Q. Patrick has won a prize in all four EQMM contests to date — and may they continue to, ad infinitum. The four prizewinning stories are, from every possible standpoint, a quality quartet — “Witness for the Prosecution,” “Love Comes to. Miss Lucy,” “Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?” and now, “Thou Lord Seest Me.” Indeed, we wonder seriously if many detective-story writers can match that foursome with short stories produced in the last four years...

The title of this year’s tale derives, of course, from the Bible. The original wording, in the 16th chapter of Genesis, 13, reads: Thou God seest me. This was a popular text chosen by mailers of Victorian samplers — remember seeing them framed, on parlor tables and on walls? — but for some reason difficult to analyze the sampler-makers could not bring themselves to use the word God. So, it became: Thou Lord Seest Me — and in that form started Q. Patrick on their creative labors.

The more obvious sources of the story are twofold: a trip to England during the war and a brooding on the human need for love. The terrible food shortage in London suggested a plot in which the authors could show how lack of food and the great longing for it can disrupt family life and bring about a whole complex of antagonisms in a society hitherto accustomed, to relative plenty. But this larger theme got sidetracked when the authors noticed an ordinary, shabby, dispirited little office worker getting into a bus to go home; the vision of this little man’s probable home life, with a probably dreary wife, in a probably dreary suburb — and lo, the character of Mr. Loomis was born — the little office worker who craved affection so deeply that... But we must not tell too much.

In the cauldron of creation the food shortage was mixed in, and the text of the Victorian sampler, and a fantasy of love, and a golden santonin world. Not the Shakespearean brew of eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, but boiling i’ the charmed pot you will find the one ingredient which remains constant — the poison’d seeds of murder...

The office clock struck five. Mr. Loomis looked up at it and frowned. Mr. Loomis hated and feared  five o’clock as most men fear death. And for him it was the death of each day’s life since it meant leaving the office. It was only in the office that Mr. Loomis felt himself a man of stature and importance.

He closed his ledger and with a little sigh carried it over to the safe. He spent as long as he could tidying up his already meticulous desk. He arranged his pencils in a neat row, first vertical then changing them to horizontal; he shuffled his inkpots and next went to fetch his hat and coat. As he appeared from the cloakroom, wearing his old bowler and his black coat with its worn velveteen collar, he looked like any tired little man in post-blitz London. His mustache was frayed like his cuffs; his front teeth needed attention; and he stooped too much for a man of fifty.

His office day was over. Now there remained only the pleasure of saying good night to Miss Henderson. Mr. Loomis hastened his footsteps slightly as, passing downstairs, he saw there was still a light in Mr. Tinker’s office. Rose Henderson was secretary to the president. She was also sales manager and occasionally — for Tinker and Smythe dealt largely in patent medicines for children — Mother’s Service Manager. The latter term was used when she signed letters dealing with the Croup Elixir or the Worm Eliminant which were two of the firm’s best sellers.

“Been kept busy, Miss Henderson?” It was the usual formula repeated almost daily for years.

“So, so, Mr. Loomis. I’m just finishing off a few letters.”

Rose Henderson looked up and smiled, showing almost perfect teeth. Unfortunately they were her only really good feature. Her nose was too wide and behind their rimless glasses, her eyes were too small. Her hair always looked like the nest of a clean but untidy heron. Nevertheless, Mr. Loomis liked her appearance.

In fact, being an incurable romantic, he had been perhaps a shade in love with her for quite a number of years. Oh, it was a perfectly respectable sentiment, for Mr. Loomis was very much a married man. Indeed, he would not have known Miss Henderson’s Christian name had he not, as the firm’s cashier, had to make out a salary check to Rose K. Henderson every month. Sometimes he wondered what the K. stood for.

It had all started with the faded snapshot of herself which Miss Henderson had showed to Mr. Loomis, just for a lark, about ten years ago, at the picnic celebrating Mr. Tinker’s wedding. It portrayed bare-legged little Rosie Henderson at the age of eight, happily sucking a stick of candy rock on the sands of Burnham-on-Sea. Mr. Loomis had purloined this picture shamelessly and kept it face downward in a locked drawer of his desk at home. Occasionally, he took it out and thought to himself how Miss Henderson, who must now be about forty, should by rights be the mother of several little girls who looked just like that. And perhaps he thought that if he and Miss Henderson...

But, no. It must be repeated that Mr. Loomis was married to a most estimable and faithful wife whose lips had never touched liquor, tobacco, or those of any man but her husband.

“Well, good night, Mr. Loomis.”

“Good night, Miss Henderson.”

Mr. Loomis put on his bowler again and passed out into the thick miasma which is Clerkenwell on a January evening. He saw with some satisfaction that there was quite a long queue waiting for the Pimlico bus. With any luck he would miss the first one, possibly the second, and thus delay the ineluctable moment when he would have to knock on his front door and find himself at home.

As he waited, his fingers ran mechanically through his pockets. The contents would have disgraced any self-respecting schoolboy. There were two lumps of sugar, the rock cake (twopence extra) carefully saved from his tea. There was also a cough lozenge, half a biscuit wrapped in an old invoice and two of the firm’s medium-sized manila envelopes. Into one of these Mr. Loomis squeezed his squirrel hoard with some satisfaction, for these fragments were offerings intended for the gratification of his most recently acquired “daughter.”

Mr. Loomis, a father, who had missed his vocation, adored little girls. He had had scores of “daughters” and he had wooed them in scores of different ways. There was blue-eyed Lucy Green of the ringlets whose heart he had won with fretwork toys made secretly in his own tiny workshop. There was short-haired, freckle-faced Belinda Wren (now a mother herself) for whom he had ransacked his wife’s ragbag to make stuffed dolls and teddy bears. There were many others, plain and pretty, whose faces had lit up eagerly at the sight of Daddy “Bloomers.”

His latest love was Dinah Milton who had recently come to live with her mother in the house next door. She was a wisp of a child with an appetite which would have done credit to a regiment of guardsmen. But Mr. Loomis saw her skinny little frame through rosy spectacles for she reminded him a tiny bit — oh, such a tiny bit — of the little girl whose faded snapshot he kept locked in his drawer.

There was something particularly touching about Dinah’s greediness because the shortage of food in England was hard on hungry little girls. An added bond was the fact that Mrs. Loomis disapproved monumentally of the easy-going habits of Dinah’s mother. That she disapproved of Dinah herself went without saying. Mrs. Loomis’ childlessness had not made her sympathetic toward the offspring of others.

The bus disgorged Mr. Loomis at last and he made his way through the gloom of the familiar streets, past little brick houses, all alike, until he reached the one which was called his home.

He slowly climbed the steps and gave an almost inaudible rap on the knocker. He was not trusted with a latchkey of his own.

The door was opened by his wife, a large, not uncomely woman with a complexion, once peach-like, now purpling to damson plum.

“You’re late, Loomis,” she said in the voice of one who has said the same thing many times before. “Kept late at the office, I suppose?”

“No, no, my dear.” Mr. Loomis pecked hurriedly at the damson of his wife’s cheek. “It’s these bus queues. Really, I don’t know what London’s coming to.”

He moved crabwise to hang his coat and hat in the hall cupboard, fearful lest his wife’s x-ray eye might detect the contraband in his pocket.

“Well, don’t blame me if dinner’s burnt to a crisp.” Mrs. Loomis turned her broad back and flounced into the kitchen, while her husband made his way into the parlor where he drew a box of matches from his pocket and lit the wall gas-bracket. Electricity had not yet reached this particular section of London.

Mr. Loomis sat down gingerly on one of the hard chairs by the small gas fire which he did not dare to light until after the evening meal. He surveyed the room gloomily without noticing that it was, as usual, scrupulously clean and scrupulously tidy. He knew only that it was scrupulously dull.

His eyes settled on the framed wool text above the mantel — THOU LORD SEEST ME.

“Loomis, dinner’s on the table.”

Mr. Loomis rose obediently and after retrieving the manila envelopes from his overcoat in the hall closet, passed into the tiny dining-room. There was a clean cloth on a neatly set table which bore a whale steak smothered with onions. There was also a dish of fried potatoes, another of Brussel sprouts, and bread, and margarine. It was as good a dinner, so Mrs. Loomis averred every evening, as they were sitting down to in Buckingham Palace.

It was also a familiar dinner. And his wife’s dinnertime conversation was equally familiar. Mr. Loomis only half listened as Mabel told of her indomitable prowess in pushing to the head of the butcher’s queue; of her tactical success in wheedling a little extra flour from the grocer; of the shocking moral laxity of her neighbors in general and, in particular, of Mrs. Milton next door.

“... bottles and bottles of beer... men at all hours of the day and night... that brat of hers... it’s my belief she’s no better than her mother. Sitting on our garden wall with her bare legs hanging down... at this time of year... bare skinny legs...”

While Mr. Loomis chewed his Antarctic Steak, vague sentimental pictures passed through his mind of little Dinah Milton on the wall, waiting hopefully for the tidbits that he always tried to bring home for her. Incongruously, the bare skinny legs merged into another pair of childish legs as seen in a discolored photograph snapped at Burnham-on-Sea.

“Bare legs in January!” Mrs. Loomis had risen heavily and started to remove the plates. It was one of her many admirable qualities that she seldom allowed her husband in the kitchen. This virtue, however, rendered far more difficult Mr. Loomis’ task of stealing morsels for his insatiable pet cormorant next door. He took advantage of his wife’s absence to slip a small square of bread and margarine from his plate into the manila envelope in his pocket.

Mrs. Loomis returned from the kitchen bearing a dish of six delicious-looking jam tarts. As she withdrew again for the inevitable custard, her husband made some lightning calculations. Dare he risk stealing a tart now? No, Mabel was not, as he well knew, like the proverbial mother bird who can count only to two or three. Perhaps he could claim that an overwhelming greed had constrained him to pop one of them into his mouth without waiting for her. No, alas. For she knew only too well that greed was not one of his weaknesses and this would only be inviting suspicion.

But his luck was in. Mrs. Loomis was so carried away by the iniquities of Dinah and her mother that she noticed nothing. By the end of dinner Mr. Loomis had been able to secrete one and three-quarter tarts in the manila envelope.

Now every sensible wife will agree — and many who are not so sensible — that there comes a time in a man’s day, usually in the evening after supper, when he should feel free to go around to the nearest pub and discuss a game of darts with the boys over a pint or two of mild and bitter. But Mrs. Loomis believed that the place for the husband, when not safely in his office, was definitely at home. And Mr. Loomis, whether he believed it or not, was obliged to agree with her. This evening he sat in his chair before the now-lit gas fire and pretended to listen to his wife’s daily recital of her own perfections. In fact, he was not listening; his thoughts were wandering along unexpected and incurably romantic avenues.

Lately they had been walking these avenues with increasing frequency, but they had taken the first step into this make-believe land some years ago, after his wife had discovered the doll’s house he had made for little Lucy Green and had insisted on presenting it herself — not to Lucy Green — but to some orphanage which she helped piously to support. Mr. Loomis’ anger had been none the less violent for being unexpressed, t nor had it been quick to fade. The next morning, as he took his ledgers out of the office safe, his eyes had settled on a small green bottle which stood on the poison shelf. On its label they had traced the word Santonin.

Now Mr. Loomis was not a chemist, but he liked to think that his long association with Tinker and Smythe had given him a little more knowledge of drugs than that normally possessed by the layman. Mr. Loomis knew that minute quantities of santonin were used in the firm’s Worm Eliminant. He also knew that it was a poison — a powerful but rarely used poison whose effects might well baffle the normal medical practitioner familiar with the toxic symptoms produced by arsenic, cyanide, or strychnine.

From that day on the small green bottle had become very important in Mr. Loomis’ day dreams. They were nothing but dreams, of course — daring fantasies in which, by some eccentric accident, the bottle of santonin and Mabel... These thoughts remained in Mr. Loomis’ mind as unfinished symphonies.

Now, as his wife’s voice ground relentlessly on, colored reveries floated before him — little Dinah Milton and a jam tart, little Rosie Henderson and the stick of candy rock, Mabel and the little green bottle...

