Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 10 — January 1939)

Arson

by Baynard H. Kendrick

Death lurked behind the talons of flame that beckoned Stan Rice on to this firebug chase.

* * *

Miles Standish Rice twisted uncomfortably on the hard bed of the Palatka Hotel fighting a series of persistent bumps which seemed to protrude everlastingly from the cement surface of the mattress. Outside of his window a tall palm brushed caressingly against the screen, throwing shadows across the ceiling as it cloaked the glow of a street light below.

Stan turned disgustedly, found a new position, and sought sleep which refused to come. Miami, and his own oversized bed, were four hundred miles away. The winter season was at its peak, and a beach replete with suntanned girls was eagerly waiting for his return. He regarded the moving shadows on the ceiling with an unpleasant frown. Across the hall, far too close for comfort, some happy sleeper had begun to snore.

He reached for cigarettes and matches conveniently placed on a chair beside his bed. The match flared up. Almost as though in answer to a signal a moaning wail started across the street, sliced through the noise of the snoring sleeper, and reached up and up to a wild frenzied scream. Mournfully it reached a pitch which roused the sleeping town, then died away, sending its dreaded warning far over the broad expanse of the St. John’s River. Fire!

Stan dragged on clothes, straining his ears for the sound which he knew would follow — the tap of the big bell in the tower of the City Hall. He stood motionless when it came beating out a slow sonorous seven-two. Twice more it was repeated and carefully he checked it again, consulting a small pasteboard card which listed all the call boxes in town. Seventy-two was on the river front. Stan gave a low whistle. The location was bad. The river front meant the crate factory or one of the large mills which were the life blood of the town.

He grabbed a topcoat and ran swiftly down the Hotel Palatka’s three flights of stairs. A glance at the lobby clock over the desk showed him it was five minutes after two.

“A helluva life a fireman leads!” Stan muttered as he opened the door of his Buick sports coupe which was parked in back of the hotel. He was touching forty miles per hour in second gear before he had gone a block.

The sleeping town had galvanized into a hectic frenzy. Ahead of him as he roared up River Street he could hear the clang and siren of the fire company’s big LaFrance pumper. From other parts of the town came sounds of auto horns sharp and distinct against the quiet of the night. A mill was on fire and that meant that sleep was gone for the night for the populace of any lumber town.

The Buick was doing over sixty when he bounced across the railroad tracks of the Georgia-Southern and Florida and saw the pinkish glow across the sky just ahead. An instant later, the flames were in full view. They reached sharp, crackling fingers high into the night, turning the frame buildings of the mill into spectral black skeletons of wood, and the piles of drying veneer into grayish coffins dancing between him and the flare.

Stan had to brake hard to keep from shooting past the mill. He saw the pumper bouncing over a crazy sawdust road toward the river, and swung in behind it. Three other cars were there ahead of him. Out of them poured members of Palatka’s excellent volunteer fire force.

By the time the pumper stopped, a dozen more cars had arrived, spewing forth half-dressed men with faces set in grim determination. If the crate factory went, two hundred men would be thrown out of work, and thousands of dollars in completed crates would go up in smoke.

Stan’s lips set grimly. The fire at the crate mill was not entirely a surprise. There had been two similar ones in the town during the past ten days — fortunately checked before any great damage was done. The two Palatka fires were the tail end of a series of paralyzing conflagrations throughout the state which had spoiled a fishing trip for Stan and brought him on the four-hundred-mile journey from Miami to Palatka.

The insurance companies were growing actively worried, and the Mill Owners Protective Association, faced with rising insurance rates, had finally forced Stan into listening to their plea. The fact that the quail hunting was excellent in Putnam County and the promised fee large, might have had a minor influence, too.

A crashing symphony of shouts, snapping embers, and the roar of water under high pressure became the background for a lighted stage-set that held half-clad men running frantically about. The pumper was at work. Throatily, its four and a half-inch suction pipe was pulling water from the river and shooting it on the blaze, sending up vast clouds of white steam from a mound of sawdust and defective boards piled close to the water’s edge.

A quiet-voiced, slow-spoken man in police blue detached himself from the crowd and approached Stan. The reddish light touched his crinkled eyes, making them look cold and hard against the glare. He leaned against the side of the Buick and spoke almost in Stan’s ear:

“What do you make of it now? It’s the third fire in ten days!”

“You’re the Chief of Police, Blunt; what do you make of it?” Stan stared at a patch of hyacinths which the suction of the pumper was drawing in close to the shore.

Chief Blunt pushed his cap farther back on his head. “I think we’re lucky, Stan. This mill’s dripping over with resin. I’d expect it to go up with the speed of a gas-filled balloon, but the boys already have it under control.”

“They got the other two fires under control, didn’t they? How?”

“By quick work. I guess.” said Blunt. “We have the best volunteer Fire Department in the State, and they’re used to dealing with mills.”

“Uh-huh,” Stan agreed absently. “It’s nice to have faith in your own home town. You’re not by any chance running for presidency of the Chamber of Commerce, are you?”

Chief Blunt scratched his head and asked, “What the devil are you driving at now?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Stan admitted, “because I didn’t see the other fires in town, but I do know this: A lot of property in Florida has been burned to the ground during the past year despite everything a flock of good fire departments could do. Maybe I’m up here on a false trail, Chief. I don’t know about the other two, but this fire looks like an accident to me!”

A cheer went up from the assembled crowd, drowning out Blunt’s words, as the flames began to die. The watchers fell back, relief taking the place of their worried expressions. The hissing steam from the dying embers was fading, sighing away as if tired. Men stood about talking, questioning, thinking of warm beds and blankets against the cold of the north Florida winter night.

Phil Cox, one of the paid members of the Palatka Fire Department, and a second man started for the river’s edge to remove the sucker and uncouple the four ten-foot joints of nonflexible hose which fed the pumper. All pumpers carry two such joints, giving them a twenty-foot leeway. The Palatka pumper carried four since most of its work was around the mills and the big La-France could not always get as near as twenty feet to the river.

The fire was almost dead, leaving the scene illuminated by the headlights of the assembled cars. Stan and Chief Blunt walked over to talk to Buck Anders, another paid member of the P.F.D.

“Nice going. Buck!” Blunt said. “Look who’s with us!”

Buck Anders, freckled-faced and sandy-haired, straightened up and wiped a smudged hand on his coveralls. “Hello, Stan!” he said. “Been doing any hunting lately?”

“That depends,” said Stan dryly.

“Oh!” Buck turned away to look at the embers. “It’s about time somebody took an interest in fire bugs instead of birds. Things have been too hot around here to suit me.”

“I might find a few hours for the birds, at that, if you can make it tomorrow,” Stan suggested.

“The day after’s better.” Buck turned back to Stan. “I’ll have some time off then. I know a good place out on the Rodman Road.”

“It’s a date!” said Stan.

Buck started down for the water’s edge. “I’ll see you then. I’ve got to uncouple the sucker. Phil and Trimmer’ll be cursing me blue.”

“Just a minute,” Stan put a hand on Buck’s arm. “Who’s Trimmer, Buck?”

“Wallace Trimmer, another volunteer. He usually works on the pumper. He’s pretty good.”

A figure emerged from the darkness down by the river’s edge and Buck started off again. “That’s Phil,” he said over his shoulder. “He must be done already.”

“Hey, Phil!” he called. “Let’s wind her up and get back to bed.”

“O.K.!” the man called back. “Come on down and lend a hand.”

Stan opened the door of the Buick and started to get in.

“I’ll ride down town with you, if you don’t mind,” said Blunt. “I could do with a bite to eat.”

“You can count me in on that, too!” Stan paused with one foot on the step of the car.

Phil Cox was running toward them, his rubber coat flapping grotesquely, his heavy boots swishing clumsily through the thick, tangled grass. “We need some help down here,” he called when he was still some distance away. “Trimmer’s passed out!”

Several men started forward, but Chief Blunt said, “Stay back! The fewer around, the better.” He added under his breath: “Come on, Stan!” He clicked on a small flash-light and led the way.

Stan fell in beside him after a few quick strides. The yellow circle of the flash-light guided them around charred pieces of board and nail-studded lathes. Dry sand gave way to thick, boggy mud which oozed about Stan’s shoes and threatened his ankles.

The circle of the flash swung ahead and stopped, lighting the contour of a pale, handsome face framed in the lapping water close to the bank.

Buck Anders and Phil Cox were bent over the limp form of Wallace Trimmer, just about to lift it to the bank.

“Lord!” Blunt breathed in Stan’s ear. “He looks like he’s dead to me!”

Blunt let his flash drop, and he and Stan joined the two firemen and carefully helped them lift the young man farther up on the shore. Stan straightened up from his task and pulled a clump of grass out by the roots to wipe his fingers dry. They felt sticky, but it was too dark to answer the question in Stan’s mind.

“I’ll get a doctor,” said Phil and started off to where the twin red lights of the LaFrance were bathing the mill in their fan-shaped glow.

Buck Anders, still on his knees, held a hand on Trimmer’s chest and looked up at Stan. “He’s pretty bad, I’m afraid.” His voice was low and trembled slightly. “I don’t see how smoke—” He stopped and looked down toward Trimmer again.

Stan picked up Chief Blunt’s flash and walked down to the water’s edge once more. For a moment, he stood watching the tiny waves pushing against hyacinths and reeds. He lifted the light and pointed it toward the black hulk of a large building some distance away up the river. The light battered ineffectually against the gloom.

Chief Blunt came up silently beside him, and after a while said, “Well, what do you think?”

“Look!” Stan lowered the light toward his feet. “The water’s full of blood, Chief. Wallace Trimmer was shot through the back of the head!”

A circle of men had already closed in about them, quietly watching the still form on the ground. The expression of relief which had come to the fire-fighters’ faces with extinction of the flames was gone, replaced by something grim and angry. It was obvious to Stan that Wallace Trimmer had been a popular man in the town.

The Chief of Police swung his torch around the circle and asked: “Did anyone hear a shot fired around here?”

No one answered immediately, except by an uneasy shifting of feet, and an angry mutter, unintelligible and low. The Chief repeated his question and waited again.

From the river’s edge a large unseen bullfrog croaked a reply. It was taken up by others until the night became hideous with the din. Farther inshore, trees which were lush and green by day stood stark and spectral as though aware that murder had violated the even, easy way of the mill town.

“There’s such things as silencers, Chief,” said some man in the crowd after a time. His words were followed by a stir as Phil Cox and a doctor pushed through. The fireman led the way, looking large and formidable in his bulky clothes. Stan studied him as he kneeled beside the physician, watching the play of reflected torch light on Phil’s red face and heavy brows.

The examination was short, and finished by the doctor saying, “He was instantly killed. I’ll send an ambulance down to take him away.”

Stan stepped forward. “Somebody suggested that a silencer was used to kill this man,” he said calmly. “I doubt if that’s so. The crackle of burning boards is a pretty good cover-up for a shot.” He turned to Phil Cox. “When did you last see Trimmer alive?”

“Less than five minutes before I found him lying on the shore. Him and I went down to drag the sucker free. I came back to uncouple the first joint and when I went back to help him, there he was lying like you seen him.”

“You and Wallace Trimmer worked the sucker together?” asked Stan.

“That’s right.”

“There was no one else around?”

“No.” Phil Cox adjusted his fire helmet. His face grew more congested as he fixed his eyes on Stan. “I don’t like what you’re driving at, mister. It sounds almighty like you’re hinting something about me.”

“Take it easy, Phil,” the Chief advised. “This is Miles Standish Rice. He’s up here looking around for the Mill Owners Protective—”

Stan ran one hand through his tousled blond hair. “There’ll be lots of questions asked, Cox, before all the checking is through. Trimmer was with you alive — and five minutes later he’s dead. And your own statement is that no one was near him but you.”

“Which I stick to!” Cox spoke quietly but the fury in his tone was most apparent. “I’ve heard of you, but detective or no, you don’t have to pick me out of this whole crowd. Anyone could have shot Wallace Trimmer.”

“That’s just the trouble, Cox,” said Stan softly. “Anyone.” He didn’t need to add: “Including you.”

Chief Blunt was silent as he and Stan started for the mill office to use the phone. The gay friendly kidding which marked their relationship seemed out of place in the face of death, sudden and quick-striking. Stan was never able to rid himself of a feeling of loss, almost personal loss, which death, and particularly murder, always gave him.

They picked their way slowly over the rough road of dampened sawdust, passed through an opening between two quiet buildings which whined monotonously to endless sawing during the day, and stopped outside of the small office.

A girl was coming toward the office, moving as quickly as the uneven ground permitted. She passed under a single swinging bulb which marked the juncture of River Street and the road to the factory. Stan caught a pleasant flash of dark hair and slender figure before she left the radius of light and drew nearer.

She stood for a moment looking toward the crowd which formed a black circle between office and river. Thrusting slim hands into the pockets of her light camel’s hair coat, she spoke to the Chief.

“Have I missed it?” Her voice was musical and low.

“I’m afraid so, Lois. There’s nothing much but smoke left now.”

“I’m glad of that. I was afraid—” She turned gray, intelligent eyes toward Stan for a split second then started on a run toward the crowd.

“Hey, wait!” Blunt called. “Don’t go down there!” He lowered his voice and swore softly. The girl was gone.

“Who is she?” asked Stan.

“Lois Gilbert. I’d rather she didn’t see Trimmer lying down there.”

“Is everybody in Palatka interested in a fire?”

“Certainly. But Lois has a definite reason. She works for young Jupiter Carnes.”

“Oh. He’s the insurance man, isn’t he?”

“You sound disappointed.” Blunt chuckled. “She’s not only his secretary. They’re going to be married. She deserves it, too. Jupe’s about the best catch in town, but Lois is plenty smart.”

“I like them smart,” said Stan. “Hurry up and phone.”

Stan stood alone as Blunt went into the mill office. Things had broken faster than he had expected. He began to whistle softly, wondering if the fire had been precipitated by his arrival that day. He snapped his fingers in irritation and abandoned his tune. Trimmer’s murder had him puzzled. It was out of place and Stan hated things which were out of place. He was supposed to be in Palatka on an arson case, a murder didn’t fit in.

He decided that he needed help in Palatka, and that Lois Gilbert might be the answer since she was with the largest insurance agency in town... The Chief was taking plenty of time. Stan was about to go inside the office when he paused and drew back into the shadow of the building again.

From out of the darkness just above the mill where the bend of River Street straightened, the figure of a man appeared. He was walking hurriedly toward the mill. Once he stopped and looked back over his shoulder as if listening for some sound; then he looked both to right and left, turned, cut through an opening in bushes which bordered the street, and headed for the crowd at the river’s edge.

The Chief came out of the office, located Stan around the corner of the building, and said, “Who are you hiding from?”

“I was watching a man,” said Stan. “This business is getting on my nerves!”

“And what about mine?” asked Blunt. “I phoned the sheriff for help. I’d like to know what the hell I’m going to do about this murder. I can’t hold everyone in that crowd for questioning, but I’ve got to do something.”

Stan was silent, his thoughts still on the man who had come so furtively to the scene.

“It looked almighty as if you were trying to pin this on Phil Cox, Stan,” the Chief went on. “Do you know any reason why I should take him in?”

“Phil Cox?” Stan repeated absently. “No, Chief, I don’t think I’d take him in, but I think I’d talk to him the first chance you get and check him carefully on time. I’m interested to know exactly how long it was from the time he saw Trimmer alive until he found him in the water.”

“What about the others, Stan? Cox was right, you know. Lots of people had an opportunity to shoot Trimmer.”

“Before we go into that,” said Stan, “let’s find out if lots of people had a motive.”

“That’s what’s got me right now.” Blunt rubbed his strong chin. “Honestly, Stan, I don’t know of a more popular fellow in town. Maybe I’d better ask some of that crowd down there to come to the City Hall and talk this thing over tonight.”

Stan shook his head. “I’m afraid you’d be wasting time. I’m beginning to get an idea. It’s so crazy that I’d better let it hatch out in its own way, but I’ll tell you part of it now. Trimmer may have been killed from the river instead of the shore.”

“From a boat?”

“Naturally,” said Stan impatiently, “unless someone was walking on the water!”

“What gave you that idea?”

“The fire,” said Stan. “The lousiest job of arson I ever saw. Come along! There’s something down here I want to check.” He strode off toward the crowd with Blunt following close behind him.

Lois Gilbert was standing a few feet outside of the circle talking to the man Stan had watched on River Street a few moments before. Stan passed quickly by, and some distance farther on, he took the Chief’s arm and asked, “Who’s that man talking to the Gilbert girl?”

The Chief swung around. “Him? That’s young Jupe Carnes I was telling you about. Now, about this shooting from a boat...”

Blunt’s voice droned on, but Stan only heard half of what he was saying. He nodded intermittently and gradually worked his way closer to get a better look at Carnes. The young man was expensively dressed for a town the size of Palatka. Clothes with the cut and style of those couldn’t be bought this side of New York, and Stan noticed one thing more — Carnes’ shoes were wet, dripping wet, as if he’d been standing in water.

Lois Gilbert and Carnes started up toward the road. Stan broke into the Chief’s observations: “I think I’ll leave you. I’m about to die of hunger. I’ll be at Chick’s for a while if you want me.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to eat alone,” the Chief said sadly. “It looks like I’m in for a night of headache on my own.”

A few minutes later, Stan nosed his Buick into the curb near the corner of Fourth and Lemon Street and unwound himself out of the car. The small lunchroom was deserted except for the proprietor who walked up from the rear to greet Stan with a “How’ya, Stan? I heard you were in town. Is it hamburgers?”

“Four!” said Stan.

“I’ll rush ’em,” the proprietor told him. “That crowd from the fire’ll be here any minute. It’s mighty tough about Trimmer. He was a swell guy!”

It never failed to amaze Stan the way news got around in a small town. Early in his career as an officer of the law, he had learned to take into account the quick, unaccountable spread of information. Despite every precaution, things seemed to get around quicker than if they had been broadcast, telephoned, telegraphed, and called out by a town crier. The proprietor already knew about the murder, yet apparently no one had returned from the scene. Stan sighed and settled down to his eating. He had come to accept such facts and dismiss them as of no importance.

Outside, cars were pulling up. Within a few minutes Chick’s tiny restaurant was nearly filled. Stan had started on his third portion when Lois Gilbert and Jupiter Carnes came in. There was one vacant seat next to Stan. The only other one was ten stools distant. Carnes took that one and Lois took the stool next to Stan.

“Hello!” he said, not wasting a minute. “Miles Standish Rice is the name. I know you, you’re Lois Gilbert. Secretary to Jupiter Carnes, and cupid hath it that you expect soon to become Mrs. Carnes. How are you, and how’m I doin’?”

Lois looked at Stan carefully. “You’re doing all right, Mr. Rice, for a detective.”

Stan elevated one eyebrow. “Now just how did you know I was a sleuth?”

“Do you think a blond six-footer can question anybody at a fire in this town and not cause talk?”

“No,” he said. “I guess a detective can’t keep himself hidden long around here. But since you’ve found out, if you ever feel in the mood for a grilling, or even a third degree, I’d love to oblige.”

“Maybe I’ll take you up on that one of these days!”

“Seriously, though,” said Stan, “I have to do some detecting to earn my fee. How about a mild workout on you?”

“Go right ahead,” Lois answered, her words muffled, coming from behind her sandwich.

“O.K! We commence. What were you doing at the scene?”

“Oh, I go to all the fires. Jupe — that’s my boss, Mr. Carnes — thinks that one of us ought to get to the scene as fast as we can. We insure most of the mills. We both usually go just in case the other doesn’t get there, if you follow me.”

“Sure, sure,” Stan said. “If he doesn’t make it, you’re there — and vice versa.”

“That’s right. Gosh, aren’t Click’s hamburgers delicious?”

“Lady, I’m going to fall in love with you; you appreciate food. Incidentally, how come you’re all dressed up? You don’t usually put on such a charming frock just to go to a fire, do you, especially at two in the morning?”

The girl shook her head. “No. I happened to be across the river tonight in East Palatka. Dancing at the River Inn.”

“With—”

“Mr. Carnes. We heard the siren and rushed over.”

Stan nodded his head and glanced away for a moment. Lois must have thought he was skeptical for she added quickly, “Jupe and I came together, all right. I left him parking the car. That was when you saw me at the mill.”

“Of course,” said Stan.

He liked the girl’s loyalty. Although there was a strong probability that she was telling the truth, Stan knew it was all of five minutes between her appearance at the mill office and the time he saw Carnes emerge from the darkness and head for the fire. She might be trying to cover up Carnes — they had ridden from the fire to Chick’s together and had plenty of time to fix up a story. Yet it was most improbable that anyone as frank and open as Lois Gilbert seemed to be would enter into such a deception. He determined to check up on Carnes and his wet shoes in the morning.

“I’m still at your service whenever you want a thorough police grilling,” Stan told her as he finished the last of his liberal meal. “I’ll most likely see you tomorrow. You cover the crate factory on insurance, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes, we do. Jupe will be glad to have you drop in.”

“Thanks,” said Stan. “Good night.”

Stan Rice breakfasted in the hotel dining-room at half past nine the following morning — dining lightly on a grapefruit, a double order of ham and eggs, a side order of grits, and three cups of coffee. With that small repast safely tucked away he felt he could face the busy day ahead.

A waiter brought him a telegraph pad. Through the smoke of his after-breakfast cigarette he composed three telegrams. He had just finished writing the third when a compulsion, purely mental, caused him to look around.

Behind him, one table removed, sat a small dark-skinned man with thin eyebrows, almost like a woman’s. Stan disconcertingly stared, running his blue eyes coolly over the man’s mean small features until his victim nervously picked up a morning paper and raised it before his face.

He turned back to his writing, and composed a fourth telegram — a request for a set of six pictures from the Mill Owners’ Protective Association. Somewhere he had seen the man behind him once before. It would be most helpful if he could find out exactly where.

He handed his telegrams to the clerk at the lobby desk, asked that they be sent off without delay, then casually said: “That man in the restaurant, at the second table just inside the door, has be been here long?”

The clerk took a look. “He checked in last night, Mr. Rice.”

“Do you happen to know what time?”

“If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll get his card.” Scenting mystery the clerk turned to his files. “Here it is, Mr. Rice. Charles Wentworth. The card shows he registered at 2:45 A. M.”

“A late-comer.” Stan smiled. “Do you know him? I mean is he a salesman — one of your regulars?”

The clerk pursed his lips. “I’ve never seen him before that I can remember.”

“Two forty-five,” Stan repeated slowly. A puzzled frown flitted about his eyes. “That was after Trimmer was killed at the fire. I must have been in Chick’s. Is there a train about that time?”

“No, sir. Mr. Wentworth came in a car. That must be his car in front, the red sedan.”

“Thanks.” Stan walked to the lobby door and returned to the desk. “Your card doesn’t happen to say whether Mr. Wentworth checked in here with wet feet, does it?”

The clerk looked mystified, then broke into a smile. “You must be joking, Mr. Rice. Our cards don’t carry that kind of information.”

“That’s a pity,” Stan declared. “Believe me, young man, it’s no joke to me.”

Chief Blunt was out when Stan dropped into the City Hall a short time later. Stan left word he would be back shortly and walked around to the fire station, housed in one end of the same building. He found Buck Anders busily engaged in polishing the big LaFrance machine. Stan watched for a minute then said:

“There ought to be plenty of fire sales in town today.”

Buck’s answering grin was feeble. “Don’t joke about things like that, Stan. At least not in Palatka right now. This whole town’s got the jitters. Three fires in less’n two weeks is too damn many for comfort.”

“A big fire might wipe out the town, mightn’t it, Buck? If it started just right with a wind?”

“You’re telling me?” Buck’s round face sobered. “One nearly did many years ago. I’m living in terror that it may happen again — and soon.”

“Why, Buck?” Stan leaned against the engine.

“I’m saying nothing right now.” Buck wielded his rag at an imaginary dust spot. “But I’m doing a little checking on my own. I intended to find out how them fires were started, and who did the work — and quick, too.”

“Good work.” Stan straightened up. “I’m going to take a run down to the crate factory today myself. I want to look around. Tell me something: Did Trimmer always help out with laying the sucker in the river?”

Buck pondered, then shook his head. “That’s Phil Cox’s job most of the time. Trimmer just happened to be on the scene quick-like last night. It don’t really take two men to lay it. Sometimes somebody helps, but most times Phil does it alone.”

“Did Trimmer usually help Phil when he was there?”

“Most anybody was liable to help, Stan. That’s about all I can say.”

“O.K. Don’t say more than you can help about my looking around, Buck.” Stan paused on his way to the door. “I haven’t forgotten our date for quail, but I’m afraid it’s going to have to wait. When this business is over—”

Buck sighed. “You can’t get it over too quick for me.”

“By the way,” said Stan. “Where’s Phil Cox now?”

“He left a short while ago for Jacksonville.” Buck looked up from his work and gazed searchingly at Stan. “He got a phone call about an hour ago. He acted some like he was worried and said he simply had to go. Jim Hancock’s going to sub for him today.”

“You don’t know what the call was about?”

“I sure don’t,” Buck declared. “That’s Phil’s business, not mine.”

It was eleven o’clock when Stan left the firehouse and entered Blunt’s office. The Chief was phoning. Stan waited until he was through, then asked abruptly: “Did you know that Cox left this morning for Jacksonville?”

The Chief packed down tobacco in his pipe before he replied. “Why, no, I didn’t.” There was worried concern in his tone. “Last night you said you had nothing on him.”

“I haven’t today either,” Stan admitted. “But I’d like to get something. Mr. Phil Cox has a slightly tainted odor to me and I can’t quite place it.” He sat down on the Chief’s desk and kicked his heels against the side. “Suppose you call Jacksonville and have him tailed from the train. I’d like to have a report on this trip.”

“I’m ready to do anything,” said Blunt grimly and picked up the phone. He pushed a typewritten sheet of paper over to Stan while he was making the call. “Here’s a report on Wallace Trimmer. All that I can see is that it gums things up worse than ever.”

After Stan had read it he was inclined to agree. Trimmer was unmarried; in his late thirties; worked as a salesman for the North Florida Wholesale Grocery Company; belonged to a lodge, and was in every way the average successful business man of a not too large town. He had been quiet of habit; not given to excess of any kind.

Stan laid the typed sheet back on Blunt’s desk and said: “At least that’s given me an idea. I’ll see you later. I’m taking a walk uptown.”

As he walked up Lemon Street heading for the office of the Carnes Insurance Agency, he thought he saw the Hotel Palatka’s newly arrived guest, Charles Wentworth, leave the Carnes office. Stan was still nearly a block away — too far to be positive whether he left Carnes’ or the drugstore next door. He slowed down and waited until Wentworth climbed into his red sedan and drove away.

A few minutes later Stan stepped inside the Carnes office and was greeted by Lois Gilbert’s friendly smile.

“Ah!” she said gaily. “The master of the third degree.” Her gray eyes were clear, and she looked fresh and untired despite her late hours of the night before.

“I need more time for that,” Stan said lightly, “and a less conspicuous place. Right now I have crate factory insurance on my mind. I’d like to know how much you carried.” He paused, watching her carefully. “I’d also like to know how much life insurance, if any, your firm carried on Wallace Trimmer.”

“The crate factory’s easy.” Lois frowned. “I’ll have to check about Trimmer.” She walked to a file in the corner. While she was searching through one of the drawers, Stan asked casually:

“You investigate applicants for life insurance, don’t you?”

Lois nodded.

“Do you have a report on Wallace Trimmer?”

“I don’t need one,” she said promptly. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything which might help to tell why he was killed.”

“Most of what I know is gossip.” Lois took papers from the file and returned to her desk. “You know how things are in a small town. There was talk about Wallace and a woman in St. Augustine — a divorcée. There’ve been rumors that Wallace caused the divorce.”

“So?”

“I can tell you something which isn’t generally known.” Lois lowered her voice. “Trimmer met her through Phil Cox. Phil and Trimmer both played on the Palatka Baseball team. Phil introduced her to Wallace one day after a game. Apparently Trimmer won out.”

“You mean Cox had run around with her before she met Trimmer?”

“That’s merely talk, Stan.”

“There’s usually enough truth in gossip to make it dangerous. Lois. Jealousy’s an old motive, but it’s still good.”

“Oh!” Lois’ eyes widened. “I hope I didn’t—”

“Throw suspicion on Phil Cox,” Stan supplied. “Well, you didn’t. Forget it, Lois. Those things are bound to be found out. What’s this woman’s name?”

“Helen Daniels,” she said after a short hesitation. She handed him two of the papers before her. “Here are the insurance figures on the crate factory.”

Stan gave them a brief survey and put them down. “And Trimmer?”

“He had twenty-five hundred dollars, twenty pay life, payable to a sister in New York. His application says that’s all he carried.”

“Thanks.” Stan started to go, turned and said, “Did a Charles Wentworth just leave here?”

“Wentworth?” Lois looked puzzled. “No. No one by that name was in here. Why?”

Stan shook his head. “Nothing. I heard there was an insurance investigator in town. I thought it might have been Wentworth.” He picked a pencil from the desk and twirled it in his fingers. “I was just about to risk getting shot myself.”

“What do you mean?” she asked whitening.

“I was about to ask Jupe Carnes’ fiancée to dance with me tonight at the River Inn.”

Color crept back into her face. “Mr. Carnes’ fiancée likes men who take risks, Mr. Rice. She might accept.”

“About nine-thirty?”

“Splendid.” Lois gave him her hand. “You’re headed for St. Augustine now, I suppose?”

“You’re a brilliant young lady,” Stan told her smilingly. “I’ll see you tonight.”

When the Buick rolled out of town half an hour later it was headed in the opposite direction from St. Augustine to a small store which Stan knew on the Peniel road. St. Augustine and Trimmer’s divorcée could wait. Stan wanted more accurate information about the man who had met sudden death the night before.

If anyone knew of any flaws in Trimmer’s past life it was Dad Fletcher, proprietor of Fletcher’s General Store. Dad spent most of his leisure time, which was plentiful, gathering choice tid-bits about customers and salesmen. He was never averse to passing them on, sometimes embellished beyond recognition.

Flat Florida country slipped by on both sides of the road. Tall turpentine-scarred pine trees grew thicker and vanished abruptly, giving way to a monotonous stretch of palmettos. A covey of quail scurried haughtily across the road and Stan sighed. His date with Buck Anders to visit good bird territory seemed dismally far away...

Half an hour later he was heading back to Palatka more puzzled than ever. His talk with Dad Fletcher had been productive, but not in the way Stan expected. It just didn’t make sense. Dad was emphatic in saying that Wallace Trimmer hadn’t an enemy in the world. The old man knew all the talk about Helen Daniels, and vigorously discounted the whole affair.

“Wally Trimmer never caused no divorce to no one,” Dad told Stan. “That woman and Wally was engaged decent as you please and she’s the finest as comes, same as him! You kin hunt your head off’n you, Stan,” he finished. “You ain’t never goin’ to find no one who wanted to shoot that boy!”

The words kept running drearily through Stan’s mind: “You ain’t never goin’ to find no one who wanted to shoot that boy!” By the time he was back in Palatka, he had decided that Dad Fletcher was right.

He stopped for a moment at the hotel. One of his telegrams had been answered. He whistled softly between his teeth as he read the reply. Phil Cox had spent five years in San Quentin. “They never quite lose the effects!” Stan muttered to himself. “I wonder where we go from here?”

He climbed into the Buick again and started over the long bridge to East Palatka to have a look at the River Inn.

The huge square one-story building was deserted, and proved to be an inn in name only. Stan crossed a wide dance floor, passed by a few scattered tables and a nickel-eating phonograph, and found himself in a small well stocked bar.

A tall, pasty-faced man in a white jacket walked down in back of the bar and stood before him. A long dank wisp of black hair was brushed down over one side of his head covering what Stan judged to be a cauliflower ear.

“Scotch,” said Stan, “and a little soda — very little soda!”

The bartender picked a bottle from under the counter and filled the order.

“Join me?” Stan asked.

“Why not?” said the man. His voice was gruff and harsh, alien to the musical drawl of the native Floridian. He downed his free drink in a single gulp, then started to move down the bar. It didn’t fit in at all with Stan’s plans.

Stan ordered another and said, “You have a pretty big place here. You must get plenty of crowds to fill such a hall.”

“Fair,” the bartender grunted.

“Dancing every night?”

“Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Why?”

Stan grinned. “I’m in Palatka for a week or so, and I thought I’d like to know.”

The bartender put an elbow on the bar and looked at Stan out of deep, opaque eyes, but said nothing.

“How were things last night?” Stan sipped his drink.

“Same as any other night.”

“I suppose there was a pretty big crowd.”

“Do you?” said the bartender. “Well, there wasn’t!”

“A couple of friends of mine were here,” Stan remarked casually. “Maybe you know them — Lois Gilbert and Jupe Carnes.”

“I know them when I see ’em.” The bartender smoothed his hair down closer over his ear.

“They were here, weren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“That fire must have broken up your dance.” Stan swished the ice around in his glass. “Miss Gilbert told me she left when she heard the siren — she and Mr. Carnes. That was about two o’clock, wasn’t it?”

The bartender put his other elbow on the bar. “Yeah.” He narrowed his disagreeable eyes. “I keep a time sheet on each of our customers, mister. Now take you: I’ll report you to the police as soon as you leave.”

“Why?”

“Well, I had a run-in with the cops not so long ago because I didn’t know when some guy they were after left here. Since then I’ve kept tabs for ’em.”

Stan picked up his glass of whiskey and held it up to the light. His face was pained. “Swell!” he said. “You tell the police about me, and I’ll tell them about you. We’ll have a party!”

“Spill it, wise guy!” said the bartender tensely. “And it had better be good.”

“I’m wiser than you think,” said Stan. “Particularly about Scotch. They padlock places in this State that sell people diluted colored shine with a fancy label on it when they order Scotch whiskey.” He stood up and tossed the balance of his drink behind the bar. “Did Carnes and that girl leave here together last night, and what time?”

“You smelled like a dick to me when you come in!” the bartender said disgustedly. “I’ll tell you this then: Don’t ask me no more questions, because I don’t know. Carnes wasn’t here till no two o’clock last night. He left before that, but I don’t know when.”

Stan left the bar and went to a pay telephone in the other room. He called Chief Blunt: “Yes, Blunt, it’s important. I wouldn’t ask you to do it if it wasn’t! Okey, I’ll wait here and call you back.”

A few minutes later, the Palatka fire siren sounded again. It moaned on and on, but strangely enough was not followed by a bell tap announcing the station. Palatka, jittery from its recent series of blazes, waited tensely. All business ceased, and still the bell tap failed to come. The siren died away, leaving the telephone exchange deluged with anxious calls. Stan finally got through to Chief Blunt from East Palatka.

“O.K., Chief. Thanks! You’re what?” Stan laughed. “That’s your problem. I’ll be at your office in ten minutes.”

He found the officer red and perspiring. “Damn you, Stan!” the Chief greeted him. “The whole town’s been calling fire headquarters and here. I told them I was just testing, and I’m expecting a lynching party any minute. They said it was a hell of a time to be just testing.”

“Watch your blood pressure!” Stan grinned. “It’s better to test mid-afternoon than night. And I found out what I wanted to know.”

“What?” asked Blunt.

“If that siren could be heard at River Inn, two and a half miles away.”

“And you heard it?”

Stan nodded. “Not distinctly, but I heard it. Over the noise of the mills, the auto horns and everything. It could be heard much plainer at night — say, at two in the morning.”

“Proving what?” asked Blunt.

Stan walked to the window, clasped his hands behind him, and stood looking out at a garage across the way. “Lois Gilbert told me last night she heard that siren while she was over at the River Inn dancing with Carnes. She said they’d come right over here.” He turned abruptly and faced the Chief. “Do you think that girl would lie to cover up Jupiter Carnes? He might be in on a deal with the owners of these factories.”

“Naw! And I don’t think she’d carry anyone on anything if she thought it was wrong.” The Chief sat erratically drumming his fingers on the desk top.

“I know why Trimmer was killed,” said Stan.

Blunt stilled his drumming fingers. “What?”

Stan was slow in continuing, and when he spoke his voice was brittle with anger. “Wallace Trimmer was a decent fellow, Chief, and he got the rottenest break I’ve met in years: He was shot by mistake.”

“My Gawd, Stan!”

“There’s no motive for his murder. I’ve checked every possible angle. The real reason’s so obvious that we’ve all overlooked it. He was hit with a bullet intended for someone else.”

