Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries)
Author: Prather, Richard S.
Date: 2014-04-29
Publisher: Open Road Media
Rights: Copyright © 1959 by Fawcett Publications, Inc., Copyright renewed 1987 by Richard S. Prather

Double in Trouble

A Shell Scott Mystery

Richard Prather

Contents

Me? I'm—Shell Scott

The Name's Chester Drum

Scott Shells It Out

The Goons Beat Drum

Shell Scott Shoots Off His Mouth

Chester Drum Is Hoodwinked

High-Flying Scott

Drum Is Fit To Be Tied

Shell Scott Catches It Cold

Chester Drum Plays It Cool

Broad-Minded Scott

Drum Sticks His Neck Out

Shell Scott Looks At The Bare Facts

Chester Drum Strings Along The Brass

Scott Takes The High Road

Drum Gets A Kick Out Of Scott

Shell Scott Sweeps Up Some Crumbs

Chester Drum Beats Up Some Yeggs

Scott Dresses To Kill

Drum Feels Beat

Shell Scott And Chester Drum Hit It Off

Two Private Eyes Out Of Focus

The Whites Of Their Eyes

Scott And Drum Kill An Evening

The Eyes Have It

Shell Scott And Chester Drum

For RICHARD CARROLL

ME? I’M—SHELL SCOTT

Hollywood, 3:00 A.M., Monday, December 14

I’m a private eye.

Most of you know me. You know I work out of Los Angeles and my cases are usually in the L.A.-Hollywood menagerie, that I’m six-two and two-hundred and five pounds, with inch-long white hair sprouting cropped-wheat fashion over my head and upside-down white V’s I call eyebrows, that I like bourbon-and-water and rare prime ribs, that I’m happy-go-lookie and my favorite hangouts are women.

You’ve gone along with me while I got slugged on the head—and the heart. While I met unbelievably lovely women and believably unlovely men, chased and got chased, shot and got shot, invaded nudist camps, and even flew through trees like Tarzan and dangled from airborne balloons.

There was much of the same this time. Much of the same—plus something more. This time I met Chet Drum.

Most of you know Chet Drum, too, the private eye who works out of Washington, D.C., with the world his beat. We didn’t just meet; we collided. And when Chet Drum and I collided, blood flowed like bourbon, guys died like flies, and we set off the wildest gang war this side of the Syndicate assassinating the Mafia—with us in the middle.

But it all started when that beautiful blonde rang the chimes at the door of my Hollywood apartment.

The chimes going off bonged me slightly awake. I crawled out of bed and staggered around, grumbling, got my bearings and clumped in darkness over the bedroom’s black carpet, over the living room’s yellow-gold carpet with the thick shag nap that tickles feet—and has tickled lots of feet—and up to the front door. I flicked on the light, leaned against the door and closed my eyes.

Maybe if I didn’t say anything, it would go away.

The chimes bonged again.

“Okay, okay,” I said, cracked the door and peeked around it, trying to focus the one peeking eye.

“Mr. Scott? Are you Sheldon Scott?”

“Yeah.”

It was a woman’s voice. I could see her sort of blurrily, and she was a tall one, ample, curving, protruding, projecting, sweeping and swooping—in a word, stacked. All that, I could see from one sleep-doped half-lidded eye.

She watched the eye as if it fascinated her. Then she blurted, “It’s dreadfully important, let me in.” She even got off a word or two like “kidnaped ... awful ... ghastly.” I got the fuzzy impression she was talking about her father. She sounded badly frightened.

But I wasn’t about to let her in, not immediately. First I had to at least put some pants on. I sleep in nothing at all—I’m a sleep faddist—and I had tottered out there without even grabbing a robe. So I said, “Yeah. Just a minute.” I shook my head. “What time is it?”

“Three o’clock in the morning.”

“There’s no such hour as three o’clock in the morning.”

Silence. Then, “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Please let me in.”

“Just a minute.”

I moved my eye away from the door-crack, fully intending to go put some pants on and splash water on my face and heat the coffee pot—maybe even shave and shower. I really didn’t know exactly what the hell I was going to do at that point, but as I moved back half a step the gal clunked into the door and leaped in very rapidly.

She eyeballed me with eyes I noticed in a flash were bright blue and lovely and extremely wide, getting extremely wider and wider, and then she let out a great shout and spun around clapping both hands over her eyes, and leaped out of the apartment even more rapidly than she’d leaped in. Crash, went the door.

Well, my eyes were pretty wide, too, by that time. I raced to the bedroom and grabbed a robe, trotted to the front door again. I opened it a bit and looked out. She was still there. And this time, awakening, and using both eyes, I got the message: long healthy blonde hair hanging full and loose behind her head, a stray loop brushing the clean whiteness of her face; skin the smooth ivory of rich whipped cream; lips that were full, well shaped, and looked warm. And now I noticed the marks of strain and fear in her face, the knitted brows, hands clasping and unclasping. She had bitten her lipstick off, too. It didn’t make her lips seem pale, though; they just looked nude.

I threw the door wide. “Hello, hello. Good morning. Good three o’clock in the morning. Come in, miss. Miss?”

She didn’t smile. She didn’t do anything except walk inside. She blinked at my white hair, my slightly broken nose, on down to my big bare feet—they’re too big, really, especially bare—and then up to my face again. Not however, as if discovering something gay and modern and exciting, but rather as if studying a crumbling old statue in a museum.

“You really are Sheldon Scott, aren’t you? You really are the detective?”

“Yeah, I really am. Is that ... so horrible?” She had lit the fire, but was starting to put it out. I am not crazy to have well-stacked blondes study me like crumbling old statues.

“I ... just didn’t know what you looked like. You’re, well, not exactly what I expected.”

I’m usually not, worse luck. Well, now she knew what I looked like. Thinking about it, I had to stifle a grin. She must have been thinking there with me, because she was also suppressing a smile.

With her nude lips curving up at the corners, she said, “For one thing, you’re so tall, so—” she smothered a chuckle—"so big. I rather expected a little short man.”

“Well, I ... have elevator feet. I suppose I should cover them up with socks, or old gunnysacks—”

“No, it’s all right. I don’t mind ... feet.”

It sounded sort of weird. And she was still looking me up and down. There must be something, I said to myself, uneasily. So I looked me up and down. Of course. It was the robe. I had grabbed it in the dark, and it is the robe I wear only on intimate occasions—when the two of you sit on the floor drinking gin out of Martini glasses, or Martinis out of gin glasses, playing wild Oriental-type music over the big Altec-Lansing speakers, and playing the kind of games two play when you sit on the floor drinking, and so on.

It was red and white and had a purple green-eyed dragon on it, and the dragon was breathing fire on fleeing Oriental tomatoes, whose wispy garments were not of asbestos. “I can’t seem to do anything right this morning,” I said. “I didn’t know I had this robe on.”

She started to smile again.

“I mean,” I said, “I didn’t know I had this robe on. I would never have worn it. Ah ... I usually only wear it in the dark. I mean, ah.”

“It’s all right. I rather like it.”

“You do? Well, now that you’ve admitted it, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m crazy about it. It was a gift, anyhow. You know what they say, give a man enough robe.... Little French-Chinese gal named Fou-Fou gave it to me. Bought it in Hong Kong for me. Never did know her last name. Just called her Fou-Fou Manchu. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Perhaps I can get out of this mire if you’ll tell me what to call you.”

“Oh.” She seemed to come back from somewhere. “I’m Alexis Frost.” She paused. For a little while there she’d been more relaxed, the worry lines in her face had smoothed. But suddenly they came back. She looked frightened again. “I ... almost forgot, for a moment, why I came here, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell.”

“It’s my father. I think something’s happened to him. Something awful. He’s not at his home. I’m afraid he’s been killed, or—”

She was getting all wound up again, her voice rising. I said quietly, “Please sit down. Miss Frost. Is it Miss or Mrs.?”

She smiled, but without much warmth this time. “Miss. I’m not married.” She silently worried her lip.

I left her briefly, threw on some clothes. When I went back into the living room Alexis was looking around. She examined the two tanks of colorful tropical fish to the left of the door, and the gaudy yard-square nude of “Amelia” on the opposite wall above my fake fireplace. She reacted normally for a woman. Audibly, with approval of the pretty little fishes; inaudibly, but with eloquently disapproving eyes and mouth for Amelia. She glanced around a moment more, then walked to the monstrous chocolate-brown divan and sat down. I joined her, tried to size her up. She wore a knitted wool dress, and knitted wool on a well-shaped woman does perhaps more than any other cloth to emphasize the charming hills and valleys, the provocations and undulations, of the well-shaped woman. This Alexis had the landscape, but there was something missing. Something—I didn’t know what.

She was a big, healthy tomato with plenty of tomato juice in her, but somehow without all the usual seasoning. It was as if the bold promise in Alexis’ curves was given with Alexis’ fingers crossed; as if she were a gal who would surely wear gauzy and frilly and enticing wisps—but that the fact would remain a matter for conjecture. And there was a hint of chill in her blue eyes, just a hint. They weren’t the blue of spring skies, but of thin winter ice. The beauty was there, but it was a kind of unthawed beauty. Or maybe I was goofy. Maybe she merely required defrosting, like a refrigerator.

I said, “Now, what’s the trouble. Miss Frost?”

“I went to see my father tonight. He lives near here, on Harvard Boulevard. When I arrived, he wasn’t there. We had something to discuss, something important. He would have been there if he possibly could.” She paused. “But he’s gone. And his house has been searched.”

“Why would anybody search your father’s house? Who is he, anyway?”

She turned the blue eyes on me and said, “It isn’t just that his house was searched. There’s more to it than that. Do you know anything about the Hartsell Committee?”

“Sure. Quite a bit, in fact.”

Technically the committee Alexis had referred to was composed of members from both the Labor and Welfare Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate, but the popular name was “Hartsell Committee” after its chairman. Senator Blair Hartsell. For two years or so the Committee had been turning up corruption in labor-management relations, and another series of hearings was scheduled to begin in Washington, D.C., on Monday, December 21. This was Sunday night—actually early Monday morning now, the 14th of December—so those hearings would begin a week from today.

The target this time was the National Brotherhood of Truckers, the biggest and, for my money, most corrupt union in the national picture, headed by a tough, hard-boiled union boss named Mike Sand.

Although I’d never had anything to do with Sand or the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., I had banged against the muggs who ran the local here in L.A. There were so many crooks in Local 280, the Los Angeles Truckers local, that in my job I’d tangled with the officials or their goons on several occasions.

Another of the personal reasons for my interest in the Truckers, and what Hartsell might turn up, was that one of my best friends, a red-haired Irishman named Braun Thorn, was a dues-paying member of the Truckers L.A. local. But he paid the dues—because he had to pay them or lose his job—under loud and continuing protest. He was perhaps the most vocal of the rank-and-filers actively opposed to the corrupt local leadership, and had thus become, literally, a Thorn in the union’s side here.

Twice in the last two years, following up leads Braun had given me, I’d tangled—inconclusively—with the local’s leadership, and its president, an ex-con named Ragen. John Ragen. And he and his fellow officials were almost as much fun as a knife in the back.

I mentioned some of that to Alexis, ending it with, “So I know quite a lot about the local boys, and a little about the national operation.”

“That makes it easier to explain. You probably know then, that Senator Hartsell announced he would produce a surprise witness when the hearings begin again.”

“Uh-huh. Got a little play in the newspapers. Supposed to be bad news for the Truckers, something like that.”

“Yes. The surprise witness is—or was—to be Dr. Gideon Frost. He’s my father.”

She’d hooked me. The big labor racketeers look with a bloodshot eye—often their shot, your blood—upon people who can accurately testify that they are, in fact, big labor racketeers. I’d heard Frost’s name, but knew only that he was an authority on labor-management relations, some kind of economist or professor who had made a massive study of the labor movement.

I looked at Alexis. “You said he was to be a surprise witness. The way I got it, nobody except Hartsell and a few others knew who the surprise was going to be.”

Alexis said slowly, “Yes. It wasn’t supposed to be known until he appeared before the Committee and actually testified. Partly to—for his own protection. But, well, these things leak out sometimes.” She paused, turned those blue eyes on me again. “I don’t even know yet if you’ll help me, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell, Sure, I’ll do all I can.” I told Alexis she’d hired a private investigator and we settled my fee. Then I asked her if she’d gone to the police. She hadn’t.

“If you have to talk to the police,” she said, “try to avoid connecting Dad’s disappearance, if that’s what it is, with the Hartsell Committee’s work. And you must give me your word to keep my name entirely out of your investigation. Don’t tell anybody that I came to see you, or hired you. I mustn’t be involved at all.”

“Want to tell me why?”

“I’ve good reasons. They have nothing to do with your investigation, Mr. Scott.”

I let it ride. “You’re pretty sure that if your father’s in trouble, it’s because he was going to testify against the Truckers, right?”

She nodded. “And there’s no question in my mind. He is in terrible danger—if he isn’t already dead.”

“I don’t know much about Dr. Frost except that he was going to hack at the union boys. Could he have drawn blood?”

“Gallons.”

“Okay. I’ll check out the Truckers. Any specific suggestions?”

“Only the obvious one, Mike Sand.” She moistened her lips. “Not only my father’s testimony, but the whole Hartsell Committee Hearings, are aiming at him, because he’s the president. Him specifically, the union generally. Others, too, but mainly Mike Sand.”

Alexis told me what she could about her father: his address, description, habits and so on. Then she stood up to go.

“Where can I get in touch with you. Miss Frost?” Usually by this time it would have been Shell and Alexis. But to her I was still Mr. Scott, and that thin ice in her eyes kept me calling her Miss Frost.

“I’m registered at the Ambassador Hotel, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell?” It didn’t work this time, either.

She went to the door and I let her out.

I stood there thinking about it all for a minute, then shrugged, stepped into the hall and locked the apartment door behind me.

The Spartan Apartment Hotel is on North Rossmore in Hollywood, a couple of minutes’ drive from Hollywood and Vine. My late model Cadillac, a sky-blue convertible coupe, was parked a short distance down Rossmore. As I walked out of the Spartan, Alexis was just leaving in her taxi. A block down Rossmore to my right a car pulled away from the curb, moving in shadow. Something was odd about the car, but it didn’t register right away. I was wondering about Alexis. After years of talking to people, interrogating witnesses, sifting the truth from lies, a guy develops a sort of invisible nostril, which sniffs the fishy exclusively. And mine was now twitching. There’d been something fishy about Alexis, or her story. But I didn’t have any idea what it was.

I walked toward the Cad, and the car I’d noticed seconds before passed me on the street, continued on in the direction Alexis’ cab had taken. And then I figured out what had seemed odd about it. The car was a new gray Buick sedan—and its lights were out. As Alexis’ cab disappeared around a turn in the road, the Buick’s lights went on and it jumped forward as the driver stepped on the gas. I’d noticed two men in the car, but that was all, just two forms.

I sprinted to the Cad, jumped in and whipped it around in a U-turn, jammed down the gas pedal. Half a minute later I spotted both cars, the cab at a stop sign, the Buick half a block back. I pulled up close behind the Buick as it slowed for a sign, tried to read the license number. I couldn’t. The plate was smeared with mud. Mud. It hadn’t rained in L.A. for three weeks.

I followed the two cars as they swung left and then turned into a side street. I started to close in on the Buick again—and it turned right. The parade was suddenly two cars, just the cab and me. I shook my head and grinned. Me and my invisible nostril. So the Buick’s owner hadn’t washed his car in months. Of such acorn items are oakish clues made.

I suppose I was still chuckling sheepishly when lights splashed my rear-view mirror. The lights loomed bright and quickly got much closer. I pulled over a little. Alexis’ cab was about two blocks ahead, nearly to Olympic.

The lights behind me left the mirror as the car swung out, and I heard the whine of its engine. And then I started getting it. My hands tightened on the wheel—and there was the high harsh screech of tires skidding on the street. The car loomed on my left, swerving slightly. Movement was a blur in the window nearest me. I ducked, jerking the steering wheel, slapping my foot toward the brake pedal. Two shots cracked in the night, hard flat blasts; flame flared in the other car’s window.

I threw myself sideways, hanging onto the wheel with my left hand, right hand slapping my chest. The gun wasn’t there. Usually I carry it when I’m away from the apartment, but this time I’d left without it. My foot was jamming the brake pedal and the Cad was slowing, swerving. I straightened up, gripped the wheel with both hands and put my foot on the gas pedal again. If that car was still close, I meant to ram it. But they were gunning ahead, not waiting around. In the glare of my headlights I got a quick look at the car. Its right-front fender was crumpled. But it was a gray Buick sedan. I couldn’t see the license plate, but I knew there’d be mud on it.

Not until then did I notice the Cad was pulling, angling toward the left side of the street. There was a grinding thumping noise. They’d shot out a front tire with those two shots. I pulled on the wheel, stopped at the right side of the street next to the curb.

Far ahead, the cab carrying Alexis turned left into Olympic Boulevard, followed seconds later by the Buick. Then they were gone. I swore, got out and looked at the flat.

Looking at it didn’t help. I opened the luggage compartment, hauled out the spare. I only swore a little more while changing the tire.

After putting in a call to the police complaint board and reporting what had happened, I drove to Dr. Frost’s home on Harvard Boulevard. The house was obviously Dr. Frost’s—letters, his books on the wall, a framed portrait told me that. Alexis had said he was fifty-one years old, over six feet tall, and quite heavy; the face in the portrait was heavy, almost handsome, with straggly eyebrows and bushy gray hair. The place had been thoroughly searched, cushions out of place, drawers open. Alexis had told me her father owned a black Volkswagen. It wasn’t around, and the garage was empty, its doors open.

I was beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable without my gun, so shortly after four a.m. I drove back to the Spartan. I had strapped on the gun harness, complete with snub-nosed .38 Colt Special, and was putting on my coat when the apartment phone rang. Alexis, maybe? I thought. I reached it, picked it up and said hello.

“Shell?” It was a man’s voice.

“Yeah.”

“Braun. I...”

“Braun? That’s funny, I was just thinking about—” I cut it off. He’d sounded strange. It hadn’t even resembled Braun’s brisk, pleasant voice.

“I’m ... hurt, Shell. Finley gas station. Mile or two ... up Spring Can—Canyon.” He groaned.

“What’s the matter? Braun, what happened?”

“Shot. I—” Noise clattered in my ear. It sounded as if he’d dropped the receiver. I heard a soft thump, scraping noises, then nothing.

I didn’t even hang up the phone. I dropped it and ran to the door, slammed through it. I leaped down the stairs, stumbled and almost fell. When I reached my Cad I was cold all over, and sweat was slick on my forehead. I went straight up Rossmore to Sunset and across it moments after the light turned red.

Spring Canyon Road runs from Hollywood Boulevard up toward the Hollywood hills, winding, a quiet residential district for about half a mile, then only a few houses scattered in open brush-filled land. I slid into Spring Canyon and pushed the gas pedal to the floorboards.

He’d sounded hurt, hurt bad. And he must have been in a bad way or he wouldn’t even have called me. He was like that. He was like a lot of things, all of them good in my book. Not tall, but strong and husky, red-haired, with a kind of pleasant homeliness and a warmth that flowed out of him and wrapped itself around you. I’d been out on the town with him, had dinners at his home with Braun and his sweet-faced younger sister, Kelly. Six years now, we’d known each other. And during all those years he’d been a member of the L.A. local of the Truckers.

That thought came into my mind suddenly and stuck there. Stuck there with the thought of Alexis, the case I’d just been hired for. Why tonight? Why would Braun call me tonight of all nights?

Then, off on the road on my right, I saw movement. Something moving in the glare of my headlights. A square building, a small gas station, white in my headlights beam, and silhouetted against it the figure of a man. Bent, twisted; it looked like a sagging misshapen scarecrow. I hit the brakes, slid to a stop at the side of the road, went out of the car at a run.

The ground was lumpy, uneven, and as I neared the man I stumbled, staggered and caught myself. I came to a sudden stop a few yards from him, stayed motionless for seconds, looking at him.

It wasn’t Braun. It couldn’t be Braun. The face was lumpy, swollen, torn. The face was red and white ugliness, not a face at all. He moved toward me slowly, his body bent forward, twisted. He walked like a man moving through thick mud, awkwardly and stiffly like a man trying out artificial legs, like something in a nightmare. In the beam of my headlights his mouth hung slack, his eyes stared.

Then I snapped out of it, jumped toward him. When I reached for him he fell suddenly, as if a cord holding him up had been cut. He brushed my fingers and I grabbed his arms convulsively, grabbed them tight and hung on. He went down, pulling me to one knee, but I held him, tried to pull him toward me.

His head flopped back loosely as if his neck were flesh emptied of bone and muscle, almost as though it were a hollow tube of skin without strength or life in it. But he was still alive. I put one hand behind his head, lifted it And he stared at me, his eyes aware. It was Braun, all right, Braun Thorn. What was left of him.

His mouth was open. He was straining to speak. Sound sighed from his throat—one clear word, ending in a whisper. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Still he tried to speak, strained to force out the words. He tried to smile. He actually tried to smile. He died like that.

He just stopped straining. His features smoothed a little. Only a little. And then he was dead. He sagged against my hands. I held his arms tight. I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t want to let him down onto the earth. While I held him, it almost seemed in a crazy way that maybe he was still alive; but if I let him crumple on the ground he’d be gone. I held him until my arms started to ache. Then I put him down.

His face was bruised and cut, puffed, his lips mashed and split. There were cuts over both eyes. Two teeth had been broken, blood was on his face and mouth. One of his arms was broken, white bone sticking through the flesh like a snapped white stick. Something had torn through his neck. A bullet, probably. The flesh there lay peeled open in an ugly furrow, dark red in the dim light. A long strip of tape was sticking to one of his wrists.

I turned him over. He’d been shot in the back. There, and also through the neck. Powder burns peppered the neck wound. I stood up. Ten yards away a car raced past on Spring Canyon Road, headlights brushing us. I walked to the small gas station. A window in one of the metal walls was broken. Inside, bits of shattered glass lay on the top of a scarred desk. On the desk was a phone’s base, cord leading from it through the window and to the receiver dangling outside. There was blood on the receiver.

At my feet the ground was furrowed, as if fingers had pulled at it. Braun lay, like a lump of earth on the ground, a few yards away. Between his body and where I stood there were other, deeper furrows in the ground, where he had fallen or crawled over it.

I looked at him, thought about him. About him—and, for a moment, about Kelly Thorn. Braun’s sister. Sweet, lovely Kelly. Somebody would have to tell her. I hoped I wouldn’t have to be the one. I thought about Alexis Frost, and her missing father, Dr. Gideon Frost. And I thought about that one clear word Braun had forced from his torn mouth.

The word had been, “Frost.”

Then I picked up the phone, Braun’s blood sticky against my palm, and put in the call to Homicide.

THE NAME’S CHESTER DRUM

Washington, D.C., 7:00 P.M., Monday, December 14

I’m a private eye, operating out of Washington and points east, and I will pack a suitcase at the drop of a hat or a client’s retainer or a blonde’s smile. I’ve chased international gangsters across the sunny piazzas of Rome and through the Iron Curtain to Berlin, tangled with Moslem fanatics—and belly-dancers—in Arabia and professional assassins in India, battled revolutionists south of the border and gunmen on skis in Canada’s mountains.

But I never knew what trouble was really like until I crossed the path of that West Coast shamus who calls himself Shell Scott.

When I finally bumped heads with the man with the stand-up white hair and devilish grin, fifty-seven different varieties of hell broke loose.

It all started at Washington National Airport....

When dusk closes in on Washington National Airport, they turn on the blinkers along the sandspit of land on the Potomac known as Gravelly Point. From the air the blinkers look like two red streaks shooting towards the runways. From the ground they zip like tracer bullets lighting up the gloom in a war between man and nature.

I had watched them from the air and now I drove past them on the big super-highway that bisects Gravelly Point. Off on a two day wrap-up of a case in Richmond, I’d left my car parked at the airport.

When I’d driven half the distance from the airport to the bridge that crosses the Potomac to the Tidal Basin, the taxi passed me. It was going very fast—doing at least seventy, I thought.

A second car came roaring up even faster. I gave him all the room he wanted in the fast lane, and he passed in a rush that whiplashed wind against my car.

Then I heard the double protest of abused brake linings and scorched tire rubber up ahead. The car that had passed me, swerving and braking suddenly, had forced the taxi onto the shoulder of the road. My headlights caught two figures moving from the car to the taxi. Maybe I would have passed them anyway, but just then a Greyhound bus pulled out behind me to do some passing of its own.

I braked, and the two figures from the car dragged someone out of the taxi. The quick glimpse I had made me think it was a woman. The car door opened, they all got in front, the door slammed. By then I had pulled to a stop. The car lurched, sped away. The taxi remained on the shoulder of the road.

Leaning across the seat, I rolled down the right-hand front window and called, “What’s the trouble there?”

The taxi driver calmly lit a cigarette and said, “Did I do okay, mac?”

“Did you what?”

“I said, did I do okay?” He sounded perplexed. “What’s the beef, mister? You got a beef, spill it. I done just like they told me. So when do I get the do-re-mi?”

Maybe it wasn’t my night for deep thinking. All I could come up with was a snatch that the taxi driver had been clued in on it in advance.

I stepped on the gas, and the car shot forward. Call it curiosity, call it habit or compulsion or anything you want. Other people’s troubles are my line of work. I was doing sixty when I passed the Greyhound bus a second time, and close to eighty before I spotted the other car and pulled even with it under the railroad bridge that carries the Atlantic Coast Line trains across the Potomac into Washington.

A freight roared above us, shattering the night with sound. When my rear fender was in line with their front fender, I gave the wheel a turn in their direction. The noise their burning rubber made in the echo chamber under the bridge was like a scream of terror.

A hundred yards beyond the bridge abutment I rode them off the highway. Behind us the freight train on the bridge rattled the dark sky.

I thumbed open the glove compartment, took out my .357 Magnum and stepped out of my car into the night. “Come out of there with your hands up,” I said.

A few seconds of waiting, then a voice answered me. “Hey, is this a stickup or something?”

“Or something,” I said. “Get out of there and in front of your headlights where I can see you. You’re covered.”

I heard footsteps on the gravel of the road shoulder. Their car door slammed.

“In front of the headlights. Hands high. Get going.”

“This a stickup?” the same voice asked me. It was a whining voice and it sounded scared, so I began to wonder if maybe I hadn’t made one hell of a stupid mistake.

They were standing obediently in front of their headlights, a small man in a tweed topcoat, a big man in a trench-coat. Both of them had their hands raised. The small man was hatless and wore glasses. The big man—and he was very big—wore a snapbrim hat with the brim turned down low over his eyes.

“Are you all right, miss?” I called.

At first there was no answer, then just a word in the night. “Yes.”

“You can get in my car now.”

Her answer surprised me. “Who are you? Did Mike send you? No one was waiting for me at the airport.”

“I never heard of Mike.”

“Then who are you?”

“What difference does it make? Get in my car.”

“All right.”

Just as the car door opened, the Greyhound bus came out from under the railroad bridge in a rushing surge of sound. It startled me for a moment. Not long, but long enough for the big guy in the trench-coat to move swiftly out of the glare of the headlights and take a swing at me. I did a bullfighter step to one side. His fist ended its short, savage flight against the fender of my car. Surprise and pain drew a yipping shout, almost like a dog barking, from his lips.

“What the goddam hell’s the matter with you?” he whispered hoarsely. “I would of pulled my punch. I would of made it look good. You nuts or something? You want me to break my goddam hand? That good it don’t hafta look.”

Add what he had said to the taxi driver’s demand for money and you could come up with only one thing—not a snatch, but a phony snatch. For the girl’s benefit? Then was someone supposed to rescue her and earn her undying gratitude? If so, he was running behind schedule. The highway was deserted.

“How good does it have to look?” I asked the big man in the trench-coat.

“Who are you. Jack?” he asked right back at me, suddenly becoming suspicious. “I ain’t seen you around before. Where’s Mr. Holt? I thought Mr. Holt—”

I grabbed the collar of his trench-coat and shoved him away from me, because the one with glasses had come up with a gun. Trench-coat stumbled back against him and the gun went off, stabbing flame at the night.

“Drop it or I’ll shoot,” I said.

The big guy barked, “Drop it, Glasses.”

Reluctantly Glasses dropped his gun. I took two steps toward him and kicked it out of his reach. The girl came up and stood alongside me.

“It was a phony setup from the word go,” I told her. “A man named Holt was supposed to come on his white charger and rescue the maiden in distress. Meaning you.”

Her laughter was on the thin edge of hysteria as she said, “You have an amusing way of putting it.”

“Do we all wait for Mr. Holt’s tardy arrival,” I asked her, “or do we go for a ride to the State Police barracks?”

For the second time she surprised me. “Neither.”

Glasses laughed phlegmily.

“Neither?” I said. “Why?”

“I can’t, that’s all. I’m not supposed to be in Washington.”

The big guy was nursing his hurt hand. I gave him a quick, hard frisk. He wasn’t heeled.

“Open the hood,” I said.

He blinked at me.

“Open the hood. Move.”

He unfastened and opened the hood of their car.

“You know where to find the distributor cap?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Yank it off.”

“We’ll get you, you sonofabitch.”

“Get me in the morning. Yank off that cap now.”

He reached under the hood, grunting. The distributor cap came loose, trailing wires. I took it in my left hand.

“Get over near your friend. Now sit down, both of you. Back to back.”

They sat down on the gravel of the road shoulder. “Stay that way till we start rolling.”

“We’re gonna get you. Jack,” the big guy said. Glasses didn’t say anything.

“Give our regards to Mr. Holt,” I told them. The girl laughed again.

We both got into my car. She was a tall girl, wearing a white trench-coat with big round leather buttons and white crew-hat. What I could see of her hair was almost platinum blonde. The coat was belted tight at her trim waist, emphasizing the rounded thrust of her breasts against the lapels.

“Who’s Holt?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry, I’d rather not say.”

“You’re sure about the cops?”

“Yes, I’m quite sure. Please, just drive me into Washington. Any place downtown will do nicely.”

“Okay.” I dropped the distributor cap on the floor and started driving.

Twenty minutes later we sat in a booth in a diner on D Street just on the other side of the Potomac bridge.

“There wasn’t any reason to stop here,” the girl said. “They gave me a little scare, but I’m all right now.”

A waitress shuffled over. “What’ll it be?”

“Coffee, I guess,” the girl said. I told the waitress to make it two.

“What would this Holt have conned you into if he popped up instead of me?” I asked the girl.

Silence.

“Look,” I said, trying another tack. “You’re frustrating my professional instincts. I’m a private detective.”

“Really?”

“Honest Injun. The name is Chet Drum.”

She smiled then. “How do you do, Mr. Drum.”

“How do you do, Miss—?”

“It’s Mrs.”

“Mrs.—?”

“Just Mrs. Really, I have to go now. Thank you for everything.” She looked at me. I didn’t make a move to get up.

“I’ve been very stupid,” she said at last. She wasn’t carrying a purse, but took a red leather wallet out of her trench-coat pocket. “If you’re a private detective, I guess you want to be reimbursed for your trouble. How much, please?”

“You weren’t stupid before,” I said.

“Oh my, then that was stupid of me. Have I insulted you?”

“I don’t want your money,” I said. “But I’d like to take a look in there.”

“My wallet? Why?”

“Call it professional curiosity. I want to see who you are.”

She smiled again. “You don’t give up easily.”

“I can be stubborn.”

“And charming, Mr. Drum. But I can be stubborner.”

“Maybe you can’t afford to be. For example, you said you weren’t supposed to be in Washington, right?”

“Yes, that’s right. So?”

“So the taxi driver was in on the deal with them. You just came in on a plane, right?”

“Right again.”

“With luggage?”

Her eyes widened. “I never thought of that. I’d like to get that luggage back, Mr. Drum. But I didn’t even notice what kind of a cab it was.”

“I did. Veterans’ Cab. Say the word and I’ll get your luggage for you.”

She stood up. “It looks like you have a client.”

“Where do I deliver the luggage?”

“I’ll call you tomorrow. Will you get me a taxi now?”

I paid the tab and we went outside. The first slow, fat snowflakes were beginning to fall.

I saw her into a taxi. I shut the door for her. She waved, giving me her third smile, the million-buck smile which she had held back until then. Those blue eyes smiling that way could take your breath away. The taxi drove off.

I got in my car and headed through the snow toward the Veterans’ Cab garage.

SCOTT SHELLS IT OUT

Los Angeles, 10:00 A.M., Monday, December 14

I got back to the Spartan Apartment Hotel at ten o’clock that Monday morning. I could still see Braun falling at my feet, saying with his last breath, with blood on his mashed mouth, “Frost...”

Alexis Frost was registered at the Ambassador Hotel, but she hadn’t been in when I’d called. The police had no leads to Braun’s killer, and they hadn’t spotted the gray Buick I’d phoned them about before dawn this morning, the Buick which had been tailing Alexis. Or ... with her?

I was getting more and more puzzled about Alexis, and even a little worried for her. But I was more worried about Kelly Thorn. The police told me she’d identified her brother’s body at the morgue. She hadn’t cried. I didn’t like that. I liked even less the fact that I’d been unable to reach her, though I’d phoned her home several times.

Kelly would be twenty-three years old now. She and Braun had been very close. Kelly was like him in many ways, with a happy Irish face and impish grin, a few freckles, a golden charm. I’d seen Braun a time or two more recently, but it had been six months since I’d seen Kelly. Far too long. I wasn’t sure why.

I phoned Kelly again, and again there was no answer. So I got out the long list of names I’d developed over the years—informants, tipsters, hoodlums—and started in.

Forty minutes later a lot of men were primed to pass on to me anything they heard or learned about Braun Thorn or Dr. Gideon Frost. One part of it was set.

Dr. Frost’s home on Harvard Boulevard was still empty. I started in on the neighbors. After five blanks I rang the bell of a house across the street and got the first nibble. A woman answered the door and told me that she had seen Dr. Frost leave his home about eight or nine o’clock last night. He’d left in a hurry, alone in his black Volkswagen—and with his lights out. She’d thought it was odd. So did I.

From there I drove up Harvard to Third Street, took a right and headed downtown. Three blocks down Third I passed a year-old green Ford sloppily parked, angled in to the curb. Its left-front fender was buckled inward, touching the tire.

I drove on past and had gone half a mile before it seeped in. But when it did I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. It didn’t have to mean anything, but I drove back, parked behind the Ford. Streaks of gray paint marred the crumpled green fender. I checked the registration slip. The car belonged to the Sunset Car-Rental Agency. Under the windshield wiper was a ticket for illegal parking. It had been issued at ten-sixteen p.m. Sunday night. I copied the Ford’s license number. When I got downtown I checked with the Sunset Agency. The Ford had been rented, early Sunday morning, by Braun Thorn.

I phoned the Police Building, passed on to Homicide what I’d found. Then I concentrated on the hunt for Dr. Gideon Frost. I handled what I could, started investigations I didn’t have time for. I covered the Highway Patrol, police, hospitals, myself. Then I found out where Dr. Frost banked—the Western-National Bank on Eighth Street in L.A.—went there and spoke to the manager. He agreed to let me know if any of Dr. Frost’s checks cleared through the bank. More important, he knew both Dr. Frost and Alexis, and told me that Alexis had entered the bank at ten a.m., gone to the vault and taken something from the safe deposit box there, a box to which only she and her father had entry. She had left immediately.

I thanked him and took off, wondering what the hell. I phoned the Spartan. There had been no message left for me, from Alexis or anybody else. A mild frustration. From there they built up through the rest of the day. But at five o’clock I phoned Kelly again—and got her. Take it from me: right then the worries, the gripes, the multiple frustrations, melted away.

When she said, “Hello,” my heart kicked up its heels, and my voice surprised me when I said, “Hello, Kelly. This is Shell.”

Silence for a little while. Then, “Hello, Shell.” A pause. “The police said you know ... about—”

“Yes. That’s why I called.”

Silence again. Sometimes a phone booth is a kind of torture chamber. I said, “Mind if I come by, Kelly? I’d like to see you.”

“I wish you would. Shell.”

“If you’d rather just be—”

“No, please come by.”

“Twenty minutes.”

She opened the door seconds after I rang. And she managed a smile. “Hello. I’m awfully glad you came.”

