lights dimmed, and a spotlight speared a young man who carried a portable microphone to the center of the dance floor.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the young man said. “Welcome to the White Swan. It’s time once again for the White Swan’s nightly show.”

“Oh, we’re going to have a floor show,” Helena said in a pleased voice.

The young M.C. told a couple of off-color jokes, which brought raucous laughter from some of the audience but didn’t stir Helena from her normal expressionlessness. She didn’t look offended, but she didn’t look amused, either. If anything, she looked bored.

Having warmed up the audience to the limit of his limited capabilities, the M.C. proceeded to eulogize the coming attractions of the evening. His announcements that they would be entertained by a female vocalist (“that great young lady with the great big voice”) and a tap dancer (“a great young man”) were greeted by total silence. But when he mentioned “our featured dancer, that great young performer, Ann Devoe,” he brought down the house. There were wild hand-clapping, whistles, and catcalls.

Helena said, “She must be good. Did you ever hear of her before?”

“The audience reaction is familiar,” Calhoun said dryly. “I imagine I’ve seen the same act. The applause doesn’t necessarily mean she’s good.”

Helena asked, “What do you mean?”

“It’s probably a strip act.”

“Oh,” Helena said with interest. “I’ve never seen one.”

The young M.C. finally retired, and the great young lady with the great big voice came on. She was a buxom woman in her mid-thirties, and the M.C. had been right in describing her voice. It shook the building. Unfortunately, volume was its sole attribute. Nevertheless she received applause, not for her talent but for her lyrics. She sang two songs, both of them the double-meaning sort of thing you usually hear only at stag parties.

Calhoun studied Helena with interest while the woman sang. Helena’s face was totally blank, and she was watching the vocalist with the intent gaze of an entomologist peering through a microscope at a new type of insect life.

When the woman finished her act, Calhoun said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

Helena glanced at him. “I was just wondering what could bring a woman to make that kind of vulgar display in public.”

“The necessity of making a living,” he said dryly. “She’s probably an ex-stripper with too much sag for the bump-and-grind circuit. You must have lived a very sheltered life.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’ve never seen a strip act. Apparently you never heard a dirty song before. And from your expression when the M.C. was on, you never before heard a dirty joke told out loud.”

Helena said reflectively, “Perhaps I have been sheltered. Lawrence would never think of taking me to a place like this. And if we got into one by accident, as we did tonight, he’d drag me out before the show started.”

“Doesn’t your friend Cushman ever take you to night clubs?”

She shook her head. “We stick to quiet places. You have to when you’re practicing adultery.”

The casual manner in which she referred to her own sins intrigued Calhoun, particularly after her comment about the vocalist. He decided that it was probably only public vulgarity she disapproved of, and that otherwise she was quite matter-of-factly amoral. A moment later he became sure of it.

He said, “Weren’t you ever exposed to life before your marriage?”

“I was married at eighteen,” she told him. “I was a clerk in Lawrence’s bank after I graduated from high school, and we were married when I’d been there only two months. Lawrence was thirty-eight at the time. He’s always been rather protective. Our relationship has been more of a father-daughter one than a husband-wife one. Which may be the reason I take lovers.”

“Lovers?” he asked. “There’ve been more than just Cushman?”

“In twelve years of marriage?” she said with raised eyebrows. “Of course.” She gave the hint of a smile. “Lawrence thinks I’m frigid.”

Her frankness both startled him and puzzled him. From another woman, he would have diagnosed the conversation as a bald invitation to become her lover. But Helena was an almost complete enigma to him. He suspected her casualness about her love life was not assumed to impress him but was her actual attitude. She was frank about her adulteries because they were unimportant to her.

Remembering the time he had kissed her, and her total lack of response, he wondered if her husband was right and if perhaps she was frigid.

The tap dancer came on, went through a routine act, and was rewarded with tepid applause. Then the feature act came on.

Ann Devoe was a voluptuous redhead in her early twenties. She had rather plain features, but a smooth, well-formed body and remarkably large breasts with no trace of sag. She did what is known in the trade as a street strip, which is the taking off of ordinary street clothes instead of a trick gown with numerous zippers that allow it to be removed a section at a time.

She started in a conservative skirt, jacket, and blouse, nylon stockings and plain pumps, and ended in nothing. In a way it was more provocative than the ordinary strip act, for she managed to create the illusion that she wasn’t a professional performer giving a professional performance, but merely an attractive young woman disrobing in public. She heightened the impression by seeming to be unaware of the audience. She maintained a deadpan expression the entire time, and she eliminated the usual gliding motions of the strip dance. She merely stood there with a thoughtful expression on her face and slowly disrobed, looking for all the world like a young secretary getting ready to take a shower and go to bed. When she was completely nude, she stood motionless for a few seconds, then made one slow, complete turn and walked off the floor.

The applause was deafening, but she didn’t come back for any bows.

Calhoun said, “What’s your verdict on that?”

“She has a lovely figure.”

“I mean, do you wonder how she can bring herself to do it?”

Helena looked at him. “It’s not the same as the vulgar songs. I could do that if I needed the money.”

When he looked surprised, she said, “I’m not ashamed of my body.”

The remark made him recall the day he had surprised her sun bathing. She had certainly exhibited no embarrassment then. He had a mental picture of her performing the act they had just seen, and decided she probably could do it without vulgarity. With her cool, unemotional manner, she would make it a display of beauty rather than a display of sex.

He wondered again if she were frigid. He also wondered if he would ever understand her.

After the floor show they had another drink and then decided to dance despite the orchestra’s lack of talent. Calhoun discovered she was a remarkably good dancer.

They stayed at the White Swan until closing time, alternately dancing and drinking. And with each drink and with each chance to hold her in his arms, Calhoun’s temperature rose another degree.

He began to get the impression that the closeness of their bodies on the dance floor was having an effect on her, too. Not from anything she said, for the conversation didn’t touch on love or morals again. But each time they danced she seemed to move more compliantly into his arms and her eyes seemed to get a warmer shine.

When he finally drove the Dodge back into the carport, he was on the verge of suggesting she come into his cabin for a nightcap, with the idea that more interesting things might develop. But before he could open his mouth, Helena jumped out of the car and went to her cabin through the carport door without saying a word to him.

Then as he sat there foolishly looking at her closed door, he experienced a terrific letdown. He was tempted to get angry, but reflected that she hadn’t actually said or done anything to make him think she had been sharing his cozy thoughts. Perhaps she had just now realized the direction his thoughts were taking, and wanted to leave no doubts in his mind that their relationship was strictly a business one.

Shrugging, he locked the Dodge and went into his own cabin.

Five minutes later, just as he finished pulling on his pajamas, there was a knock at the door. He put on his robe and opened it to find Helena standing there with her suitcase in her hand.

When he had stared at her expressionless face for nearly a minute, she asked, “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“Sure,” he said, recovering his wits enough to step aside.

She walked past him, set the suitcase on a chair, opened it, and drew out a nearly transparent nylon nightgown. Then she turned and, holding the nightgown out in front of her, examined it critically.

Her husky but flat voice said, “I’m frightened all alone over there. Am I welcome here?”

He didn’t answer because he was afraid his voice would shake. He merely closed the door, which till now he had been too stupefied to shut, locked it, and unsteadily poured out two substantial shots of bourbon.

The ice in the pitcher had all melted by now, but Calhoun needed his straight anyway.

When he turned around with the two glasses in his hands, Helena was in the process of slowly removing her stockings.

“What did you tell me that act was called?” she said. “A street strip?”

He gave her a dazed nod.

“Who knows but what Lawrence may divorce me someday and I’ll have to earn a living? See how I compare with Ann Devoe.”

Calhoun decided she won the contest hands down.

12

The next three days were like a honeymoon. They didn’t have a thing to do but wait for the Buick to be repaired, so they simply relaxed and enjoyed themselves. With Helena doing the housework, which consisted only of making the bed, emptying ashtrays, and washing out whisky glasses, they weren’t even disturbed by the proprietor’s wife coming in to clean. They slept till noon, then showered, usually together, had a leisurely lunch, and spent the rest of the day at one of the numerous beaches on Lake Erie.

Evenings they spent dancing and drinking at The White Swan or some similar roadhouse.

That first night Calhoun discovered that Lawrence Powers’ opinion of his wife was vastly wrong. Far from being frigid, she possessed an unexpectedly fiery passion. Calhoun reflected that women were different from men; it took a specific person to arouse a woman, whereas the average man could work up physical passion for nearly any attractive woman.

The idea was a little flattering.

Later, Calhoun could see that Helena’s attraction for him was almost entirely physical. Except for her beauty and her unexpected passion, she wasn’t a very stimulating companion. They had almost no conversation aside from routine discussion of their plans for the day and aside from such physical pleasures as sunbathing, dancing, drinking, and love-making, Helena didn’t have a single interest in life that Calhoun could detect.

Two things puzzled him. One was her disappearance for a short time each morning. He would awaken about eight A.M. to find himself alone, drift back to sleep, and a short time later be awakened again by her climbing back into bed. Her explanation was that she had to have breakfast coffee but didn’t want to disturb him, so she dressed and drove down the road to a diner alone.

The other thing that puzzled him was her ability to get ice from the motel proprietor. Both Wednesday and Thursday noon, as soon as she was dressed, she left the cabin carrying the china water pitcher and returned with it full of cracked ice. But when, on Friday, Calhoun happened to get dressed first and took the pitcher to the office while Helena was still under the shower, the proprietor gave him an irritated look and said that he’d already informed Calhoun once that he didn’t supply ice for guests.

When he returned empty-handed, Helena went off with the pitcher and came back five minutes later with it full. Calhoun came to the conclusion that with so many customers moving in and out, the proprietor must have forgotten that he was the supposed brother of Helena.

Friday afternoon Calhoun had Helena drive him to the Buick repair garage and discovered the convertible was all ready. The bill was three hundred and thirteen dollars.

“I had to put on a new bumper bracket,” the repairman said. “Could have straightened the other, but it would have left it weak. I put the old one in your trunk.”

“How’d you manage that?” Calhoun asked. “The lock was jammed last time I tried it.”

“Ain’t now.” The man demonstrated by inserting the key in the trunk lock and turning it. The lid raised without difficulty. He locked it again and handed Calhoun the keys.

Calhoun tried the trunk key himself, and it worked perfectly.

When he drove out of the service garage, Helena was waiting for him in the Dodge a half block away. He led the way to a quiet sidestreet, where they stopped long enough for Calhoun to switch plates back to the right cars. Then Helena followed in the Buick while he drove the Dodge to the car-rental lot.

He had thirty-four dollars coming back from the hundred he had deposited.

As they drove back toward the tourist court, he said, “We may as well start back tonight. We can have the car back in your garage by tomorrow morning.”

Helena didn’t say anything then. She waited until they were back in Calhoun’s cabin and he had mixed a couple of drinks.

Then she said, “There’s one other little job we have to do before we go back to Buffalo, Barney.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Drink your drink first, then I’ll show you.”

“Show me?” he asked, puzzled. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Drink your drink,” she repeated.

She sounded as though she meant he might need it. He looked at her dubiously, then drained his glass.

“All right,” he said. “I drank my drink. Now show me.”

She set down her own drink unfinished, took his hand, and led him to the door. Still holding his hand, she led him to her own cabin door, unlocked it, and drew him inside. Then she released her grip on him and locked the door behind them.

“It’s in the bathroom,” she said.

Now completely puzzled, he followed her. In the bathroom the shower curtains were drawn around the bathtub and a glittering new icepick lay on the edge of the washbowl. Without comment Helena drew the shower curtains wide.

Three damp burlap bags were spread over something bulky in the bathtub.

For a few moments Calhoun simply stared at the bags, the hair at the base of his neck prickling in anticipation of shock. Then he pushed Helena aside and lifted one of the bags.

Underneath, cozily packed in more than a hundred pounds of cracked ice, was the naked body of a man. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest and his back to Calhoun. The back of his head was oddly flattened and was matted with blood.

Calhoun let the burlap fall back into place, staggered out of the bathroom, and collapsed into a chair in the bedroom. Helena followed as far as the bathroom door, then stood watching him with curiously bright eyes as he stared at her in stupefaction.

Finally he managed to whisper, “Who is it?”

“Lawrence,” she said without emotion. “My husband.”

Calhoun closed his eyes and tried to make some sense out of the nightmarish discovery that Lawrence Powers, who was supposed to be at a bankers’ convention in New York City, was actually lying dead in an improvised icebox not a dozen feet away. Surprisingly, it did make sense. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, various oddities in Helena’s behavior that had vaguely puzzled Calhoun ever since they started the trip began to develop meaning.

Opening his eyes, he said in a dazed voice, “He was in the trunk all the way from Buffalo, wasn’t he? That’s why the key wouldn’t work. You substituted some other key so I couldn’t open the trunk, then put the right one back on the ring after you got his body out of the trunk and into your cabin.”

“It was the key to the trunk of Lawrence’s Packard you tried in the lock the first time,” she said calmly. “I had the Buick trunk key in my purse.”

“And that’s why you insisted on this particular tourist court,” he went on. “You wanted one with carports, so you could get him out of the trunk and into your cabin without being seen. You dragged him in through the carport door while I was taking a shower.”

She shrugged. “He wasn’t very heavy. A hundred and fifty. I weigh one twenty-five myself.”

Leaning forward, he put his head in his hands and mumbled, “Tell me the rest of it.”

Without a trace of emotion in her voice, she said, “While you were arranging for the Buick to be fixed, I located an ice house only two miles from here. I thought of ice because I knew he’d begin to smell after a few days if he wasn’t preserved. I had the man put four twenty-five-pound chunks of ice in the trunk of the Dodge. He also sold me an icepick. Then I came back here and carried the pieces in one at a time. I left the plug out of the bathtub so the melted ice would run away, and I’ve been adding fifty pounds a day. I got it while you were still in bed, when you thought I was out after coffee.” She paused, then added, “The burlap bags were in our garage at home. I put them on the floor of the trunk in case he bled any.”