Chief Blunt wiped his broad forehead. “You know who that bullet was meant for?”

“I hope to know before ten tonight. I understand that Cox is due back on the eight-twenty train.”

“Cox!” The Chief sat up straight in his chair. “Now what the hell? You mean Cox fired that shot at someone else?”

Stan shook his head. “I don’t mean any such thing, but I did learn something about Phil today — he spent five years in the pen.”

“That settles it!” Blunt declared. “I’ll pick him up when he gets in town.”

Again Stan shook his head. “You’d better wait, Chief. You can help much more by telling me everything you can about Jupiter Carnes.”

“Now I know you’re nuts!” The Chief leaned back in his chair. “There’s not a nicer fellow in the town.”

“Tell me about him,” Stan insisted. “Wallace Trimmer was a nice fellow, too, and he’s dead. Has Carnes ever been North?”

“He spent a couple of years up there,” Blunt admitted reluctantly. “Learning the insurance business in Hartford and New York. There was talk that he played around a bit, but he was young and had money. His father died three years ago and left him the business he has now. He spends plenty, but he makes a lot and that doesn’t set well with some of the stuffed shirts around town. You’re on the wrong trail, Stan, if you’re tracking Jupe Carnes.”

“I’ve traveled a lot of wrong trails before,” said Stan. “What about the girl?”

“Lois? She came to Palatka a month or so after Jupe took over the business and went to work for him. I’ve heard that Jupe knew her in New York and had her come to Palatka. I think it’s a story put out by a lot of disappointed women.”

“You can do one more thing right now,” said Stan. “Call Carnes and get me a list of the mills which have increased their insurance during the last few days.”

“I’m afraid they all have, excepting the big ones. They always carry plenty. The small ones generally try to get by and lock the stable door after the mule has run away. You’ll find this epidemic of fires has scared them plenty. I’ll call though.”

He talked for a while on the phone, and hung up looking thoughtful. “There’s an old cuss named Jeb Randolph that you may want to talk to,” he told Stan. “He has a box factory on the river on that cove back of the big mill.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“God made him naturally cantankerous,” said Blunt, “and he’s added forty thousand dollars insurance onto that junk pile of his within the last six days.”

Turning off River Street into a sawdust-filled corduroy road which ran through a low lying swamp to Randolph’s box factory, Stan pulled to one side of the narrow road to allow passage for an oncoming car. It went bouncing by at a dangerous speed, and Stan recognized Mr. Charles Wentworth’s red sedan. He sat for a moment looking through the back window of the coupe at the disappearing car. Then, abandoning the proposed interview with Jeb Randolph entirely, he maneuvered the Buick around on the tricky road and headed back for the hotel.

He made two telephone calls before dinner. The first, to the secretary of the Mill Owners Protective Association in Jacksonville, brought him the information that Jeb Randolph’s box factory had been losing money for some time, and that twenty thousand dollars would probably be liberal insurance on the entire affair. The second call was to Lois Gilbert. “I want to see Phil Cox when he gets back at about eight forty-five,” Stan told her. “I may be a bit late for our trip across the river.”

“It suits me fine,” she agreed readily. “I have some work to do at the office, anyhow. Suppose I call you at the hotel about ten.”

Stan was lingering over his second cup of coffee after dinner when he heard the distant whistle of the southbound Atlantic coastline train. He figured it would take Phil Cox at least half an hour to get to the fire house from the station. He ordered a cognac and sipped it unhurriedly, piecing together the events of the day. About quarter to nine he walked down to the fire house and found Buck Anders standing at the door.

“Is Phil Cox back yet?” Stan asked abruptly.

“Changing his clothes.” Buck jerked a thumb toward the upper floor.

“Tell him I want to see him, will you?”

Buck walked to the brass pole which led upward through a circular opening to the sleeping quarters above and called. Cox was slow in coming. Five minutes passed, then ten.

“Call him again, Buck,” said Stan. “This is important.”

Buck started for the brass pole a second time and was stopped short. With a warning whir the clapper of the shining gong on the wall moved slowly back and began to strike. Bong-bong! Bong — bong!

“Twenty-three!” said Buck before the second signal began. His voice was metallic as the brass of the gleaming La-France. “There’s plenty of hell now! That’s the barrel factory. We’ve got to roll fast or we’ll see nothing but ashes!”

The siren wailed out, calling the volunteers to action with its raucous summons. A larger bell tapped out the numbers from the tower of the City Hall. Buck had the pumper’s engine racing when Phil Cox slid down the brass pole and hit the floor with bent knees. When the LaFrance shot out of the station Stan was standing on the rear platform clinging to a strap beside Phil.

Anders slowed at the street long enough for four of the volunteer crew to swing on board. The machine roared off again, and was touching forty when it crossed Lemon Street on its dash to the mill.

Stan clung fast and prayed. They passed the scene of the previous night’s fire doing fifty, swung left with a lurch which wrenched Stan’s arm, and leaped the railroad tracks with a tooth-shaking jolt. Farther down, red over the top of huddled trees. Stan saw the glare.

The LaFrance slowed, turned left again onto the road which Stan had traversed half-way during the afternoon, and made another left turn skirting the swamp toward the river.

“Does this lead to Randolph’s box factory?” Stan yelled to Phil.

“No, that’s straight ahead. We’re headed.for the barrel factory half a mile this side. It’s too close to the Cypress Company’s lumber yards for comfort. If the yards ever caught — good night!”

Cars were trailing them in a crazy procession as volunteers poured out from every section of the town. The pumper stopped some thirty feet from the river’s edge, and Stan followed Buck and Phil as they hurriedly placed the sucker and coupled the hose together.

The flames were shooting high, bending before a strong wind, almost reaching one of the main buildings of the barrel factory. Water smashed into them, hissing shrilly and sending up a smoke screen of steam which rolled in toward the fast-gathering crowd.

A second hose was fastened to a hydrant connection. A minute later, water poured from it onto the side of the near-by building in a precautionary wetting.

Beside Stan, Buck Anders said, “Another piece of fool luck, if you ask me! I’m beginning to think some kids are startin’ these bonfires to see the fun. Who else would fire a waste pile fifty yards from the mill?”

Buck’s question struck Stan with the impact of an icy shower, straightening pieces of a diabolical puzzle neatly into line. Fifty feet away, the helmeted figure of Phil Cox was directing the heavy brass nozzle of the hose.

“Phil!” Stan yelled. “Phil Cox!”

Stan started to run. He had taken less than six steps when he knew he had blundered, been unforgivably dense, waited irretrievably too long. Gouging through the sputtering crackle of the burning brush, he heard the spat of a gun from the swamp behind him.

The nozzle wavered in Phil Cox’s hands. The hose writhed, turning the powerful stream of water away from the fire and toward the sky. Slowly, as though ineffably tired, Cox wilted to the ground.

Stan turned and headed for the swamp without breaking his stride. Blackness sucked him in. He tore with desperation at impeding bushes which clung to him ruthlessly, checking his way. Blackthorns ripped at his hands and, with an oath, he tore himself free.

The flickering, deceitful light from the pyre brought black shadows of vegetation to life, scattering them in a living army through the swamp until the morass was peopled with a malign hoard of enemies all working for his destruction.

He found freedom from the brush, but water splashed high on his knees. Bushes moved ahead and a gun spat again, sending a whining slug of destruction close by his ear. It tore bark from a cypress and started a hollow, bounding echo on its way. Sobbing in his throat, Stan started in pursuit again, but the wraithlike noise he was chasing was farther away. Twigs crackled more faintly.

A moment later, the confines of the swamp were still. When bruised and torn he burst from the swamp onto the corduroy road, he faced the calmly smoking figure of Charles Wentworth seated on the running-board of his red sedan.

“Did you see anyone come out of here?” Stan gasped demandingly.

Mr. Wentworth looked him over with surprise, slowly sharpened the crease of his well pressed trousers between thumb and finger, and said, “No, buddy, not a soul.”

Wearily Stan hobbled down the road toward the scene of the fire. Silently he pushed through the ominously muttering crowd until headlights glinted on Chief Blunt’s brass buttons and blue.

The Chief looked at Stan’s scratched face and ripped-up clothes and said, “What the hell?”

Stan drew him free of the crowd, pointed to Phil Cox’s motionless form and said, “Dead?”

Blunt nodded morosely.

“I blame myself for that,” said Stan with expressive calmness. “I’m a chuckle-headed fool!”

“Why?” The Chief gave a friendly touch to Stan’s arm.

“Why?” Stan repeated bitterly. “Because the real reason why these fires were started just penetrated my thick head a few minutes ago. A child could see these aren’t arson, Blunt.”

“Then what are they?”

“Murder traps!” said Stan. “Set to get a man who answered every alarm in Palatka because he was a member of the Fire Department — Phil Cox!”

“There’ve been four.”

“That’s what threw me off. Something must have gone wrong for the killer at the first two. Something went desperately wrong at the third, for Wallace Trimmer, handling the sucker, was mistaken for Phil silhouetted against the glare.”

“But fires, Stan—” The Chief breathed deeply and paused.

“The best cover-up for a shooting I ever heard of. Crowds, excitement, and plenty of noise. Tonight you saw it work without a flaw.” His mouth set grimly and he turned away.

“Where are you going?” asked Blunt.

“Dancing,” said Stan. “Dancing at the River Inn.”

Driving across the St. John’s River bridge toward River Inn, Stan stole a glance at Lois. She seemed content to sit beside him and watch the twin row of lights rushing to meet them. Not until they ran off onto the brick road and swung left toward East Palatka did she speak. Then it was only to say, “You’re quiet. Is something the matter?”

Stan slowed down and lighted a cigarette from the dash lighter. “I guess I’m upset. There was another fire tonight, you know.”

She took the cigarette from between his lips, inhaled, and passed it back to him. “You can’t very well miss knowing when there’s a fire in Palatka.”

“No,” said Stan, “you can’t. You didn’t go to the one tonight, did you?”

She hesitated almost imperceptibly before she said, “No, I didn’t. I had to tear through a pile of work, as it was, to come over here with you.”

“It’s kind of you to take pity on a lonely man.”

“Don’t sound so tragic!” Lois laughed. “You’re moving me to tears.”

“Men must work and women must weep,” said Stan swinging into the road to River Inn.

The place was a babble of noise and smoke. The cauliflower-eared bartender gave them a glance as they came in the door and turned quickly away. The dance hall was dimly lighted. A dozen or more couples were moving about the floor to the blare of the victrola.

Stan found a table, sat down, and ordered Scotch highballs from a Negro waiter. “Tell that whiskey surgeon in there that if he cuts that Scotch to shreds I’ll carve his heart out!”

“What you say?” the waiter demanded, widening his eyes.

“Forget it,” said Stan. “Double talk! Hustle along.” He folded his arms, rested them on the edge of the table and looked across at Lois. “Do you love Jupiter Carnes?” he asked flatly.

She bit her lip hard, then laughed. “You’re a delightfully insulting man! I’m engaged to him! Let’s dance!”

Stan took her in his arms and they moved out on the floor. “Jupe knows I’m over here with you,” she said after a few steps. “Just because I’m engaged to him, he doesn’t try to keep me in a cage.”

“I’m afraid I would,” said Stan, “if you were engaged to me.”

She moved a trifle closer and said, “I’m not.”

“Where was he tonight?” asked Stan. “I didn’t see him at the fire either.”

“He was at the office until a short time ago.” Lois missed a step. “As a matter of fact, he said he might join us later here.”

Stan deftly avoided a slightly drunken couple and said without preamble, “I suppose you heard Phil Cox was murdered — shot through the head.”

Her body tightened in his arms and she stopped short. “Please,” she said, releasing herself.

Stan followed her to the table and pulled out her chair. “Just like Trimmer,” she said, her voice low.

Stan nodded. She drained her highball and asked, “Could we go now? I don’t feel much like dancing. I knew Phil, knew him quite well.”

“But you have no idea who killed him?”

“None,” she said emphatically. “How would I know?”

“I just thought you might,” Stan told her casually. “I learned today that you’ve been married to him for ten years.”

He took her arm, holding it hard, and helped her outside and into the car. “Pull yourself together, Lois,” he said kindly. “I’ll pay the check and be right back.”

Inside, he beckoned the surly bartender to the end of the bar. “I want the truth, and I want it fast,” he told the man. “You can take your choice between talking and having this clip joint visited by cops every day for the next six months. What time did that girl I was with just now leave this place last night?”

The bartender wet his lips and said, “One o’clock.”

“She was here with Jupiter Carnes. Did they leave together?”

“They had an argument. I think he got mad and left first and she followed.”

“She didn’t go home in his car?”

The bartender hesitated, caught the glint in Stan’s eyes, and said, “So help me, mister, I ain’t sure, but I think she drove across the river with some other guy.”

“Next time tell the truth right away and you’ll save trouble,” Stan advised and went back out to the car.

Lois was huddled disconsolately in one corner of the seat. Stan pushed the Buick savagely into gear and got it under way. “How long has Carnes known you were married to Phil Cox?” he demanded when they were on the road.

“I don’t know.” He could scarcely hear her.

“Why did you lie about him last night and tonight? You’re in a murder case, Lois, and you’d better come clean.”

“Jupe didn’t kill him!” she screamed suddenly. “He didn’t, I tell you, he didn’t!” Her voice trailed off and everything was quiet inside the car.

They were on the bridge when Lois began to speak again. Stan drove slowly, keeping silent, afraid to show sympathy for fear she would break down again and begin to cry.

“I loved Phil Cox devotedly years ago.” She spoke as though Stan were not present, telling her story to the yellow lights which flickered by. “He was sent to San Quentin for arson and I stayed by him until he escaped. His real name was Phil Gilbert, the name I go by now. His escape was a mistake. We became hunted things and had to separate until Phil came here. He sent for me three years ago. He was still afraid, frightened all the time, and we couldn’t live together.

She straightened up in the seat and said more firmly, “I fell in love with Jupiter Carnes. Phil understood, but I was on the spot. I was afraid to get a divorce, for fear it would stir things up and start the hunt for Phil all over again. Two weeks ago everything toppled about my ears. One of Phil’s old arson gang came to town and recognized us both. I was in an insurance office, and Phil in the Fire Department — a perfect setup for arson, according to this man.” She turned to Stan. “You saw him today.”

“Yes,” said Stan. “I’ve checked him also. He’s registered under the name of Charles Wentworth at the hotel.”

“He threatened to turn Phil up unless we played,” Lois went on. “Both of us refused, and he started his game by writing Jupe an anonymous note saying I was married, but not saying to whom.”

Her voice broke slightly, but she recovered herself again. “You must see, Stan, you must understand! Jupe would have had no reason in the world for killing Phil. He didn’t know Phil was my husband. You have to help me!”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Stan said kindly. “What’s the rest of it, Lois? What’s Wentworth doing to town right now?”

“He’s planning a fire, I’m sure. Listen, Stan,” she said desperately, “I had to fall in with his plans part way. He intends to set off one of two mills tonight — Carter’s moss factory out at the end of Lemon Street, or Randolph’s box factory at the bend of the river. Both of them are heavily insured. I don’t know which, for he doesn’t trust me that far, but I can find out if you’ll help me trap him.”

“Good girl!” said Stan. “It’s a deal!”

“I know he’s talked to Carter,” she added, “but I don’t know which will go first.”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Stan told Lois, “and we can make our plans.” He climbed out of the car in front of his hotel and ran upstairs. He took his Colt .38 from his Gladstone bag, and slipped the heavy weapon in the side pocket of his topcoat. He put his flash-light on the other side, and was back downstairs in less than five minutes.

In the lobby he called the police station. A long series of rings produced no reply. As he stepped from the porch, Lois ran in through the front door of the lobby and crossed quickly to where he stood. Her face was white and drawn.

“Wentworth’s sedan just headed up Lemon Street!” she told Stan. “There’s no time to lose! He’s bound for the Moss factory, I’m sure!”

“Watch him!” said Stan curtly. “I’ll be there right away.”

Stan turned around and swore. The night clerk who had been back of the desk a few minutes before had disappeared, gone on some errand of his own. The lobby was entirely deserted. Stan seized a souvenir postcard from a rack on the desk, wrote on it: “Blunt: Moss factory, quick! Stan,” and laid it face up on the open guest register.

He spied a blue pencil in back of the cigar case, reached around for it, and scrawled in big letters on the guest register “Night Clerk: Get this to the Chief of Police in a hurry!”

When he climbed into the Buick, the red sedan was nowhere in sight. “He turned off a few blocks up,” said Lois. “He’s probably going up Reid Street. We can pick him up again.”

The moss factory was near sixteenth street close beside the colored section of town. It was a prosperous plant which collected, dried, and cured the abundant Spanish Moss which festooned the Florida trees. Dried and cured, the moss turned a deep brownish black and formed a servicable stuffing for fine furniture. It was highly inflammable in the drying stage. Stan knew that, once started, a fire in the moss factory would be far beyond control before help could possibly arrive.

He pulled the Buick into the curb and said, “You better get out here, Lois. This may not be much fun!”

“Hurry!” she commanded. “I know how they work. I’m going along.”

He started the pursuit again without arguing. The moss factory loomed up a couple of blocks away, a square smudge in the dark. There was no sight of the red sedan. Stan turned the Buick off the road into a vacant lot, put out the lights, and climbed out. Wordlessly, Lois followed.

The negro section of the town spread out to their right, flat and treeless. An occasional light showed dimly among the scattered unpainted houses. Beyond, the factory lay on low irregular terrain.

They circled and stole up on the unadorned squareness of the factory from the rear. Stan led the way around it, keeping close to the wall. His searching fingers found the knob of the office door, but when he started to turn it, he discovered the door was slightly ajar.

It was all too pat, too delightfully careless to be real. He held Lois back with a restraining arm, stood to one side and pushed the door wide with his toe. It creaked slightly, sending a magnified rasp into the pitchy interior of the office. Minutes later he stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and clicked his five-cell torch into brightness.

Shadows of desk and files grew large on the walls and collapsed again as the light moved on. Led by its ray, Stan and Lois explored a baling room to their right, probed behind presses, and bales of moss stacked high along the sides. Satisfied that the baling room was empty, Stan paused before a red fireproof door which barred the way to the back part of the factory. The door was locked, secured by a heavy Yale padlock.

“No one went through there,” Stan whispered. “Do you know what’s on the other side?”

“It’s the drying room.” Lois’ lips moved close to his ear. “Wentworth will try to start his fire in there.”

“There must be another way to get in.”

He clicked off the light. For a moment there was no sound except Lois’s excited breathing. Finally she said, “I believe there’s a chute from the roof where they send the moss down. If it’s open—”

Stan turned on the light again, swung it toward a narrow staircase in the corner and said, “Let’s go.”

A trap-door barred their way at the top. He pushed it up, climbed through and stood under the stars. The breeze against his face was cold, free of the dank pungency which permeated the baling room below. He took a few steps before he turned. The upper half of Lois’s body showed above the opening in the roof, motionless, as though some clever magician were bringing her into existence with his trick half finished.

She pointed to his left, raising her arm slowly. A rectangle of black showed at his feet close to the edge. His torch glinted dully on a wooden chute worn smooth and shiny from the scratch of sliding moss.

The violent shove which sent him inside, clutching at air, came without the faintest noise which might have warned him. He realized afterward that the entrance to the slide was guarded with twelve inch boards set on edge around the opening. The man he was seeking must have been lying pressed flat to one side of the rectangle, skillfully merged with the shadows.

Stan plunged swiftly down, grabbing helplessly at the hard glassy slide. The breathless descent stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Clinging tendrils of moss were all about him, trailing across his face and eyes, brushing at his groping hands.

His torch was gone. He lay back, quietly watching the stars through the opening above him. Even as he looked they disappeared and he knew the opening to the roof had been covered with a heavy door.

The moss was soft and yielding, odorous with the acid of decomposition. He sneezed and shifted his weight as he felt himself sinking down. The moss followed, persistent with its repugnant caresses.

He lay rigidly, spreading wide his arms and legs as a man might do in clutching sands. Life came into the tendrils surrounding him, slow creeping life. Silently they moved against his flesh, furtive as crawling insects in the dark. He sneezed again, and gleefully they closed in, cloaking his mouth and nose with smothering strands.

Panic threatened him, exhausting his strength and numbing his senses at the imminence of drowning in thirty feet of dank dry sea. He began to fight, flailing his arms and kicking his feet with the frenzy of a choking swimmer. The moss closed in, stealthy as a lustful harpy seeking to strangle a weakening lover in the thick strong strands of her hair.

Twice he called, muffled ineffectual yells which reached nowhere. Then icy calmness stilled his dangerous struggles. Fiercely, watching his direction by instinct, hoarding his breath, using his powerful muscles to the greatest advantage, he began to fight his way down and through. A locked fire door was his goal, but it was the single chance which would bring him out alive. Acrid smoke was already stinging his nostrils. The moss plant was aflame!

The blackness was cut by licking fire. Unexpectedly Stan found he was free of the deadly, yielding moss pile. He had come out of the sloping heap at one side. Straight before him, illuminated waveringly by a green, unearthly flare, the thick fire door barred his way.

Blinded by streaming sweat, he stood swaying slightly, listening to the wail of a siren drawing near. Flame rolled slowly down the side of the moss pile pushing a cloud of choking smoke before it, driving Stan closer against the wall. Desperately he grasped one end of the door and shook it with an insane frenzy. It moved ponderously half an inch out from the wall and settled into place again.

He stepped back, dashed perspiration from his eyes, and studied the door through a haze of scalding tears. It was a matter of minutes, he knew. Fumes were already tearing at his lungs, turning each breath into agony. The flicker of the burning pile changed from green to crimson. With the brighter light he saw that the sliding door was hung at the top from two grooved rollers which allowed it to move along an iron bar.

Weakly he leaned against the wall to think, knowing that one man, no matter how strong, could never lift it free. Close beside him something toppled over, slid scrapingly along the wall, and struck the cement floor with a dull metallic clang. Stan dropped to his knees, gratefully sucked in a gulp of the slightly cooler air, and found he was staring at a long-handled spade.

He acted mechanically from then on, his shadow dancing against the wall with the grotesque humor of a demonish stoker engaged in some infernal scene. The door hung two inches from the floor. With the full weight of his body behind the stroke, he jammed the sturdy handle of the spade beneath the door, working from the front end toward the rear. Two feet of the handle disappeared, shoved underneath, parallel to the wall.

The first time it slipped. He swore, tried again, found leverage, and with every back muscle called into play, began to raise. The ash snapped threateningly, then held until one of the rollers on top of the door was raised above the bar. Bracing the crushing weight of the shovel against his hip, Stan released his hands and pulled the heavy door inward until the roller was free. One more lunge, which approached sheer madness, dragged the loose end of the door two feet into the blazing room. An instant later he squeezed through and dropped inertly to the baling room floor, drinking in fresh air.

Smoke rolled in through the crack of the fire door behind him. Light streamed against the dirty windows of the baling room. It took him some moments to realize that the moss factory was ringed outside with the headlights of myriad cars.

Voices shouted indistinguishable words outside the plant, filling the air with sound. Stan forced himself to stand erect. Reeling crazily he zig-zagged toward the office door. Then flesh and clothing suddenly tugged at his feet. He slumped to his knees, supported himself with one blistered hand, and saw he had stumbled over the unconscious form of Jupe Carnes.

Great noxious billows of smoke were clouding the baling room now. The desire to lie down beside Carnes and peacefully sleep was almost too much to bear. He fought the pleasant idea ruthlessly. Carnes was breathing raucously, short sharp gasps which ended in a terrifying rattle.

Laboriously Stan hooked fingers into Carnes’ collar and began to inch him toward the door. When he reached up and turned the knob with a painful effort, he found it was locked on the other side.

Cold air struck the smoke and banked it into a swirling cloud of gray. Through the clear Stan saw a window had been raised and that someone was climbing through. His head grew steadier with the sharpness of the breeze. He rolled away from Carnes as hurrying footsteps dashed across the floor.

Lois Gilbert dropped to her knees and screamed: “Jupe! Jupe! He’s dead! He’s dead! God in heaven what shall I do?”

Close behind her Stan moved to a sitting position. Her voice trailed mournfully away as she turned and caught the glint of his blood red eyes. “One thing you can do is drop that sash weight, Lois.” His split, charred lip widened in a terrifying grin. “Jupe’s a hell of a sight from being dead and you’re not going to kill him. If you make a move I’ll ruin your pretty face with a bullet between your eyes!”

An hour later in the doctor’s office, Chief Blunt said, “I don’t care if you are wrapped up like a country ham, you have to talk. I’m holding Lois Gilbert on your say-so. I want to know what I’m doing it for.”

One of Stan’s ordinarily blue eyes twinkled at him like a winking miniature tail-light through a slit in the encompassing bandages. “She killed Trimmer and Phil Cox, and damn near got Carnes and me.”

“Don’t write a book,” said Blunt wearily. “Why?”

“Trimmer was a mistake, as I told you. She wanted Phil out of the way so she could marry Jupe Carnes. Jupe was suspicious of her, suspicious that she’d shot Trimmer. He followed her. That’s what he was acting so suspiciously about at the crate mill fire. That’s why his feet were wet. He’d been down to the edge of the river. I got off on the wrong track thinking she was lying to cover up Carnes. Actually she was lying to cover up herself.”

“Lying about what?”

“The time they left the River Inn last night. I got the real dope from the bartender there tonight. Both of them left there about one — plenty of time for either of them to start the fire and pull Trimmer’s accidental killing. I sprung it on her at the Inn tonight that I knew she was married to Phil. I got his record today by wiring a description of his prints to the F.B.I. in Washington.”

“Where did you get them?”

“From a hoze nozzle in the fire house. Say my lips hurt and I dislike persistent policemen.”

“Not as much as I hate secretive detectives,” said Blunt. “What did the F.B.I. say?”

Stan tried to scratch a bandaged nose with a bandaged hand and gave it up. “They gave me Phil’s real name — Phil Gilbert, and I connected it up with her. I also got an identification of my good friend Charles Wentworth by wiring his description to the Miami police. He’s familiarly known as Lighthouse Billy Blane.”

“He’s Hoosegow Billy Blane right now,” said Blunt. “Our efficient motorcycle cop picked him up as he was scooting out of town. He spilled himself as soon as he was nabbed.”

“He’s the type,” said Stan in muffled tones. “What did he say?”

“Well, seems Jupe must have trailed you and the gal to the moss plant and tried to stop her. She cracked him over the head in the baling room, intending to kill him according to Wentworth. Due to your note sent me from the hotel, I arrived with the fire department before we were expected. She got panicky and beat it outside, but waited around. When she saw the department was getting things under control and that Carnes wasn’t going to be roasted, she slipped in through a window to finish the job. The fire was all in back in the moss room, and the crowd was all at the other end. I guess she thought if she yelled loud enough everyone would think she’d found Jupe dead. She was positive you were.”

“She must have played with too many matches as a kid,” Stan declared through the bandages. “She thinks too fast for her own good. She gave me a honey of a story coming across the river tonight and I damn near fell for it all. It was almost true, too, except that she said Phil had escaped from San Quentin when I knew he hadn’t. He’d served all of his time.”

“Anyhow, she told me too much to leave me alive. Even though it was a beautiful mixture of truth and fiction. She said that Wentworth was going to fire either the moss plant, or Randolph’s mill tonight. I knew it wasn’t Randolph’s. I saw Wentworth driving on the road out there today. Any expert firebug keeps away from a plant he intends to fire.”

“What the hell did Wentworth and the girl go into the firebug business for, anyway?”

“Well, Wentworth said that it was the girl’s idea. Lois tried to get the owners to double their insurance and then set fire to their places. She didn’t put it that boldly to ’em, but they understood and would have none of it. Then she started setting fire to a few of the factories to frighten ’em into it. If they’d take out more insurance, see, she’d get the commission.”

“Money mad, huh?” Stan said.

“Guess so. One of the reasons she wanted to marry Carnes. Then she had to try to kill him to keep him from talking when he got hep to her. Anyway, under cover of her fires she tried to kill Phil Cox — tried until she finally got him. Sort of killing two birds with one fire. Kill off Cox so she could marry Carnes and scare the factory owners into taking out more insurance and eventually falling for her arson plan.”

Stan nodded and asked ruefully, “There’s one thing I can’t understand. Somehow she and Wentworth planned a trap for me at that moss factory, but damned if I can figure out when.”

Blunt laughed. “I know the answer to that, too. She saw Wentworth while you were in the hotel getting your gun. She told him to beat it up to the factory and hide along the chute on the roof. She said she’d get you there — and she did. You were always a sucker for dames.”

“If that guy’s beaten up as badly as I think he is,” Stan mumbled, “I’ll be scared to look at him in the morning. I wish I’d caught her in the swamp tonight and saved myself getting fried. The way I’m taped up I doubt if I can eat.”

“You could if you were dead! Besides, I brought you something,” said Blunt with a leer. “A bottle of milk! The doctor says you must have nothing but liquids for a month and drink them through a tube. If you so much as mention Miles Standish Rice, the Hungry, I’ll conk you one, so help me!”

A Thousand Iron Men

by H. W. Guernsey

The $1000 bill burned holes in the little bum’s pockets while its owners burned holes in each other.

* * *

Emil Fiddlemarch was the proprietor of a pale, bony nose, with a lean and waxy length to it which had the effect of pulling his eyes together and belittling his mouth. He frequented the Times Square area, the railway terminals, the Village, and crowds.

On a stagnant morning in August he was following his nose on Broadway above 42nd Street, breakfastless. There was a girl ahead of him, moving right along as though she were going places. As far as he could tell from her eloquent rear, she was a peach. She had a long bob of yellow hair that moved fluidly against her neck and shoulders as she hiked along, and choice long legs against which her skirt played provocatively.

Emil accelerated to keep up with her; it was this innocent pastime of getting an eyeful of seductive curves that brought him to the spot at the mathematical tick of time.

It was on its way down, a dozen feet above the girl’s head, when he first sighted it, and with lightning perception he knew what it was. In its descent it flipped over and over as though on an axis, rolling steadily down an invisible incline at such a degree that all he had to do was snatch it out of the air. Just like that — grab.

The grab brought him a couple of passing stares, but no challenge from other pedestrians. No one else had seen it. Finders keepers. But within one step after his brief hesitation he heard the yell from overhead, muffled by height. Way, way up, a redheaded man leaned out of a hotel window and roared, “Hey! Hey, you!”

Simultaneously a man burst out of the hotel entrance ahead. He was a young fellow in spite of his bald spot, and he had the build of a tough customer. He collided with the blond girl, spilling her interestingly across the sidewalk, and didn’t wait to see how she fared. After a hurried glance aloft at the redhead he started belligerently for the bunch of pedestrians including Fiddlemarch.

“Which one of you—” he began.

Emil turned in his tracks and fled.

His pursuer shouted, “Hey! Grab that little guy!”

Even on an empty stomach Emil could run, and he got going now with all the industry and vigor of fear. He zigzagged among people, jumped the curb and set sail through the Main Stem’s unsolvable traffic problem. He didn’t look around once, merely bent his wits to dodging fenders at top speed.

By the time he bolted down the stairs of a subway entrance and reached the turnstiles he had gained enough ground to drop a nickel in the slot like any honest person. Thereafter not a hand was laid on him as he tore through the station. Behind him, Bald Spot jumped the turnstiles, and a uniformed guard promptly ducked in and joined the chase.

There was a train at the platform; like red embers the lights over the doors were winking out one by one. Only one light remained, and that door was grinding shut.

Skinny as he was, Emil had to knife through the closing slot to freedom with less than nothing to spare. The door’s rubber bumper slammed into his hip, bounced as he clawed his way inside, and shut decisively as his pursuer arrived. Too late, the man scrabbled furiously at the door, pounded on the window as the train began to roll. The last Emil saw was a contorted face and a grim-looking guard grappling with the man.

Emil lurched his way down the car to the vestibule at the other end, where he could be alone and lean his hip against the brake wheel. His heart was ticking as fast as a watch, and his breathing snuffled as though he were laughing under it. But he had no cause for mirth, not when there was so little doubt about his being a goner. He had been around enough, mooching and scavenging wherever there were cash customers, and he knew a great number of characters who obtained their living after his own fashion.

His feeling about what he had just done was akin to horror, for he had recognized both of those men and they must have recognized him. His pursuer was Farr Luette, and the man Luette was working with was the redheaded Ira Terrin. They pulled big jobs; they hired out to murder a man they never saw before, if the price was right, and followed people home from night clubs to waylay them of money and jewelry. Things like that, strictly above Fiddlemarch’s class — those two.

At 34th Street, where he left the train, Emil copped a peek at what he had in his hand. It was the wherewithal, all right, wadded up as tight as a spitball. Covertly he peeled a corner open, and his eyes glazed. He swallowed, and his fingers jumped shut again. The banknote was a grand. A thousand frogskins! No wonder Luette had got down on his tail in such a rush.

Farr Luette rode the hotel elevator back up, mopping his face and the bald pink crown of his head, taking care not to disturb the meticulously combed, curly black remainder of his hair around the sides. He wasn’t used to running much, and he was still breathless when he got back to Terrin’s room.

“Catch him?” Terrin demanded.

Luette shook his head. “No.” Gasp. “Caught a subway.”

“You sure about that,” Terrin stated suspiciously.

“Ah, don’t pull that.” Luette snapped. “I said he got away. Damn it!”

“Of all the lousy—” Terrin swore, muttering the profanity. He stuck his heavy fists in his pockets and paced the room. He was built like a gorilla, thick through the chest, neck, and head, broad-shouldered, beefy. His face was heavy, loose-lipped, and his red hair commenced only a couple of fingers above his red eyebrows.

“Listen,” said Luette, “I seen that little runt somewhere around. Maybe we can pick him up.”

“A hell of a lot that’ll do,” Terrin growled. “How much of that grand you think we’d find on him?”

“What’s the difference? I hate to think of some little wart like that making me run my legs off. I hate to let him get away with it.”

“Go head and ask around, then,” Terrin suggested angrily. “You find out who he is, then what? The guy’s got rabbit blood in him, and besides that, you make chumps out of us.”

Luette gave Terrin a hard look, sweat beading his upper lip. It was Terrin’s clumsiness that sent the grand out the window, but Luette didn’t make any cracks about it. He compromised by beefing: “So we don’t get nothing out of this job. Well, I guess I’ll go down and lay a couple of bets.”

“Wait a minute.” Terrin’s eyes were bright squints. “You know this guy we did the job for?”

“Sure; Polumbo. Jack the Bug Polumbo.”

“And this Frankie Liano we bumped off — what did Polumbo have against him?”

“Something about a girl,” Luette said deprecatingly. He always got the essential information for Terrin before they pulled a job. “Name’s Audrey Starr, used to be in burlesque, and she’s Polumbo’s girl. Liano was a waiter at the Lisbon, and he was making little Audrey, I guess. So Polumbo has us bump Liano.”

“The Lisbon, ugh? Is that where we find Polumbo? Where is it?”

“It’s one of them joints. Over on the West Side, straight across from here, almost.”

“Come on, guy; let’s go.” Terrin shrugged into his coat and buttoned it, patted what might have been a bulge of muscle near his left armpit.

“What have you got on?” Luette asked.

“We’re gonna get another grand out of Polumbo. Maybe a couple of grand.”

“Yeah? We can’t do that, Ira.”

“The hell we can’t! Coming?”

“You dumb slob,” Luette said softly, but he followed him and the two marched over to the Lisbon.

The Lisbon bar was near the middle of the block, on the right going uptown. It was on the second floor over the dirty windows of a plumbing shop.

Terrin and Luette went through an unpainted doorway and mounted a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. A man might be delivered here if he was drunk and amorous and asked a hack-driver where he could find some nice girls at two o’clock in the morning, in midtown. The Lisbon Bar had been converted from a deep floor-through apartment, and its ceilings were stamped tin, painted gray.

The barkeep was a young guy with a fresh white apron on; he had a solitary customer, a fat man in a light, wrinkled summer worsted, whose eyes looked as though they had been cooked.

“Where’s Polumbo?” Terrin asked.

The kid wagged his head briefly.

“He’s not around.”

“Maybe he is.” Terrin leaned both elbows on the rim of the tiny bar. “He wants to know about Liano.”

The kid — on the bar-shelf a sign with a removable name-plate stated that “Jimmy” was on duty — indicated a door near the back of the bar. He said, “Last door down the hall, on the right.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.” Luette trailed after Terrin while looking back at Jimmy. The lock on the door clicked, and they went through.