“I was worried about you.”

“I’m glad you were. Shell. But there’s ... nothing to worry about.”

She was five-four, wonderfully fashioned and wearing a green-jersey dress that caressed her fine, full-curving body. I said, “I called you a dozen times—”

“I was walking. After ... I walked to MacArthur Park. Sat there and watched birds on the lake.” She smiled again. “Don’t just stand there like a big oaf, you big oaf. Come on in.”

“Okay.”

But for a few seconds more, I looked at her. And wondered why it had been so long since I’d last been here. Looking at Kelly Thorn, after six months without seeing her, was like coming home again when you’ve been too long away. She’d been crying. Tears had ravaged her eyes. Sorrow had pressed its hurt into her face. But it was easy to see, underneath, the loveliness of Kelly. At least, it was easy for me.

Scattered freckles showed on her face. Freckles which, ordinarily, she determinedly covered with makeup. Now her face was scrubbed free of powder, almost shiny, and the freckles burst forth from her clear skin like tiny brown islands. She looked even younger than twenty-three, as young as dawn, as sweet as spring.

She had red hair—naturally red, almost scarlet—and eyes the soft gray-green of shamrocks seen through mist. Her voice was like rain in Ireland, gentle and kind of pattering over the words, like a light drizzle on leaves. Usually there was merriment in her voice, but today there was just the soft sound of rain, or tears.

We went inside, sat on a lumpy green couch in the warm front room. She’d made coffee since I’d phoned, and she poured a couple of cups for us. While it was cooling I said, “Kelly, I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. I know the way it was with you and Braun.”

I guess I looked a little surprised because she went on, “He thought the world of you. And I know you felt the same way about Braun.”

“Sure I did. But—”

“But. You men. There’s not enough woman in you. You’ve got to be rough, tough, two-hundred-per cent male. Why didn’t you ever come around more, Shell?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t. What the hell, I thought. You don’t have to go around hugging people to let them know you like them. You don’t have to send them flowers. And I thought about the flowers I would sent to Braun.

Maybe Kelly caught it out of the air somehow. Or saw it on my face. Anyway, she came apart. Right then, all at once, she came apart. A gasp burst from her mouth and she bent forward sobbing, tears starting from her eyes and coursing down her cheeks. I started to reach for her but she shook her head violently and clapped her hands to her face. Muffled against her palms, her voice was barely understandable, twisted, torn.

She got up, hands against her face, strangled sobs bursting from her throat, and ran toward the back of the house. She fell, got up and went toward the door again, moaning, choking. It tore at my insides; and even when I couldn’t hear them any longer those sounds dug at my brain.

I sat there, waiting for her to come back. When she was ready. I don’t know how long it took. I had decided I’d probably better leave. I was on my feet when she came in again.

“No you don’t,” she said.

I turned to look at her. The eyes were puffier than before, but she was back to normal again. She’d washed her face and put makeup on—there wasn’t a freckle in sight.

“I was...”

“I know,” she said, “You were going to scoot out on me. Sit down. What do you bet the coffee’s cold?”

It was. “We could put some ice in it,” I said, “and have it with pretzels. As long as it’s horrible anyway, we might as well really ruin—”

She smiled, and it was a Kelly smile. “That’s more like it.” She took a deep breath. “I got the lump out of my system. I’m all right, and I’ll stay all right. I won’t do that again.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for.”

“I’m not apologizing. I just want you to know we can talk about Braun, about anything. And it won’t bother me. You know what I mean, Shell.”

“Sure.”

She carried the cold coffee out, came back and poured two drinkable cups. Then she said, “The police told me all they could. They said you were with him when he died. Tell me everything you can, Shell.”

“There isn’t much, honey. He phoned me, managed to say he’d been shot. Probably he was going to tell me more, but he couldn’t make it. I reached him just before....”

She said quietly, “Did he say anything?”

“One word, Kelly. The name Frost. Mean anything?”

Silently she shook her head. Then she asked, “Don’t you have any idea who killed him?”

“Just ideas. I’d rather hear yours first.”

She let the green eyes rest on mine. “Who would have wanted him dead, Shell? Who else but Ragen? Maybe not him personally, but that—that rotten crowd. Braun knew they were rotten, told them they were rotten, stood up in meetings and told them. He fought them every day of his life. Besides there’s something else, Shell. Braun took something from the union files Saturday night.”

It was as if a cold breeze brushed over me. I said, “You’d better give me that slowly, Kelly.”

“Saturday night Braun and I had dinner here. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, but he mentioned that Ragen and his bodyguards would be in some kind of conference most of the night. And later he talked about the way union records disappear so often—the local’s records have been subpoenaed by the Committee, you know.”

“I know.”

“He said this would probably be like other times—the important records would somehow get lost or burned or something. They just wouldn’t be available to the Committee. Well, several hours after he left, about one or two in the morning—it was early Sunday morning by then—he phoned me. He said he’d stolen something from the union and had run into a little trouble, he wouldn’t be around for a while.” She swallowed. “That was the last time I talked to him. Or saw him.”

“Go over that again. His exact words if you can, just the way he said them.”

“I answered the phone and he said. ‘This is Braun, Kelly. I’m in a hurry. I took some stuff from Ragen’s files tonight, and I’ll have to stay out of sight for a few days.’ I got kind of excited and asked him what he meant. He said something like, ‘After I grabbed the stuff I ran into a little trouble, bumped into one of the boys. Don’t worry about it.’ I asked him what he’d taken and he said he didn’t know for sure, he hadn’t had time yet to check it. But he was almost certain it was something Ragen hadn’t wanted the Committee to get.”

“By Committee, I suppose he meant the Hartsell Committee?”

“Yes. Braun thought there was a chance the hearings could bounce Mike Sand and Ragen too, maybe a lot of the littler officials.”

“He say much to you about Mike Sand, Kelly?”

She shook her head. “Just that he was a bigger crook than Ragen, if that was possible. Why?”

“There’re a lot of screwy things going on. Sand’s at least on the fringes, I think. Maybe in the middle.”

During the day I’d dug a little deeper into the Sand angle, but it looked as if I’d have to go to Washington, D.C., where Sand lived and worked, if I wanted to learn about his most recent activities.

I looked at Kelly. “Braun never mentioned the name Frost to you? Dr. Gideon Frost?”

She frowned, thinking, then shook her head. “No. I’ve never heard the name. Who is he?”

“The Hartsell Committee had him lined up as a surprise witness. Hardly anybody outside the Committee and its staff was supposed to know about it. But Braun said his name. And I left Dr. Frost’s home this morning and drove toward L.A. Four blocks away was a car Braun rented Sunday morning, a few hours after he phoned you. The left-front fender was buckled, as if another car had hit it, maybe forced it into the curb. And last night I had a run-in with some guys in a car that had its right-front fender banged in.”

Her face was puzzled. “Why would Braun have rented a car? Why would he have gone to this Dr. Frost’s place?”

“I don’t even know how he’d have learned Frost’s name, Kelly. I just hoped you could add something.”

“I don’t understand.” She stopped, shaking her head.

After another minute I got up. Kelly said, “Where are you going now, Shell?”

“I’ll take a run down to the Truckers Building. Good chance I can catch Ragen there.”

“Don’t do anything ... foolish. Besides, even if he’s in it up to his neck, he won’t tell you anything.”

“Not on purpose, anyway. Ragen wouldn’t give me the right time if he thought it would help me. But if I shake him up a little, something might drop out. You never know till you try.”

“He won’t be alone. He’s always got those two hoodlums with him.”

Two hoodlums. Coming out like that, it jarred me a little. The bigger union mobsters usually have from two to half a dozen bodyguards, carried on the payroll as organizers or business agents, and I knew Ragen had two—a thin, greasy little punk named Roe Mink, and a big, handsome, vicious killer named Candy. I thought of those two hoods, and then thought of two men in a gray Buick. Maybe this was a time when two and two didn’t make four, but added up to Mink and Candy. Or maybe I was trying too hard. But I got a small tingle along my spine just the same.

Kelly went to the door with me, opened it. Outside it was dark. The street lights were on, and there was a chill in the air now that the sun was well down.

Kelly said, “Shell.”

I looked at her. “Yeah?”

“Take care of yourself. Good care.”

“Don’t worry. Ragen’s got all the trouble he can use without asking for more. Besides everything else, he’s been subpoenaed to appear before the Committee in a week or so. He’ll be on his good behavior.”

“Will he?” She was silent for a while. “Really, Shell. I mean...” She let it trail off, then started again. “Now, with Braun ... if anything happened to—”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

She bit her lip. “I feel as if they’d beaten me, too, not just Braun.” Her face twisted. “As if something awful—”

“Hey,” I interrupted her. “Come on back. Sure, now, they talk about the luck of the Irish, Kelly. But there’s a pluck of the Irish, too.”

“Sure, now.” She smiled. “And I almost forgot.”

I bent down and kissed her gently on the lips. It wasn’t really a kiss, more of a peck, a “so long” without words. But when Kelly looked up at me again her green eyes had something soft and strange in them. Not really so strange when I thought about it, though. I remembered I’d seen that look in her eyes before.

Then she said, “Don’t just stand there like a big oaf. Come see me tomorrow.”

I walked toward the street. The door closed behind me, blocking off the light. I headed for the Cad.

And for Ragen, Mink, and Candy.

Los Angeles headquarters of Local 280, of the National Brotherhood of Truckers, is on Olympic Boulevard near Alvarado, only a couple of miles from the heart of downtown L.A.—almost on the jugular vein, you might say. The location seemed appropriate, since in the Brotherhood emphasis was not so much on the brother, as on the hood.

It seemed appropriate, too, that the guy poised there like a fang was John Ragen. Ragen was called Happy Jack—behind his back—because he rarely smiled. He was surly to bed and surly to rise, and his idea of a joke was shooting guys in cemeteries. For five years now he’d been president of Local 280, and for five years hoods had been getting out of prison and going straight—straight into Local 280.

For nearly that long I’d had varying degrees of trouble with one or another element of the Truckers union here—sluggings, acid and stench bombings, even a couple of murders. So on my way to Brotherhood Headquarters I thought of what I knew about the local and its president. Ragen and the L.A. Truckers represented, in miniature—as, on a larger scale, did Mike Sand and his hand-picked friends of labor in D.C.—virtually all the things the Hartsell Committee was fighting, what Braun and a lot of other good union men had been fighting.

A crook works or slugs his way up in a union organization until he’s near or at the top, surrounds himself with crooks, rigs the constitution and election machinery so it’s impossible to vote the incumbent officials out of office, especially when the votes are counted by those incumbent officials in a locked room filled with large wastebaskets. The rank-and-filer who protests, or demands a foolproof secret ballot—as Braun had—is often met by goons armed with saps and sawed-off baseball bats; when that rank-and-filer gets out of the hospital, he usually clams. Sometimes he winds up in the morgue, clammed permanently.

That, in capsule, was the history of Truckers Local 280, and John Ragen, the man I was on my way to see.

No lights showed in the Brotherhood’s headquarters when I reached it. The building was one-story, modern, low and wide, facing Olympic behind a row of royal palms and a long strip of well-tended lawn. The main parking lot was at the building’s right, a smaller one behind the building for the union’s top officials. I parked in the empty main lot, got out and went up the tan cement walk fronting the building, to the wide entrance doors. They were locked, but the doors were thick glass and by peering inside I could see a faint glow at the far end of the hall.

I went around to the rear lot. Two cars were in it, a dark green Cadillac and a pale blue Lincoln. The Cad was Ragen’s. Light showed behind drawn draperies of one of the headquarters’ windows, and from my previous visits here I knew that was John Ragen’s office. Neither of the cars was the one which had been following Alexis Frost this morning, but I checked the Lincoln’s registration slip. The car belonged to Norman Candello. I shut the Lincoln’s door and started toward the rear entrance as a phone rang.

The sound had come from Ragen’s office. I reached the partly open window as a man said, “This is him. I’m Ragen.”

There was a pause. I couldn’t see through the thick drapes into the room, but I could hear the words, soft and muffled, but still understandable. And the voice had been Ragen’s, all right; strong, vibrant, not very musical, but with bulging muscle in it, a voice to knock you down with.

Then I heard him say, “Yeah, hello, Townsend. How’d it go?” He listened, then swore viciously. After a string of four-letter words he said angrily, “Who? Chester Drum? What the hell do you mean. Drum fouled it up?”

He listened quietly for a minute. The name Townsend didn’t mean anything to me, but Chester Drum did. He was my counterpart in Washington, D.C., a well known private investigator. I’d never met the man, but knew him by reputation, and he was definitely not the type to be chummy with hoodlums like Ragen. On the contrary, he was considered one of the best men in the business. It puzzled me, but while I was wondering about it, Ragen spoke again.

He spoke suddenly. His voice was hard. And when John Ragen’s voice got hard it came out as if breaking his teeth. “You stupid chump. Am I gonna have to come there and do everything myself?” A pause again, then, “Yeah. Call me in the morning.” He slammed down the receiver.

Another man inside said, “What was that, John?” and Ragen answered, “I’ll fill you in at the house. Let’s go.”

I sprinted to my Cad, started it and drove into the rear lot, parked next to the Lincoln. My headlights fell on Ragen’s window as the office lights went out. Immediately they flicked on again.

I got out, slammed the door hard. I took the .38 Colt Special from under my coat, checked it, put it back in the clamshell holster. Then I walked to the rear entrance.

The glass doors were locked. I banged on them. Lights came on inside and over my head, others flooded the lot. I could see straight through the building to the front entrance, and only a few feet ahead of me an intersecting hallway led off to my right. It passed, I knew, in front of the main offices back here. In a moment a short thin guy appeared from that other hall on my right, stopped suddenly and looked me over.

His oily black hair was flat on his skull, and he wore a dark suit with white shirt and tie. I couldn’t tell from this distance, but you wouldn’t lose money betting the shirt was dirty. I knew him; he was Roe Mink. He knew me, too, and I saw his oddly thick lips form a short, ugly word. He turned quickly and went out of sight. In about a minute he came back and unlocked the doors.

“Yeah, Scott?” he said, not very pleasantly.

I brushed by him and he said, “What the hell you want?”

“In.”

I walked past him, turned right, and started down the hall toward John Ragen’s office.

Behind me I heard Mink slam the door shut. And lock it.

I made the turn into that intersecting hallway. Mink’s feet slapped the polished floor behind me. He caught up with me before I reached John Ragen’s office, grabbed my arm.

One of the things for which I have an enormous dislike is being grabbed by guys, especially by hoodlums like Mink. I stopped, turned toward him.

He wasn’t pleasant from ten feet away, but this close he was hard to take. He was only about five-seven and his face was very thin, as if it had been squashed in from the sides. It was the kind of face you would like to squash in from the sides. That oily black hair was combed straight back from his high, white forehead, and his greasy-looking dark eyes were narrowed now. His surprisingly large lips seemed to protrude from his mouth, not prettily. They pooched out even more than usual when he was irritated, and Mink was irritated. High on his left cheek was a bruise, discolored and a little swollen.

He said, “Not so fast, Scott. It’s pretty late—”

“The hand.”

“Huh?”

“The hand. You want to take it away and keep it? Or do you want me to take it away and keep it?”

He jerked his arm back. “You seem in a hell of a hurry, Scott. You can’t just bust in.”

“Okay. Announce me. I want to see Ragen.”

He walked to the door of Ragen’s office and opened it, stuck his head in and said, “The jerk ain’t said what he wants. He don’t seem to like me.” He laughed softly.

Ragen said, “Bring him in.”

Mink looked over his shoulder at me and shoved the door wide. I went in. The room was rich, comfort piled on luxury. The carpet was thick, and the walls were walnut-paneled, lustrously polished. On my left was a big, curving desk, its convex edge toward me. Behind the desk in a swivel chair sat John Ragen. Happy Jack.

He looked about as happy as he ever looked. As if he’d just been shot in the stomach. Ragen was forty-five years old, a little over six feet tall, wiry as a whip, with a hooked nose and slate eyes. The skin of his face was dark, rough, and leathery. A scar on his upper lip and several smaller scars pockmarked his left cheek. I thought of it as olive skin with the pits still in it. Curly brown hair was tight over his head like a hairy skull-cap.

He motioned toward a heavy modern chair which probably had cost three hundred dollars, or a year’s dues and assessments from five of the rank and file. “Sit down, Scott,” he said.

The chair was on my left, with its back to the door. I grinned at him, stepped to a similar chair on my right, swung it around to face the door and sat.

Ragen said, not in a friendly tone, “Okay, Scott. What the hell do you want this time?”

“I’m trying to find out who killed Braun Thorn,” I said casually. “Who specifically, that is. I think I already know why.”

Mink pushed the door shut then, and I glanced his way. Candy leaned against the wall next to Mink; he’d been out of sight behind the door when I walked in. Mink was sort of insignificant to begin with. He always wore dark, somber suits as if ready to be laid away, a kind of clothes hearse, half embalmed and still moving. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. When he came back, you didn’t know he’d been gone. But next to Candy he seemed almost invisible.

Candy was a young guy named Norman Candello, and if you took just a fast look at him, you’d say he should be in Hollywood, bringing movies back. But I’d taken some slow looks at him. Besides, I knew him, knew his record. He was a young hoodlum, only twenty-four, but he had terms in two reformatories and a year in San Quentin—for armed robbery—behind him.

Physically, he was everything Roe Mink was not. Candy was clean, strong, good-looking, with regular features and big strong white teeth, with a lot of thick healthy dark hair, carefully waved, that came down in a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead. He was notoriously successful with the ladies, but it hadn’t stunted his growth. He was at least six-three, maybe a little taller than that, and weighed about two-hundred and thirty pounds.

He and Mink were both looking at me. Candy said softly, “I heard Braun got killed, Scott. Too bad.”

“Yeah. When did you hear it?”

He shrugged, smiling. “Oh, this afternoon some time.” He was handsome when he smiled.

I said, “And here I thought maybe it was early this morning you heard it.”

“How could that be?” he said pleasantly. “The news is Braun got hit about that time. Man, I was sleeping like a baby all along in there.”

You couldn’t ruffle Candy, not easily. I was wasting my time with him. But Ragen and Mink had shorter fuses. They’d be the ones who would pop, if anybody did.

Ragen’s musclebound voice bounced against my ear. “What do you mean, you know why that punk was pushed?”

I grinned at him. “Watch it, Ragen. Don’t speak ill of the dead. The same thing could happen to you.”

Those dull slate eyes dug into mine and his face got uglier. He was a mean one, meaner than Mink and Candy put together, which, if you knew Mink and Candy put together, would seem impossible. He reached up slowly and fingered the scar on his lip. Ragen did that when he got hot, really hot. Slowly he said, and his voice could have made tender ears black and blue, “You ain’t saying I could get killed, Scott. You ain’t saying that.”

“Of course you could get killed, Ragen. But that’s not what I said. Something’s wrong with your ears, too, not just your mouth.” His eyes got even hotter, but I went on. “You have to listen close to the words, Ragen. That’s why I’m here. So you can listen close to the words.”

His finger moved on the scar. It ran from his left nostril down to the corner of his mouth. When he’d been starting up in the labor rackets he’d been badly beaten and that scar was one of the souvenirs. About a dozen other small purple scars, looking as if they’d been made with the point of a nail, peppered the left side of his face. The same guy who’d given him the lip scar, so the story went, had ground his face into gravel, then had taken off for somewhere three days later, and, oddly, hadn’t come back since. Those days were long behind Ragen now, but the scars kept them fresh in his mind.

And while he fingered the scar, he looked at me as if thinking I should join that guy who hadn’t come back since. Finally his finger stopped moving. He said, “I’ll give you one more try, Scott. Then out you go on your ear.” He didn’t say “ear.”

“One more try, hell. You can listen to it from me or go around with the fuzz. Take your pick.”

“The cops ain’t got nothing to talk to me about.”

“Try Braun Thorn.”

He spit out a four-letter word, then said, “I didn’t kill the punk, if that’s what you’re pushing around. It’s out of my line, Scott.” He paused, then added, too gently, “And the boys, they wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

“That’s because they don’t have fleas.” I looked at Mink. “At least Candy doesn’t.".

Mink’s full lips suddenly pooched out even more and he looked greatly like a camel about to spit, and that’s not good. And this, I thought was far enough to push these guys. So I looked at Ragen and said, “You want to hear it? The way it happened to Braun? And why?” He listened. So he was at least interested. Maybe even a little worried.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

“Braun was trouble to you from way back. He wanted the Truckers officials’ income tax records made public, audit of the pension and health and welfare funds, all that foolishness. So it started then. But it came to a head when Braun busted in here late Saturday night and lifted some of your records. He hightailed it, got away—” I glanced at Mink—"after slugging that flea-bitten character there, and rented a green Ford from the Sunset Agency.”

“Wait a minute.”

Here it came. I said, “Yeah?”

“You say Thorn busted in here, into this building, and stole something?”

“That’s what I said.”

“And where’d you get that, Scott?”

I didn’t say anything.

Ragen was quiet for a while. “He stole something, huh? Like what?”

That was the hell of it. I didn’t know like what. I kept on playing it by ear. “Truckers records, stuff Hartsell could slug you with, records Hartsell wouldn’t have got his hands on otherwise. Don’t tell me you’re going to deny it, Ragen.”

He was silent for what seemed a long time. I didn’t know whether he was thinking, or just glaring at me, or both. But finally he seemed to come to a decision. He relaxed and said calmly, “You seem to know all about it anyway. Why should I deny it?”

So there it was. Part of it. I went on. “Braun rented the Ford. He was in it when your boys cut in on him, forced him off—”

Ragen stopped me. “Not so fast, Scott. Thorn busted in here, sure. And he stole some records. It happened, so why deny it? Anyway, it ain’t no secret now. But it was the same way that punk done everything else. A bust. How in hell would he get to anything important?”

I didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “Spell that out,” I said.

“Sure he took some stuff. Junk.” Ragen grinned at me unpleasantly. “You think—if there was anything I was worried about, which there ain’t—I’d leave it laying around? Thorn went through a couple filing cabinets and messed up the records some, and that’s all he done. You think I had him knocked off because he stole some junk? You think I’m that crazy? With me going up in front of them Hartsell guys in a week? I figure you for a lot of things, but I never figure you for a halfwit.”

“Braun ran into Mink, didn’t he? That night? Don’t tell me Mink got that mouse from a door. Or did he maybe get it this morning.”

I glanced at Mink, who rubbed a hand over the dark bruise on his cheekbone. I turned back to Ragen as he said, “Where’d you get this, Scott? How come—” he stopped. Slowly he turned his head and looked at Mink and Candy. “Yeah. The punk must of phoned this guy after he took off. Or probably phoned that sister of his—” He stopped again.

And this time something had happened. He was quiet for only about two seconds. Candy stood a little taller against the wall. Tension in the room seemed to build up, become tangible.

Ragen went on as if he hadn’t paused at all, his voice level. “So he run into Mink, slugged him and run. Lit out through the parking lot.” He turned the slate eyes on me. “By the time Mink got up front he was gone.”

“Up front?”

“We was having a little meeting in the hall. You know where the hall is, don’t you?” His voice was sarcastic.

The big hall was just inside the front door of the building. Kelly had said that Braun had told her something about a conference Ragen and other union officials were supposed to be having Saturday night. The logical place for such a meeting was the hall here in the Truckers Building. It all checked.

I said, “Junk, huh?”

“You mean you don’t know?” His voice was no less sarcastic. “The way you been throwing it around, I figured you knew everything.”

“I’d like to hear it from you.”

He grinned again. “Correspondence,” he said. “Routine records. Plus a stack of cancelled checks he probably thought was payoffs to the Mafia or something. Junk.” He drilled those hard eyes into me. “Don’t get the idea I was happy about it, Scott. I looked for him. But I didn’t find him. If I had, I wouldn’t have pushed the punk.” He stood up. “In fact, I wish he was still alive.”

“Sure.”

Ragen walked to the door, jerked his head at Mink and Candy, went outside with them. In a few seconds he returned, closing the door. He walked back to his desk and sat in the swivel chair behind it.

He told me, “I said I wished Thorn was alive, and I meant it. So I could send the punk to the slammer.”

“Sure.”

Out back, in the parking lot, a car started. In a moment I heard the car pull out of the lot, moving fast. I said slowly, “What’s with the boys?”

“The boys? What do you mean, what’s with them?”

“Where would Mink and Candy be going all of a sudden?”

“I told them to blow. Weren’t you through playing detective with them?”

I said, “The way I hear it, they stand outside the shower and hand you the soap. How come your protection suddenly blows?”

“Yeah, I made a bad mistake. I can see that now. I really should of kept them here to protect me from you.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, dull eyes leveled on me. “Get this, Scott,” he said, and his voice might have chipped a tooth or two. “I let you walk in here and play the heavy tonight. Don’t get the idea you can make it a habit. I don’t need to explain nothing to you. The only reason you ain’t out of here on your ear—” he didn’t say “ear"—"is on account of them damned senators putting on their show next week. Understand? I give you a little of my time so you’ll stay the hell off my back. You got it now, Scott?”

I took a deep breath, held it a bit, let it out. I said, “Don’t wet your pants, Ragen. You can’t jerk my card or toss me off a job, so quit trying to scare me. If you’re clean on the Braun thing, I’ll be off your back. If not—”

“Can’t you get it through your dumb head I didn’t have no reason to do nothing to that punk?”

I’d had all there was going to be of this guy’s lip. I stood up suddenly. Ragen’s hand jerked, then stopped. It moved little more than an inch before he held it motionless, slowly moved it back to touch the other one. Maybe he thought I’d missed it, but I hadn’t.

I had, however, missed the partly open drawer in the middle of his desk, close to his hand. Ragen didn’t carry a gun; he let his boys handle that. But it didn’t make sense that he’d be sitting here needling me unless he had a gun handy. It was, almost surely, in that partly open drawer. And why was he needling me in the first place? Not just for fun, and not merely so I’d sock him—which I was about to do. Uneasiness rippled through me.

In fact, it didn’t make sense that he would let his boys go at all, especially with me here. They wouldn’t take off on their own, either. He’d sent them somewhere.

Uneasiness grew in me. The thing that had seemed to jar Ragen earlier had been—I thought back over our conversation. It had been when he was wondering how I knew about Braun’s breaking in here.

Ragen had said Braun must have phoned me, words to that effect. Then he’d said, “Or phoned that sister of his—” and that was when he’d stopped, when the tension in the room had seemed to leap up. So it had been when he’d mentioned Kelly, when he’d thought of Kelly.

Uneasiness was turning into alarm. Why hadn’t Ragen said Braun might have gone to see Kelly? Why had he said phoned her? There was one good answer. Ragen knew Braun hadn’t seen her. I glanced at Ragen and he was watching me, silently. Rhythmically he traced a finger over that scar on his lip. I pulled my thoughts together. The only way Ragen could have known Braun hadn’t seen Kelly was if he’d staked out Kelly’s home after the theft, watched Kelly.

And the thing for sure that had jarred Ragen had been his thought of Kelly. Soon after that he’d taken his two musclemen outside, sent them—somewhere. He must have sent them to Kelly’s. Mink and Candy would be on their way, almost there by this time.

A pulse started beating in my temples. I said to Ragen, “You’re sure the stuff Braun took wasn’t important to you, huh? It doesn’t really make any difference whether you get it back or not.”

“That’s right.”

While my attention had been away from Ragen for those few seconds, he had moved a little. His hand was in that desk drawer now. And I knew damned well it was on a gun.

I said casually, “That was Mink and Candy leaving, wasn’t it, Ragen?” I turned, without any sudden movement, walked to the window and pulled the drapes aside. I could see my Cad and Ragen’s. The Lincoln, of course, gone.

“Nobody else here, Scott,” Ragen said. His voice was very soft.

I walked back to the heavy chair I’d been sitting in, leaned easily over its back as I said, “I was hoping they’d stick around a little longer.” While I spoke I slid my hands down to the arms of the chair. It would be heavy. But not too heavy. As my fingers closed around the arms I said, “Maybe there’ll be another—”

And then I clamped my fingers on the chair and yanked it up, jumping toward Ragen and hurling the chair ahead of me. He had a gun, all right. It went off with a sound like a cannon, but the slug hit the chair. I saw it jerk just before it cracked into him. I shoved hard on the floor with one foot and went clear over the desk at him, spread out in the air as the chair bounced off him and he swung back toward me, snapping the gun around.

But then I slammed into him. He let out a yell and reeled backward, falling. I landed half on top of him, slid to the floor, slapped my left hand back as he tried to bring the gun around again. My fingers hit the metal and closed on it. I got a knee against the floor, balled my right fist and pivoted awkwardly, slamming the fist forward. It bounced off the side of his face and I pulled it back, clubbed him hard the second time.

He flopped over. I threw the gun across the room and jumped to the phone, dialed Kelly’s number. Maybe there was time. The phone rang ... and rang.

There were scrabbling sounds from the floor. I looked at Ragen, as the phone rang, unanswered. Ragen swore softly, filthily, dull dark eyes wild, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. “You sonofabitch,” he whispered at me. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, you bastard, I’ll kill—”

But I was on my way out by then, phone still clattering as it fell on the desk, toppled over the desk’s side. I slammed through the door, running toward my Cad, with two names filling my mind: Mink and Candy.

And then just one name: Kelly.

THE GOONS BEAT DRUM

Washington, D.C., 8:00 P.M., Monday, December 14

The Veterans’ Cab garage held down half a block on New Jersey Avenue, close to the big Naval gun factory on the Anacostia River.

I parked and locked the car near the big vehicular entrance—locked it because this was that kind of neighborhood, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses and skid-row sidewalks, with an occasional gin-mill offering its neon and alcoholic restorative to tired, bitter men riding the long skids down.

The dispatcher sat at a cluttered desk in a glass-enclosed cubicle inside the garage. He was a plump man, as bald as a discarded taxi tire. He was smoking a fat cigar. If the sour look on his face meant anything, he wasn’t enjoying it.

When I knocked, he welcomed me in with a jerk of his round head. “Just a second, mac,” he said, and spoke into the mike of a two-way radio. “Got you, Seven. Out.” He looked up. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to find a Veterans’ Cab that made a pickup at Washington National Airport around seven o’clock.”

“Trying to find it why?”

“It’s pretty important.”

He smiled sourly at his cigar and put it down in a big copper ashtray. “Important for you or for the cab company?” he said.

“Some luggage was left in the cab. I came for it.”

“Ain’t had any luggage left at the garage tonight, mac. Call back in the morning, huh?”

“I’d rather wait. How many cars went out there late this afternoon?”

He glanced up sharply. “You law?”

“No. Why?”

“I got me an ear for it. You sound like law.”

“I’m a private detective.”

That kindled his curiosity. He checked his routing sheet with a forefinger as blunt as his cigar. “We had three cabs at the airport this afternoon. Two brand new jobs.”

“It wasn’t a new car.”

“And a four-year-old Dodge, Hank Cambria driving.”

“That’s probably my baby.”

The sharp, suspicious look came back to his face. “Jesus, that’s funny,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Cambria. He ain’t reported in for half an hour or so.”

He spoke into the mike. “Dispatcher to Car Thirteen. Over. Dispatcher to Car Thirteen. Hey, wake up, Hank!” He looked back at me. “Funny. He don’t answer.”

“When was his last report?” I asked.

“Lemme see ... six-fifty-four, airport. Single fare. To the Statler.”

“You got a home address for Hank Cambria?”

“Sure I got one.”

His stare had become smug. I put a fin on the desk. His hand ate it. “Two-four-eight North Capitol Street,” he said.

Just as I turned to go, his radio began to squawk. “Charlie, this is Stan in Three. We got trouble.”

“Yeah?”

“Car on Mt. Vernon Memorial Parkway. Cops there.”

“You stop?” Charlie grunted into the mike.

“I couldn’t. Got a fare.”

“Car damaged?”

“I don’t think so. It looked like the four-year-old Dodge. Just north of the RR bridge, Charlie.”

“Okay, I’ll check it out.”

“Cambria’s cab?” I asked Charlie.

“Yeah. If that bastard tied into one on the road—” He lunged to his feet, opened the door, shouted, “Hey, Solly! Take the board, will ya please? I got an out call.”

A tall thin guy in a windbreaker came in munching a sandwich. “A night like this, the pleasure’s all yours,” he said.

“I’ll drive you,” I told Charlie.

“You will? That must be some suitcase.”

We went outside together. The snow was coming down harder.

Soon after crossing the Potomac to Mt. Vernon Memorial Parkway, we saw the blinking red dome-light of a State Police car. It was parked near the cab. Behind it a long white ambulance was also parked on the shoulder of the road. A hundred yards south I could just make out the railroad bridge through the falling snow, which made this the spot where I had run Glasses and the guy in the trench-coat off the road. But their car was gone.

We parked near the police car and got out. “Keep moving,” a burly cop told us. “This isn’t a sideshow.”

“Veterans’ Cab,” Charlie said, holding out identification. “What happened?”

“One of your drivers got beat up on, mister.”

Two other cops were talking. One of them was saying, “...car right around here. See the tread marks? And over here,” he squatted and pointed, “is where the tow-truck took them off.”

“Beat up on?” Charlie said, his face suddenly vacated by all expression. “He hurt bad?”

“They got him in the ambulance. He’s dying, mister.”

“Jesus. Hank Cambria. I was just talking to him this afternoon.”

We went over to the ambulance. The driver was just shutting the double rear doors. The aid-man was crouched over the stretcher inside.

“...swear to God, Mr. Abbamonte,” a voice cried out, “I’ll get the dough...”

“Easy,” the aid-man said.

“Lemme see him,” Charlie said.

The driver looked at the burly cop, who nodded. Charlie climbed into the ambulance and came out again in a hurry. “Did you see his face? Did you see his face?” he said over and over, his voice a hoarse croak. “Did you see his goddam face?”

The driver shut the doors and went around to the front of the ambulance.

“Can I drive the hack to the garage?” Charlie asked the burly cop.

“Not tonight you can’t. She goes to the police garage in Alexandria first. I’ll give you a receipt. Did this man Cambria have any enemies? A grudge, maybe?”

“A thing like that on a grudge?”

The cop wrote out his receipt. “You can clear out, I guess. We’ll send a man to Washington tomorrow to see your manager.”

“A grudge?” Charlie said again, then added abruptly, “I’ll tell you this, the poor slob had money troubles.”

“What kind of money troubles?”

“Search me, but he needed dough. I think he played the nags. He hit me for a touch a couple of times.”

“How much was Cambria into you for?” the burly cop asked.

“A sawbuck, that’s all.”

“But you think he had other debts?”

Snow melting on Charlie’s bare bald head was running down his face like tears. “Me and my big mouth. I talk too much.”

“You think he had other debts?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Do you guess or do you know?”

Charlie sighed. “Abbamonte,” he said. “The six-for-fiver with the National Brotherhood of Truckers. Cambria used to be a trucker.” He clutched the cop’s overcoat. “You say where that came from, you’ll fish me out of the Potomac wearing cement boots.”

“Relax and go on home. We can respect a confidence.”

The ambulance began to roll. Charlie and I got back into my car. “Abbamonte,” he said. “I ought to have my head examined.”

I started driving. Charlie was quiet until we crossed the Potomac. “It looks like you don’t get the luggage, mac,” he said finally.

“It looks that way.”

“How’ll I know where to reach you, just in case they don’t impound it?”

“You won’t. I’ll contact you.”

I let Charlie off at the garage. The snow was coming down harder now, and just beginning to stick.

Two-forty-eight North Capitol Street was a shabby frame house that had been subdivided into four apartments, two upstairs and two down. Hank Cambria had the upstairs rear.

When I knocked, a woman’s voice called from inside, “You forget your key again. Hank? Why dontcha put it on the ring with your car keys like I said?”

She opened the door and started to shut it again almost at once when she saw me. I got a shoe in the way. “What do you want, mister? Hank ain’t home yet.”

Her question was a good one. But I knew Abacus Abbamonte, the National Brotherhood of Truckers’ loan-shark, by reputation. If Abbamonte was into you for money, the debt could skyrocket astronomically. A six-for-fiver, Abbamonte charged twenty per cent interest per week. Compounded, that could turn a hundred-buck touch into a two-hundred buck debt in a month.