At last the time came for Mrs. Loomis to retire, which left Mr. Loomis a chance to retire also — not at once to the conjugal bed, but to the small den which was the one place he could almost call his own. Here he was planning to prepare the parcels of scraps for delivery to Dinah Milton.

Just as he was entering the den, he heard his wife’s voice from the bathroom.

“Light the gas and the gas fire in the bedroom, Loomis. And shut the windows. It’s turned a bit nippy.”

Mr. Loomis did as he was bid and then, having also lit the gas-bracket in his den, sat down at his small, home-made desk. With one ear cocked toward the bathroom, he drew out the manila envelopes and made two neat piles of the foodstuffs they contained. That done, he returned them to their envelopes which he wrapped around with string. Then, measuring off about ten feet of slack, he lowered the parcels out of the window so that they dangled a few feet above his wife’s chrysanthemum bed below.

With a pleasant tingle of excitement he gave a long, low whistle to signify to his young conspirator next door that the coast was clear.

Almost at once a small nightgowned form appeared at an open attic window in the Milton house.

“All right, Daddy Bloomers?” whispered Dinah.

For an answer Mr. Loomis jigged the food packages up and down on the end of the string, and Dinah disappeared from the window.

Mr. Loomis knew that this method of delivery was melodramatic and quite unnecessarily dangerous, but he employed it because it made him feel that he and Dinah were living in some fairy tale, a prince and princess banded together against the wicked ogress who might at any minute pop out and catch them red-handed. This was the only spice to his home life; it brought a heightening of every sensation — somewhat similar to that which he had felt during the worst days of the London blitz.

At length a small white figure emerged from die back door of the Milton house. Dinah scrambled over the wall which separated the two gardens. Crouching in the shadows like an experienced commando, the little girl ran to the chrysanthemum bed where she trampled relentlessly over the plants in her eagerness.

Sitting angler-fashion at the window, Mr. Loomis felt a tug on his line and released the string. Immediately, he heard the kitchen door slam and his heart missed a beat as he saw the figure of his wife standing, large and formidable, in the narrow pathway, blocking Dinah’s sole avenue of escape.

For a moment the child stood irresolute; then, deciding to make a dash for it, she crouched again and ran under Mrs. Loomis’ outstretched arm.

But that lady was too quick for her. Sensing her opponent’s strategy, she pounced with surprising agility and grabbed Dinah by the tails of her flowing nightgown.

“Caught you, my fine miss,” she panted. “Trampling on my chrysanthemums.” She swung her free hand and delivered several hard slaps to Dinah’s face and head. “Thief! Wicked, little thief!”

Quivering with outrage, Mr. Loomis shouted, but his voice did not seem to carry. He rushed into the bedroom, tugged open the window just above his wife’s head and cried:

“Stop it, Mabel. Stop it at once! The child is not stealing. I told her she might come over.”

Surprised by this unexpected attack, Mrs. Loomis looked up, momentarily weakening her grasp. Dinah was quick to seize her opportunity. Wriggling herself free and leaving a large piece of her nightgown in her captor’s hand, she dropped her packages and made for the dividing wall as if all the trolls of Grimm and Andersen were after her.

“I’ll deal with you in a minute, Loomis.”

But Mr. Loomis’ only reply was to slam down the bedroom window. He hardly noticed that he shattered a pane of glass as he did so. Angrier than he had ever been in his life, he withdrew to his den for the inevitable encounter.

Soon Mrs. Loomis swept up the stairs, carrying the two manila envelopes and trailing the string behind her like the tail of a comet. Her face was blotched with purple wrath.

“Food!” she screamed. “My food! Giving my food to that skinny little daughter of a cheap...”

The words exploded in a violent hiccough. Mabel had been addicted to hiccoughs recently and they were almost the only force strong enough to stem her overflowing indignation.

“It’s only scraps,” cried Mr. Loomis. “I wasn’t hungry.”

“Scraps! My jam tarts — scraps!”

Mrs. Loomis just managed to expel these words, but they were destined to be her swan song, for now a veritable hurricane of hiccoughing swept over her. Muttering something about: “My indigestion — now see what you’ve done,” she hiccoughed her way out of the den and into the bathroom where, Mr. Loomis knew, she was taking the sedative which Dr. Heather had prescribed for her last week. In a few moments he heard her go into the bedroom where she slammed and locked the door noisily behind her.

Mrs. Loomis, being an old-fashioned type, believed that the most effective way to punish a husband was to deny him physical access to her person. It is perhaps superfluous to state that, for Mr. Loomis, this was no punishment but a blessed relief, even though it meant a choice between the unmade bed in the spare room or (an alternative which he infinitely preferred) the narrow couch in his den.

But Mr. Loomis felt by no means ready for bed. Indignation had given him unwonted courage. Those carefully hoarded morsels were meant for Dinah. Dinah should have them. He scooped up the crumbled remnants of food and put them back into the envelopes. Then, without even bothering to go on tiptoe past the bedroom door, he made his way down to the kitchen pantry where he found the two remaining jam tarts. Defiantly he put these also into one of the envelopes and proceeded to the house of his next-door neighbor.

His ring at the bell was answered by a rather pretty little woman with a crumpled pink dress and a great deal of crumpled pinkish hair. Her face was heavily cosmeticized, but her eyes, smiling and friendly, gave her an expression of almost childlike naïveté.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “You’re Mr. Bloomers from next door, aren’t you? Do come in.”

Mr. Loomis followed her into the hall, stammered an apology for his wife’s action, offered the manila envelopes for Dinah and expressed a hope that she was none the worse for the encounter.

“So that’s what all the shindig was about!” Mrs. Milton gave a careless laugh and peeped into one of the envelopes. “Oh, my! Jam tarts. What’s a box or two on the ears if you get jam tarts? I’ll pop ’em up to Dinah while you make yourself comfy in there.”

She indicated the open door of the living room which, when he entered it, was warm and cosy, smelling pleasantly like an inn parlor. The wireless was going merrily and there were several bottles of beer, some full, some empty, on the center table. An enormous man rose to his feet.

“Name of Potts,” he said, holding out a large, horny hand. “Al Potts and pleased to meet you.”

Mr. Loomis murmured his name and indicated that the pleasure was mutual.

“So you’re Bloomers, eh? Mamie’s Dinah don’t talk of nothing but her Daddy Bloomers.” Al Potts winked and poured out a tumbler of beer. “Here, have a drink, Bloomers.”

For a moment Mr. Loomis hesitated. He had not touched any alcoholic beverage since his fire-watching days. But this had turned out to be a new, reckless type of evening.

“Thank you, Mr. Potts. I could do with a drop.”

As he seated himself and sipped at his beer, Al continued: “She’s a greedy kid, Dinah, but you can’t blame ’em these days. We none of us get enough solids. But I myself am more of a one for the liquids.” He laughed heartily at his own joke and then drained his glass.

Mrs. Milton returned to the room. “Dinah says thank Daddy Bloomers and give him a big kiss.” She looked archly at Al. “What would you say if I was to do it, Al?”

Al grunted good-naturedly.

“And she sent another message to another party with words in it a kid didn’t ought to know, so I told her to hush her mouth and eat up her tarts.”

The beer was making Mr. Loomis a trifle giddy. “Mabel had no business to slap the child. I told her off myself. Yes, I told her off good and proper.” Mr. Loomis expanded his meager chest.

“You did?” queried Mamie admiringly.

“I certainly did. And she went off to bed and — she locked the door.”

Mamie said: “Well, I never.” Al refilled Mr. Loomis’ glass. As the warmth engendered by the beer increased, Mr. Loomis felt that the “telling-off” was worth enlarging upon. It was gratifying and unfamiliar to have a sympathetic audience. Their casual friendliness was most gratifying too. Soon they were all chatting with pleasant intimacy. Al, who was a small-time contractor, expressed his dissatisfaction with current conditions in England and announced that he had decided to immigrate to Australia. With a broad grin he confided that he was trying to persuade Mamie to marry him and come along. Mamie laughed and called him “a card” and “a caution.” Later, after another round of beer, she sat on his lap. It was so free and relaxing. Mr. Loomis found it delightful.

And all the time, adding a touch of rhapsody, was the thought of the little girl, her hunger sated by jam tarts, curled happily asleep upstairs, dreaming, perhaps, of her Daddy Bloomers.

In his own happiness Mr. Loomis lost count of time and was only brought back to a sense of the hour when a voice on the wireless announced the familiar nightly message:

“Residents of the Pimlico district are warned again that, because of the present coal crisis, the gas will be shut off at the main in three minutes — that is at eleven o’clock. Service will be resumed at 5:30 tomorrow morning. If your gas is on now — whether for lighting, cooking, or heating — turn it off immediately.”

“Well,” exclaimed Mr. Loomis in a happy haze, “eleven o’clock already. I declare. I had no idea.”

Despite his hostess’ coaxing offer of a nightcap, Mr. Loomis took his leave and let himself into his own cold, dark hall. The familiar chilliness and the knowledge that instead of the slumbering Dinah, Mabel lay asleep upstairs, did not cool his exhilaration. Mabel, he knew, would become a reality in the morning. But now was now. He groped his way up the stairs and through the darkness of his den to the couch where he fell into a warm sleep.

MacKinlay Kantor chose “The Trail of the Brown Sedan” for inclusion in his fascinating AUTHOR’S CHOICE, and here is what Mr. Kantor himself wrote about the story:

“This was one of the last stories I did for Howard Bloomfield of Detective Fiction Weekly, and it was written in July, 1933, while I was working on long remember. My cops-and-robbers tales sprang out of the old Chicago days. Every young writer who has ever been a newspaper reporter, or who has lived for a time on the fringe of the underworld, can contrive countless stories of this sort. I think ‘The Trail of the Brown Sedan’ has a kind of sharpness and pungency not always found in pulp magazine material; it is the best of a series of stories which I wrote about the fictitious Glennan brothers.”

We do not mean to take issue with MacKinlay Kantor, but we can’t help wondering. Is it really true that every young writer, with the experience and background which Mr. Kantor specifies, can contrive countless stories life “The Trail of the Brown Sedan”? In all honesty, we doubt it. The word “countless” implies mass production, and mass production is admittedly not the safest or surest pathway to quality. True, many of our most prolific writers have often produced gems of the finest cut and clarity, but these were the coalescences of infrequent though inspired moments. Mass production generally means a sloppy and slovenly style, and plots patched together from outworn formulas. And note too the verb which Mr. Kantor instinctively used: “can contrive countless stories”; if these numberless yarns, so easy to produce, clearly show evidence of having been “contrived,” then they will not rise above an inferior grade of “pulp magazine material” and will not achieve future reprint.

No, the simple truth is that MacKinlay Kantor’s best stories, out of his salad days, are at least a little better than he thinks, and that stories which, fifteen years later, are a little better than one thinks are not hacked out by the ream or plucked off an assembly line. It just isn’t that easy!

The last recorded words of Sergeant Paul Van Wert, spoken about a minute and a half before he died, were directed at First-class Patrolman Nicholas Glennan, who opened the door for the three detectives and their manacled prisoner.

“Looks like more Indian summer,” said Sergeant Van Wert.

“Another good day,” nodded Nick Glennan, and pushed on the bronze cross-bar which served as handle for the narrow panel. When you’re convoying a tough guy like Rainy Moper out of a railroad station you don’t use the revolving door. No, you use the regular door — Detective Johnson goes ahead, and the tough guy follows along, locked tight to Detective Cohen’s wrist. You, Sergeant Van Wert, bring up the rear. You nod to the cop on station duty and say something about the weather. He opens the door for you, and you all go outside and get killed.

Said the News-Detail, in its second extra published about an hour and fifteen minutes later: “The three detectives were jubilant, for Rainy Moper, murderer, mail bandit, and extortionist, had fought a hard battle against extradition. Their arrival at the Union Terminal was unheralded. They stepped from the Pullman, brushed through the first crowds of office-bound commuters, and hustled their prisoner out of the station.”

Said the News-Detail, in its special copyrighted story which went ticking over twenty wires: “Officer Nicholas Glennan, hero of the raid which wiped out the American Packing Company payroll bandits last March, was on station duty. He spoke to his fellow officers and opened the door for them, then started back toward the lower station level.”