Jimmy inspected a cigarette burn on the walnut bar, polished it thoughtfully with a beery rag. He told the fat man: “I think you better beat it.”

“One more drink,” the fat man said. “Make it stiff; I can’t feel nothing.”

At the back of the hall, Terrin grasped the doorknob, found the door open. Luette crowded into a small chamber behind him and closed the door gently.

Jack the Bug Polumbo had been awake all last night. The skin under his eyes looked deadish and baggy. He had bunchy ears like mushrooms, straight black hair, and he was a bigger man than Terrin, who was big. He was writing in a canvas-bound ledger on a littered desk, and his head came up with a wondering, weary slowness. He had somber, dead-black eyes, and be asked in a monotone, “What did you come here for, you Gawd-damned fools?”

He folded the ledger shut and sat there, two hundred and twenty-odd pounds of fat and muscle bulging through his soiled clothes.

“We lost that grand,” Terrin said. “We come back for another one.”

After a stare Polumbo said, “You’re out of your mind. How did you get in here?”

“Jimmy, out there. Pal of ours.”

The muscles bulged momentarily along Polumbo’s swarthy jaws. After another pause he asked. “What makes you think I owe you a grand? Didn’t I pay you guys once?”

“I just told you it got lost.” Terrin made his voice heavy and patient. “It blew out the window; a guy picked it up and beat it before we could get down there.”

“You must be going nuts!” Polumbo complained. “Is it my fault if you lose your dough?”

“You don’t get it.” Terrin started over. “We did this job for you — we bumped this guy — and we got nothing to show for it. See? We can’t bump off a guy we never seen before, and not get any dough for it. You can see that: that’s business.”

“What’s business? Listen, Terrin,” Polumbo said, “the only thing I heard about you was that you’d do a job if the price was right, and you said you’d do it for a grand. I never heard that you were dumb. I passed you that grand down in that bar yesterday, and now you’re trying to tell me I didn’t.”

“Sure you did,” Terrin agreed calmly. “Only we haven’t got it any more. We didn’t use any part of it; if we used some of it would be different. You owe us a grand.”

“Say, what’s the matter with you guys? I paid you a grand, didn’t I? How do you figure, anyhow?”

“You wrote on the back of that bill.”

“Sure I wrote on it. What the hell? Do you think I want to shoot off my mouth that I’m hiring you to kill a guy, and some fink will hear me and tell the cops? You looked at it, didn’t you? That’s all there is to it.”

Terrin’s heavy lips grinned. “It’s your fault we lost that grand. You wrote on the back — the guy’s name, Frank Liano, and his address, and so on.”

“Sure. You read it.”

“Sure I read it. Only we had to buy an eraser to erase that off. We couldn’t pass it that way. I was at the window in the hotel erasing it, and all of a sudden the damned bill blew right out the window. Things like that happen. We had to erase it, and if that writing wasn’t on it, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Polumbo kept his hands spread out in sight, and they twitched a little on top of the ledger. They were whopping big hands, with stumpy, pale fingers like country sausages. For all his size he could move fast and handle one of them, but not both Luette and Terrin. He temporized, “Did you take care of that Liano all right? How?”

“We picked him up where you said,” Terrin recounted. “We took him down to the car. He got rubber legs and we had to drag him, but that was all right, he was drunk, maybe or scared. Up on the Number 3 Transverse in Central Park I just took the thing out and stuck it under his ear. There was no cars or anybody around, except maybe somebody in the bushes.”

“Your car must look nice.”

“I’m not dumb. I had the guy on the flood with his head on an old pillow. He was just like jelly. I was telling him this one about the drunk that was trying to break into his own house, see, and I stuck the thing under his ear while he was listening, and it just made a little pop. And the slug sticks in the pillow, too.”

Polumbo’s face expressed something like satisfaction.

“Then we drove east to the river, and found a dead end where there was nobody around, and dropped him off a barge.”

Polumbo nodded, eying his callers critically. There was his girl, Audrey Starr, whom he was keeping in the apartment down in the Village. She had been two-timing him with young Frankie Liano; he couldn’t take it out on her because there weren’t enough like her to go around, as it was; so he got the same result by removing the temptation.

There was nothing to connect him with the murder except these guys. He had paid them, and the dirty chiselers were back already with a squirrely story about losing the grand out the window. As though that could happen! If he gave in to them now, they’d keep right on coming back for more.

“O.K., boys,” said Jack the Bug. “But you don’t think you’ll be coming this way again, do you?”

“Not a chance,” Terrin promised readily. He looked steadily at Luette.

On the desk was a large cashbox, and alongside it a couple of canvas bags of coin. The lid of the box was up, but the contents couldn’t be seen. Polumbo stuck his paw into the box with deliberation, scowling, grasped firmly the butt of the .38 revolver which acted as a paperweight for a loose pile of currency. Terrin advanced expectantly.

Polumbo fired through the lid of the box. With the advantage of surprise he thought he could get both men, and nearly did. But Luette had a gun in his hand as though it had simply sprouted from his fist, and the two reports occurred almost together.

Jack the Bug sat still for a minute with his eyes open. Then his lungs deflated with a bubbling sigh, spattering blood across the ledger. There was a puncture in his fat, perspiring neck, and some of the back of his head was missing. Luette had ducked and fired upward, but Polumbo’s bullet had hit his pal, Terrin. Polumbo leaned forward heavily, struck the desk with his chest; his chair shot out behind him, dumping his bulk to the floor with a crash.

Luette bent over Terrin. There was a hole in the redhead’s back under the shoulder blade, so that was that. He darted his eyes around, listening and breathing hard, his ears ringing.

He looked into the cashbox. There was a lot of money in it, much more than the receipts of one night’s business; plainly it constituted Jack the Bug’s entire wealth. Closing the perforated lid, he tucked the box under his arm. He cracked the door open furtively, listened some more, slipped out and cat-footed down the hall toward the bar.

When he heard the blunt bark of a shot, then another in swift succession, Jimmy raised his head with an air of quiet malice. Then came a crash from the back room, as though someone had felled an ox. He said to the fat man, “Scram.”

The fat man didn’t have to be told. A Collins slipped from his hand, smashed on the bar rail. With his stomach bouncing ludicrously in his waddling run he reached the head of the stairs. At which point he had propelled his bulk to such a speed that his short legs couldn’t keep up; he sat down and went rumbling in that fashion all the way down to the street.

Crouching behind the bar, Jimmy heard the hall door thrown wide with a suddenness intended to imply command. That told him it wasn’t the boss standing there.

Then came the footfalls, with no effort at stealth. That told Jimmy that it was only one man, that two of them had got it in there. The survivor had seen the smashed Collins and heard the fat man’s toboganning descent.

But Jimmy wasn’t chicken-hearted. He might be short on conscience and a schemer, but he was a deserving lad on the whole. He was a rugged individualist, and he wasn’t going to stay poor all his life like his father and mother. So he popped his head up, gripping the revolver Polumbo kept under the bar, just as the astonished Luette came abreast.

Firing point-blank he couldn’t miss, but besides being excited he wasn’t the best shot in the world, knowing nothing more about a gun than that you held onto it and kept on beckoning with the trigger.

The first slug only laid a red three-inch groove down the center of Luette’s bald spot, but the second socked him through the pan, alongside the nose.

That did the trick all right.

Shaken and wiping the sweat from his face on his sleeve. Jimmy issued from the bar. Luette had gotten his gun out and it lay on the floor with the cashbox. The box had burst open with the weight of the two bags of silver. There was no point in giving the police the idea that a hole-in-the-wall like the Lisbon was a money-making proposition, so Jimmy appropriated better than ninety per cent of the currency and concealed it well in the refrigerator, in an enameled box under lettuce, celery, radishes and stuff.

With no waste motion he paid a visit to the back room, and saw that things spoke for themselves in that welter. Next he used the phone, dialing the number of Audrey Starr to give her the bad news. The call awakened her, since she never got up until mid-afternoon, and her voice was as mean as snarled wire.

It turned to honey with bubbles of true love in it when Jimmy gave her a brief outline of the slaughter. He said, “I don’t know where that lousy spic kept it all the time, but he must have been counting it when those guys busted in. Baby, we’re all set! We’re going places!”

Before he called the police he swallowed down one stray crumb of conscience. The door to the rear quarters of the Lisbon was pretty solid and equipped with an electric lock, worked by a push button under the bar shelf. Jimmy disconnected the batteries and disposed of them simply by dropping them down the chute into the barrel used for broken bottles. He then knocked the lock itself out of commission with a mallet and screw driver.

Lastly he spoiled all his carefulness by getting himself paralyzed on the best in the house, because after all he was only a young fellow with his nerves shattered by his experience.

Fiddlemarch entered a telephone booth near the escalators in Macy’s and closed the door, and turned his back on it. He took the receiver off the hook and held it to his ear; with his right hand he spread the thousand dollar bill out fiat, holding it close to his chest to conceal it. It was a handsome thing, a thousand bucks and no doubt about it. Not queer; back and front, green and black, the engraving was strictly governmental. There was some writing on the back — some guy’s name and address. The previous owner’s, maybe.

He hung up, wiped his face with a handkerchief, surreptitiously folded the banknote into it and crammed it back in his pocket. He looked around on the floor to make sure that it hadn’t dropped. There was a whole cigarette there, which he nonchalantly sniped and lighted with a paper of matches advertising free admission to a burlesque house where the gals stripped no more, nor teased, nor ground, nor anything. There was one he remembered in particular, that Audrey Starr. He stuck his finger into the return slot of the phone before leaving, but there were no forgotten coins, no wadding.

He walked around the store for a few minutes while he smoked the cigarette, returned to the telephone booth and fished out his gray handkerchief. The bill was still there. He spread it flat, folded it very neatly and tucked it in behind the matches with the busted theater ad.

On his way down Seventh Avenue he considered the fact that he was going to have a time breaking the grand. Not only that, but he was harried by the fear that the word about him had been passed around. Luette and Terrin would have been asking for him, and he might be spotted at any time.

In one drugstore after another, down the line, he made the telephone booths, and by the time he had penetrated the Village he had collected two dollars and forty-five cents. Unusually good pickings from the return slots. That made close to ten dollars that he had on his person, not counting the thousand brave soldiers. He couldn’t include the grand until he cracked it.

Before he became a moocher, in the past, Emil had been much better off, starting with the time he found the emerald ring in the hack and held out for six hundred bucks reward. Four hundred had been offered in the Lost & Found. The woman who paid him the money acted as though he was a maggot or something, but it wasn’t his fault if the ring had a sentimental value. Even in the palmy days he never did much hack-riding, but the girl was plastered that time, and if she said, “Please,” when he asked her if she wanted a hack, and let him get in with her, she was asking for it. He always wondered what happened about that. And he had found the ring right there on the seat, besides.

He used to hang around subways late at night and roll lushes when he got the chance. He never would forget the time he found the guy snoring on the bench and took his watch and wallet, and then just as fast as the tick of a clock the guy’s mitts were wrapped around his throat and Emil’s eyes were bugging out. The guy was a detective.

That was the only time Emil went up the river, and it would be the last time; because even if he found a lush lying in the gutter and nobody in sight he wouldn’t take the guy’s watch out to see what time it was. That had been the reason why he took the detective’s gold watch; he just wanted to know the right time, and then of course he took the wallet to see whether some lush-worker had already found the man and rolled him. The judge and everybody else in the court laughed like fools.

Anyhow, he knew it was going to be tough breaking the grand. The bill would be on record. Every time it went through a bank, the cashier had to take down the serial number, and there weren’t so many grands floating around, either. Privately, every owner would make a note of the number, if he had any brains, because it was a lot of money in one piece. Emil figured that he wasn’t a thief until he spent a piece of the grand. That might happen if he walked into just any bank to get it changed. The number might be on record in just that bank already, for either Terrin or the owner must have phoned the number around.

In the first place, any cashier would wonder how a seedy individual like Emil Fiddlemarch happened to have a piece of jack that long. Passing the grand was worse than trying to get a check cashed, and people have starved to death trying to cash perfectly good checks in Manhattan.

And the can. Back up the river for a double stretch. He couldn’t do another stretch; he’d get T.B. or something in those cells. Or stir-crazy.

He switched the grand from the paper of matches to his watch-pocket, then to another pocket. There were fourteen pockets in his suit, and in no time at all he reached the conclusion that it wasn’t safe in any of them.

Knocking off for lunch, he went up Lexington to a bar above 42nd, and nursed a ten-cent beer long enough to snitch about eighty-seven cents worth of pretzels, potato chips, little kamoojies of bread spread with ground meat, cheese, and other delicacies. He inspected with curiosity only some oily, curled-up strips of meat, since it was the first time he knew that red angle-worms had bones.

He thought of trying to cash the bill in a place like this, but knew it couldn’t be done. It was too big to cash anywhere he knew of besides a bank, except maybe one of the big department stores. There again the money would go to the tube room, the girl would turn it over to somebody, and somebody would turn the serial number over to the banks, and a store detective would walk up behind Emil Fiddlemarch.

He was not unacquainted with certain places where a large denomination could be broken up without fuss, but the boys handling that kind of dough knew that Emil never owned a yard in his life, and besides, Luette and Terrin were acquainted with those same places.

Telephone call: “If a little shrimp with a long beak on him comes in with a grand...”

While he bore his cross during the afternoon, the banknote journeyed from his shoe to his shirt sleeve, which he rolled up, carrying his coat because it was a broiling day. Its next stop was the inside of his necktie, where he pinned it. But the pin could catch and fall out, and so could the bill. It spent a few cozy moments under the lip of his spectacle case. He didn’t wear glasses; he had just found this thick-lensed pair lying on the low brick wall surrounding a Village church last Sunday morning. The gold frames might be worth selling, but Emil had hopes of their being advertised for yet. Their owner couldn’t possibly see without them.

Emil could figure things out.

Somewhere en route he acquired a needle and thread, and tailored the hot grand into the cuff of his trouser leg. But he had gotten used to the sweet velvety feel of it, and he had to get it out and count it again. It came out to a thousand iron men, even.

At length he salvaged a newspaper from a Keep the City Clean basket; since it was now quite dark he had little fear of being observed while he smoothed the leathery banknote out, laid it carefully between pages ten and eleven of the newspaper, folded the paper again and again and tucked it under his arm. He sat in Jackson Square looking down his nose and brooding.

The end of his day was approaching, and there was no place where he could safely keep that grand. When he went to sleep, some bum would come by and cop the newspaper. And tomorrow, when Luette and Terrin caught up with him... Bitter medicine: The only way to keep absolutely secret (1) is to have no secrets; (2) is not to do that which needs to be concealed.

He retrieved the banknote from the newspaper, which he dropped on the bench, and stood up. He shrugged his shoulders, folded up the grand and kept it in his fist, where it had been in the first place.

Going down 8th Avenue Emil happened upon a cop named Hutchinson, who was off duty and just strolling along the fence of Abingdon Square, batting his leg with his night-stick every other step.

“Here,” Emil said with animosity. He offered something and with his left hand rubbed his nose as though it itched.

“What is it?” Hutch asked, taking the folded bill.

“I found it; I’m turning it in.”

“What’s wrong with it? Is it phony?” Hutch asked, seeing that it was a piece of U.S. currency.

“Nope,” Emil said, turning away.

A little dumfounded at meeting an honest man face to face, Hutch called, “Hey! Where’d you find it?”

“A couple of feet off the ground!” Fiddlemarch snarled. Suiting action to his words, he broke into a run pell-mell up the avenue, and turned a corner.

The condition of Hutch’s feet being what it was, he couldn’t be bothered with guys in a hurry, besides suspecting that this was some kind of prank. He said, “Hell with him, then.”

Wherewith he examined the banknote under the next light. It had undergone considerable wear and tear, and looked as though it had been eaten by a goat and partially digested.

“A thousand fish!” Hutchinson ejaculated with awe. “Ho-ly sassafras!”

On the reverse of the banknote were still legible a couple of lines of writing in pencil. Liano was the name of a stiff who had been fished from the East River after being sighted, bobbing, from a Staten Island ferry. Emil Fiddlemarch could have discovered the same, and learned of the massacre in the Lisbon Bar, and how the cops found several thousand dollars mixed up with some groceries in the Lisbon’s refrigerator — all in the newspaper he had just discarded unread.

A lousy thousand iron men, orphan.

Murder for Pennies

by James Duncan

It’s “policy” with the Parson to clean up on — and with — the numbers game.

* * *

The beacon at the seaplane base was seven miles away, on the other side of the island, but because the moon was full with a blazing tropical fullness, the Parson could see it plainly from where he stood before the door of the little white cottage on San Pedro Road. He gave a last searching look up and down the street, an under-sized man with dark moody eyes and sharp chiseled features. Then with a shrug of his shoulders, he rang a bell next to the door.

It was hot. Cariba, a dot of marl and coral in the Caribbean, was always hot; panting, like a tiger lying in watchful repose. Even with the breeze, it was hot. But because it was outwardly a civilized, pleasurable, tight little island, under British rule, a queer melting pot of races and breeds from the four corners of the earth, Cariba was called “the little Paris of the Caribbean.”

Actually, the indolent breeze, pungent and heavy with the incense of papaya, ripening bananas, wild orange trees, humid with the smell of writhing gourd vines, somehow suggested how close to the surface was the sudden blind violence of the hot countries; the sheathed claws of the waiting watchful tiger.

There came the sound of footsteps in response to the Parson’s ring and then the door was opened. A tall man with a stubborn mouth stood looking down at the Parson. He had thin red hair and the sort of complexion, fair skin and freckles, that goes with hair of that color. He looked about, under and around the Parson without actually looking directly into his eyes.

“What d’you want?” the man said, mumbling as though he were shy.

One hand was loosely hidden behind his back. It held a gun.

“I want to talk to you, Tex,” the Parson said. His own face was expressionless, mild. It was this deceptive mild manner, his soft way of speaking and his delicate pious air which had earned him his curious nickname. But his outward appearance gave no warning of his skill in handling a 7.65 Luger; no hint to the amazing fact that mere mention of the Parson in certain quarters was enough to reduce both criminals and detectives to gibbering incoherence; for, in his time the Parson had outwitted crooks and police alike.

Without invitation, the Parson went past the man he had called Tex. past his gun into a small room furnished sparsely with a tropical regard for airiness. Tex closed the door, then followed the Parson in. His gun was now in plain view. He held it carelessly, lightly, like a man accustomed to guns.

“So you know my name,” he said quietly, “and you want to talk to me.”

The Parson said, “Yeah. I know your name, Tex Kent. I know all about you. You were Cig Wolfe’s triggerman. Sort of private executioner. That was three years ago. Cig Wolfe had New York sewed up. It was all his. Including the policy numbers racket. Remember the take on those numbers? Fifteen million a year. Oh, you paid off six hundred to one to winners. But didn’t the suckers pay, the non-winners! It was too good, if you get what I mean. The protection was O.K. Cig paid out heavy sugar to the right people. But there was competition. And Cig was rubbed out. Cig Wolfe, the biggest racketeer since Capone, kissed lead.”

Tex Kent was remembering aloud. “That chopper was good. When he got through, there was nothing left of Cig’s face. Nothing you could recognize. Twenty dum-dums tore holes in it big as silver dollars.”

“A swell guy, Cig,” the Parson said softly, reminiscently.

“You think so?”

“Every day in the week and twice on Sundays.”

Tex Kent put his gun out of sight into a pocket. His shy, diffident manner had not altered. He said very thoughtfully: “If it’s talk and not gunplay, how’s for wettin’ our whistles?”

The Parson nodded, watched him get a quart bottle out and two glasses. They drank. The Parson said, “You’re a nice reasonable guy, Tex.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re the guy they call the Parson. I remember you now. You used to run gamin’ tables back in N’York for a guy named Vince Guard, though I don’t believe we ever met. You carry quite a rep.”

“Thanks. Shall I continue my little story? I got a chance to throw a little business your way.”

“Business?” For the first time Tex fixed his strange smeary blue eyes directly on the Parson. They were the kind of blue eyes redheads often have. “I like business. What kind of business?”

“We’ll come to that in a moment. Cig Wolfe had a woman — they called her the Dutchess. It was more than a nickname. She was bright as a whip. She’d built him up. She carried on when they planted him. But the going got too hot. Not competition, this time. The law. It seems they got themselves a new D.A. with guts and no price. He just didn’t know the color of money. So he sailed in and banged things around. First thing he gunned for was the protection. Not the racket. You know. The papers are still full of it.”

Tex said nothing. The Parson went on:

“The protection was a bird named North — Judge Edwin North. He was never really a judge. That was just complimentary. But he could fix judges, get Cig’s boys out of trouble when the law got curious about the numbers game. But no sooner does the Grand Jury get ready to hand up an indictment on old Judge North than he swallows runout powders. The new D. A. — Linton’s his name — is stumped. Without North, he’s got nothing. He needs North. So where is North?”

Tex sat still, waiting.

The Parson took a deep breath. “North is here. Here in Cariba. But he’s hiding out. Am I boring you?”

“Yeah. Bore me some more.”

“Linton, the Boy Scout D.A., isn’t asleep, though. He sent his ace investigator, his most trusted man down here to ferret out North and bring him back home. That guy — Jerry Lord — got in touch with me. Do you know Jerry?”

Tex said, “Sure. Everyone knows Jerry Lord. Why did he get in touch with you?”

“It seems that there’s no extradition treaty between our country and Cariba. See? Even if Lord locates Judge North, he can’t get him out unless...”

Tex drawled, “Unless what?”

“Unless, he’s arrested outside of Cariba, say three miles out, in international waters. Or better yet, on an American ship. Then he’s legally Lord’s prisoner.”

“Is that the job? Put North where Jerry Lord can put cuffs on him?”

The Parson grinned. “You catch on quick. Tex. It isn’t like you’d be selling out on North. Hell, he’d turn you in himself if he had half a chance to get his own skirts clear. With me, it’s just a professional job. Lord offers twenty grand. Ten will go to me and ten to you. How’re you fixed for dough?”

“I’m broke,” Tex said quickly. “I had to come away fast.”

“Ten will come in handy then. How do you like it?”

“Lousy. I’m through with trouble.”

“This won’t be trouble. Not when you and I are handling it.”

“Hell, you take it for granted I know where Judge North is hidden.”

The Parson grinned again, nursed his cheek. “You got here a day after North arrived. Funny you should both pick on Cariba to hole up in.”

“When do we do it?”

“Tonight. No. better make it tomorrow. North will keep, and we don’t have to lose sleep over it.”

Tex Kent lit a cigarette. “How about another jolt?” He stood up, smiled a little and said. “Oh, well, what the hell? I don’t owe North anything. I guess I like a little double-cross myself. Ten grand, huh? Couldn’t Jerry Lord be upped a little on the ante?”

“Maybe,” the Parson said. “He’s strictly a business man. There’s just one thing. Lord has to keep his name out of this. If it ever got out that North was forced aboard a boat under a gun on Lord’s orders, his case would be blown sky-high. You can’t do things like that when you’re the law. That’s the system and I’m working with Lord on that understanding. He never appears in the case.”

“Yeah, I know the system.”

“Then it’s a deal?” The Parson held out his hand.

Tex put his hand briefly into the Parson’s. “Right,” he said softly. “Here’s your drink.”

“Thanks.” The Parson looked into its amber depths for a brief moment. “Say, whatever did happen to the Dutchess? I was always curious about her.”

Kent put down his drink in one piece. “Didn’t you hear? She lit out for Havana after Cig died and when the pieces started falling around her head. The pieces of the numbers business, I mean. I haven’t seen her since, but I was told she’s married again to a bird named Blue. Carl Blue. A race-track man or a broker or somethin’ like that.”

“Quite a gal, the Dutchess,” the Parson said.

Tex grinned appreciatively. “Yeah, quite a gal.”

The Parson chatted for a few more minutes. When he rose to go, he told Tex Kent where he could get in touch with him. They arranged to meet at ten o’clock the following morning.

As the Parson went out into the night again, his dark eyes lazily probed the reach of the moon-plated sky, the length of the moon-drenched road. The door closed softly behind him.

Two streets down was an open-air cantina. The Parson hurried to it, went inside to a telephone booth, called a number. When a grave, sing-song voice answered, he said:

“Hello, Ching. I want the master.” He tapped his foot, crowded the transmitter with his lips. “Jerry Lord? This is the Parson. So it’s on the up and up. He bit. Well, yeah. He heard me out. But I don’t think I fooled him. He’s one palooka I couldn’t fool in a million years. I’ll hang around but don’t expect me to be a Dracula the rest of the night. I can’t be everywhere. O.K.. Jerry. Hey, you got a cold? Your voice sounds funny... Uh-huh. Oh, yeah, you’ll hear from me. S’long.”

He walked around the corner to where he had parked a trim little British-made Austin, got in behind the wheel. He moved it close enough so that he could command a good view of Tex Kent’s house, but he was still a block away.

He switched off the lights and waited. He waited about three-quarters of an hour. Then a tall shadowy figure emerged from the house. The figure moved rapidly to the corner, away from the Parson. When it turned the corner, the Parson trailed after.

He rounded the corner in time to see the tall figure climb into a waiting car, lugging a small suitcase in after him.

The Parson scowled moodily through the windshield. The suitcase puzzled him. He had not counted on Tex Kent’s carrying a suitcase.

He trailed the car.

Puerto de las Damas is at the extreme eastern tip of Cariba, a little city all by itself, separated from the rest of Cariba by tradition, blood and unchallenged crime.

Its narrow streets, roughly paved with cobblestones, ended at a high cliff which frowned down on a narrow beach where lashing combers broke high through a tangle of reefs. The docks were to the left: but, long-abandoned, they had rotted and sagged until now they joined edge to edge with almost perfect closeness the limitless tropical sea of silver. Fishing stakes, upthrust like gnarled old fingers, were plunged into the sea; a mysterious crazy system of half-sub-merged bamboo fences, marking a channel passage that was no longer used.

In the days of caravels bearing the proud standard of Spain, Puerto de las Damas had brimmed with life and commerce, but three centuries of English rule had moved Cariba’s center of gravity to the other side of the island within easier hail of Trinidad, and then Puerto had been abandoned to sun and history.

Its ancient houses with courtyards and doors barred with iron gratings were today inhabited by a fierce and savage mixture of Lascars, Chinese and tall, proud blacks, who paid no rent and answered to no authority except that enforced by their own keen knives. This rule existed despite regular, scheduled raids and arrests by Cariba’s efficient police force, carried out mostly for effect, not results. For the most part, the dreary, vice-ridden Puerto was permitted to go its own way so long as its activities did not extend beyond its ancient walled confines.

Hands planted deep in his pockets, the Parson stood in the lee of an ancient rusty cannon, jutting out of the pockmarked face of an old stone ruin in the very heart of Puerto de las Damas. Around the base of the cannon, grass sprouted. This ruin of three-foot thick masonry had been a dungeon and fortress in the days of Spanish rule of the West Indies. Now only scorpions and bats lived within its damp, musty interior.

The Parson kept his eyes fixed on a rambling house of rubble and crumbling stucco, flat-roofed and squat, some two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. Tex Kent had stopped his car in front of that house fifteen minutes before. Because of the angle from which he kept vigil, the Parson could not be sure that Kent had climbed out of the car. He could not even see the car from where he stood. He decided he had waited long enough.

He moved lightly down the street, blending with shadows. He was nearly opposite the car when he heard the soft-toned whimpering of a little child.

The sound lingered in his ears for just an instant and was gone. The surprise of its coming from the house, the impossibility of its belonging there, shocked him to an immobility as controlled and rigid as a pointer’s.

On the street nothing moved. Threads of light stole secretively from lower-story windows in the house before which the car was standing. There was no other sign of life save that elusive wail of a child, either hurt, lost or frightened, that was instantly swallowed up and absorbed in the dead silence of the night.

His eyes were boring into the blackness that enveloped the car before him; his ears were alert to the slightest sound. But the child’s whimpering cry was not repeated. For a long moment the Parson stood there, wondering if he could have mistaken the plaintive call of some night bird for the voice of a child. He moved silently across the cobblestones to the car, and as he moved, his hand reached into his coat pocket and brought out his flat, hefty Luger.

He could see a figure now, seated in the driver’s seat of the car. The figure was utterly silent, watching him without movement. The Parson did not stop short nor did he call out. He kept on coming toward the grim, waiting figure as if he were being drawn to it by a magnetic force outside himself, stronger than his own will. The figure did not move. The Parson reached the car, touched its sides until he moved around to the steering wheel.

Seated before it was Tex Kent. A knife had been plunged into his heart. The haft still protruded. A lot of blood had dripped down, and instead of being absorbed by his shirt front, had formed a little pool on the leather of the seat in the V of his thighs. His head was slightly bowed toward his chest so that he appeared to be gazing into the pool.

For a silent minute the Parson stared at the inert figure of Kent. His own lips were twisted, bitter; his face sallow. He could not explain to himself why the death of Kent should touch his sympathies, but he felt strangely moved. Kent had been struck down suddenly without a chance to defend himself.

The Parson peered into the interior of the car. The suitcase was gone.

A shot crashed inside the house, echoed like distant thunder, and before its flat echoes had died, it was followed by another.

The Parson blinked. His Luger jerked up in his hand. He started toward the house, moving past trailing hibiscus ghostly and redolent in the moonlight, past sail-like banana leaves that grew in the courtyard. Before he reached the house a woman’s angry scream, not terror-stricken but angry, sliced the deafening silence.

The Parson ran swiftly toward the front door of the house, which stood slightly ajar. He pushed it wider and slid in. It was a sort of hall. A staircase angled upward at the further side and doors from it led into other rooms. From up above he heard gasping sobs. The Parson waited, he had heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

In the dim light a woman appeared, carrying a child of four or five in her arms. A little girl. It was she who was sobbing. The woman held a big automatic pistol in her right hand.

When she saw Parson, she stopped her descent and pointed the pistol at him. He said disgustedly, “Ah, I wouldn’t shoot when you got a kid in your arms.”

“That’s manners anyway,” the woman said. She came the rest of the way down the stairs, put the child down. Enormous solemn eyes with grave childlike dignity peeped at the Parson: then the child clung to the woman’s skirts, hiding her head from the Parson, but still sobbing softly.

The Parson looked at the woman, shook his head with a faint smile. A point by point description of her would leave out everything essential. It was the intangibles about her that counted. The lift of the brow; the intelligent, expressive light in her eyes. The Parson could catalog to himself a strikingly tragic, beautiful face, triangular in shape, of an unusual creamy pallor. But that would leave out too much. The fierce glint in the hazel, swimming depths of her eyes, for example; the auburn-haired head, bravely, proudly carried; the tip-tilted nose; the wide, almost barbaric flare of her nostrils.

But even these details were not really significant. What was significant and definite was her personality, her passionate awareness. A vivid, daring quality; an aliveness, a keen zest. A woman not afraid of chances, who would stake everything on the turn of a wheel.

“The Dutchess!” the Parson said softly.

She had been appraising him from head to foot. She said matter-of-factly: “I know you, too. You’re the man they call the Parson. You were a gambler in New York.”

“Cig Wolfe’s widow. Here! That’s a laugh!” said the Parson. “Who’s the little girl?”

The woman did not answer. The Parson saw that her eyes went beyond him. He turned and saw a man in an open door, holding a gun.

The Parson had never seen him before. He had brown, wavy hair, brown eyes that were steady and deadly serious. His chin was neatly cleft and his nose was perfectly modeled. Altogether a handsome face but surprisingly cold, somehow devoid of emotion and human feeling. Only the eyes seemed alive in that face.

“Who’s the boy friend?” the Parson asked.

The woman said, “My husband. Carl Blue.”

“Oh.”

Blue wagged his gun impatiently. “Hey, you! Drop your gat!” he said.

The Parson did not move. Blue crossed the hall to the little girl, who was still crying. He dropped on one knee and began to pat her hair and talk soothingly to her. The Parson blinked, then got the idea. There was to be no shooting in front of the little girl. Carl Blue had not been afraid for himself. It was strange to see Carl Blue comforting her, without showing a trace of expression or emotion on his own face. It was eery, too.

There were still tears in the child’s eyes. But almost the instant Carl Blue bent down to her, she was stretching out her little arms and laughing with a sob as little children do.

The Parson crossed the hall to the door through which Carl Blue had appeared, and looked in. On the floor in the middle of the room lay a suitcase. It looked like Tex Kent’s bag. The lid was open.

The Parson moved over to it. His nape bristled, his eyes narrowed and he threw a hard angry stare back of him at the open door. This was Tex Kent’s suitcase all right. His initials were burned into the leather. Floor boards creaked under the Parson’s feet as he knelt down and peered more closely into the bag.

It was crammed full of currency in little packages, spilling over with thousands — hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He heard a furtive footstep behind him. He whirled, caught a glimpse of a short-statured gorilla-like man, arm out-flung toward him. The man was strangely silent, furtive, red-eyed like a harbor rat. The arm had flung a sap, attached to a leather cord. The Parson ducked but not enough.

He sprawled, legs and arms outflung, but he never knew when he hit the floor. All he knew was that he was hurtling through space with blackness cascading down upon him. He heard a scream — it was the Dutchess: “They’re back! Oh God, they’re back!” Revolver shots thundered. And then there wasn’t anything.

Coming to, the Parson lay motionless for a moment or two, conscious of severe pain in his head. Then he sat up. There were voices in the next room. Stiff British voices. “After all that shooting, there should be at least something besides a man stabbed to death.” Cops! The Parson got to his feet. He remembered the bag suddenly and stared.

The bag was no longer there.

The Dutchess, Carl Blue, that little child, the man with the sap — all had pulled a fade-away.

He heard the cops moving about in the next room. He sped silently for the door. He would have to get out. Cordite fumes still hung acridly in the air. The door led to another room in which there was an open window. The Parson slid through it into the night.

Cariba’s finest hotel was the Queenshaven. It was laid out like a park with golf courses, tennis courts and private swimming pool under nodding palms, and a host of little white stucco and red tile cottages. The Parson occupied one of these cottages, number six, but he did not go to it. Instead he went to one marked number two. It was only an hour since he had quitted the twisting streets of the Puerto and his head still ached.

He came in with a cigarette between his lips, however, and a droll half-smile hovering on his mouth.

“Well, I’m back, Linny,” he said.

The man he called Linny stood up from a wicker easy chair, surveyed him with alert gray eyes, his heavy leonine head held almost to one side. Presently he too began to smile, slyly, jovially.

“Same old Parson. It that a bump on your head or are you parting your hair in a new way?”

“Both. It’s a bump and I’ve got to part my hair around it.” He dropped into a chair facing the other man, blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Want to hear about it?”

The man called Linny was a striking, distinguished figure of a man with aggressive features, graying hair. He sat down again, nodded. “Let’s have it all.”

The Parson rapidly sketched what had happened at the house in the Puerto. “That’s what we got to go on,” he finished complacently. “Riddles.”

“It’s a mess. I can’t understand the Dutchess. Far as I can see we’re not closer but further from our object.”

“And don’t forget that bagful of money!” the Parson said warmly.

“Yes, that certainly complicates matters. So does the presence of the child. I’m going to a lot of trouble to sew this case up. It would be too bad if the thing got out of hand.”

“Things moved fast,” the Parson agreed.

Linny shook his head impatiently. “You see, we’re moving forward on a hunch. There are strings attached to this we have absolutely no control over.”

The Parson shrugged. “Want to chuck it?”

“How can I — now?” The older man’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “You can, though, any time.”

“You know I wouldn’t do that.”

“Thanks, Parson.”

A tall man with smooth dark hair and dark eyes idled into the room, hands in his pockets. Almost imperceptibly the Parson tensed. Force of habit as well as the urge of precaution made his hand creep toward his gun.

The movement was not lost on Linny. He laughed. “Parson, this is Ed Clancy. He just arrived from New York. I had him come down in case you might need help. Ed, this is the Parson.”

The men nodded to each other. “I don’t need help,” the Parson muttered. “I work alone.”

“I know, boy. But in a case like this you never can tell. Anyway. Clancy will be here any time you need him. Are you going?”

“Uh-huh. It’s home and bed for me.”

When the door had closed on him, Clancy said: “Chief, I don’t altogether approve of this. The Parson’s a notorious gunman and a crook. How can you trust him in such a delicate case?”

“You don’t understand. The Parson’s a peculiar sort of crook.”

