There are some words which at first do not even shock or stun. You just don’t believe them. They can’t be true. Very carefully Dan Fraser put his suitcase down on the floor and straightened up again.

“The police,” said Joyce, swallowing hard, “have been here since early this morning. They’re not here now. They’ve taken her away to the mortuary. That’s where she’ll sleep tonight.”

Still Dan said nothing.

“Mr. — Mr. Edmund Ireton,” Joyce went on, “has been here ever since it happened. So has Toby Curtis. So, fortunately, has a man named Dr. Gideon Fell. Dr. Fell’s a bumbling old duffer, a very learned man or something. He’s a friend of the police; he’s kind; he’s helped soften things. All the same, Dan, if you’d been here last night.—”

“I couldn’t get away. I told Brenda so.”

“Yes, I know all that talk about hard-working journalists. But if you’d only been here, Dan, it might not have happened at all.”

“Joyce, for God’s sake!”

Then there was a silence in the bright, quiet room. A stricken look crept into Joyce’s eyes.

“Dan, I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I was feeling dreadful and so, I suppose, I had to take it out on the first person handy.”

“That’s all right. But how did she die?” Then desperately he began to surmise. “Wait, I’ve got it! She went out to swim early this morning, just as usual? She’s been diving off those rocks on the headland again? And—”

“No,” said Joyce. “She was strangled.”

“Strangled?”

What Joyce tried to say was “murdered.” Her mouth shook and faltered round the syllables; she couldn’t say them; her thoughts, it seemed, shied back and ran from the very word. But she looked at Dan steadily.

“Brenda went out to swim early this morning, yes.”

“Well?”

“At least, she must have. I didn’t see her. I was still-asleep in that back bedroom she always gives me. Anyway, she went down there in a red swim suit and a white beach robe.”

Automatically Dan’s eyes moved over to an oil painting above the fireplace. Painted by a famous R.A., it showed a scene from classical antiquity; it was called The Lovers, and left little to the imagination. It had always been Brenda’s favorite because the female figure in the picture looked so much like her.

“Well!” said Joyce, throwing out her hands. “You know what Brenda always does. She takes off her beach robe and spreads it out over King Arthur’s Chair. She sits down in the chair and smokes a cigarette and looks out at the sea before she goes into the water.

“The beach robe was still in that rock chair,” Joyce continued with, an effort, “when I came downstairs at half-past seven. But Brenda wasn’t. She hadn’t even put on her bathing cap. Somebody had strangled her with that silk scarf she wore with the beach robe. It was twisted so tightly into her neck they couldn’t get it out. She was lying on the sand in front of the chair, on her back, in the red swim suit, with her face black and swollen. You could see her clearly from the terrace.”

Dan glanced at the flesh tints of The Lovers, then quickly looked away.

Joyce, the cool and competent, was holding herself under restraint.

“I can only thank my lucky stars,” she burst out, “I didn’t run out there. I mean, from the flagstones of the lowest terrace out across the sand. They stopped me.”

“ ‘They’ stopped you? Who?”

“Mr. Ireton and Toby. Or, rather, Mr. Ireton did; Toby wouldn’t have thought of it.”

“But—”

“Toby, you see, had come over here a little earlier. But he was at the back of the bungalow, practising with a .22 target rifle. I heard him once. Mr. Ireton had just got there. All three of us walked out on the terrace at once. And saw her.”

“Listen, Joyce. What difference does it make whether or not you ran out across the sand? Why were you so lucky they stopped you?”

“Because if they hadn’t, the police might have said I did it.”

“Did it?”

“Killed Brenda,” Joyce answered clearly. “In all that stretch of sand, Dan, there weren’t any footprints except Brenda’s own,”

“Now hold on!” he protested. “She... she was killed with that scarf of hers?”

“Oh, yes. The police and even Dr. Fell don’t doubt that.”

“Then how could anybody, anybody at all, go out across the sand and come back without leaving a footprint?”

“That’s just it. The police don’t know and they can’t guess. That’s why they’re in a flat spin, and Dr. Fell will be here again tonight.”

In her desperate attempt to speak lightly, as if all this didn’t matter, Joyce failed. Her face was white. But again the expression of the dark-fringed eyes changed, and she hesitated.

“Dan—”

“Yes?”

“You do understand, don’t you, why I was so upset when you came charging in and said what you did?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Whatever you had to tell me, or thought you had to tell me—”

“About — us?”

“About anything! You do see that you must forget it and not mention it again? Not ever?”

“I see why I can’t mention it now. With Brenda dead, it wouldn’t even be decent to think of it.” He could not keep his eyes off that mocking picture. “But is the future dead too? If I happen to have been an idiot and thought I was head over heels gone on Brenda when-all the time it was really—”

“Dan!”

There were five doors opening into the gaudy hall, which had too many mirrors. Joyce whirled round to look at every door, as if she feared an ambush behind each.

“For heaven’s sake keep your voice down,” she begged. “Practically every word that’s said can be heard all over the house. I said never, and I meant it. If you’d spoken a week ago, even twenty-four hours ago, it might have been different. Do you think I didn’t want you to? But now it’s too late!”

“Why?”

“May I answer that question?” interrupted a new, dry rather quizzical voice.

Dan had taken a step toward her, intensely conscious of her attractiveness. He stopped, burned with embarrassment, as one of the five doors opened.

Mr. Edmund Ireton, shortish and thin and dandified in his middle-fifties, emerged with his usual briskness. There was not much gray in his polished black hair. His face was a benevolent satyr’s.

“Forgive me,” he said.

Behind him towered Toby Curtis, heavy and handsome and fair-haired, in a bulky tweed jacket. Toby began to speak, but Mr. Ireton’s gesture silenced him before he could utter a sound.

“Forgive me,” he repeated. “But what Joyce says is quite true. Every word can be overheard here, even with the rain pouring down. If you go on shouting and Dr. Fell hears it, you will land that girl in serious danger.”

“Danger?” demanded Toby Curtis. He had to clear his throat. “What danger could Dan get her into?”

Mr. Ireton, immaculate in flannels and shirt and thin pullover, stalked to the mantelpiece. He stared up hard at The Lovers before turning round.

“The Psalmist tells us,” he said dryly, “that all is vanity. Has none of you ever noticed — God forgive me for saying so — that Brenda’s most outstanding trait was her vanity?”

His glance flashed toward Joyce, who abruptly turned away and pressed her hands over her face.

“Appalling vanity. Scratch that vanity deeply enough and our dearest Brenda would have committed murder.”

“Aren’t you getting this backwards?” asked Dan. “Brenda didn’t commit any murder. It was Brenda—”

“Ah!” Mr. Ireton pounced. “And there might be a lesson in that, don’t you think?”

“Look here, you’re not saying she strangled herself with her own scarf?”

“No — but hear what I do say. Our Brenda, no doubt, had many passions and many fancies. But there was only one man she loved or ever wanted to marry. It was not Mr. Dan Fraser.”

“Then who was it?” asked Toby.

“You.”

Toby’s amazement was too genuine to be assumed. The color drained out of his face. Once more he had to clear his throat.

“So help me,” he said, “I never knew it! I never imagined—”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Mr. Ireton said even more dryly. A goatish amusement flashed across his face and was gone. “Brenda, as a rule, could get any man she chose. So she turned Mr. Fraser’s head and became engaged to him. It was to sting you, Mr. Curtis, to make you jealous. And you never noticed. While all the time Joyce Ray and Dan Fraser were eating their hearts out for each other; and he never noticed either.”

Edmund Ireton wheeled round.

“You may lament my bluntness, Mr. Fraser. You may want to wring my neck, as I see you do. But can you deny one word I say?”

“No.” In honesty Dan could not deny it.

“Well! Then be very careful when you face the police, both of you, or they will see it too. Joyce already has a strong motive. She is Brenda’s only relative, and inherits Brenda’s money. If they learn she wanted Brenda’s fiancé, they will have her in the dock for murder.”

“That’s enough!” blurted Dan, who dared not look at Joyce. “You’ve made it clear. All right, stop there!”

“Oh, I had intended to stop. If you are such fools that you won’t help yourselves, I must help you. That’s all.”

It was Toby Curtis who strode forward.

“Dan, don’t let him bluff you!” Toby said. “In the first place, they can’t arrest anybody for this. You weren’t here. I know—”

“I’ve heard about it, Toby.”

“Look,” insisted Toby. “When the police finished measuring and photographing and taking casts of Brenda’s footprints, I did some measuring myself.”

Edmund Ireton smiled. “Are you attempting to solve this mystery, Mr. Curtis?”

“I didn’t say that.” Toby spoke coolly. “But I might have a question or two for you. Why have you had your knife into me all day?”

“Frankly, Mr. Curtis, because I envy you.”

“You... what?”

“So far as women are concerned, young man, I have not your advantages. I had no romantic boyhood on a veldt-farm in South Africa. I never learned to drive a span of oxen and flick a fly off the leader’s ear with my whip. I was never taught to be a spectacular horseman and rifle shot.”

“Oh, turn it up!”

“ ‘Turn it up?’ Ah, I see. And was that the sinister question you had for me?”

“No. Not yet. You’re too tricky.”

“My profoundest thanks.”

“Look, Dan,” Toby insisted. “You’ve seen that rock formation they call King Arthur’s Chair?”

“Toby, I’ve seen it fifty times,” Dan said. “But I still don’t understand—”

“And I don’t understand,” suddenly interrupted Joyce, without turning round, “why they made me sit there where Brenda had been sitting. It was horrible.”

“Oh, they were only reconstructing the crime,” Toby spoke rather grandly. “But the question, Dan, is how anybody came near that chair without leaving a footprint?”

“Quite.”