Said Antonio Bambasino, proprietor of the Union Terminal Smoke Shop: “I was just looking out the window when those men come out with him. They is a blue touring car parked close, with another man he sit at the wheel. One detective he get in front. Those two more start to get in back with the Rainy Moper fellow. Nobody say a word. Then the guns to shoot they start, like this—”

Sister Mary Louis, Superior of St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, was only twenty feet away, walking toward the station door. Accompanied by Sister Clementina, and having just emerged from a taxicab, Sister Mary Louis was not expecting to see the very quintessence of murder... She had level gray eyes, a firm chin, and her calm voice had only a slight tremble in it as she talked to the police.

“I noticed,” she declared, “that a brown sedan was parked beside the blue touring car. Just as the group of officers got into the touring car, a man opened the door of the sedan. No, he had no mask. He held something in his hands; it must have been a machine gun. A man was shooting from the front seat, too. We heard the shots... we stood there, petrified. Looking at those men. No one screamed. It happened too suddenly. Then the brown car went forward across the low curb, turned past the lamp-post, and raced up the street—”

Taxicab Operator Fred Cepak, license No. 1786, got a good look at the men in the brown car. “There was three. One driving, one in the front seat beside him, and one in the back. Two of them was big, fleshy guys, and the one driving was a little dark runt. Naw, they weren’t masked or nothing. And well dressed, kind of. The guy in back pulls up with a machine gun, but the fellow in front had an automatic in each hand. The shots go bang, bang, plunk — faster than I can say it — then the little guy says, ‘Hell. You got him! And with that they shag-tail outa there. The cops in the touring car are sliding down, dead as anything, all blood and— The sedan door came open, just as the gunmen bounced offa the curb. Then this cop comes out the station door and starts to shoot—”

They were good witnesses, for the most part. Somehow they seemed unusually methodical in telling what they saw. It was as if the blast of gunfire had robbed them of all hysteria. Eight o’clock, on a bright Indian summer morning... there in front of the sober railroad station. They were mainly accurate in their statements.

Nick Glennan, with only thirty minutes left before he would be relieved by Officer Canaday, thought he’d see whether he had gained or lost any weight during the hours since he came on duty. He found a penny in his breeches pocket and dropped it into the maw of the slot-machine scales, there in the south corridor of the station.

Then the shooting began... He had his gun out, before he reached the street. As he opened the glass panel he could see Detective Johnson’s wet, red face sliding lower and lower in the front seat of the police car. That was enough; it told a long story to Nick Glennan in just two-fifths of a second.

The brown sedan swished across the wide parking plaza, its left rear door jolted open, swaying, a wide gray arm reaching out and trying to pull the door shut. Glennan’s revolver rang hoarsely, three times. Then, thinking that he had missed, he expended his remaining three bullets in the direction of the gas tank. A huge gray shape tumbled out across the running board of the swaying sedan. Slowly, painfully, it was trying to pull itself back inside as the car swerved around the corner into Comanche Street. Glennan had missed the gas tank, but one of his first three bullets had found a fleshy resting place.

He leaped to the bloody running board of the parked car. People screamed, all around him. Detective Johnson and Sullivan, the driver, had the blank stare of death frozen in their eyes. Out of the red-spattered rear seat came a faint sigh. It was Cohen; he died in the ambulance, five minutes later.

Glennan snapped to the paralyzed taxi driver behind him: “Switch on. Back out I Switch her on, I tell you—” He ran to the lamp-post and wrenched open the big green box. He jerked the receiver from its hook and said rapidly: “Glennan on Number Forty-three. Carload of hoods shot up Bureau car just now, at this point. Ambulances, squads, Union Terminal. Brown sedan went south on Comanche Street — stop all brown sedans at city limits! Medium-sized car — might be an Olds or Chrysler. I’m on my way—”

A traffic cop was sprinting from the Bailey Street intersection, and another from the east plaza. People screamed, screamed.

Glennan fell into Fred Cepak’s green taxicab. “Get going down Comanche,” he gasped. Through the open window he howled down to the nearest traffic cop: “Stay on it, Bert!” and the cab went swaying toward the corner, with Officer Nicholas Glennan reloading his gun in the back seat.

He snapped the cylinder home, and climbed out on the running board. In front of the Alcazar Hotel a newsboy was out in the street. “That sedan—” yelled Glennan.

“Went south — south—”

There wasn’t much traffic. The cab skidded around the left side of a southbound street car, narrowly missed a northbound car, and screeched down the tracks. There were men lining the curb — a few of them. Somebody pointed, waved. Yes, they must have seen that fat gray shape on the sedan’s side, slowly pulling its wounded self back to safety. “Keep the horn going, buddy,” said Glennan to Taxicab Operator Fred Cepak.

“Okay.”

Looooooo, wailed the horn.

A block away from Paxton Boulevard they could see the traffic cop waving his arms. “Slow!” snapped Glennan. He leaned out and waved an answering hand.

The traffic cop’s face was familiar, but to save his life Nick couldn’t recall his name.

“Brown sedan? Think it’s a Chrysler. She just made a left turn, on the yellow. East on Paxton. What’s—”

“They just rubbed out a whole carload from the Bureau,” Glennan snarled. “Get over on the box for orders.” But he was a hundred yards away as he said the last words, and the cop could only stare after him with puffy eyes.

At the top of the hill by the Episcopal Church, Nick could see the long length of the boulevard sluicing away toward the misty smoke of suburbs. Cars, glistening blotches, the wide band of concrete was dotted with their beetle shapes. Between his dry lips Glennan muttered a curse. This would be the same old story. Lost in traffic. Give any car a minute’s start, and the driver had a good chance for a clean getaway. I had to phone, he kept hurling at himself, I had to! Block the highways — get the news on the radio — stop a brown sedan at the city limits — yes, he had to phone — And that extra minute or two, which brought an ambulance: it might mean life for Van Wert or Cohen. There had been that faint sigh from the shambles of the death car. An extra minute — an ambulance... had to phone.

“Keep going; bud,” he said to the chauffeur.

They raced on, at each of the next three corners, Glennan shrieked to pedestrians or grocerymen in front of their shops: “See a brown sedan? Speeding?”

The men gaped at him. Yes, she went that way. No, that was— Did you say a black car? Hey, Pete, wasn’t there a car just went speeding past? Yeh, she went north. Right there. Up that street. Yeh. Going like hell —

With Fred Cepak and the green cab Nick Glennan went hurtling up the cross street. North. A car — going like— He overtook it; a small roadster with three high school girls in it.

“Swing her back,” he groaned wearily. “It’s the same old story, sure as life. The damn sedan’s gone...”

They came back into Paxton Boulevard. Sirens moving toward them from the east and from the west. Glennan jumped off the running board and held up his hand. A big, black limousine let its brakes crunch; the tires burned in brown ribbons on the concrete. Hard faces, hard eyes staring at him. “Brown Chrysler. Out this way. That’s all we know... Make for Five Mile Corners, Al.” They whistled away; someone was opening the rifle box and dealing out ammunition.

And so it went. There was a cordon around the whole town in less than ten minutes. The telephones jangled and squawled; teletype ribbons took up the story, and state police began to whine up and down the long, open highway on their motorcycles. Brown sedan after brown sedan — farmers, schoolteachers, radio repairmen, dentists, Fuller Brush men — car after car, they were overhauled and lined up, their hands above their heads. What’s your name? Where you been? Let’s see your license. Keep ’em covered, Jack. Car after car...

Detective Abraham Cohen died while the ambulance was still seven blocks away from General Hospital. As for Johnson and Van Wert and the driver, they were past any need for hospitalization. And Mr. Rainy Moper, extortionist and five times a murderer, had gone to his own private brimstone pool with all speed. The women who had fainted were being revived in drug stores beside the station. Newspaper reporters, policemen, gabbling witnesses — a herd of men festered around the blue touring car with its shattered windshield and wet leather cushions.

Nobody was sure what mob had done it. It was hard to believe that any hoodlums, however hopped and demoniac they might be, would cheerfully kill four officers in their eagerness to effect the demise of Rainy Moper.

Nick Glennan got back to the Union Terminal plaza in time to find his brother, Detective Sergeant Dave Glennan, on the job. Fourteen other officers of various kinds were with him.

Before Nick went away to report, he took a walk across the street. He found something lying on the asphalt, near the corner of Comanche Street. It was at this point that the big man in the gray suit had sprawled out of the open door when Nick fired. Glennan picked up the object, looked at it dazedly, made as if to throw it away, and then thrust it into his pocket. Slowly he made his way through the packed crowd and into the wide, guarded circle.

“Four of the best guys who ever lived,” his dry-eyed brother muttered to him.

Nick Glennan nodded dully. “Yes,” he whispered.

We can’t tell you everything the author of “The Big Shots” wrote to us: we wish we could; it would help every would-be writer to persevere, to hang on, to keep the light of hope burning; it would help every reader, casual or serious, to understand better the problems of the young writer, and through that understanding, appreciate more tolerantly the near-misses as well as the hits; it would help every literary critic and every literary agent to remember what John Di Silvestro, who was only 20 years old when he wrote “The Big Shots” has yet to learn — that money, and what money stands for, is not everything an intelligent person can want. Yes, John, there are things more precious than money: talent is one of them, and to compromise talent for money is too big a price for anyone to pay...

John Di Silvestro wrote “The Big Shots” back in 1945. It poured out of his typewriter like blood spurting out of a slashed jugular. He showed the manuscript to a Chicago editor who “said nice things about it” — but couldn’t buy it. So 20-year-old John threw the story into a dark place.

Two years later John sent the manuscript to a New York editor. This time it was returned without comment, without encouragement.

Tine next year John gave the story another whirl on the wheel of misfortune. He sent it to a literary agent who promptly rejected it as “not being magazine stuff.”

Then another agent read “The Big Shots” and turned thumbs down — it “wouldn’t go for magazines,” he said.

Last year John mailed the manuscript to EQMM. His accompanying letter wold more between the lines than perhaps John realized — the slow heartbreak of despair. We read the story and were immensely impressed. We simply could not understand how it had failed to excite at least one editor or literary agent sufficiently to be thrust into print.

We rushed a special delivery letter to the author, praising the story, making an offer to purchase it, and suggesting that the story be officially submitted to our annual contest. John agreed, and we cannot resist quoting from his letter: “Ellery Queen wrote me a special delivery. I was staring at wet trees when the postman’s car slid to the curb. I watched him. He got out. I heard him at the box. I ran down the stairs.

“ ‘Mr. Di Silvestro?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“I tore the envelope to shreds. I readandreadandread, then I put some paper into the typewriter. I tried to be casual. I tried to be honest. I tried to make Mr. Queen understand that his letter was the brightest, purest, finest thing that ever happened to the one called John, by some.”

In a later note John wrote us: “I know you’ll play down the slum angle. I read the truth of the matter is that your first letter hit me at a time when I would have done anything — maybe even be honest.”

And now, completing the circle, we are back to our original theme: John, there are things more precious than the golden apples paid to compromisers. This above all, be honest. Be honest until the cows come home; be honest until hell freezes over; be honest to the end of time, to the crack of doom, to the “last syllable of recorded” manuscript. And never make any excuses for being honest. And don’t worry that you’ve “yet to leave the slums” You’ll leave the slums, and help eliminate the slums — by being honest. “The Big Shots” is honest, and its honesty is a slashing condemnation of the slum conditions which breed juvenile delinquency. That is why we are so proud to publish it...

Fat Tonу Ovaki’s face was an unhealthful pallor, his dirty blond hair a mass of greasy ringlets shading a meaty nose that was speckled with blackheads; his squat body was crouched forward as if futilely trying to escape the sloven clothing.

He joined slender Pete Semo on the corner of the street that was cool and breezy in the early morning sunshine. The tall rooming houses on either side of the street were solid brick buildings with blunt, unpainted, disreputable fronts of seamed and cracked bricking, ever ready to spawn another generation of slumjohns.

“What’s the matter, Fat?” asked Pete when he got within talking distance. “You look scared.”