Figure Abbamonte was into Hank Cambria. Figure Cambria, desperate because he couldn’t meet the six-for-five payment, had agreed to do a job for Abbamonte. Which meant a job for Mike Sand, who held the National Brotherhood of Truckers in a fist as hard as a crankcase. Such as to help set up the phony snatch, for reasons unknown except that a guy named Holt was going to pull the Sir Galahad act....

Holt. The name hadn’t meant anything before, but it’s a common enough name and I had no reason to tie it to the Brotherhood. Now, with Abbamonte in the picture, I did. And a man named Townsend Holt handled public relations for the National Brotherhood of Truckers. He was up to his ears in public relations gone sour these days, could barely keep his head afloat, because the Senate Labor Investigating Committee had set the stage for public hearings on the Brotherhood and on Mike Sand’s crankcase of a fist.

“Hank ain’t home yet,” the woman said again.

“Can I come in, Mrs. Cambria? I’d like to talk to you.”

She opened the door without enthusiasm. She looked scared. She was a slightly overweight but surprisingly pretty woman in her mid-twenties. Long dark hair tied in a ponytail, wide dark Latin eyes, thick, moistly red lips and a lush figure straining at the floral pattern of her cheap housecoat. She shut the door behind me and leaned against it for a moment, as if trying to keep trouble out with the weight of her body.

It was a small living room furnished with the detritus of a dozen rummage sales—a tired, sagging sofa, two heavy wing chairs, their backs stained with hair oil, a couple of scarred end-tables, an early TV set with one of those post-card-sized screens. On it, to the sound of saccharin music, a man was making aseptically passionate love to a well-dressed woman. Mrs. Cambria shut the set off, consigning the lovers to electronic eternity.

“Listen,” she said before I could say anything, “I swear Hank’s gonna make good. You can tell Mr. Abbamonte.”

“What makes you think Abbamonte sent me?”

“Didn’t he?” She took in my open topcoat, the gray flannel under it, the button-down collar and the tie. “We don’t get no visitors here.”

I rode along with her conviction, not feeling good about it. “How does Mr. Abbamonte know Hank’s going to make good? Don’t you think he’s heard that song before?”

“What do you want us to do, mister? Get down on our knees and beg? Hank’s got a regular job, steady, pushing a hack. He’s gonna pay. You want us to get down and beg?”

“There are other ways,” I said, trying to draw her out.

“Look, I know how it is with Hank and the ponies. When he drove a truck he used to borrow from Mr. Abbamonte to put money with the union book, then borrow all over again. But he ain’t gonna—” Desperation made her voice break huskily.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Marie.”

“Don’t you think there are other ways, Marie?” I wanted to get her to talk about any deals her husband had made with Abbamonte, but she misunderstood me.

“What do you want, mister?” She unbelted her housecoat suddenly and parted it. Under it she wore a pink bra and panties. Her skin was dark, her flesh firm. “This? If this is what you want, why don’t you say so?” She stared at me steadily, questioningly, her dark eyes bright. But her lips were trembling. “I’ll do anything I hafta, for Hank. Just leave him be.”

“You’ve got me wrong, Marie,” I said. “I don’t work for Abbamonte.”

Her eyes went blank with confusion. Her arm dropped to her side, but she didn’t belt the housecoat. “What do you want from us then?” The back of one hand flew to her mouth in an exaggerated gesture of fear she had learned from the TV screen as, for the second time tonight, I got taken for a cop. “Are you the police? All the time I been telling you...”

Just then the phone rang. That would be the police, I thought. She reached it on the second shrill ring, got it off the end-table and said, “Hello?” into the receiver.

“What? Yes, this is Mrs. Cambria. Who? You what? What did you ... oh no, Jesus God, no no no...”

She let the receiver drop. It hit the bare floor, the wire dangling. I hung it up for her.

She belted the housecoat. She was shaking. “He’s dead,” she said. “Hank’s dead. You knew that all the time, didn’t you? Didn’t you? For a lousy hundred bucks they killed him.”

“Is there anybody you can call, Marie?”

“No, I ... there’s no one. Just leave me alone.”

“I’ll stay with you if you want.”

“Go away. Leave me be. Go on, get out! All the time you knew. Letting me make a fool ... get out!” she screamed. “Just get out of here and leave me alone, coming here when he was dying like that. Get out, get out, get out!”

I went outside and downstairs, and drove home knowing her grief had bought me another piece of the case more surely than a client’s retainer could have.

The blonde who had lost her luggage stared up at me alongside my morning coffee.

This was in the F Street Cafeteria, where I generally take my breakfast on the way to the office, and the blonde’s face was on page one of the Washington News-Herald. Pictured from the waist up and wearing a bathing cap and the pleasantly skimpy bra of a two-piece bathing suit, she shared the cut with a squat, muscular, hairy-chested guy with a hard, brutal face and sleepy-looking eyes. The over-cut caption said double trouble for union leader. The under-cut caption said that the picture had been taken at the Nassau vacation hideaway of Mr. and Mrs. Mike Sand several months ago.

An accompanying article explained Sand’s double trouble. “A Senatorial probe by the Hartsell Committee and a separation from his wife have further complicated the life of The National Brotherhood of Truckers’ Boss Mike Sand who, it is rumored, is fighting for his labor-leader life with a West Coast splinter group of the Union and past-President Nels Torgesen, now residing in Virginia, who was deposed two years ago after Senator Hartsell’s first legislative attack on the racket-dominated Union,” the article began. But Sand, the article also speculated with typical journalistic mixed metaphor, might be a tougher nut for Senator Hartsell’s free-wheeling committee to crack, for he had been the power behind Torgesen’s throne for five years, had had two years to consolidate his own position, and was strongly entrenched with the rank-and-file of truckers.

There was one brief paragraph about the beautiful Mrs. Sand’s defection—she had been quoted some place along the line as saying, “Mike and I have simply fallen out of love.” It wasn’t hard to see why, since the black and white cut made them look like beauty and the beast. And the writer pointed out the irony of the situation: theirs had been a secret marriage, revealed only within the past twenty-four hours, when it was on the verge of a break-up.

I took the paper outside with me and walked down the block to the Farrell Building, where I have my office. Upstairs behind the frosted glass door that said chester drum—confidential investigations, I found a smaller article that dismissed the demise of hackie Hank Cambria in a few terse lines. Cambria, it said, was beaten to death in his own cab on Mt. Vernon Memorial Parkway early last night. The Alexandria M.E. believed the beating to have been administered by brass knuckles. Closing on a line of speculation, the article said, “Usually reliable sources indicate that another vehicle was at the scene of the brutal slaying during last night’s early snowfall. Apparently it had some mechanical trouble, because treadmarks in the snow give evidence of a tow-truck hauling it away, yet none of the garages in the area have a record of any call at all last night on the Mt. Vernon Memorial Parkway.”

That one bothered me for a while, but then I remembered Veterans’ Cab Company’s two-way radio. Assume Cambria, who had helped set up the phony snatch, had driven back toward D.C., then stopped when he saw the guy in the trench-coat and Glasses stranded on the shoulder of the road. Why they were mad enough to beat him to death I didn’t know yet, but they could have used his radio before or after the killing to call for help. Assuming the mysterious tow-truck had belonged to the National Brotherhood of Truckers, that left a bald-headed dispatcher named Charlie with a bag that needed opening.

I decided to try my hand at opening it, but first I made a phone call.

“Senator Hartsell’s office.”

“The Senator, please. This is Chester Drum.”

And, a moment later, the Senator’s familiar booming voice. “Drum? When’d you get back from Richmond?”

“Last night,” I said. A few days ago I had used the Richmond affair as an excuse for not accepting a job as special investigator for the Hartsell Committee. Offering it to me, Senator Hartsell had clued me in on some of the Brotherhood shenanigans. I had done some work for him in the past because he liked my ex-F.B.I. background, but this time I hadn’t felt like getting tied up in any long legislative hassles and the public hearings of the Labor Investigating Committee.

“Ready to work for us, boy?” the Senator asked. “We always have a place for Chet Drum.”

“Thanks. And the answer’s yes—provisionally.”

“Provisionally?”

“I have a personal reason for wanting a special investigator’s badge pinned to my wallet.”

“Such as?”

“I’d rather not say right now.”

“Any tie-in with the Brotherhood?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“That’s good enough for me,” the Senator boomed. “And I can tell you this: the Committee can use a really hot-shot investigator now.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“We had a star witness all lined up. The sort of man who knew enough and had enough of a reputation in high government circles to blow the lid off the union: The only trouble is, he disappeared.”

“And that doesn’t leave you with much?”

“Gideon Frost was just the kind of witness we needed. There’s apathy, Chet, when it comes to union-busting. You know that. You’ve really got to blueprint the shakedowns and the kickbacks and the six-for-fiving and the abused welfare funds or you don’t get anywhere. Gideon Frost could have spelled it all out. He lives out in L.A. and was supposed to fly East, but never did.”

“Got a man on the Coast looking for him?”

“Moody,” the Senator said. “The Committee’s special investigator out there. So far he’s got nothing but fallen arches.” The Senator paused. Then, “A funny thing, though. Moody says there’s another P.I. tearing up L.A. trying to find Dr. Frost.”

“Who for?”

“Search me. Man’s name is Scott.”

“Shell Scott?” I said.

“Yes. Yes, I believe so,” the Senator said, brightening. “Know him?”

“I know of him.”

“Good man?”

“Well, a news magazine once ran an article on both of us. They said Shell Scott was the Chester Drum of Los Angeles, or maybe it’s the other way around. Seriously, though, Scott’s got a good reputation. One of the best. Why doesn’t Moody get in touch with him?”

“I think he tried, but he’s up to his ears in about six thousand things and hasn’t been able to reach the man. Why don’t you try to contact him? Hell, boy, if he comes equipped with the same kind of Robin Hood complex you have, maybe he can help us.”

“It’s worth a try,” I said.

The Senator told me I could pick up my identification papers and badge at his office any time today. The moment I hung up, the phone started ringing.

“Drum speaking.”

“Good morning, Mr. Drum. Do you know who this is?” a woman’s voice asked me.

“The luggage lady,” I said.

“Right you are. Any luck?”

“Nothing yet, Mrs. Sand.”

I heard her sharp intake of breath. Then she said, “Well, you are a detective, aren’t you?”

I let that one ride. “There are complications. The taxi-driver was murdered last night—”

There was a silence. Then, “What happened to my luggage?”

“The Virginia State Police impounded the cab. Your bags went with it.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?”

“I’m working for the Hartsell Committee, Mrs. Sand,” I said.

Another silence while she digested that. “Were you working for them last night?”

“Would that make any difference?”

“Were you?”

“No.”

“I—I guess I never should have come to Washington.”

“You came here to do what?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Drum. If you send a bill for your services to me care of the Statler Hotel, it will be forwarded.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. Definitely.”

I let it go at that, depressed the phone cradle and had long distance get me the information operator in Los Angeles. They had a Sheldon Scott, Investigations, listed in the Hamilton Building in downtown Los Angeles. They had a home address in the Spartan Apartment Hotel in Hollywood. While the first number was ringing, I sat there thinking about Shell Scott. Ours is a lonely business, and it’s filled with everything from rotten apples to knights in shining armor. What I’d heard about Scott on and off over the years made him one of the good ones, so I figured he might be able to help me help Senator Hartsell.

An answering service told the long-distance operator Scott hadn’t checked into his office yet. She tried his apartment, and after four rings a voice said, “Hello?”

“Shell Scott? Drum’s my name. I’m calling from Washington.”

“Chester Drum?” Scott had a deep voice. He sounded surprised. “The private detective?”

“Well, if you’ve heard of me, that makes this easier. We’re trying to find a Dr. Gideon Frost and—”

“Who’s we?” he interrupted.

“Get to that in a minute, okay? The grapevine has it you’re looking for Frost too. Any luck?”

“Plenty, but all of it bad. I haven’t been able to find a trace of him. Who did you say wanted to find him back there in Washington?”

Instead of answering the question, I asked one of my own. “You’re looking for him why?”

“The usual reason. I have a client.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Who?”

“You ought to know I can’t answer that.”

“Would you answer it for the United States Senate?”

That also must have surprised Scott. He said, “Come again?”

“I’m a Special Investigator for the Hartsell Committee. Frost was going to be their star witness against the National Brotherhood of Truckers. We’ve got to find him.”

“So?”

“Well, if you tell us who hired you, that might give us a lead.”

“Yeah, if you’re working for the Hartsell Committee.”

“Hell,” I said, getting a little annoyed. “Call the Senator if you want to.”

Then he asked a funny question. “How long has this been going on?”

“What been going on?”

“You working for Senator Hartsell.”

“Actually, about fifteen minutes. But—”

“That’s convenient, isn’t it? Fifteen minutes for Hartsell—and how long for Mike Sand and Ragen?”

I shouted, “What did you say? What the hell—”

“I can’t tell you who I’m working for.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Take your pick.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to lean on you, but if you make it necessary we can force that information out of you.” Scott didn’t answer me. I went on. “Go ahead, play hard to get. We have a man on the Coast who can slap a subpoena on you so fast you’ll—”

Scott didn’t let me finish. He said, “Don’t scare me, friend. Maybe your man can slap a subpoena on me. But he won’t have fun doing it.”

The line went dead. I banged the phone down, smoked a cigarette, wondered what Scott could have against me, said, “Who says news magazines are right all the time?” out loud. Then I climbed into my coat and hat, went downstairs and outside and drove through the inches of snow that covered Washington’s streets back to the Veterans’ Cab Garage.

Round one? Call it Scott’s. But that was only the beginning.

“Bald-headed guy named Charlie?” the morning dispatcher repeated my question. “That would be the four p.m. to midnight dispatcher, Charlie Derleth. So?”

“So I’d like his home address.”

“We don’t give out our employees’ home addresses, mister.”

“Real cloak-and-dagger, huh?”

“Just company policy. I don’t look for no trouble.”

I took out the photostat of my license and showed it to him. He wasn’t impressed. “You’re a private eye. So what?”

“So if you call Senator Hartsell’s office, they’ll tell you I’m a special investigator for the Hartsell Committee.”

He accepted that without making the call. He looked interested but pugnacious. “What’s Charlie done?”

“I’ll discuss that with Charlie.”

“I mean, him being an ex-trucker and all.”

“When was he a trucker?”

“He came over here when they give Boss Torgesen the ax, two, three years ago.”

“Would that be about the same time Hank Cambria started pushing a hack?”

“Cambria? I said all I’m gonna say.”

“Except for Charlie Derleth’s address.”

He sighed and gave it to me.

On the way over there I stopped at the Senate Office Building and picked up my identification card and special investigator’s badge at Senator Hartsell’s office. The Senator wasn’t in. I batted the breeze a few minutes with his receptionist, a stacked redhead called Luscious by everyone including the Senator, and then drove north across Washington on New Jersey Avenue almost to where it ends at Florida Avenue near Griffith Stadium.

Charlie Derleth had an apartment in a seedy residential neighborhood that had been rezoned for industry. It was a couple of blocks off New Jersey Avenue and within easy walking distance of the National Brotherhood of Truckers D.C. headquarters. The apartment was on the third floor of a walkup. An owl-eyed kid playing with a rubber ball in the dimly lit hallway watched me as I knocked at the door. There wasn’t any answer.

“Nobody’s home, mister,” the kid said. His ball rolled down to me and I tossed it back at him.

“I thought he might still be sleeping. Doesn’t he work nights?”

“He does. She don’t,” the kid said importantly. “His sister. Hope. She’s nice.”

“You know where I can find him?”

“Nope. But I know where she is.”

“Where?”

“She works at that truck place. You know, on New Jersey Avenue?”

I thanked him. He sneezed, bounced his ball against the hallway wall, blew his nose, sniffed and bounced it again. He waved as I went downstairs. The National Brotherhood of Truckers was like a magnet drawing all the pieces of the case toward it like iron filings.

The place was a big Victorian monstrosity, gabled and gambreled, that must have had fifty rooms in it. The setback lawn had been converted to a parking lot, and the rows of high-priced new cars lined up there were the only outward signs of undue prosperity.

I went in through the wide door under a sign that said:

National Headquarters
national brotherhood of truckers
Welcome, Brother

In the enormous downstairs room a couple of dozen rank-and-filers were seated around bare wood tables drinking coffee and playing cards. They were dressed in jeans or old corduroys or fatigue trousers and windbreakers. In a tweed suit and a gabardine topcoat I looked as out of place as a gob of blood-red ketchup on a slice of seven layer cake.

A tough kid in a turtleneck sweater came over to me and said three words out of the side of his mouth. “You want what?”

I could have said I wanted to see Hope Derleth. I could have said I was from the Hartsell Committee. I could have said the sign says welcome, brother, and to hell with you. But what I did say was, “I want to see Townsend Holt. Tell him it’s about Mrs. Sand.”

“Yeah?”

“It won’t bite you, sonny. Go on and try it.”

The “sonny” got a glower from him, but he turned, called, “Sit tight, dads,” over his shoulder, and went across the big barn of a room and out of sight up a flight of stairs.

He was back before I could finish a cigarette. “Mr. Holt ain’t in, dads. You wanna,” he added grudgingly, “you can see his assistant.”

I said I wanted to and followed him upstairs. The second floor hall was carpeted, the walls were paneled in mahogany and there were no signs that said, “Welcome, Brother.” Apparently the second floor was out-of-bounds for the rank-and-filers. The tough kid swaggered ahead of me to a door that bore the legend, townsend holt, public relations.

“Go on in, dads,” he said, and snickered. “But if you get to first base with that iceberg, I’ll eat your bat.”

I didn’t get the Freudian symbolism of what he had said, unconscious or otherwise, until I saw who held down the front room of Townsend Holt’s suite of offices. The tough punk opened the door for me and shut it behind me, remaining outside.

It was a large office furnished in blue—blue carpet, blue metal desk, blue filing cabinets, soft blue walls. The girl was wearing blue too, a dark blue suit cut close to her figure. It went well with her pale skin and the jet black hair that she wore not much longer than the duck-tail of the tough kid waiting outside.

She stood up and offered me a brief, fleeting smile. She had small, even, very white teeth. She was a small girl and she wore sensible office flats on her feet and blue-bowed glasses over her dark eyes. Despite the flats and the glasses, or maybe in part because of them and counterpointing them, she was a tight little bundle of sex appeal. There was a charged, almost electric quality in the way she moved her trim body, in the frank thrust of rounded thighs against the tight skirt, in the straight shoulders and the suggestion of saucy tilt of breasts restrained by the tight-fitting jacket.

I had been staring too long. She was that kind of woman. “You didn’t come here to buy me, did you?” she demanded icily.

I went along with that. “Are you up for sale?”

The reluctant fleeting smile again as she said, extending her hand, “Maybe I deserved that. I’m Hope Derleth Mr. Holt’s girl Friday.”

She pumped my hand vigorously, giving me the same kind of looking over I had given her. Hope Derleth, I thought. Charlie Derleth’s sister. Well, well, well.

She let go of my hand and waited for me to introduce myself. I didn’t. I said, tough and fast, to throw her off balance, “Where the hell was Townsend Holt last night when Mr. Abbamonte set up the snatch for him?”

The dark eyes widened. “Set up the snatch? What are you talking about? Who are you, mister?”

“Never mind me,” I said. “Let’s talk about Charlie.”

“Charlie—?”

“Charlie getting a couple of Abbamonte’s goons off the hook Townsend Holt put them on by forgetting to show up last night. That shows good sense on Charlie’s part. But where does that leave Holt? Not to mention you?”

“Mister, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hope Derleth said, building up slowly through confusion to anger. “You came in here under the pretense of wanting to talk about Mrs. Sand, though why I don’t know. Then you fed me a line that was supposed to make me believe you work for Abacus Abbamonte. But you don’t because I think I know—as you put it—all of Mr. Abbamonte’s goons. So who are you and what do you want?”

She wasn’t finished. I waited. “Is Charlie in trouble with the police? Are you a cop?”

Three strikes and out. I said, “I’m a special investigator with the Hartsell Committee.”

Her dark eyes were furious. “You—you sneak! Coming in here and getting me all worked up about my brother.”

“I didn’t get you worked up about your brother. You got yourself worked up.”

“Please get out. I don’t have anything to say to you. You’ll have to see Mr. Holt.”

“Where?”

“He’s gone for the day.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t have to tell you that. I don’t have to tell you anything.” She raised her voice. “Morty!”

The tough kid came in. He looked at me and Hope Derleth. “I told you, dads.”

Just as I left the office with Morty, a woman ran toward us from the other end of the long hall. She was dark, pretty, slightly overweight. She wore a bright blue imitation-leather suburban coat, her cheeks were flushed and she was panting. Two men sprinted down the hall after her. She was Marie Cambria. She had a big Colt .45 automatic in her hand. If her wild eyes meant anything, she was ready to use it.

“Where is he, that Abacus Abbamonte?” she screamed. “Where is he, he killed my Hank, Hank was gonna pay, I’ll kill him, I swear I’ll kill him!”

“Hey, lady!” one of the men behind her called.

The door to Townsend Holt’s office opened. Hope Derleth came out. The adjacent door also opened, disgorging an enormously fat man who did a lumbering roll and shuffle out into the hall. He looked like an overfed Neanderthal dressed in a sharkskin suit. “What the hell’s the commotion out here?” he rasped. I recognized him from pictures I had seen in the papers. He was Abacus Abbamonte, the Brotherhood’s secretary-treasurer and chief loan-shark.

“Look out, Mr. Abbamonte, she’s nuts!” one of the men behind Marie Cambria shouted.

She fired once on the run. The slug tore a hole in the mahogany paneling alongside Abbamonte’s head. The tremendous recoil of the .45 bounced Marie Cambria off the wall and right into the tough kid Morty’s arms. He reached around her large body from behind and grabbed the gun away from her. Snickering, he began to nuzzle her from behind, head against her hair, front of his body in hard contact with the back of hers, both arms circling her, one hand holding the automatic. “Got a little fight left in you, huh baby?” he said.

“Kee-rist,” Abbamonte said. “She took a shot at me.”

“That’s enough, Morty,” Hope Derleth told the kid. “’You have her gun.”

I got hold of Morty’s shoulder, wrenched him away from Marie and spun him around. “The lady says that’s enough.”

He took a swing at me with the automatic, missing. He glared at me. “Keep the crap out of this, dads. All I did was save Mr. A.’s life.” He swung again, this time with his bare left fist, missing again. I drove my own right into his belly and doubled him over.

Then a voice said, “Lookit who’s here.”

“Him all right,” another voice said. The second voice was followed by familiar phlegmy laughter.

I turned around. The two men who had followed Marie down the hall were Glasses and his big sidekick. The big guy let out a bellow of rage and joined the act, swinging on me. His right fist thudded under my heart and I went back hard against the wall and came away from it with my fists up.

“You’re gonna choke on that distributor cap, Jack,” the big guy said. Glasses was busy doing something with his hands. I didn’t know what it was at first, then I saw the gleam of brass knucks. I hit the big guy and he went back but not down. Hope Derleth cried out something.

“Hey, you jerks, what’s going on?” Abbamonte shouted.

Glasses used the brass knucks on me, low enough for me to turn my thigh into the blow. My leg went numb. I opened my hand on Glasses’ face, shoving. He stumbled back, his glasses flying off.

“Where is he, where’s the bastard?” Glasses went groping on all fours for his glasses. Hope Derleth stepped on them. Glasses lunged to his feet, swung wildly and splintered the mahogany paneling with his brass knucks.

Then an arm throttled me from behind. That was Morty. I stamped down on his instep with my heel and he howled and the arm left my neck. But before it did, the big guy pivoted two hundred pounds behind a left hook that caught me in the breadbasket.

I counter-punched with my right, once, hard, before I couldn’t draw any more air into my lungs. It hit the big guy’s jaw and he went down. But Glasses had found what he was looking for, and one lens was still whole. With the glasses askew on his face he swung a roundhouse right that drove the brass knucks against the side of my neck. I slammed against the wall in the angle formed by it and the recessed doorway of Townsend Holt’s office. I started to go down, but Glasses didn’t let me. He hacked a shoulder under my arm, holding me up, and went to work on my middle with his knucks.

For a few moments I heard Hope Derleth yelling, saw her face behind Glasses’ shoulder as she tried impotently to pull him away, felt the thud-thud-thud as the brass knucks landed but no pain because my middle was already numb, thought and tried to say but couldn’t get the words out, “Stop it, you damn fool, this is the way you killed Hank Cambria last night, you can kill people with brass knucks without even half trying,” started to slip down despite Glasses’ efforts to hold me up and even managed to knee him in the groin before the big guy got up off the floor, took one looping, measured swing that could have substituted for the chain and ball of a building wrecker and that shut off the world the way you switch off a light.

SHELL SCOTT SHOOTS OFF HIS MOUTH

Los Angeles, 8:00 P.M., Monday, December 14

I swung the Cad from Adams Boulevard into Raymond Avenue, kept the accelerator down for a block and a half, then hit the brakes hard. The car was still skidding when I saw them. The Lincoln wasn’t in sight, but lights burned inside Kelly’s house and in the glow I spotted three figures stepping from the small porch. Before the Cad stopped moving I had the door open, leaped through it onto the grass parking strip. My feet skidded and I stumbled as a gunshot cracked and a slug whipped past me.

I came up with the Colt in my hand. They were no more than twenty feet away. But Candy, looking monstrous next to Kelly, held her tight against him on the walk leading from the house to the street. Beyond them was the shape of another man. It had to be Mink. I flipped the .38 toward him and squeezed the trigger. He spun around and for a moment I thought I’d hit him; but he was running. His feet slapped on the sidewalk as he raced to the corner.

Fire shot from Candy’s gun and a slug tore into the grass at my feet. I jumped aside, hit the lawn rolling and came up onto my knees. There was enough light so I could see one of Candy’s arms around Kelly’s body, mashing her breasts as she struggled in his grip. He pulled the revolver around, steadied it on me.

I started to jerk aside as Kelly squirmed in his arms, one of her hands slapping the gun. It cracked again, a bullet flying up into the air. I got a foot under me, jumped forward as Kelly stamped downward toward Candy’s feet with one highheeled shoe. He yelled and she broke free of his arm. But she was still too close to Candy, and I fired near him, not at him. My feet were driving and I saw Kelly drop down as Candy jerked his gun back toward me. But then I hit him. I smacked into him like a fullback going through the line, feet driving as I hit.

It was like running into a house, but he staggered backward, got one leg stretched behind him and steadied himself as I bounced to the side. He came back fast, gun hand swinging. The gun clipped the top of my head and I slammed my arm up against his, saw light gleam on the revolver as it flipped through the air. His other hand came out of nowhere, hit the side of my head like a club. His face went a little out of focus, but I could see clearly enough to find his chin. I found it with a hard left jab and he went backwards, down on his fanny.

I moved in to finish him off, leaning over him, and he lifted one leg. I saw the foot coming, but I saw it come all the way. It thudded into my chin. It felt as if it was going to tear my head off. My head snapped back, then forward again when I landed on my hands and knees. I could see Candy scrambling to his feet, but he scrambled away from me. When I got up he was jumping through the front door of Kelly’s house. It slammed behind him and I heard his big feet thump across the floor inside.

I took a step after him, then stopped, whirled toward Kelly. She was still on the grass, but as I turned she started to get up. I grabbed her hands, pulled her to me.

“They hurt you, Kelly?”

She shook her head. “No. They—”

A door behind the house banged. “Here.” I shoved my Colt into her hand, spun around, caught the reflection of Candy’s gun on the grass. I jumped forward and reached for it as a car engine caught and roared nearby. It came from the direction in which Mink had been running.

I scooped up the gun and sprinted to the corner—but that engine roared, whined, and then the sound grew fainter. I caught a flash of blue two blocks away, and the flare of a red taillight as the car whipped around the corner.

I couldn’t catch them now. And I had to be sure Kelly was all right, really all right. I walked back to her. When I got near her, automatically she ran toward me, threw her arms around me. I held her tight. She was shaking. I guess I was shaking a little, too.

Lights came on in nearby houses. Somebody called to us, shouted something. I didn’t pay any attention to them. I held onto Kelly.

I let my Cad roll up the Freeway toward Hollywood, heading nowhere in particular, filled with a big burn for Mink and Candy—and Ragen. Kelly sat close to me on the front seat.

It hadn’t been long before a police radio car arrived in response to the shooting. I’d told the story, and Kelly had told hers. If Mink and Candy were picked up, I would be notified. Kelly and I were still talking about it.

I said, “Those bums didn’t say a thing, huh?”

“Not to me. When I opened the door they just forced their way in. Candy held me while that greasy Mink searched the house in a hurry. We heard the phone ringing, but naturally they wouldn’t let me answer it. They must have been looking for whatever Braun took.”

“No question about it now. I still don’t know what it was, but I knew it was not what Ragen told me it was.”

“That’s where they were taking me, I guess, to him. Candy told Mink they couldn’t leave me now, and that Ragen would want to—pump me, he said.” She rubbed her arm absently. In the light from the dash I could see faint bruises on the inside of her arm. Where Candy’s big fingers had grabbed her. Mentally I transferred them to Candy, much larger ones, not nearly so faint, and all over.

Kelly said, “Where are we going?”

“Just going. The main thing was to get you away from there.” The Sunset Boulevard tumoff was close on our right now. I said, “We could go to my apartment, Kelly. Unless you’d rather check into a hotel. Main thing is a change of address.”

“I’ve never seen your apartment.”

“Here’s your chance.”

“I’ll take it.”

Ten minutes later I parked on North Rossmore in front of the Spartan Apartment Hotel. We got out and went in. At the desk I learned there’d been no calls for me. No call from Alexis Frost. We went up to the second floor, down the hall to my apartment, and in. Kelly spotted the two tropical fish tanks on the door’s left the first thing. I turned on the small aquarium lights, and the colors of the fish almost leaped out into the room.

Kelly said, “He’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Kelly was pointing at the single gorgeously blue Betta splendens in the community tank, his long ventral and caudal fins rippling and the bright pectorals and pointed dorsal shimmering in the overhead light.

“Magnificent, isn’t he?” I said. “Bred that little devil myself. Raised him from an egg you could barely see with your eye.”

“From an egg? You mean you hatched it?”

I grinned at her. “In a manner of speaking. I don’t mean I sat on it for two weeks, but I fed him infusoria, brine shrimp and egg yolk, all that jazz. Chose my best male and female adult bettas, Cornflower Blues, they were. Gave them the best of everything including a fifteen-gallon tank, and acid water.” I glanced at her again. “Actually, I don’t mean to take all the credit. The fish had quite a bit to do with it.”

She smiled up at me, misty green eyes twinkling. “My,” she said in her cool, soft voice, “and I didn’t think you had any talents. I should have come up here before.”

“You should have, indeed, Kelly. Why, once I tried to cross a big black mollie with a small Belonesox belizanus, but all it did was make them very cross. Ah, but if it had worked—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She still wore the outfit she’d had on when I’d visited her during the afternoon, since Mink and Candy had certainly not given her time to change. The green-jersey dress fit her rounded body snugly, not so much as if it was too tight on her, but more as though she just flowed abundantly, joyously, out against the smooth cloth.

“Why,” I said, “are we talking about fish, anyway?”

“I couldn’t stop you.”

“Drink?”

“Sounds exciting. Do you have Scotch?”

“Scotch it shall be.”

I made her a Scotch-high, a bourbon and water for me. When I stepped back into the living room Kelly was seated on the oversized couch, looking askance at the nude over my fireplace. It is an odd thing but women almost always look at Amelia askance. They rarely look at her head on—though that is not a strictly accurate description of the look one gets at Amelia. And I could tell from the expression on Kelly’s perky face that I had now lost the ground I’d gained with the fish. Maybe she didn’t know it, but it is a hell of a lot more difficult to breed Bettas than Amelias. Kelly, however, made no comment.

I gave her the drink, had a slug of my own, and used the phone. Calls to informants developed no rumbles, either about Braun’s murder or about Dr. Gideon Frost. I made several calls to Truckers Headquarters, Ragen’s home, tried to find Mink and Candy. But, not surprisingly, I had no luck in that direction. It was a pretty sure thing that, for this night at least, they wouldn’t be where I could reach them.

I sat quietly for a while, thinking.

“Shell.” Kelly was looking at me.

“Yeah?”

“I think you forgot I was here.”

“I’d never forget you were here. I was just ... trying to figure some things out. But I can’t do it until I learn more. And I can’t do it in the Spartan.”

“Are you leaving?”

“I guess. You stay here, Kelly. It’s as safe as any other place. And I’ll leave you Candy’s gun for good measure.”

“Do you have to go? This couch looks big enough for you to sleep on.”

Actually, it is darned near big enough for four people to sleep on, except that one keeps falling off. I said, “A lot of hoodlum town is just waking up now.”

Kelly curled her wonderful legs beneath her on the couch, and I looked at her, let her flow in through my eyes and warm my insides. Some of the make-up on her face had worn thin, and a few freckles peeked through. Her green eyes were soft on my face. It was a pleasant moment, relaxed. The troubles and worries faded away.

“How long have I known you, Kelly?” I asked her.

“Oh, maybe a hundred years. I remember you were an old man when we met.”

“Yeah. Fortunately I’ve been getting younger since then. It’s been...” I thought back. “Six years now, isn’t it? Sure, you were seventeen then. And I was twenty-four. It seems longer than that, somehow.”

“Uh-huh. Like last lifetime or something. Maybe it was, and we met in a cave.”

“That figures. I’m a caveman at heart.”

“No, you’re not. Shell.” She smiled sweetly and leaned forward, face close to mine. “I know what you are at heart.”

Her eyes were misty, melting. Her lips were near, half-smiling, and I thought I could smell their perfume. I leaned slowly toward her and she tilted her head, red hair catching gleams of light.

It started out as just a kiss, a simple, casual kiss—casual as the peck I’d given her earlier at her door. But Kelly’s lips were like blossoms, soft, scented, sweet. Soft and warm, warm then hot, hot as my rushing blood.

I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t mean for it to happen, and I know she didn’t either. It was as if we didn’t have anything to do with it, just got caught and swept along with it. Our lips parted, but then her hands tightened around my neck. She pulled herself closer to me, soft against me. Her breath warmed my lips, and then her mouth was on mine again. Her arms tugged at the back of my neck, pulled almost convulsively, time after time in a kind of pulsing rhythm, unconscious, unheeded.

I don’t know how it happened. But it happened.

In the morning I showered and shaved, humming. And it is a rare day indeed, when I hum in the morning. I hummed several songs—and they were lilting Irish songs. Shaved, showered, dabbed with a manly lotion, and gaudily robed, I peeked into the bedroom. Kelly was still asleep, thick lustrous hair like fire on the pillow. Yes, there was fire in Kelly. And a warm glow in Shell Scott.

While she slept I got on the phone again and talked to police, muggs, friends. Nothing. Ragen was avoiding Truckers Headquarters; he wasn’t at his home. Mink and Candy, understandably, were not in their usual haunts. There wasn’t a trace of Frost—either Gideon or Alexis.

I chopped up some fresh clam for the fish and said good morning to them. To my blue betta I said, “Hello, you little devil. Raised you from an egg.”

Egg. That made me think of breakfast. I am not much of a guy for breakfast, since it always tastes lousy. And eggs are for the birds. In fact, breakfast is for the birds. But I figured I would surprise Kelly. I surprised her. At precisely nine-fifteen that Tuesday morning she called from the bedroom, “Shell? Shell?”

“Yeah.”

“I smell smoke. Is something burning?”

“Well ... yeah. But don’t worry. I can handle it.”

“What’s burning?”

“Well, some toast and...”

“And?”

“Oh, potatoes, and eggs, things like that.”

“It’s all burning?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

I heard some thumping sounds and scraping movements and the click of a door. In a moment Kelly, her flaming hair tangled, green eyes still a little heavy with sleep, walked barefooted into the kitchenette. She’d found an old robe of mine and had it, tentlike, around her. It dragged on the floor. She wrinkled her abundantly freckled nose and blinked at the shambles of my kitchenette. It was pretty shambled, and you wouldn’t believe how smoky.

I was just drying off the toaster when she came in.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asked me.

“Drying off the toaster.”

She shook her head. “Do you mean to say you washed the toaster?”

“Of course not. Who would wash a toaster? I just happened to drop it in some water in the sink and it blew a fuse.”

