Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 3,1961

Sounds and Smells

by Fletcher Flora

When Rector Goodhue got home that evening a few minutes after five o’clock, Charlie Treadwell was sitting on the front-porch steps of the house next door. It was all right for Charlie to be sitting there, for it was his house, but what impressed Rector was Charlie’s air of abstraction. He was sitting on the top step, hunched over his knees, and when Rector spoke and waved in a neighborly way, he didn’t respond by either voice or gesture. Rector went on into his house and back to the kitchen, where Gladys, his wife, was spooning strawberries over shortcake.

“What’s the matter with old Charlie Treadwell?” he said.

“Is something the matter with him?” Gladys said.

“Well, he’s sitting over there on his front steps, and he acts as if he were in a trance or something. He didn’t even answer when I spoke to him.”

“Maybe he’s had another fight with Fanny.”

“That Fanny’s a real witch. The truth is, she’s more than old Charlie can manage.”

“Oh, nuts. All he needs to manage her is a little more backbone. What he had better do about Fanny, if you want my opinion, is make her quit wearing those short shorts and tight dresses that ride up when she sits down. She’s far too sexy for her own good.”

“It’s true that men are always running after her. It makes old Charlie frantic.”

“It’s not men running after Fanny that makes Charlie frantic. It’s Fanny running after men.”

In Rector’s opinion it was really six of one and half a dozen of the other, but he did not wish to debate the issue, especially with Gladys, and so he said he guessed he’d go out and mow the back yard before supper, and Gladys said supper would be at six, which meant six thirty. Rector went into the bedroom and changed into the old clothes he wore working in the yard, and then he went out and started the power mower and mowed the grass neatly, and he was just finished with the back yard when Gladys came to the door and said supper was ready. They ate in the kitchen, baked ham and potato salad with the strawberry shortcake for dessert, and Gladys said over coffee that Sinatra was at the Paramount.

“To hell with Sinatra,” Rector said.

“What’s wrong with Sinatra?” Gladys said.

“For one thing, he’s getting bald.”

“So are you, in case you didn’t know it.”

“Just a little on top where it doesn’t show much. That Sinatra has to wear a toupee.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“It’s common knowledge.”

“I don’t care if he wears a toupee and a full plate besides. He makes me break out with prickly heat, and he’s playing at the Paramount, and I want to go see him.”

“Be my guest.”

“You mean you’ll actually go with me?”

“I mean I’ll pay your way and give you enough extra for a sack of popcorn.”

“Thanks. And what do you plan to do while I’m gone, or is it a secret?”

“Not at all. I’m going to mow the front yard, and afterward I’ll have a couple cans of cold beer and maybe watch television or just sit on the front steps and watch lightning bugs.”

“God, you’re exciting! Being married to you is just one long exciting experience! Don’t you ever worry about me running around alone at night?”

“Why don’t you take Fanny along? If she and old Charlie are sore at each other, it might relieve things to get them apart for a while.”

“Going with Fanny is better than going alone, I suppose. You run over while I’m dressing and ask her if she wants to go.”

“I’ve got to get on that yard,” Rector said.

“That’s after you do the dishes.”

She got up and went off in one direction to the bedroom, and Rector got up and went off in another direction to the back door and then around the house and across to the Treadwells’. Charlie was still sitting hunched over his knees in a trance on the top step, and he didn’t pay any attention when Rector approached and stopped a few feet away, and Rector thought for a few seconds that he wasn’t even going to pay any attention after he, Rector, had spoken and stood waiting for an answer. Then Charlie twitched suddenly and looked around at Rector slowly, his eyes coming back from a long way off and adjusting with apparent difficulty to a short focus.

“Oh, hello, Rector,” be said. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

“What’s the matter with you, Charlie?” Rector said. “You feeling sick or something?”

“No. I’m all right. I’m just sitting here listening to sounds and smelling smells.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Is there something I can do for you, Rector?”

“I came over to see if Fanny would like to go see Sinatra at the Paramount with Gladys.”

“Fanny’s gone.”

“Oh? You expect her back soon?”

“She won’t be back at all.”

“Oh, come off, Charlie. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“It’s true. Fanny’s gone for good.”

Well, anyhow, it was pretty apparent now why old Charlie was out in left field. He and Fanny had had another fight, probably over Fanny’s liberality relative to other men, and Fanny had left Charlie as a result, but in Rector’s opinion it was probably only temporary. Hell, Gladys had left Rector at least half a dozen times, and it had always turned out to be temporary. It was foolish for a fellow to become excessively disturbed by such events. It was rather embarrassing to Rector, though, standing there with nothing sensible to say to Charlie, and he decided that the best procedure would be to say nothing at all, sensible or otherwise, except whatever was necessary in making his departure.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll go back and tell Gladys that she’ll have to go see Sinatra alone.”

He went back to his house and into the bedroom, where Gladys was giving her hair a few strokes with a brush after having pulled her dress over her head.

“Now I know what’s eating old Charlie,” he said.

“What’s eating him?” Gladys said.

“He had a fight with Fanny, and Fanny’s left him.”

“What did they fight about?”

“Charlie didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

“She’ll be back. Just wait and see.”

“That’s what I think myself, but I doubt if she’ll be back in time to go to the movies with you, and so you’d better go on by yourself.”

“I’m going,” she said. “See that you do the dishes.”

She went out and drove away in the car, and Rector did the dishes in the kitchen, leaving them to dry in a rack by the sink. By that time, he only had about half an hour of daylight left, and he’d have to get on that front yard right away, he thought, if he wanted to get it done. He pushed the mower from the back yard to the front and began mowing, and all the time he was doing it, walking up and down the yard from street to house behind the mower, he kept thinking about what Charlie had said about listening to sounds and smelling smells. It was a curious thing for a fellow to say, let alone to do, but Charlie was a curious fellow, when you came to consider him, and he was somewhat inclined toward doing and saying things that might seem curious to other people. As a matter of fact, however, there actually were a hell of a lot of sounds to listen to that a fellow didn’t ordinarily hear, and a lot of smells that he didn’t ordinarily smell. At the moment, Rector couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the little engine on the mower, or smell anything but the exhaust of the same, but he remembered having had, sometimes in the past, such aural and nasal awareness. But not, he realized with a mild sensation of diminishment, since he was a boy.

Darkness gathered thickly at the close of the long dusk, and Rector, having finished the front yard, pushed the mower around to the garage and went on into the kitchen and plugged a can of cold beer. Carrying the can, he went out through the house the front way and sat down on the front steps and drank the beer slowly and watched lightning bugs. He wondered if Charlie was still on the front steps next door, listening and smelling, and after a while he walked out a few steps into the yard and peered over that way through the darkness, and Charlie was.

“Hey, Charlie,” Rector called.

No answer. No shifting of the shadow on the Treadwell steps.

“Hey, there, Charlie,” Rector called again.

This time, after a moment, the shadow shifted.

“Is that you, Rector?” Charlie said.

“Yes, it is,” Rector said. “You like to have a cold beer?”

“No, thanks,” Charlie said.

Rector felt sorry for old Charlie. It was easy enough to feel sad and lonely in a summer dusk with no good reason whatever, and it would surely be easier and worse if you’d had your wife go off and leave you besides. Especially a dish like Fanny, who wouldn’t be easy to replace, especially by a nondescript little guy like Charlie. So feeling sorry for Charlie and carrying what was left of his beer in the can, Rector walked across and sat down on the Treadwell steps to be neighborly.

“You hearing and smelling a lot of different things, Charlie?” Rector asked.

“Quite a few,” Charlie said, “but not as many as I used to smell and hear when I was a kid.”

“It’s a fact that you lose the knack,” Rector said. “Since talking to you earlier, I’ve been smelling and listening myself, but I’m not so good at it any more, either.”

They were silent for a few minutes, during which time Rector drank the last of his beer and set the empty can beside his feet.

“What got you to smelling and listening all of a sudden?” he said.

“Well,” Charlie said, “Fanny and I had this fight over someone, and I killed her, and afterward I got to thinking about all the smells and sounds I used to know and hadn’t really known for a long time since, and I thought I’d just sit out here and try to know them again while there was still a little time left.”

“What did you say about Fanny?”

“I said we had this fight, and I killed her. I lost my head and began choking her and didn’t quit soon enough. I didn’t really intend to kill her, but I did, and she’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s up there in our bedroom where we had the fight”

“Well. Well, God Almighty.”

It occurred to Rector later that this was a rather remarkably casual exchange over a serious matter, but Charlie was so calm and sensible, and so palpably telling the simple truth, that it did not seem remarkable at all at the time.

“What are you going to do, Charlie?” Rector said.

“After a while, when I’ve finished listening and smelling, I’m going inside and shoot myself.”

“You think, when it comes to it, you’ll have the nerve?”

“Oh, yes. I’ll have the nerve, all right. It won’t take much with things as they are.”

Rector sighed and stood up, remembering to retrieve the empty beer can.

“Well,” he said, “you can probably do a better job of listening and smelling if you’re alone, and so I’ll go on back home.”

“You won’t call the police or anything, will you, Rector?”

“I couldn’t get around to calling them before morning at the earliest,” Rector said.

He went back across the yards to his own house. He didn’t feel like sitting on the steps any longer, what with old Charlie sitting there listening and smelling so close at hand, and so he went inside to the bedroom and undressed and lay down on the bed in his shorts. He was pretty sweaty from the mowing, and he badly needed a shower, but he simply didn’t have the heart for one. He lay quietly on the bed, smelling himself, until Gladys got home in prickly heat from having seen Sinatra.

“You asleep, Rector?” Gladys said. “No.”

“You should have seen the movie. That Sinatra’s something.”

Rector didn’t answer, thinking instead with a kind of deadly domestic despair: Will you, please, for Christ’s sake, shut up? I’m sick of Sinatra and sick of myself and most of all, dear heart, I’m sick of you. All I want to know, if there ts anyone to tell me, is why everything must go sour that started sweet, and why a man must be driven in the end to a ruin that seems preferable, at least for a little while, to things as they were.

Gladys went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the lavatory. Rector could hear her washing and brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. Pretty soon she came back into the bedroom in her nightgown and sat down on the edge of the bed across from Rector.

“What in the world’s got into that crazy Charlie Treadwell?” she said. “He’s still sitting out there on his front steps like a stump.”

“I told you. He had a fight with Fanny, and Fanny’s gone.”

“That’s no reason to sit on the front steps all night.”

“He’s listening and smelling for the last time. After a while, he’s going inside and shoot himself.”

“Oh, don’t try to be funny, Rector. How many beers did you have?”

“Never mind. Lie down and forget it. Think about Sinatra.”

Gladys lay down on top of the covers, it being a warm night, and Rector laced his fingers under his head and continued to lie there quietly, on his back, smelling himself and listening for the sound of a shot next door.

The Mourners at the Bedside

by Hampton Stone

1.

Do you know about DA’s? They’re important. They do important people important favors. Assistant DA’s aren’t important. They just do the work, and that explains why it would be Assistant District Attorney Jeremiah X. Gibson and Assistant District Attorney Just Plain Old Me who, when the DA wanted to do the Bardons a favor, had to go see the people.

We saw the small, shriveled remnant of the old man who was William Bardon, glimpsing him dimly through his oxygen tent. We saw the battalions of nurses who rustled softly about him. We saw George Bardon, M.D., who would certainly have been there even if he hadn’t been family. George was an M.D. who wore his stethoscope as a Knight of the Garter wears his star. We saw Emory Kent; and he was to law what George Bardon was to medicine. We saw the family.

There was Hepburn Bardon, the old man’s only surviving son. Even before any of this particular bit of nasty business had broken into the open, Uncle Hep had been one of the notorious Bardons, at least as notorious as his colorful young nephew, Everett Bardon. You may remember Everett. He’s the one who was picked up for shoplifting and who through his trial and conviction was headlined as the Larceny for Larks Lad.

That was a trial. Everett had hooked, just to prove he could, a female bathing suit price-tagged at $199.98. The judge, as a point of information, asked what could make a bathing suit cost that much. As a point of information, His Honor was told that this bathing suit had incorporated into its engineering a fanny uplift.

Even in the face of that, however, Everett’s Uncle Hep stole the limelight at the trial. Day after day in court, the reporters had been equally bemused by the splendor and variety of Uncle Hep’s spats and by the splendor and variety of his blondes. Each day it was a different pair of gaudy spats and each day he had on his arm a different gaudy blonde. For attendance at his father’s sickbed, however, he had no blonde. Otherwise, he was gaudily intact.

It was old William Bardon the DA had sent us up to see; but we never got far with the old man. Emory Kent took us to the bedside.

“Mr. Bardon,” he said. “These are the gentlemen from the DA’s office.”

The old man looked annoyed. Dr. George Bardon made a try.

“Uncle William,” he said, pitching his voice several notches higher than the lawyer’s discreet tone. “You can hear me, Uncle William. These are the DA’s men you wanted.”

The old man looked more annoyed. Hepburn Bardon came forward.

“Papa,” he bellowed. “We got you the murder men you wanted. You remember, Papa. It was about Sara.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” the old man panted. “Nothing wrong with my head.”

“Yes, Papa. Will you talk to them, Papa?”

Papa wasn’t up to it. Just those few words he’d spoken had used up his ration of strength for that day. Dr. George took over and we were ushered out.

“Cardiac?” I asked when the door had been shut behind us.

“Yes,” Kent said. “Ninety-four his last birthday. Dr. Bardon is doing everything possible but it can happen any time. There’s really nothing left.”

“I could see that,” Gibby muttered, “but still, the old man thinks he’s being murdered and he wants us to prevent it.”

They set us straight on that. It wasn’t for himself the old man was concerned. It was for his granddaughter, a Mrs. Sara Frail. Promising us a full explanation, Kent ushered us into an upstairs sitting room. Like all of the rest of William Bardon’s house, this was an imposing sitting room. Already ensconced in it we found an imposing pair of dames, one of middle years and very grand, the other young and brassily blond. At first sight, the older woman was every inch a Bardon and the younger one every inch one of Uncle Hep’s showy babes. When we came on them, they were in the process of discussing Hepburn Bardon.

We hadn’t been with them more than a matter of moments before it became evident that they could never have found any other topic in common. The lady was Agatha Bardon, Hep’s sister and the old man’s only daughter. The babe was one Dorinda Gibbs, familiarly known as Dolly. To Uncle Hep she seemed to be most familiarly known. In any event, he became so much engrossed with her that we had little out of him for the rest of that session. He did suggest that any explanations might better wait till we would have his nephew Everett with us, but Agatha swept that suggestion aside.

“I,” she said, “can speak for Everett.”

We couldn’t see why anyone should speak for the young man. Gibby said as much.

“The DA sent us up here about a matter of murder,” he said. “He wants us to do what we can toward reassuring Mr. Bardon. I hope you understand we are here about the old gentleman’s problem and about nothing else. There’s certainly nothing we could do for his grandson.”

Agatha sighed. “You can’t start out with a prejudice against the boy,” she said. “Do you know him?”

“We know of him.”

“You have to know him. He’s charming. When he was arrested and all that, the people down at The Tombs and later at Sing Sing, everybody was enchanted with Everett. And what’s more, Papa wouldn’t let us use influence or anything like that, but Everett served only the absolute minimum and you know that can be done only on good behavior and since he’s come out, he’s been a complete lamb.”

“He’s still on parole,” Gibby growled.

“Yes, indeed,” said Agatha, smiling happily. “You should know his parole officer. A delightful man and devoted to Everett.”

“That,” Gibby said firmly, “was a matter of larceny. What’s the story on the homicide?”

Emory Kent and Agatha gave us the story. Old William had made his will and he was convinced that it contained provisions that were an invitation to murder. He was most concerned that this murder should be averted. He had complete faith in the DA and his office. Once he knew we’d been alerted, he wouldn’t give the matter another thought.

There had never been anything secret about the old man’s will. His heirs had always been aware of its terms. The major part of the estate was to go to his children and their issue. There had been four children — Agatha and Hepburn by his first wife; and by his second wife, two sons, now deceased. The shares of these two sons would be going to their issue, in one case a son — Everett Bardon — in the other a daughter — Sara Frail.

“And Mrs. Frail may be murdered?” Gibby asked.

“The problem,” Kent said, “is her husband.”

2.

And that was the nub of it. On that they were all agreed. Franklin Frail was a bad sort, a man capable of anything as long as it was evil. The old man had been providing Sara, as he had been the others, with an allowance, and on his death these allowances would, of course, stop. Each would then be having his individual share of the estate instead The Bardons were accepting it as axiomatic that Sara’s husband had been kept safe only by the expectation of the continuing allowance. Once the capital sum would be in the man’s hands, there would be for him no further hope of gain from not murdering his wife. At that point he would murder her. It was as simple as that and as preposterous.

“The bequests,” Kent said, “are unconditional and outright. I’ve suggested that Mrs. Frail’s portion be set up as a trust fund paying her a lifetime income, but Mr. Bardon says he gives money or he doesn’t. He ties no strings to it. It’s a matter of conviction.”

“Conviction strong enough to make him endanger this young woman’s life?” Gibby asked.

“That,” Hep Bardon offered, “is where you gentlemen come in.”

Agatha didn’t disagree but she recognized that it might take some leading up to. She provided a history. None of the family knew Sara Frail. With the exception of the old man, none of them had ever seen the girl. Sara’s father had gone West as a young man, evidently to escape the family; and he had lived out what remained of his life without ever coming home again. He had married and he had fathered Sara.

“When Sara first married the man,” Agatha said, “Papa went out to see them. He told her she’d made a horrible mistake but Sara wouldn’t listen. Papa told her she’d go on receiving her allowance. Since he didn’t like her husband, he was not increasing it and they would both have to make out on what she’d been receiving for herself alone. Then he came back to New York. His last word to her was that as long as she remained married to Frail, he didn’t want to see her again. If she wanted to divorce the man, Papa would be glad to hear from her. Otherwise, the bank could handle all necessary communications.”

“So he hasn’t seen or heard from her since?” Gibby asked.

He hadn’t. Agatha explained that they weren’t a close family. Old William had seen this granddaughter of his three times all told. He had gone out to California when the girl was born. He had seen her the second time when he attended her father’s funeral. The third time was when he went out to pass judgment on her husband.

I could think of nothing more nicely designed to exasperate Gibby and to outrage that precise mind of his. Gibby’s is a mind that feeds on facts. It is impatient of vague suspicion, conjecture, and notions born out of emotion or prejudice.

“You’ve never seen the girl,” he said. “You’ve never communicated with her, but you know all about her and you know all about her husband. You know that once a capital sum has been paid out and there are to be no further payments and nothing that could be stopped or revoked, at that moment, Sara Frail is going to need us to keep her husband from murdering her.”

They knew more than we thought. They knew that the Frails were no longer in California. They had moved to Chicago about three years back. At the time of that move, Franklin Frail had come East without his wife and he had had the effrontery to come and call on his wife’s relatives.

“The minute Papa saw him,” Agatha explained, “he ordered him out of the house, but he had been here a bit before Papa came home. We all had the chance to meet him. Papa has never been more right. The man is capable of anything.”

We explained that Chicago, no less than California, was out of our jurisdiction. That didn’t matter. Sara was about to be summoned to her grandfather’s bedside and they were certain she would bring that dreadful man with her. There was only the one reason she hadn’t already been summoned. They were waiting until we would have set up the necessary precautions for her safety. They knew just what those precautions were to be. On Franklin Frail’s arrival in New York, they wanted us to pick him up as a potential murderer and they wanted us to lock him up just on the potentiality. Kent was there and he was a lawyer. We reminded him of constitutional guarantees. We suggested that they simply refrain from calling the granddaughter to the old man’s bedside.

“She must be brought here,” Agatha proclaimed. “We must have them where the man can at least be watched. He is a criminal, after all.”

Kent protested that. All he wanted of us was that we reassure the old man. He hoped further that we might give a bit of advice on the best available procedure for protecting the life of his client’s granddaughter. He wanted it to be a method that would also protect his clients, the Bardon family. He deplored their carelessness in matters of slander. He could deplore, but he couldn’t silence Agatha.

“Am I to understand,” she asked frostily, “that you can pick on Everett and you can’t touch this horrible man, Frail?”

“Your nephew,” Gibby said with strained patience, “committed a crime. He was legally charged with it A grand jury found a legal indictment. He was brought to trial and convicted. He was sentenced to jail and he served the minimum part of his sentence. He is now out on probation, which means he’s out on the State’s hope that he can behave himself well enough to be worthy of the trust the State of New York has put in him. Meanwhile, the State has the right and the duty to keep a close eye on the boy and tell him how he must behave. He’s getting the fairest break any law can give him. Nobody’s picking on him.”

“Sara’s husband” — Agatha sniffed — “has done much better.”

“You’re prepared to accuse him of a crime? What was it? When was it? Where was it?”

“There’s nothing to that,” Emory Kent said quickly.

“Nothing?” Agatha protested. “He raped the child and she had to marry him.”

Hepburn guffawed. “Sara’s a Bardon,” he said. “Who could ever rape a Bardon?”

“If you will allow me, both of you,” Emory Kent growled.

They allowed him. There had never been any question of rape. The charge had been burglary. Sara Bardon had met Franklin Frail at some sort of party. The man had seen her home. Later that night, she had wakened. Someone was in her house. She had picked up the phone and called the police. When the police arrived, they surprised Frail in the living room. He had by then opened a wall safe and was in the process of emptying it. At that point, Sara had apologized to the police for bothering them. It had all been a silly mistake on her part. She should have known it was Frail. This was nothing. He had just come to get something she was keeping for him in the box. If he had wakened her, she would have got it for him, but he had been too considerate. So sorry, gentlemen.

“A month later,” Emory Kent said, finishing the story, “they were married. She never brought charges. The matter died right there, so there’s nothing to that.”

He didn’t have to tell us. You can’t be in a DA’s office without knowing all there is to know about that sort of deal. They do it all the time. You have them set to bring charges and they come down with the notion that they can do better than the law does. They’ll reform the character. In a situation like this one at the Bardon house, Gibby wisely doesn’t trust himself to speak. He lets me take over. I’m a milder type. As mildly as I could manage, I suggested that they hire a team of private detectives to watch over the young woman. Old William might find something of that sort reassuring.

“Anyhow,” I said, “if the man does turn illegal at all, it’ll be swiping money out of his wife’s purse or taking her jewelry out and hocking it On his record he sounds sneaky, not violent.”

We rose to go. Agatha wailed a protest.

“What about Everett? Doesn’t anyone care about poor Everett?”

Gibby took over on that. “Who’s going to kill poor Everett?” he asked. He was trying not to sound hopeful.

It wasn’t for her nephew’s life that Agatha feared. It was for his freedom. Consorting with known criminals is a violation of parole. Sara Frail had to be called. Her husband would come with her. Franklin Frail was a known criminal and he would be under the same roof with the reformed Larceny for Larks Lad.

“I would suggest,” Gibby growled, “that Everett take that up with his parole officer.” We got out of there.

3.

I was ready to wash my hands of the whole thing; and when we saw the DA about it, he saw it my way. Gibby, however, was restive; and all he could say toward explaining his feeling was that once the cry of murder had been raised and raised to us, we were in trouble. He agreed that there was no sane reason for expecting murder to happen as the Bardons feared, but he didn’t like our having been forewarned of it.

“Murder,” he said, “can always happen and if it just does happen up there, how’s it going to make us look?”

At the time, the question seemed academic; and actually, before any murder did happen, we had another problem with the Bardons. We learned of it from a newspaper story date-lined Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Frail, about to fly to New York because of the grave illness of Mrs. Frail’s grandfather, had been delayed at the Chicago airport when Mr. Frail with one punch had flattened one Steve “Cockeye” Brooks.

You would have to know about Cockeye Brooks to begin to understand how very peculiar a story this was. You will recall that Mrs. Frail was that granddaughter of old William’s about whom we’d been consulted. What you can’t know is that Cockeye Brooks was a small-time thug. People don’t punch Cockeye Brooks. Cockeye Brooks doesn’t go running to the cops. Cockeye Brooks doesn’t bring charges against anyone. It is always the other way about. People bring charges against Cockeye Brooks. People, in fact, on one of several occasions, had brought such charges and on these charges — simple assault — Cockeye Brooks had done time in Sing Sing. He had, in fact, been a contemporary of Everett Bardon’s at that same institution.

See what I mean? The Bardons wanted Sara Frail at her grandfather’s bedside. They wanted Sara without her husband. They consult us in the matter. We suggest private detectives. Cockeye Brooks turns up and, according to the Frails, for twenty-four hours he follows Mrs. Frail wherever she goes. He makes himself so annoying that Mr. Frail has to do something about it. Mr. Frail does. Brooks doesn’t retaliate in kind. Instead, he calls the cops and he brings charges. Mr. Frail is held by the Chicago police. Mrs. Frail has to come on to New York without her husband.

The Bardons had obviously made their arrangements and they were arrangements that didn’t look well for Everett Bardon and for the terms of his parole. Since to some extent we in the DA’s office were privy to these arrangements, they didn’t look well for us, either. To me it seemed a simple nuisance. Gibby grumbled along with me but his grumbling was unconvincing. I had the feeling that he rather welcomed the opportunity for another look at the Bardon crowd. They had engaged the Gibson curiosity and curiosity is a passion with Gibby.

We had that other look. Even in a matter of days, the old man had slipped enough so that they were now watching at his bedside in relays. We asked to see Everett Bardon and it was arranged, though, of course, with Lawyer Kent hovering.

Everett was the big surprise. He seemed every inch the respectable and dignified scion of a well-heeled house, a youth schooling himself to occupy with grace the position to which he had been born and training himself up to the responsibilities of that position. I had been looking, of course, for the Larceny for Larks Lad and I had been prepared for anything but so sober and sensible-seeming a young man. I wanted to think that Sing Sing had been all that good for him.

“May I tell you, gentlemen,” Everett said as a starter, “that I do appreciate the kindness you are showing me? I know how busy you are and I know you can do nothing but work according to the rules. I understand that you’re giving me a break and I am grateful for it. May I say thank you?”

“We’d rather you answered questions,” Gibby said gruffly.

Everett answered them and all his answers seemed completely candid. He’d known Brooks at Sing Sing. They had been friends there. Brooks had been released first. Since that time, there had been no communication between them. While we were at it, a door opened and a young woman started into the room. She was youngish. She wasn’t Dorinda Gibbs but she could have been another of Uncle Hep’s blondes. She had the same sort of arresting dye job. On closer inspection, however, it became obvious that any resemblance would end with the dye job. This one was handsome, but she was not the baby-doll type. She had dignity and even a forbidding sort of elegance, an impeccable black suit, impeccable white gloves, the exactly right sort of hat.

“Is this private,” she asked, “or may I come in?”

“If you will forgive us, my dear,” the lawyer began. He never finished.

Everett talked right past him. “It’s private, Sara,” he said, “but it’s as much your business as anyone’s. I’d like you to come in.”

Kent hated it but he could do nothing. She came in. She was there, accordingly, while Everett was explaining that it was one of his beliefs that each person had the inalienable right of going to hell in a hand basket of his own choosing and that, therefore, he had never agreed to any of the family plans for separating his cousin Sara from the husband of her choice. She was still there when he suggested that he would go and sit with his grandfather and he would send his Aunt Agatha out to see us. She heard him ask us to take into consideration the great, if mistaken, concern his aunt felt for him. That, of course, brought up the whole business of Everett’s parole and the record of his cousin’s husband. The lady didn’t take that kindly.

“I’m sorry, Sara,” Everett said, “but you do know Frank has a record. You knew Grandfather had him investigated.”

She snapped at him. She wanted to hear no more about that. She did, however, have to hear a lot more. She heard her Aunt Agatha freely admit that it had been she who was consorting with Cockeye Brooks. Brooks had come to call on Agatha after his release from Sing Sing and he had brought her news of Everett. When it had come to hiring detectives and Emory Kent had chosen a firm more highly regarded for its discretion than for its effectiveness, Miss Bardon had considered such measures grossly insufficient. She had taken matters into her own hands.

“Mr. Brooks,” she boasted, “went to Chicago as my agent Everett knew nothing about it”

The whole plan, in fact, had been hers and it had all gone exactly according to her plan. Brooks provoked Frank Frail. He persisted in provoking the man until Frail attacked him. Now Frail was in Chicago awaiting trial for assault and Sara Frail was in her grandfather’s house where she belonged. All that Agatha still wanted was that her niece should begin acting as though she did indeed belong.

“Go to your grandfather,” she urged. “Take off your hat and those absurd gloves. He’s been asking for you.”

“And my husband?”

“Now, Sara, we’ve been into that.”

“We have. Did Grandfather ask to see my husband?”

“You know how your grandfather feels.”

“And he knows how I feel.”

They kicked it around but the younger woman, wasn’t to be moved. She had been called and she had come. Of necessity, she’d even left her husband for it, but she’d made it clear that she would be accepted with the man she’d married or not at all. Her grandfather had known that from the first and even the fact that her grandfather was now dying made no change in that. The hat and the gloves were her symbols. They would keep her family reminded that she felt herself to be excluded. By excluding her husband, they were excluding her.

She’d taken this stand even before she’d known that it wasn’t just bad luck that had detained Frank Frail in Chicago.

Sara smoothed the gloves over her wrists. “The gloves,” she said, “stay on, now with more reason than ever. They stay on to keep you reminded of the terms on which I am here. I am a visitor. I am a stranger. You seem to think you can take any liberty with the family. Just look at my gloves and remember that I do not consider myself to be family and I allow you to take no liberties with me.” She paused for emphasis. “Or,” she added, “with my husband.”

“It may mean all that to you, my dear,” Agatha said. “To me it is simply childish and ridiculous.”

“And,” Sara added, “when Frank gets to New York, he will come here and stay here with me.”

Agatha laughed. That evidently was a contingency she expected she wouldn’t have to face. She was wrong. That young niece of hers was a woman of steel and Agatha had talked far too much. Sara knew all the right words — perjury and subornation of perjury and conspiracy. A lawyer couldn’t have done a better job of outlining to her aunt the necessity for putting a stop to that farcical affair out in Chicago. When we hauled out of there that time, Sara had Aunt Agatha on the telephone. That redoubtable lady was calling Cockeye Brooks and telling him he would have to pull out on those assault charges.

It was a battle of wills right down to the end and nobody ever knew who won. The old man died without seeing his granddaughter. Sara did bring her husband into the house; but even though the old man had fallen into a coma from which he never again emerged even momentarily, Agatha Bardon had been adamant that her father’s wish should be respected. Old William hadn’t wanted “that man” near him. “That man” wasn’t permitted to come near him. Sara had been equally adamant. She didn’t go where her husband wasn’t wanted. She’d been in the house when the old man died, but she had been in another room.

4.

Why Gibby and I went to the old man’s funeral I’ve never really known. With me it was mainly a matter of simple curiosity. With Gibby it seemed to be something else, a nervous feeling that we had come to that time of which we had been warned. He couldn’t make himself disregard that warning, however absurd it had been.

Be that as it may, from the first it was an arresting occasion. It would have to be with the Bardons. Uncle Hep was there and there was a swarm of Uncle Hep’s blondes. One of the cuties hung on his arm, and in the pews behind him sat all the others. Among them I spotted Dorinda Gibbs and with her another woman, also blond but the only one in the entire covey who looked to be more than a matter of months out of her teens. This one could have been one of Uncle Hep’s babes some twenty years back. When we greeted Dorinda, however, she disabused us. This older babe was her mother but we’d been making a mistake anyone could have made. Mama Gibbs was not a motherly type.

We greeted Aunt Agatha, correct in her wisp of black veil and leaning on her nephew. With them were George, M.D., and Emory Kent, and they looked and behaved as expected. I looked for Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Frail and if she seemed possibly a bit too much the mourner, he at least also seemed to be looking and behaving as expected. He had that look of the man who drinks hard, plays hard and works hard. It’s a type we all know, the sort that men like and women tend to adore. Ordinarily, people are so much bemused by the charm of this type that it never occurs to them to look deep into the man’s eyes in search of the killer look. Even there at the funeral, you could see it in Frail’s eyes, that cold, implacable toughness. I honestly hadn’t expected to find it there; but studying the man, I caught myself reassessing the fears the late William Bardon had felt for Sara Frail’s safety. Frail was clearly a man who would have what he wanted and who would without a quiver do what he had to do to make certain he would have it. I had only the one question on that score. Was money the thing this man wanted? He would kill for the thing he wanted, but was money that thing?

All through the preliminary waiting, the man’s behavior couldn’t have been more correct. He was all solicitude for his wife. He was taking off her any burden of affability that might be imposed in contacts with old servants or old friends of the family. None of these people had ever known her, but they had known her father. They pressed their attentions on her.

All these people were meeting her after a fashion, but I don’t think any of them was getting much notion of what she was like. Where her Aunt Agatha was content with just a token wisp of black mourning veil, Sara Frail had gone the full route. She had one of those inkily impenetrable jobs that came all the way down to her shoulders and a little below; and all the kind people got out of her was a murmured politeness, an opportunity to press her black-gloved hand and a close look at the Stygian drapery of that veil.

Her husband, however, was making up for her. He told people how wonderful it was that everyone should be so kind. He told them how deeply their kindness moved his wife. He clapped the men on their backs, hard enough to be sufficiently hearty but never as hard as he easily could have done. With the women, he held their hands firmly and gently in his and there wasn’t a one who didn’t flush with pleasure. As soon as he’d relinquished a woman’s hand, however, the woman would scuttle away. They enjoyed it, but they wanted to be at a safe distance. I wasn’t imagining it. Only a most extraordinary woman would ever consider taking this man on. We went over and greeted the lady. She introduced us to her husband and he gave us the treatment, clapped us on the back, and the force of it had been perfectly measured. People who had known the lady’s father came up behind us. We pulled away.

“I can see what the old man meant,” I muttered.

“Looks just right for his record,” Gibby said.

“Larcenous?” I murmured. “He looks more than larcenous.”

“So does his record,” Gibby told me.

He’d been doing research on it and he filled me in. There was considerably more than the Bardons or their attorneys had seen fit to tell us. In the actual criminal-record department there wasn’t so much. There had been one burglary conviction and he’d served his time on that; and since, except for the deal where Sara had decided she would bring no charges, he had been clean.

There were, however, other records on Franklin Frail and it was those Gibby was chewing over in his mind as he watched the man perform. This Bardon girl was Frail’s second wife. The first had been one Muriel Lodge and a couple of years after they were married, she was picked up on a blackmail charge. She’d hit some Hollywood executive with a packet of love letters he had written her. The executive yelled for the cops and for a while it looked as though he’d made the worst mistake an executive ever made. She did have letters and in his handwriting and bearing his signature and of a content that was more than enough for hanging any man.

The man denied writing them and somehow he got lucky. He managed to prove it. Good as those letters looked, they were forgeries. Muriel Lodge Frail had done them herself. She was enormously talented in the handwriting line and one thing led to another, like some checks she’d been talented with. The State of California jailed her on a forgery rap. It was while she was in the pokey that Frail embarked on his second romance by way of Sara’s wall safe. The man, however, had kept everything neatly legal. He had obtained a Mexican divorce during that gestation period while attempted burglary had been blossoming into love and love into marriage.

Two years later, the first Mrs. Frail had been released. She dropped out of sight for almost a year afterward and then she turned up again; but she turned up dead.

“Killed?” I asked. “Or just plain dead?”

“Dead,” Gibby answered, “and in the company of Frail and the second Mrs.”