“Nothin’,” said Tony Ovaki.

“Somebody picking on you?”

“Naw, nobody’s acting smart.” Tony told him.

“For a guy with your built you’re plenty yellow,” sneered Pete. “You look sick. Come on, tell me. You’re in my gang.”

“Just trouble at home,” said Tony. “Old lady want you to go to work, huh?” laughed Pete. “I thought you gave her the twenty bucks you had.”

“I did,” snapped Tony, his dirty face weak with rage. “She pulled me outta bed, that dirty—”

“Shut up. You’re the only guy I know that goes around cursing his own old lady.”

“She’s a—”

“I told you to shut up. I don’t like that kinda talk.”

Tony slowly met Pete’s eyes. “You angling for anything, Pete?”

Pete gurgled his abrupt little laugh. “You even act tough today, Fat. ’ He brought out a crumbled pack of cigarettes, stuck one between his lips.

Tonу looked at the two cigarettes left in the pack. “You got an extra, Pete?”

Pete put the pack back into his shirt pocket. “Go an’ call Tommy and Roachy.”

“Okay, Pete, but save me the butt.”

“You heard me, didn’t ya?”

Tony slowly turned away; for two seconds Pete fooled with the match folder. He lighted the cigarette.

The early morning sunshine spanked against this side of the street; he crossed, walking into the shade of the North side of the street.

Pete forced his eyes away from the littered curb, grimaced savagely; some day he was going to get outta this neighborhood, have an apartment out on the drive with glamor dames around and plenty of good liquor.

He sucked wistfully on the cigarette, the smoke panging against his lungs. He exhaled quickly; he was a little dizzy.

He thought of food for a while. Breakfasts just like in the movies — those round glass dishes with big grapefruits in them. He had tasted grapefruit once; he wondered why the rich guys always ate them in the movies.

He dipped his hand into his right hip pocket and brought out the nickel and three pennies. He walked up the street, forcing his legs to wide quick strides, his wide thin shoulders swinging aggressively.

The cigarette burned his fingers but he managed to choke down one last swallow from it and flipped it into the gutter and walked into the smells of cheeses and greens of Tompo’s grocery store.

“Longjohn,” said Pete.

“Three for eight cents,” grumbled Tompo.

“Just want one.”

Tompo wiped his hand on his green sweater and waved the flies away from the wooden tray and picked up a twisted longjohn.

“Gimme one with some sugar on it,” said Pete.

“What the hell you want for three cents?” Tompo said sharply, handing over the roll.

Pete bit deeply into the greasy roll, pocketing the two cents change from the nickel. He now had some change to rattle.

He walked out into the crisp morning coolness. The stench of kerosene assailed his nostrils. He breathed deeply and again bit into the roll, thoughtfully holding it away from his nose as he chewed the slightly cooked dough. He wished he had some place to go, maybe some girl who wore tennis shorts and had a tennis racket under her arm. Boy, that would be class. Would the rest of his gang get hot...

“Hey, Pete.” Tony’s voice neatly penetrated his dreamy mood. He quickly gulped down the remainder of the roll, wiping away the flakes of sugar from his chin with his palm.

“Hi,” chorused Roachy and Tommy.

“You got a cig?” asked Roachy, grimacing like Bogart.

“I got a nickel,” said Pete. “Let’s chip in and get a pack.”

“I’m broke,” said Tony.

“Didn’t ask you, Fat,” said Pete, pushing out his palm and driving Tony against tall, skinny Tommy.

Roachy laughed, running his thin fingers through his bushy, black curly hair. “What we gonna do, Pete?”

“Feel like goin’ horse-back riding,” said Pete. “But where can we get four bucks?”

“Jeez, do they charge half a buck an hour?” asked Tommy.

Pete nodded, hitching his belt around the leanness of his waist.

“Have they got black and white horses?” said Tommy. “Them are called pintos, that’s what they call them little horses.”

“I had a big one last time,” said Pete. “I didn’t call it no pinto.”

“Let’s go to the warehouse,” said Tony. “They need help there, they pay half a buck an hour. I know.”

Pete looked at the aproned, loose haired women shuffling onto the front stoops to get some early morning sunshine. He spat into the gutter. “Yeah, let’s go earn ourselves some dough.”

They walked to the huge towering Wong warehouse that bordered the slit of the Chicago river, the waterway being diverted to make passage for the Great Lakes boats to land their materials at the warehouse loading platforms.

“We see a guy called Rock,” said Tony. “He does the hiring.”

They walked through the shadowy alleys formed by the piled crates and oil cans leading to the employment shack.

“Yeah?” said Rock, turning from the small scarred desk that was papered profusely with bills of lading and routing sheets. His bare arms came up sharply, then thudded against the arm-rests of the swivel chair.

“We wanta put in a little time,” said Pete. “Tony here” — he pointed to the big figure of Ovaki — “said you hired him before.”

“I know,” Rock said. “You guys kin work, but you better not let me catch you smoking.”

“We ain’t got no cigarettes,” said Roachy.

“Okay,” wheezed Rock, slowly getting to his feet. “C’mon, I’ll show you where you work.”

They followed him to the high platform adjacent to the swirling dirty water.

“You guys just take the crates that that boat will have on board,” said Rock, pointing to a squat steamer pulling in toward the pier. “Got it?”

“Yeah,” said Pete, matching Rock’s ugly grin.

“You see that they do a good job,” Rock said to Pete.

Pete spat into the water. “Sure, Rock.”

As Rock got out of hearing distance Roachy cursed sullenly. “You lucky baba,” he told Pete.

“I’m sorta foreman,” grinned Pete, “and you guys are gonna work.”

“Who the hell feels like riding a horse?” said Tony.

“I do,” snapped Pete, “and if you don’t work, Fat, I’ll throw you in the river.”

They laughed for a while, then the squat river boat battered against the pier and two husky seamen were tying her secure.

“Go on,” ordered Pete, “jump on the boat, and start bringing those crates up here.” He watched them jump aboard. He vaguely wished he could join them. It must feel nice being on a ship, being so close to land with nothing to worry about.

Pete pushed the crates farther back onto the pier as Roachy, Tony, and Tommy dumped them on the edge of the platform.

Two hours later they struggled onto the pier.

“We put in a buck’s worth,” groaned Tony, “let’s go get our dough.”

“We need car fare to get to the stables,” said Pete. “C’mon let’s work a little more. Then we can even buy something to eat.”

“Sure, you ain’t doin’ nothing,” growled Roachy, knuckling the sweat from his eyes.

Pete brought up his clenched fist, smashed it into Roachy’s shoulder.

Roachy’s head bobbed down and he charged Pete, swinging his left with all his strength. Pete easily dodged it, grabbing Roachy’s left arm and sticking out his right foot. As Roachy lurched past him, he smashed a pile-driving fist into his stomach.

Roachy thrashed on the splintery dock.

They watched him choke, a trickle of vomit slipping past his lips. He didn’t have any breakfast to splurge on the pier. He rolled from Pete’s foot, got to his knees, and weakly tackled Pete as he closed in. They rolled and thudded against the planking.

Finally Pete had his knees on Roachy’s arms, his feet effectively keeping Roachy prostrate.

“If you really wanta get hurt, Roach, just make a move.”

Roachy’s head twisted miserably. “Okay, I had enough.”

Pete got up and before he could straighten up, the dock crashed against his face. He twisted over on his back. Rock reached down and dragged him to his feet.

“You shouldn’t’ve been fighting, sonny,” said Rock. “Now get to work.”

Pete shook his head numbly; he reached up for it, tried to screw it on. A sudden flash blinded his vision and he fell against Rock’s chest. He reeled back rather than lean against him. Tony and Tommy caught him.

Pete shook off the protecting hands of his friends. “You hit me when I wasn’t looking,” snarled Pete, moving toward Rock.

Rock easily held him off. “If you want another smack, kid, just keep on acting smart.”

Pete lashed out with his foot, it completed a shallow arc against Rock’s thick shinbone. He yelped and hopped backward. Pete’s foot came up again, this time against Rock’s unprotected stomach. Rock went over backward.

The crew aboard the boat yelled and moved toward the platform.

Tony and Tommy picked up the small but heavy crates, and heaved them against the oncoming crewmen. They cursed and jumped back onto the deck of the craft.

Pete grabbed Roachy’s arm. “C’mon, let’s get outta here,” he yelled, helping the unsteady Roach to find his stride.

They reached the comparative safety of high tiers of crates, then they raced through the street, weaving through the tangle of traffic before the street side of the warehouse.

Their breaths were hot and hard against each other’s cheeks as they paused in the alleyway to catch their breaths.

“Dirty sklink,” Pete said thickly, “we didn’t even get paid.”

“Do you think he knows where we live?” gasped Roachy.

“He knows where I five,” Tony said tonelessly. “I worked a week there. He even got my social security number.”

“You lousy fat stink,” shrieked Pete. “You—”

“Aw cut it,” said Roachy. “It isn’t his fault. We gotta think of something.”

“You kicked him,” cried Tony. “I ain’t worried.”

Pete moved toward Tony but Roachy weakly held him off. “That’ll make it worse. We gotta stick together.”

Pete quickly regained his composure. “Sure.” He was the boss, couldn’t let a big slob scare him. He’d showed them.

“Look,” said Pete, sticking his finger into Tony’s sloping stomach. “You go home, hide in the hallways, tell your old lady to tell whoever comes asking for you that you left town. If nobody comes, okay. I just wanta know if that guy Rock’s going to do something.”

“Yeah, that’s smart,” said Tommy, flexing his arms and straightening his dirty polo shirt.

“Okay, get on home,” ordered Pete, “and run. He might’ve gone to your house already.”

Tony’s face slackened. “Yeah? What if he did already? I ain’t going.”

“You ain’t yellow?” said Pete. “Or are you?”

“Yeah,” said Roachy. “Are you yella?”

“Okay,” said Tony. “I’ll go home. If he does come around asking for me what do we do?”

“We’ll protect you,” said Pete. “Now get.”

They watched him walk away.

Roachy smiled ruefully. “He’s the guy who knows our names. Rock only knows where he lives.”

“I know,” said Pete.

Tommy cursed. “He’ll talk if Rock gets ahold of him, you can bet on it.”

“We gotta take that chance,” said Pete.

Most detective and crime stories employ the garden-varieties of murder methods: the bromidic bullet, bludgeon, and blunt instrument; the stereotyped stabbing; the hackneyed hands — by pushing or strangling; the mechanical device — by running over, squashing, decapitating, or untidily tearing limb from limb; and so on. Occasionally, however, an author hits upon an unusual method, and we cannot help but be startled. Dorothy L. Sayers, in her brilliant Introduction to GREAT STORIES OF DETECTION, MYSTERY AND HORROR: FIRST SERIES (known in America as THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME), listed “a brief selection of handy short cuts to the grave,” all of them unusual — or, at least, unusual when first used. By this time most of you are more or less familiar with “poisoned tooth-stoppings; licking poisoned stamps; shaving-brushes inoculated with dread diseases; poisoned boiled eggs (a bright thought); poison-gas; a cat with poisoned claws; poisoned mattresses;” and to get away from poisons, which lend themselves so easily to gimmickry, “knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle; electrocution by telephone; biting by plague-rats and typhoid-carrying lice; boiling lead in the ears (much more effective than cursed hebanon in a vial); air-bubbles injected into the arteries; explosion of a gigantic ‘Prince Rupert’s drop’; frightening to death; hanging head-downwards; freezing to atoms in liquid air; hypodermic injections shot from air-guns; exposure, while insensible, to extreme cold; guns concealed in cameras [to say nothing of lethal weapons concealed in canes, umbrellas, and crutches!]; a thermometer which explodes a bomb when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height; and so forth.”

