The editor hereby makes grateful acknowledgment to the following authors and authors’ representatives for giving permission to reprint the material in this volume:

Lieutenant Randall telephoned me on Tuesday, catching me in my cell-sized office at the public library just after I’d finished lunch.

“Hal?” he said. “How come you’re not out playing patty-cake with the book borrowers?” Randall still resents my leaving the police department to become a library detective — what he calls a “sissy cop.” Nowadays my assignments involve nothing more dangerous than tracing stolen and overdue books for the public library.

I said, “Even a library cop has to eat, Lieutenant. What’s on your mind?”

“Same old thing. Murder.”

“I haven’t killed anyone for over a week,” I said.

His voice took on a definite chill. “Somebody killed a young fellow we took out of the river this morning. Shot him through the head. And tortured him beforehand.”

“Sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten how grim it was to be a Homicide cop. “Tortured, did you say?”

“Yeah. Cigar burns all over him. I need information, Hal.”

“About what?”

“You ever heard of The Damion Complex?”

“Sure. It’s the title of a spy novel published last year.”

“I thought it might be a book.” There was satisfaction in Randall’s voice now. “Next question: you have that book in the public library?”

“Of course. Couple of copies probably.”

“Do they have different numbers or something to tell them apart?”

“Yes, they do. Why?”

“Find out for me if one of your library copies of The Damion Complex has this number on it, will you?” He paused and I could hear paper rustling. “ES4187.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll get back to you in ten minutes.” Then, struck by something familiar about the number, I said, “No, wait, hold it a minute, Lieutenant.”

I pulled out of my desk drawer the list of overdue library books I’d received the previous morning and checked it hurriedly. “Bingo,” I said into the phone. “I picked up that book with that very number yesterday morning. How about that? Do you want it?”

“I want it.”

“For what?”

“Evidence, maybe.”

“In your torture-murder case?”

He lost patience. “Look, just get hold of the book for me, Hal. I’ll tell you about it when I pick it up, okay?”

“Okay, Lieutenant. When?”

“Ten minutes.” He sounded eager.

I hung up and called Ellen on the checkout desk. “Listen, sweetheart,” I said to her because it makes her mad to be called sweetheart and she s extremely attractive when she’s mad, “can you find me The Damion Complex, copy number ES4187? I brought it in yesterday among the overdues.”

“The Damion Complex?” She took down the number. “I’ll call you back, Hal.” She didn’t sound a bit mad. Maybe she was softening up at last. I’d asked her to marry me seventeen times in the last six months, but she was still making up her mind.

In two minutes she called me back. “It’s out again,” she reported. “It went out on card number 3888 yesterday after you brought it in.”

Lieutenant Randall was going to love that. “Who is card number 3888?”

“A Miss Oradell Murphy.”

“Address?”

She gave it to me, an apartment on Leigh Street.

“Telephone number?”

“I thought you might be able to look that up yourself.” She was tart. “I’m busy out here.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “Will you marry me?”

“Not now. I told you I’m busy.” She hung up. But she did it more gently than usual, it seemed to me. She was softening up. My spirits lifted.

Lieutenant Randall arrived in less than the promised ten minutes. “Where is it?” he asked, fixing me with his cat stare. He seemed too big to fit into my office. “You got it for me?”

I shook my head. “It went out again yesterday. Sorry.”

He grunted in disappointment, took a look at my spindly visitor’s chair, and decided to remain standing. “Who borrowed it?”

I told him Miss Oradell Murphy, Apartment 3A at the Harrington Arms on Leigh Street.

“Thanks.” He tipped a hand and turned to leave.

“Wait a minute. Where you going, Lieutenant?”

“To get the book.”

“Those apartments at Harrington Arms are efficiencies,” I said. “Mostly occupied by single working women. So maybe Miss Murphy won’t be home right now. Why not call first?”

He nodded. I picked up my phone and gave our switchboard girl Miss Murphy’s telephone number. Randall fidgeted nervously.

“No answer,” the switchboard reported.

I grinned at Randall. “See? Nobody home.”

“I need that book.” Randall sank into the spindly visitor’s chair and sighed in frustration.

“You were going to tell me why.”

“Here’s why.” He fished a damp crumpled bit of paper out of an envelope he took from his pocket. I reached for it. He held it away. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “We found it on the kid we pulled from the river this morning. It’s the only damn thing we did find on him. No wallet, no money, no identification, no clothing labels, no nothing. Except for this he was plucked as clean as a chicken. We figure it was overlooked. It was in the bottom of his shirt pocket.”

“What’s it say?” I could see water-smeared writing.

He grinned unexpectedly, although his yellow eyes didn’t seem to realize that the rest of his face was smiling. “It says: PL Damion Complex ES4187.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Great bit of deduction, Lieutenant,” I said. “You figured the PL for Public Library?”

“All by myself.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“How do I know till I get the damn book?” He sat erect and went on briskly, “Who had the book before Miss Murphy?”

I consulted my overdue list from the day before. “Gregory Hazzard. Desk clerk at the Starlight Motel on City Line. I picked up seven books and fines from him yesterday.”

The Lieutenant was silent for a moment. Then, “Give Miss Murphy another try, will you?”

She still didn’t answer her phone.

Randall stood up. My chair creaked when he removed his weight. “Let’s go see this guy Hazzard.”

“Me, too?”

“You, too.” He gave me the fleeting grin again. “You’re mixed up in this, son.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Your library owns the book. And you belong to the library. So move your tail.”

Gregory Hazzard was surprised to see me again so soon. He was a middle-aged skeleton, with a couple of pounds of skin and gristle fitted over his bones so tightly that he looked like the object of an anatomy lesson. His clothes hung on him — snappy men’s wear on a scarecrow. “You got all my overdue books yesterday,” he greeted me.

”I know, Mr. Hazzard. But my friend here wants to ask you about one of them.”

“Who’s your friend?” He squinted at Randall.

“Lieutenant Randall, City Police.”

Hazzard blinked. “Another cop? We went all through that with the boys from your robbery detail day before yesterday.”

Randall’s eyes flickered. Otherwise he didn’t change expression. “I’m not here about that. I’m interested in one of your library books.”

“Which one?”

“The Damion Complex.”

Hazzard bobbed his skull on his pipestem neck. “That one. Just a so-so yam. You can find better spy stories in your newspaper.”

Randall ignored that. “You live here in the motel, Mr. Hazzard?”

“No. With my sister down the street a ways, in a duplex.”

“This is your address on the library records, I broke in. The Starlight Motel.”

“Sure. Because this is where I read all the books I borrow. And where I work.”

“Don’t you ever take library books home?” Randall asked.

“No. I leave ’em here, right at this end of the desk, out of the way. I read ’em during slack times, you know? When I finish them I take em back to the library and get another batch. I’m a fast reader.”

“But your library books were overdue. If you’re such a fast reader, how come?”

“He was sick for three weeks,” I told Randall. “Only got back to work Saturday.”

The Lieutenant’s lips tightened and I knew from old experience that he wanted me to shut up. “That right?” he asked Hazzard. “You were sick?”

“As a dog. Thought I was dying. So’d my sister. That’s why my books were overdue.”

“They were here on the desk all the time you were sick?”

“Right. Cost me a pretty penny in fines, too, I must say. Hey, Mr. Johnson?” I laughed. “Big deal. Two ninety-four, wasn’t it?”

He chuckled so hard I thought I could hear his bones rattle. “Cheapest pleasure we got left, free books from the public library.” He sobered suddenly. “What’s so important about The Damion Complex, Lieutenant?”

“Wish I knew.” Randall signaled me with his eyes. “Thanks, Mr. Hazzard, you’ve been helpful. We’ll be in touch.” He led the way out to the police car.

On the way back to town he turned aside ten blocks and drove to the Harrington Arms Apartments on Leigh Street. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said as he pulled up at the curb. “If Murphy’s home, get the book from her, Hal, okay? No need to mention the police.”

A comely young lady, half out of a nurse’s white uniform and evidently just home from work, answered my ring at Apartment 3A. “Yes?” she said, hiding her dishabille by standing behind the door and peering around its edge.

“Miss Oradell Murphy?”

“Yes.” She had a fetching way of raising her eyebrows.

I showed her my ID card and gave her a cock-and-bull story about The Damion Complex having been issued to her yesterday by mistake. “The book should have been destroyed,” I said, “because the previous borrower read it while she was ill with an infectious disease.”

“Oh,” Miss Murphy said. She gave me the book without further questions.

When I returned to the police car Lieutenant Randall said, “Gimme,” and took the book from me, handling it with a finicky delicacy that seemed odd in such a big man. By his tightening lips I could follow his growing frustration as he examined The Damion Complex. For it certainly seemed to be just an ordinary copy of another ordinary book from the public library. The library name was stamped on it in the proper places. Identification number ES4187. Card pocket, with regulation date card, inside the front cover. Nothing concealed between its pages, not even a pressed forget-me-not.

“What the hell?” the Lieutenant grunted.

“Code message?” I suggested.

He was contemptuous. “Code message? You mean certain words off certain pages? In that case why was this particular copy specified — number ES4187? Any copy would do.”

“Unless the message is in the book itself. In invisible ink? Or indicated by pin pricks over certain words?” I showed my teeth at him. “After all, it’s a spy novel.”

We went over the book carefully twice before we found the negative. And no wonder. It was very small — no more than half an inch or maybe five-eighths — and shoved deep in the pocket inside the front cover, behind the date card.

Randall held it up to the light. “Too small to make out what it is,” I said. “We need a magnifying glass.”

“Hell with that.” Randall threw his car into gear. “I’ll get Jerry to make me a blowup.” Jerry is the police photographer. “I’ll drop you off at the library.”

“Oh, no, Lieutenant, I’m mixed up in this. You said so yourself. I’m sticking until I see what’s on that negative.” He grunted.

Half an hour later I was in Randall’s office at headquarters when the police photographer came in and threw a black-and-white 3½-inch by 4½-inch print on the Lieutenant’s desk. Randall allowed me to look over his shoulder as he examined it.

Its quality was poor. It was grainy from enlargement, and the images were slightly blurred, as though the camera had been moved just as the picture was snapped. But it was plain enough so that you could make out two men sitting facing each other across a desk. One was facing the camera directly; the other showed only as part of a rear-view silhouette — head, right shoulder, right arm.

The right arm, however, extended into the light on the desk top and could be seen quite clearly. It was lifting from an open briefcase on the desk a transparent bag of white powder, about the size of a pound of sugar. The briefcase contained three more similar bags. The man who was full face to the camera was reaching out a hand to accept the bag of white powder.

Lieutenant Randall said nothing for what seemed a long time. Then all he did was grunt noncommittally.

I said, “Heroin, Lieutenant?”

“Could be.”

“Big delivery. Who’s the guy making the buy? Do you know?”

He shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

“When you make him, you’ll have your murderer. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

He shrugged again. “How do you read it, Hal?”

“Easy. The kid you pulled from the river got this picture somehow, decided to cut himself in by a little blackmail, and got killed for his pains.”

“And tortured. Why tortured?” Randall was just using me as a sounding board.

“To force him to tell where the negative was hidden? He wouldn’t have taken the negative with him when he braced the dope peddler.”

“Hell of a funny place to hide a negative,” Randall said. “You got any ideas about that?”

I went around Randall’s desk and sat down. “I can guess. The kid sets up his blackmail meeting with the dope peddler, starts out with both the negative and a print of it, like this one, to keep his date. At the last minute he has second thoughts about carrying the negative with him.”

“Where’s he starting out from?” Randall squeezed his hands together.

“The Starlight Motel. Where else?”

“Go on.”

“So maybe he decides to leave the negative in the motel safe and stops at the desk in the lobby to do so. But Hazzard is in the can, maybe. Or has stepped out to the restaurant for coffee. The kid has no time to waste. So he shoves the little negative into one of Hazzard’s library books temporarily, making a quick note of the book title and library number so he can find it again. You found the note in his shirt pocket. How’s that sound?”

Randall gave me his half grin and said, “So long, Hal. Thanks for helping.”

I stood up. “I need a ride to the library. You’ve wasted my whole afternoon. You going to keep my library book?”

“For a while. But I’ll be in touch.”

“You’d better be. Unless you want to pay a big overdue fine.”

She was dressed all in pink. As I hoarded the bus behind her, I couldn’t stop looking at her pink shoes. Up the high grimy steps they went. Cheap shoes. Flimsy sandals made to last for one summer, if that long. The feet inside them were long and lumpy, as if too many years of ill-fitting shoes had caused them to break out in bumps of protest.

I followed her into the bus, dropped my fare into the change box, and watched her walk up the aisle. The skirl of her pink dress was wrinkled. I tried to imagine where she had spent her day, all her days, the kind of office she worked in, the chair she sat in that had pressed wrinkles into the skirts of all her dresses.

Yesterday she had been all in lavender.

She sat in a window seat in the middle of the bus. As she slid into the seat her pink handbag, a long pouchy thing, swung and thumped against her hip. I walked past her, carefully averting my eyes so that she wouldn’t notice that I had been watching her, and chose a seat two rows behind her. From there I could see her shoulders, her neck and the back of her head. I opened my newspaper and settled down for the ride.

On her head she wore a scarf of some filmy material, probably nylon. It was folded into a triangle and tied under her chin. Pink. Through it her hair, arranged in some intricate and unfashionable manner, was visible as a series of knobby clusters of curls. The scarf was evidently intended to keep the knobs in place.

The bus started on its long haul to the suburbs. Normally I read the paper a little, doze a little, look out the window and take note of the small changes that occur along the familiar route and the things that remain the same.

But lately I find my eyes drifting away from the newspaper and from the window and fastening on the back of her head. I no longer doze. Each day the scarf is a different color.

She was talking to her seat companion. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her head was turned slightly so I could see her lips moving. She wore a pink lipstick and her teeth protruded just enough to give her mouth a somewhat pouting appearance. Against her sallow skin, her mouth seemed to be a separate living organism. She spoke rapidly, interspersing her words with quick half-hearted smiles. When she did this, the side of her face creased into concentric cursed lines which would one day be permanent wrinkles. I guessed her age to be about forty.

The bus rattled on through the outlying part of town where ramshackle frame houses lean discouraged against each other down the slope toward the river. Normally I like to look out the window along this stretch of the ride. I was born in this part of town, although the house I grew up in was tom down long ago to make room for a new section of highway. If I feel a bit self-congratulatory as the bus carries me by this decayed remnant of my childhood, I feel I’ve earned it. I’ve worked long and hard to give my family a decent place to live.

Lately I have been distracted from even this pleasant satisfaction. I don’t quite understand why it should be so, but somehow her presence on the bus produces in me a vague irritability. She is a source of discomfort, and I wish she would take a different bus. I find myself watching for her at the bus stop each evening, waiting to see what her day’s color will be, and then, unconsciously at first, but quite deliberately now, taking a seat somewhere behind her so that she is never out of sight.

Let me explain that in twenty-five years of marriage I have never looked at another woman. My wife is small, quiet, and kind. She has never demanded more of me than I could give. I have worked for the same company all my life. I started as a messenger boy and now I am a division manager. A few years ago I realized that I would rise no higher in the company. But I am content.

My division runs smoothly. The typists come to me with their problems and my wife and I attend their weddings. The young men regard me as an old fogey, but they are eager to take advantage of my long experience. Some of them will rise above me in the company; others will leave. It no longer matters. In due time I will retire on full pension.

My life, like my division, has also run smoothly. My children, a boy and a girl, grew up respectful and well-mannered. My son is a science teacher in a high school on the other side of town, and my daughter is married and lives nearby. She is expecting her second child. My wife makes dresses for our three-year-old granddaughter. We have never been plagued with accident or illness, although my wife occasionally suffers from arthritis when the weather is damp.

Why, then, should I be irritated by this woman on the bus? She is nothing to me. If she chooses to dress one day entirely in pink and the next entirely in orange, and so on through the rainbow, surely that’s her affair. It needn’t concern me. Why do my thoughts persist in speculating on the probable contents of her closet? Particularly on the rows of shoes it must contain, neatly ranked in pairs of every conceivable color. I wonder if she’s married, and what her husband thinks of this color mania of hers.

The bus rolled through the belt of light industry that serves as a boundary between town and suburb. My newspaper lay forgotten in my lap. Soon she would be getting off. My own stop lay a half mile farther on. In a way we were neighbors, although I had never seen her anywhere but on the bus.

Suddenly I yearned to know where she lived. I folded my newspaper — my wife likes to read it in the evening after dinner — and felt an unaccustomed quickening of my heartbeat.

She always pulled the signal cord for the bus to stop — even if someone else had pulled it before her, even though the bus always stopped at her corner. Perhaps she was afraid that if she personally did not pull the cord, the bus would go on and on forever and she would never be able to change into her next day’s outfit, red or gray or purple, whatever it might be. Five or six people stood and lurched down the aisle while the bus was still moving. I was among them.

On the corner the people fanned out in all directions. She crossed the main road in front of the bus and headed north. I stood on the corner feeling slightly displaced and watched the bus drive away. I instantly regretted having gotten off. There was nothing for me to do but walk. I could follow the bus down the road to my usual stop. Or I could follow her.

At the first gap in the stream of traffic I hurried across the road. She was about half a long block ahead of me. She walked with a stiff-legged jouncy stride and the pink handbag swung rhythmically from her arm. Her pink dress had some kind of ruffled collar and this flapped up and down as she walked. The tail of the pink scarf fluttered and at one point flew up, exposing the back of her head. I could not distinguish the exact color of her hair, although it seemed to be dark, a kind of dusty brown.

She turned the corner and I hurried to catch up. My heart pounded and I was having trouble drawing breath. My legs were trembling from the effort not to run. When I reached the corner, she was nowhere in sight but the door of the third house from the corner was just closing. There was no one else on the street.

I walked on casually, taking in as much of the house as I could without stopping. It was a small house, as most of the houses were in this area, and it sat back from the street on a small plot of lawn. It was painted pale green with darker green trim. There was a wide front window with green drapes hanging open at the sides, and in the middle a green ceramic lamp with a green shade. I could see no more without stopping to stare. It was a house like all the others on the block, unrelenting in its greenness, but in no way out of the ordinary. With one exception.

The house was surrounded with flower beds. The flowers tumbled against each other with no regard for order: orange marigolds, purple petunias, stiff zinnias of many colors, daisies and delphinium, nasturtium and portulaca, all thrown in together in heaps and huddles of every kind and color. It was a surprise.

I walked on down the block. My eyes still tingled with the shock of those tumultuous flower beds. My heart slowed to its normal steady pace and I breathed more freely. My legs, however, were extremely tired and I longed for a place to sit down and rest.

Could she be the gardener? The creator of that flamboyant atrocity? Indeed, I suppose she could, although I would have expected something else. A garden of many kinds of flowers all chosen for a uniformity of color would have been my guess.

It became more and more necessary for me to sit down and pull myself together before going home. My way took me through the small shopping area of the village: a few shops, a beauty salon, the post office, and a small cocktail lounge. I had never been inside the cocktail lounge. I knew that some of the bus riders stopped off there occasionally before going home. I hoped that none would be there to see me — or at least none with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. I was not in the mood for conversation.

I found myself standing at the bar before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom. The bartender was attentive. I have never been much of a drinker and ordered the first thing that came into my head.

“A whiskey sour, please.”

I laid my newspaper on the bar and noticed that my hands were stained with ink. The paper was damp where I had clutched it.

“The men’s room?” I murmured.

The bartender pointed to a glowing sign at the rear of the long room.

As I made my way down the room I became aware that my hands were not the only part of me that had been sweating. My clothes felt limp and sodden, and in the air-conditioned chill I began to shiver uncontrollably. It had been warm outdoors, but not uncomfortably hot. I wondered if I were coming down with something, a summer cold or a touch of the flu.

I let the hot water run over my hands until the shivering stopped, then washed with the gritty powdered soap from the dispenser. As the ink ran away down the drain, I glanced into the mirror. I was shocked by what I saw.

Instantly I blamed it on the distortion of the glass, the fact that the mirror was old and flaked. But for a split second the face I saw was not my own — or rather it was my own, but with a subtle difference. The features were those I’d known for many years, the face I shaved each morning, the face whose lines and pouches and discolorations I’d accepted as badges of respectable seniority. But the mouth had an unpleasant downward quirk, the nose was pinched, and the eyes — the eyes were worst of all.

I dried my hands on the roller towel. Imagination, I thought. No sense in feeling guilty over stopping for a quick drink, even though I’d never done it before. Nothing wrong in taking a walk through the quiet suburban streets. I would have to come up with some reason for getting home late, but there would be no need to lie. I had never lied to my wife.

“It was such a nice evening, I took a walk and then stopped off for a drink.”

Back at the bar my whiskey sour was sitting in a circle of wetness. I sat on the barstool and glanced around the room. It was a pleasant enough place, running heavily to wood paneling and beamed ceiling. There were perhaps five or six other customers. A man and a woman sat at a table lost in an earnest whispered conversation. The others were congregated at the end of the bar chatting raucously with the bartender. Politics or baseball, most likely. I sipped my drink. Oh, it tasted good. It was just what I needed. Strength flowed back into my legs, and the evil vision in the men’s-room mirror faded from my mind.

My wife accepted my explanation without question, but she was a little disappointed that I had forgotten to bring her the newspaper. I had left it on the bar. I offered to walk down to the stationery store after dinner to get her one. I detoured past the green house with the flower beds, but saw no one.

The next evening I left the office a few minutes early and hurried to the bus stop. I wanted to get there before she did, so that I could determine from which direction she came. Things had gone badly in my division. A report that was due in the president’s office the following morning had been badly botched by a new typist. She came to me in tears, claiming she had not been given adequate instructions and she couldn’t read Mr. Pfister’s handwriting anyway and there was no need for him to be insulting.

“He called me a dumb little idiot,” she sobbed.

Normally I can settle these upheavals with a few words. Mr. Pfister was ambitious, ingratiating with those above him and overbearing with those below. The girl probably had some justification. But as she poured out her woes, I found my eyes wandering to her thin summer blouse. It had no sleeves and its round neck was cut low. It quivered with her sobs. As she bent into her handkerchief I could see that she wore no brassiere.

My thighs trembled in the kneehole of my desk. Beneath my jacket my shirt grew suddenly clammy. I wondered if my face had changed into the face I had seen in the men’s-room mirror the night before. I swung my chair around to face the window.

“Go back to your desk,” I said. “Do the report over and see that you get it right, even if it takes you all night.”

I heard her gasp and mumble, “Yes, sir.” Her soft footsteps receded. Before she reached the door, I said, “Miss — um,” I couldn’t remember her name. “In the future see that you dress more suitably.”

She ran down the hall. A few minutes later I left and went to the bus stop.

The sky was the color of tarnished brass. The air was hot and heavy, and little whirlpools of wind lifted bits of scrap paper from the gutter, flapped them about, and dropped them abruptly. We would have rain. I stood on the corner and tried to look in all directions at once. I wanted to see where she came from, to find out, if I could, which building she worked in. There was still five minutes before the bus was due.

I was watching the entrance to the new glass-fronted office building across the street and might have missed her had not a screaming siren called my attention back down the street to the entrance of my own building. The police car sped past me bound for some emergency or other, but my eyes remained riveted on the high arched doorway of the building where I had invested all the working years of my life. She stood just outside the revolving doors, scanning the livid skies. Then she turned and walked with her stiff jouncing stride toward the bus stop.

I faded back into the doorway of a shop. Could it be possible she worked for my company? I had never seen her in the elevators or in the lobby. The company employed hundreds of people. It occupied the entire building. There were many divisions and sections. I suppose there were many people working there whom I didn’t know. That she should be one of them seemed a bad joke on me.

As she neared the bus stop, I saw that she carried a red umbrella. Had she worn red today because she knew it would rain and she wanted her costume to match her umbrella? Or had she an umbrella as well as scarf, shoes, and handbag to match every dress in her wardrobe?

Today’s red dress was tightly cinched with a red plastic belt. I had not noticed before how small her waist was, nor that she was very tall. Below the gleaming belt her haunches flared and filled the red cloth. The red shoes seemed even more hurtful than yesterday’s pink ones. I was impatient for the bus to appear.

At last it came, and she was among the first to get on. Have I said that the riders of this bus are extremely well-mannered? That among this small crowd of homeward-bound suburbanites, it is customary for the gentlemen to stand back and allow the ladies to board first? I consciously violated that rule. Pretending absorption in some deep mental problem, I elbowed my way to the door of the bus and chose a seat immediately behind her. There were a few shocked murmurs, but I ignored them. She was joined by the same woman who had shared her seat before.

It is truly amazing how much you can learn about a person simply by listening in on fragments of conversation. For instance, I learned that she was a widow.

“... when poor Raymond was alive...”

That she didn’t sleep well.

“... and those pills didn’t help a bit...”

That she lived with her invalid sister.

“... so I said, my sister needs that ramp for her wheel chair, so it’ll just have to stay...”

That she didn’t have a dog.

“... I’d like to, but she’s allergic to animal dander...”

And that she would be alone in the house over the weekend.

“... I have to take her back to the hospital on Saturday for another series of tests. It may take a week...”

And all the while I watched her red mouth swimming in the placid pudding of her face. Yes, she had changed her lipstick from pink to red. I noticed, too, that at close range her cheeks were covered with a fine down and there were patches of skin where the pores had coarsened. I wondered how she failed to notice my scrutiny, but she seemed oblivious.

About halfway home the rain started. It fell straight down at first, heavy blinding sheets of water. Lightning flickered on the hilltops and the streets were quickly swamped. The bus ground slowly on, its windshield wipers barely able to cope with the deluge. She scarcely noticed the storm, but continued chatting with her neighbor. Her voice, now that I was close enough to hear it, was jarring and nasal. She was so very different from my wife.

The rain had slackened off before we reached her stop, but it was still coming down in a fine slanting spray when we got off. She was safe beneath her red umbrella. I had no protection but my newspaper. It seemed ridiculous to hold it over my head. However I held it, the paper would be soaked before I got home. I tossed it into a trash can and followed her from the bus stop.

This time I followed quite close behind her. She was engrossed in managing her umbrella, her large red handbag, and a shopping bag from a downtown department store. (Had she shopped in that store today because its shopping bags were red?) Besides, it seemed to me that she was one of those semiconscious people, only becoming aware of others when they had a direct effect on herself. I had no meaning in her life.

I saw her go to the door of the green house, search in her red bag for a key. I passed by as she was struggling to close her umbrella, then heard the door slam shut as I walked on. By the time I reached the cocktail lounge I was drenched and shivering.

“Whiskey,” I said to the bartender and went straight to the men’s room. I toweled my head on the roller towel and then quite deliberately stood before the mirror. This time I did not look away, but examined my reflection closely as if by doing so I could force my features back into their usual aspect of gentleness and benevolence. I was able to manage a compromise — a mask of bland indifference.

A shot glass was waiting for me on the bar, with a water chaser. I drained it and gestured for another. Tonight I would not have the excuse of taking a walk on a fine evening.

“The bus was delayed. I got soaked, so I stopped for a drink.”

No use lying. My wife would smell the whiskey on my breath. When I left the cocktail lounge, I remembered to stop at the stationery store to buy another paper. The rain was only a fine mist now, but I tucked the paper under my jacket and went home.

After dinner, while my wife read the newspaper and I pretended to watch television, I thought about the woman on the bus. Why was it I never saw her in the mornings? Perhaps she took an earlier bus and had breakfast in a coffee shop downtown. Or maybe she took as late a bus as she could so as to spend more time with her invalid sister. How long had she been widowed? Did she have men friends? Did she perhaps go off on weekends with them? Did she have drawers full of underwear of many colors to match her dresses?

“Don’t you feel well? You look a bit off-color.”

“No, fine. I’m fine. I think I’ll go to bed.”

My wife had accepted my excuse, only frowned a little over my drinking, and had made me change out of my wet clothes.

“Would you like some hot tea with lemon?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired.”

The next evening was Friday. She wore brown, a sad color and one that made her look unhealthy. I’d had a bad day. The vice-president in charge of marketing had named my division as one suffering from antiquated methods, and I had been called on to justify my procedures. Business was bad all over and my results did not look good. Rumors flew in and out of cubicles all afternoon.

I still had not been able to find out where in the company she worked. I didn’t even know her name. When I followed her from the bus stop it was without the usual excitement, and my two drinks at the cocktail lounge seemed more a matter of habit than of need. I didn’t go into the men’s room. As I sat at the bar I thought about my retirement plans.

Years ago I had bought an old farmhouse on an isolated lake in the southeastern part of the state. We always spent our vacations there and many weekends, and I had tinkered it into passably modern condition. When I thought about the time when I would finally leave the company, it was always with the farmhouse in mind. There would be time to read — I had always promised myself that I would one day make up for my lack of a college education by reading all the world’s great literature. The fishing was good, and my wife could grow a vegetable garden.

When I got home I didn’t bother to make an excuse for my lateness. My wife didn’t demand any.

“Would you like to go to the farm this weekend?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe next week.”

On Saturday I took a walk. There didn’t seem to be anyone at home in the green house. No doubt she was with her sister at the hospital.

On Sunday I took the car. I drove past the house twice in the early afternoon. On my third circuit of the block I saw her coming down the drive with her hands full of gardening tools. She wore faded green slacks and a green smock. Her gardening gloves were green and her head was covered with a green scarf. I couldn’t see her shoes.

I parked the car around the corner and walked back. The street was deserted except for the two of us.

“What a lovely garden,” I called out, hovering on the sidewalk and hoping that my face was safely keeping to its usual unremarkable lines.

“Oh,” she said. “Why, thank you. It’s a lot of hard work.”

“Must be. I never have much luck with flowers. I guess I must be lazy.”

“Oh, now,” she tittered. “It’s not that difficult. But people do say I have a green thumb.”

“Now, tell me,” I said, taking the liberty of crossing the lawn to where she stood. “How do you get such good results with carnations? Mine are always so spindly and have hardly any blooms at all.”

I listened to a long harangue on fertilizers, bone meal, and the efficacy of good drainage, nodding wisely all the while, my eyes fixed on her green sneakers. At the conclusion she giggled girlishly and said, “Well, I’ve talked your car off and myself into a fine thirst. Would you care for a glass of iced tea?”

“That’s very kind of you. It’s pretty hot out here in the sun.”

“Well, come on inside. It’s always nice to meet a fellow gardener. Someone who understands.”

I understood. I’d seen her sharp glance at the third finger of my left hand. I’ve never worn a wedding band.

We went round to the back door. Across half of the back steps lay a sturdily braced wooden ramp.

“My sister,” she explained. “She’s confined to a wheel chair. She’d be much happier in a nursing home, but after my husband died she insisted on living with me. To keep me company, she says. To keep an eye on me, I say. But don’t worry. She’s not here today.”

We entered the kitchen. It was yellow. Yellow wallpaper, yellow cabinets, yellow cloth on the table. Even a yellow refrigerator. She poured tea into tall yellow glasses.

“Do you live around here?” she asked.

“Not far. I have to confess, I saw your flowers a few days ago and came back in the hope of meeting the person responsible.”

“You must be married.” She certainly believed in coming to the point.

“I have been.” Sometimes a little lie is unavoidable.

“Come into the living room. We can be comfortable there.”

The house was small. I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked into the green living room, the magenta dining room, a rose-colored bedroom. On the open door of a closet in the bedroom hung a blue dress. On the floor a pair of blue shoes stood ready. Tomorrow was Monday.

“May I trouble you for another napkin? I’ve slopped my tea a little.”

She obligingly went across the kitchen to a cupboard. I picked up her green gardening gloves. She had large hands. I picked up the knife with which she had sliced a lemon for the tea...

Afterward I was really thirsty. I drank the tea. It was slightly warm. My clothes were damp. I left the green gardening gloves on the yellow counter. I went out by the back door and drove home.

The phone rang. Moorman was lying on his back, on the couch. He was a large man, pushing forty, tousled and unshaved this morning in October. He wore a T-shirt, old slacks, no shoes. A glass of white wine was balanced on his stomach; a bottle of it stood on the floor. It was about eleven o’clock.

Moorman set the glass carefully on the floor, reached back over his head, and groped until his hand connected with the phone on the end table. He put it to his head and said in deep gentle tones, “I’m terribly sorry, but your application is rejected.”

A moment of silence. Then, “What?”

“You heard me, Kleistershtroven.”

“Klei... what is this?”

“You are Kleistershtroven, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t say you were. Who’d want a name like that? Is it a Welsh name?”

“Listen, is this Mr. Moorman?”

“That doesn’t matter. The fact is that no more entries for the quadrennial bobsled steeplechase are being accepted. That’s on orders from my psychoanalyst. Would you care for his address?”

“This is Mr. Dooney.” The voice was suddenly sepulchral.

Moorman said eagerly, “Dooney? Mr. Dooney? The Mr. Dooney? Calling me? At this hour?”

“Is this Mr. Moorman?”

“It certainly is. Are you really Mr. Dooney? Well, how in the world are you? How’s the wife and all the brood? How’s Miss LaTorche?”

“Miss LaTorche?”

Moorman emitted rich laughter. “Come on, Dooley, you old lecher, who do you think you’re talking to? Everybody knows about you and Fifi LaTorche!”

“Who is this? Is this Jack Moorman?”

“Wait a minute, I’ll find out.”

Moorman put his hand lightly over the mouthpiece, and made loud braying noises. Then he said into the phone, “Yeah, Dr. Kleistershtroven says there’s no question about it — I’ve been Moorman for years. Days, even.”

“This is Mr. Dooney of Affiliated Finance. I talked to Mrs. Moorman on Friday — is she there?”

“Is she where?”

“Is she home?”

“Hold on.” He took the mouthpiece from his mouth, turned his head, and called, “Lisa, some character named Dooley wonders if you’re home... Where? I don’t know where. I’ll ask him.”

He said into the phone, “She wants to know where you want to go, and if she should wear anything.”

There was deep breathing. Moorman said admiringly, “You’re a terrific deep breather!”

The voice was low and deadly: “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull here, Mr. Moorman. You’ve made a loan through us, and I talked to Mrs. Moorman on Friday and she said the payment would be in the mail. And this is Monday, and—”

“Don’t tell me — let me guess. There’s nothing in the mail, right?”

“I want to know why not.”

“I can explain that. I put the check in one of those new self-destructing envelopes and must have miscalculated the time it would take to reach you. It must have blown up in the mailbox.”

“That’s very funny,” said Mr. Dooney, after a long silence. “Your wife promised Friday that the payment would be in the mail.”

“Well, that’s Lisa — always the cheerful word. You can’t blame her for that. A recent Harris survey indicates that too much bad news is given over the telephone.”

“You’re very funny, Mr. Moorman. But this isn’t funny — this is serious. You have an account with us for $784.47. Your September payment of $71.88 was due two weeks ago, and we haven’t received it. We have a chattel mortgage on your furniture... I’m on the verge of going to the sheriff. But on the way I’m willing to stop by your place.”

“Well, Lisa’s not here. And things are kind of a mess.”

“I’m leaving my office right now. When I get there I expect a check.”

“When you get here I expect a disappointed man. But come anyway. I have some white wine and salami.”

“I’m bringing Mr. Hector with me.”

“That’s okay. I have plenty of salami... Hector, eh? Do I know him?”

“No, you don’t. I bring Mr. Hector when I want to convince someone that paying legitimate bills isn’t a matter for joking. Do you understand?”

“Not really. But he sounds like an interesting guy... Does he like salami and white wine?”

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Good. Be nice to see you both.”

He hung up, and sipped wine, then lay back, placing the glass on his stomach. There was a pleasant smile on his face.

Frank Ames surveyed the tumbling mountain torrent and selected the rock he wanted with great care.

It was on the edge of the deep water, a third of the way across the stream, about sixty feet below the little waterfall and the big eddy. Picking his way over halfsubmerged stepping stones, then across the fallen log to the rounded rock, he made a few whipping motions with his fishing rod to get plenty of free line. He knew only too well how much that first cast counted.

Up here in the high mountains the sky was black behind the deep blue of interstellar space. The big granite rocks reflected light with dazzling brilliance, while the shadows seemed deep and impenetrable. Standing down near the stream, the roar of the water kept Frank Ames’ cars from accurately appraising other sounds, distorting them out of all semblance to reality.

The raucous abuse of a mountain jay sounded remarkably like the noise made by a buzz saw ripping through a pine board, and some peculiar vagary of the stream noises made Frank Ames feel he could hear a woman screaming.

Ames made his cast. The line twisted through the air, straightened at just the right distance above the water and settled. The Royal Coachman came to rest gently, seductively, on the far edge of the little whirlpool just below the waterfall.

For a moment the fly reposed on the water with calm tranquillity, drifting with the current. Then there was a shadowy dark streak of submerged motion. A big trout raised his head and part of his body up out of the water.

The noise made by the fish as it came down hard on the fly was a soul-gratifying “chooonk.” It seemed the fish had pushed its shoulders into a downward strike as it started back to the dark depths of the clear stream, the Royal Coachman in its mouth.

Ames set the hook and firmed his feet on the rock. The reel sounded like an angry rattlesnake. The line suddenly stretched taut. Even above the sound of the mountain stream, the hissing of the wire-tight line as it cut through the water was plainly audible.

The sound of a woman’s scream again mingled with the stream noises. This time the scream was louder and nearer.

The sound knifed through to Frank Ames’ consciousness. It was as annoying, as much out of place, as the ringing of a telephone bell at four o’clock in the morning. Frank desperately wanted that trout. It was a fine, big trout with a dark back, beautiful red sides, firm-fleshed from ice-cold, swift waters, and it was putting up a terrific fight.

That first time there had been some doubt as to the sound Ames had heard. It might have been the stream-distorted echo of a hawk crying out as it circled high in the heavens. But as to this second noise there could be no doubt. It was the scream of a woman, and it sounded from the trail along the east bank of the stream.

Ames turned to look over his shoulder, a hurried glance of apprehensive annoyance.

That one moment’s advantage was all the trout needed. With the vigilance of the fisherman relaxed for the flicker of an eyelash, the trout made a swift rush for the tangled limbs of the submerged tree trunk on the far end of the pool, timing his maneuver as though he had known the exact instant the fisherman had turned.

Almost automatically Ames tightened on the rod and started reeling in, but he was too late. He felt the sudden cessation of the surging tugs which come up the line through the wrist and into the arm in a series of impulses too rapid to count, but which are the very breath of life to the skilled fisherman. Instead, the tension of the line was firm, steady and dead.

Knowing that his leader was wrapped around a submerged branch. Ames pointed the rod directly at the taut line, applied sufficient pressure to break the slender leader, and then reeled in the line.

He turned toward the place from which the scream had sounded.

There was no sign of animation in the scenery. The high mountain crags brooded over the scene. A few fleecy clouds forming over the east were the only break in the tranquil blue of the sky. Long sweeps of majestic pines stretched in a serried sequence up the canyons, their needles oozing scent into the pure, dry air.

Ames, slender-waisted, long-legged, graceful in his motions, was like a deer bounding across the fallen log, jumping lightly to the water-splashed stepping stones.

He paused at the thin fringe of scrub pine which grew between the rocky approach to the stream and the winding trail long enough to divest himself of his fishing creel and rod. Then he moved swiftly through the small pines to where the trail ran in a north and south direction, roughly paralleling that of the stream.

The decomposed granite dust of the trail held tracks with remarkable fidelity. Superimposed over the older horse and deer tracks that were in the trail were the tracks made by a woman who had been running as fast as she could go.

At this elevation of more than seven thousand feet above sea level, where even ordinary exertion left a person breathless, it was evident either that the woman could not have been running far, or that she had lived long enough in this country to be acclimated to the altitude.

The shoes she was wearing, however, were apparently new cowboy boots, completely equipped with rubber heels, so new that even the pattern of the heel showed in the downhill portion of the trail.

For the most part, the woman had been running with her weight on her toes. When she came to the steep downhill pitch, however, her weight was back more on her heels, and the rubber heel caps made distinct imprints. After fifty yards, Ames saw that the tracks faltered. The strides grew shorter. Slowly, she had settled down to a rapid, breathless walk.

With the unerring instinct of a trained hunter. Ames followed those tracks, keeping to one side of the trail so that his tracks did not obliterate those of the hurrying woman. He saw where she had paused and turned, the prints of her feet at right angles to the trail as she looked back over her shoulder. Then, apparently more reassured, she had resumed her course, walking now at a less rapid rate.

Moving with a long, lithe stride which made him glide noiselessly, Frank Ames topped a rise, went down another short, steep pitch, rounded a turn in the pine trees and came unexpectedly on the woman, standing poised like some wild thing. She had stopped and was looking back, her startled face showing as a white oval.

She started to run, then paused, looked back again, stopped, and, as Ames came up, managed a dubious and somewhat breathless smile.

“Hello,” Ames said with the casual simplicity of a man who has the assurance of complete sincerity.

“Good afternoon,” she answered, then laughed, a short, oxygen-starved laugh. “I was taking — a quick walk.” She paused to get her breath, said, “Trying to give my figure some much-needed discipline.”

Another pause for breath. “When you rounded the bend in the trail, you — you startled me.”

Ames’ eyes said there was nothing wrong with her figure, but his lips merely twisted in a slow grin.

She was somewhere in the middle twenties. The frontier riding breeches, short leather jacket, shirt open at the front, the bandanna around her neck, held in place with a leather loop studded with brilliants, showed that she was a “dude” from the city. The breeches emphasized the slenderness of her waist, the smooth, graceful contours of her hips and legs. The face was still pale, but the deep red of sunburn around the open line of the throat above the protection of the bandanna was as eloquent as a complete calendar to Frank’s trained eyes.

The sunburned skin told the story of a girl who had ridden in on a horseback pack trip, who had underestimated the powerful actinic rays of the mountain sun, who had tried too late to cover the sunburned V-shaped area with a scarf. A couple of days in the mountains and some soothing cream had taken some of the angry redness out of the skin, but that was all.

He waited to see if there would be some explanation of her scream or her flight. Not for worlds would he have violated the code of the mountains by trying to pry into something that was none of his business. When he saw she had no intention of making any further explanation, he said casually, “Guess you must have come up the trail from Granite Flats about Sunday. Didn’t you, ma’am?”

She looked at him with sudden apprehension. “How did you know?”

“I had an idea you might have been in the mountains just about that long, and I knew you didn’t come up from this end because I didn’t see the tracks of a pack train in the trail.”

“Can you follow tracks?” she asked.

“Why, of course.” He paused and then added casually, “I’m headed down toward where your camp must be. Perhaps you’d let me walk along with you for a piece.”

“I’d love it!” she exclaimed, and then with quick suspicion, “How do you know where our camp is?”

His slight drawl was emphasized as he thought the thing into words. “If you’d been camped at Coyote Springs, you’d need to have walked three miles to get here. You don’t look as though you’d gone that far. Down at Deerlick Springs, there’s a meadow with good grass for the horses, a nice camping place and it’s only about three quarters of a mile from here, so I—”

She interrupted with a laugh which now carried much more assurance. “I see that there’s no chance for me to have any secrets. Do you live up here?”

Frank wanted to tell her of the two years in the Japanese prison camp, of the necessity of living close to nature to get his health and strength back, of the trap line which he ran through the winter, of the new-found strength and vitality that were erasing the disabilities caused by months of malnutrition. But when it came to talking about himself, the words dried up. All he could say was, “Yes, I live up here.”

She fell into step at his side. “You must find it isolated.”

“I don’t see many people,” he admitted, “but there are other things to make up for it — no telephones, no standing in line, no exhaust fumes.”

“And you’re content to be here always?”

“Not always. I want a ranch down in the valley. I’m completing arrangements for one now. A friend of mine is giving me a lease with a contract to purchase. I think I can pay out on it with luck and hard work.”

Her eyes were thoughtful as she walked along the trail, stepping awkwardly in her high-heeled cowboy riding boots. “I suppose really you can’t ask for much more than that — luck and hard work.”

“It’s all I want,” Frank told her.

They walked for some minutes in the silence of mutual appraisal, then rounded a turn in the trail, and Deerlick Meadows stretched out in front of them. And as soon as Frank Ames saw the elaborate nature of the camp, he knew these people were wealthy sportsmen who were on a de luxe trip. Suddenly awkward, he said, “Well, I guess I’d better turn—” And then stopped abruptly as he realized that it would never do to let this young woman know he had been merely escorting her along the trail. He had told her he was going in her direction. He’d have to keep on walking past the camp.

“What’s your name?” she asked suddenly, and then added laughingly, “Mine’s Roberta Coe.”

“Frank Ames,” he said uncomfortably, knowing she had asked him his name so abruptly because she intended to introduce him to her companions.

“Well, you must come in and have a cup of coffee before you go on,” she said. “You’d like to meet my friends and they’d like to meet you.”

They had been seen now and Ames was aware of curious glances from people who were seated in folding canvas chairs, items of luxury which he knew could have been brought in only at much cost to the tourist and at much trouble to both packer and pack horse.

He tried to demur, but somehow the right words wouldn’t come, and he couldn’t let himself seem to run away. Even while he hesitated, they entered the camp, and he found himself meeting people with whom he felt awkwardly ill at ease.

Harvey W. Dowling was evidently the business executive who was footing the bills. He, it seemed, was in his tent, taking a siesta and the hushed voices of the others showed the fawning deference with which they regarded the man who was paying the bills. His tent, a pretentious affair with heating stove and shaded entrance, occupied a choice position, away from the rest of the camp, a small tributary stream winding in front, and the shady pine thicket immediately in the back.

The people to whom Ames was introduced were the type a rich man gathers around him, people who were careful to cultivate the manners of the rich, who clung tenaciously to their contacts with the wealthy.

Now these people, carefully subdued in voice and manner, so as not to disturb the man in the big tent, had that amused, patronizing tolerance of manner which showed they regarded Frank Ames merely as a novel interlude rather than as a human being.

Dick Nottingham had a well-nourished, athletic ease of manner, a smoothly muscled body and the calm assurance of one who is fully conscious of his eligibility. Two other men, Alexander Cameron and Sam Fremont, whose names Ames heard mentioned, were evidently downstream fishing.

The women were young, well-groomed and far more personal in their curiosity. Eleanor Dowling relied on her own beauty and her father’s wealth to display a certain arrogance. Sylvia Jessup had mocking eyes which displayed challenging invitation as she sized up Frank’s long, rangy build.

Conscious of his faded blue shirt and overalls with the patched knees, Frank felt distinctly ill at ease, and angry at himself because he did. He would have given much to have been articulate enough to express himself, to have joined in casual small talk; but the longer he stayed the more awkward and tongue-tied he felt, and that in turn made him feel more and more conspicuous.

There was good-natured banter. Sylvia Jessup announced that after this she was going to walk in the afternoons and see if she couldn’t bag a little game, veiled references to open season and bag limit; then light laughter. And there were casually personal questions that Ames answered as best he could.

Whenever they would cease their light banter, and in the brief period of silence wait for Frank Ames to make some comment, Frank angrily realized his tongue-tied impotence, realized from the sudden way in which they would all start talking at once that they were trying to cover his conversational inadequacy.

Sam Fremont, camera in hand, came into camp almost unnoticed. He had, he explained, been hunting wildlife with his camera, and he grinningly admitted approaching camp quietly so he could get a couple of “candid camera” shots of the “sudden animation.”

He was a quick-eyed opportunist with a quick wit and fast tongue, and some of his quips brought forth spontaneous laughter. After one particularly loud burst of merriment, the flap of the big tent parted and Harvey W. Dowling, scow ling sleepily at the group, silenced them as effectively as would have been the case if some grim apparition had suddenly appeared.

But he came down to join them, a figure of heavy power, conscious of the deference due him, boomingly cordial to Frank, and with regal magnanimity saying nothing of the loud conversation which had wakened him.

A few moments later Alexander Cameron came stumbling up the trail, seeming to fall all over his heavy leather boots, boots that were stiff with newness. He seemed the most inexperienced of them all, and yet the most human, the one man who seemed to have no fear of Dowling.

There were more introductions, an abrupt cessation of the banter, and a few minutes later Ames found himself trudging angrily away from the camp, having offered the first excuse which came to his tortured mind, that he must inspect a site for a string of traps, knowing in his own mind how utterly inane the reason sounded, despite the fact that these people from the city would see nothing wrong with it.

Once clear of the camp, Frank circled up Deerlick Creek and cut back toward the main trail of the North Fork, so that he could retrieve his rod and creel.

He knew that it was too late now to try any more fishing. The white, woolly clouds had grown into great billowing mushrooms. Already there was the reverberation of distant thunder echoing from the high crags up at the divide and ominous black clouds were expanding out from the bases of the cloud mushrooms.

The thunderstorm struck just as Ames was crossing the top of the ridge which led down to the main trail.

The first patter of heavy raindrops gave a scant warning. A snake’s tongue of ripping lightning dissolved a dead pine tree across the valley into a shower of yellow splinters. The clap of thunder was almost instantaneous, and, as though it had tom loose the inner lining of the cloud, rain deluged down in torrents until the sluicing streams forging their way down the slope were heavy with mud.

Knowing better than to seek shelter under a pine tree. Ames ran along the base of a granite ridge until he found the place where an overhanging rock, sandblasted by winds and worn by the elements, offered a place where he could crawl in and stretch out.

The lightning glittered with greenish intensity. The thunder bombarded the echoing crags and rain poured in cascades from the lip of the rock under which Ames had taken shelter.

Within ten minutes the heaviest pan of the rain had ceased. The thunder began to drift sullenly to the south, but the rain continued steadily, then intensified into a clearing-up shower of cloudburst proportions and ceased abruptly. Half a minute later a venturesome shaft of afternoon sunlight explored its way into the glistening pines.

Ames crawled from under his protecting rock and resumed his way down the slippery slope to the main trail.

The soaking rain had obliterated the tracks in the trail. In fact, the ditchlike depression in the center of the trail still held puddles of water, so Ames, so far as he was able, kept to one side, working his way between rocks, conscious of the sudden chill in the atmosphere, conscious also of the fact that the clouds were gathering for another downpour, one that could well last all night.

Ames found his fishing rod and creel where he had left them. He slipped the soggy strap of the creel over his shoulder, started to pick up the rod, then stopped. His woodsman’s eyes told him that the position of the rod had been changed since he had left it. Had it perhaps been the wind which accompanied the storm? He had no time to debate the matter, for once more raindrops began to patter ominously.

Picking up his rod, he swung into a long, rapid stride, the rain whipping against his back as he walked. He knew that there was no use trying to wait out this show. This would be a steady, sodden rain.

By the time Frank Ames reached his cabin he was wet to the skin.

He put pine-pitch kindling and dry wood into the stove, and soon had a roaring fire. He lit the gasoline lantern, divested himself of his wet clothes, took the two medium-sized fish from the creel and fried them for supper. He read a magazine, noticed casually that the rain on the cabin roof stopped about nine-thirty, listened to the news on the radio and went to bed. His sleep was punctuated with dreams of women who screamed and ran aimlessly through the forest, of shrewd-eyed city men who regarded him with patronizing cordiality, of snub-nosed, laughing-eyed women who pursued him with pronged spears, their mouths giving vent to sardonic laughter.

Sometimes I wish I could trade my recurring dream with someone. My dream is like a kaleidoscope, very colorful, almost pretty. I would be glad to accept a black and white dream in return for my living-color one. I would even accept a horror dream, a terrible one in which the sleeper is chased up and down cliffs, by a mad dog. Any dream would be better than mine. My dream focuses on a pinwheel, a child’s toy, a stick on which bits of plastic are pinned to be set into motion by the wind.

My pinwheel is red, white, and blue. In my dream I spin it with my finger. As soon as my finger touches it, the colors change into black and white polka dots. Then the polka dots dissolve into a solid purple. Then the purple turns to red. After redness floods the dream I wake up.

It’s such an innocent-looking dream but after I’ve dreamed it a few nights, I make those awful phone calls. I don’t pick names randomly from the phone book. I call the relatives or friends of people who work in the same office I do.

When Ellen, the stenographer, stopped after work at the bar on the first floor of our building with John, the engineer, I was compelled to call her husband. I had overheard Ellen telling her husband on the phone that she had to work late. I knew she was lying. After John and Ellen left the office, I took the next elevator downstairs and saw them through the open door of the bar. They were sitting close together in a booth.

I hurried to a pay phone in the drug store, pulled out my address book, and called Ellen’s husband.

“I think you should know,” I told him, “that your wife is having a drink in Richard’s Bar with a man she works with. They’re there right now.”

I hung up before he could say anything.

Ellen’s eyes looked terribly red the following morning. She told everyone that her allergies were acting up. I knew differently. I knew she must have spent the entire evening in tears because after my call to her husband I went back to the lobby of our building and sat in a chair with a newspaper opened out to conceal my face. I lowered it to see Ellen pulled roughly out of the bar by her husband.