If this was smelling bad to Gibby, he wasn’t alone. Nobody else had cared for its fragrance, either. When it had happened, it smelled. Now, three years after the event, it still smelled. The Frails had been spending the summer in a mountain hideaway they had up in the High Sierras. They went there to be alone — no servants, no neighbors, just themselves and the great outdoors. It had been his story that they hadn’t even known his first wife was in the vicinity. Then one day, they’d been off on a camping trip and surprise, surprise — Muriel had come stumbling into camp. This might have been a situation but for the fact that Muriel had been a very sick first wife, so sick that they had to heave her into the car and rush her over the mountains to a doctor. They didn’t make it. They arrived too late for anything but an autopsy and the findings of that, Gibby told me bitterly, had been natural death, ruptured appendix.

“In the opinion of a country coroner who wouldn’t know much even if be wasn’t bribed?” I asked.

“That’s what the L.A. papers thought,” Gibby told me.

Gibby had read those old papers carefully and he had the whole story at his fingertips. The Frails buried Muriel in that mountain town. They never went back to their mountain cabin or to their home in the city. It was then they’d made the move east to Chicago, leaving it to their lawyers to dispose of their California properties and to ship their stuff on to Chicago. Of course, it did look as though they had fixed things up with that country coroner and had then skipped the jurisdiction before anyone would think to ask uncomfortable questions.

Everybody expected that there would be extradition back to California and a trial for the murder of Muriel Lodge Frail. The first step had been a court order for exhumation and a complete post mortem. The thought was that Frail had slipped up in not having had Muriel cremated, but he hadn’t slipped at all. Top men did the second post mortem and the whole case fell on its face. Muriel was dead of a ruptured appendix and everything else came up negative. Also, Frail voluntarily returned to California and volunteered answers to all questions. They hadn’t been fleeing the jurisdiction. They had merely been fleeing the gossip and they’d made no mistake there. It may have been a local scandal, but it had been a loud one.

The services started and Gibby had to break it off. All through the funeral, I was watching Franklin Frail. His behavior could not have been more correct, but that didn’t matter. There was only the one thought in my mind. How had he contrived to murder his first wife and get away with it so neatly? You just couldn’t look at that guy and think anything else of him.

I was still thinking it when we came out to the street after the services. There, alongside the lined-up limousines, Sara Frail and her Aunt Agatha were at it again. Agatha was insisting that all of Papa’s nearest and dearest must be together in the first car. Accordingly, she was consigning Franklin Frail to the second car along with Cousin George, M.D., Emory Kent and Uncle Hep’s blonde for the day.

Sara would have none of it. “Where I go my husband goes,” she said from behind her heavy draperies.

“You cannot impose him on your grandfather, not even now.”

“As you like.” Sara shrugged. “Then I’ll follow my grandfather in the second car.”

“Your place is with us.”

“My place is with my husband.”

She turned away to join her Franklin. He had stepped back from this fracas. He had taken a whisky flask from his pocket and unscrewed the cap. Now quickly he raised the flask to his lips, snatching this moment of lull. Sara hurried toward him, expostulating as she went.

“Really, Frank,” she said. “Couldn’t that watt? After all, he was my grandfather.”

Frail never answered. A cramping spasm twisted his face and the flask dropped from his hand. It hit the pavement only a moment before he toppled and crashed down beside it. The glass shattered and the whisky spread over the sidewalk. The unmistakable odor hit my nostrils just as that unmistakable mottling of cherry red began to come into Franklin Frail’s face.

Both Gibby and George Bardon, M.D., jumped for the fallen man; but, of course, it was no good. When it’s cyanide, nobody can be quick enough; and it was cyanide.

Sara faltered. I saw her sag and I was standing close enough to catch her. George came away from the dead to minister to the living. We laid her flat on the pavement and I threw back her veil while he loosened the collar of her black suit. The crowd closed in around us until Gibby got the police to move them back. It was just as well he did, because much of that crowd was made up of Uncle Hep’s blondes and just then Sara needed air, not perfume.

5.

We didn’t go out to the cemetery. It was obvious that Sara wouldn’t be up to going and it was even more obvious that we would now be having business with the rest of the Bardon family. They were ushered back inside and nobody was pretending that they weren’t under police surveillance even though we did work at making it as discreet and polite as we could. That first car, into which some of the Bardons had already climbed, was driven away for examination. Gibby ordered that. He was taking no chances on the possibility that further supplies of cyanide might have been concealed somewhere in that automobile.

Aunt Agatha and Uncle Hep were indignant at the delay. Emory Kent sought to soothe them down. Cousin George was busy ministering to the newly widowed Sara; and Everett came to us to volunteer information.

“That was cyanide in his whisky,” he said.

“How do you know?” Gibby snapped.

“Because I know cyanide,” Everett answered, “and because there isn’t a chance that it isn’t my cyanide.”

“Just like that?”

“I do silversmithing for a hobby,” he explained. “I use cyanide for cleaning the stuff. There is always a supply of it on the workbench in my room at home.”

“I seem to remember you have another hobby,” Gibby told him. “Letting people go to hell in hand baskets of their own choosing. You’re the only one of the family who didn’t want detectives around. You didn’t want anybody watching.”

“Does that make me smart or an idiot?”

“An idiot, perhaps, with flashes of sense. I’m going to have to search you”

“You don’t think I have cyanide on me now, do you?”

“I don’t know. I remember Hermann Goring. He had it on him for when the going would get tough. You have tough going ahead, boy.”

“I don’t mind being searched,” Everett said.

We got him off in a room by himself and he stripped for us while we went over him inch by inch. We got no cyanide out of that but we did get talk. Everett had a theory and he was snatching at the opportunity to toss it at us. He explained that he’d always made it a point that everyone in the house should know that he had the cyanide, just how dangerous it was, and where he kept it. The idea was that everyone would be forewarned. Nobody could have an ignorant accident with the poison. Servants, family, house guests always were informed.

“Your Cousin Sara and her husband?” Gibby asked.

“That’s it,” Everett answered. “That’s where I slipped. I was too much impressed by Sara’s in-the-house-but-not-of-it routine — the hat and the gloves and the attitudes and the way she kept Frail hanging aloof, too. It never occurred to me that I had to warn them. They were keeping to themselves. They weren’t making themselves at home at all. How could I imagine that he would go up to my room and make himself at home there?”

“You want us to believe that the poor man found himself not loved enough in the Bardon house and that he stole your cyanide to commit suicide with it?” Gibby snarled.

“I’d like you to see that he had an accident with it.”

“Like how?”

“Like boredom. It’s easy to see he was having a dull time of it. Sara kept sitting like a frozen image and she wanted him to sit with her and match her freeze for freeze. He got bored and he started idly wandering the house. I know our house. I can figure he didn’t find much to amuse him till he came to my room.”

“A delightful bottle of cyanide,” Gibby said. “Such fun.”

Everett shook it off. “You’d have to know what I’m working on,” he said. “Uncle Hep has a birthday coming up and I’m making him a surprise. It’s a set of silver buttons, embossed, a different bare-butt babe on each button. He’ll wear them on one of those red waistcoats of his. I’m guessing Frail came on those and got a kick out of them.”

He went on with it. The glass pocket flask had been the man’s most constant companion all the time Frail had been in the house. Left to himself, he would probably have been glad enough to drink the Bardons’ whisky but Sara wouldn’t allow that. She’d taken a position. They were in the house to be available just in case her grandfather should change his mind about her husband, but she was accepting no hospitality. She had their meals sent in from a restaurant and they ate the meals in their room. She also ordered in their own whisky and he drank only that. Therefore, the pocket flask. It was for times when he was out of the room, even briefly.

As Everett’s theory went, Frail wanders and comes on the workbench and the amusing buttons. From them, he idly turns to the rest of the workbench. He sees the bottle with all that “Poison” and “Don’t touch” on it and he’s curious about it. About this time, it hits him that he’s been more than long enough between snorts. He has the cyanide bottle open and he pulls his flask out to slug himself a little with his whisky. Somehow, in handling the cyanide bottle, he gets a little of the cyanide on his hands. He drinks his whisky and somehow in recapping the flask, he gets a little cyanide from his hands on the mouth of the flask or on the stopper.

“It doesn’t take much, you know,” Everett said. “And if it was all on the mouth of the flask or on the stopper, that would mean he got all of it when he next put the flask to his lips and started sucking on the whisky.”

“Possible,” Gibby said. “Awfully elaborate. Highly improbable.”

“The probable accidents are usually avoided,” Everett argued. “It’s mostly the elaborate and highly improbable kind that get to happen.”

“But not opportune, as well,” Gibby objected. “Your aunt, your uncle, and you all want Frail removed. He’s stupid and careless with your cyanide and his whisky and he is removed. It’s too convenient.”

Everett found it necessary to correct Gibby. Everett had never wanted Frail removed and he was also asking us to understand the feelings of his aunt and uncle.

“When you start investigating Frank Frail,” he said, “you’ll learn that he had a first wife and that she died under the most suspicious circumstances. Actually, it seems to have been pure bad luck. Appendix ruptured, too far from any doctor, that sort of thing. You can’t blame Aunt Ag and Uncle Hep for feeling as you do, though, reluctant to believe in the improbable and elaborate accident, particularly when it happens to be too convenient as well. They’ve always believed he killed his first wife and that he did it with enough cleverness to get away with it. They have been afraid for Sara. That’s a far cry from wanting to murder the man.”

“Up to now,” Gibby said, “you’ve all been most carefully not mentioning this first wife.”

“I know,” Everett conceded. “That was Kent’s doing. He kept hammering on that. It was best to say nothing at all, but it was most important to say nothing about the death of Frail’s first wife. The man had been completely cleared on that and we had to make only the slightest slip and he’d have us for slander or something. You’re lawyers. You’ll understand that better than I can.”

The young man seemed genuinely distressed, but he also seemed inordinately pleased with himself and with his theorizing. So much so that it astonished him, when the cortege finally did start for the cemetery, that the Bardons had with them in that first car, in the seat which had been intended for Sara Frail, a homicide-squad detective, instead. Hadn’t Everett explained everything? Police surveillance after that seemed to him excessive.

6.

Gibby and I remained behind with Sara Frail and we escorted her back to the house. She insisted that she was quite all right. She wanted only to be alone. She wanted to lie down and be quiet for a while. We didn’t keep her from it very long. Gibby asked her about her husband’s whisky and when she said there were supplies of it in their room, he told her we would have to get the bottles out of there.

“Now, Mr. Gibson? I would like to be alone.”

“I understand, Mrs. Frail. You must also understand. Your husband’s whisky was poisoned. It may have been just that flask or it may have been the whole bottle. We’ll have to know which and we must play it safe. I’m thinking of you, Mrs. Frail.”

“Don’t bother. I loved my husband. It doesn’t matter much now whether I live or die. Either way, my life is over. I don’t care.”

“We care,” Gibby said. “We have to care.”

She shrugged and led us upstairs to their room. It was a big, front room, right next door to that upstairs sitting room where we had first met her.

“If you think I might try to kill myself,” she said, “have no fear. We Bardons are a tenacious lot Nothing ever makes us so unhappy that we’re ready to let go of life. If it’s an accident you’re afraid of, I don’t drink, Mr. Gibson. I’ve been wishing I hadn’t made it so clear to my dear relatives that I never drink. I didn’t know how easy I was making it They had every assurance that if there was whisky around, I wouldn’t touch it and Frank most certainly would. But I suppose that doesn’t matter. Some way would have been found.”

She showed us the whisky and we gathered up the bottles. Two still had their seals unbroken. A third had been opened and was about half full. There was no smell of cyanide, but we took them, anyhow, for analysis. Sara showed us to the door of her room and she shut it after us. We took the bottles downstairs and Gibby stowed them in the trunk of his car.

We were out front and he was busy with his trunk lock. It was a quiet time of day and there weren’t many people in the street. I could hardly help noticing the two blondes who were strolling along on the other side of the street They were Dorinda Gibbs and her mama. I remarked on them.

Gibby locked his trunk and thoughtfully regarded the undulating bottoms of the two sauntering babes.

“Maybe,” he said thoughtfully, “that’s something for the vice squad and maybe it’s just peaceful picketing because it was another mouse the old goat had at the funeral with him. Anyhow, our work’s back in the house.”

We went in and looked for Everett’s room. That Was the first order of business, picking up any loose cyanide that might still be around. We left Mrs. Frail alone and we didn’t bother about that sitting room next door to hers. We knew neither of those was Everett’s room. At the back of that same floor, we also quickly ruled out the late William’s apartments and we went on upstairs. On the third floor, there were rooms at the back, overlooking the garden, and they were too feminine to be anyone’s but Aunt Agatha’s. They were ornamented with photographs. We saw a picture of Hepburn and one of the old man. All the others were of young Everett, and they were innumerable. She had him at every age and in every pursuit. I remarked that she showed a great partiality — so many of the nephew, not one of the niece.

“Could be partiality,” Gibby murmured. “Could be nobody ever sent her any of Sara.”

We pulled out of there and checked the front rooms on that floor. They identified themselves readily. One was Uncle Hep’s, the other Everett’s. Everett’s was as advertised. There was the workbench of which he had told us, the buttons he was making for his uncle, and there was the cyanide bottle — about half full. We’d just located that when the doorbell rang through the silent house. Gibby went to the window and looked down. It was Dorinda and Mama. It had come on to rain and it was evident that they wanted in. I trotted down to let them in. Gibby remained in Everett’s room. All the blondes in Uncle Hep’s extensive stable could have been on that doorstep and he wouldn’t have had the time for them, not until he’d satisfied himself that there was no further cyanide loose around that workbench.

I opened the door and I got a smile and a thank you from Dorinda. I got only a scowl from Mama. Dorinda said they didn’t want to be any trouble. They would just wait for Hep. I wasn’t to bother about them. Dorinda knew her way around the house. She pushed a door open and ushered Mama into a ground-floor deal that looked like a drawing room or something impressive like that.

I started back up to rejoin Gibby. As I passed, I noticed that the door to Sara Frail’s room was open a crack. She called to me softly. She was a bit distressed that I’d let the women in. She wondered if I’d mind asking them to go up to the second-floor sitting room where they could be a bit out of the way.

“I’m afraid there will be reporters and people at any moment now,” she said. “If Uncle Hep and his women make a circus of grandfather’s funeral, I can’t say I like that, but now it’s Frank as well and I’d much rather not. You understand?”

It did seem to me that the Gibbs babes looked more the late Frank Frail’s speed than did his own wife but I refrained from saying as much. I started down to do her errand. I was spared the trouble. The Gibbses were already on their way upstairs. They explained that they didn’t want to get mixed up with a lot of people and they’d decided to come upstairs to wait. They wanted to see only Hep. Would I tell him when he came in?

I opened the sitting-room door for them and I shut it after them. Quickly they reopened it. They were taking no chances on missing Hep when he would be coming by. I went back to Gibby and together we did the complete search of Everett’s room. The one cyanide bottle proved to be all the boy had. We’d just about satisfied ourselves of that when the Bardons arrived home from the cemetery. What with family, servants and police escort, it made quite a crowd.

Everett, tailed closely by a cop, came upstairs. He reached for the cyanide bottle.

“It will have to be checked for fingerprints,” Gibby said, not letting him have it. “When did you last see it?”

Everett thought carefully before he answered. It had been the night of his grandfather’s death. He had been at his workbench when he had been called away from it to go to his grandfather’s room for the last time. He hadn’t been near the workbench since. When asked if he remembered how much cyanide the bottle had contained, he remembered clearly that it had been almost full. Gibby held the bottle up so the boy could see the level of its contents. Everett went white.

“That,” he said, “is a lot more than any bit of the stuff be could have got smeared on his hands.”

“How much more?” Gibby asked.

“Almost half a bottle, enough left over from killing Frail to kill all the people in this house.”

“And you have no idea where it is?”

“Wherever it is, you’ve got to find it,” Everett stormed. “Don’t you see? I was all wrong. It wasn’t an accident, so that means it has to be Aunt Ag or Uncle Hep. Why would they take so much? I can tell you why. They’re not killers, so for either one, it would come to a little for Frail so that Sara would be saved and then a lot for themselves. I don’t know which of them it is, but one of them is going to kill himself and you’ve got to stop it Don’t you see?”

He was storming along that way when his uncle came upstairs. Hepburn Bardon took over. He’d heard what Everett said and the boy had it all wrong. It never had been an accident and it wasn’t murder, either. It was attempted murder and it had gone wrong.

So then we had another theory and this one seemed to be the joint enterprise of Hepburn Bardon and his sister, Agatha. They had been right about Franklin Frail all along. Their only mistake had been in underestimating the man’s greed and the vicious scope of his evil plans. Frail had recognized that come what may, Bardons leave money to Bardons. Where else would one leave it? His wife would be coming into a one-fourth share of her grandfather’s estate. Frail had seen a way to make it a larger share.

“He had that flask,” Hep explained. “He thought he’d be in the car with us, riding to the cemetery. He thought we’d all be needing picking up. He would bring out his flask. He would pass it around. It’s no more than manners for a man to offer a drink before he drinks himself. Agatha and myself, possibly even Everett. You know, an occasion of special strains in spite of this probation nonsense. He would get the lot of us and safely because he would have used this poison of Everett’s. See how clever he was? Agatha and me poisoned. Everett in the electric chair for it. That would leave Sara to inherit the whole lot and only then he would have come around to killing Sara. In all our worries about the girl, it never occurred to us that she would be safe until he’d finished with his preliminaries and that we ourselves were to be those preliminaries. Really horribly clever.”

“Horribly,” Gibby said dryly. “What made him change his mind?”

“But he didn’t. He just misjudged himself. You have to have known Frail. With him, taking a nip out of that flask was automatic. He’d have done it without even thinking, the way another man might have blinked an eye. He’d sat through the services. For him that was a long time between drinks. He was drinking out of that flask before he even knew what he was doing.”

The more Hep talked about it, the more he warmed to the idea. He was thinking up elaborations and we couldn’t get rid of him. Suddenly I remembered something that would do it. I told him that Dolly and her mama were in the sitting room waiting for him. It worked. He went off to join them, but we weren’t rid of him for long. As soon as he got into the room and before I even had time to wonder how it was that the door Dorinda had set ajar could have been closed, Hepburn Bardon was screaming. Mama and daughter were in there, but they had given up waiting. They were dead of cyanide poisoning. We found the glasses from which they had taken their fatal highballs. On the bar we found the bottle of sour-mash whisky, Franklin Frail’s brand, and enough cyanide in it to account for every last bit of the stuff that was missing from Everett’s supply.

7.

That was when the impossible happened. I’d never expected to see that Bardon family pulled together, but the death of those Gibbs babes made the difference. It brought Sara Frail back into the bosom of her family. Sara embraced her Uncle Hepburn’s theory. Now, that was a touching scene. Sara blamed herself and she blamed the blind selfishness of her pride. She had known her Frank. She had loved him and she had feared him. She had known just how right her family was in their judgment of him, but she had been too proud to acknowledge it.

Then her Frank had died and she’d known immediately how it had happened. This was the mixture as before, just as we’d already had it from Uncle Hep. Reaching for a drink was automatic with Frank. Frank would already have taken if down before he would even have known he was reaching. It had happened just as Hep believed except that Frank had been more thorough in his planning, horribly more thorough. He had anticipated the possibility that they wouldn’t all be in the same car or the possibility that they wouldn’t want to drink in the car. He had included that in his planning. When they would be home again, they would be the stricken family and he, relatively an outsider, would be less stricken. He would be ready to let bygones be bygones. He would minister to them in their grief, mix them drinks, buck them up. He would mix the drinks from his own bottle, just as a gesture of friendship. That would have done it.

“I didn’t know there was any more,” Sara wailed. “I thought he’d made his mistake and be was dead of it In my pride I thought I could leave it without telling you. I knew my aunt and uncle were innocent and I was confident that nothing could ever be proved against either one of them. The thing would remain a mystery. I wouldn’t have to humiliate myself. So now I’ve been punished for it, bitterly punished. Those two innocent women, strangers, people we didn’t even know. It’s horrible.”

It might even have remained that way, even though Gibby wasn’t at all satisfied. But then he was suddenly much happier when the routine work on the cadavers of the Gibbs women brought in something that he could fasten upon. He fastened. It was the intelligence that Mama Gibbs had had a criminal record. She had served time. She had served it in California. She had served it in the same jail that had housed Franklin Frail’s first wife and she had served it at the same time. The crime had been blackmail and extortion.

Grabbing that up, Gibby took off for the Bardon house. I followed along. I could see that here was a new dimension. Buying off a blonde obviously could not have been a new item in Uncle Hep’s career. He’d had too many of the babes in his time and it would be inevitable that he would have paid off to no few of them. This, however, would have been different This one had behind her a professional, her mother; and with them was allied another professional, his niece’s husband. It was easy to see that simple old Hep could never before have been that much surrounded; and when this man they had been fearing so much came into it, that would have been the last straw. Surrounded by tormentors, Uncle Hep had turned on all of them.

We arrived at the Bardon house in time to come in on a business session. Kent was reading the will. The legatees were signing the necessary releases. Everything was being hurried along for Sara Frail’s sake. Everybody understood how that young woman couldn’t remain in the house with the associations of grief and horror it must hold for her. She was leaving that very night, going back to Chicago and from there she didn’t know where, but it would be someplace where she could work at wiping from her memory that monster she’d had the ill fortune to love.

“He was no lily,” Gibby said, while we stood by and watched the signing. “He was no lily, but he wasn’t as bad as you think. He didn’t kill anybody.”

“He planned to,” Sara moaned, “and even if he hadn’t planned it for those poor women, that doesn’t make any difference. They’re just as dead.”

“Just as dead,” Gibby said, toying with the signed releases stacked at Emory Kent’s elbow. He fished Sara’s from the pile. “Just as dead, Muriel. It’s a pity you had to take your gloves off to sign this because now we can match it up with the fingerprint record the State of California has on Muriel Lodge Frail.”

It did match up but we didn’t have to wait till we had the word from California. As soon as Gibby had spoken, the girl who called herself Sara Bardon Frail lunged for that paper. She was clawing like a wildcat.

Nothing could have been simpler. Of course, it hadn’t been the first wife but the second who had been allowed to die before they got her to that doctor. With the first wife talented as she was, they had no need for the unfortunate Sara and when Sara conveniently developed that bad appendix in the High Sierras, that had done it. It was simple enough for Frail to come back for questioning and all that. It was his wife who couldn’t be seen in any of the places in California where she had been known; and it had been safe enough, or so he had thought, to bring her to New York for her grandfather’s last days. She could be stubborn and stay out of the old man’s room and none of the others had ever seen Sara Bardon Frail. Meanwhile, they would be on the spot so they could make certain they weren’t jobbed on the old man’s will.

He’d made his mistake in doing that. She was safe, but he wasn’t. He was taking her into a house where Sara Frail was loved and where her husband was hated. Once he’d established her there, she had no further need of him. She could improvise and for her improvisations she had all those Bardons on whom suspicion could fall.

“His luck ran out,” Gibby said. “But so did hers. Hers ran out when it happened to be cyanide that came ready to hand for murdering her husband. For a Californian cyanide was bad. The stuff has gas-chamber associations. She thought she could take it but when the moment came and she smelled the stuff and saw him drop, she weakened. That’s where her luck ran out. She fainted and while you were helping her, you put up her veil. That did it. Mama Gibbs saw her and that meant Mama Gibbs had to be silenced. Muriel knew the dame well enough to know her preference in liquor and while you were downstairs letting the Gibbses in, she did a quick job of poisoning the bottle and setting it out on the bar.”

So that’s the way it was. For all of Gibby’s brilliance, in this one it was I who cracked the case. I caught the gal when she fell. I lowered her to the sidewalk. I threw back her veil and with that last act, I finished her off. I have my uses.

Sacrifice

by Warren Frost

“There’s the gun, Padre. You want to be a hero, use it.”

The young priest stood perfectly still facing the gnarled, phlegmatic sheriff. Only his clenched fists marred the otherwise placid façade, but his thoughts were racing up and down a scale of emotions he had never encountered before. For the first time in his life he wanted to hurt a man. Reach out with his hands and hurt this tired, inept old man standing before him.

“Well?” the lawman asked. “What are you going to do?”

Words finally came to him and he spoke them softly and slowly, as though testing their truth before he freed them from his mind. “That man is a human being, Sheriff. He’s not an animal. He deserves a trial.” He pointed to the half-breed crouched in the corner of one of the two small cells of the jail. Sweat poured down the faces of the three men for, although not yet eleven, the sun was baking the little town of Dobart for the tenth straight day in 110-degree heat.

“Let me tell you something, young fella,” the sheriff growled. “You can’t come out here with your fancy ideas and change us over in a week. You best let nature take its course like I am.”

“That man is going to be... be murdered!”

“Padre, I’m an old man. I’m tired. I got an eyewitness to the killin’.”

“A simple-minded boy. You can’t take his...”

“I take what I want,” the sheriff interrupted. “I don’t take what I don’t want. My job’s to keep this miserable little town happy as possible. Now I had a killin’ this mornin’. I got a man says he saw that man do the killin’. And I got a town full of men who ain’t happy about the killin’. If I wait for the circuit judge, it might be two, three weeks afore we have a trial, with them same men that ain’t happy today sitting on the jury. I don’t rightly see how it makes much difference whether they hang him today or next month. Do you?”

The noise was growing louder from across the street. All that was missing was the final spark.

The priest turned his back on the law and walked out into the hot, dusty street. He couldn’t take up a gun, but he knew he must at least try to stop it. Perhaps he could reach them before it was too late — but how? At all costs, he had cautioned himself over and over on the trip west, you must avoid a pious attitude. The roughhewed would never understand.

He walked quickly across the deserted street to the saloon that now caged most of the town’s male population. Men, who two hours before had been ordinary, peace-loving citizens, were now turning into animals. Through the swinging doors he saw Jerry, the eyewitness, swaggering up and down on top of the bar, the toast of the town. A simple-minded boy having a moment of glory.

He pushed the doors open and started for the bar. His sudden presence hushed the crowd. For a brief moment the color of his habit made wild men sane and he felt their resentment. They were working toward a goal of courage. Their god was in a bottle now and they wanted no earthly representative of another faith to block their progress.

He walked straight to the bar as the silent men parted to make a path for him.

The trouble had started early that morning when Frank Craven had been shot in the back as he trudged along the old Mesa Pass road near Banner Forks. Frank was old, nobody knew how old, and harmless. Everybody had always accepted Frank as part of the scenery around Dobart. Now that he was dead, he had become everyone’s best friend.

“Great old guy!”

“Never forget him!”

“Poor Frank!”

“Great old guy!”

Tempers had soared with the sudden discovery of the terrible loss of such a great friend.

“Who’d do it?”

“We ought to get a posse.”

“The guy who finds him would be a hero!”

Hero! The man who finds the killer would be a hero!

This oft-repeated word reached the listening ears of the boy named Jerry, age eighteen, who swept stores, ran errands and dreamed of the day he might be a recognized part of Dobart’s male society. His thoughts came slowly, but the pattern began to form.

“Sheriff,” the men said, “we ought to get a posse.”

“Poor Frank.”

“Be calm. It’s a hot day. We’ll find him,” the old sheriff said and went to his office, had a swig from the bottle, mopped his brow and put his feet up on the desk to think, and sleep, or just sleep.

Hero! The man would be a hero. The word echoed louder and louder in the empty caverns of Jerry’s mind.

So, tempers rose and tempers fell and an hour later the incident was almost forgotten. Frank Craven was dead. He had his moment of fond memory and immortality in the minds of his pathetic friends and then he slipped away to be forgotten until his burial later that day.

It was at this moment that the young priest made his first public appearance of the day after an unsatisfactory breakfast of greasy eggs at the hotel, but he accepted this as part of the cross he must bear in order to bring his teachings where they would do the most good. His task was uppermost in his mind this morning, for in two days he would be celebrating his first mass and certain physical necessities would have to be taken care of.

The sheriff looked up as he entered the dirty office. “Hello, Padre. Have a swig.” He offered the bottle.

“Good morning, Sheriff. I don’t believe right now, thank you.” This man was going to be difficult for him, yet he knew he needed the lawman’s acceptance since he was the titular leader of his new parish.

“Suit yourself,” the old man said.

“I hear a man has been killed?”

“You hear right.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

The sheriff looked up at him again. Christ, he’s an oddball, he thought, but what can you expect from someone in long skirts? “We’ll bury him when the sun goes down. You can bring your little book with you if you like.” It would save him the trouble of saying meaningless words, so perhaps there was consolation after all.

“Of course,” the priest said with a note of scholarly reverence in his voice. He let a moment pass, then launched into the real reason for his visit. “Sheriff, I wonder if I could get some benches built. For Sunday. I realize it’s relatively short notice, but I thought it’d be nice if folks could sit down.”

“What folks?”

“I’m having church services Sunday morning.”

“So the sign said.”

“I expect a few of your citizens will attend. At least some of the ladies have indicated they would.” He was being baited and he knew it. Perhaps now was the time to get their differences out in the open. He certainly couldn’t operate efficiently under the conditions this man would set up if he allowed him to. “You don’t like me very much, do you?” he said, bracing himself for what might come.

“I ain’t thought about that one way or the other.” The old man grinned showing his half-gone set of teeth. “Would you like a definite answer right now or can you wait a spell?”

“Sheriff, I was sent here. I was sent to do a job.” It was a schoolboy rebuttal, but debate had never been one of his strong points. “What your views may be on religion are your own,” he concluded.

“Thank you.”

“But I had hoped for some cooperation.”

“Look, Padre,” he snapped, as his feet found the floor and he sat up in his chair, “I ain’t got nothing against you personally, but things are running pretty smooth hereabouts. We settle our troubles the easiest way we can and folks take to it that way. Now I ain’t doubting your methods, but I’d just like to get one thing straight. I won’t bother you none, and you can return the favor. Do I make myself clear?”

The priest made no outward sign, but tolerance was coming hard for him.

“What I’m trying to say is, I run this town my way. Folks believe in me. I wouldn’t want that sort of thing changed. I’m too old for change.”

“Changes come along sometimes whether we like them or not.”

“Maybe in Boston, Padre, but not here. They like things the way they are. They lie still. You leave ’em that way, we won’t have no troubles.”

“I have no plans for making any sweeping changes, Sheriff, at the moment”

“Now that’s mighty reassurin’.” The sheriff sighed. He looked about him, letting his unhappy guest hang for a moment. Finally, he continued. “This is my territory,” he said, indicating the dilapidated room with the two cells in the rear. “Josh Reynolds might make you some benches for your church. That’s your territory. Now you stay in yours and I’ll stay in mine. You sing them songs on Sunday and you hold them ladies’ hands. You bring your little book to the open graves and you forget everything else.” He paused to allow the words time to sink in. “Good-by, Padre,” he said, and the dismissal fell like spit at the feet of the young man.

There is no recourse with men like this, he thought. Their souls had obviously closed off the real world and were living in an abyss of self-indulgence. He spun on his heels, fought back a “thank you” that formed in his parched throat and walked out into the street to find Josh Reynolds, the casket-maker, handy man of Dobart.

He hardly noticed the boy, Jerry, casually leaning on an old broom as he came out of the jail. Jerry had heard all and he wanted to run in and shake the old lawman’s hand for the way he’d handled the critter. But, the sheriff didn’t take kindly to intrusions when he was aiming to rest, so the boy settled for a laugh. It was not loud enough for the ears of the retreating priest, but it gave the boy that indefinable feeling of belonging. His muddled thoughts groped back to that word, Hero, and be cussed to himself because it wasn’t easy to be a hero and it was so important. He figured the only way he’d ever be one was with some sort of miracle.

Ten minutes later his miracle arrived.

The half-breed reined his pinto up beside the dozing boy. “Hey, kid?” be called. “What’s the name of this dumb town?” His voice was high-pitched and be spoke with a thick accent.

“Dobart,” Jerry answered numbly, pulling himself awake.

“Look like not much of a town,” the man sneered.

“You think so?” Jerry replied haughtily, for insults such as these demanded proper attention.

The man laughed. “Dumb kid,” he said and tugged at the rein and headed across the street to the saloon.

Jerry lay the broom carelessly against the post. He stepped into the road and as though hypnotically drawn, he followed the stranger. The word was pounding harder in his mind now. Hero! Hero! Hero! Its staccato beat punished him and drove him forward. He watched the ugly creature tie off his horse. He watched him swagger into the bar and listened to him demand a bottle like no man should demand — least of all a man like him. Then he knew. The way two cowhands looked at the new arrival and the way the bartender gave his customer the cheapest rotgut and walked away without a word. He knew — his miracle was ready-made.

He didn’t tell his story very well, but he didn’t have to. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?” The sheriff asked, regretting even then he found it necessary to question at all

“I didn’t know where it had happened,” Jerry went on, fighting to control the twitching sensations that throbbed through his sweating body. “I was too far away to see what the guy was doing, but when he rode by me I got a good look at him. That guy in the bar is the man who killed Frank Craven. I swear it, Sheriff.”

In his story he had claimed to be out for an early-morning walk and since Jerry’s behavior pattern had long since defied definition it did not seem surprising.

For a moment the sheriff showed no sign. He thought of asking why Jerry didn’t check to see if it had been Craven, but he discarded the idea, at least for the moment.

The old man’s silence tore at Jerry because he was sure he was close and...

“Let’s have a look,” the lawman said.

A look was all he needed. The fact that the drifter could neither prove his whereabouts at dawn nor account for the sixteen dollars in his tattered pants only added fuel.

“Who tell you this?” the man screamed, as the sheriff threw him into the cell and slammed the rusty old door shut. “He lie! He lie!” the frightened man cried as he shook his cage violently.

As the unremitting sun gathered its strength for another day of punishment, the word spread. Some of the more curious peered through the jail windows for a look, but most just accepted, because accepting was less demanding.

“Some greaser!”

“Might’a know.”

“Jerry saw him.”

“Jerry?” incredulously.

“Sheriff says.”

“Well!”

“WELL!”

“What d’ya know.”

“Hey! There he is!”

There he was, standing meekly near the jail. He was uncertain and having conscience pains. Now that it was done, maybe he shouldn’t have — or worse still, maybe it wouldn’t work, and folks would only laugh like always and he would have lost his chance. Christ, it was difficult figuring out things about people. And if it didn’t work, maybe he ought to tell the sheriff he’d made a mistake. And...

“Hey, Jerry! Come on, kid. I’ll buy you a drink.”

Invitation! No funning? No cussing? No jokes? A real invitation, just like a real man?

“Here he is, boys. The man who got Frank Craven’s killer!”

He was numb and fighting to smile. Was it true? Suddenly all his dreams were there on the bar before him and folks were passing the word. The crowd swelled and over and over he repeated his story between free drinks until the drinks and the story became one and the same and the story became much more explicit and at the same time fuzzy. The room danced and faces blurred. All the smiling, happy, sweating faces that looked up at him on his lofty perch on top of the bar.

“Here’s to the man who got the greaser!” a voice from the haze proposed.

The noise grew louder with the agreements and the boy danced a little and bowed deeply until they helped him regain his balance. Then everyone laughed and that felt good, too. Everybody laughing with him, and he wanted to cry. He would have, too, he thought, if he hadn’t been so happy. You dream and dream and dream of happiness and when it finally comes it wraps you up in its soft cloak and makes you feel so warm and good all over.

So, the hero was made and the oft-repeated word began to fade into the jubilant background and from this fog of phony merriment another word came slipping stealthily out. Softly, hesitantly at first, but the momentum was as inevitable as the rising sun. As the parched lips grew wet with whisky, the word grew bolder and more important and more compelling — LYNCH!

No one had said a word. The priest had been allowed to enter through the crowd. He had stopped when he reached the bar and stared into the expressionless eyes of the bartender. To his left, along the bar, he could see the newly crowned hero, weaving slightly and glaring at him through bleary eyes. He dared not turn around to face them, for his intrusion had been a grandstand move in a game he had never played before. Perhaps they will make the first move, he thought, but as the silence continued behind him, he realized it was up to him. They were giving him his moment. “Oh, My Heavenly Father,” he prayed silently, “give me strength.”