“Nobody could have,” Toby said just as grandly. “The murderer, for instance, couldn’t have come from the direction of the sea. Why? Because the highest point at high tide, where the water might have blotted out footprints, is more than twenty feet in front of the chair. More than twenty feet!”

“Er... one moment,” said Mr. Ireton, twitching up a finger. “Surely Inspector Tregellis said the murderer must have crept up and caught her from the back? Before she knew it?”

“That won’t do either. From the flagstones of the terrace to the back of the chair is at least twenty feet, too. Well, Dan? Do you see any way out of that one?”

Dan, not normally slow-witted, was so concentrating on Joyce that he could think of little else. She was cut off from him, drifting away from him, forever out of reach just when he had found her. But he tried to think.

“Well... could somebody have jumped there?”

“Ho!” scoffed Toby, who was himself a broad jumper and knew better. “That was the first thing they thought of.”

“And that’s out, too?”

“Definitely. An Olympic champion in good form might have done it, if he’d had any place for a running start and any place to land. But he hadn’t. There was no mark in the sand. He couldn’t have landed on the chair, strangled Brenda at his leisure, and then hopped back like a jumping bean. Now could he?”

“But somebody did it, Toby! It happened!”

“How?”

“I don’t know,”

“You seem rather proud of this, Mr. Curtis,” Edmund Ireton said smoothly.

“Proud?” exclaimed Toby, losing color again.

“These romantic boyhoods—”

Toby did not lose his temper. But he had declared war.

“All right, gaffer. I’ve been very grateful for your hospitality, at that bungalow of yours, when we’ve come down here for week-ends. All the same, you’ve been going on for hours about who I am and what I am. Who are you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“For two or three years,” Toby said, “you’ve been hanging about with us. Especially with Brenda and Joyce. Who are you? What are you?”

“I am an observer of life,” Mr. Ireton answered tranquilly. “A student of human nature. And — shall I say? — a courtesy uncle to both young ladies.”

“Is that all you were? To either of them?”

“Toby!” exclaimed Joyce, shocked out of her fear.

She whirled round, her gaze going instinctively to Dan, then back to Toby.

“Don’t worry, old girl,” said Toby, waving his hand at her. “This is no reflection on you.” He kept looking steadily at Mr. Ireton.

“Continue,” Mr. Ireton said politely.

“You claim Joyce is in danger. She isn’t in any danger at all,” said Toby, “as long as the police don’t know how Brenda was strangled.”

“They will discover it, Mr. Curtis. Be sure they will discover it!”

“You’re trying to protect Joyce?”

“Naturally.”

“And that’s why you warned Dan not to say he was in love with her?”

“Of course. What else?”

Toby straightened up, his hand inside the bulky tweed jacket.

“Then why didn’t you take him outside, rain or no, and tell him on the quiet? Why did you shout out that Dan was in love with Joyce, and she was in love with him, and give ’em a motive for the whole house to hear?”

Edmund Ireton opened his mouth, and shut it again.

It was a blow under the guard, all the more unexpected because it came from Toby Curtis.

Mr. Ireton stood motionless under the painting of The Lovers. The expression of the pictured Brenda, elusive and mocking, no longer matched his own. Whereupon, while nerves were strained and still nobody spoke, Dan Fraser realized that there was a dead silence because the rain had stopped.

Small night-noises, the creak of woodwork or a drip of water from the eaves, intensified the stillness. Then they heard footsteps, as heavy as those of an elephant, slowly approaching behind another of the doors. The footfalls, heavy and slow and creaking, brought a note of doom.

Into the room, wheezing and leaning on a stick, lumbered a man so enormous that he had to maneuver himself sideways through the door.

His big mop of gray-streaked hair had tumbled over one ear. His eyeglasses, with a broad black ribbon, were stuck askew on his nose. His big face would ordinarily have been red and beaming, with chuckles animating several chins. Now it was only absent-minded, his bandit’s mustache outthrust.

“Aha!” he said in a rumbling voice. He blinked at Dan with an air of refreshed interest. “I think you must be Mr. Fraser, the last of this rather curious week-end party? H’m. Yes. Your obedient servant, sir. I am Gideon Fell.”

Dr. Fell wore a black cloak as big as a tent and carried a shovel-hat in his other hand. He tried to bow and make a flourish with his stick, endangering all the furniture near him.

The others stood very still. Fear was as palpable as the scent after rain.

“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” said Dan. His voice rose in spite of himself. “But you’re rather far from home, aren’t you? I suppose you had some... er... antiquarian interest in King Arthur’s Chair?”

Still Dr. Fell blinked at him. For a second it seemed that chuckles would jiggle his chins and waistcoat, but he only shook his head.

“Antiquarian interest? My dear sir!” Dr. Fell wheezed gently. “If there were any association with a semi-legendary King Arthur, it would be at Tintagel much farther south. No, I was here on holiday. This morning, Inspector Tregellis fascinated me with the story of a fantastic murder. I returned tonight for my own reasons.”

Mr. Ireton, at ease again, matched the other’s courtesy. “May I ask what these reasons were?”

“First, I wished to question the two maids. They have a room at the back, as Miss Ray has; and this afternoon, you may remember, they were still rather hysterical.”

“And that is all?”

“H’mf. Well, no.” Dr. Fell scowled. “Second, I wanted to detain all of you here for an hour or two. Third, I must make sure of the motive for this crime. And I am happy to say that I have made very sure.”

Joyce could not control herself. “Then you did overhear everything!”

“Eh?”

“Every word that man said!”

Despite Dan’s signals, Joyce nodded toward Mr. Ireton and poured out the words. “But I swear I hadn’t anything to do with Brenda’s death. What I told you today was perfectly true: I don’t want her money and I won’t touch it. As for my... my private affairs,” and Joyce’s face flamed, “everybody seems to know all about them except Dan and me. Please, please pay no attention to what that man has been saying.”

Dr. Fell blinked at her in an astonishment which changed to vast distress.

“But, my dear young lady!” he rumbled. “We never for a moment believed you did. No, no! Archons of Athens, no!” exclaimed Dr. Fell, as though at incredible absurdity. “As for what your friend Mr. Ireton may have been saying, I did not hear it. I suspect it was only what he told me today, and it did supply the motive. But it was not your motive.”

“Please, is this true? You’re not trying to trap me?”

“Do I really strike you,” Dr. Fell asked gently, “as being that sort of person? Nothing was more unlikely than that you killed your cousin, especially in the way she was killed.”

“Do you know how she was killed?”

“Oh, that,” grunted Dr. Fell, waving the point away too. “That was the simplest part of the whole business.”

He lumbered over, reflected in the mirrors and put down stick and shovel-hat on a table. Afterward he faced them with a mixture of distress and apology.

“It may surprise you,” he said, “that an old scatterbrain like myself can observe anything at all. But I have an unfair advantage over the police. I began life as a schoolmaster: I have had more experience with habitual liars. Hang it all, think!”

“Of what?”

“The facts!” said Dr. Fell, making a hideous face. “According to the maids, Sonia and Dolly, Miss Brenda Lestrange went down to swim at ten minutes to seven this morning. Both Dolly and Sonia were awake, but did not get up. Some eight or ten minutes later, Mr. Toby Curtis began practising with a target rifle some distance away behind the bungalow.”

“Don’t look at me!” exclaimed Toby. “That rifle has nothing to do with it. Brenda wasn’t shot.”

“Sir,” said Dr. Fell with much patience, “I am aware of that.”

“Then what are you hinting at?”

“Sir,” said Dr. Fell, “you will oblige me if you too don’t regard every question as a trap. I have a trap for the murderer, and the murderer alone. You fired a number of shots — the maids heard you and saw you.” He turned to Joyce. “I believe you heard too?”

“I heard one shot,” answered the bewildered Joyce, “as I told Dan. About seven o’clock, when I got up and dressed.”

“Did you look out of the windows?”

“No.”

“What happened to that rifle afterwards? Is it here now?”

“No,” Toby almost yelled. “I took it back to Ireton’s after we found Brenda. But if the rifle had nothing to do with it, and I had nothing to do with it, then what the hell’s the point?”

Dr. Fell did not reply for a moment. Then he made another hideous face. “We know,” he rumbled, “that Brenda Lestrange wore a beach robe, a bathing suit, and a heavy silk scarf knotted round her neck. Miss Ray?”

“Y-yes?”

“I am not precisely an authority on women’s clothes,” said Dr. Fell. “As a rule I should notice nothing odd unless I passed Madge Wildfire or Lady Godiva. I have seen men wear a scarf with a beach robe, but is it customary for women to wear a scarf as well?”

There was a pause.

“No, of course it isn’t,” said Joyce. “I can’t speak for everybody, but I never do. It was just one of Brenda’s fancies. She always did.”

“Aha!” said Dr. Fell. “The murderer was counting on that.”

“On what?”

“On her known conduct. Let me show you rather a grisly picture of a murder.”

Dr. Fell’s eyes were squeezed shut. From inside his cloak and pocket he fished out an immense meerschaum pipe. Firmly under the impression that he had filled and lighted the pipe, he put the stem in his mouth and drew at it.

“Miss Lestrange,” he said, “goes down to the beach. She takes off her robe. Remember that, it’s very important. She spreads out the robe in King Arthur’s Chair and sits down. She is still wearing the scarf, knotted tightly in a broad band round her neck. She is about the same height as you, Miss Ray. She is held there, at the height of her shoulders, by a curving rock formation deeply bedded in sand.”

Dr. Fell paused and opened his eyes.

“The murderer, we believe, catches her from the back. She sees and hears nothing until she is seized. Intense pressure on the carotid arteries, here at either side of the neck under the chin, will strike her unconscious within seconds and dead within minutes. When her body is released, it should fall straight forward. Instead, what happens?”

To Dan, full of relief ever since danger had seemed to leave Joyce, it was as if a shutter had flown open in his brain.