Calhoun thought of something. “Good God!” he said. “All you borrowed from the motel proprietor was an empty pitcher. The ice for our drinks has been coming out of that bathtub!”

When her lip corners curled upward in the suggestion of a smile, he got to his feet, reeled into the bathroom, and threw up.

When he returned to the bedroom, he found Helena seated on the bed and serenely smoking a cigarette.

“Tell me how it happened,” he suggested dully.

“He was going to call the police,” she said. “It was all because he insisted on getting everywhere early. I was going to drive him to the airport. His plane didn’t leave until three thirty, so I planned to leave the house at two thirty. But he was all packed up and ready to go an hour before that. I intended taking the station wagon, figuring I’d make some excuse if he asked why I wasn’t driving the Buick. But Lawrence tried to be helpful. Without my knowing, he went out to the garage before two o’clock and backed the convertible out for me.”

She crushed out her cigarette and lighted another one. “He didn’t notice the damage at first. He’d got in and out on the left side, you see. When he came back in the house to tell me how helpful he’d been, I told him I wanted to take the station wagon. I almost got away with it. I sent him upstairs on a pretext and went out to put the Buick away and back out the station wagon. But he looked out an upstairs window and noticed the damage. And he guessed at once what had caused it. He used to read every inch of both papers, so he knew the police were looking for a green Buick. He didn’t even ask me. When he came back downstairs, he just looked at me in a horrified way and said, ‘Helena, you killed that old man.’”

She blew twin streams of smoke from her nostrils, creating a curious mental impression on Calhoun. With her immobile face and motionless body and the smoke issuing from her nostrils, she looked like a carved Oriental idol.

Tonelessly she went on. “There was no reasoning with him, Barney. He was the most self-righteous man who ever lived. It didn’t mean a thing to him that I might go to jail for months or even years if I was discovered. He was determined to call the police. We have five phone extensions, and one of them is in the garage. He marched over to it like an avenging angel and was dialing O when I picked up a wrench and hit him over the back of the head.”

Calhoun said shakily, “You can probably beat the charge down to manslaughter. A spur-of-the-moment thing like that.”

She gave her head a slow shake. “That didn’t kill him, Barney. It only knocked him out. He lay there for some time while I tried to figure out what to do. There was only one thing to do, of course. He would never have listened to reason. If I had let him live, I would not only have gone to jail; my affair with Harry would have come out and Lawrence would have divorced me without alimony. I’m afraid it’s premeditated murder. The second time I used the wrench quite deliberately.”

He said huskily, “Haven’t you any sense at all? Never admit that to anyone again. You want to end in the electric chair? And why’d you wait until now to mention all this? Why not before we started for Cleveland?”

“Because I wanted to make sure you’d help me get rid of the body,” she said serenely. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to dispose of it myself. And you might have backed out of the whole deal if you’d known about Lawrence.”

“Might have?” he said sarcastically. “What makes you think I won’t, anyway? I’m not an accessory to this yet. Suppose I just walk out?”

Helena yawned slightly. “Then I suppose I’d be caught. But I doubt that the police would believe you knew nothing about it. I’d tell them it was you who killed Lawrence, of course. And even if they didn’t believe me, they’d certainly never accept your story that you had nothing at all to do with it. Particularly after the motel proprietor identified you as the man who registered here as my brother.”

She was right, he knew. No policeman would ever believe he’d transported a body two hundred miles without knowing it, or that the woman he was traveling with had kept it on ice in her bathtub for three days without his knowledge. He had to save Helena in order to save himself.

If it was possible to save either of them.

He didn’t waste any time upbraiding her. In the first place it wouldn’t accomplish anything, and in the second place he didn’t think it would bother her in the least.

“Let’s go over to my cabin where I can think,” he said wearily.

13

Calhoun spent the next twenty minutes pacing up and down and chainsmoking while Helena calmly watched him and sipped a highball. He had one straight shot. He would have preferred a highball, but he refused to use any more of Helena’s ice.

Finally he stopped pacing and faced her. “Look,” he said. “I’ve figured out how to get rid of him, but before we even discuss that, we’ve got to plan a story to cover you. When your husband doesn’t show up on Monday, you’re going to have to act like a normal wife. First, phone his bank to ask if they’ve heard from him. Then on Tuesday wire convention headquarters in New York. They’ll wire back that he never showed, of course. Soon as you get that wire, you’ll have to phone the police and put on a worried-wife act. Think you can manage all that?”

She nodded indifferently.

“Then the hard part will start. First the police will discover he never caught that plane, so they’ll know he disappeared in Buffalo—”

“I thought of that before I killed him,” Helena interrupted. “He’ll be listed on the flight.”

Calhoun stared at her. “How?”

“It was only a little after one thirty when all this happened,” she said. “By two I had Lawrence stripped, his clothing hidden in the garage, and his body in the car trunk. Then I went back inside, told Alice I wouldn’t be home for dinner after I took Mr. Powers to the airport, and she could go home. I also told her I intended driving up to my sister’s in Urica the next morning, so she could take the week off. I had her out of the house by two fifteen.”

“How’d that get your husband listed on the plane flight he was supposed to take?” Calhoun asked.

“I haven’t finished. As soon as Alice left, I took Lawrence’s plane ticket over to Harry Cushman’s apartment. I picked him up and drove him to the airport. He flew to New York under Lawrence’s name, and took the next plane back under a different name. When the police start looking for Lawrence, they’ll start looking in New York.”

He looked at her in wonderment. Finally he asked, “How’d you ever talk Cushman into doing a silly thing like that?”

“Silly?”

“Naturally the police will question the airline personnel,” he said patiently. “The minute they get Cushman’s description from the stewardess, they’ll know somebody substituted for your husband on the flight.”

She shook her head. “In the first place, neither Lawrence nor Harry is known on the New York run. Lawrence often flew to Washington, but almost never to New York. I know he hasn’t made the trip in three years. And Harry never flies anywhere. In the second place, though Harry is ten years younger than Lawrence was and twenty pounds heavier, a rough description of either would fit the other. Both have gray hair and small mustaches. Both are about the same height and build, except Lawrence was beginning to develop a paunch. Harry stuffed some towels under his belt to fix that. And he wore Lawrence’s steel-rimmed glasses on the plane. In the third place, the police won’t question the stewardesses too closely. Just enough to satisfy themselves Lawrence was on the plane.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because they won’t suspect murder. The first thing the police do when a banker disappears is request an audit of bank funds.”

She was right again, Calhoun realized. The probability was that the first premise the police would work on was that Lawrence Powers had disappeared voluntarily. And by the time a bank audit disclosed he hadn’t absconded with any funds, the trail would be too cold to pick up.

Calhoun said, “I still don’t understand how you talked Cushman into sticking his neck out.”

“He’s in love with me,” she said complacently.

He studied her broodingly, not satisfied with the answer. “Look, Helena, if I’m going to help cover up your murders, I want the whole story. Maybe Cushman’s in love with you, but he was in a blue funk over being accessory to mere criminal negligence. I don’t think he’d stick his neck out for first-degree homicide even for you.”

She shrugged. “Of course Harry doesn’t know Lawrence is dead.”

Again he studied her broodingly. Finally he asked in an exasperated tone, “What in the devil did you tell him?”

“You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I told him the truth up to a point. I told him exactly what happened up to the time I hit Lawrence with the wrench the first time. I didn’t mention finishing the job by hitting him again. I said I had knocked him unconscious and was holding him captive, tied and gagged, in our basement. I told Harry if he’d help me rig grounds for a Nevada divorce, I’d marry him as soon as I got it.”

“What kind of grounds?” Calhoun asked, fascinated.

“Insanity. That’s grounds for divorce in Nevada. I didn’t mention to Harry that the spouse has to be proved insane over a period of two years.”

“How were you supposed to prove your husband insane?”

She said, “I told Harry you’d agreed to help. I said we’d hold Lawrence captive until we got the car fixed. Then, after it was back in the garage, you’d transport Lawrence to New York in a private plane owned by a friend of yours and turn him loose in the city unshaven and in dirty clothes. When Lawrence took his story to the police, they’d think he was crazy. The flight list would show he’d flown to New York as scheduled, and he’d look as though he’d been on a several-day drunk. When the police came to check my car, they’d find it undamaged. Then I’d announce that my husband had been suffering delusions about me for some time and that I thought he was insane, and I’d ask a court to commit him to Gowanda State Hospital.”

Calhoun was conscious that his mouth had dropped open. “And Cushman believed that fantastic yarn?” he asked in amazement.

“Why not? It was the divorce idea that sold him. He wants to marry me. I don’t think he’d have agreed to take Lawrence’s place on the plane if I hadn’t included that, because he was scared silly.” She added reflectively, “Then, too, Harry isn’t very bright. He’s got so much money, he’s never had to do any thinking.”

He must not be bright, Calhoun thought. But it was just as well for their chances that he wasn’t. Having taken the plane to New York under Lawrence Powers’ name, he was an accessory to murder clear up to his neck; he could never convince the police he hadn’t known Powers was dead at the time. It occurred to Calhoun that pointing that fact out to Cushman when they got back to Buffalo ought to silence any urge he might ever develop to tell his story.

Then it also occurred to Calhoun that Helena Powers had a remarkable talent for maneuvering her aides into positions where they had to protect her in order to protect themselves. For she had Calhoun in the identical position she had Harry Cushman. All three had to hang together, or they would hang separately.

Helena broke into his thoughts by inquiring, “How do you plan to get rid of Lawrence?”

Glancing at his watch, Calhoun saw it was seven P.M. “I don’t, tonight. He’ll keep in his icebox another day. But we’ve got some scouting to do. Better put on a jacket, because it may be chilly along the lake.”

Calhoun drove the car on their scouting trip. Beyond Cleveland to the west, Route Six runs along the lake and is dotted with both private and public beaches and boat liveries. It took them more than an hour just to drive through Cleveland, and it was nearly eight thirty before they ran into the type of beach area Calhoun was looking for.

Helena said, “Shouldn’t we be thinking about dinner soon?”

“No,” Calhoun said shortly. Ever since he had lifted that burlap bag, he had been unable to think of anything but the iced corpse beneath it, and the thought didn’t induce much appetite.

Now he drove as slowly as the traffic would let him, checking signs on the right side of the road. Finally, about nine o’clock, he spotted one that looked promising. It was on a wooden arch over an unpaved road leading toward the lake, and read, CRESTWOOD BEACH, PRIVATE ROAD.

They were past it before Calhoun spotted it. He had to drive on another mile before he could turn around.

Crestwood Beach proved as promising as it had looked. The beach was but a narrow strip of sand, and clustered along its edge were some two dozen modest summer cottages. Calhoun noted with satisfaction that lights showed in not more than a half dozen.

He parked next to one of the dark cottages, and examined it carefully before getting out of the car. Apparently its owner’s summer vacation had not yet started, for the windows were still boarded up. The cottages on either side of it, each a good fifty yards away, were dark also.

He climbed out of the car and told Helena to get out also.

Together they walked the scant fifty feet down to the water. As Calhoun had hoped, each of the cottages had its own small boat dock. Nothing much, merely a series of planks laid across embedded steel rods, but adequate for an outboard boat.

“Think you can find this same place again tomorrow night?” he asked Helena.

“If I have to.”

He pointed out over the calm, moonlit water. “I’ll be out there somewhere in an outboard. I won’t be able to tell one beach from another in the dark, so you’re going to have to signal me with the car lights. Well set a time for the first signal, and you blink them twice. Just on and off fast, because we don’t want any of the cottagers out here to come investigating. Then regularly every five minutes blink them again. Got it?”

“Yes.”

They went back to the car and they drove back under the wooden arch to the main road again. He turned right and drove on another mile and a half before coming to the next sign he was looking for. The sign read, BOATS FOR RENT.

This sign, too, was at the entrance to an unpaved road leading toward the lake. Calhoun followed the road only about a hundred yards before coming to the boat livery.

The proprietor was a grizzled old man in his seventies who chewed tobacco. He sat on the screened porch of a small cottage reading a Bible by the light of a Coleman gasoline lantern.

“They’re all taken tonight, mister,” he said as soon as Calhoun put his foot on the step. He shot a stream of tobacco juice at a cuspidor halfway across the porch. “Everybody heard the walleyes are hitting.”

Then he let out a cackle. “Don’t know who starts them rumors. Look at that lake. Calm as glass. They’ll come in with a mess of six-inch perch.” He spat again.”

“You booked up for tomorrow night?” Calhoun asked through the screen door.

“Nope.” The old man got up and opened the screen door for him.

Walking onto the porch, Calhoun said, “Then I’d like to reserve a boat. When’s best to go out?”

“Ain’t much point till it gets dark. If you mean to use live bait, that is. If you get here around eight thirty, it’ll be dark by the time you’re out on the lake and set to fish. Get here at nine, and you’ll be sure it’s dark enough.”

Calhoun told him he’d be there at nine and paid in advance. The price of a boat with a five-horsepower motor was six dollars, a Coleman lantern fifty cents extra, and Calhoun gave him a dollar for a can of night crawlers.

“Think the yellows might be hitting tomorrow night?” Calhoun asked.

The old man’s shrewd eyes narrowed. “Up from around Buffalo way, are you?”

The question startled Calhoun. He asked cautiously, “Why do you say that?”

“Had fellows from up your way before. Around here we don’t call walleyes yellow pike.”

“No?” Calhoun said. “That’s what we call them in Detroit, where I’m from.”

The old man followed Calhoun outside when he left, and watched as he climbed into the Buick. Noticing Helena, he said, “Gonna take the wife out tomorrow night, too?”

Calhoun shook his head. “She doesn’t fish.”

As they drove off, Helena said, “Inquisitive old man, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Calhoun said.

“May we eat now?”

“You may,” he told her.