She looked so pathetic that I felt a little guilty. I brought coffee to her desk. She thanked me before pouring out the story of her humiliating exit from the bar.

“I have to tell someone, Lorna,” she sobbed, “and you’re so good, such a good person, I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, Ellen,” I replied.

“I don’t know how he found out. He must have been suspicious about all the overtime that didn’t appear on my paycheck.”

“You won’t do it again, dear? Promise Lorna.”

“I promise,” she said like a repentant child.

I went back to my desk and opened my ledgers. I’m a bookkeeper and my books are a work of art. They are neat and orderly, just as life should be but isn’t, unless a person steps in at the right moment to see that life balances out properly. I smiled down at the figures in the books. Ellen’s life was balanced. She had erred and been punished for it.

A simple phone call from Lorna, good old Lorna, the office’s maiden aunt, everybody’s friend and confidante, had straightened her out. And good old Lorna could continue her behind-the-scenes accounting like an invisible but efficient guardian angel. Ellen’s husband had not mentioned the phone call to her. Telling her would have destroyed the image of omniscience he needed to keep Ellen in line in the future.

After the incident with Ellen, I looked forward to my pinwheel dream. I seemed to derive courage from it, the courage to do the necessary calling. So much time and energy in our office seemed to be devoted to perpetrating deceptions that I felt our business motto should be “Deception is our most important product.”

After dreaming the pinwheel dream for five nights, I called Harry’s wife to tell her that Harry had gone to the race track one afternoon. Harry belongs to Gamblers Anonymous and he shouldn’t go to the track. I had heard Harry telling his wife on the phone that he had to meet a client in the afternoon, but I saw the racing forms on his desk when I brought him a doughnut and coffee. Deception, deception!

Harry was red-faced when he asked Payroll to mail his check home each week instead of giving it to him. Like Ellen’s husband, his wife must not have told him about the anonymous call.

The pinwheel dream receded from the proscenium of my sleep for nearly a month after my call to Harry’s wife. I was grateful. The forces set into motion by the dream caused me elation, I do admit that, but they also caused me some anxiety. If I were discovered, I would no longer be “good old Lorna” to my associates. Stripped of that title, I would have lost access to the deceptions that proliferated in our office like fruit flies.

The new employee, Paul Mason, forced me to summon the dream from the wings where it always lurked. At first Paul puzzled me; then he angered me. He not only refused to confide in me but he refused to make self-incriminating phone calls in my hearing. Yet I knew his poker face and formal mannerisms masked a deception more evil than anyone’s. Paul became my greatest challenge. I brought coffee and discussed the weather more times with him than I had ever done with a new employee. My efforts at conversations yielded only polite responses.

After dreaming the dream, I knew what I had to do. Under the pretext of working late I stole through the empty offices to Personnel. In the filing cabinet I found his personnel folder. It revealed a deception more vile than I had expected. True, he had not deceived Personnel but he had deceived me and the others in the office who had a right to know about him. After all, sharing deceptions was part of our office mystique. Even I had contributed a deception to the office gossip — a false deception if that’s not a redundancy. I had invented an affair I supposedly had years ago with a married man. I shared this imaginary escapade with everyone so I’d appear more human.

My excitement at the discovery in Paul’s folder left me breathless. I slipped the folder back into the cabinet and sank into the Personnel Director’s chair. If I might resort to a bit of humor, Paul Mason’s case was to be my greatest balancing act.

But excitement, such a fickle sensation, ebbed almost immediately. Whom could I call? His wife? Hardly. She had to know the contents of his folder. My co-workers? Impossible. If I passed Paul’s data along, Sue Nelson, the Personnel Director, would know someone had peeked into the files, and she might remember I had worked late. I could not afford to lose my job. At fifty it’s not easy to get another one.

Then whom to call? I picked up a small flag that stood on Sue’s desk. I twirled it around and around like the pinwheel in my dream. Invoking the power of the dream, I sat back and waited. In minutes I knew whom to call.

But first I had to take a short ride. I drove to Paul’s street. Pretending the car had stalled, I glanced at the house next to his. In the middle of the grille-work on the storm door I read the name Barrett. My excitement returned. I drove home, sailing through yellow lights which I don’t ordinarily do. My hands shook as I picked up the telephone directory. Yes, yes, it was there — Paul’s neighbor’s listing: J. B. Barrett, 45 Dover Drive, 867-4259.

A child answered the phone. “Get your mother,” I ordered. After his mother said hello, I said, “Your next-door neighbor, Paul Mason, is a child molester who spent five years in Rutherford Prison.”

I hung up in the middle of a gasp at the other end.

A week after the phone call I met Paul’s wife. She came into the office to pick up his belongings, the photographs and other things from his desk that were of no value to anyone else. With the usual solicitude of good old Lorna, I helped her put them into a cardboard box. Collecting his office mementos proved to be too much for her. She slumped into his chair and cried, “Why did he have to slash his wrists? Things were going so well for us until the neighbors refused to let their children play with ours. They told their kids Paul was a bad man. And that he was cured.”

I gave her two aspirins and helped her to the elevator. I winced when she smiled through quivering lips to tell me what a good person I was. That night I stayed late at the office, but not to prowl through filing cabinets. I stayed to do some prowling through my mind.

The exultation I usually experienced for weeks after a phone call had disappeared. I realized I had gone too far. Rather than balancing Paul’s accounts, I had placed his liabilities on the first page of the ledger where they had overwhelmed him. That wasn’t good bookkeeping. And the anxiety that I might someday be caught had almost overwhelmed me. I had to stop making those calls.

From the office I called Dr. Kevin Adams, the first psychologist listed in the Phonebook. I hoped he could help me to stop. But on my first visit I detested him and sustained the emotion throughout all my visits. He sat behind a desk, puffing on a pipe, a thirtyish sandy-haired man with a studied poker face that reminded me of Paul Mason.

“Just tell me who you are,” he said on the first visit. “That’s always good for starters.”

“I’m Lorna Tyson,” I answered.

He puffed on his pipe for fifteen minutes, saying nothing. The clock on his desk ticked away my time and my money.

Finally he said, “Just who is Lorna Tyson?”

Unable to decide if he wanted a philosophical discourse on the concept of “person,” or if he simply wanted some background information on me, I sat silently for almost fifteen minutes. I finally settled on: “She’s a bookkeeper.”

“A bookkeeper.” He scribbled some words on a pad before telling me my time was up. I had spent $30.00 for the privilege of telling him my name and occupation.

During the next three sessions I told him about good old Lorna, everybody’s friend and confidante. He nodded once or twice before saying “umph” and telling me my time was up. Seething, I left his office. I was so upset I forgot my gloves. When I went back to get them, I saw Dr. Adams locked in a passionate embrace with his receptionist. I quickly closed the door. The next morning I called the Psychological Association and reported his unprofessional behavior. For the first time since Paul committed suicide, I felt relaxed.

Dr. Adams shattered that good feeling on my next visit.

“Tell me, Lorna,” he said, “about your compulsion to report people’s transgressions.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered.

“Oh, come now, Lorna, let’s not play any more games. We’ve had four sessions together and not once have you indicated what’s bothering you. I saw your gloves on the table in the waiting room and knew you’d come back. I deliberately kissed my receptionist to see what your reaction would be. You called the Psychological Association to report me. That didn’t upset me or the Association. The receptionist is my wife. As a new patient, you wouldn’t have known that.”

Along with some other epithets that I didn’t know spiced my vocabulary, I called him Dr. God.

“You’re quite unprincipled, Dr. God,” I shouted. “You manipulate behind the scenes like some superior being so you can make lesser creatures squirm!”

“Then we’re very much alike, aren’t we, Lorna?” he said.

I was too stunned to answer. I dropped into the leather armchair across from his desk and watched as he emptied the ashes from his pipe into a large ashtray. He was waiting for me to speak. All my defenses had toppled, so I told him about the phone calls to Ellen’s husband and to Harry’s wife. He said nothing, but he knocked his pipe against his desk as if it were a judge’s gavel. On the following visit I told him about my call to Paul’s neighbor. The pipe hit the desk with metronomic frequency.

“Stop that, Dr. God,” I said.

“Stop what?” he asked.

“Stop passing judgment on me with your pipe.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize what I was doing. You’re quite astute.”

“Quite,” I answered.

When I returned to my office, I doodled the number seven all over a memo pad. The next visit with Dr. God would be my last. I had seen him six times and poured all my deceptions into his gossip-pot. He had a great racket going. He sat on his chair, a dead-pan Father Confessor, consuming all the meat from the patient’s pitiful emotional stew as well as chomping on all the money in the patient’s pitiful wallet, and he offered nothing in return. My bookkeeper’s mind rebelled against the imbalance of it.

On the seventh visit, before I could say a word, he opened with, “Tell me about your dreams.”

I almost slipped off my chair. I had said nothing to him about my dream. Dr. God could read minds!

“How did you know about my dream?” I choked.

“Ah,” he said, “now we’re getting somewhere. I didn’t say, ‘Tell me about your dream!’ I said, ‘Tell me about your dreams.’ You heard the singular of the word, therefore I must conclude you have a recurring dream.”

Trapped, I told him the dream.

“I dream I have a red, white, and blue pinwheel. Since there is no wind to move it, I must turn it with my finger. After I touch the pinwheel it disintegrates into spinning black and white polka dots. The polka dots stop moving and are replaced by purple. Then the purple dissolves into red and the red fills up the dream.”

Dr. God put his pipe down because he had no verdict to tap out on the dream. He looked baffled. I rejoiced. He stood up and began to pace behind his desk. For five beautiful minutes I reveled in his bewilderment.

“I admit the dream puzzles me, but I do see one clue. Since the pinwheel is a child’s toy, I assume the dream relates to an incident in your childhood.”

“Bravo, Dr. God. You’ve hit on the old psychological standby childhood. I was wondering when you’d get to that.”

He ignored my jibe and sat down. He led me into a game. Free association, he called it. I had to sit like an obedient child and tell him all the words that came to my mind when I thought of a pinwheel.

“Flag,” I told him because of the pinwheel’s red, white, and blue colors. Windmill, bicycle wheel, I told him — spinning wheel, roulette wheel, wagon wheel.

He eyed me like a teacher about to fail a student. “Think harder,” he urged, “harder! What else is round like a pinwheel and needs an outside force to move it?”

I glanced around the room. Nothing came to my mind until I looked at the phone on his desk. “A telephone dial,” I said softly.

“Eureka!” he shouted. “As a child, the pinwheel reminded you of a telephone dial, something else that you had to turn with your finger. And the black and white polka dots spinning in your dream are the letters and numbers on a black instrument. When you were a child, telephones were only black with white letters and numbers. We are decoding the dream, Lorna,” he said.

I ignored his use of the word “we.” I was decoding the dream. I began to cry. He came to me and patted me on the shoulder, a gesture that made me cry-harder. It reminded me of the day the policeman patted eight-year-old Lorna on the shoulder as she sat on the front steps watching the three stretchers being lifted into ambulances.

“One of the stretchers,” I heard myself telling him, “held my mother, the other, her lover, and the other, my father. My father came home from work and found my mother upstairs with another man. My father shot both of them, and then himself.”

He handed me his handkerchief. “And all that happened on a day when you were playing happily with a pinwheel. Then you heard shots, ran into the house, and dialed the police. They probably told you to wait outside, but you went upstairs — were you wearing a purple dress? — and saw all the redness from the blood of the three bodies.

“Now we understand the meanings of the pinwheel, the polka dots, the purple, and the red. And now we understand why you made those calls to damn your co-workers. You wanted to punish them. You transferred your rage at being deceived by your mother to your co-workers who, in your mind, were deceiving others.”

“Yes, Dr. God,” I admitted. I said yes to his interpretation so I could leave. I had to think. I had to plan.

“May I use your phone, Doctor, my car is in the shop. I must call a cab.”

“Of course.”

He watched me dial the phone. I put through my request for a cab in a shaky voice. Then I hung up.

“Do you always do that?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Hang up the phone by tapping the listening end of the receiver on the table before putting the receiver back in its cradle.”

“I guess so. Why?”

“Because tapping the phone on the table reminds me of a judge tapping his gavel at a trial.”

“Then we have something in common, Doctor,” I said casually. “You tap your pipe when you deliver a verdict. I tap the phone.”

His face became dead-pan again. “Now that you understand your dream you’ve probably delivered your last verdict via the telephone.”

“But you have more verdicts to tap out, don’t you, Dr. God?”

“If you say so,” he responded.

He was wrong about my delivering my last verdict on the phone. I had another one to deliver. He was correct about some of my dream, but not all of it. In his egotism he missed the more complex points. I had to see to it that he never discovered the truth when he had a chance to think it over.

The truth was mine alone. The dream did unravel its meaning to me in Dr. God’s office. On that summer day when I was eight years old, I walked two blocks to wait for the bus that was to take me on a day trip with my Brownie troop. My mother waved to me from the door. She seemed happy that I would be gone all day.

But the bus didn’t come. It had broken down. Our Scout Leader knew we were disappointed so she gave us each a pinwheel to take home. The pinwheel didn’t move because there was no wind. I took it in the house so that the fan in the living room would make it spin. I heard them, my mother and him, laughing upstairs. I turned the pinwheel round and round with my finger.

The spinning pinwheel made me think of the telephone dial. I called my father at work and told him about my mother and the man upstairs. As I waited for him to come home, I colored a picture of a queen in my fairy-tale coloring book. I used purple for her dress. My father had told me that purple was a royal color, the color of kings and queens. I felt like a queen sitting there. I felt powerful. I felt royal. I felt purple. And purple was exciting. I always felt purple when I made the calls about my co-workers.

Dr. God was right about the red in the dream. It was blood, the blood all over my mother and that man. I didn’t look at my father. Red is a good color too. It’s the color of satisfaction, of a verdict delivered, of sentencing received. Harry — his gambler’s face was red from embarrassment when he asked to have his paycheck mailed home. Ellen’s eyes were red after a night’s crying. Paul’s wrists were red after he slashed them.

And Dr. God’s pipe will glow red when he puffs and puffs on it as he desperately tries to extricate himself from the situation I am planning for him. I feel no pity for him. He too was feeling purple in that office when he thought he had interpreted my dream. I can’t have that — purple belongs to me. And so does red.

I looked at my mussed hair and my scratched face and my ripped dress in the mirror of my apartment. I had had time to do those things to myself in the ladies room before the cab came. The cab driver noticed and asked if I was all right. I acted too distraught to answer him. I smiled at my cleverness. My car isn’t in the shop. I just needed a witness to my disheveled state. And luckily Dr. God’s wife hadn’t come to work today.

I dialed my beige phone, regretting that it wasn’t an old black one. When a voice said, “Jones. Twenty-second Precinct,” I began to sob. I was quite good at it. “Dr. Adams of the Baker Building tried to attack me in his office this afternoon. Please come, please!”

It was the best acting job of my life. It’s hard to feign tears when one is feeling so purple. The police promised to come at once. Before I hung up the phone, I carefully tapped the listening part of the receiver on the table.

It’s hard not to believe in ghosts when you are one. I hanged myself in a fit of truculence — stronger than pique, but not so dignified as despair — and regretted it before the thing was well begun. The instant I kicked the chair away I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my 193 pounds would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around my neck.

There was pain, of course, quite horrible pain centered in my throat, but the most astounding thing was the way my cheeks seemed to swell. I could barely see over their round red hills, my eyes staring in agony at the door, willing someone to come in and rescue me, though I knew there was no one in the house, and in any event the door was carefully locked. My kicking legs caused me to twist and turn, so that sometimes I faced the door and sometimes the window, and my shivering hands struggled with the rope so deep in my flesh I could barely find it and most certainly could not pull it loose.

I was frantic and terrified, yet at the same time my brain possessed a cold corner of aloof observation. I seemed now to be everywhere in the room at once, within my writhing body but also without, seeing my frenzied spasms, the thick rope, the heavy beam, the mismatched pair of lit bedside lamps throwing my convulsive double shadow on the walls, the closed locked door, the white-curtained window with its shade drawn all the way down. This is death, I thought, and I no longer wanted it, now that the choice was gone forever.

My name is — was — Edward Thornburn, and my dates are 1938–1977. I killed myself just a month before my fortieth birthday, though I don’t believe the well-known pangs of that milestone had much if anything to do with my action. I blame it all (as I blamed most of the errors and failures of my life) on my sterility. Had I been able to father children my marriage would have remained strong, Emily would not have been unfaithful to me, and I would not have taken my own life in a final fit of truculence.

The setting was the guestroom in our house in Barnstaple, Connecticut, and the time was just after seven P.M.; deep twilight, at this time of year. I had come home from the office I was a realtor, a fairly lucrative occupation in Connecticut, though my income had been falling off recently — shortly before six, to find the note on the kitchen table: “Antiquing with Greg. Afraid you’ll have to make your own dinner. Sorry. Love, Emily.”

Greg was the one; Emily’s lover. He owned an antique shop out on the main road toward New York, and Emily filled a part of her days as his ill-paid assistant. I knew what they did together in the back of the shop on those long midweek afternoons when there were no tourists, no antique collectors to disturb them. I knew, and I’d known for more than three years, but I had never decided how to deal with my knowledge. The fact was, I blamed myself, and therefore I had no way to behave if the ugly subject were ever to come into the open.

So I remained silent, but not content. I was discontent, unhappy, angry, resentful — truculent.

I’d tried to kill myself before. At first with the car, by steering it into an oncoming truck (I swerved at the last second, amid howling horns) and by driving it off a cliff into the Connecticut River (I slammed on the brakes at the very brink, and sat covered in perspiration for half an hour before backing away) and finally by stopping athwart one of the few level crossings left in this neighborhood. But no train came for twenty minutes, and my truculence wore off, and I drove home.

Later I tried to slit my wrists, but found it impossible to push sharp metal into my own skin. Impossible. The vision of my naked wrist and that shining steel so close together washed my truculence completely out of my mind. Until the next time.

With the rope; and then I succeeded. Oh, totally, oh, fully I succeeded. My legs kicked at air, my fingernails clawed at my throat, my bulging eyes stared out over my swollen purple cheeks, my tongue thickened and grew bulbous in my mouth, my body jigged and jangled like a toy at the end of a string, and the pain was excruciating, horrible, not to be endured. I can’t endure it, I thought, it can’t be endured. Much worse than knife slashings was the knotted strangled pain in my throat, and my head ballooned with pain, pressure outward, my face turning black, my eyes no longer human, the pressure in my head building and building as though I would explode. Endless horrible pain, not to be endured, but going on and on.

My legs kicked more feebly. My arms sagged, my hands dropped to my sides, my fingers twitched uselessly against my sopping trouser legs, my head hung at an angle from the rope, I turned more slowly in the air, like a broken windchime on a breezeless day. The pains lessened, in my throat and head, but never entirely stopped.

And now I saw that my distended eyes had become lusterless, gray. The moisture had dried on the eyeballs, they were as dead as stones. And yet I could see them, my own eyes, and when I widened my vision I could see my entire body, turning, hanging, no longer twitching, and with horror I realized I was dead.

But present. Dead, but still present, with the scraping ache still in my throat and the bulging pressure still in my head. Present, but no longer in that used-up clay, that hanging meat; I was suffused through the room, like indirect lighting, everywhere present but without a source. What happens now? I wondered, dulled by fear and strangeness and the continuing pains, and I waited, like a hovering mist, for whatever would happen next.

But nothing happened. I waited: the body became utterly still; the double shadow on the wall showed no vibration; the bedside lamps continued to burn; the door remained shut and the window shade drawn: and nothing happened.

What now? I craved to scream the question aloud, but I could not. My throat ached, but I had no throat. My mouth burned, but I had no mouth. Every final strain and struggle of my body remained imprinted in my mind, but I had no body and no brain and no self, no substance. No power to speak, no power to move myself, no power to remove myself from this room and this suspended corpse. I could only wait here, and wonder, and go on waiting.

There was a digital clock on the dresser opposite the bed, and when it first occurred to me to look at it the numbers were 7:21 — perhaps twenty minutes after I’d kicked the chair away, perhaps fifteen minutes since I’d died. Shouldn’t something happen, shouldn’t some change take place?

The clock read 9:11 when I heard Emily’s Volkswagen drive around to the back of the house. I had left no note, having nothing I wanted to say to anyone and in any event believing my own dead body would be eloquent enough, but I hadn’t thought I would be present when Emily found me. I was justified in my action, however much I now regretted having taken it, I was justified, I knew I was justified, but I didn’t want to see her face when she came through that door. She had wronged me, she was the cause of it, she would have to know that as well as I, but I didn’t want to see her face.

The pains increased, in what had been my throat, in what had been my head. I heard the back door slam, far away downstairs, and I stirred like air currents in the room, but I didn’t leave. I couldn’t leave.

“Ed? Ed? It’s me, hon!”

I know it’s you. I must go away now, I can’t stay here, I must go away. Is there a God? Is this my soul, this hovering presence? Hell would be better than this, take me away to Hell or wherever I’m to go, don’t leave me here!

She came up the stairs, calling again, walking past the closed guestroom door. I heard her go into our bedroom, heard her call my name, heard the beginnings of apprehension in her voice. She went by again, out there in the hall, went downstairs, became quiet.

What was she doing? Searching for a note perhaps, some message from me. Looking out the window, seeing again my Chevrolet, knowing I must be home. Moving through the rooms of this old house, the original structure a barn nearly 200 years old, converted by some previous owner just after the Second World War, bought by me twelve years ago, furnished by Emily — and Greg — from their interminable, damnable, awful antiques. Shaker furniture, Colonial furniture, hooked rugs and quilts, the old yellow pine tables, the faint sense always of being in some slightly shabby minor museum, this house that I had bought but never loved. I’d bought it for Emily, I did everything for Emily, because I knew I could never do the one thing for Emily that mattered. I could never give her a child.

She was good about it, of course. Emily is good, I never blamed her, never completely blamed her instead of myself. In the early days of our marriage she made a few wistful references, but I suppose she saw the effect they had on me, and for a long time she has said nothing. But I have known.

The beam from which I had hanged myself was a part of the original building, a thick hand-hewed length of aged timber eleven inches square, chevroned with the marks of the hatchet that had shaped it. A strong beam, it would support my weight forever. It would support my weight until I was found and cut down. Until I was found.

The clock read 9:23 and Emily had been in the house twelve minutes when she came upstairs again, her steps quick and light on the old wood, approaching, pausing, stopping. “Ed?”

The doorknob turned.

The door was locked, of course, with the key on the inside. She’d have to break it down, have to call someone else to break it down, perhaps she wouldn’t be the one to find me after all. Hope rose in me, and the pains receded.

“Ed? Are you in there?” She knocked at the door, rattled the knob, called my name several times more, then abruptly turned and ran away downstairs again, and after a moment I heard her voice, murmuring and unclear. She had called someone, on the phone.

Greg, I thought, and the throat-rasp filled me, and I wanted this to be the end. I wanted to be taken away, dead body and living soul, taken away. I wanted everything to be finished.

She stayed downstairs, waiting for him, and I stayed upstairs, waiting for them both. Perhaps she already knew what she’d find up here, and that’s why she waited below.

I didn’t mind about Greg, about being present when he came in. I didn’t mind about hint. It was Emily I minded.

The clock read 9:44 when I heard tires on the gravel at the side of the house. He entered, I heard them talking down there, the deeper male voice slow and reassuring, the lighter female voice quick and frightened, and then they came up together, neither speaking. The doorknob turned, jiggled, rattled, and Greg’s voice called, “Ed?”

After a little silence Emily said, “He wouldn’t — he wouldn’t do anything, would he?”

“Do anything?” Greg sounded almost annoyed at the question. “What do you mean, do anything?”

“He’s been so depressed, he’s — Ed!” And forcibly the door was rattled, the door was shaken in its frame.

“Emily, don’t. Take it easy.”

“I shouldn’t have called you,” she said. “Ed, please!”

“Why not? For heaven’s sake, Emily—”

“Ed, please come out, don’t scare me like this!”

“Why shouldn’t you call me, Emily?”

“Ed isn’t stupid, Greg. He’s—”

There was then a brief silence, pregnant with the hint of murmuring. They thought me still alive in here, they didn’t want me to hear Emily say, “He knows, Greg, he knows about us.”

The murmurings sifted and shifted, and then Greg spoke loudly, “That’s ridiculous. Ed? Come out, Ed, let’s talk this over.” And the doorknob rattled and clattered, and he sounded annoyed when he said, “We must get in, that’s all. Is there another key?”

“I think all the locks up here are the same. Just a minute.”

They were. A simple skeleton key would open any interior door in the house. I waited, listening, knowing Emily had gone off to find another key, knowing they would soon come in together, and I felt such terror and revulsion for Emily’s entrance that I could feel myself shimmer in the room, like a reflection in a warped mirror. Oh, can I at least stop seeing? In life I had eyes, but also eyelids, I could shut out the intolerable, but now I was only a presence, a total presence, I could not stop my awareness.

The rasp of key in lock was like rough metal edges in my throat; my memory of a throat. The pain flared in me, and through it I heard Emily asking what was wrong, and Greg answering, “The key’s in it, on the other side.”

“Oh, dear God! Oh, Greg, what has he done?”

“We’ll have to take the door off its hinges,” he told her. “Call Tony. Tell him to bring the toolbox.”

“Can’t you push the key through?”

Of course he could, but he said, quite determinedly, “Go on, Emily,” and I realized then he had no intention of taking the door down. He simply wanted her away when the door was first opened. Oh, very good, very good!

“All right,” she said doubtfully, and I heard her go away to phone Tony. A beetle-browed young man with great masses of black hair and an olive complexion, Tony lived in Greg’s house and was a kind of handyman. He did work around the house and was also (according to Emily) very good at restoration of antique furniture; stripping paint, re-assembling broken parts, that sort of thing.

There was now a renewed scraping and rasping at the lock, as Greg struggled to get the door open before Emily’s return. I found myself feeling unexpected warmth and liking toward Greg. He wasn’t a bad person; an opportunist with my wife, but not in general a bad person. Would he marry her now? They could live in this house, he’d had more to do with its furnishing than I. Or would this room hold too grim a memory, would Emily have to sell the house, live elsewhere? She might have to sell at a low price; as a realtor, I knew the difficulty in selling a house where a suicide has taken place. No matter how much they may joke about it, people are still afraid of the supernatural. Many of them would believe this room was haunted.

It was then I finally realized the room was haunted. With me! I’m a ghost, I thought, thinking the word for the first time, in utter blank astonishment. I’m a ghost.

Oh, how dismal! To hover here, to be a boneless fleshless aching presence here, to be a kind of ectoplasmic mildew seeping through the days and nights, alone, unending, a stupid pain-racked misery-filled observer of the comings and goings of strangers — she would sell the house, she’d have to, I was sure of that. Was this my punishment? The punishment of the suicide, the solitary hell of him who takes his own life. To remain forever a sentient nothing, bound by a force greater than gravity itself to the place of one’s finish.

I was distracted from this misery by a sudden agitation in the key on this side of the lock. I saw it quiver and jiggle like something alive, and then it popped out — it seemed to leap out, itself a suicide leaping from a cliff — and clattered to the floor, and an instant later the door was pushed open and Greg’s ashen face stared at my own purple face, and after the astonishment and horror, his expression shifted to revulsion — and contempt? — and he backed out, slamming the door. Once more the key turned in the lock, and I heard him hurry away downstairs.

The clock read 9:58. Now he was telling her. Now he was giving her a drink to calm her. Now he was phoning the police. Now he was talking to her about whether or not to admit their affair to the police; what would they decide?

“Nooooooooo!”

The clock read 10:07. What had taken so long? Hadn’t he even called the police yet?

She was coming up the stairs, stumbling and rushing, she was pounding on the door, screaming my name. I shrank into the corners of the room, I felt the thuds of her fists against the door, I cowered from her. She can’t come in, dear God don’t let her in! I don’t care what she’s done, I don’t care about anything, just don’t let her see me! Don’t let me see her!

Greg joined her. She screamed at him, he persuaded her, she raved, he argued, she demanded, he denied. “Give me the key! Give me the key!”

Surely he’ll hold out, surely he’ll take her away, surely he’s stronger, more forceful.

He gave her the key.

No. This cannot be endured. This is the horror beyond all else. She came in, she walked into the room, and the sound she made will always live inside me. That cry wasn’t human; it was the howl of every creature that has ever despaired. Now I know what despair is, and why I called my own state mere truculence.

Now that it was too late, Greg tried to restrain her, tried to hold her shoulders and draw her from the room, but she pulled away and crossed the room toward... not toward me. I was everywhere in the room, driven by pain and remorse, and Emily walked toward the carcass. She looked at it almost tenderly, she even reached up and touched its swollen cheek.

“Oh, Ed,” she murmured.

The pains were as violent now as in the moments before my death. The slashing torment in my throat, the awful distension in my head, they made me squirm in agony all over again; but I could not feel her hand on my cheek.

Greg followed her, touched her shoulder again, spoke her name, and immediately her face dissolved, she cried out once more and wrapped her arms around the corpse’s legs and clung to it, weeping and gasping and uttering words too quick and broken to understand. Thank God they were too quick and broken to understand!

Greg, that fool, did finally force her away, though he had great trouble breaking her clasp on the body. But he succeeded, and pulled her out of the room, and slammed the door, and for a little while the body swayed and turned, until it became still once more.

That was the worst. Nothing could be worse than that. The long days and nights here — how long must a stupid creature like myself haunt his death-place before release? — would be horrible, I knew that, but not so bad as this. Emily would survive, would sell the house, would slowly forget. (Even I would slowly forget.) She and Greg could marry. She was only 36, she could still be mother.

For the rest of the night I heard her wailing, elsewhere in the house. The police did come at last, and a pair of grim silent white-coated men from the morgue entered the room to cut me — it — down. They bundled it like a broken toy into a large oval wicker basket with long wooden handles, and they carried it away.

I had thought I might be forced to stay with the body, I had feared the possibility of being buried with it, of spending eternity as a thinking nothingness in the black dark of a casket, but the body left the room and I remained behind.

A doctor was called. When the body was carried away the room door was left open, and now I could plainly hear the voices from downstairs. Tony was among them now, his characteristic surly monosyllable occasionally rumbling, but the main thing for a while was the doctor. He was trying to give Emily a sedative, but she kept wailing, she kept speaking high hurried frantic sentences as though she had too little time to say it all. “I did it!” she cried, over and over. “I did it! I’m to blame!”

Yes. That was the reaction Ed wanted, and expected, and here it was, and it was horrible. Everything I had desired in the last moments of my life had been granted to me, and they were all ghastly beyond belief. I didn’t want to die! I didn’t want to give Emily such misery! And more than all the rest I didn’t want to be here, seeing and hearing it all.

They did quiet her at last, and then a policeman in a rumpled blue suit came into the room with Greg, and listened while Greg described everything that had happened. While Greg talked, the policeman rather grumpily stared at the remaining length of rope still knotted around the beam, and when Greg had finished the policeman said, “You’re a close friend of his?”

“More of his wife. She works for me. I own The Bibelot, an antique shop out on the New York road.”

“Mm. Why on earth did you let her in here?”

Greg smiled; a sheepish embarrassed expression. “She’s stronger than I am,” he said. “A more forceful personality. That’s always been true.”

It was with some surprise I realized it was true. Greg was something of a weakling, and Emily was very strong. (I had been something of a weakling, hadn’t I? Emily was the strongest of us all.)

The policeman was saying, “Any idea why he’d do it?”

“I think he suspected his wife was having an affair with me.” Clearly Greg had rehearsed this sentence, he’d much earlier come to the decision to say it and had braced himself for the moment. He blinked all the way through the statement, as though standing in a harsh glare.

The policeman gave him a quick shrewd look. “Were you?”

“Yes.”

“She was getting a divorce?”

“No. She doesn’t love me, she loved her husband.”

“Then why sleep around?”

“Emily wasn’t sleeping around,” Greg said, showing offense only with the emphasized word. “From time to time, and not very often, she was sleeping with me.”

“Why?”

“For comfort.” Greg too looked at the rope around the beam, as though it had become me and he was awkward speaking in its presence. “Ed wasn’t an easy man to get along with,” he said carefully. “He was moody. It was getting worse.”

“Cheerful people don’t kill themselves,” the policeman said.

“Exactly. Ed was depressed most of the time, obscurely angry now and then. It was affecting his business, costing him clients. He made Emily miserable but she wouldn’t leave him, she loved him. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”

“You two won’t marry?”

“Oh, no.” Greg smiled, a bit sadly. “Do you think we murdered him, made it look like suicide so we could marry?”

“Not at all,” the policeman said. “But what’s the problem? You already married?”

“I am homosexual.”

The policeman was no more astonished than I. He said, “I don’t get it.”

“I live with my friend: that young man downstairs. I am — capable — of a wider range, but my preferences are set. I am very fond of Emily, I felt sorry for her, the life she had with Ed. I told you our physical relationship was infrequent. And often not very successful.”

Oh, Emily. Oh, poor Emily.

The policeman said, “Did Thornburn know you were, uh, that way?”

“I have no idea. I don’t make a public point of it.”

“All right.” The policeman gave one more half-angry look around the room, then said, “Let’s go.”

They left. The door remained open, and I heard them continue to talk as they went downstairs, first the policeman asking, “Is there somebody to stay the night? Mrs. Thornburn shouldn’t be alone.”

“She has relatives in Great Barrington. I phoned them earlier. Somebody should be arriving within the hour.”

“You’ll stay until then? The doctor says she’ll probably sleep, but just in case—”

“Of course.”

That was all I heard. Male voices murmured awhile longer from below, and then stopped. I heard cars drive away.

How complicated men and women are. How stupid are simple actions. I had never understood anyone, least of all myself.

The room was visited once more that night, by Greg, shortly after the police left. He entered, looking as offended and repelled as though the body were still here, stood the chair up on its legs, climbed on it, and with some difficulty untied the remnant of rope. This he stuffed partway into his pocket as he stepped down again to the floor, then returned the chair to its usual spot in the corner of the room, picked the key off the floor and put it in the lock, switched off both bedside lamps and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Now I was in darkness, except for the faint line of light under the door, and the illuminated numerals of the clock. How long one minute is! That clock was my enemy, it dragged out every minute, it paused and waited and paused and waited till I could stand it no more, and then it waited longer, and then the next number dropped into place. Sixty times an hour, hour after hour, all night long. I couldn’t stand one night of this, how could I stand eternity?

And how could I stand the torment and torture inside my brain? That was much worse now than the physical pain, which never entirely left me. I had been right about Emily and Greg, but at the same time I had been hopelessly brainlessly wrong. I had been right about my life, but wrong; right about my death, but wrong. How much I wanted to make amends, and how impossible it was to do anything anymore, anything at all. My actions had all tended to this, and ended with this: black remorse, the most dreadful pain of all.

I had all night to think, and to feel the pains, and to wait without knowing what I was waiting for or when — or if — my waiting would ever end. Faintly I heard the arrival of Emily’s sister and brother-in-law, the murmured conversation, then the departure of Tony and Greg. Not long afterward the guestroom door opened, but almost immediately closed again, no one having entered, and a bit after that the hall hight went out, and now only the illuminated clock broke the darkness.

When next would I see Emily? Would she ever enter this room again? It wouldn’t be as horrible as the first time, hut it would surely be horror enough.

Dawn grayed the window shade, and gradually the room appeared out of the darkness, dim and silent and morose. Apparently it was a sunless day, which never got very bright. The day went on and on, featureless, each protracted minute marked by the clock. At times I dreaded someone’s entering this room, at other times I prayed for something, anything — even the presence of Emily herself — to break this unending boring absence. But the day went on with no event, no sound, no activity anywhere — they must be keeping Emily sedated through this first day — and it wasn’t until twilight, with the digital clock reading 6:52, that the door again opened and a person entered.

At first I didn’t recognize him. An angry-looking man, blunt and determined, he came in with quick ragged steps, switched on both bedside lamps, then shut the door with rather more force than necessary, and turned the key in the lock. Truculent, his manner was, and when he turned from the door I saw with incredulity that he was me. Me! I wasn’t dead, I was alive! But how could that be?

And what was that he was carrying? He picked up the chair from the corner, carried it to the middle of the room, stood on it—

No! No!

He tied the rope around the beam. The noose was already in the other end, which he slipped over his head and tightened around his neck.

Good God, don’t!

He kicked the chair away.

The instant I kicked the chair away I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my 193 pounds would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around my neck.

There was pain, of course, quite horrible pain centered in my throat, but the most astounding thing was the way my cheeks seemed to swell. I could barely see over their round red hills, my eyes staring in agony at the door, willing someone to come in and rescue me, though I knew there was no one in the house, and in any event the door was carefully locked. My kicking legs caused me to twist and turn, so that sometimes I faced the door and sometimes the window, and my shivering hands struggled with the rope so deep in my flesh I could barely find it and most certainly could not pull it loose.

I was frantic and terrified, yet at the same time my brain possessed a cold corner of aloof observation. I seemed now to be everywhere in the room at once, within my writhing body but also without, seeing my frenzied spasms, the thick rope, the heavy beam, the mismatched pair of lit bedside lamps throwing my convulsive double shadow on the walls, the closed locked door, the white-curtained window with its shade drawn all the way down. This is death.

The story you have just read was nominated by MWA (Mystery Writers of America) as one of the five best new mystery short stories published in American magazines and books during 1978.

It was a chance meeting with an old love, almost forgotten with the passage of years, that brought John Jericho face to face with a violent murder. Words spoken to him in the strictest confidence set him on a path totally different from the ones taken by the police and the District Attorney’s staff. That he walked that path at all was due to a blazing anger that made it imperative for him, personally, to see to it that Justice was not blind.

What developed into a bloody horror began in the most pleasant of ways. It was a summer day in New York City, one of those rare blue-sky days without smog or unbearable humidity. The sky was cloudless. Jericho, walking uptown on Fifth Avenue, felt younger than he was and carefree. This was a coincidence because, unsuspecting, he was about to encounter his youth again. He found himself thinking of a day like this in Paris, ten years or more ago, when he had been sitting at an outdoor cafe with friends, drinking a particularly good wine, watching the world go by, and thinking how marvelous it was just to be alive. He had been a young artist in those days, just launching a career that was to make him world-famous. The future hadn’t seemed too important that day in Paris — just the present, the joy of being alive and doing what he wanted to do, of being mildly in love.

Remembering that, Jericho now paused at a crossing and looking east saw a sign outside a building: WILLARD’S BACK YARD. This was an expensive little restaurant he could afford to patronize in these days of success, and in the summer months there was a charming outdoor garden, shaded by awnings and potted trees. It would be pleasant to sit there and drink a glass of wine and remember Paris. So he turned east and went into Willard’s.

Coincidences are the enemies of fiction writers, but life is full of them. Willard’s was filling up for luncheon, but Willard, an old friend, found Jericho a table in the garden. People turned to look at him as he was led to his place. He was eye-catching: six feet four inches tall, 240 pounds of solid muscle, with flaming red hair and a blazing red beard.

He sat down, ordered a split of champagne, filled and lit a black curve-stemmed pipe, and leaned back to watch the world go by, just as he had years ago in Paris.

A woman was led to a table a few yards away from Jericho and he looked at her, enjoying her as he always enjoyed looking at beautiful women. She was, he guessed, in her very early thirties, expensively dressed, with an unusual personal electricity. There was something familiar about her, he thought — the familiar charm of a woman of taste and experience, without a veneer of toughness. This kind was rare — familiar but rare.

The woman looked at him, her dark violet eyes widening. “Johnny?” she said. It was a question.

She was no stranger. The absurd thing was that he had been thinking about her as he walked up Fifth Avenue, thinking of her as she had been ten or more years ago, thinking of her as she had been in Paris when he was mildly in love with her.

“Fay!”

He went over to her table and her small cool hands were in his.

“The beard,” she said. “I wasn’t sure for a moment.”

He had been a smooth-faced young man in Paris. “May I join you? Are you expecting someone?”

“Please. No,” she said.

He beckoned to the waiter to bring his wine.

“It’s wild,” she said. “I came in here because I was thinking of you and the old days.”

“ESP,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened to me.”

“Oh, Johnny!”

He ordered a stinger for her. Her taste couldn’t have changed. Nothing had changed. He said something to that effect.

“I wear a size twelve dress today,” she said. “It was an eight back in those days. That much has changed.”

She had been a model in those Paris times. She had also been a member of a young group of Revolutionaries bent on destroying the establishment in general and General de Gaulle in particular. Jericho had thought of them as crackbrained and lovable, particularly Fay. She had posed for him and they had made love and she had forgotten about the Revolution. There had been no anxieties, no guilts, no regrets when they came to the inevitable parting.

“Of course I’ve kept track of you, Johnny. You’re famous now. I’ve gone to all your exhibitions, including your one-man show at the Mullins Gallery last month.”

“You’re living in New York?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And you never tried to get in touch with me? I’m in the phone book.”

“So am I. You’ve forgotten, Johnny, that it was you who walked out. You would have to do the getting in touch — if you wanted to.”

“I was young and stupid,” he said. “I always thought of you as still being back in that other world, taking pot shots at General de Gaulle.”

She laughed. “We were pretty crazy kids, weren’t we? No, I came back here right after we broke up. I am a respectable secretary now, for a man in the brokerage business. You may have heard of him. He’s in the news these days. Lloyd Parker.”

“He’s running for the United States Senate. That your man?”

She nodded. A tiny frown edged lines in her forehead. “A fine man,” she said. “A good warm idealistic man.”

Her man? Jericho wondered. Something in her voice—

“I don’t have very good luck with men, Johnny,” she said, reading his mind. She’d been like that in the old days. “First it was you who mattered. You walked out. Then there was — is — Lloyd Parker. I am his efficient, loyal, ever-ready office machine. He couldn’t get along without me — in the office. Out of the office he is married to a beautiful, exotic, fabulously rich gal. Crandall Steel — she was Ellen Crandall. I am the classic figure of the secretary hopelessly in love with her boss, preferring to work with him every day and not have him rather than drop him and find someone who might want me as a woman.”

“There are probably a hundred such someones,” Jericho said.

She seemed not to hear that. “I was thinking of you when I came in here, Johnny, because I need help.”

“Oh?”

“I need advice from someone who understands how complex people are, who wouldn’t make judgments by hard and fast rules. I thought that of all the people I’d ever known you never prejudged, never insisted that all people follow black-and-white formulas.” She tried a smile. “I thought that if I could only get advice from you — and presto, here you are.”

“Try me, before I make improper advances,” he said, answering her smile.

Her frown returned and stayed fixed. “Lloyd is running against a man named Molloy — Mike Molloy to his friends. Molloy is a machine politician, supported by the big-city moguls, the hardhats, the labor bosses. Perhaps not a bad man, Johnny, but not a man of Lloyd’s caliber, not a potential statesman, not in any way an idealist. Lloyd could be Presidential material in the future. Molloy belongs to other men. Lloyd belongs to himself and his country.”

“He can have my vote.”

“Lloyd is about forty-five. He has always had a little money. His family was Plymouth Rock-Mayflower stuff. I say ‘a little money’ in comparison to his wife’s fortune. He was graduated from Harvard in the late forties, having missed the War. He knew that sooner or later he would be faced with the Army, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do, really. A college friend persuaded him to put some money into a business, one of the first computer-dating services. Lloyd had nothing to do with the operation of the business; he was just a part owner. Someone blew the whistle on them. Lloyd’s partner was using information they gathered to blackmail clients. He was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison. Lloyd was cleared.”

“So?”

“After that came the Army in Korea. One day Lloyd’s top sergeant asked him to mail a package for him. On the way to the post office Lloyd was stopped by M.P.s and it was discovered that the package contained about thirty thousand dollars in cash. The sergeant, it turned out, had been stealing the P.X. blind. There was a court-martial. The sergeant went to Leavenworth. Lloyd was cleared. He had simply been an innocent messenger boy.”

“But not lucky with his friends or connections,” Jericho said.

“Neither of these things was a great scandal at the time,” Fay said. “They’ve been long forgotten. But suddenly they’ve reappeared in Wardell Lewis’ political column. Lewis is supporting Molloy. Someone has fed him these two old stories, along with some malicious gossip about a love affair which Lloyd is supposed to have broken off in order to marry the Crandall money.”

“A love affair with you, Fay?”

“No,” she said sharply. “There is some truth in it, though. He did have an affair with a girl, he did break it off, he did marry Ellen Crandall five years ago. Lewis is using all this and I’ve been trying to find out who’s been feeding Lewis this information.”

“Any luck? The partner, the sergeant, the dropped girl?”

Fay shook her head. She looked at Jericho, her eyes wide. “Ellen, Lloyd’s wife, is having an affair with Wardell Lewis.”

“Wow!” Jericho said.

“Of course Lloyd has no knowledge of it,” Fay said. “That’s what creates my problem. He loves his wife deeply. If he learns the truth, I think it will destroy him. What do I do? Do I go to Lloyd and wreck his life with the truth? Do I go to her and Lewis and threaten them with exposure? They would laugh at me. Exposure, beyond what it might do to Lloyd personally, would ruin his political future. A cuckolded candidate for the Senate becomes a national joke.” Fay brought her closed fist down on the table. “What do I do, Johnny?”

“Have another stinger,” he said, wondering just what she should do. She obviously was in love with the man.

“It’s for you, Nicky,” Gloria yelled from the telephone, and Nick Velvet put down the beer he’d been savoring. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon in late winter, when the snow had retreated to little lumps beneath the shady bushes and a certain freshness was already apparent in the air. It was a time of year that Nick especially liked, and he was sorry to have his reverie broken.

“Yes?” he spoke into the phone, after taking it from Gloria’s hand.

“Nick Velvet?” The voice was deep and a bit harsh, but that didn’t surprise him. He’d been hearing that sort of voice on telephones for years.

“Speaking.”

“You do jobs. You steal things.” A statement, not a question.

“I never discuss my business on the telephone. I could meet you somewhere tomorrow.”

“It has to be tonight.”

“Very well, tonight.”

“I’ll be in the parking lot at the Cross-County Mall. Eight o’clock.”

“How will I know your car?”

“The place is empty on a Sunday night. We’ll find each other.”

“Could I have your name?”

The voice hesitated, then replied. “Solar. Max Solar. Didn’t you receive my letter?”

“No,” Nick answered. “Your letter about what?”

“I’ll see you at eight.”

The line went dead and Nick hung up the phone. He’d heard the name Max Solar before, or seen it in the newspapers, but he couldn’t remember in what context.

“Who was that, Nicky?” Gloria appeared in the doorway, holding a beer.

“A land developer. He wants to see me tonight.”

“On Sunday?”

Nick nodded. “He needs my opinion on some land he’s buying near here. I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.” The excuses and evasions came easily to Nick’s lips, and sometimes he half suspected that Gloria knew them for what they were. Certainly she rarely questioned his sudden absences, even for days at a time.

He left the house a little after 7:30 and drove the five miles to the Cross-County Mall in less than fifteen minutes. There was little traffic and when he reached the Mall ahead of schedule he was surprised to see a single car already parked there, near the drive-in bank. He drove up beside it and parked. A man in the front seat nodded and motioned to him.

Nick left his car and opened the door of the other vehicle. “You’re early,” the man said.

“Better than late. Are you Max Solar?”

“Yes. Get in.”

Nick slid into the front seat and closed the door. The man next to him was bulky in a tweed topcoat, and he seemed nervous.

“What do you want stolen?” Nick asked. “I don’t touch money or jewelry or anything of value, and my fee is—”

He never finished. There was a movement behind him, in the back seat, and something hit him across the side of the head. That was the last Nick knew for some time.

At 11:31 A.M. on an unusually fine morning in Pasadena, California, the operator of a power shovel swung in full load of soil over the top of a heavy truck and pulled the release. Since the truck was almost full, a small shower of stones rattled off the sides, some loose dirt, and one human skull.

Fortunately Harry Hubert, male, thirty-one, was working close by. As he raised his arm to signal the truck driver to move on he looked down, then froze in his tracks. “Hold it!” he yelled.

He was not a superstitious man, but he did not want to handle the skull. He signaled the shovel operator to cease digging, pointed to what he had discovered, then waved his arms in the air to be sure that everyone understood that all work was to stop.

The shovel operator brought his machine to a halt and the truck driver shut off his engine.

Superintendent Angelo Morelli was sent for. Meanwhile, the truck driver got out of his cab and joined Hubert to find out what was wrong. He looked down at the object on the ground, bent over to examine it more closely, then spoke. “Alas, poor Yorick,” he said.

He was an admirer of Sir Laurence Olivier.

Superintendent Morelli was a man accustomed to making decisions. It took him only seconds to assay the situation, then he sent for the police.

One of the all-white Pasadena patrol cars responded promptly. It arrived without lights or siren, and as the working officer driving it got out, Morelli wondered. What the hell. The officer was a woman and a comely one at that.

As soon as she was close enough, he read the nameplate over her right pocket. It said DIAZ.

Morelli checked her over. She was armed, of course; metal handcuffs were properly pouched on her belt, and there was even a small container of Mace visible.

The superintendent approached her. Although he was a rough-and-ready type, he also knew how to be diplomatic. “I certainly appreciate your quick response,” he said. “However, I’m not sure this is suitable for a police woman.”

“I’m not a policewoman,” she answered. “I’m a cop. Where’s the fight?”

Morelli was amused. “No fight this time,” he reassured her. “Do you get many of those?”

“I broke one up last night — knives in a bar. I have a suspect in custody.”

“Then kindly step this way.”

Officer Marilyn Diaz spent three minutes in a careful survey of the situation. Then, despite her immaculate uniform, which was the same as the ones worn by the male members of the department, she explored the fresh excavation and the approximate spot where the skull had been unearthed.

She had one question for the shovel operator. “Is there any way you can tell,” she asked, “how deeply that skull was buried when you dug it up?”

“No, ma’am, because I started my pass at the bottom of the cut and came up. I would guess that it was somewhere near to the top.”

“So would I,” Diaz agreed. “Hold everything, will you?”

“Right.”

Officer Marilyn Diaz, who is one of the particular prides of the Pasadena Police, returned to her car and picked up the radio mike. Socially she was an attractive and charming young woman; on the job she did not waste words. “I’ve got one for Virgil,” she reported. “At the Foothill Freeway construction site, near Raymond.”

“Paramedics wanted?”

“No, human remains, but so far bones only.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Diaz answered. “I’ve seen the skull. Unless I’m very wrong, the victim was an eight-to-ten-year-old child.”

I read the Chronicle story that evening at dinner; and when I got home and read the letter from Doc Wharton, I read the Chronicle story again.

The newspaper story said that Belcher and Crumb had been shot and killed by two Mountain County deputies named Arkins and Jellicoe. Belcher and Crumb were the two prison escapees and bank robbers every cop north of Bakersfield had been looking for lately. Arkins and Jellicoe, according to the story, had been patrolling one of the Mountain County roads near the Nevada border when they saw the body of a man on a dirt trail winding uphill from the road. He was dead. He’d bled to death from a gunshot wound in the belly. His name was Edward Wharton and he lived in a cabin farther up the trail and he hadn’t been dead long.

Investigating, the two deputies came upon Belcher and Crumb near Wharton’s cabin, and in the ensuing gunfight had shot them dead. In the two-column cut of Arkins and Jellicoe, they looked like the winner and runner-up in an idiot contest, but maybe they were thinking about the $8,000 reward that went with the two dead crooks.

I’d known Doc Wharton for fifteen years. I’d arrested him in the early ’60s for practicing medicine without a license and failing to report a gunshot wound he’d treated. A couple years before that he’d lost his license for performing illegal abortions. The medical board agreed he was a good doctor — when he wasn’t drunk — but that wasn’t often enough to warrant his continued practice.

Personally, I liked the man. He seemed to have an affinity for the underworld, but I liked him anyway. He had style. I got a Christmas card from him every year, but the letter I got that night was the first. And the last. It was typed and full of errors and smears, which I won’t attempt to reproduce. It follows in full:

The enclosure was a Wanted poster, probably ripped from a post-office bulletin board. Guys on the lam have an affinity for their own publicity. It showed the usual pictures of Belcher and Crumb, recited their crimes, and offered $8,000 for them, dead or alive. Lower middle class on the crook scale.

I got up from my desk, poured myself a brandy, and looked in my dictionary. Adutrumque paratus was Latin for “ready for either alternative.” I laughed. As I said, Doc Wharton had style. And a way of screwing things up to the bitter end.

Mitzi Wharton had been dancing topless when I first knew her, and I mean to advise, she was built for the work. In the ’ 60s she got herself picked up two or three times a year, but as far as I know she was never convicted of anything but damn foolishness. She was about five-ten tall, but always carried herself straight with her chest out. Most tall girls tend to slump, but not Mitzi.

Doc Wharton once told me she’d got into a fist fight with a boy her first day in kindergarten, and she’d had her dukes up ever since. She had a face that shifted around between pugnacity and pulchritude. She wasn’t pretty in any ordinary way, but she was good-looking and had a lot of the Wharton style.