“She was lying on her back,” Dan said. “Joyce told me so. Brenda was lying flat on her back with her head towards the sea. And that means—”

“Yes?”

“It means she was twisted or spun round in some way when she fell. It has something to do with that infernal scarf — I’ve thought so from the first. Dr. Fell! Was Brenda killed with the scarf?”

“In one sense, yes. In another sense, no.”

“You can’t have it both ways! Either she was killed with the scarf, or she wasn’t.”

“Not necessarily,” said Dr. Fell,

“Then let’s all retire to a loony bin,” Dan suggested, “because nothing makes any sense at all. The murderer still couldn’t have walked out there without leaving tracks. Finally, I agree with Toby: what’s the point of the rifle? How does a .22 rifle figure in all this?”

“Because of its sound.”

Dr. Fell took the pipe out of his mouth. Dan wondered why he had ever thought the learned doctor’s eyes were vague. Magnified behind the glasses on the broad black ribbon, they were not vague at all.

“A .22 rifle,” he went on in his big voice, “has a distinctive noise. Fired in the open air or anywhere else, it sounds exactly like the noise made by the real instrument used in this crime.”

“Real instrument? What noise?”

“The crack of a blacksnake whip,” replied Dr. Fell.

Edmund Ireton, looking very tired and ten years older, went over and sat down in an easy chair. Toby Curtis took one step backward, then another.

“In South Africa,” said Dr. Fell, “I have never seen the very long whip which drivers of long ox spans use. But in America I have seen the blacksnake whip, and it can be twenty-four feet long. You yourselves must have watched it used in a variety turn on the stage.”

Dr. Fell pointed his pipe at them.

“Remember?” he asked. “The user of the whip stands some distance away facing his girl assistant. There is a vicious crack. The end of the whip coils two or three times round the girl’s neck. She is not hurt. But she would be in difficulties if he pulled the whip towards him. She would be in grave danger if she were held back and could not move.

“Somebody planned a murder with a whip like that. He came here early in the morning. The whip, coiled round his waist, was hidden by a loose and bulky tweed jacket. Please observe the jacket Toby Curtis is wearing now.”

Toby’s voice went high when he screeched out one word. It may have been protest, defiance, a jeer, or all three.

“Stop this!” cried Joyce, who had again turned away.

“Continue, I beg,” Mr. Ireton said.

“In the dead hush of morning,” said Dr. Fell, “he could not hide the loud crack of the whip. But what could he do?”

“He could mask it,” said Edmund Ireton.

“Just that! He was always practising with a .22 rifle. So he fired several shots, behind the bungalow, to establish his presence. Afterwards nobody would notice when the crack of the whip — that single, isolated ‘shot’ heard by Miss Ray — only seemed to come from behind the house.”

“Then, actually, he was—?”

“On the terrace, twenty feet behind a victim held immovable in the curve of a stone chair. The end of the whip coiled round the scarf. Miss Lestrange’s breath was cut off instantly. Under the pull of a powerful arm she died in seconds.

“On the stage, you recall, a lift and twist dislodges the whip from the girl-assistant’s neck. Toby Curtis had a harder task; the scarf was so embedded in her neck that she seemed to have been strangled with it. He could dislodge it. But only with a powerful whirl and lift of the arm which spun her up and round, to fall face upwards. The whip snaked back to him with no trace in the sand. Afterwards he had only to take the whip back to Mr. Ireton’s house, under pretext of returning the rifle. He had committed a murder which, in his vanity, he thought undetectable. That’s all.”

“But it can’t be all!” said Dan. “Why should Toby have killed her? His motive—”

“His motive was offended vanity. Mr. Edmund Ireton as good as told you so, I fancy. He had certainly hinted as much to me.”

Edmund Ireton rose shakily from the chair.

“I am no judge or executioner,” he said. “I... I am detached from life. I only observe. If I guessed why this was done—”

“You could never speak straight out?” Dr. Fell asked sardonically.

“No!”

“And yet that was the tragic irony of the whole affair. Miss Lestrange wanted Toby Curtis, as he wanted her. But, being a woman, her pretense of indifference and contempt was too good. He believed it. Scratch her vanity deeply enough and she would have committed murder. Scratch his vanity deeply enough—”

“Lies!” said Toby.

“Look at him, all of you!” said Dr. Fell. “Even when he’s accused of murder, he can’t take his eyes off a mirror.”

“Lies!”

“She laughed at him,” the big voice went on, “and so she had to die. Brutally and senselessly he killed a girl who would have been his for the asking. That is what I meant by tragic irony.”

Toby had retreated across the room until his back bumped against a wall. Startled, he looked behind him; he had banged against another mirror.

“Lies!” he kept repeating. “You can talk and talk and talk. But there’s not a single damned thing you can prove!”

“Sir,” inquired Dr, Fell, “are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“I warned you,” said Dr. Fell, “that I returned tonight partly to detain all of you for an hour or so. It gave Inspector Tregellis time to search Mr. Ireton’s house, and the Inspector has since returned. I further warned you that I questioned the maids, Sonia and Dolly, who today were only incoherent. My dear sir, you underestimate your personal attractions.”

Now it was Joyce who seemed to understand. But she did not speak.

“Sonia, it seems,” and Dr. Fell looked hard at Toby, “has quite a fondness for you. When she heard that last isolated ‘shot’ this morning, she looked out of the window again. You weren’t there. This was so strange that she ran out to the front terrace to discover where you were. She saw you.”

The door by which Dr. Fell had entered was still open. His voice lifted and echoed through the hall.

“Come in, Sonia!” he called. “After all, you are a witness to the murder. You, Inspector, had better come in too.”

Toby Curtis blundered back, but there was no way out. There was only a brief glimpse of Sonia’s swollen, tear-stained face. Past her marched a massive figure in uniform, carrying what he had found hidden in the other house.

Inspector Tregellis was reflected everywhere in the mirrors, with the long coils of the whip over his arm. And he seemed to be carrying not a whip but a coil of rope — gallows rope,

In the morning papers the next day, after Luke Daly had gone off to duty, he read that a man named Dingbat Green had been shot dead in a tenement doorway at half-past eleven last night. His wife had heard the shot and found him in the entry; she had heard some people running through the yard but she had not seen them, and she had not seen Mickey Gavegan. He read all the papers, and all said the same thing. No one had seen him; he was safe.

That night, smoking in the armchair with his eyes wrinkled up thoughtfully in his lean homely face, Luke Daly gave him his idea of it.

“It ties in with those four guys who got away with a hundred thousand in that payroll job,” he said. “We found that out. This Dingbat was talking about it in O’Brien’s place last night, an hour before he was killed — saying he’d get his cut out of that or something was going to break. Joe Glennon got a tip on what was going on and went down there to pick Dingbat up, but missed him by five minutes. He was on his way over to the house when Dingbat got it.”

“Dingbat liked his liquor,” Mickey Gavegan said. “I guess it made him talk too much.”

Luke Daly said slowly, “This is how I figure it, Mike. Whoever bossed that payroll job was smart enough to know what anybody like Dingbat Green would do with twenty grand or so in his pocket. He knew he’d tear the town wide open and put the finger right on himself — and on the others too. So I think he didn’t split the money right away — he gave them maybe a couple of hundred each and held back the rest until things got quieter. But Dingbat gets drunk and begins to bellyache, and this other bird hears what he’s saying, or somebody passes him the word. So he rubs out Dingbat right away, to save himself — and maybe to split what’s left just three ways instead of four.”

“I guess that’s it,” Mickey Gavegan agreed, trying not to seem too interested. He looked at a bracelet Luke Daly had bought that day for his girl; and afterward, when Luke Daly, all decked out, had started out to see her, he sat around for a while reading the papers again.

His face looked dull and tired when he raised it at the knock on the door. He said, “Huh? Come in,” and a thin man in a brown topcoat and a soft hat turned down all around opened the door, closed it after him, and leaned against it with his hands in his pockets.

“Hello, Gavegan,” he said, his small mouth smiling in his long, pale face. “How’re tricks?”

Mickey Gavegan looked at him across the room; he knew him right away. “Bohannon,” he said. “Jack Bohannon. What—” His throat got kind of dry; he swallowed to clear it.

“Yeah,” Bohannon said, jerking his head backward. “I seen Daly go out a couple of minutes ago. When’s he due back?”

“Late,” Mickey Gavegan said automatically. Up there where they’d sent him he used to think that he’d meet Jack Bohannon again; and when he did— Something tingled in his fingers, as if a charged wire had touched him, and he got out of his chair slowly.

“Wait a minute,” Bohannon said. He didn’t move; his voice was casual. “Listen to what I got to tell you before you act up. I never knew you took the rap for that holdup until I got back in town last month; I figured you scrammed out of there the way I did. Why in hell didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” Mickey Gavegan said huskily, “because I didn’t know what it was.”

In the pale face across from him the brows arched outward in a shallow V.

“No,” Bohannon said, watching him curiously. “I guess you didn’t. You were always slow on the uptake.” His voice was soft but his dark eyes were cold and serious. “As soon as I heard about it I figured I owed you something. Not that I’m scared of you— Don’t get ideas. I’m no corner punk any more, Gavegan. I been around. I got connections, good connections. In Chi—” He raised his brows again. “That ain’t here or there. I got a grand in my pocket, Gavegan — it don’t square everything but it’ll help.”

“A grand?” Mickey Gavegan repeated. His mind did not take in the words; he spoke only because Bohannon paused.

“That’s it.” Bohannon nodded, watching him directly. “For what I owe you, and for something I want you to do. There’s a guy I want to get in touch with, Gavegan, only he’s ducked out of sight and I don’t know where to find him. He’s got a sister on the west side who could locate him — but she’s never gonna do it for me. Just tonight, when I heard you were living with Daly, I got an idea how maybe you could work it out of her.”