He stopped at a roadside eatery and let her have some dinner while he drank two cups of coffee. He hadn’t eaten since noon, but he still couldn’t develop any appetite.

14

By ten the next morning Calhoun and Helena were downtown at Cleveland’s largest branch of Sears, Roebuck.

While he was still on the police force, Calhoun had often wondered why criminals ever bought their equipment anywhere other than at a Sears, Roebuck branch. The confused workings of the average criminal mind had puzzled him whenever he saw a case record where some kidnaper was trapped because the paper of the ransom note was traced to an exclusive stationery shop, or some murderer was caught because a hammer was traced to some neighborhood hardware store where every customer was remembered.

Shopping at a place like Sears eliminated such dangers. There you were only one of thousands of faces seen by the clerk, and even if the item you bought was traced back to that clerk, the chance of his remembering anything at all about you was remote. The chance of its being traced that far was even more remote, since identical items are sold across Sears counters all over the country every day.

In the men’s clothing department Calhoun bought the cheapest fishing jacket he could find.

In the sporting department he bought a cheap glass casting rod, a $3.95 metal and plastic reel, fifty yards of nylon line, a cheap bait box, and an assortment of Ieaders, sinkers, hooks, and lures to fill up the bait box. He didn’t intend to use any of them, but it might excite comment at the boat livery if he showed up to go fishing without any gear.

He also bought two eight-pound small-boat anchors. He intended to use them.

In the hardware department he bought fifty feet of sash cord. Also to use.

He stowed all of his purchases in the trunk of the convertible.

“Do you have everything you need?” Helena asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What do we do now?”

“Wait until evening.”

“We can have all day to ourselves, then?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go to the beach,” she suggested.

Calhoun looked at her. He opened his mouth to explain that he would be in no mood for recreation until the job at hand was finished. Then he closed it again, deciding the explanation would be useless.

He just said shortly, “No.”

He spent most of the rest of the day watching television in his cabin. Helena sat and watched him, apparently content to do nothing at all since she had no companion to do it with. Several times she asked if he would like her to mix him a drink, and he merely shook his head each time. Not solely because of the source of her ice, either. He was afraid that if he took one drink, he’d drink himself into a stupor. For the same reason he stuck to the cabin even though Helena’s silent watchfulness set his nerves to screaming. He knew that if he went out somewhere alone to get away from her company, he’d end up getting drunk in some tavern.

It took iron discipline to get through the day, but he managed it.

At seven thirty in the evening they started the job of disposing of Lawrence Powers’ body. First Calhoun transferred the fishing gear, anchors, and sash cord from the car trunk to the rear seat. The fishing jacket he put on. Then he carefully covered the floor of the trunk with the three burlap bags.

They hadn’t added any ice to the tub since Helena had shown him the body, and it had melted away to about twenty-five pounds. Calhoun managed to lift the dead man out without spilling ice all over the floor.

The body was stiffened in its prenatal position, the ice apparently having caused it to retain rigor mortis longer than it normally would have. Calhoun made no attempt to straighten out the body, because he would only have had to fold the knees up to the chest again to get it into the trunk.

There was little danger of anyone’s seeing him carry the corpse the one or two steps from the carport door to the trunk, since the car blocked the view from outside, but he had Helena stand in front of the stall anyway as a lookout.

The body was cold and slippery against his arms and chest as he staggered through the door with it and shoved it into the trunk. When he locked the trunk, he found he was drenched with sweat.

“Let’s go,” he said to Helena, and slid under the wheel.

As they pulled out of the carport, Helena said, “Shall we have some music?” and reached across him to switch on the radio.

As though they were starting out on an evening of entertainment, Calhoun thought sourly. However, he didn’t object.

Helena punched the radio’s station-control buttons one after another without getting anything but static. She looked puzzled.

“They’re set for frequencies around the Buffalo area,” Calhoun informed her. “You’re two hundred miles from there.”

“Oh,” she said.

She turned the manual station selector until she found a dance band. Thirty seconds later the news came on.

As Helena reached to change stations, Calhoun said, “Leave it on. Aren’t you interested in anything at all in the outside world?”

Sitting back, she glanced at him sidewise. “You haven’t been very nice to me today,” she said. “You’ve been pretty grumpy.”

“I’m not used to women giving me presents,” he said bitterly. “Particularly ones packed in ice. Let’s listen to the news.”

She remained silent until it was nearly over. After the international and national news, the reporter got around to local items.

He said, “The two bandits who held up an armored payroll truck at two P.M. this afternoon and escaped with more than a hundred thousand dollars are still at large. Police believe they must have switched cars after the daring daylight robbery, and somehow managed to slip through the roadblocks that were set up shortly after the robbery. Roadblocks were lifted at six P.M., as it is believed the bandits are no longer in the vicinity. A four-state alarm has gone out for the two men, who are described as—”

Calhoun missed the descriptions when Helena broke in with, “Did you hear that? There was a big robbery in Cleveland today.”

“It’s been on television a half dozen times this afternoon,” he growled at her.

“I wasn’t listening. I was watching you.”

Music swelled from the radio speaker, indicating the newscast was over.

When they reached the edge of town, Calhoun said, “That news fellow was telling the truth, apparently. I’m surprised.”

“The truth about what?” Helena asked.

“The roadblocks being lifted. I was a cop so long, my mind still works like one. I thought it was a police trick.”

Helena looked puzzled.

“If the bandits are still holed up locally, they’ll listen to every newscast,” he explained. “So the police give out the news that roadblocks are lifted. If the bandits are dumb enough, they’ll believe it and try to run. And run square into a roadblock.”

After thinking this over, Helena said, “That’s clever. And even cleverer of you to see the danger. But if you thought we might run into a roadblock, why did you take the chance of driving into town?”

“It wasn’t a chance. They’d be stopping cars leaving Cleveland, not entering it. If we’d spotted a roadblock on the way in, we’d have to change our plans and figure some way to get rid of him within the city limits. But they must actually have lifted them. They must have definite information that the bandits are out of the area.”

They passed through Cleveland without incident. Some miles beyond it Calhoun slowed as they went by the wooden arch reading, CRESTWOOD BEACH, PRIVATE ROAD.

“There’s the place you’ll have to come back to,” he said. “Better pick out some landmarks, so you won’t drive past it on the way back.”

“I’ll find it,” Helena said.

A half mile farther on they ran into a double lane of stopped cars.

“What is it?” Helena asked. “An accident up ahead?”

Calhoun shook his head to indicate he didn’t know. Both lanes moved a car-length forward at that moment, then stopped again. Calhoun’s eyes narrowed as he noted that traffic coming from the opposite way was moving along without interruption.

Waiting for a break in the traffic coming toward them, he started to nose out to make a U turn. But a motorcycle officer roared toward them from up ahead and motioned him back in line. The motorcycle swung around and drew up alongside.

“You’ll have to stay in line, mister,” the officer said.

Calhoun said, “We went past our turn, officer. We were headed for Crestwood Beach. My wife says we just passed it.”

“You did,” the policeman told him. “You can swing around as soon as your car is checked.”

“Checked?” Calhoun said. “Listen, officer, there’s nothing wrong with my brakes. Do we have to wait? Some people are expecting us, and we’re late now.”

“It isn’t a brake test. Sorry, mister. You’ll have to go through the checkpoint. It won’t take long.”

Apparently the two men in the black Ford sedan in the lane next to them had been listening. Both were small, dark men dressed in leather jackets and battered felt hats. The driver called over, “We were going to Crestwood Beach, too, officer. Did I hear you say we passed it?”

“About a half mile back,” the policeman said.

The driver said, “Can we pull out of this and swing around?”

The policeman shook his head. “Sorry. Not till you’ve gone through the checkpoint.”

Looking across at the other car, Calhoun caught an expression of near desperation on the face of the little dark man. In the reflected glow of dozens of headlights, he could see the man clearly.

The line moved forward several car lengths and several more cars pulled in behind. The policeman swung in another U turn and went to the end of the line to head off any other cars that might try to turn around.

Calhoun cursed under his breath.

“Is it a roadblock?” Helena asked.

“Obviously,” Calhoun said. “The radio was lying after all.”

“But why wasn’t there one the other side of town?”

“It was probably east of the tourist court. We were inside of it. They’ve set it up more than ten miles from town so the bandits will get overconfident. I should have thought of that.”

Helena said, “What are we going to do?”

“Fry in the electric chair, probably,” Calhoun said bitterly.

15

Calhoun was thinking furiously as they drew closer and closer to the checkpoint.

Finally he said, “Maybe we can delay the inevitable, anyway. Get that Packard trunk key out of your purse.”

Helena unsnapped her bag and handed him the key. The next time the line stopped again, he cut the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition lock, and quickly unclipped the trunk key. He substituted the Packard trunk key, handed Helena the other, and slipped the ignition key back in its lock just as the line moved forward again. Helena dropped the key in her bag.

They were now nearly to the head of the line. Both lines were being checked at the same time. The operation was being handled with smooth efficiency. A state trooper standing on the highway shoulder a few yards from the checkpoint said to each driver as he came abreast, “Have your driver’s license and registration ready, please.” At the checkpoint one officer in each lane examined license and registration papers, while another quickly but thoroughly checked the interior of the car and the trunk.

Calhoun got his driver’s license from his wallet and told Helena to give him hers and the car registration. Silently she took them from her bag and gave them to him.

The inside lane had moved a trifle faster than the outer one. The black Ford containing the two small, dark men reached the checkpoint one car before the Buick did. Calhoun noted again that the driver seemed highly nervous as he got out to open the trunk.

A wild hope struck him. Was it possible that the Ford was the bandits’ car? It would be a highly unlikely coincidence, a near miracle even, for the police to net their prey at this precise instant. But the little dark man certainly was acting in a suspicious manner. And he had attempted to get the motor officer to let him turn around. Now it struck Calhoun that it would be a remarkable coincidence if the Ford actually had been heading for Crestwood Beach, as the driver had claimed. It seemed much more likely that he had jumped at the name as an excuse to avoid the checkpoint.

Calhoun peered forward at the Ford’s trunk with growing hope as the little man reluctantly let it swing open. His hope collapsed abruptly when he saw the interior of the trunk. It was piled high with dead fish.

The little man peered fearfully sidewise at the state trooper as the latter glared into the trunk.

“Well, well,” the trooper said in an ominous tone. “Must be at least a hundred black bass in there.”

“Seventy-two is all,” the little man said. “There was twelve of us out fishing, officer. Honest. The others went on ahead in different cars. We just happen to be carrying all the fish. We only took six apiece.”

“Twelve of you all in one boat?” the trooper inquired sarcastically.

“We had three boats,” the little man said.

“Explain it to the judge,” the trooper said. “Pull over on the shoulder, mister.”

Dejectedly the little man climbed back in his car and drove off on the shoulder. He was no more dejected than Calhoun.

“Why couldn’t it have been the bandits?” he muttered under his breath. “Instead of a couple of lousy fish hogs.”

“What?” Helena asked.

“Nothing,” he said wearily.

The car ahead was waved on, and Calhoun drove the Buick into the checkpoint.

As he got out of the car and handed over the registration certificate and two drivers’ licenses, he said to the officer who was peering into the back seat, “I’m afraid I can’t open the trunk. The lock’s jammed.”

“Yeah?” the trooper said. He finished his examination of the car’s interior. “Let’s have the key, sir. Maybe I can work it.”

Calhoun handed him the key ring. “This one,” he said, indicating the Packard trunk key.

The trooper tried it. Then he tried the ignition and glove-compartment keys, but neither of them would work, either.

Handing the keys back to Calhoun, he said, “Pull over on the shoulder, sir. Afraid you’re going to have to wait.”

Then he called to a trooper seated in a state patrol car parked on the shoulder, “Jammed trunk lock, Jim. Better put in a call for Brady.”

Calhoun retrieved the registration and licenses from the other trooper, got back into the car and drove over onto the shoulder ahead of the patrol car. The black Ford had parked behind it, and the little driver was sullenly giving personal data to a trooper who was taking down the information in a notebook.

Calhoun climbed from the car and went back to the patrol car.

“Who’s Brady?” he asked the trooper named Jim.

“Lock expert, sir. Take him maybe fifteen minutes to get here.”

“Oh,” Calhoun said. Then, after a pause, “I suppose it’s that payroll loot you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Well, you certainly can’t think we have it. The bandits were two men, not a man and a woman. And they’d probably be in a stolen car. We’re on vacation up here and our papers are in order. Why do we have to be held up?”

“The orders are to search all cars, mister. Sorry, but you’ll have to wait.”

Calhoun went back to the car.

Helena said, “Shall we chance making a sudden break and running for it?”

Calhoun shook his head. “We’d never make it. Besides, they have our names and license number.”

She settled back, drew a cigarette from her purse, and lit it with the dash lighter. Examining her face, he saw that it was completely calm.

“You don’t look very worried,” he said.

She shrugged. “Why worry about the inevitable? We’re caught. I don’t intend to wring my hands over it.”

Despite himself, he had to admire her fatalism.

Ten minutes dragged by. Then the officer named Jim climbed from the patrol car.

He called to the men working the checkpoint, “You can knock it off, boys. Checkpoint Three just called in that they’ve been netted.”

One of the troopers who was checking car interiors and trunks paused in the act of unlocking a trunk. “Yeah?” he said. “The loot, too?”

“The works. No shooting. They surrendered like little lambs. Captain says to break it up and come in.”

The officer withdrew the key from the trunk lock and handed it back to the car owner. The trooper named Jim walked forward to the Buick and said to Calhoun, “Guess you can move on, sir. Sorry you were held up.”

In a voice he barely managed to keep steady, Calhoun said, “Thanks.”

He started the engine, drove on a half mile, then pulled over on the shoulder and lit a cigarette with shaking hands.

Helena said, “Why are you nervous now? The crisis is over.”

He controlled an impulse to bat her.