She closed her eyes and looked pained. Then she fixed her eyes on me again and said, “Shell, how did you just happen to drop the toaster in some water?”

“I pushed the toast down a second time and forgot it. When it started to smoke I upended it over the sink to shake the toast out, and it sort of slipped. While I was putting another fuse in, so it would go again, the potatoes got a little ... ruined. Then by that time the eggs—”

“Never mind, Shell. You go sit in the corner. I’ll fix breakfast.”

“I thought I’d have everything all ready for you,” I said brightly.

She looked at the blackened toast floating in the water, the eggs which now might well have been fungused Betta eggs, and the little-ruined potatoes. Then she grinned at me, and the grin widened. “I appreciate it. Shell. I’d appreciate it if you’d go sit in the corner, too.”

Kelly didn’t say anything else, but her eyes were eloquent. She shooed me out and fifteen minutes later we sat down to breakfast. And I mean breakfast. I don’t know where she found all the fixings, but we had orange juice, then fluffy omelettes stuffed with cheese and bacon and some little crunchy doo-dads I never did identify, but which were delicious. Plus oven-baked pineapple rounds, and golden buttered toast. It was ambrosial.

No wonder I’d never gone for breakfasts. I hadn’t been having breakfasts. Halfway through gustatorial ecstasy I said, “Kelly, I have been living in a fool’s paradise of burned toast and mush, or eggs sunny-side all over. This proves it. I need a woman around the house.”

“You sure do,” she said. Then she added, “I mean ... I suppose so.”

Suddenly she was very shy. Her eyes met mine only briefly, then moved away. It was a pleasant breakfast, but when the excitement of putting all the kitchen fires out had worn off, Kelly became quite a bit more subdued.

The phone rang. It was Chester Drum calling from Washington, D.C.

Three minutes later I slammed the receiver down on the hook.

Kelly was cleaning up the kitchenette. Now she called, “What’s the matter. Shell?”

“Plenty. And it’s all Chet Drum. That call was from him, in D.C.”

“Who’s Chet Drum?”

“I wish I knew. Twenty-four hours ago I thought he was a pretty good private eye. Now I don’t know. Last night I heard Ragen talking about him—and just now Drum tried to find out if I know where Dr. Frost is, who’d hired me to find him. And then the slob had the gall to threaten me with a subpoena.” I felt the heat boiling up in me again as I thought about it.

“How can a private detective subpoena you?”

“Claims he’s working for Hartsell. Maybe he is. Ragen would like nothing better than to plant one of his men inside the Committee.” And how, I thought; that would tell Ragen everything he wanted to know, including the name of Hartsell’s surprise witness. Dr. Frost.

The picture in my mind was getting even uglier, when the phone rang again. The guy calling was a little ex-cannon named Bitsy, one of the boys I’d phoned yesterday morning.

I said, “You got something, Bitsy?”

“Nothin’ on the Braun thing or that doc.” He had a high, weak voice. “But you asked about any rumble on them Trucker ghees.”

“Yeah.” I sat up straight.

“I don’t know if it’s nothin’, but I’ll pass it on. A couple of Trucker organizers been askin’ around today about a box-man supposed to of turned a trick Saturday night.”

A box-man in Bitsy’s parlance was a safe-cracker. Saturday night was when Braun had swiped the stuff from Ragen. And all of a sudden it hit me. The obvious thing. The answer. The big thing I’d completely missed.

“Bitsy,” I said, “did they find him? You know who the pete-man is?”

“No. I only just heard this—”

“Where was the can?”

“I dunno.”

“Let’s talk money, Bitsy. How much to make you go all out on this? I’m in a sweat, I want to know who did the job, and fast. So name it.”

After a few seconds of silence he said, “A couple C’s?”

“Done. And Bitsy, don’t keep it to yourself—you won’t lose by it. Spread it around. No matter where it comes from, you still get the two bills. And a bill for whoever gives me the steer. But I want it fast, see?”

“Okay. I ... think I know where to go, Scott. To get the rest of it. But them ghees lookin’ for the box-man is droppers. Makes it a tough gaff.”

Droppers—hired killers. I said, “Bitsy, I’ve got to get to him before they do.”

“Yeah, it figures. He won’t be much good if you don’t.”

“You’ve already got a hundred coming for this. Get to work on the two C’s.”

“I’m there, man. Call you?”

“If you get anything, call here and tell the desk I’m to get in touch with B. Then I’ll ring you. And I’ll check with you during the day, besides.”

“Okay.” We hung up.

Kelly had perched beside me on the couch. “What was that?”

“The most important part of any detective, policeman, sleuth, what have you. A tip from a tipster.”

“Was it good?”

“I think it was very good. But I only got part of it; I need a couple more. I think I know where to get one part, myself; Bitsy’s working on the other.”

“I couldn’t understand all that talk. Just what happened?”

“A safe-cracker blew open a safe Saturday night. Ragen’s boys are looking for him. To kill him, I think.” She didn’t get it. I said, “Honey, they’re looking for the guy who helped Braun.”

She blinked at me, the green eyes opening wider. “How did you know somebody helped him?”

“I didn’t until just now. But I should have. We know whatever Braun got from Ragen was plenty important, and that he got it Saturday night. It doesn’t make sense that it would be lying in a filing cabinet, or in a desk drawer where he could just walk in and grab it. Braun knew that, and got somebody to help him, somebody whose profession was or is undoing safes.” I lit a cigarette. “It’s an honorable profession in the—underworld.”

She got it then. And caught up. “Then that man can tell you...”

“Yeah, he can fill in some blanks. Tell me plenty, maybe. Maybe the most important part, what was in that safe.”

“But you said somebody might—kill him.”

“And how somebody might.”

“How awful.”

I dragged on my cigarette. “Maybe it won’t happen. Bitsy’s digging right now. He might get the info for me in time. And he might get a bullet in the back of his head for his trouble.”

She was obviously concerned about it. Her face was serious, eyes frowning. “He really might be killed,” she said, “And you just let him go.”

“Yeah, I just let him go. In fact, I told him to make it snappy.” I looked at her and said slowly, “That’s the business, Kelly. My business. It goes on all the time.”

She swallowed. “Somehow it didn’t seem real when you were talking on the phone. But now it’s ... real. And I don’t like it, Shell. I don’t think I like your business.”

I jammed my cigarette out in the tray. “Sometimes I don’t like it myself. But it isn’t just my business, Kelly. It’s the way the world is—and there isn’t any ‘underworld,’ just this world, the pretty gift-wrapped one we’re in.”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“Who’s yelling.” I lowered my voice considerably and said, “I mean it’s not something hidden away, it’s the guy at the next table maybe, the fellow across the street or down the hall, a wino or a gal drinking champagne with a nice-looking boy who couldn’t possibly push dope. And, surprise, that’s how he got the money for the champagne.”

I stopped, then said quietly, “I remember something Braun said to me once. He was talking about unions and even their rank and file, especially the Truckers but most of the others today, too. He said the trouble was they were out for all they could get, instead of all they could earn. Honey, there in a nutshell, Braun summed it up. And that is also, and precisely, why there’s an—underworld.”

Finally she smiled slowly. “I don’t have to like your job, do I? Isn’t it enough if I just like you?”

I grinned at her. “Honey, of that, I’ll take all I can get.” I stood up. “Ready to go?”

“Ready.” She lifted her handbag. “Nothing to pack.”

Last night I’d told Kelly I would be moving her to a hotel. While I was with her, my apartment was safe enough. But I was going to be roaming around today. And Mink and Candy just might find out I was gone, and come here a-calling. And so might Drum’s subpoena server.

Before we left I called the Garden of Allah Hotel and reserved a villa for Miss Kay Sheldon. Then I hung up and said to Kelly, “Come on, Kay Sheldon. How’s that?”

“Sounds sinister,” she said, smiling, and we left. I took pains to make certain I wasn’t tailed, and when I take pains, I am not tailed. After a while I drove up from La Cienega to the Sunset Strip, took a right to the Garden of Allah Hotel and wheeled in. In, and out of sight.

That was one of the things I liked about the Garden of Allah. It’s big and sprawling, lovely, with a huge pool, and individual villas, complete with kitchen apartments, so that if she wanted to, Kelly could stay inside the villa and still eat.

After Kelly had checked into a luxuriously furnished villa, she talked me into one drink at the bar. “I’ve never had a drink at a bar with you,” she said. “And I feel sinister.”

It was fun. About five minutes of fun. And I would sure have enjoyed making it five hours. Maybe she was trying to hang onto this time now, put behind her momentarily all that had happened; but whatever the reason, she was gay, fun, quietly but effervescently wonderful.

She finished her drink and looked at the lipstick-smeared rim of her glass, then got out lipstick and a mirror from her handbag and fixed her lips—being very sinister about it, glancing sideways at me from the soft green eyes and carrying on something awful. She picked up the napkin her glass had been on, one of the Garden of Allah napkins, with the little minarets and bearded Arab printed colorfully on it, and blotted her lips the way gals do.

I looked at the delightful red mouth on the paper square and said, “Gad! Your lips look almost as good off you as on you!”

“I know your kind,” Kelly said airily. “You do that with all napkins.”

“Only yours, Kelly.”

She folded the paper into a small square, stuck it into my coat’s breast pocket and said, “Then keep this to remind you. And don’t look at any other lips. You can’t play fast and loose with sinister Kay Sheldon.”

I grinned. “It’s a deal.” I actually took the napkin out, looked at it—and stuck it back into my pocket. Sometimes I haven’t a brain in my head.

Ragen lived in the Hollywood Hills in a sprawling fourteen-room pile almost as luxurious as the Garden of Allah. I knew that he also owned a private plane, a twin-engined DC-3 he used for “union business,” and a thirty-eight foot Chris Craft inboard cruiser. He really made a dues-dollar go a long way. I had already phoned his home without any response, so I drove up the white-graveled half-moon drive, stopped before the white steps leading up to the big white double doors and let the Cad’s engine idle while I pushed on the horn with the butt of my Colt Special.

Nothing happened. I cut the engine, opened the trunk, got my kit of pick-locks from the trunk and went around behind the house. In two minutes I had the back door open. Nobody was home. I put the Colt back in its holster, started prowling. The safe was in a big room up on the second floor, a room with dark-wood panelling on the walls, massive furniture, thick coral carpeting, and a built-in bar. The bar was in one corner of the room, and the safe was behind the bar; it had been behind a wooden panel in the wall. But now the heavy steel door hung crookedly from its hinges, warped, edge discolored from the blast. It had been blasted, blown, a soup-job. Nitroglycerine, undoubtedly. The safe was empty.

Now I knew why Ragen had seemed to talk so freely in his office Monday night. I had erroneously assumed that Braun had broken into the Truckers Building—not Ragen’s home. It had been to Ragen’s advantage that I continued to labor under that erroneous assumption, so he’d built it up for me, even to admitting that Braun had run into Mink. The big difference was that Braun must have run into Mink here, not down at the Brotherhood’s headquarters.

So that wrapped this part of it up. The who and the when and the why and the where. All but the what. Bitsy, I thought, get me that guy with the what ... while he’s still alive.

The smog was bad as I drove down Olympic into L.A. Smog is the foul belch of Los Angeles, blowing back into its face. And blowing into everybody else’s face for a hundred miles around. It bit at my eyes with its sharp, diseased teeth, bored into my lungs, cast an ugly pall over the city. I drove past Alvarado and swung into the lot alongside the Truckers building, parked and went up the tan cement walk to the wide glass doors.

Just inside the door, on your right, is a small office, open to your view. There’s a wide counter, waist-high, and I leaned on it, looked beyond it to a couple of filing cabinets, a table, pine desk with papers, a typewriter, and a phone on it, and behind the desk a large swivel chair. In the chair, a large Tootsie Mellerbam. That is really her name. Tootsie Mellerbam. Maybe the Tootsie was a nickname, but nobody ever called her anything else.

In all the years I’d been working the detective dodge in L.A., occasionally visiting the Truckers Hq. on one kind of business or another, Tootsie had been the gal just inside the door, even several years back when the hall had been on Maple Street.

John Ragen had made sure the top men around him were jailbirds of his feather, but that didn’t apply to Tootsie. She was as honest as they come, an enormously efficient secretary. I liked her, and we got along very well.

I said, “Hello, Tootsie.”

“Shell. Haven’t seen you in a too-long time.”

She smiled. It was a big smile, because Tootsie was a big gal. Somewhere between thirty and forty, she was very fat, but on her it almost looked good. I always thought of her as a very pleasant couple.

“I was in the joint last night. Didn’t you hear?”

She shook her head, plump cheeks wiggling a bit. “Should I have heard?”

“Well, I knocked Happy Jack on his ear.”

She opened her mouth wide and blinked her eyes at me. “What? Why?”

“I think he had Braun Thorn killed.”

After a long pause she said, “You wouldn’t kid a girl.”

“I wouldn’t kid a girl. Ragen here?” She shook her head. “Mink and Candy?”

“Where he is, they are. They called in word they’d be out, but not out where. Shell, about Braun. We all heard what happened. But do you really think Ragen...”

“Yeah. You ever hear of a man named Dr. Gideon Frost?”

“No.”

“Try a couple more names.” She nodded, and I said, “Try Townsend.”

She frowned. “Sounds familiar. But I’m pretty sure it’s nobody here. Shell.”

“Try another: Chester Drum. You know anything about him? Did Ragen ever mention him?”

She thought about it, shook her head.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re a good gal, Tootsie. And Braun was a good guy. If you knew, or picked up, anything that might help me tag the boys who gunned him down, you’d give it to me, wouldn’t you?”

“You know it.”

“Even if it was Ragen?”

“Even if it was Ragen. Maybe especially. Even if it was Cesare Lombardi.” Cesare Lombardi was an Italian movie idol who practically gave Tootsie coronaries. She had seen his epic The Dying Gladiator four times, and cried every time he died.

That was good enough for me. I said, “Has there been any noise about something stolen from the Truckers or from Ragen? Not just from this building here, but from Ragen’s home?”

She shook her head. “No. What was stolen?”

“There you have me. But according to Ragen, it’s no secret. Well, I’m going to take a look in back.”

“Nobody there but Flo.” Her voice was mildly contemptuous.

Flo was Ragen’s ‘personal’ secretary, and she was about as personal as a gal could get. She typed with two long red fingernails and wore lace pants, slit up the sides. Or so I’d heard. I nodded at Tootsie, walked on down the hall toward the glass doors I’d come through last night, turned left and stopped before Ragen’s office. I knocked, then went in.

Flo was sitting in Ragen’s swivel chair, with her long, curving legs propped on his desk. She was quite a sight. She wore a tan blouse and brown skirt, and the blouse billowed out alarmingly, and the skirt hung away from her nyloned calves and un-nyloned thighs and so on. I could see a great deal, but let it merely be said that there could be no doubt that Flo was a girl.

She didn’t take her feet off the desk. She just spoke after about five seconds. Or ten. “Well, is it still there? I haven’t looked lately.”

“You haven’t? You don’t know what you’re missing...” That wasn’t what I’d meant to say at all. I rubbed my eyes, walked to the same chair I’d sat in last night.

“What do you want, Scott?” Flo knew me from my visits here before, but we’d never really hit it off, maybe because she was a gal who found Ragen jolly.

“Looking for Ragen,” I said.

“I don’t know where he is, Scott. But I talked to him on the phone last night. He gave me a message for you. I guess he figured you’d be in today.”

She paused. I said, “So deliver it.”

“It wasn’t much. Just to tell you he’d keep his promise. That’s all. You know what he was talking about?”

“Uh-huh. He, uh, promised me something last night.”

“What would he promise you, Scott?”

“Oh ... a surprise. Tell me to shut up if you want to, Flo. But what does a sharp tomato like you see in a sour apple like Ragen?”

“He’s all right, Scott. All right to me, anyway. He’s a pretty big man in the union, you know. And he’s going to be bigger. National President, maybe.”

“Is that what he told you?”

Flo frowned slightly, as though wondering if she could be saying too much, decided she was on safe ground. “Sure. He says six months from now he’ll be in. He’s already got a lot of the boys, friends, delegates, lined up.”

“He just might make it,” I said. “If Mike Sand gets pushed out. Or pushed. And if Ragen lives.”

“Why wouldn’t he live?”

“A number of guys would like to kill him. You know he’s knocked off half a dozen people himself, don’t you?”

“I never saw him.” I guess that was enough for her; he was nice to her, and she’d never seen him kill anybody. There are gals like that. She added, “I’m getting a crick in my neck, looking round at you like this.”

She was sitting as she’d been when I came in, relaxed, head turned to the left now so she could talk to me. So she swung around to face me, and plopped her feet on the desk again. It was just like before. Worse, maybe. It was either a crick in her neck, or a crick in my neck, but I didn’t want to be indelicate and say anything about it.

Instead I said one of the things I’d come back here to say. “What about Townsend?”

“Holt? What about him?”

“Where is he now? Still in the same place?”

“Sure. Why would he leave D.C.?”

Silently, I thanked Flo. Townsend was Townsend Holt. I remembered he was some kind of bigshot in the Truckers head office in Washington—and very close to president Mike Sand. So he was the guy Ragen had been talking to by phone last night, and that did not seem a happy development for Sand.

I said, “Drum fouled up the play last night, Flo. Ragen tell you about it?”

“Drum? What are you talking about? What do you mean he fouled up the play?”

She had a worried look on her face now—I also looked at her face—and right then she clammed. Either she’d merely decided she’d said too much, or else the mention of Drum had jarred her into silence.

Another minute’s conversation with Flo developed nothing except further strain on my eye muscles. She had clammed. I thought peaceful, empty thoughts for a while and got up, walked to the door.

“Thanks, Flo,” I said.

“For what?”

I grinned at her. “What do you think?”

Tootsie waved at me when I stopped by the front desk. I said, “Honey, the Townsend I asked you about is Townsend Holt. Now does it mean anything.”

“Townsend Holt? Of course. He’s the top P.R. man in the head office.” She made a face. “I shouldn’t have missed that one—but I thought you meant it was somebody in the local. Shell. I didn’t even think of the D.C. people.”

“What are he and Ragen up to?”

“Are they up to something?”

“You can bet on it, but I don’t know what it is. If it were routine, though, on the level, I figured you’d know what was going on.”

“Probably I would, unless Ragen didn’t want me to know. But I haven’t heard a thing.” She paused. “I wonder if it could have anything to do with Marker.”

Marker was Rex Marker, a vice-president of the local, another one of the boys. He’d been pretty close to Ragen for a while, virtually his second-in-command, but from what I’d picked up here and there, I gathered they were a bit wider apart these days than formerly.

“What’s with Marker?” I asked Tootsie.

“I don’t know. He hasn’t been around for a few days is all. Ragen isn’t happy about it, has some of the men trying to locate him. One of them asked me if I knew where he was.”

That reminded me. “Ragen’s got his disorganizers looking for a safe-cracker, too. I don’t suppose that would have hit your ears, though.”

“First I’ve heard.” She frowned. “A safe-cracker?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Tootsie. If you get anything, call the Spartan and leave word, huh? And I’ll give you a ring or two here.”

“You’re on. If it’s late, phone me at home. I’m in the book. The only one.” She grinned. “I’ll keep my ears open.” Then she smiled one of those wide smiles and added, “If I hear something good ... what’s in it for me?”

It was a gag. She wouldn’t have done it for money. So I said, “What else? I’ll take you to see The Dying Gladiator.”

“Oh, would you?” She leaned forward, a pleased look on her face. Suddenly I realized she was serious.

I hesitated only a moment, then I said, “I sure will, Tootsie.” And it sort of surprised me, but I was serious, too.

I had reached the Cad and was opening the door when it happened.

I had walked out through the wide glass entrance of the Truckers Building and down the tan cement walk to the lot, and I had been thinking of that story about Flo wearing lace pants, slit up the sides. I had been thinking it was a lot of baloney.

So, in a way, it was understandable that I didn’t notice the car, or the guys in it, or the gun.

I heard the gun, though. And I reacted the way I always react when I hear a gun go off. I moved. I moved fast. I let go of the Cad’s door handle, leaped to my right, turning, hand slapping the .38 under my coat. It was broad daylight, with dozens of people nearby, and surprise mingled with shock in my brain. I snapped my head around toward the street. The shot had come from behind me, across Olympic, somewhere, and in a kind of blur as my head swung around I saw them.

At least I saw the car, got a quick flash of a dark sedan and two men inside it, movement in the car and the glint of light on metal in one man’s hand. My fingers clamped on the butt of the Colt and I flipped it out, thumbing back the hammer. My Colt steadied on the car. I saw the faint blaze of fire from the gun across the street, faint in the sunlight, and then the sun exploded.

With that tremendous flare of light something slammed the top of my head like a hammer. There was the blinding light, and then darkness that somehow got darker and darker. I knew I was falling. But I never knew when I stopped.

Time is warped at a moment like that. It was only a moment. But between the light and the blackness I had time to know I had been shot, and time for one other thought.

It was that this was a hell of a time to be thinking about Flo’s lace pants.

CHESTER DRUM IS HOODWINKED

Washington, D.C., 2:15 P.M., Tuesday, December 15

You come out of it slowly, a little at a time.

You come out of it like Time fashioning the long hard years out of seconds and minutes, like lights going on one by one in a city at dusk to alter the fear and loneliness of night.

I felt cold all over. I heard a voice, no particular voice as yet, just a voice echoing broken strings of words. “Come on, come on ... please ... heavy ... can’t move you...”

And then the cold centered on my face and what it was was snow, and I felt hands rubbing the snow against my face. The voice went on pleading. It belonged to Hope Derleth, and she was saying, “You’ve got to come out of it. I can’t move you. You weigh a ton.”

I told her to go away. The snow she was rubbing against my face began to sting. My legs tingled, and then I could move them. The pain had not started yet. It would come later. I showed what a very tough guy I was by standing up without help, brushing off the shoulder she offered me for support. She opened the door of the car for me. I fell in. That put my head in the driver’s seat. The sleeve of her camel’s hair coat brushed it and she helped me into a sitting position. A moment later she started driving.

“Where are we, Florence Nightinghood?” I said, inordinately proud of the double allusion.

“Six or seven miles from nowhere on a service road along Shirley Memorial. They left you there. Glasses and Rover.” Surprise and indignation made her voice hoarse. “To freeze to death, I guess. I followed them.”

It was a dream car gliding smoothly over a dream world. She turned on the windshield wipers and they metronomed me into drowsiness. “Here comes the snow. Don’t get any wrong ideas, mister. I want to find out about my brother Charlie. He didn’t come home this morning. That’s why I went after you.”

“What happened to Marie Cambria?”

“Who?”

“Girl who took a shot at Abbamonte.”

“Some rank-and-filers heard the commotion, came upstairs. Morty took her gun away and they let her go. They can’t stand any kind of publicity now. What was the matter with her, anyway?”

“Nothing much,” I said, because she sounded exasperated with Marie Cambria. “Glasses and Rover beat her husband to death last night.”

There was a silence. I said, “How come the rank-and-filers didn’t keep me from going for a ride?”

“They didn’t see you. Glasses and Rover dragged you into Mr. Abbamonte’s office, then out the back way. What’s your name?”

“Chet Drum.”

That finished the conversation. I began to ache—my jaw, the side of my neck, my entire torso, my thigh where I’d turned it into Glasses’ brass knucks. The snow flying against the windshield like smoke and the swish-thump of the wipers made me drowsy again. It seemed a very short time later when Hope Derleth said, “Here we are.”

We got out of the car. She watched me move and decided she didn’t have to support me. The cold air made me feel better. I took a few deep breaths, then we went into the small, dim lobby of the walk-up apartment house where she lived with her brother Charlie. Finally she opened their door and called hopefully, “Charlie?”

There was no answer. We went inside and shut the door. This put us in a surprisingly large living room furnished in maple colonial. The wood of the chairs had a well-rubbed, lustrous, cared-for look. It was very warm in there. I took off my coat and looked at my watch. Two-thirty of a dim, snowy afternoon, Tuesday the fifteenth of December, and apparently no bones broken.

Hope Derleth brought me a large drink. It was almost all Scotch, as hairy as a tarantula and with not quite enough water to float one. I drank it so fast her eyes widened. She brought me another and I sat down with it.

“Just a minute,” she said. With her back to me she dialed a phone. The tight blue jacket of her suit hour-glassed her waist and hips. When I decided they would be very nice to hold in your hands, I suspected I was beginning to feel all right.

“Hello, is Charlie Derleth there? This is his sister. Oh. Oh, I see. No, I just thought he might have been working day-shift today. Thanks.” She hung up. “He isn’t there, Mr. Drum. Would you know where he is?”

“Not me.”

“What were you snooping around for? If Charlie’s in trouble, I want to know.”

“Your brother ought to be able to take care of himself. He’s old enough to be your father.”

“That’s just it,” she said, surprising me. “He is old enough to be my father. Or almost. All my life he’s taken care of me, given me the things he could never have. If he’s in trouble now, I want to help him.”

“Last night Glasses and Rover beat a cabbie named Hank Cambria to death. Either your brother was an accessory-after-the-fact or did what they asked him to without asking questions.”

“Oh, no. What did he do?”

“They used Cambria’s taxi-radio to get a tow-truck. Their car was disabled. The call went through the Veterans’ Cab switchboard. Charlie must have taken it.”

She just stared at me.

“Where was Townsend Holt after five o’clock yesterday afternoon?” I asked.

“How should I know? I only work for the guy.”

“And then of course,” I said, “there is the Brotherhood of Truckers.”

“I told you I know the heat’s on,” she said crossly. “They’re even going to call a strategy conference pretty soon, because all the answers better jibe when the Hartsell Committee starts its public hearings. Why, I’ve even put through a few calls to the Coast. They’re really getting together on this.”

“Calls for who? Mike Sand?”

“No. For Mr. Holt.”

I took a stab. “Does Charlie owe Abacus Abbamonte any money?”

She looked alarmed. She knew what it meant to be in debt to Abbamonte. “I don’t know.”

I backed off a little. “Whom did Holt call on the Coast?”

“John Ragen, the Brotherhood Local president in Southern California. I ... I guess you’d call Mr. Holt the coordinator of strategy. He’s Mike Sand’s right-hand man. So what about it?”

But Holt, I thought, had set up a phony snatch on Mike Sand’s wife. To win her confidence—for Sand or opposed to him? “You usually log calls?” I asked.

She lit a cigarette. Either the smoke or dawning suspicion narrowed her dark eyes. “Yes. Yes I do.”

“What about Holt’s calls to Ragen?”

She shook her head. “Not those. Mr. Holt asked me not to.”

For a while she was silent, smoking thoughtfully. Then she unbuttoned her blue jacket and folded it neatly across the arm of a chair. Under it she wore a very pale blue blouse, the kind you could see the shoulder straps of her bra through. My eyes were drawn to what the straps held up.

She said coldly, “Will you please stop staring at me? I don’t like being stared at like that.” She came lithely to her feet.

“You saved my life,” I said lightly. “Now you’ve got to make the rest of it happy.”

“I know the joke,” she said. “I guess I know them all. Charlie’s a great one for jokes.” She jabbed her cigarette out. “If you’re wondering why I took the jacket off—”

“I’m not complaining,” I said, and stood up too.—"I wanted to take you inside and see what I could do about the damage. They really gave you a pounding, didn’t they?”

I followed her through an archway and into a bedroom and beyond it to the bathroom. She talked with a sudden nervous compulsion, as if she realized for the first time that we were alone together in the apartment. “That was very stupid of me, talking and talking like that with you probably aching all over.” She switched on the light and opened the medicine cabinet over the sink. “Will you please strip to the waist,” she said nervously, self-consciously. Or maybe, I thought suddenly, she wanted me to think she was nervous and self-conscious.

It hadn’t started until I’d given her natural endowments that inadvertent stare, and she still wanted to know what I knew about Charlie. How was she to know I’d already told her everything I knew about him, which wasn’t much? So maybe, from her point of view, a subtle use of the weapons at hand was in order.

I removed my jacket, tie, shirt and undershirt, watching her watch me in the mirror. She winced when the skin below my ribs was exposed. It was as blue as a Monday after a hard week end.

“Oh my,” she said. “Does it hurt?”

“I’ll live. And you ought to see the colors a couple of days from now.”

“All purple and yellow,” she said, making a face. “I know.”

She took a tube of ointment out of the medicine cabinet and unscrewed the cap. “Don’t worry, it’s the new, non-sticky kind,” she said, and touched me tentatively with a gob of the ointment on her fingertips. “Hurt?”

It was just cold, and I said so. She began to rub it in gently. Her fingers moved in a smooth, round, soothing motion. Then she looked up at me. “You’ve got quite a build.”

“Okay,” I said. I took her blue-bowed glasses off and placed them on the edge of the sink. Then I leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips.

She slapped my face, not hard and not really in anger. “When I put up the signal for passes,” she said coldly, “I use capital letters.” She could go hot and cold as fast and as thoroughly as any girl I have ever known. Then she asked, not quite ingenuously, “What did you mean by ‘okay’?”

So I kissed her again. Her arms remained at her sides, but she didn’t fight me. She just wasn’t there. She stepped back, a smile as meretricious as a hooker’s parted her lips, and she looked up at me. The smile left her lips slowly. She was a small girl, but very lovely. She looked like a girl who had just tasted an exotic food and couldn’t make up her mind whether she liked it or not. Then she took a step toward me. Her arms went up over my shoulders and she got up on tiptoes. If her two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back was supposed to get me erotic, it succeeded.

I kissed her a third time, hard. This time her lips had their own idea about what ought to be done. It was a delightful idea. Her fingers wandered up the back of my neck into my hair. Finally she broke away from me. Her smile was different. Her eyes were narrow gleams and her full lips looked thicker and redder. Either she belonged in Hollywood or the situation had got out of hand. “Now hold on, Hope girl,” she said softly. “You’re supposed to use it, not lose control of it.” The second smile, not at all meretricious, also went away. “Which the man ought to thank you for telling him. Or maybe you just ought to shut off the talk-faucet.”

She let go of the bright, clever monologue. We looked at each other. Sometimes it is like that. What you plan is one thing and what you get is something very different and very much better. I took her hand. We turned as if this had all been staged, and moved through the doorway. Our hips bumped there. Then we were in the bedroom. Buttons ran down the back of the pale blue blouse. I took care of them. Her skin was pale and creamy smooth. She pivoted toward me and let me slide the blouse off her arms.

That was when the telephone extension on the night-table rang.

Neither one of us went quite so high as the ceiling. On the second ring Hope crouched for her blouse, scooped it up and quickly slipped into it, as if the phone had eyes. On the third ring she went around the bed, the blouse on backwards, parted in front. With one hand she held it together at her breasts, with the other she picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” She sounded breathless.

“Yes, Mr. Holt,” she said. “No, of course not. What calls? No, they haven’t been logged, you know that. Sure, of course, if you don’t want me to. Tomorrow? I see. I’ll meet you at the office. All right, yes. G’bye.”

Hope hung up and smiled at me over her shoulder. But her smile was shy now. “Talk about timing,” she said, making a face.

I sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over toward her. She got up shaking her head. “Not now. Please, Chet. He ... it kind of broke the spell, didn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t push it. Hope’s cheeks were pink. She went on talking, rapidly, nervously. “Listen, I want you to know something. I was going to ... it started out ... the coldly calculating wench was going to use what appeal and talents she had to find out ... if my brother was in trouble ... but then all of a sudden...”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

She went right on as if I hadn’t spoken. “All of a sudden it was different. All of a sudden I just ... plain wanted ... you.” Her face got even redder. “You must think I’m terrible.”

She was so damn contrite, as much about her deception as her wantonness, that I felt sorry for her. So I said, “It’s been a pretty rough day for both of us. Why don’t we just start from scratch, Hope? Dinner tonight?”

Seated with her back to me, she hadn’t moved. “Boy meets girl. I like the sound of that, Chet. But...”

Which was as far as she got. We both heard the front door open. Charlie Derleth called, “Hope? What are you doing home so early?”

Hope sprang up as if the mattress was straw and someone had touched a match to it. Her eyes searched wildly. There was the bathroom, but half my clothes were in there. Hope just stood rigidly. I took two big steps toward the bathroom when I heard Charlie Derleth shout from the bedroom doorway. Then he was pounding across the room at me, and I had to turn to meet him.

He wore a windbreaker, still zipped. The overhead light gleamed on his bald head. His jaw hung slack in amazement, his eyes were wide with rage. He telegraphed a right-handed haymaker from halfway across the room. He lunged and swung. It tore a sob from his throat. Missing me by two feet, he collided with the bathroom doorjamb.

Abacus Abbamonte stood in the bedroom doorway, almost filling it. He was still puffing from the climb up two flights of stairs. He wore a tweed topcoat, unbuttoned, and a white silk scarf. He was hatless. His girth, framed by the doorway, was something to see. He seemed almost as wide as he was tall. He looked like Nikita Khrushchev with a little hair.

He said; “Well, if the little sister ain’t home playing on office time.”

Hope’s face had gone blank. She was buttoning her blouse, not that it mattered.

Turning, Charlie swung on me again. When I caught his arm, he stumbled and went down to one knee. Tears of frustrated rage filled his eyes.

“Stop it, Charlie,” Hope said.

“You filthy little hooker!” he screamed at her. Veins stood out like white worms on his bald head. “After all I done for you, all I got to do is turn my back and...”

“You’re too loud,” I said, “and you’ve got it wrong.”

“You sonofabitch, don’t you tell me...”

“Chet, please,” Hope said quietly. “You’d better leave now. Please. I can take care of it. All right?”

I shrugged but let go of Charlie’s arm and started to turn. Hope sobbed. A small handgun had materialized like magic in Charlie’s right fist. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “I’ll kill the sonofabitch.”

Reluctantly Abacus Abbamonte drew his small eyes away from Hope’s body. He had been enjoying himself. “Now, Charlie,” he said, “be smart. No little bitch is worth it, not a wife, not a sister, not one of them. You put that gun away, Charlie.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, you fat slob!” Charlie cried.

Abacus Abbamonte moved. It was incredible. He must have weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, but he came across the room as if he weighed a third of that and had six legs. There was no place for Charlie to go, so Charlie stood waiting for him. He might have had time—but only just time—to use the gun. He didn’t. Abbamonte grabbed the gun and hit him with a shoulder. Charlie banged against the wall and off it and sat down at its base. The room shook. Abbamonte put the gun in his pocket.

He looked me over and then asked conversationally, “The boys wanted to kill you, huh? You got what they say a charmed life. Take it and get out of here while you still got it.”

Hope kneeled near her brother. His eyes were open but unfocused. I went into the bathroom and put on my undershirt, shirt and jacket. I stuffed my tie in a pocket. I looked at Hope’s blue-bowed glasses on the edge of the sink and went back to the bedroom.

“If that guy comes near you again I’m gonna kill him,” Charlie was telling Hope, his voice ragged. “I swear to God.”

“Will you be all right?” I asked Hope.

“Yes. Please go.”

“After you, Mr. Abbamonte,” I said.

He looked at me. Then he smiled. “Sure, what the hell. It can keep, Charlie. And Charlie? Don’t ever get in an uproar like that around me again, huh? Huh, Charlie? It ain’t so good for the blood pressure.”

We went out together. I got my coat in the living room and followed him downstairs. A black Caddy was parked outside and he climbed in ponderously. The rim of the steering wheel indented his belly. He started the motor, then rolled down the window. “Hey, grifter! The girlie’s got herself a nice build. She should be smart. She shouldn’t ought to waste it on a cheap grifter like you.”

I took a step toward him. He laughed. The car sped away smoothly and left me standing there in the lightly falling snow. I walked a couple of blocks and found a cab and went home.

Over my breakfast coffee I found a listing for Derleth, Charles in the phone book. I dialed it.

“Hello?” Hope said.

“This is Chet. How goes it?”

“I ... I feel like such a damn fool. Charlie calmed down a little, but first he paddled me. Maybe I deserved it at that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Where’d the man go?” Hope asked lightly.

“When can I see you?”

“I don’t know. You know what will happen if Charlie finds us together. Besides, I’m worried about him.”

“Worried about him why?”

“Maybe you know he used to be a trucker. He always said anybody who became involved with Abacus Abbamonte had rocks in his head, but you saw how they came in together yesterday. Chet, what am I going to do?”

“You can start by packing your bags and getting out of there.”