“Could I have a glass of wine, bartender, please?” he finally asked. His voice caught on the word “wine,” but the bartender never flinched as he produced a dusty bottle, a clean glass and fulfilled the churchman’s request. When the priest started for his money pouch the bartender’s growl stopped him. “On the house,” he said.

The priest nodded his thanks. He felt the silent words of laughter and contempt pass from eye to eye of the men behind him. The wine burned and tasted vinegary and he was ashamed of the tear that formed in his eye. He blinked it away helplessly.

From somewhere out of the forest of silent men a throat was cleared. His time had come. “Turn and face us, Priest,” their probing eyes demanded. “Say your say — if you dare.”

He turned quickly, jerkingly, for he was not able to muster the courage of a confident slow turn. There they were, waiting — a sea of hot, sweating, featureless faces staring through him and seeing inside him to his paralyzed mind and pounding heart.

He noticed Charlie Tinkham, the dry-goods storekeeper, near the front of the mob. The man’s rimless glasses clung perilously to the prim little nose and his mouth twitched as the priest’s eyes singled him out. “Mr. Tinkham? Hadn’t you better be getting back to the store?” he asked softly. The little man sighed with relief at being let off so easily and his eyes cast about looking for a twinkle of encouragement. But the priest wasn’t through. “Might lose some sales,” he blundered on. He tried to make it sound light, but the laugh, which should have accompanied his little Joke, caught in his tense throat.

Tinkham had passed his test. Without a word he turned toward the bar and offered his empty glass for a refill.

What frightened the churchman most was that there seemed to be no anger toward him. It was as though he posed no threat and thus rated only a passive tolerance for his trouble.

He spotted Josh Reynolds and asked the old carpenter if he’d been able to get started on his benches. “Busy!” came back the terse reply. “Building a casket for Frank Craven.”

Had he tried, he could not have written a better epitaph to his peacemaking efforts.

“Best be going along, Padre,” Logan Answain, the giant blacksmith, advised. He spoke as though telling a small boy to leave the room so, the adults could talk and the silence around the dismisser only added insistence to his request.

As the crowd had parted on his entrance, so they gave way again. He made no effort to save face. No strong nod or pointed wave of the hand. He dragged himself out the way he had come. Pushing open the door before him, he passed through into the sweltering street. The door swung closed behind him and a voice inside exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! Gimme a drink!”

Twenty-eight years old and ever since he could remember he had wanted to be a priest. Hard work and honest devotion had earned him his collar. Now he was on the threshold of his first real challenge and all he had been able to offer was a silly joke — “You might lose some sales.” What manner of man was he? The thoughts tore at him. Had he deluded himself so completely? He had asked for his assignment with splendid assurance. Now he stood in the dusty street, outside a saloon, a pitiful failure and he wanted to be sick.

The church had done a great deal in bringing both understanding and peace to the difficult border lands. Their task hadn’t been easy, but the men who had preceded him west had cut their niche. He had read about them eagerly and he honestly felt it to be his destiny. He could have had a church in Weymouth or he might even have stayed on to teach at the seminary, but his belief was genuine and the bishop had wished him well.

He gripped the hitching post and fought back the nausea boiling within him. He was losing a battle to self-pity and his weakness disgusted him. Slowly he gained control of his churning stomach. I am going to be a party to a murder, he thought, and he mumbled a silent prayer for forgiveness. Well, pull yourself together, he finally demanded. At least face your victim like a man. Give him solace if you can give him nothing else. He straightened up with an exaggerated effort and marched across the street to the jail.

When he entered, his eyes met those of the prisoner. They were eyes full of hate and fury. They asked for neither love nor understanding, as if they belonged to a man who had learned that such did not exist for him.

“May I speak to him?” he asked the lawman.

“Suit yourself.”

He walked to the barred cage. “I’m afraid there may be some trouble,” he explained weakly. “Do you know what you are charged with, my son?”

“They think I kill a man.”

“An old man.” The priest went on, “Did you do it?” he asked, hopefully wishing to find help for his sagging conscience.

“I kill nobody,” he said defiantly. “Nobody!”

Dear God in Heaven, the priest thought, they are going to kill an innocent man. He is telling the truth. He must be, he repeated to himself as he searched the man’s eyes for one sign of untruth. “I believe you,” he said solemnly. “May God give you strength, my son.”

He spun away from the condemned man and walked quickly to the sheriff. For just a moment the eyes of the prisoner twinkled with a laugh of contempt, but the priest had already turned away.

“The man is innocent,” he said to the sheriff. “How can you sit there and let them believe what is not true? I implore you. Have you no human feelings left? Have you slipped so far as to condone murder?”

“You say he’s innocent How d’you know?” the sheriff asked and took another drink, for time was running out.

“He told me so.”

“And you believe him?”

“He wouldn’t lie to me, Sheriff. What would he gain?”

“Don’t ask roe to figure ’em. I never could.”

“You’ve never tried.”

“Maybe I never wanted to try.”

The saloon across the street exploded with the final release from the bounds of human dignity.

“They’re coming,” the priest heard himself say half-aloud.

The sheriff removed his gun once again from its holster and pointedly lay it on the desk before the priest. “They’re doing what they want to do and doing it’ll solve their problem.”

“They’re going to lynch him.”

“Ain’t never had a lynching in Dobart. Maybe they figure it’s their turn,” he said, but he took another drink.

The priest was white. His trembling limbs quivered under his cloak as another roar came rolling across the dusty road. It was louder than before and with more assurance.

“Reckon they found the spark they needed.” The sheriff mumbled, for already the alcohol was numbing his tongue.

Their spark appeared in the form of Eben Lawrence, a crony of Frank Craven’s from the hotel-porch set. Eben never really slept, but he lived most of his daylight hours in the cradle-like grasp of a porch rocker. So, when he appeared now in the saloon, all the morning’s events had slipped past him. He only knew that some few minutes before he had become aware that the chair beside him was not holding its usual occupant and anything that important needed looking into.

“Seen Frank Craven?” he asked one of the men on the outer ring of the crowd. “I been looking for Frank and I ain’t seen him.” Eben was like family and he got family treatment as they eased him through the mob and up to the bar.

“Frank’s dead,” somebody told him and Eben learned the assassin was resting across the street behind bars.

“I’ll kill him,” the old one said as he began to shake with anger. “He killed Frank and I’ll kill him. Frank was my friend. My friend,” he repeated, and the tears began to trickle down the sun-dried old face.

So this was the spark. An old man with an antiquated love of a dead friend.

“We’ll take care of him for you, Eben,” they said and the chorus grew in numbers. “Won’t we?” they shouted and from somewhere came a rope. Glasses were emptied and the saloon spilled men out into the street. The men stumbled, but marched in force, for only in force, despite all the time and whisky, did they possess the courage for such an act.

And Eben sat down on the floor of the empty saloon and he cried. When you’re an Eben Lawrence you can’t afford such a loss for there is nothing to take its place. So you cry for it is best and it is easy and suddenly it makes you feel good because so many people really care.

As the wave rolled on, the four men fought their separate battles.

The priest found himself staring at the gun before him. His ineffectiveness had ground him to immobility as each beat of his pounding heart stabbed him for his inadequacies.

The sheriff held the near-empty bottle to his lips. Pass out, he prayed. Let me pass out right now, he begged silently.

The intended victim, when he realized the time had come, could only gather his helpless form in one last swing at the ugly world and curse it up and down in the two languages he knew. “Pigs!” he screamed and his mocking words fell in with the storm from outside and echoed aimlessly in the air.

And the boy, the hero, melted from the crowd. His role had faded from importance with the advent of old Eben and he clung more and more desperately to his obscurity as the tension mounted.

They came as an army through the door. They pressed past that atrophied man of justice, the sheriff, and seized their goal within their hands. They passed the screaming, kicking animal among them until once more they reached the street.

Down the road they pulled and dragged the half-breed toward the single oak silhouetted against the merciless sky.

Almost without knowing it, the young priest followed. His steps were faulty and his eyes blurred from the scene as he repeated feebly his prayers for forgiveness.

The sheriff stumbled out of his sanctuary and leaned drunkenly against the porch rail. Watch, you miserable slob, he said to himself. Watch it and try your damnedest to forget.

When Jerry saw the struggling man being tossed from hand to hand, he bolted. As fast as his weakened legs would carry him, he ran for the cover of the empty saloon. Over the roar of the mob the sobs of the dead man’s friend came to him. He put his hands over his ears, frantically trying to close out all sound from his terrified mind.

The rope went up and over the limb and the noose came down and swayed lightly in the heavy air. They brought up a horse and started to boost the man up. His eyes came to rest on the big knot with the loop below and suddenly he stopped squirming. His tense body relaxed as he looked from the rope to the nearest man. “Priest!” he said, and the men lowered him to the ground. The word worked its way through the crowd and presently, as they had in the saloon, the mob parted and from the end of the gantlet came the priest.

He knelt beside the still figure as a hush fell over the mob. They pushed the ring back to give space, if nothing else, to the solemn moment.

“May I help you, my son?” There was a quiver in his voice, but he didn’t care. He did not feel impersonal about the act which was coming.

“Father,” he began in a whisper, as he put his lips close to the priest’s ears. Some few heads turned and others bowed and for the moment no man spoke.

Jerry crouched behind the bar still trying to stifle the sound from without. Then he became aware of no sound save Eben’s quiet sobbing and out of this sudden silence came a memory from the dim past. The memory took the shape of a word and it reached out and seized its owner by the throat and held him in its terrifying grip. The boy fought and swung his arms wildly, as the word increased its hold. Hero! the memory cried. Hero! Hero! Hero! the beat continued and the boy slumped flat on the floor. Hero! Hero! Hero! the punishment increased and through it all came the constant accompaniment of Eben’s tearful moans.

“I kill him, Father,” the man confessed. “He was old. Near deadlike and I kill him. I no think he live here. I swear, Father, I never kill before.” The man babbled on, but his words suddenly lost definition after the first sentence had reached the listening ear of the priest He felt himself stiffen as the blood drained from his face. “What difference does it make?” he heard the sheriff say. “Now or in a month?” “But he’s innocent! He told me!” “And you believe him?” Believe? Believe? Dear God in Heaven, do I believe in anything any more?

Somehow he listened, giving solace when he could and absolution and blessing when the man was through. Their eyes met at the last and the man smiled simply at the priest Then he stood up stiffly.

As the man rose, the crowd moved in and the silence stopped. They needed momentum now and shouting helped, so they shouted loud and long. They pushed and shoved one another, because pushing was striking out and shoving made one mad and when one was mad one could do all kinds of things.

The roar, after the interminable silence, cut the cringing boy like a knife. He was sick now and helpless as he lay on the dirty floor. As the sound increased in tempo, his head began to swim and he seemed to pass out only to have some unexplainable urge revive him.

Then all was deathly still and the silence settled mistlike over the boy. Whatever it is in man that keeps him from falling over that final precipice of reason, surged forth now in the boy. Suddenly he was on his feet As he plunged through the doors he found his voice. He had difficulty projecting, but as he half-ran, half-stumbled toward the circle around the craggy old tree, it gained in volume. “Stop it,” he begged. “Stop. Stop it. I lied,” he cried. “I lied!”

Through the quietly triumphant mob he pushed until he stood alone within the circle. “I lied,” he screamed. His words grasped each man by the throat. “I lied,” he repeated as the dangling feet came menacingly close to his tear-filled face. “I didn’t see anything,” he muttered. His knees failed him, and he sank slowly into a heap within the swaying shadow of the dead man.

Some men bolted and others, not as lucky, fought a losing battle with their stomachs as their eyes followed, with uncontrolled fascination, their strangled victim. Their innocent victim.

The storekeeper returned to his calico and muslin and the blacksmith attempted to soothe his conscience before his anvil. Within seconds the street was clear. Clear, except for a simpering boy groveling under a shadow. Except for the trembling sheriff, who somehow had dragged himself to the side of his accomplice and stood glassy-eyed, staring through and beyond a man who would haunt him forever. And except for the priest. I hold a secret, he thought, a secret that could free a town of its bonds. I wonder, he mused more wisely than ever before in his short, sheltered life. I wonder? Would I free them even if I could?

The shadows dimmed that day on Dobart’s last lynching. Though the street in time resumed an air of life and custom, no man who stood among them ever forgot.

Incidents on B Street

by Paul W. Fairman

He turned into B Street around half-past three that afternoon. He came from no place in particular and he had no clear destination at the moment — this shuffling little nondescript who had caused some concern among the mothers of the Flat Point area; an entirely logical concern because his twisted body and ragged filth were translated easily into marks of latent viciousness.

So they were naturally worried when they saw him walking their streets and sitting empty-eyed in their parks. Some of them felt a complaint was in order, but none went quite that far because they were all honest taxpayers and neighborhood protection was up to the police. So the little man went his way, unaware of their low regard, the mute hostility simply not penetrating his consciousness.

He lived on Garth Place in a windowless little cubbyhole, existing by grace of a tiny pension of some sort — a pittance that gave him means of survival. He had no one and no one claimed him. Even his name was known only to the bank teller who cashed his monthly check and then forgot him until the next visit.

But it had not always been thus, even though the little man himself could not clearly remember when it had been different. There was a picture of better and more vital days somewhere back in his memory — bright days — but glimpses of them could be dredged up only by dint of great mental effort. And even then the memory-bridge never quite took him back to the times before chaos, always threw him squarely into the blur of that terrible brink-of-death business from which great surgical skill had salvaged his life, but little else.

So he’d stopped trying to remember; content now to live from moment to moment in the half-world of damaged mind and broken body. A not-unpleasant life, really, because the sun warmed him on good days and the Garth Place furnace was generous with its heat when the streets turned icy.

Content because he was incapable of discontent and that about summed him up.

But on this particular afternoon a probing recall nudged him sharply. This occurred when he moved up B Street and saw four boys playing in the open basement of a burnt-out warehouse — a dangerous ruin — a second menace that had brought worry to the mothers of Flat Point.

Fire had gutted the building some months earlier — so fiercely that nothing remained but the basement and a three-floor brick wall running thin and fragile along one side of the excavation. This wall should have been long-since demolished, but a jurisdictional argument between two city departments had delayed the work. And until the dispute could be settled, red DANGER — NO TRESPASSING! signs had been posted on the three open sides of the basement.

But the four boys had ignored the signs with careless courage and an urgent something stirred in the crippled man’s mind; something that told him he had once been a person of authority; that protection of the public had been a part of his work, warning the foolhardy still his duty.

So, acting on this cloudy instinct, he straightened his bent back, frowned down Into the pit, and called out, “Get out of that hole! What are you trying to do — get killed? Come on — get moving!”

The boys looked up in idle wonder. They’d seen the old bum before, roaming aimlessly through Flat Point, but they’d ignored him as being not even a worthy target for the hazing impulsive youth sometimes inflicts on the helpless.

But this was different. He’d made sounds like a human being — ridiculous sounds — and they commented.

“Dig the loud-mouth slob, you guys.”

“Beat it, ya crazy lush.”

“Is he for real, fellas?”

“Let’s find out.” And the fourth boy picked up a rock and threw it with enough accuracy to hit the man on the leg.

The sharp pain broke the spell, and he whimpered as he came back to reality because pain was an undefeated enemy he remembered well. And with pain came fear and he turned and ran off up the street although ran was hardly the word. He hopped along ridiculously on one stiff leg and one that gave limply under pressure; an amusing spectacle, and it was understandable that four boys, alert for chances of fun on this pleasant afternoon, should climb outof the pit and take off in hot pursuit.

They closed in on him at the edge of Flat Point Park and what happened was no doubt his own fault. He should not have shown such terror. He should not have clambered like a scared, crippled rabbit up a rocky embankment as though danger were at his heels. He shouldn’t have tempted the four boys in this manner with so many rocks handy. It was a stupid thing to do.

And certainly not the fault of the lads that they responded to a whim of the moment and threw a few of the rocks. They weren’t bad boys; not killers by any stretch of imagination.

This was amply proved when an accidently accurate pitch hit the old man squarely in the temple and he dropped as though pole-axed; proved by the fact that the boys stopped throwing instantly and registered fright. They hadn’t meant any harm. They’d only been having a little fun.

Immediately, the logical argument started as to which one had really thrown the lethal rock. They all denied it and accused each other. Then they debated as to whether any of the rocks had actually hit the old man. Probably not. He’d been drunk in the first place. Anybody could see that. And they hadn’t been chasing him, either. They had as much right in the park as he did, so how was it their fault if the drunk old coot fell down and hurt himself?

They arrived at these conclusions as they retreated slowly — slowly to make it obvious that they really weren’t retreating at all. And then they remembered they hadn’t been home from school yet and that their mothers would probably be worried. So they broke up as a group and each went quietly and obediently home.

The old man lay on the rocky hillside for almost an hour, just another drunk nobody paid any attention to until a squad car cruised by containing two policemen whose business it was to pay attention to bums.

They went up and looked the old fellow over, found him unconscious, and sent for an ambulance. The response was tolerably prompt, two internes arriving within twenty minutes, but the old man died halfway to the hospital.

What had happened was pretty obvious. An old drunk trying to find a secluded spot to sleep it off had fallen on a rocky hillside in the park and busted his skull. The mark of the rock was plainly visible. No perceptible signs of alcohol — but that didn’t mean too much because you could never tell about those old rummies. Even if he hadn’t been drunk at the moment, what was he doing there in the first place? Easy for a cripple to slip on that rocky incline.

As a matter of form the two policemen went back to check. And sure enough, there was a sharp rock with blood on it. You didn’t even have to look close. After all, what was this? A big murder case or something?

So that closed one of the afternoon’s incidents on B Street; the other — the sudden collapse of the brick wall into the basement of the old warehouse — generated more interest and excitement.

A woman across the alley was sure she’d seen some boys playing in the basement just before the wall went down. But a quick check showed the basement to contain nothing but bricks and mortar, leading them to believe the woman had merely wanted to “get into the act,” to be momentarily important.

So, all in all, the incidents on B Street that afternoon were not without value to the community. In a matter of minutes, the mothers of Hat Point were relieved of two worries. Twin threats to the well-being of their children had been eliminated.

And that made it a better community.

A safer place to grow and prosper.

Cure for a Headache

by Stuart Palmer

The bottle of Bromo-Seltzer arrived by mail on Christmas Eve, its package addressed in a rather flowery hand to Mr. Harry Cornish, Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Madison Avenue and 45th Street, New York City. A gift package, gift-wrapped — and the gift was death.

Harry Cornish was chief athletic director of the exclusive club, a red-haired, moderately pugnacious man in his early thirties. He seems to have been very popular with all — or almost all — its select membership of young men about town.

There was no return address on the parcel. Inside it was a Tiffany box — or at least a box with a Tiffany label — containing a little blue bottle of Bromo in an ornate, solid-silver holder. It was the sort of gift a woman might choose — a woman with a sense of humor. Harry Cornish received a bit of ribbing from the members about the gift, and his anonymous admirer; the implication was, of course, that he would be likely to need some sort of hangover remedy after the imminent holiday festivities. But he professed to have no idea as to the identity of the mysterious donor, and on second thought, he retrieved the package wrapper from the wastebasket and put it into his desk, with some vague idea of finding who might have sent it. He also left the bottle and its silver container there, and went home as usual to the boardinghouse where he lived. This was a sedate brownstone at 61 West 86th Street, operated by the elderly Mrs. Katherine Adams, a distant relative of his. There he celebrated Christmas in his usual sedate fashion.

This was back in the so-called Gay Nineties, but Harry Cornish was no gay bachelor. He had been married briefly and divorced; his ex-wife had remarried happily and was living in Albany — and he was wary of women and wine. In the household was also Mrs. Adams’ daughter Laura, separated from her husband, and an elderly lady known as Aunt Anna. It cannot have been a very exciting menage — but he wasn’t out for excitement.

On the day after Christmas, back at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, there was in the locker room more friendly masculine badinage about Cornish and his Bromo. Mr. Henry King, a Wall Street broker of some standing, spoke up and said that he had a bit of a brannigan — or hangover — and that he would like to try a dose. He took the sealed bottle of powder and went over to the water cooler. In the words of the late Edmund Pearson, who wrote one of his inimitable essays on the case: “If he had listened carefully, I think he would have heard the soft rustling of wings; it was a moment of intense activity for Mr. King’s guardian angel!” For the water cooler luckily happened to be empty. After a few harsh words about the laxity of the house committee, King returned the bottle to Cornish and forgot all about it.

A day or so later, Cornish took the anonymous Christmas present home to the boardinghouse and put it on his dresser. Here also, from the three ladies in the house, he received some “joshing” about his secret admirer. And then next morning, Mrs. Katherine Adams arose with a blinding headache. Her dear daughter Laura thought immediately of Cornish’s Bromo-Seltzer and asked him to prepare a therapeutic dose for the old lady, which he did. To his lasting sorrow.

Mrs. Adams downed the draught with a wry face, complaining that it tasted “sort of bitter.” Cornish himself took a sip, and said he didn’t notice anything out of the way. But in a matter of moments, the old lady collapsed in agony. Cornish rose from his chair to go to her aid, and found that his knees buckled under him. A doctor was hastily summoned, but the old lady was dead on arrival. Heart attack, said the medico.

When the undertaker had been sent for, and the other melancholy formalities attended to, the conscientious Mr. Cornish went down to his regular daily duties at the Knickerbocker. But he was in no shape for work; he was suffering excruciating abdominal pain and had to be hastily put to bed in one of the rooms for resident members. For some days he hovered on the brink betwixt life and death. Yet nobody at that moment seemed to see any possible connection between Mrs. Adams’ fatal “heart attack” and the severe gastritis attack suffered the same morning by her lodger.

The first crack in the case appeared when an alert cub newspaperman from the New York Journal — a so-called “yellow sheet” of that year of 1898 — saw the report slip hanging on a hook in the coroner’s office in the Criminal Courts Building — and smelled a rat. Those were the halcyon days when the gentlemen of the fourth estate were allowed, or at least ventured to take, a great deal more latitude than reporters can today.

As a result of this reporter’s brief story in the Journal, the police picked up the bottle of Bromo-Seltzer from the Adams boardinghouse. Upon analysis it was found to have been spiked with cyanide of mercury, one of the deadliest of all poisons and one of the hardest to come by — at least for the average citizen.

So now it was clearly a matter for Homicide. Poor old Katherine Adams had no known enemies, in her house or without. But she had died, suddenly and horribly. The newspaper boys, especially those on the Journal, did a lot of the investigation for the police. It was fairly obvious, at least to one of them, that some murder plot had here misfired — that the poisoned Bromo had been aimed at Harry Cornish. Reporters from all the papers of the time bore down upon the Knickerbocker — and there they began to lift the lid of a veritable Pandora’s Box.

One of their discoveries was that about nine months ago, Harry Cornish had had a disagreement with one of the leading members and directors of the Knickerbocker Club. This was a handsome young buck in his early thirties, by the resounding name of Roland Molineux, who threw his weight around at times but was still popular, if only for his athletic prowess. Roland was the son of General Edward L. Molineux, then one of Brooklyn’s wealthiest and most respected citizens. The younger Molineux was a chemist, superintendent at the factory of Morris Herman, Inc., in Newark, manufacturers of paints and colors. He was also, at this time, a national champion amateur gymnast — among other things. Among many other things.

Our alert reporter, working in the true Front Page fashion, dug up some of the pertinent details of this old, almost forgotten disagreement between the powerful, spoiled young Molineux and Mr. Harry Cornish. The Knickerbocker Club had been planning an amateur athletic circus, and Molineux had loudly objected to having Cornish, as only a paid employee, taking any part There had been words — and the record shows that Cornish, who had red hair and the temperament which traditionally goes with it, was driven so far as to call Roland “a vile name.”

Certainly it was not tactful of Cornish to talk like that to one of the most influential members of the club he worked for. But Roland Molineux, instead of immediately resorting to fisticuffs to defend his honor, only set out to get Cornish fired from his job. “He goes — or I go!”

And as it happened, the directors of the club decided in favor of their faithful if hotheaded athletic director, so Mr. Roland Molineux departed in a high huff. He immediately joined a rival athletic club, and the incident was forgotten — by everybody but Roland Molineux, as the record shows later.

The inquisitive reporters also uncovered something else, which they brought to the attention of John D. Adams, secretary of the club, and of Andre Bustanoboy, its superintendent This was the surprising fact that only last November, a prominent member, a Mr. H. C. Barnet, had died in his room there, after an illness diagnosed by the doctors as diphtheria. He had got up from his sickbed too soon, decided the medicos, and had had a cardiac attack. But there was some mention, by club employees, of Mr. Barnet having received a bottle of Kutnow Powders in the mail, a bottle in a Tiffany box containing an empty envelope meant for the donor’s card, just as had Harry Cornish later. Barnet even had taken one or two of the powders, and had complained of their taste!

The reporters also found out that both Harry C. Barnet and Roland Molineux had for a fair period of time been courting the same lovely lady, a choir singer by the name of Blanche Cheseborough. Blanche seems to have divided her favors — which certainly were not inconsiderable — between her two swains. She couldn’t make up her mind, at least not until Barnet succumbed to diphtheria.

Blanche Cheseborough, according to the newspaper pen sketches of the time, was an exceptionally lovely and well-formed young woman and one who was almost of Miss America caliber. She also happened to have one glass eye, the result of a childhood accident. Perhaps it is true that one obvious flaw enhances real beauty.

Anyway, Blanche married Roland Molineux, less than three weeks after Barnet’s funeral at the Church of the Ascension, a ceremony which neither attended, though Blanche did remember to send flowers. Roland was later to explain that while he and Barnet were the closest of friends, he didn’t go to the funeral because “I wasn’t invited.”

The young couple plighted their troth in an ornate ceremony at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan, and then moved to the Waldorf-Astoria, where they had a brief and obviously superfluous honeymoon. Then they moved to a rooming house operated by a Mrs. Bellinger. And the roof began to fall in.

All this time, Roland Molineux had kept a set of rooms at the Herman factory in Newark, where, remember, he was the boss. This suite was cared for by an extremely attractive girl of Italian-Spanish-Mexican extraction, named Mamie Melando. We cannot at this late date inquire into the depth and extent of the relationship between Roland and Miss Melando. However, it is part of the record that after his marriage to the fair Blanche, he usually resided with her at the Bellinger house, and commuted to Newark. He also had numerous other ports of call, being a devious young man. In fact, for months before he and Blanche “made it legal” — and solemnized their relationship in church — he had maintained a flat in New York City under the name Mr. Cheseborough. Roland Molineux was a man of many parts, and a man of many names not his own. Why he chose the names he did is primarily of interest to psychologists, some of whom have debated on the point. It is also of possible interest to any serious observer. Molineux had his times when he was not Molineux, but somebody else. At least, in his own mind. He was Mr. Cheseborough, and so on and so forth — but at crucial times he was never Roland Molineux.

While the police of the City of New York were acting or thinking very slowly and carefully, the newspaper reporters kept busy. Finally, the Journal came out with a banner head: POLICE WANT ROLAND MOLINEUX. It was not quite the exact truth. But it served its point. That same day, the dapper young dandy, accompanied by his father, the General, and an influential family friend, did call upon Chief of Detectives McClusky, where they were received with kid-glove treatment and told that if and when the authorities wanted Roland, they knew where to find him.

Roland Molineux went home, and the heat seemed to be off. But the gentlemen of the press kept digging, and needling the authorities in every column. It was discovered that the bottle of Kutnow Powders, an effervescent laxative, had contained enough cyanide of mercury to kill a horse — or a whole stable of horses.

Chief McClusky then came up with a remarkable deduction. He had a small press conference and said, “The same mind sent both poisons!”

What good Chief McClusky wanted to say was that Harry C. Barnet had taken a draught from a bottle sent to him anonymously in the mail, and that Harry Cornish had narrowly escaped doing the same thing. One died, and one narrowly escaped death only to have his landlady die in his stead.

There was no immediate action taken, however. Except by the busy reporters. They found out somehow that a mail-service box had been rented, over a year earlier, at a shop on Broadway under the name Harry Cornish. The renter was a well-dressed, handsome young man who did not in any way resemble the real Cornish. That led to the discovery of the fact that another handsome, well-dressed young man had rented another “convenience-address” box in another shop on West 47th, this time under the name H. C. Barnet.

Somebody who wished his mail to come to him anonymously had rented mailboxes under the names of two other people. It is perhaps significant that the renter of these boxes never thought of a “John Smith” or a “Joe Robinson” alias. It was then found that the proprietors of these convenience-address shops had done a bit of snooping, and that they had in their busy way come to note that all the correspondence of their mysterious, handsome young client had been with firms dealing in “lost manhood” pills — in other words, in remedies for impotence, real or imagined. Also, the description of the client fitted Roland Molineux so perfectly to a T, and the handwriting on the application forms fitted his hand so perfectly to the same T, that it looked to everyone as if the case was in the bag.

All this was proved, and effectively proved, later in court. Roland Molineux had once taken an apartment under the name of his then mistress, he had taken at least two mailboxes under the names of two acquaintances whom he considered to be enemies. He could, of course, at any time have bought his potency pills at the nearest drugstore, with no questions asked.

Why this man went into such devious ways is a question we can only ask. Why he spent so much time, and so much of his father’s money, on the pills, when he was a champion athlete, with a mistress — later, for a short time, his wife — and at least one or two other ladies with whom he had an “understanding,” is also, as the politicians say, a good question. Besides, it is in the record that at the age of fifteen, our hero had been named as corespondent in a divorce case!

There was finally an inquest into the death of Harry C. Barnet, after DA Asa Bird Gardiner and his assistant, Mr. Osbourne, got into action. Molineux testified, saying under oath that he had been Barnet’s dear friend right up to the end; he had only refrained from visiting his sick pal because of a natural desire to avoid the danger of catching diphtheria. Since, as he well knew, the diphtheria was loaded in a little bottle of Kutnow Powders prepared by himself, we can perhaps understand his point of view.

The lovely Blanche Cheseborough Molineux, then only twenty-three, testified that she had never had any “improper” relations with Barnet. It was then her word against that of numerous hotel clerks who swore in court — and who had no reason to lie — that she and Barnet had registered often as Mr. and Mrs. Barnet.

Blanche made a marked impression on the Coroner’s Jury, and it looked well for our fair-haired boy. And then seven handwriting experts testified that Roland Molineux and nobody else had written the name and address on the two anonymous packages — one of which led to the demise of Mr. Barnet and one to the death of Mrs. Katherine Adams. At this point in the proceedings, Colonel Gardiner took over from his assistant, Mr. Osbourne, and summed up the evidence so strongly that the jury found against Roland Molineux on “both counts.” Which may have made sense, but which was not according to law; this was supposed to have been an inquest into the death of H. C. Barnet and nothing else.

The bewildered but loyal General Molineux, a nice old gentleman for whom we can have only pity, went to vast lengths to put up bail for his son. Bail was, however, refused, and young Molineux spent that night not in the arms of his beautiful, one-eyed Blanche, but on a bare mattress in The Tombs.

Now everybody began to get into the act, as the old show-business saying goes. It was discovered by reporters and/or police detectives that there was a hallmark on the ornate silver holder which had enclosed the poisoned Bromo sent to Cornish. That hallmark was checked, and led to a wholesale jeweler in Newark, and thence to a retail jeweler in the same city — just around the corner from where Roland worked.

The body of Harry Barnet was disinterred, and found — as nearly everybody expected by that time — to be loaded with cyanide of mercury. Katherine Adams’ body was also dug up, and found riddled with the same poison. Cyanide of mercury has limited commercial uses, but it is used in the manufacture of Prussian blue, one of the paint colors prepared at the Herman factory, of which the dashing Roland was superintendent.

During this time, young Molineux languished in his jail cell — and languished well. He had his meals sent in from Delmonico’s, his bedding also sent in daily and, no doubt, his copy of the Police Gazette every Tuesday.

He gave no interviews to the press; he seems to have just smiled and waited. It would seem to have been an open-and-shut case, but when it came before the grand jury, the jurors refused to find a true bill, on the somewhat quibbling grounds that the prisoner before the bar should not have been tried for two crimes at once.

Roland Molineux was released, but DA Asa Bird Gardiner was not through with him. Nor were the gentlemen of the press; there was a front-page story in the New York Journal every day for some months, and in the other papers almost as often.

Finally, in July of 1899, another grand jury did move to indict Roland Molineux, charging him with first-degree homicide. There is one thing about “the simple way of poison” — once the facts are known, there is no chance of a plea to second-degree, or self-defense, or to anything other than the big one. To quote De Quincey: “Fie on these dealers in poison — can’t they keep to the old honest way of cutting throats?”

For murder by poison is obviously premeditated murder.

The trial of Roland B. Molineux for the (accidental) murder of Katherine B. Adams began in November, 1899, with the defendant pleading, as expected, not guilty. Recorder Goff, a famous jurist of the time, was on the bench. Assistant DA Osbourne appeared for the People; Bartow Weeks and George Gordon Battle, a pair of famous and expensive criminal attorneys, for the defense. It was to be a long-drawn-out affair, to say the least.

To quote the late Mr. Pearson again: “It would be depressing to think that American criminal justice ever appeared more futile, or more wasteful of time and money, than in the proceedings of the next three years. The State of New York spent $200,000 and General Molineux, who ruined himself financially in his son’s defense, spent much more.” I venture to say, a whole lot more.

And nobody profited except the New York newspapers, whose newsstand sales pyramided as the trial went on. Roland was composed and confident in court, with the fair Blanche Cheseborough Molineux beside him, and with his expensive attorneys. But the weight of the actual evidence was staggering. It was even proved that some pale-blue writing paper, with a crest of three silver crescents intertwined, sold only in Newark, had been seen by Mamie Melando in Molineux’s desk. On this same paper somebody had ordered by mail a bottle of Kutnow Powders in the name of Harry Cornish, with the address of one of the “convenience” mailboxes. Twelve handwriting experts swore to that, and to the fact that certain other exhibits for the People were in Molineux’s hand.

Roland never wavered. He smiled and smirked and was very confident at all times, making no answer to the increasingly pressing questions as to why he had used the names Mr. Cheseborough, and H. C. Barnet, and Harry Cornish in his activities.

The first trial dragged on for almost three months — then a record for the course. It even took twelve days to choose the jury and when the prosecution restated its case, the defense flabbergasted everybody by announcing that there would be “no further defense than that already offered by the People’s witnesses”! It would seem here that poor old General Molineux got very little from his expensive legal lights, Mr. Bartow Weeks and Mr. George Gordon Battle, in spite of the thousands he had paid them.

Weeks stood up in court and decided to attack only Cornish, suggesting that the unhappy athletic director had for some mysterious reason of his own killed his landlady, and then rigged a colossal frame-up on poor Molineux. Weeks said, “We stand here on our sworn statement” — there hadn’t been any — “that we are innocent of anything connected with these cases. The prosecution failed to prove that the defendant was the writer of the address on the wrapper that covered the bottle of poison addressed to Cornish. It has failed to demonstrate any connection between the hired boxes and the sending of the poison packages.”

Weeks wound up with a long plea to send this fine boy back to the arms of his loving wife, and to his venerable and respected father. Meanwhile, this fine boy sat by his beautiful, one-eyed wife and smiled. Things were still going his way.

Mr. Osbourne delivered the summing up for the People, pointing his thick thumb at Blanche Cheseborough Molineux and thundering, “There sits the motive!

Which was a classic non sequitur. Molineux was on trial for the murder of Mrs. Katherine Adams — an accidental murder happening during an attempt on the life of Harry Cornish, via mail. It was something with which Blanche really had nothing to do at all. The prosecutors had got the Adams murder mixed up with the Barnet murder, not just in the summation but all through the trial. They were to regret it later.