I hadn’t seen her for months now and had no idea where she was living, but I didn’t even bother to look her up in the book. I called this desk sergeant I know and asked him to locate her for me and he said he would.

Then I wondered if I should put in a call for the Mountain County Sheriff and tell him he had a couple of cuties on his staff; but I figured he probably knew that already, and was maybe even party to his deputies’ little deception.

Mitzi was in the slammer. When my friend, Mike Phelps, called back at 10:30 he said she’d been picked up around seven that evening for disturbing the peace and hitting a cop in the face with her handbag. “Which wouldn’t have been so bad,” Mike said, “except it had a sixteen-ounce jar of strawberry jam in it.”

“Why’d she do that?”

“She said he called her a hooker.”

“Is she?”

“Well, her means of support lacks a little something in the way of visibility, but she claims she isn’t.”

“How’s the guy she hit?”

“He’ll be eating soft food for a few days, they tell me, but outside of that he’s okay.”

I sighed. “Now what’ll happen?”

“I don’t know, Sam. She’s at Central Station, not here, but it has the makings of a stand-off. Maybe if you call Lieutenant West over there you can get him to drop it. He’s got a lot bigger fish to fry than her.”

I thanked Phelps, then punched out the Central Station number and finally got West. He and I came up together in the Force and had good rapport. I’d quit after the strike, but he’d hung in there. He had two kids in college and couldn’t afford to quit. Now he was having a bad night. The street rats were running and he had two knifings and a half-dozen other happenings on his hands. When I told him I’d pick up Mitzi at 8:00 A.M., he told me I could have her now if I wanted. But I didn’t want.

The next morning, over breakfast, I let Mitzi read her father’s letter and the Wanted poster. She had an interesting face to watch. It had matured some since I’d seen it last, but it had the old mobility I remembered, eyes, brows, and mouth moving with the sense of what she read. She smiled wryly at the end. She knew the Latin, which surprised me.

“Heaven or hell,” she said. “He didn’t care which, did he? He thought it was all here anyway. If he hadn’t been my father, Sam, I would have killed him. I guess. A girl is supposed to have a thing for her father, isn’t she? Maybe we did, in reverse.”

It pleased me she hadn’t mentioned the money first, but she got to it soon enough. “So now I’m an heiress, huh? Eight grand.”

“There’s a problem,” I told her, and showed her the story in yesterday’s Chronicle. Her face displayed hostility, her eyes fire as she read it. “The damn nerve of them!” she exploded. “Typical cops!”

“Don’t generalize, Mitzi.”

“You read it your way, Lieutenant, I’ll read it mine.”

“Drop the title, Mitzi. It’s Sam Train now. I’m private.”

“Couldn’t live with it any longer, huh?”

“Never mind why. Do you want to go up there and get this thing straightened out, or not?”

“Why do I need you?” Her big green eyes flashed animosity at me as the symbol of everything she was accustomed to hold in contempt. It was an automatic reaction. She’d belted a street cop in the face last night with sixteen ounces of strawberry jam and evidently taken a lick or two herself in return. There was a mark under her right cheekbone that wasn’t a makeup smear and wouldn’t wash off with soap and water. And it wasn’t the only knock she’d taken from a cop in her thirty-two or thirty-three years.

“Think of me,” I said, “as administrator of your old man’s estate. This letter gives me both the authority and the responsibility.”

“At just how big a cut, Mister Train?”

“Just pay for the gas.”

“I can get a car somewhere. I don’t need yours.”

“But you need my letter, Mitzi.”

“You guys’ve always got the last word, haven’t you.” She added something in a deep throaty voice and slumped tiredly in her chair. The desk cop at Central had told me she hadn’t slept much last night in the tank, but then nobody does except the drunks. In the moment’s repose her face was lovely and I wondered, as I had wondered before, why some big rangy guy hadn’t taken her in hand long ago. I’ve even wondered once or twice why I hadn’t myself.

She straightened abruptly in her chair, shucking off the fatigue, shoulders back, eyes engaging mine. “Sam, is it real, the eight grand?”

“It’s real, but we’ve got to go there and reclaim it.”

“Fight ’em for it, huh?”

“If it comes to that, Mitzi.”

“It’ll come to that — it always does. Damn it, what a world,” she added, then raised her coffee cup and said, her eyes flashing again, “Well, adutrumque paratus, shamus.” She pronounced it suavely.

“We’ll win,” I said. “Just leave the strawberry jam at home.”

“Not a chance! It’s my shillelagh.”

I’d better begin at the beginning — but when, I ask myself, was that? The day, I suppose, when I agreed to buy the one-acre section of property at the south end of Phil Ritchie’s farm. It was one of those days when for want of something better to do, for want of a home to go to, I hung around the station house for an hour after my tour of duty. I am that figure of fun, a small-town cop. Watch some television series and you’ll know what I mean. They have small eyes and paunches, and sometimes they spit and beat up on the innocent. It makes my blood boil.

About that no-home-to-go-to business. I was married for over twenty years until my wife died last year, and what I can’t understand is why the end of twenty years of an unhappy marriage can leave you feeling lost, at a loss, high and dry in a fog or a desert, take your choice, and without a future. It should be a time for rejoicing, right? Well, the older I get, and I’m forty-eight, the less I know about life. In fact, at my present rate of progress, I should be completely ignorant in another six months, give or take a few.

Well, as I say, on this particular day I ran into Phil Ritchie as I was heading back to my room in Mrs. Plauder’s house, having sold my own house on the advice of my friends and enemies when Connie died. Let me give you one piece of advice: never listen to advice. They said the house was too big for me. Well, there are no apartments in this town for rent, and let me tell you that room of mine is big, but it’s too small for me. Dismal, is what I was feeling. It’s all very well to live in the present when you’re a young kid; you can do it because there’s that great big bank account of time and the unknown up ahead, but when you’re my age and the present is all you’ve got, the absence of a desirable future invades the day you’re living through and turns it black around the edges.

Phil Ritchie is the best type of man you find in a town like this, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s a successful farmer; he also owns the farm-equipment agency down in Skyton, and the only gas station on this stretch of Route 180. Everything brings in money, and with it all he is a calm, friendly, honorable guy who does a lot of good in town, and when he suggested that we stop for a beer and a bite to eat I was glad to go along and sit with him.

He got onto my mood right away and told me I was a damn fool for listening to people about selling my house in a hurry. Then he brightened up and said he had just the solution for me and although it entailed a bit of profit-taking for him, that wasn’t the reason he was offering the idea, which turned out to be this; he owned a one-acre piece of land, wooded, lying at the extreme south end of his farm and between him and the county lands, which as far as he knew they weren’t about to build anything on. It would be an ideal place for me to build myself a house, he said, and start living like a human being again.

I asked him why I needed a house for one man.

“Get yourself a wife,” he said. He is also blunt.

I felt my face turn red. “Like who?” I asked him.

“There are attractive women in town.”

“Name one.”

“Mary Ann Shifler.”

We went up there just before twilight and looked at the piece of land. It was beautiful, a little bit hilly, with a gentle slope running up from the road in a westerly direction, and covered with oak and dogwood except for a little glade right in the middle of it. I knelt and scooped up a handful of earth and let it trickle through my fingers and it smelled of earth and spring and hope and I knew I would pay any price for that place.

“Name me a reasonable figure and I’ll take it off your hands,” I said.

He named a reasonable price, and we shook hands on it.

“If you stay in the Soft Goods you’ll be all right.”

My mother’s voice comes to me and I go on combing my hair. My hair is quite long now. I haven’t cut it for four years, except when my girl friend, Alexis, trims the ends. Alexis’ family is Syrian and my mother doesn’t like me to pal around with her. Oh, God! There she goes again.

“Don’t go in the Housewares Department. Mimi, do you hear me? Don’t even go near it. It’s not safe. Answer me.”

She’s standing in the doorway. Momma, don’t you want me to get you a nice new scrub brush so you can scrub out the rest of your life? No. Be nice to Momma, she’s at a hard time in her life. My sister says. My sister who lives in Great Neck and doesn’t have to listen listen listen, and come up with an answer. I put on some lipstick and try to say something.

“Momma, I’m only going to buy a bathing suit.”

The lipstick is crooked and I wipe it off. Forget it. I stuff things into my shoulder bag. She comes into the room and sits down on the bed plop like that. She dumps herself down when she sits. Always. Like a sack of somebody else’s dirty laundry she’s carried around too long. The bed shakes.

“A bathing suit, anh. What, one piece or two?”

“I don’t know, Momma. I’ll see what they have. Maybe I won’t get anything.”

I’m ready to go, but I haven’t been released yet. I have to wait until all the questions have been asked. Until all the wrong answers have been given. There aren’t any right answers.

“A bikini? Don’t bring home a bikini. You bring home a bikini, I’ll send it right back.”

She won’t though.

“All right, Momma. No bikini.”

“You’re going with that Alexis? She’s not a nice girl, Mimi. I saw her in the pizza place smoke a cigarette.”

So what should she be smoking, a cigar? No. My mother is still fighting the Six Days’ War. Alexis is an Arab guerrilla who kills Israeli babies. Would she like to see me in khaki shorts with a rifle on my back? Marching? Singing? Shooting Alexis? Would she?

“No, Momma. I’m going by myself.”

“Don’t lie to me. You never go downtown by yourself. Why can’t you go with a nice girl like Rose next door?”

“No, really, Momma. This time I’m going alone.”

Because Rose is a nice fat girl and it hurts both of us to go shopping together. Could you understand that, Momma? That Rose couldn’t wear a bikini, and she would have to say they all looked terrible. And I would have to say something bitchy about her flab, and then we couldn’t speak to each other for a week.

“You have enough money?”

Her hand is in her apron pocket pulling out the old black-leather change purse.

“Yes, I have enough. I have to go now.”

“Here. Here, prices go up overnight. Everything goes up, nothing comes down. Just in case.”

A weary crumpled five-dollar bill gets shoved into my shoulder bag. At last I can go. I head for the door.

“Thanks, Momma.”

Her voice follows me to the front door.

“Be home for supper. Be careful. Don’t go in the Toys, they’re all plastic.”

Out.

Lieutenant Decker, the lean, gray-haired, gray-eyed Chief of Homicide, sat behind the beat-up desk in his tiny office and felt old. Empty inside. Past his prime. Licked, washed up. Twenty years ago he’d have shot fire and brimstone, and blasted this overweight slob into a confession.

But now — what? Here was Frank London, a half-baked, itinerant burn of a folk singer, sneering at him, sneering at the police. Logic hadn’t worked, threats hadn’t worked, the tricks of the trade hadn’t worked. Nothing had even dented the guy, and Decker had nowhere to go. Not up, not down. Not sideways. Just stay put and molder away. Call the case a bust, put it in the Unsolved File, and know in his heart that he’d failed.

There was only one thing that Lieutenant Decker was sure of: Frank London had killed her. Decker knew it and London knew he knew it which was why London had that smirk on his face. A big, round, oversized face with large agate eyes, cheeks like little red balloons, and that impossible, twisted handlebar of a blond mustache decorating his lip.

It was a grotesque mustache, braided like a quoit or a pretzel or a wicker carpet-beater. The Beatles had their hairdo, Groucho had his cigar — but this joker had his mustache; and he was making a monkey out of Decker and the Homicide Squad and the whole police department. And when they released London, somebody would be the fall guy and his name was Decker. William B. Decker, a cop for thirty-five years and head of Homicide for the last fifteen. The smart thing was to hand in his resignation, then go home and tell Martha, his wife. And move to Florida or California and never work, never worry, never be alive again.

Yeah? Not me, brother, not me!

Decker stared at the beefy hunk of beatnik in front of him and said, “Okay, let’s go over it once more. You got to the cottage around five, her folks were already gone, and so you and Jodie rehearsed for a couple of hours. You left her a little before seven, walked up the path to the top of the cliff where your car was parked, and nobody saw you. A damn freak like you, and nobody ever noticed you!”

“The invisible man,” London said tauntingly. His deep, resonant, troubadour voice separated every word and enunciated it with care. “I left, didn’t I? Or do you think I’m still there?”

Decker knew that the car had been driven away around seven, although nobody could identify London as the driver. “You got into your car,” Decker said crisply, “drove home and took a shower. Presumably to wash off the blood.”

“There was no blood.”

“What did you do with the towel?” Decker asked. That was one of the few points he had. London’s landlady was certain that a towel was missing from London’s bathroom, and Decker was convinced the folk singer had used it to wipe off the blood and then had disposed of it, along with the white polo shirt he’d been wearing. “What did you do with the towel?” Decker asked again.

“I buttered it, put pepper and salt on it, and cut it into terrycloth canapés. My usual dinner.”

That was the way the interrogation had been going. London kidding him, skating rings around him, and enjoying every minute of it. Always the showman, always putting on an act. And then London pulled a masterpiece of pure gall. He took the unbelievably long braids of that fancy mustache of his, pulled one ropy end straight up, over his nose, and stretched the other end at a right angle, to his right. With Decker facing him, the mustache now looked like the two hands of a clock, pointing to nine o’clock.

Nine o’clock — the crucial time.

He did it solemnly, deadpan, and then he twisted his mustache back into its usual pretzel shape, sat there with that maddening smirk on his face, and clammed up. That was his answer: nuts to you, Lieutenant Decker. And somehow, Decker felt he’d been given the clue to the puzzle — been given it by the man’s brag and conceit; but Decker was just too dumb to figure it out.

Restraining an impulse to smack the guy, the Lieutenant thought back to the first, futile interview between them. He’d been pretty sure, even then. He’d asked questions, listened to answers, then sent London back to a cell for the night, while the Homicide Squad checked up on what London had said.

Orthodox procedure, and Decker thought he had the guy cold. Duck soup, he’d told himself. London’s alibi depended on the time when the murder had been committed, and so he had simply set a clock on the scene of the crime to the hour of his alibi. Which was a trick that had never fooled anybody, once a case was properly investigated.

Except this time.

Decker scowled. “Then you went to the Red Grotto for your evening performance. Jodie didn’t come, and you went on stage alone.”

“The show must go on,” London said smugly.

Decker’s adrenaline oozed out, and his face turned red. “You sang Frankie and Johnny,” he said tightly. “Then you sang a new song, one you say you had just made up. A few people remembered some of the words. It started off—”

He picked up the sheet of paper on which he’d scrawled the beginning of the ballad, as some of the audience had recalled it. He read it off starkly, prosaically. “ ‘My love has gone to a far country. My love has gone away from me. Sing die, goodbye. Oh, sigh, sigh, sigh.’ ”

“Nice song,” London said judiciously.

“Where’d you learn it?”

“I made it up as I went along. It came naturally.” London gave Decker a self-satisfied grin and added, “That’s genius for you.”

“You were singing her requiem. How did you know she was dead?”

“I didn’t. I felt sad. Maybe it was telepathy. Maybe her spirit was in me, for those few minutes. The audience was so touched that for a few seconds nobody even applauded. Then their cheers rang to the rafters. It was a great moment.”

The folk singer cocked his head to one side and grinned like an overfed gargoyle. “It was nine o’clock, exactly.”

Decker glared, then spun around in his chair. The swivel squeaked. He reached for the doorknob, twisted it. He swung the door outward and gave it a kick. “Okay,” he said in a dead voice. “You can go. You’re free.”

London jumped up with a shout and held out his hand. “Lieutenant, that’s great! Thanks, Lieutenant, thanks.”

Decker turned away.

“Look,” London said, “don’t take it like that. So you were wrong. Forget it. Enjoy yourself. I’m going to throw a party at the Red Grotto that this town’s going to remember for years. I’m going to have all my friends there, including you. Lieutenant, be my guest — the guest of honor.”

“Get the hell out of here,” Decker said, barely spitting out the words.

London shrugged, grinned, and left.

Decker frowned as he slid his finger along the pieces of paper on his desk — the sheets with the words of the song and the timetable of the murder.

It was years since he’d blown his top and let a suspect see how infuriated he could become. Alone now, Decker asked himself where he’d gone wrong.

His investigation had been thorough, he’d examined the facts exhaustively. There were no loose ends, no doubts in his own mind. Jub Freeman, lab man and forensic scientist and a damn good one, had gone over every inch of the cottage, and the Homicide Squad had spent days questioning everybody who had been in the neighborhood. The picture was clear enough.

The Dorkins and the Finleys lived together — they had lived together for twenty years in the big stone house on Dixon Heights. Hannah Dorkin and Natalie Finley were sisters — their relationship was close. In his own mind, Bill Decker called it beautiful, and they were beautiful women in the fullness of maturity. Prominent in social work, married to eminent men, Hannah Dorkin and Natalie Finley were kind, gentle, rich in forgiveness. Decker wondered whether they’d forgiven London. And whether they’d ever forgive him, Lieutenant Decker.

Jodie Dorkin was the only young person in the household, and the Dorkins told the Lieutenant that, as a child, Jodie had sometimes got mixed up as to who were her father and mother, and who were her aunt and uncle. She solved the problem by loving them all equally.

Her father and uncle were distinguished men. Judge Dorkin was gruff, blunt, rigorous in his honesty and rocklike in his adherence to high principle. Decker knew him professionally and respected him for his clear mind and incorruptible character. Dorkin’s clipped wit and his firm, impartial administration of justice had made enemies. No upper court appointment for him. Politics couldn’t take away his distinction, but it had kept him from the advancement he so richly deserved.

Dr. Richard Finley was a small gentle man, a world-famous cardiologist and surgeon. He was urbane, civilized, honored in his profession. You looked at him and wondered how such an unobtrusive little man could have risen so far. But when he spoke, you began to understand why, and when you noticed the delicacy and strength of his hands, you knew there was talent in them. He had the king’s touch, which cured.

The four adults had gone down to their river cottage early that mild, summery Saturday afternoon. The cottage was at the foot of the river bluff, just within the metropolitan limits. A dozen other cottages were scattered along the bank of the river — pleasantly cool refuges in the heat, each of them with a dock and a boathouse built over the water.

Jodie was already at the cottage — she’d gone there the day before and stayed overnight. At 18, she was interested in folk singing and had performed here and there as an amateur; but she hadn’t been serious about it as a career until she met Frank London. He had a good voice, he was an experienced performer, and on some level he and Jodie clicked. Their voices complemented each other, but more than that, they gave each other style. London’s stature grew as some part of him softened and gained understanding, while Jodie acquired some of his confidence and bravura. They were a team, and fast becoming the sensation of the small hootenannies.

Jodie had told her family that Frank was meeting her at the cottage, that they wanted to rehearse some new numbers. The older people had never liked London, but they realized you don’t have to like your colleagues in order to work with them. And Jodie had assured them there was nothing serious between her and Frank, and never would be.

“He likes me,” she’d said. “Maybe a little too much, but I know he’s a heel. Except the times we’re singing together, he rubs me the wrong way. So you’ve nothing to worry about, any of you.”

And they didn’t. They loaded the picnic basket in their boat, and went upriver. They didn’t take watches, didn’t know what time it was. That was part of the fun, part of what made their outings so carefree.

“We go upriver,” Dr. Finley said, “and land wherever we feel like, or else we just drift back. We do it every weekend. Sometimes we swim, sometimes we birdwatch, sometimes we just talk. We eat when we’re hungry. Occasionally we stay out overnight. We never know. But we’re free, we’re completely emancipated from time.”

Brother, Decker thought. What a day to be emancipated!

They had returned after dark. They had no idea what time it was. Ten — twelve — two — they couldn’t say. They’d been immersed in a dream world and their senses were drugged, suspended, heavy with sound and sight and the richness of their own living. Until they turned on the light in the living room of the cottage and saw Jodie.

She’d been stabbed with a kitchen knife. There was blood. There had been a fight. She’d resisted. Her clothes were tom. In the course of the struggle her foot had apparently caught the cord of the electric clock, unplugged it, and sent it crashing down. The cord was still hooked around her leg.

What the four grownups had subsequently gone through, they themselves could hardly relate. Dr. Finley had examined Jodie. Respiration had not entirely ceased. The doctor took over, and with the help of the others he improvised emergency techniques. First-aid equipment and some of his basic instruments were in the cottage, so he tried to accomplish a medical miracle.

There was no phone, and even if there had been, no one would have bothered to summon the police. Time was too important — a transfusion and manual massage of Jodie’s heart were the only possible hopes, and they had to be done immediately, without moving her.

Natalie Finley had formerly been a nurse. She assisted; she was familiar with the delicate and unusual operation that Dr. Finley had performed before, in hospitals. He made the incision and they stood by and did what he told them to. They gave blood, under primitive conditions.

How long Finley worked on Jodie, none of them could tell. An hour, three hours? They hadn’t the slightest idea. But it was dawn when Finley finally gave up and told Judge Dorkin to trudge up the hill to the nearest phone and notify the police.

When Decker got the call from headquarters, he tumbled out of bed and drove to the scene. He saw the two women briefly, then got the basic facts from Judge Dorkin and Dr. Finley. Frank London had presumably been there. The clock had always kept accurate time. Decker didn’t touch it. Jub Freeman would dust it for fingerprints and examine it and the cord for any possible physical evidence, no matter how minute. The hands pointed to nine o’clock.

Decker had four homicide men at the scene before he and Mitch Taylor left to pick up London. London was the obvious suspect and Decker woke him up, heard him mutter sleepily that he’d rehearsed with Jodie and left her around seven, maybe a little earlier, that she’d failed to show up at the Red Grotto, and so he’d gone on alone, and what the hell was this all about?

Decker told him and hauled him off to headquarters. Decker’s grilling was expert. London was reticent about details and insolent in his general behavior, but Decker thought he had a pretty good case. London had stabbed her, then set the hands of the clock to indicate nine, and figured he had a pretty good alibi.

He spent the day in jail while Decker gradually learned how a man can come to hate a clock.

His first theory — that London had set the clock after the stabbing — ran into immediate difficulty. The time-set button was jammed and bent, and couldn’t be moved. Decker decided it was jammed because, when the clock fell, the button had hit the arm of a wicker chair. Fragments of the wicker were wedged against the stem of the time-set, and there were clear marks on the chair to show where the clock had hit.

Microscopic examination made it seem highly unlikely that London had scraped off tiny bits of wicker and inserted them in such a way as to make the time-set inoperative. It was just one of those accidents. Therefore, London must have set the clock at nine before he committed the murder. That was Decker’s first conclusion, in what he now thought of as his hours of innocence.

Medical evidence was consistent with placing the time of attack between seven and nine P.M. London had been there until almost seven, and everything in his background was against him. He’d been a juvenile delinquent in Chicago and had spent time in a reformatory. Later, he’d gone to New York and had become something of a Greenwich Village character. He sang and strummed in bars, drank too much, got into fights. He’d been arrested for assaulting a woman, but she’d refused to prosecute. There were rumors of other, similar incidents, although they hadn’t got as far as a police blotter. He’d finally left New York, gone on tour, landed here, and met Jodie.

He was in love with her, according to everybody who knew the pair of them, but she would have no part of him. He’d made a few scenes at the Red Grotto, but she’d always managed to hold him off. To Decker, the picture of the murder was crystal-clear. Jodie and Frank London had been alone in that isolated river cottage. He’d tried to make love to her, she’d resisted, and he’d grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed her in a violent rage.

So much for London. But granting him his nine o’clock alibi, it was reasonable to believe that a prowler had walked into the cottage after London had gone. The Homicide Squad combed the neighborhood for evidence of a stranger who might have assaulted and killed Jodie. No trace of an intruder had been found.

Which brought everything back to the clock.

It was an old battered clock, hexagonal in shape, and the numbers on the dial were indistinct. Nevertheless they were there, and the clock had stopped at nine. Decker bought two similar clocks and offered five bucks to any of his squad who could figure out how London could have jammed the time-set button in exactly the way it had been found. Nobody collected the five bucks.

It was a noisy clock, and the judge told him the family used to joke about it, referring to its death rattle. But it kept good time and they were sentimental about it, so they never replaced it.

“The electricity might have been cut off,” the judge said.

“It wasn’t,” Decker said. “We checked that, for the last month. And we checked your fuse box. If it was keeping accurate time earlier in the afternoon, when you were still here, we have to assume it remained accurate.”

The judge frowned. “I can’t say that I really noticed.”

But his wife had. “It was not only keeping time,” Hannah Dorkin said quietly, “but the week before it had stopped making noises. I’m sensitive to sound, and I missed hearing the funny little rattle it always made. I mentioned it to Jodie, and she said she’d fix it, and she did.”

“How?”

“She didn’t tell me. We were making sandwiches and she was slicing some ham and she cut her finger. She went for a Band-Aid and we never finished the conversation.”

Decker was still clinging to the idea that London had set the clock ahead to nine, and then murdered Jodie. Finally Dr. Finley scotched that theory.

“You couldn’t set it,” he said. “I tried to do something about the noise a few months ago, and I dropped it and bent that time-set button. Couldn’t even turn it with a pair of pliers. But you couldn’t hurt that clock. I checked it by my watch on Saturday, before we went out on the boat, and the clock was accurate.”

The judge was philosophic in his point of view. “Lieutenant,” he said, “we’ve both seen a lot of murders. The unbalanced man, the psychopathic killer without a motive — sometimes he commits a crime and isn’t seen. Years later he’s caught for something else and he confesses, and you just marvel at his luck, at the string of coincidences that made his escape possible.”

“Not this time,” Decker said. “London killed her.”

“What does the D.A. say?” the judge asked.

“That he won’t indict London until I can place him at the cottage at nine. And at nine — well—”

Decker turned away. At nine o’clock Frank London had been strumming a guitar at the Red Grotto and making public lament for Jodie Dorkin. He’d known she was dead, he’d practically advertised it. Therefore she’d been killed around seven — except that an unimpeachable clock said no.

Decker had traced Jodie’s movements in detail; he had looked for a jealous suitor, for some clue that would provide a name, another person to question. Decker drew a total blank.

On Friday, the day before her death, Jodie had had an all-day swimming party at the boathouse. About a dozen teenagers had come in the morning and stayed until after dark, but most of them hadn’t even been in the cottage. Around 6:30, however, two or three of them had gone there with Jodie to get food from the refrigerator; but they hadn’t even noticed the clock.

Nothing unusual had happened. Nobody had got drunk. There were no fights, no incidents. Decker obtained a list of everybody who’d been at the party and checked out their whereabouts on Saturday. They could all account for themselves, and so it came back to London. Every time it came back to Frank London.

What, then, had gone wrong? Where had Decker slipped up?

Grunting, he yanked open the drawer of his desk. His favorite pencil, his personal diary. There on the bookcase, the small stuffed crocodile that brought him luck — or used to. He wondered whether to take it home with him, or to leave it here for his successor.

Fifteen years as head of the Homicide Squad, and what would he leave behind? What was personal to him in this tiny cubicle of an office that had held so much drama, had seen so many killers break down, confess, and walk out the door to their inevitable fate?

He sighed morosely. Tonight, London was setting up a celebration. He’d get drunk and shoot off his mouth about how he’d put one over on the police. Maybe Decker ought to go to that party, after all. Maybe London would give himself away.

Decker stepped outside and told the receptionist he was leaving for the day. In the corridor, he thought of going upstairs to the lab. Jub Freeman was working on that robbery case. The clock would be over in the corner, on the workbench near the window; but if Decker set eyes on the thing now, he was liable to smash it to pieces.

He went out to the parking lot, got in his car, and drove home.

Martha seemed to know. She’d suffered these many years through all his moods, all his triumphs and despondencies, all the tough cases that woke him up in the middle of the night and sent him down to his desk in the small book-lined den, where he might scrawl out an idea, put together some outlandish logic, or connect two bits of apparently unrelated evidence that finally solved the unsolvable.

Tonight, she seemed to understand. She was tender, quiet; she talked of small things in a low, comforting voice, while he sat on the couch and sipped at a double scotch. After dinner he stalked out, got in his car, and went driving.

Anywhere. Out to the river cottage. Past the Red Grotto. It didn’t matter where. He just wanted to be moving, to get away from himself and his problem.

He had a dozen bright ideas to explain how, although London had stabbed Jodie around seven, the clock had stopped at nine. Maybe it had still been going after she’d been stabbed. Maybe London had removed the glass over the dial of the clock after stabbing her, pushed the hands to nine, and then replaced the glass.

Decker swore. He was kidding himself with wild theories that no jury would take seriously. What he needed was a simple, down-to-earth explanation that would undermine the evidence of the clock and blast the cockiness out of London. He’d confess then. No doubt about it. Lieutenant Decker knew the type — he could handle guys like London.

Still driving aimlessly, Decker found himself rolling past headquarters. There was a light on in the lab — Jub Freeman was apparently working late. On impulse Decker swung through the arched entrance of the building and parked in his regular spot in the courtyard. He got out of the car, strode through the lobby where a sergeant was seated at the long high desk, and went upstairs.

Jub, a stocky, cheerful, round-cheeked guy, dimpled up in a smile as he greeted Decker. “Just checking up on a soil precipitation test that I started this afternoon,” he said, putting down a test tube. “Anything on your mind?”

“I got no mind,” Decker said. “When I give up on a jerk like London, I’m a nitwit. No brains. Low I.Q. Been lucky up to now, but I got found out.”

Jub corked the test tube carefully and placed it in a rack. “He’ll give himself away, some time. He’ll get drunk. He’ll brag about it to some dame. Just wait, Lieutenant. You’ll get him.”

“I can’t wait. You know what the papers are going to say tomorrow, don’t you? Then the Commissioner will have a little talk with me and—” Decker shrugged despondently, noticed the Dorkin clock lying on a workbench near the window, and stalked over to it.

“Who the hell left it at nine o’clock?” he demanded bitterly. “Somebody needling me?” He plugged the cord in, then picked up the clock.

Jub said, “You’ve been working too hard. Go away for a few days. Rest up. Things will blow over.”

Decker whirled, twisting his body. “Jub, don’t try to—” He broke off, aware that the clock had started making its distinctive rattling.

As the six-sided clock now lay in Decker’s hand, it was tilted sixty degrees, one side to the left — that is, counterclockwise. The numbers on the dial were faded and barely legible. If you told time simply by the position of the hands, they now indicated about ten minutes to seven.

The Lieutenant gasped. He shifted the clock back one side, clockwise. The dial now read nine o’clock. The barely visible numeral six was now at the base, and the rattling sound had stopped.

“So that’s how Jodie ‘fixed’ it,” Decker said in a low, somewhat awed voice. “She just turned it one side to the left. Look, Jub. Stand it up the way it’s supposed to be, with six at the bottom, and it doesn’t make any noise. But if you do this—”

He shifted it to the next left of the six fiat sides, with the barely discernible numeral eight at the base. The noise started, and the dial now seemed to show ten minutes to seven. “And nobody noticed that she left the clock standing on the wrong side. After all, lots of clocks don’t even have numerals and people tell time easily enough.”

Jub nodded. “She must have done it on Friday, when she was there all day. Then on Saturday, alter he stabbed her and looked down and saw the clock, London realized what a terrific break had been handed to him. Standing in the correct position, with six at the base, the clock showed the wrong time — not ten minutes to seven when he stabbed her, but nine o’clock — time enough for London to give himself an alibi!”

Decker, wonderment still on his face, patted the clock and broke into a broad grin. “Until now but now we’ve got him,” he said, “got him cold!”

They came knocking at the door just as she was getting ready to leave for the hospital: two dark-eyed, dark-haired children she hadn’t seen before in the month of living in the new house.

“Can we go swimming?” It was the boy, perhaps ten or eleven, holding his younger sister’s hand with a firmness that suggested a frequent guardianship. Their fringed and upturned glances were hopeful but wary, in ease of a rebuff, and Sarah smiled at them in spite of her own distraction.

“Well, not today, I’m afraid.” She was careful not to explain that there wouldn’t be anyone here for the next few hours, because the temperature was in the mid-nineties and with the confidence of childhood they wouldn’t worry in the least about swimming unattended; it would strike them as much more fun. “Where do you live?”

The two round dark heads nodded obliquely across the field, which meant around the corner. What with the bulldozer and the cement mixer and then the various pickups with the company’s name on the side, they had probably known to the minute when the swimming pool was completed and filled. (Tom had said, yesterday, “We’ll probably have to establish some kind of rules, with the only private pool in the neighborhood, but let’s face that when we come to it.”)

Sarah suggested eleven o’clock the next morning, waited for a cautious few minutes after they were out of sight, then forgot them as soon as she was in the car.

It was only the second time she would be visiting her husband in the hospital. The first had been before dawn, when after what seemed like hours in the waiting room she had been allowed to go up to the fifth floor. She knew by that time that Tom’s terrifying middle-of-the-night collapse had been caused by a bleeding ulcer, but she was still unprepared for his total pallor and the visible effort it cost him to open his eyes and smile faintly at her. It was clear that at this point her presence would do more harm than good, so she kissed him, drawing a black look from the nurse whose possession he now was, and said simply, “I’ll be back.”

In the corridor, following her out, the doctor was blunt. “It’s a good thing you got him in here when you did, Mrs. Birchall. He’s going to need another transfusion, and I want someone to have a look at his heart. Better wait until two or three o’clock this afternoon before you come in.”

Meticulously, Sarah had split the difference; it was 2:30 when she left the elevator on the fifth floor of the hospital, followed the room-indicator arrow to 523, and felt an actual slam in her chest at the white-stubbled, scooped-out face that turned wearily on its pillow as she entered. But — of course — this was a semi-private room and Tom’s bed was the far one; she hadn’t registered that fact in the small-hours panic.

She rounded the dividing curtain, and a lesser shock awaited her. Tom wasn’t sitting up as she had somehow expected but was lying flat and vulnerable, and although the dark suspended bottle was gone he was still very pale and his hand, when she took it and held it hard as she bent to kiss him, was cold.

She said, fast, “Tom, you look so much better. I’ve brought” — she produced the small suitcase — “your robe and slippers and pajamas and things.” Her eyes were beginning to fill, and she turned briefly away as though a nurse had started into the room. “And some stupid damn cherries and books. How do you feel?”

“Better. Really, better,” said Tom, speaking in the light and careful way in which a man with a murderous headache might talk. “This is an awful nuisance for you, driving all the way in.” He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Did you have a swim? Christen the pool?” This time his smile was less effortful. “Better hurry up.”

Sarah was three and a half months’ pregnant, although she had tried on her bathing suit the day before and no one would have guessed it. “Not yet, I’m waiting for you. As a matter of fact, though—”

She realized belatedly, with a kind of buried shock, that she could not present Tom with even the tiniest concern right now; she could not say that neighborhood children had already asked to swim in the pool which did not yet have its protective fence; could not inquire if they were insured against the kind of accident that might happen even if she were on the scene.

Depleted though he was, Tom was gazing at her and waiting for her to finish the sentence.

“—I imagine the water is fairly nippy, coming straight from the well,” said Sarah, “and I wouldn’t mind giving it a few days under the sun first. When does the doctor think you can come home?”

Tom hadn’t seen his own doctor yet, although three different ones had gone into a huddle over his electrocardiogram. He thought he would have some kind of word around seven o’clock, when the doctor apparently made his rounds. He said, “Don’t drive all the way back in tonight, Sarah,” and nodded at the telephone beside his bed. “I can call you.”

“So you can,” said Sarah, and they both understood that she would be back there that evening.

He was my first client.

“Mr. Turnbuckle,” he said, “I’ll pay you fifty dollars for each day’s report. How does that strike you?”

It struck me as being a bit frugal, but possibly he was prepared to be generous with expenses. I voiced the thought. “Fifty dollars and expenses?”

“I don’t forsee any expenses. Just fifty dollars for each day’s report. Thirty reports.”

I smiled tolerantly. “Fifty dollars a day for confidential investigation might have been a munificent sum twenty or thirty years ago, but by today’s standards—”

He held up a hand. “It will not be necessary for you even to leave this office. Just sit down at your typewriter, insert the stationery of your agency, and type the reports, one after another until you are finished. Thirty reports to cover thirty days.”

I glanced down at my notes, which consisted of just two words: Paula Smith. “You mean you don’t want me to find this Paula Smith?”

“Exactly. I want you to do no searching at all. However, fill out your reports as though you had been exceedingly busy. Use your imagination. Trace her across the country — on paper — and finally lose her in, say, San Francisco or Seattle. Make it appear that you are sending your reports back here, where a secretary transcribes them, and forwards them to me.”

I considered that. “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if you had a few letterheads printed and then filled in the reports yourself?”

“I suppose so. But it would be quite a bother, and besides, I simply don’t know the forms used, the methods of search, and the jargon or whatsoever used by private detective agencies, and I want these reports to appear as authentic as possible. I will also need thirty envelopes with your agency imprint.”

I nodded to myself. He’s going to mail the reports to himself — one at a time — and when they arrive, he intends to show them to one or more other people.

My client was a tall distinguished man in his fifties, graying at the temples, exceedingly well-dressed, and he had refused to tell me his name.

I consulted my sheet of paper again. “Is Paula Smith her real name?”

“Just fill out the reports.”

“To whom shall I address the reports?”

“Leave that part blank. I’ll fill it in later myself.”

I sighed. “Just to recapitulate, we have a missing person, one Paula Smith. You do not want me to find her. But she is missing, isn’t she? Have you gone to the police perhaps?”

He regarded me for a few seconds. “Paula Smith is quite well and, I presume, happy. You need to know no more than that. How long will it take you to compile those reports?”

“Probably a week. I’ll have to do some research at the library — things like the names of streets, hotels, restaurants, and the like in various cities. Where was Paula Smith last seen?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“If she were last seen in the Sahara, I can hardly begin my report by taking up the trail at the North Pole.”

He nodded reluctantly. “Begin your report with the statement that you located the taxi which took her and her luggage from ‘your residence’ to the airport or the bus station. You do not specifically need to know my address.”

“What was the date and time she was last seen, and by whom?”

“You do not need to know by whom. But she was last seen Sunday at approximately ten o’clock in the evening when she went up to her rooms. Do you suppose I could have the first report by noon today? I’d like to get on this as soon as possible before somebody else—” He stopped and reached for his wallet. It was a fine piece of leather with the initials A.B. in one corner. He handed me two twenties and a ten.

I took the bills. “How did you happen to select my agency?”

“I walked through the yellow pages of the phone book and there you were.” He went to the door. “If you have any idea of following me, forget it. I intend to take all due precautions.”

When he was gone, I proceeded to think.

What did I have here?

I was being asked to fill out a series of false reports. Why? Obviously to fool someone — to make some person or persons think that this Paula Smith was indeed being searched for, though my client did not have the slightest desire in the world that she be found.

And what about the name Paula Smith itself?

Was the name fictitious? Or did such a person really exist?

I reached for the telephone book and turned to the Smiths. There were legions of them, of course. Several Peter Smiths, but no Paulas or even P. Smiths.

And what about my caller. A.B.?

For one thing, he had said that he had walked through the yellow pages until he found my name and address.

But that was hardly possible since the name of my agency was not yet listed in the book. I had just opened my office three weeks ago. My name would appear in the next issue of the phone book which was not due for distribution for another two months.

Then why and how had he chosen me?

If not by means of the telephone book, had he simply wandered the corridors of downtown buildings until he saw the lettering on my door? Hardly likely. I am on the eighth floor of a twenty-six-story building and there are at least a hundred tall buildings in this city.

Or was it possible that he actually worked in this very building and that during the last three weeks while waiting for the elevator to take him up to his floor he had noticed my agency’s name on the directory on the wall? And had it been filed in his memory bank until, when he needed the services of a private detective, it had suddenly leaped to his mind?

I rubbed my neck. Should I restrain my curiosity, mind my own business, and collect the $1500 as per order? Is that what an experienced private detective would do?

My phone rang. It was Ralph. He is a detective sergeant on the police force and I was his partner until three weeks ago.

“How are you doing, Henry?” he asked.

“I just got my first case.”

“Congratulations. My wife and I were a little worried. I mean it’s been almost a month since you opened your office.”

I cleared my throat. “I just realized that most people consult the yellow pages of the phone book when they want to hire a private detective and I won’t be in the book for another two months when the new edition comes out.”

“You picked the wrong time of the year to open for business. Why not advertise in the newspapers?”

“I’m not sure that’s professionally ethical.”

“Henry, I wouldn’t worry about ethical as far as the private detective scene is concerned. What’s your first case about?”

“A missing person. Paula Smith.”

“Smith? Well, I suppose the Smiths get lost now and then too. My wife’s wondering if she should bring over some chicken soup or something?”

“No, Ralph. I’m doing just fine.”

After he hung up, I went downstairs to the lobby and studied the directory next to the bank of elevators.

I found twelve companies and individuals listed under B. Albert Bancroft, Investments, seemed to be what I was looking for.

I went to the nearby public phone and turned the white pages of the book to the Bancrofts. I found only one Albert Bancroft listed.

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly ten in the morning. Where was Bancroft at this moment? Probably upstairs in his office poring over municipal bonds or something equally exciting.

I checked his address and phone number and then dialed.

The phone was picked up by a man who said, “Bancroft residence.”

“Could I speak to Paula?”

There was a pause. “Paula?”

“Yes. Paula Smith.”

Another pause. “I’m sorry, sir, but she is no longer in our employ.”

Ah, so there really was a Paula Smith. And whom was I talking to? He had used the words “Bancroft residence,” and had called me “sir.” Was he the butler? After all, people who listed their trade as Investments and lived in Bancroft’s neighborhood probably could afford to hire butlers. “Is this Jarvis?” I asked.

“No, sir. This is Wisniewski.”

“Wisniewski?” I laughed lightly. “Jarvis. Wisniewski. I always seem to get those two names mixed. But you are the Bancroft butler, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course,” I said. “Paula wrote to me about you.”

“Miss Smith wrote to you about me?” He seemed cautious. “What did she say?”

“I don’t remember the exact words, but they were nothing but good.”

“Who is this speaking, sir?”

“John Smith. Paula’s cousin, twice removed.”

“I understood that she had no living relatives.”

I chuckled. “I don’t blame Paula for not mentioning me. But I’m on parole now. Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“No, sir.”

“You mean she just disappeared into thin air?”

“Not exactly into thin air, sir. She just packed up during the night and left. I understand there was a note, sir, but it did not mention where she was going.”

What had Paula’s job been at the Bancroft’s? Cook? I chuckled again and quoted H. H. Munro, better known as “Saki”: “She was a good cook, as cooks go. And as good cooks go, she went?”

“Sir?” Wisniewski said.

I had evidently missed the mark. “The last place Paula worked, she was a cook,” I said. “I just assumed—?”

“She was the housekeeper here, sir.”

Housekeeper? What did housekeepers do? Oh, yes. They supervised the other servants, kept the household accounts, and generally feuded with the butler.

When I hung up, I pondered a few moments, then decided that further investigation at the scene was in order.

I left the phone booth for the multi-level garage where I park my car and drove to 217 Lake Crest Drive.

The entrance to 217 Lake Crest Drive was flanked by fifteen-foot stone pillars. The gates were open, but I had the feeling that a door-to-door salesman would hesitate before considering that an invitation to enter.

I turned into the driveway and followed it through the shade of elms and other greenery until I reached a large Tudor-style structure.

I parked, ascended the wide stairs, and used the knocker. While I waited, I watched an ancient gardener trimming a hedge.

To circumvent the possibility that Wisniewski might recognize my voice, I had intended to speak in a Scots burr, which I perfected while playing the part of Macbeth in my senior year in high school, but a uniformed maid answered the door instead. “Yes, sir?”

Where was Wisniewski? Probably in the pantry polishing the silver or in the cellar turning wine bottles.

“Could I speak to Mr. Bancroft?”

“He is not at home, sir.”

“Mrs. Bancroft?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. She died three years ago.”

That certainly eliminated her. “Are there any other Bancrofts on the premises?”

“There is Miss Bancroft, sir. Mr. Bancroft’s daughter.”

“She will do nicely.”

“Who shall I say is calling, sir?”

“John P. Jones. Attorney.”

She left me there, but returned a minute later and led me to one of the drawing rooms.

Miss Bancroft appeared to be in her early twenties, wore shell-rimmed glasses, and had possibly been reading the open book on the cocktail table.

“I’m Marianne Bancroft,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“I understand that you have in your employ one Miss Paula Smith? Could I speak to her?”

“Paula?” Marianne Bancroft shook her head. “Paula is gone. She left sometime before Monday morning when we were all asleep. Bag and baggage. There was a note, but it didn’t say where she was going.”

“Did it say why she left?”

“She said she was just fed up here and had decided to move on. Why do you want to find her?”

“Her uncle Theophilus Smith died and left her some money.”

“Was it a lot?”

“Not really. About a thousand. I know very little about Paula Smith besides her name. How old was she?”

“About forty. But she looked younger when she tried.”

“How long was she the housekeeper here?”

“Less than a year.”

I noticed a framed photograph of three people on the corner shelf. One of them was my client, Albert Bancroft, another Marianne, and the third probably Bancroft’s son, a younger, thinner, and taller version of his father.

“Did anyone see Paula leave?” I asked.

“If they did, no one’s said so.”

I assumed a thoughtful pose. “You don’t suppose I could have a look at her room just on the off chance that there might be some indication of where she was going? Perhaps some scrap of paper or some underlined portion of a bus schedule?”

She led me up to the third floor. “You look familiar. I could swear that I’ve seen you somewhere before.” She opened the door to Paula Smith’s suite. “Sitting room, bedroom, bathroom.”

I opened the sliding doors to a large closet. It was completely bare except for a few wire hangers, but the scent of perfume and powder still lingered. “I always think of housekeepers as wearing uniforms. With maybe a dress or two for going out?”

“Housekeepers don’t wear uniforms anymore. At least I can’t think of any who do. Paula probably had that closet full of clothes. I know she was always sending things to the cleaners or getting them back. Are you going to scour the ends of the earth until you find her?”

“Not for one thousand dollars. We’ll just put it in escrow and hope that someday she’ll get in touch with somebody who’ll tell her about us. You don’t happen to have a photograph of her?”

“No.”

“What did she look like?”

Marianne shrugged. “Quite tall and — well-developed. Blonde.”

“There isn’t any shortage or anything of that nature in her household accounts?”

“Nobody’s checked yet, but I doubt it. I’m willing to bet that her books are in perfect order. She was after bigger—” She stopped. “Are you sure you’re not some kind of detective?”

I smiled. “Well, there is quite a bit of detecting involved in tracing heirs.” I moved to a door on the further wall of the bedroom and opened what appeared to be another closet or storage area. A large steamer trunk stood upright but open. It appeared to be almost fully packed with dresses, skirts, and coats.

“Paula’s?” I asked.

Marianne moved closer. “It appears to be. I recognize some of the clothes.”

“Why would she leave this behind?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she intended to send someone back for it.”

“But wouldn’t she at least close the trunk and probably lock it before she left?”

“Perhaps she just decided that it was all too much to take along with her.”

“It all looks like fairly good quality. Would she abandon it?”

“Why not?” Marianne said a bit testily. “She could always buy more. She didn’t leave here exactly empty—” She stopped and smiled sweetly. “Anything else?”

“Did Paula own an automobile?”

“No.”

“Did she have any other luggage besides this trunk?”

“I seem to remember two suitcases when she came here.”

“This note she left? Do you mind if I see it?”

“It doesn’t exist anymore. I tossed it into the fireplace.”

“Why?”

“Because I felt like it.”

When I returned to my office, I phoned police headquarters and left a message for Ralph to call me when he next checked in.

Then I sat down at my typewriter and began composing my first report for Bancroft.

At ten after eleven Ralph phoned.

“Ralph,” I said, “I’d like you to find out if Paula Smith left a forwarding address at the post office and also if she had or has any savings or checking accounts in her own name. I’d do it myself, but you’re on active duty and that opens doors and saves time.”

Ralph clicked his tongue. “Shame on you, Henry, using a public servant for private business. The post office will be easy, but the bank accounts won’t — do you know how many banks there are in this town?”

“Try the branch banks in the Fiebrantz shopping center. It’s only half a mile from the Bancroft place.”

“And what is the Bancroft place?”

“That’s where Paula Smith worked until the night she disappeared.”

At noon, when Bancroft stepped into my office, I had two reports ready for him. “So far I trace her from your residence to a pizza parlor in Billings, Montana.”

He read and nodded. “These look fine.”

I offered him two envelopes. He put the second report into one of them, but not the first, from which I deduced that he intended to show the first report to someone immediately and did not want to wait out the time lag of mailing the report to himself.

He produced his wallet and handed me another $50 for the second report. “I’ll drop in every day to pick up whatever reports you’ve finished.”

After he left, I paused to wonder again why he preferred to remain anonymous. Was he just embarrassed over the charade, or was he afraid that I might possibly attempt to blackmail him later. After all, he obviously had something to conceal and if I knew his identity I might find out what it was all about and attempt to profit from it.

Ralph phoned me in the afternoon. “The post office says that Paula Smith left no forwarding address. And according to the First National Branch at Fiebrantz, Paula Smith still has a checking account there. Balance $112.16. The bank’s records show that she deposited her paycheck into the account each month and was usually overdrawn by the time the month was over.”

“Why would she leave $112.16 behind?”

“That isn’t necessarily a final balance, Henry. There might be some checks outstanding. She could have closed the account for all practical purposes.”

“Ralph, when Paula left the Bancrofts’ place she probably took along a couple of suitcases. She didn’t own an automobile, so she must have taken a taxi.”

“I’ll check on it. But maybe someone in the Bancroft house drove her to the airport or bus station or whatever.”

“If anybody did, he certainly hasn’t volunteered the information.”

In the afternoon I dropped in at the main library for research that carried Paula from Billings to the Custer Battlefield National Monument and then on to the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.

That evening, at home in my apartment, I created and consumed my supper, and then sat down to TV, turning, as usual, to the educational channel. I was quietly engrossed in the history of barrel making when my door buzzer sounded.

I identified my caller immediately as Albert Bancroft’s son. He looked even taller and thinner than his photograph.

He introduced himself. “My name is Jerome Bancroft. Are you the Turnbuckle of the Turnbuckle Detective Agency?”

I nodded.

He cleared his throat. “I understand that my father is employing your agency to search for Paula Smith? My father showed me your first report this evening and I memorized your letterhead.” He stepped into the room. “I knew you wouldn’t be in your office at this time of the night, of course, so I looked in the white pages of the telephone book. You are the only Turnbuckle listed.”

I beamed proudly. “The Turnbuckle line is long but narrow. What can I do for you?”

He seemed uncomfortable. “Do you think your agency will find Paula?”

I shrugged. “One can only do one’s best.”

He took the chair I offered. “I don’t know what father is paying you to search for Paula, but I’m willing to double it — if you do not find her.”

I raised an eyebrow. Here was someone else who didn’t want Paula Smith found and was willing to pay handsomely for it. “Why don’t you want her found?”

“It’s a personal reason. I really don’t think it’s necessary that you know.”

I went to my TV set, which at the moment featured a cooper spoke-shaving some barrel staves, and turned it off. “I have the strangest suspicion about this case. Is Paula Smith still alive?”

He seemed surprised at the question. “Alive? Of course she’s alive. I just don’t want her to be found and persuaded to return.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

“No.”

“Why did she leave in the first place?”

Jerome Bancroft took half a minute to wrestle with a decision and then sighed. “I guess I might just as well give you the whole story. I paid Paula to leave. Twenty thousand dollars, to be exact. I felt that Paula had an undue influence on my father and that it was just a question of time before he asked her to marry him.”

“You didn’t think that Paula Smith was a suitable stepmother?”

“Frankly, no. As a matter of fact, she was considerably free with the amount of personal attention she paid to me too.”

“You were attracted to her?”

“Actually she frightened me half to death.”

“But still you were afraid that she might seduce you?”

“No. Frightened or not. I do have a mind of my own. I would have been able to resist her, regardless of temptation or perfume, both of which were considerable. But I was worried for Dad’s sake. I don’t know how strong he is in matters of this nature.”

“Did the fact that Paula Smith, as your father’s wife, would be in a position to claim a considerable share of your father’s wealth disturb you?”

“Not particularly. Both Marianne, that’s my sister, and I have quite enough money in our own right. Personally we both feel that Dad ought to remarry, but we can think of a number of more suitable candidates.”

“So you offered Paula Smith twenty thousand dollars to leave the household?”

He frowned thoughtfully. “Now that I think it over, I’m not quite positive whether I offered or she suggested that I give her the money and she would leave. Anyway, I handed her twenty thousand in cash on Sunday afternoon. She promised that she would leave on Monday while Dad and I were at the office. She said she’d leave a note saying that she was just fed up with the job and had decided to get out. The note was so that Dad wouldn’t think she’d been kidnaped or something and call the police.”

“And she left the note?”

“Yes. On her bedroom dresser.”

“But instead of leaving Monday she left sometime between ten P.M. Sunday, when she was last seen going up to her rooms, and seven A.M. Monday, when she was scheduled to report for duty, so to speak?”