Jerry Lord, special investigator for New York’s D.A., swung in his chair, pushed back his emptied plate and drained his morning coffee. This was another day, cheerful and serene, with blue sky and golden sun benevolently bright overhead. Lord was a square-built, stocky man with bright whimsical eyes, a frank broad face, an easy engaging grin. He watched his Chinese boy place food deftly before the Parson, said:

“Clung, if I want you again I’ll ring.”

“Very good, master.” The boy padded out, closed the door.

Lord said, “Don’t let that bump on the head spoil your breakfast, Parson.”

The Parson pushed the food away from him. “I’m not hungry. Besides, it’s not the bump; it’s knowing all those people were there and all that money.”

“You did your best. And anyway think of my position. I send you to get the cuffs on Judge North, and he’s not even there.”

“I didn’t see him,” the Parson corrected. “He may have been there. Anyway, somebody else was there. The Dutchess.”

Lord grunted. He lit a cigarette, took three quick drags, spoke through the smoke. “What kind of a guy is her new husband, this Carl Blue you told me about?”

The Parson shrugged. “Just another guy, I guess. Cold, though, like a fish. You can feel it just looking at him. Good looking. Perfect features. Maybe too perfect.”

Lord got up, went to the window and peered out. After a minute he came back to the table solid-heeled and sat down, eyes clouded and bemused. He looked up at the Parson.

“Boy, I can’t make this out. Not yet. You’re likely right when you say you frightened Tex Kent into running to the Judge’s hideout with a bagful of money, if the Judge was really there. But what the hell is the Dutchess doing here? She bailed out of the rackets two years ago, a few months after Cig Wolfe was killed.” His hands balled into fists and he repeated forcefully: “Why should the Dutchess be in Cariba?”

The Parson said, “And that kid. Somehow I think that kid is the whole story. You say you heard about that kid?”

Lord waved his cigarette. “Well, there were rumors that she and Cig had a little baby girl they were keeping under wraps, away from the seamy side of life. But I never saw it and I never met anyone who had. It was all very vague.”

“Tell me more about the numbers racket,” the Parson said. “When Cig was torpedoed, somebody else took over the trade, didn’t they?”

“Well, yes. The Frankie Moore mob from Jersey City stepped up to the big time. But by then, Linton, my boss, had his sleeves rolled up and was breaking things up fast. So Frankie Moore never got to earn the big important dough that Cig Wolfe had rolled in. In fact, before he got started, Frankie Moore was out.”

“Was it Frankie Moore who gunned Cig?”

“Huh?” Jerry Lord looked sharply at the Parson. “It was never cleared up who killed Cig. It was just one of those things. But it was never believed that Frankie was responsible for the rubout.”

“How come? If he stepped into Cig’s shoes, isn’t it more than likely that he knocked off Cig to get there?”

Lord shook his head. “I see where you’re heading. But you’re making a lot of mistakes. In the first place, Frankie Moore got his start under Cig as a racket man, and secondly he was Cig’s friend; he owed a lot to Cig who had practically made him a gift of the Jersey City territory.”

The Parson dug in. “That was always the Wolfe’s way. Not kill off but buy off the competition. Divide and rule.”

Lord was silent, intently watching the Parson. He snapped a finger against his cigarette, flicked the ash into his cup, said: “Well, what do you think?”

“This: Something went blooie last night. I don’t say I know why Tex Kent was killed, though that bagful of dough could be motive enough. I don’t even say I know who put a knife in him. But I do say motives don’t start here in Cariba, they stretch away back to New York. Judge North didn’t show last night. It’s even possible he butchered Kent. I don’t know. I’m sure he was there somewhere.

“The Dutchess and her fancy new husband, Carl Blue, are thick in it. And that little girl... I don’t think that suitcase of money was intended for Judge North. I think it was being delivered to the Dutchess. And above all I think there was opposition present that neither the Dutchess, Tex Kent, nor Judge North had counted on. Keep this in mind. Just as I was passing out I heard her yell: ‘They’re back! Oh God, they’re back!’ It was a general mix-up, a scramble, a root-ta-tootin’ lead party.”

“You’re lucky,” Lord sighed, “one of those bullets didn’t wing your way. The whole thing sounds like a bad dream.”

“Sure. But things happened faster than in dreams. That yell of the Dutchess’ now: ‘They’re back!’ Who was ‘they?’ The opposition. And the opposition almost spoiled the plant.”

“Plant?” Lord’s head bobbed up. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. Plant. Something fixed beforehand.” The Parson was relaxed, eyes somnolent. “Everything that happened last night was planned, figured out before it happened. But the opposition was the unpredictable event that spoils the best of plants... and murders.”

“You mean there was some gang present, some gunmen who were after the Dutchess?”

The Parson nodded. “Somebody who took a licking from her and Cig Wolfe sometime back, probably in connection with the numbers racket.”

Lord shrugged. “You may be right. As far as you go. But remember, my job is to bring Judge North back home. I could take the Dutchess, too. That would help. But I don’t give a damn about the dough or Tex Kent or that little girl or what you so quaintly call the opposition. That’s incidental.”

“Yeah. But sometimes it’s the incidentals that count most.”

Lord smiled ruefully. “You’re telling me. Listen, boy. No racket’s been bloodier than numbers. It’s pennies, just pennies. A business in pennies. But millions upon millions upon millions of pennies. And each one is red with blood. Soaked in it. Dozens of people have been murdered for control of those pennies.”

“What are you driving at?”

“There’s a whole lot involved here. It’s not your quarrel. If you want to, you can slide out.”

The Parson frowned. This was the second time he had an offer to quit. He stuck a cigarette between his lips, lit it, sent up a white balloon of smoke. “Hell, I’m in it this far, I might as well stick.”

Lord reached over the table and put friendly pressure on the Parson’s arm. “Boy, you’re tops. In New York they used to say you were one of the best shots and one of the smartest heads in the rackets. I can well believe that. You got what it takes.”

The Parson shrugged. “I look out for number one. I had an eyeful of that bag of money last night. I’d just like to put my hands on it. That’s why I’m sticking with it. And then this is the first time I’m working with the law — even if only from the outside.”

“You like working with the law?” Lord asked.

“It’s a new experience. It gives me a kick to watch a respectable law like you at work.”

Lord looked quizzical. “I don’t know if you’re kidding or not. Anyway, I still think this is not your quarrel, and that you ought to quit. I’ll pay you whatever you think you ought to get for your work last night and you can drop it right as is. I mean if it’s money...”

“It’s not money,” said the Parson.

Lord grinned. “Oke. I’m glad to have you, boy. I’m glad you’re so set on sticking. Tell me,” he added curiously, “what makes you and Linton such pals? When I left New York, Linton said, ‘Get hold of the Parson. He’ll help you.’ You didn’t know me when I arrived here, yet soon as I showed you Linton’s letter, you were ready to pitch in. He’s New York’s crusading D. A. and you’re supposed to be a red-hot. Where’s the connection?”

The Parson nodded reflectively. “I can see where you’d be puzzled. You know the old Five Corners district, backwash of the docks in New York? Linton and I played there together as kids, we went to school together. When he was admitted to the bar, I was his first case. He got me out—”

The Chinese boy looked in the door. “The milk is here, master.”

“The milk? Oh, yes. Yes. Very well, Ching. I will take it later, chilled.”

“Chilled, master?” The boy’s head ducked. “Very good, master.”

“Milk?” said the Parson. “Do you drink stuff like that? Say, that bottle of Demerara looks good. Break it out, will you? I could inhale a slug. Breakfast doesn’t seem to be what I need.”

The tropical morning air was fresh and the bright-plumed birds poured song abandonedly from throbbing throats.

The Parson entered his cottage at eleven, whistling soundlessly to himself. He liked living at the Queenshaven with its spacious country club air, cottage-plan and privacy. There were rooms to be had at the main building, but these were mostly for tourists. The cottages were for more permanent guests.

He peeled off his dark jacket, lit a cigarette and dropped into an easy chair. He unstrapped his holster, laid gun and holster on a tabouret beside him.

When the bathroom door across the room began to open toward him, he did not stir nor did he snatch at his gun. He sat and watched it.

The door took a long time in opening. Then a gun peeped through, held in a white hand. Behind the hand came a man. His face was ruddy, well packed; his hair white. His clothes were good but wrinkled as though they had been slept in. His gun was a Police Positive .38, but he did not seem to be sure of it or of himself.

He moved hesitantly to the door leading to the bedroom and peered in. He came back to the middle of the room and with an apologetic smile, said:

“I just wanted to be sure we’re alone.”

The Parson accepted this as the natural order of things, nodded sagely.

“I’ve been waiting almost an hour for you,” the man went on. “I’m Judge North. Edwin North.”

“You don’t look much like the pictures the New York papers printed.”

“Those were old pictures, taken ten years ago. I’ve changed, I guess. Listen.” His words dragged to a stop. The room was quiet. The Parson could hear the man’s soft breathing.

“Listen,” he said again slowly. “We’re ready to make a deal. We’ll lay the dough on the line. We’re through fighting.”

The Parson stared at him unblinkingly. The lines at the corners of his mouth drew down skeptically. He waved his cigarette, said: “Call off the artillery and take a chair.”

North nodded. He pocketed his gun gingerly, sat down. He looked tired.

“O.K.,” said the Parson. “You said ‘we.’ ”

“The Dutchess and I. Listen. She knows when she’s licked. That’s why she sent me to you. You’re working for Jerry Lord. I saw you last night in Puerto de las Damas. I know what’s wanted. We’ll kick in.”

The Parson said, “Tex Kent was kicked — out. He was murdered.”

North lifted his head. “I know that. It was tough. We liked Tex. He was good oats. But we won’t try to make it tougher by going at things the hard way. I mean with guns. We’re licked, see? And we know it. That’s why I’m here. We want to make a deal with Jerry Lord.”

“Oh, a deal with Jerry Lord?”

“Yes.”

“When do you want to see him?”

“Right away. Now.”

The Parson rose to his feet. “Then why wait?” He strapped on his holster, sheathed himself in his tight-fitting black coat. “Does Carl Blue know about this deal?”

North fidgeted, shot a sidelong glance at the window. “Oh, of course.”

“And it’s oke with him?”

“It’s oke.”

“Hm.” The Parson was silent a second. “You know that Jerry’s job is to take you back to New York to stand trial.”

“I know.”

“Is that the deal you have in mind?”

A sad, wistful smile appeared on the older man’s tired face. “No, but it may be part of it. After all Jerry’s the one to dictate terms. We’re licked and we know it. We’ll play ball.”

“Did you come here alone?”

The sudden ferocity with which this question was flung at him jarred Judge North. Panic guttered in his eyes; they flicked involuntarily to the window, again they slithered away. “I... I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last. “Of course I’m alone.”

The Parson grinned suddenly. “There’s just one more thing. Last night...” He waved a hand airily. “You know what happened last night. There was quite a rumpus. Shooting and yelling and things like that. And one guy sapped me. Do you know who that guy was?”

North nodded wearily. “That was Hugg, Tobe Hugg they call him. He’s Frankie Moore’s hot trigger.”

“Frankie Moore?” the Parson repeated gently. “I didn’t see him after the sapping. So he was there last night, too.”

“Yeah. He and Tobe Hugg nearly wrecked everything.”

“Frankie Moore took over Cig Wolfe’s numbers racket, didn’t he?” the Parson said lazily. “The Dutchess sold the business to Frankie, didn’t she?”

North stood moistening his dry lips, staring at the Parson.

“Well, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” North’s voice was tired and soft. “She sold it to him.”

“How much did she get?”

North went on staring.

“I said how much did she get?”

“About a half million.”

The Parson nodded. “So that was why.” He pursed his lips. “All right. Let’s go.”

As they drove in the little Austin through the crowded streets to the other side of the island the Parson imagined they were being followed, but when he glanced about, he could not be sure. He drove with a steady hand and from time to time he even smiled as if at a private, and very droll, joke.

The cottage which Jerry Lord occupied stood almost alone in a street that fronted the estate region of Cariba. There were flowers in front of it in huge yellow and blue ceramic pots, a small terrace. There was even a lawn. It was a poor lawn, however, with a wretched stand of grass, blighted by the limestone, which crops out in gray masses like dirty snow from the thin topsoil of the West Indies island.

Ching opened the door to the Parson and when the Parson walked in on Jerry Lord, he looked up with surprise, said: “Round trip, Parson? Forget something?”

“No. I brought you a visitor.”

Judge North walked into the room.

Lord’s smile receded slowly, leaving his face hard, purposeful. He was up on his feet, saying through clenched teeth: “Damn you, Parson! I thought I told you to keep me out of this. You know I can’t—”

The Parson shook his head. “This is not a pinch. At least you don’t have to make it here. The Judge says he wants to make a deal with you.”

Lord’s eyes snapped. “A... a deal?” he said waveringly. Then again he roared, pounded the table hard. “To hell with a deal! I gave you orders—”

“Aw, push your tongue between your teeth,” the Parson said, and reversing a chair, sat down. “Ankle out, Ching.”

The Chinese boy stood with his hands folded in his loose black sateen sleeves and did not stir. Lord shot an angry glance at the boy, barked impatiently: “Well, get out! Get out!” And when the door had closed, “This is sweet, boy, sweet! Fine mess you’ve thrown me into.”

“It’s not a mess,” the Parson said patiently. “It’s a deal. Maybe we both stand to make something big out of it.”

Lord put his hands on his hips and stared fixedly, venomously at Judge North. Then his shoulders shrugged helplessly. “O.K., since you’re here. What’s the deal?” He swung across the room. “Wait until I lock this door.”

He stopped short. The door opened and two men crowded in, pushing Ching before them. Both had huge .45 automatics leveled. They were rather young men to judge by their clothes. But their faces were old, hard. One was tall, even good looking in a hard-faced, thin-lipped way, with slaty, murderous eyes and vigorous, determined features.

The other was short-statured, furtive, with long arms ending in powerful looking hands; his eyes, cold as a reptile’s, slid over the room, went carelessly past the Parson, then came back to linger at leisure on him. It was the man who had sapped the Parson the night before in the house in Puerto de las Damas.

“In reverse,” the taller man said.

“What? Who?”

“In reverse, you.”

Slowly Jerry Lord stepped back. His face was the color of smudged paper; his eyes jiggled nervously in his head; his upper lip twitched with the movement of his eyes, while the rest of his face was frozen.

“Hi, Judge,” the tall man said, flicking a hand in mock cordiality in the air.

Judge North swallowed but he did not seem especially frightened. There was a fine dignity to the way he held his white-haired head.

“Hello, Frankie,” he said.

“Who’s the gent in black?” Frankie Moore asked.

“The Parson,” North said almost indifferently. “That’s what they call him.”

“This runt? This little guy? He’s supposed to be tough. I’ve heard of him. But he’s built more like a divinity student. Hey, Tobe. This is rich. Rich!” Laughter gurgled in his throat. “Whatta you know — this is that famous guy, the Parson!”

Tobe Hugg grunted. “Hell, I can take him, Frankie. I took him last night.”

Hugg moved suddenly. One step, one swing with his left. The Parson crashed to the floor with the chair he had been seated in. He scrambled to his feet. There was death in his eyes. His hand streaked for his shoulder holster, but at once, almost at the same instant, he let it drop to his side and put it behind his back. But the light in his eyes did not die out, though they were now almost calm.

“See?” said Hugg. “I can take him.”

“That was a dumb thing to do. Hugg,” the Parson said softly. “You’d better kill me, finish the job. That will be your easiest out.” That was all he said. His glance was locked with Hugg’s.

Hugg, holding the gun, dropped his eyes first. The Parson stood there, leaning slightly forward on the balls of his feet, with infinite purpose expressed in every line of his face, his body. It was as if Hugg suddenly realized that the Parson did everything and said everything behind the eternal mask of that mildness and obliqueness which had given him his nickname; and that behind the mask was concealed cruelty, steel-hard ruthlessness; a quite blind, but leashed, and terrifying power.

“Ah-h!” snarled Frankie Moore. “Don’t horse around. We got business, Hugg. Let’s get on with it.”

Something of the Parson’s unruffled confidence seemed to have communicated itself to Jerry Lord. He drew himself up.

“I can tell you that whatever your business may be, it will be better done without guns. I ask you — I insist you put your guns away.”

“Aw, take a walk on the ceiling! Shoo, fly!” Frankie’s low, rough laugh was ironic, cutting.

“Nevertheless, I insist you put your guns away!”

“Insist then!” Frankie turned to Hugg. “Fat Face insists, Hugg, old tomato. He won’t play it our way. He insists. He thinks we’re still listening to him.”

A covert look passed like a darting visible flame between Jerry Lord and Ching.

“All right, you’re inviting trouble,” Lord said doggedly.

“We’re inviting trouble!” Frankie guffawed. “Listen to Fat Face! Boy, oh boy, if you ain’t the icing on the cake! Keep ’em covered, Hugg.”

He was crossing over to Judge North, but stopped short in sudden, sharp alarm. “Hey, ain’t that footsteps I hear outside that door?”

Hugg and Frankie turned their heads for but a split watch-tick. Ching’s folded hands came undone and from the folds of his sleeve appeared a small-bore Smith and Wesson.

“Geez!” yelled Hugg. “Lookit the Chink!”

Ching’s gun went off, and the bullet tore Hugg’s hat from his head. It slammed against the wall, seemed to float lazily to the floor.

Frankie Moore shot Ching.

Ching whirled, spun as if by a centrifugal force with one foot raised slightly off the floor. There was something undignified and silly about it, as though he were executing a dance step. Then he crashed down with one hand under him and blood seeping from between his fingers.

The sight of the blood, the feel of the hot gun in his hand did something to Frankie Moore. He was grinning vapidly, breathing hard, like a drunken man. He was kill-drunk.

He said, “I’ve got five more bullets. Any takers?”

No one in the room stirred. Frankie bent his gaze on the Parson. “What about you, toughie?”

The Parson shook his head slowly, dreamily.

“O.K. You’re goners. All of you. Shell out your hardware while you still can.”

No one moved. It was clear that the slightest movement would invite a bullet. It was very still in the room. Distinctly footsteps could be heard racing up the stairs; little, exceedingly rapid steps; someone seemed to be running.

But Frankie shook his head, still grinning. “I was made out a sucker last night — and in New York. You know about that. Judge. There was a bagful of dough last night. I didn’t get it. I almost got it but I didn’t get it. I’ll collect in my own little way. Look at me, all of you. Look at me!”

“Geez! There’s somebody movin’ around outside,” Hugg grunted uneasily. “There’s someone outside, boss.”

“Look at me!” chanted Frankie, disregarding Hugg’s anxiety. “Look at me because you’re going to die!”

“Look up here, why don’t you?” a voice cut in softly.

There was a jarring, tearing sound.

A Tommy gun’s ugly snout ripped through the copper screening of the window, thrust into the room. Behind the gun was a face the Parson had last seen standing beside the Dutchess, soothing a sobbing little child.

Apparently nothing could change the expression on this face. It was as elegant, as dignified, as unfeeling as it had been last night. The eves, too, were the same — stern, thoughtful, preoccupied. The man said, “You two with the heaters — slide ’em to the floor. And don’t be sloppy about it.”

Frankie Moore’s grin stayed congealed on his face. He seemed stupefied. Then suddenly his .45 spat viciously.

The Parson melted to the floor as the Tommy gun laid down a barrage. Frankie Moore screamed, twisted and fell on his side. Blood oozed out of his ears and nose.

Hugg, from an angle, smashed two bullets into the copper screen. The Tommy gun wavered. It was evident that Carl Blue had been hit. No fire was returned from the Tommy gun.

A gun behind the Parson began to cough. The bullets sang wide over his head. But they were not intended for him. Judge North took three of the bullets in the chest and neck and went down.

A bullet that was earmarked for the Parson dug splinters out of the floor inches from his head. His head jerked about and he saw Hugg shooting at him. He went over backward, hooked himself around a chair and somehow was unhurt. His hand snaked in, brought out his Luger.

“Curtains for you, toots,” the Parson muttered, and fired.

Hugg plunged forward and hit the back of a chair with an outflung arm to keep from falling.

“That was for the sap last night,” the Parson muttered. “And this is for the sock you just handed me.”

He fired again and Hugg went down without even a groan.

The machine gun was operating again, pouring slugs into the bodies of Hugg and Frankie Moore.

And then suddenly above the choked roar of crashing bullets, there was a faint sound of a child’s sobs, muted, distant but clear, unmistakably clear.

The Parson’s head shot up, listening, like a creature of the wild.

The machine gun came to a sudden halt. Simultaneously, a woman yelled. And instantly the machine gun went back on the job, but no longer was its snout protruding into the room. It was being fired at some short distance from the window. Pieces of plaster chipped off in an even row along the wall, head high.

The Parson stayed down. He heard a car being started outside in the street. Then abruptly the Thompson was silenced. Footsteps raced away across the lawn. The car was roaring, exhaust bubbling, and then it gunned down the street, its clean getaway plainly underscored by the diminishing sound of swishing tires and whirring engine.

Gunsmoke swirled in clouds in the bright bars of sunlight that angled into the room. The Parson heard people shouting out in the street. Then he heard a little whimper close at hand.

It was Jerry Lord. “My shoulder. A hunk of bullet ricocheted. A lot of blood, but it ain’t bad. Help me out.”

The Parson lifted him up and towed him across the room into the hall. The cottage was very quiet. Lord straightened, “Guess I’m all right now. Touch of nerves in there. Pretty horrible, with all those bodies on the floor.”

“Yeah. Death is something you gotta get used to. Listen. There’s gonna be cops and questions. What’s the story?”

Lord groaned, pushed at his face with his knuckles. “Are... are they all dead?”

The Parson nodded.

“Then we’ll tell the truth. We got nothing to hide. We’ll tell ’em how I came down here to sew up Judge North and bring him hack. The D.A. Linton, will back me up. Then Frankie Moore and Hugg tried to save the Judge. There was shooting and that’s all.”

“And the chopper — Carl Blue?”

Lord shivered. “Was that Blue? I didn’t know him.”

“Leave him out,” the Parson said decisively. “Listen. With North dead, you must bring something back. Why not the Dutchess, possibly Blue as well?” Lord stared. “Right! Right as rain. There were footsteps from upstairs, weren’t there? I mean it wasn’t imagination?”

“No. I heard them, too.”

Lord pulled out a handkerchief. “Here. Tie up this arm. I feel better already. I’m going up to have a look.”

“Be careful.”

“Where’s the need?” Lord asked cheerfully. “We came through alive out of that shambles in there, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. We’re the only ones who got down on the floor while we were still in one piece.”

“What a horrible experience!” Lord said vexedly. “I wish I could understand all this.”

“It’s simple. Frankie and Hugg were at that house in the Puerto last night. They nearly killed the Dutchess. So her new husband trailed them today and when they came here he took his revenge and killed them.”

“Yes, but Judge North. You said he had a deal to make with me.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t know what it was. Probably a deal to turn State’s evidence if he consented to go home with you quietly and submit to formal arrest. We never got around to discussing it, you know.”

“Not with all that happening.”

“Say... that Ching. That was a fast one he pulled, plucking a gun out of his sleeve. It was a good trick even if it failed.”

“Ching was very devoted to me,” Lord said solemnly. “I am very sorry he had to die.”

“So am I.” There was a pounding at the door. “Cops. You do the talking. Just grease it thick and I’ll supply the amens.”

Dusk placed a gossamer, inky blanket over Cariba and as if through tiny rents stars began to appear. Lights began going on here and there among the cottages. Huge drop-lights illumined the dining terrace of the main building of the Queenshaven. The Parson had been sitting in cottage number two all the afternoon. His coat was off and his tie was loosened. A tall iced drink had been riding at his elbow throughout the day. From time to time it had been replenished by the leonine-headed man he called Linny. The Parson was enjoying himself.

“Everything depends on catching up with the Dutchess now!”

The Parson made an expansive gesture. “Don’t worry. She can’t get out of Cariba.”

“I wish I were as certain as you. I wish Clancy would phone.”

“He will. Just hold on to your pants and subside.”

Linny nursed his jaw. “Too damn bad about Judge North. All the guys who can talk knocked off. That helps, doesn’t it? That helps loads!”

“What’s the odds?” The Parson shrugged. “Besides, you know how he came to die.”

“Oh, hell. If you’d brought him here instead of down to Jerry Lord, the whole picture would be different.”

“Maybe. But there would have been nothing in it. I took a chance, I’ll admit that. But it seemed the right thing to do. I wanted to play the string out. You can’t blame me because Frankie Moore and his stooge showed up and dead-pan and his chatter gun. It was a circus setup and I took a header. Before I could get organized, it was all over.”

The other man sank down into a chair. “I’m not blaming you, Parson. You’re fine. But I’m worried. All these people dead and nothing to show for it.”

“There’ll be plenty if you’ll only wait.”

“I’m waiting! Hell, I’m sick and tired of waiting.”

“Everybody’s tired of waiting. Judge North was and he got the shroud.” The Parson’s eyes twinkled. “Boy, if you’d seen the faces on those British cops when they walked into that room. Four corpses! No less than four!”

They were silent a moment and then the Parson said, “You know what to do when Clancy phones, don’t you?”

“Sure. I’ll be at my post just as we arranged.”

“Good. I’d like the act to go over smooth this time.”

The Parson finished what was left in his glass, took out and inspected his Luger. Satisfied, he slipped it back, folded his hands over his stomach, seemed to doze.

The phone rang some five minutes later. Instantly alert, the Parson snatched it up. “Yes?... When?... O.K., Clancy, I’ll be over in ten minutes. Just keep an interested eye on them but don’t make a grandstand play. Swell.”

He hung up, swung about. “Just as I figured, Linny. Clancy just lamped them at the seaplane base. I knew it was either a plane or the Santos Prince, the only boat sailing from Cariba tonight. My dough said the plane all the time.”

“You sure figured the angles right this time, Parson! I hope nothing goes wrong!”

“It won’t,” said the Parson decisively. “Just do your part.”

“I’ll be under the window looking in, just as you said.”

The Parson parked his car in the cinder-spread parking area at the seaplane base and walked to the bright lights of the concrete, modernistic waiting room. Clancy met him near the door, said laconically: “They’re inside. They’ve been buying the kid ice cream.”

He fell in behind the Parson, strode with him across the cork-lined floor. The Parson saw them seated across the room with the little child between them. Three bags were on the floor at their feet. One of them the Parson recognized at Tex Kent’s bag.

Neither the Dutchess nor Carl Blue moved when the Parson came up to them. He did not draw out his gun. His voice was soft, easy when he spoke. “We’ve got a date, folks. Let’s go.”

Carl Blue gazed fixedly at the Parson, but his expression did not change. “You’re making a mistake. We’re leaving on the plane.”

The Dutchess put an arm about the little girl, drew her to her protectingly. The child gazed with solemn, round eyes at the Parson. He leaned over and chucked her under the chin. She did not smile. There was something sinister, deadly about the Parson’s lean, sharp-featured face. The child seemed fascinated by him.

He said, “Don’t ever say I’m making a mistake. This is the show-down. I wouldn’t touch either you or the Dutchess. The kid would be the first thing I’d shoot for.”

Wide-eyed with fright, the Dutchess was saying: “You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t!” She looked deep into the Parson’s eyes. Shuddering, she turned away, tugged at Blue’s arm. “We’d better go,” she said wearily. “He’s not bluffing.”

“That’s sensible. Pick up the bags, Blue. All of them. You can hold the girl by the hand, Dutchess. Now march and act nice.”

Blue bent over, took up the bags, one under his arm, two in his hands. Clancy walked at his elbow. The Parson walked a little behind the Dutchess and the child. Outside, at the car, he said:

“Search ’em for guns, Clancy. You’ll drive. Blue will sit next to you.” And to the Dutchess: “You get in the back. I’ll hold the little girl on my knee. That’s so you won’t go getting ideas.”

The little Austin purred down Cariba’s boulevard, bright and colorful with evening promenaders. “What do you intend doing?” Blue asked.

“We’re going to pay a call on an old friend,” said the Parson. “Say, what’s the little kid’s name?”

“Alice. Parson, you can’t get away with this. You can’t take me where I don’t want to go.”

“Relax, pal. This is my party.”

“Be quiet, Carl,” said the Dutchess. “Oh, please!”

The car rolled through the main artery of town, hit Upper Leeward Road and followed it to Victoria. A mile or so on and it pulled up before a solitary house.

“But this is Jerry Lord’s place!” the Dutchess exclaimed.

“Exactly. There are lights in the lower-story windows, so he must be at home. Now listen, all of you. There’s going to be no break here for a getaway. Unless, of course, you want little Alice killed. I wouldn’t like to do it. Honest. But if you force me... So act nice. You take the bags and go first, Blue. Wait right there before the door. Keep him covered, Clancy. Now you, Dutchess. I’ll carry Alice. Gee, she’s just no weight at all. Now that’s sensible all around.”

Suddenly the child began to cry. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I don’ wanna go. I don’ wanna. Bad mans!” she said suddenly to the Parson.

“Sh! You’re all right, babe. Cripes, I won’t hurt you.” There was unexpected, soothing gentleness in the Parson’s voice. And to Clancy: “Open the door.”

Clancy took hold of the knob and pushed the door open. Carl Blue stepped in, still loaded down with the bags. Clancy prodded the Dutchess in, followed her. The Parson walked in last, carrying the wide-eyed child.

The house was utterly silent. The Parson saw Blue stop short at the threshold of the room in which the shooting had taken place that afternoon. The Dutchess also stopped. Only her profile was visible but he could see her lips tighten, her face muscles grow rigid. Clancy stepped closer, cried out bitterly:

“It’s the Chief. He’s been killed!”

The man the Parson had called Linny lay on the floor on his side with a hand pressed to his ribs. The Parson began to see that the copper screening had been removed from the window, which stood open. The Dutchess caught her breath as she looked down at the figure on the floor, exhaled slowly, said:

“Isn’t that District Attorney Lew Linton?”

The Parson nodded. “Come in, everyone. Keep ’em covered, Clancy.” The Parson knelt down beside the inert figure. Very faintly he could hear breathing. His eyes flicked up at the others. “He’s been stabbed. Just as Tex Kent was stabbed. But he’s still alive. Knife didn’t touch his heart. There! He’s coming to.”

Linton’s eyes opened slowly. Slowly recognition came into them. “Hello, Parson,” he whispered.

“Are you hurt bad?”

“S-scratched. Hit my head on the floor when I fell. I’ll be O.K.”

“Who did it, Linny?”

Linton tried to speak. But the words did not come. Again his eyes closed. The Parson felt his heart. The pulse was regular, strong enough.

He straightened. “He’ll be fine in a little while. Sit down, folks.” His voice dropped lower: “Sit down, Dutchess. You too, Cig.”

The Dutchess broke in. “You can’t—”

“Button up,” the Parson silenced her dryly. “I’m talking to Cig. Cig Wolfe. How about it. Blue? You’re Cig Wolfe, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” Again his voice lowered: “You see, Cig, the masquerade is over.”

Carl Blue turned his face to the Parson, his eyes wide, pupils dilated, but still his face was cold, expressionless, without movement of a muscle. He looked at the Parson without fear. His voice was quiet. “How did you know I was Cig Wolfe?”

“I knew almost at once. Your face. Always calm. Never a smile, never a frown. Lifeless, cold. And the too perfect features. No nerves in it. I remembered what Tex Kent had told me. The chopper was good. Twenty dumdums went through the face of the man they thought was Cig Wolfe. Twenty dumdums so that no one could recognize it. You were that chopper, weren’t you, Cig? Who was the man you killed so that they could bury him under your name?”

“Just a guy off a park bench. No good to anyone, not even himself. I sent his mother ten grand. That’s the way he wanted it. He looked enough like me — hair, features, build — to pass, if the face wasn’t examined too closely.”

The Parson nodded, eyes lowered for a minute. “And then you got this new face. Plastic surgery. It’s a beautiful job. But you can’t smile or grin or look angry or show any other expression. They cut up your nerves to make over the face. They gave you not a new face but a mask. A perfect mask. Why did you do it, Cig?”

The man’s head jerked back. A light flamed in his eyes, then instantly died away. He glanced sidewise at the Dutchess and it seemed, almost it seemed, that he smiled. But actually his features were as rigid as ever. His words, though, showed his intention.

“Don’t take it so big, honey. This isn’t the end yet.” He looked back at the Parson. “Why did I do it? Alice. There’s your answer. When the Dutchess had that kid, everything changed for us. We hid her from the world on a little farm in the White Mountains. But that couldn’t keep up forever. Someone would have found out, hit out at us through her. And I couldn’t quit as Cig Wolfe. There were too many — committments. So we thought up this plan. I didn’t want to be in the rackets any more. We had some dough. I wanted to live like other people, do things like other people, have my daughter grow up to be proud of me.”

The Parson looked keenly at the impassive face of Cig Wolfe. He suddenly felt sorry for him. Cig was just a man who wanted to be a husband and a father. There was something touching in the way his voice broke, in the way his eyes strained, darted about; but something terrible, awesome in the way his face remained cold, expressionless.

The Parson said, “But you didn’t break clean enough. Your kickback was when the Dutchess sold the numbers racket to Frankie Moore. Two weeks later Linton cracked down and Frankie never got to see any profits. He was dumb but not dumb enough not to know he’d been tricked into buying something worthless. That’s why he followed the Dutchess here.”

Cig Wolfe nodded diffidently. “We needed more money. We had to take the chance on Frankie. Listen, I never begged for a break in my life. But I’ve handed them out in my time. Look, I’m not a tough gunman now; I’m just a guy who’s a father. I’m begging for a break. Not for me. For the Dutchess and the kid.”

“You should have thought of that before you killed Frankie and his stooge, Tobe Hugg. The Cariba cops want you and the Dutchess now. You didn’t have to come here and do a lot of typewriter work.”

Cig shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. When a guy, who has no business in the mix-up, hooks up with a mugg like Frankie, knifes your best pal and then, when the shooting starts, sneaks off your little girl — what would you do? Exchange a bag of money for the kid and forget it?”

“You got the dough and this guy got the kid in that mix-up in the Puerto,” the Parson interrupted. “Is that the way it went?”

Cig nodded.

“Then why didn’t you pay out the sugar if the kid means so much to you?”

“We intended to. That was supposed to be the deal Judge North wanted to swing. The money for the kid. Then we saw Frankie and his gun and we knew it was no go. So we took the kid the hard way.”

The Parson moved across the room to where the bags had been deposited, knelt before Kent’s bag, unstrapped and snapped the lid open. The money was there in neat little piles as he had seen it last.

“Tex Kent brought this with him from the States, eh?” he said. “And the Judge brought the kid.”

The Dutchess said, “Yes!” Her handsome face was very lovely, grave, stoical. “Maybe it’s no use, but we’ve lived hard, we’ve tried to live it down, make a new life. You’ve got to give us our chance. You can’t snatch our chance away from us. Here! We don’t care about the money any more. It was the last of the numbers money cached away. We should never have touched it. You take it. It’s yours. Let us go. There’s still a few minutes to make that plane.”

The Parson looked at her. “O.K.,” he said quickly. “You can go and take the kid with you. Cig and the money stay here. I’ll help you but I wouldn’t lift a finger for him, even though I think he’s a right guy.”

“No! No! Oh, you can’t do that! I won’t leave him. You think I’ve gone through all this just to run out on him?”

“He’s right, honey,” Cig said. “I’ll take my dose. After all, I can’t kick. I guess I got this coining. You blow with the child.”

There was no abjectness in his manner and no heroics. Perhaps the abnormal passivity of his face lent particular dignity to his bearing. The Parson could not be sure.

“I won’t go!” the Dutchess said with a quietness to match his own. “Nothing you can say will make me.”

“Well, if that’s that, Clancy,” the Parson said, “you’d better get a move on. Linny needs help fairly fast.” He snapped shut the lid of the bag of money. “Take this down to police headquarters. No, don’t phone,” he added as Clancy made a move in that direction. “Go there yourself and bring back a squadron of cops with you.”

Clancy walked toward the Parson to take up the bag, but he never got his hand on it. The closet door opened and Jerry Lord stood there with a .45 automatic in his hand. He was breathing heavily. His coat was off. The armpits of his shirt were dark with sweat.

“Put down that bag,” he said thickly. “Gosh, it was hot in that closet.” His eyes were wild in his head.

The Parson put the bag down gently. “Hello,” he said cheerfully. “Is that a gun? I thought knives were your specialty.”

“Put up your hands, all of you,” said Lord. “If any of you make a grab for me, it’s the works.”

He started moving toward the door, making his way closer to the bag all the time.