This catalogue of unusual short cuts to the coffin could be extended indefinitely. You will no doubt remember Anthony Wynne’s classic use of anaphylactic shock in “The Cyprian Bees”; Ronald A. Knox’s murder by starvation in “Solved by Inspection”; Dorothy L. Sayers’s own “new idea for a murder” — transfusion of the wrong type of blood — in “Blood Sacrifice”; Melville Davisson Post’s combustion power of the sun in “The Doomdorf Mystery” (although, believe it or not, this method was first used by M. McDonnell Bodkin in a Paul Beck short story, “Murder by Proxy,” as early as 1898!); E. C. Bentley’s loaded golf club in “The Sweet Shot”; Agatha Christie’s electrified chess piece in the big four; Marc Connelly’s diabolical shortening of a walking stick in “Coroner’s Inquest”; and so on, almost ad infinitum.

And, yes, we mustn’t forget: there is an extraordinary method of murder in Donn Byrne’s virtually unknown “The Brown Box”; whoever opened the ancient case — faded, mildewed, embossed, scrolled with crescent-shaped Arabic script, and locked with automatic Damascan bolts and tumblers — whoever threw back heavy lid, died suddenly, spontaneously. No poison, no explosive, no actual weapon of any kind — indeed, the cause of death is unique in murder fiction. No, we won t tell you: this is one murderous memorandum worth your looking up in the original text.

But if we kept on listing all the unusual means we could fish out of our memory or find among our notes, it is unlikely that we would come upon a duplication of the mortal method invented by Hector Bolitho in his story, “Dirge.” “There are things,” as Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote, “beyond the power even of a coroner to imagine or of a coroner’s jury to believe” — in London, New York, or the Congo. And Hector Bolitho learned some of these things during his extensive travels throughout the world.

A lethargic swell ruled oncoming lines across the ocean, a swell so peaceful that the surface rose and fell as gently as the breast of a sleeping child. The water finally broke into waves which moved indolently towards the Congo coast. They made the finest possible white rim of foam when they broke upon the sand. The visible circle of sea was tremendous, for there were no clouds in the sky and no mists upon the water. Far out, helpless as a twig, a small, dirty boat rose and fell in obedience to the movement of the tide. A half-caste woman sat in the stern of the boat, staring out into the hot space. She could see nothing but the sea and sky, laced together on the distant edge with what seemed to be a silver ribbon. For an hour she peered, her hand over her eyes, her black hair falling down over her back, her dingy black cotton blouse stained with the white of dried salt water. Then she looked into the boat itself. In the bows, asleep, perhaps unconscious, was the figure of Reek Dryden. She watched his ugly, purple face with the passivity of habit: she had been married to him too long to reveal any sensation of hatred upon her face. He might have stirred at any moment. Then it would all have begun again: the raving and the screaming. She could not have borne a refreshed attack of his drunken insolence. She took a rope out of the locker and tied him to the seats, his arms to one and his feet to the other. She returned to the stern and squatted there, her elbows upon her knees, her chin in her hands. She was far enough away from him now. For still another hour her sad cold eyes looked out toward the limit of sight. As far as she could see, there might be no world left, no people; only this brilliantly lighted space between the lofty blue sky and the sea.

A street photographer clicked his camera at us, and handed Karmesin a ticket. Karmesin simply said: “Pfui!” and passed it to me. It was a slip of green paper, printed as follows:

“There is an opportunity for you,” said Karmesin. “Procure nine or ten dummy cameras. Give them to nine or ten men, with your printed tickets. Have an accommodation address. A reasonable number of your tickets will come back with quarters. It will be quite a time before anybody complains. If someone does, explain: ‘Pressure of business: millions of customers.’ In three or four weeks you have made some money. Then you can start a mail-order business. By the time you are forty you may retire. Voila! I have set you up in life. I have done more for you than many fathers do for their sons. Give me a cigarette. Well, what are you laughing at?”

“Why don’t you try the scheme yourself?”

Karmesin ignored this question and went on in an undertone: “On second thought, have real cameras and real films. That relieves you of the necessity for accomplices. Always avoid accomplices. Don’t develop your film: just keep it. Then if the police come, you say indignantly: ‘Look, here are the pictures. Give a man a chance to develop them!’ In this manner you can last for two or three months. Never trust any man. Work alone. And speaking of photography, keep out of the range of cameras. They are dangerous.”

“Why?”

“I once blackmailed a man by means of a camera.”

I was silent. Karmesin’s huge, plum-like eyeballs swiveled round as he looked at me. Under his mustache his lips curved. He said:

“You disapprove. Good! Ha!” and he let out a laugh which sounded like the bursting of a boiler.

I said: “I hate blackmailers.”

“The man I blackmailed was a very bad man,” said Karmesin.

“How bad?”

“He was a blackmailer,” said Karmesin.

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“It was a good example of the manner in which little fleas bite big fleas. The man whom he proposed to blackmail was myself.”

“Make it a little clearer,” I said.

“Certainly. It is very simple. We were going to blackmail Captain Crapaud, of the French Police. He, in his turn, was blackmailing a certain Minister. The man with whom I was working was a certain villain named Cherubini, also of the French Police. He, not content with blackmailing Captain Crapaud, also wanted to blackmail me.”

“On what grounds?”

“He was going to blackmail me because I was blackmailing Captain Crapaud; and blackmail is a criminal offense, even in France. ЛИ he had to do was obtain evidence that I was blackmailing Crapaud.”

“All this is very complicated.”

“Not at all. It is childishly simple,” said Karmesin; and having borrowed a cigarette, he proceeded to explain:

Once upon a time (and it was not so many years ago) any attempt on the part of scholars, historians, or mere editors to link the names of great literary figures with the lowly detective story was greeted with impolite noises. Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer Prize winners writing detective stories? Ridiculous twaddle and insidious propaganda! Yet in the eight short years since EQMM has practised what it has preached, we have proved the truth again and again and again — that literary snobbishness is the sin of critics, not of writers... Consider, if you will, the Nobel Prize winners: six English and American authors have won the most coveted of all literary awards — an award made in the field, may we remind you, of idealistic literature; and of these, five — Rudyard Kipling, Sinclair Lewis, John Galsworthy, Eugene O’Neill, and Pearl S. Buck — have written tales (in the case of O’Neill, dramas) of crime or detection.

Consider, if you will, the winners of Pulitzer Prizes: every single one of the following has appeared in the pages of EQMM — Edith Wharton, Louis Bromfield, Elmer Rice, Marc Connelly, Susan Glaspell, T. S. Stribling, Stephen Vincent Benét, Ellen Glasgow, John Steinbeck, and soon we hope to bring you tales by Oliver La Farge and Robert E. Sherwood.

Oh, the literary snobs have conceded, in their patronizing way, that one of the earliest stories in the Bible is a tale of murder, and that it is possible, from a perverted point of view, to regard Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a detective story — indeed, as a psychological thriller; but they laugh off these classical examples as prodigious freaks of nature. Perhaps murder can be judged a freak of nature, but paradoxically the study of murder, in all its fictional forms, is a compellingly instinctive and natural theme — and if murder comes, can the detective be far behind?

Yet the literary snobs, from their ivory towers leaning so Pisa-like in the clouds, look down their long noses at the detective story. But the writers, we repeat, don’t. They recognize the detective story as a difficult and artistic medium, worthy of their sincerest efforts. How else explain that in addition to the famous literary figures mentioned above, EQMM has published detective-crime stories by Mark Twain, W. Somerset Maugham, Theodore Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, J. B. Priestley, William Faulkner, James Hilton, Arnold Bennett, Charles G. Norris, John van Druten — an incomplete roster which does injustice to many other fine writers.

Snobbery, as Berton Braley has said, is the pride of those who are not sure of their position. How different the literary attitude to detective stories would be if the critics themselves could be persuaded to try to write detective stories!

Snobbery, said Isaac Goldberg, is but a point in time. Let us have patience with our inferiors. They are ourselves of yesterday...

The room was in a cheap hotel, a few blocks from Market Street. The room had two windows, one of which faced the Bay. Jo Gar, his small body sprawled on the narrow bed, shivered a little. San Francisco was cold; he thought of the warm winds of Manila and the difference of the bays. He sighed and said softly to himself:

“Four more of the Rainbow diamonds — if I had them I could return to the Islands. I do not belong away from them—”

The telephone bell on the wall jangled; Jo Gar stared towards the apparatus for several seconds, then rose slowly. He was dressed in a gray suit that did not fit him too well, and his graying hair was mussed. He unhooked the receiver and said:

“Yes.”

A pleasant voice said: “Inspector Raines, of the customs office. I have information for you.”

Jo Gar said: “That is good — please come up.”

He hung up the receiver and stood for several seconds looking towards the door. One of his three bags had been opened; the other two he had not unlocked. The Cheyo Maru, bringing him from Honolulu, had arrived three hours ago, and there had been much for the Island detective to do. In the doing of it he had gained little. Perhaps, he thought, Inspector Raines had done better.

He took from one of his few remaining packages a brown-paper cigarette, lighted it. His gray-blue eyes held a faint smile as he inhaled. Down the hall beyond the room there was the slam of the elevator’s door, and footfalls. A man cleared his throat noisily. Jo Gar put his right hand in the pocket of his gray suit at his right side, went over and seated himself on the edge of the bed, facing the door. A knock sounded and the Philippine Island detective called flatly:

“Please — come in.”

The door opened. A middle-aged man entered, dressed in a dark suit with a light coat thrown across his shoulders. The sleeves of the man’s suit were not within the coat sleeves; it was worn as a cape. Raines had sharp features, pleasant blue eyes. His lips were thick; he was a big man. He said:

“Hello, Señor Gar.”

Jo Gar rose and they shook hands. Raines’ grip was loose and careless; he looked about the room, tossed a soft, gray hat on a chair. Jo Gar motioned towards the other chair in the room, and the inspector seated himself. He kept the coat slung across his shoulders.

Jo Gar said slowly, almost lazily:

“Something was found?”

The inspector frowned and shook his head. He took from his pocket a small card. His picture was at one corner of the card, which was quite soiled. There was the printing of the Customs Department, some insignia that Gar merely glanced at, a stamped seal — and the statement that Albert Raines was a member of the San Francisco customs office.

Raines said: “The chief thought I’d better show you that right away, as we hadn’t seen each other.”

The Island detective smiled. “Thank you,” he replied, and handed the card back. “Something was found?”

Raines shook his head. “Not a thing,” he said. “We held her up for two hours, and we searched everything carefully. We even searched the child — and the child’s baggage. We gave her a pretty careful questioning. For that matter — everybody on the boat got about three times the attention we usually give. And we didn’t turn up a stone.”

Jo Gar sighed. Raines said grimly: “If the diamonds were on that boat — they got past us. And that means you’re in a tough spot, yes?”

The Island detective said: “I think that is very much — what it means.”

Raines said in a more cheerful tone: “Well, the chief said you recovered six of the stones, between Manila and San Francisco — that’s not at all bad.”

Jo Gar smiled gently: “I was — extremely fortunate,” he said. “But the woman in black — I had hopes that the four diamonds—”

Raines said quickly: “So had we. When we got your coded wire telling us that you suspected her of the murder of the man you recovered five stones from, but that you couldn’t prove a thing against her, we figured we might be able to help. We weren’t. But we did as you requested — when she left the dock we had a man follow her.”

The Island detective said: “Good — she went to a hotel?”

Raines shook his head. “Don’t suppose you’ve ever been out around the Cliff House, Señor Gar. It’s a spot out on a bunch of jagged rocks, about an hour from town. A sort of amusement park has grown up around it. Seals fool around in the rocks and the tourists go for it strong. The woman took a cab, and our man took another. She went to the amusement park near the Cliff House.”

Jo Gar’s gray-blue eyes widened slightly.

“She spent more than three weeks on the Cheyo Maru,” he breathed slowly. “And when she landed and had been cleared after an exhaustive customs examination, she went to an amusement park. Strange.”

Raines made a grunting sound. “Damn’ strange,” he said. “Took all the baggage, which included a trunk we’d gone very carefully through. And the child.”

Jo Gar narrowed his eyes and looked beyond the inspector. He said quietly:

“In Manila we have an amusement park that is quite large. After entering I he main gate there are many places one can go.”

Raines nodded. “It’s like that here. Only this park has several entrances, and you can drive through a section of it. The cab went in one entrance, stopped for a while near a merry-go-round — went out another. Then it went to a house and stopped. The luggage was taken inside, and the woman and child went in. Our man stayed around a short time, but nothing else happened.”