“Yes. I don’t know why though. Maybe she thought I’d think things over and demand the twenty thousand back. So she decided to skip while the skipping was good.”

I debated whether to tell him that his father apparently had as little desire as he to have Paula Smith return, then I decided that this case needed a little more investigation first.

Jerome Bancroft brought out his checkbook. “How much would you like as a retainer?”

I pondered. What would your average private detective do? Take money for not doing a job for which he was already being paid for not doing? I’d have to think it over. “A retainer will not be necessary,” I said. “I prefer to bill at the completion — or in this case, the noncompletion — of my job.”

When he was gone, I turned on the TV set just in time to catch Winnebago Indians harvesting wild rice.

The next morning I completed several more reports tracing Paula Smith to Salt Lake City, where by finding a ticket stub in a room she had just vacated at the Excelsior Motel, I deduced that she had the night previous attended a concert of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

In the afternoon Ralph phoned.

“No taxi picked up a fare anywhere near the Bancroft residence either on Sunday or Monday,” he said. “Maybe she phoned a relative or a friend to pick her up?”

“She told the butler she had no living relatives. As for friends outside of the household, I don’t know. Nobody’s mentioned any.”

“If someone from the house drove her away, why is he so shy about mentioning it?”

“Maybe she wasn’t alive when he drove her away.”

Late in the afternoon a silhouette appeared at the opaque glass of my door and the knob turned.

Marianne Bancroft entered my office.

Her eyes widened. “You? You are the Turnbuckle Detective Agency?”

I thought for a flashing moment of telling her that I just happened to be visiting, but there I was coatless and before a typewriter.

So I admitted the fact. “Yes, I am Henry Turnbuckle. I’m sorry if I misrepresented myself yesterday, but it was necessary in my pursuit of information.”

She regarded me with narrow-eyed suspicion, but nevertheless got to the point. “I understand that my father hired you to find Paula Smith.”

I dodged the exact point delicately. “I am in your father’s employ, yes.”

“All right. I don’t know what he’s paying you to find her, but I’ll double it if you don’t find her.”

I had heard those words before, of course, and I repeated my part of the dialogue. “Why don’t you want her found?”

“I really don’t think it is necessary you know.”

I closed my eyes for a few reflective moments and then opened them. “The pieces are beginning to fall into place. You do not want me to find Paula Smith for the simple reason that you paid her to leave. Possibly twenty thousand dollars?”

Naturally she was astounded. “How did you know that?”

I tapped my forehead with a finger. “Sheer deductive reasoning based solidly on coincidence. And the reason you paid her to leave and do not want to have her found and returned is that you feel she was on the verge of entrapping either your father or your brother into matrimony.”

She was, for the moment, speechless.

I smiled understandingly. “My dear Miss Bancroft, neither your father nor your brother has the slightest desire ever to see Paula again. As a matter of fact, your brother also offered me double what his father was paying me if I also did not find Paula.”

She was confused. “Why did father hire you in the first place, if he doesn’t want Paula back?”

“I believe he was under the impression that your brother was infatuated with Paula. She seems to have been clever at creating conflicting impressions. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if your father also was conned into paying her to leave. And it occurred to him that when Jerome discovered that Paula was gone, he might be heartbroken enough to decide to employ a private detective to find her. And he might have, at that. So to forestall that possibility, your father hired me not to look for her, but to prepare a number of reports to make it appear as though I was conducting an extensive search. He would show them to Jerome to indicate that everything was already being done to find her.”

Marianne sighed. “I guess the three of us will just have to get together and compare notes.” She regarded me for a few moments and then frowned. “Now I remember where I saw you before. When the Culbersons had that break-in and jewel robbery at their place a couple of years ago, I dropped in because I wanted to hear all about it from Jenny Culberson. The place was overrun with police and detectives.” She nodded reflectively. “And you were there questioning one of the maids. You and another man, both in plainclothes. He was kind of chubby, with straw-colored hair.”

“That was Ralph, my partner.”

She stared at me accusingly. “You’re not a private detective, you’re a public detective.”

“Well, yes and no. At the moment I’m on educational leave from the department. I’m doing my Master’s on quasi-police organizations — like the Merchant Police, security guards, private detective agencies, and things like that. As part of my research, I’m putting in a spell as a private detective. My license cost me fifteen dollars, but I expect it’s worth it.”

She was still dubious. “You mean the police department put you on leave for something like that?”

I nodded. “Frankly, I did feel a little guilty about being absent from the force for one whole year and possibly letting them down in some way, but Captain Wilkerson was very understanding. He not only approved my application, but actually urged me to take the year off. As a matter of fact, he generously suggested that I make it two or three years.”

She smiled faintly. “I know one thing for certain, Henry Turnbuckle, you’ll never become a rich private detective.”

I shrugged. “Well, I certainly have never expected to.”

“I mean now that you’ve cleared the air, it isn’t necessary anymore for either me or my brother to double the money Dad is paying you, is it? And as for Dad, I don’t know what he’s given you so far, but he really has no reason now to pay you any more, does he?”

Good heavens! She was right. In my moment of candor I had shot down my own financial balloon. I frowned. What would an experienced private detective do in a situation like this? Threaten to find Paula Smith on his own and bring her back unless the family paid? I rejected that after a few moments’ consideration. No, that would be blackmail.

Marianne seemed about to pat me on the shoulder. “I’ll tell you what, Henry, I’ll take you home and the family will come through with some kind of settlement that won’t leave you exactly empty-handed.”

We used her car for the transportation to the Bancroft mansion and I’m afraid I was a bit moody during the ride. When we arrived, two other automobiles were parked in front of the house.

“Dad and Jerome are home,” Marianne said. She led me to a drawing room where we found Bancroft Sr. and Jerome.

A large man, well over six feet tall, balding, and wearing a butler’s uniform stood at the liquor cabinet making drinks. I deduced that this was Wisniewski. Both of the Bancrofts blanched when they saw me.

“It’s all right, Dad,” Marianne said. “I’ll explain everything.” She did, and during the course of the explanation and clarification, I learned that Bancroft Sr. had also paid Paula Smith $20,000 to leave.

I had been thinking heavily while they talked and suddenly I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. “Ah, hah!” I said, gaining their attention.

I smiled tightly. “Paula Smith privately assured each one of you that she would leave secretly on Monday while all of you were gone from the house for one reason or another, presumably to ‘prevent’ some member of the family from pleading with her to remain. And yet she left suddenly the night before. Why?”

None of them had the answer.

I continued: “It is my belief that Paula Smith was murdered here sometime after ten P.M. on Sunday — when she was last seen alive — and before seven A.M. on Monday, when she normally assumed her duties for the day, and that her body was removed from the premises by her murderer.”

They blinked, of course, and Marianne said, “Are you intimating that she changed her mind about going and that one of us killed her to get her out of the way?”

“No. I think she planned to go. She had milked all three of you for about as much as she could expect and she probably thought that you were on the verge of comparing notes and learning that none of you actually wanted her to remain. You might even decide to go to the police. After all, the entire scheme was a form of extortion. No, she had decided to leave, but before she could go voluntarily, she was murdered. You ask why? And by whom?”

None of them did, but I felt that the questions were implied.

“The Why is obvious,” I said confidently. “For the sixty thousand dollars in cash which she had accumulated.”

Albert Bancroft seemed shocked. “I know that I certainly would not kill anyone for any amount of money.”

Jerome agreed. “Neither would I. Besides, I couldn’t strangle anybody. My wrists are too weak.”

I thought that over and regarded Jerome piercingly. “What makes you think she was strangled?”

He shrugged. “Nobody seems to have heard a shot and if a knife or a bludgeon were used, there would be blood sprayed about, I imagine, but nobody’s mentioned any. So I opt for strangulation.”

He seemed to have a keen mind. I continued: “The fact remains that Paula was murdered and that her murderer knew that she planned to leave on Monday and used that fact as a coverup for the murder. And after killing her he carried her body downstairs and put it into an automobile or a station wagon and then returned to her room, finished packing her suitcases, and then took them away with him.”

“Why didn’t he take the trunk too?” Marianne asked.

“Either he didn’t know it was in that closet or, if he did, he probably felt that it was too great a risk attempting to carry a fully loaded trunk down three flights of stairs in the dead of night without making enough noise to waken someone. Or possibly he thought that each of you would just assume that Paula had decided at the last moment to abandon the trunk of clothes. After all, she had plenty of money to buy more.”

Marianne nodded. “And you think that a man has to be the murderer because of the heaving and hauling involved with the body? After all, Paula was rather a full-bodied woman.”

“Exactly. And who in this household, besides your father and your brother, is capable of carrying a hefty body down three flights of stairs?”

“Who?” Marianne asked.

I smiled. “Shall we consider the gardener for a moment?”

“Hector?” Marianne shook her head. “He’s sixty-five and I doubt if he weighs over one hundred and twenty pounds.”

I agreed. “You are quite right, Marianne. The murderer couldn’t have been Hector.”

Wisniewski had been doing make-work at the liquor cabinet so that he could remain in the room.

Now I turned to him and pointed triumphantly. “You. Wisniewski, you are the murderer of Paula Smith!”

He regarded me coldly. “Utterly ridiculous, sir. How could I possibly have known that Miss Smith had sixty thousand dollars in her possession?”

I chuckled meaningfully. “Miss Smith was a woman who, shall we say, came on strong. She lived in this house for almost a year, all the while apparently getting noplace at all with any member of the opposite sex, and frankly, in her case, I think that would have been both unendurable and unbelievable. She had to find some man who would prove more compliant and more willing—”

Wisniewski’s crown reddened. “Preposterous, sir. She was definitely not my type.”

Albert Bancroft was still aghast. “You mean that in this case it was the butler who did it?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “The butler.” I scowled at Wisniewski. “And so there you were with a body on your hands. What did you do with it? Hide it on the grounds? No. A bit too risky. You might be seen or the body found at some future date. No, you had to take the body somewhere else to dispose of it. A lake? A river? But bodies have a nasty habit of floating to the surface eventually. Or did you bury Paula? Do you own some property around here? Perhaps a cabin on a lake? Certainly an ideal remote burial place.”

There was silence.

The Bancrofts and Wisniewski had assumed a stance of deep thought.

After a while Marianne spoke. “Meadows is the murderer.”

“Meadows?” I said. “Who is Meadows?”

“The chauffeur.”

“Chauffeur?” I said. “What chauffeur?”

“He has quarters over the garage,” Albert Bancroft said.

I frowned. “Nobody told me you had a chauffeur.”

“Come to think of it,” Jerome Bancroft said, “Paula and Meadows were a sort of package deal from that employment agency, weren’t they, Marianne?”

I was getting a bit warm. “No one said a damn word about Meadows and Paula coming here at the same time from the same employment agency.”

Wisniewski rubbed his chin. “Now that I reflect on it, there were a number of times when I saw the two of them together in what one might call close circumstances.”

“Now look here,” I said, my voice rising a bit. “How can anybody expect me to solve anything if I’m kept in the dark? No one even hinted that Paula and Meadows were the least interested in each other.”

“Meadows is about twenty-five,” Marianne said. “And Paula was at least forty and it was beginning to show. She must have told him about the sixty thousand dollars and they even planned on going away together. But he was getting tired of her and figured that this was the time to split, and with the money.”

I glared out of the nearest window. “Suppositions, suppositions.”

Wisniewski brightened. “I believe that Meadows once mentioned that his uncle had a hunting cabin on an acre of land up north. An ideal place to bury Paula. It’s probably miles from neighbors.”

I turned back to them. “Now there’s another example. No one had the decency to tell me that Meadows had an uncle or that this mysterious uncle had a hunting cabin.”

“The money,” Marianne said. “If the police find the money on or near Meadows, that ought to incriminate him.”

“Ha,” I snorted. “But suppose they don’t find the money on or near Meadows? Then what?”

“In that case they’ll tell Meadows they’re going to go over his uncle’s land with a fine-tooth comb. That ought to crack him wide-open.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Nobody cracks wide-open just because someone threatens to search the land around his uncle’s hunting cabin.”

Wisniewski phoned the police and told them what we knew and what we suspected.

When they arrived, they talked to Meadows and in the course of questioning mentioned that they were going to have a look at the land surrounding his uncle’s hunting cabin.

Meadows cracked wide-open.

At what point, exactly, did the embarrassment — the sheer, cringing embarrassment of the thing — change over into fear? And then from fear into outright terror, and the recognition of approaching tragedy?

Twisting the bedside lamp to a sharper angle, Agnes leaned closer, watching the uneasy twitching of her husband’s eyelids over his closed eyes. In the dim greenish light the lines were sharply etched in the face sunk against the pillows, and he looked suddenly, terrifyingly old. But of course illness — serious illness — can do that to a person, even within a few hours.

How many hours? Glancing at Lady Olivia’s bedside clock — for it was to their hostess’ bedroom that Bert had been carried, amid a muted turmoil of well-bred dismay, after his collapse at the dinner table just as the salmon paupiettes were being served — glancing at the clock. Agnes noted, with a sort of slow incredulity, that it was still only a little after nine. Less than an hour had passed since Bert, glass of whiskey still in his hand, had brought to a standstill in mid-sentence the amusing anecdote he had been relating to his neighbor, the local M.P.’s wife, and had quietly slewed sideways in his chair and come crashing to the floor, dragging with him a great swath of shining linen tablecloth. With a dreadful clattering of Georgian china and priceless glass, he had subsided into a crumpled heap on the carpet, limbs twitching.

How could he! This (to her subsequent shame) had been Agnes’ first and totally spontaneous reaction to the catastrophe. How could he! — and in front of all these important people too! Lady Olivia’s antique dinner service, her precious glass! Fury — a whole raging, bottled-up decade of it — boiled up in Agnes during those microseconds of scandalized silence before the clamor began: the blinding, impotent fury of a wife whose husband has disgraced her, has once again, and in the most public and unforgivable way possible, humiliated her — humiliated himself — in front of their friends.

No, not even friends. Friends, perhaps, could forgive these things, even within a week or two laugh at them. “Do you remember that awful night when old Bert...?” — but Lady Olivia and her entourage were not friends, not in this sense. They were too important to be friends, and too rich. All those smoothly successful men, those straight-backed women aglitter with diamonds — they weren’t friends, but people whose favor must be sought, whose approval must be gained: tycoons, diplomats, television personalities. The catastrophe could not have been more awful.

Because, of course, they would all have assumed that Bert was drunk. Agnes herself assumed it. All those whiskies before dinner, and then those soft-footed waiters padding round the table, filling his glass again, and yet again, even before the hors d’oeuvres were finished, knowing her husband’s weakness, especially under stress.

Agnes had been watching every sip he took, counting every glass, ever since they’d arrived at the house. Even before they filed into the great dining room, her nerves were already at snapping point on his account; and when at last the crash came, the ghastly glittering slither of silver and precious glass, she had found herself praying, before she could stop herself, Please God, let him be dead! Please God, let him not be merely drunk! To die at an elegant dinner table — that is socially forgivable; but drunkenness, never.

He wasn’t dead, of course; but nevertheless, everyone behaved beautifully, as of course they would in that kind of household. Without even a flicker of a glance toward her ruined dinner service or her smashed crystal goblets, Lady Olivia had calmed her guests, had had the victim carried solicitously and instantly upstairs to her own bedroom, and herself had telephoned the doctor.

“Suddenly taken ill,” was the phrase she used, in tones of ringing concern, clearly audible through the great dining-room door; and neither by word nor by intonation had she given the faintest indication of being aware that the patient had simply passed out.

Such is breeding. Slinking shamefacedly upstairs behind her disgraced and unconscious husband, Agnes could not but be vaguely grateful for it. Though she could scarcely breathe for shame at the thought of what Lady Olivia must really be thinking, it was a relief that Lady Olivia could be counted on not to say it.

Brandy? Dinner sent up on a tray? Even a cup of tea? Agnes shook her head, still speechless with shame; and presently Lady Olivia, her duty by the two disgraced guests correctly, even graciously, performed, swept elegantly from the room.

What poise! What savoir faire! Crouched guiltily by her husband’s bedside, Agnes could not help feeling a stab of unwilling admiration. By now the mess would have been unobtrusively cleared up, and the dinner party would be in full swing again, with Lady Olivia effortlessly setting her guests at ease, passing it all off as if this sort of thing happened every day.

Well, that’s aristocracy for you, Agnes reflected wryly. Bred into the bones it was, over hundreds of years, this unflappable presence of mind, this imperturbable façade in the teeth of absolutely anything. Poor Bert, with all his passionate social climbing, he would never make it, never. It took a thousand years; and Bert, at forty-three, had been at the job for barely ten.

And anyway, just look at him! Couldn’t even hold his liquor, let alone display these other, more regal, forms of self-command!

And it was now, looking down at her husband’s still face in the green-shaded lamplight, that Agnes became conscious of her first qualm of fear.

Because this didn’t look like drunkenness — not the kind of drunkenness she had grown used to over the years. Where were the hiccups, where was the heavy, stertorous breathing, the throwing-up over someone else’s carpet? The awful insufferable humiliations rose up out of the past — and suddenly they seemed like mere pinpricks in the context of this new and unfamiliar dread. She would have given anything now to see a return of the familiar, disgusting symptoms; how willingly would she have rushed at this very moment, in all the old familiar panic, for towel and basin to save Lady Olivia’s heirloom bedspread!

But there was no need. Not this time. Already he had gone beyond this sort of thing. In the greenish light she looked again at her husband’s face, and it appeared waxen, and very still. Even the twitching of the eyelids had ceased, and he lay as if dead, only the faint jerky rise and fall of the sheets showing that he was still breathing. Breathing too rapidly, too unevenly, as if his lungs and heart were already faltering in their rhythm.

She wished desperately that the doctor would come. Dare she make a fuss about it — ring the bell at the bedhead — bother someone? Was it done to ring for your hostess’ servants, even if someone was dying?

Turning the lamp away from Bert’s face, she leaned over and tried once again to rouse him.

“Bert!” she said, quite loudly, “Bert, wake up! It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right, Lady Olivia isn’t angry, she—”

But it was no good. She shook him, spoke loudly into his ear; but there was no drunken, inconsequential mumbling in response, no clumsy groping of half-conscious hands. The hand she held in hers was limp and cool, it reminded her of lilies. White lilies, and the proximity of death.

Death! How could such a thing be possible? Bert dying? Greedy, self-indulgent, go-getting Bert? Impossible! Death just wasn’t his thing!

When would the doctor arrive? An hour now since he’d been summoned — surely he’d have realized that it was an emergency? A man of forty-three collapsing suddenly — why it might be anything!

Heart attack? Stroke? Raking through her sparse medical knowledge, Agnes tried to recall those last minutes before the catastrophe. Had Bert looked odd in any way? Ill? Had he been behaving strangely? Certainly, in the drawing room before dinner, he had looked nervous and agitated.

From her observation point at the far end of the room, Agnes had watched him arguing heatedly with a slim supercilious young man — a television star, as she learned later — and losing the argument. Not that she’d been able to hear from the distance what either of them was saying, but she could tell by the insolent set of Bert’s shoulders, by the arrogant gesture with which he thrust his empty glass at a passing waiter, that he had been worsted.

But not ill, no. Just at a disadvantage, and out of his depth in this company, and too proud, as always, to admit it to himself.

And at dinner? — the abortive beginnings of dinner, that is, which were all that either he or she was destined to enjoy. From across the huge mahogany table she had watched him, with wifely anxiety, launching into conversation with Mrs. Beltravers, wife of the Conservative M.P., watched him boasting, as usual, describing how he’d used his influence to quash the Council’s plans for a Remand Home just next to the Arts Centre — was he sure, Agnes remembered wondering, that this had been a Labour project and not a Conservative one? Not that it mattered — you could see from Mrs. Beltravers’ glazed expression that the affairs of her husband’s constituency bored her into the ground.

And at least Bert was eating, Agnes remembered noting. That’ll settle all those whiskies, she had reflected with satisfaction, watching him polishing off a plate piled high with assorted hors d’oeuvres. Duck pâté, jellied oysters, prawn darioles — wasn’t it rather a faux pas, Agnes remembered wondering uneasily, to be eating the lot like this, as if he’d been starving for a week?

But now, sitting at his bedside in a growing turmoil of anxiety, Agnes had few thoughts to spare for the etiquette of the thing; ideas far more sinister were beginning to take possession of her.

Duck pâté! You could get food poisoning from duck pâté. And from shellfish too. She’d heard of people collapsing like that, suddenly, from food poisoning, though of course it was more usual for the symptoms to appear after an hour or so. On the other hand, if it was food poisoning, you’d expect the other guests to be affected too. The chance that Bert alone—

Chance? It was only now that Agnes became clearly conscious of the direction in which her uneasy thoughts were leading. She felt herself gripped by a violent trembling; sweat broke out on her forehead and on the palms of her hands; her stomach seemed to be tying itself in knots within her.

Murder! Deliberately administered poison! Poisoned pâté — or poisoned oysters? Poisoned anything, in fact, from that lavish table, groaning with exotic and unfamiliar foods. And Bert — poor gullible Bert, who for all his social pretensions knew no better than she did how these weird things ought to taste — poor Bert (and she could sympathize with this) would have swallowed anything, no matter how bitter or unpalatable, rather than show his unfamiliarity with such delicacies.

And if someone, knowing him well, aware of his hidden social ineptitude, and of his pride, and choosing to take advantage of this knowledge— But who? Who, of all this glittering throng, could be Bert’s enemy?

Most of them — that was the answer. A man like Bert, pushing his way ruthlessly to the top, thrusting aside everything and everyone that stands in his way — such a man is going to make enemies. Somewhere along the way, had he pushed too hard? — trampled too blindly over feelings whose intensity he was unaware of? Stirred up against himself a hornet’s nest of revenge and hate? Was this then, in the end, what Bert had earned for himself by all his struggles, all his social climbing, all his single-minded self-aggrandizement? Murder, death by poisoning?

The sheer horror of the thing seemed to take Agnes’ breath away; her head swam; her heart pounded in her cars. The effrontery of it too! The dreadful, coldblooded simplicity of the method! A little pharmaceutical knowledge, a little insight into Bert’s vainglory and his precarious self-conceit, and the thing was in the bag. A verdict of accidental food poisoning would be a near certainty.

It was an elegant building, tall and exclusive. The doorman, a resplendently caparisoned goliath, stood guard at the entrance like Leonidas defending the pass at Thermopylae. If you live in the Big Apple and can afford the protection, why not?

I paused alongside the revolving doors and stooped over to tighten a shoelace just as a taxi pulled up at the curb. Its occupant, apparently a paraplegic, struggled heroically to alight with the aid of aluminum crutches. As the doorman hastened across the sidewalk to assist, I ducked into the lobby, sprinted for the elevator, and jabbed the ninth-floor button.

Just before the door closed, I witnessed a miracle. The passenger suddenly straightened, tucked the crutches under his arm, saluted, and marched jauntily down the street. The doorman scratched his head in astonishment and then the elevator was lofting me skyward.

I found Lily Olson’s door and rang the bell. It was opened by a spare, craggy-faced gent. “Mr. George Finney?” I asked.

“Who wants him?”

“This is for you, sir.” I handed him a paper. “Summons and complaint. Finney versus Finney. Nonpayment of alimony and child support. Have a pleasant day.”

There was a woman standing behind him, a striking blonde, thin-lipped now and furious. She ran to the house phone and as I walked back to the elevator I heard her chewing out the doorman, a venomous tirade in the lexicon of a mule-skinner.

On the way down I could not repress a smile of satisfaction. I had succeeded where two professional process servers had dismally failed to breach the building’s security. Ordinarily, a lawyer does not serve his own papers. It’s undignified. Nor do I generally handle cases of this kind. But Kate Finney had been recommended by an important client. She had a child from a previous marriage, legally adopted by Finney, and she desperately needed financial help.

She gave me the facts on the telephone. George Finney had walked out, left her and the child to shift for themselves, and had moved in with Lily Olson. She did not miss him, not on any emotional level. He drank excessively, worked sporadically, and could squeeze a dime until F.D.R.’s nose came out on the other side.

The elevator door opened on the lobby. The doorman was waiting. He towered over me, shoulders bunched, glowering and belligerent and spoiling for a fight. I handed him one of my cards.

“The name is Scott Jordan,” I said. “Counselor and attorney-at-law. So if you decide to use your hands it won’t cost me anything to sue the owners for aggravated assault. As a matter of fact, I’m perfectly willing to go a couple of rounds with you, but not at the moment. I’m due at my office for an appointment with the governor.”

It gave him pause. The owner’s wrath could be more catastrophic than Olson’s abuse. While he was considering it, I slipped past him to the street and caught a cab back to the office.

Ten minutes later Danny Karr showed up. Danny, my new assistant, put some bills on my desk. He was grinning from ear to ear. “I returned the crutches, boss. Here’s your change. How did you like my performance?”

“A bit gaudy,” I said. “But the timing was fine and it worked.”

“So how about a raise?”

“You had a raise last week.”

“Inflation is killing me.”

“You and everyone else. Learn to economize. Your time will come.” And I was sure it would. Danny, only eight months out of law school, was young, eager, and bright. I moved some papers around on my desk. “On that environment case, where are those precedents I asked for?”

“We don’t have the Minnesota Reports.”

“Naturally. There are fifty states. Who has the shelf space? Use the Bar Association library.”

“I’m not a member.”

“I’m a member and you’re my employee. Get over there tomorrow morning. Early, Counselor.” He left and I phoned Kate Finney, asking her to stop by for trial preparation.

At four o’clock she arrived accompanied by Sara. The child had enormous eyes and an adult air of gravity. Kate, a slender, somewhat faded woman in her mid-thirties, introduced us. “This is Mr. Jordan, Sara. He’s my lawyer.”

“I don’t like lawyers,” Sara said.

“Why don’t you like lawyers?” I asked.

“George says they’re not honest. He says if you don’t watch out, they’ll steal you blind.”

Her mother reprimanded her sharply. “Sara! Apologize at once.”

“Okay,” she said, not changing her opinion. “I apologize.”

Keeping a straight face, I buzzed for Danny Karr. “Danny,” I said, “this young lady is Sara Finney. Entertain her in your office while I talk to her mother.”

Sara looked him over. “Are you a lawyer too?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She handed her small plastic purse to her mother. “Then you’d better hold this for me.”

Danny rolled his eyes, beckoned, and she followed him out. Kate gestured helplessly. “I don’t know what to do with that child.”

“She’ll grow out of it. Is George attached to her?”

“Hah! There is no room in George’s emotional equipment for anyone but George. His ego is exceeded only by his selfishness and his penury. The man is incapable of sharing.”

“You mentioned that he’s a writer.”

“Well, he’s sold several short stories, but he drinks too much and he can’t discipline himself to a full-time schedule.”

“You said he has an independent income.”

“Yes. From a trust fund administered by an old fossil of a lawyer he inherited from his parents.”

“We’ll levy an attachment against it.”

She smiled. “I’d like to see his face.”

“Tell me about Lily Olson.”

“He met her through his literary agent, a man named Arnold Procter. She’s a writer too, and fairly successful. She writes those romantic Gothic novels. After our last fight George went to live with her. Maybe she’s more tolerant than I, or less sensitive.” She paused and looked thoughtful. “I — er — have a confession to make.” When I said nothing, she continued. “Last week a letter came for George from the editor of a magazine in Chicago. They used to correspond with each other and I guess he didn’t know George had moved out. Anyway, I steamed it open. He said he liked the new story Procter had submitted and he would be sending a check to the agent at the end of the month.”

“We’ll get a court order restraining Procter from turning the money over to George until the determination of your case against him. There’s really no way you can lose.”

I spent some time preparing her for the court hearing and then I buzzed for Danny Karr. Sara was holding his hand and apparently had changed her mind about lawyers.

He accompanied Kate and Sara to the elevator and then came back, smiling.

I said, “Let’s see how good you are, Danny.” I told him to get the form book and to prepare a restraining order against Arnold Procter. “Complete the papers and serve them before you go home this evening.”

When Howard P. Ransom reached fifty-five, he retired from his job, sold his house, murdered his wife, and settled down in Rome, thereby fulfilling four long-cherished ambitions. He loathed his house, detested his job, hated his wife and loved the prospect of taking up life, late but renewed, in a foreign capital of endless attraction.

His job, he felt, was far beneath one of his talent but it paid so well that his love of money outweighed his distaste. His house was a constant burden, insatiable in its demands for repairs, rapacious in its tax requirements, an unstaunchable bleeding of the money and time that he would rather have spent on his boat. But it was his wife Hannah whom he regarded as the major obstacle to freedom and a new life.

As the years of their marriage passed, whatever of love and understanding there may have been had vanished, with Hannah exhibiting a half-hidden sufferance bordering on contempt, and he an impotent chafing and smoldering resentment. He found that the cute pussycat face of twenty-two became the snarling mask of a stalking tiger at fifty.

Hannah had adamantly refused to agree to a divorce, primarily because Howard wanted it. For Howard to have simply walked out was repellent to his nature, which required order and planning and abhorred loose ends and unfinished business. This plus the fatal flaw in the mind of every killer — the conviction that his action was justified — led him to the murder of his wife.

The act itself was simple, well planned, and swift. One of the few remaining things they did together was to take an occasional weekend cruise in the boat. Returning home just after dark one Sunday, they rounded the breakwater at the end of the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal and turned north against the ebbing tide where the river and bay met. Two miles upstream Howard put the engine on idle and came astern to where Hannah sat.

“I want you to put on this life jacket. The tide is ebbing quite strongly and there’s all this debris floating about. If I have to make a quick turn and if you should be standing, you might go over the side.”

“Oh, Howard, is that necessary? Such unusual precautions here on the river.”

“This is practically the top end of Delaware Bay. And there’s this heavy tanker traffic—”

“Oh, all right, all right. A lesson in geography. Always a lesson in something.”

“Just this one last lesson then.”

She stood and he helped her into the life jacket, steadying her as she staggered slightly, and swiftly tied the ribbons. He could smell the perfume she used, a smell that he had come to loathe as much as once it had attracted him.

“Howard,” her voice rose in bewilderment, “what have you done to this jacket? It weighs a ton.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “it’s packed with lead” — and he pushed her over the stem.

The greasy water was barely disturbed as she went under. He switched on the spotlight and played it back and forth over the water. Crates, fruit baskets, odd pieces of lumber, all swam placidly by on the outward tide, but the surface betrayed no sign of what had happened.

For two hours he waited, to be sure that his plan had worked, and then headed for the nearest marina and a telephone to report his well-rehearsed story to the Coast Guard, with special care in placing the scene of the incident farther up the river than it had actually occurred.

It took Howard three months to make what he thought of as his getaway. Calls placed at lengthening intervals to the Coast Guard brought no news and elicited finally the opinion that there was no likelihood of the body being recovered.

The house was sold, removing forever the burden of wet basements, rising taxes, and ever more plentiful crops of crabgrass. Kindly neighbors offered sympathy and expressed understanding of his wish for a complete change of scene, expressions which Howard gravely accepted, inwardly relishing the contrast between his decently submissive outward manner and his inner satisfaction with the fruition of his plans.

Thoughtfully he arranged for a tombstone to be erected — a fact that was noted in the local paper — and had it incised with Hannah’s name and the years of her birth and death, and, as indicative of his intentions, he had his own name added, followed by the year of his birth and a small uncarved rectangle in which at the proper time another year would be cut. With a touch of grim wholly uncharacteristic humor he thought that a suitable epitaph for Hannah might be “Lost at sea,” but sensibly he restrained himself.

Late in the fall, after a dutiful and symbolic visit to the cemetery, Howard arrived in Rome. Through the columns of a newspaper aimed at the American tourist he rented a small furnished apartment in a converted palazzo on a street near the top of the Spanish Steps, a house reputed to have been owned by a cadet branch of the Medici.

After the spare trimness and openness of his suburban house he was struck by the stony, secretive exteriors of the Roman houses and the contrast with their ornate, pretentious interiors. His living room was furnished with heavy oaken furniture, elaborately carved; one chair with a faded damask cover on its tall back was supposed to have once been the property of the infamous Principe di Canisio who, it was said, had died in it, a messy affair of a jealous husband and a silken cord.

Dim acne-ed mirrors on the walls on each side of the door reflected windows with heavy velvet drapes looped back by tassled rope ties. It seemed that the same style of furniture that was suitable for the palazzo of a doge had been used in this small room, giving it a theatrical, shop-worn splendor. But Howard settled contentedly in these falsely elegant surroundings and gave himself over to the delights of leisurely explorations of the ancient city.

It was not until early summer that he saw Hannah. Or thought he saw Hannah.

He was returning from an afternoon of browsing among the many shops near the Piazza di Spagna and had begun to climb the magnificent stairway street of the Spanish Steps, the sweeping thoroughfare that leads majestically up to the Monte di Trinita. In the wall of the building to the right of the first landing was the shrine of millions of poetry-loving tourists, the window of the room where the poet Keats had died. He paused on the landing, looking up at the open window, and saw a woman looking down at him, a woman who resembled Hannah.

Shaken, he stared up at her, his mind rejecting the atavistic fear of the dead returned to life and telling himself to wait for a movement or gesture to dispel the likeness, for her aspect to shift from identity to mere similarity. The woman gazed down calmly, framed portraitlike in the window, an absent-minded half smile on her lips, and raised her hand; but whether or not the gesture was in greeting he could not determine. Then the woman slowly moved back from the frame of the window and was out of sight.

He stood and stared upward at the window not thirty feet away, his mind searching for the possibility of error in the execution of his plan, but at no point could he find a mistake. He was brought back to reality when he heard a passing American schoolteacher comment to her companion, “Look. Another poetry lover paying homage to John Keats.” As they passed him he smelled the faint fragrance of the same perfume Hannah had used and he wondered if he had smelled it unknowingly as he looked at the woman in the window and if it had not added a subliminal reinforcement to a chance likeness.

He concluded that the resemblance was accidental, but from that time forward, before he fell asleep at night, he saw again the face and form of Hannah framed in the window.

A week later he saw her again.

It was during the intermission before the last act of “Aida,” which was performed outdoors at the Baths of Caracalla. He strolled among the crowds under the lights along the wide paths that skirted the towering walls with their shadowed arches recessing into darkness. She was standing under an arch, well back from the walk and partially obscured by the shadow of a tree as well as by the shadows of the arch.

He stopped, the crowd moving slowly past him, and stared at the figure that stood dwarfed by the tall arch, hugging itself as if chilled and idly watching the passing crowd. Her eyes swept over him with no sign of recognition and then swung back to look at him uncertainly as if she were not sure she knew him, and then she turned away toward the interior darkness of the arch, on her lips the same half smile that he had seen from the Steps.

He pushed his way through the crowd toward her but the overhead lights flicked off and on several times to signal the end of the intermission. By the time he made his way through the returning surge of the crowd she had vanished. He made his way to the entrance where the patrons were returning to their seats and although he observed each one until the first aria was well under way he did not see her again.

Similarly after the performance he watched the main exit but saw no one who remotely resembled his dead wife. But he found this occurrence less troubling than the previous one and although he thought about it constantly for days it did not cause the questioning and examination the first encounter had. A resemblance, close enough to be sure, but it was not Hannah. If it had been, he was certain she could not have resisted showing the new power which she would now have over him.

Three days later in the late afternoon he returned to his apartment, slipped his key into the handsome walnut door, swung the door inward, and froze. Delusions of sight and errors in identification were always possible but there is no autosuggestion in the sense of the smell. The living room smelled faintly of Hannah’s perfume.

Terror spurted in him but he forced himself to stride into the room. Hannah sat in the Principe di Canisio’s chair, her face as worn as the scarlet damask that covered the tall back of the chair, and in her hand was an ugly and unladylike .45 caliber automatic. She pointed it upward, directly at his face, so that he looked into its cruel, uncompromising muzzle that seemed small for such a deadly object.

For several seconds they stared at each other wordlessly, the woman who should have been dead and the man who should have been free. She waved the gun toward a slender gilt chair beside the door and he sat down facing her, the light from the window behind her chair making him feel, irrationally, that if only he could be in shadow he would be able to explain everything.

“How?” he managed to whisper.

“You thought of everything, Howard, everything but one small detail. I surfaced under an upturned fruit basket and stayed there while you were making certain with the spotlight that you had murdered me. My clothes made me buoyant for a time and the tide was carrying me downstream away from your light. When I was in sufficient darkness I grabbed a floating timber and paddled to shore just below a refinery. Murder and a polluted river, Howard! Some form of repayment is indicated, don’t you agree?

“I floundered through the marshes until I came to a highway and walked along it until I found a filling station. It was closed but it was also a bus stop. After an hour’s wait, during which most of the water dripped out of my clothes — but oh, the smell — a bus marked Ocean City came in and I got on. In the two-hour ride down the coast to Ocean City I planned what I would do.

“First of all, I couldn’t let you, or anyone else, know I had survived. You would surely try again. I decided that this was no matter for the law and, besides, what could I prove? I had $48 in my purse. The next day I got a job as a summer waitress at a restaurant and worked there all summer under an assumed name. I even got a new Social Security number. I worked hard and they liked hard-working steady help who showed up seven days a week and didn’t irritate the customers. I also subscribed to our hometown paper so that I would have some way of finding out about you. That tombstone now, that was touching.

“After the summer was over they offered me a job in their Florida place and I worked there until two weeks ago when I had enough money saved for this trip. The paper had reported your departure to live in Rome ‘for an indefinite period,’ it said, and how wrong that is now. My one fear was that my money would run out before I located you. I didn’t realize how easy it is to find an American in Rome. Just watch the tourist attractions long enough and you’ll find them.

“I saw you first at the Colosseum one day and followed you to this address. I thought at the time what a fitting place the Colosseum would be to do what I had come to do if it weren’t so public. Too bad we didn’t meet there by moonlight.”

“May I get up and stand by the window?” he asked. “I can’t breathe.”

“Do,” she answered, “but don’t get too close. It’s too late for accidents.”

He walked to the window in the wall behind her chair and stood looking down into the street. Shielded from her direct view by the tall back of her chair she was sitting in, he slowly slid one hand under the window drapery and unhooked the ropelike tie that looped the drape back.

“How did you get out of the life jacket?” he asked, not turning toward her chair.

“Oh, it almost worked. But you made one mistake — one small detail. When you tied the ribbons of the life jacket your reflexes took over. You tied the same knot that you, and nearly everybody else, ties every day of their lives — a simple bow knot. Under water I gave one pull at the ends of the ribbons and the knots came apart and I slipped out of the jacket. It was simple compared to untying and taking off my sneakers under water as we used to do when I was a girl in camp. If you had tied a good hard square knot, Howard, things would have been different for me. And for you.

“If you’re wondering about the gun, I borrowed it — stole it really — from the Florida restaurant. They always kept one near the cash register.”

He whirled from the window and leaped toward the back of her chair, the drapery tie outstretched between his hands. Her first shot, fired in frightened reflex at his reflection, shattered the mirror on the wall opposite her chair. Hanging over the chair back, he fumbled desperately to twist the rope tie around her neck. She slid from the chair to the floor and fired backward and upward in the blind instinct of self-preservation.

Howard staggered backward from the impact of the shot, one hand jerking upward and holding the moth-eaten drapery tie as though in some baroque scalp dance, the other clutching the window drape which he pulled to the floor with him as he fell, his body becoming partly hidden in its pretentious folds. She pulled herself to her feet and stood over the body, sickened at the reality of what her plans had brought to pass, and dreading the possibility of having to fire again. But the thing that lay there was still and dead, the rope tie grasped in one hand.

She replaced the gun in her bag, inspected the room carefully to be sure she left no trail, and left the apartment without looking back. She made her way through the streets to the top of the Spanish Steps, rejecting the waiting taxis in case the drivers would be questioned later. Going down the long cascade of the Spanish Steps, she stopped at the landing one flight from the street below and looked up at the figures that drifted aimlessly past the open window of the room where Keats had died.

She wondered what historic shrine this house might be but knew that now she would never find out, any more than she would learn whether operas were performed in ruined bathhouses, as advertised. She had already placed a foot on the next descending step when her body contracted with rigid terror. Looking down at her from the open window of Keats’s room was Howard, or a man who at this distance resembled Howard in startling detail.

He stood in full view immediately in front of the window, looking patient and expectant. She stared up at him in a paralysis of fear; he gazed down at her with serene assurance.

Then the figure slowly disappeared backward into the room, smiling as if in anticipation and passing confidently, almost negligently, a faded rope tie through one hand and then the other.

The Minerva Club, in a discreet turning off Brook Street, is one of the most exclusive clubs in London. Members must have served at least two years in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons and be able to pay £50 a year dues. In the quiet of its Smoking Room, under the mild eye of Milky Waye, the club secretary, some of the most ambitious schemes for money-making, allied of course with evasion of the law, have been worked out. But, although notoriety is a common quality among members, fame — real honest solid fame — has come to few of them.

Lancelot Pike is one of these few but, although he is still a member, he is not often seen in the august halls of the Minerva. However, over the fireplace in the Smoking Room, hangs one of his greatest works — never seen by the general public — a full assembly, in oils, of the Management Committee of the club; it shows thirty figures of men whose photographs and fingerprints are cherished lovingly by Scotland Yard.

Lancelot’s road to fame was a devious one and the first step was taken on the day that Horace Head, leaning against a lamppost in the Old Kent Road and reading the racing edition, saw Miss Nancy Reeves. Without thinking, Horace began to follow her, some dim but undeniable impulse of the heart leading him. And, naturally, Lancelot Pike, who was leaning against the other side of the lamppost, followed Horace, because he was Horace’s manager and was not letting Horace out of his sight.

Horace Head at this time was at the peak of his brief career as a professional middleweight fighter. He was younger then, of course, but still a wooden-headed, slow-thinking fellow with an engaging smile bracketed by cauliflower ears. He was wearing a gray suit with a thick red line in it, a blue shirt, a yellow bow tie, and brown shoes that squeaked.

He squeaked away after Miss Nancy Reeves and there wasn’t any real reason why he should not have done so. She was a trim slim blonde with blue eyes and a pink and white complexion that made Horace think — and this will show how stirred up he was — of blue skies seen through a lacing of cherry blossoms. It had been a good many years since Horace had seen real cherry blossoms too.

Lancelot Pike followed him. Lancelot was a tall, slim, handsome, versatile number, with a ready tongue, a fast mind, and a determination to have an overstuffed bank account before he was thirty no matter what he had to do to get it. At the moment, Horace — at one fight a month was his stake money.

If Miss Nancy Reeves knew that she was being followed, she showed no signs of it. She eventually went up the steps of the neighborhood Art School and disappeared through its doors.

Horace continued to follow. He was stopped inside by an attendant who said, “You a student?”

Horace said, “Do I have to be?”

“To come in here, yes,” said the attendant.

“Who,” said Horace, “is the poppet in the green coat with blonde hair?” He nodded to where Miss Nancy Reeves was almost out of sight up a wide flight of stairs.

“That,” said the attendant, “is Miss Nancy Reeves.”

“She a student?” asked Horace.

“No,” said the attendant. “She’s one of the art teachers. Life class.”

“Then make me a student in the life class,” said Horace, the romantic impulse in him growing.

At this moment Lancelot Pike intervened. “What the devil are you after, Horace? You couldn’t paint a white stripe down the middle of the road. Besides, do you know what a life class is?”

“No,” said Horace.

“Naked women. Maybe, men, too. You’ve got to paint them.”

“To be near her,” said Horace, “I’ll paint anybody, the Queen of Sheba or the Prime Minister, black all over. I got to do it, Lance. I got this sort of pain right under my heart suddenly.”

“You need bicarbonate of soda,” said the attendant.

Horace looked at him, reached out, and lifted him clear of the ground by the collar of his jacket and said, “Make me a student.”

Well, it had to be. There was no stopping Horace. Lancelot helped to fill out the form and, in a way, he was glad because he knew that the classes would keep Horace away from the pubs between training. Horace was the kind who developed an enormous thirst as soon as training was finished.

So Horace became a student in the life class. It was a bit of a shock to him at first. He came from a decent family of safe crackers, holdup men, and pickpockets. He didn’t approve of naked women posing on a stand while a lot of people sat round painting them.

To do him credit, Horace seldom looked at the models. He sat behind his easel and looked most of the time at Nancy Reeves. Naturally he did very little painting — but he saw a lot of Nancy Reeves.

She was a nice girl. She soon realized that Horace was almost pure bone from the shoulders up; but she was a great believer in the releasing power of art, and she was convinced that Horace would never have joined the class if there had not been some deep-buried longing in him for expression.

Now Horace, of course, had not the faintest talent for drawing or painting; but, realizing that he could not sit in the class and do nothing, he would just smack an occasional daub of paint on his canvas in a way that loosely conformed to the naked shape of the model before him. Nancy Reeves soon decided that Horace was — if he was going to be anything — an abstract painter. She would come and stand behind him at times and her talk went straight over his head — but Horace enjoyed every moment of it.

After two weeks of this, Horace finally got to the point of asking her if she would go to a dance with him. Surprisingly, she agreed, and she enjoyed it because, whatever else he was not, Horace was quick on his feet at that time and a good dancer.

Now, a week after the dance, Horace and Lancelot had fixed up a little private business which Lancelot had carefully planned for some time. This was to grab the payroll bag of a local building firm when the messenger came out of the bank on a Friday morning.

Lancelot Pike had the whole thing worked out to the dot. Horace would sit in the car outside the bank, and Lancelot would grab the moneybag as the man came to the bottom of the steps and they would be away before anyone could make a move to stop them. It was a bit crude, but it had the merit of simple directness and nine times out of ten — if you read your papers — it works.

It worked this time — except for one thing. The man came down the steps carrying the bag, Lancelot grabbed it and jumped into the car, and Horace started away; but at that moment the messenger shoved his hand through the rear window and fired at Lancelot Pike.

But the gun wasn’t an ordinary one. It was a dye gun full of a vivid purple stain. The charge got Lancelot full on the right side of the face, ran down his neck, and ruined a good suit and a silk shirt.

Well, there it was. They got back to the Head house, where Lancelot had a room, without any trouble from the police. Lancelot nipped inside with the moneybag and Horace drove off to ditch the car.

When Horace returned he found Lancelot hanging over the wash basin trying to get the dye off. But it wouldn’t budge. It was a good rich purple dye that meant to stay until time slowly erased it.

“You won’t be able to go out for a while,” said Horace. “Months, maybe. The police will be looking for a purple-faced man.”

“Lovely,” said Lancelot savagely. “So I’m a hermit. Stuck here for weeks. You know what that’s going to do to a gregarious person like me?”

Horace shook his head. He didn’t know what a gregarious person was.

“We got the money,” he said.

“And can’t spend it. Can’t put it to work to make more. Cooped up like a prisoner in the Tower. Me, Lancelot Pike, who lives for color, movement, people, the big pageant of life, and golden opportunities waiting to be seized.”

“I could go to the chemist and ask him if he’s got anything to take it off,” suggested Horace.

“And have him go to the police once he’s read the story in the evening newspaper!”

“I see what you mean,” said Horace.

So Lancelot — very bad-tempered — was confined to his room. For the first few days he kept Horace busy running to and from the public library getting books for him. Lancelot was a talented, not far from cultured type — things came easily to him and idleness was like a poison in his blood that has to be worked out of his system. But it was people and movement that he missed. Every evening Horace had to recount to him all that he had done during the day and, particularly, how he was getting on with Miss Nancy Reeves at the Art School.

Curiously enough, Horace was getting on very well with her. There was something simple, earthy, and engagingly wooden about Horace which had begun to appeal to Nancy Reeves. It happens that way — like calling to unlike... think of the number of men, ugly as all get-out, with beautiful wives, or of dumb women trailing around with top intellects.

Anyway, Lancelot began to take a great interest in Horace’s romance, and he knew that the time would come when Horace would ask the girl to marry him, and he was offering ten to four that she would not accept.

Horace wouldn’t take the bet, but he was annoyed that Lancelot should think he had such a poor chance.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Lancelot, “except that you really aren’t her type. To her you’re just a big ape she’s trying to educate.”

“You calling me a big ape?”

“Figuratively, not literally.”

“What does that mean?”

“That you don’t have to knock my head off for an imagined insult.”

“I see.”

“I wonder,” said Lancelot. “However, forget it. You ask her and see what answer you’ll get.”

Meanwhile Lancelot helped Horace with his homework from the Art School.

Each week each student did a home study composition on any subject he liked to choose. Lancelot got hold of canvas and paints and went to work for Horace. And then the painting bug hit him — and hit him hard.

He gave up reading books and papers, gave up listening to the radio and watching television, and just painted. It became a mania with him in his enforced seclusion — and it turned out that he was good. He had a kind of rugged, primitive quality, with just a lick of sophistication here and there which really made you stop and look.

Naturally, Nancy Reeves noticed the great improvement in Horace’s work and her spirit expanded with delight at the thought that she was drawing from the mahogany depths of Horace’s mind a flowering of his true personality and soul. There’s nothing a woman likes more than to make a man over. They’re great ones for improving on the original model.

Well, one week when Lancelot’s face had faded to a pale lilac, Horace came back from the Art School saying that the home study that week had to be “The Head of a Friend,” and Lancelot said, “Leave it to me, Horace. Self-portrait by Rubens. Self-portrait by Van Gogh—”

“It’s got to be a friend,” said Horace. “I don’t know no Rubens—”

“Quiet,” said Lancelot, and he began to ferret for a canvas in the pile Horace had bought for him. As he set it up and fixed a mirror so that he could see himself in it, he went on, “How’s tricks with the delicious Nancy?”

“Today,” said Horace, “I asked her to marry me. A couple more good fights and with my share of the wages snatch, I can fix up the furniture and a flat.”

“And what did she say?”

“She got to think it over. Something about it being a big decision, a reckonable step.”

“Irrevocable step.”

“That’s it. That’s what she said.”

“Means she don’t believe in divorce. If she says Yes, which she won’t, you’ll have her for life. When do you get your answer?”

“End of the week.”

“Twenty to one she says No.”

“You’ve lengthened the odds,” said Horace, wounded.

“Why not? Deep knowledge of women. When they want time, there’s doubt. Where there’s doubt with a woman, there’s no desire.”

“Why should she have doubts? What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re always asking that,” said Lancelot. “Someday somebody is going to be fool enough to tell you. Horace, face it — you’re no Romeo like me. I’ve got the face for it.”

“I love her,” said Horace. “That’s enough for any woman.”

Lancelot rolled his eyes. “That anyone could be so simple! A man who has only love to offer is in the ring with a glass jaw. Now then, let’s see.” He studied himself in the mirror. “I think I’ll paint it full face, kind of serious but with a little twinkle, man of the world, knowing, but full of heart.”

Well, by the end of the week the self-portrait was finished and Horace took it along to the school. He set it up on the easel and pretended to be putting a few finishing touches to it. When Nancy Reeves saw it she was enraptured.

“It ain’t,” said Horace, who had learned enough by now to play along with art talk to some extent, “quite finished. It needs a something — a point of... well, of something.”

“Yes, perhaps it does, Horace. But you’ll get it.”

She put a hand gently on his shoulder. They were in a secluded part of the room. “By the way, I’ve come to a decision about your proposal. It’s better for me to tell you here in public because it will keep it on a calm, sane, level basis — a perfect understanding between two adult people who considered carefully, very carefully, before making an important decision. I feel that by producing in you this wonderful flowering of talent that I’ve completed my role, that I have no more to give. Marriage after this would be an anticlimax, since my attachment to you is really an intellectual and artistic one, rather than any warm, passionate, romantic craving. I know that you will understand perfectly, dear Horace.”

“You mean, no go?” asked Horace.

Nancy nodded gently. “I’m sorry. But for a woman, love must be an immediate thing. There must be something about a man’s face that is instantly compelling. Now take this painting of yours — there’s a man’s face that is full of the promise of romance, of tenderness and yet manly strength. I’d like to meet your friend.”

For a moment Horace sat there, the great fire of his love just a handful of wet ashes. That Nancy Reeves could go for Lancelot just by seeing his portrait filled Horace with bitterness — a bitterness made even blacker by the fact that Horace had taken Lancelot’s bet at twenty to one, and now stood to lose £100.

“You mean,” said Horace, “that you could go for him?”

“He’s certainly got a magic. You’ve caught his compulsive personality and—”

“You should really see him,” said Horace jealously. “One-half of his face is as purple as a baboon’s — well, like this—”

In a fit of pique, Horace picked up his brush, squirted some purple paint onto his palette, and slapped the purple thickly over the right side of Lancelot’s face.

From behind him Nancy Reeves’s voice said breathlessly, “But Horace — that’s just the defiant abstract touch it needed! The unconventional, the startling, the emphatic denial of realism... Horace, it’s staggering! Pure genius. Don’t do a thing more to it — not another stroke!”