“You can’t get far, you know,” the Parson drawled quietly. “Not loaded down with the bag.”

“What’s in it will give me wings, take me ten times around the world. Far enough for me.”

The Parson spoke again, still lazily. “Linton forced your hand, didn’t he? He was supposed to be outside that window looking in while Clancy and I faced you with Cig and the Dutchess. Linton wanted proof of your crookedness, Jerry. He got it, didn’t he? More than he expected. We were going to stage a little tableau, Clancy and me. But that isn’t needed now. You surprised him looking in your window.”

Lord’s breathing was slow and thick. “Don’t you dare move. I’ll plug you, Parson.”

“I’m not moving, Jerry. But I just wanted to tell you how it was. Linton knew there was a leak in his office, bribery, corruption, a guy who had ‘protected’ Cig Wolfe and was tied in with his successor, Frankie Moore. He wanted to root it out. He suspected you were it. When Judge North escaped the Grand Jury and came here, Linton gave out a story that North had been Cig’s protection. The protection was you, but Linton couldn’t prove it. So he sent you to round North up. That’s what you thought. Actually he sent you to me. It was up to me to pin the goods on you. You thought I was a sap. You didn’t think I knew that when you sent me to Tex Kent, it would dynamite Kent into running to North with his bagful of dough.

“Linton knew about that dough. He had followed Kent here. And when I phoned you about my talk with Kent, you weren’t on the phone. It was Ching, covering for you. There was just enough difference in his voice to tell me. You and Frankie Moore and Hugg were on Tex Kent’s tail. You followed him — and me — to the Puerto. You stuck a knife into Kent and you got the bag. But that wasn’t all Frankie wanted. He wanted to blast Cig and the Dutchess. You got tripped up, lost the bag. In the mix-up, you took second best — the child.

“When I got here with North to lay his deal before you. Ching was waiting with a gun up his sleeve. That gun was meant for me. Frankie busted in. He had been upstairs with Hugg. They sneaked down the back way probably. Frankie was riding high. You got scared. Frankie fully intended to kill North and me. You caught Ching’s eye. You wanted him to wipe out Frankie, a dangerous confederate. But Cig spoiled that party and saved my life, even though he couldn’t save North. You shot North over my head. The bullet came from behind me. I knew it came from your gun but I couldn’t do anything about it — then.”

Lord had stopped, standing on the balls of his feet. He said very coldly: “Is there any more?”

“Yeah,” said the Parson. “This: I’ll bet I can draw out my gun and shoot faster than you with a gun already in your hand.”

Cig Wolfe laughed. It was something to hear not see. Nothing showed on his face. He threw himself in a pantherlike spring that carried him six feet to crash into Lord. The gun in Lord’s hand barked aimlessly.

Lord went hurtling into the wall, went down on one knee, face panicky, gray, the gun wavering in his hand. Again that dry, hard laugh of Cig Wolfe’s was heard. He lifted himself from the floor and leaped at Lord a second time. It was practically tossing his life away.

Lord fired and Wolfe was hit but not stopped. He kept on coming with a slow, dragging step, while blood pumped out of his cheek in a gushing rivulet. His mouth was filled with blood and he spat out a dark wad of it and a tooth.

Behind him Clancy began to fire with nervous haste, chipping the wall. The Dutchess cried out once and covered her little girl with her body. The child’s frightened screams blended with the roar of gunfire.

Lord jumped toward the door, tripped, almost fell headlong, then caught his balance and pumped two bullets into Cig.

The Parson’s body had jerked to one side and out of the jerking had appeared his gun, large and ominous in his hand. But he had held his fire. Cig had been in his line. Now Cig went down on his face. The Parson fired. He did not want to kill Lord. He wanted to hurt him.

Lord screamed as the bullet smashed the delicate bones of his hand. His gun fell down out of the bloody mess, bounced on the floor.

Cig kept on coming, crawling, dragging along on the floor. Lord, screaming in pain and hysterics, pushed at him. Cig got a hand on his trouser leg, pulled him down. Lord frantically snatched up his gun with his left hand, dug it into Cig’s eye.

The Parson fired again with delicate, precise aim. A small round hole appeared magically high up on Lord’s beaded forehead. At once three small drops of blood trickled slowly out, mingled with the sweat, trickled into Lord’s glassy eyes.

Linton slowly, painfully raised his head, as if roused by all the shooting, gazed about dazedly.

The Parson stood quietly, a short undersized figure in black, unruffled and calm. He walked swiftly across the room to where Cig lay on the floor, squatted down beside him.

“How is it, Cig?”

Cig spat blood. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I gave you your chance,” Cig said brokenly, hoarsely. “I gave you your chance to get him. He’d have killed you otherwise. It wasn’t throwing my life away. I was a goner anyway. If I stuck around, the Dutchess would stick with me. She would never leave me no matter how I argued. Some dames are stubborn, huh? So I gave you your chance. You won’t forget a favor. You’ll give her a break. And my kid. Now she’s got to go, doesn’t she? She can’t stick with me now, poor kid. She’s got to go...”

The agonized eyes peered at the Parson but the nerveless face was set, expressionless, cold like a mocking mask.

Soft Breezes stirred the pennons and rigging of the magnificently white Cortania, but still it was hot. Cariba was always hot. Linton, perched moodily at the rail, watched the shimmering lights of the little city. He drew on his blackened pipe, said: “You saw her off?”

The Parson nodded. “She took the plane for Buenos Aires. She’ll get a new start there. A dame with her brains and looks won’t find the going tough.”

“All I can say is I hope she has her lesson learnt by heart.”

“Oh, she’ll go straight. There’s her kid, after all. You know, she fell in love with Cig and married him before she knew how he made his dough. She was just a babe in arms then. Barely eighteen. And when she found out, she didn’t quit. Some dames are like that. She stuck and tried to talk him into giving up the life he led. The reason why she plunged into the racket the way she did was to shame him; show him she was being dragged down too. Then the kid came along and Cig really decided to ease out.”

“So Cig hauled off and got himself a new face?”

The Parson’s eyes dreamed. “Yeah. And if he hadn’t crossed Frankie Moore he’d have gotten away with it.”

Linton sighed. “Poor Cig... so close to his goal. But he’d never have reached it really. Somehow, somewhere the backwash of his past life would have caught up with him, engulfed him. Still, that was a pretty noble thing he pulled on Lord.”

“Well, he had it figured right. He was never yellow. He wasn’t afraid to die. He knew he’d never get clear. He wanted the Dutchess and the little girl to get their chance.”

A voice bawled, “All ash-oah that’s go’n ash-oah...”

The ship’s whistle throbbed. People started to wave handkerchiefs, hats. The ship’s band tootled, “Auld Lang Syne.”

Linton thrust forth his hand. “Well, it’s good-by again, Parson.”

The Parson, wrapped in thought, took it, shook it briefly. “Good-by, Linny. If you should happen to pass by the old Five Corners where we played as kids, just give it a look-over for me.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go back? Aren’t you tired,” Linton waved a hand toward Cariba’s lights, “of all this?”

The Parson shrugged. “One place or another, they’re all the same after a while. And I’m beginning to like it here, to be truthful.”

He was on his way to the gang plank when Linton ran over and caught his arm. “One more thing, old kid. If I remember correctly there was a suitcase mixed up in the case somewhere. Somehow when we got around to it, it had disappeared and I didn’t want to make a fuss in front of those stiff British colonial police.”

“Suitcase?” asked the Parson innocently. “What suitcase?”

“A suitcase full of money which Tex Kent had brought with him from New York.”

“Oh, that. A trifle, you know.”

“Seriously, Parson, how much was in it?”

The Parson faced him. “A hundred and twenty grand.”

“Wha-at! What did you do with it?”

“Well, I kept twenty. I thought I had at least that much coming to me.”

“And the rest?”

“Went with the Dutchess. Only she doesn’t know it. Maybe she does by now. I helped her pack her bags.”

Linton squeezed his arm affectionately, grinned. “You’re the berries, kid. No fooling! And you’re a white man, too!”

“What’s up? What went wrong?”

Linton exploded into rich laughter. “Nothing’s wrong. But the Dutchess — now don’t break down, boy — the Dutchess returned that money to me just before her plane took off. She didn’t want any part of it. You see, it was blood money to her. She wants to start clean. I’ve got it now in the ship’s safe. A cool, clear hundred grand.”

The Parson’s eyes snapped. “And I was sucker enough to hand out good dough to a dame only to have her turn around and hand it right back! That’s gratitude!”

He looked at Linton for a half a second. Linton was grinning broadly, and presently the Parson, too, was grinning.

“Anyway,” he said, “I got my twenty grand. That’s no gag. And you’re not getting any part of it back.”

All-American Menace

by H. H. Stinson

O’Hara tackles some killers and makes a football out of their racket.

* * *

Even the padded leather doors of the washroom couldn’t keep out the sound of splintering furniture. O’Hara said, “My cockeyed aunt,” under his breath, threw a wadded paper towel at the waste box and batted the swinging doors out of his way.

Barging up the steps that led to the main floor of the Club Bolero, his brown, angular face wore a look, half of apprehension and half of exasperation. He was resplendent in a dinner jacket, a half acre of white shirt front, all of which didn’t go with the shagginess of his hair and the breadth and careless swing of his shoulders.

He hit the top step, shoved past velvet hangings and came into the lounge of the Bolero. At the far end of the bar a flying wedge of waiters was engulfing a large young man with blond hair and the light of battle in blue eyes. The flying wedge went up and over the blond young man and the young man rose through it, shedding waiters right and left.

He ducked, reversed his field and slung a punch enthusiastically at a tall, black-haired man with a smooth old-young face who was sidling down the bar. The punch took the black-haired man on the ear but he shook it off, didn’t go down. The waiters pounced on the blond young man again.

A redheaded girl stood on the bar, powdering her nose and looking things over with interest.

O’Hara dove into the melee and came out the other side, shoving the blond young man who took a wild punch at him. O’Hara said, “Dead ball, Eddie.”

You could have taken an alcohol rub in Eddie’s breath. He squinted at O’Hara, said, “Hi, Ken.”

A waiter threw a punch at O’Hara and missed and Eddie said, “Hey, is that guy trying to pick a fight?”

O’Hara pushed him at a door beyond the end of the bar, fended off more waiters with his back and said, “Beat it, nitwit. Wait for me on the corner.”

“If you need any help, jus’ yell,” said Eddie and went out through the door.

The waiters surged past O’Hara after Eddie and O’Hara tripped the first one and the others piled up over the man. O’Hara, his shirt front bulging and his collar flaring around his ears, walked away from the pile-up toward the front of the bar and a man with roached gray hair and quizzical eyes above heavy pouches said, “Hello, Ken.”

“Hello, Mat,” said O’Hara. “How much will the damage be?”

Mat Wyman surveyed two broken tables, a scattering of broken chairs, broken glass, two waiters who had coats ripped up the back and another whose underwear showed where his dickey had been torn off. The redheaded girl was climbing down from the bar, assisted by the man with the young-old face, and Mat looked her legs over.

“A hundred bucks ought to cover it,” said Mat. “You better fix your collar, Ken.”

O’Hara peeled two fifties off a respectable roll and gave them to Mat. Mat tucked them into a pocket of his vest and said, “Thanks, kid. Your collar’s kind of haywire.”

“Sorry about the uproar,” said O’Hara.

“That’s all right. Only don’t bring your pal back here, kid. Fun’s fun but there’s such a thing as too much trouble.”

“Trouble?” O’Hara said. “My friend, you don’t know what trouble is. You had him for fifteen minutes and me, I’ve been with him for twelve hours.”

“What is he — something special?”

“He’s a nephew of Old Man Randall, publisher of the Tribune. The Old Man’s in the East and this kid arrived today with a letter of introduction with him, saying the kid figures he’ll be a newspaperman when he finishes college and to show him the works in operation while the kid’s out here on his midwinter vacation. So my city editor hands me a lot of expense dough and the job of nursemaiding the kid and keeping him out from under everybody’s feet.”

“From what I’ve seen, I don’t envy you the job.”

“Ah,” said O’Hara, “he’s a nice kid. Just a little too enthusiastic. What started it this time?”

“He was making a play for the redheaded gal and the black-haired guy didn’t like it.”

O’Hara said, “Ouch, that guy!”

Mat looked curious. “Anything unusual about that guy?”

“It depends on what you call unusual. He happens to be a very, very tough egg from New York.”

“Is that so?” said Wyman. “I’ll have to keep an eye on him.” O’Hara started to move away and Wyman clapped him on the shoulder, said, “Drop around again, Ken — alone.”

O’Hara went out through the lounge toward the foyer, past a dozen couples who were eating and drinking. Most of them were drunk and seemed to have thought the fight was part of the floor show, only better. O’Hara slapped a hat check and a quarter in front of the dark girl at the check room and the dark girl gave him his hat.

She said, “Thanks. And, mister, your collar is undid.”

O’Hara went out, trying to fix his collar. The buttonholes were torn and he couldn’t fix it so he let it go and forgot about it.

The long, sinuous, black pavement of Sunset Boulevard shone empty under early-morning street lights. The Club Bolero was on the “Strip,” that small segment of county territory that lay between restless Hollywood and sedate Beverly Hills. The lights of the Troc glowed softly down the block and the Wilshire district lay spread out below and beyond like a huge field of paralyzed fireflies.

O’Hara went down the block to the corner, his feet slapping the pavement in the emptiness. When he got to the corner, Eddie wasn’t around and O’Hara swore. He scratched an ear and went back toward the Bolero. There were two cabs parked in the graveled lot next to the club.

O’Hara said to one of the drivers, “You see a blond fella come out the back door a few minutes back?”

“Was he kinda drunk?” said the driver.

“Yeah.”

“I mean very drunk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said O’Hara. “Very kinda drunk. Which way’d he go?”

“I didn’t see him,” the driver said.

“For the love of—”

“I was asleep. The other hacker seen him,” the driver said. “Supposin’ you ask him.”

The driver of the other cab leaned out from under his wheel. He said, “The blond kid come out through the lot, mister, and he met two guys in front of the club and they all went back through the lot. And, hey, mister, your collar’s loose.”

“Nuts,” said O’Hara irritably and headed for the rear of the club.

“Nuts or not,” the driver said, “it is loose, mister.”

O’Hara went around the corner of the club, sidestepped a couple of huge garbage cans and stopped when a small man in a black hat popped in front of him. The small man’s hand pressed something gently against O’Hara’s stomach.

He looked up at O’Hara and pressed the gun harder. He said, “And what were your plans for the evening, pal?”

O’Hara’s eyes went over the small man’s shoulder and saw Eddie lying on his face on the concrete that surfaced the service yard of the club. Eddie wasn’t dead because he was managing to moan, although not very loudly. There was a second man, standing above him, with a blackjack dangling by its thong from his hand.

O’Hara said, “If you’ve slammed that kid too hard—”

His right hand came up between him and the small man and batted the gun away from his belly. His left hand crossed very fast to the small man’s face and the small man banged into one of the garbage cans and went over along with it with a lot of clatter.

O’Hara’s lunge carried him at the man standing over Eddie and the man backed away in a spasm of indecision whether to cut at O’Hara with the blackjack or try with the gun he was hauling from a shoulder holster. O’Hara cocked his right and somebody grabbed him by one of the loose ends of his collar, jerked hard.

The collar tore loose but the jerk pulled O’Hara off balance, made him miss his swing at the man with the blackjack. By then the man had his gun out and he covered O’Hara with it.

O’Hara, turning his head, saw the black-haired man standing outside the back door, holding the collar. The redheaded girl was helping the small man out of the mess that had spilled from the garbage can.

The black-haired man said, “Sorry, friend, but I seem to have torn your color off.”

“Thanks,” O’Hara said. “I was getting tired of having people tell me it was loose. Now suppose you call your muggs off, Philippi, and let me get the kid into a cab and take him to be patched up.” “You seem to know who I am,” said Philippi, smiling.

“Why not?” said O’Hara.

“Hmm,” Philippi said, “I’d like to talk to you.” He walked a half-dozen steps away from the others and seemed to be expecting O’Hara to follow him. The small man was cursing violently while he climbed out of the garbage and the man with the blackjack watched O’Hara with flat, hostile eyes. The redheaded girl moved along with Philippi and Philippi said, “Seena, you go back and brush the broccoli off Sam.”

He said to O’Hara, “What else do you know about me besides the name?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m curious, friend.”

O’Hara shrugged. “I know you left New York in 1937 A.D. — After Dewey — and that you’ve been fiddling around in Florida and that you got out to the Coast several weeks ago.”

“What are you — a dick?”

“A newspaper reporter.”

Philippi didn’t seem to like that. His eyes got narrow and pointed and the smile went away from his face. He said, “I suppose you’re going to plaster me all over your sheet.”

“What makes you think,” O’Hara said, “that you’re news?”

“I’ve been in the papers.”

O’Hara chuckled. “This is a town where you have to earn your way into the news columns — you get lots of competition from movie queens and the Chamber of Commerce. Now how about calling this off and letting me get the kid to a doctor?”

Philippi’s dark eyes swiveled sulkily toward the prostrate figure of Eddie, who was squirming a little now. He said, “The guy’s a fresh punk and I don’t like fresh punks on the make for my girl friends. Or taking socks at me. I ought to have the boys mess you both up.”

“Be big,” O’Hara said. “He’s fresh but it’s all in fun. He’s Eddie Mullen, a tackle or something from Brand University, and he’s just having himself a time on his vacation.”

Philippi said, “I thought he looked sort of familiar. I saw Brand play Columbia last fall and I probably saw him play. Well, cart him away but keep him out of my hair after this.”

O’Hara said, “I wish someone would do as much for me.”

He walked over to Eddie Mullen, who was swaying around on his knees. The redhead gave O’Hara the eye covertly but O’Hara didn’t let her have a tumble. He pulled Eddie to his feet.

The small man who was a mess from the garbage said violently, “Listen, Vic, le’me have these two muggs for a couple minutes.”

“Skip it, Sam,” said Philippi.

“But look at me, Vic, all over mayonnaise!”

O’Hara chuckled, said, “Cheer up. Sam. I’ll send you a head of lettuce to sit on.”

Sam shook with rage, cursed viciously. He said, “If it wasn’t for Vic, I’d level on you punks. And if I catch you around again by Gaw, I will fix you up. Beat it!”

O’Hara loaded Eddie into one of the cabs, said, “The Belmont Turkish Baths, skipper.”

The cab got under way and Eddie swayed around on the seat, mumbling and groaning with his eyes closed. The cab rounded a corner fast and threw Eddie against the side. He bounced back and gurgled, “Who you pushing, you slug?” and aimed a roundhouse punch at O’Hara.

O’Hara caught the punch in his palm, said tolerantly, “Hey, hey, Eddie, you’re running the wrong way with the ball.”

Across a table at the Little Bit O’Denmark the next evening, O’Hara said, “Can you handle this blond ape for a while, Tony?”

Tony Ames let her hazel eyes rest on Eddie Mullen for a moment, smiled at him. She was small, trim in a brown tailored suit and a new hat that rode pertly on the waves of her brown hair.

She said, “I’ll try anything once.”

Eddie Mullen reached over and patted her hand with a paw the size of a Virginia ham. He looked fresh, clean and happy except for a shaved spot and a strip of tape above his left car. He laughed and said, “Ken, I would jump through hoops for this little citizeness here.”

“O.K.,” said O’Hara, getting up. “I’ll be back. Tony, this ape has had one drink so far today. He can have one more — and that’s all. I’ve spent most of the night and day boiling him out and sleeping him up and I don’t want my work ruined.” To Eddie he said, “And don’t forget, laddie, this girl is my girl.”

“Poor girl,” said Eddie. “I’ll see what I can do about it. Don’t hurry back, Ken.”

O’Hara walked from Eighth and Hope to the offices of the Tribune and went upstairs to the city room. He nodded to Joe Hawke, who was sitting in at the desk for Braddock, the city editor, and went to a typewriter at the back of the big, barnlike city room. He wrote half a dozen lines and then tossed his cigarette into a waste basket when he saw a man with a round, pug-dog face come in the door of the city room. He went over to the desk where the man was inserting himself into the city editor’s chair.

“What the hell are you doing around here?” said Braddock, his pug-dog face peevish. “I assigned you to keep the Mullen kid out of mischief. If we don’t send him back to college right side up, we’ll probably all lose our jobs.” He scratched his square chin, scowled. “Hell, if the old man can’t dig up more unknown relatives and unload ’em on the city room! How you getting along with him?”

“I must be getting old,” said O’Hara. “I handle three-alarm fires, floods, quakes, triple murders and society on the side without a breathing spell. But I’m getting too feeble to body-guard a college football player all night and all day. Be a pal and send three strong men to take my place.”

Braddock’s scowl changed into a grin. “What’s the matter. Irish, is the boy sort of active?”

“Active?” said O’Hara. “I met him yesterday noon and since then he’s had four fights with citizens, borrowed a police squad car so he could play with the siren, wrecked two bars and a night club—”

Joe Hawke interrupted, said, “I’m going to eat, Brad. All quiet except Ben Tyndall’s out with the cops on a shooting of some kind. He should be calling in soon.”

Hawke rolled his sleeves down and went away and O’Hara said, “Where was I? Oh, yes. The kid winds up by trying to make Vic Philippi’s girl, socking Philippi and getting blackjacked by Philippi’s hooligans. I got him out of it whole but it was just luck.”

“Vic Philippi, eh? What’s he doing out here?”

“I’d heard he was out here but not why. He may be vacationing or he may have business ideas. He was first lieutenant to Luck Hauser when Luck was running the cleaners’ and dyers’ racket in New York. And when Luck got himself bumped off, Philippi fell heir to the racket and also to Luck’s sweetiepie, Seena Vance. That was the redhead the kid was on the make for last night, although I didn’t realize who she was until I heard Philippi call her ‘Seena.’ ”

“What makes you think he might have business ideas?”

“He’s been washed up in New York since Dewey began throwing his weight around there and this town is ripe for a cleaners’ and dyers’ shakedown. Harry Atkins and his boys have operated it a bit but they’ve been too busy with their gambling spots to pay much attention to it. But there’ll be plenty of fireworks just the same if Philippi tries to horn in on it because there’s a lot of dough in protecting all the little cleaning stores. So I wrote you a memo on it and you can stick one of your reporters on it.”

Braddock read the memo swiftly, said, “What’s the matter with you handling it, Irish?”

O’Hara grinned. “I’m no reporter. I’m a nursemaid now.”

One of the city desk phones cut in with a peremptory jangle and Braddock picked it up, listened a moment, said, “O.K. Ben, I’ll send you a photog.”

He hung up, said, “A guy shot to death in a car near Eighth and Hope. Witnesses said a young blond guy jumped out of the car with a gun and beat it and a gal chased after him.”

O’Hara growled in his throat, said, “That tears it.” He reached in a hurry for the limp felt he had tossed on the desk.

“Huh?” Braddock said.

“I left the Mullen kid in a restaurant at Eighth and Hope.”

“You think it might be—”

“If it isn’t, I’ll eat the Old Man’s toupee, and be glad to.” O’Hara was already heading for the door.

Braddock yelled after him, “I— Hey, listen...” But O’Hara was gone.

At Seventh and Hope O’Hara could see the crowd a block ahead, overflowing across the curb, jostling around a glossy, black sedan. His cab nosed into the fringe of the crowd, brakes shrieking, and O’Hara tossed silver at the driver and piled out. He used his shoulders freely through the mob, got to the center and brought up against Ben Tyndall, who was sitting on a fender of the dark sedan, whistling cheerfully through his teeth and attending to his nails. There were half a dozen uniformed cops trying to keep the crowd back and two Homicide dicks, Hal Clark and George Sanderson, were poking around at the door of the car.

Tyndall said, “Quit shoving, guy,” and then looked up and saw it was O’Hara. He said, “Hi, Ken. I thought you were governessing Eddie Whatshisname.”

“Smile when you say that, Bennie,” said O’Hara. “I don’t suppose you’ve found out yet what happened here.”

“I’ll give you nice odds on that. A young guy with blond hair shot a guy named S. Ticino of New York three times in the head. The blond guy hopped out of the car and beat it on foot, west on Eighth. He was waving a gun and a gal was chasing him. Looks to me like one of these here triangle things.”

“Probably,” O’Hara said. He went to the door of the car and looked in over the shoulders of thin Hal Clark. Clark was holding a flash on the face of the dead man, who was sprawled across the front seat, and the face was that of the small man who had stuck a gun in O’Hara’s belly behind the Bolero the night before. The small man’s coat was flung open, showing a small belt holster clipped just below his vest at one hip, but there was no gun in the holster.

Clark recognized O’Hara, bobbed his head at him.

Sanderson straightened up, said, “Hello, Ken. No gun around, Hal. The blond guy must have used this mugg’s rod for the job.”

“Got any line on who this lad is?” O’Hara said.

“S. Ticino, whoever the hell that is,” Sanderson said.

A coroner’s wagon came through the crowd, scattering it, and stopped by the sedan. O’Hara stepped back, oozed through the crowd and, when he came out on the other side, made a beeline for the Little Bit O’ Denmark. Inside the door, O’Hara ran his eye over the restaurant, saw two elderly women at the table where he had left Tony Ames and All-American Eddie.

He headed for a phone booth at the rear of the place, dialed the Tribune and snapped, “Braddock. Duchess,” when the operator at the paper came on. He hardly waited for Braddock to speak.

“O’Hara, Brad. It was the fair-haired boy, all right.”

“What d’you mean, all right?” Braddock snarled.

“I’m just trying to tell you—”

“I’m way ahead of you. Tony Ames is at a drugstore at Third and Alvarado. She’s a good enough reporter to phone in. Beat it out there and pick her up and then find this kid. Don’t stick your nose in this office until you’ve got him hog-tied. Who’d he shoot?”

“A slug named S. Ticino.”

“And who is that?”

“One of Vic Philippi’s punks who sapped the kid around last night. He was good at bombing the stores that didn’t want protection.”

Braddock swore feelingly. “When the Old Man hears about this, we’ll all be on the street. The cops got any line on the kid?”

“Only a vague description so far.”

“All right, pick up Tony and then round up the kid quick and let me know. I’ll be figuring what we can do about it.”

In a cab, headed for Third and Alvarado, O’Hara sucked at an unlit cigarette unthinkingly. He was sore, sore at himself for having left a screwball like Eddie Mullen on Tony Ames’ hands and sore at the blond kid for being a screwball.

He had a pretty fair notion of what had happened. Philippi’s punk, still smarting from the night before, had run across the kid, put a gun on him and started to take him some place where he could finish what had been started in the service yard of the Bolero. And the kid somehow had got the gun away and turned it loose.

Only that didn’t make very good sense, either, when he thought it over a second time. It didn’t seem reasonable that the guy, Sam, would have snatched the kid out of a crowded restaurant just to take him some place and hand him a slugging. And, too, he had noticed that Sam had been shot only in the head. If there had been a struggle for the gun one shot might have landed there but it wasn’t probable that all three of them would.

He shrugged. After all, there wasn’t much profit in trying to guess. When he located the crazy kid, he’d find out quickly enough what had happened.

At Third and Alvarado the cab slid in toward the curb under the crimson glow of a huge soft-drink sign. Tony Ames stepped from the drugstore doorway into the neon radiance. She looked upset and ruffled, which wasn’t in character for her.

She got into the cab, said, “Club Bolero, please,” to the driver through the window and then shut the window.

“I regret at times,” she said, “that I was raised to be a lady. There’re so many words I’d like to use right now.”

“I’ve said ’em all,” O’Hara grinned sourly. “Give, kitten.”

“After you left, we were nibbling smorgasbord and Eddie was talking about making passes and I was telling him I had a swell stiffarm and then he looked across the restaurant and said there was a pal of his he wanted to talk to. He went to a table near the door and sat down with a man there, a small, dark man.”

“That’d be one of the guys who were sapping Eddie last night. Well, he won’t sap anybody else.”

“He was the man that was shot?”

O’Hara nodded. “How’d the kid get away?”

“Paul Akely of Paramount came in and sat down at my table and started to talk. A few minutes later I looked at the other table and no Eddie and no other man. There was only one place they could have gone — out. So I jumped up — Akely probably has his mouth propped open yet — and started out, myself. I just got to the door when I heard some shots, not very loud, and when I reached the sidewalk, I saw Eddie running down the street with a gun in his hand.”

“So you ran after him?”

“I didn’t walk. He turned west on Eighth and when I got to the corner he was at Figueroa, jumping into a cab there. I found another one and kept after him — this far. A flat tire on my cab ended that, so I called to see if I could get you and Brad told me there’d been a man shot. Ken, do you think the kid would do anything like that?”

“Sweetheart, I’ll pick long shots at the track or guess what the weather’ll be a week from now, but I refuse to predict what our All-American nitwit will do from moment to moment.”

“But he’s a nice kid even if he’s a little wild.”

“Thank God he’s only a little wild. Why the Club Bolero?”

“I got the number of his cab and called the cab company. They said the driver had just reported in from there to take another call. So maybe we can find him there.”

“All I hope,” O’Hara growled, “is that the place isn’t on fire when we arrive. Arson is the only thing Eddie hasn’t committed so far and all he needs is time. Tony, you wait in the cab for me.”

By eight o’clock in the evening the Club Bolero was between its dinner-time crowd and its late-in-the-evening mob. It was quiet, so quiet in fact, that O’Hara said, “Eddie can’t be here, kitten. The walls aren’t shaking and the roof isn’t sliding off. Wait for me.”

He had the cab park, not in the parking lot, but a half-block away along the curving length of Sunset. He walked down to the club past antique shops, swank travel agencies and interior decorators’ studios, and turned in under the awning. The doors of the Bolero were of tooled leather, each with a round pane of plate glass, resembling a porthole.

There was a long tear in the leather of one door and one of the plate-glass panes were cracked across the middle. A very tall doorman was looking at the wrecked door in a displeased way.

O’Hara said, “Hello. A truck try to use this entrance?”

“Some fresh kid,” the doorman said. “We hadda throw him out. He was prowling around like he was looking for somebody and he was bothering people so we hadda throw him out.”

“You should have tried opening the door before you threw him.”

Ike looked at O’Hara and a remembering gleam came into his eyes. He said, “Hey, I think it was you who brung him here last night.”

“He sounds like the same enthusiastic type. Where’d he go from here?”

“The third time we tossed him out he went away. I wouldn’t know where he went.”

“And he seemed to be looking for somebody, eh?”

“Now, listen, Mr. O’Hara,” said Ike in a worried way. “You ain’t got any idea of making trouble, have you?”

“Not me. I’m past my pugilistic days by about ten years.”

O’Hara went past the scarred door and down shallow steps to the cocktail room. He couldn’t begin to fathom why the kid had made for the Bolero or whom, if anyone, he had been prowling around and looking for. He knew that if Eddie Mullen had shot the guy called Sam, the Tribune couldn’t cover him even for the sake of the Old Man. But it would help immeasurably if he could locate the kid before the cops pounced on him, could get his story and know what it was all about. Maybe if he could discover why the kid had headed for the Bolero, it might give him a notion where he could find him now. So he looked the Bolero patrons over casually, taking his time.

There were four men lounging on stools in front of the bar, two bartenders behind it. At a table a girl with platinum hair was listening to the life story of an elderly drunk and yawning.

O’Hara knew only one of the men at the bar. The man was tall and rawboned with a high-colored face. He looked a lot like a farmer but wasn’t a farmer. He was Deke Hanna, who body-guarded for Harry Atkins. He didn’t have much brains, O’Hara suspected, but he was one of the main reasons why Harry Atkins could say “yes” and “no” on gambling matters and other rackets in the county without much competition.

Hanna nodded to O’Hara and drowsed over his small beer. O’Hara ordered Scotch and soda, drank half of it, wandered with the glass in his hand to the dining-room. There were scattered diners but he didn’t know any of them. He took stairs to the second floor where the gambling rooms were but the games were closed and there were only two dealers there, cutting each other’s throat at high card. There wasn’t any one in the entire place, so far as O’Hara could tell, whose presence would have explained the kid’s coming there.

But if he had been drawn to the Bolero once this evening, O’Hara reasoned, he might wind up there again and that gave O’Hara an idea. He went back to the cocktail room and into a corridor at the back.

He hadn’t gone very far when quick, light feet stepped along behind him. Deke Hanna grabbed his arm from the back and said, “Hey, Irish, where you think you’re heading?”

“Hello, Deke,” said O’Hara. “You body-guarding Mat Wyman now, too?”

“Never mind,” Hanna said. “You better come on back to the bar, pal, and not bother nobody.”

“Suppose I feel like seeing if Mat’s in his office, instead?”

“You don’t feel like that, Irish.”

A door at the end of the corridor opened wide and Mat Wyman looked out. Through the vista of the door O’Hara saw a tall, starkly thin man lounging on a leather divan.

Mat said, “Hello, Ken. What’s the matter?” He had a nervous, worried look on his sagging face.

O’Hara shrugged. “I had an idea I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oke, kid. Just as soon as I’m free.”

He shut the door on his worried look and Deke Hanna let go of O’Hara’s arm.

“Sorry, Deke,” O’Hara said, not looking particularly apologetic. “I should have known your boss was in there.”

“Yeah,” Hanna said expressionlessly. He stood aside and let O’Hara precede him back to the bar.

There Hanna went back to his beer which seemed never appreciably to lower in the glass. O’Hara ordered another Scotch and soda and made that last, too.

It was twenty minutes before Mat Wyman showed up. When he came out of the corridor into the cocketail room, he was alone and he still looked unhappy, darkly disturbed. He stopped by Deke Hanna and said, jerking his thumb toward his office, “He wants to see you, Deke.”

Hanna thriftily finished his beer and disappeared. Mat came down the bar and stood by O’Hara. “What’s on your mind, pal?”

“You recall my blond boy friend?”

Wyman rubbed the pouches under his eyes with tentative forefingers, squinted at himself in the glass behind the bar. His gaze was abstracted, vacant. He said as though he was thinking about some-think else, “Who?”

“The kid that raised all the stink here last night.”

Wyman brought himself back from wherever he was, said to a passing bartender, “Double brandy, Chet.” To O’Hara he said, “Yeah, I remember that kid. They said he was back here tonight raising hell so they had to throw him out. Why the hell can’t he pick on some other spot for a while? I’ve got enough trouble.”

“Harry Atkins?”

Wyman downed the brandy without any preliminary sniffing. He stared morosely at O’Hara, said. “Hell, all I want to do is run a nice, quiet food spot, and what do I have to do but stick in tables and a wheel because Atkins tells me to.”

Deke Hanna came out of the corridor and back to the bar and Wyman, after one glance at the raw-boned man, lowered his voicee. It still had the note of injury to it. “And after I do that for Atkins, I get cursed and growled at because the place happens to attract gamblers.”

“I don’t get it,” O’Hara said.

“That guy last night.”

“Vic Philippi?”

Wyman nodded. “He’s been giving the Bolero some play but I didn’t know who he was. As a matter of fact, I don’t give the upstairs much attention but when you made that crack last night, I asked around.”

O’Hara said dryly, “And Philippi has Atkins worried.”

“Plenty. Atkins has had things his way in this town for so long he’s gone soft. He’s afraid Philippi is going to take his candy away from him and seems to think that because Philippi has been here a few times, I’m playing with him. So I get shoved around for it. Cripes, if I could get my dough out of this joint, I’d quit and run a hamburger stand.”

“Is Atkins going to do anything about it?”

“I doubt it. He’s lost his old-time guts. But if he was driven into a corner, I don’t know.” Wyman shrugged dispiritedly.

“Have Atkins and Hanna been out here long this evening?”

“They had dinner here. Why?”

“They didn’t give you any idea trouble had already started?”

Wyman shook his head. “Not a peep. The last trouble I’ve had or heard about was the uproar your pal started last night.” He stopped and his pouched eyes widened. “Listen, kid, that blond guy tying into Philippi last night didn’t have anything to do with angles, did it? Because I don’t want my place mixed up.”

“No. That was just a friendly barroom fracas.”

Hanna, carrying another small beer, ambled by toward a table.

Wyman asked him, “Is Harry still back there, Dike?”

Hanna flicked a pale-eyed glance at Wyman, at O’Hara, and said, “He left by the back way and went home.” He went on.

“That mug,” Wyman said, “sets my teeth on edge. I wish to God all I owned was a hot-dog stand.”