The Island detective said: “You have the address?”

Raines nodded. He took from his pocket a small slip of paper, on which were scrawled some words, handed it to Jo Gar.

The Island detective read: “One hundred and forty-one West Pacific Avenue.”

Raines nodded. “That’s it — Cary said it was a frame house, set back a short distance from the road. The section isn’t much built up out there.”

Jo Gar nodded. “It is very good of you to bring me this information,” he stated.

Raines made a swift gesture with both hands. “That’s all right,” he said. “Cary has another job just now, or he’d have come along to tell you about it. Looks queer to me.”

The Island detective spoke slowly. “It is not necessary to drive through the amusement park, in order to reach this address?” he asked.

Raines said: “Hell, no — that’s what seems funny. That woman was trying to hide where she was going. Maybe she figured she might be followed.”

Jo Gar nodded. “I think you are right,” he said.

Raines got to his feet, held out his right hand.

“Sorry the office couldn’t get something on her at the pier,” he apologized. “But you know where she is — and you know she acted funny getting there.”

Jo Gar smiled and shook the inspector’s hand. He sat down on the bed again as Raines took his hat. When Raines reached the door, he said:

“Luck on those other four.” He grinned and went out. Going along the corridor he whistled. The elevator door slammed.

Jo Gar got to his feet with remarkable speed for him. He got his coat and hat, was out of the room quickly: He used the stairs instead of the elevator. When he reached the small lobby he saw Raines light a cigar, go outside and raise a hand. A cab pulled close to the curb. When it started away the Island detective hailed another, parked some feet from the hotel entrance. He said to the driver:

“Follow that machine, please — but do not move too close to it. When it halts, halt some distance away.”

The driver looked at Jo curiously, but nodded his head. The two cabs moved from one street to another. There was a great deal of traffic, but Jo’s driver was skillful. For perhaps ten minutes the two cabs moved through the city, apparently keeping in the heart of it. Finally the leading cab curved close to a building that had a large clock set in granite stone. It halted. Unfamiliar as Jo was with San Francisco, he recognized the building as a railroad station of considerable importance. There were many porters about, and cabs were everywhere.

As his own cab pulled close to the curb Jo watched Raines alight and pay his driver. The inspector hurried into the station, and when he was out of sight Jo paid up and left his cab. Me pulled his hat low over his eyes, straightened his small body a little, went into the station. Almost instantly he saw Raines. The man was at a luggage checking counter; as Jo watched from a safe distance he saw Raines handed two large-sized valises. A porter picked them up; Raines gestured towards another clock inside the station and said something. The porter hurried away, followed by the inspector.

Jo Gar followed, being careful not to be seen. When Raines and his porter went through a train gate, the Island detective halted near it, a peculiar smile on his face. After a few minutes the colored porter came back through the gate. Jo beckoned to him.

“The gentleman whose luggage you just carried to the train — I think he was a friend of mine. You saw his ticket?”

The porter shook his head slowly: “He tol’ me his car and seat number — didn’t show no ticket,” he replied.

Jo Gar frowned. “How did you know what train to take him to?” he asked slowly.

The porter grinned. “That’s right,” he said. “He wanted the Chicago train.”

The Island detective drew a sharp breath. He handed the porter a quarter, walked slowly back into the station’s waiting room.

“Mr. Raines had barely time to make his train,” he breathed softly. “Yet he was very kind to me — and said nothing about leaving on such a journey.”

He took a cab back to his hotel, found everything in his room in perfect order. He called the customs office and after considerable inquiry was told that Inspector Raines had left for his hotel some hour or so ago. He said:

“Yes, he has been here. I wondered if he had returned.”

There was a pause, questions were asked at the other end, and he was informed that Raines was not expected to return for special night work, but that he would be on duty in the morning. Jo Gar thanked his informant and hung up the receiver.

He sat on the edge of the small bed and watched a light sign flash in the distance. A ferry boat was a glow of moving light, on the Bay waters. The air seemed very cold. Jo Gar decided that the real Inspector Raines had met with injuries, and that a certain person had impersonated him, had told him an untrue story about a certain woman in black — and had then departed from the city of San Francisco. He decided that he was expected to go to the house at One hundred and forty-one, West Pacific Avenue, that he was supposed to believe the woman had acted suspiciously in going there.

He said softly and slowly: “I have the six diamonds — they have the four. I am in a strange city, and a card with a seal on it was expected to make a great impression. But one man’s picture can replace another’s — very easily—”

He rose and looked at his wrist-watch. It was almost eight o’clock. He inspected his Colt automatic, slipped it back into a pocket of his coat. The phone bell rang, and when he lifted the receiver and gave his name he was told that the customs office was calling, and that Inspector Raines had been found unconscious in an alley not far from the piers. He was still unconscious and it was not certain that he would live. He had apparently been struck over the head with a blunt instrument. The customs office felt that Señor Gar should know why he had failed to arrive, and also that all passengers on the Cheyo Maru had been passed through the office. One had been followed as requested, but her cab had been lost in traffic. The office was very sorry.

Jo Gar said: “I am very sorry to hear of Inspector Raines’ injuries. I will call at the office tomorrow. Thank you for calling.”

He hung up the receiver, went to the window that faced the Bay and the distant, lighted ferry boat. His gray-blue eyes were smiling coldly. He thought: They did not expect Inspector Raines to be found so soon. They did expect me to go immediately to the address the imposter gave me. They might easily have escaped with the four diamonds, but they chose to lead me to them. They wish the six in my possession, being very greedy. But I am warned, directly and indirectly.

The Island detective turned away from the window and moved towards the room door. He breathed very softly:

“Just the same — I shall go directly to the address given me.”

Mary Adams Sarett’s “Subject to Review” one of the eleven “first stories” which won special awards in last year s contest. It is an unusual story, told in documentary style, and although restrained in tone and deliberately mannered, has the impact of a real-life case history.

Mrs. Sarett majored in writing at Sarah Lawrence College and has been writing off and on since her graduation. In the last five years she has written what she describes as “an exceptionally bad novel” (we wonder), a number of plays which pleased only herself — and, in general, “bit off more than [she] could chew.” More recently, she tried her hand at short stories, but while these received encouragement, she did not actually sell one until EQMM offered to buy “Subject to Review.”

Yes, Mrs. Sarett’s first story is unusual — for who things of murder in the midst of battle? Who things of the murder of an individual while mass murder is the order of the day? Gilbert K. Chesterton once wrote a story in which he asked: “Where would a wise man hide a leaf?” And he answered: “In the forest.” And then GКС proceeded to have a man murdered on a battlefield — how better conceal a dead body than to surround it with many dead bodies? But Mrs. Sarett’s conception of murder on a battlefield is altogether different, and stems from far more realistic sources.

“Subject to Review” was inspired by newspaper accounts of just such tragedies as Mrs. Sarett has woven into her first story. True, the newspaper accounts were always vague and curiously incomplete, leaving plenty of room for a writer’s imagination. Once committed to her theme, however, Mrs. Sarett found that she had to bolster her imagination with considerable research; she studied official procedure and cross-examined many people whose war experiences were more intimate than hers and whose memories were still vivid and, in some instances, partially recorded. And Mrs. Sarett did her research well: the stamp of authenticity shines through her tale of a military murder investigation.

In 1920 John Leslie Palmer, dramatic critic and editor, joined the Permanent Secretariat of the League of Nations, at Geneva. The Secretariat, unhappily, proved far from Permanent. But Mr. Palmer met another member of the Secretariat, a famous man-about-continent bearing one of the most distinguished English-sounding names we have ever heard outside a “serious” novel — Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders. (And that reminds us, quite irrelevantly, that Robert Louis Stevenson, who had an exceptional flair for le nom juste, once wrote to Sir James M. Barrie that Stevenson’s uncle “has simply the finest name in the world, Ramsay Traquair.”) Anyway, Messrs. Palmer and Saunders discovered that they had many things in common, besides wording for the League of Nations: they were both Oxford men; they both had literary leanings; and they both had a particular weakness for “full-blooded, high-sounding and richly melodramatic carryings-on.”

In a phrase, they both lilted detective stories. Thus was born the pseudonym of “Francis Feeding,” and under that name Messrs. Saunders and Palmer have produced “many superior mystery novels” — including DEATH WALKS IN EASTREPPS (which Vincent Starrett has ranked as “one of the ten greatest detective novels”), THE HOUSE OF DR. EDWARDES (which has more than once been the basis of a moving picture), and that series of books with the most ambitious of all continuity-titles, THE ONE SANE MAN, THE TWO UNDERTAKERS, THE THREE FISHERS, THE FOUR ARMOURERS, THE FIVE FLAMBOYS, THE SIX PROUD WALKERS, THE SEVEN SLEEPERS, and ad (we fervently hope) infinitum.

And now we give you Francis Feeding s finest performance in the short story field — the pathetic tale of Bert Higgins, an innocent man, waiting in the death house for a last-minute reprieve. You will find an Ambrose Bierce quality in the story, too; indeed, though we do not know what English prison Francis Beeding had in mind, the story might have been called “An Occurrence at Pentonville.”

Bert Higgins pulled on his trousers and looked round for his collar and tie.

It was quite comfortable in the condemned cell, but dark. There was a fire in the grate and that, in itself, was a luxury to which Bert Higgins was not accustomed.

These were his own clothes — the double-breasted blue serge suit in which he had been tried. They had taken it away from him after sentence and given him prison — clothes. But today they had given it back to him.

This meant, of course, that the reprieve had come at last. It must have arrived during the night. But he could not go out into the street, reprieve or no reprieve, without a collar and tie.

“Collar,” he said, “where’s my collar, Joe?”

Joe was a nice fellow — nicer than the other warder, Mike.

Joe turned away, a little awkwardly, and stared at the window which, since it was of frosted glass, was not of much use as a peep-show.

“You won’t be needin’ them,” he said.

“Not needin’ them?” Bert began to protest.

Then he stopped and smiled.

Joe, of course, was under a false impression. Joe believed that he, Bert Higgins, was going to be hanged. That, however, was absurd. It simply wasn’t done. Only criminals were hanged. He was not a criminal. He was innocent. He hadn’t done it and a man was never hanged if he hadn’t done it.

“Anything you fancy for breakfast, Bert?”

It was Joe speaking. He had a face as long as a yard measure. Bert, in his superior knowledge of English justice, smiled at him reassuringly.

“Breakfast,” he said. “I don’t mind ownin’ I feel a bit peckish. Could they run to a steak and chips, d’ye think?”

Joe looked at him a moment.

“I’ll see what we can do, mate,” he answered and went to the little trap in the door which he slid back, saying a word to someone outside.

“It will be along in ten minutes,” he announced, turning away from the door.

“That’s prime,” said Bert. “Got a fag about you, Joe?”

Warder Joe silently produced a packet of Gold Flakes. Bert lit up, and bent to lace his boots.

Why didn’t they hurry up with that reprieve? It was cruel to keep a fellow waiting. Suppose, for example, he had been one of those nervous chaps. He would be carrying on something dreadful now, imagining things. It was past eight o’clock already — not quite another hour to run.

Bert smiled again. He hadn’t done it. They couldn’t hang him because he hadn’t done it. The reprieve was bound to come.

Mechanically he put on his vest. What would he do first, on leaving the prison? It was no use going home. Amy was dead. That was the only thing that had really troubled him at all through the business of the trial — a much worse thing than anything that had happened since his arrest, much worse than when the old geezer in the wig and red robes had put that silly bit of black cloth on his nap-per and told him he was going to be hanged by the neck.

There was no getting over it. He loved Amy. Always had. And he would miss her cruel. It wasn’t her fault if she was a bit flighty. She could not help being flighty any more than he could help having his pint and then some more at the Goat and Compasses. Besides, there had never been anything wrong, really. Not what you would call wrong. And naturally, with her that pretty, she had her temptations.

Pretty, indeed. Amy was lovely, like a rose from Coven t Garden, a whole bunch of roses. That parson chap who had married them had said he had never seen a ’andsomer couple, and as this thought passed through his mind, Bert stopped in front of the mirror and began, with great care and a comb wetted in the basin, to arrange his hair.