The roadblock had delayed them nearly twenty minutes. It was a quarter past nine when they drove down the dirt road and stopped next to the boat livery. Calhoun had Helena synchronize her watch with his.

“I’ll give you a half hour,” he said. “Blink your lights exactly at nine forty-five, then again every five minutes after that until I dock. Okay?”

“I understand,” she said.

He collected his fishing gear from the back seat, leaving the anchors and sash cord, and got out of the car. Helena drove off without a word.

Calhoun found the old man sitting on the screened-in porch again, still reading a Bible.

“Evening,” the old man said. “Beginning to think you wasn’t coming.”

“You saved my boat, didn’t you?” Calhoun asked quickly.

“Oh, sure. No call for it anyway. And it’s paid for.”

He led Calhoun down to the boat dock to show him his boat.

Another boat with two men in it was tying up at the dock just as they got there.

The old man called, “Not quitting so soon, are you?”

“Ran out of bait,” one of the men called back. “Just came in to get more. They’re really hitting.”

He held up a string of about a dozen fish averaging about a half pound each.

“Nice string of calicoes,” Calhoun commented.

The old man gave him a curious glance. “Yeah,” he said after a moment.

The boat the old man gave him was a flat-bottomed scow about ten feet long. In addition to the motor, it contained a pair of oars and a gas can with an extra gallon of gas. The Coleman lantern had a bolt welded to its bottom that fitted into one of the oarlocks.

Calhoun had to wait while the old man picked two dozen night crawlers from a large box of moss. Calhoun didn’t have a use in the world for them, but it would look peculiar to go fishing without bait.

When he was settled in the boat, the old man said, “Looks like a good night for walleyes.”

Calhoun looked out over the water, which was as smooth and moonlit as it had been the previous night.

“Yeah,” he said sardonically. “Just a little choppy.”

The old man cackled. “Them little six-inch perch is good eating anyway, even if they ain’t much sport. You ought to catch a bushel. Or maybe some of them enormous crappies like the other fellers just brought in.”

Calhoun started the motor and pulled away while the old man was still cackling at his own humor.

16

For about a quarter mile Calhoun set a course straight out from shore; then he swung right and followed the shoreline for what he judged to be about a mile. The water was dotted with lights of other night fishermen, some farther out and some between Calhoun and the shore.

At nine forty he picked a spot several hundred yards from the nearest fisherman’s light, cut the motor, and let the boat drift. There was a slight inshore current, but he figured he would maintain the same relative position to the other boats because they would be taking advantage of the current for drift trolling instead of anchoring and doing still fishing.

At nine forty-four by his watch he began studying the shoreline, concentrating on the point he judged would be Crestwood Beach. Minutes passed and nothing happened.

With his eyes straining at the shoreline, dotted here and there by cottage lights and silhouetted by the lights of moving traffic on the highway beyond it, he sat motionless for minutes more. Finally he risked lowering his gaze long enough to glance at the time, and was shocked to see it was five of ten. By now Helena should have flashed her lights three times.

Just as he raised his eyes again, a pair of headlights blinked twice off to his right, a good quarter mile from where he had been searching for them. He barely caught them from the corner of his eye, and they blinked on and off too fast for him to take a fix. There was nothing to do but wait another five minutes with his gaze fixed in that direction.

Eventually they blinked twice again.

He started the motor and headed at full throttle toward the point where he had seen the lights. But running a boat in the dark is confusing. He was fifty yards offshore, had turned out his Coleman lantern, and was heading confidently toward a narrow dock he could see protruding out over the water when the lights blinked again, a hundred yards to his left.

Changing course, he cut the throttle way down and slowly chugged up to the small dock Helena and he had stood on the night before. As he tied up, he could make out the dim shadow of the convertible next to the dark and boarded-up cottage.

Helena greeted him with a calm, “Hello, Barney.”

“Any trouble?” he asked.

“Not since I got here. But I missed the turn and was a few minutes late. No one from the other cottages has come out to ask why I was blinking my lights.”

Looking in both directions, Calhoun could see no one. The cottages both sides of them were still dark. He went behind the car, lifted the trunk lid, and took the dead body of Lawrence Powers in his arms.

As he lurched past the front seat with his burden, he said, “Bring the gunny sacks.”

Calhoun was a fairly strong man, but it’s quite a trick even for a strong man to carry an inanimate hundred and fifty pounds over uneven ground in the dark. Once he stumbled and nearly dropped the body, and as he started to lower it into the boat, it slipped from his grip and nearly tumbled into the water before bouncing off the gunwale and settling just where he wanted it on the bottom of the boat.

He was drenched with sweat.

When he finished wiping his face with a handkerchief, he found Helena standing on the dock beside him, the three burlap bags in her hands. Carefully he covered her husband’s body with them.

Then he returned to the car for the two anchors and the sash cord.

When he was finally reseated in the boat and ready to start, Helena still stood on the dock.

“Can’t I go along and help?” she asked.

“I’d never find this place again in the dark,” he told her. He looked at his watch, noting it was ten after ten. “Pick me up at the boat livery at a quarter to eleven.”

When she didn’t say anything, he glanced up at her. Maybe it was only an effect of the moonlight, but he imagined there was a look of disappointment on her usually expressionless face, as though he had refused her some pleasure she particularly wanted to enjoy.

“Quarter to eleven,” he repeated.

She nodded, and he started the motor and pulled away.

He headed straight out from shore at quarter speed for about fifty yards, then stopped long enough to light his lantern. He didn’t care to have the Coast Guard or Coast Guard Reserve pick him up for running without lights.

When he started up again, he opened to full throttle and held it until he was even with the farthest boats from shore, approximately two miles out. He didn’t want to risk calling attention to himself by going out beyond them.

There weren’t many boats out that far, perhaps a half dozen spaced several hundred yards apart. He cut his motor halfway between two.

There was no risk working under the bright glare of the Coleman lantern; he could see nothing of the other boats except their lights, so he knew it was impossible for them to see what was going on in his. Working rapidly, he uncovered the body, cut a length of sash cord, and tied one of the anchors around Lawrence Powers’ neck. The other he tied firmly to Powers’ feet after lashing the ankles together.

He was standing up in the boat getting ready to heave the body over the side when a voice said almost in his ear, “Any luck?”

Starting violently, he lost his balance, made a wild grab for the side of the boat, and sat down with a thump on the body. He took one terrified look over his shoulder, expecting to see someone within feet of him, then drew a deep sigh of relief. There was a boat light slowly coming toward him, but it was still a good twenty yards away. He realized it was only the acoustic effect of sound traveling across water that had made the voice seem so near.

Since the two figures in the other boat were only faceless shapes to Calhoun, he realized they couldn’t see into his boat any clearer than he could see into theirs. Quickly he pulled the burlap sacks over the body and pushed himself up onto the rear seat next to the motor.

Only then did it occur to him that he hadn’t even answered the other boat’s hail. Belatedly he called back in as calm a voice as he could muster, “Couple of small perch is all.”

The boat was now within ten yards, and Calhoun could make out the two men in it. The one in front was in his early twenties and the man operating the motor was middle-aged. The motor was barely turning over, which was the reason Calhoun hadn’t heard their approach. But they hadn’t been trying to sneak up on him, he realized when he saw a line stretching back from either side of the boat. They were moving at that slow speed because they were trolling.

They passed within three yards of Calhoun’s boat. As they went by, the middle-aged man said, “We ain’t having any luck, either. We’re about ready to go in.”

Then they were past. Neither had glanced at the burlap-covered mound in the bottom of Calhoun’s boat.

He waited until he could see nothing of them but their light, then uncovered the body again, lifted it in his arms, and heaved it into the water. It landed on its back, the sightless eyes peering straight up at him for a final second before it disappeared in a gurgle of bubbles.

Calhoun tossed the burlap bags overboard after it. Then, with shaking fingers, he lit a cigarette and drew a deep and relieved drag.

He was halfway back to shore before it occurred to him that the old man at the boat livery might think it odd if he noticed his line wasn’t even wet. He cut the motor, tied a yellow and red flatfish to his line without even using a leader, and made a long cast out over the water. He knew the chance of getting a strike on an artificial lure at night was remote, but all he was interested in was getting his line wet.

His usual bad fisherman’s luck held. If he had been fishing seriously, he would have sat there all night without a single strike. Now, because the last thing he wanted at that moment was a fish, he nailed a northern pike that must have weighed close to five pounds. It took him nearly ten minutes to land it.

Then he had another thought. He didn’t have an Ohio fishing license. And it would be just his luck to step out of the boat into the arms of a game warden.

So he unhooked one of the nicest northerns he had ever boated and tossed it back into the water.

The old man saw his light coming in and came down to the dock to meet him. When he pulled up alongside the dock, the old man said, “Any luck?”

“A five-pound northern,” Calhoun said. “But I tossed it back in.”

The old man cackled. Calhoun knew he wouldn’t believe it.

As he climbed out of the boat, the old man said, “No fooling, didn’t you even get a perch?”

“None I felt like keeping,” Calhoun said. “I like them bigger than four inches.”

“Should have got something. Most everybody is tonight. Perch and crappie mostly, with an occasional largemouth. Nobody’s brought a walleye in here yet, though. Got any bait left? They been cleaning me out.”

“A few crawlers left in the can,” Calhoun said. “You’re welcome to them.”

Lifting his fishing gear from the boat, he walked up past the cottage to the dirt road.

Helena had parked the car some twenty yards up the dirt road, facing the highway. She was sitting on the right side of the seat. After tossing his fishing gear in the back, Calhoun slid under the wheel.

“Everything go all right?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. “I even caught a fish on the way in.”

“Oh? Do you like fishing?”

“Under ordinary circumstances,” Calhoun said. “It’s my favorite sport.”

“Then why didn’t you stay out awhile?” she asked seriously. “I wouldn’t have minded waiting.”

The question crystallized an opinion Calhoun had been forming. Beneath her beautiful exterior, Helena was almost psychotically callous. He remembered the casual way she had taken ice for their drinks from the tub containing the corpse of her husband. And now she was suggesting that Calhoun might enjoy a little fishing immediately after dumping the same corpse in Lake Erie.

He didn’t try to explain it to her. He just said, “I wasn’t particularly in the mood for fishing tonight.”

Back at the tourist court, they had one more job. Calhoun set Helena to work scrubbing out the tub that had been her husband’s bier for five days.

Then he informed her there wasn’t any reason, now that her cabin was corpseless, that she couldn’t sleep in her own bed that night. She gave him a mildly surprised look, but she made no objection.

He didn’t think it necessary to explain that musing on her homicidal tendencies had given him the feeling that it might not be too safe to go to sleep in the same room with her.

Calhoun locked his cabin door that night.

His last thoughts before going to sleep concerned what Helena’s feelings would be when she stepped into the tub for a shower the next morning. He stopped speculating because he knew it wouldn’t bother her in the slightest.

17

At twenty-eight Vance Kriegler suffered the frustrating experience of realizing he had chosen the wrong career. For five years he had worked in the Crime Lab of the Cleveland Police Department. Although he enjoyed his work, what he really wanted to be was a detective. His type of crime investigation involved peering through a microscope at bits of thread, ash, or dirt, weighing bullets taken from corpses, and other such purely laboratory routines. He never personally saw or talked to a victim or suspect of a crime, never questioned a witness, and in some cases never even knew the details surrounding the bits of evidence he was asked to work on.

He would have loved to go out in the field — as a Homicide officer, for instance — and try his hand at deduction at the scene of a crime. He was too good a lab technician, however. Also, you don’t start out as a detective on a major-city police force. You first attend a Police Academy, if you can pass entrance requirements, then work in uniform at such humdrum jobs as walking a beat or directing traffic for a considerable time — possibly years — before you can expect to move into a glamorous job such as homicide investigation. And Vance Kriegler was a civilian employee of the Crime Lab. He would have to start from scratch.

As this would involve not only the scrapping of a scientific education but a considerable drop in income, he settled for dreaming about what a brilliant criminal investigator he could have made if he hadn’t decided to major in physics and chemistry in college. He even had the physical appearance of a detective, he often told himself. Tall and lanky, with a narrow face, long nose, and bulging forehead, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations of Sherlock Holmes in the early Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books.

There was one advantage to Kriegler’s job that he was thankful for and that he wouldn’t have as a detective. He worked regular hours instead of sometimes being on the day shift, sometimes the night trick, and always being on call. Some people in the Crime Lab — those who went to the scenes of crimes to gather and preserve evidence — worked odd hours. But Vance Kriegler was strictly a lab worker, and there is rarely any rush to get a decision on a piece of evidence, once the police have the evidence in hand. If the police pick up a suspect at three in the morning and want a bit of cloth found clutched in the murder victim’s hand matched to a tear in the suspect’s clothing, they don’t rout a lab worker out of bed. They simply jail the suspect and wait till the lab opens in the morning.

Kriegler always had Sunday off. It was the only day he didn’t envy the detectives on the force. Because his second love was fishing. He spent every Sunday that weather permitted out in a boat on Lake Erie.

The morning after Calhoun dumped the body of Lawrence Powers into Lake Erie, Vance Kriegler arrived at the boat livery at seven A.M. He backed as close to the dock as he could get, lifted his five horsepower motor from the car trunk and laid it on the dock.

The old man who ran the boat livery came from his cottage and walked down to the dock.

“Morning, Sherlock,” the old man greeted him with a grin.

“Morning, Jonas,” Kriegler said.

He didn’t resent the nickname the old man had given him. He was rather proud of it, as a matter of fact. On one or two occasions when the fishing was particularly good, old Jonas had hired a boy to tend the livery and had gone out fishing with Kriegler. He had exhibited keen interest in the crime-lab technician’s work, and flattered by the interest, Kriegler had exaggerated his role as criminologist. The old man was under the impression that Kriegler went out on criminal cases, examined evidence at the scenes of crimes and deduced the meaning of the evidence on the spot. He always asked Kriegler’s opinion on any criminal case in the news, and if the lab technician had any inside dope, he usually spoke of the case as though he were personally in charge. If he knew nothing about it except what he had read in the papers, he simply said someone else had the case.