Horace stood up, looked at her, and said, “There’s a lot more I could do to it. But if you like it so much — keep him. Call it ‘A Painter’s Goodbye.’ ” He walked out and he never went back to Art School again.

A week later, while Horace was sitting dejectedly in Lancelot’s room watching him work at a painting, the local Detective-Inspector and a Constable walked in unexpectedly.

The Inspector nodded affably and said, “Hello, Horace. Evening, Lance. Forging old masters, eh?” He was in a good mood.

Horace gave him a cold stare, and Lancelot kept his hand up to his face to cover his pale lilac cheek.

The Inspector went on, “Funny — I never connected you two with that wages snatch. Bit out of your line. Thought it was strictly an uptown job.”

He leaned forward and looked at the painting on which Lancelot was working. “Nice. Nice brushwork. Fine handling of color. Bit of a dabbler myself. Bitten by the bug, you know. Great relaxation. Go to all the exhibitions. They had one at the Art School yesterday. Picked up this little masterpiece by Horace Head.”

The Constable stepped forward and brought from behind him Lancelot’s self-portrait with Horace’s purple-cheeked addition.

“Fine bit of work,” said the Inspector. “Sort of neo-impressionistic with traces of nonobjective emotionalism, calculated to shock the indifferent into attention. It did just that to me — so you can take your hand away from your cheek, Lance, and both of you come along with me.”

And along they went — for a three year stretch.

But it didn’t stop Lancelot painting. He did it in prison and he did it when he came out. Gets 500 guineas a canvas now, and his name is known all over the country.

But he’s not often in the Minerva Club. His wife — who was a Miss Nancy Reeves — doesn’t approve of the types there and rules the poor fellow with a rod of iron.

One of the unique encounters in the short and happy history of The Puzzle Club began, as so many interesting things do, in the most ordinary way.

That is to say, 7:30 of that Wednesday evening found Ellery in the foyer of Syres’s Park Avenue penthouse aerie pressing the bell button, having the door opened for him by a butler who had obviously been inspired by Jeeves, and being conducted into the grand-scale wood-leather-and-brass-stud living room that had just as obviously been inspired by the king-sized ranchos of the Southwest where Syres had made his millions.

As usual Ellery found the membership assembled — with the exception, also as usual, of Arkavy, the biochemist whose Nobel achievement took him to so many international symposiums that Ellery had not yet laid eyes on him; indeed, he had come to think of the great scientist as yet another fiction his fellow members had dreamed up for mischievous reasons of their own. There was Syres himself, their hulking and profoundly respected host — respected not for being a multimillionaire but for having founded the club; tall sardonic Darnell of the John L. Lewis eyebrows, the criminal lawyer who was known to the American Bar, not altogether affectionately, as “the rich man’s Clarence Darrow”; the psychiatrist, Dr. Vreeland, trim and peach-cheeked, whose professional reputation was as long as his stature was short; and wickedly blue-eyed little Emmy Wandermere, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry to — for once — unanimous approval.

It was one of the strictest rules of The Puzzle Club that no extraneous matters, not of politics or art or economics or world affairs, or even of juicy gossip, be allowed to intrude on the business at hand, which was simply (in a manner of speaking only, since that adverb was not to be found in the club’s motto) to challenge each member to solve a puzzle invented by the others, and then to repair to Charlot’s dinner table, Charlot being Syres’s chef, with a reputation as exalted in his field as that of the puzzlers in theirs. The puzzles were always in story form, told by the challengers seriatim, and they were as painstakingly planned for the battle of wits as if an empire depended on the outcome.

Tonight it was Ellery’s turn again, and after the briefest of amenities he took his place in the arena, which at The Puzzle Club meant sitting down in a hugely comfortable leather chair near the super-fireplace, with a bottle, a glass, and a little buffet of Charlot’s masterly canapés at hand and no further preliminaries whatever.

Darnell began (by prearrangement — the sequence of narrators was as carefully choreographed as a ballet).

“The puzzle this evening, Queen, is right down your alley—”

“Kindly omit the courtroom-type psychology, Counselor,” Ellery drawled, for he was feeling in extra-fine fettle this evening, “and get on with it.”

“—because it’s a cops-and-robbers story,” the lawyer went on, unperturbed, “except that in this case the cop is an undercover agent whose assignment it is to track down a dope supplier. The supplier is running a big wholesale illicit-drug operation; hundreds of pushers are getting their stuff from him, so it’s important to nail him.”

“The trouble is,” Dr. Vreeland said, feeling the knot of his tie (I wonder, Ellery thought, what his analyst made of that — it was one of the psychiatrist’s most irritating habits), “his identity is not known precisely.”

“By which I take it that it’s known imprecisely,” Ellery said. “The unknown of a known group.”

“Yes, a group of three.”

“The classic number.”

“It’s convenient, Queen.”

“That’s the chief reason it’s classic.”

“The three suspects,” oilman Syres broke in, unable to conceal a frown, for Ellery did not always comport himself with the decorum the founder thought their labors deserved, “all live in the same building. It’s a three-story house...”

“Someday,” Ellery said, peering into the future, “instead of a three-story house I shall make up a three-house story.”

“Mr. Queen!” and Emmy Wandermere let a giggle escape. “Please be serious, or you won’t be allowed to eat Charlot’s chef-d’oeuvre, which I understand is positively wild tonight.”

“I’ve lost track,” Syres grumped. “Where were we?”

“I beg everyone’s pardon,” Ellery said. “We have an undercover police officer who’s turned up three suspects, one of whom is the dope wholesaler, and all three live in a three-story house, I presume one to a floor. And these habitants are?”

“The man who occupies the ground floor,” the little poet replied, “and whose name is John A. Chandler — known in the neighborhood as Jac, from his initials — runs a modest one-man business, a radio-and-TV-repair shop, from his apartment.”

“The question is, of course,” Lawyer Darnell said, “whether the repair shop is just a front for the dope-supply operation.”

Ellery nodded. “And the occupant of the middle floor?”

“An insurance agent,” Dr. Vreeland said. “Character named Cutcliffe Kerry—”

“Named what?”

“Cutcliffe Kerry is what we decided on,” the psychiatrist said firmly, “and if you don’t care for it that’s your problem, Queen, because Cutcliffe Kerry he remains.”

“Very well,” Ellery said, “but I think I detect the aroma of fresh herring. Or am I being double-whammied? In any event, Cutcliffe Kerry sells insurance, or tries to, which means he gets to see a great many people. So the insurance thing could be a cover. And the top floor?”

“Is rented by a fellow named Fletcher, Benjamin Fletcher,” Syres said. “Fletcher is a salesman, too, but of an entirely different sort. He sells vacuum cleaners.”

“Door to door,” Ellery said. “Possible cover too. All right, Jac Chandler, radio-TV repairman; Cutcliffe Kerry, insurance agent; Ben Fletcher, vacuum-cleaner salesman; and one of them is the bad guy. What happens, Mr. Syres?”

“The undercover man has been watching the building and — isn’t the word tailing? — the three men, according to his reports to his superior at police headquarters.”

“And just after he finds out who the drug supplier is,” Darnell said mournfully, “but before he can come up with the hard evidence, he’s murdered.”

“As I suspected,” Ellery said, shaking his head. “Earning the poor fellow a departmental citation and the traditional six feet of sod. He was murdered by the dope boy, of course.”

“Of course.”

“To shut him up.”

“What else?”

“Which means he hadn’t yet reported the name of the dope supplier.”

“Well, not exactly, Mr. Queen.” Emmy Wandermere leaned forward to accept the flame of Dr. Vreeland’s gold lighter, then leaned back puffing like The Little Engine That Could on a steep grade. She was trying to curb her nicotine-and-tar intake, so she was currently smoking cigarettes made of processed lettuce. “The undercover man hadn’t reported the drug supplier’s name, true, but in the very last report before his murder he did mention a clue.”

“What kind of clue?”

“He referred to the supplier — his subsequent killer — as, and this is an exact quote, Mr. Queen, ‘the odd man of the three.’ ”

Ellery blinked.

“Your mission, Mr. Queen, if you accept it — and you’d better, or be kicked out of the club,” said Darnell in his most doom-ridden courtroom tones, “is to detect the guilty man among Chandler, Kerry, and Fletcher — the one of them who’s been selling the stuff in wholesale lots and who murdered our brave lad of the law.”

“The odd man of the three, hm?”

Ellery sat arranging his thoughts. As at all such critical stages of the game, by protocol, the strictest silence was maintained.

Finally Ellery said, “Where and how did the murder of the undercover agent take place?”

Darnell waved his manicured hand, “Frankly, Queen, we debated whether to make up a complicated background for the crime. In the end we decided it wouldn’t be fair, because the murder itself has nothing to do with the puzzle except that it took place. The details are irrelevant and immaterial.”

“Except, of course, to the victim, but that’s usually left out.” Having discharged himself of this philosophical gripe, Ellery resumed his seat, as it were, on his train of thought. “I suppose the premises were searched from roof to cellar, inside and out, by the police after the murder of their buddy?”

“You know it,” Syres said.

“I suppose, too, that no narcotics, amphetamines, barbiturates, et cetera ad nauseam, no cutting equipment, no dope paraphernalia of any kind, were found anywhere in the building?”

“Not a trace,” Dr. Vreeland said. “The guilty man disposed of it all before the police got there.”

“Did one of the men have a record?”

Miss Wandermere smiled. “Nyet.”

“Was one of them a married man and were the other two bachelors?”

“No.”

“Was it the other way round? One of them a bachelor and two married?”

“I admire the way you wriggle, Mr. Queen. The answer is still no.”

“The odd man of the three.” Ellery mused again. “Well, I see we’ll have to be lexical. By the commonest definition, odd means strange, unusual, peculiar. Was there anything strange, unusual, or peculiar in, say, the appearance of Chandler or Kerry or Fletcher?”

Dr. Vreeland, with relish: “Not a thing.”

“In a mannerism? Behavior? Speech? Gait? That sort of thing?”

Syres: “All ordinary as hell, Queen.”

“In background?”

Darnell, through a grin: “Ditto.”

“There was nothing bizarre or freakish about one of them?”

“Nothing, friend,” Emmy Wandermere murmured.

Ellery grasped his nose more like an enemy.

“Was one of them touched in the head?” he asked suddenly. “Odd in the mental sense?”

“There,” the psychiatrist said, “you tread on muddy ground, Queen. Any antisocial behavior, as in the case of habitual criminals, might of course be so characterized. However, for purposes of our story the answer is no. All three men were normal — whatever that means.”

Ellery nodded fretfully. “I could go on and on naming categories of peculiarity, but let me save us all from endangering Charlot’s peace of mind. Did the undercover man use the word odd to connote peculiar?”

The little poet looked around and received assents invisible to the Queen eye. “He did not.”

“Then that’s that. Oh, one thing. Was the report in which he fingered the supplier as being the odd man written or oral?”

“Now what kind of question is that?” the oil king demanded. “What could that have to do with anything?”

“Possibly a great deal, Mr. Syres. If it had been an oral report, there would be no way of knowing whether his word odd began with a capital O or a small o. Assume that he’d meant it to be capital O-d-d. Then Odd man might have referred to a member of the I.O.O.F., the fraternal order — the Odd Fellows. That might certainly distinguish your man from the other two.”

“It was a written report,” Darnell said hastily, “and the o of odd was a small letter.”

Everyone looked relieved. It was evident that the makers of this particular puzzle had failed to consider the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in their scheming.

“There are other odd possibilities — if you’ll forgive the pun — such as odd in the golf meaning, which is one stroke more than your opponent has played. But I won’t waste any more time on esoterica. Your undercover man meant odd in the sense of not matching, didn’t he? Of being left over?”

“Explain that, please,” Dr. Vreeland said.

“In the sense that two of the three suspects had something in common, something the third man didn’t share with them — thus making the third man ‘the odd man’ and consequently the dope supplier and murderer. Isn’t that the kind of thing your undercover agent meant by odd man?”

The psychiatrist looked cautious. “I think we may fairly say yes to that.”

“Thank you very much,” Ellery said. “Which brings me to a fascinating question: How clever are you people being? Run-of-the-game clever or clever-clever?”

“I don’t think,” Miss Wandermere said, “we quite follow. What do you mean exactly, Mr. Queen?”

“Did you intend to give me a choice of solutions? The reason I ask is that I see not one possible answer, but three.”

“Three!” Syres shook his massive head. “We had enough trouble deciding on one.”

“I for one,” Counselor Darnell stated stiffishly, “should like to hear a for-instance.”

“All right, I’ll give you one solution I doubt you had in mind, since it’s so obvious.”

“You know, Queen, you have a sadistic streak in you?” barked Dr. Vreeland. “Obvious! Which solution is obvious?”

“Why, Doctor. Take the names of two of your suspects, John A. — Jac — Chandler and Benjamin Fletcher. Oddly enough — there I go again! — those surnames have two points of similarity. ‘Chandler’ and ‘Fletcher’ both end in ‘er’ and both contain eight letters. Cutcliffe Kerry’s surname differs in both respects — no ‘er’ ending and only five letters — so Kerry becomes the odd surname of the trio. In this solution, then, Kerry the insurance man is the supplier-killer.”

“I’ll be damned,” Syres exclaimed. “How did we miss that?”

“Very simply,” Miss Wandermere said. “We didn’t see it.”

“Never mind that,” Darnell snapped. “The fact is it happened. Queen, you said you have three solutions. What’s another?”

“Give me a clue to the solution you people had in mind, since there are more than one. Some key word that indicates the drift but doesn’t give the game away. One word can do it.”

Syres, Darnell, and Dr. Vreeland jumped up and surrounded Emmy Wandermere. From the looped figures, the cocked heads, and the murderous whispers they might have been the losing team in an offensive huddle with six seconds left to play. Finally, the men resumed their seats, nudging one another.

Said little Miss Wandermere: “You asked for a clue, Mr. Queen. The clue is: clue.”

Ellery threw his head back and roared. “Right! Very clever, considering who I am and that I’m the solver of the evening.

“You hurled my specialized knowledge in my teeth, calculating that I’d be so close to it I wouldn’t see it. Sony! Two of the surnames you invented,” Ellery said with satisfaction, “are of famous detective-story writers. Chandler — in this case Raymond Chandler — was the widely acclaimed creator of Philip Marlowe. Joseph Smith Fletcher — J. S. Fletcher — produced more detective fiction than any other writer except Edgar Wallace, or so it’s said: Fletcher’s The Middle Temple Murder was publicly praised by no lesser mystery fan than the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. On the other hand, if there’s ever been a famous detective-story writer named Cutcliffe Kerry, his fame has failed to reach me. So your Mr. Kerry again becomes the odd man of the trio and the answer to the problem. Wasn’t that your solution, Miss Wandermere and gentlemen?”

They said yes in varying tones of chagrin.

Ordinarily, at this point in the evening’s proceedings, the company would have risen from their chairs and made for Syres’s magnificently gussied-up cookhouse of a dining room. But tonight no one stirred a toe, not even at the promise of the manna simmering on Charlot’s hob. Instead, Dr. Vreeland uttered a small, inquiring cough.

“You, ah, mentioned a third solution, Queen. Although I must confess—”

“Before you pronounce your mea culpa, Doctor,” Ellery said with a smile, “may I? I’ve given you people your solution. I’ve even thrown in another for good measure. Turnabout? I now challenge you. What’s the third solution?”...

Ten minutes later Ellery showed them mercy — really, he said sorrowfully, more in the interest of preserving Charlot’s chancy good will than out of natural goodness of heart.

“John A. Chandler, Cutcliffe Kerry, Benjamin Fletcher. Chandler, Kerry, and Fletcher. What do two of these have in common besides what’s already been discussed? Why, they derive from trades or occupations.”

“Chandler.” The lawyer, Darnell, looked around at the others, startled. “You know, that’s true!”

“Yes, a ship chandler deals in specified goods or equipment. If you go farther back in time you find that a chandler was someone who made or sold candles or, as in very early England, supervised the candle requirements of a household. So that’s one trade.”

“Is there another in the remaining two surnames?”

“Yes, the name Fletcher. A fletcher was — and technically still is — a maker of arrows, or a dealer in same; in the Middle Ages, by extension, although this was a rare meaning, the word was sometimes used to denote an archer. In either event, another trade or occupation.

“But the only etymological origin I’ve ever heard ascribed to the name Kerry is County Kerry, from which the Kerry blue terrier derives. And that’s not a trade, it’s a place. So with the names Chandler and Fletcher going back to occupations, and Kerry to Irish geography, your Mr. Kerry becomes once again the unpaired meaning, the odd man — a third answer to your problem.”

And Ellery rose and offered his arm gallantly to Miss Wandermere.

The poetess took it with a little shake. And as they led the way to the feast she whispered, “You know what you are, Ellery Queen? You’re an intellectual pack rat!”

When I arrived in the office Tuesday morning Cord’s wife was waiting for me. She didn’t rise from the chair. I’d heard the news on the car radio and her grief didn’t surprise me but it was mitigated by anger: she was in a rage.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cord. I just heard.”

Her lips kept working and she blinked at me but she held her tongue; perhaps she was afraid of what might come out. Her natural appearance was drab but normally she managed attractive contrivances. This morning there was no makeup. She sat with her shoulders rolled forward and her arms folded as if she had a severe abdominal pain. Now she snarled — a visible exposing of teeth — and afterward she remembered herself, tried an apologetic smile, gathered herself with an obvious effort of will. Her wrath had rendered her quite inarticulate.

I tried to help. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. I didn’t expect—”

“I want you to help me, Bill. I want you to go up there.”

Her voice had lost its customary music; it was like a smoker’s morning voice — a deep hangover baritone. I stood at my desk unwilling to sit down. “Up where?”

“That place in Colorado. Whatever it’s called.”

“You’d like me to bring the body back? Of course.”

“Bill, I want you to find out who was responsible.” She spoke slowly with effort; the words fell from her with equal weight, like bricks. She said again, clenching a fist, “Responsible.”

“The radio said it was an accident.”

She watched me with her injured eyes. It rattled me. I said lamely, “My work’s industrial security, Mrs. Cord. You seem to be asking me to investigate a homicide. It’s a little out of my—”

“You don’t like — you didn’t like Charlie.”

“Mrs. Cord, I—”

“Never mind. I didn’t like him very much myself. But he was all I had.”

“You need rest,” I told her. I sat down behind the desk. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“He gave me a pill. I’ll take it when I go home. Bill, you’re the only one I trust to do this.”

What a sad thing for her to say, I thought. I hardly knew her. She was the wife — the widow — of an acquaintance who’d been an executive in a neighboring department; I hadn’t known Charlie Cord very well. She was right — I hadn’t liked him, and therefore I’d avoided him when I could. Yet she’d come to me. Hadn’t they any friends?

She looked down and saw her fist and unclenched it slowly, studying the fingers as if they were unfamiliar objects. She was waiting for me to speak; she almost cringed. I said, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me to do.”

“Bill, nobody here cares about Charlie. Good riddance — that’s what they’ll be thinking. You know the gossip of course.”

“Gossip?”

“Why Charlie married me. I’ve never been what you could call a glamour girl. But my father happens to be a director of the company with sixteen percent of the stock. When Charlie married me, he married sixteen percent of Schiefflin Aerospace and married himself into a forty-thousand-a-year job in the sales and marketing division. Charlie made his way well up in the world from the football team of a second-rate state university. That’s what most everybody thinks of Charlie. That’s all they ever think of him.”

“Mrs. Cord, you’re upset and that’s understandable, but—”

She went on, not allowing me to interrupt further. “He wasn’t likeable. He was a boor. He was a hearty backslapper, he was never sincere enough, he told outhouse jokes badly and too loudly. He affected garish jackets and ridiculous cars. He had a fetish for big-game hunting. But he did a good job for this company, Bill. People tend to ignore that — deliberately I’m sure, because no one likes to give credit to a person as obnoxious as Charlie. As Charlie was.” Then her voice cracked. “He made my life miserable. Intolerable. But he was all I had. Can you understand that?”

“Sure.” I tried to look reassuring.

“Bill, I want you to be the instrument of my revenge.”

“Revenge? Wait a minute now, Mrs. Cord.”

“He was mine and I was his.”

“But apparently it was simply an accident.”

“Accident? Maybe. He was shot twice.” She paused as if to challenge me to contradict her. Then she said, “I’ve talked to my father. The company will voucher your expenses. There’s a plane to Denver at half-past eleven.” She stood up. “Find out how he was killed. And why. And who did it.”

My name is Karen Anders I’m nine years old I’m little and dark and nearsighted I live with Max and Libby I have no friends

Max is my brother he’s 20 years older than me he has close-together eyes and a worried look we Anders always were a homely lot he has asthma too

Libby used to be pretty but she’s put on weight she looks like a wrestler in her new bikini I wish I had a bikini Lib won’t buy me one I guess I’d stop being so scared of going in the water if I had a yellow bikini to wear on the beach

Once when I was seven my father and mother went shopping they never came home there was a holdup at the bank like on television Lib said this crazy guy just mowed them down

Before they went out I knew I had to say goodbye I said it slow and clear goodbye Mommy first then goodbye Daddy but no one took any notice of it much seeing they were going shopping anyway but afterwards Max remembered he said to Libby the way that kid said goodbye you’d think she knew

Libby said for gosh sakes how could she know be reasonable honey but I guess this means we’re responsible for her now have you thought of that

She didn’t sound exactly pleased about it

Well after I came to live with Max and Libby I knew I had to say goodbye to Lib’s brother Dick he was playing cards with them in the living room and when Lib yelled Karen get to bed can’t you I went to him and stood as straight as I could with my hands clasped loose in front like Miss Jones tells us to when we have choir in school

I said very slow and clear well goodbye Dick and Libby gave me a kind of funny look

Dick didn’t look up from his cards he said goodnight kid

Next evening before any of us saw him again he was dead of a disease called peritonitis it explodes in your stomach and busts it full of holes

Lib said Max did you hear how she said goodbye to Dick and Max started wheezing and gasping and carrying on he said I told you there was something didn’t I it’s weird that’s what it is it scares me sick who’ll she say goodbye to next I’d like to know and Lib said there honey there baby try to calm yourself

I came out from behind the door where I was listening I said don’t worry Max you’ll be okay

His face was blotchy and his mouth was blue he said in a scratchy whisper how do you know.

What a dumb question as though I’d tell him even if I did know

Libby bent down and pushed her face close to mine I could smell her breath cigarettes and bourbon and garlic salad

She said only it came out like a hiss don’t you ever say goodbye to anyone again don’t you ever say it

The trouble is I can’t help saying goodbye

After that things went okay for a while and I thought maybe they’d forgotten all about it but Libby still wouldn’t buy me a new bikini

Then one day in school I knew I had to say goodbye to Kimberley and Charlene and Brett and Susie

Well I clasped my hands in front of me and I said it to each of them slow and careful one by one

Miss Jones said goodness Karen why so solemn dear and I said well you see they’re going to die

She said Karen you’re a cruel wicked child you shouldn’t say things like that it isn’t funny see how you made poor little Susie cry and she said come Susie dear get in the car you’ll soon be home and then you’ll be all right

So Susie dried her tears and ran after Kimberley and Charlene and Brett and climbed in the car right next to Charlene’s mom because Charlene’s mom was doing the car pool that week

And that was the last we saw of any of them because the car skidded off the road to Mountain Heights and rolled all the way down to the valley before it caught fire.

There was no school next day it was the funeral we sang songs and scattered flowers on the graves

Nobody wanted to stand next to me

When it was over Miss Jones came along to see Libby I said good evening and she said it back but her eyes slipped away from me and she breathed kind of fast then Libby sent me out to play

Well when Miss Jones had gone Libby called me back she said didn’t I tell you never never never to say goodbye to anyone again

She grabbed hold of me and her eyes were kind of burning she twisted my arm it hurt I screamed don’t please don’t but she went on twisting and twisting so I said if you don’t let go I’ll say goodbye to Max

It was the only way I could think of to make her stop

She did stop but she kept hanging on to my arm she said oh god you mean you can make it happen you can make them die

Well of course I can’t but I wasn’t going to tell her that in case she hurt me again so I said yes I can

She let go of me I fell hard on my back she said are you okay did I hurt you Karen honey I said yes and you better not do it again and she said I was only kidding I didn’t mean it

So then I knew that she was scared of me I said I want a bikini to wear on the beach a yellow one because yellow’s my favorite color

She said well honey you know we have to be careful and I said do you want me to say goodbye to Max or not

She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes and stood quite still for a while and I said what are you doing and she said thinking

Then all of a sudden she opened her eyes and grinned she said hey I know we’ll go to the beach tomorrow we’ll take our lunch I said does that mean I get my new bikini and she said yes your bikini and anything else you want

So yesterday afternoon we bought the bikini and early this morning Lib went into the kitchen and fixed up the picnic fried chicken and orange salad and chocolate cake and the special doughnuts she makes for company she said Karen are you sure it’s all the way you want it and I said sure everything looks just great and I won’t be so scared of the waves now I have my bikini and Libby laughed she put the lunch basket into the car she has strong brown arms she said no I guess you won’t

Then I went up to my room and put on my bikini it fitted just right I went to look in the glass I looked and looked then I clasped my hands in front I felt kind of funny I said slow and clear goodbye Karen goodbye Karen goodbye goodbye

The day was sunny, with an August warmth that hung in the air like an unseen cloud. It was the sort of day when children’s voices carried far in the muggy atmosphere, when the slamming of a screen door or the barking of a dog could be heard throughout the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Street.

Out back, beyond the trees that marked the boundary of developed land, a group of boys barely into their teens stood watching while one of them fired a .22 rifle at a row of beer cans they had set up on a log. Presently the mother of the boy with the rifle appeared at the line of trees and shouted for him to stop. He did so, reluctantly, and the other youths drifted away. The boy with the rifle walked slowly back to his mother, his head hanging.

The afternoon settled into a routine of humid stillness, broken only by the rumble of an occasional delivery truck or the crying of a baby. It was nearly an hour later that the screaming started in a house on the next street, beyond the trees and across the open field.

Though the houses were some distance away, the screaming was heard quite clearly on Maple Street.

It was said of J. C. Cordell that he owned half of the world — oil, electronics, airlines, shipping, hotels, you name it. In an article about him Cordell was quoted as saying that he had the only three things in the world that could matter to any man. “I have my son, my health, and the wealth and power to live and do exactly as I please,” he told his interviewer.

On a warm lovely summer day J. C. Cordell was deprived of one of those assets. His son lay dead in a small studio apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, with three bullet holes in his head. “The police suspect gangland revenge,” an early radio report informed the world.

It revived an old waterfront story — old by at least two years. Special guards in the employ of J. C. Cordell had trapped some men trying to steal a cargo of expensive watch mechanisms from the hold of one of Cordell’s ships. The guards had opened fire and one of the thieves was killed. The dead man turned out to be Mike Roberts, son of the reputed czar of the waterfront underworld, Reno Roberts. The word was out at the time that Reno Roberts would even that score with J. C. Cordell, but two years had gone by without reprisals, and Roberts’ threats were forgotten.

Now J. C.’s only child, Paul Cordell, was dead, and the waterfront and the Village were alive with police trying to pin a Murder One rap on Reno Roberts and his men.

It was almost overlooked in the heat of that climate that a second man had died in the Village studio, also of gunshot wounds. He was the artist who lived there. Richard Sheridan was considered to have been an innocent and unfortunate bystander. It turned out that J. C. Cordell indulged himself in the buying of paintings and sculpture. He had come across the work of Richard Sheridan in a Madison Avenue gallery, been impressed, and had commissioned Sheridan to paint a portrait of his son.

Paul Cordell had gone to Sheridan’s studio in the Village for a series of sittings. Ever since the shooting of Reno Roberts’ son on the waterfront and Roberts’ threats, Paul Cordell had been accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard.

One had to assume that the tensions had relaxed after two years. The bodyguard, a private eye named Jake Martin, had grown fat and careless on his assignment. He had waited outside dozens of places where Paul was gambling or involved in one kind of party or another. Jake Martin’s life was almost entirely made up of waiting for Paul Cordell to satisfy his various appetites.

On that particular summer day Paul had told Martin that his sitting for Sheridan would last a couple of hours. Certain that no one had followed them to Sheridan’s studio, Martin had gone across the street to a bar to have himself a few beers. It was a hot day. While Martin was away from his post a killer had struck, wasting Paul Cordell and Richard Sheridan, the innocent bystander.

Telephone lines were busy with the story. J. C. Cordell was in touch with the Mayor, the Waterfront Commission, the F.B.I. Reno Roberts was going to have to pay for this. The Mayor, in turn, was in touch with the Police Commissioner. Unless a cap was put on this case, fast, bloody waterfront violence was facing them. A girl who had been with Paul Cordell only the night before called her friends. My God, did you hear what happened to Paul Cordell? And the news had spread like wildfire...

John Jericho was not in the habit of listening to the radio. He didn’t own a television set. He had been working with a kind of burning concentration on a painting in his studio in Jefferson Mews at the exact moment when Paul Cordell and Richard Sheridan had been wiped out only a few houses down the block. When Jericho, six feet four inches of solid muscle, his red hair and red beard giving him the look of an old Viking warrior, got absorbed in a painting, the sky could have fallen in on Chicken Little and he wouldn’t have been remotely aware of it.

Exhausted after the last brilliant strokes on his canvas, Jericho had thrown himself down on his bed and slept. An unfamiliar creak in a floorboard would have awakened him instantly. He heard the telephone ring, but it was a nuisance, so he ignored it. But the caller was persistent, dialing the number every five minutes over a long stretch of time. Finally, outraged, Jericho reached for the instrument on his bedside table and shouted an angry hello.

“Mr. Jericho?” It was an unsteady female voice. “This is Amanda Kent.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Amanda.” Jericho glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s after one o’clock in the morning!”

“Did you hear what happened to Rick Sheridan?” the girl asked.

It was, perhaps, a notable question because all the people who had made all the phone calls during the evening had always asked: “What happened to Paul Cordell?”

Amanda Kent, Jericho had heard, had been desperately in love with Rick Sheridan. To her Paul Cordell was a nobody, a zero.

I went down to see Superintendent Minter just before the election began. He heard I was going to participate in the fray with a visible sneer on his homely face. “Politics!” he said. “Good Lord! At your time of life! Well, well, well! I’ve known a lot of fellows who took up that game, but nobody that ever made it pay, except Nippy the Nose, who used to travel the country and burgle the candidates’ rooms when they were out addressing meetings.

“You know a lot about the hooks and the getabits of life, and you know that they’re all specialists. If a man’s a lob crawler—”

“What’s a lob crawler? I’ve forgotten.”

The Superintendent shook his head sadly. “You’re forgetting everything,” he said. “I suppose it’s these politics. A lob crawler’s a man who goes into a little shop on his hands and knees, passes round the counter, and pinches the till. There’s not much of it nowadays, and anyway in these bad times there’s nothing in the till to pinch.

“But once a lob crawler, always a lob crawler. If you go on the whizz — and I don’t suppose you want me to tell you that whizzing is pocket-picking — you spend your life on the whizz. If you’re a burglar, you’re always a burglar. I’ve never yet met a burglar who was also a con man.

“That’s the criminal’s trouble — he’s got no originality, and thank the Lord for it! If they didn’t catch themselves, we’d never catch ’em. Nippy was an exception. He’d try anything once. If you went into the Record Office at Scotland Yard and turned up his M.O. card, which means—”

“I know what a Modus Operandi card is,” I said.

The Superintendent nodded his head approvingly.

“That’s right. Don’t let these politics put business out of your mind. As I say, if you turned up his M.O. card you’d have a shock. He’s been convicted of larceny, burglary, obtaining money by a trick, pocket-picking, luggage pinching — everything except blackmail. It’s a funny thing that none of the regulars will ever admit they’ve committed blackmail, and there’s not one of them that wouldn’t if he had the chance.

“I used to know Nippy — in fact, I got two of his convictions. Nothing upsets a police officer more than these general practitioners, because we are always looking for specialists. We know there are about six classes of burglars. There’s a class that never attempts to break into a live shop, by which I mean a shop where people are living in the rooms upstairs; and there’s a class that never goes into a dead joint, which, you will remember, is a lock-up shop with nobody on the premises.

“And naturally, when we get a burglary with any peculiar features, we go through the M.O. cards and pick out a dozen men who are likely to have done the job, and after we’ve sorted ’em out and found which of ’em are in stir and which of ’em are out of the neighborhood, we’ll pull in the remainder one by one and give them the once-over.

“So that when there was a real big bust in Brockley, and we went over the M.O. cards, we never dreamed of looking for Nippy, because he hadn’t done that sort of thing before; and we wouldn’t have found him, but we got the office from a fence in Islington that Nippy had tried to sell him a diamond brooch. When you get a squeak from a fence it’s because he has offered too low a price for the stolen property, and the thief has taken it elsewhere.

“Nippy got a stretch, and the next time he came into our hands it was for something altogether different — trying to persuade a Manchester cotton man to buy a one-tenth share in a Mexican oil field. Nippy would have got away with the loot, but unfortunately he knew nothing about geography, and when he said that Mexico was in South Africa the cotton man got a little suspicious and looked up the map.

“Nippy was a nice fellow, always affable, generally well dressed, and a great favorite with the ladies. When I say ‘ladies’ I mean anybody that wore stockings and used lipstick.

“Nippy used to do a bit of nosing, too, but I didn’t know he was making a regular business of it. Now, a nose is a very useful fellow. Without a nose the police wouldn’t be able to find half the criminals that come through their hands. I suppose I’m being vulgar and ought to call them police informers, but ‘nose’ has always been good enough for me, because, naturally, I’m a man without any refinement.

“I happened to be walking down Piccadilly towards Hyde Park Corner one day when I saw Nippy. He tipped his hat and was moving on when I claimed him. ‘Good morning, Sooper.’ he said. ‘I’m just on me way to the office. I’m going straight now. I’m an agent, you see, and everything’s warm and dry. I’ve opened a little business in Wardour Street.’ he said.

“Nippy had opened lots of businesses, mostly with a chisel and a three-piece jimmy, but I gathered that he had opened this one by paying the rent in advance. All criminals tell you they’re going straight. Usually they’re going straight from one prison to another. There are exceptions, but I’ve never heard of ’em.

“We had a few minutes’ conversation. He told me where his office was, and I promised to look him up. He was so happy about me calling that I thought he was lying, but when I dropped in a few days afterwards I found that he had a room on the third floor.

“I expected to find that he was the managing director of the Mountains in the Moon Exploration Company, or else the secretary of a new invention for getting gold out of the sea. It was a bit surprising to find his real name, Norman Ignatius Percival Philipson Young, on the glass panel. It was now that I found what he was agent for. He was standing in with the very fence who had given him away on his last conviction, and I suspected he was doing the same job.

“Anyway, he was full of information about various people, and he gave me a tip that afternoon to prove his — what’s the phrase? yes, bona fides — that’s French, isn’t it? I made a pretty good capture — a man called Juggy Jones, who did a lot of automobile pinching, and was in with a big crowd up at Shadwell, who took the cars, repaired them, and shipped them off to India. There’s many a grand family car running round Madras, loaded to the waterline with little Eurasians.

“Anyway, Juggy was a very sensible man, and if ever a thief could be described as intelligent, Juggy was that man. He didn’t talk much.

“He was a big fellow, about six feet two, with a face as cheerful as the ace of spades. But if he didn’t say much he did a lot of thinking.

“I took him out of a café, where he was having dinner with a lady friend, and we walked down to the station together and I charged him.

“He said nothing, but when he came up before the magistrate and heard the evidence and was committed for trial, he asked me to see him in his cell.

“ ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised, Sooper,’ he said, ‘if I know the name of the man who shopped me.’

“ ‘And I shouldn’t be surprised either, Juggy.’ I said, ‘because you’ve known me for years.’

“But he shook his head and said nothing else. Somebody got at the witnesses for the Crown, and when they went into the box at the Old Bailey they gave the sort of evidence that wouldn’t bring about a conviction, and it looked as if he was going to get an acquittal and something out of the poor box to compensate him for his wounded feelings, when the prosecuting counsel took a pretty strong line with one witness who, after he had changed his evidence three times, said just enough to convict Juggy on the count.

“He went down for a carpet. Am I being vulgar? Let me say he went down for six months, and a very lucky man he was. If we could have convicted him on the other indictments he’d have taken a dose of penal servitude.

“Naturally Nippy didn’t appear in court, and I wondered what he was getting out of it.

“It was a long time afterwards that I found out there was a quarrel between the two rings as to who the stuff should be shipped to, and Nippy had been put in to make the killing. Nippy gave me one of two bits of information which were useful, but you could see that he was just acting for the fence. I made a few inquiries up Islington way, and I found out that whenever the police went to him to find out about stolen property, he referred them to the gentleman in Wardour Street who’d be able to tell them something.

“Now a thief who’s earning a regular living has never got enough money, and I was pretty certain Nippy was doing something on the side, because he began to have his old prosperous look and started attending the races. As a matter of fact, though I didn’t know it, he was working up a connection with a gang of luggage thieves. I found this out when he came on to my manor — into my division, I mean, i found him at a railway station acting in a suspicious manner, and I could have pinched him but, being naturally very kind-hearted with all criminals if I haven’t enough evidence to get a conviction, I just warned him. Nippy was very hurt.

“ ‘Why, Sooper,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a good job. I’m warm and dry up in Wardour Street. Why should I lower myself to go back to my old sinful life? I haven’t had a drink for three months, and I never pass the Old Bailey without taking off me hat to it.’

“ ‘There are two ways of being warm and dry, Nippy,’ I said. ‘One is to be honest, and the other is to get to Dartmoor, where I understand there is a fine system of central heating.’

“No, no telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous,” said Miss Emmeline Fosdyke decisively; and the young welfare worker, only recently qualified, and working for the first time in this Sheltered Housing Unit for the Elderly, blinked up from the form she was filling in.

“No telephone? But, Miss Fosdyke, in your — I mean, with your — well, your arthritis, and not being able to get about and everything... You’re on our House-Bound list, you know that, don’t you? As a House-Bound Pensioner, you’re entitled — well, I mean, it’s a necessity, isn’t it, a telephone? It’s your link with the outside world!”

This last sentence, a verbatim quote from her just-completed Geriatric Course, made Valerie Coombe feel a little more confident. She went on, “You must have a telephone, Miss Fosdyke! It’s your right! And if it’s the cost you’re worrying about, then do please set your mind at rest. Our Department — anyone over sixty-five and in need—”

“I’m not in need,” asserted Miss Fosdyke woodenly. “Not of a telephone, anyway.”

There had been nothing in the Geriatric Course to prepare Valerie for this. She glanced round the pin-new Sheltered Housing flatlet for inspiration, but she saw none. It’s bland, purpose-built contours were as empty of ideas as was the incomplete form in front of her. “Telephone Allowance. In Cases of Maximum Need...”

It was a case of maximum need, all right. Valerie took another quick look at the papers in her file.

Fosdyke, Emmeline J. Retired dressmaker, unmarried. No relatives. One hundred percent disability: arthritis, diabetes, cardiovascular degeneration, motor-neurone dysfunction.

The case notes made it all so clear. Valerie glanced up from the precise, streamlined data and was once again confronted with a person — an actual, quirky, incomprehensible person, a creature whose eyes, sunk in helpless folds of withered skin, yet glittered with some impenetrable secret defiance.

Why couldn’t old sick people just be old and sick, the poor girl wondered despairingly. Why did they have to be so many other things as well, things for which there was no space allotted on the form, and which just didn’t fit in anywhere?

“But suppose you were ill, Miss Fosdyke?” Valerie hazarded, her eyes fixed on all that list of incapacitating disabilities. “Suppose—?”

“Well, of course I’m ill!” snapped back Miss Fosdyke. “I’ve been ill for years, and I’ll get iller. Old people do. Why do I have to have a telephone as well?”

Valerie’s brain raked desperately through the course notes of only a few months ago. Dangers to Watch Out For in Geriatric Practice. Isolation. Mental Confusion. Hypothermia. Lying dead for days until the milkman happens to notice the half-dozen unclaimed bottles...

An easy job, they’d told her back in the office — an easy job for Valerie’s first solo assignment. Simply going from door to door in the Sheltered Housing block, and arranging for a free telephone for those who qualified, either by age or disability or both. She’d pictured to herself the gratitude in the watery old eyes as she broke the good news, imagined the mumbling but effusive expressions of gratitude.

Why couldn’t Miss Fosdyke be like that? Eighty-seven and helpless — why the hell couldn’t she?

“Miss Fosdyke, you must have a telephone!” Valerie repeated, a note of desperation creeping into her voice as she launched into these unknown waters beyond the cosy boundaries of the Geriatric Course. “Surely you can see that you must? I mean, in your situation — suppose you needed a doctor?”

“Nobody of my age needs a doctor,” Miss Fosdyke retorted crisply. “Look at my case notes there, you can see for yourself the things I’ve got. Incurable, all of them. There’s not a doctor in the world who can cure a single one of them, so why should I have to be bothered with a doctor who can’t?”

Obstinate. Difficult. Blind to their own interests. Naturally, the course had dealt with these attributes of the aging process, but in such bland, nonjudgmental terms that when you finally came upon the real thing, it was only just recognizable.

But recognizable, nevertheless. Be friendly but firm, and don’t become involved in argument. Smilingly, Valerie put Miss Fosdyke down for a free telephone, and left the flat, all optimism and bright words.

“Hope you’ll soon be feeling better, Miss Fosdyke,” she called cheerfully as she made her way out, and then on her long lithe young legs she almost ran down the corridor in order not to hear the old thing’s riposte: “Better? Don’t be silly, dear, I’ll be feeling worse. I’ll go on feeling worse until I’m dead. Everyone does at my age. Don’t they teach you anything but lies at that training place of yours?”

“Darling, I’d just love to be able to stay. You know I would. I’m just as disappointed as you are. But—”

But.

But, but, but. What would it be this time, Stella wondered bitterly. Whatever it was, she’d have heard it before, that was certain. After five years of going around with a married man, a girl knows his repertoire by heart.

But I have to help Wendy with the weekend shopping. But the man is coming to fix the hot-water boiler. But I have to fetch Carol from the Brownies. But Simon is away from school with a temperature. But I have to meet Aunt Esmé at the airport.

This last had been the funniest “but” of all; and though in fact it had happened quite near the beginning of her relationship with Gerald, it still made Stella laugh, and grind her teeth, when she thought about it. For it had come so soon after that golden September day when, lying in the long grass by the river outside Marlowe, Gerald had been confiding in her, as married men will, about his loneliness. Even as a child he’d been lonely, he told her.

“No brothers and sisters. Not even any uncles or aunts,” he’d explained sadly. “I used to long sometimes for one of those big, close, quarrelsome families, all weddings and funerals and eating roast chicken and bread sauce at each other’s tables, and running down each other’s in-laws. I yearned for a group larger than just myself and my two parents — I wanted my own tribe, and that wonderful feeling of belonging. Particularly at Christmas I used to feel...”

Stella couldn’t remember, at this distance of time, what it was that Gerald used to feel at Christmas — something about tangerines, and somebody else’s grandfather out in the snow sawing apple logs — or something; it was of no importance, and that’s why she’d forgotten it. What was important was the discrepancy she’d instantly spotted between these maudlin reminiscences and the cock-and-bull story about meeting “Aunt Esmé” at the airport.

She’d given him every chance. Why couldn’t Wendy be the one to meet the woman, she’d asked, watching him intently while she spoke. After all, she was Wendy’s aunt, not his — “Oh, no, darling, no, whatever gave you that idea? She’s my aunt. She was awfully good to me as a kid, and so I feel this is the least I can do. It’s an awful bore, but — you do understand, don’t you, darling?”

Of course she’d understood. That’s what mistresses are for.

“Of course, darling!” she’d said, not batting an eyelid; and afterward, how she’d laughed about it — when she’d finished crying!

She had to be so very careful, that was the thing: call Gerald’s bluff even once, and the whole relationship could have been wrecked forever. He had made it quite, quite clear to her, very early, that suspicion, jealousy, and possessiveness were the prerogatives of the wife, and of the wife alone. It was in the nature of things (Gerald seemed to feel) that Wendy should cross-examine him about his business trips, ring up the office to check that he really was working late, go through his pockets for letters and for incriminating theater-ticket stubs; for Stella to do these things struck him as an outrage, an insult to the natural order of things.

“Look, darling,” he’d said (and the cold savagery of his tone had seemed to Stella quite out of proportion to her very minor misdemeanor a single tentative little phone call to his secretary asking, just simply asking, what time he was expected back from Wolverhampton), “Look, darling, when a married man starts an affair, it’s because he wants to get away from that sort of thing, not because he wants more of it! He has enough trouble getting a few hours’ freedom as it is, without having his mistress waiting for him like a cat at a mousehole every time he steps outside his front door!”

A speech both cruel and uncalled-for, and Stella had been dreadfully upset. But being upset never got her anywhere with Gerald, it just made him avoid answering the telephone; and so after a while she’d stopped being upset, and had resolved to watch her step even more carefully in the future. And so that was why, when the Aunt Esmé “bit” cropped up, she’d let it pass without a flicker of protest. Dumber than the dumbest blonde she’d been, as she sleeked back her wings of black burnished hair and listened, her dark eyes wide and trusting, while he flounced deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lies and evasions from which he would never (unless she, Stella, chose to assist him) be able to extricate himself.

For the lies hadn’t ended with the meeting of “Aunt Esmé,” at the airport; they had gone on for weeks. Because that hypothetical lady’s visit had proved to be a long one, and packed with incident. She had to be taken to the theater on just the night when Gerald usually went out with Stella; she caught the flu on the exact weekend when Gerald and Stella had planned a trip to the country; and when Stella herself caught the flu, she had to have it alone because it just so happened that Aunt Esmé had to be taken on a visit to an old school friend in Bournemouth at just that time.

And Stella had taken it all smiling. Smiling, smiling endlessly down the telephone, making understanding noises, and never questioning, never protesting. It had been over a year later (surely a year is long enough, surely no one could accuse her of checking up after a year?) before Stella had ventured, warily, and with lowered eyelashes, to ask after Aunt Esmé. Had they seen her lately, or had a card from her, she’d asked innocently, one late December day when Gerald, preoccupied, filled and brimming over with family life, had driven over hastily with Stella’s present. Jewelry again, and expensive — Gerald was good at that sort of thing.

Stella thanked him prettily, even warmly; and then, still prettily, she tossed her bombshell into his face. “Have you heard from Aunt Esmé lately?” she asked, and enjoyed, as she only rarely enjoyed his lovemaking, the look of blank uncomplicated bewilderment that spread over his pink, self-absorbed features. Not even any wariness, so completely had he forgotten the whole thing.

“Aunt Esmé? Who’s Aunt Esmé?” he asked curiously, quite unsuspicious.

Stella had intended it to stop there, to brush it off with a light “Oh, well, I must be mixing it up with some other family”; to leave him unscathed, untouched by guilt, and to savour her triumph in secret. But the temptation to go on, to spring the trap, was irresistible.

“Aunt Esmé, darling! You know — the one you had staying with you for all that time last winter” — and as she spoke Stella watched, with terror and with glee, the dawning of guilt and alarm in his plump lazy features. Fear, calculation, and panic darted like fishes back and forth across his countenance; and then he recovered himself.

Of course! How stupid! Dear old Esmé, she must mean! Not an aunt at all, but the old family governess from Wendy’s mother’s old home — the children had been taught to call her “aunt” because, you know...

And of course Stella did know, smiling and lying and letting him off the hook. She, too, had had an “aunt” like that in her childhood. An Aunt Polly (she quickly improvised) who had made gingerbread animals. Smiling, inventing, chattering, breathlessly easing the embarrassment, Stella was nevertheless already making her plans. In a year’s time — or maybe two years — “How’s your mother-in-law’s old governess getting on?” she’d ask, all innocence, watching his face while he blundered into the trap. “Governess? But Wendy’s mother never had—” And while his words stuttered into silence, she would be watching his face, never taking her eyes off it as it disintegrated into terror, bewilderment, and guilt.

Guilt, that was the important thing. Guilt so richly deserved and so long outstanding, like an unpaid debt. Such a sense of power it gave her to be able to call him to account like this, just now and again — a sense of power which compensated, in some measure, for the awful weakness of her actual position, the terrible uncertainty of her hold on him. To be able to make him squirm like this every so often was a sort of redressing of some desperate balance — a long-merited turning of the tables without which Stella sometimes felt she could not have gone on.

Oh, but it was fun too! A sort of game of catch-me-if-you-can, a fun game. Not quite as much fun, though, as it used to be, because of late Gerald had been growing more wary, less easily trapped. He was more evasive now, less buoyantly ready to come out with giveaway remarks like “What trip to Manchester, darling?” or “But they’ve never had measles.” Now, before he spoke, you could see him checking through the lies he had told recently, his gray-green eyes remote and sly.

And as Gerald grew more wary, so did Stella grow more cunning. The questions by which she trapped him were never direct ones now, but infinitely subtle and devious. It was a dangerous sport, and, like all dangerous sports, it demanded skill and judgment, a sure eye and perfect timing. Push Gerald too far, and she would have a terrible, terrifying row on her hands. “Possessive! Demanding!” and all the other age-old accusations hurtling round her head.

Push him not far enough, however, and the opposite set of mishaps would be set in motion. He would start thinking he could get away with anything, leaving her for days on end without so much as a phone call, and then turning up all smiles, as if nothing had happened, and expecting her to cook him steak and collect his shoes from the repairers. Taking her for granted, just as if she was a wife — and what sensible woman is going to put up with all the disadvantages of being married as well as all the disadvantages of not being?

It was a cliff-hanger business, though, getting the push exactly right. Only a few months ago Gerald had actually threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop spying on him — though surely “spying” was an unduly harsh term to apply to Stella’s innocent little show of interest in the details of the business conference he’d pretended to attend the previous weekend?

“But darling, Lord Berners wasn’t at the dinner!” she’d pointed out, with a placating little laugh, just to save Gerald the trouble of inventing any more humorous quotes from a nonexistent speech. “I read in The Times the next morning that” — and at this, quite suddenly, he had gone berserk, and had turned on her like an animal at bay. His rage, his dreadful, unwarranted accusations, were like nothing she had ever heard before, and they threw her into such terror that she scarcely knew what she was doing or saying.

In the end he had flung himself out of the flat, slamming the door on her tears and screams, and vowing never to set foot in the place again. It had taken an undated suicide note, no less, to bring him back again. It was just about as generous a suicide note as any woman has ever penned to a recalcitrant lover, and Stella still remembered it with a certain measure of satisfaction.

“You mustn’t blame yourself, darling,” she’d written. “It is my decision, and mine alone. If I cannot face life without you, that is my problem, not yours. So don’t, my love, feel that you have to come rushing round when you get this letter. The very last thing I want — or have ever wanted — is to inconvenience you in anyway, or make you feel guilty. By the time you get this, darling, I shall be dead...”

The posts must have been slow that week, because it was nearly three days before she at last heard his feet pounding up the stairs, and had started taking the pills, stuffing them into her mouth in handfuls as he burst into the room.

It had been worth it, though. He’d been sweet to her for days afterward, visiting her often in the hospital; and even after she got home, he’d continued to shower her with presents, calling every day, and displaying in full measure all the remorse, the tenderness, the self-recrimination that such a situation demands of a man.

Until, of course, he got bored with it. First bored, then resentful, and finally-beginning to throw the thing up to her in their arguments. “Blackmail,” he called it now whenever Stella tried to get him to do anything he didn’t want to do; and Stella began to realize, gradually, that she was right back at square one — having to be careful, careful, knowing all the time that the only way she could hold him now was by avoiding quarrels and by being infinitely tolerant and understanding — in short, by letting him get away with every bloody thing.

And this was why, this summer Saturday afternoon, Stella, her teeth set in a smile, was making herself listen without a murmur to what Gerald was saying. She had known, of course, the kind of thing it would be; married men always have such righteous reasons for letting you down. Sick wives, kids on holiday, family visits — all perfectly uncheckable, and all revealing what a kind, compassionate, virtuous, dutiful creature the lying, treacherous creature really is.

So what was it this time?

Simon’s Sports Day. Gerald was potty about that son of his.

“You do understand, don’t you, darling,” he was pleading; and of course she understood very well, she understood that he preferred the prospect of watching a nine-year-old running across a field in gym shoes to the prospect of spending the whole long afternoon with his mistress, cool and mysterious in her darkened fiat, the sunlight flickering across the bed through the slatted blinds.

“You see, darling, the thing is, he might win! Only nine and he might actually win the under-eleven two hundred and fifty yards! He’s a marvelous little runner, Mr. Foulkes tells me — a real athlete’s body!”