After eight hours of deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty. Roland took it rather calmly, but his father, the General, collapsed. Blanche is said to have blanched.

Roland was hastily hauled off to Sing Sing, where he spent the next eighteen months in durance vile and in extensive literary endeavor, much after the pattern of the more recent Caryl Chessman, in another death house. Roland even managed to get published a small volume of sketches of prison life, entitled The Room with the Little Door. It is now out of print, but certain critics of the time compared it not unfavorably with the works of Ambrose Bierce.

In October, 1901, the New York Court of Appeals reversed the verdict against author Roland and ordered a new trial on the grounds that he had been unjustly tried for two murders at once. This is, of course, in strict accordance with the letter of our law. It is sometimes different in England; George Joseph Smith, the “Brides in the Bath” mass murderer, would never have got his just deserts if it had not been brought out at his trial that he had been repeating the same murder technique over and over again for years.

By the time of the second trial, poor old Katherine Adams was quite forgotten; so was Harry Barnet. One notices that victims in murder cases soon fade out of the picture, and that public sympathy is apt to go out to “that poor boy in the death house, fighting for his life.” It is quite common nowadays for defense attorneys to object most strenuously to the prosecution’s presentation of photos of the battered, bloody corpse, because it might inflame the jury.

This trial of our hero, Roland Molineux, was heard before Justice Lambert of Buffalo, and here a very different picture presented itself. The public was by now sick and tired of the case; the newspapers gave it little space. Mr. Osbourne was allowed much less leeway in introducing the handwriting evidence. Ex-Governor Black handled the defense with aggressive brilliance.

Roland put up a surprise alibi: at the time the poison package had been mailed to Cornish, he himself had been visiting out at Columbia University, and even had a full professor present to swear to it! There was also the Marvelous Female Witness, the surprising lady who comes into so many major murder trials. She swore on her sacred oath that she had been in the New York central post office on that fatal day, and that after four years, she could clearly recollect standing at the window and seeing a man — a man not answering to Molineux’s description in any way — mailing a package. She had even been close enough to glimpse a few essential words of the address; she had seen the name Mr. Harry Cornish and the word Knickerbocker. Her memory certainly must have been phenomenal — and why she had kept silent for four years about all this is not a question for us to ask, except to ourselves.

It is a well-known fact, and a reflection on American justice and its legal lights, that no person of means has ever been executed for murder in this country. The poor, the ignorant, who have no choice but to be defended by the public defender, usually get the works, period.

At any rate, in this second trial, Roland Molineux was freed. The jury was out only four minutes. He was returned with apologies to the arms of his beloved Blanche — who divorced him some months later and married her attorney. Then and there the lovely if one-eyed charmer disappears from the scene.

Molineux himself, no longer the playboy son of a wealthy father, no longer the superintendent of a chemical firm making Prussian blue, settled down most seriously to his literary work. He had published Death Chamber Stories and Tales of the Tombs, then essayed a serious romantic novel entitled Vice Admiral of the Blue, full of purplish prose about Lord Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, a copy of which I believe is still available in the New York Public Library. It did not make any best-seller lists, but Roland, as a famous author, suddenly did pop up in Who’s Who, and with the help of a female amanuensis even wrote a play, The Man Inside, which was produced on Broadway by the late, great David Belasco. The play unfortunately had a very short run.

But our hero, Roland Molineux, never quite gave up. This young man, who had murdered once to gain a lady, and who had murdered months later in an abortive attempt on the life of a man who had called him “a vile name,” soon married his fair literary aide and moved out to Long Island. This was in November of 1913. Evidently the long rest in the death house had restored him physically.

The end, however, was tragic and perhaps inevitable. One bright autumn morning in the fall of the year 1914, Molineux appeared on the streets of a suburban town clad in a straw hat and absolutely nothing else, running up and down the sidewalks and shouting that he was a wild she-wolf from Bitter Creek, and that it was his night to howl.

The men with the strait jacket came and took him away, and just three years later, in a padded cell in King’s Park State Hospital, he passed on to his reward. He lies buried in a nearby cemetery, but it is reported that in the last forty years, nobody, except for your reporter, has taken the trouble to visit his grave.

Requiescat in pace. May his victims rest as well.

Dead Drunk

by Frank Kane

The blonde stood at the picture window, stared down at the silver ribbon that was the East River ten stories below. The occasional hoot of a tug or the clank of a barge barely penetrated into the room.

She had been poured into a tight-fitting sheath that hinted at the sleekness of her thighs, the roundness of her hips, and gave up any pretense of disguising the cantilever construction of her façade.

The man was sprawled in an easy chair, a half-filled glass in his hand, a cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He was eying the snugness of her skirt around her hips with appreciation. When she turned to face him, the effect from the flip side was equally interesting.

She appeared to have made a decision. “All right, Mr. Davis—”

The man swirled the liquor around the sides of his glass. “Tim,” he told her. “Mr. Davis sounds so formal.”

A brief flash of annoyance clouded the slanted green eyes; the full lips narrowed into a thin slash. “Let’s keep this on a business basis, shall we?” She walked over to the portable bar against the wall, picked up a glass, spilled some liquor into it and added ice. “You say you’ve been hired by my husband to get him the evidence he needs for a divorce.” She looked over to where he sat. “So?”

Tim Davis took the cigarette from between his lips, grinned at her. “Baby, baby. You sure didn’t try to do much covering up.” He leaned over, crushed the cigarette out in an ash tray. “You left a trail a mile wide.” He tapped his breast pocket. “I’ve got stuff here that would get him that decree in any court in the country.” He licked at his slack lips. “Real good stuff.”

The blonde took a deep swallow from her glass. “How much?”

The man in the chair shrugged. “Suppose you do buy this stuff back, Lorna—”

“Mrs. Kyler,” the woman said coldly.

Davis considered, shrugged again. “Like the guy says. What’s in a name? Mrs. Kyler today” — he tapped his breast pocket suggestively — “no Mrs. Kyler tomorrow. You know?”

The blonde drained her glass, set it down, walked back to the window, her full hips working smoothly against the fabric of her skirt. She stood with her back to him. “If you didn’t come here to sell the information, what do you want?”

The private detective clinked the ice in his glass against the sides. “Like I was saying, Lorna. It wouldn’t do any good to buy this stuff back. There’s lots more around where this came from. You buy me off, there’s a hundred other oops your husband could buy to get him what he wants.”

“So you took the trouble to come up here to tell me how hopeless my position is. How nice of you.” Lorna Kyler swung around. “If that’s all—”

“Who said it was hopeless?” The man in the chair reached up, scratched at his pate where the hairline had receded. “I thought maybe you and me, we’d have a talk. I’ve got some ideas.”

A frown ridged the blonde’s forehead. “You just said—”

“I just said there’s no use trying to buy up all the evidence you left behind.” He pursed his lips, dropped his eyes to his half-filled glass. “As long as he’s alive, you’ve got troubles.” He rolled his eyes up from the glass to the woman’s face. “Big troubles.”

The blonde’s shoulders drooped slightly. “You have a suggestion?”

“Accidents have been known to happen.”

Lorna Kyler stared at the man in the chair for a moment, walked over, sat on the couch facing him. “You’re presuming an awful lot to come here and make statements like that. Suppose I should go to the police? Or even to my husband?”

The man in the chair grinned, shook his head. “You’d be crazy to. In the first place, they wouldn’t believe you. I’m a licensed private investigator doing a job for your husband. Naturally you’d try to discredit me. And when they saw what I’d managed to dig on you” — he grinned again, shook his head — “you wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Lorna caught her full lower lip between her teeth, worried it. The slanted green eyes studied the face of the man in the chair opposite her. She realized she was taking a big chance if the man had been sent by her husband; on the other hand, her husband had no need for such traps. The detective was right — she had left a wide-open trail, overly confident that she could always twist Abner Kyler around her finger.

“Why should you do this?” she asked finally.

Tim Davis took a deep swallow from his glass. “Money.” He leaned back, rubbed the heel of his hand along his chin. “Either way, I can’t lose. You don’t buy the idea, I take what I’ve got to the old man. You buy it, I make triple my fee.”

“I see.” The blonde got up out of her chair, made another trip to the window. “How much is that fee?”

The detective considered. “You get the whole package for a hundred thousand.”

The woman at the window whirled. “You must be crazy. A hundred thousand! Why—”

“There’ll still be plenty left. A lot more than if I turn over what I’ve found.” He managed to look sad. “That way we’re both out.”

Lorna started to argue, then shrugged. “I’d be the first one they’d suspect.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work.”

“Why don’t you leave that to me?” Davis told her. “You’d be out of town when it happened. There’d be no way they could tie you to it.” He tilted the glass to his lips, drained it. “I’m not exactly an amateur.”

The blonde couldn’t repress a slight shudder, rubbed the backs of her arms with the palms of her hands. “How would it happen?”

Tim Davis leaned over, deposited the empty glass on the edge of the coffee table. “Leave that up to me, too. The less you know about it, the less you’re likely to spill if they do start questioning you.” He consulted his watch. “Is there someplace you can go for let’s say a week?”

The blonde bobbed her head. “I have friends up on the Cape.” She licked at her lips. “Would it take that long? I mean...”

The man in the chair pulled himself to his feet. “Don’t worry about when it’s going to happen. That way you’ll be all the more surprised when they send for you.” He made an ineffectual attempt to smooth some of the creases out of his pants. “I’ll be in touch in about ten days.” He walked to the door, stopped with his hand on the knob, turned back. “If you have any idea of reneging on the price, forget it. The money wouldn’t do you any good in a shroud.” He pasted a grin on his lips that failed to make his eyes, pulled the door open and closed it after him.

Lorna Kyler stood looking at the door for a moment, then ran to it. She reached for the knob, hesitated, then dropped her hand. She turned, walked back to the portable bar, poured herself a stiff drink.

In the hallway, Tim Davis waited for two minutes, then grinned his self-satisfaction. He knew he had her figured right from the minute he started digging into her background. But even some of these case-hardened babes backed away from murder. He was glad she didn’t.

Johnny Liddell walked down the corridor to the double glass door at the far end of the hall bearing the inscription SEAWAY INSURANCE CORP. He pushed through into the anteroom, walked up to the girl at the desk in the enclosed area.

“Lee Devon.”

The girl behind the desk stopped pecking at the typewriter keys and turned a pair of incurious eyes on him. “May I have your name?”

“Johnny Liddell.”

“Mr. Devon’s expecting you.” She got up from her chair, waited until Liddell had pushed through the gate, turned and headed for an office diagonally across from her desk. “Will you walk this way, please?”

Liddell watched for a moment, shook his head sadly. “Sorry, honey. I just don’t have the equipment.”

The girl gave no sign that she’d heard, held the door open for him. He had an impression of full breasts and firm thighs as he squeezed past her into the room.

Lee Devon looked as if he had been jammed into the armchair behind the desk. He was fat and soft-looking, and was swabbing his forehead with a balled handkerchief as Liddell walked in. His eyes were two bright-blue marbles that were almost lost behind the puffy pouches that buttressed them. He nodded to the girl, his jowls swinging. “I don’t want any calls, Janie.” When the girl had closed the door behind her, he turned to Liddell. “Sit down, Johnny. I think we’ve got some business for you.”

Liddell pulled a chair up to the desk, dropped into it.

Devon picked up a folder from the corner of his desk, flipped it open. “You read about Abner Kyler?” He rolled his eyes upward, studied Liddell from under heavily veined lids. “Millionaire, got himself boxed out of his mind, got himself killed when his car went through a railing over the viaduct leading to the Hamptons.”

Liddell reached over to the humidor on the desk, helped himself to a cigarette. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “I read something about it,” he said. He scratched a match, touched it to the cigarette. “You don’t think that’s how it happened. That it?”

The fat man picked up a cigar, tested it between thumb and forefinger. He pursed his lips, made and broke bubbles between them. “Let’s just say that I want you to find out if that is the way it happened.”

“Any reason for thinking it wasn’t?”

Devon bit the end off the cigar, spat it at the wastebasket. He stuck it between his teeth, chewed on it “Nothing I can put my finger on. Just a feeling.” He held the unlit cigar in the center of his mouth, seemed to be selecting his words. “You fly a desk like this for twenty years, you get a feeling every so often.” He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “I’m not as active as I used to be, so I figured maybe you’d like to check this one out for me.”

Liddell nodded. “What’ve you got?”

The man behind the desk shoved the folder toward him. Liddell dumped the contents on the desk, skimmed through a flimsy on the police report, glanced at the findings of the coroner.

“Alcohol concentration point three in his blood?” Liddell whistled. “This boy didn’t do things halfway.”

The fat man bobbed his head, starting the jowls swinging. “According to the A.M.A., a concentration of point one five would mean he’d had twelve ounces of hundred-proof stuff. A point three concentration would mean twenty-four ounces.”

Liddell dropped his eyes back to the coroner’s report, then picked up a glossy showing a smashed car lying on its top, the tangled legs of a body visible inside it. A second picture showed the dead man after he had been removed from the car, his head lopsided, his eyes staring blankly upward.

Liddell flipped the glossies back on the desk, turned to the coroner’s report, checked through it, grunted. “Compound fracture of the right frontal.” He looked across the desk at Devon. “You’d think the wheel would be enough to keep him from cracking his head against the windshield, wouldn’t you? A broken neck, or the top of his head crushed in, sure. But the front of his head caved in...” He shook his head.

“Anything could happen in a freak accident like that. When it crashed through the barrier, the car did a flip, landed on its roof twenty feet below.” Devon chewed on the unlit cigar, half-veiled his eyes with the heavily veined lids. “Thing that bothers me is that there was still plenty of alcohol in his stomach.” He pulled the cigar from between his teeth, touched his tongue to a loose strand of tobacco, pasted the cigar back into place. “But it was after four o’clock and there wasn’t a bar open within fifty miles. No sign of a bottle in the car or anyplace near it.”

Johnny Liddell leaned back, nodded thoughtfully. “I read you real clear. Who benefits?”

The fat man screwed his features into a grimace. “Dry run. His wife collects everything. We checked her out real good. She spent the four days up to the accident on the Cape with friends. No phone calls, no letters, never out of sight.”

“But?”

The fat man shrugged his shoulders, spilling his jowls over the side of his collar. “This wife — she’s half his age, stacked. From what I gather, she’s been living it up but good for the past few years.”

“Have a talk with her?”

Devon grunted, shook his head. “She has a real fancy-pants lawyer. The boys upstairs have turned hands down on anything but polite conversation unless we got something concrete. And this we don’t have.”

Liddell got up from his chair, walked over to where a water cooler was humming softly to itself, drew a paper cupful of water. “You say she was young and pretty. Maybe the old man knew about her cutting up and figured that was a small price for rent on the chassis?”

The fat man pulled the cigar from between his teeth, stared at the soggy end, bounced it in the wastebasket. “He wasn’t He wanted out At least, he had a later model he wanted to trade her in on. And from the little we’ve been able to dig, he wouldn’t have had much trouble doing it. If he hadn’t gone and got himself dead.”

“And the model?”

“Gita Ravell, a little redhead who acted as his secretary. She claimed she saw him earlier that night, that he left her about one and that at that point he hadn’t had a drink. A couple of hours later, about fifty miles away, he shows up reeking of alcohol and dead.” He sighed lugubriously. “And that’s all she did have. Suspicion. I let Legal talk to her and they ruled it out But she still insists he wasn’t much of a drinker. Definitely not in that point-three-concentration league. She never saw him take more than two Scotches, she insists.” He raised his hands, palms out “Not much to give you, but that’s the story. Think you can do anything with it?”

Liddell scowled. “Like you say, it’s not much. Where do I find this Gita Ravell?”

“Kyler had an office in the Graybar Building.” He leaned forward, pulled a desk calendar toward him, flipped back a few pages. “She has a pad in the Village. Fifty-one Perry.” He sank back with a sigh. “I think you’re wasting your time talking to her. Our boys pumped her for everything she has. Nothing.” He stared down at his hands clasped across his midsection, dimples where the knuckles should have been. “Our only hope is to break down the wife.” He rolled his eyes upward, shook his head. “And that’s not going to be easy.”

The directory listed Mrs. Abner Kyler’s address as the Cathedral Arms on East End Avenue. It turned out to be an oppressively modem pile of bricks and plate glass towering over the East River at 89th Street.

Johnny Liddell dropped the cab at the curb, headed across the lobby to where a rheumy-eyed old man in a dark jacket stood guard at the desk.

“Mrs. Kyler. Mrs. Abner Kyler,” Liddell told him.

The clerk deigned to consider it, shook his head judiciously. “Mrs. Kyler isn’t receiving. There’s been a loss, you know.”

“Suppose you ask her. Tell her I’m a private detective and I’ve been doing some work for her husband. I thought she might be interested in what I discovered for him.”

The clerk tsk-tsked his annoyance, made a production of picking up the desk phone. He murmured into it, waited, then replaced it on its hook. “Mrs. Kyler will see you,” he told Liddell with no show of enthusiasm. “She’s in Suite Ten F.” He wrinkled his nose, dabbed a handkerchief at his rheumy eyes, followed Liddell’s progress toward the elevator bank with disapproval.

The elevator whooshed gently to a stop at the tenth floor, the doors sighed open. Suite 10F was at the end of the corridor, facing out over the East River.

The woman who opened the door in response to Johnny Liddell’s knock was tall, blond. He ran his eyes appraisingly from the top of her blond head to her sandaled feet with appropriate stops on the way.

“Mrs. Abner Kyler? My name’s Johnny Liddell. I’m a private detective.”

The woman stepped aside, permitted him to enter the large living room, closed the door behind him. In the light of the room, he could see that she was a little older than her silhouette would indicate, but still comfortably on the right side of thirty-five.

“All right, mister,” she snapped. “Now suppose you tell me what this is all about.” The slanted green eyes snapped angrily, the full lips were drawn into a thin red line.

“It’s just like the lilac-scented character on the desk told you—”

“You were working for my husband and wanted to tell me what you’d found out,” she mimicked. “You’re a liar. Look, mister. I don’t have to put up with this. Either you level with me right now, or I call the police. What are you doing here?”

Liddell scratched at the side of his jaw. “Your husband wanted a divorce, lady, and—”

“You’ve got things a little mixed up, haven’t you? I’m the one who wanted the divorce. And if he’d lived a few weeks more, I would have got it.”

Liddell managed to look confused. “Maybe you didn’t know it, but your husband did a complete check of your background.”

The blonde sneered at him. “My husband knew what I was when I married him; he went into it with his eyes wide open. I never tried to hide from him the fact that I hated being married to an old man and that I wanted out. He refused to give me a divorce, even flaunted that red-headed floozy he was keeping in my face. Just a few more weeks...” She brushed past Liddell, picked up a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, tapped it against her thumbnail. “Who really sent you? The Ravell woman?”

Liddell scratched at his head, found a match, lit the blonde’s cigarette. “Actually I’m checking out a report that your husband wasn’t much of a drinker, that he never would normally have been as boxed out as he was that night”

Lorna Kyler filled her lungs with a deep drag, let the smoke dribble from between parted lips. She turned her back on him, walked to the window. When she turned back, some of the anger seemed to have drained from her face. “Who’d know more of a man’s vices? His wife — or some young floozy he had big eyes for?” She indicated the filled bar at the side of the room. “It was one of Abner’s worst failings. There were days on end he’d just lay here and empty bottle after bottle.”

Liddell held his hands up. “That’s what I wanted to know. I’m sorry if I upset you. I was just trying to earn a fee.”

The blonde studied him, seemed to be seeing him for the first time. “I’m sorry, too. It’s just that — well, I don’t like the insinuations. I don’t like the way the insurance company is trying to twist this thing around.” She dropped her voice. “But that’s no reason for me to take it out on you.” She indicated the bar. “Would you like a drink? I could use a Scotch.” She walked over and perched on the arm of a chair.

Liddell walked over to the bar, dropped ice into two glasses, spilled some Scotch over them. He brought one back to the blonde.

She smiled up at him. “I’m not always this inhospitable.” She brought the glass to her lips with a shaking hand, spilled most of it down the front of her gown. “Damn!” she exclaimed. She swabbed at the wet portion with a hopelessly inadequate wisp of linen, stood up. “Pardon me while I get into something dry.” She headed for the bedroom.

Johnny Liddell took his drink, wandered to the picture window, stared down at the river below. The blonde had made no attempt to hide the unsavory past Lee Devon had indicated, but what the insurance man apparently didn’t take into consideration was the woman’s contention that it was she, not Abner Kyler, who wanted the divorce. He sighed, took a deep swallow from the glass. If she could make that stand up, it would be understandable that Kyler might have got himself boxed out, especially in view of her statement that he was a secret drinker. It could even be suicide, if she could project the picture of an old man who felt things closing in on him. Liddell swore under his breath. Either way, Lorna Kyler wasn’t the type to do too much leaning on.

He had finished his drink and was building a refill when the door to the bedroom opened and the blonde reappeared. She had changed into a loose, nile-green dressing gown.

“Sorry to be so long.” She smiled at him. “I promise not to be so clumsy if you’ll make me a new one.” She walked to the couch, dropped down onto it, watched him make a second drink. “Why can’t we be friendly instead of tossing implied threats at each other?”

“I’d prefer it that way,” Liddell conceded. He brought her drink over to the couch, dropped down alongside her. “Like I said, I’m only earning a fee.”

The woman took a deep swallow from the glass, nodded. “I’ll tell you the whole story.” She leaned forward, set her glass on the coffee table, turned the full power of the slanted eyes on him. “That is, if you’re sure you won’t be bored.”

He wasn’t.

It was growing dark when Johnny Liddell walked out of the Cathedral Arms and waved down a cruising cab. He gave the cabby the address of the redheaded secretary, leaned back against the cushions, speculated on what Lorna Kyler had been trying to tell him in her rambling story of a small-town cigarette girl who’d married an elderly millionaire. He finally gave up.

Fifty-one Perry Street was a brownstone building nestling anonymously in a row of identical brown-stones. Liddell climbed four steps from the sidewalk level, pushed his way through the vestibule door. A highly polished brass letter box supplied the information that Gita Ravell occupied street floor rear. He followed the dimly lit hallway to the rear apartment, knocked.

When there was no response to his second knock, he tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand. He pushed the door open and stepped into the small vestibule. The room beyond was in darkness accentuated by drawn shades.

As he closed the hallway door behind him, he was aware of an oddly familiar smell pervading the room — a sickly smell that made his nostrils twitch, the hair on the back of his neck rise.

He fumbled for the light switch, spilled light into the room beyond.

Gita Ravell sat in a chair facing the doorway. Her hair was a thick coppery pile on the top of her head; her eyes were half closed, her lips parted as though she were on the verge of saying something.

The ugly, gaping wound in her throat made it improbable that she would ever finish what she had started to say.

Johnny Liddell stared at her, swore under his breath. He walked over to the chair, laid his hand against her cheek. The skin was beginning to cool. He reached down, caught her sleeve, lifted her arm. Clutched clumsily in her fist was a long-bladed knife, its edge red-tinged.

Liddell straightened up, looked around the apartment. There was no sign of a struggle, no evidence to support his conviction that the girl’s fingers had been wrapped around the handle after her throat had been slashed. He bent over the body again, examined the gaping wound. It was a clean slash, no sign of the hesitation marks, the telltale little scratches that invariably precede the lethal cut in a suicide. It satisfied him that the girl had been murdered, but the district attorney might require more proof.

Liddell stared at the face of the girl, once undoubtedly pretty, now caricatured by death. He wondered why it would be necessary to murder her, tried to imagine what she could have known that made her dangerous. In his mind’s eye, he reviewed everything he knew about the case. Gita Ravell had insisted Kyler was murdered, but she had nothing to prove her contention. Or did she have something she wasn’t aware of? Something the killer was afraid she’d remember or find?

Suddenly, as he studied the face of the dead girl, things began to fall into place. He again checked the warmth of the dead girl’s cheek, made a fast estimate of the time of death. It was a hunch that would require checking in the morning — but for the first time, things were beginning to make sense.

It was after midnight when Tim Davis stalked into the lobby of the Cathedral Arms. He ignored the night man behind the desk, headed for the elevator bank, pushed the button for the tenth floor.

Lorna Kyler opened the door in response to his knock, drew in her breath sharply when she recognized the private detective. “What are you doing here?”

“Let me in. Or do you want me to discuss our business from out here?”

The door swung open. Tim Davis pushed through, closed it behind him.

“You should know better than to come here at this hour,” the blonde stormed at him. “You gone crazy?”

“No. But maybe you have. If you’re trying to pull something.” He pulled an edition of the News from his pocket, shoved it at her.

She stared at him, dropped her eyes to the front page of the tab, walked into the living room, held it under a lamp. After a moment, she looked up, wide-eyed. “Gita Ravell was murdered last night You?”

“That’s not the point She was discovered by Johnny Liddell. The same Johnny Liddell you were supposed to be keeping here until I had a talk with Ravell. A few minutes earlier and he might have walked in on me.” He caught the blonde’s arm, squeezed it cruelly. “If I thought you tried—”

Lorna Kyler shook her head. “I didn’t. I kept him here as long as I could. I thought you were only going to reason with her.”

“She knew too much. The canceled checks came back today. One of them was made out to me. Signed by Kyler.” He dug his hand into his pocket, brought out a check. “It could blow hell out of our story.”

The color drained from the blonde’s face, leaving her make-up as garish blobs on the pallor. “And now?”

Tim Davis tore the check into pieces, dropped them into an ash tray, touched a match to them. “I fixed it to look like she did the Dutch.” He looked up from the ash tray. “They’ll figure she was so upset about the old man dying, she cut her own throat.” He grinned crookedly. “But I guess this changes our deal.”

“I should have known. I suppose you want more money.” The woman’s lips were twisted with contempt. “Your kind always does.”

“Is that a nice thing to say to your prospective husband?”

Lorna stared for a moment “Prospective husband? Now I know you’re crazy. If you think I—”

Davis grinned crookedly. “No. I don’t think you want to sit in the electric chair. That’s why you’re going to marry me. A wife can’t testify against a husband, you know.” The grin became strained. “But it’s a two-way street. A husband can’t testify against a wife, either.”

“Testify about what? All I did was keep Liddell here while you went to talk to the girl. I didn’t know you were going to kill her.”

“I know that, baby. And so do you. But if they ever started putting the heat on me at headquarters, who knows what I’d be likely to say. You know?”

“That’s blackmail.”

“Insurance, baby. Electric-chair insurance. And the premium isn’t very high.”

“Just half of everything I’ve got.”

“Look what you get in return. You get to keep on living.”

The blonde shook her head from side to side. “It won’t work, I tell you. They’d smell a rat in a minute if I were to marry you so soon after Abner—”

“Nobody has to know. We don’t announce it for a year or so unless they get lucky and stumble on something.” A hard note crept into his voice. “Don’t forget it’s for your good as well as mine. If I get to sit in that chair, you’ll be sitting in my lap.”

The blonde stared at him with stricken eyes. “There’s no other way?”

“That’s not very flattering, baby. Good thing I’m not sensitive.” Davis grinned at her. The grin got broader as she swung away from him, headed for the bar and poured herself a stiff slug of Scotch. She swallowed it in one gulp, coughed as it burned her throat. “When do we do it? Get married, I mean?” she asked without turning around.

Davis shrugged. “The sooner the better. We can drive out tonight, get down to Baltimore, get it over with and be back before morning.”

Lorna poured herself another drink, swallowed it slowly. She set the glass down, bobbed her head jerkily. “Okay. I’ll get dressed. I won’t be long.”

Davis nodded. “Sure, baby. Only leave the door open. Just so I know you’re not making any phone calls. Like the one you made to me while Liddell was here. The one where you told me to take care of the redhead.”

Lorna whirled on him, started to retort, shrugged her shoulders. She headed for the bedroom, left the door open.

Davis grinned as she disappeared into the other room, licked his lips in anticipation. He poured himself two fingers of liquor, sipped it contentedly. He was almost finished with his drink when the girl reappeared in the doorway. He frowned his displeasure when he noticed she hadn’t begun to change.

“I told you as soon as possible, baby.” The hard note was back in his voice. He saw the .38 in her hand for the first time, gasped as she brought it into firing position. “You crazy? I warned you—”

“Sure. You warned me — husbands can’t testify against their wives. But neither can dead men.”

Davis dropped his glass, his hand streaked for his lapel. The gun in the girl’s hand bucked, spat yellow flame. The detective’s body staggered backward as the slug hit him. He struggled to free his gun from its holster, fielded two more slugs in the midsection. He laced his hands across his body in a futile effort to stem the flow of red that was already beginning to seep through his fingers. His knees buckled under him, he hit the floor face first, didn’t move.

Lorna Kyler moved swiftly. She scooped up the glass Davis had been using, quickly dried it and replaced it on the bar. Then she ran to the hall door, pulled it open, started screaming.

Inspector Herlehy of Homicide stood at the picture window, stared down at the river below. Behind him, the men from the medical examiner’s office were lifting Tim Davis’ body onto a stretcher. They covered him with a blanket, strapped him on. One of the men approached the inspector, held out a form to be initialed.

Herlehy looked up at the knock on the door, scowled when he recognized the newcomer as Johnny Liddell. He initialed the form, gave it back to the man from the mortuary section.

“What are you doing here, Johnny?” he wanted to know.

“Representing Seaway Insurance, Inspector.” Liddell nodded to the shrouded body on the stretcher. “My company has an interest in this character. When word came through that he got himself dead, they asked me to drop by.”

“What kind of interest?”

Liddell shrugged. “A big client, Abner Kyler, was supposedly killed in an automobile accident. This character had been doing a tail job on Abner. Supposed to have been keeping an eye on the old man and his secretary.”

Herlehy suddenly looked as though he had a sour taste in his mouth. “The one who cut her throat.” He nodded toward the dead man. “Davis tried to blackmail her and she couldn’t face it. So we’re sending him down to keep her company.”

Liddell pursed his lips. “Where’d you get all this?”

“Mrs. Kyler. Davis came here after he left the secretary. He read about the secretary doing the Dutch in the early edition of the tabs, and he saw a chance to make some real money by selling the whole story to a scandal magazine. He wanted money from Mrs. Kyler to keep quiet about the whole mess.” He shrugged. “She didn’t want the scandal so she started to argue with him. When he started to push her around, she tried to call the police. In the struggle, she killed him.”

Liddell considered it, nodded. “Sounds like it could happen.”

“The night clerk saw the guy come in. He wasn’t here much more than fifteen minutes when the shooting and screaming started.” Herlehy pushed his hat to the back of his head. “Want to talk to Mrs. Kyler?” Liddell nodded.

The Inspector led the way to the bedroom door, knocked. There was a muffled invitation to enter. He turned the knob, pushed the door open.

The room beyond was a large bedroom with a small balcony that overlooked the river. The blonde was sprawled out on the bed, a handkerchief pressed against her mouth. She sat up when she saw Liddell, then looked from him to the Inspector and back.

“Mr. Liddell! You heard?”

Liddell nodded. “What happened?”

“He tried to blackmail me. When I refused, he beat me. He threatened to kill me. I managed to get the gun—”

“You did real good, chickie, but it was a waste of time.” He turned to Herlehy. “On my advice, Seaway will refuse to pay the claim on Abner Kyler.” He looked back to the woman on the bed. “We’re convinced it was no accident.”

Lorna Kyler jumped to her feet. “What are you saying?”

“We’re saying that Abner Kyler was killed because you wanted his money and you knew you wouldn’t get a cent if he got his evidence against you into a divorce court. So you made a deal with Davis to kill him.”

“You crazy?” the girl gasped. “I hired Davis to get evidence of his carrying on with the Ravell woman.”

“You can stop lying, chickie. Davis was working for your husband. That’s why Davis was able to get him.”

Herlehy scowled. “You can prove some of this, I hope?”

Liddell turned to the Inspector. “That’s why the secretary had to be killed. The canceled checks came back today, and when she saw the retainer check made out to Tim Davis, she put two and two together.”

“You can’t prove that,” the blonde snapped. “There is no such check.”

“Don’t count on it, chickie. Even if Tim Davis did destroy the check itself, the bank makes photostats of all checks paid out”

Herlehy watched the play of emotion on the girl’s face. “Even so, why should she kill Davis?”

“It was getting too hot. Maybe he raised the ante. Maybe he wanted it all, huh, Lorna? With you thrown in for a bonus?” The blonde stared at him, started to back away. “You kept me here while he went to scare the redhead,” Liddell continued. “That bit of spilling the liquor on the dress was pretty transparent. But I couldn’t figure out why. When I found the redhead dead, I knew.”

The girl started to shake uncontrollably. “You’re wrong,” she muttered. “All wrong.”

Liddell shook his head. “We haven’t got all the pieces yet, chickie. But now that we know where to look, it won’t take long.”

The blonde continued to stare at him for a moment, then with a scream, she turned and ran for the balcony. Liddell looked away, heard the Inspector swear as he started after her. When Liddell looked up, the balcony was empty. The Inspector was leaning over the edge, looking down.

From somewhere below there was the sound of a soul in agony, then with breath-taking suddenness, there was quiet.

Break-Out

by Donald E. Westlake

Alcatraz is probably the toughest and best-known prison in the United States, long considered an impregnable, escape-proof penitentiary. The entire imprisoned population there consists of hard cases transferred from less rugged federal penitentiaries. In the middle of San Francisco Bay, it is surrounded by treacherous currents and is almost always enveloped by thick fog and high winds. A high percentage of the prisoners sent there are men who have already escaped from one or more other prisons and penitentiaries. “Now you are at Alcatraz,” they are told. “Alcatraz is escape-proof. You can’t get away from here.”

It was a challenge, and sooner or later someone had to accept it. That someone was a felon named Ted Cole. Cole had already escaped once, from an Oklahoma prison, where he had been assigned duty in the prison laundry. That escape had been made by hiding in a laundry bag. But now Cole was on Alcatraz, and Alcatraz, he was told repeatedly, was escape-proof.

Cole’s work assignment was in the prison machine shop, which suited him perfectly. Through an involved code in his infrequent mail, he managed to line up outside assistance from friends in the San Francisco area. While waiting for things to be set up outside, he spent a cautious part of each workday on the machine-shop wall, on the other side of which was the rocky, surf-torn beach of the island.

The day finally came. Leaving right after a head count, so he would have an hour or two anyway before his absence was noticed, Cole went through the machine-shop wall and dove into the water, swimming straight out from the island, the fog so thick around him he could barely see the movement of his own arms as he swam.

This, as far as he was concerned, was the only really dangerous part of the escape. If his friends couldn’t find him in the fog, he would simply swim until he drowned from exhaustion or was recaptured by a police patrol from the island.

Finally, a launch came out of the fog ahead, throttling down beside him, and Cole treaded water, staring anxiously, wondering whether this was escape or capture.

It was escape. His friends fished him out of the water, gave him blankets and brandy, and the launch veered away toward shore. Yet again, society’s challenge had been accepted, and another “escape-proof” prison had been conquered.

Accepting society’s challenge in his own antisocial way is second nature to the habitual criminal. The desire for freedom is strong in most men, and perhaps it is strongest in those who have, by the commission of crime, tried to free themselves from the restraint of society’s laws. The much harsher and much more complete restraint of a narrow prison cell and an ordered, repetitive existence within the prison walls, plus the challenge of being told that escape from this prison is impossible, increase this yearning for freedom to the point where no risk seems too great, if only there is the possibility of freedom. No matter what the builders of the prison have claimed, the imaginative and determined prisoner can always find somewhere, in a piece of wood or a rusty nail or the manner of the guards’ shift changes, the slim possibility that just might end in freedom.

This yearning for freedom, of course, doesn’t always result in imaginative and ingenious escapes. At times, it prompts instead wholesale riots, with hostages taken and fierce demands expressed and the senseless destruction of both lives and property. Such outbreaks are dreaded by prison officials, but they never result in successful escapes. They are too noisy and too emotional. The successful escapee is silent, and he uses his wits rather than his emotions.