If Vance Kriegler had studied psychology instead of physics and chemistry, he would have recognized that he was addicted to what psychologists call “ego-building lies.”

Jonas said, “Just take your regular boat.” He looked out over the water. “Don’t look like much of a day. Still too calm for walleyes to start hitting.” The old man never lied about fishing conditions to his favored customers.

Kriegler dropped down into a twelve-foot Lyman tied to the dock, one of the livery’s better boats, which were reserved for regular patrons. Jonas handed down the motor, and Kriegler started to clamp it onto the transom.

“Had a regular mystery here last night,” the old man said. “Right down your alley. Tried the kind of deductin’ you do, but never could work it out. Guess I don’t have the same knack.”

“What was that?” Kriegler asked.

“Well, it really started Friday night,” Jonas said. “Feller and his wife drove up in a Buick convertible with New York plates. Feller wanted a boat for last night. Asked if I thought the yellows would be biting.”

“Yellows?”

“Yellow pike, he meant. What they call walleyes up around Buffalo. I’ve had fishermen from there before. I said, ‘You must be from up Buffalo way,’ and right quick he denied it. Said he was from Detroit. But I’ve had Detroit fishermen, and they call walleyes walleyes. Then next night when he come, some fellers was just bringing in a string of crappies. He called ’em calicoes. That’s what the fishermen I’ve had from up around Buffalo always called ’em. Calico bass.”

“Hmm,” Kriegler said, interested. “Think he actually was from Buffalo?”

“Somewhere near there, I’ll bet. I’ve had fishermen from all over, and never heard no one but fellers from that section call a walleye a yellow. Then too, he had New York plates on his car. But that ain’t all. When he showed up last night, he was dressed like no fisherman you ever saw. Had on a fishing jacket, a brand-new one, but otherwise he was dressed to kill. Wore a dress shirt without a tie, pants to some suit with a crease like a knifeblade, and shoes shined so bright you could see yourself in ’em. All his gear was brand spanking new, too. And cheap, like he’d just bought it for the occasion. Besides that, he didn’t do no fishing. What he was doing out on that lake for near two hours, I don’t know. But it weren’t fishing.”

“How do you know that?” Kriegler asked.

“Bought some night crawlers from me. Give him two dozen. When he come in, he said I could have the rest in the can. I counted ’em. Two dozen exactly. He hadn’t used a single one.”

Kriegler finished tightening the motor clamps and sat back in the rear seat. He was beginning to be intrigued by the mystery.

“Maybe he dipped minnows,” he suggested. “You know how they swim around a boat light at night.”

“No dip net,” Jonas said promptly. “Besides, he didn’t bring in no fish. Only boat out last night that didn’t catch something. ‘Course he claimed he threw back some small perch. And joked about throwing back a five-pound northern. But how do you figure him using no bait?”

Kriegler thought it over. “You say he was all dressed up?”

“Neat as a whistle.”

“Maybe he was meeting some woman in another boat,” Kriegler hazarded.

“With his wife dropping him off and picking him up again?” the old man snorted. “Least I guess she was his wife. Beautiful woman. Got a good look at her Friday night. Feller wouldn’t be likely to go romancing some other gal with her available.”

“Hmm,” Kriegler said. “It’s certainly a provocative situation.”

“Thought you might be interested. Threw a tarp over the boat he used. To preserve fingerprints, in case it rained.”

“Fingerprints?” Kriegler asked with raised brows.

“This feller was up to no good. Smuggling, maybe. Taking dope or something out to a confederate in a boat from Canada. Or maybe picking it up.”

Kriegler smiled. “Dope smugglers don’t operate like that, Jonas. They use their own boats.”

“Well, what could he of been doing then?” the old man demanded.

Kriegler had no idea. But the mystery intrigued him more and more. It occurred to him that this was the sort of situation he had dreamed of stumbling on. Momentarily he envisioned himself unraveling some deep international plot by brilliant detective work.

He came down to earth. More probably he would make a complete fool of himself if he started investigating the behavior of a total, and probably entirely innocent stranger.

Nevertheless it might make an interesting game for his own amusement. He wouldn’t have to mention it to anyone at headquarters.

“Keep the boat covered,” he suggested. “I’ll drive back again tonight with a fingerprint kit. Happen to get this man’s license number?”

“Sure,” Jonas said. “New York 9I-3836.”

As old Jonas had predicted, the walleyes weren’t running. Kriegler picked up a few good-sized perch by chugging with a worm on the end of his flatfish lure, but perch aren’t much sport. He’d meant to make a day of it, and had brought sandwiches so he could lunch in the boat, but he came in at noon.

Back in Cleveland, after he had cleaned up and had dinner, he dropped past Police Headquarters to borrow a fingerprint kit. The sergeant he got it from accepted his explanation that he suspected his landlady of going through his dresser drawers when he was away, and that he wanted to make the pretense of checking for fingerprints in order to scare her out of the habit.

He was back at the boat livery by four P.M.

The old man watched interestedly as Kriegler used a camel’s hair brush to gently dust the top of the outboard motor with silvery powder. Several overlapping handprints appeared, showing all five fingers, where the last user of the boat had laid his left hand while pulling the starting cord with his right. Kriegler hadn’t tried to borrow a fingerprint camera because he would have had to go higher than a sergeant to get one. Instead, he lifted the prints on a special type of Scotch tape that came with the kit and pasted the tape, print side down, to a large white card. By picking the best print of each finger, he got a complete set of the left hand plus a palm print.

“Now where’ll you check those prints?” the old man asked.

“Try our own files first,” Kriegler told him. “If he’s not in there, we’ll try the FBI files in Washington. They’ve got most everybody who’s been fingerprinted. Not just criminals, but people who’ve been in military service or held civil-service jobs or applied for passports. Practically everybody who’s ever had occasion to be fingerprinted for anything.”

Jonas was suitably impressed. “Guess a criminal ain’t got much chance these days, has he?” he said. “With all this modern scientific stuff you fellers use.”

Monday morning Kriegler had the prints run through the Cleveland fingerprint files by a clerk friend of his. They weren’t on record.

This brought the game to an abrupt halt. He couldn’t ask any of his acquaintances in the Detective Bureau to send them to Washington without explaining why. And he couldn’t bring himself to explain to anyone on the force what he had been doing. To his own ears the true explanation made it sound as though he were either a snoop or given to playing childish games. And he couldn’t devise any false explanation that sounded plausible.

It occurred to him that the next time he went fishing, old Jonas was going to want a progress report. The old man might be put off for a time, but eventually he would realize nothing was going to come of the mystery, and Kriegler would drop a notch in his esteem. His reputation with Jonas as a criminal investigator was at stake.

Kriegler stewed over the matter all day. It wasn’t until late that night in his room that a possible solution hit him. He suddenly remembered that one of his old classmates at Ohio University was now teaching in the Chemistry Department at the University of Buffalo.

He got out his portable typewriter, ran a sheet of bond paper into it, and typed his address and the date in the upper righthand corner. Leaving two spaces, he typed on the lefthand side: “Professor Charles Torrington, Chemistry Department, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, N.Y.”

After a few minutes of thought, he wrote:

Dear Charlie:

You’re probably surprised to hear from me after all these years, but I have a minor problem. As you may remember, I’m with the Cleveland Crime Lab. I have a case — an unofficial one, so I can’t go through regular channels — you may be able to help me on.

There may be nothing to this. Certainly there isn’t enough at this point for me to request official action. It’s just a mysterious situation I happened to run into and decided to try to work out for my own satisfaction. You might call it a busman’s holiday. Probably I should have my head examined for worrying about it and bothering you, but I can’t get the matter out of my mind.

The owner of a boat livery where I fish put me next to it. Last Friday night a man he describes as in his early thirties, about six feet two, and over two hundred pounds, came around to engage a boat for the next night. He had a woman of perhaps thirty with him, whom the livery owner describes as a strikingly beautiful brunette. He only saw her seated in the car, so he can’t give any description of her height or weight. The car was a green Buick convertible with New York license 9I-3836.

This man dropped a couple of remarks that convinced the livery owner that he was from the Buffalo area. Specifically, he referred to a walleyed pike as a yellow and to a crappie as a calico bass, which the livery man says are terms unique to that section. But when asked if he was from Buffalo, the man denied it and said he was from Detroit. This aroused the livery man’s suspicion enough to make him observe the man closely when he returned the next night.

Saturday the man showed up dressed in clothing far too good to go fishing in. He spent nearly two hours on the lake but didn’t fish. At least he used none of the bait furnished by the livery owner, and brought in no fish, although everyone else was catching them that night.

That’s all there is to the story. In reading it over, it doesn’t sound like very much. A stranger, apparently from the Buffalo area, denies he’s from there. He hires a boat, pretends to go fishing, but doesn’t fish. I suppose you can see why I haven’t mentioned the matter to the police here. They’d probably tell me to stop eating opium. But the mystery intrigues me.

I thought perhaps you might know someone on the Buffalo Police Force whom you could ask to do some unofficial checking, just to satisfy my curiosity. First, find out who owns the car with the above license plate. Second, see if the enclosed fingerprints are in the local files. I lifted them from the outboard motor the man used. What I’d do with the information — even if you’re able to find out who the man and woman are — is beyond me. It still wouldn’t explain the mysterious actions. But I can’t get the matter out of my mind, so I’d appreciate your help.

If you don’t know anyone on the Buffalo force personally and it would embarrass you to ask a strange policeman about the matter, just forget it. I’ll understand perfectly, because it would embarrass me to pursue such a vague matter within my own police department. Which is the reason I’ve passed the ball to you.

In any event, thanks, and let me hear from you.

Best regards,

VANCE KRIEGLER

18

Calhoun and Helena’s trip back to Buffalo on Sunday was uneventful. En route he briefed her again on how she must behave on Monday in order to keep suspicion from herself. He elaborated a little on his original instructions and made her repeat them back to him.

“I’m to meet the plane Lawrence intended to come back on just as though I expected him to be on it,” she said tonelessly. “After it lands and everyone is off, I’m to check at the airline desk and pretend to be upset because he wasn’t listed on the flight. Then I’m to wire Lawrence in care of convention headquarters in New York. When word comes back that the telegram isn’t deliverable, I’m to wire an inquiry to convention headquarters itself.” She paused, then asked, “But will anybody be there if the convention is over?”

“Conventions are always headed by local people in the town where the convention’s held,” Calhoun told her. “Usual procedure is for the chairman to rent a temporary post office box under the convention’s name, then inform Western Union that wires addressed to convention headquarters are to be delivered either to his office or home. He’ll have the same office and home after the convention.”

“I see. Well, when the wire comes back from convention headquarters saying Lawrence never reported in, I’m to phone the police and report him missing.”

“You’ve got it pretty well,” he said, satisfied that she could carry it off. “There’s only one more thing. You’ve got to get it across to Harry Cushman that if he mentions his part in this, he’s an accessory to first-degree murder. He’s going to have to know Lawrence is dead. Otherwise he may get rattled enough at Lawrence’s continued disappearance to take his story to the police. Don’t give him any details. Just give it to him cold that Lawrence is dead and he’d better keep his mouth shut if he wants to stay out of jail. Also tell him to stay completely away from you for the present. I don’t want the cops accidentally stumbling over him, because while I’m sure he’ll keep his mouth shut if he’s left alone, I think he’d break pretty easily under questioning. If he keeps away from you, there isn’t any reason for the cops to find out you even know him.”

“I understand,” she said. “I can handle Harry.”

Back in Buffalo, Calhoun drove straight to his flat, then turned the car over to Helena. He didn’t invite her in.

Standing on the sidewalk with his bag in one hand and his new fishing gear in the other, he said, “I’ve kept a list of expenses. But I’ll wait until the police lose interest in your husband and you get your affairs straightened out before I bill you. I imagine your money will be tied up for some time if everything was in Lawrence’s name.”

“Are you charging an additional fee for disposing of Lawrence?” she asked.

“That was on the house. Just don’t give me any more little jobs like that.”

“Will I see you again, Barney?” she asked. “I mean, aside from when you submit your expense account.”

He shook his head definitely. “You’re a lovely woman, and except for the third party you rang in on our trip, I enjoyed the week thoroughly. But this is the end. When things quiet down, get yourself a Nevada divorce for desertion and marry some nice millionaire. Harry Cushman, maybe, if he isn’t too scared to come near you again.”

He thought her expressionless face looked a little wistful for a moment, but it may have been imagination. Her voice was totally lacking in emotion as usual when she spoke.

“Good-by, Barney.”

“Good-by, Helena,” he said.

She drove away.

Calhoun felt that after his suspenseful week he deserved a little relaxation. That evening he set out with the deliberate intention of getting drunk.

As often happens when a man has that intention, nothing he drank seemed to faze him. At eleven thirty P.M., some twenty highballs later, he arrived at the Haufbrau dead sober.

There was only a sprinkling of customers in the place. Joe the bartender came to him immediately and set a drink before him.

“Evening, Barney,” Joe said. “Where you been keeping yourself?”

“Been busy,” Calhoun said. “How are you, Joe?”

He searched for change in his pockets, found none, and pulled out his wallet. Riffling through the bills there, he could find nothing less than a fifty. When he laid it on the bar, Joe picked it up and eyed Calhoun speculatively.

“You must be in the chips,” he said. “Was this the smallest in that roll?”

Calhoun ignored the question. The bartender rang up the drink and rapidly counted out the change.

“Harry Cushman has been in here twice in the last few nights,” Joe said. “Drinking himself blind all alone. Seems worried about something.”

A prickle went along Calhoun’s spine, but his expression didn’t change. “Cushman?” he said, as though searching his memory. Then, “Oh, the guy you pointed out to me one night.”