Raising his head so that his chin was tilted up, he nodded to the bedroom. “All you have to do is to put on the uniform Luke Daly’s got in there. Then you’re a cop, see? You’re pretty near his size and it would fit you all right; she won’t know any different. You tell her you’re from the D.A.’s office and they want to get in touch with her brother. You say they want to protect him because they heard he’s in trouble and somebody’s plannin’ to knock him off. That’ll scare her all right; she’ll tell you where he is then. Ain’t you a cop? So you pick him up and take him to where I tell you—”

His hands spread wide on the table, his head lowered between his shoulders, Mickey Gavegan stared at him with glittering eyes.

For a moment Bohannon considered him. Then he said in an edged voice, “Or maybe I got to get tough with you. You want that, Gavegan? After that guy was shot last night I saw you running away, scared as hell. Say the cops got that tip phoned in to them tonight. You think they’d want to know why?”

“What?” Mickey Gavegan asked thickly. “You can’t pull that. I never—”

“The cops might believe you,” Bohannon said. He showed his teeth delicately, like a cat smiling. “And maybe they won’t.”

His voice stopped carelessly there. Cold inside, not scared, but upset and uneasy, Mickey Gavegan tried to think this out. But it was confused in his head, offering no place from which to start.

Bohannon gave him no time. Lifting his left arm, he glanced at his wrist watch.

“I got a black coupe parked downstairs with the keys in it. You get into it with Daly’s uniform on in fifteen minutes or that call goes in to headquarters.” Looking up, his eyes narrowed. “Or don’t you think it would?”

Shaking his head, Mickey Gavegan said slowly, “I guess it would go in all right, Bohannon.”

“I guess so too,” the pale man added. He threw a piece of paper to the table. “The first address is where this sister lives; the second is where you bring this Joe Larkin when you get him. If he squawks about not going to headquarters you say the D.A. wants to see him personal; he’s not taking chances on any leak from his office.” He opened the door, nodded, said, “Fifteen minutes,” and left.

Even after Mickey Gavegan was alone, it seemed hard to get it all straight in his head. He thought of those guys in the cell block — how many claimed they had been framed? Say some of them lied; a few had told the truth. They’d done it to the other men and they’d do it to Gavegan. Unless...

He walked into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and looked at Luke Daly’s uniform. Blue shirt, blue pants, blue coat, blue tie — some buttons, a shield, a holster, a gun. Then he looked at the paper Bohannon had left, which he held mechanically now in his hand. Ann Larkin, 441 Court Terrace; and under that 64 Arverne Road, Ransom’s Beach.

He put the paper on the dresser, next to the jeweler’s box that held the bracelet Luke Daly had shown him. Luke had forgotten that, he thought; but he’d be over at his girl’s house probably before he found it out. Too late anyway to come back for it; he wouldn’t be home now till twelve or one. And Mickey Gavegan could be through then, and safe; the suit would be hanging up the way Luke had left it, as if it had never been touched. Only—

Mickey Gavegan forced his mind away from that only. He kept it as empty and thoughtless as he could. He took off his clothes and put on Luke Daly’s. Then he went out to the hall, listened there, and started down quietly, his head lowered.

Nobody met him in the hall; nobody noticed him on the street. He got into the black coupe that was parked where Bohannon had said it would be and drove across town to 441 Court Terrace. The number and the name were very clear in his mind; he did not have to look at Bohannon’s paper. The number and the name, Ann Larkin — they might have been painted on a board before his eyes.

When she came into the front room where the landlady had asked Mickey Gavegan to wait, this Ann Larkin had a tension in her features that showed mostly in the trembling line of her lips.

“Yes?” she said, in a shaky voice, looking at him as he sat on the couch, in Luke Daly’s uniform, with Luke Daly’s cap on his knee. She was a tall girl, with steady, rather serious brown eyes, very slender in a dark blue dress. Her eyes were bright now with anxiety or fright, he could not tell which; but the moment he saw her, Mickey Gavegan knew he wouldn’t have any trouble here,

Bohannon had been right: the uniform was enough. Mickey Gavegan repeated what Bohannon had told him to say, calm now, sure of himself, everything conquered, even the shame; and she listened to him quietly, her eyes meeting his, dropping away from them, all the while he spoke.

For a moment after he stopped she was silent; then she looked up at him again and said what, of all things, Mickey Gavegan had not expected her to say. She said in a soft breath, as if she weren’t frightened any more: “I’m glad you came. It’s — Joe will be glad too. He wanted to go to the police before — I told him to. But always, at the end, he was afraid to. Afraid of what that man would do. Joe wouldn’t even tell me where he was living. All I have is a phone number.”

When Mickey Gavegan asked her what that was, she shook her head at him.

“No. He wouldn’t be there now — he never is before eleven. I think it’s a restaurant where he goes to eat. They always have to see if he’s there. But I’ll go with you now, wherever you want; I’ll call you for him at eleven. You see—” she looked at him with a timid, painful smile — “it may help him if I’m there. Please take me, too.”

“I can’t do that,” Mickey Gavegan said. Bohannon wouldn’t like this at all. “Sorry, lady.”

“But I’m going,” she told him, in an unsteady voice. “Why not? He hasn’t done anything wrong. If they just want to talk to him I can be there. I can help.”

It struck Mickey Gavegan that if he protested too much she might get obstinate; she might insist on calling the DA.’s office herself.

The fall night, damp and rainy, seemed to seclude them very close together in the little coupe. As soon as they started off, she began to talk about her brother and that man he’d met. After a while Mickey Gavegan realized who she meant: Bohannon.

Moving around in his seat, grunting answers, he began to wish savagely that she’d shut up; he wasn’t asking her life’s history. How she’d left the small town upstate when her mother died, how she came here, got a job, and sent for Joe. Maybe, she said, it was all her fault, because if she hadn’t sent for him he’d still be back home; he’d never have met that man. Did he — her face turned dimly to him — did he think this would be very serious?

Maybe not, he said shortly. He thought they could fix this up all right. Yes — her voice lifted there. They could, couldn’t they? It wasn’t as if Joe had done anything terrible; he’d just taken the bag Bohannon had given him and put it in a safe-deposit box downtown. He didn’t know what was in it; and when he suspected, from what Bohannon let slip one night, he was afraid to go to the police, he slipped out of sight because he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That was all he’d done, and they couldn’t punish him for it, when they understood how it was. The bag? The one with the money — the money Bohannon and his friends had stolen last month in the payroll holdup.

Mickey Gavegan remembered then what Luke Daly had said about the holdup, and Dingbat Green and the leader who must be Bohannon; and he remembered the car that had passed him last night. That’s where Bohannon had seen him, from the car, after he’d killed the other man. And he’d hooked in Joe Larkin the way he’d hooked in Mickey Gavegan years ago — a chump to hold the bag, a sucker who didn’t know what was going on.

Mickey Gavegan’s lips were strangely colorless in his set face went they came to the little village of Ransom’s Beach, and he stepped under a light to look at the address on Bohannon’s paper again.

Around them all the store fronts were dark, the streets deserted; rows of cottages sloped desolately away under the indifferent pale pools of street lights. He looked through his pockets for Bohannon’s paper once, twice, a third time; he didn’t find it. In his other suit maybe, left there when he changed. But Arverne Road anyway, and a low number; he remembered that much. The coupé went on more slowly then, until on a corner signpost he saw the letters he was watching for.

There was only one bungalow lit up, far down near the beach; he pulled in to the curb before it and told her to stay in the car, for he knew he had to see Bohannon alone, and tell him she was there too. Because she had said she knew Bohannon; and if she saw him first she’d never call her brother. She’d know then that Gavegan—

“I’ll be back,” he said harshly. “I’m not sure this is it.”

After he rang, Bohannon opened the door, but his thin body was sheltered from the car by Mickey Gavegan’s bulkier one. In the hall, with the door closed, Mickey Gavegan told him how it was; he listened, fretting at his lower lip.

“She knows me all right,” he said when Mickey Gavegan was done. “You’ll have to get her to put in the call. Tell her you’re a little early, and the D.A. won’t be here for a while. After she calls him I’ll run things. That call is all we want out of her.”

Outside on the street she was standing by the car, looking around. It was dark here, she said — scary. And her hand clung to his arm all the way up the stoop — a small hand he could crush in his, a hand that weighed nothing at all.

Mickey Gavegan seemed to feel it there even after they got inside, and he looked at his watch and said maybe she could call now; it was almost eleven. The touch of her hand seemed still on the coat. From the hall he heard her dial.

He went out to the kitchen and nodded silently at Bohannon, and then, when the other man went inside, he lit a cigarette. After a moment, when he heard her voice muted through the walls, he went out to the corridor that ran into the living-room arch.

He didn’t know what he was going to do. Why had he left the kitchen? There was a small room on his right that he looked into absently, his head aching — a tiny, bare pantry with one window high up in it not wide enough for a man. It was odd why he examined the room so very carefully, why he stood there motionless in the hall, listening to Ann Larkin’s voice, panicky and breathless, in the room beside him. You aren’t — this isn’t — her chair pushed back. Where was the policeman?

“Who?” Bohannon said. Mickey Gavegan heard him chuckle — low, not too amused. “I guess the suit fits him pretty good at that, baby; only it ain’t his. He’s no more a cop than I am. Gavegan!”

When he stopped in the archway her eyes watched him with a kind of incredulous horror.

Mickey Gavegan did not look at her at all; he stood there rigidly, in Luke Daly’s uniform, like a statue.

“I guess there ain’t a cop within a mile of here,” Bohannon said, “but at that I guess you could take a gander around from upstairs, Gavegan. See if anybody’s getting nosy about the lights.”

The girl never said a word; she just kept watching him as if she had lost the power to move her eyes. They seemed to stay on him when he went out to the stairs, and her hand, too, remained tangible on his arm. Upstairs, in a dark bedroom, he stood by a window.