“Oh no. I couldn’t do that.”

“If it’s Charlie you’re concerned about, I don’t know what you can do.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have asked. But I do want to see you again. Really.”

“I’ll call you,” I said, meaning it but feeling impotently angry about her attitude toward Charlie.

I made another call, this one to Senator Blair Hartsell’s home. The maid put me through with reluctance.

“Morning, Senator. Sorry to bother you at home, but you’re a hard guy to get hold of at the office.”

“Always a pleasure talking to you, Chet,” he boomed. “What’s on your mind?”

“Know anything about a strategy conference of all the Brotherhood bigshots? One’s pending.”

“So I heard. We don’t know where or when.” Then the Senator added, “Tell you who really needs a strategy conference, though. The Hartsell Committee does.”

“Why?”

“Well, maybe Moody’s on to something in L.A. A guy was murdered out there Monday. Shot to death in the outskirts of L.A. He was a member of the L.A. local, but if he was on the take Moody never heard about it. Guy name of Braun Thorn. And the damn thing is, Moody saw Thorn visiting Gideon Frost a couple of times.”

“How come? Was Frost being watched?”

“Sure we were watching him. For his own protection. He managed to give Moody the slip when it mattered though.”

“Can you use the Thorn killing?”

“If we can prove a union tie-in we can.”

I thought about telling the Senator what I knew about the Hank Cambria killing, but decided against it. He’d put Moody’s opposite number in D.C. on it and with the two of us snooping around the case could clamshell on me. So all I said was, “Let’s hope you can, Senator.”

“Well, I like the sound of this strategy conference. If you can learn the where and the when, we’d like to know.” He chuckled. “We might even try to bug it. Keep in touch.”

I said I would. I had almost hung up when the Senator boomed, “Chet! About this Shell Scott guy now. It’s funny, him popping up just when Frost disappeared and right after Braun Thorn got shot to death. Maybe a couple of coincidences, but I don’t know. Moody thinks he may be involved in the Thorn killing. Ever look into it?”

“I gave him a call. He played it cagey, I don’t know why.”

“Want Moody to subpoena him?”

I thought of Scott playing it close to the vest—too close. “Why not?” I said.

“Okay, boy. Moody’ll serve the papers. Keep in touch.”

I hung up, wondering about Shell Scott. Before this case ended I would have my hands full of Scott, but of course I didn’t know that yet.

I spent an hour and a half in my office typing out the report on the Richmond case. It was eleven-thirty. I thought of Hope. I wanted to see her. I had no place to go, nothing to do, no medals to win. Nobody would care if I opened a hole in the ground, jumped in and pulled the hole in after me. “Cut it out,” I said out loud. There are days like this.

Just then the telephone rang. I picked it up on the first ring. “Drum speaking.”

“Mr. Chester Drum? One moment please for Front Royal, Virginia.”

I didn’t know anyone in Front Royal, a town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I waited with the whispering sounds of the long distance circuits against my left ear.

“Chet? This is Hope.”

“You’re in Front Royal?” I asked stupidly.

“Thank God I reached you.” Her voice was strange, utterly without inflection.

“What happened?”

“Townsend Holt wanted me to come out here. The Nels Torgesen place in Front Royal.” Torgesen was the deposed president of the National Brotherhood of Truckers who had stepped down a few years back in favor of Mike Sand. There was talk that by resigning Torgesen had avoided a prison sentence.

“They murdered him,” Hope said.

“Who? Did you call the cops?”

“I can’t. Charlie...”

“Charlie’s been killed?”

“No. Charlie, he ... Please come, Chet. Come to me. I can’t call the cops. Come to me, Chet.”

Then I was holding a dead line in my hands. I placed the receiver back on its cradle and buckled on my shoulder rig. The revolver that fitted the holster was a new one, a .44 Magnum. Compared to it my old .357 Magnum was a pea-shooter, and except for the .44 Magnum there is no handgun with a greater muzzle velocity than the .357. Some people like powerful cars. I like powerful guns, and the .44 Magnum had enough stopping power, like a rifle, to knock you down if it hit you anyplace at all. Foolish, inconsequential thoughts. I felt foolish and inconsequential. Hope was two hours away at top speed in a fast car. She needed me.

In the hall the elevator indicator pointed to the first floor. I hit the fire-stairs on the run and sprinted down seven flights to the street.

I got there in just over two hours, driving on ice and snow most of the way. A traffic cop in Front Royal directed me to the Torgesen place, which stood a quarter of a mile back from and above the road to Shenandoah Park. It was a big white rectangular box of a house with a pillared portico out front. Two cars were parked in the driveway, a Chevy and a Rambler. But there were other tire tracks, and footprints too. I parked behind the Rambler, got my Magnum clear of its rig and ran over the snow toward the house.

The door was not quite big enough to get a dinosaur through. It opened just before I reached it. A small, slat-thin, hard-faced man in a cop’s whipcord uniform stood just inside. If the .44 Magnum in my hand did anything to him, such as making him miss a heartbeat, his face didn’t show it.

“You-all better give me that thing and come inside, mister,” he said. He had a rasping voice that went with the hard face but not with the Virginia drawl.

He held his hand out. It was a small hand. The skin looked like leather. I didn’t give him the Magnum. He shrugged and turned his back, on it, as if he knew I would follow him meekly. I spun around. A uniformed figure was running through the snow toward my car. Another one passed him on the run, heading toward me. This one held a revolver that trailed a lanyard from its butt to his belt in his hand.

“Drop it, mister!” he shouted.

He came up to me panting. I gave him the Magnum. Scowling down at it, he said, “What the hell you doing with a Magnum, planning to hunt rhino?”

The slat-thin, hard-faced cop turned around and laughed. He stood in a dim hallway just beyond the door. At the far end of the hall light glowed and I could see the gleam of sun on glass.

“Lets have a make on him, Lindzey,” the little hard-faced cop said in that odd mixture of rasp and drawl.

The cop called Lindzey put my Magnum .44 in his coat pocket and showed me the palm of his hand. I put my wallet on it. He went through the cards quickly. “Chester Drum,” he said. “Private detective license 2487, D.C. Private detective license 480, Commonwealth of Virginia.” He gave me back the wallet. “A double-barrel private-eye, Lieutenant Ballinger.”

“You-all better step inside,” Ballinger said.

I followed him along the hallway. Lindzey followed me. We went into a large room at the back of the house. It had a big sweep of floor-to-ceiling window. Through it I could see three police cruisers with Front Royal markings and a hearse or an ambulance parked out back.

The room was cluttered with massive leather and dark wood furniture. There was a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, and on it under a tarp lay a body. A man sat hunched over a teak desk drawing a diagram of the room on blueprint paper. Between him and the body on the rug a stand of fireplace tools lay on its side. The wrought-iron shovel and brush were where they belonged. The heavy poker was on the floor between the tool-stand and the body. Its black tip gleamed dully with blood.

“Where’s Torgesen?” Lieutenant Ballinger asked me. “I don’t know.”

“You-all work for him?”

“No. I never even met him.”

“What are you doing here then?”

I reached for my wallet again. That made Lindzey reach for his gun. “Take it easy,” I said. “All I want is the wallet. There was something you missed.”

I showed Ballinger the Special Investigator ID card I’d got from Senator Hartsell’s office. “That’s what I’m doing here.”

Ballinger gave the card back to me. He stooped suddenly over the body and pulled the tarp back. “Know him?” he said. I looked, and shook my head. The dead man had been young, not out of his thirties. No one had shut his blankly staring eyes. Something hard and heavy—probably the poker—had dented the side of his head above the left ear. There wasn’t much blood.

“Name of Townsend Holt,” Lindzey said.

“You-all investigating him?” Ballinger asked me.

“Among other things,” I said. I wondered where Hope was. If they knew she’d been here, they kept the fact to themselves. “The nature of my investigation is confidential. Why not check me out with the Hartsell Committee?”

Lindzey looked at Ballinger, who shrugged. “A Senate Investigation?” Lindzey said. “It ends at murder, don’t it?”

“Exactly what were you-all doing down here?” Ballinger asked.

“Confidential work for the Hartsell Committee,” I told him.

“One of those,” Lindzey said. “Downtown, Lieutenant?”

Ballinger nodded slowly. “I reckon.”

They took me outside the back way. The air was cold and bracing, the sky clear. You could see a long way to the white humps and ridges of mountains in Shenandoah Park.

“You hit him in the head?” Lindzey asked suddenly.

“Sure. I came back here because I figured this was the best place to hide out.”

Lindzey got into the back of one of the police cruisers with me. The heater was on. A driver sat over the wheel in front.

“You know where,” Lindzey said.

We started rolling.

HIGH-FLYING SCOTT

Los Angeles, 1:30 P.M., Tuesday, December 15

I came to slowly, painfully. Throbbingly and achingly, I came to. And wouldn’t you know? I was thinking about Flo’s lace pants, slit up the sides.

Gradually it filtered back. From the Truckers’ building to the parking lot ... the gunshot, sight of the car across Olympic ... then the second shot. And blackness.

I hadn’t died after all. They’d missed my brain. Of course, it would take a real sharpshooter to hit my brain. I finally figured out where I was: the Los Angeles County Hospital down near Mission Road. There I underwent numerous awesome tests. Later I got the word. The word was, “Nasty blow, Scott, but there’s no pressure on the brain, no damage.” The speaker was a doctor, whom I knew, since I know a couple dozen of docs at the County.

“No pressure, that’s good, I guess. I can leave, huh?”

“Sure, Scott. After you spend the night.”

“Ha. I can see me spending the night in this joint.”

“I can see it, too.”

He could see better than I could. I spent the night in the joint. But before the night had really started. I remembered Kelly. By that time I was in a pleasant private room, and the nurse—unfortunately, an old hag—hauled a phone in for me. I rang the Garden of Allah, got Kay Sheldon’s villa. Kelly answered on the first ring.

“Shell, honey,” I said. “Everything all right?”

“Yes. Except my nerves are hanging out. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call. Where are you, Shell? I’ve been worried about you.”

“I’ll tell you. But first, everything is now under control. All is dandy.”

“Now, what do you mean, now?”

“Well, I got shot at. Are you listening?”

“What happened!”

“Like I said, I got shot at. In, actually. A mere bagatelle, but I’m in the hospital—”

"Shell! In the hospital?"

“I told you, all is dandy. I just wanted you to know why I won’t be around tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Are you badly hurt?”

“Of course not. It was just a flesh wound, anyway. They shot my head, but all it hit was fat. A glancing blow, at that.”

“You must be all right. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re not hurt at all. What does your nurse look like? You have a nurse, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” I said, thinking of my nurse. “Did you miss me?”

“Of course.” Her voice got gentle. “Shell, you’re really all right? Will you ... look the same?”

“Yes, unfortunately. Except to an extremely tall man looking down at me. It’s really nothing. See you tomorrow.”

“Oh, Shell! Can’t you be serious?”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll be serious. Good-by, honey.”

“’Bye...” But she didn’t hang up just then. First she said a few things in her soft, cool voice, the voice that kind of pattered, I thought, lightly over the words. Kelly was less shy on the phone. And her words were sweet.

I was discharged from the L.A. County Hospital, with a bandaged headache, at eight a.m., Wednesday, December 16. Fully dressed, up to and including a loaded .38 Colt Special, I walked down the hospital steps. First, though, I looked all around very carefully. From now on I was going to look around very carefully.

While in the hospital I’d done some phoning, without learning anything new. The police had no lead to the men who’d shot me, and were getting nowhere on the Braun Thorn killing. I had by now phoned the Ambassador Hotel twenty or thirty times, and had left my number for Alexis to call. But she had not been in at any of those times, and there’d been no call from her for me. It was as though she hadn’t even come to my apartment, almost as if she’d never existed. And for the first time I began thinking, seriously, that she might be dead.

I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on when Kelly and I had enjoyed our drink at the Garden of Allah bar, so I went to the Spartan and changed clothes, then concentrated on the search for Dr. Gideon Frost. I phoned, or later saw, all my contacts who’d been running down leads to Frost. There were blanks from every check I’d gotten under way, all the leads had come to dead ends. From Downtown I phoned the Spartan again—and this time B had left his message. Bitsy. I dialed his number and waited anxiously. When he answered the phone, relief swept over me.

“This is Scott, Bitsy. Did you get it?”

“Yeah. That dude was tougher to find than canned goods in a cat-house. But I made him.”

I didn’t ask him how. You don’t ask the Bitsy’s how. I said, “Who and where?”

“Blue Eye Louie, 1266 Guirado, Apartment 14 upstairs in back.”

The rest of it was easy.

Guirado is in the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles. I found Blue Eye there, told him who I was and why I’d called on him, and that Ragen’s gunmen were probably not far behind me. He’d been a friend of Braun’s and knew my name, so in a couple of minutes he told me his story. Braun had asked him to blow the safe at Ragen’s home; he didn’t know why, but because of his liking for Braun he’d done the job Saturday night. He’d left Braun at Ragen’s, at nearly midnight, but before leaving got a look at some of the stuff inside the safe. Blue Eye told me there were some papers, but the thing he got a good look at was some tapes.

When Blue Eye reached that point I asked him, “What kind of tapes?”

“Recording tape. Like for music, you know?” He grinned. “Don’t seem likely it was music, does it?”

“Not in a crib. Especially Ragen’s crib. These were regular spools of recording tape then?”

He nodded. “Braun grabbed those first thing. Excited. Stuffed them in his pockets and that was the last I saw. When I left he was digging into the box, looking for more.” He looked at the floor. “I didn’t think there’d be no trouble. I should of stayed with him.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Louie. You just did what Braun asked you to. That’s the way he wanted it.”

He stood up, put out his cigarette. “That’s all of it, Scott. Time we were moving.”

A little after three p.m. I reached the Garden of Allah, walked past the big swimming pool and on to Kelly’s villa. She let me in, and it was five minutes before we got away from the door. After things settled down, and I’d showed her the neat white bandage on my skull—hardly noticeable in my white hair, I thought—and explained all that needed explaining, we sat on the low, modern divan and had a highball. It was so pleasant that I could hardly get up and leave. In fact, I didn’t get up and leave. Not right away, that is.

I reached the National Brotherhood of Truckers, Southern California Local 280, minutes before five p.m. Nobody shot at me on the way in.

Most of the people were gone by this time, but Tootsie, good old Tootsie, was still at her post, I leaned on the counter and said, “Hi.”

She looked up and her eyes got wide. “Shell. I heard about—you shouldn’t be here!"

“I know. I’m supposed to be at Macduffy’s.”

“Macduffy’s?”

“Yeah, they call him the greedy undertaker. He’s even got an installment plan ‘Pay now—Go Later.’ But I fooled—”

“I mean it’s dangerous for you to be here.”

“I believe you, Tootsie. Anyone here I know?”

“Just me and a couple truckers in the hall, Shell. You—you’re all right? I thought I’d die when I found out what happened.” She looked seriously at me.

“Sure, I’m fine, Tootsie. Anything develop on what we were talking about yesterday?”

“Yes.” She nodded emphatically. “Sure did.” She got up from behind her desk and walked over to the counter, a billowing mass of womanhood. She looked down the hall, then spoke softly to me. “I’ve got a lot of friends in the Brotherhood, several in the National office in Washington, and I talk to D.C. by phone quite a bit, you know. So I phoned D.C. a few times, routine calls, and asked what was going on. I just finished talking to one of the girls there.” She shook her head. “I thought we were having excitement here, but there must be as much or more in Washington.”

“Excitement?”

“You asked about Townsend Holt, remember? He’s dead. He was murdered today.”

It came at me so suddenly that I just stared at Tootsie. I felt my jaw sag slightly and I said dully, “Murdered? Somebody knocked him off?”

“Only a few hours ago. It just happened.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. I sure wouldn’t talk to Holt now, not in D.C. or anywhere else. But, more and more, things happening out here pointed straight to Washington, D.C. Washington and the National office of the Brotherhood—and Mike Sand. Washington and Holt. Washington and the Hartsell Committee. For a moment the thought brushed my mind: Washington and Dr. Frost ... maybe?

Tootsie was saying almost gaily, as if excited, herself, “I heard that other name again, too. That Drum you asked me about.”

Mentally I added: Washington, and Chet Drum. “What about him?”

“I just hung up the phone before you walked in, Shell. An old girl friend of mine works in the Truckers’ Headquarters on New Jersey Avenue there in D.C. She’s in Public Relations, and when she heard about Holt getting killed, she naturally checked, talked to the police and all.”

“That’s part of her job?”

“Not exactly. She works under Hope Derleth, Townsend Holt’s number-two man in Publicity.” Tootsie smiled slightly. “Only she doesn’t look anything like a man. I’ve seen her. Wow. Anyway, Holt wasn’t there—naturally; he was off in Front Royal. And Hope Derleth was gone, too, so my friend was temporarily in charge of the office. Well, when your Public Relations Director is murdered, that’s about the worst public relations you can get.”

“It sure isn’t good.”

“So she learned everything she could from the police and all and she said that just a couple of hours or so after they found Holt’s body, the police took this Drum to jail.”

“Jail? Where?”

“Right there in the town where it happened! Holt was killed in a place called Front Royal, Virginia. That’s where this Drum was jailed. His name is Chester Drum, by the way. He’s a detective.”

“Yeah. I know that. Why’d they lock him up? He kill the guy?”

“My friend didn’t know anything about that. But here’s the funny thing. Do you know who Eric Torgesen is?”

“Any relation to Nels Torgesen?”

“His son.”

Nels Torgesen, I knew, had been for years the crooked national president of the Brotherhood of Truckers. It was not likely that son Eric was a fine, true-blue, upstanding All-American Boy.

“Around five o’clock Drum was released from jail. The man who arranged his release was Eric Torgesen.”

I lit a cigarette, had a few puffs in silence. Then I squinted at Tootsie. “You said he was sprung about five o’clock. It’s barely five now.”

“Here it is. Back there it’s—” she looked at a watch on her fleshy wrist—"six minutes after eight p.m.”

That was right. I’d forgotten the three-hour time difference. So Drum had already been out of the can for three hours. No telling what the guy had done by now. Maybe he’d even killed a couple more people. I said, “Hear anything about Frost? Dr. Gideon Frost?”

“I asked, Shell, but I couldn’t find out anything. Just that nobody back there seems to know where he is.”

“You ever hear of Dr. Frost’s daughter, Alexis?”

She shook her head. “That’s all I was able to learn, Shell.”

“That’s all? It’s enough.”

She smiled, pleased. Looking happily at me she said, “Would you say I came up with something really good, Shell?”

“You bet it’s good, honey. You really came through for me in fine style.”

She smiled one of those wide, happy smiles of hers. Too bad she wasn’t better looking. And about fifty pounds lighter. She was really a nice gal.

“And I appreciate it,” I added. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you, Tootsie.”

The smile got a little pinched, and she gave me an odd look. Not exactly odd, just ... different. I didn’t get it. She looked as if she’d remembered this was her day off, and she shouldn’t have been working. Or a small ant had bitten her. Or as if a tooth had just started hurting her. That was probably the closest; it was the kind of expression people get on their faces when a tooth gives a small sharp twinge.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got a busy night ahead of me.”

She was still looking at me.

I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh. Oh, nothing.” She glanced away, then back at me. “I guess I was just thinking that you look a little bit like Cesare Lombardi.”

“Lombardi?” Then I remembered the name. He was the egg in The Dying Gladiator. I grinned at her. “You mean I look like I’m dying?”

“No. I just ... Is there anything else I could do?” Her voice sounded funny.

“You’ve done plenty, honey. I don’t suppose you’ve heard any news of Ragen or his monkeys.”

“No. If I hear anything, you could call me.”

“Okay. Don’t go asking any more questions. Just keep your ears open, that’s all. Don’t take any chances.”

She didn’t say anything.

“So long,” I said. “I’ll see you around.”

Tootsie still didn’t say anything. I went out.

I stopped in a bar, had a beer and phoned a man named Patrick Donovan, a member of the Truckers union, and driver for Pioneer Trucking lines. He’d been Braun Thorn’s closest friend. I told Pat I was having trouble locating Ragen and his gunmen, Mink and Candy, asked him if he could lend a hand by putting some of the other truckers to work looking for signs of the bums. He was enthusiastic about the idea, said he could probably find forty or fifty men who would keep their eyes peeled for Ragen and Company.

I hung up, finished my beer and started to leave. As I passed the end of the bar a guy sitting there opened a newspaper and began to read the front page. Something on the page caught my eye and stopped me. I stared.

When I got it, when it penetrated, it shook me. It really shook me. Without thinking, I grabbed the newspaper, jerked it from the man’s hands.

“Hey!” he yelled.

I was staring at the paper, at a picture heading the left-hand column, at the caption and start of the story beneath.

The guy grabbed at the paper. “What the hell are you—”

I blinked at him. “I’m sorry. Really. But ... just a minute. Let me look at this, please.”

He started to say something, shrugged and told me to go ahead. I looked over the story again, and the picture. I couldn’t understand. It was too crazy—twisted, even. I didn’t get it. But it was there in black and white. There wasn’t any doubt about it.

The picture was of my client, Alexis Frost. And the caption told the rest of it.

My lovely client was—Mrs. Mike Sand.

Ten minutes later I was still in the bar. Before me was another beer and a copy of the L.A. Examiner in which the story was front-paged. It was headed double trouble for union leader, and the picture showed Alexis Frost—"Mrs. Mike Sand”—standing by her husband. The picture had been taken several months back and showed Sand in trunks.

I had never met Sand, though I’d seen photos of him before. Never, however, in trunks. And, especially in trunks, he looked like a guy I wouldn’t ordinarily want to meet. The face was one to bruise eyeballs and knuckles, hard and aggressive, with heavy-lidded eyes and a solid, belligerent chin above a bull neck. His black hair was short-cropped, and so was he short-cropped, but even though he wasn’t tall the shoulders would have been large on a six-footer. He had muscles all over him, and his chest looked as if it was made of hair.

Alexis was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, and it would have pleased me, normally, to look upon such an interesting photograph. It was interesting even now, but it didn’t please me.

In fact, I was so little pleased that I mashed the paper together in my hands. This I had to think about for a while. Alexis Frost—Mrs. Mike Sand. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find her; she hadn’t wanted me to find her. It seemed almost certain now that she’d been acting for her husband when she’d hired me. I smoothed out the crumpled newspaper, read the article again. It didn’t give me anything new this time. The first paragraph indicated that Sand and his wife were on the outs; but the way it looked to me they were still in, and deep. It also told me that former Truckers President Nels Torgesen now resided in Virginia. Front Royal was in Virginia. That was where Townsend Holt had been murdered, and where Chet Drum had been jailed, to be sprung by Torgesen’s son.

I found a phone booth and called the L.A. Examiner, got one of their top reporters and feature writers. We’d done business before, and I told him who I was, asked if he knew anything about Dr. Gideon Frost and his daughter.

“Sure, Shell,” he said. “I’m just doing a piece on the missing doctor. You got anything for me there? Hear you’re looking for the man.”

“I am, but I haven’t anything to pass on, except a headache. How come you’re doing a piece?”

“The guy was supposed to show for the Hartsell thing in D.C. and he’s suddenly missing. Looks like another racket story there to me. Frost is the surprise witness Hartsell promised a while back.”

“Not much surprise any more,” I said. “Where’d you get that?”

“Hartsell just released it. Reluctantly, I imagine, but the only thing he could do under the circumstances. If the horse is stolen, it can’t hurt to open the barn door now. It’ll be in the morning editions.”

“I just found out Dr. Frost’s daughter is married to Mike Sand.”

“So did the rest of us. Married and maybe about to be unmarried, according to the latest.”

“Isn’t it kind of peculiar that Dr. Gideon Frost’s daughter, of all people, would be hitched to one of the biggest crooks in the union field?”

“In one way, yes. I guess you know Frost is one of the top labor experts in the country.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Great fighter for the legitimate rights of labor, against the illegitimate demands of labor, and all that. The way I’ve pieced the story together. Shell, this Frost spotted Mike Sand way back—well before he helped shove Torgesen out and took over the Truckers—as a bad one, and a guy who might make the grade. It worried Frost, and it seems he talked about Sand so much, his daughter got interested. Or maybe curious is a better word.”

“Interested, apparently. She married the thug.”

“True, but that came later. First she was curious. Curious enough so she managed to meet the beast. Maybe she likes beasts. Anyway, that was it, the chemistry was there. Wham-bang, six months later they were married—secretly. Managed to keep it a secret, too, until now.” He paused, “You ever meet Sand?”

“Not yet. I’m going to.”

“I can understand what might have happened to the gal. I’ve met Sand several times. He’s not tall and handsome, not pretty to look at, but he’s enormously powerful. A vital, energetic egg—virile as a bull-rabbit, I hear. A lusty bastard. Hell, you figure it out.”

“The way you tell it, it makes sense. Make some more for me. Where’s Alexis Frost—or Alexis Sand—now?”

“I dunno. Frost originally lived in New York, came out here a dozen years or so ago. When the daughter got hitched to Sand she took up residence with him in D.C. Where she is now, I wouldn’t know. I’d like to know. See that shot of her in today’s late edition?”

“Yeah, I saw it. She’s probably in D.C., huh?”

“Could be.” He paused a moment. “That interview in D.C. was handled by a reporter on the Washington News-Herald, so it was likely there in D.C. He could tell you.” He gave me the reporter’s name.

I thanked him, hung up and called Washington, D.C. The News-Herald gave me their reporter’s phone number and I caught him at home. He said Mrs. Mike Sand had been at the Statler when he’d interviewed her. I called the Statler. Yes, Mrs. Sand had a suite there; no, she was not in at the moment.

I called Los Angeles International Airport, talked to the reservation clerk. He checked the passenger manifest for the Monday morning flight to Washington, D.C. An American Airlines Jet Flagship had left International Airport at eleven a.m., arriving in D.C. at six-thirty p.m. Monday, D.C. time. One of the passengers had been Alexis Frost.

I was lucky enough to reserve a seat on the Mercury flight taking off from Inglewood for D.C. at eight-fifty-five p.m. Lucky, that’s me.

Mike Lyman’s Flight Deck Grill at International Airport is softly lighted and provides a beautiful view, through big plate-glass windows, of the runways. I sat in the lounge section on the second floor, at a table beneath one of the windows, nursing a bourbon and water and the fine blue flame burning in me.

There was quite enough to take me to Washington now even if Alexis wasn’t there. If she was, that settled it. I had twice long-distanced the Sand suite in the Statler without any answer. I had also phoned Kelly here, told her I was flying to Washington, and other less formal things. At eight-forty-five p.m., eleven-forty-five D.C. time and ten minutes before my flight was scheduled to leave, I tried the Statler once more. And got results.

A man answered the phone in the Sand suite, and I said, “Hello, I’d like to speak to Alexis Sand.”

“Scott? Shell Scott?”

What the hell, I thought. I hadn’t mentioned my name—and that voice sounded familiar. Then I remembered where I’d heard it. He must have remembered, too. The man on the other end of the line was Chet Drum!

And everything fell into place. Chet Drum in Mrs. Mike Sand’s Statler suite, minutes before midnight in D.C.—it fit the pattern now; it even had a kind of nauseating beauty. My hand tightened on the phone’s receiver as my thoughts nipped back over things that had happened in these last three days. When I added Drum to the picture they all made sense. Drum and Ragen. Drum and Holt. Drum in Front Royal. Drum sprung from jail by Torgesen’s son. Drum with Mrs. Sand. Drum with Alexis Frost.

I said, not pleasantly, “Still going to slap me with a subpoena, Drum?”

“Unless you tell us who your client is.”

“I already told you I can’t spill that to anybody. And especially not to you.”

“That makes sense—if your client is a punk named Ragen.”

This guy was out of his skull. I said, “Drum, you sound sick. If Mrs. Sand is there, put her on.”

“Use your head, Scott, and cooperate with us. We’re having enough trouble without—”

“The ‘we’ being Sand, Torgesen, and the rest of your chums, huh?”

“You’re a little mixed up, aren’t you?”

“Not any more. And I guess you know now what you can do with that subpoena.”

“What’s the matter, don’t you believe in constitutional democracy?”

“Not your kind.”

“Scott, I’m getting more than a little tired of you.”

My steely control slipped just a fraction. About nine-tenths. “Then get the hell off the phone and put Mrs. Sand on. Kick her out of bed if you have to, but put that woman on.” I was kind of roaring, I decided.

There was a great crashing sound and for a moment I was sure it had punctured my eardrum. At first I thought he’d hung up. But in a minute the soft voice I remembered from early Monday morning in my apartment caressed my punctured eardrum.

“Mr. Scott?”

It was Alexis. That was really all I’d wanted to know. She was there. With Drum at that.

“Yeah, this is Shell Scott, Mrs. Sand. Or Alexis Frost. The lady who didn’t know anything about Mike Sand.”

“I ... can explain that. Our marriage was secret until a reporter caught me here Monday night.”

“Hell, I can explain it now.”

She said, “Have you any news of my father?”

“No. But if I did, you wouldn’t really expect me to tell you, would you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t, huh? All right, then, since you say you can explain, explain about the two muggs who followed you away from my apartment Monday morning. And took a couple shots at me.”

She gasped. “You’re lying.”

That did it. There wasn’t time for more, anyway. There’d be time in D.C. I said, “Good-by, Mrs. Sand. For now.” Then I hung up and sprinted for the plane.

I barely made it, but I made it. I got my seat belt fastened, the surge of powerful jets started pushing us down the runway. In four and a half hours I would be in Washington, D.C. That was fast, hardly any time at all. But not fast enough to suit me. Dear Alexis, I thought; you’ve got a lot more explaining to do. And Drum. For him I had a message.

I remembered I’d heard Drum’s name for the first time in this mess Monday night, outside Ragen’s window. Just two nights ago. It was funny how little it had meant to me then.

And how much it meant to me now.

I was on my way to Washington, the Brotherhood of Truckers, Mike Sand, and no telling what else. On my way to Alexis Frost ... to Mrs. Mike Sand.

And my pal. My buddy. The doublecross I had to bear.

Chet Drum.

DRUM IS FIT TO BE TIED

Front Royal, Virginia, 4:00 P.M., Wednesday, December 16

The lockup was on the second floor of the police station in Front Royal. “Right next to the other one,” Lindzey told the turnkey, who was a fat balding man with a red face and a fringe of pink-gray hair.

“What’s the charge?” I asked.

“We can hold you without one a piece,” Lindzey said.

“I get to make a call?”

“Not until we book you,” the turnkey told me.

“What the hell,” Lindzey said. “Go on and use the phone.”

I called Senator Hartsell’s office. The Senator wasn’t in. I told Luscious that Townsend Holt had been murdered in the Torgesen place in Front Royal and that I was being held pending charges. She said they would send one of the Committee lawyers at once. She sounded very indignant.

Five minutes later I sat on a cot in a small ten-by-ten cage in the lockup. Three walls were wire mesh. The fourth had a small high window, too small to need bars, through which the mid-afternoon sun shone weakly. In the adjacent cage, one wire mesh wall serving for both, Charlie Derleth lay on the cot smoking a cigarette.

“Charlie,” I said.

Charlie Derleth rubbed a hand over his bald head, sat up and stepped on his cigarette. “I don’t wanta talk to you.”

“Did you drive out there with Hope? The Torgesen place?”

At first Charlie didn’t answer me. Then he said, “Holt was dead when I got there. I heard a car, got scared and ran for it.”

“That was probably Hope. She’d seen you.”

“I thought it was the cops at first. I hurt my leg. My goddam ankle. I almost froze out there. It wasn’t the cops. There’s a road back of the place. I tried to make it to my car. Then I saw Hope. She was going the wrong way.”

“Couldn’t she pick up your footprints in the snow?”

“I dunno. Maybe there were others. I called her and she didn’t hear me. Then the cops picked me up.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Screw you, shamus,” Charlie said.

“You got a tow-truck to haul Glasses and Rover off the Memorial Parkway Monday night, didn’t you?”

He got up to sneer at me through the wire mesh. “You’re nuts.”

“Am I? You think they have it all arranged as to who picks up the pieces when Mike Sand’s house of cards comes tumbling down?”

Charlie just went on sneering.

“Holt was feeding some kind of information out West to Ragen and the L.A. Truckers. Did you know that? If you didn’t, ask Hope. But Holt got himself killed, and unless you killed him, Charlie, that means there’s more than one faction here in the East. If they killed Holt, what makes you think you couldn’t be next?”

“I still say you’re nuts.” But Charlie was beginning to look worried now.

“Abbamonte sent you out here to do a job. What it is I don’t know. But either someone else had other ideas and cooled Holt before you could reach him or the job Abbamonte sent you to do was a phony and you were set up to take the rap—or maybe you really did kill him. You tell me which.”

“Ha-ha. Me take the rap. That’s a good one.”

“Sure. This place is a hotel. You’ve got the best room in the house.”

Fear and confusion twisted Charlie’s face. “Listen, shamus,” he said hoarsely, “the word got around Torgesen was playing footsie with Townsend Holt. Torgesen had some papers, some stuff on Mike Sand. I came out here to find it. That’s all.”

“For Abbamonte?”

“Nobody set me up for any rap!” Charlie shouted.

He wouldn’t answer any more questions. I sat down on my cot and went through the last of my cigarettes. The weak, watery sun sank below the level of the high window and it became chilly. Just before five o’clock the red-faced turnkey came into the lockup from the far end. With him was a young guy I had never seen before. Pale and blond, he was dressed conservatively and expensively. They came past Charlie Derleth’s cage to mine. The turnkey’s keys rattled and the door to my cage opened.

The young blond guy stuck his hand out. I shook it. “The Senator send you?”

“That’s right. The name is Erickson. Let’s get going, Drum. You’re a free man.”

Charlie looked at me and at Erickson and laughed. “Sucker,” he said. I was slow on the up-take. I didn’t get it then.

Downstairs, the turnkey gave me everything I’d come in with except the .44 Magnum. He knew nothing about that. The cops had driven my car into Front Royal, and it was parked outside. Erickson said he’d taken the train.

Just before we reached my car. Hope came across the snow-covered sidewalk with Lindzey holding her arm. She seemed startled to see me and Erickson. I went toward her.

She backed away as if I’d struck her. “Keep away from me,” she cried, “you no-good lying rat!”

“Wait,” I said. “Listen—”

“I see you got sprung, huh?” Lindzey said. He spat on the snow. “Big man with connections.” Erickson didn’t say anything. “Why don’t you try and spring the girl?” he challenged us. I looked at Erickson, who shrugged. “You couldn’t do it with an H-bomb,” Lindzey went on. “Know what she is? A material witness to murder.”

He walked away from us with Hope. Her back was very straight.

“What about it?” I asked Erickson.

“They didn’t tell me anything about a girl.”

“Can we call the Senator?”

Erickson shook his head. “He’s at some kind of banquet, I think.”

That meant Hope would have to remain on ice until we got back to Washington. But why had she looked at me like that? What did she think I’d done?

Erickson and I got into my car. “In a hurry?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “What’s on your mind?”

“The Torgesen place. I’d like to pay it a visit.”

“Why?”

“The girl’s brother is in the cooler. He was sent out there to find some papers Torgesen had. The Senator might want them if they haven’t already been taken. Hell, the Senator would give his right arm for them.”

“I’m with you,” Erickson said. I started to drive.

It was dark by the time we reached Nels Torgesen’s big colonial mansion. The huge white box of a house was dark too. I parked out front and we checked the back before going inside. The cop cars were gone. French doors opened out back off the big room in which Townsend Holt had been murdered. I put on a glove and punched a pane of glass near the doorknob, then stuck my hand through and turned the latch from the inside.

Erickson and I went in there. I groped on the wall and found a light switch. At that moment a car stopped out front. Erickson went tense alongside of me. “Christ, now what?” he said.

We heard a car door slam, then a key turned in the front door of the house. A man’s voice called, “Eric? You home?”

Then Erickson surprised me. Moving away from me, he said, “We’re in here, Pop.”

The man came in. He was only six-feet-four with a mane of white hair that made him look three inches taller. His eyes were a pale, almost colorless blue, he had steel-wool worms for eyebrows and a big arrogant prow of a nose pink and purple with the burst capillaries that came from prolonged heavy drinking. I recognized him right away. I’d seen his picture in the papers often enough, though not for some time. He was Nels Torgesen, the deposed president of the Brotherhood.