“Yeah.” The bartender’s gaze was still speculative. “You know, I’ve been wondering a little about that night, Barney.”

“Wondering about what?”

“Occurred to me that hit-and-run up the street happened right after Cushman and his date left. Just about long enough after so it could have been them.”

“Oh?”

“I found out who the woman was.”

“Yeah?” Calhoun said with raised brows. “How?”

“Checked the society sections of back Sunday papers until I found her picture. I’ve got a six-month stack in my basement. She looked like society stuff, and I figured she’d be in if I looked long enough. Sure enough, she was in the reception line at a charity ball last March. Name’s Mrs. Lawrence Powers. He’s president of Haver National Bank.”

“Urn,” Calhoun said noncommittally.

“Had a cousin of mine in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles look up what kind of cars she and Cushman drive. Know what? Cushman doesn’t even own a car. With all that money.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to drive,” Calhoun said.

“Possible,” Joe said seriously. “But you know what else? Mrs. Powers owns a green Buick convertible.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“Don’t you read the papers? It was a green Buick that killed that old man.”

After a moment of silence, Calhoun said dryly, “You ought to be a detective.”

“You think it’s a pipe dream?” Joe asked.

Calhoun shrugged. “What difference does it make? I don’t know her, I don’t know Cushman, and I didn’t know the old man who was killed. Did you?”

Joe shook his head. A customer up the bar called for service, and he moved away to tend to him. As soon as he finished, he came back to Calhoun.

“I just had another pipe dream, too,” Joe said. “I thought about it before, but since you came in it’s getting stronger.”

“Yeah?”

“That night of the accident. You went out the front way just a couple of minutes before it happened. When you came back in, you said you didn’t see it. But now all of a sudden you’re loaded. I don’t mean to be personal, but it’s a long time since you laid anything bigger than a one on this bar.”

Calhoun frowned at him. “What’s the connection?”

“You haven’t been doing a little shaking down, have you? Without cutting in your old buddy who gave you the steer?”

Calhoun said coldly, “I told you before I haven’t sunk to blackmail yet. I don’t like the suggestion.”

“No offense meant,” Joe said with a humorless smile. “But you can’t blame me for asking. I’d hate to think I gave you a steer that paid off and you forgot my commission.”

“‘You didn’t,” Calhoun assured him. “If you want to go in for blackmail, work it yourself.”

Joe shook his head. “I’m strictly a finger man. But I don’t like to be crossed. Sure you don’t want to throw me a bone?”

Calhoun growled. “I’ll throw you five knuckles if you keep it up.”

Joe’s nostrils flared a little. “Let’s put it this way, Barney. If Cushman or Mrs. Powers did pay you off, they might get a little sore if the cops came nosing around anyway.”

“Why would they come nosing around?”

“I’m just sorehead enough to phone them an anonymous tip to look over her car. I told you I don’t like to be crossed.”

Calhoun’s eyes narrowed. Was it a bluff, he wondered? Silently he cursed his luck at having spent his last small bill at the previous stop. This was the first time all evening he’d laid more than a five on a bar.

He contemplated throwing the bartender a fifty-dollar bill to shut him up, but immediately realized that this would constitute admission that the man’s guess was right. And it couldn’t be anything but a guess. Even if the man carried out his threat to phone the police, nothing could be proved now that the car was repaired. He probably wouldn’t phone anyway. He was merely running a bluff on the chance that if he had guessed right, he could shake a commission from Calhoun. It was safer to risk Joe’s vindictiveness than to risk letting him know for certain that there were grounds for blackmail.

“You phone anybody you want, Joe,” Calhoun encouraged. “Meantime, why don’t you go to hell?”

Scooping up his bills and change, he walked out without leaving a tip.

Outside, he sat in his car moodily smoking a cigarette, thinking over the conversation. Eventually he decided he had taken the best possible action under the circumstances.

His desire to get drunk had passed. He started the car and headed for home.

19

Sunday evening Helena phoned Harry Cushman at his apartment.

“Thank God!” he said in a relieved tone when he recognized her voice. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”

“I had to take a little trip,” she said enigmatically. “Did everything go well?”

“No trouble,” he said. “But I’ve been going crazy every minute since, wondering what was happening on your end.”

“Everything is under control,” she told him.

“You got him to New York all right?”

“I said everything is under control.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Are you sure you told me everything? How’s it happen Calhoun didn’t raise his fee again for a service like this?”

“I don’t think we’d better discuss it over the phone, Harry.”

“Why not?” he asked. “They’re both private lines. There’s no operator to listen in on dial phones.”

She said, “I just don’t think we should.”

“Can I come over, then? Or can you come here?”

“Not tonight, Harry. I don’t think it would be wise until my business with the police is finished. I just phoned to let you know everything is all right. I’ll call you again in a day or two.”

“A day or two?” he complained. “I want to know the details of all this. I’ve got a dozen unanswered questions on my mind.”

“They’ll have to wait,” she said firmly. “We can’t afford to be seen together now. You wouldn’t want anyone to notice how closely your description fits Lawrence’s, would you?”

“Good God, no!” he said fervently.

“Then just be patient for a day or two, dear. I’ll phone you as soon as I think it’s safe.”

After she broke the connection, Helena dialed Alice’s home and told her she could come back to work the next morning.

Monday morning Helena met American Airlines flight 785 at the Buffalo airport. It came in on time at 9:24, and she waited patiently until the last passenger had come up the stairs.

Then she went to the American Airlines desk and inquired about the passenger list.

“He had a reservation on the flight,” the clerk told her. “Made from Buffalo at the same time he made his reservation to New York. But he didn’t verify it from that end and didn’t cancel either. Apparently he just didn’t show. There’d be a notation here if he’d called in to change his reservation to some other time.”

Helena managed to look puzzled. “Where can I send a telegram?” she asked.

The clerk told her and she sent a wire addressed to her husband from the airport. Then she went home and waited.

At noon she got a call from Western Union informing her that her telegram was undeliverable. Immediately she sent a wire of inquiry to convention headquarters. At one thirty a return wire informed her that her husband, though expected, had never checked in at the convention.

Before phoning the police, she practiced her worried-wife act on Alice by rushing into the kitchen and asking the maid what she thought of the situation. Apparently it was an impressive exhibition, for the maid became even more upset than Helena was pretending to be. She hung over Helena’s shoulder wringing her hands when Helena phoned the police.

Helena succeeded in putting over an excellent imitation of a desperately concerned woman holding her panic in check when she explained matters to the desk man at Police Headquarters. His tone was politely sympathetic when he told her the police would institute inquiries and inform her if anything turned up. He asked for a full description of her husband, including the clothing he wore the last time she saw him.

“A brown suit,” she started to say, then caught herself when she realized she ought to describe the clothing Harry Cushman wore on the plane rather than what her husband had worn that day. “I mean a light-gray suit, beige summer loafers, a light-blue shirt, and a maroon necktie.”

After she hung up, Alice said worriedly. “You got that all wrong, Mrs. Powers. The mister was wearing a brown suit and brown shoes that day.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Helena said imperiously. “That was to work in the morning. He changed before I took him to the plane.”

“He did?” Alice said doubtfully. “I thought when he come up for your handkerchief, he still had the brown suit on. Maybe I was mistaken.”

“You were,” Helena said in a firm tone. “Let’s not confuse the police by giving different descriptions of his clothing. He wore a gray suit and beige shoes.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alice said.

Before the afternoon was over, Helena began to wish she hadn’t called Alice back to work. The girl was in such an emotional state over the disappearance of the master of the house that she was incapable of doing any work. She seemed to feel responsible for solacing her mistress, and went about it by following Helena everywhere she went, staring at her with large, mistily sympathetic eyes.

Shortly after dinner that evening the doorbell rang. Alice went to answer it and returned to the front room followed by a stocky, middle-aged man dressed in a neat blue business suit.

“Sergeant Hanover of the police, ma’am,” Alice announced in a tremulous voice.

“Good evening, Sergeant,” Helena said graciously. “Will you have a seat?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the sergeant said, gingerly seating himself on the edge of a chair. “I guess you know I’m here about your husband.”

“You have news of him?” Helena asked.

“No, ma’am. At least not about where he is. We’ve got some sort of negative information.”

“Oh? What?”

“He caught the plane to New York you said you put him on, all right. Flight Four Thirty-two American. He was on the passenger list, and one of the stewardesses remembered him well enough to describe him. That flight lands at Newark Airport, you know. It came in right on time at five forty-five P.M.”

When he paused, Helena said, “Yes? Go on.”

“We got in touch with the Newark police by phone,” Sergeant Hanover said reluctantly. “Had them check the airport. You know those dime and quarter lockers they have at airports?”

Helena nodded.

“Well, if stuff isn’t taken out in twenty-four hours or another coin isn’t put in, they remove the stuff and put it in storage. Your husband’s bag was in storage.”

Helena widened her eyes. “What could that possibly mean?”

“Looks like he meant to go somewhere in Newark before grabbing a subway or taxi over to Manhattan,” the sergeant said uncomfortably. “He wouldn’t have checked his bag unless he expected to come back. He disappeared in Newark. Never checked into the hotel room he’d reserved in Manhattan, never showed at the convention.”

Helena made her voice faint. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Not necessarily,” Sergeant Hanover said quickly. “It could be amnesia or something. We’re having the morgues in the area checked as a matter of routine, of course, but we’re also checking hospitals. No use giving up hope until we know more. A picture of your husband would help in the search.”

“Of course,” Helena said. She crossed to a bookcase and returned with an eight-by-ten portrait mounted on a cardboard frame. “Will this do? It’s five years old, but he hasn’t changed a great deal except he’s a little grayer.”

“It’s fine,” the sergeant said, examining it. “Ah — there’s one more thing, Mrs. Powers. Has your husband been depressed, or been acting strange in any way lately?”

Helena resumed her seat. “How do you mean, Sergeant?”

“Well, has he mentioned any worries?” After a pause he said hesitantly, “Financial worries, for instance?”

Helena frowned. Glancing at Alice, who had been standing near the door taking all this in, she said, “Isn’t it past your time to go home, Alice?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the maid said. “I thought tonight I’d stay around in case you need me. I can stay all night if you like.”

“I’ll be all right,” Helena said. “You run along and come back in the morning.”

“All right, ma’am,” Alice said in a reluctant tone. “Will you call me at home if you hear anything, though?”

“Of course. Run along now, and stop worrying about me. I’ll manage fine.”

Helena waited until the maid had got her purse from the kitchen, passed through the front room again, and closed the front door behind her. Then she said coolly, “Are you asking about his finances because he’s a banker, Sergeant?”

“Of course not,” Hanover protested. “It’s a routine question in all missing-persons cases.”

“He hasn’t been embezzling from the bank,” Helena said quietly. “My husband is a completely honest man.”

“I didn’t mean that, ma’am,” the sergeant said, flushing. “I meant any kind of worries.”

Helena looked thoughtful.

“His health all right?” the sergeant prompted.

“Oh, yes. His physical health.”

Sergeant Hanover raised his eyebrows. “How about his mental health?”

Helena considered the question before saying with an air of frankness, “There’s nothing wrong with Lawrence’s mind. At least not the sort of thing that requires psychiatric treatment. But my husband is fifty years old. He’s reached that age some psychologists refer to as male change of life. Do you know what I mean?”

Sergeant Hanover nodded understandingly. “Been a lot of magazine articles on the subject. When a guy wants a last fling at romance, just to prove he’s not getting old.”

“You express it better than I did,” Helena said. “For some time I’ve suspected Lawrence of having a mistress in Washington, D.C.”

“Washington?” Hanover said with surprise.

Helena smiled. “You expected me to say New York? Sorry to complicate things for you, but Lawrence rarely visits New York. He flies to Washington several times a year.”

“He could have had her meet him,” the sergeant mused. “Or better yet, caught a plane out of Newark Airport for Washington five minutes after he landed, just to throw us off the trail. You know this woman’s name?”

Helena shook her head. “It’s only a suspicion, Sergeant. Lipstick on his pocket handkerchiefs when he returns from Washington. A bill in the mail once for a jeweled bracelet I never saw. Things like that. I never discussed it with him.”

“Why not?” Hanover asked with raised brows. “My wife would clobber me if she suspected another woman.”

“I followed the standard advice of the lovelorn columns,” Helena said with a gentle smile. “I tried to make myself more attractive and more of a companion. I wanted to win him back, not force him back to me.”

The sergeant looked impressed. “Can’t understand a man straying from you in the first place, ma’am,” he said gallantly.

“Thank you,” Helena said in a gracious voice.

Sergeant Hanover rose. “Well, I guess that’s all for now, Mrs. Powers. We’ll let you know the minute we hear anything.”

As Helena let him out, she felt complete satisfaction with her performance. Planting the idea that Lawrence might have run off with another woman had been a brilliant stroke, she thought. Checking her husband’s contacts in Washington should occupy the police for some time. And sidetrack them from Newark Airport, where there was always the danger that it might occur to some officer to recheck with the stewardess and show her a picture of Lawrence.

20

As soon as Sergeant Hanover left, Helena phoned Barney Calhoun’s flat.

“Everything went smoothly, Barney,” she announced the moment he answered the phone. “It worked out just as you said. The police were just here for a picture of Lawrence to send to New York. The sergeant who talked to me wasn’t in the least auspicious. About all he asked me was if Lawrence had said anything about financial troubles recently. I told him—”

“Listen,” Calhoun interrupted in a cold voice. “Did it occur to you your phone “might be tapped?”

She was silent. Then she asked, “Could it be?”

“No,” he snapped. “They wouldn’t tap a phone on a routine missing-person case. They couldn’t have got a court order to. tap it in this short time, anyway. But don’t call me again. It’s an unnecessary risk.”

“I’m sorry, Barney. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Just let me know if something goes wrong,” he said. “If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’re doing fine.”

He hung up.

Helena gazed ruefully down at the phone before slowly replacing it in its cradle. It was evident that Barney Calhoun had meant yesterday’s definite good-by.