A real athlete’s body. The light shining in Gerald’s eyes was something Stella had never seen before. For a few seconds she tried to imagine what it would be like to be the mother of that athlete’s body, to have produced it jointly with Gerald, to have a right, now, to a share in that idiotic pride. At the sight of those heavy, self-indulgent features thus irradiated, Stella felt a great darkness coming around her. It came like a black monstrous wave, engulfing her, leaving her bereft of speech.

“I wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds!” she heard him saying, from somewhere outside the swirling blackness. “To hear his name called — Simon Graves — my own son! And then the clapping, the cheers! And him only nine! The others are all over ten, darling, all of them! He’s the only nine-year-old who managed to...”

She preferred his lies, preferred them a thousand times. How could she have guessed that the truth, when she finally heard it from those evasive, prevaricating lips, would hurt as much as this?

By the end of the afternoon I had seen three of them check in at the reception desk and I knew one of them had come to kill me but I didn’t know which one.

Small crowds had arrived in the course of the afternoon and I’d had plenty of time to study them while they stood in queues to check in at the reception desk. One lot of sixteen had come in together from an airport bus — middle-aged couples, three children, a few solitary businessmen; tourists, most of them, and sitting in the lobby with a magazine for a prop I wrote them off. My man would be young — late twenties, I knew that much.

I knew his name too but he wouldn’t be traveling under it.

Actually the dossier was quite thick; we knew a good deal about him, including the probability that he would come to Caracas to kill me. We knew something of his habits and patterns; we’d seen the corpses that marked his backtrail; we knew his name, age, nationality; we had several physical descriptions — they varied but there was agreement on certain points: medium height, muscularly slim, youthful. We knew he spoke at least four languages. But he hadn’t been photographed and we had no fingerprints; he was too clever for that.

Of the check-ins I’d spied at the Tamanaco desk, three were possibles — any one of them could be my intended assassin.

My job was to take him before he could take me.

It was not until (he third day that they came for Eliot. He had expected them sooner, and in his cold withdrawn fashion had resented and grown impatient at the delay — for although his tastes had never been luxurious, the squalid bedroom which he had rented in the Clerkenwell boardinghouse irked him. Now, listening impassively to the creak of their furtive steps on the staircase, he glanced at his gun-metal wristwatch and made certain necessary adjustments in the hidden thing that he carried on him. Then quite deliberately he turned his chair so that his back was toward the door.

His belated dive for his revolver, after they had crept up behind him, was convincing enough to draw a gasp from one of them before they pinioned his arms, thrusting a gun muzzle inexpertly at the back of his neck. Petty crooks, thought Eliot contemptuously as he feigned a struggle. And “petty crooks” again, as they searched him and hustled him down to the waiting car. Yet his scorn was not vainglorious. The hard knot into which his career of professional killing had twisted his emotions left no room even for that. Only once had Eliot killed on his own account and that was when they had nearly caught him. He was not proposing to repeat the mistake.

It was a little after midnight and the narrow street was deserted. The big car moved off smoothly and quietly. Presently it stopped by an overgrown bomb site, blanched under the moon, and the blinds were drawn down. There they gagged Eliot, and blindfolded him, and tied his hands behind his back. When they found him submissive, their confidence perceptibly grew. Between them and Addison’s lot, Eliot reflected as the car moved off again, there was little or nothing to choose: petty crooks all of them, petty warehouse thieves whose spheres of operation had happened to collide. That was why he was here.

He made no attempt to chart mentally the car’s progress. He had not been asked to do that — and it was Eliot’s great merit as a hired murderer that he was incurious, never going beyond the letter of his commission. Leaning back against the cushions, he reconsidered his instructions as the car purred on through London, through the night.

“Holden’s people are getting to be a nuisance,” Addison had said — Addison the young boss with his swank and his oiled hair and his Hollywood mannerisms. “But if Holden dies they’ll fall to pieces. That’s your job — to kill Holden.”

Eliot had only nodded. Explanations bored him.

“But the trouble is,” Addison had continued, “that we can’t find Holden. We don’t know where his hideout is. That means we’ve got to fix things so that they lead us to it themselves. My idea is to make you the bait.” He had grinned. “Poisoned bait.”

With that he had gone on to explain how Eliot was to be represented as a new and shaky recruit to the Addison mob; how it was to be made to seem that Eliot possessed information which Holden would do much to get. Eliot had listened to what concerned him directly and ignored the rest, it was thorough, certainly. They ought to fall for it.

And to judge from his present situation, they had...

It seemed a long drive. The only thing above all others that Holden’s men wanted to avoid was the possibility of being followed, the possibility that he, Eliot, might pick up some clue to the hideout’s whereabouts. So whatever route they were taking, it certainly wasn’t the most direct.

At last they arrived. Eliot was pushed upstairs and through a door, was thrust roughly onto a bed. A bed, he thought: good. That meant Holden had only this one musty-smelling room. All the more chance, therefore, that the job would come off.

He let them hit him a few times before he talked: his boyhood had inured him to physical pain, and he was being well paid. Then he told them what they wanted to know — the story Addison had given him, the story with just enough truth in it to be convincing. Eliot enjoyed the acting: he was good at it. And they were at a disadvantage, of course, in that having left the blindfold on they were unable to watch his eyes.

In any case, Holden — who to judge from his voice was a nervous elderly Cockney — seemed satisfied. And Holden was the only one of them who mattered... Before long, Eliot knew, the police would get Holden, and Addison too, and their smalltime wrangling for the best cribs would be done with for good and all. That, however, was of no consequence to Eliot. All he had to do was to say his lesson nicely and leave his visiting card and collect his fee.

And here it was at last: the expected, the inevitable offer. Yes, all right, Eliot said smoothly after a few moments of apparent hesitation; he didn’t mind being their stool pigeon so long as they paid him enough. And they were swallowing that, too, telling him what they wanted him to find out about Addison’s plans, sticking a cigarette between his bruised lips and lighting it for him. He almost laughed. They weren’t taking off the blindfold, though: they didn’t trust him enough for that. They were going to let him go, but in case he decided not to play ball with them, after all, they weren’t risking his carrying away any important information...

Yes, they were going to let him go. This is it, Eliot thought. And delicately, as he lay sprawled on the bed, his fingers moved under the hem of his jacket, so that, hidden from his interrogators, something slim and smooth rolled out onto the bedclothes.

Fractionally he shifted his position, thrusting the object — to the limit that the rope round his wrists would allow — underneath the pillow. It was a nice little thing, and Eliot was sorry to lose it: in appearance, nothing more than an ordinary mechanical pencil, but with a time fuse inside it and a powerful explosive charge. Addison had told him that it was one of the many innocent-looking objects supplied to French saboteurs during the Occupation, to be deposited on the desks of German military commanders or in other such strategic places. And Eliot, who cared nothing for war but who was interested in any destructive weapon, had appreciated its potentialities. As a means of murder it was chancy, of course: this one might kill Holden, or on the other hand it might kill a cleaning woman making up the bed.

But that was none of Eliot’s business He was doing what he had been told to do, and whether it succeeded or not he was going to collect.

The return drive was like the first. At the bomb site the gag and bonds and blindfold were taken off and presently Eliot was back at his lodginghouse door, in the gray light of early dawn, watching Holden’s car drive rapidly away.

He mounted to his room, examined his damaged face without resentment in the mirror, and on impulse started to pack. Then, tiring suddenly, he lay down on the bed and slept.

The pencil had been set to explode at eight...

It was a quarter to eight when Eliot woke, and the full light had come. Finish packing first, he thought: then see Addison, report, and get paid off. The early editions of the evening papers would tell him, before he caught the boat train, whether Holden was dead or not...

So he was shifting the pillows, to make more room on the bed for his shabby suitcase, just as the clock of St. John’s struck the hour.

And that was when he saw the pencil.

For a second he stared at it in simple incomprehension. Then understanding came. Of course, thought Eliot dully, of course! They weren’t risking the secret of their precious hideout. This is where they brought me to, after driving me round and round the streets. This is where they questioned me — here in my own room!

Panic flooded him. He ran. From the bedside to the door was a distance of no more than three paces.

But the explosion had caught and killed him before his fingers even touched the doorknob.

The green park in the heart of London, to the passing eye, had not changed in half a century. But to George Drayton, born seventy-three years ago in a vast bedroom overlooking Knightswood Square, it had been altered in every possible way. Nothing was as it used to be.

He was the second person to enter the Square, fog or shine, every morning. Purdy, the gardener, was always the first, and Mrs. Heatherington the third. Actually she was fourth because her ancient Pekinese, Kwong Kwok, darted through the gate ahead of his mistress. That was how it had been for more than thirty years. Except that the gardener was never there on Sundays or bank holidays. On those days George Drayton was the first.

Every resident of the long rows of identical mansions surrounding Knightswood Square possessed a key which unlocked all the gates in the shoulder-high iron fence. A discreet sign near each gate warned that this was a private park.

George Drayton sniffed the morning air as he stepped out under the white-pillared portico and let the massive front door close itself behind him. He stood for a moment on the broad top step, eyes darting across the sunny Square in search of Purdy. A blue veil of smoke curled at the far northern corner. The gardener would be burning yesterday’s accumulation of twigs and dead flowers. He daily raked every path and walk, picked up each fallen leaf and broken branch. Before dusk they were always neatly piled for burning the following morning.

The sun had climbed above the chimneys on the opposite side of the Square, dropping a curtain of haze across the elegant Regency facades so that all he could see was a blur of white columns against shadowed brick. It was going to be a pleasant August day. He would sit on his morning-bench under the protecting branches of the oak tree. There were several favorite benches he occupied, depending upon time of year and weather, but never the same bench, morning and afternoon.

George started down the shallow marble steps to the sidewalk and was careful not to drop his books or leather cushion. He carried three books into the park every morning. Today there was a new novel from his own publishing house and two detective novels.

“Morning, sir.” Fitch, the caretaker, squinted up the basement steps where he was polishing the brass hand-rail. “Another fine day, sir.”

“Splendid.” He kept walking or Fitch would come charging up the steps for a chat that could delay him at least ten minutes. On those unfortunate mornings when it was impossible to escape, Mrs. Heatherington and Kwong Kwok always reached the Square ahead of him.

He hesitated at the curb and peered up and down for any moving vehicles. There was only the milkman pulling his small cart at the far end of the street. George walked more briskly as he crossed to the narrow pavement which edged Knightswood Square. Reaching the curb he slowed his steps again and headed for the nearest gate. He rested the cushion and books on the gate post as he felt in his pocket for the key. There was always a moment of panic when he was unable to find it among the jumble of loose objects. Blast! He would have to go all the way back to his flat. Fitch couldn’t help him. None of the caretakers were permitted to have keys. Then his fingers touched cold metal and a sigh of relief escaped from his lips.

George unlocked the gate and stepped into the Square. He had made it ahead of the Pekinese.

Before closing the gate he removed his key from the lock and dropped it back into his pocket. Then, in a final burst of speed, he headed for the shaded morning-bench under the oak tree. He placed his leather cushion on the bench and sat on it, arranging the books beside him.

As he filled his first pipe for the day he let his eyes wander over the familiar mansions around the Square. George knew who lived behind every window. He also knew who slept late, who was ill, dying, or convalescent, and which wife had left which husband. His charwoman, Mrs. Higby, kept him informed. Twice a day she reported all the latest news of Knightswood Square. At the moment she complained that nothing much was happening. There had been little worth talking about since last year’s murder. That sort of thing didn’t happen often enough to please Mrs. Higby.

She came to him for several hours, every day but Sunday, and also did daily work in two other mansions on the Square. Late morning, while he sat in the park, Mrs. Higby would straighten the flat and cook his lunch. He always made his own tea but she would return, after finishing her other jobs, and prepare his supper before catching a bus home to Putney.

Each day as she served his lunch and supper she reported, with relish, the news of the day. He looked forward to Mrs. Higby’s gossip because, otherwise, he would never know what was going on behind his neighbors’ windows. It had been exasperating, last winter, when she was kept to her bed with the flu. He had hired a woman through an agency but she had known nothing about the other residents of the Square. It was as though his morning and evening papers had not been delivered for three weeks.

Purdy wheeled an empty barrow past, without a word, touching an earthy finger to his leather cap. He never paused for conversation until late in the afternoon.

George watched as the gardener settled down to work, digging at the roots of a rosebush. Then he turned to look across to the south side of the Square, but there was no sign of Mrs. Heatherington and her Pekinese.

He checked his watch. 9:36. Six minutes late! Very likely packing for her holiday. She was taking an afternoon train from Victoria Station to Brighton where her daughter-in-law would be waiting to drive her across to Hove. The old lady spent two weeks every August with her son and his family in their pleasant Georgian house overlooking the distant seashore. Mrs. Higby had described the place to him, in detail, many times; she had heard all about it from her friend Mrs. Price, who came in twice a week to char for Mrs. Heatherington.

A blur of movement caught his eye at the opposite side of the park and he turned his head to see someone on a bicycle. As his eyes adjusted to the distance he saw that it was Willie Hoskins who, once a month, washed every window facing the Square. Each flat had its regular day for the window cleaner.

Willie braked his bicycle in front of Number 26, hoisted it across the pavement, and propped it against the railing of the basement area way.

Then he lifted a bucket from the handlebar and carried it up the steps to the front door. George could see the flash of color as the sun caught in Willie’s red hair, noticed the yellow rubber gloves tucked under the wide leather belt that circled his waist, the faded blue shirt and trousers as the boy went into the house. Boy? He was a married man of twenty-three with a wife who, according to Mrs. Higby, regularly had him up before a local magistrate on charges of drunkenness, nonsupport, and knocking her about.

The tenants of the Square frequently threatened to dispense with Willie’s services, but he would disarm them with his great smile, flashing white teeth and tossing his curly head. It was suspected that Willie was not averse to tossing some of the ladies of Knightswood Square between washing windows. “He’s a complete rascal, he is!” Mrs. Higby would say. “Always leave the front door wide when he does any windows where I be.”

George turned to look, once again, for Mrs. Heatherington. She was just coming down the front steps of the mansion where she had a second-floor-front flat. The Pekinese was pulling on his leash, furious at being late, eager to get into the park. He yanked his mistress across the street and when she had unlocked the gate, sprang onto the grass jerking the leather leash out of her hand. The small beast darted to a favorite bush as the old lady closed the gate and dropped the key into her handbag. She crossed to the busy dog and bent stiffly to retrieve his leash. Then, finally, she stood for a moment surveying the Square.

That was when George Drayton looked in another direction. He had no idea whether Mrs. Heatherington could see him from that distance, but he didn’t want her to think he was observing her. So he always looked away.

He noticed Willie Hoskins washing a window on the third floor of Number 26 — Colonel Whitcomb’s flat. A reflection of sunny sky gleamed from two panes he had already finished, but the others were dull with a month’s accumulation of London soot. As he watched the window cleaner work he could hear the scuffling sound of Mrs. Heatherington’s footsteps approaching down the walk, and as she came nearer he sensed the soft padding of the Pekinese. He turned to look and found that they were much closer than he had anticipated.

The Pekinese stalked past with majestic disdain but his mistress nodded and smiled. George Drayton bowed as usual. They never spoke. In fact, he had never heard Mrs. Heatherington’s voice except when she talked to the dog.

George watched them head for the north gate. The old lady paused for a moment to speak to the gardener. Usually she only nodded to Purdy. Probably telling him that she was leaving on holiday. The gardener touched his cap as she continued on her way out of the Square, toward the Old Brompton Road. She would have final errands to do. Small presents for her grandchildren. Very likely a visit to her bank to withdraw money for the two-week holiday.

He wondered how old the dog might be. A Pekinese, named Kwong Kwok, had accompanied Mrs. Heatherington back from China, more than thirty years ago, when she returned to London after the death of her husband. Ever since there had been a Pekinese named Kwong Kwok, but it was impossible that the original dog could have survived so many years. The dog was a constant topic of conversation among the charwomen. To them and to George Drayton all Pekinese looked alike.

The first pram of the day, guided by a uniformed nanny, rolled into the Square as George picked up his small pile of books. Soon there would be dark clots of nursemaids and prams. Older children would avoid them and keep to the far side of the park where they could run and shout without glares and reprimands from the easily disturbed nannies.

He decided to put off reading the novel from Drayton House. Since his retirement, eight years ago, they had sent him a copy of each new book but, too frequently, he only became upset when he read the pretentious trash his nephew was publishing. No point in getting into a temper on such a beautiful day. He put the book aside and hesitated, deciding between the new Simenon and the new Christie. This would be a perfect morning to read about Paris. Simenon it would be...

As he turned to the first page he glanced across the Square to the dirt-encrusted windows of the third-floor flat where last year’s murder had taken place. They still remained curtained. The Clarkson fiat had never been rented. And the murder remained unsolved.

For two hours he lost himself in a rain-drenched Paris. Inspector Maigret sat in a small café, drinking calvados, listening to neighborhood gossip as he watched a house across the street where a man had been murdered. Home for lunch with Madame Maigret in the apartment on the Boulevard Lenoir, then back through a cold drizzle to the café with its view of the bleak street. Drinking toddy after toddy. Smoking his pipe...

George put down the book and filled his own pipe. Why couldn’t he sit here and through pure deduction, like Inspector Maigret, solve last year’s murder? Except that New Scotland Yard had put their best men on the Clarkson case and they had been unable to find any trace of the murderer.

As George lighted his pipe he noticed Mrs. Higby, parcels clutched in both arms, dart up the front steps of his building. Another hour and she would have the fiat in order and his lunch waiting. Wouldn’t she be surprised if he announced the name of the Clarkson murderer as he ate his noon chop!

He turned again to study the curtained windows of the murder fiat. The victim, young Mrs. Clarkson, had been separated from her husband, but not divorced. Harry Clarkson had an alibi for every minute of the afternoon when his wife was killed. They had found her partially clothed body, sprawled across the bed, one silk stocking twisted around her throat and another stuffed into her mouth. The newspapers said that she had not been attacked sexually.

Clarkson had testified, at the coroner’s inquest, that he had not seen his wife in several months. His solicitor sent her a monthly check and, regularly, tried to persuade her that a divorce would be wise; but she had refused to discuss such a possibility. Her char told the police that Mrs. Clarkson entertained many male visitors. She had never seen any of them but, every morning, she had to clean all the ashtrays. Unfortunately, she had no idea how much money Mrs. Clarkson kept in the flat, so there was no way of knowing whether there had been robbery as well as murder. The dead woman’s purse, containing a few shillings, was found on her dressing table.

The police reported there had been no fingerprints. All the locals were questioned — caretaker of the building, milkman, florist, laundryman, greengrocer, window cleaner, postman, delivery boy from the chemist shop. Every name in Mrs. Clarkson’s address book had been traced and interrogated. Nobody knew anything.

A distant chime of bells brought George Drayton out of his dream of murder. Twelve o’clock. He would finish the Simenon after lunch. As he got to his feet he glanced, once again, at the Clarkson flat. Maigret would have solved the mystery easily, sitting here in the Square, looking up at those curtained windows. But he, George Drayton, didn’t have a suspicion of an idea — in spite of all the detective novels he had read and published.

He gathered up his books and leather cushion and headed for the gate. As he walked down the path he noticed that the gardener was already wolfing a sandwich, perched between the handles of his barrow. George looked for Willie Hoskins but the window cleaner had disappeared. All the windows of Colonel Whitcomb’s fiat gleamed in the noon sunshine, reflecting bright rectangles of blue sky.

Instead of a chop there was cold salmon for lunch which he ate with appetite. He had all his meals at a small table in the study, surrounded by overflowing bookshelves and facing tall windows which overlooked the Square.

Mrs. Higby had her usual morning collection of gossip. “That young American couple what sublet Number 29 are leavin’ for Paris next week.”

Yes, Maigret would have solved the Clarkson murder without difficulty. Except that now the case was more than a year old and the clues would have long since vanished.

“The old gent in Number 12 is boozin’ again. Mr. Mortan, the super, had to help him out of his cab last night. Carry him in to the lift an’ up to his fiat. I’ve a lovely bit of Leicester for you.”

He studied the curtained windows of the Clarkson apartment, across the Square, as he ate the cheese. Curious that someone — the caretaker or the dead woman’s solicitor — wouldn’t have those unsightly windows washed.

“Mrs. Heatherington’s off this afternoon on holiday. Her an’ that of dog. This year she’s told Mrs. Price, her char, not to come in while she’s away. Paid her two weeks’ wages, she did. Told her to have herself a bit of a rest. Such a fine lady, Mrs. Heatherington.”

After lunch George placed his cushion on an afternoon bench near the northwest corner of the Square, his back to the sun. He filled his pipe again and as he smoked he watched the renewed activity around him.

The gardener was pruning some kind of shrub near the rose arbor. Most of the noisy older children had not reappeared. Probably having an afternoon nap. Several of the nannies had returned with their prams. Or were these different nursemaids? Some of them sat dozing in the warm sunlight.

He noticed that Willie Hoskins was now washing the windows of Mrs. Heatherington’s flat. Odd that the old lady would want them cleaned the afternoon she was going away. Except that she had given her char a holiday, so there would be no one, these next two weeks, to let Willie Hoskins or anyone else into the flat.

George opened the Simenon and immediately returned to Paris. He became so absorbed in Maigret’s progress that he was no longer aware of the others in the Square. Squealing children ran past him unheeded. The distant chime of the bells on the quarter hours did not penetrate to his inner ear. He was conscious only of the sounds and voices of Paris, just as Maigret heard them.

A sudden penetrating scream, shrill and sharp, pulled him back to London and Knightswood Square.

Some of the nursemaids still sat beside their prams. The gardener was sweeping one of the walks. No one in the Square seemed to have noticed the scream he had heard. Or had he heard it? And was the sound human or animal? Perhaps one of the older children playing in the distance? The sound was not repeated.

George raised his eyes to the windows of Mrs. Heatherington’s flat. Apparently the window cleaner had finished and gone on to his next job. One of the windows had been left open and the curtains had not been drawn together.

He took out his watch and checked the time. 4:27.

Mrs. Heatherington would have telephoned for a cab and left for Victoria Station long before this. Strange he hadn’t noticed her departure. He remembered the scene from other years. Luggage brought down by the cabbie. Last of all, the small wicker hamper containing the Pekinese. He wondered if the old lady had forgotten to shut that window and close the curtains in the flurry of her departure.

He saw that he had finished all but a dozen or so pages of the Simenon. The puzzle in the detective novel was nearly solved.

...Maigret was moving quickly now. Each of the clues which had seemed so innocent before, had become ominous as the great French detective linked them together.

“Pardon me, sir.”

George looked up from his book to see the gardener with a large bouquet of yellow roses in his hand.

“Told Mrs. Heatherington I’d have these for her. Fresh cut. So they’d last till she got to Hove.”

“They’re very beautiful.”

“Said she’d get them before she took off. But I never seen her go.”

“Didn’t notice her leave, myself. I was reading.”

“Guess I’ll take them home to the Missus. S’prise the old girl.” Purdy held the bouquet in front of him, carefully, as he started back up the walk.

George reopened the Simenon. As he read on, something seemed to shadow the final pages of the book. The printed words faded together and his thoughts wandered.

Why had Mrs. Heatherington forgotten the bouquet of roses?

And why hadn’t she shut that window before she left on her holiday? And closed those curtains?

...Maigret had crossed the street and was climbing the stairs to the floor where the murder had taken place.

There had been no fingerprints in the Clarkson apartment because the murderer had, obviously, worn gloves.

It was a dog that had screamed. George was certain of it now.

Could it have been Mrs. Heatherington’s dog? Why would the Pekinese make such a sound? It seldom even barked. Of course there were other dogs in the mansions around Knightswood Square.

...Maigret was now standing in the dark hall, outside the murder apartment, listening at the door.

Too bad Mrs. Clarkson had not owned a dog. Might have saved her life.

George glanced across to the curtained windows of the Clarkson flat again.

Those dirty windows. Disgraceful.

Dirty windows!

George whirled to look again at Mrs. Heatherington’s windows. Something wrong there!

The open window had been completely washed. All its panes sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. And the window next to it reflected blue sky in every rectangle of gleaming glass. But the other two windows were still dull with grime.

Half the windows of Mrs. Heatherington’s flat had not been cleaned—

Why?

Had Willie Hoskins seen something inside Mrs. Heatherington’s living room? Something that had stopped him in the middle of his job?

And why the devil hadn’t the old lady shut that window and closed those curtains before she left to catch her train?

Why had she gone off without that bouquet of roses the gardener had cut for her?

Yellow roses.

Something else yellow—

The window cleaner’s gloves! That was it! Willie Hoskins always wore yellow rubber gloves.

No fingerprints.

Why had the Pekinese screamed?

What possible reason—

“Murder!” The terrible word exploded from his throat. “Murder!” He was on his feet, pointing up at Mrs. Heatherington’s open window.

Everyone in Knightswood Square had turned to stare. Purdy was running toward him across the grass.

“Up there! Mrs. Heatherington! Hurry, man! Get the police!”

The gardener, without pausing to ask questions, raced toward the nearest gate, at the southern end of the Square.

George Drayton collapsed onto his leather cushion, exhausted and out of breath. All he would ever be able to remember of the next hours would be a blur of strangers.

Arrival of the first policeman.

Cars screeching to a stop.

Dark-suited men hurrying to Mrs. Heatherington’s flat.

The ambulance.

A clutter of curious people gathering on the sidewalk.

White-uniformed figures carrying something down the steps.

His bench surrounded. The dark-suited men. Polite questions. How did he know what had happened? What had he seen? Had he heard something? The dog? Questions ran together until they gave him a headache.

He finally managed to get home to the quiet of his flat where he stretched out gratefully on the sofa in his study...

Mrs. Higby wakened him. “You’re a hero! Saved the old lady’s life, you did! They say another hour an’ she’d have been a goner. Just like her dog. Poor little beast. His head bashed in—”

“Mrs. Heatherington? Is she—”

“In hospital. They had to operate. But she’s goin’ to be fine. I just talked to Mrs. Price, her char, and the police told her. They say the old lady’s money was stolen. What she took out of the bank for her holiday. Afraid your supper’s goin’ to be late this evenin’.”

The telephone rang.

Mrs. Higby hurried to snatch it from the desk. “Mr. Drayton’s residence... What is it, love? What’s happened now?... Fancy that!” She turned to pass on her information. “It’s me chum, Mrs. Price. They’ve caught Willie Hoskins! Drunk in a Chelsea pub. The old lady’s money still in his pocket.” Her eyes widened as she spoke into the phone again. “He didn’t! Well, I never.”

She turned back toward the sofa. “He’s confessed to killin’ Mrs. Clarkson last year. I always said he was a rascal.”

George Drayton smiled. He had solved the Clarkson case. And he had done it without moving from his bench in Knightswood Square.

...Just like Inspector Maigret.

Mr. Gihon Gore

℅ Chutney & Chives, Inc., Publishers

New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Gore:

Although your mystery stories have not been exactly unheard of by me, last week was the first occasion I had to pick one up and read it. I am speaking of Brent’s First Case. Generally speaking I found the book adequate but there were two errors in Chapter 21. You speak of the killer African bees navigating to the bedroom of elderly pig-iron heiress Harriet Heald (a) by polarized light from the sky and (b) by being attracted to the interior of the bedroom by the phlox-scented room-freshener spray used by Miss Heald. I’ll take the easy one first.

Bees are never attracted to phlox, Mr. Gore. Their tongues are too short to reach the nectar deeply buried within the flowers. The bees know this and you might say that they wouldn’t even stick out their tongues (ha, ha) at phlox scent. Try cyclamen scent. Your bees will go bananas over that one.

Now about that polarized light bit. It is true that bees do navigate by polarized light from the sky but never (I repeat, never) on cloudy days. You have to have blue sky in order to detect polarized light at certain angles to the sun. Cloud particles destroy the effect by scattering the light.

What to do?

The cloudy day seems necessary in order to give Miss Heald her attack of sinus migraine, an attack which brings old Dr. Physick tottering to her bedside so that they can be killed by bee venom together. On the other hand, if the sun isn’t shining, forget the polarized light.

Thinking the matter through, I believe that skilled replotting of Chapters 21, 22, 23, and 24 might turn the trick. You might want to consider this in your next edition of Brent’s First Case.

                        Very truly yours.

                        George Ohm

                        Associate Professor of Science

                        Dimwiddie University

                        Glen Cove, L.I., N.Y.

All of a sudden, in the fog that blanketed London one midwinter evening, the tall figure of a policeman loomed up at a street corner and, waving a red lantern, brought a hansom jingling to a standstill.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” he told the passengers, who happened to be A. J. Raffles and myself, Bunny Manders, “this street is closed.”

I had spent the past couple of hours watching Raffles win his match in a tennis tournament in progress at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where the building which houses the court for the gentlemanly game of “real” tennis, or jeu-de-paume, is for a spectator about the chilliest place in town.

So, being anxious to thaw myself out with a rum toddy or two at my flat, where Raffles would drop me off on the way to his own bachelor chambers in The Albany, I protested to the bobby.

“But look here,” I said to him, “this is Mount Street. I live in this street.”

“Well, sir,” he replied, “there’s been a gas explosion in a house along there on the left.”

“You describe, more or less,” I said, startled, “the area where I live! Raffles, if you’ll excuse me—”

Leaving him to pay off the cabbie, I sprang out of the hansom and, breaking into a run along Mount Street, saw above the roof of some house ahead a dull red glow pulsing in the fog. The glow faded out as I arrived upon the scene, but the gabled roof from which clouds of smoke and steam were now billowing up was that of the very house in which I had my domicile.

I stopped dead, incredulous. The windows of the flat on the top floor, the fourth, and of my own flat on the third floor, were shattered, and a brass-helmeted, thigh-booted fireman was in the act of clambering from a ladder into my living-room.

“Mr. Manders!” a voice called to me.

I looked round. Firemen’s lanterns and the lamps of three Fire Brigade vehicles, one of them of the new horseless type, pallidly mitigated the fog, and I saw that the man who had called to me was Hobday, the hall porter of the house. He was talking to three of the residents.

“Who would have thought it?” said Hobday, as I went over to him. “A gas explosion in Mount Street, sir! In the top flat, it was — Major Torrington’s, just above yours, Mr. Manders. The Major was out at the time — still is.”

“Luckily for him,” said Charles Chastayne, who occupied the other flat on my floor. A typical man-about-town, who played cards in the best clubs and probably, I suspected, derived his income from it, he was in evening dress, his cape and silk hat blotched with some sort of white stuff. “I’d only just come in, Manders,” he told me, “when the big bang shook the whole house.”

“Anyone hurt?” asked Raffles, who had joined us.

“No, sir,” said Hobday. “I had my hands full getting Lady Davencourt an’ her marmosets out of her first-floor flat, into a cab an’ off to her sister’s. But, my word, I was worried about Miss Van Heysst here, who’s unfamiliar with the premises as yet. It was lucky a few lights stayed on for a minute or two, or she mightn’t ’ave found her way out, plunged in the dark, an’ come over panicky, bein’ foreign.”

“I do not at all panic in the least, Mr. Hobday — though foreign,” said Miss Marika Van Heysst, whose accent was as charming as her person and who had moved recently into the flat below mine. “Only, see now how it is with us! We have run out safely, yes, but the firemen say we cannot go back in. We say, for how long? They only shake their heads. So we are become refugees in the fog, and your London fog is so cooold!”

She drew more closely about her a cloak like Red Riding Hood’s, but Miss Van Heysst’s cloak, its hood framing her enchanting young face and flaxen hair, was as blue as her forlorn, appealing eyes.

“You make a sensible point, Miss Van Heysst,” agreed the man who occupied the other flat on her floor. A handsome naval officer with a staff job at the Admiralty, he was in uniform, his cap and greatcoat marred here and there with white smears. “Since we’re not allowed back in the house,” he said, “there’s no point in our standing here in the cold. Miss Van Heysst, may I suggest that I seek a cab for you and escort you to a hotel I know of?”

“Oh, Commander Rigby, that would be kind, for if I am lost in the fog alone and meet with your Jack the Ripper, then yes, I panic very much — being foreign,” said Miss Van Heysst, with a flash of her lovely eyes at Hobday as she accepted Clifford Rigby’s proffered arm and went off with him into the fog.

“You can trust the Navy with a pretty young woman,” said Chastayne, the cardplayer. “Or can you?” He shrugged cynically. “No business of mine. I must go and find somewhere to pig it temporarily myself. Good night, Manders.”

Only then, as Chastayne left us, did it dawn on me that the white smears on his evening-cape and on Rigby’s greatcoat must have been caused by ceiling plaster falling when the explosion shook the house — and a sudden thought threw my mind into a cerebral commotion.

“Raffles,” I blurted, “I’ll just pop up to my flat — see the damage.”

He gripped my arm, restraining me. “Nonsense, Bunny, you won’t be allowed in. You can have my spare room in The Albany I take it your goods and chattels are insured, so you’ve nothing to worry about.”

But I knew otherwise — knew it so damnably well that I did not sleep a wink in his spare room and, while still the lamps were dim yellow blurs in the murk of what passed for dawn, I inserted my key into the front-door lock of the now silent house in Mount Street.

In the dark hall I stood listening. All was still. I struck a match. The light quivered on the walls of the water-drenched, chaotic hall. On a coffer stood a candelabrum with three unused candles in it. Their wicks spluttered wetly but finally lit and, my heart thumping, I stole up the stairs.

The sodden carpet was blotched with plaster-white bootprints all the way up to the second floor, where my candles showed the landing littered with chunks, still wet, of lath-and-plaster. The ceiling must have come down at the moment of the explosion, and down with the ceiling must have come a package of mine — a package so private that, under a sawn section of floorboard in a corner of my living-room immediately above this landing, I had kept the package hidden on the laths between the floor-beams. I peered up, holding my candles higher, and their light showed me the exposed floor-beams and, dangling down from a hole between them, a corner of my water-soaked carpet.

My package must have fallen, with the lath-and-plaster, onto this second-floor landing. I searched vainly through the debris lying here, then crept on up to my living-room, which was a shambles, and checked the hole from above. But there was no possible doubt about it. My package was gone.

I slunk out of the house. I had rather have blown out my brains than tell Raffles what I had now to tell him, but I forced myself to walk back to The Albany, where I found him at breakfast.

The lights were on, a coal fire burned cheerfully in the grate, and Raffles, immaculate in tweeds, a pearl in his cravat, his keen face tanned, his dark hair crisp, looked up from The Times propped against the coffee-pot.

“Chafing-dishes on the sideboard, Bunny. Ring for more toast.”

“I don’t want any,” I said. I sat down. “Raffles, I’ve had a shock. Due to that damned explosion last night, some private papers of mine have — gone astray. They were wrapped in a yellow silk muffler patterned with red fleurs-de-lys, the package tied with cord, the knot sealed with red wax.”

“A colourful package, Bunny, and valuable-looking. Some fireman at work in your flat has probably spotted the package and taken charge of it for you. What are these papers — or are they so private you’d rather not tell me?”

“I’d rather not tell you,” I said, “but I must. Raffles, you know that ever since we were at school together I’ve had a sort of — well, a compulsion to write? If one has that sort of compulsion, one naturally writes about things that have made a strong impression on one’s mind. Somehow, writing them down is the only way one can get them off one’s mind — especially if they’re things it would be suicide to talk about to other people. So these private writings of mine are accounts, no names or details changed or omitted, of some — recent experiences of ours.”

“Ours?”

“Raffles,” I muttered, “that package contains full accounts of six of our — criminal adventures.”

Silence. Only the rustle of the fire in the grate, the quiet ticking of the clock above it. Then I heard Raffles cross to the fireplace. I thought it was to get the poker, and my scalp tingled in anticipation of a terminal impact upon it. But he was only lighting a cigarette with a spill. I sensed him standing there on the hearthrug, his grey eyes looking down at me, studying me with a clinical detachment. At last he spoke, his tone even.

“I now know, Bunny,” he observed, “why it’s said, of people with the strange compulsion to write, that they’ve been ‘bitten by the tarantula.’ ”

He asked me then for further details, and I explained that the package, which did not have my name on the outside, must have been found on the second-floor landing.

“Raffles,” I said, “your cricket’s made your name very well known. If whoever’s found that package opens it to see whom it belongs to, and sees your name in a criminal context on every page of those manuscripts, the finder may hand them to the police!”

“Who, if they once start inquiries,” Raffles said, “could be a bit awkward.”

“We must get out of the country — immediately!”

“And, not knowing whether the police have or have not got that package, have to spend the rest of our lives in Callao?”

“Why Callao, Raffles?”

“Because, as the famous rhyme says, Bunny: ‘Under no condition is extradition allowed from Callao’! No, we’ve got to try to trace your package. It may be unopened. We’d better not make overt inquiries in person. I’ll get Ivor Kern, our invaluable ‘fence,’ to put some of his snoops on to this. Take a room at your club, Bunny. A red light glows for us in the fog. If the light should glow redder still, I’ll get word to you. Meantime, keep a suitcase packed handy for instant travel.”

All the things in my flat had been ruined by water from firehoses. I had to buy a suitcase and new togs. And towards the end of a week of torturing suspense, I returned to my club after a fitting at my tailor’s and was told that Raffles was waiting for me in the Hastings Room.

I hared up the handsome marble staircase and found Raffles, alone except for a whisky-and-soda, sitting in a saddlebag chair under a dismal great painting. The Trial of Warren Hastings.

“Well, Bunny,” Raffles greeted me, “we’ve had a communication.”

“From the police?”

“No,” said Raffles. “From the Tarantula.”

He handed me a large envelope, which had been opened, and with shaking hands I drew out the contents — about forty pages of my own handwriting, held together with a paper clip.

“One of your six manuscripts,” Raffles said. “Came in my mail this morning. No message with it. None needed. The sender holds five more of your writings. This one, obviously, is to serve notice on us.”

“Notice?”

“Of the Bite To Come,” Raffles said.

It came three agonizing days later. It was another of my manuscripts. Raffles showed it to me in the Hastings Room. Attached to the manuscript was a typewritten message:

“To. A. J. Raffles, Esq.:—

“There now remain in the hands of the present writer four further manuscripts from the pen of your confederate, the ineffable Manders.

“To hand these manuscripts to Scotland Yard, and so end the career of an individual who, little suspected of being a criminal, frequents high social and sporting circles, would be less to the purpose of the present writer than to exchange the manuscripts in return for services rendered.

“Here, Mr. Raffles, is the particular service required of you:

“Sir Roderick Naismith, a pillar of the British Treasury, frequently has with him, when he leaves his office in the evening, a small dispatch-case. Invariably is this so on Friday evenings, when no doubt his dispatch-case contains matter for study in his Hampstead home over the week-end.

“In winter, however. Sir Roderick does not go directly home, but proceeds in a cab to Lord’s Cricket Ground, where, at 6:30 on Friday evenings, he exercises himself at the aristocratic game of ’real’ tennis.

“To you, Mr. Raffles, a familiar of that exclusive haunt of the nobility and squirearchy, the building which houses the ’real’ tennis court at Lord’s, an opportunity to acquire Sir Roderick’s dispatch-case should readily present itself.

“On Friday evening, therefore, you will obtain that dispatch-case. You will then return to your chambers in The Albany, where, it has been ascertained, the window of your chambers at the rear of the building overlooks Vigo Street. You will place in that window of yours, as a signal that the service has been duly rendered, a reading-lamp with a green shade. You will then receive, by second post the following day, instructions regarding arrangements for the exchange of Sir Roderick’s dispatch-case in return for your confederate’s manuscripts.

“Failure on your part to carry out the specified service will result in the delivery of your partner’s manuscripts to Scotland Yard.”

“Oh, dear God!” I said.

“Sir Roderick Naismith’s match at Lord’s on Friday evening,” Raffles said, “is one in the intermediate stages of the tennis tournament. He’ll be playing against a distinguished soldier, a Field-Marshal — Kitchener of Khartoum.” Raffles’ eyes glittered. “Bunny, the Tarantula — so to call that unknown person — has made a significant slip in this missive, a slip that may well indicate a curious element in this whole situation. The ball’s now in my court — and I intend to play it.”

“How?”

“By doing, more or less, as the Tarantula demands,” Raffles said. “But, Bunny, I think you’d do well to keep out of this from here on.”

“I got you into the situation,” I said, “and I damned well intend to see it through with you — come what may.”

He raised his glass to me.

So the following evening, Friday, found us arriving together, in one of those taximeter-cabs currently challenging the supremacy of London’s hansoms and “growlers,” at Lord’s, the headquarters of world cricket.

The stands and terraces, gaily stippled in summer with the confetti hues of men’s blazers and ladies’ parasols, loomed now deserted, spectral in the persistent fog. Only from the tennis-court building, in its secluded corner of the famous demesne, did gleams of gaslight faintly mitigate the dank, muffling vapour.

Capped and ulstered, we entered the building. Just inside the entrance stood a glass case. In this was housed the token trophy of the tournament — token only, as it was one of the priceless treasures at Lord’s and never left the ground. Warped, time-blackened, wormeaten, the long-handled, curved, stringless old racquet in the glass case was a reminder of that long ago day when a monarch of France had presented to a monarch of England, as they met in conclave among the pennoned pavilions and glittering shields and lances of the armoured chivalry of both nations, on a French meadow, a gift of tennis balls.

Now, from the unseen court to our left, sounded hollow thuds and bangs, and from the changing-room, to our right, emerged a wiry man carrying a huge basket loaded to the brim with tennis balls of a type little changed since that far-off day of the two monarchs.

“ ’Evening, Mole,” said Raffles.

“Good evening, Mr. Raffles,” said Mole, the resident professional. “Come to see the match? Lord Kitchener and Sir Roderick Naismith are in the court now, warming up. I’m just going in to mark for them.”

He went off with his heavy basket, and Raffles strolled over to the door of the changing-room, glanced in casually, then returned to me.

“Just three men in there, Bunny,” he murmured. “Let’s hope they decide presently to watch the match. Meantime, we’ll watch it ourselves.”

Gripping my arm, he opened a door to the left, closed it behind us, and in the almost total darkness of the restricted space for spectators steered me to the rearmost of a half-dozen spartan benches. Through the interstices of a protective net I saw the reflector-shaded, wire-caged gaslights which from aloft shed down their brilliance solely on to the court proper, a stylized version of a barnyard of some ancient abbey in the Avignon of Pope Joan, or Cahors of the turreted bridge, or grey-walled Carcassonne of the many candlesnuffer towers.

But whereas medieval monks, banging balls at each other across a net slung between the monastery cow byre and the barn wall, had played this tennis stripped to their hairshirts, the two gentlemen now in the court here — one of the only eight such courts in England, including Henry VIII’s at Hampton Court — were in white flannels and sweaters.

“In these troubled times, Bunny,” Raffles murmured, “when a European monarch’s keeping half of the world nervous by his rapid expansion of his High Seas Fleet, it’s good to see Kitchener looking fit.”

I nodded, my gaze on the powerful figure, granite jaw, heavy moustache, and challenging steel-blue eyes of the great soldier, with whom the distinguished senior civil servant, gaunt, grey-haired, shrewd-faced Sir Roderick Naismith of the Treasury, markedly contrasted.

From the marker’s niche to the left of the court, where a section of penthouse roof simulated the eaves of a cow byre, Mole appeared, carrying his basket of tennis balls, which he emptied into a trough that already contained hundreds. And the match now began, but here in the dark I was trying to discern how many shadowy figures were spaced about on the benches in front of Raffles and myself. There were, as far as I could make out, only about half-a-dozen spectators — members here, of course — but presently I became aware of three more men quietly entering. Closing the door behind them, they groped their way to the front bench.

Raffles breathed in my ear, “The three from the changing-room. Sit tight!”

Silent as a ghost, he was gone from my side. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the game. Sir Roderick was serving, sending the ball, struck underhand, sliding along the penthouse roof. The ball, falling at the far end, was emphatically struck back across the centre net by Lord Kitchener. Sir Roderick’s return went high, the ball banging hollowly against a piece of wood — shaped like a Gothic arch and simulating a monastery pigeon-cote — on the wall behind Kitchener.

“Fifteen thirty,” chanted Mole, the marker, as the players changed ends. “Thirty fifteen — chase four.”

The game continued, the players changing ends as service was won or lost. Twanging of racquets, thudding of balls, thumping of plimsolled feet echoed hollowly in the court.

“Better than three,” rang the voice of Mole. “Deuce!”

Vicariously, I was with Raffles, breaking now into Sir Roderick’s locker in the changing-room. Or surprised red-handed at the job? I did not know. Crypt-cold as it was here in the dark, my gloved hands were clammy with sweat. Because I could not keep a pen out of them, Raffles now risked total ruin — and the grim lines of Omar Khayyam rang in my ears: “The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ—”

“ ’Vantage,” chanted Mole. “Game! Game and set to Lord Kitchener!”

The players met in mid-court to mop their faces with towels proffered to them by Mole from his marker’s niche between the netted apertures which represented the window-openings of a monastery cow byre. Sir Roderick’s pale face looked as cool as ever, but the hero of Khartoum was considerably ruddier as he dried his brow and his heavy great moustache.

“Have at you again, Naismith,” I heard him growl.

“Good-oh, Field-Marshal,” said Sir Roderick.

Half-way through the second set, I became aware, with a start, of a shadow at my side. Raffles was back.

Neither of us said a word until the match was over, with victory to Kitchener, and we made our way out from the tennis-court building into the fog shrouding the cricket ground, when I ventured to ask Raffles how he had got on.

“I’ll tell you when I’ve thought it over,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find a cab of some sort. I’m hoping there may be a message for me at The Albany.”

When we reached his chambers and with a match he popped the gas-globe alight, we saw an envelope lying on the doormat. He tore the envelope open, read the message enclosed, thrust it into his ulster pocket.

“From Ivor Kern,” he said. “Come on, we’ve a call to make.”

“On Ivor?”

“No, Bunny. On the Tarantula!”

He turned out the gas, hurried me out of the building by the front entrance to Albany Courtyard and Piccadilly, where we were fortunate enough to get a cab, a four-wheeler. Telling the cabbie to drop us at the corner of Church Walk, Kensington, Raffles thrust me into the dark, cold interior of the cab and, as the horse jingled us off westward, gave me a cigarette.

“Now, Bunny,” he said. “Consider your lost package. On the night of the explosion in the Mount Street house, just three people passed along the second-floor landing in making their hasty exits from the house. Any one of those three could have spotted and snatched up your valuable-looking package — and, oddly enough, when we had our brief conversation with them in the street each of them was wearing a garment which could have concealed the package. Charles Chastayne was in evening-dress — with cape. Miss Van Heysst had thrown on a hooded cloak — as blue as her eyes. Commander Rigby was in uniform, with a deep-pocketed Navy greatcoat.”

A match flared. We dipped our cigarettes to the flame Raffles held in his cupped hands.

“I had Ivor Kern,” he went on, “set his snoops to find out where those three persons had taken up their respective temporary abodes — and keep an eye on them. Then came the Tarantula’s missive — with its significant slip, the reference to ‘the British Treasury.’ Any English person would say, simply, ‘the Treasury.’ So here was a hint that the writer of the Tarantula missive was a foreigner — and one of our three suspects is a foreigner.”

“Miss Van Heysst!”

“Yes, but she couldn’t have written that letter, Bunny. Her English is charming, but if she’d written that letter there’d have been more slips, more foreign locutions. No, if it were she who snatched up your package, she must have shown it to someone — the person, a foreigner fluent in English and well informed on English ways and values, who wrote the Tarantula letter. So who — and what — is this person with the very sharp bite?”

Our cab was jingling past the muffled gaslamps and flickering fog-flare braziers of Hyde Park Corner.

“And just what,” Raffles said, “is the youthful, seductive Miss Van Heysst? A new resident, she moves into a flat adjoining that of Commander Clifford Rigby. A gas explosion puts them on the street. At whom, Bunny, was Miss Van Heysst’s forlorn plea of fearing to meet Jack the Ripper in the fog subtly directed, and who takes it up with the gallantry to be expected of the Navy and promptly tucks Little Blue Riding Hood under his wing? Commander Rigby. And what, in these times when the clang of shipbuilders’ hammers is resounding threateningly to us across the North Sea, is Rigby? He’s a naval officer — with a staff job at the Admiralty.”

“Oh, dear God!” I said.

“What an adroit little opportunist,” said Raffles, “is Miss Van Heysst! But, Bunny, though it seemed to me that a curious element was beginning to creep into this matter of your lost manuscripts, it struck me as odd that the Tarantula was anxious to view the documents in a dispatch-case of a senior civil servant at the Treasury. If the Tarantula is what I was beginning to suspect, it would have been more understandable if the documents he wanted stolen belonged to, say, Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener. Why those of a senior civil servant at the Treasury? I decided to have a look at Sir Roderick’s documents, in the changing-room at Lord’s this evening, and find out.”

“And you did?”

“I did,” said Raffles. “Naturally, I left the documents intact and Sir Roderick’s dispatch-case and locker relocked. What the Tarantula, as a foreigner, doesn’t realise is that a member at Lord’s does not, however dire his need, rob another member. It’s simply not done. But a brief skim through Sir Roderick’s documents made all plain to me. He’s an impostor!”

“Sir Roderick Naismith’s an impostor? Raffles, that’s incredible!”

“But true, Bunny. He’s a senior civil servant, but not at the Treasury. That ostensible occupation of Sir Roderick’s is a mask for his real one. He’s the head of our Secret Security Service.”

“I never knew we had such a thing!”

“How could you?” said Raffles. “It’s secret.” He peered out into the fog. “We’ll be arriving any minute now,” he said, and he went on, “I’ve no doubt now that the Tarantula is a spymaster. He’s evidently learned Sir Roderick’s real occupation. And what the Tarantula is anxious to find out is whether any of the agents whose activities in this country he directs and controls are under suspicion. And, significantly enough, Bunny, in Sir Roderick’s dispatch-case there’s a pencilled list of five names, each with some personal particulars noted against them. The list is headed: ‘For expulsion from England subject to Firm Evidence of Espionage Activity.’ Among the names is that of Miss Van Heysst of Mount Street. But not the name of the Tarantula.”

“You know his name, then?”

“It’s in the note I had just now from Ivor Kern,” Raffles said. “One of his snoops, who’d traced Miss Van Heysst to a respectable hotel, Garland’s, near the Haymarket Theatre, was keeping an eye on her. It seems that this afternoon she went, by a circuitous route, to Richmond Park, a place usually deserted on a foggy afternoon. She met a man at the Priory Lane gate, had a brief talk with him. As I’d instructed, any person she met with was to be followed. So Ivor’s snoop followed the man. He lives on the first floor of Number Eight, Church Walk, Kensington. So we’re now about to visit him in his spidery lair,” Raffles said, “and return his Tarantula bite!”

We were, as always, unarmed, and I was taut with apprehension as Raffles paid off our cab at the corner of Church Walk and we walked along that silent side-street. Here and there, dim light from curtained windows faintly blurred the fog.

“Here we are, Bunny,” Raffles said, “that house with the number 8 barely visible on the front-door fanlight. He’s probably in that first-floor where faint edges of light show around the window-curtains. No doubt he’s waiting impatiently for word from whatever minion he has skulking in Vigo Street, at the back of The Albany, that a green-shaded reading-lamp has appeared at the window of my chambers. H’m! Now, how’re we to trap this hairy Tarantula?” Raffles thought for a moment. “Tell you what, Bunny. We’ll get him worried. Got plenty of small change in your pocket?”

“A fair amount, Raffles.”

“Good. Now, I’m going to try that front door. It’ll probably be locked, but may not be bolted — in which case the little implement I used on Sir Roderick’s locker at Lord’s should serve our purpose. If I can get into the house, you keep well back in the fog and toss coins up at that first-floor window. The man’s almost certainly armed, so my prudent course will be to steal in on him from behind when his back’s turned as he peers out of the window.”

Instantly grasping Raffles’ strategy, I whipped off my gloves, took a handful of small change from my pocket as he moved silently up the two steps to the door under the dim fanlight. As I watched his shadowy figure at work on the door, a vertical line of light suddenly appeared there — and vanished instantly as Raffles, entering, soundlessly closed the door.

Drawing back into the fog, I tossed up a coin at the first-floor window. I heard a tinkle against the glass, a second tinkle as the coin dropped down into the railed basement area. No movement of the curtains ensued, so I tossed up another coin — another — and another. Suddenly, the faint lines of light that edged the window-curtains vanished. Drawing back further into the fog, I sensed, my heart thumping, that the curtains had been parted a little and that some evil, spider-like creature, crouching there at the window of the now dark room, was glaring out balefully into the fog.

Listening intently, I heard no sound from within the room, but I saw the light go on again. For a second Raffles showed himself to me between the curtains, then he closed them. I waited, swallowing with a parched throat. It seemed a long wait before the front door of the house silently opened and closed, and Raffles rejoined me.

We picked up a cab in Kensington High Street, and Raffles gave the cabbie an address in Hampstead.