He had won Amy, won her fair and square, from the lot of them — including George, who would soon be standing where he, Bert Higgins, stood that day. For George had done it and there would be no reprieve for George.

George had begun by taking them out, both of them, to the pictures and to a little fish and chips afterwards.

So it had gone on till one day he had come back from looking for a job of work to find George and Amy in the parlor together. Sitting on the sofa, they were, and there had been words with Amy about it that evening and Amy had been saucy and he had smacked her face and she had thrown the saucepan at him, and the biggest black eye you ever saw had begun to sprout where the saucepan had hit him. But when Amy had seen it next day she had cried and kissed him and gone out and got a bit of meat to put on his eye. And he had said they ought to eat it and they had laughed together. Quick-tempered Amy was... had been.

A sob rose in his throat, but he gulped it down and at that moment the door of the cell opened.

It was Mike with the breakfast.

Bert sat down and began to peg away. But his mind was not on the food though the steak tasted good. He had started to think again of his final quarrel with Amy, not about George, this time, but something quite silly — the sort of thing people quarrel about in music halls. He couldn’t even remember what it was. Yet he would never forget that Saturday evening as long as he lived — not as long as he lived.

Well, he was only twenty-four. No reason why he should not live till seventy — after the reprieve.

Amy had been violent again and he had raised his hand, but he hadn’t meant to strike her. This time she had thrown the coffee-pot. But it had missed him and hit the wall and made a hell of a clatter. And he turned on his heel and walked straight out into the fog.

That was the first misfortune. No one had seen him leaving the house.

He had made his way to the Goat and Compasses. But it had taken him some time, for the fog had been so thick. There he had taken a drink and what with one thing and another... well, he had taken several drinks and his pal, Harry, being sympathetic, had poured gin in his beer and suggested he should go home and give Amy a good walloping.

“Bert,” he had said, “what she wants is a firm ’and.”

So he had started back home meaning to give Amy what she wanted. But it had taken him half an hour to get home.

Half an hour to go from the Goat and Compasses to West bury Terrace when it was only five minutes’ walk.

Nobody, of course, believed it — least of all that nasty little man with the twitching nose who had conducted the prosecution.

Yet what could have been more natural? He had just wandered round the street for half an hour making up his mind to go in and wallop Amy. And then, when at last he had gone in...

Bert pushed away his unfinished cup of tea. He suddenly felt he did not want any more breakfast. He still saw Amy lying there, in the bedroom upstairs, with her head all cut open and a broken beer bottle lying on the floor. He would remember that to his dying day... his dying day.

He had picked up the bottle and at that moment the coppers had come. Old Green from next door brought them. Old Green heard the row earlier in the evening and he hadn’t seen the prisoner — that was him — Bert Higgins — leave the house or come back. Old Green had sworn to having heard several such rows before. He had testified in court that Amy and Bert Higgins were on bad terms with each other, which was a lie. He had always been on the best of terms with Amy. Bad terms, indeed!

Nobody had seen George enter or leave the house. But that was only because of the fog. George, of course, must have come along while he was at the Goat and Compasses. It was George who had sloshed Amy with the beer bottle. Wasn’t he employed by a brewery? But that prosecutin’ fellow had pointed out that you could get a bottle of Bishop’s ale anywhere and that there were several bottles of it in Bert’s own kitchen.

George must have had a row with Amy, the same as he had. But while he had only hit her with his hand, George had sloshed her with a bottle.

That was what had happened, but he couldn’t prove it and George had dug up an old sweetheart who had sworn he had been with her at the time and that was what they called an alibi.

There came a knock at the door and Warder Joe crossed the cell.

“Chaplain to see you, mate,” he announced.

“Not for me,” said Bert. “ ’E’ll only talk to me about a future life and this one’s good enough for me.”

Bert spent the next quarter of an hour walking up and down his cell. They were cutting things rather fine with the reprieve. But those government chaps were always like that. Look at the clerks at the Labor Exchange. It took you hours to draw the dole. Lack of organization, that’s what it was.

But here, at last, was the governor. Chap in gray with a white mustache. Behind him were three men in dark clothes. Two of them had their hands behind their backs as though they were hiding something. Behind them again was the chaplain. There was no getting away from these parsons.

“Put your hands behind your back, please.”

It was one of the men in dark clothes speaking. Warder Joe stood at his elbow. Somebody seized his arms firmly above the elbows. Something tight was pressing against them and he found suddenly that they had been strapped behind him. Another of the men in dark clothes was slipping something over his head, something woolly, a woolen bag.

“ ’Ere,” protested Bert Higgins.

But they had pulled it right down to his neck and he could not see and his protest was stifled. But he could hear all right. The chaplain was at him now.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live.”

“ ’Ere,” Bert protested again.

But no one answered him. He felt himself being pushed firmly forward. His feet touched stone as he walked, then wood. The wood quivered a little beneath his feet and he was brought to a halt. At the same moment something was slipped over his head.

It rasped his neck as it settled on his shoulders and a hard lump sat uncomfortably to the left underneath his chin.

“ ’Ere,” protested Bert Higgins for the third time.

The hands which had touched him, moved away. He was suddenly alone...

Footsteps sounded somewhere. A door creaked. A voice cried out sharply in the darkness.

“Here you are, Governor. Straight from the Home Secretary.”

There was a crackle of paper. The Governor was saying something.

Bert Higgins breathed a sigh of relief. They had cut it pretty fine but this was just what he had expected.

Yes, that was right. They were untying his arms. The woolen bag was pulled from his face and there stood the Governor smiling at him.

“A narrow squeak,” the Governor was saying. “But the reprieve has come at last. George Butterworth was arrested early this morning.”

“And may God have mercy on his soul,” said Bert Higgins, as he followed the Governor from the cell.

Could they be at the prison gates already?

“Here they are, mate,” said Joe and Bert Higgins perceived that the warder was offering him a collar and tie.

But first he must shake hands with the Governor.

“Goodbye, Higgins,” said the Governor.

“So long, Guv-ner.”

It was raining as usual and the streets were sombre and gray. That was a tram. It was fading with a noise of bells, into the fog. Bert Higgins ran after it. His legs were heavy and reluctant, but by a supreme effort he jumped on board and found a place.

He sat in the train. Time passed. He was being carried quite a long way and suddenly he perceived that the tram was empty. The conductor, wearing a mackintosh cape, loomed in from the fog.

“Terminus, mate,” he said. “Tram don’t go no further.”

Bert Higgins left the tram. The streets were very dark and the fog was thickening. But Bert could see quite clearly where he was. That was Westbury Terrace. Why had he come to Westbury Terrace? Force of habit, he supposed. Was the house still empty or had it a new tenant? He did not want to walk down that familiar street but his feet dragged him forward.

There stood the door, same as ever, a dirty green. It hadn’t had a spot of paint on it for years.

But the steps were nice and white. Who could have cleaned them, now Amy was gone. He pushed open the door and entered the hall. A light shone from the kitchen and someone was standing at the wooden table. It was a woman and her back was turned to him. She stood at the table with a rolling pin in her hand, rolling... rolling.

The woman turned and looked at him. She was all in white... in her wedding dress, and there was flour on her forearms.

“Hello, Bert,” said Amy, “thought you was never comin’.”

When the world was born, Man came first and Woman second. God so ordained. When the detective in fiction was born, Man again came first and Woman second — so Man himself ordained. If we think of Poe’s Dupin as the Adam of story-book sleuths, who is the Eve? The Lord said: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.” And out of the man’s rib made He a woman — and so it came to pass in fictional ferretry. A full twenty years after the creation of Dupin an unknown writer brought forth the first detectivette, and so shrouded in mystery is her origin that we still have only tentative data on her nativity. We do know that

I knew something was up, because he came in nervous instead of just plain lit. He’d had his usual liquid transfusion, but his cooling system must have jammed; it wasn’t taking.

He didn’t bother looking at me. Me — last year’s moll, left-over around the place. I was just a part of the furniture. That was his mistake. Chairs don’t stand around waiting to get even on you.

The first six months or so I’d tried to run out on him, but I always got brought back feet first, and I usually had to have a new porcelain cap put on a tooth or two right afterwards. Since then things had changed. Now he was sick of me, but he couldn’t get rid of me for love nor money. I was staying until I could get something on him.

He started dialing a number the minute he came in the door, before he even took his hat off. When he wanted a number that fast and that early — five in the morning — it couldn’t be anyone’s but his mouth’s. So that meant he was in a jam.

I couldn’t read the slots as he spun them, because he was out in the hall and I was inside at the mirror fiddling with my nails, but I could tell by the length of time the dial took slipping back each time about which ones they were. The first three were short turns — the exchange and its subdivision. The next two were long hauls — the end slot. His mouth’s private number began with two zeros; that was it all right. Then he changed his mind, hung up instead of going ahead. So that meant he wasn’t sure whether he was in a jam or not; he’d just done something that worried him and was afraid he might be.

He came in instead, stiff-armed me by the shoulder, twisted me around his way so I nearly broke in two, and blew a lot of expensive Cutty Sark in my face for an atomizer. “Listen, Last Year,” he said. “I been here with you from about three on, get that? I been here with you from the time I left the club.”

“You been here from three on,” I repeated. I had more porcelain caps than I could carry now. He was bending over me and I couldn’t help seeing his collar.

“She’s got the damnedest aim,” I remarked. “Why don’t you hold still when you’re leaving her, so you get it on the kisser and not the Cluett Peabody?”

He yanked the collar off so hard and fast his whole tie stayed on around his neck. He looked at it kind of scared, and blew out a little breath, as though he were relieved I’d spotted it for him in time. He went into the bathroom. I heard a match scratch and I saw flame reflected against the tiles. I got a whiff of scorched linen, and then a lot of water ran down. He’d burned it.

That gave me a hint about what the jam was. He’d done something to her, whoever she was. Because he certainly hadn’t got rid of it on my account. He’d brought those same lipstick trademarks back with him before, and it hadn’t bothered him whether I saw them or not. They wouldn’t come out in the wash, I’d found that out; it was waterproof rouge and they just went a little lighter.

And if it bothered him, that meant he hadn’t meant to do it, whatever it was. Because what was a little kill to him? If he’d cut notches in a stick he’d have had a buzz-saw by now. But he always had it done by remote control, and this was one time he’d been very much all there, judging by his collar; that made a difference. That alone was positive proof to me that it was unintentional.

The way I figured it, one of two things had happened. Either he’d found out something, lost his head for a minute, and couldn’t control his trigger-finger in time, and now he regretted it; or it had been altogether an accident. Maybe she was one of those dumb twists that just had to fool with his gun to kill time between huddles, and had playfully pulled the trigger.

Either way it looked like my long-delayed payoff was coming up. So I just sat where I was and rubbed cold cream into my map as an excuse for staying up, to get all the dope I could. He came out again, collar gone now, and massaged the back of his neck. That meant he was trying to figure out whether to let the jam ride and take a chance on getting away with it, or do something to straighten it out.

He took off his coat and vest, and took a .32 out of one of the pockets. He took a sniff at the bore, and then tapped it against the palm of his hand a couple of times, worried. That wasn’t his gun; he would have used a caliber like that to pick his teeth with.

Finally he went out to the phone again, and dialed a different number, without any zeros. “Louie,” he said in a low voice. “I want you to come over here and do something for me.”

Louie made it fast. But that’s all he was geared for anyway, just one of his stooges. He brought him into the room with him. I was working on my neck now.

Louie said, “H’lo, Mae,” just to stay in good with Buck, not knowing for sure if I’d been scratched yet.

“Never mind her,” Buck said, letting him know I had. He gave me a traffic signal toward the bathroom with his thumb. “G’wan, get inside there and swaller some iodine or something until I tell you to come out again. And keep that door closed.”

I missed some of it that way, but not for lack of pushing my ear hard enough against the door seam. His voice rose irritably every once in a while, which was a habit of his whenever he was talking to his stooges, and that helped some.