The prisoner who is carefully working out the details of an escape, in fact, dreads the idea of a riot fully as much as do the prison officials themselves.

The result of a riot is inevitably a complete search and shakedown of the entire prison. And this means the discovery of the potential escapee’s tunnel or hacksaw or dummy pistol or specially constructed packing case or rope ladder or forged credentials. And the escapee has to think of some other plan.

He always does. No matter how tight the control, how rigid the security, how frequent the inspections or “impregnable” the prison, the man who desires freedom above all other things always does think of something else.

Take John Carroll, perhaps the only man ever to break both out of and into prison. In the twenties, Carroll and his wife, Mabel, were known throughout the Midwest as the Millionaire Bandits. Eventually captured and convicted, John Carroll was sentenced to Leavenworth while Mabel was imprisoned at the women’s reformatory at Leeds.

At that time, in 1927, Leavenworth was still thought of as being nearly escape-proof, and the constant shakedowns and absolutely rigid daily schedule had Carroll stymied for a while. But not forever.

Carroll had been put to work in the machine shop, and he spent months studying the guards, realizing that he would be much more likely to escape if he could get one of them to collaborate with him.

He finally picked the shop foreman himself, a truculent, middle-aged, dissatisfied guard obviously unhappy in his work. Carroll waited in the machine shop one afternoon until everyone else had left and he was alone with the foreman. The foreman wanted to know what he was still doing here. Carroll, making the big leap all at once, said, “How would you like to make thirty-four thousand dollars?”

The foreman showed neither interest nor shock. Instead, he demanded, as though it were a challenge, “How do I do that?”

“I have sixty-eight thousand hidden on the outside,” Carroll told him. “Help me get out of here, and half of it is yours.”

The foreman shook his head and told Carroll to go on with the others. But the next day, when work was finished, he signaled to Carroll to stay behind again. This time, he wanted to know what Carroll’s plans were.

Carroll told him. A part of the work in this shop was devoted to building the packing cases in which the convict-made goods were shipped outside. Carroll and the foreman would construct a special case and when Carroll felt the time was right, the foreman would help him ship himself out of prison and to the foreman’s apartment.

The foreman agreed, and they went to work. Carroll was a cautious man, and they worked slowly, nor did Carroll make his escape immediately after the special packing case was completed. Instead, he waited for just the right moment.

A note from his wife, delivered through the prison grapevine, forced Carroll to rush his plans. The note, which he received on February 28th, 1927, read: “Your moll has t.b. bad. I’ll die if you don’t get me out. I’m in Dormitory D at Leeds.”

Carroll knew that his wife’s greatest terror was of dying in prison, of not dying a free woman. He left Leavenworth that same night, in the packing case. But the case was inadvertently put in the truck upside down, and Carroll spent over an hour in that position, and had fallen unconscious by the time the case was delivered to the foreman’s apartment.

Coming to, Carroll broke out of the case and discovered the apartment empty and the new clothes he had asked for waiting for him on a chair. He changed and left before the foreman got home, and the foreman never saw a penny of the thirty-four thousand dollars.

Carroll went straight to Leeds. Posing as an engineer, he became friendly with one of the matrons from the prison, and eventually learned not only the location of Dormitory D within the wall, but even the exact whereabouts of his wife’s cell.

It took him five months to get his plan completely worked out. Finally, shortly after dark the night of July 27th, he drove up to the high outer wall of the prison in a second-hand car he’d recently bought. In the car were a ladder, a hacksaw, a length of rope, a bar of naphtha soap and a can of cayenne pepper.

Setting the ladder in place, Carroll climbed atop the wall and lay flat, so as not to offer any watchers a clear silhouette. He then shifted the ladder to the other side of the wall, climbed down into the prison yard, and moved quickly across to Dormitory D. He stood against the dormitory wall and whistled, a shrill, high note, a signal he knew his wife would recognize. When she answered, from her barred third-story window, he tossed the rope to her. She caught it on the third try, tied one end inside the cell, and Carroll climbed up to the window.

Mabel then spoke the only words either of them said before the escape was complete. “I knew you’d come.”

Carroll handed the tools through to his wife, then, one-handed, tied the rope around his waist, so he’d have both hands free to work. Meanwhile, Mabel had rubbed the hacksaw with soap, to cut down the noise of sawing. They each held an end of the saw and cut through the bars one by one, with frequent rest stops for Carroll to ease the pressure of the rope around his waist.

It was nearly dawn before they had removed the last bar. Carroll helped his wife clamber through the window, and they slid down to the ground, where Carroll covered their trail to the outer wall with cayenne powder, to keep bloodhounds from catching their scent They went up the ladder and over the wall, and drove away.

Carroll was recaptured over a year later, and returned willingly enough to jail. His wife was dead, had been for five months. But she hadn’t died in prison.

Most escapees don’t remain on the outside for anywhere near as long as a year. The majority seem to use up all their ingenuity in the process of getting out, and none at all in the job of staying out. Such men have fantastic courage and daring in the planning and execution of one swiftly completed job, be it a murder or a bank robbery or a prison break, but seem totally incapable of giving the same thought and interest to the day-to-day job of living successfully within society.

Another escape from Leavenworth is a case in point. This escape involved five men, led by a felon named Murdock. Murdock, employed in the prison woodworking shop, was a skilled wood-carver and an observant and imaginative man. On smoke breaks in the prison yard, Murdock had noticed the routine of the main gate. There were two gates, and theoretically they were never both open at the same time. When someone was leaving the prison, the inner gate was opened, and the outer gate wasn’t supposed to be opened until that inner gate was closed again. But the guards operating the gates had been employed in that job too long, with never a hint of an attempted escape. As a result, Murdock noticed that the button opening the outer gate was often pushed before the inner gate was completely closed, and that once the button was pushed, the gate had to open completely before it could be closed again.

This one fact, plus his wood-carving abilities, was the nucleus of Murdock’s escape plan. He discussed his plans with four other convicts, convinced them that it was workable, and they decided to go ahead with it. Murdock, working slowly and cautiously, managed to hide five small pieces of wood in the shop where he worked. Taking months over the job, he carved these pieces of wood into exact replicas of .38-caliber pistols, down to the safety catch and the trigger guard, then distributed them among his confederates.

The day and the time finally came. A delivery truck was leaving the prison while Murdock and the other four were with a group of prisoners on a smoke break in the yard. Murdock saw the outer gate opening before the inner gate was completely closed. He shouted out the prearranged word signal and ran for the gate, the other four with him. They squeezed through just before the inner gate closed all the way and Murdock, brandishing his dummy pistol, warned the guards not to reopen it The five dashed through the open outer gate and scattered.

This much planning and imagination they had given to the job of getting out. How much planning and imagination did they give to the job of staying out? Murdock himself, the ringleader, was the first one captured, less than twenty-four hours later. He was found, shivering and miserable, standing waist-deep in water in a culvert. A second was found the following morning, cowering in a barn, and numbers three and four were rounded up before the week was out.

The fifth? He was the exception. It took the authorities nearly twenty years to find him, and when they did, they discovered he had become the mayor of a small town in Canada. His record since his escape from Leavenworth was spotless, and so he was left to live out his new life in peace.

The courage and daring, the ingenuity and imagination, the skill and talent demonstrated in these and similar escapes, if used in the interests of society rather than directed against society, would undoubtedly make such men as these among society’s most valuable citizens. But the challenge is given these men, and they accept that challenge. They are not challenged to use their talents to benefit society, but to outwit society.

In fact, there seems to be a correlation between rigidity of control and attempts to escape. The tighter the control, the stronger and more secure and solid the prison, the more escape plans there will be, the more attempted escapes, and the more successful escapes.

The career of Jack Sheppard, probably the most famous despoiler of “escape-proof” prisons of all time, is a clear-cut demonstration of this. In one five-month period in 1724, Sheppard escaped from Newgate, England’s “impregnable” prison, no less than three times! The first time, he had help from inside the prison, which is probably the easiest and most common type of jailbreak. The second time, he had tools and assistance from outside, a little more difficult but obviously not impossible. The third time, without tools and absolutely unaided, he successfully completed one of the most daring and complex escapes in history.

Sheppard, born in 1701 and wanted as a highwayman and murderer before he was out of his teens, was first jailed in Newgate in May of 1724. When arrested, he had been with a girl friend, Bess Lion, who was also wanted by the police. They swore they were married and so, in the manner of that perhaps freer day, they were locked together in the same cell. Bess had managed to smuggle a hacksaw in with her — history doesn’t record how — and as soon as the two were alone, they attacked the bars of the window. But it was a twenty-five-foot drop to the prison yard, and the rope ladder they made of their blankets didn’t reach far enough. So Bess removed her clothes, which were added to the ladder, and they made their way down to the yard, the nude girl first. Bess rolled her clothes into a bundle, and she and Sheppard climbed over a side gate which was no longer in use. Bess put her clothes back on, and the two of them walked away.

He was recaptured almost immediately, returned to Newgate, and this time held long enough to be tried for his crimes and sentenced to be hanged. The day before the scheduled hanging, he was brought, chained and manacled, to the visitors’ cell. His visitors were Bess Lion and another girl friend, Poll Maggott. While Bess “distracted” the guard — history is somewhat vague on this point, too — Poll and Sheppard sawed through the bars separating them, and Poll, described as a “large” woman, picked Sheppard up and carried him bodily out of the prison, since the ankle chains made it difficult for him to walk.

That was July of 1724. Two months later, Sheppard was captured for the third time and once more found himself in Newgate. This time, the authorities were determined not to let him escape. He was allowed no visitors. After a whole kit of escape tools was found hidden in his cell, he was moved to a special room known as The Castle. This room was windowless, in the middle of the prison, and with a securely locked double door. There was no furniture, nothing but a single blanket. Sheppard’s wrists were manacled, and his ankles chained, with the ankle chain slipped through an iron bolt imbedded in the floor.

Sheppard, at this time, was twenty-three years of age. He was short, weak, sickly, suffering from both a venereal disease and too steady a diet of alcohol. His physical condition, plus the manacles and the placement of his cell, seemed to make escape absolutely impossible.

Sheppard waited until October 14th, when the opening of Sessions Court was guaranteed to keep the prison staff too busy to be thinking about a prisoner as securely confined as himself. On that morning, he made his move.

First, he grasped in his teeth the chain linking the wrist manacles, squeezed and folded his hands to make them as small as possible, and finally succeeded in slipping them through the cuffs, removing some skin in the process. He then grabbed the ankle chain and with a single twisting jerk, managed to break the link holding him to the bolt in the floor.

He now had a tool, the one broken link. Wrapping the ankle chains around his legs, to get them out of the way, he used the broken link to attack one wall, where a former fireplace had obviously been sealed up. He broke through to the fireplace, only to discover an iron bar, a yard long and an inch square, bisecting the flue a few feet up, making a space too small for him to slip by.

Undaunted, he made a second hole in the wall, at the point where he estimated the bar to be, found it and freed it, and now had two tools as well as an escape hatch. He crawled up the flue to the floor above, broke through another wall, and emerged in an empty cell. Finding a rusty nail on the floor — for tool number three — he picked the door lock with it, and found himself in a corridor. At the end of the corridor he came to a door bolted and hinged on the other side. He made a small hole in the wall beside the door, reached through and released the lock.

The third door, leading to the prisoners’ pen in the chapel, he popped open with the iron bar. The fourth door got the same treatment, and now he came to a flight of stairs leading upward. He knew his only chance for escape lay in reaching the roof.

At the head of the stairs was door number five. Thinking it was the last, Sheppard and his iron bar tore through it almost without stopping. And ahead of him was door number six.

This sixth door was fastened with a foot-wide iron-plated bar, attached to door and frame by thick iron hoops, plus a large iron bolt lock, plus a padlock, and the whole affair was crisscrossed with iron bars bolted to the oak on either side of the door.

Sheppard had now been four hours in the escape. He was exhausted, his hands were bleeding, the weight of the leg shackles was draining his energy, and the door in front of him was obviously impassable. Nevertheless, Sheppard went to work on it, succeeding at first only in bending the iron bar he was using for a tool.

It took him two hours, but he finally managed to rip the crossed bars down and snap the bolt lock, making it possible to remove the main bar, and he stepped onto the prison roof.

So far, the escape had taken six hours. It was now almost sundown. Sheppard crossed the roof and saw the roof of a private house next door, twenty feet below him. He was afraid to risk the jump, not wanting to get this far only to lie down there with a broken ankle and wait for the prison officials to come drag him back. So, regretfully, he turned around, recrossed the roof, went down the stairs and through the chapel, back down the corridor and into the cell above The Castle, down the fireplace flue and back into his cell, which was ankle deep in stone and plaster from the crumbled wall. He picked up his blanket, retraced his steps again, and went back to the roof. He had forgotten tool number four, and so he had simply gone back for it!

Atop the prison again, Sheppard ripped the blanket into strips, made a rope ladder, and lowered himself to the roof of the house next door. He waited there until he was sure the occupants had gone to sleep for the night, then he crept down through the house and out to freedom.

In the normal manner of escapees, however, Sheppard could never learn to devote as much energy to staying out as to getting out. He spent the first four days hidden in a cowshed, until finally someone came along who would bring him a hacksaw and help him shed the ankle chains. He then went straight home, where he and his mother celebrated his escape by getting drunk together on brandy. They were still drunk when the authorities showed up, and this time Sheppard stayed in Newgate long enough to meet the hangman.

Here is the core of the problem. The tougher the prison officials made their prison — the more they challenged Sheppard and told him that this time he couldn’t escape — the more determined and daring and ingenious Sheppard became.

This misdirected genius was never more evident than in the ten-man escape from Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State in 1955. Their escape route was a tunnel under the main wall, but one tunnel wasn’t enough for them. They also had tunnel routes between their cells, so they could communicate and pass materials and information back and forth. When they were recaptured — which, in the traditional manner, didn’t take very long at all — the full extent of their ingenuity and daring was discovered. Each of the ten carried a brief case containing a forged draft card, business cards, a driver’s license, birth certificate and even credit cards and charge-account cards for stores in Seattle. Beyond all this, they all carried identification cards claiming them as officials of the Washington State prison system, and letters of recommendation from state officials, including the warden of Walla Walla State Penitentiary. And four of the escapees carried forged state pay checks, in amounts totaling over a thousand dollars. Every bit of the work involved had been done in the prison shops.

Compare this with the record of a jail such as the so-called “model prison” at Chino, California. Escaping from Chino is almost incredibly easy. There is a fence, but no wall, and the fence would be no barrier to a man intent on getting away. The guards are few, the locks fewer, much of the prisoners’ work is done outdoors, and the surrounding area is mostly wooded hills. For a man determined to escape, Chino would offer no challenge at all.

And yet, Chino has had practically no escapes at all!

Perhaps the lack of challenge is itself the reason why there are so few escapes from Chino. The cage in which the prisoner must live is not an obvious cage at Chino. He is restricted, but the restrictions are subtle, and he is not surrounded by stone and iron reminders of his shackled condition. At tougher, more security-conscious prisons, the challenge is flung in the convict’s face. “You cannot escape from here!” Inevitably there are those who accept the challenge.

The challenge at Chino — and at other prisons constructed from much the same philosophy — is far different “You should not escape from here! And when you know why society demands that you stay here, you won’t need to escape. You will be released.”

Both challenges demand of the prisoner that he think, that he use his mind, his wit and his imagination. But whereas the one challenge encourages him to think along lines that will drive him yet farther from society, the other challenge encourages him to think along lines that will adjust him to society.

No matter which challenge it is, there will always be men to accept it, as the warden of Walla Walla State Penitentiary — from which the ten convicts escaped with their forged-card-bulging brief cases — inadvertently proved, back in 1952. He gave the prisoners a special dinner one day in that year, in honor of the fact that a full year had gone by without the digging of a single tunnel. Three days later, during a normal shakedown, guards found a tunnel one hundred feet long.

Service Call

by Bruno Fischer

I take Fridays off, but you know how it is with a dentist That morning I had to go downtown to my office to attend to a patient who had spent a bad night. I made the necessary extraction.

When I returned home at noon, I found Margaret on the porch indulging in her favorite hobby, which was minding other people’s business. Time hung heavily on her hands since our daughter had gone off to college.

“Now that hussy is carrying on with the television repairman,” she told me.

I didn’t have to ask her which hussy she meant this time. She was staring at the Hamilton house directly across the street, and in front of it at the curb stood a small truck on which was lettered riverside TV SERVICE.

“He’s been in there for quite a while. And it’s not the first time.”

“So they have trouble with their set,” I said. “Don’t we all?”

“Every few days?” Margaret sounded pretty grim about it, a sure indication that she was enjoying herself. “In recent weeks, practically every time I looked I saw that truck parked there.”

I took off my jacket. Now at noon the day was becoming quite warm. “All it could mean is that the Hamiltons got stuck with a lemon of a set. Some need more fixing than others.”

“How convenient for her — if true.” She uttered that feminine sniff that proclaimed she knew what she knew beyond argument “You men,” she said. “Always trying to find excuses for women like Norma Hamilton.”

“Oh, hell,” I said eloquently.

Leaving Margaret on the porch to her fun, I went upstairs to our bedroom to change my clothes.

Two of the bedroom windows were at the front of the house, and as I pulled on a cool polo shirt, I could look down at the placid, tree-lined street and across it at the Hamiltons’ red-brick house sitting behind a lawn and a rock garden and shrubbery. The truck remained at the curb. We also used Riverside Service, and I remembered the repairman from the time he had been in to change a tube in our set a couple of months ago. I supposed he was the same one — a youngish man who rolled his shirt sleeves up to his shoulders to display his muscles. A virile blond animal, that one was, and it could be that Margaret was right Because Norma Hamilton Was very much a man’s woman.

She was about thirty, the prime age, and rather pretty, but what set her off from other women was an aura of sexuality that enveloped any man in her presence. It affected even me, who had a middle-aged paunch and whose feet always hurt from standing at a dentist chair. Often, of an evening, I would watch Norma Hamilton standing at her rock garden, charmed by her ripe figure in shorts and a snug blouse, and maybe I would dream a little. The scuttle butt in the neighborhood, especially among the women, was that there were men other than her husband who did considerably more than dream. Now including, perhaps, the television repairman.

Suddenly a familiar gray sedan rolled up the street.

I moved closer to the window. The sedan stopped some hundred feet away, in the middle of the street, and I could feel Arnold Hamilton staring at that truck in front of his house. He owned a haberdashery store downtown a block from my office; usually he had lunch in the same restaurant I did, and sometimes, since we were neighbors if not exactly friends, we ate at the same table. Had he come home in the middle of the day because he suspected something or merely because he had decided to have lunch at home for a change?

Margaret burst into the bedroom. “Erwin, Arnold’s come home.”

“So I see,” I said.

She joined me at the window. He was getting out of his car, which he had pulled into his driveway.

“I ought to phone Norma,” she said.

“Why?”

“To warn her.” She was still panting from her run up the stairs. “Something terrible might happen if he catches them together.”

“You’ll only make yourself ridiculous,” I pointed out. “Besides, it’s too late.”

Arnold Hamilton was at the front door of his house. He was a gaunt man with sad eyes and thinning hair. It seemed to me that there was something stealthy in the way he let himself into the house, though probably I was simply being affected by Margaret’s overactive imagination. The door closed behind him.

We waited at our upstairs window. I found myself listening for loud voices; they would surely have carried across the quiet street. No sound came from the house, and after a minute or two, the repairman appeared carrying his kit. He got into his truck and turned around at the end of the street and drove off.

I chuckled. “Disappointed, Margaret?” I said.

She actually seemed to be. It occurred to me that nothing much was happening in her life since Betty had left for college. She wasn’t the club-woman type and made few friends and usually I was too tired to take her places after work. The result was that she lived a lot of her life vicariously through books and television and the more dramatic doings of our neighbors.

I slipped my arm about her waist. “Tell you what, sweetheart. Let’s go swimming after lunch.”

“I’d like that,” she said, leaning against me.

Her waist was remarkably slim for a woman her age. Not that she was old — only partway in her forties. In my arms she didn’t feel much different than she used to. I kissed her on the cheek and we went down to the kitchen.

It must have been an hour later that I heard the siren.

I ran out to the porch. A black-and-white police car stopped with a jerk where the truck had been. We had finished our lunch and Margaret Was upstairs getting our swimming things together. In almost no time, she joined me on the porch. We stood together watching two uniformed policemen hurry into the Hamilton house.

“Something must have happened,” she said.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” I said.

Cars continued to arrive. They contained policemen both in uniform and in plain clothes, and the entire neighborhood was pouring into the street. A word spread among the people gathered in groups, a word we could hear all the way to our porch. The word was murder.

“We ought to tell the police what we saw,” Margaret said to me in a hoarse whisper.

“We didn’t see anything much.”

“Still, it’s our duty to tell them.”

“All right, I’ll do it,” I said. “You stay here.”

I crossed the street. A uniformed cop stopped me on the opposite sidewalk.

“If what I hear is true, I think I have some information,” I said. “Was somebody really killed?”

“It was Mrs. Hamilton. Who are you, sir?”

“I’m Dr. Erwin McKay. I live in that house across the street.”

He led me up the walk to the front door and said to wait there and went inside. Pretty soon he reappeared with a burly man in a slouch hat. “This is Dr. McKay,” the cop said and returned to his post on the sidewalk.

The other man said, “I’m Detective Breen,” and put out his hand. After I had shaken it, I told him about the television repairman and how Arnold Hamilton had suddenly come home.

“Yes, we know,” Detective Breen said. He was sucking a curved pipe the way a child would a lollipop. “Mr. Hamilton told us about him. But he doesn’t know his name and can’t think of the name of the company he works for.”

“It’s the Riverside TV Service.”

“Thanks a lot, Dr. McKay. This will save lot of trouble locating him.”

“Glad I could help,” I said. But I didn’t leave. Putting a match to his pipe, the detective studied me lazily. The entire street was watching us. I began to feel self-conscious. I drew in my breath and asked, “Has he confessed?”

“Mr. Hamilton? No. He insists it was the TV man.”

“At least an hour passed after he’d driven away before the police came,” I said. “Did you know that?”

“No, we didn’t. Interesting.” He nodded to himself. “Would you mind coming in with me, Dr. McKay?”

I had no idea why he wanted me in there, but of course I went.

The house had a center hall. Through an open door on the left, I could look into a kind of study. The television set stood against a wall, and on a sofa at the opposite wall Arnold Hamilton sat. His face was in his hands. The way his sparse hair was plastered sideways on his scalp to cover as much area as possible struck me as particularly pathetic. He didn’t look up. A motionless, silent detective stood near him.

We went up the hall a little way and turned through an arched doorway into the bedroom. Three men in plain clothes and one in uniform were in there. And Norma Hamilton.

She was grotesque in death. In falling, one of her arms had hooked over the post at the front of the bed. She hung there, just her toes touching the floor. Blood covered her head and face and spattered the beige carpet. Not far from her right hand was what must have done it, since some blood was on it — a slender, off-white earthenware flower vase. The only aura emanating from her now was that of death. I was quite shaken.

“The coroner is on the way here,” Breen was saying to me. “But he’s not a doctor. We’ve sent for Dr. Morganstern, who usually comes in a homicide, but he happens to be out on a call. I’d appreciate it, Dr. McKay, if you’d make a preliminary examination to determine how long she’s been dead. Time is important, as you—”

“But I’m not a physician,” I broke in.

“You’re not?”

“I’m a dentist.”

Somebody in the room laughed softly.

“I see.” Breen managed to keep himself from looking foolish. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

He conducted me out of the house. As we passed the television room, I had another look at Arnold Hamilton on the sofa. He had raised his head, but he wasn’t looking at anything. Breen opened the front door and said, “I’d like to speak to you and your wife later, Dr. McKay,” and closed the door behind me.

Neighbors converged on me when I reached the street. I told them what I had seen; then I moved on to my house, where Margaret was waiting on the porch rocker, and I told her.

“We should have done something,” she said.

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know, but I feel we could have saved her.” Margaret was very pale; at times like this she was beginning to show her age. “I felt in my bones something would happen. But you scoffed at me.”

“You sound as if you think it’s my fault.”

Margaret said nothing more for a while. She rocked gently and I paced the porch, both of us watching what went on across the street, along with the rest of the neighborhood.

There was a lot of coming and going of cars, and then from a police car that had pulled up at the curb stepped the television repairman. He now wore a tan poplin jacket over his muscles. On the sidewalk, he paused to look at the crowd with an expression of bewilderment. Then one of the two detectives who had brought him touched his arm and they moved up the walk to the house.

Margaret said, “It’s his fault Arnold killed Norma. And nothing will be done to him.” She sniffed — a habit of hers I detested. “But of course the really guilty person has already been punished.”

“How easy for you to make moral judgments.”

“You’re still trying to find excuses for her,” she said like an accusation.

“I don’t know enough about it to excuse or not to excuse anybody,” I said. “But I saw what had been done to her with that vase. Try a little pity, Margaret.”

She looked up at me from the chair, and then in the same instant, we looked away from each other.

The afternoon dribbled on. The repairman came out with one of the detectives who had brought him and they drove away. Shortly afterward, Arnold Hamilton appeared, flanked by two detectives. The street became very quiet; a funeral hush hung in the hot air. Arnold Hamilton walked between the detectives as if unaware of them and his gawking neighbors. The three got into one of the police sedans, and when it was gone, the voices in the street resumed like a collective sigh.

Then Detective Breen was crossing the street. He came up on our porch and I introduced him to Margaret. She did not pause in her rocking as she nodded, moving in that chair with a kind of relentless rhythm. Breen, taking his time, put his broad rear on the porch railing and set about loading his pipe.

“Well, did either of them confess?” I burst out.

His quiet eyes looked up at me over the flaring match. “No.” He drew the flame into the bowl and then said, “Mrs. McKay, your husband told me you often saw the TV truck parked at the Hamilton house.”

“I don’t know how often. Every few days, it seemed. There may have been other times when I wasn’t home to see it.” Margaret rocked and rocked. “Didn’t he admit he was carrying on with her?”

“He denies it. But then he would. It gives him a motive.”

“Motive?” I said. “Isn’t it obvious that her husband killed her?”

“Not obvious. Let’s say probable at this point.” He smiled a little. “We policemen have to make these nice distinctions. We are holding Hamilton for further questioning. We are also holding Forrest.”

Margaret said, “Did he, Forrest — that’s the repairman, isn’t it?”

“Larry Forrest, ma’am. What were you going to ask me?”

“Didn’t he admit anything at all?” Margaret said.

“About what, ma’am?”

“About their affair.”

“I said he didn’t. Mrs. McKay, how long would you say his truck was in front of the house before Hamilton came home?”

“Quite a while. I don’t remember exactly. But longer than it ordinarily takes to repair a set.”

Breen nodded. “In this case, there was nothing wrong with the set.”

“You see!” Margaret cried triumphantly. I didn’t like the almost gloating expression on her face. “It’s proof of what I’ve been saying.”

“It could be.” Perched on the railing like a small boy, Breen rubbed the hot pipe bowl against his cheek. “Mrs. Hamilton called up Riverside Service and said that her set was out of order. According to Forrest, there was no answer when he rang the doorbell. But the door was unlocked, so he let himself in.”

“Because he was right at home there,” Margaret said.

“So it seems. He said he’d been there before and knew where the set was in that room off the hall. He turned it on and the picture was all right. But the fact was that Mrs. Hamilton had called in saying it wasn’t He said he thought maybe the trouble would show up after the tubes had warmed up, so he sat down to wait He said after ten minutes, maybe a little longer, the set was still working properly, and he decided to leave. Just then, he saw Hamilton get out of his car in the driveway. Anyway, that’s his story.”

“And what’s Arnold Hamilton’s story?” I asked.

“He agrees that Forrest was in the hall, apparently about to leave, when he entered the house. Forrest explained about the service call and Mrs. Hamilton not being home and the set being all right. Then he left. As for Hamilton, he claims he spent a few minutes in the bathroom, then he passed the bedroom and looked in and saw his wife lying there dead in her own blood. He insists that Forrest must have done it.”

“The hour that passed,” I murmured.

“Yes, the hour between the time you two saw Hamilton come home and the time he called the police. Hamilton admits it. He says he went into shock — that he was so numb, it was a long time before he could rouse himself to call the police. And that’s his story.” Breen struck a match; like most pipe-smokers, he smoked more matches than tobacco. “I’m not supposed to discuss a case with outsiders. But you’ve both been of help, and I’m hoping you can both be of still more.”

I said, “Arnold seldom came home for lunch.”

“I see,” Breen said. “That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to learn. Possibly Hamilton suspected Forrest and set a trap for him. He didn’t catch them together, but he caught Forrest there and nothing wrong with the set. Let’s say Mrs. Hamilton had gone out for a few minutes and Forrest was waiting for her and Hamilton guessed why. She came home after Forrest left and—” Breen paused. “You folks didn’t see Mrs. Hamilton come home, did you?”

“We were eating lunch in the kitchen,” I told him. “You can’t see the street from there.”

“Well, it could be that she came home after Forrest left and she and her husband had a fight because of him and in a fit of jealous rage, he grabbed hold of that vase and struck her with it.”

Margaret, still rocking, had a kind word to say for somebody. “I can’t believe it Arnold is such a nice, mild person.”

“You think so, ma’am?”

“Oh, yes. Arnold couldn’t hurt a fly. It must have been the other one — that Larry Forrest He was here once to repair our set. He looked so — well, I wouldn’t put it past him having an affair with a married woman and then murdering her.”

“We’re considering that,” Breen said, and suddenly he looked around.

The hush had again descended on the street A stretcher covered by a sheet was being brought out of that red-brick house. I could imagine Norma Hamilton under there — not as I had seen her a short time ago but vibrantly alive. The stretcher was shoved into a police ambulance, which then rolled to the corner and made a U-turn and passed the house.

“Let’s see,” Breen said. “Isn’t that where the new Green Acres development is?” He had got off the porch rail; facing the street, he waved his left hand.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Mostly dead-end streets and loops, as I remember. Hard to get through. So I guess most cars come to this street from that direction and go the same way.” This time he waved his right hand, toward where nearly all of the city lay.

Again I told him he was right I had no idea why that should interest him, and I brought him back to what we had been discussing by saying, “Isn’t it possible to tell which one killed her by determining the exact time of her death?”

“If we could,” Breen said. “It’s never simple, and circumstances make it even tougher than usual in this case. First of all, it’s a hot day, which delayed the onset of rigor mortis. Secondly, quite a lot of time passed before the body was finally examined. That was why I was anxious to have you do it, Dr. McKay, when I thought you were an M.D. No, I’m afraid we won’t be able to pin the time of death down close enough to mean much.”

Suddenly Margaret stood up. The chair continued to rock for a moment after she was on her feet. “Would you like a cool drink, Mr. Breen?”

“Very much, ma’am. But something soft, please. I’m on duty.”

I noticed that as she moved to the door, he looked after her figure the way men hanging around on street corners look after almost any passing woman. Detectives, I supposed, were as human as anybody.

He drank the lemonade Margaret brought out and then left the porch. But he didn’t leave the street. He mingled with the people lingering on the sidewalk and talked to them. Later, after practically all of our neighbors had gone back to their houses, I saw him move down the street like a door-to-door salesman.

Needless to say, we didn’t go swimming that afternoon. Much of the day was gone; anyway, we weren’t in the mood. Margaret went into the house to work on a skirt she was sewing for our daughter, Betty, and I got out the lawn mower.

I was mowing the front lawn when Detective Breen, having been in about every house on the block, passed by and stopped. I said, “You seem to be the only detective working on this case.”

“There are plenty more,” he said. “This particular angle happens to be mine.”

“Which angle?”

“What the neighbors know about the Hamiltons. They agree with your opinion that Norma Hamilton was rather free and easy with the men.”

“That was my wife’s opinion, not mine.”

Breen pushed back his slouch hat and ran a handkerchief over his brow. Going from door to door must have been hot work. “Were you, Dr. McKay?” he said.

“Was I what?”

“A man Mrs. Hamilton was free and easy with?”

“Look at me,” I said, patting my pot belly. “Am I the kind of man who would appeal to an attractive young woman?”

“Let’s turn it around. Did she appeal to you?”

“I’m a normal man,” I said. “Every now and then I see a woman who appeals to me. So what? That doesn’t mean I do anything about it. Or could even if I wanted to. You’ll have to concentrate on a handsome young man or on a jealous husband.”

“My job is to concentrate on everybody.” He looked across the street. “Your wife wasn’t the only one who noticed Forrest’s truck parked often in from of that house.”

“Then there’s your proof she had an affair with him.”

“Not exactly proof, but something.” Breen clicked his pipe against his teeth. “Well, it’s been a long afternoon.”

“Just a minute,” I said as he started to move on. “I’m curious about one thing. Weren’t there fingerprints on the vase?”

“Somehow, they’re seldom where you want them. The vase had been handled too much before the murderer did to leave anything but smudges.”

And his lazy eyes studied me — as if to see, I thought, if I was relieved by that information. Then he said good-by and crossed the street to where he had left his car.

I went into the house and told Margaret my conversation with the detective — except for the part where he had asked me if Norma Hamilton had been attractive to me.

“You see, I was right about the hussy and the TV truck out there so often,” Margaret said. “And you refused to believe me.”

As usual she had the last word.

After dinner, we did what we always did after dinner — we settled down in the living room to watch television. We started at eight o’clock, when a movie we hadn’t seen in years came on. It ran an hour and a half. After that there was a half-hour Western and then a comedy show that would last a full hour and bring us to our bedtime, at eleven o’clock. We never saw it all. At about a quarter to eleven, the doorbell rang.

“Who can that be at this hour?” Margaret said in a tight voice.

She knew as well as I who it was. I went to the door and admitted Detective Breen.

He took off his hat. For the first time, I saw him without it on and he was quite bald on top. He said hello to Margaret and stood in the middle of the living room, watching the television screen as if that was what he had come here to do.

“This is a good set you have,” he said presently. “Have much trouble with it?”

“Hardly any,” I said.

“Then why has Larry Forrest been here so often to fix ft?”

There was an uproar of laughter from the set at something the comedian had said. I turned it off. Margaret was sitting deep in the wing chair with her hands folded on her lap.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said to Breen. “The only trouble we had with it was a couple months ago, when a tube had to be replaced.”

“So I was led to believe.” Breen took from his pocket a number of yellow cards. “These are from the Riverside Service files. They are made out by the repairman after each call so the company will have a record of what work was done on each set and how much time was spent on the job.” He shuffled the cards as if about to deal them. “There are nine here in the name of McKay at this address. Nine in seven weeks. There were only three under Hamilton.”

I said, “There must be a mistake.”

But looking at Margaret, I knew there wasn’t. She had put her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes.

“Like almost all cars that come to this street, Forrest’s truck came from the right,” Breen was saying. “That’s why he always parked across the street, on the right side of the street, in front of the Hamilton house, because it’s directly opposite this house. He made his calls here. Anyway, most of them. The last one here was eight days ago. Then two at the Hamilton house.”

He had been speaking to me, and only to me, from the first. As Margaret remained silent, I had to say something. I said, “But if it was anything but a service call, would he have made out a service card?”

“The only time the coast was clear was when you were at your office,” Breen said. “Those were also his working hours. He had to report each call he made to explain to his office the time spent. These are the cards. Probably be paid for the charges written on each of these out of his own pocket”

Margaret started to laugh. That was the most awful sound I had ever heard.

“I paid for each call,” the said. “I paid the charge each time.” She laughed some more and said, “For services rendered.”

“Margaret!” I cried.

She looked at me, and for some reason, I was the one who cringed.