“I’m afraid, Bunny,” he said, “I had to violate a rule of ours and use a modicum of violence. I banged the Tarantula’s head hard against his floor, to stun him while I relit the gaslight he’d turned out. Still, he was beginning to come round as I left. He’ll find he’s lost your four manuscripts. They were on his desk. Here they are, still loosely wrapped in your yellow silk muffler.

“There was a locked drawer in his desk. The lock presented no problem. So we’re richer by about one thousand pounds — spies’ wages, I imagine. I also abstracted from the drawer a batch of the Tarantula’s papers — which provide, I fancy, all the ‘firm evidence’ Sir Roderick Naismith needs to justify some expulsions from this country. I noticed Sir Roderick’s Hampstead address on letters in his document-case at Lord’s, so we’ll drop these papers he needs through his letterbox, then drive to Piccadilly Circus and see if we can buy a few flowers.”

I was at a loss to divine why he should want flowers at this hour. However, late as it was when we got back from our Hampstead errand and paid off our cab in Piccadilly Circus, we found this hub of London an oasis of activity in the blanketing fog. The theatres and music-halls were disgorging their second-house audiences, the gin palaces their inebriates, into the blurred glow from gaslights and the naked flicker of naphtha fog-flares.

Police whistles shrilled above the clip-clop of hoofbeats, harness-jingle of hansoms, fourwheelers, and rumbling omnibuses, and mingled with the honking of occasional taximeter-cabs and the raucous cries of the Piccadilly flower women sitting beside their big baskets at their usual receipt of custom on the steps of the Eros statue.

“Oy, misters, you gents there!” A cheeky-looking wench, much shawled and petticoated, with a feather boa, a huge hat bedecked with ostrich plumes, and high-heeled button boots, brandished a great bunch of chrysanthemums at Raffles and myself. “Out lyte, you are! Bin on the spree, you two ’ave! You’d best tyke a few flowers ’ome — beautiful chrysanths, fresh as a dysy — to sweeten yer little bit o’ trouble-an’-strife!”

“On behalf of my friend here,” said Raffles, “I’ll give you a sovereign for that fine bunch of chrysanthemums, and if you’d care for an extra half-bar, you can deliver them for him at your leisure. The place is not far. It’s just off the Haymarket there — a hotel called Garland’s. Hand the flowers in at the desk and say they’re for Miss Van Heysst, as a bon voyage gift from A Gentleman of Mount Street. Are you on?”

“Mister, for an extra ’arf-bar, the w’y tryde’s bin to-night in this bleedin’ fog,” said the wench, “I’d walk as far as Seven Dials for yer wiv me whole bloody basket!”

So Raffles gave her the extra half-sovereign and, raising our caps to the wench, we walked across the misty Circus towards the nearby Albany.

“There are games, Bunny, and games,” Raffles remarked thoughtfully. “ ‘Real’ tennis is an old one, but espionage is an older one still — and much more dangerous. As far as women are concerned, only a brave woman would play it. It’s to be hoped that Miss Van Heysst doesn’t continue her activities in the pay of the Wilhelmstrasse, or — in the troubled state of Europe to-day — she may come to a bad end. That would be a pity, because she’s not only an exceptionally attractive and very young woman, but also a brave one.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I think, Bunny,” Raffles said, “although she was a fellow resident of yours in Mount Street for only a short while, it would be nice for her to have a small tribute of flowers from you, to take with her when Sir Roderick Naismith has her escorted aboard the Harwich to Hook-of-Holland boat to-morrow. I wish we’d seen more of her. She’s a most interesting person. According to some particulars against her name in Sir Roderick’s list, her real surname is Zeller — and she’s believed to use aliases other than Van Heysst.”

“Other aliases?” I said.

He nodded.

“One of them, noted against our Little Blue Riding Hood in Sir Roderick’s list, is rather striking,” Raffles said. “Mata Hari.”

I resented the old woman’s approach, not having driven 150 miles along a rugged coast highway to be an unwilling dinner partner at Little River Inn. Particularly so early in my short stay. But I’d been told thirty or forty years ago that a lady was always kind to old people since she herself would be old one day, and perhaps unhappy and lonely as well. Now my time had come, and I had no need to be reminded of my age and circumstances. But as usual I hated to be in the position of rejecting anyone.

“No,” I said, as she stood waiting by my table, “nobody’s with me. I’m alone.” Which was the solitary truth — family dead, friends dead or moved away, everyone I’d ever loved gone.

“It’s not good for a woman to eat by herself,” she said, sitting in the opposite chair. “And that makes two of us. What are you drinking?”

“Gin and tonic, no fruit.” Even then I should have told her I was in a poor mood for company, because her voice and gestures jangled my nerve ends. I looked at her more closely. Short gray hair, carelessly brushed, a blue pants suit, wrinkled and slightly soiled; she looked neglected. My own hair was white, but so far I had not neglected my appearance.

“Why, that’s what I drink too,” she said, beaming. “I’ll have one tonight, I think. Where are you from?”

“The Bay Region.”

“I used to live there,” she said. “I live here now. This is as close to a home as I’ll ever get, unless they put me in the booby hatch someday. What are you going to eat?”

“Petrale sole.” I’d stayed at the inn and dined in this room at this table before. Tonight the sole, tomorrow night the salmon. The next morning I’d be gone, leaving behind all that was precious and good in my life. Only memories now, but once a man had sat opposite me at this table, he down from the north, I up from the south.

For fourteen years we’d met every other month for a weekend together, walking on the beach at the mouth of the river, driving around the headland to watch the surf on the rocks at sunset, and retiring to the same cottage after a superb and leisurely dinner.

“And apricot cobbler.” I spoke aloud, out of my thoughts.

“We have rhubarb cobbler tonight,” the hostess said at my side. And to the woman across from me, “Miss Barnes, did you ask the lady if she minded your sitting with her?”

“Yes, I did.” Miss Barnes flushed unbecomingly. “She didn’t tell me I couldn’t.”

I said, “Perhaps you’ll excuse me after all. I intend to eat very slowly tonight, and I have something serious to think about.” Immediately I wished I’d kept still. Miss Barnes looked about to weep. But it was too late. The hostess, after a prolonged argument, led her away to another table, somewhere behind me.

The waitress brought me a bowl of clam chowder, and normally I’d have savored every spoonful. As it was, I could hardly swallow. By the time the salad arrived, however, my thoughts were back on Jim and how he’d always ordered oil and vinegar while I took the roquefort dressing.

Food had been one of the things we had in common, although he was married, a drygoods merchant in Eureka, while I was single, a librarian from Concord. I had hobbies and friends, I kept up with the news and theaters and concerts, I read a lot; I was fairly well content. When I met him, he had no interest beyond his work and his children, whom he adored and for whom he maintained the semblance of a marriage. Periodically he had to get away from his wife, and one time we turned up separately here at the inn. Our rooms happened to be next to each other, and on our way to dinner we collided as we locked our doors.

But we sat at separate tables to eat. I certainly hadn’t thought of a possible friendship, much less an affair, on that first meeting. Yet, as we acknowledged later, both of us felt the impact of looking at a stranger and thinking how nice it would be if we could have been together.

Call it luck as I did, or fate as Jim did, we kept colliding all the next day — in the village, up Fern Canyon, and finally on the headland at sunset. “This is silly,” Jim said as he left his car to come sit in mine. “Tomorrow let’s spend the day together.”

It took another accidental weekend before I accepted what Jim said had been obvious and inevitable to him from the beginning. Probably it was his immediate honesty about his family situation that persuaded me to let my unexpectedly insistent fantasies become a reality, because I was never in any doubt as to the source of his interest in me, and if I were honest, the source of my interest in him. We represented adventure without danger, excitement without consequences, love without responsibility...

Behind me, Miss Barnes asked for a doggie bag because her little dog was starving, she said, and anyway, she couldn’t cat all her sole. Suddenly I couldn’t finish mine cither.

The hostess came to refill my water glass. “Sorry about that,” she said quietly. “Poor Miss Barnes has a habit of accosting the other guests, and tonight you were elected. It must be very annoying; I do apologize.”

“It’s all right,” I told her. “Only I feel sorry for her because she seems so lonely, and — well, isn’t she a bit out of touch?”

“Out of touch,” the hostess said. “She’s senile, poor thing. I’m afraid we’re going to have to do something about her.” I winced and covered it with a cough. Then she added, “Oh, you aren’t eating. Isn’t the fish all right?”

“It’s perfect, thank you.”

She nodded and moved away, while I took another bite of sole, remembering how Jim had always called it ambrosia and said we were the gods. Laying my fork down again, I got out a cigarette and my lighter.

“Could I have that little bit of fish you’re not going to eat?” Miss Barnes asked, right at my elbow. “It’s for my dog.”

“What about bones? I never give my dog fish for fear of his choking on a bone.”

“My dog eats anything I give her,” Miss Barnes said, holding her doggie bag open. Then she leaned closer, her voice barely audible. “That’s a lie. I want the fish for my lunch tomorrow. You see, retirement isn’t all it’s supposed to be these days.”

Silently I transferred the remnant of my sole to the doggie bag and was relieved when the waitress came to lead Miss Barnes back to her own table.

Thought of my own retirement, not so far off now, was so unnerving that I left the dessert, finished my coffee, and went out through the bar onto the long front porch of the old inn, with the rose vines climbing up to the wooden scrollwork of the gabled windows and eaves. In front was the parking area where my car stood among others, and beyond the highway running below the property were the rocks with the sea pounding the shore under the dark old windblown cypresses.

I considered what I wanted to do and decided to get my Sheltie and feed him before we walked down the hill to the beach.

Miss Barnes was right behind me. “Is your doggie with you?”

“Locked in the car.”

“Oh, dear, they say it’s dangerous leaving children and animals in locked cars.”

“I left the window partly open,” I said. “Anyway, I’m going to feed him now and then go to bed.”

Her smiled faded. “Oh, dear. I thought maybe you and I could go for a walk.”

“Not tonight.” And hastily I added, “Thanks.”

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes filled with weak tears. “I’m being tiresome, aren’t I? It’s a part of growing old not to know when you’re being tiresome. That and being retired. What about you? Are you retired?”

“Not yet.” But I would be. Any day now.

She shook her head. “You won’t find it easy when you do. People die or drop away from you, and finally you’re alone, with nothing but your regrets to sustain you.” She looked far out to sea where a fishing vessel was beating the waves back to port. “I was young once, you know, and there was a man who found me attractive. But nothing came of it.”

“Why not? Did you quarrel?”

“Oh, it was my fault.” She faced me, lips quivering. “You see, I didn’t trust him. He said he would leave his wife for me, but I thought he was just trying to — oh, you know. Then he died, and I discovered he’d gone ahead and started a divorce. If he’d lived, I think he would have come after me again. By the time I found out what I truly wanted, it was too late.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and helpless to comfort her, I escaped to my car, put Star on his leash, and took him to my room for his meal. He gobbled it as usual, finding no strange smell from the phenobarb I’d put in the food I’d brought from home.

When I was sure Miss Barnes had disappeared, I took Star down the path through the red alders and young firs, past the Oregon grape and elderberry bushes, and across the highway to the beach at the mouth of the river. Here the water was calm, and I let Star run in and out of the waves, his barking already muted and uncertain. He got all wet and shook himself feebly when I whistled him back and restored the leash.

He was my second Sheltie, Jim having given me both dogs to remind me of him during our separations, he said. When the first Star sickened and died, I was inconsolable and felt it was a bad omen. But Jim simply went out and bought the second puppy for me. Now the second Star was twelve years old and I couldn’t bear to see the way he was aging, because it was like a reflection of my own state.

We walked around to the point where I stood hypnotized by the surf pounding up and over the glistening black rocks and falling back, leaving ruffles of white foam...

“The seahorses are riding high tonight,” Jim said in my ear.

I felt his arm around me, and leaned back wanting only to preserve and extend the love and security he gave me. Wanting it harder and oftener as the years rolled by, worrying that he was tired of me, resenting the sterile two months between our weekends, frequently mistrusting his ultimate intentions. In this I was unreasonable, for I’d known from the beginning ours would be love without responsibility, but the force of resentment swept me along anyway.

And sensing this in me, he tried to make it all right again by saying, “Oh, God, I’d give my life to go south with you tomorrow.”

“Do it then.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t, not unless—”

“Not unless she divorces you, which she won’t, or the children become mature enough not to be damaged.” I threw back the words he always used whenever I spoke of the future. Not that I often did, because I respected his love for his children, his desire to protect them, or their image of him. But that didn’t prevent the slow rot of distrust from growing in my mind...

I sighed and turned to go, thinking of Miss Barnes. “I thought he was just trying to — oh, you know.”

My poor old Star came dragging after me, already asleep on his feet from what I’d put in his food. Finally I had to pick him up and carry him like a baby in my arms. He died an hour after I got back to my room, and I sat weeping all night because I lacked the courage to finish what I’d started.

When daylight came, I wrapped the body in a blanket and carried it out to the car where I placed it on the passenger seat. Then I sat beside him until it was time for the dining room to open.

I couldn’t eat, but the coffee helped, and so did being seated at the table near the fireplace where Jim and I had always sat. Until the last morning when I’d come here alone while he still slept in the cottage we’d shared for the past two nights.

Presently I went out to the car again, and with Star’s body beside me, drove off to visit our favorite headland and sit watching the water burst on the rocks for the rest of the day. I’d have given anything to bury Star there under a carpet of Indian paintbrush, lupines, and poppies, but it was public property.

I returned to the inn after sundown and had barely seated myself and ordered a drink in the dining room when Miss Barnes came to my table.

“Good evening,” she said, face aglow. “How’s your sweet little dog today? Not locked in the car again, I hope.”

“My dog? Star?” I swallowed. “Oh, he died last night.”

“Why, you poor thing! What happened?”

“Please. If you don’t mind, I can’t talk about it.”

“Of course not. I’ll sit down and keep you company—”

“Please don’t, Miss Barnes. Please leave me alone.”

The hostess heard me and led the old woman away.

I ordered the salmon and toyed with it. After refusing berry cobbler, I went straight to my room and sat down to wonder what I should do about Star’s body, which was still in the car. I couldn’t think where to take it, or whom to ask for help. All I could think about was poor old Miss Barnes, and how in a way I resembled her: not accosting strangers in the dining room, not yet; but inside, where it counted, and where I’d worked for eight long years to contain it. Now, if I could, I had to recall the last night Jim and I ever had together. Not as I would like to remember it, but as it really happened...

He had said that his wife was going to tell his children if he didn’t give me up.

“Oh, Jim, no! She wouldn’t.”

“Well, she said she would. And it will devastate the kids. The youngest isn’t quite fifteen, and I can’t stand even the thought of their disillusion and hurt.”

“What did you tell her then?”

“I said I’d think about it.”

He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and believing he’d already made his choice, I lost control. I said unspeakable things, made unreasonable accusations and threats. I was beside myself, and all the resentment and distrust in my festering mind came out until at last we faced each other, pale and shaking, utterly washed up, and we both knew it.

Jim was the first to break the silence. “Before I left home, I thought of another way, if you’re willing. I’d rather die with you than live without you.”

Shaken to my fibers, I finally agreed.

So we made our pact and went to bed for the last time, close and warm together as if nothing had changed. Only in the morning he didn’t wake up — and I did.

After weeping for a time, I’d gone for breakfast which I didn’t eat and driven straight home, a journey I don’t remember. Nobody ever came after me, though I presume his wife must have had difficulty convincing the authorities who she was because nobody would have recognized her as the woman who’d been registered as Jim’s wife so often at the cottage.

Later when I went to Eureka and read his obituary in the local paper, I discovered she’d had enough influence to hush up the circumstances. Death from a heart attack, the notice read. But it should have said murder, because at the last minute and without saying so to Jim, I had panicked and failed to keep the suicide pact we’d made...

I stirred at last, calm and not unhappy as I got the bottle and swallowed the rest of the phenobarb tablets Jim had handed me eight years ago on the night, when in my madness, I believed he intended that only I should die...

The story you have just read was nominated by MWA (Mystery Writers of America) as one of the five best new mystery short stories published in American magazines and books during 1977.

The 134 freeway is reasonably well lit as it passes through Glendale so that Mrs. Robert Shozinsky had no difficulty as she drove carefully only a little over the legal limit of 55 miles per hour. Because she was alone in her car, she had the doors locked. As soon as she passed the city limits the roadway became much darker, particularly when it began the long climb up toward the Arroyo Seco bridge that led into Pasadena.

The freeway had been carved out of the side of a substantial hill, one that would have been called a mountain in many other places; consequently it was both isolated and very dark at two o’clock in the morning. Since the only illumination Mrs. Shozinsky had was provided by her own headlights, she did not see the body until she was almost on it.

Her fingers locked with sudden panic as she swerved her car; her knuckles went white against the steering wheel. For the first few seconds she was unable to realize exactly where she was, then she saw that she had reached the top of the long grade, and the first lights of Pasadena were visible ahead. Although the freeway was almost deserted at that hour on Monday night, she used her turn signal as she pulled off to the right. She was a knowledgeable woman and she remembered there were emergency telephones approximately every quarter mile along the right of way.

She saw one about 200 feet ahead. She let her car come to a stop beside it, and seconds later she was in communication with the operator at the Zone Five headquarters of the California Highway Patrol.

“There’s a man lying on the freeway,” she reported, “on his face, all sprawled out. I–I almost ran over him. Please come quickly!”

“Right now,” the operator assured her. He made note of the phone number she was calling from and popped the slip on the conveyor belt.

The dispatcher put the call on the air promptly and also notified the Fire Department paramedics. Four minutes later Mrs. Shozinsky had company — a one-man CHP unit arrived at almost the same moment the red paramedic unit rolled up, silently but with lights flashing. No one used sirens on the freeway system; they had proved to be too dangerous.

The body was spreadeagled on the concrete pavement in the Number Four lane, lying almost directly opposite the sign that marked the city limits of Pasadena. The paramedics went to work immediately while the highway patrolman set out emergency flares. It did not take them long. The taller of the two men gave the verdict. “Dead,” he said simply. Then he asked, “Whose jurisdiction is it?”

The patrolman couldn’t answer that immediately. Instead he went on the air with the suggestion that both Pasadena and LAPD be notified. Meanwhile, the paramedics covered the body and informed the coroner’s office. By the time they had finished and were ready to pull away, a white Matador patrol car from Pasadena was just rolling up. The two officers were getting out of their vehicle when a Los Angeles black and white appeared.

The highway patrol officer thanked his informer for her cooperation and sent her on her way after he had taken her name and address.

The four newly arrived officers surveyed the situation and mutually determined what they had. One man from each team radioed in, at almost the same time. “Homicide,” the Pasadena officer reported to his dispatcher. “Possible 187. Request full backup.”

The dispatcher alerted the watch commander, Lieutenant Robenson, who wanted to know the exact location. “Is that in our jurisdiction?” he asked.

“I think so, but Bob Watson also asked for a full backup.”

Code 187 meant murder, so Robenson did not hesitate. He called out a homicide team that would respond with its specially equipped vehicle, then he dialed an unlisted number on his personnel index. Virgil Tibbs answered the third ring.

“Good morning, Virg,” Robenson said. “Rise and shine. Apologize to the young lady, I assume there is one, and come on in. We have a nice dead body for you.”

“I don’t want a dead body,” Tibbs replied, “I want to get some sleep.”

He hung up after that, because any further conversation would be pointless, and dressed quickly. He ran his hand across the skin of his face, but despite the stubble, he decided not to take time to shave.

The black detective found a small mob scene when he arrived at the point on the freeway, close to Malcolm Street, where the body had been found. The Pasadena Police had put a full homicide team into action and the LAPD had sent an even larger contingent. Obviously, the question of jurisdiction had not been clarified. Both teams were busy taking photographs and making the usual measurements while two men from the coroner’s office waited patiently to remove the body.

Virgil went quietly to the place where the body lay, removed the cover, and began a swift careful examination. He had barely started when a tall, powerfully built man in plainclothes appeared at his side. “May I see your ID, please,” he asked.

A uniformed Pasadena sergeant answered for Virgil. “He’s with us — our top homicide man.”

The Los Angeles man remembered what he had heard about Pasadena’s specialist. “Virgil Tibbs?” he asked.

Tibbs rose and shook hands. “Tim Yost,” the tall man introduced himself. “That whitehead over there is Vince Scott, my partner.”

“Nice to know you,” Tibbs said.

“I don’t know why they called you out, Virgil. The body is in Los Angeles and it’s our headache.”

“Assuming the sign is accurately placed,” Tibbs countered, “from the hips down it’s in Pasadena.”

“Look, Virgil, the guy was shot in the head — one neat hole right in the forehead. On this side of the freeway he had to be coming from Los Angeles. Somebody made the hit in a car, then dumped him out. It’s ours all the way.”

“Suppose,” Virgil suggested, “that the car stopped and he got out. Not a likely place, but I’m assuming he wasn’t given any choice. Then he was shot. The hole in the forehead fits and that would keep any blood out of the car.”

“Remote, but possible,” Yost conceded.

“The man fell where he was found. I didn’t get very far with my examination, but if he had been thrown from a moving vehicle, there would be abrasion marks, particularly on his exposed skin. There don’t seem to be any. That points to his having been put out, and then shot.”

“So?” Yost asked.

“Notice the position of the feet. He was standing in Pasadena when shot — from the hips down he’s clearly on the left side of the sign. He fell forward, partly into Los Angeles, after he was fatally wounded. It’s our case.”

It was an impasse which for the moment no one was in a position to resolve. “Have you IDed the victim?” Tibbs asked.

“Yes, there were some things in his pockets — nothing very significant. Look, the powers that be will settle whether you’ll be handling this one or Vince and me, so for the moment why don’t we avoid duplication of effort?”

“I’ll agree to that,” Virgil said. “But I’d still like to know exactly what was in his pockets.”

“Just the usual things — a wallet, pocket comb, ballpoint pen, some change, a key case, a handkerchief, and a cocktail napkin.”

Tibbs made a swift decision. “You take the body and all the personal effects. Let me have the napkin. I’ll work on that.”

Yost looked at his partner for a moment of silence, then the two men seemed to agree by telepathy. “It’s a deal,” Yost declared.

The Grants lived in Kennington. Mr. Grant worked in an architect’s office in the City and had inherited the small terrace house on Dodman Street. It was convenient, since he could reach the Bank Station in ten minutes on the Underground. But it was not a neighborhood which he found really congenial. There was Mr. Knowlson, who worked in insurance and lived two doors up. But most of the inhabitants of Dodman Street were uncouth men, with jobs at railway depots — men who went to work at five o’clock in the morning and spent their evenings in public houses.

Mr. Grant had often spoken to his wife of moving out to the suburbs, where people went to their offices at a rational hour and spent the evenings in their gardens and joined tennis clubs and formed discussion groups. The factor which tipped the balance against moving was Timothy. Timothy was their only child and was now fourteen, but with his pink and white face and shy smile he could have been taken for eleven or twelve. After a difficult start he was happily settled at the Matthew Holder School near the Oval, and sang first treble in the choir at St. Mark’s.

“It would be a pity to make a change now,” said Mrs. Grant. “Timothy’s easily upset. I’ve put his dinner in the oven, so I hope he won’t be too late back from choir practise. If his dinner gets dried up he can’t digest it properly.”

At that moment Timothy was walking slowly down the road outside St. Mark’s. He was walking slowly because, if the truth were told, he had no great desire to get home. When he did get there, his mother would make him take off his shoes and put on a dry pair of socks and would sit him down to eat a large and wholesome meal, which he did not really want, and he would have to tell his father exactly what he had done in school that day and—

A hand smacked him between the shoulder blades and he spun around. Two boys were standing behind him, both a little older and a lot bigger than Timothy. The taller one said, “It’s a stickup, Rosebud. Turn out your pockets.”

Timothy gaped at him.

“Come on, come on,” said the other one. “Do you want to be ruffed up?”

“Are you mugging me?”

“You’ve cottoned quick, boyo. Shell out.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Timothy. “But I’ve actually only got about ten pence on me. It’s Thursday, you see. I get my pocket money on Friday.”

He was feeling in his trouser pocket as he spoke and now fetched out a fivepenny piece and a penny and held them out.

The taller boy stared at the money, but made no move to touch it. He said, “How much pocket money do you get every week?”

“A pound.”

“So if we’d stuck you up tomorrow, we’d have got a quid?”

“That’s right,” said Timothy. “I’m terribly sorry. If you’re short tonight I could show you how to make a bit perhaps.”

The two boys looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

“Cool,” said the tall one. “That’s cool.”

“What’s the gimmick?” said the second one.

“It’s the amusement arcade in the High Street. There’s a big slot machine, tucked away in the corner, and no one uses it much.”

“Why no one uses that machine is because no one ever makes any money out of it.”

“That’s right,” said Timothy. “It’s a set-safe machine. I read about it in a magazine. It’s a machine that’s organized so that the winning combinations never come up. A man comes and clears the machines on Friday. By this time it must be stuffed with money.”

“So what are you suggesting we do? Break it open with a hammer?”

“What I thought was, it’s plugged into a wall socket. If you pulled out the plug and broke the electric circuit while it’s going, the safety mechanism wouldn’t work. It would stop at some place it wasn’t meant to stop, so you’d have a good chance.”

The two boys looked at each other, then at Timothy.

Timothy said, “It would need three people. One to distract the attention of the attendant. You could do that by asking him for change for a pound. The second to work the machine and the third to get down behind and jerk out the plug. I could do that. I’m the smallest.”

The tall boy said, “If it’s as easy as that why haven’t you done it before?”

“Because I haven’t got—” said Timothy and stopped. He realized that what he had nearly said was, “Because I haven’t got two friends.”

They met one bright August afternoon in one of the elegant red and gold Hotel Versailles elevators, and since it was a bit crowded at the moment they had to stand close together, though without touching. Yet even on that first occasion, in the way that such people instinctively recognize each other’s morality and inclinations, there was something communicated between them. They touched eyes for only a brief instant, yet even so the man knew the woman from then on, and the woman the man.

They were very careful, however. Mistakes were always possible. So it was mid-October before the man rented a small furnished apartment on East 78th Street under the name of Robinson, after which the woman came over there to spend a few hours in the afternoon with him about twice a week. They were both experienced in such matters, the man very experienced, and after he had made sure there was an automatic elevator in the building and no doorman, everything could be managed with the most admirable discretion.

Nobody knew about them. Nobody suspected about them. But something unforeseen happened. Little by little the thing got more serious, or perhaps only more passionate, and by January it had become very serious. That was when they began to think with increasing hatred of the one person who stood in their way. Without that one person they would have more money than they could use. Without him they could have everything they wanted and enjoy a long happy life together.

At first, however, they only considered the thing silently, in their thoughts. But one afternoon the man remarked as if jokingly how fortunate it would be if only some sort of accident occurred, and the woman responded in the same manner. But an accident, the man pointed out, might be very dangerous for them. Details could go wrong; mistakes could be made; everyone concerned, husband or wife, son or daughter, would be thoroughly checked out, even down to the hotel staff — unless, of course, someone else could be found who obviously had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to eliminate that one person.

After that, no longer jokingly, they began to discuss who the someone might be. First, there must be no question as to his identity. And second, the police must be made to realize at once who had done the thing and the reason for it. If that part could be set up, only one very simple question remained. Who would the tool of murder be? Whom would they pick as the sacrificial goat?

Finally the solution presented itself and they both immediately understood it was the perfect solution. Soon a pleasantly conspiratorial excitement carried them ahead faster and faster, and by the last week in January, with every possible difficulty taken care of, they arranged the whole thing from beginning to end.

Isabella had soaped her face, her neck, and was beginning to relax in the spray of deliciously warm water on her body when suddenly — there he was again! An ugly grinning face peered at her not a meter from her own face, with one big fist gripping an iron bar, so he could raise himself to her level.

“Swine!” Isabella said between her teeth, ducking at the same time.

“Slut!” came his retort. “Ha, ha!”

This must have been the third intrusion by the same creep! Isabella, still stooped, got out of the shower and reached for the plastic bottle of yellow shampoo, shot some into a bowl which held a cake of soap (she removed the soap), let some hot shower water run into the bowl and agitated the water until the suds rose, thick and sweet-smelling. She set the bowl within easy reach on the rim of the tub, and climbed back under the shower, breathing harder with her fury.

Just let him try it again! Defiantly erect, she soaped her facecloth, washed her thighs. The square recessed window was just to the left of her head, and there was a square emptiness, stone-lined, between the blue-and-white tiled bathroom walls and the great iron bars, each as thick as her wrist, on the street side.

“Signora?” came the mocking voice again.

Isabella reached for the bowl. Now he had both hands on the bars, and his face was between them, unshaven, his black eyes intense, his loose mouth smiling. Isabella flung the suds, holding the bowl with fingers spread wide on its underside.

“Oof!” The head disappeared.

A direct hit! The suds had caught him between the eyes, and she thought she heard some of the suds hit the pavement. Isabella smiled and finished her shower.

She was not looking forward to the evening — dinner at home with the First Secretary of the Danish Embassy with his girl friend; but she had had worse evenings in the past, and there were worse to come in Vienna in the last week of this month, May, when her husband Filippo had to attend some kind of human-rights-and-pollution conference that was going to last five days. Isabella didn’t care for the Viennese — she considered the women bores with nothing on their minds but clothes, who was wearing what, and how much did it cost.

“I think I prefer the green silk tonight,” Isabella said to her maid Elisabetta, when she went into her bedroom, big bathtowel around her, and saw the new black dress laid out on her bed. “I changed my mind,” Isabella added, because she remembered that she had chosen the black that afternoon. Hadn’t she? Isabella felt a little vague.

“And which shoes, signora?”

Isabella told her.

A quarter to eight now. The guests — two men, Filippo had said, besides the Danish secretary who was called Osterberg or Ottenberg, were not due until eight, which meant eight thirty or later. Isabella wanted to go out on the street, to drink an espresso standing up at the bar, like any other ordinary Roman citizen, and she also wanted to see if the Peeping Tom was still hanging around. In fact, there were two of them, the second a weedy type of about thirty who wore a limp raincoat and dark glasses. He was a “feeler,” the kind who pushed his hand against a woman’s bottom. He had done it to Isabella once or twice while she was waiting for the porter to open the door. Isabella had to wait for the porter unless she chose to carry around a key as long as a man’s foot for the big outside doors. The feeler looked a bit cleaner than her bathroom snoop, but he also seemed creepier and he never smiled.

“Going out for a caffé,” Isabella said to Elisabetta.

“You prefer to go out?” Elisabetta said, meaning that she could make a caffé, if the signora wanted. Elisabetta was forty-odd, her hair in a neat bun. Her husband had died a year ago, and she was still in a state of semi-mourning.

Isabella flung a cape over her shoulders, barely nodded, and left. She crossed the cobbled court whose stones slanted gently toward a center drain, and was met at the door by one of the three porters who kept a round-the-clock guard on the palazzo which was occupied by six affluent tenants. This porter was Franco. He lifted the heavy crossbar and opened the big doors enough for her to pass through.

Isabella was out on the street. Freedom! She stood tall and breathed. An adolescent boy cycled past, whistling. An old woman in black waddled by slowly, burdened with a shopping bag that showed onions and spaghetti on top, carelessly wrapped in newspaper. Someone’s radio blared jazz through an open window. The air promised a hot summer.

Isabella looked around, but didn’t see either of her nuisances, and was aware of feeling slightly disappointed. However, there was the bar-caffé across the street and a bit to the right. Isabella entered, conscious that her fine clothes and well-groomed hair set her apart from the usual patrons here. She put on a warm smile for the young barman who knew her by now.

“Signora! Buon’ giorno! A fine day, no? What is your wish?”

“Un espress’, per piacere.”

Isabella realized that she was known in the neighborhood as the wife of a government official who was reasonably important for his age which was still under forty, aware that she was considered rather rich, and pretty too. The latter, people could see. And what else, Isabella wondered as she sipped her espresso. She and Filippo had a fourteen-year-old daughter in school in Switzerland now. Susanna.

Isabella wrote to her faithfully once a week, as Susanna did to her. How was Susanna going to shape up? Would she even like her daughter by the time she was eighteen or twenty-two? Was Susanna going to lose her passion for horses and horseback riding (Isabella hoped so) and go for something more intellectual such as geology and anthropology, which she had shown an interest in last year? Or was she going to go the usual way — get married at twenty before she’d finished university, trade on her good looks and marry “the right kind of man” before she had found out what life was all about? What was life all about?

Isabella looked around her, as if to find out. Isabella had had two years of university in Milan, had come from a rather intellectual family, and didn’t consider herself just another dumb wife. Filippo was good-looking and had a promising career ahead of him. But then Filippo’s father was important in a government ministry, and had money. The only trouble was that the wife of a man in diplomatic service had to be a clothes-horse, had to keep her mouth shut when she would like to open it, had to be polite and gracious to people whom she detested or was bored by. There were times when Isabella wanted to kick it all, to go slumming, simply to laugh.

She tossed off the last of her coffee, left a five-hundred-lire piece, and turned around, not yet leaving the security of the bar’s counter. She surveyed the scene. Two tables were occupied by couples who might be lovers. A blind beggar with a white cane was on his way in.

And here came her dark-eyed Peeping Tom! Isabella was aware that her eyes lit up as if she beheld her lover walking in.

He grinned. He sauntered, swaggered slightly as he headed for the bar to a place at a little distance from her. He looked her up and down, like a man sizing up a pick-up before deciding yes or no.

Isabella lifted her head and walked out of the bar-caffé.

He followed. “You are beautiful, signora,” he said. “I should know, don’t you think so?”

“You can keep your filthy ideas to yourself!” Isabella replied as she crossed the street.

“My beautiful lady-love — the wife of my dreams!”

Isabella noticed that his eyes looked pink. Good! She pressed the bell for the porter. An approaching figure on her left caught her eye. The bottom-pincher, the gooser, the real oddball! Raincoat again, no glasses today, a faint smile. Isabella turned to face him, with her back to the big doors.

“Oh, how I would like to...” the feeler murmured as he passed her, so close she imagined she could feel the warmth of his breath against her cheek, and at the same time he slapped her hip with his left hand. He had a pockmark or two, and big cheekbones that stuck out gauntly. Disgusting type! And a disgusting phrase he had used!

From across the street, Peeping Tom was watching, Isabella saw; he was chuckling silently, rocking back on his heels.

Franco opened the doors. What if she told Filippo about those two? But of course she had, Isabella remembered, a month or so ago, yes. “How would you like it if a psychopath stared at you nearly every time you took a shower?” Isabella had said to Filippo, and he had broken out in one of his rare laughs. “If it were a woman maybe, yes, I might like it!” he said, then he had said that she shouldn’t take it so seriously, that he would speak to the porters, or something like that.

Leave me alone.

Terror of you paralyzes me, nails me to the threshold. My hands hesitate to open a door. I’m afraid you’re on the other side.

I can’t sleep. After short troubled naps I wake with the sensation you’ve been hovering over me. These last few days I’ve convinced myself it’s safe to walk only when the sun is shining so I’ll be warned of your presence by your shadow.

I don’t go to museums anymore. They have too many dark and secluded nooks where you could find me.

My concert tickets go unused; in the darkened auditorium when the music reaches a crescendo you could easily crush out my life while my shouts of protest are drowned by the percussion instruments.

My mail goes unanswered and I refuse invitations. I’ve lied out of attending committee meetings, pretending that minor illnesses keep me from dinners and parties.

I’ve never been a coward — what had to be faced I faced. Yet I can’t face your malice.

Perhaps you’re enraged because I have ignored you. No, ignored is too strong a word. Disdained would be a more accurate way of putting it. I suppose I do have some of Aunt Carrie’s arrogance. She wasn’t a snob. She just had a way of walking straight past some people without seeing them — she didn’t seem to know they were there. I honestly didn’t know you were there. I couldn’t believe it when you began to threaten me. When I realized your intentions were deadly, that it was my life you were after, I refused to believe it. I called myself an imaginative fool.

Why I despise you most of all — rather, why I despise my fear of you most of all — is that my fear makes me oblivious of everything else. I don’t even notice the weather. I have loved weather, no matter what form it takes. Its ridiculous caprices that can begin a morning at twenty degrees and a few hours later have the thermometer soaring to summer heat — those caprices have delighted me. Hot. Cold. No extreme mattered. I responded to it all with joy.

Now I don’t pay any attention to the weather, and since I don’t notice its vagaries the weather has turned into my enemy. I find myself shivering, not having put on warm enough clothing. I plunge into rain without an umbrella or sink ankle-deep in puddles without my boots.

One day my fear of you made me panic and I telephoned the police for protection. My damsel-in-distress, ladylike trills had an immediate effect. Within minutes a policeman arrived at my door.

But I had no crime to report, only your vague threats. I began to apologize for having summoned the policeman on a fool’s errand. Immediately he reassured me. I had reason to be afraid, he insisted, as he looked around at the paintings and the silver. He hoped I had good locks. And surely I wasn’t ever foolish enough to let anyone enter whom I didn’t know.

If only I could tempt you with the things I’ve accumulated, appease you with a minor Gauguin or a George III silver beaker.

The policeman went around appraising the security, suggesting a stronger lock here and there.

Locks won’t keep you out. You’re not interested in valuables. What you’re after is my life. I’m positive of that. Yet never before have I felt the inevitability of anything; life has always offered many paths and one could easily retreat from a path already begun. Trips to be taken always held as many choices as there were air routes and if one residence didn’t prove satisfactory there were dozens of houses and apartments — a planetful of locations — to select from. A jewel could be recut and reset and a joyless love affair ended. To be pleased was only a matter of making another and wiser choice.

But there is no choice now.

The paths have all converged and they lead straight to you. They lead to my death from you.

If only these last days were free of dread and the short time remaining to me were not ruined by constant apprehension. I should have thought that when one knows she is looking on something for the last time it would be with a heightened response. Flowers are blooming — roses and lilies-of-the-valley are bursting with beauty and fragrance. The shelves are heavy with books I’ve promised myself the pleasure of reading again.

But the flowers might as well be rank and the books printed in Sanskrit for all the delight they will ever give me.

It isn’t as if I haven’t made preparations for death. My last will and testament has been sensibly drawn. My daughter is well provided for; objets d’art are to go to museums; and there are legacies and keepsakes for my friends.

I detest myself for this cowardly preoccupation with my annihilation. Newspapers and TV and the radio should have hardened us all to death — hundreds dashed to death in tornadoes shown on the TV shortly before dinner, thousands demolished in a tidal wave in the paper read with the morning coffee, unnumbered victims crushed in earthquakes announced on the radio as one sips a cocktail before lunch.

Death and danger are everywhere and much closer home than the announced tragedy delivered with the morning paper along with the advertisements of month-end clearance sales or reported on TV between the detergent commercials. There can be a car out of control only a block away or a fire can devour a house on the next street.

But all those tragedies are dealt by destiny impersonally and without malice.

There’s nothing impersonal in your malice toward me.

Please — I beg you — leave me alone. I was a dutiful child. I obeyed my parents. I was polite to my elders. I was a loving wife and a conscientious mother. I’ve been committed to good causes.

Only listen to that — you have me whining — I’ve been degraded by you. I’m trying to cash in my chits of good behavior. I’m sniveling for mercy, sucking up to you for leniency.

The telephone is ringing. I’m not going to answer it. I know it’s you. I know what you’ll say.

The ringing goes on and on and on. Finally it stops. After a while there’s a harsh knock on the door. Then two hands are pounding. The bell works perfectly. Yet the person outside is too excited to use the bell. It can’t be you. You’re much too sneaking to knock and ask for admission.

I open the door and my daughter is standing outside. I am always amazed by her beauty and her lack of knowledge of it or at least of her refusal to take advantage of it. How lovely to have a child like her.

“Mama,” she says, “what on earth’s the matter?” Not even a frown of worry can disturb her beauty. “I telephoned and there was no answer and suddenly I realized that it’s been a week since you’ve called. I know how busy you are but you’ve never gone this long before without phoning me. Darling, come home with me now. It would be such a pleasure to have you. Please?”

I love my daughter and her husband and her children, but I can’t infect their house with my fear. I can’t spoil their happiness. I can’t have you following me there. I beg off with a promise to come as soon as I can manage.

When she has kissed me and left I begin to work compulsively.

I polish silver. I tidy the broom closet. I arrange pots and pans in neat rows and realign the already regimented rows of canned food on the pantry shelves.

Mollie won’t like this. She hates for me to tidy the kitchen or to polish the silver. Again and again she has said she ought to be out working for a woman who needs her more than I do. She says it makes her feel I no longer trust her to do the job I pay her to do.

But I must occupy myself. I must somehow black out my terror of you.

The shelves are in meticulous order and the silver glistens. The kitchen is spotless.

There’s nothing else to do.

Yet I must occupy myself.

I can play solitaire.

There’s something infinitely soothing in knowing that the cards may all be played one upon the other, black and red in descending order. At least there’s a possibility that they may all find their prescribed places.

I don’t often win. Still it’s possible. And when I do win there’s such a feeling of exuberance. Once I even won twice in succession. I wonder how often that has happened. I’m sure the probability of winning twice in succession in solitaire is most unlikely.

I take the cards from the second drawer of the red lacquered desk and then sit down at the fruitwood card table. I like the feel of the cards. As I riffle them they flutter like a bird beating its wings in my hands.

I play the first card.

It’s the ace of spades.

Death.

I won’t believe it. I refuse to believe it.

Somehow my fear of you has infected the cards.

Yet I know the cards can’t respond to my fear. There is no such thing as inanimate objects responding to human moods and emotions. My terror cannot have summoned up the card that signifies death.

Perhaps my fear did infect the cards.

If the mind can influence cards, then I will influence them. I pick the cards up from their various small stacks and shuffle them again. I must concentrate on a good luck card. The nine of hearts or the ten of diamonds — or, best of all, the ace of diamonds.

I shuffle and riffle the cards. Again, against my palms there is that feeling of the heartbeat of a bird or some small caged animal. I distribute the cards and prissily take time to make the seven stacks symmetrical.

I turn the first card face upward.

The ace of spades.

I push the ace of spades from me, then grasp it and try to tear it. It remains intact and blood oozes from the thin cut the card has made on my right forefinger.

I need reassurance — not reassurance from a wise professional or a dear friend but from a very particular source.

The walls of my large apartment seem to contract. I must escape before they crush me.

I go outside and hail a taxi, and as I enter it I repress my fear. I insist to myself that I’m on a lark, a small diversion, something foolish, but forgivable; any bored housewife could understand my action.

When I’ve ridden several miles I dismiss the taxi and tip the driver lavishly as if he’s done me a special favor or service. I have not been let out at my real destination and must walk four blocks to my goal.

Outside there is a sign of a large hand marked like a road map, but its routes are the life line, the heart line, the line of destiny, and beneath it in small letters there is a legend; Madame Sybil — the Past, Present, and Future.

I have teased my friends who have come here and have smiled over their insistence that they don’t believe a word of what Madame Sybil says; but going to her is fun, like getting a new hairdo or finding an unexpected bargain in an antique shop. But I had no such feeling now. I was here from absolute necessity.

I pushed the bell.

There was a long wait and the door was jerked open.

Madame looked like someone caught unaware. She had the petulance of someone aroused needlessly from sleep. Grease was smeared around her mouth beyond the splotched and spotted lipstick. Her tongue explored her teeth, as if for bits of food, and I realized I must have surprised her at a meal. She had the ruffled, somewhat annoyed air of someone summoned to an emergency; there was nothing about her of a sybil who could foretell the future or divine the past or give me sage counsel on how to act. But with a commanding motion that contradicted her disheveled appearance, she waved me down the hall to a doorway, then swept past me.

In a room cluttered with furniture she squinted against the sun eking through the slats of some dirty and disjointed Venetian blinds, and with theatrical flicks of her wrist she adjusted the blinds so that we were in darkness.

Then from somewhere behind me a thin light wavered and a candle projected unsteady shadows on the walls. There was another flickering of a match and almost immediately I began to smell incense of such stifling intensity that I coughed. Madame slid into a chair across from me at the heavily draped table and said, “Ten dollars.” Her voice was as bland and impersonal as that of a checkout clerk at a supermarket counter demanding the amount to be paid for a cart of groceries.

I fumbled in my pocketbook. I shuffled through credit cards and dry-cleaning tickets and at last found some money. A lizard’s tongue could not have been as quick as her hand darting for the money and there was a detour into her large bosom to bank the fee before her hands came to rest in her lap.

I waited for her to speak, to ask me why I was here, what I wanted to know. But there was only silence. After a while I was about to question her when she said angrily, “I can’t tell you anything.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You tell other people things. You’ve talked to a number of my friends and acquaintances. Last week you told Eloise Smithson she was going to get a legacy.”

“I can’t tell you anything,” she said again, as if I hadn’t heard her the first time. “Take your money and leave.” Her right hand dived inside her bodice and then my bill sailed across the table and lighted like a crippled moth on the sleeve of my coat. “Take the money and go.” Her voice was shrill.

I did not move. Then she screamed at me. She was like a very poor actress overplaying a scene. Her mouth curled in anger. “Leave this house at once,” she ordered.

I left with as much dignity as I could muster. Even as she shrieked at me to leave I got up slowly and smoothed my skirt and tucked the money back into my bag and snapped the fastener and walked down the dim hall with composure, but once I was on the street I began to run.

I thrust people aside. I scrambled onto a bus, then got off. I took another bus in the direction from which I had just come. I was like a spy in a third-rate film who is trying to shake pursuers. I ran down an alley. I lost myself in the crowds of a department store.

I was trying to evade you.

Then I took a taxi home, to be swallowed up by the lobby of the apartment house where I live. Far beyond me, as unapproachable as an astronaut in orbit, was the receptionist behind the shield of a heavy glass partition. Nearer was the bank of elevators. I knew that none of my dodges or detours had worked and that you were in one of the elevators waiting for me.

I dared not risk taking an elevator. I left the elevators and skirted the gigantic plants in their huge cachepots that lined the passage to the stairway. I pulled at the door beneath the discreet sign marked STAIRS and scurried up the steps. I was tempted to stop at each landing to rest but fear of you made me race to my floor and terror forced me to brush so close against the wall of the corridor that paint scaled off onto my sleeve.

I had to stop for breath and I looked through one of a long row of tall windows hung with full thick draperies. I knew you were hiding somewhere in that endless line of heavily swathed windows. I looked down on the lawn with its neatly clipped boxwood hedges and rosebushes bulging with blooms, and then I ran down the gantlet of windows expecting you to grab me.

At my door I pawed through my bag for the key. My trembling hand made it clatter outside the lock. I finally inserted the key and entered my apartment.

With the double-locked door at my back I whimpered with relief, but fear had drained me. I stood as still as an autistic child, as if any movement from me might arouse your wrath.

At last I fell across the bed in exhaustion and went to sleep, and then, after a while I awoke. My bed was a grave. I couldn’t move. Wind blew through the windows. The curtains fluttered, swirled — one reached out and stroked my cheek. I had left the windows beside my bed open and the fire escape was just outside. It was an invitation to you to enter, an oven sign of welcome. I was like a virgin who invites rape. I was like a miser who entices thieves.

I glanced at the clock. Another night is over. There is some small comfort in the precise and orderly ticking of the clock, but only dread in the prospect of another day that will wither and become rancid by my fear of you.

Suppose I were to surrender. I’m weary of suspense. I’m tired of being wary.

But I won’t surrender. Keep away from me. Mollie will be here soon. She’ll protect me from you. I think that’s her key in the lock now. Don’t touch me. Keep away—

The topsail had been easy. He remembered how lightly the spade had tossed the loose earth this way and that in the moonlight. For those first minutes it had all been as effortless as in a dream — the strange euphoria of the previous evening was still flowing strongly in his veins, giving his thin young arms the strength, almost, of a grown man.

But two feet down he came to the clay — the sullen, sodden, implacable London clay; and it was only then that the dreamlike omnipotence began to drain out of him. Now the sweat of terror began to glisten on his forehead and his skinny adolescent arms began to quiver with exhaustion.

The length was all right. The uprooted dahlias and the shaggy, seeding willow-herb lay blanched in the moonlight along half the length of the devastated autumn flowerbed. But only two feet deep! It would have to be deeper than that, much deeper. Four feet? Six? Years of wide but desultory reading of lurid paperbacked stories had not provided him with this sort of solid, factual information; but any fool could see that a depth of two feet would not be enough.

He was crying now, in a sort of weak fury at the obstinate, devilish clay. He would have stamped and stormed at it, throwing a tantrum like a toddler, if it had not been for all those silent, curtained windows overlooking, like lightly closed eyes, the whole row of little back gardens. Any moment now one of those sleeping eyes might open, with a streak of yellow light between the curtains, and a sly sleepy voice would call out, “What’s going on there?” or maybe, more raucously, “Shut that bleedin’ row!”

This soft squelch of spade on clay — was it a bleedin’ row? Of course it was — it seemed to him that it must be heard for miles! And then there would be more voices, more cracks of light, eyes everywhere, queries called across the cloying darkness. Would it be best, when all this began happening, to make a clean breast of it? To tell them straightaway, in a ringing shout, before they came flitting out of the doors and alleyways, over the fences, like ghosts attracted by the smell of blood, to find out what was going on?

“I have killed my love,” he would yell to them across the gardens, across the closed, listening night swept silent by the moon. “I have killed my love, my only love. She was with Cyril — Cyril from the Gas Board offices, with his posh voice and natty suit. She was standing by the front door, I could see her face in the moonlight, and when she saw me coming she laughed. She pointed, and she whispered to Cyril, and then he laughed, too.

“That was their last laugh, though, the last laugh they’ll ever have. He ran away like I’ve never seen a man run, nor even a rat; and her, she’s lying there in the passage where I dragged her. I hope — yes, the thing I hope most of all — is that she was still alive just long enough to see him run like that, see him run away like a rat, and never lifted a finger to protect her! That’s what I hope — she was alive just long enough to see — to see it, and to know it, before she died.”

The clay, the damnable accursed clay! Tears of fury and terror streaked the boy’s thin moon-blanched face; his breath came in feeble sobs, like the sobs of the wet clay under the onslaughts of his jabbing spade.

But he did not give up. He couldn’t give up, for soon it would be dawn, and then bright morning, and the cover of darkness would be gone. So he struggled on, and gradually, inch by inch, as if dragging at the very intestines of the earth, he got the clay to move; and presently, into his trance of exhaustion, there came, dully, the knowledge that the hole was deep enough at last. As deep as it would ever be. Deep enough anyway, for his love, his sweet treacherous love.

Oh, but the dangers still ahead! With morning, the neighbors would come. “Getting busy in the garden, eh? Them dahlias — you didn’t oughter ’a’ pulled up them dahlias, not while they’re still flowering. What a shame! Just look at them, all them colors!”

“To plant a new lilac, you say? But you didn’t need to’ve cleared the whole bloomin’ bed, a whole six foot of it, just to plant a lilac bush! Besides, what does a young lad like you want with a lilac? It’s only a rented room you got in there, innit? You’ll be gone off, lad, somewheres else, that’s for sure, long before that lilac can bloom!”

But as the days went by, the questioning died down. Gradually the horticultural experts of the little street lost interest in the boy’s folly, and turned their attention back to their own gardens; and at last the boy himself began to sleep again at night, instead of lying tense as whipcord through the black hours, waiting for the police to come for him.

And so the autumn passed, and a long sodden December, and while it was still winter, before even the crocuses had begun to show their first leaves, tiny green things had already begun to sprout in the flat untidy soil above his own true love. Weeds, presumably, but he never found out for certain; nor did he ever know whether the lilac bloomed, for, just as the neighbors had predicted, before this could possibly have happened, he was gone.

That Sunday was, in its beginning, no different from any other Sunday. I got up about 7:30 and put the coffee on to boil while I shaved and dressed. Then I had my usual breakfast — corn flakes and milk, toast with grape jelly, and coffee. I was finishing the second cup when the bell rang to let me know that a car was driving into the service station.

I hurried down the stairs, through the office, and out to the pumps. It was a ’69 Pontiac with out-of-state tags and it took 12.8 gallons of high test. I entered the sale in my log, noting the time as 8:15, then went back to my living quarters to make the bed and wash the dishes.

It was kind of chilly for the end of April, so I pulled a sweater on over my work shirt. With the chores done. I settled down in the office to tot up the week’s receipts and write an order for the supplies I needed for the month ahead.

Business is always slow on Sunday mornings. My station is at the junction of State Highway 40 and the road to Morristown. That’s a town in name only — a two-block business district surrounded by farms — and the people don’t do much Sunday gadding. It’s a good day for paperwork and I finished with only two interruptions, both from the highway. A ’66 Mercury took 12 gallons of regular and a ’63 Volks wanted directions to a turnoff he’d missed a mile and a half back.