“What the hell goes on here, Eric?” he said. “You sent me on a wild goose chase. Holt wasn’t home. I took that whole damn drive for nothing.”

“Not for nothing, Pop,” the man who had called himself Erickson said. “You see, Holt came out here.”

“Yeah? Did you know he would? I ought to wallop you.” The pale eyes blinked in my direction. “Who the hell is this?”

“His name is Chester Drum, he’s a private eye working for the Hartsell Committee and he’s about to take a little trip with me. So are you, Pop.”

That made Erickson Eric Torgesen, Nels Torgesen’s son. I’d been suckered. Charlie Derleth had known it in the lockup, had probably recognized Eric Torgesen. And if Hope had recognized him outside, which seemed likely, that explained her anger. I wasn’t working for the Hartsell Committee, I hadn’t come out to Front Royal to help her, I was in deep with the Torgesens. What else could she think?

I asked Eric, “Which one of those comic opera cops told you to make like a Committee lawyer? Lindzey?” But I could answer my own question. It had to be Lindzey. Ballinger hadn’t been around when I made the call.

“Where’s Holt?” Torgesen snapped at his son, who hadn’t answered me. “I want to see him.”

“You’re on the wrong side, Pop. You’ve got this dream of making Mike Sand suffer the way he made you suffer, but believe me it won’t work out that way. You’re backing the wrong horse.”

“Where is Townsend Holt?” Torgesen demanded.

“Why not try the morgue?” his son suggested blandly.

Torgesen’s stare was bleak. “He’s dead? You killed him?”

“Me? Don’t be ridiculous. Holt was doing his best to feed Happy Jack Ragen the kind of stuff that could send Mike Sand to the federal pen. So were you. You think I’d finger my own father? Get wise, Pop. The point is, if they hit Holt they could try to hit you next.”

“I don’t know what you would or wouldn’t do,” Torgesen said bleakly. “Maybe you’d sell your own father out to Mike Sand.” Torgesen gazed at the ceiling for inspiration, but all he could come up with was, “To that filthy scum.”

“What’s the matter with you, Pop? I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need your help. I don’t want it!”

“Listen, will you, for crying out loud? I’m taking Drum to see Abba tonight. With Holt knocked off, Happy Jack Ragen’s up the creek without a paddle. But if you think Mike Sand’s going to pick up the pieces, or if you think I think he’s going to, you’re nuts. Because Sand doesn’t know it yet, but he’s all finished—just like you are.”

Torgesen hit him. He struck with his open hand, but his hand was big and he struck hard. Eric fell down, almost on the exact spot in front of the fireplace where Holt’s tarp-covered body had been. He got up shakily. Twin streams of blood were oozing from his nose and he used the back of his left hand to wipe them because he held a small, nickel-plated automatic in his right.

“You shouldn’t ought to have done that, Pop,” he said.

They faced each other, glaring. I took one step and grabbed Eric’s right wrist with my left hand, palmed his chin up and back with my right. He tried to kick me. I moved away from it and turned his wrist. He cried out. I got the automatic.

While he rubbed his wrist and glared at me, I removed the magazine from the butt of the nickel-plated automatic and took the cartridges out of it. “We going to pay Abbamonte a visit?” I asked.

“Not with you packing a rod. They’d never let you in.”

I gave him back the unloaded automatic. “You’re not taking me anywhere at gunpoint.”

He shrugged, put the empty gun away and headed for the French doors. His father followed him mutely. I followed them outside and around the house to my car.

Eric told me to do the driving. “Get in front with him, Pop,” he said, climbing in back himself. I’d taken the pills from his gun, I outweighed him by thirty pounds and his father outweighed him by fifty, yet he was still playing the tough guy. You had to give him that.

It was almost eight-thirty when I followed Eric’s instructions and pulled up in front of the National Brotherhood of Truckers Headquarters in Washington. No windows were lighted. An unmarked panel truck waited at the curb ahead of us. I cut the motor and the lights. A man got out of the panel truck and came toward us. Eric opened the rear door of the car.

“Jesus, what took so long?” the man complained. “I almost froze my ass off waiting.” He was a small man in a tweed topcoat and he had a whining voice. He wore glasses. The last time I had seen him he had also worn brass knucks.

“What’s the old man doing here?” he asked.

“He better come too,” Eric said.

“Well,” Glasses said, laughing phlegmily, “he ain’t my old man.”

Nels Torgesen said out loud, “They used to say yes sir and no sir every time I opened my mouth.” But he was really talking to himself.

Glasses looked at him. “Them days are gone forever.”

While I was locking the car, the two Torgesens went to the rear of the panel truck. They opened the double door and got in. I followed them and Glasses climbed in after me, shutting the doors. The Torgesens were seated on the bare floor, their backs against the front wall of the truck body. The two small windows in the double doors in back had been painted black. Glasses banged on the wall over Nels Torgesen’s head. The motor coughed and caught and we started rolling.

The truck ran smoothly. It stopped several times, probably for traffic lights. What little light we had came from a red distress lantern on the floor of the truck. At first I heard the sounds of traffic, horns blatting, three-hundred horsepower engines roaring away from the traffic light stops, the growl of big diesel semi-trailers bringing produce into Washington in the unseen night. Then I heard other sounds—train sounds. That meant we were heading either northeast out of D.C. on New York Avenue past the freight yards or southeast out of town on Florida Avenue and Benning Road. Whichever it was, we left the sounds of the shunting engines behind us. After that traffic thinned out too.

“Where are you taking us?” Nels Torgesen asked.

“To see the boss,” Eric said. “He’ll want to see you.”

In the glow from the distress lantern, Glasses looked nervous. “You hope,” he said. “The boss, he only asked for Drum.”

Eric Torgesen laughed. It was a thin, inconsequential sound swallowed by the rumble and vibration of the truck. “Matter of fact,” he said, “the boss didn’t ask for anybody.”

Glasses looked bewildered. “Kee-rist, what are you talking about?” He took off his glasses and gave Eric a vacant, bewildered stare. “On the phone you told me—”

“I told you what I had to tell you. I know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah? You better.”

Fifteen minutes went by. Twenty. We didn’t pick up any more traffic, but the road surface was good. That ruled out New York Avenue, which outside the city limits became the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and was always crowded with traffic. We might have been further north on Rhode Island Avenue, which fed Route 1 outside the city, but Route 1 would also be busy at this hour. I began to like Florida Avenue and Benning Road. They led southeast out of the city to Upper Marlboro, Chesapeake Beach and the other Tidewater Maryland towns. At this hour traffic would be light on Benning Road.

Just as I was thinking that, the truck turned, bounced over a badly surfaced road for a while and came to a stop. Whoever was driving cut the engine. I heard a door slam, heard footsteps on a hard surface.

“Hold it,” Eric called. The footsteps had stopped at the rear door of the panel truck.

Eric took a dark silk scarf out of his coat pocket. “Turn around,” he told me. Now that we had arrived, apparently without sanction from above, Eric sounded as nervous as Glasses.

I turned around. Glasses held a gun in his hand, but I only saw it for an instant because Eric slipped the silk scarf over my eyes and tied it behind my head. Glasses laughed phlegmily. “Don’t try to take it off till we tell ya.”

Nels Torgesen mouthed an exclamation of surprise and indignation. They were blindfolding him too. “Okay,” Eric called.

The rear doors of the panel truck opened. Either Glasses or Eric held my arm as I climbed out. A cold wind blew against my face. The air was damp. I could smell the brackish tidewater. And I could hear something fluttering in the wind nearby. At first I didn’t know what it was, then I decided on a flag, a flag on a high pole whipped by the strong tidewater wind. Underfoot the surface was hard and solid. We walked a little way. I touched something with my right hand. It was a cyclone fence, waist-high.

We walked a little further, then the hand on my arm pressured me to stop. I heard a pounding sound. Someone banging on a metal door.

“It’s me, Glasses. Open up.”

The door opened. Warm air and the faint smell of gasoline fumes hit my face.

“What the hell is this, a convention?”

At first I didn’t recognize the voice, then I knew it belonged to Morty, the kid who’d roughed up Marie Cambria at Brotherhood Headquarters.

“Tell the boss we’re here. With company,” Eric said.

“I’ll tell him, dads. He may not like it, but I’ll tell him.”

We waited. I had a strong urge to remove the blindfold, but decided that would only earn me the butt of Glasses’ gun. In a little while Morty came back. “Come on in,” he said. “But the boss ain’t delirious with joy.”

The door shut behind us. Someone worked at the knot of the blindfold behind my head.

The first thing I saw was a dream of a face. Halo’d by blonde hair, it was almost on a level with my own face. That was because the girl it belonged to was tall and wore spiked heels. She also had the kind of exaggerated, long-legged, full-blown figure of a calendar pinup and a face of patrician, haughty beauty that had no-sale written all over it. She wore a tan linen dress that clung electrically to the curves and hollows of her body.

“Hello there,” she said uncertainly. “You do get around.”

“Sometimes I even get around under my own power, Mrs. Sand.”

The man standing with her asked, “You know this guy, Alexis?”

“I told you about him. His name is Drum.”

The man was short and heavy-set. He was only five-six but must have weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. He had huge shoulders and a bull neck. His face was sleepy-looking, the eyes lidded and the brows puffed with scar tissue. I put his age at thirty-five. He wore a blue worsted suit and no tie. He had short-cropped black hair and very dark, almost black eyes. He would have been a pretty impressive-looking guy if he wasn’t in the same room with Abacus Abbamonte. Even seated, Abbamonte made him look anemic.

The place looked like the interior of a garage that had gone out of business. Bare cinderblock walls, green-shaded lights dangling from chains, a high ceiling and no windows, a grease-stained concrete floor. The only items of furniture were a bare wood table and a chair. Abacus Abbamonte sat at the table, its surface cluttered with slips of paper. Abbamonte was a man who took his work with him wherever he went.

“Get a move on, Abba,” the man with Mrs. Sand said. “We don’t have all night.”

Mrs. Sand patted his hand. “Take it easy, Mike.”

Mike Sand shook his wife’s hand off irritably, but he looked down at Abbamonte’s enormous head and didn’t say anything. Behind Abbamonte, the punk Morty lounged insolently against the wall. In front of him were the Sands, Nels Torgesen and son, Glasses and the big hood called Rover, who must have been driving the panel truck, and a private eye named Drum who hoped the confusion didn’t show on his face. Whoever heard of Mike Sand being scared by Abacus Abbamonte?

We held it that way for close to ten minutes. Abbamonte went over his loan slips with a stub of a pencil and Glasses paced nervously. Once, for no reason at all, Glasses laughed. The only sign that Abbamonte had heard it was that the pencil stub stopped moving on the loan slips. Glasses stopped laughing. He even stopped pacing.

“Eric,” Abbamonte said finally, tapping the table with the pencil stub, “this here says you owe me six thousand five-hundred smackers.”

Nels Torgesen gasped. “I never dreamed—”

“You kidding?” Abbamonte said. “You been dreaming ever since Mike moved in on you.”

Mike Sand laughed. It was meant to be a hearty, that’s-the-way-I-like-my-right-hand-man-to-operate laugh. What it sounded like was the choked, sob-preventing laugh of a man who just found out he had an incurable cancer.

“I’m working it off,” Eric said earnestly. “I’m working it off right now.”

“You’re doing great, kid,” Abbamonte told him sarcastically. “Why’d you bring them out here? You know you ain’t never supposed to bring anybody out here without first you ask me.”

“Drum was at my old man’s place, snooping. He—”

“And your old man is playing footsie with Townsend Holt and Happy Jack Ragen. That ain’t news.”

“Sure it is, Mr. Abbamonte. Drum was prowling around when the body was found.”

Abbamonte bit his teeth together. “What body, kid?”

“Holt. Hit in the head in Front Royal. Dead.”

Abbamonte shoved back from the table and lunged to his feet. The table went up on two legs and righted itself. Loan slips fluttered to the floor. Morty scooted after them on hands and knees.

“Okay,” Abbamonte said. “Okay, Holt’s dead. Anybody wanna cry?”

Mike Sand smiled. “We ought to celebrate, Abba. He was an opportunist. We all know how the wolves gather when a guy gets his lumps from Congress. It happened before. Look at Nels.”

“You look at him,” Abbamonte said. “He makes me sick. He should of been chilled when he stepped down, Mike. I always told ya. Know what’s been going on behind your back? Torgesen, Holt and Ragen. They been planning to move in.”

“I know,” Mike Sand said eagerly. “But that’s all changed now. We—”

“Say the word, boss,” Glasses said, “and you don’t have to sweat about Torgesen no more.”

“When I want—” Mike Sand began, but Abbamonte cut him off with a wave of his hand.

“Glasses wasn’t talking to you.” Abbamonte came ponderously around the table and planted himself like a redwood tree in front of Glasses. With every word he jabbed a thick index finger against Glasses’ puny chest. “You stupid cross-eyed bastard, the beginning of the week you was taking orders from Holt and Ragen. Every time you open your yap you wanna bite a guy’s whadyasay jugular vein. For Holt and Happy Jack. For me. For anybody or nobody. You and Rover. A couple of real brainy guys I got.”

Rover said, “You’re the only guy we take orders from now, boss.”

“How long? Till next Sunday maybe?” He slapped Glasses’ face with a hard, horny hand. Glasses took it without moving. Rover winced. Abbamonte swung around abruptly to face Mike Sand. “What you got to say for yourself, Mike?”

“I was out of town. I got in touch with Alexis, and she said you wanted to see me. That’s why we’re here. You’re a good, loyal man, Abba. You always have been. Let’s keep it that way. And we have good news for you too.” He looked at Alexis. She avoided his eyes. “My wife brought most of her father’s papers in from the Coast. Enough of them so we’ll know what we’re up against, enough so—”

“I never said I’d give them to Abacus Abbamonte,” Alexis Sand said coldly.

“Abba? Who’s talking about giving them to Abba? He works for me.”

“I wanted to help you, Mike. I felt sorry for you.”

“Abba works for me!” Sand roared. White brackets of rage ringed his mouth.

“Rover,” Abbamonte said softly. “You got a gun?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“Take it out.”

Rover did so. It was a Colt .45.

“Point it at Mr. Sand.”

Rover did that too. Mike Sand just stood there.

“What would you do if I said squeeze the trigger?”

Rover looked puzzled. “Maybe like I’d ask you how many times,” he said, suddenly brightening. “Yeah. I’d ask you how many times.”

“Okay. Put it away.”

Rover put the gun away, looking mildly and confusedly disappointed.

“You ain’t the boss, Mike,” Abbamonte said. “You stopped being the boss. You get it? Is it clear enough? Hey, Mike? Ragen and Holt wanted power; Nels is just dreaming up a storm. You, Mike, you were so damn busy looking out for number one, you kind of lost sight of the organization. Me, I got the organization in my hip pocket.”

He returned to the table and pounded a fist on it. “I got everybody I need, Mike. I got them right here, on these slips. You honest to God think I need you now? I say the word, and they find your body on a beach on Chesapeake Bay. The best thing you can hope for is to make like Nels. Just fade away slow, with the loot you got stashed. Oh yeah, and one more thing.”

Mike Sand studied the concrete floor like an infantryman studying a contour map in enemy territory.

“I want those papers you got, baby,” Abbamonte said, looking at Alexis Sand.

“You’ll never get them from me.”

Abbamonte shrugged, turning back to Mike Sand. “How would you like to see the boys here do a gang job on her?”

Glasses licked his lips. He was suddenly salivating copiously.

“You know,” Abbamonte went on. “Glasses, Rover, Morty. With you in a ring-side seat.”

“I’d kill you, Abba,” Mike Sand vowed. “I’d kill you for it.”

There was a tense silence. I used it to put my two cents in. “You’re going to let her go, Abbamonte,” I said. “You’re going to let her walk out of here, and I can tell you why.”

His massive forehead ridged by frown lines but his fleshy lips parted in a grin, Abbamonte said, “Get a load of him.”

At the same time Mike Sand shouted, “That’s my wife you’re both talking about! I’ll kill the man who touches her!”

“She ain’t your wife any more, the way I hear it,” Abbamonte said calmly. “I said you’re a has-been. More ways than one. So shut your yap.”

Mike Sand hurled himself, bellowing like an animal in pain, at the table.

He never reached it. Glasses got in his way and he hooked his left fist at Glasses’ face and the little hood fell down. I started toward them, but Morty pointed a short-barrelled revolver at me, waving me back. “Sit tight, dads.”

Rover took three long strides to Mike Sand’s side and slugged him with the .45. Sand turned and looked at him foolishly. Then Rover laid the barrel of the .45 along the side of Sand’s jaw, and Sand thudded to his knees. Rover stood over him, while Alexis, ignoring the big hood, sobbed and went down on her knees next to her husband and cradled his head against her breasts. That was when Glasses got to his feet, fumbled for his brass knucks, slipped them on and stood over Mike Sand.

“Cut it out,” Abbamonte ordered. “All of you.” His deepset eyes swung to me. He said, as if nothing had happened, “Why’m I gonna let her walk right out of here, cop?”

I looked at Morty and his revolver, at Rover and his big automatic, at Abbamonte’s almost atavistic face. But the caveman kisser and the almost illiterate speech hid a tough, shrewd mind. And Abbamonte had just declared himself in for the biggest slice of pie. He had sent for Mike Sand to humble him, and it had worked. He had tested his hoods, once loyal to Sand, then loyal to Townsend Holt, and that had worked too. He was feeling his way, now, as their boss.

I took a deep breath. What had been a dangerous situation had suddenly become a deadly one. He might have them gang-job Alexis Sand just to show he could pull it off. And he might not let me leave here alive for the same reason.

“Well, cop?” he said. “You tell me why.”

“I’m a special investigator for the Hartsell Committee,” I said slowly. “How do you think it would look if one of their guys got murdered right before the hearings? Because if you don’t let Mrs. Sand go, you’re going to have to take me out the hard way.”

Rover made a noise that was almost barking. “You give us the word, boss, we’ll do it. This is the s.o.b. who caught us on the Memorial Parkway.”

“Shut your stupid yap!” Abbamonte roared. “If you had it your way, you’d of chilled Drum right in the goddam Brotherhood Headquarters.” He looked at me again. “And if I let you go, cop?”

“You’d have to let Mrs. Sand go with me.”

Alexis raised her blonde head. “I’m not going anywhere—without Mike.”

“Both of them then,” I told Abbamonte.

“That ain’t what I mean. You know what this place is?”

“I can take a guess. If the Hartsell Committee pops into Brotherhood HQ with a search warrant, they won’t find a thing but the furniture. You’ve got what records you couldn’t destroy here, right?”

“I like a guy that thinks on his toes, cop. Maybe you and me can do business. Huh?”

That was a hard one to answer. I remembered the tidewater smell outside and the strong onshore wind. We were close to the water. The wrong answer might earn me a cement overcoat.

I shook my head. “No sale, Abbamonte. We can’t do business.”

He laughed. “You want to know something, cop? If you had made like we could, I’d of told Glasses and Rover to do a job on you. Hartsell Committee or no.”

“Can you get up, Sand?” I asked. “Can you walk?”

Mike Sand mumbled something. “He’ll make it,” Alexis promised.

I stared at Abbamonte. He stared right back at me. “On your feet then,” I said. “We’re getting out of here.”

I didn’t offer to help. If Mike Sand had any pride left, he wouldn’t have wanted that. He shoved Alexis away from him and struggled to his feet like a drowning man rescuing himself from a hard heavy surf. The side of his jaw was swollen and blue.

I took a deep breath and held it. Time went away, and the world. If Abbamonte called my bluff, the gray cinder-block walls stark and pockmarked in the glare of the hanging green-shaded lights might be all of the world I would ever see again.

“Blindfold Drum and the broad,” Abbamonte said. “Glasses, you and Rover are gonna take them back to town.”

Glasses tied a handkerchief around Alexis’ eyes. He used the black silk scarf on mine. Apparently Mike Sand knew where we were, because they didn’t blindfold him.

“Listen, Mike,” Abbamonte said. “No hard feelings. I took orders from you for years, now you work for me. I’ll admit you got one thing I don’t. You got the rank-and-file eating outa your hand. I’m gonna need you.”

Mike Sand didn’t say anything. I heard the metal door clang open. “And Mike,” Abbamonte called after us. “If the wife has her old man’s papers, I want them. You get them for me, Mike. You get them.” Then, as we left, he was talking to the Torgesens.

We got into the back of the panel truck with Glasses. Rover would do the driving. Before he shut the doors on us I could hear the high unseen flag whipping in the wind.

“Is he asleep?” I asked Alexis Sand.

“I think so. Do you think I ought to call a doctor?”

“He needs sleep more than he needs anything else.”

We were in the living room of her suite at the Statler Hotel. Glasses and Rover had delivered us downstairs at eleven o’clock, and I had helped Alexis get Mike Sand into bed. He had been conscious but drowsy.

“Can that—that animal—really take over as he claims?” she asked now.

“Sure he can. If the Hartsell Committee doesn’t stop him. If your husband doesn’t. If your father doesn’t. Your father is Gideon Frost?”

“Yes. He’s missing. I suppose you know that.”

“You hired a P.I. on the Coast named Scott to find him?”

“Scott?” She licked her lips. “I ... never even heard of him.”

“What about those papers of your father’s?”

For the first time Alexis Sand’s icy composure seemed headed for a thaw. She lit a cigarette. Her hands were trembling. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I brought them East not knowing if I would give them to Mike at all. I was mixed up. He was in the worst kind of trouble. I knew that. But my father ... I certainly won’t give those papers to Abbamonte.”

“Mike may ask you to.”

She didn’t say anything, so I said, “May I use your phone, Mrs. Sand?”

“Of course.”

I called Senator Hartsell’s home number. He answered the phone himself. “Where the hell are you?” he boomed. “I sent one of our beagles to Front Royal to get you off the hook. You were gone when he got there.”

“It’s a long story. Is he still out there? There’s a girl named Hope Derleth who—”

“I know all about her. They let her go when her brother confessed to the murder of Townsend Holt.”

“Confessed?” I said blankly. “Charlie Derleth confessed?”

“He confessed, all right. But I have something more important to tell you.”

“Where’s Hope?”

“Home. She’s under protective custody, don’t worry. The Committee has subpoenaed her. We can use that girl’s testimony. We won’t let them touch her.”

“I’ve got something important to tell you too,” I said, but my mind was on Charlie Derleth. Somehow I hadn’t thought he’d killed Holt. I told the Senator about the union hideout and how I’d got there. “It’s out in Tidewater Maryland, just off Benning Road probably. An old garage. There’s a cyclone fence in front of it, and a flag. I think I can find it for you.”

The Senator was jubilant. “That’s great, Chet. If we can pull a raid and get some of those union records we’d have something to go on until we find Dr. Frost. Meet me at the office as soon as you can. We’ll get started on it right now. You can sleep on the plane tomorrow.”

“On the plane? Where am I going?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you. Moody called.”

“From Los Angeles?” I said. Alexis looked at me.

“Right. He’s onto something big. A lead to Dr. Frost maybe. He needs help. Will you go?”

I did some quick thinking. Hope was safe. Her brother’s confession could keep. Maybe the best place for Charlie under the circumstances was the Front Royal lockup. And if I could set up the raid on the Benning Road hideout, they could pull it off without me.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be at the office in twenty minutes.”

I hung up, and Alexis said, “You told me one of the people who could stop Abbamonte was Mike. Do you really think so?”

“That’s up to Mike. You know him better than I do. He’d have to get up off the canvas to do it.”

Alexis pouted. “Mike’s tough, take it from me. How tough, you couldn’t possibly know. Don’t get the wrong idea from what happened tonight. Abbamonte’s play came like a bolt out of the blue. It was a shock to Mike, but he’s going to fight. I know him.”

As if to prove she was right, I heard Mike Sand stirring in the bedroom. Alexis went in to him and in a few moments both of them came out together. The bruise on the side of Mike’s jaw had darkened. “...rank-and-file,” he was saying. “That’s something Abba doesn’t have, and it’s something he’s not going to get.”

“Be reasonable, Mike. You need rest.”

“I need to get started.” Mike Sand was unsteady on his feet. He was holding Alexis’ shoulder and she was half-supporting his weight. He sucked in air and pushed her away gently. His face blanched. “I got to get started now.”

“What are you going to do, Mike? You’re hurt.”

He blinked, and wobbled, and took another deep breath. “I’ve got to start lining up the union stewards and foremen.”

“Listen, Mike—”

“You want to talk, ride down the elevator with me. I’m on my way.”

Alexis gave me an I-told-you-so look. Separated or not, she was proud of her man. Mike never even looked at me. I was part of the furniture as far as he was concerned. They went out into the hall together.

Abbamonte and Sand at each other’s throats. It was shaping up that way, and I liked it. I lit a cigarette thinking about it. And then the phone rang.

“This is the switchboard operator, sir. We have a call for you from Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yeah, sure, put it through.”

She did, and the next voice I heard was Shell Scott’s.

Scott and Ragen? I wondered two minutes later as he asked me to get Alexis out of bed. In our line of work you don’t go around broadcasting your client’s name, but I was a Hartsell operator and Scott seemed to swallow at least that much; he was worried about the subpoena. Which left exactly one reason why Scott couldn’t identify his client: the man who’d hired Scott to find Dr. Frost must have been John Ragen.

I slammed the receiver down and thought about that, then Alexis came back into the room. “Who is it?” she asked me.

“Scott. On the Coast.” I added suddenly, “I thought you said you never heard of him.”

“That’s right,” she told me quickly. “I didn’t. What does he want?”

“Somebody, maybe Ragen, hired him to find Dr. Frost.”

Her eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really,” I said. If she was lying, she was a smoothie. But she didn’t have to be lying. Scott, searching for Dr. Frost, would naturally call his daughter.

I gave her the phone. “Mr. Scott?” Her eyes went wide again. “I can explain that. Our marriage was secret until a reporter caught us here Monday night. Have you any news of my father?” Then her eyes narrowed angrily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Another pause while she listened to Scott. “You’re lying!” she gasped. For a moment she looked at the receiver, then hung it up.

“What was that about?” I asked her.

She shook her head, saying, “I know you saved me from a very unpleasant experience, Mr. Drum. I’m very grateful.”

“But you can’t tell me what the boy friend wanted?”

“The boy friend? Oh, I see. You mean Mr. Scott. No, I’m sorry. I can’t. You’re right, though. He is looking for my father.”

I got up. “So Mike is going to stop Abbamonte, huh? Are the Truckers supposed to jump for Joy? Mike’s been running them into the ground for years.”

Before she could answer, if she was going to answer, I got out of there and went downstairs and called a cab.

“Senate Office Building,” I told the driver.

SHELL SCOTT CATCHES IT COLD

Washington, D.C., 4:30 AM., Thursday, December 17

The jet flagship came down on the runway at Washington National Airport smoothly. It was four-thirty in the morning here in Washington, D.C., and snow was falling. Snow.

That was dandy.

I was wearing the same Southern-California-style clothes I’d had on when I’d left L.A. Tan gabardine slacks, a yellow sports shirt with bright pink goblins on it, and a tan jacket. My hind end, numb from the plane seat, started freezing almost immediately. I have been in better moods.

I slopped through slushy snow to the coffee shop inside the terminal, gulped a cup of hot black coffee, then climbed into a cab.

“Where to, pal?” the driver asked me. Then his eyes fell on my gaudy getup. “What...” he began, than cut it off.

“The Statler Hotel. And don’t spare the horsepower.”

He moved. Snow fell through the headlights’ beams like glistening white feathers. We reached the Statler a few minutes after five a.m. and a minute later I was asking the desk clerk the number of Mrs. Sand’s suite.

The clerk was tall, young, thin, and stooped. He wore horn-rimmed glasses on a thin, fragile-looking nose that appeared on the verge of quivering. He eyed me with frank and haughty disapproval, glanced, elaborately, at his wrist watch. “I’m not sure I should give you that infor—”

“Listen, friend. Ordinarily I am gay, light-hearted. But take my word for it. At this moment I am not gay, light-hearted. Either I start knocking on every door in this establishment, or you can, please, give me the number of the Sand suite.”

He opened his mouth, ran his tongue out about halfway, as if dunking it in air, then plopped it back in and said, “Twenty-six.”

I went to the elevator, up one flight, down a plushly carpeted corridor to number 26, banged on the door. All I got was an echo. Twenty dollars and a larcenous bellhop got me into the suite. It was empty. I saw the phone Drum had banged down a few hours ago, ruining my ear. I saw a rumpled bed—which didn’t raise my spirits—and a few clothes in a closet. Nothing else of importance. No Alexis. No Drum.

Back at the desk the clerk saw me coming and tasted the air again. It seemed to be a kind of nervous reflex with him.

I said, “Mrs. Sand isn’t in her suite. You have any idea where she went?”

“She left, sir. Several hours ago. I’ve no idea where she went.”

“You knew that when I asked for her?”

He nodded.

I smiled at him. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Frankly, sir, I feared you might strike me.” He flapped his tongue out, twitching a little. This boy had not far to go, and he would be gone. I said, “Okay. I’m sorry if I barked boorishly. But I’m, uh—”

“Not gay, light-hearted,” he supplied hopefully.

I said, “You saw her leave, but you don’t know where she went?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.” I turned to go, then said, “You know if she took a cab?”

He didn’t know. I went out. Into the snow.

It was still snowing at noon. I had spent seven hours getting my socks wet. That was my big accomplishment. Walking through the D.C. streets, climbing into and out of cabs, that unbelievably wet snow—it isn’t dry, you know, no matter what you’ve heard—had soaked through my clothes, my shoes, and abundantly into my socks. My ears ached, my nose ached, my lungs ached, and I guess you know what else ached. What I would have given for just one miserable, choking, strangling breath of hot smog. But I continued soggily on.

By noon I had several times phoned Chet Drum’s office, getting only a switchboard gal who told me Drum was out. The phone book gave me the address on F Street. At noon I went there. The address was in the Farrell Building, and on the top floor was an office, its frosted-glass door bearing the words chester drum—confidential investigations. But there was no sign of Drum himself. There was no other office or home address listed for him in the phone book or City Directory, and I went back down to F Street.

In the same block as the Farrell Building was a place called the F Street Cafeteria. I went in, hungry for anything hot, grabbed a steaming bowl of soup and warmed my hands and insides with it. On my way out I said to the curvy dark-eyed gal behind the cash register, “You happen to know a guy named Chester Drum, miss? His office is just a—”

She didn’t let me finish. “Oh, sure, I know Chet,” she said. She was actually smiling, as if knowing Chet were something grand. “He comes in here almost every morning, when he’s in town.”

“He come in this morning?”

She shook her head. “Do you know Chet?”

“We ... haven’t met. I’m a brother detective.” I thought about that and added, “Though brother is probably not the right word. I’m, uh, going to meet him soon. What kind of guy is he?”

“Oh, he’s awfully nice. You’ll like Chet.”

“I will, huh?”

“Oh, sure. He’s ... oh, you know. Sort of a man’s man, and a woman’s man, all at once.”

“All at once?” Obviously we were not talking about the same guy. I said, “This Chet Drum to which I refer has an office in the Farrell Building—”

“I know. I’ve been there.”

She seemed to know a lot about the guy. I said, “You wouldn’t happen to know where he lives, would you?”

“Sure, I’ve been there, too, a couple—” She stopped suddenly. “I mean, he told me where he lives.”

“Grand,” I said, with real enthusiasm. "Maybe I can catch him there!" Undoubtedly I spoke with too much enthusiasm, and it could have ruined everything. But it worked out. I smiled. “I’ll just run over there. Where is it?”

She said, “It’s over in Georgetown.”

“Swell. I’ll go over and see old Drum in Georgetown. Yes, sir. I sure bet he’ll be surprised to see me.” I laughed, as if overjoyed. I was overjoyed.

She wasn’t sure of the address, but said it was near Canal Road and described the location well enough so I could find it. She sure had a good memory for what Drum had told her.

Among other things, I thought, this Drum was a despoiler, a ravisher, of sweet young womanhood. I took another look at the little lovely. Man, it would be fun to ravish and despoil her, too.

She smiled, looked at my clothes. “Where you from, Africa?”

“No, no. Just Los Angeles. Hollywood, really.”

“Oh.”

What did she mean, “Oh,” I wondered. But I said, “Thanks. I’ve got to run. But if I have any more soup, I’ll have it here.”

She smiled with her lips and her dark eyes. Only the hope of catching Drum could have got me out of there.

I had the cab wait while I went inside the building. I told the almost pleasant but somewhat acid-faced and acid-tongued landlady that Drum was in great and grievous danger, that it was essential I get a look inside his apartment to be sure he was still alive, among other things all true enough; I just didn’t explain all of the why. Reluctantly, she let me in, but stayed at my shoulder while I looked around the place. She actually seemed worried about the guy and I wondered why—until I learned how much rent he paid. The place was neat enough, but the bed was still unmade. It had been slept in. I shrugged, thanked the landlady, and left.

National Headquarters of the Brotherhood of Truckers was clear out on New Jersey Avenue, almost at the north end of the street. The driver pulled into the big lot before the building and I asked him to wait, got out and looked at Mike Sand’s headquarters.

It was a monstrosity. For one thing, there wasn’t a palm tree in sight. It was a great, rambling place which seemed to be cracking up, and it was naturally all messed up with snow. But it wasn’t amusing. From here, from this building, stretched out lines of influence and power which could paralyze the entire continent. A word from the boss man here—after a token “vote” or meeting of a joint or executive council, of course—and trucks would stop, shipments to and from a thousand kinds of businesses would stop, deliveries or pickups of fuel, garbage, raw and refined materials, milk and fruit and vegetables and steaks, and you-name-it, would come to a screeching halt. The Truckers controlled movement of it all.

Even that which came in by ship or train or plane had to be further transported to the center of manufacture or distribution—again, Enter the Truckers. More, often the success or failure of other unions’ strikes depended largely upon whether or not those unions received Truckers support. So Mike Sand, or whoever sat in the boss man’s seat inside the building now before me, automatically became one of the most powerful men in the United States. In the world. Only the best, most capable, honorable and loyal of men, should sit in that seat. And what did we have? We had Mike Sand.

I shuddered. Not nice happy thoughts while I stood there in the snow. But, then, my socks were wet. Besides which, the thoughts were true.

I walked from the parking lot to the entrance. Over the door was a boldly-lettered welcome sign.

Welcome Ragen, Mink, Candy. Welcome, Al Capone, Dillinger. Welcome, Dracula.

Welcome, Shell Scott?

I went inside, and into a big room.

It wasn’t just big, it was huge. There were a lot of wooden tables, chairs, the inevitable coffee urn, but still the room seemed mostly empty space. Otherwise it was much like the Truckers’ big hall in L.A. About twenty men were present, roughly dressed. I asked one of them where I could find Mike Sand.

He said, “Just a minute,” and walked to the far side of the room, spoke to a young guy wearing tight jeans held up by a very wide belt, a black turtleneck sweater, and heavy clodhopper-type shoes. The young guy started toward me. I almost expected him to putt-putt across the floor at me on a motorcycle. He walked up to me, rolling slightly on his feet as if the ship were about to sink. “Yeah, dads?”

This guy sure thought he was tough. I had a hunch he really was tough, despite the getup and roll and side-of-mouth dialogue. His eyes were hard, cold. I had a hunch he’d kill a guy for kicks, saying, “Down you go, dads.”

I grinned at him and said pleasantly, “I’d like to see the boss. But in this joint, he might be half a mile away. Where’ll I find him?”

He was staring at me. “Man,” he said, “you look crazy.”

“You look pretty cuckoo yourself.”

Yeah, they were cold eyes. There wasn’t any doubt about it now. He moved a foot back, faced me squarely and lowered his head a little. For a moment I thought the guy was going to take a poke at me. He said, “You want a fat lip, don’t you, dads?”

This one was really starting to gripe my frozen butt. “No,” I said quietly. “I don’t want a fat lip. Not on either of us. But if you don’t stop leaning on me, friend, it may come to that. Now why don’t we stop insulting each other and see if we can’t find—”

He interrupted me. “What’s your name?”

I sighed and said, “Shell Scott. What’s yours?”

His eyes had widened when I told him my name. “Scott?” he said absently. “Well, now. What can I do for you, crumb?”