A car came down the street, slowing as it passed the house. A cheap black sedan, like the one Luke Daly had, it reached the end of the block, turned around in a driveway there, and passed the house once more. On the boulevard it stopped a moment and then turned left, out of sight. Somebody looking for a number, he thought; there were a million models like Luke Daly’s around. Still his heart began to beat unsteadily, and the quiet around him became an oppressive thing whose weight he could not endure.

So down the stairs again, into the living room, where Jack Bohannon sat on a corner of the table, and the girl, her eyes shaded darkly, moved her head aside as he came in so that she did not have to look at him. “All quiet?” Bohannon asked. Gavegan nodded. It wasn’t Luke Daly; it couldn’t be. For how could Luke Daly know where he was?

But while they sat there, waiting for Joe Larkin, things began to come together in Mickey Gavegan’s mind. There was the paper Bohannon had given him, which he had lost; and there was the bracelet Luke Daly had bought for his girl, Had Gavegan put the paper on the dresser, forgetting it completely after he changed, so that Luke Daly, missing the bracelet before he reached his girl’s house, came back for it and found the paper by its side?

If it was there, Luke Daly would have found it, and he’d have seen Mickey Gavegan’s gray suit rumpled on the bed. He’d have looked in the closet and found the uniform gone, and then puzzled, worried, he’d have driven over to the first address, the landlady’s. And she’d have told him Miss Larkin had gone out some time ago. Yes. With a policeman. Was there any trouble?

He could see Luke Daly, cursing him, perplexed, not wanting to get him into any mess, coming down here to see what it was all about. Impersonating an officer — they could send Mickey Gavegan up for that—

In the house, in the dark kitchen, there was something that might have been the creak of a floorboard, the rasp of a door. Mickey Gavegan coughed and made the chair creak under him to cover it; when Bohannon looked at him he said to smother it entirely:

“I been thinking, Bohannon. A car passed me last night, maybe a minute after the shot; you could have seen me from inside it. Say you did — then you’re the guy who killed the Dingbat.”

“I am?” Bohannon said, in a lazy voice, as if he was just repeating the statement. But his eyes grew watchful — flat and depthless.

“You always used your head,” Mickey Gavegan went on, trying to make himself believe that he only imagined the sound, he was imagining another, fainter, almost indistinguishable, that could have been the scuffle of a shoe on oilcloth. “You always had a sucker — me for that cigar store holdup, and Joe Larkin for this. That’s the way you work, isn’t it?”

“Then maybe it’s a good way,” Bohannon answered softly, regarding him with watchfulness, but no alarm. “I never got picked up, Gavegan. I roped you into that holdup — hell, it’s over and done with now; you didn’t know any more about what was going on than a baby. But you want to remember that they hooked you for it all the way, the way they’d hook you for killing the Dingbat if I talk. Unless—”

He turned his head sharply, as if he heard something now that Mickey Gavegan had not caught. Getting up suddenly and silently from the table, he was past the archway in two strides, peering down the hall. Then he snarled something and the hand in his coat pocket jerked up; sound and smoke rebounded from the wall in a roll of clamorous enormity.

The girl was on her feet. Had she screamed? Mickey Gavegan, not conscious of moving, was in the archway behind Bohannon’s crouching form. “In the pantry,” Bohannon said breathlessly. “A guy.”

Straightening clear of the arch, with his body pressed flat to the wall and the gun extended before him in his right hand, Bohannon moved forward carefully on his toes. Behind him, Mickey Gavegan moved too, one step into the passage, with Luke Daly’s gun in his hand, and Luke Daly’s uniform on his back.

“Bohannon,” Mickey Gavegan said. The band at his temple snapped with the word; his body lost its pain and its shame; it became in an instant supple and careful.

The pale man turned, and they looked at each other, and Luke Daly’s gun was solid and sure in Mickey Gavegan’s hand. For a moment Bohannon just watched him; then in a quiet and persuasive tone he said, “If you’ll use your head, Gavegan, if you’ll let me handle this the safe way—”

His voice was so quiet, his eyes so steady and sensible, that Mickey Gavegan did not watch his gun. The reports came, one, two, three, rapid and wild, even while Bohannon spoke.

The hall was quiet then. Smoke whirled and eddied in it like lazy fog. And Jack Bohannon lay very still, clumsily sprawled out, on the floor...

In the living room Luke Daly made him tell it all — how he got scared and ran at the shot last night because he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, how Bohannon came to see him, how he thought that if he didn’t do what Bohannon wanted him to...

“You couldn’t tell me,” Luke Daly said bitterly. “You couldn’t do anything as brilliant as that. This mess now—” He went to the window and looked out; coming back he said, “I don’t think anybody heard us; I didn’t see a light for blocks around. Give me the gun, Gavegan. I killed him. I heard him call the girl from a saloon and I followed him here and shot him when he fired at me.”

“What?” Mike Gavegan asked huskily. “You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”

“Who shot Bohannon?” Luke Daly asked the girl. His voice was tight and savage. “You know, sister. You’re the only one who does. They sent him up once for something he never did — you heard Bohannon say that. And now this goes the way you tell it. Who shot Bohannon?”

“You shot him,” she said. But she had turned to Luke Daly then. “I saw you. You came in and—”

“Sister,” Luke Daly said, with his eyes gleaming, “we’ll cook something up. Get into the coupe and scram out of here. Mike, take off the cap and the shield and no one will spot you. I’ll give you five minutes before I call the precinct.”

Half pulling Mickey Gavegan out across the porch, he said something else — that maybe they could clear the other business up. The holdup three years ago. And if they did, if the commission believed what Luke Daly and the girl would have to tell them about what Bohannon had admitted back there, that he didn’t have anything to do with that holdup at all, that he hadn’t known anything more about it than a baby—

“Maybe,” Luke Daly said, shoving him into the car, “maybe you’re not too dumb to make a pretty good cop.”

He bounced back up the stairs. Mickey Gavegan stared after him and then got the coupe in gear. Driving off through the rain, he thought of unbelievable things.

Gavegan the cop — and the girl—

He drove on faster, once touching the cap beside him. There was a curious lightness in him, a prickling like bubbles in all his veins. Say he made the list — say, one day, he got in touch with her again. He remembered her fingers on his arm. Would they ever be there again?

Maybe they would, he thought. Just once — that was all he wanted. For even now, sure in his mind, was the knowledge that he would never let them go.

They dropped Granville at the garage where his car was being fixed, and went home for lunch. After lunch Marla took her nap. Later she would go out again to finish the day’s round of chores and John, if he did not go with her, would be left with a bitter choice between reading and television. He hated daytime television, but usually he preferred it to being a helpless passenger. When Marla had retired to her room, he limped out to sit on the end of the boat dock in the shade of an overhanging live oak.

The Carter home was on the edge of a natural canal between the Gulf and a small bay. They had a boat, its outboard motor covered by a tarpaulin; the boat had been unused now for months and was laid away in the carport against a more active time. Sitting there, John wondered why the motor had to be inactive, why he had allowed himself to drift into an inertia as complete as that of the motor. There were literally hundreds of things he could still do. He liked to fish. There was a wheelbarrow in the tool shed. Tomorrow he would trundle the motor down here, set it up in the boat, and go out with his tackle. There were also plenty of odd jobs to do around the house. The guard-rail on this boat dock needed strengthening. He had always been handy with tools, and it was merely a question of getting interested again. A change of attitude — no more than that. Tomorrow...

Marla came out of the house, a preoccupied expression on her face. “Is anything the matter, John?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“The way you act — like a sulky little boy. You make me feel as if I’d done something wrong.”

“Have you?”

“Of course not. Coming into town?”

He shook his head. “Rather listen to TV. Good program coming up. Captain Alligator. It’s about—”

“Do you have to be so bitter?”

“I’m not bitter. I just want to listen to Captain Alligator. Do you mind?”

It was a horrible, frightening thing. It happened so rarely as to be unimaginable — yet every hospital had seen it at one time or another. St. Christopher’s Hospital was not the first, nor the last.

And when it happened, it was unbelievable, and sickening.

How and when it would start nobody knew. Nurses are close to sickness and death; pain is the enemy, healing the goat. The drugs and medications for relief of pain are part of the nurse’s daily work, and she knows them well. But who could tell what pain the nurses suffered, too? To some of them, nursing is merely a job to be endured; to others it is a way of life, a glorification. But to a few it is a day’s work to be dreaded, an emptiness and a loneliness with nothing for fulfillment. A healthy mind would find a healthy answer — adjust to the way of life and find contentment, or leave the profession. But on rare occasions an unhealthy mind would find a different kind of fulfillment...

She would come to the hospital as an experienced medications nurse. She would probably not be, but she would be efficient, would know her job. A confident voice, an aura of solid reliability — not like the giddy senior students about to graduate. References? Perhaps — but the hospitals she names so firmly are good hospitals, and with nurses so badly needed these days—

She might not start as a medications nurse, but she would soon end up there, or her interest in the job would quickly fade and she would be gone — to another hospital. A week after she was hired, you would find her, quietly and efficiently dispensing medications on the surgical floor, or perhaps on a medical floor caring for patients with heart disease or cancer or gall bladder trouble. She would be working the shift from three in the afternoon until eleven at night — so obliging of her to fill in on the shift the younger girls find so unpopular, not to mention that this is the shift when the morning’s new surgical patients are recovering from their analgesics and hypnotics, and feeling the first bite of postsurgical pain — the shift when much narcotic is used, often freely used. And her narcotics-check with the evening supervisor before she went off duty each night would always be scrupulously accurate...