I was putting the order into its envelope when I heard the first car on the Morristown road. By the sound it was traveling faster than is safe or legal on the two-lane gravel surface that is still as winding as the cowpath that provided its original design. There’s a stand of timber behind my station, so I can’t see vehicles till they’re almost here. This one hardly slowed for the turn into the station and pulled up beside the pumps with tires screeching, it was Chad Bascom in his ’72 Chevy.

“Fill ’er up, Gimpy,” he said.

I walked to the back of the car with the heat starting someplace near the bottom of my stomach and rising in waves to the top of my head. My fingers were unsteady when I unscrewed the top of his gas tank and I was afraid, when I set the nozzle down, he’d hear the clatter and get satisfaction from knowing he’d pushed me once more to blind and trembling rage.

You’d think that after twenty years I’d be immune to Bascom’s insults, that a single word, so often repeated, would have lost its power to send my blood pressure soaring. I stood still while three gallons flowed through the hose and while I built a fantasy of lighting a match and bringing gas and flame together to turn his car into a fiery coffin. Then, as the throbbing in my temples eased, I picked up the spray bottle and paper towels and cleaned his back window. When that was done I did the same to the front, keeping my lips tightpressed to hold back an answer to anything he might say. But today, for a change, he didn’t keep on riding me, just sat in stony silence till I was forced to speak.

“Check under the hood?” I asked.

“The way you move,” he snapped, “that would take all day. Put the lid on and let me out of here.”

The pump cut off at 13.2. I squeezed out a few more drops to make it an even $5 and capped his tank. He thrust a $5 bill at me and had the car moving almost before I could step out of the way. I went into the office, put the money in the register, looked at the clock on my desk, and entered it in the log: “10:10–13.2 regular — $5.”

Then I stood at the window and watched Chad Bascom’s car head north on the highway. There’s a straight stretch of almost a mile with good visibility, but even after he was out of sight I still stood there with my eyes on the white-lined asphalt. Going to the city, I thought, on his way to a good time — with Ruth, predictably, left behind.

I wasn’t really seeing the highway. My thoughts, as always after an encounter with Chad, turned inward. Gimpy he’d called me and gimpy he’d made me. Time had honed my anger to a bitter edge and my hatred now had a depth and hardness that would have been beyond my capabilities at the time it happened.

I was a year out of Ag College then and had put my savings into the old Mullen place. The mortgage payments were manageable, the spring weather benign, and a good crop would have permitted me to buy a tractor and modernize the kitchen. After the harvest Ruth Hadley and I were going to be married. We weren’t engaged — folks in our community don’t formalize things that way; but ever since high school it was taken for granted that as soon as I was able to make my own way and had a place to take her, it would be Ruthie and me for life. Nobody had to tell me how lucky I was.

Ruth wasn’t the prettiest girl in our class. Thelma Frankes, with her blonde curls and china-blue eyes, had that distinction. But in any group it was Ruth your eyes kept coming back to. Her dark brown hair had a sheen that caught the play of light and shadow. Her eyes were brown too and held a glint of humor that even her most serious mood couldn’t quite vanquish. What held attention, though, was her sheer aliveness, the sense she passed to all around of a deep and bubbling joy.

I never knew what she saw in me. I was that nice Sprague boy. Good old Nate Sprague. Steady, honest, hard-working, dependable. All the adjectives were dull. But Ruth looked at me as if we shared a wonderful secret. And I could never look at her without a sense of inner singing. Not in those days.

That June was the fifth reunion of our high-school graduating class. We met in the gym and danced to records and reminisced. There were platters loaded with sandwiches and a bowl of punch made from grape juice blended with ginger ale. Chad Bascom’s class was holding its tenth reunion in the cafeteria. Late in the evening he crossed the hall to the gym. I was dancing with Ruth when I noticed him first. He was standing near the door looking over the crowd with something in his expression that was like a cattleman at an auction. I wondered whom he was looking for and then forgot him until a few moments later I felt a sharp rap on my shoulder.

“Cutting in, partner,” he said.

That’s an alien custom in our county. When we bring a girl to a party we dance with her all evening. Or maybe, if two or three couples come together, we trade off a few dances within the group. But Chad was an older man with big-city ways. I looked at Ruth and she gave her little what’s-it-matter shrug, so I let him dance with her.

At the time it didn’t seem important. I leaned against the wall and watched them. Together they made a very pretty picture. Like him or not, no one could deny Chad’s handsomeness. He was big, well over six feet, with rock-hard muscles. And he was a far better dancer than I. Ruth’s natural rhythm matched his and they seemed to float across the floor as a single body.

“Better watch out, Nate.” A classmate stopped beside me, only half kidding. “That Bascom’s a grade-A wolf.”

I knew Chad’s reputation, but it didn’t worry me. I was too sure of Ruthie. When the dance ended he kept his arm around her and guided her to the refreshment table. I followed and saw him fill two paper cups from a pint bottle he took from his back pocket.

“This’ll put back our bounce,” he said.

“No, thank you,” she refused politely. “I’d rather have punch.”

“Punch with no punch in it.” He pushed his own brew toward her. “Come on, baby, live a little.”

I went to the bowl, ladled punch into a cup, and carried it to Ruth. Chad gave me an ugly look.

“Don’t crowd me, youngster,” he said. “I’m taking care of the lady.”

I tried to ignore him and offered her the cup. He knocked it out of my hand and purple drops spattered her white linen dress. She looked frightened. Chad. I realized, had already drunk most of his pint.

“Let’s go home, Nate,” she said.

“Yes, sure.” I moved to her side, but Chad put the flat of his hand on my chest and pushed me away.

“Stay out of this, small fry,” he warned. “I said I’d take care of the lady.” He took Ruth’s arm, tightening his hold as she tried to pull away. “I’ll see you home, baby, by the longest way round.”

I sprang at him with a fist that was aimed at his chin but landed on his shoulder. His surprise and my momentum nearly knocked him off balance, but my advantage was brief. He was four inches taller and forty pounds heavier. Almost before I knew it I was on the floor with a feeling that the room was rocking like a boat. He nudged my side with the steel-tipped toe of his boot.

“Get up, boy,” he ordered. “I got some more things to show you.”

I tried to raise my head and focus my eyes. Chad drew back his foot and kicked me with stunning force. The last thing I saw was his mouth stretched in an exultant grin.

I was in the hospital for five months. The hip bone was shattered and at first it looked as if I’d spend the rest of my life on crutches. Twice Ruth drove ninety miles to visit me. The first time I asked her not to come again. The second time I had the doctor tell her that seeing her was bad for my morale. That was true. I’d been shamed in front of her and I couldn’t stand being reminded of that or of all that I’d so nearly had and lost.

Later they moved me to a hospital in another state where there was a surgeon especially skilled in bone grafts. The operation was successful and I came home almost as good as new, except that my left leg was two inches shorter than my right.

While I was healing, my neighbors pitched in to save my crop. And the county sheriff had a long talk with Chad. He offered him a choice — pay my medical bills or face trial on assault charges. As a result I left the hospital in fair financial condition. But a farmer needs to work on two good legs. So I sold my land and made a down payment on this gas station. With the second story fixed up as a small apartment it makes a good enough living for a man alone.

Since Ruth and I weren’t formally engaged, there was nothing to break off. I kept away from her and when her mother called or her friends came round I told them it was over and Ruth should forget me. A woman like Ruth deserves a whole man and I just couldn’t take her pity. Chad moved quickly to fill the vacuum and those same friends described the smoothness of his operation.

When sober and trying, Chad could display great charm. He came to her first with profuse apologies for his behavior while under the influence. He let her know that he was taking care of my medical expenses, but he carefully neglected to mention Sheriff Crane’s alternative. He took her to movies and dances and was always a perfect gentleman. He won her mother with flattery and her younger brother with presents. He told her he loved her and needed her and wanted nothing in life so much as to make her happy.

Six months after I began living above my service station, Ruth became Mrs. Chad Bascom.

I tried not to hate him. A man shouldn’t be held responsible for what he does when he’s drunk. I had been a fool to stand up to him. He hadn’t taken Ruth from me, I’d given her up. Those were the things I told myself to hold down the bile that surged up at the thought of him. After a while I was able, most of the time, to put him out of my mind.

He seldom patronized my station and I seldom left the premises. It was painful going out among my old friends with things so changed and I had everything I needed right at home. The weekly bookmobile supplied plenty of reading material, and daily banter with my customers was sufficient social life. So I was a long time learning how things really were between Ruth and Chad.

I heard a few things. People who came by the station dropped hints that he was giving her a bad time. They told stories about his jealousy, how he raged if she smiled too brightly at another man. Some even said he beat her, that they’d seen bruises on her face and arms. But I know how easily gossip starts in a small town and how quickly it can grow. I didn’t encourage them to talk and dismissed their tales as puffed-up versions of normal crises in married life. Perhaps, I told myself, they were exaggerating on purpose, thinking it would cheer me to believe the marriage had turned sour. Then Ruth’s mother began to call me and I discovered the reports weren’t exaggerated at all.

Mrs. Hadley and I had been close in the early days. My own mother died when I was thirteen and in high school and when I was eating more dinners at the Hadley house than at home, I had started to call her Ma. She seemed to like it and joked sometimes about my being the first young man to choose a mother-in-law ahead of a wife.

For the first few years after the marriage I didn’t hear from her. Then Ruth’s brother went off to college and Mrs. Hadley’s arthritis got so bad she couldn’t go out much. I guess that gave us a special bond — both alone, both crippled. Anyway, she began to phone and tell me her worries. Mostly they had to do with Chad’s treatment of Ruth.

“Ruthie doesn’t tell me half of it,” she said. “She tries to pretend everything’s all right. But I’ve seen her eyes red and puffy with crying. Sometimes there are black and blue marks she can’t hide. And I’ve heard him yell at her as if she were his servant. Remember, Nathan, how bright and pretty she always was? You wouldn’t know her now.”

Others too spoke of these changes. Ruth had lost her looks and her vitality, and she seemed to care little about her appearance. Chad no longer had cause for jealousy, but that didn’t improve his temper. Instead he berated her for being such a poor stick that no other man would look at her. It was as if he’d set out deliberately to break her spirit and then, having succeeded, made the deterioration that he caused another mark against her. He used it too as excuse for infidelity.

He drove often to the city, sometimes stayed two or three days. The rumor was he had a woman there. On his return he’d be more cruel than ever to Ruth, as if that was a way of working off his guilt.

I didn’t want to hear these things, but I couldn’t endure not knowing either. One of the worst times was after her miscarriage. She was in the hospital for nearly a week and Mrs. Hadley was barely coherent when she told me about it.

“He hit her in the stomach,” she sobbed. “A woman four months pregnant! Now she can’t have children, the doctor says. But maybe that’s a blessing. It’s bad enough what he’s done to my girl, but to see an innocent little one at his mercy — who could bear it? You should have married her, Nathan.” It was the nearest she ever came to reproach me. “When you turned away from her he was there. And none of us saw the brute inside him.”

Ruth’s friends tried to persuade her to leave him. Some thought he should be sent to jail and Sheriff Crane went to the hospital to ask if she was willing to bring charges. But she gave everyone the same answer. Chad was her husband. She’d promised to honor and obey him for better or for worse and she was bound, whatever he did, by that promise. If there’s a thin line between a saint and a fool, Ruth Bascom walked very close to that line.

A peculiar thing happened after that. Chad began coming more and more often to my service station. Some perverse streak seemed to make him want to draw me into the orbit of their discontent. The purchase of a few gallons of gas bought him the right to rail at his wife’s misery and my helplessness.

“You ought to give me a discount,” he said once. “That gimp leg of yours cost me a packet. Maybe you think your girl was my payoff. Boy, was I ever fooled! You should come out some time and see the sourpuss bag of bones she’s turned into. Could it be you knew something I didn’t?”

I learned to say nothing, not even to look at him, just to fill his tank, take his money, and pretend not to hear his taunts. But they got under my skin, every one of them, and grated long after he was gone. Sometimes he thought up small meannesses, like buying just one gallon of gas and asking me to check the battery and all the tires. He watched with a sneering smile as I hobbled and bent my way around the car. “Shake that short leg,” he jeered. “I’ve places to go even if you don’t.” I gritted my teeth and told myself that if he got the spite out of his system here, maybe he’d take less home to Ruth.

So I felt relieved, that Sunday morning, because he was in and out of the station in such a hurry and with so little to say. I serviced three more cars before going upstairs to make myself a liverwurst sandwich and reheat the coffee. I had just returned to the office when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Hadley.

“Oh, Nathan!” Her voice was strange, low and breathy as if each word was pulled from a deep pit. “Nathan, is that you?”

“Yes, Ma. Is something wrong?”

“You haven’t heard yet? Oh, Nathan!”

“What is it? Has something happened to Ruth?”

“My poor girl!” It was a drawn-out wail. “Nathan, he’s killed her.”

“My God!” Blood rushed to my head and I grasped the edge of the desk to keep from falling. “How — what—”

My disturbance neutralized hers. She told me the story in a fiat tone as if it had grown stale with repetition.

“I didn’t go to church this morning, my arthritis was that bad. Instead I listened to Pastor Meyer on television. His text was ‘Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice’s sake,’ and it was beautiful. He could have been talking about Ruthie, I thought, and as soon as he finished I called to tell her what he said. But we only talked for two or three minutes when she said, ‘I’ve got to go now, Ma. Thanks for calling,’ in that scared voice she uses when he comes into the room and catches her at something he doesn’t like. ‘I’ve got to go now, Ma. Thanks for calling.’ Those are the last words I’ll ever hear her say.”

“What did he do to her?” My fingers ached from the tight grip I had on the phone.

“Maybe she told him about Pastor Meyer’s sermon.” She went on as if she hadn’t heard my question. “Maybe she repeated the part about people who suffer in doing their duty and earn a high place in heaven. That might have set off one of his rages. He doesn’t like her talking to me anyway. I shouldn’t have called. It’s my fault what happened.”

“What did he do to her?”

“Joachim and Kitty found her.” Kitty is Ruth’s cousin, hut they were as close as sisters. “They drove round that way, thinking if he wasn’t home she might like to go to church with them. When they didn’t see his car, they went up to the back door. They saw her through the window. She was dead, Nathan. She was already dead. He’d hit her — like he was always hitting her — but this time he broke her neck.”

“He was here, Ma,” I said the first thing that came into my head, trying to shut out the picture her words made. “He stopped here for gas, then drove off toward the city.”

“They’ll catch him, Nathan. They’ll bring him back and make him pay for what he’s done.”

“Yes, Ma,” I said, “he’ll pay.”

For a long time after she hung up I sat and stared at the phone as if it might have more to tell me. Dead, I thought. Ruth is dead. All our dreams, all we planned to do together, and this is how it ends. But our dreams and plans were twenty years out of date and what had ended for her was pain and humiliation and despair. I couldn’t, in honesty, mourn her death. On an obscure impulse, seeking a share in her last moments, I went to my bookshelf, pulled out my Bible, and opened it to the Sermon on the Mount.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit... Blessed are the meek... Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Ruth was poor in spirit. Ruth was meek. Ruth was persecuted. She lived by those words and she died by them. Had she, at the last, found comfort in her mother’s quotation from the TV preacher’s sermon?

I put the Bible down and my thoughts turned from Ruth to Chad. Now I understood his haste, why he didn’t play his usual games with me. He had just killed her and was making his escape. His tank was low and he couldn’t risk running out of gas on the road. If I had looked at him I might have read what he had done in his face. How long was it, I wondered, between the murder and the time I saw him?

The county paper was on my table. It comes out on Thursdays and carries the television schedule for the week. I spread it out and ran my eyes up the Sunday column till they reached Pastor Meyer’s name. He was on, it told me, from 9:30 to 10:00 A.M. So Mrs. Hadley had called Ruth at ten o’clock. And Chad had driven into my station a few minutes later.

It took several seconds for the two facts to meet in my mind and register. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t have happened that way, it absolutely couldn’t. The Bascom place is twenty-five miles from here over a very rough and winding road. The best driver, the fastest driver, can’t make it in less than forty minutes. Chad must have left home before the TV program even began.

So Mrs. Hadley had to be mistaken. She’d listened to some other preacher. I looked again at the newspaper schedule. There’s only one channel that reaches our area. Its first Sunday program, from 8:00 to 9:00 A.M., was made up of children’s cartoons. From 9:00 to 9:30 the Department of Agriculture had a special report. Pastor Meyer’s sermon was the only one Ruth’s mother could have heard. And my own log proved that Chad left my station with a filled tank at 10:10.

He must have gone back, I reasoned. That’s the only answer. He couldn’t have been home when Mrs. Hadley phoned Ruth. After he left here he must have remembered something he’d forgotten and circled back. He found Ruth doing something he disapproved — like getting ready to go to church — and struck her down.

It was the only answer, but it wasn’t a good one. I remember how long I’d stood at the window after Chad was out of sight, speeding toward the city. The only road from the highway to his house is the one that goes by my station. And I’m conditioned to be aware of every passing car. How could he have turned round, come back, and gone down that road without my knowing? Especially on Sunday morning when traffic is so light. It could only have happened when I was servicing another car, perhaps with my head under the hood.

That theory lasted a short while, till the Kroehler brothers brought in their Ford pickup. It took only 4.4 gallons, so I knew they’d come to find out if I’d heard the news and how I was taking it. I said yes, I’d heard, and didn’t tell them any more. But that didn’t stop them from sharing the news they’d gathered elsewhere.

Jointly the Kroehlers play the role of town crier. They’d talked to Joachim and learned, among other things, that it was 10:40 when he and Kitty got to the Bascom house. He was sure of the time because the church service began at 11:00 and they were worried about being late. So there was no way that Chad could have made it home ahead of Joachim and Kitty.

For a moment I toyed with the notion that he’d left her dying but not dead, that she’d lived a half hour or so, long enough to receive her mother’s call. One of the Kroehlers answered that question without my asking it.

“She died instantly, the doc said,” he reported. “Didn’t suffer at all, Nate, if that’s any consolation to you.”

“And Chad will get his just deserts,” his brother added. “The sheriff ought to be back with him pretty soon.”

“They’ve caught him?” I asked.

“Sure. He has a woman in the city. The sheriff’s known about her for a long time — he doesn’t miss many tricks, old Crane doesn’t — and he figured that’s who he’d run to. The sheriff phoned the city police, they went round and picked him up, and Crane and his deputy drove in to get him. Reckon Chad thought he had more time to plan a getaway. Ordinarily it might have been a day or so before anybody found Ruth’s body. Joachim and Kitty stopping by was his bad luck.”

I didn’t contradict him and a few minutes later they drove away. I went into the office, entered their 4.4 gallons in the log, and gazed at the earlier entry. “10:10–13.2 regular — $5.” Chad hadn’t killed Ruth and the proof was right in front of me. I realized then that what had borne me up, what had made Ruth’s death a tolerable fact, was the belief that it carried the seeds of Chad’s destruction. He had at last done something for which he would be punished — punished to the full extent of the law.

Now that prop was pulled from under me. Someone else had murdered Ruth. A stranger, perhaps a tramp. I didn’t care who had done it. All that mattered was that Chad was not guilty and would go free. He was probably lording it over the sheriff right now, showing him up in front of the city police as a hick who went chasing after the wrong man while the right one got away.

I was surprised, therefore, about an hour later to get a call from Sheriff Crane.

“Mrs. Hadley says she called you about Ruth,” he began. “A bad business, Nate.”

“Yes.”

“You told her Chad got gas at your place?”

“That’s right.”

“Good. I’ll be right over to talk to you. Your evidence should fill in the last gap in our case against him.”

“You’ve arrested Chad?”

“Just locked him in the jail.” There was grim satisfaction in his tone. “His next stop will be the state prison.”

“You still think he did it?”

“Not a doubt in the world.”

“But he — he hasn’t confessed, has he?”

“Chad? Not a chance! He denied everything and then clammed up. You don’t catch him doing anything to make my job easier. See you in a few minutes, Nate.”

So Chad was in jail charged with murder. At least he’d have a bad hour or so. Until the sheriff heard my story and went back to set him free. Was I the only one who’d seen him, the only one who could swear he was miles away from home at the time of the murder? God in heaven, I prayed, don’t play that kind of trick on me. Don’t make me the instrument of Chad’s freedom.

Yet there it was in my logbook, in black and white, in my own handwriting — the incontestable proof of his innocence.

But he’s not innocent! The protest was thunder in my brain. He’s black with guilt. What if he didn’t strike the final, fatal blow? What he did to Ruth, day in, day out, was worse than murder. He deserves a murderer’s penalty. Everybody in town will agree to that. I’d be nobody’s hero if I saved him. So why do it? Why should I give Chad an ironclad alibi?

The more I thought about it, the more right it seemed. Chad had been arrested for Ruth’s murder. Without my evidence he would be tried and convicted — not a shadow of doubt about it. All I had to do was fudge the time a little, say it was later when he came to my station. Or perhaps it would be best to be vague. Might have been 10:30, I’d say, or maybe 11:00. It’s quiet here on Sunday morning, so I don’t pay much attention to what time it is. That way I wouldn’t need to perjure myself, probably wouldn’t even be called as a witness. Chad would be convicted without my saying a word.

I closed the log and pushed it under the order forms in the bottom drawer of my desk. No one even knew I kept a log. There was no reason for anyone else to see it. Twenty years, I told myself. Twenty years since he crippled me and stole my girl. But I mustn’t think of that. Not about my own injury. I was seeking retribution for Ruth. That mustn’t be tainted with thoughts of personal revenge.

Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay. The long-forgotten text came unwanted to my mind. But the Lord, I answered, uses human agents. And there’s justice, the purest kind of justice, in convicting Chad for Ruth’s murder. The person who killed her only stopped her breathing, her suffering. The life that person took today ended many years ago and Chad was the destroyer. He deserves to pay for that and I have no obligation to testify in his defense.

There had been, I realized suddenly, something odd in my conversation with the sheriff. It was Mrs. Hadley who told him about Chad’s stopping here for gas. Chad hadn’t mentioned it. Why not, I wondered. Ruth was alive when he left home and he knows that I can help establish the time. Why hadn’t he said so?

The answer to that was easy. He knows how much I hate him. He’s sure I’ll never lift a finger to help him. He didn’t send the sheriff to me because he was afraid I’d seize the chance to lie and make it worse for him. I’d only be doing what Chad expects, acting as he would if he were in my place.

With that thought I knew exactly what I had to do. One Chad Bascom in this world is enough. I could not — no matter how righteous the words in which I cloaked my motive — remake myself in his image. When the sheriff drove up to the door I was waiting with the logbook in my hand.

He sat in my office and went over it again and again, as if I might, in repeating it, change my story. The logbook lay open on the desk between us.

“You’re sure that’s the record of Chad’s buy?” Crane’s index finger moved on to the line below. “Not this one? The later time would fit.”

“I’m positive he’s the one at ten past ten,” I said wearily. “I remember his snapping that $5 bill at me. And the 10:55 entry shows a quart of oil. Chad got nothing but gas.”

“That pulls it apart. I checked the television station to confirm the time and text of Pastor Meyer’s sermon. He talked about blessing the persecuted and went off the air at 9:58. Ruth was alive and talking to her mother at ten o’clock. So your story gives Chad an airtight alibi.”

His tone was angry, blaming me for the flaw in his case. “When it comes to credibility he couldn’t have a better witness. His woman would protect him, he might have gotten a pal to lie for him. He could even bribe a stranger. But you, Nate — when you testify on Chad’s side it has to be the truth.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s the truth.”

“Funny thing,” Crane went on. “Chad’s been taken off the hook by the testimony of the three people who’d most like to make him pay for what he did to Ruth — her mother, her cousin Kitty, and you.”

And me, I added mentally. A sanctimonious fool who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Nothing left but to go back to the jail and turn him loose.” His lips twisted in a humorless smile. “With apologies yet.”

The bell rang and I left him sitting there while I went out to fill another tank. When I came back he was pacing the length of the office with an air of great impatience. I wondered why he hadn’t left.

“Go on.” He waved me to the desk. “Write up your sale.”

I did so and he moved round beside me. “Is that” — he pointed to the desk clock — “your only timepiece?”

“I’ve a watch upstairs. I don’t wear it when I’m working. That clock keeps good time.”

“Okay, let me see what you just wrote.”

Puzzled, I pushed the log toward him and let him read the last line: “5:20–11.3 gallons high test — $4.55.”

“Then it’s all right.” He let out his breath in a long sigh. “We’ve got Chad tied up in a neat package.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is the last Sunday in April, Nate. Daylight Saving Time began this morning, but you didn’t turn your clock forward.” He thrust his left arm in front of my face, pushed back the sleeve. His watch said 6:20. “Chad was here not at 10:10, but at 11:10 — one hour later than you thought.”

It was a sight Borgville had never seen before and most likely would never see again, and I almost missed it.

It had been raining hard all morning, and for want of anything else to do I was down in the cellar getting in some target practice with my air rifle. I had a couple of windows open, and when I heard something that sounded like a herd of cows stampeding along the sidewalk, naturally I went to look.

It was Doc Beyers’ wife, and she was running!

Mrs. Beyers prides herself on being the most sedate woman in Borgville — though as Grandfather says, she really hasn’t much choice. There’s so much of her to move around that it’s only a question of doing it sedately or staying put. She even holds her laughs down to chuckles because of what she’d have to move if she cut loose with anything more violent than that. If I’d known she was going to be running in front of our house, I’d have set up some chairs and charged admission.

I watched her until she started up our walk, and then I headed for the stairs. I got to the front hall just as she came stumbling across the porch. My Grandfather Rastin had seen her coming, and he was waiting at the front door. He helped her out of her raincoat, and she gasped, “Elizabeth...” and collapsed onto the sofa.

“Take it easy,” Grandfather said.

“Elizabeth...”

“Elizabeth will keep for a couple of minutes. She’s standing out on her porch now, looking over this way, so she can’t be in very bad shape. Wait till you get your breath back.”

For the next ten minutes Mrs. Beyers panted on the sofa, and was hushed up by Grandfather every time she opened her mouth. I came close to dying of curiosity, but Grandfather sat down and rocked as if it was an ordinary social call. He always says the first lesson a man has to learn from life is patience, and in eighty years he’d learned it pretty well.

Finally Mrs. Beyers got a grip on her breathing, and Grandfather let her talk.

“Elizabeth found a violin in her attic!” she said.

Grandfather nodded. “You don’t say. That’d be...”

“It’s a Strad — Strad—”

“Stradivarius? You don’t say. That’d be...”

“It’s worth a fortune.”

“You don’t say. That’d be Old Eric’s fiddle. I heard him play it many times, when I was a boy. I often wondered what happened to it.”

“It’s a godsend, what with Elizabeth needing money for Elbe’s wedding. She wants you to come and see it.”

“I’ve seen it,” Grandfather said. “Many times. Old Erie was quite a fiddler in his day.”

“He lived to be a hundred and two,” Mrs. Beyers said.

“A hundred and three. And he loved to tell about the time...”

“Will you come and see it?”

“I suppose.”

We got our raincoats and went back to Elizabeth Peterson’s house with Mrs. Beyers, all three of us walking very sedately.

The place was almost a shambles when Max Ritter, Lieutenant of Detectives, arrived. All the living-room furniture was slashed or overturned. Chair legs and lamps littered the apartment. So many light bulbs had been broken that the police had to work by flashlights until more bulbs could be sent up. The bed was a rat’s nest of bloody tatters, and a trail of gore led from the bedroom through the living room into the bathroom.

The dead man was lying in the bathroom in a pretzel-like posture that would have made a Ringling Brothers contortionist green with envy. He had one foot in the toilet bowl, one arm in the wash basin, and his head in the bathtub. The wood-handled long-bladed kitchen knife which had carved hieroglyphics into his torso had been left lying on the bathroom floor. So had a cheap plastic raincoat which the murderer had obviously worn to protect his clothing, as well as the crumpled bloody towels with which he had wiped his hands and probably his shoes.

The house phone was off the hook and lay on the floor a fact which led to the early discovery of the crime. The desk clerk of the Westside Residential Hotel had plugged a jack under a signal light that had suddenly flared for Apartment 26. He had said “Office” several times, but got no response. He thought he heard curious sounds in the background and repeated “Office” three more times. When he heard what he thought was the sound of a door closing, he had run up the stairs — the self-service elevator was somewhere in the stratosphere — and had banged on the door of Apartment 26. When there was no response, he ran back down the stairs and called the police. He made no attempt to enter the apartment with his passkey until the squadcar cops arrived. Why should he, a law-abiding and unarmed citizen, usurp the unquestioned duty of the uniformed forces of the law?

While the print men, photographers, and other technicians were picking their way gingerly through the mess in Apartment 26, Lieutenant Ritter was collecting pertinent data. But the swarthy, lugubrious beanpole of a detective found the desk clerk, the manager, and the neighbors singularly uninformative. It seemed incredible to Ritter that such a desperate life-and-death struggle could have gone on without arousing some auditory interest: yet this appeared to be the case. The man and wife across the hall were addicted to loud television — the wife was rather deaf — and the people in the apartment next door were out for the evening. The girl at the end of the hall had taken a sleeping pill and even slept through five minutes of door pounding by the police.

Neither the desk clerk nor the house manager was of much help at first. The desk clerk, a young man with curly brown hair, long eyelashes, and suspiciously red lips, was terribly, terribly bored and terribly, terribly vague about who had entered and left the lobby during the evening. The manager said that the dead man had registered three weeks previously as Gerald Sampson of New York, although he agreed with the desk clerk that the deceased had a pronounced Southern accent.

Lieutenant Max Ritter was convinced that the dead man’s name was not Sampson and that he had not come from New York. In the wastebasket of Apartment 26 the Lieutenant had found an envelope addressed to Mr. Paul Wallace, General Delivery, Northbank, and postmarked Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There was no return address on the envelope and no letter inside the envelope or in the wastebasket.

In a dresser drawer, under a pile of expensive shirts, Ritter found a Social Security card in the name of Paul Wallace and a passbook showing a balance of $1706 in a Cleveland bank to the credit of P. L. Wallace. In an envelope stuffed into the inside pocket of a Brooks Brothers sports jacket hanging in a closet, the detective found an envelope containing a dozen newspaper clippings about a young singer named Patty Erryl.

Even in the smudged halftone pictures, Patty was a comely lass, apparently not far out of her teens, brimful of that intangible effervescence which is the exclusive property of youth. In most of the poses her eyes glowed with the roseate vision of an unclouded future. Her blonde head was poised with the awareness of her own fresh loveliness. Patty Erryl was quite obviously a personality. Moreover, Lieutenant Ritter concluded as he read through the clippings, Patty had talent.

Patty had been singing in Northbank night clubs for the past year. Just a month before the sudden demise of Mr. Paul Wallace, she had won the regional tryout of the Metropolitan Opera auditions. In a few weeks she would go to New York to compete in the nationally broadcast finals.

Ritter took the clippings downstairs and reopened his questioning of the bored desk clerk.

“Ever see this dame?” He dealt the clippings face up on the reception desk.

“Ah? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have.” The clerk fluttered his eyelashes. “I saw the pictures in the papers, too, even before I saw the girl, but I somehow didn’t connect the one with the other. Yes, I’ve seen her.”

“Did she ever come here to see this bird Wallace?”

“Wallace? You mean Mr. Sampson?”

“I mean the man in Twenty-six.”

“Ah. Well, yes, as a matter of fact she did.”

“Often?”

“That depends upon what you call often. She’s been here three or four times, I’d say.”

“Do you announce her or does she go right up?”

“Well, the first time she stopped at the desk. Lately she’s been going right up.”

“What do you mean, lately? Tonight, maybe?”

“I didn’t see her tonight.”

“If she comes here regular, maybe she could go through the service entrance and take the elevator in the basement without you seeing her?”

“That’s possible, yes.”

“Does she always come alone?”

“Not always. Last time she came she brought lover boy along.”

“Who’s lover boy?”

“How should I know?” Again the clerk fluttered his eyelashes. “He’s a rather uncouth young man whom for some reason Miss Erryl seems to find not unattractive. She apparently takes great pleasure in gazing into his eyes. And vice versa.”

“But you don’t know his name?”

“I do not. We don’t require birth certificates, passports, or marriage licenses for the purpose of visiting our tenants.”

“You’re too, too liberal. You let in murderers. Did lover boy ever come here without lover girl?”

“He did indeed. He was here last night raising quite a row with the gentleman in Twenty-six. When he came down he was red-faced and mad as a hornet. Right afterward the gentleman in Twenty-six called the desk and gave orders that if lover boy ever came back, I was not to let him up, and that if he insisted I was to call the police. Lover boy had been threatening him, he said. But I think he came back again tonight.”

“You think?”

“Well, I had just finished taking a phone message for one of our tenants who was out, and I turned my back to put the message in her box when this man went by and got into the elevator. I only had a glimpse of him as the elevator door was closing, but I’m sure it was lover boy. I shouted at him but it was too late. I tried to phone Twenty-six to warn Mr. Sampson—”

“Wallace.”

“Wallace. But there was no answer, so I assumed he was out. Then a few minutes later the phone in Twenty-six was knocked off the hook.”

“Did you see lover boy come down again?”

“Now that you mention it, no, I didn’t — unless he came down while I was up banging on the door of Twenty-six.”

“Or took the car down to the basement and went out the service entrance, maybe?”

“You’re so right, Lieutenant. Or he could have been picked up by a helicopter on the roof.” The clerk giggled.

“Very funny.” Ritter advanced his lower lip. “Any other non-tenants come in tonight since you came on duty?”

“Traffic has been quite light this evening. There was the blonde who always comes to see the man in Sixty-three on Wednesdays. There was a boy from the florist’s with roses for the sick lady on Nine, and there was an elderly white-haired gent I assumed to be delivering for the liquor store on the corner.”

“Why?”

“Well, he had a package under his arm and it was about time for Miss Benedict’s daily fifth of gin, so—”

“What time do you call ‘about time’?”

“About an hour ago.”

“This was before Wallace’s light went up on your switchboard?”

“About twenty minutes before. Now that I think of it, I didn’t see him come down either. Of course, with all the excitement—”

“That makes two for your helicopter,” the detective said. “Let me know if you think of any more.”

Ritter went upstairs again for another look at the dead man and to wait for the coroner who had been summoned from his weekly pinochle game but had not yet arrived. At least this was one case the coroner could not very well attribute to heart failure — “Coroner’s Thrombosis,” as Dr. Coffee called it — since the cause of death was plainly written in blood.

The dead man had been on the threshold of middle age. His temples were graying and there was gray in his close-cropped beard. The beard, instead of giving him an air of distinction, left him with a hard ruthless face.

His features were regular, except perhaps for his earlobes which were thick, pendulous, and slightly discolored as though they had been forcibly twisted.

Whoever killed Mr. Wallace-Sampson must have really hated him to have done such a savage knife job on him. Why, then, would the victim have admitted a man w ho was such an obvious and determined enemy? Could the murderer have obtained a key from some third party?

Ritter’s reverie was interrupted by the approach of Sergeant Foley, the scowling fingerprint expert.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “we got something special here. I think we’re stuck with a sixty-four-million-dollar question and with no sponsor to slip us the answer.”

“You mean you can’t make the stiff?”

“Oh, the stiff’s a cinch. We haven’t made him yet, but we got a perfect set of prints and he’s old enough so he must be on file somewhere in the world. But the murderer — no soap!”

“Sergeant, you surprise and grieve me,” Ritter said. “With my own little eyes I see five perfect bloody finger marks on the bathroom door.”

“Finger marks yes,” said Sergeant Foley, “but prints no.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning no prints. No ridges, no pore patterns, no whorls, no radial loops, no ulnar loops — no nothing.”

Ritter frowned. “Gloves?”

“We usually get some sort of pattern with gloves, even surgical gloves sometimes, although they’re hard to identify. But here, nothing — and I mean nothing.”

“The knife?”

“Same thing. It wasn’t wiped. Bloody finger marks, yes — prints, no. The knife, by the way, comes from the kitchenette here.”

Max Ritter scratched his mastoid process. He pursed his lips as though rehearsing for a Police Good Neighbor League baby-kissing bee. Then he asked, “Your boys finished with that phone, Sergeant?”

“Yup. Go ahead and call.”

A moment later Ritter was talking to his private medical examiner, Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, chief pathologist and director of laboratories at Northbank’s Pasteur Hospital.

“Hi, Doc. Get you out of bed?... Look, I got something kind of funny, if you can call homicide funny... No, the coroner’s a little late, but this one he can’t write off as natural causes. A knife job, but good. Like a surgeon, practically... No, I don’t think there’s anything you can do tonight, Doc. I already emptied the medicine chest for you, like always. But if I can talk the coroner into shipping the deceased to your hospital morgue for a P.M.... You will? Thanks, Doc. I think you’re going to like this one. The killer’s got no fingerprints... No, I don’t mean he left none; he’s got none. Call you in the morning, Doc.”

Folks say everything changes, but that’s not so. I’ve lived in Windville all my life, and Joe’s Bar & Grill looks just the same to me as always.

It has the same heavy steel grill, the same counter, the same swivel stools. Those long tables sticking out of the walls aren’t much different than they were thirty years back, when Joe opened up — just older and more beaten up. The booth cushions got new upholstery seven years back, but Joe had them fixed up in the same red vinyl stuff as before, so you can’t hardly tell the difference.

Only one thing has changed about Joe’s place. That’s the people. Some of the old-timers keep dropping by, regular as clockwork. But time has changed them considerably. Lester Keyhoe, for instance, fell to pieces after his wife kicked over. And old Gimpy Sedge lost his conductor job, so he just watches the train pull in and leave without him, then comes by here to tie one on with Lester.

Joe’s gone, too. Not gone, just retired. I’ve kept the place going for the past three years, since I turned twenty-one. When Joe isn’t shooting deer in the mountains, he comes in for coffee and a cinnamon bun every morning. He likes to keep an eye on things.

I sure wish he’d been after deer the morning Elsie Thompson blew in.

The place was empty except for me and Lester Keyhoe, who was sitting down the bar where he always does, getting a start on the day’s drinking.

I was toweling down the counter when the car pulled up. I could see it plain through the window. It was an old Ford that looked like somebody’d driven it a dozen times back and forth through Hell. It sputtered and whinnied for a minute after the ignition key was turned off.

I stopped toweling and just stared. The old gal who jumped out of the Ford was a real sight — short and round, dressed in khakis, with gray hair cut like Buster Brown, and wearing big wire-rimmed glasses. She chewed on some gum like she wanted to kill it. A floppy wicker handbag hung from her arm. I said, “Get a load of this,” to Lester, but he didn’t even look up.

The screen door opened and she stumped towards the counter in her dusty boots. She hopped onto the stool in front of me. Her jaw went up and down a few times. One time when it was open, the word “coffee” came out.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and turned away to get it.

“Does this establishment belong to Joseph James Lowry from Chicago?” she asked.

“Sure does,” I said, looking at her.

Behind the glasses her round eyes opened and shut in time with her chewing mouth. She gave me a huge grin. “That’s mighty good news, young man. I’ve been driving through every one-horse town west of Chicago looking for this place, looking for Joe Lowry and his damned tavern. There’s a place called Joe’s in every single one of them. But I knew I’d find Joe Lowry’s place sooner or later. Know why? Because I’ve got will power, that’s why. When do you expect him in?”

“Well... what did you want to see him about?”

“He is coming in?”

I nodded.

“Good. I expected as much. I’m only surprised not to find him behind the counter.”

“You know him, huh?”

“Oh, yes. My, yes.” Her eyes turned sad for a second. “We used to know each other very well, back in Chicago.”

“How about if I give him a ring, tell him you’re here?”

“That won’t be necessary.” Snapping her gum and grinning, she opened the handbag on her lap and pulled out a revolver. Not a peashooter, either — one of those long-barreled .38’s. “I’ll surprise him,” she said. Her stubby little thumb pulled back the hammer and she aimed the thing at me. “We’ll surprise him together.”

I didn’t feel much like talking, but I managed to nod my head.

“What time will Joe be in?” she asked.

“Pretty soon.” I took a deep breath and asked, “You aren’t planning to shoot him, are you?”

She pretended like she didn’t hear me, and asked, “How soon?”

“Well...” Far away, the 10:05 from Parkerville let loose its whistle. “Well, pretty soon, I guess.”

“I’ll wait for him. Who’s that slob over there?”

“That’s Lester.”

“Lester!” she called.

He turned his head and looked at her. She waved the gun at him, grinning and chewing, but his face didn’t change. It looked the same as always, long and droopy like a bloodhound s, but more gloomy.

“Lester,” she said, “you just stay right on that stool. If you get up for any reason, I’ll shoot you dead.”

His head nodded, then turned frontwards again and tipped down at his half-empty glass.

“What’s your name?” she asked me.

“Wes.”

“Wes, keep Lester’s glass full. And don’t do anything to make me shoot you. If some more customers come in, just serve them like everything is normal. This revolver has six loads, and I can take down a man with each. I don’t want to. I only want Joe Lowry. But if you drive me to it, I’ll make this place wall-to-wall corpses. Understand?”

“Sure, I understand.” I filled Lester’s glass, then came back to the woman. “Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away.”

“Why do you want to kill Joe?”

She stopped chewing and squinted at me. “He ruined my life. That’s enough reason to kill a man, I think. Don’t you?”

“Nothing’s a good enough reason to kill Joe.”

“Think so?”

“Whal’d he do to you?”

“He ran off with Martha Dipsworth.”

“Martha? That’s his wife — was.”

“Dead?”

I nodded yes.

“Good.” Her jaw chomped, and she beamed. “That makes me glad. Joe made a mistake, not marrying me — I’m still alive and kicking. We’d be happily married to this day if he’d had the sense to stick with me. But he never did have much sense. Do you know what his great ambition was? To go out west and open up a tavern. Martha thought that was a glorious idea. I said, ‘Well, you marry him, then. Go out west and waste your lives in the boondocks. If Joe’s such a romantic fool as to throw his life away like that, I don’t want him. There’re plenty of fish in the sea.’ That’s what I said. More than thirty years ago.”

“If you said that—” I stopped. You don’t catch me arguing with an armed woman.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She shifted her chewing gum over to one corner of her mouth and drank some coffee. “What were you going to say?”

“Just... well, if you said they could get married, it doesn’t seem very fair of you to blame them.”

She put down the cup and glanced over at Lester. He still sat there, but he was staring at the gun. “When I said that about the sea being full of fish, I figured it’d only be a matter of time before I’d land a good one. Well, it didn’t work out that way.”

She chewed a few times, gazing up at me with a funny distance in her eyes as if she was looking back at all the years. “I kept on waiting. I was just sure the right man was around the next corner — around the next year. It finally dawned on me, Wes, that there wasn’t ever going to be another man. Joe was it, and I’d lost him. That’s when I decided to gun him down.”

“That’s—”

“What?”

“Crazy.”

“It’s justice.”

“Maybe the two of you could get together. He’s unattached since Martha died. Maybe—”

“Nope. Too late for that. Too late for babies, too late for—”

All at once Lester flung himself away from the bar and made a foolish run for the door. The old gal swiveled on her stool, tracked him for a split second, then squeezed off a shot. The bullet took off Lester’s earlobe. With a yelp he swung around and ran back to his stool, cupping a hand over what was left of his ear.

“You’d better pray nobody heard that shot,” she said to both of us.

I figured nobody would. We were at the tail end of town, so the closest building was a gas station half a block away. The cars passing by on the highway kicked up plenty of noise. And around here, with all the hunting that goes on, nobody pays much attention to a single gunshot unless it’s right under his nose.

But I was nervous, anyway. For five minutes we all waited without saying a word. The only sound was her gum snapping.

She finally grinned and squinted as if she’d just won a raffle. “We’re in luck.”

“Joe’s not,” I said. “Neither’s Lester.”

Lester said nothing. He was pinching his notched ear with one hand and draining his glass with the other.

“They shouldn’t have run,” the woman said. “That was their mistake — they ran. You aren’t going to run, are you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Because if you do I’ll shoot you for sure. I’ll shoot anyone today. Anyone. This is my day, Wes — the day Elsie Thompson pays Joe back.”

“I won’t run, ma’am. But I won’t let you shoot Joe. I’ll stop you one way or another.” I went over to fill Lester’s glass.

“You can’t stop me. No one can stop me. Nothing can. Do you know why? Because I’ve got will power, that’s why.”

Grinning mysteriously, she chomped three times on her gum and said, “Today I’m going to die. That gives me all the power in the world. Understand? As soon as I gun down Joe, I’ll drive out of this burg. I’ll get that old Ford up to seventy, eighty, then I’ll pick out the biggest tree—”

I made a sick laugh, and came back to her.

“Think I’m fooling?” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s just kind of funny, you talking like that about crashing into a tree. Not funny ha-ha, funny weird. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“That’s ’cause you don’t know about Joe. He crashed into a tree — an aspen, just off Route 5. That was about three years back. Martha was with him. She got killed, of course. Joe was in real bad shape, and Doc Mills didn’t give him much chance. But he pulled through. His face got so broken up he doesn’t look quite right, and he lost the use of an eye. His left eye, not his aiming eye. He wears a patch over it, you know. And sometimes when he gets feeling high, he flaps it up and gives us all a peek underneath.”

“You can stop that.”

“He lost a leg, too.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry. It’s just that... well, everyone that crashes into a tree doesn’t die.”

“I will.”

“You can’t be sure. Maybe you’ll just end up like Joe, hobbling around half blind on a fake leg, with your face so scarred up that your best friends won’t recognize you.”

“Shut up, Wes.”

She stuck the pistol into my face, so I slowed down and said quietly, “I just mean, if you want to make sure you die, there’s a concrete bridge abutment about a mile up the road.”

“Warm up my coffee and keep your mouth shut.”

I turned around to pick up the pot. That’s when I heard the footsteps outside. Boots against the wood planks out front, coming closer. I faced Elsie. She grinned at me. Her jaw worked faster on the gum. Her eyes squinted behind her glasses as the unsteady clumping got louder.

Through the window I saw his mussy gray hair, his scarred face with the patch on his left eye. He saw me looking, smiled, and waved.

I glanced at Lester, who was holding a paper napkin to his ear and the glass to his mouth.

Elsie pushed the pistol close to my chest. “Don’t move,” she whispered.

The screen door swung open.

Elsie spun her stool.

“Duck, Joe!” I cried out.

He didn’t duck. He just stood there looking perplexed as Elsie leaped off the stool, crouched, and fired. The first two bullets smacked him square in the chest. The next hit his throat. Then one tore into his shoulder, turning him around so the last shot took him in the small of the back.

All this happened in a couple of seconds as I dived at Elsie. I was in mid-air when she wheeled on me and smashed me in the face with the barrel. I went down.

While I was trying to get up, she jumped over the body and ran out. I reached the door in time to see her car whip backwards. It hit the road with screeching brakes, then laid rubber and was gone from sight.

I went back inside.

Lester was still sitting at the bar. His stool was turned around, and he was staring at the body. I sat down at one of the booths, lit a cigarette, and kept Lester company staring.

We spent a long time like that. After a while I heard the sheriff’s siren. Then an ambulance’s. The cars screamed by and faded up the road in the direction of the bridge abutment.

“My God!” The big man looked at me, then at Lester, and knelt down over the body. He turned it over. “Gimpy,” he muttered. “Poor old Gimpy.” He patted the dead conductor on the back, and stood up. His eyes questioned me.

I shook my head. “Some crazy woman,” I muttered. “She came in here dead set to kill you, Dad.”

The late-afternoon sun, shining through the barred skylight, striped the bodies of the four boys sprawled on the floor. Nearby the Sunday traffic went panting down the Wandsworth High Street, but in this quiet, upper back room the loudest noise was the buzzing of a bluebottle. The warm, imprisoned air smelled of copperas and leather and gun oil.

The oldest and tallest of the boys was sitting up, with his back propped against the wall. In one hand he held a piece of cloth, something that might once have been a handkerchief, and he was using it to polish and repolish a powerful-looking air pistol.

“They’re beauties, ent they, Roh?” said the fat boy. He and the red-haired boy both had guns like their leader’s. The smallest boy had nothing. He couldn’t take his eyes off the shining beauties.

“Made in Belgium,” said Rob. “See that gadget?” He put the tip of his linger on the telltale at the end of the compression chamber. “You don’t just open it and shut it, like a cheap air gun. You pump this one up slowly. That gadget shows you when the pressure’s right. It’s accurate up to fifty yards.”

“It may be accurate,” said the fat boy. “What about us? I’ve never had a gun before.”

“We’ll have to practise. Practise till we can hit a penny across the room.”

“Why don’t we start right now, Rob?” said the red-haired boy. “These things don’t make any noise. Not to notice. We could chalk up a target on the wall—”

“Yes?” said Rob. “And when the geezer who owns this shop comes up here tomorrow morning, or next week, or whenever he does happen to come up here, and he finds his wall full of air-gun pellets, he’s going to start thinking, isn’t he? He’s going to check over his spare stock and find three guns missing. Right?”

“That’s right,” said the fat boy. “Rob’s got it figured out. We put everything else back like we found it, it may be months before he knows what’s been took. He mayn’t even know anyone’s broke in.”

The leader turned to the smallest of his followers. “That’s why you can’t have one. Winkle,” he said. “There’s plenty of guns in the front of the shop, but we touch one of them, he’ll miss it.”

“That’s all right, Rob,” said Winkle. But he couldn’t keep the longing out of his voice. To own a big bright gun! A gun that went phtt softly, like an angry snake, and your enemy fifty yards away crumpled to the ground, not knowing what had hit him!

“What about Les?” said the red-haired boy.

“What about him?”

“He’ll want a gun when he sees ours.”

“He’ll have to go on wanting. If he’s not keen enough to come with us on a job like this.”

“ ’Tisn’t that he’s not keen,” said the fat boy. “It’s his old man. He’s pretty strict. He locks his bedroom door now. Where can we practise, Rob?”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” said the tall boy. “You know the old Sports Pavilion? The Home Guard used it in the war, but it’s been shut up since.”

The boys nodded.

“I found a way in at the back, from the railway. I’ll show you. There’s a sort of cellar with lockers in it. That’ll do us fine. We’ll have our first meeting there tomorrow. Right?”

“Right,” they all said. The red-haired boy added, “How did you know about this place, Rob?”

“My family used to live round here,” said the tall boy. “Before my Ma died, when we moved up to Highside. As a matter of fact, I was at school about a quarter mile from here.”

The fat boy said, “I bet I get a strapping from my old man when I get home. He don’t like me being away all day.”

“You’re all right,” said Winkle. “You’re fat. It don’t hurt so much when you’re fat.” He looked down with disgust at his own slender limbs.

It was nine o’clock at night nearly a month after that talk and in quite another part of London that Fishy Codlin was closing what he called his Antique Shop. This was a dark and rambling suite of rooms, full of dirt, woodworm, and the household junk of a quarter of a century. Codlin was in the front room, locking away the day’s take when the two boys came in.

“You’re too late,” he growled. “I’m shut.”

He noticed that the smaller of the boys stayed by the door, while the older came toward him with a curiously purposeful tread. He had a prevision of trouble and his hand reached out for the light switch.

“Leave it alone,” said the boy. He was a half-seen figure in the dusk. All the light seemed to concentrate on the bright steel weapon in his hand. “Slip the bolt, Will,” he added, but without taking his eyes off Codlin. “Now you stand away from the counter.”

Codlin stood away. He thought for a moment of refusing, for there was nearly £25 in the box, the fruits of a full week’s trading. But he was a coward as well as a bully and the gun looked real. He watched the notes disappearing in the boy’s pocket. When one of the notes slipped to the floor the boy bent down and picked it up, but without ever removing his steady gaze from the old man.

When he had finished, the boy backed away to the door. “Stay put,” he said. “And keep quiet for five minutes or you’ll get hurt.”

Then he was gone. Codlin breathed out an obscenity and jumped for the telephone. As he picked it up, “I warned you,” said a gentle voice from the door. There was a noise like a small tire bursting and the telephone twisted round and clattered to the floor.

Codlin stood, staring stupidly at his hand. Splinters of vulcanite had grooved it, and the blood was beginning to drip. He cursed, foully and automatically. Footsteps were pattering away along the road outside. He let them get to the corner before he moved. He was taking no further chances. Then he lumbered across to the door, threw it open, and started bellowing.

Three streets away Detective Sergeant Petrella, homeward bound, heard two things at once. Distant shouts of outrage and, much closer at hand, light feet pattering on the pavement. He drew into the shadow at the side of the road and waited.

The two boys came round the corner, running easily, and laughing. When Petrella stepped out, the laughter ceased. Then the boys spun around and started to run the other way.

Petrella ran after them. He saw at once that he could not catch both, so he concentrated on the younger and slower boy. After a hundred yards he judged himself to be in distance and jumped forward in a tackle. It was high by the standards of Twickenham, but it was effective, and they went down, the boy underneath. As they fell, something dropped from the boy’s pocket and slid, ringing and spinning, across the pavement.