O’Hara finished his highball. He said, “What I really wanted to ask, Mat, is for you to keep an eye out for my pal. If he shows here again, let him in and feed him a mickey. Then hold until called for. I’ll give you a ring from time to time.”

“Anything to oblige,” Wyman grinned. “I’ll even slip him an extra mickey on my own account.”

Out on Sunset again, O’Hara turned toward where he had left the cab and Tony Ames. When he reached the spot there wasn’t any cab nor was there any cab in sight along the Strip. There wasn’t any Tony, either. He went back to the Bolero parking lot and looked but none of the three cabs squatting on the gravel was the one he had left his girl in.

He said, “Hell’s fire,” and stood irresolutely on the sidewalk up from the Bolero. He was still there a couple of minutes later when a cab swerved out of a side street into the boulevard, cut in toward the curb and suddenly changed course to head for where O’Hara stood under a street lamp. It pulled up beside him and Tony Ames stuck her face at the window.

She said, “Hello, everybody.”

“And I suppose you just went for a ride through the park?”

She opened the door, said, “Climb in, crosspatch.”

O’Hara got in and Tony said to the driver, “Same route, Oscar.”

The cab went down a block and shot away from Sunset to the north.

“He got away again,” Tony said. “Eddie?”

“Eddie. If he’s as slippery on a gridiron as he is in a taxi, they ought to put him on the All-American. While I was waiting for you, I saw a cab pull out from down the street. Eddie was in it, leaning forward and talking to the driver. By the time Oscar got his hack turned around, Eddie’s cab had turned down here and then onto Franklin and toward Hollywood. They gave us a run but we managed to get within half a block of them at Franklin and La Brea. Then a kid in a cut-down Ford snaked in front of us and we went lickety-slam up on somebody’s lawn. When we got out of that, the other cab was out of sight. I had Oscar roam around for fifteen minutes up in that section but there wasn’t any further sign of Eddie. What’s the idiot up to, anyway?”

“Kitten,” said O’Hara, “I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care. All I’m asking is that when we catch up with him. I have a monkey wrench handy.”

“A monkey wrench?”

“A bung starter would do just as well. Because I’m going to tap him to sleep, and start him back east before he comes to.”

“But if the cops find out he shot that man and you helped him get away, Ken, they could be nasty.”

“I can take it from the cops. But Eddie defeats me.”

“Here’s where we lost him,” Tony said.

The driver slid open the panel behind his head and said, “Up and down again, lady?”

“Up and down.”

The cab went a block east, dawdled down El Cerrito to Hollywood Boulevard, went another block east and turned up Sycamore to Franklin again. In that fashion they dissected virtually all that part of Hollywood that lay above the boulevard. In all the length and breadth of the streets there was no sign of Eddie.

O’Hara said, “Back to the Bolero, Oscar.” To Tony Ames, he said, “It’s our best chance. The joint seems to have a fascination for our blond pal. And if he gets away next time, he’ll be good.”

They turned west on Franklin, hummed up over the hill to cross Vine. They went a block beyond and O’Hara, scowling glumly out of the window at his side, saw a doorman in an elegant uniform, standing under the awning before a tall apartment house. There wasn’t anything unusual about that but about the doorman there was something distinctly out of the ordinary. Blood had dripped down over the gaudy front of his uniform coat and one eye was nearly closed and his nose and lips looked too big to belong to his face.

O’Hara said, “Ha!” suddenly and when Tony Ames and Oscar looked around at him, he said, “Set her down, Oscar.”

Oscar cut into the curb with a squeal of brakes and Tony Ames said, “Now what?”

“Now a black eye and a bloody nose,” O’Hara grinned. “Virtually a signboard saying Eddie has passed this way. You wait here, honey.”

“Oh, sure,” Tony said. “That’s all I do.”

O’Hara got out, crossed the street and walked back to the apartment house. The doorman had his handkerchief out, patting at his nose tenderly. He looked as though he might usually be good-natured but he wasn’t good-natured now.

O’Hara said, “Look, captain, did you see a young blond guy?”

The doorman glared at O’Hara bale-fully. He took two catlike steps and grabbed O’Hara by the front of the coat. He said, “You a friend of that guy?”

“He’s a hard guy to be friends with,” O’Hara said diplomatically.

“You’re telling me?” snarled the doorman. “So this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, gorgeous, who was that I just seen come in here?’ and I tell him who does he think he is and I don’t go for that gorgeous stuff and if he ain’t careful I’ll sock him and—”

“And,” O’Hara said, lifting the doorman’s grip off his lapels, “he took the first sock.”

“For nothing at all, too,” said the doorman aggrievedly. “And I wasn’t looking, neither. And when I come to, he was gone or I’d of... I’d of—”

“Sure,” O’Hara said soothingly. “You haven’t seen him since?”

“Just leave me see that guy once again.”

“I’ll bet. Incidentally, who was the guy our friend was so interested in, the guy that had come in here just before?”

“Oh, you wanta know things, too?” said the doorman. “Well, who comes and who goes here ain’t the public’s business. Now beat it before I sock you — and call the cops, too.”

O’Hara grinned. “If I had your fight record, I’d call the cops first.”

The doorman snarled, “Izzatso?” and started at O’Hara. He began a swing and as he did so, a cab slanted in toward the awning and the doorman pulled his swing, missed O’Hara’s blocking arm by two feet and let his hand grab for the door of the cab instead. He opened the door and the redheaded girl O’Hara had last seen at the Bolero the night before tumbled out into the doorman’s arms. She was gloriously drunk and she put her arms around the doorman’s neck and pulled herself up straight.

She said, “Hi yah, toots?”

The doorman said, “I’m fine, Miss. Now take it easy.”

He threw a nasty look at O’Hara and the redhead followed the look with one of hers that wasn’t nasty.

She said to O’Hara, “Hi yah, ya old handsome brute. Say, toots, how’s to introduce me to old handsome brute here?”

“Now, Miss,” the doorman said, beginning to haul her inside, “just take it easy. Easy.”

At the door the redhead rolled her eyes at O’Hara but she didn’t offer any resistance to being dragged in. O’Hara watched the doorman get her into an elevator. The door clanged and whirring noises came from inside the shaft. O’Hara went in and watched the indicator spin until it stopped at six.

There were stairs at the rear of the lobby and O’Hara went inside, threaded his way between potted plants, went up the stairs. He went quietly and when he was at the third floor he heard the rumble of the descending elevator.

Each floor had three apartments, one that ran across the front of the building and one each along the sides. At the sixth floor O’Hara stepped along the hall on soft carpeting. There was a lot of noise somewhere on the floor and it didn’t take long to locate it in the front apartment. The noise included all the ingredients of a Hollywood party and O’Hara skipped that apartment.

At the rear of the hall the globe of a fire-escape light glowed ruddily. O’Hara padded down the carpet to the window beneath the light, got the window open and poked his head out. A row of windows flanked the fire-escape at either side. One side was dark; from the other, light poured into the night. O’Hara climbed out on the fire-escape landing, found the nearest window was still three feet out of reach.

He scowled at the window in frustration and while he was scowling someone inside blocked the light for a moment, passed on.

After a little O’Hara snapped his fingers noiselessly, surveyed the hall and, seeing it still empty, climbed inside again. He went to the elevator shaft, wrestled with the small mirror that was hinged at the edge of the door frame and wrenched it off the hinge. A brass strip held down the carpeting at the elevator entrance and he got his fingers under one end of the strip and ripped it up.

Back on the fire escape, he slid the end of the brass strip into the slot that had held the mirror to the hinge. Bending the strip of brass, he got a satisfactory angle to the mirror and extended it toward the lighted window. The brass strip, none too stout, quivered in his hand and the mirror shimmered light at him, showing small quivering figures inside the lighted room.

He steadied the mirror and the figures stopped quivering, became three men and a woman. The woman was the redheaded girl and one of the men was Vic Philippi. One of the other two men was the hoodlum who had been with Philippi the night before and O’Hara didn’t know the third man. The mirror showed them only from the knees up because they were fairly close to the window but he could see them looking at something on the floor. By moving the mirror up and down a bit O’Hara managed to get a look at the floor of the room at the far side of the room. He worked on it for a couple of minutes.

The best he could get in the mirror was something that looked at first like a pair of feet. He steadied the mirror and saw that the something actually was a pair of feet. He got a cold feeling at the pit of his stomach and then it went away because the feet were clad in gray, suede shoes. And Eddie Mullen had worn sturdy and expensive affairs of imported Scotch grain.

The feet in the gray suede shoes were so awkwardly inanimate that O’Hara had a hunch they’d never wear out any more shoe leather. He wondered who the owner of the feet might be and while he was working the mirror around, trying to get an image of the rest of the body, the glass wiggled at the end of the brass strip and suddenly slid off and went down into darkness. In its flight it flashed light up at him once as it passed a third-floor window and then there was a tiny explosion of breaking glass in the yard below.

O’Hara swore, not because he was superstitious about breaking mirrors, but because he had been just on the point of finding out who wore those very quiet suede shoes and now, before he could do that, he’d have to go to the fifth floor or the seventh and help himself to another mirror. However, as long as the elevator mirrors held out, he could hold out.

The hall was empty when O’Hara climbed off the fire escape. The party in the front apartment was going stronger than ever and somebody there was singing about the “Butcher Boy” very loudly while the radio was concentrating on “Says My Heart.” O’Hara walked toward the stairway, came even with the doors of the two rear apartments.

One of the doors opened and the redheaded girl came out, staggering and rubber-kneed, while a man behind her grabbed at her vainly. The redhead barged into O’Hara, wound herself around him. Her breath washed up at him in a warm, beery wave.

She said, “H’yah, toots,” and then got a good look at O’Hara. “Ha, it’s old handsome brute.”

O’Hara tried to look nonchalant while he unwound the girl’s arms from around his neck and the man behind her got her around the waist. The man, O’Hara thanked his lucky stars, was the man he didn’t know and who, presumably, didn’t know him.

The man had a large, round, oily face with a small cupid’s bow mouth that was very displeased now. He said, “Cripes, Seena, d’you have to go on the make for every stranger you run into? Come on — and, mister, will you excuse it?”

He tugged at the girl and O’Hara tried to move out of her embrace, grinning at the oily-faced man. He said, “Think nothing of it. I’ve had ’em go tight on me, too.”

“He’s no stranger, Rig,” the redhead burped, clinging closer. “This’s ol’ handsome brute — been following me round since last night.” She kissed O’Hara enthusiastically, if sloppily, on the neck and said, “Haven’t you been following me round, ol’ handsome brute?”

The brown eyes of the man named Rig got very sharp and narrow suddenly. They bored at O’Hara, left him and flicked sidewise down the hall to where the fire-escape window stood open. He said, “He’s been tailing you, has he?” in a soft, inquiring voice.

The redhead suddenly lost her hold on O’Hara and sat down on the floor where she seemed perfectly satisfied. O’Hara took a step away from her and the right hand of the oily-faced man slid under his lapel with lightning speed and came out again, holding a well worn, useful-looking automatic.

O’Hara made his face surprised, startled. He said, “Now wait, fella, this is all wrong. The gal’s so tight she’s having delusions. I haven’t been following her around and there’s no reason for playing with guns.”

The redhead cooed from the floor, “Ol’ handsome brute’s kidding, Rig. S-sure he’s been—”

“Never mind, Seena,” Rig said, still in the soft voice. “We’ll find out about this, pal. Pick the gal up and bring her back into the apartment.”

O’Hara swore silently but he kept the injured and nervous look on his face and he didn’t have to work very hard for the nervous look. He didn’t like the oily-faced man’s soft voice or hard eyes and he knew that if he once got into that apartment with Vic Philippi and the other hoodlum, things would start working out very, very badly.

He stooped, picked the redhead up and she cuddled to him. He figured, maybe that with her in his arms, covering him from Rig’s gun, he might work out something. But Rig was smart, too; while O’Hara was leaning over, getting a grab on the redhead in various places, he moved around, got his gun into O’Hara’s back.

He said, “March, pal.”

They went through the door into a good-sized foyer and the oily-faced man heeled the door shut behind him, called, “Vic! Hey, Vic!”

Draperies between the foyer and the next room went aside suddenly and Vic Philippi came past them. O’Hara didn’t think he’d ever seen so great a change in a man in the short space of twenty-four hours as he saw in Philippi. The man’s face had been smooth and youngish although you knew it wasn’t really young; now it was old without any qualifications, lined, shadowed. The dark eyes were staring pinpoints and Philippi’s mouth was tight and strained.

“Look, Vic,” said Rig, “I found this slug snooping around outside. Seena says he’s been tailing her and the fire-escape window was open, like he’d been trying to be nosy.”

Philippi didn’t even look at Rig or seem to hear him. He took three quick steps across the foyer and his hand, pulling into a fist, slammed O’Hara across the jaw. A large seal ring tore flesh off O’Hara’s chin and O’Hara, already overbalanced by the redhead’s weight, went backward into the wall. The redhead fell out of his arms and lit flat on her back. She said, “Ow!” and began a steady stream of violent language.

Philippi said between his teeth, “You—”

“You know him?” said Rig.

Philippi said, “Bring him in here.”

“Not in there, Vic.”

“I said bring him in!”

“Mistake,” Rig said briefly but he took his cue from Philippi’s harsh, threatening voice. He hauled O’Hara away from the wall and manhandled him into the room off the foyer and O’Hara made no resistance but his eyes were sultry, his nostrils pinched in and his mouth a thin line. He looked as though he were wishing he could have Rig alone somewhere and minus the gun.

The room O’Hara was shoved into was the one he had seen in the mirror. The man who wore the gray suede shoes lay on his back near the window, tall and thin and bony and yet oddly limp for all his boniness. He was — or had been — Harry Atkins, the town’s racket head. He had been shot twice, once through the throat just below the chin and once high in the left cheek; blood made a mess on the taupe rug around his shoulders. Beyond the body, the hoodlum who had been beating Eddie Mullen the night before, lounged in a chair and gloomed at O’Hara.

Philippi said in a half-strangled voice, “You see that, you lousy son?”

O’Hara nodded, said, “I couldn’t exactly miss it, could I?”

If he’d been perplexed, muddled before by the night’s chain of screwy circumstances, he was doubly so now. By all the rules Philippi ought to be covering up a murder which was bound to kick back at him, if only because it removed the main obstacle to his moving in locally and starting up a first-class protection racket. And it didn’t add up, either, that Philippi was so overwrought, almost beside himself. O’Hara had run across a lot of racketeers, mobsters, in his day and he’d never seen one yet that seemed to take somebody else’s murder quite so hard.

Philippi snarled, “Smart, hah?” and swung at O’Hara.

O’Hara ducked this time and Philippi missed. But Rig didn’t miss. His gun clunked across O’Hara’s skull behind the ear and O’Hara went, slack-kneed, against a chair and down on the taupe rug. Philippi’s foot slammed him hard in the stomach and Philippi’s face, enraged, bent over him.

Philippi said from back in his throat, “So that punk you had with you last night was just a college boy, was he?”

O’Hara’s head was buzzing, his ribs felt as though they’d been caved in. His voice came out dully, “What else would he be?”

“Where’s he holed up at?”

“I don’t know, Philippi — that’s the God’s honest.”

Rig hauled O’Hara up and held him. He said, “You’ll sure wish you knew, fella, before the boss finishes with you.”

O’Hara wagged his head, tried to clear it. He blinked at Philippi’s pallid, menacing face and muttered, “This is all Greek to me, guy. What’s the kid done that you’re blowing your top about?”

Philippi threw his hands in the air. He said bitterly, “He asks what the punk’s done, he asks that! The punk kills my boy Sam and he kills Atkins here, messing up a million-buck deal, and he asks what the punk’s done.”

O’Hara still didn’t quite get it. He said so. He said, “You’re still over my head. Philippi. If he killed Atkins, he probably saved you a lot of dough and trouble. And as for the guy, Sam, it was probably self-defense and, anyway, guys like Sam are a dime a dozen in any racket.”

Philippi bellowed and flung himself at O’Hara. O’Hara blocked with his el-lows, let a punch slide over his shoulder and stopped Philippi with a short right to the belly. His fist was still in Philippi’s vest pocket when Rig cut things short by whamming O’Hara across the back of the head again with his gun barrel.

When he picked O’Hara off the floor and slung him into a chair, he said reprovingly, “You damn fool, that’s no way to talk about Sam to the toss. Sam was the boss’s half-brother, you damn fool.”

Philippi was gagging, catching his breath. He looked at O’Hara balefully, but didn’t make any more moves toward him. After a little he said, panting, “Rig, you and Max go get me that young punk. You go get him if it takes you a week and bring him to me.”

“What about this guy?” Rig said practically. “And what about the stiff?”

“Get rid of them both first. And then bring me the punk. I’ll find out first what makes him tick and then I’ll burn him down personally if it’s the last thing I do.”

Max, who had been standing at the other side of the tall, bony figure on the floor, said, “What’ll we do with the lug and the stiff, Vic?”

“Do I have to tell you everything?”

“I’ll handle it, boss,” Rig said soothingly. “Max, you go empty Seena’s wardrobe trunk and bring it here. And, boss, you better get Seena away from the door into bed. We ain’t got time now to cart her down to the Turkish baths.”

Philippi was getting hold of himself. He nodded, went out to the foyer. Max went through another door, humming, “It’s off to work we go,” and Rig wagged his head at O’Hara.

He said, “That blond pal of yours is a killer-diller, guy. Two bump-offs in a couple of hours is pretty near a amateur record.”

O’Hara cursed Eddie Mullen in his soul and wished he’d never seen, never even heard of, him. He said, “What makes you so sure he killed Atkins?”

“We practically seen him do it. He was standing over Atkins with the gun still in his hand when we got here. Naturally it was a nice, big surprise, us not expecting anything like that, and he had the drop on us so he got away. And is the boss burned up! He thought a lot of Sam and then Atkins getting himself bumped here messes things up, too.”

“What was Atkins doing here?”

Rig shrugged. “I dunno. We found the back door unlocked but you could open that with a hairpin anyway. Maybe he sneaked over here to see the boss without any of his boys getting wise to it. He was going to sell out the numbers racket here to Vic and maybe he didn’t figure on cutting the deal with any of his boys. What I’d like to know, fella, is where this pal of yours comes in. What’s his angle in knocking off Sam and Atkins?”

“I don’t know,” O’Hara said and meant it.

“Close-mouthed, huh?”

Philippi came back from the foyer. The redhead was like a sack of flour across his shoulder, passed out cold. He carried her into the bedroom and then he and Max came out with a wardrobe trunk bulkily between them. They put the trunk down on the floor beside Atkin’s body and Philippi came across to Rig, took Rig’s gun.

He said, “I’ll watch him.”

He watched O’Hara silently, with cold virulence. Max and Rig worked fast, ripping drawers, hangers, partitions, out of the trunk. Rig got the body by the feet. Max by the head, and they jackknifed Atkins into the trunk very neatly, tucked in a trailing arm and slammed the halves of the trunk shut, locked it. Max tossed a Chinese throw rug over the bloody stain on the large rug while Rig carried the debris from the trunk back into the bedroom.

When Rig came back, he said, “We’ll lug this one down the back way to the car and come back for the live one. You can handle him, Vic?”

“What d’you think?” Philippi said, his eyes darkly on O’Hara. “If we had another trunk, I’d handle him here and now.”

Max said, “Uh-uh, boss. He looks pretty heavy. Why should we lug him around if he can walk?”

Max hummed some more about “Off to work we go” while Rig wedged open a swinging door between dining-room and kitchen and they carted the trunk through the door, out of sight.

Philippi’s pinpointed stare made O’Hara sweat gently between the shoulder blades, down the length of his spine. There had been lots of times when he had stuck his chin out, asking for trouble and finding it, but at least on those occasions he’d been prepared for it, had had an even chance of blocking it away from his chin. But this time all he’d been was the big-hearted sap, a dumb Good Samaritan, trying to get a screwball kid out of his jam, and he’d succeeded only in messing himself up.

There wasn’t any misreading the vengeful purpose in Philippi’s eyes, his tight mouth, and if O’Hara sat there passively until Rig and Max came back, it would be too late, quite a bit too late. He couldn’t handle three of them; he didn’t even think he could handle Philippi who stood a dozen feet away with the gun like a rock on his hip.

O’Hara thought, “Damn Eddie Mullen!”

He put his hands tight over his knees to keep them from shaking. He said, “Look, Philippi, suppose the kid did kill your brother and Atkins, why take it out on me? I didn’t do it, did I?”

“Try to talk your way out of it. I think you know plenty about it and I’ve got a hunch you ain’t even a newspaper guy.”

“Look me up, ask anybody about me.”

“Turn it off,” Philippi said coldly. “I’m going to get the punk — it’s personal with me, now — and I suppose I should let you go so you could shoot off your face about that?”

There was an odd noise at the bedroom doorway and O’Hara looked, saw the redhead standing there unsteadily in nothing more than pink panties, a brassiere. She said, “I’m gonna... I’m gonna—”

Philippi barked, “Seena, get back in there.”

Seena started to run blindly out into the room, reeling and stumbling. She burped. “Look out, I’m gonna be... be sick. Where’s the... the...”

She weaved into a table, upset it and stumbled away. O’Hara got springs in his knees but he didn’t move because Philippi still didn’t take his eyes off him for a moment.

“Seena, you little tramp,” Philippi snapped, not looking at her, “get back in there. Damn it, get back in—”

The redhead gurgled incoherently and unseeingly she ran into the end of the divan, caromed off it in front of O’Hara. O’Hara’s foot shot out, caught her on the hip. She went sidewise as though she had been sprung from a catapult and tangled with Philippi as he tried to duck her, tried to get the gun centered on O’Hara again.

O’Hara was on his feet instantly. He caught the back of the chair he had been in and skated the heavy piece of furniture across the rug at the pair. It slammed into Seena just as Philippi was getting clear of her and snarled them both up again while O’Hara whirled, flung toward the velvet draperies between the living-room and the foyer.

Philippi’s gun blasted as he cleared the draperies and he knew he wouldn’t have time to get the hall door open before Philippi would be on him from behind. He dived to one side of the draped arch, spun and poised himself. The draperies whipped aside and O’Hara uncorked one from his knees. Philippi literally drove his chin into the punch. He had been coming so fast that the blow didn’t quite halt him and he came on forward, falling as he did so.

He was out like a light, in mid-air. He rolled over twice on the floor before he came to a stop.

O’Hara scooped the gun off the floor where it had fallen from Philippi’s hand. He swung back into the living-room and picked up his hat. The redhead was climbing to her feet and she must have had a stronger stomach than she’d figgured on because she hadn’t been sick yet.

O’Hara said, “Thanks, babe,” and she said. “Ol’ handsome brute again.”

O’Hara went out into the foyer and found that Philippi was coming out of it so he tried the sedative effect of a kick on the chin. Philippi very promptly relaxed and O’Hara opened the hall door, headed for the stairway.

The party in the front apartment had reached the quartet stage and you couldn’t hear yourself think, even out in the hallway.

At the second floor O’Hara heard the elevator rumble up the shaft beside the stairway and when he reached the lobby, the doorman in the elegant uniform wasn’t in sight. O’Hara was glad of that; not that he couldn’t have handled an argument with the guy but he was temporarily tired of arguments.

He went down the block toward the red tail-light of the cab in which he’d left Tony Ames not thirty minutes before. It seemed closer to thirty days. He stuck his head in the open window, didn’t open the door.

He said, “Hi, Gadget.”

“Don’t gadget me, you trifler,” Tony Ames said. She laughed a little but she sounded as though she had been worried. “I saw you trailing after that redhead.”

“Now, kitten—”

“I’m kidding you, funny face. Get in and tell me what kept you so long.”

O’Hara didn’t open the door. He said, “Honeybunch, will you do me a favor?”

“When you start that ‘honeybunch’ stuff,” Tony said dryly, “I know the fun is starting and you’re trying to ace little Ames out of it.”

There was a sudden rasp of flint against steel in her hand and the small flame of a cigarette lighter sprang into yellow life. It wasn’t much light but enough to outline O’Hara’s face and head.

She said softly, “Lipstick on your neck and blood on your chin. Did the redhead have to knock you down before you’d let her get affectionate? Get in here, fella, and tell me what happened.”

O’Hara sighed. “Try to keep anything from you, nosy.”

He didn’t get in but he talked briefly, pithily. Oscar was apparently sound asleep on the front seat and there were panes of glass between him and them but O’Hara kept his voice down anyway.

When he’d finished, Tony Ames breathed, “Ken, this is an awful, horrible mess! D’you really think the boy killed Atkins?”

O’Hara shrugged.

“But why would he have done it?”

“That’s among the things I’m going to find out. Up to now we’ve been so busy following the paper chase the kid’s leading us, that we haven’t had time to do anything. From now on he’ll have to sort of look out for himself, because two murders make this thing too big to be just background for a game of button, button, where’s Eddie Mullen.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to find out who killed the guy in the car and who killed Atkins and why. If the kid did it, he’ll have to take what’s coming.”

“Where do we start?”

“First I want you to scoot to a phone some place and get a flock of cops over here. I’ll try to slow up these Manhattan babies in moving Atkins’ body while the cops are on the way. Then you can trot down to the office, dig in the sports library and find a picture of the Brand University football squad of last fall. Eddie Mullen ought to be on it.”

Tony Ames said, “I begin to get it. Maybe Eddie Mullen isn’t Eddie Mullen. After all, nobody out here ever saw him before.”

“I want to be sure, one way or another. Now get along, little doggie.”

“Promise you won’t start anything until the cops get here?”

“Don’t worry. I’m getting smart in my old age.”

Tony Ames didn’t sound too convinced but she said, “O.K. Wake up Oscar for me.”

When the cab was a receding tail — light, swooping down the hill toward Highland. O’Hara cut back across the street and went at a smart walk toward the corner. He knew the layout of these hill apartments — a concrete apron behind them with private garages opening onto the concrete. He figured he’d have time to get back there, locate the car to which Rig and Max had carried Atkins in his trunk coffin and do something about it while Rig and Max were upstairs reviving Vic Philippi. It ought to take Philippi a little while, anyway, to shake off the effects of that kick in the chin.

There was a chance that O’Hara might find either Rig or Max along with the car and the body. He wouldn’t mind that too much, either. He could be pushed around and slapped down just so long and then something in him, harking back to the bogs of Ireland, overrode caution and what was commonly denominated as plain horse sense.

The driveway leading to the garages wasn’t twenty feet distant and O’Hara was freeing Rig’s automatic from his coat pocket where he’d dropped it, when there was a roar of exhaust back of the apartment. O’Hara swore, stretched his legs and he hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when a neat, tan sport job whipped out of the drive. It rasped rubber in a vicious right turn, swerved far into the street and straightened out.

O’Hara had a swift, fragmentary glimpse of Rig’s round, oily face behind the wheel and there were others in the car although he couldn’t tell one from another or even how many there were. But he didn’t think he’d find anybody left behind in that sixth-floor apartment. Vic and the redhead had no doubt been piled in the car, too. O’Hara had been in darkness as the car slammed out past him to the street and there wasn’t much chance anybody in the car had seen him or recognized him if they had.

Not that that made much difference, with the sport job streaking south toward the boulevard while he was virtually rooted there.

A shiny V-8 coupe purred up from the boulevard, nudged the curb a hundred feet away and O’Hara said, “Hah,” and got going. He came up on the street side of the coupe and the driver, a young fellow in evening clothes, looked up, startled. A girl was climbing out the other door to the sidewalk.

O’Hara said, “Borrow your car, laddie?”

The young fellow’s mouth dropped open. “I... I should say not. What’s the idea?”

“A swell idea if I had time to explain it,” O’Hara said. He grinned a little, no more than a little, and shoved the automatic into sight. He said, “This is part of it. Catch on?”

The lad slid away from the gun fast, almost knocking the girl down, while O’Hara jerked the door open, got behind the wheel. He said, “Thanks, old-timer,” and got the V-8 away in a fast U-turn while he was still saying it.

Down at the boulevard a block and a half away the tan sport job was slowing for a turn. It wound to the right and O’Hara jammed his foot hard on the coupe accelerator. The V-8 was fast, had lots of guts. It whooped up to fifty inside of half a block, bore down at the boulevard intersection. O’Hara eased it off at the cross walk, swung wide into the boulevard. He wove in front of a bus, startling the driver into near-spasms, and got to the outside lane of traffic.

There wasn’t a great deal of traffic on the boulevard at that hour but there was enough to hide, for the moment, the sport job. Then O’Hara saw it jogging along past a street car a block ahead, not going fast, not going slow. O’Hara let up on the throttle, began to pace the tan car. Apparently neither Rig at the wheel nor any of the occupants had any idea they were being followed and they had no intention of attracting notice by stepping along too fast.

The sport job rolled across Highland, kept going west. O’Hara beat the red light at Highland by a bare fraction of a second and rolled the V-8 closer to the sport job, settled down half a block behind and held that distance.

He hadn’t the faintest notion where Philippi and his goon squad were headed, but he knew he was headed the same place even if he didn’t know what he was going to do about anything when he did arrive. As he drove he kept his eyes open for a radio patrol car but block after block slid by and there wasn’t a sign of one.

That was the trouble with cops — when you didn’t want them around, they were all over yon like gooseflesh, and when you did need them, they were as scarce as Republicans in Texas.

Both cars crossed La Brea. Traffic got lighter as the boulevard hiked up toward the hills that were black against the star-strewn sky. O’Hara dropped the V-8 a full block behind and the sport job ground on west. It made the boulevard stop at the Laurel Canyon road and turned to the right along the canyon floor.

O’Hara gave himself one guess then. Philippi was headed for Mulholland Highway which wound along the crest of the hills for miles, deserted at this time of night and with hundreds of brush-covered slopes down which a body might be tumbled to lie hidden for weeks, months, maybe years.

His one guess was wrong. Their car whipped around the curves of the canyon road, grinding steadily upward. Its tail light vanished around a curve and when the V-8 swung to make the turn, the red spark was gone completely.

O’Hara could have drawn from memory a detailed road map of Laurel Canyon, all the tributary canyons there, and he knew instantly where the sport job was headed — Horseshoe Canyon, which angled off to the left and wound sharply upward to a cul-de-sac in the hills. He knew also that there were three canyon estates and three only along the slopes of Horseshoe and that of the three one had belonged to Harry Atkins.

He grimaced faintly. A very humorous guy, this Vic Philippi, picking out Harry Atkins’ own place as a dumping ground for his body.

O’Hara drove the V-8 a hundred feet beyond the entrance to Horseshoe Canyon, parked it. Horseshoe Canyon was dark, quiet, almost as isolated as though it had been ten hours instead of ten minutes away from busy Hollywood. The sky was a star-powdered ceiling to the canyon as he plodded upward but the floor of the canyon, the dirt road, lay in complete blackness.

In the stillness his feet seemed to wake tiny, almost inaudible echoes. Only he knew they weren’t echoes when he stopped for a moment and the echoes came right on up the canyon after him. So he freed the automatic from his pocket, stepped into the darker gloom of a tree bole. After a little his eyes picked out a figure and when the figure came abreast of him, he chuckled faintly.

He said with dryness in his voice, “Well, Gadget?”

The figure jumped a loot and Tony Ames said, “You idiot, d’you want to scare my permanent wave right off my head?”

“When you walk up dark roads, you can expect boogymen. So what are you doing here — and keep it down.”

“I’ll tell you,” Tony whispered, “and then maybe you’ll tell me. I’d just finished putting through that call for the cops in a drugstore at Highland and the boulevard and was coming out the door when I saw you slide past in a V-8. Well, that wasn’t according to schedule. You should still have been up at that apartment. So I hopped into the cab and set sail after you. You were way ahead when you turned into the canyon but I saw the V-8 parked down there. So some rapid deductions and so here we are. Maybe you can tell me why.”

O’Hara told her. He added. “I don’t know if that exactly answers why but I’m hoping to go deeper into the subject. Now would you mind scramming and phoning the cops a new address?”

“I can’t walk that far back,” Tony said. “My feet hurt. Let’s use the phone at Atkins’ place.”

O’Hara sighed. “I was afraid you’d be like that, pest. Got a gun with you?”

“I’ve got the sweetest little .25 in my bag, as you very well know.”

“O.K., break it out.”

They almost ran into the rear of the sport job before they saw it. The car was parked off the road, half in and half out of a clump of brush and across the road lights gleamed mellowly from a studio window high on the canyon side.

O’Hara said, “Easy,” under his breath and got his eyes up to the rear window of the sport job slowly, cautiously. He hadn’t expected the car to be parked there deserted or to see lights on in Atkins’ sprawling hillside home.

After a moment he took his eyes away from the rear window and stepped around the car, jerked the rear door open. He said, “Hello, Red.”

The redhead, who was slumped in the rear seat, squalled a little but not very much or very loudly at the sight of him. She said thickly, “ ’S handsome brute, b’ Gawd. Wha-what’re you doing here, ol’ handsome brute? What you followin’ me round for?”

There wasn’t anyone else in the car and the body of Harry Atkins, if it had been in it, wasn’t there now. O’Hara said, “Climb out, Red, and no noise if you don’t want to get slapped in the pan with a lot of gun barrel.”

The redhead climbed out awkwardly. She was in bedroom slippers, a dress that had been hastily pulled on over her head so that the red hair was all awry in the faint light from the studio window up the hill.

O’Hara said, “Can you handle her, kitten?”

“What d’you think I am?” said Tony. “A sissy?”

“Then she’s all yours while I case the place, and maybe crash the party there. If you hear a couple of whistles that’s an engraved invitation for you to join the merry throng — but otherwise, Gadget, you keep Red down here.”

O’Hara plowed away into blackness. He found a gate, opened, in a high wire fence and after that it was really too easy. He angled across a smooth, upward sweep of lawn, came alongside the house and looked through the studio window from a dozen feet away. He could see Vic Philippi standing in the center of a big, white-walled room, talking through a jaw that was twice the size it should have been.

Max was lounging on a table beside Philippi and Deke Hanna and Mat Wyman stood very stiffly and tensely against one wall under a gun in the hand of the oily-faced man named Rig who was just inside figure draperies at an archway. O’Hara saw shoe tips of imported Scotch grain and by stretching a little he saw the rest of Eddie Mullen.

The blond young man was stretched out on a divan across the room, an arm trailing limply to the floor. O’Hara could see his chest moving spasmodically, his lips fluttering loosely with each breath.

O’Hara cut across velvety grass again toward white stone steps. His feet didn’t make any noise when he went up the steps or when he went through a wide-open door and along the thick, expensive rug of an entry hall. He stopped just the other side of the archway he had seen through the window, got his hand on folds and jerked.

He put the muzzle of the automatic into Rig’s fat neck and said, “Surprise, fellows! And in case you’re puzzled, what I’ve got poked into your neck, Rig, it’s your own trusty rod. Now just drop that cannon you’re holding and we can all be friends.”

Rig swore fluently and Philippi cursed sharply once and was silent. Max didn’t say anything but Rig was still swearing when the gun dropped out of his hand onto a thick Oriental.

Deke Hanna’s rawboned face was quiet, expressionless but Mat Wyman cried out sharply with relief. He said, “Cripes, O’Hara, wherever you came from, am I glad to see you! These... these — cripes, these muggs were trying to decide whether to blast us or just beat our brains out.”

O’Hara said, “Everybody over to that wall, facing it and hands reaching. You too, Mat.”

“But, Ken, what the hell? All I’ve done is try to do people favors and get kicked in the pants for it. You asked me to feed your pal a mickey if he showed at my Bolero Club and I did. And I couldn’t keep him around there so I got Hanna to help me get him up here. If there’s any funny business, all I want is out of it.”

“And all I want.” O’Hara said, “is answers, Mat. After I’ve got the answers, maybe you can beat it, maybe you can’t. Now everybody against the wall before I get very, very nervous. And you. Rig, quit cussing; you’re repeating yourself.”

Rig shrugged and moved across the room reluctantly. When O’Hara had them all lined up, he said, “Swell. And now where’s Atkins’ body, Philippi?”

Philippi said thickly, as though his jaw wasn’t feeling any too good, “We dumped him over his own fence and what’s it to you, nosy?”

“One of the answers,” O’Hara said. He let his eyes flick sidewise at Eddie Mullen and for the first time saw the long purple bruise over the blond kid’s right temple. He said, “What’d you do, Mat, feed the kid his mickey with a sap?”

“I swear—”

“Skip it,” O’Hara grunted. He put two fingers of his left hand to his teeth, blew a couple of shrill blasts. “In a moment, pals, we’ll be getting some more answers. Just relax, but not too relaxed.”