But presently, insidiously, the complaints would begin. Mr. Thornton’s leg must be bothering him again — he needed two hypos between six and nine this evening before he got relief. And Mrs. Findley, complaining that her hypos aren’t relieving her the least bit (although one has been tempted to think that nothing short of a tap with a sledge hammer would effectively silence Mrs. Findley for more than half an hour at a stretch). But Mrs. Conway, always so quiet, now hesitantly and almost apologetically asking for just a tiny hypo before she goes to sleep tonight — her back has been acting up something terrible this afternoon, for some reason—

Once or twice it could be ignored. All patients had different needs, different pain thresholds. A cry-baby with an appendectomy might demand more narcotic than a stolid old trooper with massive cancer resection. But gradually the trend would appear, and the evening supervisor (who has been through this mill before, painfully and wearily, somewhere, sometime) knows without any possibility of doubt that a nurse drug addict is at work in the hospital.

“Davis!” said Dr. Ned Thompson. “You mean Jane Davis? The little brown-haired girl that started on Fourth last month?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’d never have thought it.”

Gibby grimaced. “Nobody ever does. She seems so — well, colorless. She’s never been particularly friendly with any of the girls, no gossiping about the doctors or the patients. She just keeps to herself most of the time, as quiet as can be. And now this.”

“Have you talked to Benedict down in the office about it?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn’t he fire her”

“Because I talked him out of it,” Gibby snapped, suddenly angry. “I begged him not to fire her. That won’t solve the problem. She’ll just go on to another hospital, get the same job there, do the same thing there. And then what about us? How do we know we aren’t hiring another one to take her place?” She shook her blonde head emphatically. “Fire her, and you just turn her loose. This kind of person is horrible and cruel and you have to catch her to stop her, don’t you see? You have to actually catch her in the act of stealing the stuff, catch her giving it to herself, in order to stop her. Then you can do something — you can charge her and prosecute her and put her away somewhere.”

The girl took a deep breath and stamped out her cigarette. “But if you get excited and accuse her without proof — oh, brother! That’s what she’s waiting for. It’s the worst possible charge. A hundred thousand dollar suit against the hospital for slander and defamation of character, her choice of the slickest lawyers in town to help her win it — she’d love that! She’d win it, too. And a hundred thousand dollars would buy her an awful lot of morphine.”

“You really hate her, don’t you?”

“You bet I do,” said Gibby. “Wouldn’t you if you were a nurse?”

“So what are you going to do?” “Watch her. Mr. Benedict said he’d hold off for a few days. If we could catch her before the end of the week, he’d sit on my report without any action until then. But if we’re still sure then and can’t prove it—” she shrugged. “He can’t do any more than that. The hospital can’t afford to keep her.”

“All right,” said Ned Thompson, grimly. He poured more coffee, and stared up wearily at the clock. “If you’re going to nail her in that time, you’re going to need some help. You’ve got it.”

But Muller must be questioned sometime and Walsh now set out to find him. He worked at the problem while his hands automatically guided the car along the country road between stubble fields and rolling, oak-dotted pasture land. Muller had been on the hill near the barn. He could have seen the murderer, or he could have shot Kershaw himself. Either way, what he said — or what he didn’t say — would be important. But the sheriff had never seen Muller before that morning — so how could he tell if the farmer was lying if he didn’t know how the man acted when he was telling the truth? The sheriff wished he knew more about Muller, that he’d had the sense to ask Hanslow about him. He could have learned a lot about Nancy’s brother from Doc, only like a fool he hadn’t thought to ask. Walsh sighed, depressed anew by the conviction of his own inadequacy.

A mailbox, black-lettered ED MULLER, jutted into the road. Walsh braked and studied the white house at the end of the drive, liking the green window-trim, the chrysanthemums blooming by the steps, the shade trees that blocked a view of the barn. He lowered his eyes to the drive and grunted approval of the smooth, graveled bed.

He parked at the house, not because he expected to find Muller indoors in mid-morning, but because talking to the wife might help Walsh’s understanding of the husband. If there was a wife. He wasn’t even sure of that.

There was. He found her in the backyard hanging out the wash. She was a flat-chested, sharp-featured woman who heard his errand without stopping her work, and then said that Ed was at the barn.

She asked grudgingly, “Want I should call him on the extension?”

“I’ll find him, thanks.” He sensed hostility and worked to counter it. “You got a pretty place, flowers and all, and everything so neat. Must take a heap of work.”

He had touched the right chord. She tossed her head and said proudly, “Work or not, that’s how I like it. So does Ed. Even in bad times — that drought five-six years back — even then Ed never let things get run down.”

“The drought hit you hard?”

“It hit everybody hard. But we come through all right.”

Walsh hunkered down by the clothes basket and held up a miniature pair of jeans.

“How old’s the boy?”

“Going on four. That’s another reason. No matter what, that kid’s going to remember a decent home. Good house, nice garden, clean fields, and straight fences. Not weeds and tin cans and an old shack like some.”

“It’ll be a good memory,” said the sheriff, rising.

As he turned to leave she asked abruptly, “You know who did for Matt?”

“I’m working on it.”

The thin lips tightened. “Don’t work at it too hard. Matt was a no-good.”

Ben Stemler, the eldest of four brothers, of which Louis was the third, was a round, pallid man, always out of breath — as if he had just climbed a long flight of steps. He was district sales-manager for a New York manufacturer, and attributed his moderate success, after years of struggling, to his doggedness in refusing to accept defeat. Chronic nephritis, with which he had been afflicted of late years, was more truly responsible for his increased prosperity, however. It had puffed out his face around his protuberant, fishy eyes, subduing their prominence, throwing kindly shadows over their fishiness, and so giving to him a more trustworthy appearance.

Ben was dictating pantingly to his stenographer when Louis entered the office. “Your favor of the... would say... regret our inability to comply... your earliest convenience.” He nodded to his brother and went on gasping. “Letter to Schneider... are at a loss to understand... our Mr. Rose...”

The dictation brought to a wheezing end, he sent the stenographer out, and turned to Louis.

“How’s everything?” Louis asked.

“Could be worse, Lou, but I don’t feel so good.”

“Trouble is you don’t get enough exercise. Get out and walk; let me take you down to the gym; take cold baths.”

“I know, I know,” Ben said wearily, “Maybe you’re right. But I got something to tell you — something you ought to know — but I don’t know how to go about telling you. I... that is—”

“Spit it out!” Louis was smiling. Ben probably had got into trouble of some sort.

“It’s about Pearl!” Ben was gasping now, as if he had come from an unusually steep flight of steps.

“Well?” Louis had stiffened in his chair, but the smile was still on his face. He wasn’t a man to be knocked over by the first blow. He had never thought of Pearl’s being unfaithful before, but as soon as Ben mentioned her name he knew that was it. He knew it without another word from Ben; it seemed so much the inevitable thing that he wondered at his never having suspected it.

“Well?” he asked again.

Unable to hit upon a way of breaking the news gently, Ben panted it out hurriedly, anxious to have the job off his hands. “I saw her night before last. At the movies. With a man. Norman Becker! Sells for Litz & Aulitz. They left together — in his car. Bertha was with me — she saw ’em too!”

He closed with a gasp of relief and relapsed into wheezes.

“Night before last,” Louis mused. “I was down to the fights — Kid Breen knocked out O’Toole in the second round — and I didn’t get home until after one.”

Jimmy stayed away from the beach for a long time — right through the height of the summer season. Steve figured he was working on his promotion, but there was no word from him.

Then the news started trickling in. The trickle became a stream, the stream became a flood.

The Betsey Blake legend burst open the American public during the latter part of August. By September the first magazines hit the stands, carrying their planted stories. By October the specials were out, the fan clubs were formed, and the television people were combing their files for old kinescopes of Betsey Blake’s few live shows.

The whole thing was just as Jimmy Powers had outlined it, only more so. I Was Betsey Blade’s Last Date vied for attention with The Loves of Betsey. And there was The Truth About—, and The Real—, and What They Don’t Dare Print About—, and a hundred others. The studio, meanwhile, was doing an indefatigable job tying in Splendor. Betsey Blake in her last and greatest performance! The greatest actress of the American screen!

On a different level there was the Betsey Blake — The Woman Nobody Knew approach. In this series it was possible to learn that Betsey Blake had herself been the daughter of a reigning celebrity of the silent screen, or of royal European blood, or merely a youngster out of Hollywood High School who deliberately set out to fashion a career for herself.

There were as many, and as conflicting, details as to her love fife. And there was much speculation about why she had maintained such an air of secrecy concerning her personal affairs. She was a devout churchgoer, she was a freethinker, she was a secret Satanist, she dabbled in astrology, she attended Voodoo ceremonies in Haiti, she was really an old woman who had discovered the secret of eternal youth. She was secretly an intellectual and her lovers included most of the celebrated literary figures of our generation; she was actually a shy, sensitive person who couldn’t face her own image on the screen; she was a devoted student of the drama who had planned to retire from the screen and establish her own repertory theater. She loved children and wanted to adopt half a dozen, she had been jilted as a girl and still cherished the memory of her one real love, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and spent all her money on psychiatrists.

All this, and much more, could be learned by any reader during early fall.

But Jimmy Powers had prophesied correctly when he said that the mystery angle would prove to be the most attractive part of the legend. There was the Betsey Blake Did Not Die! theory, which played up the “strange circumstances” surrounding the case, the “unexplained disappearance” of the two boats, the “reluctance” of the studio to exhibit the body in a public funeral. This angle fastened on every conceivable circumstance, real or rumored, which could be offered as “proof.”

As November approached, the volume and tempo of the articles neared a crescendo. For now the Betsey Blake legend was public property, and the fake fan clubs had given way to real fan clubs. Some of the scandal rags were printing the “inside story” and the “real lowdown” — Betsey Blake had been a tramp, she had been an alcoholic, she had started out posing for “art studies” and worse — but none of these allegations affected the legend. Rather, they served to strengthen it. To her growing army of devotees came the teenagers, and that was the final victory. Everyone from eight to eighty was breathlessly awaiting the advent of Splendor on their local screens.