Crumb. That was the one that did it. “You can,” I said gently, “take me to your leader.”

It took him about two seconds, and for two seconds his face got darker and uglier, and then he pivoted suddenly and jabbed his left fist at my mouth. I jerked my head, let it skim the side of my face and started to go in on him and all over him, feeling almost happy about it.

But just as I started my fist driving a deep voice from the doorway behind me called sharply, “Morty!”

I pulled my punch. Even so, it bounced on his belly and he let out some air. It wasn’t sweet air. But then he wasn’t a sweet kid. He flicked his eyes toward the doorway, his balled-up right fist relaxed. I hadn’t taken the fight out of him—not yet—but whoever was in the doorway had.

I looked over my shoulder.

The guy in the doorway looked like the doorway. He was a monster. He actually looked almost like the “leader” I’d asked the kid to take me to. I didn’t know who the man was, but he was enormous, fat and messy, short, but between 250 and 300 pounds, and all of it unpleasant. “What’s goin’ on here, Morty?” he asked.

The kid he’d called Morty walked to the doorway. I walked along behind him. “This crumb’s Shell Scott, Mr. Abbamonte,” he said. “From the Coast. He come in and started throwing his weight around.”

“Wrong again,” I said. By that time I was next to him. He glared at me, but the man he’d called Abbamonte looked at me and said, “Wrong?” From the way Morty acted, this guy was one of the bigshots. So I spoke to him.

“Yeah. This kid’s just been fed too much raw meat, is all. Broke out of his cage. I asked him a civil question and he started slobbering.”

I got the impression that Morty was getting ready to hit me, Abbamonte or no Abbamonte. But the fat guy said, “What the hell you talking about? You’re from the Coast?”

“That’s right.”

“They talk a different language out there?”

“No, just here. At least Morty does. Look, all I asked the guy was where I could find the boss.”

“Yeah,” Morty said. “It was the way he asked. But he did want to see you, Mr. Abbamonte.”

I blinked. Something was wrong here. “This kid can’t get anything right,” I said. “I’m looking for Mike Sand.”

Abbamonte chewed on a fat lip, then said to the kid, “Beat it, kid. I’ll take care of this.”

“You know who he is?” Morty asked. “I said he—”

“Beat it.”

Somehow this was all pretty creepy. I was twenty-five-hundred miles from my beat, but just my name seemed to rub some of the guys here the wrong way.

Abbamonte said, “Come on up to my office, Scott. We can talk there.”

He led the way, out of the room and up wooden stairs to the second floor. You would think a guy that big, that fat, would have to struggle up stairs and would get to the top wheezing. But he didn’t. He took each step almost gracefully, as if springs gently lifted him up. Maybe a lot of what I’d assumed was fat was muscle. It was a kind of chilling thought.

I looked around as Abbamonte walked ahead of me. Up here, the walls were mahogany-paneled, a contrast to the rough woodwork below. Everything gleamed, and it was quieter. We walked past the door on which it said, townsend holt, Public Relations. Holt, I knew, was the man Drum—or somebody; I didn’t really know it was Drum—had killed.

I tried it out on Abbamonte. “All right if I see Mr. Holt while I’m here?”

“He’s dead,” he said, without looking around.

The next office was Abbamonte’s. This time the door told me my host was:

A. ABBAMONTE
International Secretary-Treasurer
National Brotherhood of Truckers

He opened the door and we went into an expensively furnished and very comfortable office, done in soft browns and beiges, with a springy dark brown carpet underfoot. Abbamonte sat behind a heavy desk and as I took a chair he said, “What brings you out here, Scott?”

“I didn’t really come here to see you, Mr. Abbamonte. I wanted to talk to the boss. Mike Sand.”

He smiled. “Well, you got to understand what’s goin’ on around here, Scott. Mike’s the president, but he—he depends on me a lot. You got to put everything through me.”

“I’d still like to talk to Sand.”

“He ain’t even in the building today. Take my word for it, anything you want to know about the setup here, I can spell it out for you.”

“You know who I am, don’t you? And that I’m a detective.”

He said easily, “We keep in close touch with the local in L.A. And you ain’t been exactly out of touch with them boys yourself, Scott. We got a word or two about you—and nobody’d claim you was hard to recognize.”

That made sense. I dropped it and said, “You mentioned Holt was dead. You got any idea who killed him?”

“Thought you didn’t know somebody killed him.”

I grinned at him. “So I knew he was dead when I walked in here. But I thought I might get you to offer an opinion about it.”

He didn’t grin back. It seemed doubtful that he ever grinned back. “You should of come right out and asked me about it then, Scott. Don’t play no games with me.”

“Okay, then. Who killed him?”

He shrugged. “What the hell would I know about it? Maybe you can find out and tell me. I’d like to know.”

“Could be. What can you tell me about a guy named Chester Drum?”

“Why him?”

“I heard he got tossed in the Front Royal pokey right after Holt got it.”

“Yeah.” He paused, then said slowly, “He could of done it. Yeah. That makes good sense.” He paused. “Now you mention it.” He bit a thick lip. “You hear about him gettin’ sprung by Torgesen’s kid?”

“I heard it.” That, at least, was corroboration of the info Tootsie had given me. I asked Abbamonte, “How’d he happen to get sprung by Torgesen?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on out there. All I know’s Holt got hit.”

He seemed to come to some sort of decision, because he reached abruptly for the phone, dialed the operator and asked for a Front Royal number. While waiting he said to me, “Might be I can help you, Scott.”

I didn’t know whether that was good or bad, coming from this guy, but I lit a cigarette and waited. He got his number and said, “Lindzey? Okay.” He waited another minute then said into the mouthpiece, “Yeah. Abbamonte here, Lindzey. I got a man in the office name of Shell Scott. Yeah, from L.A. He’s wondering about Holt getting hit. Thinks maybe Drum done it. What you got on it?” He listened, ran his tongue under his lip and said, “Looks like he might of done it, huh? Yeah, the connection’s no good. I can’t hardly hear you. Kane and Mahoy? Well, that ought to do it, huh?” He listened some more and said, “Be glad to co-operate. They ain’t been in today, but I’ll see they talk to you ... they’d maybe of done it themselves, but it ain’t usual for them to get chummy with no law. That’s right, I say the word and the boys jump. Don’t worry none about it.” He then hung up.

He turned to me, appearing almost pleased. “Looks like you got the right dope, Scott. I just talked to an officer there in the Front Royal can—one that took Drum in. Had to let him go, but he thinks like you do, that Drum done it. There’s supposed to of been a couple witnesses seen this Drum around there, but the officer ain’t been able to find them.”

“You don’t have any idea where I could find this guy Drum?”

“No. You lookin’ for him?”

“That’s right. By the way, you said Mike Sand wasn’t around. I want to talk to the man. Do you think he might be with his wife?”

“How in hell would I know?”

I’d had enough of this guy. And I hadn’t come here to see him in the first place. So I stood up. “Thanks for the help.” I grinned at him again. “If that’s what I got.” Again, he failed to grin back. I went out.

Thinking about Abbamonte and the way Morty had acted, I walked back down the hall to the door labeled townsend holt, Public Relations. Two men, one a big heavy ape, and the other a pale-faced little guy wearing glasses with thick lenses that looked like pieces of old headlights, were just leaving the top of the stairs and turning my way as I reached Holt’s office. Both of them looked straight at me.

I glanced at them, put a hand on the doorknob and turned it, started to go into the office. But then I heard one of the men let out a weird noise, as if he’d accidentally run a tooth through his tongue, followed by, “Lookit! Geez, it’s that white-haired shamus the L.A. local’s gunning for—”

I yanked my head around and saw it had been the big ape talking, and also saw his big hand come out from under his trench-coat, filled with a big gun, which he pointed at me. I froze, fingers on the doorknob.

The little guy was bugging me, and when he bugged you, you really got it. His eyes, behind the thick lenses, gave the impression of two small one-eyed monsters, side by side, staring at me. His lips flapped away from slightly protruding teeth, and he said, “Kee-rist! We ain’t got enough trouble?”

Finally the big guy said, “He’s prob’ly got a gun, Glasses. Go get it.”

I turned to face the two men. As the little guy nodded and stepped toward me I said, “Keep the hell away from me!” The one called Glasses stopped. I didn’t have a private detective’s license permitting me to operate in Washington, D.C., not even a license to carry a gun here. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to be caught surrounded by Truckers—who had obviously heard from L.A. about me, and didn’t like what they’d heard—without the Colt under my coat. License or no license.

I looked from Glasses to the big guy. “Slow down, friend,” I said. I glanced at the Colt Automatic in his hand. “That’s a lot of heater, and I’ve a lot of respect for it. But if you think you’re going to take my gun, without any argument from me, you’re even dumber than you look.” I meant it, but the last phrase was perhaps an overstatement. He could not possibly have been dumber than he looked. I had never seen either of these guys before, so naturally I was again wondering what the hell.

They were quite a pair, but somehow they didn’t seem to add up to two. The little guy was now peering up at me, bug-eyed behind the thick glasses, and if there was the light of intelligence in his eyes, it was a very dim light indeed. If any original thoughts had ever struck him, they had surely struck a glancing blow. They had not bounced off onto the other boy, either. No, this was a case where two heads were not better than one. Between them they appeared to have enough brains to scramble with a one-egg omelette. In fact, they gave me the impression that perhaps something like that had already happened inside their heads.

The little tableau here had lasted for perhaps five seconds, which under the circumstances was a very long time for me. I said to them, “Okay. By now you should have memorized me. But I’ll bet you’ve forgotten what I said. So I’ll repeat it—keep the hell away from me.”

They looked at each other, searching through their egg for the answer to this impasse. The little guy said, “What you think, Rover?”

Rover looked at me. He looked at me quite nastily, and that was a thing he could do well. “You’re askin’ for it. Jack.” He glanced at the little guy. “Go ahead, Glasses. If he wiggles, I’ll let him have one. Get his gun.”

Glasses took another step toward me. He really meant to do it. And maybe Rover was sincere when he said he’d let go if I wiggled.

But I was going to wiggle.

CHESTER DRUM PLAYS IT COOL

Los Angeles, 6:00 P.M., Thursday, December 17

Bucking headwinds all the way, the Boeing 707 Jetliner made it from Washington to Los Angeles in just under seven hours. I hadn’t had much time to sleep and even less to think. It was Thursday the 17th of December.

I had spent the early morning hours, until dawn, in Senator Hartsell’s office with the Senator and two of his Committee staffers and a few dozen Tidewater Maryland close-scale county maps. As far as we knew, they showed every beach shack and outhouse in Tidewater Maryland, the scale was that small. But we still hadn’t been able to find what we wanted.

An abandoned garage close enough to shore to smell the tidewater and feel the onshore wind. A large high flag whipping in that wind. A waist-high cyclone fence between the flagpole and the garage. We spent five hours on it over coffee and cigarettes, getting nothing but bloodshot eyes. The Senator wasn’t discouraged. His staff would roam Tidewater, he said. They’d fan out on the side roads and dirt trails off Benning Road. They’d find the place. But I wasn’t convinced. We hadn’t driven far off Benning Road in the panel-truck, and according to the maps the combination of shore, garage, flagpole and cyclone fence just didn’t exist.

I had gone back to my rented house in Georgetown for a few hours of sleep, then the Senator had called to say he had a round-trip American Airlines ticket for me to Los Angeles. He had called Dan Moody, the Special Investigator out there. Someone would meet me at the airport.

We took off from Washington National Airport at two in the afternoon into a bleak overcast that threatened more snow and landed in the balmy twilight at Los Angeles International Airport at six o’clock Pacific Coast Time. I carried my topcoat over my arm and picked up my B-4 bag at the baggage counter. Someone tapped my shoulder.

“I beg your pardon. You must be Mr. Drum. The Senator described you.”

I hefted the canvas bag and turned around. I saw a small, plump woman. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a warm, pleasant face tanned by the Los Angeles sun, smiling eyes and a contented full-lipped mouth. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m Drum.”

“Dan couldn’t meet you, Mr. Drum. I’m Cora Moody.”

“His wife? And call me Chet, will you?”

“Yes, I’m Dan’s wife—Chet. Dan had a couple of things to attend to, but he ought to be home by the time we get there. I hope he is. The baby-sitter’s a teenager; she has to be home for dinner.”

We drove in Cora Moody’s three-year old Ford through Inglewood and downtown L.A. and Glendale to Pasadena. The house was what is known as a California bungalow—one story, redwood, with wide overhanging eaves and a deep porch. The porch light was on. Scarlet hibiscus bloomed in front of it. Cora Moody pulled into the carport and we went inside. “Dan?”

“Your husband isn’t home yet, Mrs. Moody.” A teenager in a sweater and skirt came across the living room toward us.

“Isn’t home yet?” Cora Moody repeated. “That’s funny.” She placed her pocketbook on an end-table as I set my B-4 bag on the floor. “Judy,” she said, doing the introductions mechanically, but with a worried look on her face, “this is Mr. Drum. Chet, Judy Jaffe.”

Judy said, “Are you a private detective like Mr. Moody?”

“That’s right.”

“Gee, you must lead an exciting life.” She went into another room and came back with three books. “Well, I’d better get home.” Cora Moody gave her a dollar.

“Where are the kids?”

“Downstairs in the playroom, watching TV. Well, g’night, Mrs. Moody. Good night, Mr. Drum.”

After Judy left, Cora Moody bustled about preparing dinner. She kept looking up as if expecting the doorbell or the telephone to ring. I asked her if there was a hotel nearby where I could get a room.

“Don’t be silly. You’re going to stay with us.” She told me to make myself a drink in the living room while she fed the children. They were a couple of pre-school kids, a boy and a girl. By seven-thirty she had them tucked in for the night and came back to me.

“He always calls if he’s late. He always calls.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be along soon. Call his office?”

She brightened then and went to the phone. She dialed it and held the receiver at her ear a long time. “No answer. I’m scared, Chet. Now I’m really scared.”

“Take it easy. What was he doing when you went to pick me up at the airport, do you know?”

“He—he’s working on this Trucking Union case, like he said you were.”

“Senator Hartsell told me he stumbled onto something big.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Dan’s a cautious man but ... he doesn’t talk much.” Her smile was as weak as the winter sun in Labrador. “I guess I do enough talking for both of us.” She got out a cigarette and I lit it for her. She said, “Rex Marker.”

“Marker?”

“He works for John Ragen and the Union. Dan said he was going to break the case for the Committee. Through Marker.”

We both heard a car driving up outside. Cora Moody sighed and went to the window. The car drove by without stopping. When she turned to me, her face was white. She had been holding the Venetian blind to one side. It dropped with a rattle. “He would have called. I know it. I know something’s wrong.”

“You have a phone book?”

She did, but there was no listing for Rex Marker in it. I looked up the L.A. Local of the Brotherhood of Truckers, and dialed the number. There was no answer.

“They wouldn’t have given you Marker’s phone number anyway,” Cora said. “Guys like him don’t like to be bothered—by anyone.”

“Your husband’s bothering him.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

After a while I asked, “Does the name Shell Scott mean anything to you?”

“Scott? No-o. Should it?”

“Search me.” I picked up the phone book again. Except for the union and the missing Dr. Frost, Scott’s was the only name I had out here, and Moody had told Senator Hartsell that Scott seemed up to his ears in the Braun Thorn killing.

There was a listing for Sheldon Scott, Investigations, in Los Angeles, and another at the Spartan Apartment Hotel in Hollywood. I tried the first number and got an answering service operator. Scott was gone for the day. I tried the Spartan Apartment Hotel. Eight rings and no answer. I hung up.

Showing Cora Moody the address, I asked, “How far is it?”

“No more than half an hour by car. Are you going there?”

“It’s just about the only lead I’ve got.”

Cora Moody said, “Then you must be worried about Dan.”

“No, I want to get a line on Scott anyway. Can I use your car?”

While she got her car keys for me, I brought my bag inside, unzipped the central section and took out my shoulder holster. With my Magnum .44 in Lindzey’s keeping in Front Royal, I was back to the .357. While I was strapping it on, Cora Moody came in with the car keys.

“No,” she said with bleak sarcasm, “you’re not worried.”

“This is just a habit. Dan will be all right, believe me.”

She walked me to the door and told me how to reach the Spartan Apartments in Hollywood.

“Take it easy,” I said as I climbed into the Ford. “I’ll call you.”

It wasn’t cold, but she stood with her arms crossed over her breasts, shivering a little, as I backed the car out of the carport.

Half an hour later I was talking to the desk clerk of the Spartan Apartment Hotel. He was a small roly-poly man with a twinkle in his eye that got brighter as I mentioned Scott’s name.

“Now there’s a real nice tenant,” he said, rolling those twinkling eyes. “And brother, does he have a way with the ladies.”

“I’d like to take a look at his apartment.”

The twinkle was gone. “You can’t do that,” he protested.

“This says I can,” I told him, and showed him my Hartsell Committee ID card. “I’m a special investigator for the Senate.”

“Don’t tell me Mr. Scott’s in trouble with the government.”

“All right, I won’t tell you anything. Just let me have the passkey.”

He wasn’t happy about it, but he gave it to me. I took the elevator up, found Scott’s door and unlocked it. I found a light switch and put the light on.

The first thing I saw was a nude in oil ogling me from the far wall. I ogled her back. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it was a damned interesting bachelor apartment, what with the nude and the modern furniture and the tanks of tropical fish that shared it with Scott. I poked around for a while, not knowing what I was looking for. There was a large closet in the bedroom, and Scott’s clothes were neatly hung in there. The only thing they told me was that he was a moderate clotheshorse. But then, I wasn’t above buying a new tweed or a summer wash-and-wear when the seasons rolled around.

One jacket wasn’t in the closet. It hung on a clothes-tree near the bed, a camel’s hair job with diagonal slash pockets and narrow lapels. Scott would be about my size, I thought. A big bastard. I looked at the label. I was right: forty-four long. I poked around in the pockets. My fingers touched a paper napkin, and I withdrew it.

The napkin was white, bore the words: garden terrace room, garden of allah—hotel—restaurant, and was stamped with a blue and red minaret and a gray Arab. Beneath the blue minaret, and not part of the napkin design, was the lipsticked imprint of a woman’s lips. The lipstick hadn’t begun to flake off. It was still moist. The Garden of Allah, I thought. Why not?

I used Scott’s phone to call Cora Moody. Dan wasn’t home yet, and she was still worried. I said I would call again.

The Garden of Allah was a big sprawling heap of Spanish-style buildings with red tile roofs on Sunset Boulevard. It surrounded a courtyard of palm trees and the palm trees surrounded a pool, and there was music out there.

I headed for the office and showed my ID card to the narrow-shouldered, bespectacled guy behind the desk.

“Sheldon Scott,” I said. “He here?”

“No, sir. He was here yesterday. He took one of our poolside units. Took it for a lady. She’s here. I trust a man in your position, sir, to be discreet.”

I told him discretion was my middle name. He told me the unit number.

“Yes? Who’s there?”

“The name is Drum, miss. I’m an investigator for the Hartsell Committee in Washington.”

She said a surprising thing. “I’ve heard of you. I know who you claim to be working for.”

There was enough space under the door to slip my ID card through. It had been having a busy time.

“Really, Mr. Drum, there isn’t anything I can tell you.”

“How do you know until I ask?”

“I’m sorry.” She sounded nervous, but she had the lilt of Ireland in her voice too.

“I just flew in from Washington,” I said. “I spoke to Scott on the phone last night, and he said he’d like to see me.” That was true enough in a way. What I didn’t tell the girl was what he’d like to do when he saw me.

“I...”

“You expect him soon? I can wait.”

She laughed, but she still sounded nervous. “Sure, and I’ll show you Shell’s etchings. I think you’d better go away, Mr. Drum. I wouldn’t be about to let you in.”

“I’ve got all night,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere until I talk to you.”

She made an exasperated sound.

I waited a few seconds. She hadn’t moved away from the other side of the door. I knocked again. “Steel knuckles,” I said. “I can keep it up all night.”

She moved. At first I thought she was going away from the door but then I heard the latch turn, and the door opened. “Maybe I ought to have my head examined,” the girl said.

She was young, with a mane of red hair tied back in a ponytail with a white ribbon. Her long hair was as vividly red as any I’d ever seen. She also wore a snug green jersey dress that fit her like skin fits a ripe peach. She had a saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose which the face-powder she wore didn’t quite hide. As to sex appeal, she was an interesting contrast to Hope Derleth, though surprisingly the end result was the same.

Hope hid her voltage behind thick-bowed glasses and severely cut suits like a don’t-touch-the-merchandise sign. This one displayed her lush figure ingenuously, like a teenager who had matured overnight and didn’t know quite what to do with all the equipment.

But I’ve said the end result was the same, and it was. Because the snug green dress worn so ingenuously, covering what it covered or tried to cover with such frank happy awareness, gave the same message as Hope’s cheaters and severely tailored suits. The message was: I dare you to keep hands off.

She shut the door behind me and waved a hand airily. “All of a sudden private detectives are crowding into my life. The line forms on the right, men.” But that was like her clothing too: as a defense mechanism it was as effective as Hope’s get-up and the way Hope could cut you down with a few icy words.

“Is one of them Dan Moody?” I said.

“Moody? I never heard of him.”

“Umm-hmm. Pardon me while I go out of character for a minute, but the first thing I have to do is use your phone.”

I used it to call Cora Moody. Dan still hadn’t come home. I gave Cora the number and extension of the phone I was using and told her to call as soon as he did.

“So you never heard of Dan Moody?”

“No. I already told you. Who is he?”

“Another private dick. A Hartsell Committee op. Where’s Scott?”

Her slim shoulders shrugged under the green dress. “Shell is out of town.”

“Out of town where?”

“Just out of town, Mr. Drum.”

We both smiled. I said, “I’m supposed to have a pretty good cross-questioning technique. But it looks like you won’t tell me the time of day. Can you at least tell me your name?”

“It’s Kelly.”

“Miss Kelly?”

“Just Kelly. That’s my first name.” Kelly’s eyes were friendly, but she seemed poised and ready for trouble. “Do you want some fruit or a drink or something? I could call room service.”

I shook my head, then said quickly, trying to get her off balance, “Do you and Scott spend much time calling room service?”

She didn’t bat an eyelash. “Shell’s a good friend of mine.”

“Good for Shell. He’s looking for Gideon Frost, isn’t he?”

“No comment, as the man on the TV interview said.”

“Why fifth-amendment me, Kelly? I’m trying to find Frost too.”

“Sure, and you’ve got a whole hatful of questions and I’ll just give you the same no comment to all of them.” Her laughter was soft and low, like her voice. “I’m as hard to get an answer out of as a leprechaun, when I want to be.”

“Why do you want to be?”

“No comment. There, you see? I told you.”

“It’s easy to get an answer out of a leprechaun. But he tricks you into taking your eyes off him, and then he disappears. I’m not going to do that.”

“What? Disappear?” But she knew what I meant, if the smile in her eyes meant anything.

“No. Take my eyes off you.”

I took a step closer to her, and she got the wrong idea. “Then look but don’t touch, Mr. Drum. Just because Shell took this room for me, don’t make any mistakes. I said we were old friends.”

“Good for Shell,” I said again, and meant it. If being Kelly’s old friend meant she’d share a room with you, I was all for it.

I offered Kelly a cigarette and lit it for her and one for myself. Then I said, “I flew out here to meet Dan Moody. That was his wife I called on the phone. He should have been home by now. He’s not. He’s been gathering information on the Brotherhood of Truckers, and he may be in trouble. That’s why I’m asking you to answer my questions. That’s why I don’t want you to hold out on me.”

“Listen, mister,” Kelly said, her voice throaty with anger, “don’t think I’d hold anything back for the sake of the union. Not that I know who your Mr. Moody is or where he is. I don’t lose any love on the Brotherhood.”

“Why not?”

“My full name is Kelly Thorn. My brother was Braun Thorn. The brotherhood had him ... shot to death.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All right. All right.” Her green eyes had misted over suddenly. She was inhaling smoke as if her life depended on it, or at least as if it could keep her from crying.

“Miss Thorn ... Kelly ... Dan Moody said Shell Scott was up to his ears in the Braun Thorn killing.”

Her laughter was harsh and bitter now, a startling contrast to her pretty, guileless face. “Oh did he? Did he say that now? Well, your Mr. Moody has been gumshoeing on the wrong block. Of course Shell is up to his...” her lip trembled and she smiled all at once and went on, “shell-like ears in it. He and Braun were friends. He wants to find Braun’s killers. I hope you and Mr. Moody have no objections. Because if you do, I’m liable to forget I’m a lady.”

Just then the telephone rang. Kelly answered it. “Yes? Hello? Why, yes, he’s here.” She held the receiver out to me.

“Cora?” I said into the mouthpiece.

“No, Mr. Drum. This is Judy Jaffe. The baby-sitter, remember? I ... I found your name and phone number written down on the phone pad. Something terrible has happened...” Her voice broke. I thought I heard a sob.

“What’s the matter, Judy? What happened?”

“It ... it’s Mr. Moody. Mrs. Moody got a call from the police. She went down there.”

“Where?”

“Mr. Moody is at the Loma Drive Receiving Hospital. He’s hurt bad, Mr. Drum. Maybe he’s dying. I don’t know.”

“Sit tight, Judy. Take it easy. There’s nothing you can do. I’ll go down there.”

I hung up. “Trouble?” Kelly asked me.

“Dan Moody’s been hurt. Where’s the Loma Drive Receiving Hospital?”

She told me. “Those vermin,” she said. “Won’t there ever be an end to their maiming and killing?” The tears stood out in her eyes now, as Dan Moody’s injury and possible death brought her own loss home to her. I wondered how a nice kid like her had got mixed up with a bad apple like Scott.

“Good-by,” I said, opening the door. “And thanks.”

“What for? I didn’t help you any. I ... good luck, Mr. Drum. If you’re on the side I hope you’re on.”

I went downstairs to Cora Moody’s car and drove off into the neon-glowing night, toward where a man was hurt and maybe dying.

BROAD-MINDED SCOTT

Washington, D.C., 2:55 P.M., Thursday, December 17

I barely had time for the thought that, since reaching Truckers Headquarters here in D.C., several strange things had happened, and this was perhaps the strangest. Then Rover moved to his right so that Glasses wouldn’t get between us when he reached for my gun.

I brought my hands slowly up in front of me, leg muscles tensed. Glasses stopped a couple of feet from me and said, “Uh, Rover. I got an idea.”

“An idea?” Rover seemed startled.

Glasses went on, “Make this slob lean up on the wall. Then I’ll get his gun. While he’s leanin’ on the wall.”

Well, I suppose if they’d kept at it they might actually have gotten the gun away from me. It was a sure thing I wasn’t going to cooperate, but they were now heading in the right direction. Fortunately, there was an interruption. The door to Abbamonte’s office opened and he came into the hall. I didn’t see him; my eyes were on Glasses and Rover.

But I heard him let out a harsh bellow. “You lousy jerks! What the hell you tryin’ to pull?”

Both men winced a little. Rover said, “But—”

“Put that heater away, you stupid jerk.”

Rover reluctantly put his gun away and I looked at Abbamonte. His face was dark, teeth jammed together. He didn’t look like a man you’d want to meet in an alley. Or even out of an alley. Slowly he pried his jaws apart and, narrowed eyes flicking from the big man to the little one, said, “I already told you jerks. Just do what I tell you. Don’t never try to do none of the thinking.”

He looked at me then and tried to compose his face. “Sorry about this, Scott. The boys don’t like ... strangers wandering around up here. Natural mistake. This is supposed to be real private up here around the offices.”

I said casually, “Sure. I can understand that. They probably mistook me for somebody else they wanted to shoot.” I looked at Glasses and went on conversationally, “Why, you probably thought I was Shell Scott.”

He blinked. “Ain’t you?”

I grinned at him. “Of course I’m Shell Scott.”

His face stayed blank momentarily, then started looking unhappy. Abbamonte spoke, barely controlled fury in his voice. “Get in my office. You—” He cut it off.

The two men walked past me, through the open door. Abbamonte said to me, his voice more calm, “That what brought you in from the Coast, Scott? Check up on Drum?”

“No. Maybe that was part of it.”

“Maybe?”

I didn’t say anything. He glared at me for a moment, then turned ponderously, stepped into his office and slammed the door shut in my face. I walked on down to the end of the hall, stopped before a door which told me this was the office of Mike Sand, President.

I knocked. Immediately a man inside said, “Come in.”

I went in, closing the door behind me. There was one man in the room.

The man was Mike Sand.

Good old Abbamonte, I thought. Honest Abb. Something very queer was going on in this joint. Sand sat behind a heavy black desk, arms folded over his thick chest. The boss. The leader. The hoodlum. He stared at me silently, waiting for me to speak, and I got the impression he’d been sitting there just like that before I’d come in. He sat very still, but it seemed as though pumps and dynamos and churning machinery worked and whirred away inside him, as if the quiet were only on the outside and underneath was a continual boiling and bubbling like the witches’ cauldron. Muscles rested in almost quivering repose all over him. His neck was a size or two larger than mine and his wrists looked like carved mangrove roots sticking out from his coat sleeves.

It was the same face I’d seen in the newspaper photograph, but with everything more pronounced. The face was hard but strong. The features were harder, more uncompromising, perhaps more brutal. The heavy-lidded eyes darker, smouldering, the short hair seeming blacker and more wiry. I noticed that scar tissue was lumpy over his eyebrows.

But there was another difference. Something new had been added. A discolored welt marked the left side of his jaw now. It didn’t make him any prettier. Or, apparently, any happier.

I stopped inside the door and looked at him, then walked closer to his desk. There were a couple of big leather chairs in front of it, but he didn’t invite me to use one. I used one.

As I looked at him, in his big building in his big office, behind his big desk, I was thinking that it’s muggs like Mike Sand who get men like Braun Thorn killed. Ragen was the man who’d set up Braun’s murder. I felt sure, but without Sand and the men who kissed Sand’s behind, there wouldn’t have been a Ragen in L.A. to begin with.

Even so I said, pleasantly enough, “I’m Shell Scott, Mr. Sand, a private investigator from Los Angeles.”

“From L.A., huh? Then why aren’t you in L.A.?”

“Several reasons. For one, I’ve had a lot of trouble with one of your hand-picked champions of labor on the Coast—”

“This isn’t the complaint department, Scott. If you come here to tell me somebody stepped on your toes, you’re wasting my time.”

I bit off the first words that started out, then said quietly, “In an outfit like the Truckers, you probably get lots of complaints to ignore. But that’s not why I’m here—”

“Then get to the point.”

“If you’ll clam up for a second, I will.”

He burned the dark eyes into me, but I went on, “For one thing, I’d like to get in touch with your wife.”

He looked surprised. “Why in hell would you want to get in touch with her?”

“Don’t you know?”

He frowned and seemed puzzled. He hadn’t even blinked when he’d seen me come in, or when I’d told him my name. Ever since I’d found out my client was Mrs. Mike Sand, I had assumed she must have hired me with her husband’s knowledge; if that wasn’t true, this was an even stranger situation than I’d thought.

Sand said slowly, “How in hell would I know why you want to talk to her? I never saw you before. I never even heard of you.”

Maybe it was true. I said, “Did you hear anything about a guy named Braun Thorn getting killed in L.A.?”

“Oh, that. Yeah, I heard it.” He frowned. “Yeah, you must be the dick mixed up in the thing there.”

“Now you remember. But it was just a little thing. Some of your Trucker officials beating a guy and shooting him.”

Finally he unwound his arms, put his hands together on the desk in front of him. He leaned toward me and said, “Don’t give me no big mouth, mister. You got no idea the trouble it could get you in. So watch that mouth.” He glared at me. “Why do you want to talk to my wife?”

On rare occasions you meet a man it would be a joy to hit. This was one of those occasions. But I made myself count ten, lit a cigarette slowly, had a drag on it. “I’m looking for Dr. Frost,” I said. “It’s just possible Mrs. Sand might know something that would help me.”

“I don’t know where she is right now.”

“How about Chester Drum?”

“What about Drum?”

“He seems pretty chummy with you. Or Mrs. Sand.”

“He’s not working for me, Scott. I got no use for Drum—or you. For no damn keyhole snooper.”

“You wouldn’t have any idea where Dr. Frost is, then?”

“No, I wouldn’t have no idea.”

“You’ll at least admit you know who he is, won’t you? That wouldn’t be spilling any beans, would it?”

“You know damn well he’s my wife’s old man.”

“Yeah. He’s also one of the guys about to carve you up in the hearings next week.”

He grunted. “Nobody’s going to carve me up.”

A long ash was on my cigarette. There wasn’t an ashtray in sight; Sand’s desk top was bare, except for a phone. I asked him, “You got an ashtray somewhere?”

“No. And don’t drop no ashes on the rug.”

I do not often count ten twice. But I held the burn in, flicked the ashes into the cuff of my trousers. Then I said, “You’ve got it wrong, Sand. I hear there are a large number of guys ready to start carving. Besides Frost and Hartsell, there’s John Ragen on the Coast, for, instance.”

His lips twisted. “That—” he spat out an unpleasant epithet. “He’s washed up, even if he don’t know it.”

I grinned at him. “He sure doesn’t know it. In fact, according to Ragen, he’s going to take over here right after the decline and fall of Mike Sand.”

His eyes smouldered at me. It was a look that could almost have driven spikes into a plank. “There ain’t going to be no decline and fall of Mike Sand.”

“I got the impression there was some anticipation of that decline—even here. From Abbamonte.”

He started to speak, then the lids fell lower over his eyes and he went on casually, “Abbamonte takes a lot of routine off my hands. I can’t handle every little thing. He’s a good, loyal member of the Brotherhood. My right-hand man.”

It came out as phony as a Kremlin guarantee. Sand had almost let something slip, I thought; so I got out a bigger needle. “Sure,” I said. “About as loyal as Ragen, maybe.”

“I’ll take care of Ragen and anything else comes up.”

“Including Hartsell and Frost, I suppose.”

“That lousy committee don’t bother me. The rank and file know what I’ve done for them. I’ll stand on my record.”

“You do and you’ll get fifty years in the slammer.”

His voice was deceptively gentle. “Everything I ever done was for the working man, so he could have a living wage, decent working conditions—”

“Add the dynamite, blackmail picketing, phony strikes, murder. Living wage, huh? Decent working conditions?”

He squeezed his hands together so hard a couple of knuckles popped softly, like necks breaking. “I’m getting damned tired of you, Scott. But I’ll tell you this: If it takes toughness to protect the rights of labor, then I’ll play it tough.”

“Rights of labor again. How about the wrongs of labor, Sand? How about the right of guys to make a living without paying off muggs like you and Ragen?”

That one did it. “Get out,” he said. “Or I’ll throw you out.” He seemed ready to try it.

So I said, “I already got that message from Abbamonte. I came here to see the boss—and was shown to him. It almost seemed he was calling the shots here, not you, Sand. In fact, talking to Abbamonte, I got the impression you were some kind of flunky.”

Sand glared across the room, not seeing me. “That sonofabitch,” he said. He raised his hand and pawed hard at the welt on his jaw, pawed it some more. “That sonofabitch,” he said again. “He may think he’s calling some shots. But he may not even be around when them hearings—”

Suddenly he broke off, turned to look at me, glaring. I could see the anger growing in his dark eyes. He stood up, walked around the desk and over to me, moving quickly. He wrapped a hand around my forearm and squeezed it tight.

“Either way you want it, Scott. Out your way or my way. But you’re going out.”

“Let go of me, Sand.”

His fingers bit into my arm. The short butt of my still smouldering cigarette was in my free hand. Somehow it kind of collided with his wrist. Sand roared, yanked his hand back, balled it into a fist.

“Don’t do it, Sand.” I got to my feet. “We’ll really go around, friend.” He didn’t quite swing. He was still making up his mind when I said again, “Don’t do it. Think of how much I’d enjoy it. Think of all the reporters who’d come to interview you in the hospital.”

He bit down on his lower lip, eyes glaring at me. But he didn’t swing that right hand.

“Good loyal man, huh?” I said.

His face sort of congealed, like quick-drying cement. “You got it wrong, crumb. You got everything wrong.”

I’d said all I wanted to say. And Sand, apparently, had said more than he’d meant to. I walked to the door, and out. I still didn’t know where Mrs. Sand was, or Chet Drum, but the trip here had been profitable, nonetheless.