After a little there were steps in the hallway. The redhead weaved past O’Hara, made one complete turn and flopped into a chair and Tony Ames came in after her, kept a serious, hazel gaze and a small but competent-looking gun on her.

O’Hara said, “Thanks, Gadget. And now for the inquiring reporter stuff. Mat, suppose you start by telling me where you were between six and eight this evening.”

Mat’s words bounced back from the wall in front of him. He said vehemently, “I was at my club. I was there without a break from five until a few minutes ago.”

“You can prove it?”

“By a dozen people, Ken. Why?”

“Because a very smart try has been made tonight to ease both Atkins and Philippi out of the local picture. At seven o’clock somebody started it by knocking off Philippi’s half-brother, Sam Ticino.”

Philippi growled, “Who you kidding? Your pal killed Sam.”

“Wrong,” said O’Hara. “The kid only saw who killed Sam. He grabbed Sam’s gun and grabbed a cab, tailed whoever it was out to the Bolero. He hung around there, saw the killer leave the place with Atkins and followed them to your apartment. He got in there after Atkins had been killed and was probably trying to figure what to do next when you barged in on him and he had to scram. So he beat it back to the Bolero, which seemed to be the nerve center for the whole thing and was sapped and brought up here by Deke Hanna and Wyman.”

“By Gawd,” Philippi breathed. “Wyman—”

“That doesn’t quite hold up, either. I think his alibi on the first killing will prove out, so he couldn’t have been the one the kid was tailing, although he did have the opportunity to bump Atkins. He was out of sight with Atkins for twenty minutes, supposedly in his office, but he could have waltzed Atkins out the back way, over to your apartment and been back in that time. Only, if he didn’t do the first one, he didn’t do the second. He probably knew a lot about it — afterward — but I doubt if he was in on it. He hasn’t that kind of guts. But he’d be too afraid of Hanna to spill anything on it.”

“Ah, nuts, Vic,” said Rig, “this guy is just talking. The kid done it all right.”

“That’s not reasonable, either,” O’Hara said, his words flowing on evenly. “The kid’s college-bred and even though he might have killed Sam in self-defense, he wouldn’t have had a motive in the world to kill Atkins.”

“You know,” said Tony Ames, “that he’s really Eddie Mullen?”

O’Hara grinned a little. “I saw his scrap book at the hotel today and he’s in twenty pictures with his football squad. I tried to send you to the office to check the picture because I smelled trouble and I wanted you safely out of it.”

“You meanie, you.”

“If the kid didn’t do it,” Philippi said, “then who did?”

“There’s Rig — or Max.”

“Both of ’em were with me all evening.”

O’Hara said cheerfully, “That’s all I needed to know.” He flicked a glance at the redhead who was slumped in the chair with her eyes closed, her mouth slack. He said, “Friends, let me present a smart gal — Seena Vance.”

Out of the silence Philippi choked, “You mean Seena — you mean she killed Sam and Atkins?”

“I’ve had her on my mind for quite a little while,” O’Hara said. He kept the edge of his gaze on her, saw that her eyes were open, her mouth was firming up although she hadn’t moved otherwise. “She was Luck Hauser’s girl before she was yours and she knew the cleaners’ and dyers’ inside out. I think maybe she was tired of being the doll and figured she could be the brains, particularly with the racket getting off to a fresh start in fresh territory. But she had to ace both you and Atkins out first and there wasn’t any better way than by framing a war between you. She laid Sam’s killing at Atkins’ door and Atkins’ murder at yours. And between the cops running both mobs ragged, and both mobs gunning each other out, she’d get in.

“Sam had been shot three times in the face which made it almost certain that whoever did it was sitting in his car, waiting for him, and that he’d known and trusted whoever it was because he walked right into it. Then at the apartment tonight I suspected she wasn’t within a mile of being as plastered as she pretended. All I got on her breath was beer. She pretended I was a brand-new face to her downstairs and then up in the hall she suddenly remembered I’d been following her around for twenty-four hours. Also when she pulled the stunt that let me get away — I don’t quite get it yet why she did that — she put on a gonna-be-sick act. But she didn’t get sick which shows it was a fake because I know from experience that when you gotta go, you gotta go and you can’t change your mind.”

The redhead didn’t look very tight now, although she was still slumped loosely in the chair. She sneered, “This guy uses a swell brand of hop, Vic. I suppose I was just going to walk in and take over the town all by my little self.”

“No,” O’Hara said. “You were going to take it over with your brains and Deke Hanna’s gun. Deke had to be in on it. You’d never have got Atkins away from the Bolero alone if Deke hadn’t wanted it that way. Atkins hadn’t ridden or walked the streets without him for five years that I know of.”

O’Hara hadn’t been watching the redhead, he’d been watching Deke Hanna’s back arching, his high farmer’s shoulders twisting. It was sort of fascinating watching his slow killer’s brain working out through his muscles, his nerves that way.

So O’Hara didn’t see the redhead uncoiling like a spring from the chair, winding herself around Tony Ames, grabbing at Tony’s little gun — until the thing was done.

The redhead screamed, “Deke!”

The scream took O’Hara’s eyes involuntarily away from Hanna for no more than the fraction of a second. And when they returned, Hanna had spun away from the wall, dropping to one knee. A gun was sliding out of his coat sleeve, a short-barreled deadly little thing, and the room trembled to its thunder.

Lead tunneled through O’Hara’s coat sleeve. O’Hara’s hand began to squeeze Rig’s automatic and Tony Ames and the redhead swayed between him and Hanna. He swore, tried to sidestep, to get a clear shot before Hanna’s gun cut loose again and the women kept getting in the way.

He saw Hanna up on his feet, dodging, holding the little gun poised with a practiced coolness. Hanna danced agilely to one side, cut along by the divan, got into the clear. His gun cut down toward O’Hara and the automatic swung toward Hanna. Then Eddie Mullen rolled off the couch and gathered Hanna into his arms like an end cutting down a wide-running half-back. O’Hara thought he could hear the bones crunch as the pair of them hit the floor.

Out of the corner of his eye O’Hara saw movement at the wall and the gun in his hand swiveled. He said, “Drop it, Max. The party’s over and you’re just a bit too late to get into it.”

Max looked sheepish and stuck a gun back into his shoulder holster and Philippi said severely, “You damn fool, ain’t everything worked out nice for us without you trying to start trouble all over?”

O’Hara looked back at Eddie Mullen and the blond young man was beating Deke Hanna’s head enthusiastically against the floor. Tony Ames was on her feet again and the redhead was back in the chair.

O’Hara grinned, said, “Remember the unnecessary roughness ruling, Eddie. The guy’s been out for at least a minute now.”

Eddie stopped pounding Deke Hanna’s head but he didn’t get up. He said, “Say, you’re not a bad reporter yourself, Ken. I heard how you doped it out and it was just about right. I got talking to this Sam guy at the restaurant and it turned out he was a pretty good egg when he was sober so I said I was sorry about the night before and I’d like to say so to Philippi.

“So he said Philippi was in a bookie joint a couple of blocks away and we could go down and see him. The rest of it was the way you said. This guy, Hanna, brought the Atkins fellow out the back way from the Bolero and put Atkins behind the wheel of a car. Then the redhead climbed in with a gun and made Atkins drive away.

“I tailed them to that apartment and I was prowling around the back stairs when I heard shots and saw the redhead run out the back door. So I went there.

“Afterward I went back to the Bolero and in the back door there when — bam! — something hits me and I don’t know any more until I hear you talking here. Even then I felt sort of dopey as though a couple of full-backs had run over me and I thought maybe I was dreaming until the shooting started.”

O’Hara wagged his head despairingly. He said, “You dope, if you’d only told somebody in the beginning instead of trying to imitate a whole Homicide squad—”

“All I was after, Ken, was the story. I thought that was the way to be a reporter.”

Deke Hanna moved a little and Eddie took hold of his ears again and banged his head.

“Hey, you,” said Eddie. “The rules say no crawling with the ball after the referee blows his whistle.”

At the airport Tony Ames came through morning sunlight toward O’Hara and Eddie Mullen. She grinned at O’Hara, said when she got close, “Your girl friend’s sore at you, Ken.”

“My what is which?”

“Seena. I’ve just come from talking to her at the city jail and she says she saved your life last night and why don’t you come to see her. What is this strange power you have over redheaded women, my broth of a boy?”

O’Hara looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t stop now.”

“She said she angled you into things at the apartment last night because Philippi was getting ready to move Atkins’ body before she had a chance to tip off the cops and she wanted you to see it, sort of be a witness. She hadn’t figured Philippi would also decide to remove you and she liked you too well for that so she decided to create a little diversion and give you a chance to get out from under.”

O’Hara said, “Sure, and also get me to the outside where I could yell my head off to the cops.”

An announcer began bellowing in a megaphone something about Trip Five to El Paso, Memphis and so on and so on and points east and Eddie Mullen looked lugubrious.

A redcap grabbed his bag and Eddie said. “Gee, kids, I don’t know why the folks had to wire me to come home when I was just about getting warmed up out here.”

“I can’t imagine,” Tony Ames said, smiling.

Eddie got under way. Over his shoulder he said, “We’ll make a swell team when I come back in the spring, Ken. So long — and don’t forget. I’ll be back with you in the spring.”

O’Hara chuckled. “Lord,” he prayed to Eddie’s retreating back, “Lord, give me strength.”

Jake and Jill

by Steve Fisher

A weirdly assorted pair prove murder’s no accident in Hawaii.

* * *

The man who came into the Honolulu Police morgue was very small, and he wore baggy trousers, and a loose, open coat; you could see his pink shirt under the coat, and that he didn’t wear any tie. The suit looked as though he didn’t have much faith in cleaners and pressers. But the thing you noticed most about the man was that his head was completely nude and round; and on his monkeyish face there were huge, thick eyebrows. The eyebrows were so big and thick you might have got the idea they made up for the naked pate of his head.

A woman came in with the man, and she was his exact opposite. She was a head taller than he; and she was finely dressed in white tropic linen. Though she must have been in her fifties, her gray hair was done up in the latest Parisian coiffure, and she wore strapped to her jacket a lorgnette. She was prim and dignified. She looked extremely social, which she was. Her social asset was definitely established with the fact that she had inherited a vast fortune many years ago. Despite her eccentricities she’d had the good sense to hang onto her money.

Both she and the man were glancing toward the naked corpse of a girl on the slab across the room; they didn’t pay much attention to the coroner who sat at the door, puffing on a pipe.

“Hello, Jake,” said the coroner.

Jake lifted his heavy eyebrows. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, Miss Conway,” the coroner continued.

Jill Conway nodded. “Good morning, good morning,” she said.

Jake walked over to the corpse, and Jill Conway, fumbling with a notebook, followed him.

The corpse of the girl was a little crushed around the hips, and the back spread out, and you could see two ribs sticking through the flesh. But she had been a pretty girl. Her hair was reddish, and her face, though coarse, was nice. She’d had thick lips, and big eyes.

Jake addressed Jill. “Now this girl,” he said, “she was a Portugee; but she lived in the Islands so long among the Chinks and the Hawaiians and the Filipinos, she was what you call a White Kanaka.” He glanced back at the corpse; then he looked over at the coroner. “Will you please cover Rosy up,” he said. “The idea of subjecting Miss Conway to such nudity!”

The coroner hurriedly threw a sheet across the body. Just the feet stuck out.

Jill was making notes.

“What are you writing?” said Jake.

Jill lifted her lorgnette and glanced down. “I was writing that the corpse has dirty feet.”

“Now, why in the hell do you want to write that?”

“Why it might be an interesting thing,” Jill said, “you never know.”

“Well, it won’t be an interesting thing,” Jake said, “because this is just a corpse; and there wasn’t no murder, or anything like that. I was trying to tell you about it, but you gotta write about her feet. Anyway, all these Island girls are pretty careless. Sometimes I’m sorry I contracted to take you around with me during my day-time hours. You pay me good money, I ain’t kicking about that; but I was perfectly happy before, just being house dick in the Hell Acre Hotel. I was doing all right, then you gotta come down and offer me so much dough to conduct you through my cases that I can’t turn it down. As I say, sometimes I’m sorry.”

Jill Conway was properly humbled, for she was in mortal fear that the grumbling Jake Sutton would one day refuse to take her with him on his investigations, and then she would never get finished her notes on the book which for two years she had been planning.

The book was to be her gift to humanity, a treatise, entitled: “The Grim Aspects of Island Crime.” She so far had nothing but notes; but way back when she first decided to write it, she contacted Jake. He was house detective in the largest and most run-down hotel in Honolulu. It sat on the edge of Hell’s Half Acre, the squalor hole of the world, where, as Jake said, “Things happen.”

Jill was well convinced that Jake could do without the money she paid him, for twice in the past two years, each time after a political shake-up, he had turned down the job of Homicide Chief of the city.

“I kind of like it where I am,” he’d said. “I come and go as I please; and if I feel like looking into a case I do, and if I don’t I just forget about it, and nobody in Hell’s Half Acre has anything to say.”

Jill had long ago decided that Jake Sutton would be the main subject of her book, if and when it was ever written. She was beginning to suspect that she enjoyed this life of moving around where there was danger and murder better than she would the idea of sitting down to write about it.

“Now this girl,” Jake went on, “the police have it all down on the books, and there ain’t nothing else to do about it. I just brought you here because there ain’t nothing else happening today.”

“What happened to the poor creature?” Jill asked.

“Why this Rosy,” Jake said, “she was a taxi dance dame. You know how those kind are by now. They work at the Rizal; or at that Gook joint across the street, and they work so hard, and dance so much, they get tight almost every night. It seems that last night Rosy got good and swacked; right up to the ears. Then she came home. She was walking peacefully along on the fourth floor of Hell Acre Hotel, only she was kind of blind drunk, and instead of turning left from the balcony and going into her room, she turned right.”

Every floor of Honolulu hotels are skirted with outside balconies; there is no hallway.

“Go on,” said Jill, “she turned right.”

“Well, that’s all,” said Jake. “She turned to the right and went through the banister and fell four stories and got killed. The wood’s kind of rotten, and the banister is very weak. Well, it’s not weak now, it’s just not there. Rosy took it with her when she fell. She fell kind of straight and she landed on her—” He paused, lifted his shaggy eyebrows. “She landed sitting down, if you know what I mean.”

“And that’s all?” asked Jill. “Nobody’s going to do anything about it?”

“What can anybody do? It was an accident, and that’s all. She wasn’t important, so the cops ain’t breaking their necks to find out much more. They figure I’ll make the routine examination and turn in my report which is required of the hotel; I guess they figure I can do it as well as they can. Sometimes I think the cops are lazy; but don’t tell nobody that because they might libel me.”

“Maybe it was murder,” said Jill. “If it was it would make a very good chapter in my book. I would call it ‘The Corpse with Dirty Feet’.”

“Yeah; but it wasn’t murder,” said Jake. “It was just that Rosy got drunk and went right instead of left.” He scratched his bald head as though something was biting him. Jill winced at this. She squirmed a little herself and straightened her jacket. “But you can tag along while I make the check-up on the details,” he concluded.

“That means,” said Jill, “you think and hope this is murder just as much as I do. Else you wouldn’t take me. You don’t fool me at all.”

Jake was scratching his leg; he didn’t say anything.

Jake and Jill stood on the sidewalk out in front of the only theater in Honolulu which featured high-class vaudeville; most people in the Islands didn’t know that vaudeville was out of date, and they thought these stage acts were quite a thing. Jake and Jill were a sight: Jake with his baggy coat open showing his pink, tieless shirt; and Jill a head taller, all dressed up like a rich tourist. She wasn’t a tourist, she was an old resident.

“I’ll tell you why we’re here,” said Jake, “it was just a little idea of my own. There’s a guy in here that’s got an act. He does imitations and all that. He was on an amateur hour once in New York and, when he imitated Garbo and Sophie Tucker, people thought he was almost as good as Shiela Barrett. The thing is, he’s Hawaiian; started out by touring the States in an Hawaiian string trio. These Hawaiians, they’ve got high voices when they sing; they can hit notes like a woman does, and he found out he could imitate everybody he’d ever seen on the screen, so he broke away and got his own act. It’s a pretty good act and he finishes it by doing a yodel.”

“But what has that to do with Rosy?” Jill asked.

“Well, I saw this guy at the hotel a few times; he was always with Rosy. I thought that was kind of screwy, because once these Kanaka boys get in the dough, and they come back to the old home town, they try to pretend like they never saw Hell’s Half Acre, and don’t even know it exists. They get maybe a thousand or ten thousand in the bank and they think they’re rich, and they want to live at the good hotels; and they don’t want to know nobody they knew back in the old days when they was eating poi and were glad to get it.”

“And you saw this boy down at the hotel?”

Jake scratched his chin. “Yeah, and with Rosy. That’s the thing. Because this guy — he calls himself Prince Kalemi now — he’s married to a Spanish dancer that’s in an act here at the theater. She does an adagio with a Russian. Kind of a good looking number, I’d say she was. Kind of—”

A huge, handsome Hawaiian emerged suddenly from the little side door that, was next to the theater’s foyer. He was carrying sheet music under his arm. He was six feet, and he had kinky hair, which was plastered back; his eyes were brown and very large. From the cut of his high-waisted gray trousers, and his Hollywood pleated coat, you could see he didn’t want anybody to mistake him for a beach boy.

“Prince Kalemi,” said Jake.

“I heard you wanted to see me,” Kalemi said, coming up; he had a deep, husky voice. It was smooth and studied.

“Yeah,” said Jake. “I wanted to know what you were doing hanging around with Rose?”

Kalemi’s eyes flickered. He spoke softly. “I read of her death in this morning’s paper. I was awfully sorry. I used to be married to Rosy. About six years ago, that was. Naturally, when I finally arrived back in the Islands for this engagement, I went down to see her. That was how I happened to be in the hotel.”

Prince Kalemi’s reply was so smooth and convincing that Jake floundered for another question.

Jill said, “You had correspondence with Rose all those six years, young man?”

“Why, no ma’am; of course not.”

“Then how did you know where she lived?”

Kalemi looked tolerant. “I got in touch with friends at the Rizal dance hall. They told me. Rosy was a taxi dance girl then, too.”

Jake finally revived himself. “You’re married now, Kalemi? A nice little number, I hear.”

“Thank you,” said the Hawaiian. “Yes, it is true; and I know you are happy for me.”

“Indeed we are,” said Jill, gradually being impressed with the Adonis build of the brute.

Jake glared at her.

When Prince Kalemi had gone, Jake said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll take a walk over to the city hall; then we’ll go back to the hotel. There was a sailor that Rosy was in love with, and he’ll be there. Rosy roomed with another taxi dance girl. We’ll talk to her too. Just routine stuff, of course. You can come if you want to.”

“This city hall business,” Jill said. “You must have an idea.”

Jake didn’t say anything.

It was five o’clock, and the sun was very hot still. Jake and Jill had been asking questions of the people in Hell Acre Hotel, and now they were walking along the fourth floor balcony where there was no rail, because Rosy had taken the whole side of the place with her when she plunged. Jake knocked on the door of the room in which Rosy had once lived.

A tall, thin girl opened the door. She was garbed in a print dress, and wore no stockings. She was half-Hawaiian, and her legs and arms were very brown; her face looked better because she wore a lot of rouge to play down the thickness of her lips. She had warm eyes, but they looked kind of tired.

“This is Gertrude,” Jake said. “She and Rosy were friends. Anyway, they saved rent by living in the same room.”

“Yeah, that’s what we did,” said Gertrude.

Jake and Jill entered. There was a sailor in the room, sitting on a day cot looking at funny papers. He glanced up now. He was fairly handsome; but he hadn’t shaven today. He wore whites, and they were fresh and clean. He had short-clipped black hair; and on his arm there was the rate of yeoman.

“This is Barney,” said Jake. “He was Rosy’s boy friend.”

“That I was,” Barney said, “and I think it’s a stinking shame this hotel can’t have strong enough guard rails to hold people when they get crocked. By Gawd, if I was married to Rosy and had some legal right, I’d sue the pants off this joint.”

Jake scratched his bald head, and lifted his shaggy eyebrows. Jill was regarding the pair through her lorgnette.

Gertrude pointed at it. “You know,” she said, “I always wanted one of those hinkeys.”

Jake sat down. He had turned a chair around. “Well,” he said, “I came about Rosy’s death, and let’s get all the dispositions of you people over with it. It’s like this: I think maybe it’s murder. And I’ve never been wrong yet. I thought I might as well tell you.”

“Murder!” snapped Barney.

“That’s just what he said,” Jill echoed. She had her notebook out and was writing in it.

“What you writing?” asked Jake.

Jill looked up. “There’s no wall paper on the wall; and I saw a cockroach.”

“Well, look under the bed sheets,” Jake replied, “you’ll probably see more than that.” He turned to Barney. “Now look, gob. I’ve been around; I’ve seen a few yeomen and radiomen and guys that worked in navy post offices taken in. All the time they catch up with guys and arrest them — espionage charges, mostly. Some enlisted man selling stuff that comes his way at ten bucks a crack. Just little cases, but—”

Barney leapt to his feet. “Are you accusing me?”

“No, I’m not,” said Jake, “I’m just considering possibilities, that’s all I’m doing. What kind of a yeoman are you?”

“Communications.”

“Well, that’s all the better. You’re usually hanging around Rosy. Where were you last night?”

“I went swimming up near Wailupe. Night swimming.”

“Why weren’t you with your girl?”

“She has to work; but there’s no sense of me dancing every night just because she has to.”

“You went swimming by yourself?”

Barney nodded.

Jill glanced over. “As you always say, Jake: It has the odor of an alibi.”

Jake said, “Well, we’ll have to let it pass for right now; but if Barney was fooling around with navy communications, and Rosy was going to spill her guts...” He turned to Gertrude. “How about you, sweetheart? What time’d you get in?”

“About twelve; I was sick.”

“You mean drunk?”

“Call it what you want,” said Gertrude. She lit a cigarette.

“It was about one when Rosy fell off the balcony outside here. I suppose you were asleep?”

“That’s right. I was passed out cold. I didn’t know anything about it till Barney got here and woke me up and told me.”

Jill stared through her lorgnette; and Jake raised his eyebrows again. “Oh, so it’s like that. Maybe you and Barney bumped Rosy off to—”

“You’re nuts,” Gertrude spat.

“Maybe so,” Jake said, “maybe I’m nuts. But I’ll tell you, Gerty. We’ve got half a dozen witnesses here in the hotel that was awake at that time that heard you and Rosy arguing like hell at about one o’clock. You were screaming your heads off at each other. You mentioned Barney’s name several times. Right after that Rosy took the pitch to eternity. I just found out about all this half an hour ago.”

Gertrude’s face was scarlet. “It’s a stinking lie!” she screamed. “I was sound asleep. I didn’t even hear Rosy singing when she came reeling down the balcony.”

“How do you know she was singing?”

Gertrude jerked. “Somebody told me. They said she was singing ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ That’s only what they told me. But I didn’t hear her.”

Jake was on his feet. “We’ll be around to see you later. But it looks pretty bad, Gertie.”

“Get the hell out,” she snapped. “You can’t frame me on anything like this!”

Barney had left his funny papers. He was holding open the door.

Jill sniffed and swept through the portal. Jake followed along behind.

“I guess it was murder,” said Jake.

That night a nice soft, definite rain dripped across the porch of the hotel. Now and then there was a streak of lightning, and a clap of thunder. Through the downpour you could hear the sharp laughter of men and women; or angry argument; and far in the distance, though it was only half a block away, there came the brassy melody of the Rizal. Soldiers and sailors moved by in rubber coats, and girls were squealing and talking. A few automobiles swished past in the street, and the lone gas lamp shone bleakly down on them.

Through the rest of Hell’s Half Acre there was the rattle of rain on tin roofs, washing the soot from them. The original wooden roofs of the section had long ago defied repair, and they had been replaced with cheap galvanized tin.

Jill had returned to her elegant suite in the Majestic Hawaiian Apartments in the Waikiki district; but now she was back at Hell Acre Hotel. She was sitting in the chair that faced Jake’s roll-top desk. Jake was pacing up and down. He walked back and forth past an open window that was on the ground floor. You could look out through it and see as far as the little bridge over River Street, and Aala Park, where Filipinos clustered in groups under an awning; across from Aala park there were Chinese shop lights still gleaming from their windows, although the hour was late.

“I had supper,” said Jill.

“You were gone long enough to see a couple of movies,” Jake complained. Jill was writing notes. “Here I get things lined up, fool around making a thing that looks like an ancient letter — postmarked and all; and you take a powder on me. If you want to see things concluded, you should hang around.” He turned on her. “What are you writing?”

“What I had for dinner,” she said.

Jake was disgusted. “Now what good is that?”

“Well,” replied Jill, “maybe this’ll be an important night; maybe we’ll accomplish something, and it’s nice to remember little things about the evening, such as what you had for dinner. I’ll bet you don’t know what you had for dinner just three nights ago, even. That goes to show how people forget things.”

“I, for one,” said Jake, “don’t want to read your book when it’s written. If it wasn’t that I thought you might finally fall in love with me and marry me, I wouldn’t even bother with you.”

He hurried on before she could interrupt with an exclamation. “Now about Rosy. We’ve got all these people that say they heard her arguing with Gertrude. Gertrude claims she was in bed passed out. These people that heard the fight, they make what is a pretty good hunk of evidence. But I’ve got just one more idea by which we can get even more evidence, and maybe definite proof of what happened. I—”

While he was talking a large revolver lifted over the windowsill. A gloved hand held it. Its giant muzzle followed Jake as he moved up and down the room. Jake paused to scratch his knee, and Jill saw it. She screamed.

The gun went off with a bang. The bullet landed in the wall, three inches from Jill’s head.

Jake whirled around. He grabbed at the gun. In the next moment he had it by the muzzle and was whirling it around over his head. The hand at the window vanished. Jake stuck his head out the window. He tried to straighten the gun to shoot it; but rain pelted down across his bald head, and in the excitement, the heavy old revolver slipped through his fingers. It fell into the mud. Jake saw the vanishing figure; it was in white. It looked like a uniform.

While Jake was still bent out over the window, trying to cope with the figure which had now disappeared, Jill got to her feet. She opened the door of the office and ran into the lobby. There she stopped. Jake came out after her.

He looked upset. “You see? It must be murder.”

“It must be,” said Jill, chattering.

At that moment a figure in a bathrobe and bare feet moved in through the back of the hotel. It was Barney, the sailor. He didn’t look happy.

“You’re the house dick, aren’t you?”

“That I am,” said Jake.

“Well, some skunk stole my uniform. I don’t know what kind of a joint you’ve got here. But I demand you find my whites or I’ll sue you birds right up to your eyeteeth!”

“My goodness,” said Jill.

“You go back to your room,” said Jake. “I’ll instigate an investigation into the disappearance of your uniform.”

Barney moved off grumbling. He was wet from the rain. But he’d had to come down stairs which are outside; and along the balcony which was only partially protected by a sloping roof.

“Why didn’t you look and see if he’d rolled up his pants, taken off his shoes and stockings; and was just fooling us,” asked Jill. “He could have done that, and put on the bathrobe over his uniform.”

“Because,” said Jake, “I’ve got my own ideas. Though, I’ll say this: The incident involving Barney’s missing whites, it’s well—” he scratched his ear lobe. “It’s peculiar.”

“Yes,” Jill replied, “very.” Then she thought of the bullet which had barely missed her, and she began once more to chatter.

Prince Kalemi came in after his last-night performance, as Jake had requested. He looked very nice, wearing a tux, and a big blue band around his waist, like a Cuban trying to look Spanish. The only thing Hawaiian about the Adonis was a silk lei which he wore around his dusky neck. Jill looked at him and sighed. Then she remembered her age.

“Tell you why I asked you to come,” said Jake. He was wetting his fingers with his tongue, and then running the wet fingers along his eyebrows to paste them down. Kalemi’s beauty made him self-conscious. “It’s like this,” he went on. “We’re pretty sure Rosy was bumped off by Gertrude.”

He told how so many people had heard the argument just prior to the fatal fall. “Now these same people are in their same rooms. If I could have that noise all over again, and they could hear it again, we could be absolutely sure. They’d swear that they’d heard the quarrel.”

“But where do I come in?” asked Kalemi.

“Well, you do imitations. You know what these taxi dance kanakas sound like when they get fighting. If you can imitate a movie star, you could sure imitate one, or two, of these babes, because you lived here in the atmosphere so long. You just go up there on the fourth floor, and for about four minutes you sound as much as you can like Rosy and Gertrude having a fight. Do you see what I mean?”

“I do. But I don’t understand how it’s going to help any.”

“Well, maybe it won’t help so very much; but it was my idea of an experiment, and I thought you might be nice enough to help me out. After all, the dead girl was once your wife.”

Kalemi bowed. “I’m glad to.”

Jake and Jill waited on the third floor balcony, while Kalemi went up to the fourth. In a moment he launched into his act. It sounded exactly like two Kanaka girls having one hell of a row. Perhaps it was the pride Kalemi had in his profession that induced him to make the sounds hauntingly real. At any rate, there wasn’t anyone of the twelve people Take had asked to listen who could believe it was one man making all those noises like two girls.

When it was over, Jake went up to the fourth floor, and Jill followed. The rain was pouring down.

“That was fine,” said Take. “Step into Rosy’s room a minute.”

They stepped into Rosy’s room. Gertrude was sitting on the floor dead drunk. She had on Barney’s whites.

Take locked the door. Jill looked at Gertrude through her lorgnette. Prince Kalemi looked at her too.

“Poor girl,” said Jake. “These kids get hysterical when things happen. There was so much evidence against her that she had killed Rosy that she went off her nut. I guess everybody was accusing her, and like that. Anyway, she got stinking drunk. She swiped Barney’s whites, and she probably got an old, ancient gun from a hock shop. She got so plastered and hysterical she was going to kill me. The reason she took Barney’s whites from next door — while the guy was taking a nap — was so if I saw anybody running away, it’d look like a sailor.”

“You mean she was the one who shot at us?” asked Jill.

Gertrude raised her weary head. Hair tumbled down about her white face. She belched; and then she began singing. Her voice was irregular and hoarse. She sang the words: “When I was young and handsome—” and stopped. She belched again.

Prince Kalemi was impatient. “Well, have you the evidence you want?”

Take turned slowly. “Yep. Against you.”

“Me?”

“That’s right. I thought this whole thing over. I just took a chance that when Gertie said she was asleep and hadn’t done any arguing, that she was telling the truth. But it was such good evidence against Gertie I began wondering how somebody could frame her with evidence like that. Then I thought of you with those imitations. It’d be easy for you to pick up Rosy outside the Rizal, get her half crocked, then come up here and shove her off.”

“Why you fool! You can’t convict me on evidence like that!”

“I think I can,” said Jake. “You sounded very real, and a lot of people heard you. Back up all that testimony with the fact that you never bothered to get a divorce from Rosy, and you’ve got something. I know you kanakas do that all the time, so I went down to city hall to check up, and there it was. You hadn’t divorced Rosy, but you were married to this Spanish woman. You’re nuts about the Spanish girl, and you didn’t want any trouble.

“But Rosy was clever. When you came here, a big success, and all high-hat like you were, she decided she’d indulge in a little blackmail. She wanted money, and lots of it, to keep still about the information that you were a bigamist. You stood not only to lose the money, but your Spanish wife. You were kind of frantic when you got Rosy’s letter. So you came here to see her. You tried to settle it without no trouble. You tried to get her to keep her mouth shut, but it was no go.”

Kalemi had his back to the door; he was breathing hard.

“So when Miss Jill Conway asked you how you’d gotten Rosy’s address, she really had something. Because I’d just told her when you guys get a little dough you don’t know your old friends. You try to travel in a different circle. The way you got Rosy’s address was from that first letter she wrote you. And with the testimony of your little performance here tonight, and the fact that you’re married to two women; and the letter Rosy wrote you—”

Jake pulled an old-looking letter out of his pocket.

Kalemi had drawn a knife from his pocket. He snapped open the blade. But now he stared at the envelope.

“That isn’t the let—” He stopped.

“So there was a letter?” Jake snapped. “I figured it that way, that’s why I— Well, there’s witnesses that can—”

Kalemi was moving forward. “You runt, you insignificant little—” He kept coming, the knife blade pointed toward Jake’s throat. “I’m going to kill you!”

Jake was ready for Kalemi. He’d picked up a little ju jitsu in his day. But he didn’t have the chance to try it. Kalemi had walked past Jill; and now she picked up a light wicker chair and slammed it across Kalemi’s head. The Hawaiian was unhurt, but enraged. He whirled around. Jill saw the knife and screamed.

Jake grabbed Kalemi’s arm, twisted it behind him. The Hawaiian howled, and dropped the knife. Jake whirled the huge man over his shoulder. Ju jitsu at last. When Kalemi thudded to the floor, Jake was on him, putting on handcuffs.

Gertrude was drunkenly unconscious of the drama. She began once more to sing. “When I was young and handsome, it was my chief delight, to go to balls and dances...”

Jill wrote in her notes the following day:

“As I reflect back over the case of the corpse with the dirty feet, it seems to me that the most horrible thing about it was the song that Gertrude insisted upon singing; time will eventually put from my memory the thought of Prince Kalemi’s broken confession that night at the police station; and too, the noises Barney made when he found Gertrude had not only stolen his uniform but had stained it, will slip away from me. But I shall never forget that song Gertrude kept singing over and over. It haunts me. ‘When I was young and handsome...’ ”

The Doc and the Dame

by Eric Howard

Two cops chase an unknown killer — and we bet you’ll never guess who it was.

* * *

They pulled me off the traffic detail, where I was really doing something important, getting rid of deathtrap crossings, and put me on Homicide. I didn’t like it. But when you’re on the cops you do as you’re told. It’s like the army.

My partner, Luke Hennessey, had always been a Homicide man. Murder was his meat. He came into the office while I was studying a big map of the city, trying to see how the traffic jam at Sixth and Central could be eliminated. Three people had been killed there during the past month, four more injured. Luke stood there, looking down at me, with a grin on his broad, good-natured face.

“Still worried about the gas-buggies?” he asked. “I’ve got a better puzzle for you.” He tossed a sheet of paper down before me. “Read that, Mike.”

It was a sheet of cheap yellow paper, with a brief note typed in capital letters. It read: “Dr. Harris did not kill himself. He was shot by a man with a deep scar on his right cheek, black hair and black eyes.”

Luke sat down on the edge of the desk, pushed his hat back. I looked up at him, questioningly.

“I had a hunch there was something phony about that suicide,” he said. “Why should the old Doc kill himself?”

“Well, why not?” I argued. “He was sick, broke, all through. Living in that cheap, dirty hotel. He had lost everything — money, family, standing.”

“But not courage,” Luke smiled. “He still had that. He was still fighting. As long as a guy has courage, he doesn’t do the Dutch. Let’s go down there again.”

I handed him the note, which he folded and put in a billfold. I reluctantly left my traffic problem and got in the car with Luke. He drove down to the old firetrap where Dr. Harris had lived — and died.

The slovenly wife of the man who ran the hotel had found him on the floor of his room last night, after hearing a shot. He was lying on the floor, with a bullet hole in his head, and he had the gun in his hand. It looked like suicide.

The doctor was seventy. Two years before they had taken his license to practice away from him, after he had publicly admitted that he had performed an operation while drunk. His patient had died, and he had violently accused himself, saying that such doctors should be locked up. He could have covered it up, but in his grief and nervous excitement he had asked to be punished.

His second wife, considerably younger, had divorced him. He had settled everything he owned on her and had slipped down to the slums, to this cheap hotel. He had stopped drinking and had tried to start over in various kinds of work — selling gadgets from house to house, odd jobs and things like that.

He hadn’t had much luck. He ate when people fed him. He owed two months’ room rent, but the hotel man let him stay because the Doc had given him something for his stomach ulcers. The Doc had two stepchildren, his second wife’s kids, but they had run out on him, too, after his disgrace.

It still looked like suicide to me, no matter what Luke said, but he knew more about such things than I did.

“We’ll try to get a line on the scar-faced guy, with black hair and eyes,” Luke said. “Maybe this note means something.”

“Who wrote it?”

“You got me, Mike,” Luke shrugged. “It came into Headquarters in a plain envelope. Maybe a nut. Maybe somebody that saw the killer. Maybe — if he’s blond and baby-faced — the killer himself. Sometimes guys like that like to give us poor dumb cops some trouble.”