The moment he set foot in the room he knew he had walked in on a catastrophe.

Louise Carpenter stood tensely straight at her desk, her pretty face almost as white as the envelope she was clutching. And she was glaring at a mass of boy and girl faces so blankly, so furtively quiet that the silence sizzled.

The first thing she said to him was, “I’ve been robbed.”

The terrible mass of boy and girl eyes followed him to her desk. In his nose was the pungent smell of ink, glue, paper, chalk, musty wardrobe closets; surrounding him were discolored walls, peeling paint, tarnished fixtures, warped window poles, and mutilated desks.

“Robbed in my own classroom,” Miss Carpenter choked.

He laid his coat and hat gently on her desk. “A practical joke?” He smiled at the class.

“Hardly. They didn’t know you were coming.” They had betrayed her, the sick shock in her voice said. “Class, this is Ellery Queen. I don’t have to tell you who Mr. Queen is, and how honored we are to have him visit us.” There was a gasp, a buzz, a spatter of applause. “Mr. Queen was kind enough to come here today as a special treat to give us a talk on crime. I didn’t know he was going to walk in on one.”

The spatter stopped dead.

“You’re sure there has been a crime, Miss Carpenter?”

“An envelope with seven one-dollar bills in it was stolen, and from the way it happened the thief can only be someone in this room.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He deliberately looked them over, wondering which of the 41 pairs of eyes staring back at his belonged to Joey Buell, Howard Ruffo, and David Strager. He should have asked Louise Carpenter to describe them. Now it was too late.

Or was it?

It seemed to Ellery that three of the 20-odd boy faces were rather too elaborately blank. One of them was set on husky shoulders; this boy was blond, handsome, and dead-white about the nostrils. The second was a sharp-nosed, jet-haired boy with Mediterranean coloring who was perfectly still except for his fingers, and they kept turning a pencil over and over almost ritually. The third, thin and red-haired, showed no life anywhere except in a frightened artery in his temple.

Ellery made up his mind.

“Well, if it’s a real live crime,” he said, turning to Louise, “I don’t imagine anyone wants to hear me ramble on about crimes that are dead and buried. In fact, I think it would be more interesting if I gave the class a demonstration of how a crime is actually solved. What do you think, Miss Carpenter?”

Understanding leaped into her eyes, along with hope.

“I think,” she said grimly, “it would be lots more interesting.”

“Suppose we begin by finding out about the seven dollars. They were yours, Miss Carpenter?”

“One dollar was mine. Miss McDoud, an English teacher, is being married next month. A group of us are chipping in to buy her a wedding present, with me as banker. All this week teachers have been dropping in to leave their dollars in an envelope I’ve had on my desk. This morning—”

“That’s fine for background, Miss Carpenter. Suppose we hear testimony from the class.” Ellery surveyed them, and there was a ripple of tittering. Suddenly he pointed to a little lipsticked girl with an Italian haircut. “Would you like to tell us what happened this morning?”

“I don’t know anything about the money!”

“Chicken.” A boy’s jeering voice.

“The boy who said that.” Ellery kept his tone friendly. It was one of the three he had spotted, the husky blond one. “What’s your name, son?”

“David Strager.” His sneer said, You don’t scare me. But his nostrils remained dead-white. He was the boy Miss Carpenter had said worked after school as a stock boy at the Hi-Kwality Supermarket on Amsterdam Avenue.

“All right, Dave. You tell us about this morning.”

The boy glanced scornfully at the girl with the Italian haircut. “We all knew the money was in the envelope. This morning before the bell rings Mrs. Morrell comes in with her buck and Miss Carpenter puts it with the other money and lays the envelope on her desk. So afterward the bell rings, Mrs. Morrell beats it out, Miss Carpenter picks up the envelope and takes a look inside, and she hollers, ‘I been robbed.’ ”

The thin boy with the red hair called out, “So what are we supposed to do, drop dead?” and winked at David Strager, who had already sat down. The big blond boy winked back.

“And your name?” Ellery asked the redhead.

“Joseph Buell,” the boy answered defiantly. He was the one who worked at Kaplan’s, the big cigar, candy, and stationery store on 89th Street. “Who wants their old seven bucks?”

“Somebody not only wants it, Joey, somebody’s got it.”

“Aaa, for all we know she took it herself.” And this was the third of the trio, the sharp-faced dark boy. If Ellery was right, he was the one who delivered part-time for O’Donnel’s Dry Cleaning on Columbus Avenue.

“And you are—?”

“Howard Ruffo.”

The Three Musketeers, rushing to one another’s support.

“You mean, Howard, you’re charging Miss Carpenter with having stolen the teachers’ money?” Ellery asked with a smile.

The boy’s dark glance wavered. “I mean maybe she took it like by mistake. Mislaid it or somepin’.”

“As a matter of fact,” came Louise’s quiet voice, “when I saw the money wasn’t in the envelope, my first thought was exactly that, Mr. Queen. So I searched myself thoroughly.”

“May I see the envelope?”

“This isn’t the one I was keeping the seven dollars in—” she handed him the envelope — “though it looks the same. I have a box of them in my locker there. The lock hasn’t worked for ages. This one must have been stolen from my locker yesterday, or earlier this week.”

“It’s a blank envelope, Miss Carpenter. How do you know it isn’t the one that contained the money?”

“Because the original had a notation in ink on the flap — Gift Fund for Helen McDoud.” She looked about and glances fell in windrows. “So this theft was planned, Mr. Queen. Someone came to class this morning armed with this duplicate envelope, previously stolen and filled with worthless paper, prepared to make a quick exchange if the opportunity arose. And it did. The class was milling around while Mrs. Morrell and I chatted.”

The paper in the substitute envelope consisted of a sheaf of rectangular strips cut to the size of dollar bills.

“At the time you placed Mrs. Morrell’s dollar among the others in the original envelope, was everybody here?”

“Yes. The door opened and closed only once after that — when Mrs. Morrell left. I was facing the door the whole time.”

“Could Mrs. Morrell, as a practical joke, have made the switch?”

“She wasn’t anywhere near my desk after I laid the envelope on it.”

“Then you’re right, Miss Carpenter. The theft was planned in advance by one of the boys or girls in this room, and the thief — and money — are both still here.”

The tension was building beautifully. The boy must be in a sweat. He hadn’t expected his theft to be found out so soon, before he got a chance to sneak the money out of the room.

“What time does the first period end, Miss Carpenter?”

“At 9:35.”

Every head turned toward the clock on the wall.

“And it’s only 8:56.” Ellery said cheerfully. “That gives us thirty-nine minutes — more than enough time. Unless the boy or girl who planned this crime wants to return the loot to Miss Carpenter here and now?”

This time he stared directly from David to Howard to Joey. His stare said, I hate to do this, boys, but of course I’ll have to if you think you can get away with it.

The Strager boy’s full lips were twisted. The skinny redhead, Joey Buell, stared back sullenly. Howard Ruffo’s pencil twirled faster.

It’s one of those three, all right.

“I see we’ll have to do it the hard way,” Ellery said. “Sorry I can’t produce the thief with a flick of my wrist, the way it’s done in books, but in real life, detection — like crime — is pretty unexciting stuff. We’ll begin with a body search. It’s voluntary, by the way. Anybody rather not chance a search? Raise your hand.”

Not a muscle moved.

“I’ll search the boys. Miss Carpenter. You roll those two bulletin — boards over to that corner and search the girls.”

The next few minutes were noisy. As each boy was searched and released he was sent to the blackboard at the front of the room. The girls were sent to the rear.

“Find anything, Miss Carpenter?”

“Rose Perez has a single dollar bill. The other girls either have small change or no money at all.”

“No sign of the original envelope?”

“No.”

“I found two boys with bills — in each case a single, too. David Strager and Joey Buell. No envelope.”

Louise’s brows met.

Ellery glanced up at the clock. 9:07.

He strolled over to her. “Don’t show them you’re worried. There’s nothing to worry about. We have twenty-eight minutes.” He raised his voice, smiling. “Naturally the thief has ditched the money, hoping to recover it when the coast is clear. It’s therefore hidden somewhere in the classroom. All right, Miss Carpenter, we’ll take the desks and seats first. Look under them too — chewing gum makes a handy adhesive. Eh, class?”

Four minutes later they looked at each other, then up at the clock.

9:11.

Exactly 24 minutes remaining.

“Well,” said Ellery.

He began to ransack the room. Books, radiators, closets, lunch-bags, schoolbags. Bulletin boards, wall maps, the terrestrial globe. The UN poster, the steel engravings of Washington and Lincoln. He even emptied Louise’s three pots of geraniums and sifted the earth.

His eyes kept returning to the clock more and more often.

Ellery searched everything in the room, from the socket of the American flag to the insect-filled bowls of the old light fixtures, reached by standing on desks.

Everything.

“It’s not here!” whispered Louise in his ear.

The Buell, Ruffo, and Strager boys were nudging one another, grinning.

“Well, well,” Ellery said.

Interesting. Something of a problem at that.

Of course! He got up and checked two things he had missed — the cup of the pencil sharpener and the grid covering the loudspeaker of the PA system. No envelope. No money.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his neck.

Really it’s a little silly. A schoolboy!

Ellery glanced at the clock.

9:29.

Six minutes left in which not only to find the money but identify the thief!

He leaned against Louise’s desk, forcing himself to relax.

It was these “simple” problems. Nothing big and important like murder, blackmail, bank robbery. A miserable seven dollars lifted by a teen-age delinquent in an overcrowded classroom...

He thought furiously.