“Naw, no one heard it and no one saw it, or I woulda gotten Mendes on the wire right off,” was the first thing I got, after a minute or two of static. Mendes was his mouthpiece.

More poor reception, and then: “Why didn’t I leave it there? Suppose it was hers! Don’t you think they’re gonna know someone was up there, you dumb lug? Her wrist was weaker than I thought it would be; I pushed it all the way back over her shoulder, and it hit something, turned aside, and the bullet went into her from the back!”

More interference, and then: “I wouldn’t wanna pass it off like that even if I could. I didn’t want to lose the kid, even after what I found out. I was just gonna slap her around a few times. I got somebody lined up for it. No one takes anything away from me without paying for it!”

A name was coming up. I shifted down to the keyhole, where the reception was better.

“The boy friend’s name is Frank Rogers; I got that much out of her before it happened. He came on here to take her back to her home town, when they’d heard she was getting in wrong. He’s at the Hallerton House, one of these men’s hotels. You know how to work it. Put a little vaseline on the gun, but see that you’ve got on gloves yourself. You be looking it over just as he comes along — in the hall outside his room, for instance. You drop the gun and it lands on one of your pet corns. You grab your foot with both hands and hop around, so you’ve got an excuse for not picking it up yourself. He’ll bend down and hand it back to you without thinking twice — any guy would. Then just keep it well wrapped up after that, so it don’t catch cold.”

Some low-pitched beefing I couldn’t catch came in from Louie at this point. Then Buck overrode him: “What you worrying about? You don’t have to go in there with her, you yellow belly. The body’s safe until ten; the woman that does her cleaning don’t come around before then. Just see that you leave the gun around inside the building some place where the cops can’t miss it, like he threw it away on the lam. Now get over there fast. He’ll be getting up early; he was figuring on taking her back with him on the early-morning bus. The six o’clock one. So hurry.”

I heard the outside door slam, I counted ten, and then I drifted out. “We’re kind of low on iodine in there,” I said meekly. “Should I have used a razor?”

He fired his shoe at me. It missed my head but busted the mirror. “Have a little bad luck on me,” he wished fervently.

There were still enough pieces left in the mirror’s frame to do piecework by, so I sat down at it again, for a stall to stay awake longer than him. He put on a pair of pajamas with zebra stripes. The last thing he said was, “You may as well quit that; it’s not gonna get you anything — even in the dark.” His yap dropped open and he started to breathe heavy.

I took another halfturn on the cold cream, to make sure he was asleep. I kept thinking, “I gotta find out who she is. Was, I mean. This is what I been waiting for six months. This is my chance to fix him good, and if I pass it up it’ll never come again, he’s too cagy. I’ve got the fall guy’s name. Frank Rogers. But I gotta find out hers, and especially where she’s lying dead right now.” Then a short cut occurred to me. “What the hell, this Rogers can tell me who and where she is.”

I had to work fast, but I had to work carefully too. One wrong move and I knew what my finish would be. And it wouldn’t be just another busted tooth this time either. He or some one of his gang would kill me. That was why there was no question of just anonymously ratting on Buck to the cops. I had to stay out of it altogether. They had to trace it back to him themselves. I had to find some way of making sure they did — and leave me in the clear, on the sidelines, when they did. Even with him in the death house, my life wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel if there was a leak afterwards.

I wouldn’t call it a frame. There was once a guy named Gordon, may his good soul rest in peace... Never mind that now.

I didn’t have much time. Those stooges of Buck’s moved fast when they were on his shift. That Louie must be practically at Rogers’ hotel by now. Here goes, I thought, and I tiptoed out to the phone, keeping my face turned his way so I could do a quick right-about-face if his eyes opened.

The dial made an awful clack. I tried to bury it against my chest, but it wouldn’t go around then. Finally I muffled it all I could by keeping my finger in the slot on the return trip each time, but I expected to feel a slug in the back of my neck any minute.

“Get me Mr. Frank Rogers and get him fast,” I said to the hotel clerk under my breath. They got him fast but not fast enough to suit me. He sounded sleepy too, must have just got up. Which was another bad break; it would have been bad enough talking to someone wide-awake.

I began: “I haven’t time to repeat what I’m going to say a second time, so don’t ask me to, get it the first. I’ve got a message for you from your girl friend.”

“Alma?” he said, surprised.

That was only one-third of what I needed. “To make sure I’ve got the right party, kick back with her full name and address. There may be another Frank Rogers in the same building.”

He fell for it. “Alma Kitteredge, 832 East Seventy-second. What’s the message?”

“Just put on your pants and pull out of town fast. She’s not coming with you, you’ll find out why when you get back home. Buy a two-cent paper and shut up about this call.”

I was going to warn him not to touch anything, not to pick up any guns for any strangers, but before I had time I had to hang up. Buck had just changed sides in the hay. “What are you doing out there?” he growled.

“Just bringing in the morning paper, dee-yur.”

It hadn’t come yet, but he was asleep again by then anyway.

I made a quick round-trip to the closet, grabbed up whatever was handiest, and got dressed out there in the foyer on the installment plan, stopping between each layer to see if I was still in the clear. I put on my checker-board swagger-coat. Black and white plaid; you could see it a mile away even with low visibility, but it had been on the end hanger. I wasn’t heading for an Easter parade, anyway.

The last thing I took was a clean collar of his, rolled it up small, and put it in my handbag. Then I edged over and fished his key holder out of his vest-pocket. He had an awful lot of them, but only three Yales. I stepped outside and found out which was the one to our place, and that left only two. One probably to his office at the gambling club, and the other one to her place. I detached both of them and took them with me.

I eased the door closed after me, and then I hot-footed it down to the street, scared up a cab, and gave Alma’s address. I hadn’t been out this early in the morning since I was a good girl in love with an honest guy.

I had the driver let me off on the corner instead of right outside the door. It wasn’t such a hot place. None of the trimmings. No doorman, nothing. I could tell Buck hadn’t picked it for her. Still, he already had the key. She’d been afraid to refuse it to him, I guess. Just like I’d been before Gordon had his “accident.”

The door key opened the street door too. The mail slot said 3-A. I walked up a couple of flights of stairs and found the door, a little to the left. I didn’t knock. I knew there was no one in there to hear me any more. The key I’d taken from Buck worked the door without any trouble, and I closed it quietly after me with a back-hand motion. The lights had been left on.

She had it nice inside. But she was spoiling the looks of it, even though she was a pretty little thing, lying slopped all over the floor like that.

I looked down at her. “Cheer up, kid,” I said softly. “He’ll get it hung on him, don’t worry.”

I went in to her dressing table, rummaged, and got out her lipstick. It was waterproof rouge. I took it back to where she was, bent down by her, lifted her head, and reddened up her mouth plenty. When I’d put it on so thick that it was practically caked on her, I picked up her hand and closed her fingers tight around the lipstick holder.

“Just so the dicks’ll know what you were trying to tell them,” I murmured to her. “If they don’t think it funny that a girl dying from a slug takes time out to rouge her lips, they oughta be out shoving street cleaners’ tea wagons around. Now spread yourself on this.” I unrolled his clean collar, held it out straight by both ends, and pressed it hard against her smeared mouth. The print came out perfect, a complete cupid’s bow.

“They’ll check the rouge, they’ll check the shape of your mouth. Oh, they’ll know,” I promised her softly. I rolled the collar up carefully again, put a little tissue paper around it so it wouldn’t blur, put it back in my handbag.

“Now just so they’ll know what to look for it on...” I said. I went over to the table and picked up a big glossy magazine lying there. I thumbed through the ads until I came to a full-page men’s collar ad, with a handsome he-model illustrating it. “Here you go,” I said. I held that against her mouth, so that the print came out on the collar in the photograph just about where it had on Buck’s. Then I dropped the mag on the floor near her, open at that particular page.

“Now if the cops are any good at all, that oughta bring them around where I live sooner or later — without me having to be filled full of buckshot for it either.” I looked back at her from the door, saluted her sadly. “Take it easy, Toots. And the next time you live, marry your Frank Rogers fast and don’t fool around with dynamite.”

I had my hand on the door knob ready to leave when I heard someone outside in the hall. A sort of tiptoey tread, the kind you notice all the quicker just because it’s trying not to be heard. I knew it was Louie, with his little gun all neatly fingerprinted now by Rogers. Louie must have come up through the basement, because I had Buck’s key. I got good and scared. I didn’t stop to think what a wonderful break I’d just had; if I’d left a minute sooner I’d have run into him head-on on the stairs. Or if he’d shown up a minute later. I was all right where I was. He was too yellow to come in here, and he didn’t have the key anyway.

The sound of his tiptoeing went down the hall to the back. There was a muffled clunk from a tin bucket, then his steps came back again, passed the door where I was holding my breath, and faded out down the stairs.

I gave him all the time he needed to get out of the building. Then I let myself out, closed her door, and went up there to the end of the hall. There was a fire-ax clamped to the wall, and there was a red fire-bucket on the floor under it. The gun was lying at the bottom of it.

I’d seen Buck clean his often enough. He always used a piece of chamois or kidskin. Of course this was different; this was to get prints off, but I figured the same thing would work. I took one of my own gloves, from my handbag, to it. That, and my breath, and — what a lady spits with. I worked until there couldn’t have been anything left on it. Then I laid it down again inside the pail.

I took a couple of swabs at the outside door knob too, just for luck, before I left. Not that I was particularly worried about myself, but just not to cloud the issue. The whole job must have taken about five, six minutes. Then I went downstairs and out of the building, and stood there for a half-minute outside the street door — like a fool, but the way anyone’s apt to do. Sort of taking a deep breath after finishing something. It was still early but it was good and light by now.

You know how you can feel it when anyone’s looking at you hard, even from a distance? Something pulled my head around in the opposite direction, and there was a figure in a light gray suit down at the next corner, on the other side of the street, sizing me up for all he was worth. It was Louie, same suit he’d just had on up at our place; he’d just come out of a cigar store that he’d gone into either to buy smokes or to report his success back to Buck over the wire.

My first thought was, “Take it easy. He can’t tell who you are from that far off.” Then I looked down at myself and I saw those checker-board black and white squares all over me. “Oh, Lord!” I gasped, and I stepped down from the doorway fast and went up the other way.

The steady way he’d been staring told me he already had a hunch it was me. And I knew what the next step would be. He’d phone back to Buck fast to see if I was there or not.

I jumped into the first cab I saw and I almost shook the driver by the shoulders to get some speed out of him. “Fast!” I kept whimpering. “Fast! I’ve got to beat a phone call.”

“I don’t see how it can be done,” he said.

I didn’t either, but it had to be. If Louie had only wasted time tailing me around to where I’d hopped the cab... If he’d only run out of nickels...

But if he’d already phoned Buck the first time and woken him up, then what was the use of all this? I was already finished. I threw something at the driver, I think it was a fin for a six-bit ride, and I never got up to a third floor so fast before or after.

It was ringing away, I could hear it right through the door while I was trying to get it open. And of course I would drop, the key on the floor in my hurry and have to dredge for it. I don’t know how I did it but finally I was in and had the damned thing at my mouth and ear, just as Buck came up for air in the other room and growled, “Are you gonna get a move on and shut that damn thing up or d’ya want a ride on the end of my foot?”

It was Louie, all right. “Who’s that — Mae?” he said. He acted surprised I was there. So was I.

“Sure, who else?” I couldn’t say much, I was too winded.

“I got three wrong numbers in a row, can y’imagine?” I thanked God and the Telephone Company. “I coulda sworn I seen you down on Seventy-second Street just now.”

“Whaddya think I do, walk in my sleep?”

“Well, this dame beat it away fast.”

“She probably got a look at your face. Listen, get through, will you? You just busted a dream Charles Boyer was in with me.”

“Just tell Buck: Okay.” He hung up. I got undressed right where I was standing, on the zipper plan; just dropped everything off together and stepped out of them. But he was asleep again, he didn’t ask who it was.

I got her door key and the other one back into his pocket. I hung that blasted checker-board coat as far back inside the closet as it would go, and made a mental note to sell it to the first old-clothes man that came around. The collar with her death kiss on it I rolled up at the bottom of the laundry bag.

The rest was up to the dicks.