“Twenty years of dullness,” she said. “Twenty years of living with you. And it was unbearable this last year with Betty away and the house always so empty. Then there was Larry Forrest and it was like being reborn. Like being young again.” Her hands writhed on her lap. “Then he saw Norma. He made a call there, and he was no different than the others. Because she was younger and prettier and threw herself at him, he... he...”

There was a silence. She had become a stranger to me. It was odd that a man could live with a woman for so long and not know her.

The detective stood shuffling those cards, and after a long moment, he said, “So this morning you killed her.”

“I didn’t go there to kill her,” Margaret said. “I went, to plead with her. I told her she bad other men. I had only Larry. I begged her to let him come back to me. Norma sneered at me. She said I was too old for him. We were in the bedroom. I snatched up the vase.”

Her voice faded. She slumped in the chair.

“And then you had to bring Forrest into it,” Breen said. “You called Riverside Service and told the girl in the office that you were Mrs. Hamilton. You said your set was out of order and please send a man at once because there was a program on soon you were anxious to see. You knew that Forrest phoned his office every hour or so to find out if there were calls for emergency service in his area. From your porch, you watched him arrive and go into that house across the street. Once again he was serving you, this time in a different way. He was set up by you to take the rap for you.”

“No. That wasn’t it. I didn’t care so much about myself.” Margaret’s head lifted, and her face was stem. “He had to be punished, too,” she said.

Cops and Robbers

Vincent H. Gaddis

INSTALLMENT PLAN

In Atlanta, Georgia, D. A. Stoddard, Jr., told police that when he returned to his parked car, he discovered that someone had stolen the battery and drained the gasoline tank.

He left the car and went to a service station to purchase a battery and a can of gasoline. When he got back, both front wheels on his car were missing. Stoddard then went to a nearby garage to see if he could get two wheels. Again he returned — and this time the entire car was missing.

Later, he learned, police in a scout car had noticed the stripped car, thought it might have been stolen, and had it hauled away.

FEMININE TOUCH

A young woman, convicted of burglary in Baltimore, Maryland, carried her tools in her purse. Police said Miss Josephine Ditmore, twenty-three, broke into a restaurant and a tailor shop with eyebrow tweezers, a nail file and a lady’s-size razor.

RESTAURANT RIDDLE

A classic case of ingenuity in larceny was disclosed after a large branch of a national restaurant chain showed an inexplicable decline in receipts. Undercover inspectors sent to the scene were puzzled. “Everything seems to be in order,” they reported. “A close watch was kept on all three cash registers and all sales were rung up accurately.”

The report revealed the gimmick. Management remembered that only two cash registers had been installed. A clever cashier had installed a third register of his own.

MISLABELED

Mrs. Carrie Crump was fined fifty dollars in Knoxville, Tennessee, city court for selling window-cleaning fluid for fifty cents a portion. Police explained that Carrie’s customers didn’t use the stuff to clean windows. They drank it.

MASCOT

A bird-watching society has been formed by a group of inmates at Dartmoor Prison, Princetown, England. Officials report that the prisoners chose the jackdaw, known as the bird world’s No. I thief, as their object of study.

BOLD AND BRAZEN

With some embarrassment, Alfonso Garcia, of Nogales, Arizona, informed police that someone had stolen the collar off his watchdog’s neck.

EXCEPTIONAL

As a rule, a burglar with plenty of time to work reportedly takes “everything but the kitchen sink.” But the intruder that entered the home of Mrs. Betty Stillman at Jacksonville, Florida, left everything but — the kitchen sink.

ETHER ENIGMA

At Montello, Wisconsin, a freak atmospheric condition occasionally causes the radio frequency of the Marquette County sheriff’s department to become crossed up with one on which an unidentified police department in the far South is operating. Officer Don Neilson ona night was attempting to contact a squad car when he was interrupted by the drawl of Southern officers on the same wave length. Suddenly Neilson heard one of the annoyed Southern officers say, “Doggone it, Rufe, I can’t bear a word you’re saying. Some mushmouth damn Yankee keeps breaking in.”

BLOODS THICKER

A young man at Mansfield, Louisiana, asked Sheriff Harmon Burgess to let his uncle sober up on a jail cot. Burgess agreed, and the youth helped his intoxicated companion to bed in a cell, promising to come for him later.

Awakening, the older man disclosed that he had no nephew — and a quick check revealed that he had no car, either. The sheriff sent out an alarm for a youth about twenty-one, driving a car filled with luggage, small appliances and a television set.

TWX THEFTS

Three teen-age boys in Ardmore, Oklahoma, were apprehended and turned over to juvenile authorities. They were accused of giving the telephone company tape-recorded sounds of coins being deposited into a pay telephone instead of money.

And in Hammond, Indiana, Patrolman Robert Dowling was unable to make his hourly report to headquarters from his beat. Someone had stolen his call box.

BUDDIES

When Donald Bolland, twenty-two, applied for a job with the Tucson, Arizona, police force, he listed his friend, Pat Daily, as a character reference. A few days later, an FBI fugitive report revealed that both Bolland and Daily were wanted for violation of the Dyer Act.

Before She Kills

by Fredric Brown

1.

The door was that of an office in an old building on State Street near Chicago Avenue, on the near north side, and the lettering on it read HUNTER & HUNTER DETECTIVE AGENCY. I opened it and went in. Why not? I’m one of the Hunters; my name is Ed. The other Hunter is my uncle, Ambrose Hunter.

The door to the inner office was open and I could see Uncle Am playing solitaire at his desk in there. He’s shortish, fattish and smartish, with a straggly brown mustache. I waved at him and headed for my desk in the outer office. I’d had my lunch — we take turns — and he’d be leaving now.

Except that he wasn’t He swept the cards together and stacked them but he said, “Come on in, Ed. Something to talk over with you.”

I went in and pulled up a chair. It was a hot day and two big flies were droning in circles around the room. I reached for the fly swatter and held it, waiting for one or both of them to light somewhere. “We ought to get a bomb,” I said.

“Huh? Who do we want to blow up?”

“A bug bomb,” I said. “One of these aerosol deals, so we can get flies on the wing.”

“Not sporting, kid. Like shooting a sitting duck, only the opposite. Got to give the flies a chance.”

“All right,” I said, swatting one of them as it landed on a corner of the desk. “What did you want to talk about?”

“A case, maybe. A client, or a potential one, came in while you were feeding your face. Offered us a job, but I’m not sure about taking it Anyway, it’s one you’d have to handle, and I wanted to talk it over with you first.”

The other fly landed and died, and the wind of the swat that killed it blew a small rectangular paper off the desk onto the floor. I picked it up and saw that it was a check made out to Hunter & Hunter and signed Oliver R. Bookman — a name I didn’t recognize. It was for five hundred dollars.

We could use it. Business had been slow for a month or so. I said, “Looks like you took the job already. Not that I blame you.” I put the check back on the desk. “That’s a pretty strong argument.”

“No, I didn’t take it. Ollie Bookman had the check already made out when he came, and put it down while we were talking. But I told him we weren’t taking the case till I’d talked to you.”

“Ollie? Do you know him, Uncle Am?”

“No, but he told me to call him that, and it comes natural. He’s that kind of guy. Nice, I mean.”

I took his word for it. My uncle is a nice guy himself, but he’s a sharp judge of character and can spot a phony a mile off.

He said, “He thinks his wife is trying to kill him or maybe planning to.”

“Interesting,” I said. “But what could we do about it — unless she does? And then it’s cop business.”

“He knows that, but he’s not sure enough to do anything drastic about it unless someone backs up his opinion and tells him he’s not imagining things. Then he’ll decide what to do. He wants you to study things from the inside.”

“Like how? And why me?”

“He’s got a young half brother living in Seattle whom his wife has never met and whom he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Brother’s twenty-five years old — and you can pass for that age. He wants you to come to Chicago from Seattle on business and stay with them for a few days. You wouldn’t even have to change your first name; you’d be Ed Cartwright and Ollie would brief you on everything you’ll be supposed to know.”

I thought a moment and then said, “Sounds a little far out to me, but—” I glanced pointedly at the five-hundred-dollar check. “Did you ask how he happened to come to us?”

“Yes. Koslovsky sent him; he’s a friend of Kossy’s, belongs to a couple of the same clubs.” Koslovsky is chief investigator for an insurance company; we’ve worked for him or with him on several things.

I asked, “Does that mean there’s an insurance angle?”

“No, Ollie Bookman carries only a small policy — small relative to what his estate would be — that he took out a long time ago. Currently he’s not insurable. Heart trouble.”

“Oh. And does Kossy approve this scheme of his for investigating his wife?”

“I was going to suggest we ask Kossy that. Look, Ed, Ollie’s coming back for our answer at two o’clock. I’ll have time to eat and get back. But I wanted to brief you before I left so you could think it over. You might also call Koslovsky and get a rundown on Ollie, whatever he knows about him.”

Uncle Am got up and got the old black slouch hat he insists on wearing despite the season. Kidding him about it does no good.

I said, “One more question before you go. Suppose Bookman’s wife meets his half brother, his real one, someday. Isn’t it going to be embarrassing?”

“I asked him that. He says it’s damned unlikely; he and his brother aren’t at all close. He’ll never go to Seattle and the chances that his brother will ever come to Chicago are one in a thousand. Well, so long, kid.”

I called Koslovsky. Yes, he’d recommended us to Bookman when Bookman had told him what he wanted done and asked — knowing that he, Koslovsky, sometimes hired outside investigators when he and his small staff had a temporary overload of cases — to have an agency recommended to him.

“I don’t think too much of his idea,” Koslovsky said, “but, hell, it’s his money and he can afford it. If he wants to spend some of it that way, you might as well have the job as anyone else.”

“Do you think there’s any real chance that he’s right? About his wife, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t know, Ed. I’ve met her a time or two and — well, she struck me as a cold potato, probably, but hardly as a murderess. Still, I don’t know her well enough to say.”

“How well do you know Bookman? Well enough to know whether he’s pretty sane or gets wild ideas?”

“Always struck me as pretty sane. We’re not close friends but I’ve known him fairly well for three or four years.”

“Just how well off is he?”

“Not rich, but solvent. If I had to guess, I’d say he could cash out at over one hundred thousand, less than two. Enough to kill him for, I guess.”

“What’s his racket?”

“Construction business, but he’s mostly retired. Not on account of age; he’s only in his forties. But he’s got angina pectoris, and a year or two ago the medicos told him to take it easy or else.”

Uncle Am got back a few minutes before two o’clock and I just had time to tell him about my conversation with Kossy before Ollie Bookman showed up. Bookman was a big man with a round, cheerful face that made you like him at sight. He had a good handshake.

“Hi, Ed,” he said. “Glad that’s your name because it’s what I’ll be calling you even if it wasn’t. That is, if you’ll take on the job for me. Your Uncle Am here wouldn’t make it definite. What do you say?”

I told him we could at least talk about it and when we were comfortably seated in the inner office, I said, “Mr. Bookman—” “Call me Ollie,” he interrupted, so I said, “All right, Ollie. The only reason I can think of, thus far, for not taking on the job, if we don’t, is that even if you’re right — if your wife does have any thoughts about murder — the chances seem awfully slight that I could find out about it, and how she intended to do it, in time to stop it.”

He nodded. “I understand that, but I want you to try, anyway. You see, Ed, I’ll be honest and say that I may be imagining things. I want somebody else’s opinion — after that somebody has lived with us at least a few days. But if you come to agree with me, or find any positive indications that I’m maybe right, then — well, I’ll do something about it. Eve — that’s my wife’s name — won’t give me a divorce or even agree to a separation with maintenance, but damn it, I can always simply leave home and live at the club — better that than get myself killed.”

“You have asked her to give you a divorce, then?”

“Yes, I–Let me begin at the beginning. Some of this is going to be embarrassing to tell, but you should know the whole score. I met Eve...”

2.

He’d met Eve eight years ago when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-five, or so she claimed. She was a strip-tease dancer who worked in night clubs under the professional name of Eve Eden — her real name had been Eve Packer. She was a statuesque blonde, beautiful. Ollie had fallen for her and started a campaign immediately, a campaign that intensified when he learned that offstage she was quiet, modest, the exact opposite of what strippers are supposed to be and which some of them really are. By the time he was finally having an affair with her, lust had ripened into respect and he’d been thinking in any case that it was about time he married and settled down.

So he married her, and that was his big mistake. She turned out to be completely, psychopathically frigid. She’d been acting, and doing a good job of acting, during the weeks before marriage, but after marriage, or at least after the honeymoon, she simply saw no reason to keep on acting. She had what she wanted — security and respectability. She hated sex, and that was that She turned Ollie down flat when he tried to get her to go to a psychoanalyst or even to a marriage consultant, who, he thought, might be able to talk her into going to an analyst. In every other way she was a perfect wife. Beautiful enough to be a showpiece that made all his friends envy him, a charming hostess, even good at handling servants and running the house. For all outsiders could know, it was a perfect marriage. But for a while it drove Ollie Bookman nuts. He offered to let her divorce him and make a generous settlement, either lump sum or alimony. But she had what she wanted, marriage and respectability, and she wasn’t going to give them up and become a divorcee, even if doing so wasn’t going to affect her scale of living in the slightest. He threatened to divorce her, and she laughed at him. He had, she pointed out, no grounds for divorce that he could prove in court, and she’d never give him any. She’d simply deny the only thing he could say about her, and make a monkey out of him.

It was an impossible situation, especially as Ollie had badly wanted to have children or at least a child, as well as a normal married life. He’d made the best of it by accepting the situation at home as irreparable and settling for staying sane by making at least occasional passes in other directions. Nothing serious, just a normal man wanting to live a normal life and succeeding to a degree.

But eventually the inevitable happened. Three years ago, he had found himself in an affair that turned out to be much more than an affair, the real love of his life — and a reciprocated love. She was a widow, Dorothy Stark, in her early thirties. Her husband had died five years before in Korea; they’d had only a honeymoon together before he’d gone overseas. Ollie wanted so badly to marry her that he offered Eve a financial settlement that would have left him relatively a pauper — this was before the onset of his heart trouble and necessary semiretirement; he looked forward to another twenty years or so of earning capacity — but she refused; never would she consent to become a divorcee, at any price. About this time, he spent a great deal of money on private detectives in the slim hope that her frigidity was toward him only, but the money was wasted. She went out quite a bit but always to bridge parties, teas or, alone or with respectable woman companions, to movies or plays.

Uncle Am interrupted. “You said you used private detectives before, Ollie. Out of curiosity, can I ask why you’re not using the same outfit again?”

“Turned out to be crooks, Am. When they and I were finally convinced we couldn’t get anything on her legitimately, they offered for a price to frame her for me.” He mentioned the name of an agency we’d heard of, and Uncle Am nodded.

Ollie went on with his story. There wasn’t much more of it. Dorothy Stark had known that he could never marry her but she also knew that he very badly wanted a child, preferably a son, and had loved him enough to offer to bear one for him. He had agreed — even if he couldn’t give the child his name, he wanted one — and two years ago she had borne him a son: Jerry, they’d named him, Jerry Stark. Ollie loved the boy to distraction.

Uncle Am asked if Eve Bookman knew of Jerry’s existence and Ollie nodded.

“But she won’t do anything about it. What could she do, except divorce me?”

“But if that’s the situation,” I asked him, “what motive would your wife have to want to kill you? And why now, if the situation has been the same for two years?”

“There’s been one change, Ed, very recently. Two years ago, I made out a new will, without telling Eve. You see, with angina pectoris, my doctor tells me it’s doubtful if I have more than a few years to live in any case. And I want at least the bulk of my estate to go to Dorothy and to my son. So— Well, I made out a will which leaves a fourth to Eve, a fourth to Dorothy and half, in trust, to Jerry. And I explained, in a preamble, why I was doing it that way — the true story of my marriage to Eve and the fart that it really wasn’t one, and why it wasn’t. And I admitted paternity of Jerry. You see, Eve could contest that will — but would she? If she fought it, the newspapers would have a field day with its contents and make a big scandal out of it — and her position, her respectability, is the most important thing in the world to Eve. Of course, it would hurt Dorothy, too — but if she won, even in part, she could always move somewhere else and change her name. Jerry, if this happens in the next few years, as it probably will, will be too young to be hurt, or even to know what’s going on. You see?”

“Yes,” I said. “But if you hate your wife, why not—”

“Why not simply disinherit her completely, leave her nothing? Because then she would fight the will, she’d have to. I’m hoping by giving her a fourth, she’ll decide she’d rather settle for that and save face than contest the will.”

“I see that,” I said. “But the situation’s been the same for two years now. And you said that something recent—”

“As recent as last night,” he interrupted. “I kept that will in a hiding place in my office — which is in my home since I retired — and last night I discovered it was missing. It was there a few days ago. Which means that, however she came to do so, Eve found it. And destroyed it So if I should die now — she thinks — before I discover the will is gone and make another, I’ll die intestate and she’ll automatically get everything. She’s got well over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of motive for killing me before I find out the will is gone.”

Uncle Am asked, “You say ‘she thinks.’ Wouldn’t she?”

“Last night she would have,” Ollie said grimly. “But this morning, I went to my lawyer, made out a new will, same provisions, and left it in his hands. Which is what I should have done with the first one. But she doesn’t know that, and I don’t want her to.”

It was my turn to question that. “Why not?” I wanted to know. “If she knows a new will exists, where she can’t get at it, she’d know killing you wouldn’t accomplish anything for her. Even if she got away with it.”

“Right, Ed. But I’m almost hoping she will try, and fail, Then I’d be the happiest man on earth. I would have grounds for divorce — attempted murder should be grounds if anything is — and I could marry Dorothy, legitimize my son and leave him with my name. I... well, for the chance of doing that, I’m willing to take the chance of Eve’s trying and succeeding. I haven’t got much to lose, and everything to gain. How otherwise could I ever marry Dorothy — unless Eve should predecease me, which is damned unlikely. She’s healthy as a horse, and younger than I am, besides. And if she should succeed in killing me, but got caught, she’d inherit nothing; Dorothy and Jerry would get it all. That’s the law, isn’t it? That no one can inherit from someone he’s killed, I mean. Well, that’s the whole story. Will you take the job, Ed, or do I have to look for someone else? I hope I won’t.”

I looked at Uncle Am — we never decide anything important without consulting one another — and he said, “Okay by me, kid.” So I nodded to Ollie. “All right,” I said.

3.

We worked out details. He’d already checked plane flights and knew that a Pacific Airlines plane was due in from Seattle at ten fifteen that evening; I’d arrive on that and meanwhile he’d pretend to have received a telegram saying I was coming and would be in Chicago for a few days to a week on business, and asking him to meet the plane if convenient. I went him one better on that by telling him we knew a girl who sometimes did part-time work for us as a female operative and I’d have her phone his place, pretend to be a Western Union operator, and read the telegram to whoever answered the phone. He thought that was a good idea, especially if his wife was the one to take it down. We worked out the telegram itself and then he phoned his place on the pretext of wanting to know if his wife would be there to accept a C.O.D. package. She was, so I phoned the girl I had in mind, had her take down the telegram, and gave her Ollie’s number to phone it to. We had the telegram dated from Denver, since the real Ed, if he were to get in that evening, would already be on the plane and would have to send the telegram from a stop en route. I told Ollie I’d work out a plausible explanation as to why I hadn’t decided, until en route, to ask him to meet the plane.

Actually, we arranged to meet downtown, in the lobby of the Morrison Hotel an hour before plane time; Ollie lived north and if he were really driving to the airport, it would take him another hour to get there and an hour back as far as the Loop, so we’d have two hours to kill in further planning and briefing. Besides another half hour or so driving to his place when it was time to head there.

That meant he wouldn’t have to brief me on family history now; there’d be plenty of time this evening. I did ask what kind of work Ed Cartwright did, so if necessary I could spend the rest of the afternoon picking up at least the vocabulary of whatever kind of work it was. But it turned out he ran a printing shop — which was a lucky break since after high school and before getting with my Uncle Am, I’d spent a couple of years as an apprentice printer myself and knew enough about the trade to talk about it casually.

Just as Ollie was getting ready to leave, the phone rang and it was our girl calling back to say she’d read the telegram to a woman who’d answered the phone and identified herself as Mrs. Oliver Bookman, so we were able to tell Ollie the first step had been taken.

After Ollie had left, Uncle Am looked at me and asked, “What do you think, kid?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Except that five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks. Shall I mail the check in for deposit now, since I won’t be here tomorrow?”

“Okay. Go out and mail it if you want and take the rest of the day off, since you’ll start working tonight.”

“All right. With this check in hand, I’m going to pick me up a few things, like a couple shirts and some socks. And how about a good dinner tonight? I’ll meet you at Ireland’s at six.”

He nodded, and I went to my desk in the outer office and was making out a deposit slip and an envelope when he came and sat on the corner of the desk.

“Kid,” he said. “This Ollie just might be right. We got to assume that he could be, anyway. And I just had a thought. What would be the safest way to kill a man with bad heart trouble, like angina pectoris is? I’d say conning him into having an attack by giving him a shock or by getting him to overexert himself somehow. Or else by substituting sugar pills for whatever he takes — nitroglycerin pills, I think it is — when he gets an attack.”

I said, “I’ve been thinking along those lines myself, Uncle Am. I thought maybe one thing I’d do down in the Loop is have a talk with Doc Kruger.” Kruger is our family doctor, sort of. He doesn’t get much business from either of us but we use him for an information booth whenever we want to know something about forensic medicine.

“Wait a second,” Uncle Am said. “I’ll phone him. Maybe he’ll let us buy him dinner with us tonight to pay him for picking his brains.”

He went in the office and used his phone; I heard him talking to Doc. He came out and said, “It’s a deal. Only at seven instead of six. That’ll be better for you, anyway, Ed. Bring your suitcase with you and if we take our time at Ireland’s, you can go right from there to meet Ollie and not have to go home again.”

So I did my errands, went to our room, cleaned up and dressed, and packed a suitcase. I didn’t think anybody would be looking in it to check up on me, but I thought I might as well be as careful as I could. I couldn’t provide clothes with Seattle labels but I could and did avoid things with labels that said Chicago or were from well-known Chicago stores. And I avoided anything that was monogrammed, not that I particularly like monograms or have many things with them. Then I doodled around with my trombone until it was time to head for Ireland’s.

I got there exactly on time and Doc and Uncle Am were there already. But there were three Martinis on the table; Uncle Am had known I wouldn’t be more than a few minutes late, if any, so he’d ordered for me.

Without having to be asked, since Uncle Am had mentioned it over the phone, Doc started telling us about angina pectoris. It was incurable, he said, but a victim of it might live a long time if he took good care of himself. He had to avoid physical exertion like lifting anything heavy or climbing stairs. He had to avoid overtiring himself by doing even light work for a long period. He had to avoid overindulgence in alcohol, although an occasional drink wouldn’t hurt him if he was in good physical shape otherwise. He had to avoid violent emotional upsets as far as was possible, and a fit of anger could be as dangerous as running up a flight of stairs.

Yes, nitroglycerin pills were used. Everyone suffering from angina carried them and popped one or two into his mouth any time he felt an attack coming on. They either prevented the attack or made it much lighter than it would have been otherwise. Doc took a little pillbox out of his pocket and showed us some nitro pills. They were white and very tiny.

There was another drug also used to avert or limit attacks that was even more effective than nitroglycerin. It was amyl nitrite and came in glass ampoules. In emergency, you crushed the ampoule and inhaled the contents. But amyl nitrite, Doc told us, was used less frequently than nitroglycerin, and only in very bad cases or for attacks in which nitro didn’t seem to be helping, because repeated use of amyl nitrite diminished the effect; the victim built up immunity to it if he used it often.

Doc had really come loaded. He’d brought an amyl nitrite ampoule with him, too, and showed it to us. I asked him if I could have it, just in case. He gave it to me without asking why, and even showed me the best way to hold it and crush it if I ever had to use it.

We had a second cocktail and I asked him a few more questions and got answers to them, and that pretty well covered angina pectoris, and then we ordered. Ireland’s is famous for sea food; it’s probably the best inland sea-food restaurant in the country, and we all ordered it. Doc Kruger and Uncle Am wrestled with lobsters; me, I’m a coward — I ate royal sole.

4.

Doc had to take off after our coffee, but it was still fifteen or twenty minutes too early for me to leave — I’d have to take a taxi to the Morrison on account of having a suitcase; otherwise, I’d have walked and been just right on the timing — so Uncle Am and I had a second coffee apiece and yakked. He said he felt like taking a walk before he turned in, so he’d ride in the taxi with me and then walk home from there.

I fought off a bellboy who tried to take my suitcase away from me and made myself comfortable on one of the overstuffed chairs in the lobby. I’d sat there about five or ten minutes when I heard myself being paged. I stood up and waved to the bellboy who’d been doing the paging and he came over and told me I was wanted on the phone and led me to the phone I was wanted on. I bought him off for four bits and answered the phone. It was Ollie Bookman, as I’d known it would be. Only he and Uncle Am would have known I was here and Uncle Am had left me only ten minutes ago.

“Ed,” he said. “Change of plans. Eve wasn’t doing anything this evening and decided to come to the airport with me, for the ride. I couldn’t tell her no, for no reason. So you’ll have to grab a cab and get out there ahead of us.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where are you now?”

“On the way south, at Division Street. Made an excuse to stop in a drugstore; didn’t know how to get in touch with you until the time of our appointment. You can make it ahead of us if you get a cabby to hurry. I’ll stall — drive as slow as I can without making Eve wonder. And I can stop for gas, and have my tires checked.”

“What do I do at the airport if the plane’s late?”

“Don’t worry about the plane. You take up a spot near the Pacific Airlines counter; you’ll see me come toward it and intercept me. Won’t matter if the plane’s in yet or not. I’ll get us the hell out of there fast before Eve can learn if the plane’s in. I’ll make sure not to get there before arrival time.”

“Right,” I said. “But, Ollie, I’m not supposed to have seen you for twenty years — and I was five then, or supposed to be. So how would I recognize you? Oh, for that matter, you recognize me?”

“No sweat, Ed. We write each other once a year, at Christmas. And several times, including last Christmas, we traded snapshots with our Christmas letters. Remember?”

“Of course,” I said. “But didn’t your wife see the one I sent you?”

“She may have glanced at it casually. But after seven months she wouldn’t remember it. Besides, you and the real Ed Cartwright are about the same physical type, anyway — dark hair, good looking. You’ll pass. But don’t miss meeting us before we reach the counter or somebody there might tell us the plane’s not in yet, if it’s not. Well, I better not talk any longer.”

I swore a little to myself as I left the Morrison lobby and went to the cab rank. I’d counted on the time Ollie and I would have had together to have him finish my briefing. This way I’d have to let him do most of the talking, at least tonight. Well, he seemed smart enough to handle it I didn’t even know my parents’ names, whether either of them was alive, whether I had any other living relatives besides Ollie. I didn’t even know whether I was married or not — although I felt reasonably sure Ollie would have mentioned it if I was.

Yes, he’d have to do most of the talking — although I’d better figure out what kind of business I’d come to Chicago to do; I’d be supposed to know that, and Ollie wouldn’t know anything about it. Well, I’d figure that out on the cab ride.

Barring accidents, I’d get there well ahead of Ollie, and I didn’t want accidents, so I didn’t offer the cabby any bribe for speed when I told him to take me to the airport. He’d keep the meter ticking all right, since he made his money by the mile and not by the minute.

I had my cover story ready by the time we got there. It wasn’t detailed, but I didn’t anticipate being pressed for details, and if I was, I knew more about printing equipment than Eve Bookman would know. I was a good ten minutes ahead of plane time. I found myself a seat near the Pacific Airlines counter and facing in the direction from which the Bookmans would come. Fifteen minutes later — on time, as planes go — the public-address system announced the arrival of my flight from Seattle, and fifteen minutes after that — time for me to have left the plane and even to have collected the suitcase that was by my feet — I saw them coming. That is, I saw Ollie coming, and with him was a beautiful, soignée blonde who could only be Eve Bookman, nee Eve Eden. Quite a dish. She was, with high heels, just about two inches short of Ollie’s height, which made her just about as tall as I, unless she took off her shoes for me. Which, from what Ollie had told me about her, was about the last thing I expected her to do, especially here in the airport.

I got up and walked toward them and — remembering identification was only from snapshot — didn’t put too much confidence in my voice when I asked, “Ollie?” and I put out my hand but only tentatively.

Ollie grabbed my hand in his big one and started pumping it “Ed! Gawdamn if I can believe it after all these years. When I last saw you, not counting pictures, you looked— Hell, let’s get to that later. Meet Eve. Eve, meet Ed.”

Eve Bookman gave me a smile but not a hand. “Glad to meet you at last Edward. Oliver’s talked quite a bit about you.” I hoped she was just being polite in making the latter statement.

I gave her a smile back. “Hope he didn’t say anything bad about me. But maybe he did; I was probably a pretty obstreperous brat when he saw me last. I would have been — let’s see—”

“Five,” said Ollie. “Well, what are we waiting for? Ed, you want we should go right home? Or should we drop in somewhere on the way and hoist a few? You weren’t much of a drinker when I knew you last but maybe by now—”

Eve interrupted him. “Let’s go home, Oliver. You’ll want a nightcap there in any case, and you know you’re not supposed to have more than one or two a day. Did he tell you, Edward, about his heart trouble in any of his letters?”

Ollie saved me again. “No, but it’s not important. Ail right, though. We’ll head home and I’ll have my daily one or two, or maybe, since this is an occasion, three. Ed, is that your suitcase back by where you were sitting?”

I said it was and went back and got it, then went with them to the parking area and to a beautiful cream-colored Buick convertible with the top down. Ollie opened the door for Eve and then held it open after she got in. “Go on, Ed. We can all sit in the front seat.” He grinned. “Eve’s got an MG and loves to drive it, but we couldn’t bring it tonight. With those damn bucket seats, you can’t ride three in the whole car.” I got in and he went around and got in the driver’s side. I was wishing that I could drive it — I’d never piloted a recent Buick — but I couldn’t think of any reasonable excuse for offering.

Half an hour later, I wished that I’d not only offered but had insisted. Ollie Bookman was a poor driver. Not a fast driver or a dangerous one, just sloppy. The way he grated gears made my teeth grate with them and his starts and stops were much too jerky. Besides, he was a lane-straddler and had no sense of timing on making stop lights.

But he was a good talker. He talked almost incessantly, and to good purpose, briefing me, mostly by apparently talking to Eve. “Don’t remember if I told you, Eve, how come Ed and I have different last names, but the same father — not the same mother. See, I was Dad’s son by his first marriage and Ed by his second — Ed was born Ed Bookman. But Dad died right after Ed was born and Ed’s mother, my stepmother, married Wilkes Cartwright a couple years later. Ed was young enough that they changed his name to match his stepfather’s, but I was already grown up, through high school anyway, so I didn’t change mine. I was on my own by then. Well, both Ed’s mother and his stepfather are dead now; he and I are the only survivors. Well...” And I listened and filed away facts. Sometimes he’d cut me in by asking me questions, but the questions always cued in their own answers or were ones that wouldn’t be giveaways whichever way I answered them, like, “Ed, the house you were born in, out north of town — is it still standing, or haven’t you been out that way recently?”

I was fairly well keyed in on family history by the time we got home.

5.

Home wasn’t as I’d pictured it, a house. It was an apartment, but a big one — ten rooms, I learned later — on Coleman Boulevard just north of Howard. It was fourth floor, but there were elevators. Now that I thought of it, I realized that Ollie, because of his angina, wouldn’t be able to live in a house where he had to climb stairs. But later I learned they’d been living there ever since they’d married, so he hadn’t had to move there on account of that angle.

It was a fine apartment, nicely furnished and with a living room big enough to contain a swimming pool. “Come on, Ed,” Ollie said cheerfully. “I’ll show you your room and let you get rid of your suitcase, freshen up if you want to — although I imagine we’ll all be turning in soon. You must be tired after that long trip. Eve, could we talk you into making a round of Martinis meanwhile?”

“Yes, Oliver.” The perfect wife, she walked toward the small but well-stocked bar in a corner of the room.

I followed Ollie to the guest room that was to be mine. “Might as well unpack your suitcase while we talk,” he said, after he closed the door behind us. “Hang your stuff up or put it in the dresser there. Well, so far, so good. Not a suspicion, and you’re doing fine.”

“Lots of questions I’ve still got to ask you, Ollie. We shouldn’t take time to talk much now, but when will we have a chance to?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll say I have to go downtown, make up some reasons. And you’ve got your excuse already — the business you came to do. Maybe you can get it over with sooner than you thought — but then decide, since you’ve come this far anyway, to stay out the week. That way you can stick around here as much as you want, or go out only when I go out.”

“Fine. We’ll talk that out tomorrow. But about tonight, we’ll be talking, the three of us, and what can I safely talk about? Does she know anything about the size of my business, or can I improvise freely and talk about it?”

“Improvise your head off. I’ve never talked about your business. Don’t know much about it myself.”

“Good. Another question. How come, at only twenty-five, I’ve got a business of my own? Most people are still working for somebody else at that age.”

“You inherited it from your stepfather, Cartwright. He died three years ago. You were working in the shop and moved to the office and took over. And as far as I know, or Eve, you’re doing okay with it”

“Good. And I’m not married?”

“No, but if you want to invent a girl you’re thinking about marrying, that’s another safe thing you can improvise about.”

I put the last of the contents of my suitcase in the dresser drawer and we went back to the living room. Eve had the cocktails made and was waiting for us. We sat around sipping at them, and this time I was able to do most of the talking instead of having to let Ollie filibuster so I wouldn’t put my foot into my mouth by saying something wrong.

Ollie suggested a second round but Eve stood up and said that she was tired and that if we’d excuse her, she’d retire. And she gave Ollie a wifely caution about not having more than one more drink. He promised he wouldn’t and made a second round for himself and me.

He yawned when he put his down after the first sip. “Guess this will be the last one, Ed. I’m tired, too. And we’ll have plenty of time to talk tomorrow.”

I wasn’t tired, but if he was, that was all right by me. We finished our nightcaps fairly quickly.

“My room’s the one next to yours,” he told me as he took our glasses back to the bar. “No connecting door, but if you want anything, rap on the wall and I’ll hear you. I’m a light sleeper.”

“So am I,” I told him. “So make it vice versa on the rapping. I’m the one that’s supposed to be protecting you, not the other way around.”

“And Eve’s room is the one on the other side of mine. No connecting door there, either. Not that I’d use it, at this stage, even if it stood wide open with a red carpet running through it.”

“She’s still a beautiful woman,” I said, just to see how he’d answer it.

“Yes. But I guess I’m by nature monogamous. And this may sound corny and be corny, but I consider Dorothy and me married in the sight of God. She’s all I’ll ever want, she and the boy. Well, come on, and we’ll turn in.”

I turned in, but I didn’t go right to sleep. I lay awake thinking, sorting out my preliminary impressions. Eve Bookman — yes, I believed Ollie’s story about their marriage and didn’t even think it was exaggerated. Most people would think her sexy as hell to look at her, but I’ve got a sort of radar when it comes to sexiness. It hadn’t registered with a single blip on the screen. And Koslovsky is a much better than average judge of people and what had he said about her? Oh, yes, he’d called her a cold potato.

Some women just naturally hate sex and men — and some of those very women become things like strip teasers because it gives them pleasure to arouse and frustrate men. If one of them breaks down and has an affair with a man, it’s because the man has money, as Ollie had, and she thinks she can hook him for a husband, as Eve did Ollie. And once she’s got him safely hog-tied, he’s on his own and she can be her sweet, frigid self again. True, she’s given up the privilege of frustrating men in audience-size groups, but she can torture the hell out of one man, as long as he keeps wanting her, and achieve respectability and even social position while she’s doing it.