We went into the dump where the Doc had lived. It was smelly and dirty, and the man who ran it — Linker, by name — was dirty, too. Luke asked him about Scarface. He didn’t know such a guy; or, if he did, he wasn’t telling what he knew.

We went upstairs to the Doc’s room. It hadn’t been cleaned up yet. It was just as we had seen it last night, except that Doc’s body had been removed. There was a blood stain added to all the other dirt on the carpet. And Doc’s few possessions were still there.

I looked across the hall. There was a door almost opposite. Somebody in there, if the door was open, would have the best chance to spot the guy who came after Doc. I crossed the hall and put my hand on the knob.

“Hey! Don’t bother her!” the hotel man said. “She’s asleep. She works all night and her dogs give her hell. Let her sleep.”

“Who?” I said.

“Belle Henry. She’s a waitress on the night shift down at Sharkey’s Grill in the next block.”

I would have let her sleep, being a traffic engineer at heart, but Luke shoved Linker aside and opened the door.

“Jeez!” gasped Linker. And we said things, too.

Belle Henry, a fat blonde, was asleep all right — her last sleep. There was a knife in her back. A dusty curtain had been ripped off the window, probably by the man with the knife as he got in or out of the room, by way of the window and the fire escape.

“Nice place you run, Linker,” Luke said. “And this is not suicide.”

“It ain’t my fault,” Linker growled. “It could happen in the Biltmore. Jeez, Belle has been here for three years, never missed a rent day.”

“That’s all you care about, huh?”

“No, I liked her. Belle was all right. She was a good-natured girl and kind-hearted, too. She was always feeding the Doc. He took care of her when she had the flu. She thought he was swell.”

“And this is what it got her.”

Luke phoned in, got the boys to come down and take charge.

“Come on, Mike,” he said to me. “I want to look around another dump.”

He warned Linker not to touch anything till the medical examiner and the rest of them got there. He dragged me down the street, lined with pawn shops, cheap clothing stores, flop joints and employment offices. There were a lot of men hanging around, waiting for jobs; tough huskies, most of them, who had stuck around town all winter, getting by this way and that, waiting for construction work to open up in the spring.

Now it was spring, but things weren’t opening up. They were in for a long hard summer, most of them; and that meant the cops would have trouble. Some of these guys would get hungry; they’d pull stick-ups; they’d crack open service stations and so on; some of them would use rods on their jobs, or saps, and kill people.

We would have plenty to do, and meanwhile the traffic problem would get worse and worse. Traffic had me worried. But the Doc’s death — and now Belle’s — was different. The Doc had nothing to steal. Robbery hadn’t entered into it. Somebody had got him for other reasons. And Belle, too.

We went into Sharkey’s Grill, where Belle had worked. It was not run by a guy named Sharkey. The proprietor was a big, pallid Greek with stiff, bristly hair cut short, whose name was Sam Popoupolos. He thought Sharkey was a good trade name. He served two-bit meals, featuring tough steaks that covered a large area but were paper thin and greasy enough to give a coyote the bellyache. He was standing at the cashier’s desk, up front, typing out a menu with two thick fingers on a battered old typewriter.

He knew we were cops and gave us an oily smile.

Luke swung the typewriter around, looked at the print. He pulled out the note. Anybody could see that it had been typed on this machine — by Belle, maybe. Belle must have seen Scarface go to the Doc’s room. Afraid to talk, she had taken this way of letting the cops know what the killer looked like. That had been just too bad for Belle.

“What’s worryin’ you boys?” Sam asked.

“A girl named Belle Henry work for you?” Luke said.

“Sure. She’s my best girl. Been with me three years. I couldn’t hardly get along without Belle.”

“You’ll have to, feller,” Luke said. “Somebody stuck a knife in her.”

“Huh! You mean— Hey! You mean somebody — croaked Belle?”

Luke nodded, watching him. The Greek looked scared. His eyes shifted and his face twitched.

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Funny, ain’t it? Right after Doc Harris got shot. They tell me Belle liked the old Doc.”

“Didn’t Doc kill himself?” Sam asked. “I heard—”

“Looks like it now, don’t it?” Luke said sarcastically. “No. Some guy killed Doc. Belle got a look at him and got shut up. You wouldn’t know anything, would you?”

“Me? No. All I know is, Belle was O.K. She was right, see? She was havin’ trouble with her dogs and I was buyin’ her some shoes the Doc said she ought to have. Belle was a pal. Sure, she liked Doc. Used to feed him in here or take stuff up to him. I never kicked. Doc was all right.”

Luke shifted his feet, looked around the place, then back at the Greek.

“You know a black-haired guy with black eyes and a deep scar on his right cheek?” he said.

Sam shook his head. “A lot of guys come in here, but I don’t remember nobody like that. No.”

I was just going to grab his arm and call him a cockeyed liar when Luke stepped on my foot. I kept still.

“If you do see such a guy, let me know,” Luke said. “So long, Sam.”

“So long, boys. This about Belle — it’s got me down. I depended on her. Lots o’ times I let her run the place when I wanted to take time off. I’m good for her funeral and if I can help get the guy that knifed her— Say! Did you boys know Doc’s son was down here last night?”

“Huh? His son?”

“Stepson. I guess. He was in here talking to Belle about the Doc. Say, he’s black-haired and black-eyed. Only there’s no scar on his face.”

“What did he want to see Belle about?”

“He was asking about his old man — what had made him bump himself, and like that. And there was something about insurance, too.”

“Insurance?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Belle told me after. Doc had some insurance, all paid up. His missus, the one that split with him, this punk’s mama, was the bene... bene — you know. So the kid said.”

“Beneficiary,” Luke nodded. “Does the punk go by Harris’s name?”

“No, his name is Rogers, so Belle said! Bert Rogers. She gave him the devil because he was never down to see Doc until he died.”

“Thanks. You see a guy with a scar on his face, you let me know.”

“Yeah! Always glad to help you boys out.”

Bert Rogers lived with his mother, the Doc’s ex-wife, and his sister, in a comfortable old house on a wide boulevard. Bert was home when we got there. So was Mama, a fluttery dame about fifty, scatter-brained and full of chatter. And Bert’s sister, a serious-eyed, seventeen-year-old girl with looks; as quiet as her mother was talky.

Bert and Mama were screwballs, nervous, irritable, always interrupting each other and exchanging savage looks. The young girl was all right. Maybe Mama had divorced the Doc because he drank, but she hit the bottle herself. So did Bert. He was about twenty-two, a runt, unhealthy looking; and I’d have bet that he occasionally got high on reefers.

We didn’t get much out of them. They talked a lot, but said little. The dame was mad because the Doc’s death had brought her more scandal. She didn’t know or care whether it was suicide or murder. All she cared about was that the Doc had brought her grief, nothing but grief.

“Yeah,” said Luke. “He set you up to all this, too. When you ditched him, he gave you all the dough he had. The poor guy had an alcoholic conscience. And now about this insurance.” He turned to Bert. “How do I know you didn’t go down and croak the old man, so Mama here could collect?”

The girl gasped, but Bert sneered. He stuck a cigarette between his teeth, let it dangle from his lower lip, and said, “How do I know what you know? What do I care what you think, copper? Try and pin something on me. Go ahead and try.”

Luke grinned at him. “When did you hear the Doc was dead? Where were you?”

“I’m not talking until I see my lawyer,” the punk said. “But I was in a place where a lot of people saw me, right up to the time the news came out.”

I walked over to him. I looked at Luke and he nodded. I put my hand on the punk’s thin neck, lifted him out of the chair, swung my fist under his nose. He yelled; so did Mama.

“Where was this place?” I said.

“The Parisian Inn,” he spluttered. “A lot of people saw me there.”

“Jud Marvin’s spot,” said Luke. “So you hang around there? That helps.”

I didn’t see how, but if Luke thought so, all right. We walked out, with Luke warning them to stay put. The young sister followed us into the hall. She seemed to want to say things to us and I gave her a smile.

“Could I— Would they let me see Dad?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “You liked him?”

“Oh, yes! He was always very good to me. I was very sorry for him. Mother is — difficult. I think that’s why he drank. But he was a wonderful surgeon, a wonderful man!” The kid was whispering, and she meant every word of it.

“Florence!” Mama yelled. “Florence! Come here!”

“If I can go to the — the morgue,” she said, “will they let me see him?”

“Sure, honey,” I said. “Tell ’em we said so — Hennessey and McGuire.”

“Thank you!” she breathed, and went back to mama.

“Lousy people,” Luke muttered, as we piled into the car. “Except the kid. Well, let’s go down to Jud Marvin’s.”

“Why?”

“I smelled something like Jud. You know what, boy? This could be bigger than we think. We were going to skip it as the suicide of an old guy who didn’t count any more, just a poor old tramp who hit the skids. But it’s different now. There’s more to it. Let’s talk to Jud.”

Jud Marvin was two hundred and fifty pounds of immobile fat. The guy needed exercise, but never took it. He had a suite of rooms upstairs over his Parisian Café — an office, bedroom and bath — and he spent most of his time there, except when he was downstairs.

He was expecting us. He had been tipped off by a buzzer as we walked in.

“Hello, boys,” he said. “Have a drink? Have a cigar? No? What can I do for you?”

“Help us find a guy, Jud,” Luke said. “You’re doing all right here. Nobody’s bothering you. You want it to stay like that, don’t you?”

Jud smiled. “I’m going to keep it like that,” he said. “It costs me some dough, but I lay it on the line the first of every month. Tell me.”

“Did you hear about a guy named Doc Harris doing the Dutch?”

“Yeah, I heard about it. Some of the boys were talking.”

“He was murdered, Jud, for some pretty good reason. And a dame he knew, a waitress in Sharkey’s Grill, got it, too, on account she tried to tip us off about the killer. A guy with black hair and black eyes and a scar on his right cheek. That’s the one we’re looking for. Maybe you can help us.”

Jud blew cigar smoke toward the ceiling. “I don’t know anybody like that,” he said. “I don’t get around much. But I’ll be glad to help. I’ll put my boys on it. If there’s some guy like that going around killing people, the boys may be able to find him for you.”

“Thanks,” Luke said dryly. “You know Bert Rogers?”

“A punk?”

“A punk.”

“Yeah, he comes here. He was making a play for one of the dancers in our floor show. Why?”

“He’s Doc Harris’s stepson and his old lady, Mrs. Harris, who took everything the old Doc had when he got in a jam and she divorced him, is the beneficiary of an insurance policy Doc had — ten grand she overlooked when she took him to the cleaners.”’

Jud shook his big head. “That’s dames for you,” he said. “They’ll do it every time.”

“You got any ideas about this setup?”

Jud shook his head, blew more smoke. “Unless the punk did it, so the old lady would cash in and he could get his hands on some jack. He’s short of change. He gave me a rubber check some time back, but he made it right. No, I don’t know a thing, boys. You want me to try to find this scar-faced guy for you?”

“Wish you would, Jud. Thanks.”

That was that. When we went out, Luke was muttering, “The damned whale! I’d like to stick a harpoon in that blubber of his and make him yell. I know him. He was lying right down the line.”

Luke was cussing and shifting gears. Suddenly I said, “Wait! Look at this!”

A thin guy, in a light overcoat, stepping high, was approaching the entrance of the Parisian Café. His lips were moving as he talked to himself, and his eyes had a glassy look. He was hopped to the gills. But the interesting thing about him was the scar on his right cheek — and his black hair and black eyes.

“You!” I said.

When he saw I meant him, he shot his hand down into his overcoat pocket. And brought it out fast, with an automatic. He slid back toward the wall of Jud’s building. I was climbing out of the car, and he was telling me to stand still or he’d do things. I stood still and got my hands up. I thought what a sap I was, yelling at him that way without having my gun on him. But Luke had taken care of that.

Luke had got out of the car when I first spoke. He had circled around. The glassy-eyed guy was concentrating his attention on me. Luke smashed down on his right arm; a slug hit the concrete. Then Luke drove one to the side of his neck, caught him as he fell and brought him to the car.

“Drive on, Mike,” he said.

Jud’s doorman saw us leave.

“Headquarters?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” Luke said. “They’d spring him before we could work him over. My place.”

Luke’s place was a flat up above a delicatessen shop, on a little, forgotten street that hadn’t changed in twenty years. It was cheap, roomy and all by itself. The Swiss cheese and bologna merchant down below owned the building, rented Luke the upstairs and asked no questions. Luke had a garage in the yard back of the place, and there was a rear stairway. We took the scar-faced guy up that way. Luke yelled to the delicatessen man:

“Ignatz, send up some beef sandwiches, half a dozen bottles of beer and a side order of chili.”

“Honest, is his name Ignatz?”

“Honest,” said Luke. “Throw that guy on the couch while I telephone.”

I tossed Scarface down and sat on him, while Luke phoned Headquarters. They had just done the usual, routine stuff on the two murders and had nothing new for us, except that they had found the Doc’s insurance policy and a brief will. He had scratched his former wife’s name and had written in Belle Henry’s. In his one-paragraph will, he cut his ex-wife and the two kids off with a dollar apiece, directed that the insurance money go to Belle “for her great kindness.”

The police chemist said this had been written at least a month before. Belle, apparently, hadn’t known the Doc intended to reward her.

“So who gets it?” I asked. “Belle’s heirs, if any.”

The scar-faced guy was coming out of it. When Luke hits ’em on the side of the neck, they’re paralyzed for a while. This one woke up mean and scared.

“Cops, huh?” he said. “What do you want me for? Somebody put you on me? Huh? Who?”

“Yeah, we got word you shot Doc Harris. And if you did, then you also stabbed a dame named Belle Henry.”

“I’ll kill that fat—!” the guy yelled.

“He can’t cross me and then frame me! I’ll kill—”

“That’ll make three,” Luke said. “Why’d you kill the old Doc?”

“You damn fool!” the guy popped off. “I didn’t! Why should I? I don’t even know the mutt. I don’t know this dame you claim got stabbed. You think I go around killin’ people I don’t know?”

“You might — if the price was right.”

He swung off the couch and looked at us, earnestly. “Listen, coppers, it’s a frame, see? I had a little business deal on with a guy—”

“Jud Marvin,” Luke said.

“Yeah, Marvin. When the pay-off time came, he welshed. Gave me the run-around. He thinks I can’t get to him in that joint of his. I’ll get there if I have to tear it to pieces! He thinks he’s a big shot in this town. Thinks he can cross me because I’m a stranger here. Then he put you guys on me. Don’t be saps! I never killed those people. But give me a break and I’ll toss a murder right in your lap. I’ll bump Marvin.”

“Too bad, but it’s against the law,” Luke grinned. “That would make us accessories. What was the deal you had with Jud?”

“That’s none of your business,” the guy said, “and if you think you can make me talk, try.”

“Don’t be so hard,” Luke said. “You might scare my partner, Mike McGuire, only the McGuires scare hard. If you’re telling it straight, tell us this: Why would Marvin want to rub out old Doc Harris?”

“I’ll tell you why,” the guy said. “Sure! The old guy was a surgeon, huh? I heard about it. He fixed up two of Marvin’s boys. Two guys that got hurt in that Second National stick-up, a couple of weeks ago. They held a gun on this Doc and made him do it. He was tough about it. He said he was going to report it to you cops. They told him what would happen if he did. Marvin thought he had him scared. But the old coot had guts, huh?”

“He had ’em,” Luke said. “But he didn’t report.”

“He was going to. There was more to it. Something about a punk kid that had lost some jack to Marvin. The Doc wanted that squared. If Jud had fixed it, Doc wouldn’t tell the cops, he said. But Jud gave him the laugh. Like he give me!”

“Thanks, pal,” said Luke. “This kind of clears things up. Marvin had Doc bumped. Belle was wise, so they got her too. Then they typed that note in Sharkey’s Grill, like it came from Belle, describing you as one we wanted.”

“Yeah? Why in hell should I kill ’em? Give me a break, cops! Let me get that fat—”

“Now, now!” Luke shook his finger at him. “Take it easy. Be good and maybe we’ll overlook your recent jobs in this town. Would you know which of Jud’s boys were on the Second National project? And where the wounded ones could be picked up?”

“No. Give me a crack at Jud and I’ll find out for you.”

“The guy has just one idea,” Luke grinned. “He wants a crack at Jud.”

Somebody knocked on the door and Luke said, “O.K., Ignatz, bring it in.”

It wasn’t Ignatz. A guy kicked the door open and all we saw was the business end of a submachine gun.

“If we turn loose,” the guy said, and I didn’t care for the way he talked, “none of you will ever walk out of here. Throw your guns to the door, coppers. We want your playmate, little Willie the squealer.”

“Come in and get him,” Luke invited.

“Toss your guns, cops!”

“Oke,” said Luke, and we obeyed.

The machine gun didn’t move, but a second guy ducked forward, picked up our two Police Positives.

“Where’s the other guy’s gat?”

“He dropped it when we picked him up,” Luke said. “Where’s Jud?”

“Jud who?” the guy asked, and stepped into the room.

The second man, holding our guns, followed him and kicked the door shut.

“There’s two of the rats that pulled the Second National job,” Scarface said. “The other two are the ones your Doc fixed up. That makes it easy, copper. One of these muggs killed the Doc and the dame.”

The second man swung his right hand with a gun in it. He caught Scarface on the jaw, knocked him down on the couch.

“I’ll cut your guts out for that,” Scarface said, but he’d never get a chance, the way things looked.

But I didn’t know Scarface. He was one tough little guy. The man with the machine gun was facing Luke and me. The other one was standing over Scarface. All at once Scarface sent two pillows at them — right to the nose. At the same time he jumped, or maybe you’d call it diving, and hit the guy with our guns right on the knees.

Luke hit the floor, too, got the machine-gunner around the legs, brought him down. I jumped across the room, kicked the guy in the head and knocked him cold.

The Police Positives had roared a couple of times, but when I got around to looking at Scarface, he was on his feet, near the door, one of the guns in his hand.

“Stay back, copper,” he said. “I’m going after Marvin. I told that rat I’d cut his guts out.”

I looked down. So did Luke. Scarface had sunk a knife in one of Jud’s boys — an ordinary pocket knife, with a blade about three inches long, only it opened with the push of a button. Scarface had twisted it around. He wouldn’t rob any more banks.

The door banged and Scarface was out.

“Get that damned hop-head!” Luke yelled.

He grabbed up the other gun, ran out the door. I nabbed the machine gun and went to the window. There was a sedan down there and a fat man was filling the back seat. Marvin!

It was too late even to warn Jud. Almost as soon as I spotted him, Scarface got him. Marvin’s big body just settled over to one side, as though he had decided to take a nap.

Then Scarface was running down the street, Luke after him, and Ignatz, downstairs, was cheering him on. Scarface was all for getting away; he didn’t stop to do any shooting. Luke lamed him, first in one leg, then the other. When he went down, Luke jumped him and snapped handcuffs on him.

“Call Headquarters,” he yelled up to me, “and get the wagon. Tell ’em Hennessey and McGuire have done it again! Tell the chief—”

I went to the phone and reported in. Our boss, Blair, yelled at me: “Where you guys been? Why in hell don’t you do what I say? Get down here — quick!”

As soon as the wagon came, we left. Luke was saying what he thought of Blair, who was always riding us.

“We clean up two murders, a bank stick-up and incidentally get rid of Jud Marvin,” he griped. “And what does it get us from Blair? A reprimand!”

We walked in on Blair and Luke started to tell him all we had done.

“Yeah?” Blair grunted. “You cleaned up two murders? You two? Nuts! We’ve got the guy who killed the Doc and Belle — right in the next room. He’s confessed.”

“One of Jud’s boys,” Luke said.

“No,” said Blair. “Not one of Jud’s boys. Maybe you cleaned up the Second National job. Maybe, I said. But I sent you out on two Homicides.” He swung the door open. A guy was sitting under a bright light. He screamed when he saw Blair who must’ve been roughing him a bit.

It was Sam Popoupolos.

“Him?” I said.

“Yeah, him,” Blair nodded, and shut the door. Luke looked kind of sick. “You boys overlook things. I don’t. I check on everything. Sam married Belle three months ago. When you told me the note was written on the typewriter in the grill, I looked ’em up and got all I could on Sam and Belle. Somebody else might have used the machine, but Sam had the best chance at it. So I found out they were married. Why did Sam marry this dame? Love? Not him. There were plenty of younger, prettier dames around. So why? Because the Doc told him he had made over his insurance to Belle. Simple, huh?

“Why did he kill the Doc? So Belle would get that jack and he could use it. And why did he kill Belle? He had to. She knew the gun he used. She had seen it in his desk. She accused him. He lied to her, got her to believe somebody had stolen the gun.

“But he couldn’t take a chance. He had to shut her up. Then he wrote the note about this scar-faced punk — he had seen him with Marvin and heard he was a gunman. He thought you boys would stumble around if he gave you something to trip over. Scarface was one, the Rogers punk another. But he’s coughed up the whole story — the gun’s his, the knife in Belle is his; it checks and checks again.”

Luke sat down. “Well, anyway,” he began, “we—”

“You!” Blair snapped. “Hennessey, you’d be good pounding pavements again. And you, McGuire, you’d—”

“I’d like to go back to traffic,” I said meekly. “There’s a jam at Sixth and Central that—”

Blair waved his hands. “Get out, the both of you!” he roared.

Dusty Death

by Jackson Gregory, Jr

The fingers of the dead reach out to point a killer.

* * *

Big Bill Meadows tossed the check for his dinner and his last four-bit piece onto the rubber mat along side the cash register. When the girl behind the register glanced up at him, he winked at her. She pretended not to notice him, but all the same she was smiling when she handed him his four cents change. Big Bill did that to women — for several reasons they always smiled at him.

He picked up the four pennies and laughed. “That’s a lot of money for a single man, sister,” he said. “How about helping me spend it later on?”

The girl laughed too. “Well, I don’t get through here until eleven o’clock,” she said.

“Swell,” he told her. “I’ll be looking at you in two hours. And say, you better keep this for me; I might spend some of it.” He slid the pennies out of his big hand into the palm of her little one. He grinned at her again, then turned for the door.

Two men were coming in through the door when Big Bill was starting out. He acted as though they didn’t exist and walked right into them and through them, sent them staggering out onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, you!” one of the men yelled. “What the hell’s the idea!”

There was still a grin on Bill Meadows’ face when he turned around and said: “Feel like making something out of it, buddy?”

The man looked at Bill’s heavy jaw, at his thick, broad shoulders and the flat, narrow waist; he looked at the biceps that filled the arms of his blue coat. Then he mumbled:

“Well, you might look where you’re going once in a while.”

Deep laughter rumbled up out of Big Bill’s chest. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. Then his right hand flicked up from his side, knocked the man’s hat off, sent it spinning into the gutter.

Still laughing, he turned his back to the men and strode up the street. He stuck his hands in his pockets, and then pulled them out again because there wasn’t any money in those pockets to rattle.

His legs carried him in long strides through the people who were moving on the sidewalk. He was headed for a place where he could get all the money he’d want for the next few days. Here in the biggest city he had ever been in there was money every place that was his for the taking.

Big Bill wasn’t hiding out. Sure he had driven an ax into the skull of a fellow logger up in the big timber country, but what the hell? While things were blowing over, he’d stay here in the city and have a good time. And that meant money.

Two blocks up the street he stopped in front of a pawnshop. He had spotted the place yesterday, looked it over from the outside and even gone inside and pretended that he was going to buy a camera. So he knew what he was going to do and how to do it.

He swung the door open and stepped inside. As he was closing the door behind him, he flipped on the catch so that it locked. The old man behind the counter at the back of the shop looked up at him as he strode down between the glass cases. The old man had a round head like a pool ball and round eyes that looked big behind his thick-lensed glasses.

“Hello, Pop,” Big Bill said. He leaned on the counter and grinned at the old man.

The pawnebroker squinted at Bill Meadows and grinned back. “Say, you’re the guy what told me the joke about the woman and the two dogs.” He chuckled.

“That’s me, sure enough,” Big Bill said. “Listen, Pop, I got to have a suitcase, and I got to have a good price on it. Think you can fix me up?”

“Can I fix you up?” The old man rubbed his hands together in evident pleasure. The middle finger of his left hand was a stump — a caloused stump that ended where the first knuckle should have been.

“With the best price in town,” he said. “You come on with me. The suitcases are in the back room.”

Bill knew that the suitcases were in the back room. He followed the old man through a narrow door.

It was a dusty, cobwebby place, that room. The walls were crowded with shelves loaded with dust-covered odds and ends. On one shelf were stacked half a dozen suitcases. The old man pointed and said:

“There, son, take your choice. You pick out the one you like and then we’ll fix the price.”

“Let’s see that one.” Big Bill pointed to one high on the shelf. “The tan one up there.”

While the old man got a ladder and climbed up for the suitcase, Big Bill spotted the light switch. Then the old man came down with the bag, wiping the dust off the leather with his hands.

The pawnbroker said, “This is the best piece of luggage in the shop, son.”

Bill grinned. “Yeah, that looks pretty good.” Then he drove his fist at the pawnbroker’s face.

The old man saw it coming and tried to duck. Fear made him fast, a lot faster than Bill would have guessed he could ever be. But he wasn’t quite quick enough. The blow caught him on the side of the cheek, sprawled him backward. He fell on his hands and knees on the floor.

The old man was squealing like a frightened rabbit. When he tried to get to his feet and run he looked so funny and scared that Big Bill laughed out loud. Then he jumped on the old man.

It was even funnier when the old man tried to fight back. He threw his arms around Bill and tried to wrestle with him. Then he began to pound Bill’s face. The old man’s glasses were off and his eyes popped out big and round with near-sighted fright.

Big Bill left his hand over the pawnbroker’s mouth while he rolled him over onto his face. Then he put both his knees in the middle of the man’s back and began to pull up with both hands on his head. He didn’t have to pull very hard because the neck was thin and scrawny. It broke easily.

After Big Bill had pulled on a pair of black cotton gloves, he carried the pawnbroker across the room and tossed him into a dark corner. Then he took the suitcase and threw it on top of the man. He took a couple of more suitcases down off the shelf and threw them on top of the body, too. He found an empty cardboard box and covered up the old man’s feet with that.

There was gray dust from the floor on Big Bill’s knees. Carefully he brushed it off of the blue serge. Then he turned off all the lights except the dim night bulb up at the front of the shop. It glimmered over the drawer in the back of the counter where the old man kept his cash.

Big Bill went straight to that drawer, jerked it open and scooped his gloved hand into the metal box that held the money. He stuffed all the paper into his left-hand pocket and let the coins rattle into his right pocket. He grinned at the jingle of the cash and the weight it made in his pocket.

He looked through the windows at the front of the shop. There were a lot of people on the street. They didn’t stop to look in, but one of them might see and remember him if he went out that front door. But there was an alley running behind this building, so there would be a door opening out on it.

The coins in his pocket made a merry sound when they chinked together. He looked around the shop. He could see the dim shapes of the many things that were collected there. Anything that he wanted here was his, and it made him feel good to know that, but he didn’t want any of it. He was too smart to take anything that could be traced to him.

He was thinking all this, and thinking too how lucky he was to have been born with a smart-thinking head as well as a hard-hitting body, when he heard a sound. It was a sound that made the muscles in his body jump out into sharp, quivering ridges and brought his legs into a crouch. Somebody was pounding on the front door.

He pushed his body tight against the back wall where the shadows were heavy. Outlined in the door he could see the thick form of a uniformed cop. The cop was shading his eyes and peering into the dimly lighted shop.

Big Bill dropped down behind the counter. He had to get out of there, get out fast and without being seen.

As he crept toward the narrow doorway, he heard the cop calling: “Matt! Oh Matt! Open up! It’s me, Joe.” Then he was in the back room and groping toward the door that would let him out on the alley. He passed the pile of suitcases and saw that the old man’s hand with its missing middle finger had flopped out into the open.

Three blocks away from the shop, Big Bill stopped in front of a gum machine and looked at himself in the mirror. He brushed dust off the front of his coat, grinned at himself. He was plenty pleased with the way he had pulled off the job. They’d never be able to trace it to him. The old man was dead, and there wasn’t so much as a slug in him to point to who had killed him. Yeah, the whole thing had been pretty slick.

It was still a little more than an hour before the girl in the restaurant would be through work. He decided he’d just sort of wander back toward the pawnshop and see what was happening there.

As he walked up the street, he stuck his hand into his pocket and let the coins trickle through his fingers. He’d really be able to show that girl a big time tonight.

A block from the pawnshop he crossed to the opposite side of the street. The door to the shop was standing wide open and all the lights inside were burning, but Bill didn’t want to stand there staring.

Just ahead of him and directly across the street from the shop was a bar. He walked in there and sat on one of the stools in front of the bar. By turning his head and looking out through the window he could see right into the shop.

The bartender came over. He was young and blond and looked bored with his job.

“Rye with a beer chaser,” Bill said.

Big Bill poured whiskey into the glass until it bulged up higher than the rim. Then he pushed the bottle toward the bartender and said: “Better join me.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The barkeep added a dash of bitters to his. “Here’s how,” he said.

The whiskey felt hot and made saliva pour into Bill’s mouth. He rolled his tongue around with pleasure.

“That’s damn good,” he said. Then he reached for his beer. He was sucking in the foam when he heard the long, high wail of approaching sirens.

He wanted to look across the street, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Must be a fire.”

“Yeah.” The bartender walked over to the window and looked up and down the street. Bill looked too. He saw a cop standing on the curb in front of the pawnshop; probably the same one who’d been pounding on the door.

“What the hell? They’re stopping at Matt’s place,” the barkeep said, staring at the radio car that pulled to the opposite curb. The cops piled out of the car, and an ambulance pulled up behind them.

Big Bill watched the men in the ambulance haul out a stretcher and follow the cops into the pawnshop. Then he poured himself another full drink.

The bartender was still looking out the window. “Wonder what happened,” he said.

“Guess somebody got hurt.” Big Bill was doing some wondering too — wondering why the ambulance if the old man was dead. If the old pawnbroker were alive — but he couldn’t be.

A crowd was gathering across the street in front of the shop. Bill reached in his pocket for two half-dollars, tossed them on the bar.

“Keep the change,” he said. “Guess I’ll go over and see what’s going on.”

“How about coming back and telling me?” the barkeep asked. “If you’ll do that, the drinks’re on me.”

“O.K.” He strode out of the place and across the street. As he reached the crowd, it parted to let the ambulance men through with their stretcher. Lying there, his head still twisted to the side, was the pawnbroker. He looked dead all right.

Big Bill tried to get closer, but the pack of the people kept him back. Before he could break through, the old man had been shoved into the back of the ambulance. Bill watched the ambulance scream up the street.

The crowd began to thin out. The cops came out of the building and stood beside the prowl car. One of the radio cops said, “Don’t take it so hard, Joe. We’ll get the guy.”

“Yeah.” Joe said dully He was the big cop that had pounded on the door.

The patrolmen drove away and Bill grinned as he looked at the cop called Joe. Those dumb heels would never guess that he was the guy they were looking for.

When Joe walked to the front door of the shop and locked it, Bill strode over to him.

“Hello,” he said “Was the old man hurt bad?”

“How’d you feel if somebody broke your neck?” Joe said, biting his words off sharp.

“Broke his neck!” Bill shook his head slowly. “Say, that is bad. Was he dead?”

“No,” Joe said.

Big Bill’s body grew tense. The old man was alive! His eyelids drew together as he thought what that meant. He forced himself to say: “I’m sure glad to hear that. He looked pretty bad when they brought him out.”

When Joe spoke, it was more to himself than to Big Bill. He said: “The doc says he isn’t going to come out of it, not even enough to say who murdered him. He couldn’t even recognize me. He couldn’t do anything but groan when we moved him.”

“Gawd, that’s tough.” Bill said. He felt the warm glow of security inside of him now that he knew that the old man had not said anything and never would. “That’s sure tough,” he said again. “Did you know him?”

“Yes,” Joe answered. “I knew him. The squarest guy I ever did know. I know his wife, too, and his kids.”

“That’s hell,” Big Bill sympathized. “Makes you feel lousey just to think of it. Say, come over and have a drink with me. It’ll make you feel better.”

The cop looked at him for a minute, then said: “O.K.” They walked across the street shoulder to shoulder.

When they came in through the door, the bartender said: “Hello, Joe. What happened over there at Matt’s? I couldn’t see.”

Big Bill sat on a stool. Joe leaned against the end of the bar, explained:

“Some rat broke Matt’s neck, broke it just to get the few lousy dollars Matt had in his drawer.”

“No! What a hell of a thing to do!”

“It sure is!” Big Bill said. “Better break out that whiskey.”

The cop was nervous. He killed his drink, filled his glass again. Carrying his whiskey, he crossed the room. Bill watched him in the mirror behind the bar. The cop pulled the plunger on a pin-game machine a couple of times. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket, looked in it for a nickel. Then he turned back toward the bar.

Joe stopped suddenly, staring. The muscles of his face knotted. The whiskey glass in his hand dropped to the floor. Big Bill, watching him in the mirror, saw that the cop’s eyes were focussed on his back.

“Where’d you get that?” Joe asked, his voice so low and hoarse that it was almost a whisper.

“Get what?” Bill swung around on his stool. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“On your back.”

Bill twisted his neck around to look in the mirror. Stamped in dust in the center of his blue coat was the imprint of a hand. It was a sharply outlined impression. The middle finger was a stump.

Big Bill stared at it, and the sweat began to come out on his body. That was the old man’s hand, reaching back from the grave to damn him. He rubbed his hand across his face, and then turned to the cop. Joe had moved over so that he stood between Big Bill and the door. His face was deadly calm.

Big Bill slid off his stool and stood on the floor, his hands balled up at his sides. His legs bent at the knees as his body settled into a crouch.

“Well!” he grated.

“So you killed him,” Joe said softly. “Matt left that on your coat when he tried to fight you off.”

Big Bill looked out at the street. It was empty. His eyes traveled back to Joe’s face. “So what?” he said.

“You’re under arrest,” Joe said.

“Think so?”

“Give me a chance to kill you,” Joe breathed. “I’d like that! I’d like to send you to hell for what you did to Matt.”

Big Bill had dropped lower into his crouch. Now his legs snapped straight, his body launched through the air toward the cop. His arms were stretched wide to clamp around the body of the man before him.

His arms slashed through empty air. Joe, tense and waiting, had side-stepped. As Big Bill grabbed at the bar to catch his balance, the cop’s fist hammered into the side of his face, drove him sprawling to the floor.

He bounced to his feet, shaking his head. The cop, standing with his back to the window, was looking at him. Joe’s eyes were as hard and cold as the metal of the gun he gripped in his right hand.

“So you’d like a chance to kill me!” Big Bill yelled. “Well, let’s see you do it.” He grabbed at one of the stools at the bar, tore at it frantically. It was bolted down.

“Cut it out!” Joe yelled. “Get away from there before I kill you!”

As he ripped the stool loose from the floor, Big Bill laughed, shouted out his laughter in the face of death. He swung the stool high over his head and started for Joe.

The gun in Joe’s hand jumped as flame and lead jabbed out of the snout. Big Bill kept coming, the grin on his face lopsided with pain. Joe’s gun crashed again.

Bill’s shoulders jerked as the second slug tore into his body. The chair flew out of his hands and crashed through the glass of the door. Going slower now, blood jetting out of his chest, Big Bill staggered forward. His arms were stretched wide, his fingers were distended claws.

“Stop!” Joe shouted. “Stay where you are!”

He didn’t stop. His face distorted as he started coming faster. Joe fired twice point-blank, then hurled himself out of the way.

Big Bill went past him, his head bent low his body leaning forward. He was blind with pain and approaching death. One thought inflamed his mind — there was a man that he had to get.

All of his dying strength went into one final lunge. His feet left the floor and he dove forward. His great body smashed through the plate-glass window, went sprawling onto the sidewalk outside.

Joe looked out through the gaping hole. It was very quiet, and the smell of burnt powder was acrid in his nostrils.

He stared down at the big man on the sidewalk. A penny had jumped out of the man’s pocket and was rolling toward his head. Blood was flowing out of the man’s mouth, and when the penny struck the thick stream, it fell over and stopped rolling.

Content

Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 10 — January 1939)

Arson by Baynard H. Kendrick

A Thousand Iron Men by H. W. Guernsey

Murder for Pennies by James Duncan

All-American Menace by H. H. Stinson

Jake and Jill by Steve Fisher

The Doc and the Dame by Eric Howard

Dusty Death by Jackson Gregory, Jr