Let the bell ring at 9:35 and the boy strut out of Miss Carpenter’s room undetected, with his loot, and he would send up a howl like a wolf cub over his first kill. Who says these big-shot law jerks ain’t monkeys? The biggest! He’s a lot of nothin’. Wind. See me stand him on his ear? And this is just for openers. Wait till I get goin’ for real, not any of this kid stuff...

No, nothing big and important like murder. Just seven dollars, and a big shot to laugh at. Not important? Ellery nibbled his lip. It was probably the most important case of his career.

9:30½.

Only four and a half minutes left!

Louise Carpenter was gripping a desk, her knuckles white. Waiting to be let down.

Ellery pushed away from the desk and reached into the patch pocket of his tweed jacket for his pipe and tobacco, thinking harder about Helen McDoud’s seven dollar gift fund than he had ever thought about anything in his life.

And as he thought...

At 9:32 he was intently examining the rectangles of paper the thief had put into the substitute envelope. The paper was ordinary cheap newsprint, scissored to dollar-bill size out of a colored comics section. He shuffled through the dummy dollars one by one, hunting for something. Anything!

The 41 boys and girls were buzzing and giggling now.

Ellery pounced. Clinging to one of the rectangles was a needle-thin sliver of paper about an inch long, a sort of paper shaving. He fingered it, held it up to the light. It was not newsprint. Too full-bodied, too tough-textured...

Then he knew what it must be.

Less than two minutes left.

Feverishly he went through the remaining dollar-sized strips of comic paper.

And there it was. There it was!

This strip had been cut from the top of the comic sheet. On the margin appeared the name of a New York newspaper and the date April 24, 1955.

Think over. Take your time. Lots of seconds in a minute.

The buzzing and giggling had died. Louise Carpenter was on her feet, looking at him imploringly.

A bell began clanging in the corridor.

First period over.

9:35.

Ellery rose and said solemnly, “The case is solved.”

Later that afternoon, as Dr. Kang came out of his hotel bedroom, a door two rooms away from his own opened and a short, sallow-faced man came toward him. He wore a panama and carried a heavy stick. He stopped alongside Dr. Kang and his face was working with anger.

“So...” he spluttered. “Dr. Kang has become a good angel.”

“Dr. Kang has no hope of ever achieving such an elevated condition, Monsieur Charap. Why are you so angry?”

“Why?” Monsieur Charap’s eyes narrowed. “The girl is gone. And it was you who explained things to her. She left me a note saying why she has gone, and mentioning your name.”

For a moment Dr. Kang was silent. The girl indeed was a fool to have mentioned his name.

“I merely explained that the climate would be bad for her. She must have misconstrued my words. But why should you worry? Governesses are easy to find even for the Emir.”

“Not English ones. And the Emir has already paid me.”

“Then pay him back, monsieur.” But although he said it calmly, Dr. Kang was not fool enough to think that Charap would part with any money he already had, or let this interference with his arrangements go unrevenged. He had a feeling that it would be wise for him to leave Port Rabat. One did not steal titbits from a lion and wait around to see how the beast would take it. But unfortunately Dr. Kang no longer had any money.

“Somebody shall pay,” snapped Monsieur Charap.

An hour later the matter of repayment was being arranged. Monsieur Charap, worried over the loss of his charge and the anger of the Emir, was with an Arab in a small room over a shop in the native quarter of Port Rabat. He and the Arab had often worked together.

“It will indeed be hard to explain to the Emir,” said the Arab, flicking the sleeves of his robe back and reaching delicately for his cup of mint tea. “He was looking forward to the arrival of the English person. Also, I remember, that some weeks ago it was this same Dr. Kang who was involved in the matter of an arms deal. He had done this to spite the Emir.”

“Nothing short of the death of Dr. Kang will satisfy the Emir for the loss of this English person,” said Monsieur Charap. “The Emir has carried her photograph around with him for weeks.”

“You wish me to soften his disappointment?”

“I do,” said Monsieur Charap savagely.

“It is easily managed. Tell me, what is the number of Dr. Kang’s room at the hotel?”

“It is on the same floor as mine. Number ten.”

“Then tonight I shall pay him a visit. It will be easy to bribe the hotel clerk for a passkey. Leave it all to me. It shall be taken care of, and when he is dead it is possible that the Emir — since he has no love for Dr. Kang — will not ask for his money back.”

By seven, after supper in the barracks dining room, Kin was in uniform. The November wind all day had dried out the leaves and now they were rattling and scuffing against the windows like blown twigs. He moved restlessly from window to window: the trees out there, oaks, and maples, reeled and tossed in the moonlight and high up shredded clouds sailed fast, far off, over the Witch Hills. Behind him the police teletype clicked intermittently; DiPolo, the civilian dispatcher, talked lazily from time to time on the police radio with some patrol car or the district command post at Plummerston. McGraw, the night sergeant, spoke at odd intervals on the telephone.

“Checkers, Kin?” McGraw said at eleven thirty.

Kin cleared his throat. “Little headache, Mac.” And went to the washroom at the back of the central room to take an aspirin. And then he was at the windows again, restive under the pall of inactivity yet vaguely apprehensive — tonight like any other he was on duty — that despite all his care and caution something, some night, would happen to him. He peered toward town, where Katherine was at a church supper.

“Kin,” McGraw said at midnight, yawning, “how’s to liven up a dull night by making us all a pot of coffee?”

Kin jumped at that. “Right, Mac.” And he moved swiftly enough on long, lithe legs across the central room to the kitchen wing.

“He’s sure changed,” DiPolo said, making a complete turn on his swivel chair. “He gives me the creeps. Loosening his belt one minute, tightening it the next. Off in corners. Hesitating before he comes around corners.”

McGraw said, “All right, all right,” and scrubbed his red hair energetically with thick fingers.

“So all right, all right,” DiPolo said, spinning the chair round again; he had dark, knowing eyes and a sly, teasing smile. “You like the kid, huh? Troopers always stick together, huh?”

McGraw opened a desk drawer for no reason whatsoever, then slammed it shut and beetled round the room, everywhere and nowhere.

“Could be,” DiPolo said, “he lost his guts when—”

McGraw said, “Button up your loose mouth, Lulu. Belt out the midnight summary on the teletype to Headquarters and Plummerston. You just take care of your end, that’s all.” McGraw tramped over to the washroom.

DiPolo’s soft whistling was somewhere between drollery and insolence. He drummed the keyboard with offhand efficiency. Kept on drumming, no let up, when a radio report started coming in. He glanced at the big electric clock above his head; he nodded, typed one-handed, wrote with the other hand on his sheet. The time he put down was 12:09.

“Boagard,” he said when McGraw returned. “On the Turnpike trying to overhaul some throttle-happy drunk. Guy’s weaving all over the place.”

McGraw said, “Tell Boag not to knock his brains out on that. We can always get the drunk by his license number.”

“You know the law, Mac, on drunk driving. Park the car, lock it, and bring the drunk to the barracks. Book him, toss him in the clink overnight — his operator’s license automatically suspended till trial. You know Boag and you know the law. No guy laughs off eighty an hour with Boag — drunk or sober. Besides, can’t read the license — mud on it.”

Kin came in just then with cups and a pot of coffee on a tray. He’d heard the last part and asked what was up with Boagard; and when McGraw told him he fiddled with the knot of his tie and then made his belt a notch tighter. “He ought to be careful out there, Mac, even if he does overhaul the car.” He poured the coffee, slopping some.

DiPolo said, “Boagard’s a man for the book, all right. All he was trying to do in the first place was a favor — Chapter Twenty-one, Courtesy and Assistance to Motorists. He was cruising west on the Pike when he saw this car up ahead start off from the muddy shoulder. Then his headlights spotted something on the shoulder, he stopped, picked up a fedora and took off after the guy, to give it back and now—” He broke off, listening to the loudspeaker, nodding; he said, “Okay, Boag, I’ll do that. Good luck.” And then to McGraw: “You heard. The Hake Mountain road now, so it won’t be long.” He marked down the time — 12:14 — and chuckled. “Up hill, down dale, and either Boag will nail him or the guy’ll fly off one of those hairpin curves. Don’t bother him, you heard, with the radio; he’s got all he can do to handle the wheel.”

Kin said, “Hake’s a bad road. Where they’ve straightened out some of those hairpins they left the old loops and a desperate man could scoot in there, brake sharp, sideways, then turn out his lights and jump. Hitting in there hard, a trooper would plow into it—”

“This is just some knuckle-head drunk, kid,” DiPolo said. “Get the ants out of your pants and pass some coffee.”

But at 12:20 McGraw said, “Get hold of Boag, Lulu. Never mind — I don’t care what he said.” But Boagard made no answer and that caused McGraw to get up and make a circle of the room. At 12:25 he told DiPolo to try again, and peered across the room, uncertain, where Kin stood by a window tugging this way and that at his belt.

“Nope,” DiPolo said. And then he was half out of his chair and his coffee cup crashed on the floor. “Boagard? Boag — is that you, fella? Boag!” He was writing the time down — 12:27 — and then he was all the way up on his feet, still writing; but he shouted: “Mac!”

“Right here,” McGraw said, at his elbow.

DiPolo still shouted. “All he could say was — ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ Then it sounded like he dropped the phone.”

McGraw pointed, said, “Okay, Lulu. Call a doctor. Call an ambulance. Get ’em started and tell ’em to wait at the Pike and Hake for further instructions.” He wheeled about, almost smashing into Kin; he said, “Get going. Out Hake. Watch those old loops.”

“And see can you get the lead out of your pants,” DiPolo snapped.

Kin gave him a sad look. He said softly to McGraw, “Right, Mac,” and put on his stetson and stretched his long legs, soft and fast, across the central room. His stomach was held in — tight, rigid — and the pounding of his heart reached to his eardrums.

“Ten minutes should do it,” McGraw shouted after him.

DiPolo yelled, “If he can get the lead out!”