Oh, she’d been very pleasant to me, very hospitable, and no doubt was pleasant to all of Ollie’s friends. And most of them, the ones without radar, probably thought she was a ball of fire in bed and that Ollie was a very lucky guy.

But murder — I was going to take some more convincing on that. It could be Ollie’s imagination entirely. The only physical fact he’d come up with to indicate even the possibility of it was the business of the missing will. And she could have taken and destroyed that but still have no intention of killing him before he could make another like it; she could simply be hoping he’d never discover that it was missing.

But I could be wrong, very wrong. I’d met Eve less than three hours ago and Ollie had lived with her eight years. Maybe there was more than met the eye. Well, I’d keep my eyes open and give Ollie a run for his five hundred bucks by not assuming that he was making a murder out of a molehill I went to sleep and Ollie didn’t tap on my wall.

6.

I woke at seven but decided that would be too early and that I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself by being up and around before anybody else, so I went back to sleep and it was half past nine when I woke the second time. I got up, showered and shaved — my bedroom had a private bath so all of them must have — dressed and went exploring. I went back to the living room and through it, and found a dining room. The table was set for breakfast for three but no one was there yet.

A matronly-looking woman who’d be a cook or housekeeper — I later learned that she was both and her name was Mrs. Ledbetter — appeared in the doorway that led through a pantry to the kitchen and smiled at me. “You must be Mr. Bookman’s brother,” she said “What would you like for breakfast?”

“What time do the Bookmans come down for breakfast?” I asked.

“Usually earlier than this. But I guess you talked late last night. They should be up soon, though.”

“Then I won’t eat alone, thanks. I’ll wait till at least one of them shows up. And as for what I want — anything; whatever they will be having. I’m not fussy about breakfasts.”

She smiled and disappeared into the kitchen and I disappeared into the living room. I took a chair with a magazine rack beside it and was leafing through the latest Reader’s Digest, just reading the short items in it, when Ollie came in looking rested and cheerful. “Morning, Ed. Had breakfast?”

I told him I’d been up only a few minutes and had decided to wait for company. “Come on, then,” he said. “We won’t wait for Eve. She might be dressing now, but then again she might sleep till noon.”

But she didn’t sleep till noon; she came in when we were starting our coffee, and told Mrs. Ledbetter that she’d just have coffee, as she had a lunch engagement in only two hours. So the three of us sat drinking coffee and it was very cozy and you wouldn’t have guessed there was a thing wrong. You wouldn’t have guessed it, but you might have felt it Anyway, I felt it.

Ollie asked me if I wanted a lift downtown to do the business I’d come to do, and of course I said that I did. We discussed plans. Mrs. Ledbetter, I learned, had the afternoon and evening off, starting at noon, so no dinner would be served that evening. Eve would be gone all afternoon, playing bridge after her lunch date, and she suggested we all meet in the Loop and have dinner there. I wasn’t supposed to know Chicago, of course, so I let them pick the place and it came up the Pump Room at seven.

Ollie and I left and on the way to the garage back of the building, I asked him if he minded if I drove the Buick. I said I liked driving and didn’t get much chance to.

“Sure, Ed. But you mean you and Am don’t have a car?”

I told him we wanted one but hadn’t got around to affording it as yet. The few times we needed one for work, we rented one and simply got by without one for pleasure.

The Buick handled wonderfully. With me behind the wheel, it shifted smoothly, didn’t jerk in starting or stopping; it timed stop lights and didn’t straddle lanes. I asked how much it cost and said I hoped we’d be able to afford one like it someday. Except that we’d want a sedan because a convertible is too noticeable to use for a tail job. When we rented cars, we usually got a sedan in some neutral color like gray. Detectives used to use black cars, but nowadays a black car is almost as conspicuous as a red one.

I asked Ollie where he wanted me to drive him and he said he’d like to go to see Dorothy Stark and his son, Jerry. They lived in an apartment on LaSalle near Chicago Avenue. And did I have any plans or would I like to come up to meet them? He said he would like that.

I told him I’d drop up briefly if he wanted me to, but that I had plans. I wanted him to lend me the key to his apartment and I was going back there, after I could be sure both Mrs. Ledbetter and Mrs. Bookman had left. Since it was the former’s afternoon off, it would be the best chance I’d have to look around the place in privacy. He said sure, the key was on the ring with the car keys and I might as well keep the keys, car and all, until our dinner date at the Pump Room. It would be only a short cab ride for him to get there from Mrs. Stark’s. I asked him if there was any danger that Eve would go back to the apartment after her lunch date and before her bridge game. He was almost sure she wouldn’t, but her bridge club broke up about five thirty and she’d probably go back then to dress for dinner. That was all right; I could be gone by then.

When I parked the car on LaSalle, I remembered to ask him who I was supposed to be when I met Mrs. Stark — Ed Hunter or Ed Cartwright He suggested we stick to the Cartwright story; if he told Dorothy the truth, she’d worry about him being in danger. Anyway, it would be simpler and take less explanation.

I liked Dorothy Stark on sight She was small and brunette, with a heart-shaped face. Only passably pretty — nowhere near as stunning as Eve — but she was warm and genuine, the real thing. And really in love with Ollie; I didn’t need radar to tell me that. And Jerry, age two, was a cute toddler. I can take kids or let them alone, but Ollie was nuts about him.

I stayed only half an hour, breaking away with the excuse of having a business-lunch date in the Loop, but it was a very pleasant half hour, and Ollie was a completely different person here. He was at home in this small apartment, much more so than in the large apartment on Coleman Boulevard. And you had the feeling that Dorothy was his wife, not Eve.

I was only half a dozen blocks from the office and I didn’t want to get out to Coleman Boulevard before one o’clock, so I drove over to State Street and went up to see if Uncle Am was there. He was, and I told him what little I’d learned to date and what my plans were.

“Kid,” he said, “I’d like a ride in that chariot you’re pushing. How about us having an early lunch and then I’ll go out with you and help search the joint. Two of us can do twice as good a job.”

It was tempting but I thumbed it down. If a wheel did come off and Eve Bookman came back unexpectedly, I could give her a song and dance as to what I was doing there, but Uncle Am would be harder to explain. I said I’d give him the ride, though. We could leave now and he could come with me out as far as Howard Avenue and we’d eat somewhere out there; then he could take the el back south from the Howard station. It would amount only to his taking a two-hour lunch break and we did that any time we felt like it. He liked the idea.

I let him drive the second half of the way and he fell in love with the car, too. After we had lunch, I phoned the apartment from the restaurant and let the phone ring a dozen times to make sure both Mrs. Bookman and Mrs. Ledbetter were gone. Then I drove Uncle Am to the el station and myself to the apartment.

7.

I let myself in and put the chain on the door. If Eve came back too soon, that was going to be embarrassing to explain; I’d have to say I’d done it absent-mindedly and it would make me look like a fool. But it would be less embarrassing than to have her walk in and find me rooting in the drawers of her dresser.

First, I decided, I’d take a look at the place as a whole. The living room, dining room, and the guest bedroom were the only rooms I’d been in thus far. I decided to start at the back. I went through the dining room and the pantry into the kitchen. It was a big kitchen and had the works in the way of equipment, even an automatic dishwasher and garbage disposal. A room on one side of it was a service and storage room and on the other side was a bedroom; Mrs. Ledbetter’s, of course. I looked around in all three rooms but didn’t touch anything. I went back to the dining room and found that a door from it led to a room probably intended as a den or study; there was a desk — an old-fashioned rolltop desk that was really an antique — two file cabinets, a bookcase filled mostly with books on construction and business practice but with a few novels on one shelf, mostly mysteries, a typewriter on a stand, and a dictating machine. This was Ollie’s office, from which he conducted whatever business he still did. And the dictating machine meant he must have a part-time secretary, however many days or hours a week. He’d hardly dictate letters and then transcribe them himself.

The roll-top desk was closed but not locked. I opened it and saw a lot of papers and envelopes in pigeonholes, but I didn’t study any of them. Ollie’s business was no business of mine. But I wondered if he’d used the “Purloined Letter” method of hiding his missing will by having it in plain sight in one of those pigeonholes. And if so, what had Eve been looking for when she found it? I made a mental note to ask him about that.

There was a telephone on top of the desk and I looked at the number on it; it wasn’t the same number as that on the phone in the living room, which meant it wasn’t an extension but a private line.

I closed the desk and went back to the living room and through its side doorway to the hall from which the bedrooms opened. Another door from it turned out to be a linen closet.

Ollie’s bedroom was the same size as mine and furnished in the same way. I walked over to the dresser. A little bottle on it contained nitroglycerin pills. It held a hundred and was about half full. Beside it were three glass ampoules of amyl nitrite like the one in my pocket, the one I’d got from Doc Kruger last night at dinner. I looked at the ampoules and decided that they hadn’t been tampered with. Couldn’t be tampered with, in fact But I took a couple of the nitro pills out of the bottle and put them in my pocket. If I had a chance to get them to Uncle Am, I’d ask him to take them to a laboratory and have them checked to make sure they were really what the label claimed them to be.

I didn’t search the room thoroughly, but I looked through the dresser drawers and the closet. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, unless maybe a gun. If Ollie kept a gun, I wanted to know it. But I didn’t find a gun or anything else more dangerous than a nail file.

Eve Bookman’s room was, of course, the main object of my search, but I wasn’t in any hurry and decided I’d do a little thinking before I tackled it. I went back to the living room and since it occurred to me that if Eve was coming back between lunch and bridge, this would be about the time, I took the chain off the door. It wouldn’t matter if I was found here, as long as I was innocently occupied. I could just say that I was unable to see the man I’d come to see until tomorrow. And that Ollie — Oliver to her — had had things to do in the Loop and had lent me his car and his house key.

I made myself a highball at the bar and sat down to sip it and think, but the thinking didn’t get me anywhere. I knew one thing I’d be looking for — pills the size and color of nitro pills but that might turn out to be something else. Or a gun or any other lethal weapon, or poison — if it could be identified as such. But that was all and it didn’t seem very likely to me that I’d find any of those things, even if Eve did have any designs on her husband’s life. One other thing I thought of: I might as well finish my search for a gun by looking for one in Ollie’s office. If he had one, I wanted to know it, and he might keep it in his study instead of his bedroom.

I made myself another short drink and did some more thinking without getting any ideas except that if I could reach Ollie by phone at the Stark apartment, I could simply ask him about the gun, and another question or two I’d thought of.

I rinsed out and wiped the glass I’d used and went to the telephone. I checked the book and found a Stark, Dorothy on LaSalle Street and called the number. Ollie answered and when I asked him if he could talk freely, he said sure, that Dorothy had gone out shopping and had left him to baby-sit.

I asked him about guns and he said no, he didn’t own any.

I told him I’d noticed the ampoules and pills on his dresser and asked him if he carried some of both with him. He said the pills yes, always. But he didn’t carry ampoules because the pills always worked for him and the ampoules he just kept on hand at home in case his angina should get worse. He told me the same thing about them the doctor had, that if one used them often they became ineffective. He’d used one only once thus far, and wouldn’t again until and unless he had to.

After I’d hung up, I remembered that I’d forgotten to ask him where the will had been hidden in his office, but it didn’t seem worth while calling back to ask him. I wanted to know, if only out of curiosity, but there wasn’t any hurry and I could find out the next time I talked to him alone.

I put the chain bolt back on the door — I was pretty sure by now that Eve wasn’t coming back before her bridge-club session, as it was already after two, but I thought I might as well play safe — and went to her room.

8.

It was bigger than any of the other bedrooms — had originally, no doubt, been intended as the master bedroom — and it had a dressing room attached and lots of closet space. It was going to be a lot of territory to cover thoroughly, but if Eve had any secrets, they’d surely be here, not in Ledbetter territory like the kitchen or Ollie’s office or neutral territory like the living room. Apparently she spent a lot of time here; besides the usual bedroom furniture and a vanity table, there was a bookcase of novels and a writing desk that looked used. I sighed and pitched in. Two hours later, all I knew that I hadn’t known — but might have suspected — before was that a woman can have more clothes and more beauty preparations than a man would think possible.

I’d looked in everything but the writing desk; I’d saved that for last. There were three drawers and the top one contained only raw materials — paper and envelopes, pencils, ink and such. No pens, but she probably used a fountain pen and carried it with her. The middle one contained canceled checks, neatly in order and rubber-banded, used stubs of checkbooks similarly banded, and bank statements. No current checkbook; she must have had it with her. The bottom drawer was empty except for a dictionary, a Merriam-Webster Collegiate. If she corresponded with anyone, beyond sending out checks to pay bills, she must have destroyed letters when she answered them and not owed any at the moment; there was no correspondence at all.

I still had almost an hour of safe time, since her bridge club surely wouldn’t break up before five, so for lack of anything else to go through, I started studying the bank statements and the canceled checks. One thing was immediately obvious: this was her personal account, for clothes and other personal expenses. There was one deposit a month for exactly four hundred dollars, never more or never less. None of the checks drawn against this amount would have been for household expenses. Ollie must have handled them, or had his hypothetical part-time secretary (that was another thing I hadn’t remembered to ask him about, but again it was nothing I was in a hurry to know) handle them. This account was strictly a personal one. Some of the checks, usually twenty-five- or fifty-dollar ones, were drawn to cash. Others, most of them for odd amounts, were made out to stores. There was one every month to a Howard Avenue Drugstore, no doubt mostly for cosmetics, most of the others were to clothing stores, lingerie shops and the like. Occasional checks to some woman or other for odd amounts up to twenty or thirty dollars were, I decided, probably bridge losses or the like, at times when she didn’t have enough cash to pay off. From the bank statements I could see that she lived up to the hilt of her allowance; at the time each four-hundred-dollar check was deposited, always on the first of the month, the balance to which it was added was never over twenty or thirty dollars.

I went through the stack of canceled checks once more. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but my subconscious must have noticed something my conscious mind had missed. It had. Not many of the checks were over a hundred dollars, but all of the checks to one outfit, Vogue Shops, Inc., were over a hundred and some were over two hundred. At least half of Eve’s four hundred dollars a month was being spent in one place. And other checks were dated at different times, but the Vogue checks were all dated the first of the month exactly. Wondering how much they did total, I took paper and pencil and added the amounts of six of them, for the first six months of the previous year. The smallest was $165.50 and the largest $254.25, but the total — it jarred me. The total of the six checks came to $1,200. Exactly. Even. On the head. And so, I knew a minute later, did the six checks for the second half of the year. It certainly couldn’t be coincidence, twice.

Eve Bookman was paying somebody an even two hundred bucks a month — and disguising the fact, on the surface at any rate, by making some of the amounts more than that and some less, but making them average out I turned over some of the checks to look at the endorsements. Each one was rubber-stamped Vogue Shops, Inc., and under the rubber stamp was the signature John L. Littleton. Rubber stamps under that showed they’d all been deposited or cashed at the Dearborn Branch of the Chicago Second National Bank.

And that, whatever it meant, was all the checks were going to tell me. I rebanded them and put them back as I’d found them, took a final look around the room to see that I was leaving everything else as I’d found it, and went back to the living room. I was going to call Uncle Am at the office — if he wasn’t there, I could reach him later at the rooming house — but I took the chain off the door first. If Eve walked in while I was talking on the phone, I’d just have to switch the subject of conversation to printing equipment, and Uncle Am would understand.

He was still at the office. I talked fast and when I finished, he said, “Nice going, kid. You’ve got something by the tail and I’ll find out what it is. You stick with the Bookmans and let me handle everything outside. We’ve got two lucky breaks on this. One, it’s Friday and that bank will be open till six o’clock. Two, one of the tellers is a friend of mine. When I get anything for sure, I’ll get in touch with you. Is there an extension on the phone there that somebody could listen in on?”

“No,” I said. “There’s another phone in Ollie’s office, but it’s a different line.”

“Fine, then I can call openly and ask for you. You can pretend it’s a business call, if anyone’s around, and argue price on a Miehle vertical for your end of the conversation.”

“Okay. One other thing.” I told him about the two alleged nitro pills I’d appropriated from Ollie’s bottle. I told him that on my way in to town for dinner, I’d drop them off on his desk at the office and sometime tomorrow he could take them to the lab. Or maybe, if nitro had a distinctive taste, Doc Kruger could tell by touching one of them to his tongue.

9.

It was five o’clock when I hung up the phone. I decided that I’d earned a drink and helped myself to a short one at the bar. Then I went to my room, treated myself to a quick shower and a clean shirt for the evening.

I was just about to open the door to leave when it opened from the other side and Eve Bookman came home. She was pleasantly surprised to find me and I told her how I happened to have the house key and Ollie’s car, but said I’d been there only half an hour, just to clean up and change shirts for the evening.

She asked why, since it was five thirty already, I didn’t stay and drive her in in Ollie’s car. That way we wouldn’t be stuck, after dinner, with having both the Buick and the MG downtown with us and could all ride home together.

I told her it sounded like an excellent idea. Which it was, except for the fact that I wanted to get the pills to Uncle Am. But there was a way around that. I asked if she could give me a piece of paper, envelope and stamp. She went to her room to get them and after she’d gone back there to dress, I addressed the envelope to Uncle Am at the office, folded the paper around the pills and sealed them in the envelope. All I’d have to do was mail it, on our way in, at the Dearborn Post Office Station and it would get there in the morning delivery.

I made myself comfortable with a magazine to read and Eve surprised me by taking not too long to get ready. And she looked gorgeous, and I told her so, when she came back to the living room. It was only six fifteen and I didn’t have to speed to get us to the Pump Room by seven. Ollie wasn’t there, but he’d reserved us a table and left word with the maître d’ that something had come up and he’d be a bit late.

He was quite a bit late and we were finishing our third round of Martinis when he showed up, very apologetic about being detained. We decided we’d have one more so he could have one with us, and then ate a wonderful meal. As an out-of-town guest who was presuming on their hospitality already, I insisted on grabbing the check. A nice touch, since it would go on Ollie’s bill anyway.

We discussed going on to a night club, but Eve said that Ollie looked tired — which he did — and if we went clubbing, would want to drink too much. We could have a drink or two at home — if Ollie would promise to hold to two. He said he would.

Since Ollie admitted that he really was a little tired, I had no trouble talking him into letting me do the driving again. Eve seemed more genuinely friendly than hitherto. Maybe it was the Martinis before dinner or maybe she was getting to like me. But it was an at-a-distance type of friendliness; my radar told me that.

Back home, I offered to do the bartending, but Eve overruled me and made our drinks. We were drinking them and talking about nothing in particular when I saw Ollie suddenly put down his glass and bend forward slightly, putting his right hand under his left arm.

Then he straightened up and saw that we were both looking at him with concern. He said, “Nothing. Just a little twinge, not an attack. But maybe to be on the safe side, I’ll take one—”

He took a little gold pillbox out of his pocket and opened it.

“Good Lord,” he said, standing up. “Forgot I took my last one just before I got to the Pump Room. Just as well we didn’t go night-clubbing, after all. Well, it’s okay now. I’ll fill it”

“Let me—” I said.

But he looked perfectly well now and waved me away. “I’m perfectly okay. Don’t worry.”

And he went into the hallway, walking confidently, and I heard the door of his room open and close so I knew he’d made it all right.

Eve started to make conversation by asking me questions about the girl in Seattle whom I’d talked about, and I was answering and enjoying it, when suddenly I realized Ollie had been gone at least five minutes and maybe ten. A lot longer than it would take to refill a pillbox. Of course he might have decided to go to the john or something while he was there, but just the same, I stood up quickly, excused myself without explaining, headed for his room.

The minute I opened the door, I saw him and thought he was dead. He was lying face down on the rug in front of the dresser and on the dresser there wasn’t any little bottle of pills and there weren’t any amyl nitrite ampoules, either.

I bent over him, but I didn’t waste time trying to find out whether he was dead or not If he was, the ampoule I’d got from Doc Kruger wasn’t going to hurt him. And if he was alive, a fraction of a second might make the difference of whether it would save him or not I didn’t feel for a heartbeat or look at his face. I got hold of a handful of hair and lifted his head a few inches off the floor, reached in under it with my hand and crushed the ampoule right under his nose.

Eve was standing in the doorway and I barked at her to phone for an ambulance, right away quick. She ran back toward the living room.

10.

Ollie didn’t die, although he certainly would have if I hadn’t had the bright idea of appropriating that ampoule from Doc and carrying it with me. But Ollie was in bad shape for a while, and Uncle Am and I didn’t get to see him until two days later, Sunday evening.

His face looked gray and drawn and he was having to lie very quiet. But he could talk, and they gave us fifteen minutes with him. And they’d told us he was definitely out of danger, as long as he behaved himself, but he’d still be in the hospital another week or maybe even two.

But bad as he looked, I didn’t pull any punches. “Ollie,” I said, “it didn’t work, your little frame-up. I didn’t go to the police and accuse Eve of trying to murder you. On the other hand, Eve given you this break, so far. I didn’t go to them and tell them you tried to commit suicide in a way to frame her for murder. You must love Dorothy and Jerry awfully much to have planned that.”

“I... I do,” he said. “What... made you guess, Ed?”

“Your hands, for one thing,” I said. “They were dirtier than they’d have been if you’d just fallen. That and the fact that you were lying face down told me how you managed to bring on that attack at just that moment. You were doing push-ups — about as strenuous and concentrated exercise as a man can take. And just kept doing them till you passed out. It should have been fatal, all right.

“And you knew the pills and ampoules had been on your dresser that afternoon, and that Eve had been home since I’d seen them and could have taken them. Actually you took them yourself. You came out in a taxi — and we could probably find the taxi if we had to prove this — and got them yourself. You had to wait till you were sure Eve and I would be en route downtown, and that’s why you were so late getting to the Pump Room. Now Uncle Am’s got news for you — not that you deserve it.”

Uncle Am cleared his throat. “You’re not married, Ollie. You’re a free man because your marriage to Eve Packer wasn’t legal. She’d been married before and hadn’t got a divorce. Probably because she had no intention of marrying again until you popped the question to her, and then it was too late to get one.

“Her legal husband, who left her ten years ago, is a bartender named Littleton. He found her again somehow and when he learned she’d married you illegally, he started blackmailing her. She’s been paying him two hundred a month, half the pin-money allowance you gave her, for three years. They worked out a way she could mail him checks and still have her money seemingly accounted for. The method doesn’t matter.”

I took over. “We haven’t called copper on the bigamy bit, either, because you’re not going to prosecute her for it, or tell the cops. We figure you owe her something for having tried to frame her on a murder charge. We’ve talked to her. She’ll leave town quietly, and go to Reno, and in a little while you can let out that you’re divorced and free. And marry Dorothy and legitimize Jerry.

“She really will be getting a divorce, incidentally, but from Littleton, not from you. I said you’d finance that and give her a reasonable stake to start out with. Like ten thousand dollars — does that sound reasonable?”

He nodded. His face looked less drawn, less gray now. I had a hunch his improvement would be a lot faster now.

“And you fellows,” he said. “How can I ever—?”

“We’re even,” Uncle Am said. “Your retainer will cover. But don’t ever look us up again to do a job for you. A private detective doesn’t like to be made a patsy, be put in the spot of helping a frame-up. And that’s what you tried to do to us. Don’t ever look us up again.”

We never saw Ollie again, but we did hear from him once, a few months later. One morning, a Western Union messenger came into our office to deliver a note and a little box. He said he had instructions not to wait and left.

The envelope contained a wedding announcement. One of the after-the-fact kind, not an invitation, of the marriage of Oliver R. Bookman to Dorothy Stark. On the back of it was scribbled a note. “Hope you’ve forgiven me enough to accept a wedding present in reverse. I’ve arranged for the dealer to leave it out front. Papers will be in glove compartment. Thanks for everything, including accepting this.” And the little box, of course, contained two sets of car keys.

It was, as I’d known it would be, a brand-new Buick sedan, gray, a hell of a car. We stood looking at it, and Uncle Am said, “Well, Ed, have we forgiven him enough?”

“I guess so,” I said. “It’s a sweet chariot. But somebody got off on his time, either the car dealer or the messenger, and it’s been here too long. Look.”

I pointed to the parking ticket on the windshield. “Well, shall we take our first ride in it, down to the City Hall to pay the fine and get right with God?”

We did.

Because We’re Friends

by Irving Shulman

Eyes wary, jaws hard, wide-legged stance as if about to draw, and rubbing his thumb across the raised gold initials of his money clip gave Tucson (name chosen by 4-Square Productions as suitable for the star of their Western series) a fillip of confidence and, more important, moments to think. He recognized the ma’am — girl — on his sofa; saw she was drinking his good Scotch, and had made herself free with ice, soda and cigarettes, all of these his property.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Rhoda said.

“You didn’t?” he repeated but permitted his features to relax, and he moved to the fireplace. Above the mantelpiece was a pair of twisted steer horns, tips ringed with gold.

“Of course not,” she continued. “You wouldn’t mind because we’re friends. Or aren’t we any more?”

“That’s hard to say,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since when.”

Rhoda raised both legs and swung them around to strike her heels against the carpeting as she sat erect. Now her heavily made-up eyes, shadowed in royal blue and framed by false lashes, each of them beaded, actually glowed as she beckoned for Tucson to come closer.

“I want to take a look at you.” She continued to waggle an index finger. “After all, seeing you inside a twenty-one-inch screen or so isn’t the same as seeing you in person.”

“Right now, Rhoda, I’d rather either one of us was inside the idiot box.”

“But then we’d be just like all the other idiots who won’t do anything on Wednesday nights between seven thirty and eight because Tucson Cross, the All-American saddle tramp, the restless wanderer of the wasteland” — she parroted the voice that rose above banal woodwinds to announce “Saddle-Sore” and its story theme of the restless hand who sought to find himself and peace but always rode into injustice and violence, which he corrected by killing in twenty-six minutes, interrupted this year by three dentifrice commercials, bullies, villains, cheats, land sharks, and other menaces to the good frontier society; once the justice by violence was fulfilled, he could no longer remain in this place, so, saddle-sore and weary, Tucson rode off, head bowed and shoulders slumped, hating himself and his fast gun hand, into the last commercial, where he flashed his choppers to plug his sponsor’s product and advised his fans to meet with him next week; thanks, friends — “is bringing justice to the West. And you wouldn’t want me to be that way, Sam? Or would you since they changed your name to Tucson? Man,” she reflected, “if that handle isn’t gaslight.”

He was twenty-two, but looked several years older, and had known Rhoda since he was nineteen, when he had been dropped off in front of Schwab’s, at the east end of the Strip, by the swell people from Ohio; they had picked him up in Las Cruces and provided him with food, shelter and five dollars for luck because he had admitted having some coins in his pocket that didn’t add up to a dollar; the swell people hadn’t known he had already stolen ten dollars from the woman’s purse. Now his gold money clip held at least five hundred, because fifty dollars less than that magic number made him nervous.

But to get back to that afternoon. He had stood before Schwab’s and gaped at the interior through a plate window, felt thirsty and walked into Googie’s next door because there were too many people in the drugstore. The interior of the small restaurant with its large mosaics in primary colors was cool, the piped music soft but with a good beat, and the waitresses in their neat uniforms cool, crisp and understanding, because as he was about to seat himself at the counter, one of them with really made-up eyes tilted her head toward the rear of the restaurant and he had understood.

When he returned, washed and somewhat refreshed, his mouth feeling cleaner and teeth less gritty, he saw that Rhoda had set a place for him in one of the booths and stood there with a pitcher of ice water and half pack of cigarettes. That was how they had met She had seen that his portions were extra large and the double scoop of ice cream on the pie was a little gift from her. It was almost quitting time, she explained, and if he didn’t have a place to go, the court apartment she rented was only streets away and the bathroom was larger than the living room but there was a large stall shower, all tiled, and while he really cleaned up she would do his laundry.

“Do you do that for everyone who comes in off the road?” he asked and was immediately sorry because the question indicated he thought of her as a tramp. Son, his mother had once said, in this town of ours, the whores could make a pretty good living if it wasn’t for the waitresses. That was his mother, sharp of tongue and observation, and one of the reasons be had decided to leave home; the other was his father and what his mother’s observations had done to him.

But Rhoda didn’t look at all offended. “Of course, not for everyone. Neither would you. But wouldn’t you do it for a friend?”

“Sure.”

“That’s it,” she continued. “I knew right off we were gonna be friends. Because I only have good-looking actors as friends.”

“Actors?”

“Naturally. To each his own. Are you formal or method? But whatever you are, you’ve got a wonderful chin. And deep, deep eyes.”

Which was not the reason at all. Sure, he had hoped to see some movie stars, see their houses and the places they hung out. He had read about Schwab’s in the Hollywood columns and as the tourists from Ohio had driven along Sunset Boulevard on their way to relatives in Santa Monica, and he had become increasingly nervous about being hailed as a thief, he had seen the sign above the drugstore and decided to leave the good folks there. But not because he wanted to be an actor. The thought made him grin and his strong, handsome face, tanned and darkened by sun and wind, was warmed by a smile that revealed his white, even teeth. An actor? What he had hoped for was a job in an aircraft plant or something similar, a plant where he could make use of his ingenuity with tools and ability to use the micrometer and read a blueprint, talents which had always amazed his family because no one close to them had ever been anything but farmers or clerks. But he had no place to go, fifteen, almost sixteen dollars wasn’t much, and Rhoda had changed into tight shorts, a tighter sweater, and had drawn her long brown hair into a bun. While he had showered, she had sprayed gold highlights into her hair, fixed her eyes by adding dark lines of pencil around the lids and made two highballs. She was older than he, this he knew, but only by two or three years. Still, in a girl it was an awful lot of years. But he was nineteen, good-looking, lean and handsome, this he knew, this he had been told, and if someone who had obviously been around and knew this place as well as Rhoda thought he could be an actor...

“Changing my name doesn’t mean I’ve changed my friends.” He returned to the present with an outrageous lie. “But I’ve a question for you” — he forestalled an obvious gibe. “Just how did you get in here?”

The apartment was in a good building on Beverly Glen and the superintendent had strict orders that no one was ever to be admitted when he wasn’t there. This was necessary because several fan-club presidents of jail-bait age had once been found in the apartment and they had made themselves free with several bottles and more personal souvenirs. And Rhoda, still wearing the high makeup, her hair pretty well shot because of many bleachings and dyeings, its ends brittle and broken because she would decide that certain colorings had to be done immediately rather than over extended periods, was not the sort of person who could sweet-talk the super. She was wearing too-tight black elastic slacks with metallic threads that refracted light, and her black cotton turtle-neck sweater was thin at the elbows and, as always, too tight. But it was the scuffed and shapeless flats of cracked patent leather that told him Rhoda was really down on her luck. At her feet lay an oversize purse that bulged. But in her case, clothes still weren’t necessary to make the man, and at another time — some years before — he might have laughed at finding her in his apartment and got into the branding spirit.

“I want to know how you got in here,” he demanded.

“You showed me,” she said after a long sip of her drink. Deliberately she tonged two cubes of ice into her almost empty glass and covered them liberally with Scotch. Then, hoping to make him laugh, she passed the bottle of soda above the glass; the comedy bit was too old and fell flat “I always watch your show. That’s to give you one intelligent person in an audience of millions.”

“I showed you?”

“A couple of weeks ago.” She nodded and raised the glass to him in a salute. “Remember where you had to get into the sheriff’s house and the windows were locked? So you cut a window with a glass-cutter and you taped the glass and gave it a sharp tap so that it broke out but didn’t drop. It works,” she said with awe. “I thought it was some sort of a trick but it works.”

He strode to the bedroom at the rear of the apartment, saw that the window at the fire escape had been opened and knew how Rhoda had avoided the superintendent. Someone who would burgle her way in wouldn’t hesitate to walk through an alley, and getting to the lowest fire escape was simple. And she was wearing black. But how had she got his address?

“Celebrity Service,” Rhoda explained from the doorway, and he started and turned with his hands raised as if to conceal his head. “It took my last five to find out. My name and number you’d probably find scrawled on a rest-room wall. But to get your address costs.”

Tucson smiled as he took the gold money clip from his pocket “Let’s say that was really casting bread on the waters, because it’s going to get you much more. How much do you need?”

“Money?”

“Money.” He nodded. “Or bread. That even makes the old saying more meaningful. You sure look coffeehouse.” He shook his head in friendly disapproval. “Just what’s been happening to you?”

“As if you care.”

“Must someone care to ask? Rhoda, look, I’ve gotta get dressed and meet some people.” He looked at his large gold wrist watch. “So finish your drink and tell me what you need and get going? But you’ll give me your number and I’ll call you.”

“When?”

He thought for a moment with his head raised to tighten the skin of his throat. Rhoda had always loved, raved about his chin and jaws; now her love was emulated by millions. “Day after tomorrow,” he said with a quick nod. “It’s the last day of shooting and then I’ll be free.” Again he shook his head. “Poor kid, you sure look awful.”

“And you sure look great,” she said. “Clean and All-American. And I’ve read you’re strong on English TV. So you’re a cultural asset, too.” Gravely closing one eye, she raised the glass, held it at arm’s length and turned it slowly to see the cubes from varying angles. “How come you never thought of me for a part in your show?”

So this was it, he sighed with relief. “I never thought of it,” he admitted in a tone that sounded truthful. “But if you want me to put in the word with casting—”

“You have.” She interrupted him with sudden ferociousness. Deliberately she poured the drink on the thick taupe carpeting before she tossed the glass across the room to shatter against the wall. “It’s out — all over town — that you gave orders that anyone who showed up and said they knew you when wasn’t to be taken on. It’s true” — she pointed at him — “and don’t give me the honor pitch. I believed it. I wanted my friends to be actors, to honor the old traditions. Even today being an actor doesn’t mean you have to be a louse.”

“If you want me to put the word in with casting...” he repeated. “If you want me to make the call right now...” He pointed at the phone at the side of his king-size bed; the spread was of thick candlewick embroidered with ranch brands and his name across the middle; he had to get this creep Rhoda out of here before the San Marino doll put in an appearance, and that was within the half hour; damn, how would he explain the broken window and the broken glass? “What’s the point in chewing the past, Rhoda?” he asked. “Let’s plan a little future. Yes?”

“I’ve got no future.” Her voice was dull and she rubbed her eye with a finger to smear some of the dark pencil. “I’m washed up and out. But what make* me wonder is why?” Lips screwed into twin lines of anguish, she turned away to stare at a lamp base made of cactus; the shade had once been an Indian ceremonial drum. “Why you and not someone else?”

“Maybe it’s because I didn’t really want it,” he said.

“You didn’t want it?”

He traced his old initials in the carpeting with the toe of a custom boot, fitted by a firm that catered only to Texas and Oklahoma millionaires; one of each had sponsored his feet for measurement.

“I was broke when I got here and you were good to me and if you thought I’d come out to the Coast to be an actor, why make a friend unhappy?” he explained. “Come on, Rhoda.” He wanted her to see his impatience. “I want you to get aholt of yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re still friends, I hope.”

She pointed to the bed. “Prove it”

“You’re drunk. If you don’t get out, I’m gonna call the super — the cops.” He paused to negate this threat; scandal was the last thing Tucson wanted when he was waiting for Miss San Marino and everything she stood for. He had told her, this slender, poised, low-voiced graduate of the Marlborough School and Mills and member of The Spinsters, just who he was, where he had come from, and it hadn’t mattered because she had brushed his lips and told him that they lived in a democracy, didn’t they, and too much inbreeding did to people what it had done to cocker spaniels — made them stupid. Although it had troubled him to be thought of in terms of a stud, he consoled himself with the knowledge that the stalls of sound horseflesh were always cleaner than a bunkhouse. But he had also learned to take the bad if it was part of the good, and someday soon he would have to write to his father and invite him out, and the invitation would pointedly ignore his mother; she shore could’ve stood off a passel of Injuns by her lonesome.

“Rhoda, doll,” he cajoled, both palms pressed together in prayer, “tell me how much you need and give me your number so that me and casting can call you?”