The thought depressed her. She had found the private detective by far the most interesting lover she had had for some time. She began casting around in her mind for a method of getting him back.

On Tuesday afternoon Helena was taking her accustomed sun bath on the sun porch when Alice came in to announce that two police officers wanted to see her. As usual Helena was wearing only brief shorts. She lifted a scarf from the end table next to her deck chair and draped it across her bosom, then told the maid to send them in.

Neither of the policemen was Sergeant Hanover. One was a lean man of about thirty who introduced himself as Sergeant Doyle. The other, a plump middle-aged man with a bald head, the sergeant introduced as his partner, Officer Judd.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” Helena said, indicating deck chairs. “Have you news of my husband?”

Neither man accepted the invitation to sit. “We’re not here about that, Mrs. Powers,” the lean sergeant said. “We’re from the Hit-and-Run Squad.”

Helena’s expressionless face gave no indication of the shock she experienced. She said in a placid tone, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Sergeant Doyle asked, “You own a green Buick convertible, ma’am? License number 9I-3836?”

Helena’s lip corners lifted faintly. “Obviously you know I do. What about it?”

“Could you tell us where the car was two weeks ago today at two thirty in the morning? The Tuesday before last.”

Helena raised her eyebrows. “In the garage, of course.”

“You’re sure, ma’am?” Sergeant Doyle asked.

“Positive, Sergeant. I don’t even have to think back. I’ve never been out at two thirty A.M. in my life. My husband and I retire at eleven every night. There hasn’t been an exception since last New Year’s Eve.”

Officer Judd said, “Ever lend your car to anyone, Mrs. Powers?”

“Never,” Helena said definitely. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“A man named John Lischer was killed by a hit-and-run car two weeks ago,” Sergeant Doyle told her. “It’s been established that it was a green Buick. We have information that it might have been yours.”

“Information from whom?” Helena demanded.

“An anonymous phone call,” Doyle admitted honestly. “It may just have been a crank, or somebody with a grudge against you trying to get you in trouble. But we have to check it out. May we see the car?”

“Certainly,” Helena said. She pointed to her straw bag on the table by the wall. “Will you hand me that, please, Sergeant? I’m afraid I’ll lose my scarf if I try to get up.”

Both officers had been manfully striving to ignore her scanty attire. Now the younger Sergeant Doyle couldn’t resist a quick glance at the indicated scarf. His expression suggested that he wouldn’t be offended if she lost it. When he handed her the bag, Helena drew a set of keys from it and held them out to him. The movement caused the scarf to slip slightly, exposing the upper swell of one tanned breast nearly to its pink tip. As the sergeant blinked, Helena casually drew the scarf back in place.

“The thin key’s to the garage lock,” she said. “You’ll find the Buick in the righthand stall. You won’t mind if I don’t come with you, will you? I’d have to get dressed, and you really don’t need my presence. You have my permission to back the car out into the sunlight where you can get a good look at it if you wish.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sergeant Doyle said, averting his eyes from her. “We’ll find it.”

“Just go out this door,” Helena said, pointing to one of the French doors. “Then you won’t have to walk clear around the house.”

She lay still listening after they had passed through the door. In a few minutes she heard the Buick start and back from the garage. Shortly afterward she heard it drive back in again. Several more minutes passed, then she heard the garage doors close.

Sergeant Doyle came back in the French door alone. He handed Helena the keys.

“No sign of damage to the car, ma’am,” he said. “Guess it was a false alarm.”

“I knew it would be,” Helena said. “Where’s your partner?”

“Went around front to the car. Sorry to have bothered you, ma’am. I’ll find my way out.”

When she heard the front door close, she threw aside the scarf, sat up, and reached for the phone on the end table. She dialed Barney Calhoun’s number.

He was home and answered immediately.

As soon as he recognized her voice, he said angrily, “I told you not to phone!”

“You said I should if something went wrong,” Helena said placidly. “Well, something has.”

“What?”

“The police were just here again, Barney. Not about Lawrence. This time it was two men from the Hit-and-Run Squad.”

There was a stretch of silence, then he said in a voice that sounded more tired than concerned, “They’d had an anonymous tip, had they?”

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

“The bartender at the Haufbrau made a wild guess. He remembered you and Cushman leaving just before the accident. He told me all about it Sunday night. I thought I’d sidetracked him, but apparently I hadn’t. Don’t worry about it. They can’t prove anything now. Did they look at the car?”

“Yes. And apologized for bothering me.”.

“Then why did you phone me?” he asked irritably. “What can I do about it? There’s nothing even you can do, except sit tight.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“All right,” he said. “Now I know. Don’t call again.”

He hung up.

Helena made a face at the phone as she put it back in its cradle. She padded through the house on bare feet and went up the stairs. She took a long, warm shower, soaping herself thoroughly and massaging her body with savage roughness in an effort to work the frustration out of her system.

At nine P.M. Harry Cushman phoned Helena.

“What’s all this in the paper about Lawrence?” he asked worriedly. “Why did you report him missing?”

“I haven’t seen the paper,” she told him.

“Well, you must know what’s in it,” he said peevishly. “You’re extensively quoted. Why hasn’t he been to the New York police? When did Calhoun leave him in New York?”

“Maybe you’d better come over, Harry,” she suggested. “It’s time we had a talk.”

“It certainly is,” he agreed. “Be there as soon as I can get a taxi.”

Helena went upstairs, stripped to the skin, and put on a white wrap-around housecoat whose lapels slanted downward in a steep V to below her bosom. She carefully adjusted it to expose the deep cleft between her firm breasts. She touched perfume behind her ears, then studied an assortment of lounging and bedroom slippers in her closet. She finally decided to remain barefoot.

She was deliberately preparing herself to be distracting, because she knew it was going to take all her feminine powers of persuasion to make Harry Cushman accept what she had to tell him.

Cushman arrived at nine thirty. When she locked the door behind him, he stood staring at her for a time, the worried expression on his face gradually being replaced by one of hunger. Moving against him, she put her hands on his shoulders and raised her lips for a kiss.

A struggle took place in his face as he gazed down at her. Then his expression hardened and he backed quickly away.

“I know you too well, Helena,” he said crossly. “You’re all set to soften me up. This time it’s not going to work. I want some answers, and I want them right now.”

He turned, strode into the front room, and took up a stance before the empty fireplace. Helena followed slowly. She stopped three feet from him and thrust her hands in the pockets of the housecoat. The movement widened the V at her throat, apparently by accident, so that the tips of her breasts just showed.

“Aren’t you even going to kiss me hello?” she inquired.

“No,” he said definitely. “And cover yourself up. I have no intention of even touching you until you’ve explained what’s going on.”

For a long time Helena examined him without expression. Then she shrugged, removed her hands from her pockets, and drew the housecoat so closely around her that it covered her to the hollow of her throat.

“Very well, Harry,” she said tonelessly. “Since you insist. Lawrence is dead.”

Cushman’s face gradually paled. But his expression was only that of a man whose worst fears have suddenly been confirmed. There was no surprise in it.

“How?” he asked in a low voice.

“He was murdered,” Helena said calmly. “I’m afraid you’re an accessory to first-degree murder, Harry.”

“Me?” he said on a high note. “I had nothing to do with it. I don’t want any part of it.”

Her lip corners lifted in the suggestion of a smile. “You don’t have much choice, Harry. You’d never convince the police you didn’t know he was dead when you substituted for him on the plane.”

He said indignantly, “He was already dead then? You tricked me. How did it happen? Where is he?”

She answered only the last question. “On the bottom of Lake Erie, Harry. We’re quite safe. There isn’t a chance in the world the body will ever be recovered.”

“Why did you do it? And how?”

She shook her head. “Mr. Calhoun instructed me to tell you nothing except that you’re an accessory to murder. He doesn’t want you to know any details.”

Cushman walked over to the portable bar, poured a double shot of bourbon into a glass, and tossed it off. He didn’t inquire if Helena wanted a drink.

After a slight shudder, he returned to the fireplace and faced her again. In a voice that trembled slightly he said, “Did you kill him, or did Calhoun?”

When she merely shook her head, he said, “I have to know, Helena.”

“What difference does it make?” she inquired. “If we’re ever caught, we’re all three equally guilty under the law.”

“It makes a difference to me,” he said tightly. “I have no intention of marrying a murderess.”

“That’s all right, Harry,” she said agreeably. “You don’t have to marry me. I was never too enthusiastic about the idea, anyway, if you’ll remember. It was always you who wanted marriage.”

“Then it was you who killed him!”

“Don’t look so horrified,” she said. “It was necessary. He discovered the damage to the car, and was going to call the police.” She paused as a thought struck her. “Harry, Lawrence’s clothing is still hidden in the garage. I forgot it completely. We’ll have to get it and burn it tonight. Right now.”

“Not me,” he said in a definite tone. “I’m having nothing more to do with any of your plans. I’m walking out right now. Forever.”

She studied him thoughtfully. “You’re not planning to go to the police, are you, Harry?”

“And stick my own neck in a noose?” he inquired with bitterness. “You’ve arranged things so I can’t afford to do that.”

Walking back to the portable bar, he spilled more whisky into a glass, this time lifted a siphon bottle to add soda. As she moodily contemplated his back, it suddenly occurred to Helena how she could get Barney Calhoun to come back to her.

Her moody expression disappeared and a full smile appeared on her face.

Quietly she faded to the opposite side of the room, her bare feet making no sound on the thick rug. With one eye on Cushman’s back, she soundlessly drew open the top drawer of a secretary. Reaching into the drawer, her fingers closed over the butt of a.32-caliber automatic.

She crossed the room again. Harry Cushman was tilting his drink to his lips when she placed the muzzle of the gun at the back of his head.

21

Since Sunday night Barney Calhoun had spent little time away from his flat. He couldn’t escape the feeling that something might develop, and he wanted to be close to his phone. On the two occasions that Helena phoned, he had been prepared for the worst. Yet when each call had turned out to be unnecessary, his reaction was anger at her calling rather than relief.

When her third call came shortly after ten P.M. on Tuesday, it didn’t anger him. The minute he picked up the phone he sensed that this time she had something important to say.

“What is it?” he asked in a controlled voice.

“How soon can you get out to my home, Barney?” she asked.

He felt a cold chill run along his spine. “Why?”

“I need you. Right away.”

“Why?” he asked again.

“I can’t tell you over the phone. But you must come. Right away.”

“Twenty minutes,” he said, and hung up.

All the way during the drive up Delaware he wondered what possibly could have gone wrong. There wasn’t anything that could have gone wrong, he kept assuring himself. If ever a perfect murder had been pulled, Lawrence Powers’ was it. Not only was the body beyond recovery, the police didn’t even suspect there had been a murder, and probably never would. And it couldn’t be anything about the hit-and-run case. The police had already examined the car and had apologized for bothering Helena.

The only thing he could think of was that Harry Cushman had gone to the police. But that seemed inconceivable to Calhoun. If he had evaluated Cushman correctly, the man would stay as far away from both the police and Helena as he could get from the minute he realized he could be charged as an accessory to first-degree homicide.

His thoughts didn’t accomplish anything but to get him all upset by the time he arrived at Helena’s home.

Helena met him at the front door. She wore a white housecoat, tightly wrapped around her from the throat nearly to the ankles. He suspected it was all she had on. She was barefoot. She looked as calm and unruffled as ever.

“Don’t look so worried,” she greeted him. “We’re all alone. Alice doesn’t stay after eight, you know.”

As she locked the door behind him, he said, “What is it?”

“Harry,” she said calmly. “He came over tonight, and I told him all about it.”

So it was Harry Cushman after all who was causing whatever the trouble was.

He said, “Has he gone to the police?”

“Oh no,” she said. “Nothing as serious as that. Would you like a drink before we talk?”

“No, I wouldn’t like a drink before we talk,” he said, exasperated. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’d rather show you.”

The words raised the hair at the base of his neck. The last time she’d used similar words, she had led him to her husband’s iced corpse. Now she took his hand, just as she had that previous time, and led him into the front room. He followed numbly, almost knowing what to expect.

The light was off in the front room, but the switch was by the door. Helena flipped it on as they entered. Then she dropped Calhoun’s hand and looked at him expectantly.

Lying face down in front of a portable bar was Harry Cushman. The entire back of his head was soaked with blood, and there was a small round hole in his forehead where the bullet had come out. High on the wall a scar in the plaster showed where the bullet had ended up. Cushman’s left hand clutched a glass from which liquid had spilled, and near his outstretched right hand lay a siphon bottle on its side. Next to him lay a.32-caliber automatic.

The shock was not great because Calhoun had anticipated something on this order from the moment Helena said she would rather “show” him. Glancing about the room, he saw that the drapes were drawn so that they were safe from outside observation.

He said coldly, “It looks like you shot him from behind while he was mixing a drink. Right?”

She merely nodded.

“Why?”

“Because I was afraid he might give us away. He was in a panic when I told him Lawrence was dead.”

“Did he threaten to go to the police?”

She shook her head.

“What did he say?”

Helena shrugged slightly. “Nothing, really, except that I hadn’t any right to involve him in murder. And that he was through with me. It was the way he acted. He shook like a leaf.”

For a long time he looked at her. “Let me get this straight,” he said finally. “He didn’t threaten to expose us. He wasn’t going to the police. But just because he seemed to you like a poor security risk, you murdered him.”

“It wasn’t only that,” she said. “He refused to help any more. While I was explaining things to him, I suddenly remembered that Lawrence’s clothing was still hidden in the garage. I suggested we get it and burn it, but he point-blank refused.”

“That’s certainly a motive for murder,” Calhoun said sardonically.

She frowned slightly. “You make it sound worse than it was.”

“Then make it sound better.”

She made an impatient gesture. “What difference does it make now? It’s done. We have to dispose of the body.”