“I don’t think I can act any more,” she said. “I’ve suffered too much. And that burns you out. Just like a rocket.” She raised her right arm in trajectory. “You suffer and glow and light up the sky all around you. Then you just drop. A black nothing falling through a deeper black and no one sees you. And if they did” — she paused to sniffle against a knuckle — “no one cares.”

“That’s not bad, Rhoda. Not bad at all!” He crossed to put both arms around her and interlace his fingers against the small of her back before he rested his chin against her forehead; that way she might not see his grimace of distaste because she smelled dirty, sweaty, of cheap toilet water and underarm deodorants; she should never have quit her job as a waitress, because that required cleanliness; then her hair, no matter how elaborate the setting or bizarre its color, had always been fresh. “You know, maybe you’ve been following the wrong thing all the while. Acting.” He raised a hand as if to wipe her face free of pain, for she had stepped back and he could see her unhappiness and the wild glints of — it could be all the feathers coming loose in her bonnet — but call it frustration in her eyes, suddenly bleary as tears wet her lashes and ran into the blue shadow and black outline to make Rhoda look as if she had just been declared loser in a free-for-all. “Any girl who can express herself like that ought to be writing. That’s it!” His fingers snapped with the suddenness of decision and surety that delighted Tucson’s younger fans; the national imitation was of concern to certain child-guidance clinics. “I’m gonna see about having you put on as a writer! You’ll have to join the Writers Guild, but anybody can do that, and maybe you can come up with some woman’s-angle stories written by someone who is one instead of a wishful thinker. That’s it, Rhoda doll.” He was genuinely pleased with himself and the absence of protest as he led her from the bedroom and through the living room toward the two steps that rose to the foyer and the front door. “You made an actor outa me. So I’m gonna make you into a writer.”

Overconfident that he had done as well in real life as Tucson would do as guided by script and director, he had relaxed his hold on Rhoda’s arm and could not keep his grip as she wrenched free, tearing the thin elbow of her sweater. Her breasts rose like two eight balls as her fingers plucked at the torn elbow to enlarge the tear before she ran for her purse, fumbled in its deep interior and came up with a gun. Eyes hot with rage, she moved slowly toward him.

He recognized the Frontier Colt with the carved bone grip because it was similar to one that he carried in the series, and she laughed as he ran to the bedroom and returned quickly to swear at her in an accomplished monotone, for she had ransacked his bureau, found the gun, and it was loaded.

“You’ve got such good publicity.” She held the gun on him as she relaxed in the sofa. “Publicity that tells how you keep one of your guns everywhere so you can keep practicing and practicing your quick draw. Tell me” — she leaned forward — “did you really win that quick-draw contest at San Jose?”

“I’ll answer after you give me the gun. Crazy broad, is that the way to treat a friend? Maybe that’s why I stopped being your friend,” he said accusingly. “Because you stopped behaving like a friend.”

“Who stopped seeing who?” she began to shout. “Who took you around? Introduced you? Got you a job parking cars at the Interlude so you’d get the attention of people? Who got you plants in the trades and paid for your Screen Extra’s card? Who?” She screamed and punctuated her questions with jabbing movements of the gun. “You’d better answer who!”

“You did,” he admitted. “Now put that gun down.”

“I’m giving the orders,” she continued. “Tucson!” She spat the name. “You’re just plain stinkin’ Sam Slocum to me. Some name. And you can even thank me for writing a fan letter to 4-Square and getting all the people I knew to write also that we liked your new name and the part you were playing. That’s what a friend does.” She was mournful. “That’s why it hurts so much.”

The girl from San Marino prided herself on punctuality. People looked so alike, she said, with all the luxuries available for purchase on five down and five when you were dunned, and credit cards handed out to anyone who asked for them, that it was well nigh impossible to identify people that really mattered except by little secret habits, and she considered punctuality as one of the more important contemporary identifications. Which meant she would be pressing the button in fifteen minutes and when the chords of his theme music would sound, she would expect him at the door, promptly, smiling, leaning forward to kiss her gently; ardor would come later.

“Some hero,” she wept. “Lets my hand go when I needed a lift. When I’m scraping bottom so hard all the skin’s rubbed off.”

“It wasn’t me but my agent,” he protested. “And I’m not with that galoot any more. I’m sorry, honest. So why not take this and we’ll talk tomorrow?” Carefully, but calling upon his shy, lonesome grin, the one that made so many women want to mother him, he removed all the money from the clip, then put back a ten, and kneeled to place the money on the carpet where Rhoda could reach it. Once she stretched an arm, and if she lowered the gun, he would make his move. And for sure he was going to call the police, and if San Marino objected, then the hell with her, because a man faced with a shootin’ iron capable of putting a hole through him the size of a fist couldn’t be concerned with too many niceties. “That’s almost five hundred.” He pointed at the money. “Count it.”

Her kick at the money fluttered the bills. “Don’t have to. You’re honest Tell me” — she looked at him — “tell me the secret.”

“Of what?”

“Your luck.” She looked surprised at his unawareness of good fortune. “Is that the secret? That you didn’t push yourself and other people always did? You know what the kids say about you?”

“Your friends?” he asked.

“Once they were your friends, too.”

“Sound another note, will you?” he told her flatly. One of her kind was too many, but he was willing to go along until she got out of the apartment. Then would he fix her wagon! First, he would prefer charges, then as an act of charity which would be well applauded, would withdraw them. But the police wouldn’t let her go because she had threatened him with a gun. “Any time the sponsors get a letter saying how lousy my show is, I wonder which one of my friends has been using his poison ballpoint. Look, Rhoda, I’m trying awfully hard to keep things amigo between us. If I haven’t seen you recently—”

“More’n a year!”

“... it’s because I’ve been busy. Thirty-nine shows and personal appearances to keep the small fry happy don’t give me much time for friendlyizin’! You’ve been here. Had time to look around the spread and see what’s to be seen.” Again his arms swept the apartment. “And you didn’t find girl things around? So there.” He spread both arms in a gesture of nobility. “I haven’t picked up any new friends.”

“Liar.”

“Acquaintances, yes. But side kicks, no.” He was gently didactic. “Now look, Rhoda—”

“You look.” She pointed the heavy gun at him and held it steady with both hands. “I’ve just got to test that luck of yours.” For a moment, she stared at him along the sight and Tucson felt his palate and lips become dry as cold beads of perspiration began to dot his lips. “I’ve just got to see how lucky our big Western star really is. So we’re gonna play Russian roulette.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Say that again and you’ll find your luck’s run out,” she warned him. Now she stood to point the gun at his middle and moved to place a sofa between them. “I’m taking out five bullets,” she said as she broke the Colt. With the airy grace of a princess, she dropped five bullets on the sofa and warned him not to approach by raising the Colt. “Who goes first?”

“Me,” he said too quickly.

Her laughter was contemptuous of the obvious: if she had agreed and given him the gun, there wouldn’t be any game. Still laughing, she spun the cylinder and locked the gun with a hard snap before she retreated toward the bedroom.

“We’ll play in there,” she said. “It’ll be like old times.”

“Rhoda—”

“Before, neither one of us amounted to anything but I meant more than you. I had a chance” — she beckoned to him with the big blue gun — “because I had some luck. But I gave it all to you. All to you,” she repeated dully. “I let it pass from me to you and you never said thanks.”

“All right, thanks!” He pounded the upholstered back of the sofa. “Now take the money and get out and call me tomorrow if you want to get put on as an extra or want to try writing. But get out, you goddamn pig! Out!”

Her eyes were half closed in an expression of pity as she used the gun to compel him to follow her into the large bedroom, where she turned for a quick look at the bed before she yanked the candlewick spread half off and flopped against one of his monogrammed pillows.

“I’ll try it first,” she said. “Now, if I were playing by myself, I’d be sure to blow my head off. Do you know where the bullet is?”

“Are you— I wish you’d cut it out!”

Her reply was to kick both flats across the room. “Come over here,” she ordered. “And sit right here. Nearer.” She smiled.

“Rhoda, listen—”

“Such a pretty Western shirt.” She cooed and laughed as she grasped a pocket to tear it free down one side. “You can afford it.”

She saw his terror, the heavy sweat that ran down his cheeks, saw the dryness of his lips and the quick movements of his eyes.

“I’m ready.” She pointed the gun at him. “Ready for you to pull the trigger for me.”

“No—”

There was no strength left in him, her moist, nut-brown eyes bordered in blue and black were wide and staring, the gun was pointed at his head, and with her lips parted in a bloodless smile, she reached for his right hand to fit the gun into his palm, and as the coolness of the bone grip made him shiver, Rhoda put his finger on the trigger. As he cried out, she turned the gun toward her forehead and squeezed hard. The gun went off with a roar to split her face in two as the chimes of his theme music for “Saddle-Sore” sounded through the apartment and Tucson rose slowly, the gun b his hand, realized that the dead girl on his bed would wash him out with Miss San Marino.

Rhoda’s luck had been bad, as always; sobbing, he wondered if his would hold out, for his prints were on the grip and trigger guard, and the way things looked, well, Rhoda might have put up a struggle.

Game

by Herbert D. Kastle

Ed Gaines was a man in his thirties, tall and slim, who had lost the excitement, the drive, the verve of life during the past ten years. Working in Margaret’s father’s shoe store had done it; living with Margaret herself had done it. So he was running, fleeing down the two-lane highway which stretched over the Texas Big Bend country like a dark ribbon.

He’d left the Fort Worth store at one, saying he had an appointment at the doctor’s after lunch. That would hold his father-in-law. And the call he’d made at 5 p.m. from the gas station on the highway would hold Margaret. “I’ve run into an old friend, dear...”

Now it was almost nine and he’d penetrated deep into the near-desert. His lights tunneled a path through the blackness; a path which could end in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil — he had enough money to go anywhere, to start fresh when he got there. Eight thousand seven hundred dollars; his life’s savings; Margaret’s, too, for that matter. He had emptied their joint bank account at one thirty this afternoon. He had taken it in cash, and put it in the money belt fastened around his waist under his clothing. Now he was driving toward the Rio Grande, about three hours away. Now he was heading for a renewal of brightness and youth. Or so he hoped, and the hope was strong enough to keep him smiling and humming.

Until shortly after the gaudy Cadillac hard-top passed his Lark sedan, passed it so quickly that he failed to catch even a glimpse of the occupants. It shot ahead some hundred feet, slowed, and stayed there, matching his own sixty to seventy miles per hour. Together they streaked along the smooth, straight road, through the cloudy-night darkness, deeper into arid country.

Five minutes later, the Cadillac swerved far to the left, across the white line and into the opposite lane of the two-lane road, to smash a jack rabbit that was attracted by its lights.

Ed Gaines was immediately sickened. He’d lived in Texas all his life; he’d traveled its roads and knew the habits of the jack rabbit and had no particular love for the stupid creature which often ran mothlike into the lights of night-traveling autos. But he’d never met anyone who deliberately ran them down. What was more to the point, he had never been so captive an audience to the results — his eyes and senses were offended by the red-and-brown splotch steaming on the night-cool pavement. And within the next sixty seconds, the driver of the Cadillac swung even farther left to destroy a second rabbit. And again the bloody mess came under Ed’s headlights.

He turned on the radio, made himself hum, made himself go back to planning the good life. A store of his own. A beautiful woman to arouse and satisfy passion. Leisure time...

Twenty minutes later, the road bulged around a huge malpais rock formation, then straightened. During that brief turn, Ed glimpsed the interior of the car before him — a split-second view of two shadowy shapes in the front seat.

He wondered what it was like to be traveling with the kind of man who enjoyed smashing out life at seventy miles per hour. He wondered if the second shadow was a wife, and felt quick pity.

They approached a gas station, small, dark, dead, with a dim light showing from behind drawn shades on the second floor. Someone lived up there; and someone’s dog ran out barking to meet the Cadillac. Ed never did see what sort of dog it was, only that it was small. And while it was a foolish mutt to chase after cars, it wasn’t quite so foolish as to cross in front of the hurtling vehicles. But the driver of the Cadillac swung hard right as soon as the dog appeared. The dog tried to reverse field, but the Cadillac plunged off the road, churning up hard-packed sand and scrub grass, hunting it down. The dog was sent spinning up and over the hardtop’s roof to land in a mangled, intestine-smeared clot near the pavement.

Ed shouted and pounded his horn and pressed his gas pedal to the floor boards, raging to catch the Cadillac and do something to the man who was driving. But the Cadillac swung back onto the road and shot out ahead, picking up speed much faster than the six-cylinder Lark could. And continued to streak away at what must have been close to a hundred miles an hour, its tail lights dwindling rapidly in the darkness, until Ed was again alone on the road to Mexico — except for a bloody little clump some five miles farther on.

It was a few minutes to ten when he pulled off the road onto the blacktop of the Green Circle Tavern, which maintained a dozen cabins in addition to its wine-and-dine facilities. He tinned left to park within white guide lines, radiator first against a low wire fence. Walking back toward the road and the entrance to the tavern, he counted four other cars beside his own. The last one made him stop. It was the Cadillac hard-top.

The Green Circle’s taproom held three separate couples at three separate tables. Ed Gaines walked to the bar, took a stool and glanced into the long mirror. To his right, near the door and just visible past the barrier of his own reflection, were two middle-aged women chatting over the remains of a meal. To his left was the greater part of the room, and the other two couples. The one nearest him — just a few feet away — immediately claimed his attention. The man was big and heavy and graying, but it was his face that made Ed feel a swift return of the rage he’d experienced on the road. He quickly cautioned himself about judging people by their looks, and moved his eyes to the woman. She created another quick surge of emotion. She was slender, yet fully fleshed; small-boned and curved and catlike; a dark, sleek girl with wide-set eyes. And those eyes rose, as if in response to his, and searched his face in the mirror. They looked at each other a moment, and in that moment, Ed knew she was full of sickness, full of despair. As if to point to the reason for this despair, her glance flicked to the man beside her. The man laughed, and said quite distinctly, “Would you like him for your Prince Charming, Cecily?” She paled, picked up a cocktail glass and drank. The man laughed and drew on a cigarette and looked at Ed in the mirror. Ed’s first impulse was to drop his eyes, but he controlled it. He stared back at the thick-faced, hard-faced, cruel-faced man. And something made him move his eyes slowly, deliberately, to the lovely woman and smile at her. The man laughed again.

Ed examined the last couple — youngsters; honeymooners, probably; wrapped up in each other. He made himself consider the possibility that they, or the middle-aged women now rising from their table, were the occupants of the Cadillac. Or a person or persons not present. But then he returned his eyes to Cecily, and she was again looking at him, and her sickness, her hatred of the man beside her, again came through. And the soft, thick laughter again sounded, and the deep, taunting voice said, “He’s definitely the Prince Charming type, Cecily.”

Ed turned and looked at the lovely girl. “You and your friend driving to Mexico?”

The man laughed. “I told you, Cecily.” He nodded at Ed. “We are. Or we were. But we’ve had a few discussions, my lovely wife and myself, and we’re undecided now.”

The bartender finally made his appearance. Ed ordered beer and a ham sandwich. His heart was pounding wildly, and he wondered why he was doing this. And said, “That your Cadillac in the parking lot?”

Cecily’s eyes remained on the table; her face remained deathly pale. Her husband looked surprised. “That’s right.” Then his smile grew and a note of vindictive delight entered his voice. “You’re the one we passed, aren’t you? You’re the one who blew his horn.” He slapped his hands on the table. “He’s the one, Cecily. I tell you—”

She jumped up, whispering, “Let me go, Carl! Let me go!” She stopped then. The young couple was staring.

Ed’s mouth was dry, but he said, “My name’s Ed Gaines. Mind if I join you?”

Cecily looked at him. There was surprise in her face, which was quickly replaced by a childish surge of pure hope.

“By all means,” her husband said, and he was shaking his head and laughing heavily, consistently.

Ed walked to their table. As he sat down, one clear thought emerged. This girl was the beauty and passion he’d wanted all his life!

Cecily was still standing. Ed examined her, openly, not hiding a thing from the heavy-set man. She wore a simple, tight sheath; pale-blue, sleeveless, perfect because her body was perfect He smiled at her. She sat down.

The bartender came with his beer and sandwich. He raised his glass, and cleared his throat “It might help to tell me what the trouble’s all about”

Carl lighted a fresh cigarette. His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Why certainly, Ed. Cecily wants me to give her a divorce. She wants to get away from me as soon as possible — tonight; tomorrow morning; just as soon as she can.” He smiled, his hard face genuinely amused. “But I won’t allow it. I like having her.”

“Having me,” Cecily whispered.

Carl nodded, looking at her. “I spent thousands feeding, clothing and entertaining you. That proves I like having you, doesn’t it?”

Her face flamed.

Ed sipped his beer. He looked at that wide, cruel face, at the smirking lips, at the amused but cold eyes, and felt a sudden chill. Dogs and rabbits weren’t the only things that man could kill. Yet he said, “Are you sure you want to leave your husband, Cecily?”

She put her hands to her cheeks and whispered hoarsely, “God, I’ve never been so sure of anything in all my life! If you asked me whether I’m more sure of that or of wanting to live, I couldn’t answer.”

“Then I offer you transportation.”

“I accept”

He nodded, the blood pounding in his temples. “Would you like to leave now?”

“Yes, but...” Her eyes broke away.

“I really feel bad about mentioning it,” Carl said, “but I still want her around. At least for a while yet.” He shook in laughter.

“This is the United States,” Ed said. “You can’t force a woman—”

Carl’s laughter ended. “You’re wrong, Prince Charming. I can.”

This was the part Ed feared; the part where the claws would begin to show. “How, if we just drive away?”

Carl rose slowly. “I have money, and money can buy all sorts of services, and I also have the will—” his smile was pure malice as he looked down at his wife — “and the contacts to carry out that will. If you doubt me, leave with Cecily while I’m washing up. I won’t follow. I’ll just use the phone.” He walked away.

Ed raised his glass, but his hand was trembling and he put it down again. “Want to leave?” he asked.

“He means what he says!” And then, face and voice suddenly shy, “Why in the world would you want to...” She didn’t finish.

“I’m running away myself,” he murmured. “We could run together.”

Her hand came across the table and touched his. His fingers reacted as if with a will of their own, meshing in hers. The trembling flowed through both of them, merged, and stifled. Her eyes blinked back tears. “So quickly — yet we both feel...” She shook her head. “But it’s a waste, Ed. Only when he dies...”

“It can happen.” He heard himself say it, and didn’t wonder. He only wanted. He’d wanted to leave the old life, and had done so. Now he wanted to gain the most important single component of his new life — a woman to arouse and satisfy passion — and would do so. He stood up, jerking his head at the archway. “Just for a minute, Cecily, please?”

She flushed at the hunger in his voice, and rose. They went along the central corridor to the doors, where it was dark. He touched her arms, and she turned. A second later, she was tight up against him, her lips parting moistly under his. Then her breath tingled his ear. “Money and possessions, that’s all he ever thinks of! That’s why I hate him. Feelings — excitement and warmth and human feelings — they don’t mean a thing to him. But you, Ed! You’re what I’ve wanted! You’re doing this, even though you heard what he said.”

He backtracked. “He wouldn’t actually try to—”

“He would! He’s not just an ordinary businessman. He manufactures games — pinballs and one-armed bandits and dice cages and roulette wheels. He has contacts with all sorts of people. He’d have me killed — you, too.” Her head jerked; she made sure her husband wasn’t returning. She whispered, “He’s had others — at least one I know of — taken care of. Please don’t doubt that, Ed! He can kill without a thought!”

Ed nodded slowly. Thinking of that dog, he believed her. And for a moment, he wanted to walk away. But in the next moment, her lips returned to his; her kiss was pure fire; they rocked together, burning. He spoke to her, and learned they were staying the night, and got the number of their cabin. And said, “If it’s the only way, so be it.” She trembled against him. They spoke again, whispering frantically, interrupting each other frequently. Then it was settled.

When Carl came to find them, they were sitting on straight-backed chairs, smoking. Carl laughed. “For a minute I thought I’d have to make those calls. But Prince Charming’s sensible, isn’t he? Try again in a year or so, Prince Charming. I might be ready to dump her.”

Cecily left. Carl laughed. Ed returned to the taproom, just as the honeymoon couple was leaving. His sandwich and beer were still waiting. He ate slowly, alone in the room. The bartender began cleaning up. Ed finished, paid, and said, “Well, back to the road.” He went outside. Hugging the building shadows, he moved toward the line of twelve cabins a hundred or more feet back. And noticed that only the Lark and Caddy remained in the parking lot, and that no other car was visible at the cabins. Still, he moved carefully, quietly, as he approached the one lighted cabin. When he reached the door marked with a brass four, he put his hand on the knob and turned. Cecily had done her part. The door opened and he stepped inside. And from then on was in mortal danger, because the important part of his plan was that there be no plan at all when it came to this.

Carl was standing near the bed, fastening a blue silk dressing gown around his thick body. Cecily was on the other side of the bed, face twisted, saying, “... never again!” They both turned to Ed. Carl’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Cecily said, “On your right, Ed.” Ed saw the table, and the two full bottles of whisky. He took one by the neck. It felt heavy in his hand. He was terribly afraid.

Carl said, “Get out of here, fast! You can still save your life!” He stepped forward, fists rising.

Cecily moved then. She picked something up off the lamp table — a long nail file. Carl glanced at her. Ed moved forward with the bottle.

Carl jumped back. His face changed. He was afraid. He said, “Now just a minute. Now hold it a minute. Maybe—”

“He’ll have us killed,” Cecily whispered. “If he ever gets to a phone, we’re dead.”

Carl laughed — a braying, panicked sound. “That was just talk. Big talk with nothing—”

Cecily was near enough to jab his shoulder. Carl said, “No, please!”

Ed didn’t want to do anything to this frightened man. But then Carl grabbed Cecily’s wrist and the nail file clattered to the floor. “Silly broad!” he said, triumphant and threatening again.

Ed hit him with the bottle. It broke. Whisky flooded the graying hair, soaked the blue dressing gown. Carl sat down on the floor, hands over his head. “Stop,” he murmured. He fell over on his side and his eyes rolled back. He said something else. Ed bent, trying to hear. “Again,” Cecily said, and put the other whisky bottle in his hand. “Again, Ed, again, or he’ll kill us!” So he hit him again, and yet again, as Cecily directed.

They worked hard, cleaning the cabin of everything but liquor, moving Carl and their luggage to the Caddy. Ed didn’t allow himself to think of what he’d done. He merely walked to the Lark as Cecily went to the restaurant-bar. It was 2 A.M.

Ten minutes later, he was parked at the side of the road, waiting. Cecily was to tell whoever was on night duty that she and her husband were getting an early start for Mexico. She was to ask for a bottle of bourbon, and pay as much as necessary to get it. She was to act drunk, and intimate that her husband was even drunker. If she heard Ed pulling out of the lot, she was to raise her voice to cover his exit. Failing that, she was to say it was a car on the highway. Then she would go to the Caddy and drive off.

If everything went well, that is.

The Caddy pulled up behind him. He got out. Cecily ran over. “The bartender was the only one there,” she said. “He didn’t hear you.” He nodded and went to the Caddy. She went to the Lark and pulled onto the highway. He followed her, refusing to glance at the body propped up beside him.

Eight or ten miles farther, he saw the sign on the right reading ARROYO NEGRO — BLACK CANYON. Cecily pulled over and waved her hand at car tracks packing down the sandy soil. He drove carefully, though moon and stars gave plenty of light. And saw the low picket fence and second sign — a warning to stop here as the canyon commenced within fifty yards. He went off the car tracks and around the brief fence and saw the change in land ahead; saw the black gash in the earth which was Arroyo Negro. Cecily had been here before, on her honeymoon.

He opened the Caddy’s door. He stepped on the gas. As he’d seen so many times in movies, he sent the car spurting forward and leaped clear. It went over, hit the side with a tremendous rending of metal, bounced, and continued down to the bottom, about three hundred feet at its deepest point. There it settled with a chittering of smashed parts. There it lay in the moonlight, even more of a wreck than he’d hoped.

Cecily stood beside him, brushing at his clothes, examining him for cuts and bruises. There weren’t any, except for a mildly skinned wrist. “We’re all right,” she said. “It’ll be found, but not soon. They’ll think I got out and died in one of those caves. Or wandered into the desert. Or maybe wasn’t in the car when it crashed. Anyway, we’ll be in South America. Far away. We’ll be together. Forever. We’ll be so happy...” She was gripping him about the waist. He felt her body pulsing against his. But he was very tired now; very dull and drained and tired.

They returned to the Lark. He asked if she minded driving. He just had to rest for a while. She kissed him and said of course she would drive. She would do whatever he wanted from now on. Weren’t they bound together by the strongest of ties — blood?

They pulled onto the road. He slumped low in the seat and put his head on her shoulder. Her fragrance came to him, soft and delicate. After a while, he slept.

He awoke, knowing something was wrong. It was still dark, and he was still in the car, and she was still driving. Nothing had changed from the time he’d fallen asleep, so nothing could be wrong. And yet he knew there was.

His thoughts came to an end as he squinted up at her. She was sitting — or crouching — over the wheel, lips parted, eyes wide and fixed, dampness covering her forehead, face and neck. And even as he stared, a new and terrific tension entered her body.

He moaned once — a sound embodying his sudden and complete loathing for this terrible stranger to whom he was tied forever; this stranger who might yet cost him his life. She didn’t hear him. She was too engrossed in swinging the wheel hard left, peering intently at the road directly in front of the swerving, hurtling car, and then releasing her pent-up breath in a gasp of pure delight as the thump and sodden, squishing sound filled his ears and all the world.

Package Deal

by Lawrence Block

“If I Were younger,” John Harper said, “I would do this myself. One of the troubles with growing old. Aging makes physical action awkward. A man becomes a planner, an arranger. Responsibility is delegated.”

Castle waited.

“If I were younger,” Harper went on, “I would kill them myself. I would load a gun and go out after them. I would hunt them down, one after another, and I would shoot them dead. Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross. I would kill them all.”

The old man’s mouth spread in a smile.

“A strange picture,” he said. “John Harper with blood in his eye. The president of the bank, the past president of Rotary and Kiwanis and the Chamber of Commerce, the leading citizen of Arlington. Going out and killing people. An incongruous picture. Success guts a man, Castle. Removes the spine and intestines. Ties the hands. Success is an incredible surgeon.”

“So you hire me.”

“So I hire you. Or, to be more precise, we hire you. We’ve had as much as we can take. We’ve watched a peaceful, pleasant town taken over by a collection of amateur hoodlums. We’ve witnessed the inadequacy of a small-town police force faced with big-town operations. We’ve had enough.”

Harper sipped brandy. He was thinking, looking for the right way to phrase what he had to say. “Prostitution,” he said suddenly. “And gambling. And protection — storekeepers paying money for the right to remain storekeepers. We’ve watched four men take control of a town which used to be ours.”

Castle nodded. He knew the story already but he wasn’t impatient with the old man. He didn’t mind getting both the facts and the background behind them. You needed the full picture to do your job properly. He listened.

“I wish we could do it ourselves. Vigilante action, that type of thing. There’s a precedent for it. Fortunately, there’s also an historical precedent for employing you. Are you familiar with it?”

“The town-tamer,” Castle muttered.

“The town-tamer. An invention of the American West The man who cleans up a town for a fee. The man who waives legality when legality must inevitably be abandoned. The man who uses a gun instead of a badge when guns are effective and badges are impotent.”

“For a fee.”

“For a fee,” John Harper echoed. “For a fee of ten thousand dollars, in this instance. Ten thousand dollars to rid the world and the town of Arlington of four men. Four malignant men, four little cancers. Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross.”

“Just four?”

“Just four. When the rats die, the mice scatter. Kill four. Kill Lou Baron and Joe Milani and Albert Hallander and Mike Ross. Then the back of the gang will be broken. The rest will run for their lives. The town will breathe clean air again. And the town needs clean air, Mr. Castle, needs it desperately. You may rest assured of that. You are doing more than earning a generous fee. You are performing a service for humanity.”

Castle shrugged.

“I’m serious,” Harper said. “I know your reputation. You’re not a hired killer, sir. You are the twentieth-century version of the town-tamer. I respect you as I could never respect a hired killer. You are performing an important service, sir. I respect you.”

Castle lit a cigarette. “The fee,” he said.

“Ten thousand dollars. And I’m paying it entirely in advance, Mr. Castle. Because, as I have said, your reputation has preceded you. You’ll have no trouble with the local police, but there are always state troopers to contend with. You might wish to leave Arlington in a hurry when the job is finished. As I understand it, the customary method of payment is half in advance and the remaining half upon completion of the job at hand. I trust you, Mr. Castle. I am paying the full sum in advance. You come well recommended.”

Castle took the envelope, slipped it into an inside jacket pocket. It made a bulge there.

“Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross,” the old man said. “Four fish. Shoot them in a barrel, Mr. Castle. Shoot them and kill them. They are a disease, a plague.”

Castle nodded. “That’s all?”

“That is all.”

The interview was over. Castle stood up and let Harper show him to the door. He walked quickly to his car and drove off into the night.

Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross.

Castle had never met them but he knew them all. Small fish, little boys setting up a little town for a little fortune. They were not big men. They didn’t have the guts or the brains to play in Chicago or New York or Vegas. They knew their strengths and their limitations. And they cut a nice pie for themselves.

Arlington, Ohio. Population forty-seven thousand. Three small manufacturing concerns, two of them owned by John Harper. One bank, owned by John Harper. Stores and shops. Doctors and lawyers. Shopkeepers, workers, professional men, housewives, clerks.

And, for the first time, criminals.

Lou Baron and Joe Milani and Albert Hallander and Mike Ross. And, as a direct result of their presence, a bucketful of hustlers on Lake Street, a handful of horse drops on Main and Limestone, a batch of numbers-runners and a boatload of muscle to make sure everything moved according to plan. Money being drained from Arlington, people being exploited in Arlington, Arlington turning slowly but surely into the private property of four men.

Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross.

Castle drove to his hotel, went to his room, put ten thousand dollars in his suitcase. He took out a gun, a .45 automatic which could not be traced farther than a St. Louis pawnshop, and slipped the loaded gun into the pocket which had held the ten thousand dollars. The gun made the jacket sag a bit too much and he took out the gun, took off the jacket and strapped on a shoulder holster. The gun fit better this way. With the jacket on, the gun bulged only slightly.

Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross. Four small fish in a pond too big for them. Ten thousand dollars.

He was ready.

Evening.

A warm night in Arlington. A full moon, no stars, temperature around seventy. Humidity high. Castle walked down Center Street, his car at the hotel, his gun in its holster.

He was working. There were four to be taken and he was taking them in order. Lou Baron was first.

Lou Baron. Short and fat and soft A beetle from Kansas City, a soft man who had no place in Kerrigan’s K.C. mob. A big wheel in Arlington. A man employing women, a pimp on a large scale.

Filth.

Castle waited for Baron. He walked to Lake Street and found a doorway where the shadows eclipsed the moon. And waited.

Baron came out of 137 Lake Street a few minutes after nine. Fat and soft, wearing expensive clothes. Laughing, because they took good care of Baron at 137 Lake Street They had no choice.

Baron walked alone. Castle waited, waited until the small fat man had passed him on the way to a long black car. Then the gun came out of the holster.

“Baron—”

The little man turned around. Castle’s finger tightened on the trigger. There was a loud noise.

The bullet went into Baron’s mouth and came out of the back of his head. The bullet had a soft nose and there was a bigger hole on the way out than on the way in. Castle holstered the gun, walked away in shadows.

One down.

Three to go.

Milani was easy. Milani lived in a frame house with his wife. That amused Castle, the notion that Milani was a property-owner in Arlington. It was funny.

Milani ran numbers in St. Louis, crossed somebody, pulled out. He was too small to chase. The local people let him alone.

Now people ran numbers for him in Arlington. A change of pace. And Milani’s wife, a St. Louis tramp with big breasts and no brains, helped Milani spend the money that stupid people bet on three-digit numbers.

Milani was easy. He was home and the door was locked. Castle rang the bell. And Milani, safe and secure and self-important, did not bother with peepholes. He opened the door.

And caught a .45-caliber bullet over the heart.

Two down and two to go.

Hallander was a gunman. Castle didn’t know much about him, just a few rumbles that made their way over the coast-to-coast grapevine. Little things.

A gun, a torpedo, a zombie. A bodyguard out of Chi who goofed too many times. A killer who loved to kill, a little man with dead eyes who was nude without a gun. A psychopath. So many killers were psychopaths. Castle hated them with the hatred of the businessman for the competitive hobbyist Killing Baron and Milani had been on the order of squashing cockroaches under the heel of a heavy shoe. Killing Hallander was a pleasure.

Hallander did not live in a house like Milani or go to women like Baron. Hallander had no use for women, only for a gun. He lived alone in a small apartment on the outskirts of town. His car, four years old, was parked in his garage. He could have afforded a better car. But to Hallander, money was not to be spent. It was chips in a poker game. He held onto his chips.

He was well protected — a doorman screened visitors, an elevator operator knew whom he took upstairs. But Hallander made no friends. Five dollars quieted the doorman forever. Five dollars sealed the lips of the elevator operator.

Castle knocked on Hallander’s door.

A peephole opened. A peephole closed. Hallander drew a gun and fired through the door.

And missed.

Castle shot the lock off, kicked the door open. Hallander missed again.

And died.

With a bullet in the throat.

The elevator operator took Castle back to the first floor. The doorman passed him through to the street. He got into his car, turned the key in the ignition, drove back to the center of Arlington.

Three down.

Just one more.

“We can deal,” Mike Ross said. “You got your money. You hit three out of four. You can leave me be.”

Castle said nothing. They were alone, he and Ross. The brains of the Arlington enterprise sat in an easy chair with a slow smile on his face. He knew about Baron and Milani and Hallander.

“You did a job already,” Ross said. “You got paid already. You want money? Fifteen thousand. Cash. Then you disappear.”

Castle shook his head.

“Why not? Hot-shot Harper won’t sue you. You’ll have his ten grand and fifteen of mine and you’ll disappear. Period. No trouble, no sweat, no nothing. Nobody after you looking to even things up. Tell you the truth, I’m glad to see the three of them out of the way. More for me and no morons getting in the way. I’m glad you took them. Just so you don’t take me.”

“I’ve got a job to do.”

“Twenty grand. Thirty. What’s a man’s life worth? Name your price, Castle. Name it!”

“No price.”

Mike Ross laughed. “Everybody has a price. Everybody. You aren’t that special. I can buy you, Castle.”

Ross bought death. He bought one bullet and death came at once. He fell on his face and died. Castle wiped off the gun, flipped it to the floor. He had taken chances, using the same gun four times. But the four times had taken less than one night Morning had not come yet The Arlington police force still slept.

He dropped the gun to the floor and got out of there.

A phone rang in Chicago. A man lifted it, held it to his ear.

“Castle,” a voice said.

“Job done?”

“All done.”

“How many hits?”

“Four of them,” Castle said. “Four off the top.”

“Give me the picture.”

“The machinery is there with nobody to run it.” Castle said. “The town is lonely.”

The man chuckled. “You’re good,” he said. “You’re very good. We’ll be down tomorrow.”

“Come on in,” Castle said. “The water’s fine.”

Content

Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 3,1961

Sounds and Smells by Fletcher Flora

The Mourners at the Bedside by Hampton Stone

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Sacrifice by Warren Frost

Incidents on B Street by Paul W. Fairman

Cure for a Headache by Stuart Palmer

Dead Drunk by Frank Kane

Break-Out by Donald E. Westlake

Service Call by Bruno Fischer

Cops and Robbers Vincent H. Gaddis

Before She Kills by Fredric Brown

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Because We’re Friends by Irving Shulman

Game by Herbert D. Kastle

Package Deal by Lawrence Block