Again she looked at him expectantly, a curious brightness in her eyes. And suddenly he realized something he had been aware of subconsciously for some time but hadn’t brought to the front of his mind for examination.

Helena enjoyed watching him solve the problems brought on by murder.

It was a game to her, he knew with abrupt understanding, for the first time really knowing what went on behind that expressionless face.

He said, “What do you mean, we have to dispose of the body? I haven’t killed anybody.”

Her lip corners curved upward in a barely discernible smile. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me caught, Barney. You can only be executed for one murder. So there wouldn’t be any point in not telling the police about Lawrence if I got caught for this one. Including how cleverly you got rid of the body.”

With a feeling of horror Calhoun looked off into the future, seeing himself disposing of corpse after corpse as Helena repeatedly indulged her newly discovered thrill.

With only one possible result. Nobody gets away with murder forever.

He knew what he had to do then.

For a moment he examined her moodily. Then he shrugged. “All right, Helena. We may as well start now. Get some rags.”

Obediently she went into the kitchen, and returned in a few moments with several large rags. Taking them from her, Calhoun said, “Lift his head a little. So I can spread rags under it.”

She turned her back to him, put both hands under the dead man’s shoulders, and tugged upward. Calhoun scooped up the pistol lying on the floor, raised it high overhead, and swung it down on top of her head with all his force. She dropped without a sound as the metal barrel crunched through her skull.

Staring down at her body sprawled across that of her former lover, Calhoun thought grimly that it wasn’t much harder to dispose of two bodies than it is to dispose of one.

Fortunately Buffalo, as well as Cleveland, was on Lake Erie.

Calhoun’s first act after the murder was to make sure all doors to the house were locked. Then he searched until he found Helena’s straw bag in an upstairs bedroom. It contained keys to the house, the garage, and her Buick. He took them all downstairs with him.

Quietly he let himself out the front door, locked it behind him, and climbed into his Plymouth, parked in front of the house. He drove it into the driveway without turning on lights, braked with his front bumper nearly touching the garage doors, then backed across the lawn until the rear of the car was next to the back-porch steps.

Getting out, he looked at the houses on each side. Both were a good hundred feet away, and the views from them were partially obstructed by trees. There was a full moon, but filmy clouds reduced its light to a dim glow, just sufficient for visibility at close quarters.

Calhoun unlocked his car trunk and contemplated its interior with an estimating eye. It seemed far too small to receive two bodies. After studying it, he unscrewed the gadget that held the spare tire in place and lifted out the tire. He put it on the floor of the rear seat of the club coupe.

Leaving the trunk lid standing open, Calhoun unlocked the back door of the house. He left that standing open, too. On his way through the kitchen he switched off the light; he didn’t want its glow outlining him for any possible onlookers when he came out the back door again.

In the front room he lifted Helena’s body off of Cushman’s and laid it to one side. His single blow had crushed the back of her head, but her thick hair had absorbed most of the blood. There hadn’t been much, for she had died instantly. Only a small rusty spot at the back marred the sleek black head.

In the process of moving her aside, the housecoat had come open and one sleeve had been pulled halfway down one arm. It would be unwieldy trying to carry her with the long garment flapping loose, Calhoun decided. He pulled it the rest of the way off, carried it upstairs, and hung it in her closet.

Downstairs again, Calhoun carefully wrapped Cushman’s battered head in one of the large rags Helena had brought from the kitchen. He noted with satisfaction that because of the body’s face-down position, no blood had got on the rug.

He heaved the corpse into his arms, and staggered through the house with it and down the back-porch steps. Rigor mortis had not yet begun to set in, and the body was totally limp. He had no great difficulty fitting it in a doubled-up position into the car trunk.

The only trouble was that, despite his forethought in removing the spare tire, Calhoun had left insufficient room for a second body.

22

Calhoun considered what to do. The spare tire in the back seat left no room there for a body. And he could hardly put Helena upright in the front seat next to him. If she had been dressed, she might appear to passers-by to be sleeping. But naked as she was, he wouldn’t get two blocks before some busybody would be calling the police.

He contemplated dressing her, then decided this would only involve more clothing to get rid of when he disposed of the bodies. It would be simpler to make two trips.

He locked the car trunk and the house’s back door, and climbed into the front seat. He drove out of the driveway without lights, switched them on as soon as he reached the street, and drove straight down Delaware Avenue. Twenty minutes later he parked in front of his flat.

It was now past eleven P.M., and Pearl Street was deserted. Leaving his apartment door wide open, he returned to the car and unlocked the trunk. After glancing both ways along the street, he lifted the lid, heaved Cushman’s body into his arms, and carried it inside at a staggering trot. Unceremoniously he dumped it on the front-room floor, immediately went out again and locked the door behind him.

By eleven thirty P.M. he was backing the Plymouth to the rear door of Helena’s house again.

Inside, he stared down at Helena’s body for a long time. She lay on her side in a natural sleeping position, her face no more expressionless in death than it had been in life. Calhoun experienced a moment of regret at the sight of her perfect body. Then he steeled himself with the thought of the nightmare his life would undoubtedly have become if he had allowed her to live. There had been no choice.

He scooped her into his arms.

When the second body was safely locked in the trunk, Calhoun returned to the house to tidy up. First he carefully wiped off the gun and dropped it into a pocket. Then he went through the house wiping every surface he could recall touching. He considered digging out the bullet buried in the wall, then decided against it. Helena’s disappearance was going to mystify the police anyway, and one more mystery wouldn’t matter.

He turned off all the lights and left the keys on the kitchen table. He was about to pull the back door closed when he remembered something Helena had said. Lawrence Powers’ clothing was still in the garage.

Re-entering the kitchen, he recovered the keys and crossed the back lawn to the garage. Unlocking it, he opened one garage door only far enough to slip inside. He slid it shut again behind him and used his lighter to locate the garage’s light switch.

A tool bench running the length of the back wall seemed the most likely place of concealment. Calhoun pulled open drawers containing nails and screws, electrical fittings, and odds and ends. None of the drawers contained any clothing.

He searched the three cars in the garage with equal lack of result. Then he frowningly ran his gaze over the empty rafters and bare walls. Wherever Helena had hidden the clothing, she had done an excellent job, he decided. For there was nowhere else to look.

Giving up, he switched off the light, relocked the garage, and returned the keys to the kitchen table. The house’s back door clicked shut with a sound of finality when he pulled it closed from outside.

He got into the Plymouth and drove home.

When he had parked in front of his flat, he sat in the car thinking. His initial plan had been to leave Helena’s body in the car trunk until he was ready to dispose of it. But it occurred to him that with the hot sunny days Buffalo was having, the sun’s beating down on the car all the next day would have an unfortunate effect on the body. And it would have to stay there until after dark the next night. There were arrangements to be made before he could get rid of the bodies, and the arrangements couldn’t be made until morning.

Also, he didn’t relish driving around the next day with a dead body in the car trunk. He decided it would be much safer in his flat.

He got it inside in the same manner that he had carried Cushman in. He laid it on the front-room floor next to the other.

Outside again, he closed and locked the trunk, considered, and then pulled the spare tire from the rear seat. He decided that the best way to begin the next night’s operation was to stow Cushman’s body in the car trunk and Helena’s on the back floor with a blanket over it. The spare would be in the way.

He rolled the wheel up to the door of his flat, then carried it inside. He left it leaning against the kitchen wall.

Then, one at a time, he carried the two bodies into the bedroom and laid them side by side on his bed. Rigor mortis was beginning to set in on Cushman, but Calhoun didn’t bother to straighten the limbs. From his police experience he knew that rigor mortis would pass within twenty-four hours, and while the bodies wouldn’t be exactly limp, the residual stiffness wouldn’t prevent him from bending the joints sufficiently to fit both bodies into the car.

He opened the bedroom window slightly from the top to allow ventilation, then switched off the bedroom light and went into the front room, pulling the door closed behind him.

He sat in the front room smoking and thinking. His plan of body disposal was basically the same one he had used for Lawrence Powers. He knew a stretch of deserted beach only a mile from a boat livery at Sheridan Bay. He could park his car there and walk the mile to the livery. Knowing the shoreline in this area, he was sure he could find the beach without a signal from shore.

In the morning he would drive up Main Street to the large Sears, Roebuck branch there and buy some sash cord and four small-boat anchors. By this time tomorrow night, he told himself, there would be no evidence of either murder.

He slept on the couch in the front room.

By noon the next day Calhoun had completed all necessary arrangements. In the spare-tire channel in the car trunk there were twenty-four feet of sash cord and four eight-pound small-boat anchors. He had made arrangements with the boat livery at Sheridan Bay to rent a boat at eight P.M. and keep it until midnight.

Because it would have to be completely dark when he loaded the bodies in the car, his procedure was going to differ from the one he had used in Cleveland. This time he planned to take the boat out before dark and beach it at the deserted strip of beach where his car was parked. He’d then drive back to town for the bodies and bring them back to the beached boat.

On the way back from Sheridan Bay, Calhoun stopped for some lunch. He got home about one P.M.

He was just taking the key to his flat from his pocket when two men got out from a car parked at the curb and moved toward him. Glancing over his shoulder, he recognized them and a chill went along his spine. One, a thin, mournful-looking man with a pinched face and deeply sunken cheekbones, was Sergeant Gerald Budding. The other, a stocky, round-faced man with a perpetual smile was his partner, Officer Henry Gent.

Calhoun dropped his key back in his pocket and waited.

“Afternoon, Barney,” Sergeant Budding said when they came to a stop at the bottom step.

“How are you, Gerry?” Calhoun said. “Hello, Hank.”

“Hi,” Henry Gent said with a cheerful smile. “Hot, isn’t it?”

“Uh huh.”

Sergeant Budding said, “Been waiting for you to come home, Barney. Can we come in and talk a minute?”

Calhoun thought of the two bodies stretched out on his bed. “Pretty hot indoors,” he said. “Let’s make it out here.” He sat on the top step and lit a cigarette with hands he barely managed to keep from trembling.

“Okay,” the mournful-looking Budding said. “Want to ask a few questions about Lawrence Powers, Barney.”

For the space of a second Calhoun’s heart stopped. Then he said calmly, “The banker who’s disappeared? I saw it in the paper. Sounded like a voluntary skip, the way it was written up. What’s Homicide’s interest in it? You boys are still with Homicide and Arson, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Budding said. “We thought it was a voluntary skip at first, too. Now we think it was a homicide.”

“No fooling?” Calhoun asked. “How do you figure?”

“We really fell into it by accident,” Budding told him. “Some crank phoned in an anonymous tip that Powers’ wife was the hit-and-runner who killed some old man a couple of weeks back. Couple of guys from the Hit-and-Run squad made a routine check, and her car checked out clear. But there’s always a chance on a thing like that that the suspect got some shady repairman to fix up the damage, you know. The boys shook down her garage on the off-chance they’d find some damaged part of the car that had been replaced. They didn’t find any damaged part, but they found some men’s clothing in a workbench drawer.”

Calhoun’s heart stopped again, then resumed pounding at an increased rate. “What kind of clothing?” he asked with forced interest.

“A brown suit, brown shoes, socks, underwear, shirt, and tie. The works. Plus a tie clip, wrist watch, and a wallet with money in it and papers showing it belonged to Lawrence Powers.”

The idiot, Calhoun thought, meaning Helena. After all his careful planning, she had had to leave a glaring loose end like this.

He said, “How do you know he didn’t leave the clothes there himself? Be logical to dump identification papers and personal items, wouldn’t it, if he wanted to disappear and establish a new identity somewhere?”

Hank Gent said with a smile, “Think he’d dump his money, too, Barney?”

Calhoun said weakly, “Have you talked to Mrs. Powers about it?”

“Not yet,” Sergeant Budding said in a gloomy voice. “She’s not home. But we will. We’ve got her house staked out. She’s got some interesting questions to answer. Not just about the clothing, either.”

“Oh? What else?”

“She claimed she put her husband on that plane personally. After the Hit-and-Run boys turned up the clothing, we talked to the stewardess again. When it was just a missing-person case, the boys working on it had been satisfied from her description that Powers had been on the plane. This time we showed her a picture. It wasn’t Powers who made the flight. Somebody stood in for him. What would you figure from that?”

After a long pause, Calhoun said with difficulty, “Sounds like murder, all right. But what have I got to do with all this? I don’t even know the woman. You’re not under the impression that I stood in for Powers on the plane, are you?”

Budding shook his head. “You’re too big. This guy was Powers’ size. What we want from you is what you were doing in Cleveland with Mrs. Powers, and why you rented a boat to go fishing, then didn’t fish?”

This was so unexpected that Calhoun paled. He was unable to think of any reply.

The smiling Hank Gent said, “You were unlucky, Barney. You picked a livery run by a curious guy. And one of his other customers works for the Cleveland Crime Lab. He got your fingerprints off the outboard motor and sent them to an old classmate of his who’s now a professor at U.B. He also sent along the license number of Mrs. Powers’ Buick and descriptions of you both. What were the two of you doing up there, Barney?”

Calhoun said huskily, “You can’t tie me into this. You haven’t even established that a crime’s been committed yet.”

“There’s no corpus delicti,” Sergeant Budding agreed. “We figure you dumped him in Lake Erie. Why you took him all the way to Cleveland, we don’t know. But you always were a devious guy. We think we can work up a corpus delicti, though. If you recall from your cop days, that doesn’t necessarily mean a body. It just means proof that a crime’s been committed.”

“Where’s the proof?” Calhoun challenged.

“We don’t know yet. But after your clothing boner, we figure you both probably left some other loose ends lying around. We plan to go through her house with a fine-tooth comb, and give your flat a shakedown, too.”

A film of perspiration appeared on Calhoun’s forehead. In a last desperate effort to gain time, he said, “You’re going to need a search warrant to get in my place.”

Round-faced Hank Gent smiled at him. “Oh, we’ve got one of those,” he said cheerfully, and produced it.

Content

Richard Deming
Hit and Run

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