On my way out I looked into Townsend Holt’s office. Tootsie had told me a gal named Hope Derleth would be in charge of publicity now that Holt was dead, but the office was empty. In a bookcase against the wall I found a phone book. Only one Derleth—Charles—was listed in it. I picked up a phone on one of the desks. A woman’s voice said, “Yes?” Switchboard. I hung up. I didn’t want this call going through the Truckers’ switchboard, and I had the feeling it was time I got far from here, anyway.

My cab was still waiting. So was the snow.

Before the driver started the cab Sand came through the wide doors of the Truckers’ Building. He was moving in a hurry, short legs driving like pistons, head down. He didn’t even see the cab. He hustled to the sidewalk and turned right.

I had the cabbie follow him, well back. Sand walked two blocks, went into a pay phone booth outside a garage, dialed a number. He talked for a minute or so, slammed the receiver down, headed back for the Brotherhood’s building. It seemed a bit odd. I told the driver where I wanted to go.

The Derleth address was only a few blocks from Truckers’ Headquarters. I walked up three flights in the building, started looking for the number of the apartment. I found it. I also found a uniformed policeman sitting outside the door.

I identified myself, asked him why a guard was outside the apartment.

He handed back the copy of my California license and said, “The Hartsell Committee wants Miss Derleth under protective custody until she can testify next week.”

“Friendly witness? Or unfriendly.”

“She’s going to cooperate with the Committee.”

That sounded good. It indicated that Hope Derleth and I were on the same side, which would be a relief after the people I’d been talking to. “Okay if I have a word with her?”

“You can ring the bell and ask her.”

I rang the bell. In a moment I heard quick, light footsteps. The door swung open. And suddenly I forgot the snow outside, began wishing I’d brought along another suit and had just changed into it. I was very conscious of my sort of clammy moistness.

She was a dark-eyed brunette, and she was a sweetheart.

She had a trim little figure that hadn’t been trimmed too much, all of it nicely encased in a pale blue blouse, dark blue skirt, smooth nylons and high-heeled blue shoes. She seemed to like blue. I was starting to like it pretty well myself. Her smile was nice, curving up just right at the corners. She curved up—and in and out—just right at the corners, too. In fact, there weren’t any corners.

She had been smiling when she’d opened the door. But as she looked at me the smile went away. As if she might have been hoping I was somebody else.

I grinned at her. “I’m in luck.”

“You are?”

“Yes. Finding you behind this door. All I knew was that Hope Derleth was in here. Are you Hope? I hope.”

She smiled that nicely curving smile again. “I am.”

I liked her smile. So far I liked everything about this lovely. I said, “My name’s Shell Scott. I’d appreciate a short chat with you. All right if I come in?”

She glanced at the officer. “All right.”

I went inside, and as she shut the door she frowned slightly and said, “Shell Scott. I’ve heard that name.”

Oh, oh, I thought. But I said, “It seems to have been bandied around out here. So far, everybody I meet who’s heard it makes ugly faces. As if I’m something incurable and they’re afraid they’ll catch me. So please don’t frown.”

She asked, “Who’s been making faces at you?”

“A blob named Abbamonte for one.”

It got the right reaction. If Abbamonte frowned at me, then maybe she would smile. I added, hopefully, “And two muggs named Glasses and Rover. They actually hate me.”

The smile came back. “Well, you must be all right. Let’s sit on the couch.”

My, I was doing splendidly. I walked to the couch, feeling very jazzy. Washington D.C. was a pretty good place when you got to know it. And I felt I was now getting to know it. We got seated and I said, “Morty hates me, too. And especially Mike Sand. Everybody hates me.”

She chuckled. “Don’t beg for sympathy, Mr. Scott.” It was said lightly, pleasantly.

“Shell.”

“Shell, then. What did you want to see me about?”

“Well, several things, Miss Derleth.” I paused, but she didn’t plead with me to call her Hope. “I got the impression you weren’t exactly enamored of those eggs I named.”

“I’m not.”

“There’s just as rotten an egg named John Ragen on the Coast,” I said.

Naturally she knew of Ragen. She nodded.

“I’ve had some trouble with the man and I understand he was in communication with your immediate superior, Townsend Holt, quite a bit recently, right?” She nodded, and I went on, “Since you know that much, I’m hoping you can tell me what some of those calls were about. Especially one that Holt made to Ragen last Monday night.”

She seemed a bit guarded now. “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me a little more about why you’re interested.”

“Well, I think Ragen may have been happy to see Townsend go. Him and a guy named Drum. The way it stacks up—”

“What?” Her dark eyes were suddenly wide. And there was a very strange expression on her face. “What did you say?”

“I said Ragen might have—”

“No, about Chet—Drum, you said.”

“Yeah, Chet Drum. Do you know him? I’d give my eyeteeth to catch up with that boy. Where is he?”

“I haven’t heard from him.” She spoke in a rush. “He’s ... all right, isn’t he? He hasn’t been ... hurt?”

Something was screwy here. “Not yet,” I said slowly. “But I haven’t caught up with him yet. What’s with this Chet business? Don’t tell me—” I didn’t get to finish.

She said with ominous calmness, “I get the impression you don’t hold Mr. Drum in high regard.”

“That’s one way to put it. After all, he—”

“You can just leave. Why, you’ll never meet a finer man than Chet.” Her voice rose a little higher. So did she. As she straightened up she went on rapidly, “It’s a good thing he’s not here right now.”

“Good thing for him, maybe—”

“You! Coming here and trying to get me to answer all sorts of—of loaded questions! I’ll bet Abbamonte doesn’t like you.”

She was on her feet now, and she stamped one of them on the carpet. Those eyes had a lot of spark and snap in them, even fire. But the fire had gone out—at least for me. Ashes I got. And it began to seep into my skull that maybe the fire was for Drum. For Chet. Dear Chet.

I stood up. “Lady, I hope you haven’t let this guy con you, too, along with half the United—”

“Please go, Mr. Scott.”

There was no question that she meant it. Her tone, her pose, her gesture toward the door, the ashes in her eyes, all told me she meant it. I would get no more information from this one. Not only no more. I hadn’t gotten any information.

But maybe I had. Apparently she and Drum were on the same team. Obviously it was not my team. So, since I was on the good side, she and Drum had to be on the bad side. Somehow, though, that didn’t set quite right now. Didn’t please me. Two minutes ago I would have bet my income tax that Hope Derleth was one of the good ones.

I walked to the door and outside, thinking that I was in a kind of rotten business. I turned and said to Hope, “Lady, I hate to see a gal like you—”

And the door slammed in my face.

I looked at it for a while. Not very long. The officer seemed amused. I was not amused. I went down to the cab and told the driver to take me to the Statler. As he pulled out into the slush I tried to figure out what had just happened. Either she and Drum were in cahoots, or she was just as nice a gal as I’d thought and Drum had snowed her somehow. He had sure snowed a lot of people.

I didn’t even know yet what the bounder looked like, but I had been thinking of him as closely resembling the picture of Dorian Gray. After Dorian kicked the bucket. But that didn’t fit now, either. I remembered the reaction of the curvy little waitress in the F Street Cafeteria when I’d mentioned his name. His slightly sour landlady. And now Hope.

I wondered if there could be a third possibility. That Drum wasn’t quite the murderer, despoiler and ravisher, con-man and foul fiend I’d pictured him all along.

It was a disturbing thought. I didn’t really believe it. But it disturbed me. If I was wrong about Drum, I might be wrong about a lot of other things. And that was, you can believe me, an empty thought.

We drove down New Jersey Avenue toward the center of D.C. through the falling snow, falling more heavily now, while I considered that emptiness....

I stepped out of the hot shower and rubbed down with a thick, rough towel until my skin glowed with warmth. It was eleven p.m., and I’d taken a room at the Statler for the night. Since leaving Hope Derleth I had checked a newspaper morgue, found a picture of Chet Drum. So finally I knew for sure what the guy looked like.

He wasn’t the Dorian Gray after-picture I’d built up in my mind. It kind of disappointed me.

It was nine a.m., Friday, the eighteenth of December, and I was standing outside Mrs. Mike Sand’s suite in the Statler with the same larcenous bellhop at my side, and a different twenty-dollar bill in my hand. I had phoned the suite, but there’d been no answer. The bellhop inserted his key in the lock, turned it, and took off. I went in.

Two minutes later I’d covered the place quickly and was in the bedroom looking at a piece of luggage which I’d found under the bed. When I’d first met the tall blonde Alexis at my apartment, I had thought she must wear brief and gauzy underthings. In the suitcase were underthings, and they were wonderfully brief. And gauzy. Also in the suitcase was a small leather-bound book. I picked it up, and saw beneath it the corner of a black ledger of some kind. I grabbed it, opened the cover and smiled. It was a checkbook, one of the big flat kinds with three rows of checks to a page, the stubs in a vertical column down the left side. About half the blank checks had been used, black-ink notations on the stubs. The stubs looked interesting, especially since this obviously belonged to Alexis—to the wife of Mike Sand, President of the National Brotherhood of Truckers.

I glanced at the leather-bound book, noting pen-and-ink writing on the pages, and that it was apparently some kind of record or journal, then turned back to the checkbook. I was starting to give the stubs a closer look when a key rattled in the lock of the front door.

I straightened up suddenly as I heard the door swing open, then jammed the two items in my hands back where I’d found them, shoved lacy items over them. Somebody was walking across the living room floor—toward the bedroom and me.

I closed the suitcase, snapped it shut and kicked it under the bed, then rolled onto the bed in almost the same movement. As my head touched the pillow I saw her, saw Alexis. She stepped into the open bedroom doorway and stopped, eyes on me.

Immediately I sat up. “Hello, Alexis,” I said, not agreeably. “Hello, Mrs. Sand.”

Her blue eyes widened and she gasped, then said, “What ... are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you. Before you duck out on me again, we’re going to have a talk. Including the truth this time.”

She glanced beneath the bed, at the suitcase, and for a long moment her eyes remained on it. Then she stared at me again and said, “How long have you been here?”

I looked at my watch. “Four minutes. Maybe five by now. Frankly, I thought I’d have a longer wait. I tried to locate you yesterday. And much of last night.”

“I ... was out.” She took a deep breath, walked farther into the room, sat in a spindly chair. For a moment she was quiet, then she asked me, “Mr. Scott, what in the world are you doing here? In Washington, I mean. And why did you speak to me so—so inexcusably on the phone?”

“Inexcusably? Well, that’s a switch.” I explained it to her. I told her about following her from my apartment Monday morning, all the rest of it. I ended the tale, “And then, of course, the guy who answered the phone here—with you, clearly was Drum. So perhaps I spoke to you excusably, what?”

“I can explain, Shell.” It was the first time Alexis had called me Shell. She smiled, and it was a lovely smile. When she wanted to use it. “Truly, I can.”

“Uh-huh. It had better be good. I’ve been all over this frozen town looking for you, and for Drum, hit the Truckers Headquarters and chatted with people, including your not exactly lovable husband—”

“Mike?” Her eyes were concerned. “You didn’t tell him I hired you, did you?”

She looked ready to spring from wall to wall. I said, “No. I told you I’d keep your name out of it, and I have until now. But I assumed he must know. And all bets are going to be off unless—”

“But that’s why I didn’t tell you I was Mrs. Sand, why I used my maiden name with you.”

“Come again?”

“He doesn’t know I hired you. If Mike knew, he’d—oh, there’s no telling what he’d do to me.” She paused, then went on more slowly. “Please remember that only minutes before I hired you, Mr. Scott, I had discovered that my father wasn’t in his home and it had been searched. It seemed obvious that he had been ... forcibly taken from the house. I still don’t know who did it, but then I thought it must have been Mike. That’s the main reason I hired you, mentioned Mike’s name.”

“But you don’t think it was your husband now.”

“No. I’ve seen Mike. He’s as mystified by Dad’s disappearance as I am.”

“What made you think he would have kidnaped your father, his wife’s father, in the first place?”

“He’s capable of it. I don’t mean he would actually have harmed Dad, but he might have had somebody ... keep him from going before the Committee. At least I thought then he might have. I was horribly upset at the time anyway, but now I know Mike had nothing to do with it.”

“If he even thought about it, he must have known Dr. Frost was going to be Hartsell’s surprise witness, right?”

“I ... no. He didn’t have anything—”

“Lady, you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this if you expect me to believe you. Either level with me all the way down the line, or—”

“All right. He knows now, of course. Perhaps he found out some time ago.”

“Did he or didn’t he?”

She sighed heavily. “We both knew it. Mike found out somehow and told me. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk with Dad about Sunday night in Los Angeles. I hoped he wouldn’t crucify Mike.”

“That is hardly the word to use in connection with Mike Sand, Alexis, even if I am speaking of your husband. But now you make a little more sense. How did Mike learn Dr. Frost was going to testify?”

“I don’t know. But you can understand, can’t you, why I told you I was Alexis Frost? If I’d hinted I thought Mike was responsible for Dad’s disappearance and at the same time told you Mike was my husband, you might not even have helped me. You might have thought I was trying to trick you some way.”

“I’ll go along with that.”

“But the main thing was that I couldn’t take a chance word of what I’d done would get back to Mike himself. Our marriage was still secret—until that reporter found out and broke the news. After that, and especially after Senator Hartsell made it public that my father was to have been his surprise witness, the cat was out of the bag. But even then you might not have learned I was Mrs. Sand if you kept your promise not to mention my name.” She sighed again. “At least I handled it so Mike still doesn’t know I hired you, and actually told you I suspected him.”

“If he should find out, what would he do? Carve you up in little pieces?”

She shuddered. “Probably not.”

And there she left it. Probably not. Probably he would only break her arms and legs, and take a few teeth out with pliers. Alexis seemed to have had a change of heart about Sand since arriving back in D.C. I thought about it.

“That’s why I couldn’t locate you here last night, huh? I presume you were with your husband somewhere.”

“Yes, his country place. We—you know we were having a little trouble. But that’s all patched up now.”

“Uh-huh.” I looked at her. “You’re doing pretty well, Alexis. You do make a weird kind of sense. But an item which still needs explaining is the Drum item. When I phoned here Wednesday night, quite late indeed, the guy who answered was Chet Drum, a chap buried in this mess up to his nostrils. And not on our side. At least not on my side.”

She looked puzzled. I was starting to get sick of people looking puzzled when I mentioned Drum. She said, “Of course he’s on our side, to use your words.”

“Yeah. Like appendicitis.”

“But he is. He’s helped me. He even saved me from being ... killed maybe.”

“He did what?”

She told me a story about two gunmen who’d forced her from a taxicab, being rescued by Chet Drum. She made him sound like a combination of Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon.

I said, “Ha!” and snorted a few times, but before she was through she’d convinced me it had really happened. Moreover, her description of the two men who’d roughed her up fitted the goons I’d met in the Truckers’ Building down to the last moronic detail. Glasses and Rover.

She was serious, all right. So again I was between the horns of that Drum Dilemma. Either he’d really been a giant-sized boy scout doing an extremely good deed, or ... I thought about it. Or—a lot of things.

I wasn’t ready to accept Drum as Prince Valiant-Flash Gordon, not by a long shot, and the answer seemed perfectly plain after small consideration. Especially after I thought back to that phone conversation I’d overheard between Ragen and Townsend Holt Monday night. I asked Alexis, “This happened right after you got off the plane from L.A. Monday night?”

“Yes.”

“And the two muggs were waiting for you. Then out of space in his rocketship came Chet Drum, and he saved you from these two dragons—”

“Oh, Shell!” She sounded angry. “You can twist it around any way you want. I’ve told you exactly what happened. And even if you don’t want to believe it, it took real courage to do what he did. I was ... well, I was simply petrified. But he stood there—”

“Oh, please, Alexis, spare me the rest of it.” I got up and stomped back and forth over the bedroom carpet. “Anyhow, you’re very grateful to him, right?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Let’s not go into that. Look, these two muggs grabbed you and Drum ungrabbed you, thereby winning your undying gratitude. Have you considered the possibility that maybe they weren’t such deadly enemies as it seemed?”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Is it? Anybody get killed? Arms and legs torn off? Was there blood all over?”

She pressed her lips together, narrowed the blue eyes. “No, there wasn’t blood all over.”

I dropped it. That was enough for me, anyway. The silence was a bit strained for a while. I asked her about the other things that had puzzled me, and she said she hadn’t been aware Monday morning of anybody following her taxi, and stated vigorously that if so they certainly weren’t with her. She had gone to the Western-National Bank—she said—merely to get some cash and securities which belonged to her, and which she’d felt she might need.

I thought about it a while. Then I said, “So what now, Alexis? Do you still want me working for you?”

“Of course. Unless you already know where my father is.”

I shook my head. “I don’t. The only thing I know for sure is that he left his house alone Sunday night.”

“Alone?” There was an odd, taut expression on her lovely face. “Alone? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, took off in that black Volkswagen of his. And in a hurry.” I left out the rest of it, because while Alexis had settled some of my doubts about her, I still didn’t feel like telling her everything I knew. Especially now that she was again—or still—so chummy with Mike Sand.

She looked almost angry. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why?”

“For one thing, the last time I talked to you on the phone, the happy detective-client relationship was dissolving in acid, if you’ll recall. Since then I haven’t been able to catch up with you. Until now.”

“But that means he left of his own free will. That nobody ... kidnaped him or anything.”

“Looks that way.”

“Shell, until this moment I never even considered the possibility that he’d left the house voluntarily. The way the house had been searched and all, it just seemed certain he’d been forced to leave.”

“I figure the house was searched after he left.”

She was silent, thinking. Abruptly she said, “I have to go back to Los Angeles. Are you planning to stay here?”

“I’ve done most of what I came here to do. Except for catching up with Drum. I’ll stick around till I find him, then go back.” I thought a moment. “Assuming I’m still ambulatory. If he’s such a Prince Flash—”

“But he’s in Los Angeles, Shell.”

I stared at her, then said slowly, “He’s ... in Los Angeles?”

“Just before you called Wednesday night, he was talking on the phone, here, in this suite. I heard him say something about flying to Los Angeles.”

“Do you know who he was talking to?”

“No, I don’t believe he mentioned the name.”

“What was the conversation?”

“I don’t quite remember. Except he said he’d fly to L.A. and check up on something.”

“What was he doing up here when I phoned from L.A.?”

“It was ... in connection with the men who forced my cab off the road.” She didn’t elaborate, and soon changed the subject. I thought about me here, and Chet Drum in Los Angeles. The more I thought about it, the less I liked it.

“Alexis,” I said, “how would you like company on your flight to L.A.?”

She said she’d enjoy it. I used a phone in the bedroom, called the airport to see if I could use the other half of my round-trip ticket on today’s flight. There had been a late cancellation, and I put my name in for the seat.

While I was using the phone, Alexis went into the bathroom. Oddly, she took the suitcase in with her. I thought of all those frilly things, and the near certainty that she was, even while I grew pained thinking about it, slipping into some of the frilliest. And gauziest. Then she came out, carrying the small suitcase, put some other travel items into it, snapped the bag shut.

I paid a quick visit to the bathroom myself and looked around. Except for her trip in here she hadn’t been out of my sight. The checkbook was too big to hide, and it wasn’t in view, so she still had it in the suitcase. That suited me.

It also suited me to be heading back toward L.A. Especially if Chet Drum was there. Drum.

I wondered what the hell he was doing in Los Angeles.

DRUM STICKS HIS NECK OUT

Los Angeles, 10:45 P.M., Thursday, December 17

Cora Moody sat huddled on a bench in the corridor outside the emergency room at the Loma Drive Receiving Hospital. I went over to her and she looked up. Her face was pathetically vulnerable, the eyes swollen with crying, the lips trembling, the plump cheeks gleaming with tears.

“Why him?” she said. “Why did it have to happen to him?”

A uniformed cop who was pacing the floor outside the emergency room asked me, “Who are you, mister?” I showed him my identification.

“Oh Dan, Dan,” Cora Moody cried. “God in Heaven, why did it have to happen to him?”

“You take it easy now, Miz Moody,” the cop said, gruffly sympathetic. He was a short, beefy man with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his tunic. “They’re doing everything they can.”

I took the cop aside. “How bad is he?”

“A traffic cop picked him up on the Santa Monica Freeway. He’d been left for dead, the way we figure it.”

“Will he make it?”

The sergeant showed me the hairy back of his hand, then its palm. “Nobody would make book on his chances. He’s conscious, but there’s a concussion, a possible skull fracture. He’s got a gash eight inches long in his scalp. Some ribs busted, and his right arm. Shock, of course. And they kicked the bejeezus out of him.”

“He talk to you?”

“Uh-uh. He ran into a crooked cop once, I figure it.” The sergeant’s bitter voice showed what he thought of crooked cops. “He won’t let us come near him. But he asked for you.”

“Can I talk to him now?”

“The doc said nobody could after we tried. Not even the wife.”

I put a cigarette between my lips. A young doctor wearing a white tunic came out of the emergency room. When the door swung shut behind him, Cora Moody leaped to her feet. Her voice was as flat as a blown-out tire. “I’m all right now, doctor. You can tell me. Is my husband going to die?”

“Now, Mrs. Moody. You know we’re doing everything we can.”

“Those are words. Just words!”

The doctor was young, a resident or an intern probably. He sighed. “If he lives through the night, he’ll have a chance.”

The sergeant asked me, “You have any idea what he wanted to see you about?”

“Just an idea. What does the name Rex Marker mean to you?”

“Marker? The trucking union big-shot?”

“Right. The Hartsell Committee is investigating the National Brotherhood of Truckers all over the country. As you know, I’m working for the Committee. So’s Dan Moody.”

“We’ll bring Marker in,” the sergeant said, then asked the nurse, “Where’s a phone?”

She told him, and he went away. He was back in ten minutes, and we waited. After a while an orderly brought us sandwiches and coffee. The sergeant and I ate, but Cora Moody wouldn’t touch her food. She sipped slowly from her steaming mug of coffee.

A patrolman came along the corridor. “No Marker,” he told the sergeant. “He’s not home. We checked out a couple of places he might have been. He found a box somewhere and pulled the lid over himself, sarge.”

The night crawled by. The sergeant was called to the phone twice. They didn’t find Rex Marker.

The break came at two o’clock Friday afternoon. After breakfast with Cora Moody at a cafeteria across the street from the hospital, I’d called home for her. She was too upset to talk on the phone. Judy Jaffe’s mother said she’d take the Moody children home with her until Cora returned. When we went back to the hospital, the sergeant was going off duty. He looked haggard, and so did the intern who told us Dan Moody’s condition hadn’t changed.

“He gonna make it?” the sergeant asked before he left.

The intern’s mouth was a tight line. “I just don’t know.”

They found a bed for Cora Moody in the nurse’s quarters, and one for me where the interns slept. That was at ten o’clock. In the small bare room they had found for me I took off my shoes and shoulder-holster and stretched out on the bed, draping the gun-rig across the back of a chair.

The intern was standing in the middle of the room looking at it when I awoke. “Do you ever use that thing?” he asked when he saw my eyes had blinked open.

“Do you ever use your scalpel, doc?”

I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. My mouth was dry and had a taste in it as if someone had gagged me with a dirty sock.

“He’s conscious. His wife is with him now. He wants to talk to you.”

It was a semi-private room with only one bed occupied. The light was dim because they had pulled the dark shade on the room’s single window. Dan Moody’s bandaged head gleamed. As I went in, his wife was just coming out.

“I knew it, Chet,” she said tremulously. “He’s going to be all right.” As she passed me I saw the tears on her cheeks. “I’ll be right outside, honey.”

“You go home now,” a weak voice from the bed said, “and take care of the kids.”

I drew a chair up to the edge of the bed and sat down. “I like your hat,” I said.

“The latest thing.” Dan Moody tried to smile. His lips were puffy and raw. His left eye, swollen shut, looked like a large ripe purple plum. His arms lay outside the covers, the right one in a cast from shoulder to wrist. “So you’re Chet Drum. See that Cora gets home?”

“I’ll try.”

He sighed, then said, “Rex Marker. I had him in a corner. Ragen figures ... to move East and take over if the Senate gets too rough on Mike Sand. Marker figured he was slated for Ragen’s post out here as top man in the Southern Cal setup. But Ragen soured on him, I don’t know why, and Marker got mad. He was playing footsie with Gideon Frost, going to give Frost the kind of dope that could crucify the union. That way—see?—Marker figured to get off easy when the Senate lowered the boom. Otherwise he stood to fall with the others, and since he’d already been written off by Ragen he had nothing to lose. Hell, if he didn’t co-operate with Frost he was really in hot water. Once Ragen soured on him, he figured to use Marker as a fall guy. Because there’s been more in the papers ... out here about the union than ... elsewhere. So Marker decided to play ball with the Committee, to make a deal. I saw him in a rooming house in downtown L.A., just off Main Street. Mex section.” Dan Moody’s lips twisted in a bitter grimace.

“What happened?”

“We never even got to talking. A couple of Ragen’s muscles showed up.”

“And Marker took off? He won’t go back there, will he?”

“Hell no. But from the look of the place someone ... was keeping house for him.” He gave me the address.

“A woman you mean? She wouldn’t be stupid enough to go back there now.”

“I don’t know. Ragen’s muscles are too busy looking for Marker, too busy getting ready ... to move in on Dr. Frost. They only jumped in for a minute anyhow. Long enough for Marker to go out the window. Long enough for them to take me out with them and work me over. Maybe they didn’t figure a woman was living with him. Hell, they’re not detectives.” His battered face gave me a bitter look. “Sometimes I wonder if I am.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve given us the one lead we’ve got.”

“See that Cora takes care of the kids, huh?”

The intern’s head appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Drum,” he said.

I squeezed Dan Moody’s good shoulder and headed for the door.

“Drum?”

I turned around.

“I ... never mind. It’s nothing.”

A nurse was sitting in the corridor with Cora Moody. “You going home?” I asked her.

“Yes. I just wanted to see him once more. Will that be all right, doctor?”

The intern nodded. The sergeant asked me, “What’d you get?”

I told him, and he turned to the patrolman standing nearby. “Who’s in the car?”

“Miller, sarge.”

“Okay. You stay put. The captain wants a guard maintained around the clock here, just in case. You want to drive out there with us, Drum?”

I nodded and gave the keys to the Ford to Cora Moody. Then the sergeant and I went outside to the patrol car.

We got to the rooming house a little before three, Miller tooling the patrol car slowly through the clogged clots of traffic on Main Street, past the strolling sloe-eyed Mexican girls and their small, tight-bodied men who had claimed the center of the sprawling city as it spread out into the canyons.

The house was one of those sad relics of the 1920’s Midwestern colonization of the West. With its asbestos shingles and gabled roof and fenced porch and dormer windows it could have been transplanted from Illinois or Iowa, a symptom of the homesickness of one of Horace Greeley’s addicts.

In the small weed-choked front yard a black-lettered sign on rotting white wood bore the single word, rooms. The boardwalk porch was pulpy and sagging underfoot. A fat Mexican landlady opened the door for us.

“Marker?” the sergeant asked.

The woman looked at his uniform suspiciously, then shook her head. "No tengo Marker aqui."

In Spanish the sergeant described his man. The woman’s eyes narrowed, then widened. "Sí, sí. Pero no está a casa."

“What’s his room number?”

"Quatro. Vengan ustedes conmigo."

“No. We’ll go in alone. Where is it?”

“First floor, back of the house,” the Mexican woman said in English. “I don’ wan’ no trouble.”

A recessed door bearing the numeral four in white paint had the end wall of the hallway all to itself. The sergeant motioned Miller to one side of the door, stationed himself on the other side. I went over there with him. This was approved entry technique, straight out of the police manual. We listened. We didn’t hear anything inside at first. Then I thought I heard a woman whimper.

Rapping his knuckles sharply against the door, the sergeant said, “Open up in there. We’re police officers.”

The answer, which came immediately, was the explosive sound of confined gunfire. Two holes exploded in the door.

“Jesus, Miller,” the sergeant barked. “The window. Get around back.” He took out his service revolver and fired twice at the door just below the knob. Ducking and moving fast, Miller sprinted along the hallway. I heard the front door slam.

Then the sergeant placed the sole of his shoe against the door below the knob and leaned his weight on it in a sudden, lunging motion. The door gave, slamming against the wall inside the room. The sergeant and I went right in after it.

The first thing I saw was the window, directly across from the door. It was open, the dirty lace curtain sucked out by the draft. Through it I could see Miller running, chasing two men through the thick growth of knee-high weeds. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” he cried, and fired once into the air. The men kept running. Then Miller tripped, went sprawling and disappeared for an instant in the weeds. Then I saw his head, and his forearm, and he steadied the forearm with his other hand and fired twice. The men didn’t stop. They went around the side of the house. Miller got up and plunged after them.

I had a quick glimpse of a small room, sparsely and cheaply furnished. There was a bed, and on the bed sat a woman wearing a slip and a terrified expression on her face. The sergeant went through the window, and I went through after him.

When we got around the side of the house to the sidewalk, a crowd had gathered. A Merc was leaping away from the curb a couple of dozen yards ahead of the police car. Miller and the sergeant got into the police car, and Miller had it rolling before he shut the door. For one moment more I saw the Merc ahead of them, turning into the traffic on Main Street. They followed it fast. Even from here I could hear the shriek of their tires.

The Mexican woman stood on the porch of her house and shouted, “Go ‘way, is nothing, go ‘way. All of you go ‘way.” Then, “Shooting up the place, goddam cops,” she muttered, and slammed the door.

Gradually the crowd dispersed. I stood on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. I could have gone in there and questioned the woman in Rex Marker’s room, but I didn’t. She wouldn’t stay here long, I thought. And she had no reason to go out the much-used window. When she came out she’d use the front door. I’d be waiting.

Up the block I found a taxi and got in back. The driver took his last bite out of a sandwich and crumpled the crust of bread up in a wax-paper ball which he tossed on the seat beside him as he craned his neck at me. “Where to?”

“No place yet. Just stay put.”

He shrugged. “If you’re paying for it.”

He swung down the flag on his meter, and we waited.

It was ten minutes later when the woman in Rex Marker’s room came across the porch, looked both ways with the exaggerated mannerisms of a small child who had just learned to cross the street, and started up the block. She was a good-looking woman, if you like them slightly on the heavy side. She was walking fast, twitching her hips.

“That’s the one,” I said. “Don’t lose her.”

We started moving. Walking very fast, the woman turned the corner on Main Street. Halfway up the block she got into a Plymouth parked at the curb. We drove by in second gear as she started it.

“What do we do now?” the cabbie wanted to know.

“Take it slow. In this kind of traffic it’s easier tailing from in front anyway.”

The Plymouth followed us for several blocks along Main Street, then turned left. “Hey!” the cabbie cried.

“Make a U-turn. Hurry up.”

He grumbled something under his breath but made a U-turn in the middle of the block. A big semi-trailer coming the other way on Main had to jam on its brakes.

I saw the Plymouth a block and a half ahead of us after we made a right turn. We followed it for ten minutes along Olympic Boulevard. As it reached the corner of Alvarado, the Plymouth slowed almost to a stop near a big, low one-story building set off the street behind royal palms. Above the double glass doors I saw the sign: national brotherhood of truckers, southern california local.

But the woman changed her mind. We were close enough to hear her clash the gears of the Plymouth as she sped away. Fear, I figured, and whatever feelings she had for Rex Marker had fought in her, and for the moment at least Marker had won.

Fifteen minutes later she pulled into the entrance to a shopping center. When she parked, I told the cabbie to stop up the block.

I smoked half a pack of cigarettes and watched the sun set while she spent three and a half hours primping in a beauty parlor. The afternoon limped by like a wounded animal. When she came out her hair was in tight ringlets against her skull. She got into the Plymouth, turning on the lights and engine. If the time she’d spent in the beauty parlor meant anything, she was finally going to visit the boy friend.

The place was one of those fancy new motels off the San Bernadino Freeway, glass and redwood in a single long U-shaped building around a courtyard. The woman pulled in near a long, sleek Lincoln, got out fast and knocked on the door of the motel unit. The door opened far enough for her to slip inside, and banged shut behind her.

“This it?” the cabbie asked me hopefully.

“For now. Don’t go away.”

“Not when you owe me twelve-fifty, I won’t.”

I walked between the Plymouth and the Lincoln. The unit had a large picture window, but it was shut tight and the blinds were drawn. Probably the entire motel was centrally air-conditioned. The cabbie stuck his head out the rolled-down front window and gave me a conspiratory smile. Armed with it I went to the door, took a deep breath and knocked.

“Yeah?” a voice called.

“Manager,” I said. “I’m sorry as hell to bother you, but our kid got to playing with the registry cards and yours is missing.”

“I’ll fill it in tomorrow,” the voice said.

“Well, the State insists we have them. I could get into a mess of trouble.”

He made a noise that might have been a four-letter word and opened the door. He had a strong, square face topped by dark black hair thinning over his scalp. He wore a white shirt open at the throat. His right hand hung out of sight at his side behind the doorjamb. From what I could see of him through the partially open door he looked as strong as a tank and only a little less unfriendly.

“Okay, give me it,” he said.

He reached out with his left hand; his right in all probability held a gun. I rammed a shoulder into his chest hard, got a knee against the door and shoved, crossing my right hand under my lapel and reaching for the .357 Magnum at the same time.

He stumbled back a foot or so, startled. That was far enough for me to get inside, and I did so. He had an automatic in his right hand, and he brought it up. I pointed the muzzle of the .357 at him.

“That’s right, Marker,” I said, “let’s both shoot holes in each other.”

SHELL SCOTT LOOKS AT THE BARE FACTS

Los Angeles, 6:40 P.M., Friday, December 18

We were cruising at 30,000 feet, doing nearly ten miles a minute, and the jet was less than an hour from L.A. when Alexis sprang the surprise on me.

We had been talking pleasantly, and the moments of friction seemed behind us now. She looked at me, cheek resting against the cushion of the seat behind her, and her blue eyes warmer than they had appeared before. A thick loop of that blonde hair rested against the creamy skin of her face.

“Shell,” she said, “when you told me Dad left the house alone, in his car, it just came out of the blue. And it changed my thinking. Until then I’d been sure somebody forced him to leave. But if he left of his own free will, it was probably because he just wanted to get away for a while before the hearings start.”

“Maybe.” I knew there was more to it than that, but I left it unsaid.

“He had a lot to think about. It’s not an easy thing to testify against a man who’s married to your own daughter. He knew Mike and I were having trouble, but it must still have posed a problem for him.”

“Understandably. You think he just went off to worry about it?”

“He must have had good reasons. I can’t be sure why he went, but I think I know where he must be.”

I sat up straight. “You know? Where?”

“Dad has a cabin near Lake Arrowhead. Actually at Blue Jay, three or four miles from the lake. We used to go up often, but it’s been—oh, ten years or more since I was there. I was only a kid the last time.” She was quiet for a while, then said, “If he wanted to get away, be alone for a few days, he almost surely went to Blue Jay.”

“Then we’d better get that word to the law, and fast. Even if we went straight there from the airport it would take two or three hours to make Blue Jay. The pilot can radio—”

“Why the police?”

“So they can reach him before some of those union goons get there. Maybe your husband is pure as Ivory Soap, but I know John Ragen and his musclemen would give half of California away to get their hands on him.”

“I don’t doubt that. But, Shell, they can’t possibly know where the cabin is. Even I didn’t think of it until after you told me he left alone.”

“Well ... maybe you’re right.”

She smiled. “He’s been gone for five days already. Two or three hours now won’t make any difference. There’s no phone at the cabin, but we can drive up tonight. If you want to go with me.”

“You bet I want to. I’ve some questions to ask Dr. Frost.”

“So relax.” She smiled. “Everything’s all right. There’s no hurry, no worry now.”

That’s what she said.

I parked the Cad before the Spartan Apartment Hotel and Alexis went up with me. All I meant to do was make a quick change into some clean clothes. I’d been living in my African outfit for two days now, and felt a little bit like a savage old witch doctor.

But when I pushed open the door of my apartment, everything changed. I no longer felt like a witch doctor, but I could feel the savage growing in me. For about a minute I just stared, not saying a word.

Alongside me Alexis was saying, “What ... what happened? Why, how awful. Who could have done a thing like this?”

The place was a mess.

It looked as if somebody had gone over it with a knife and pitchfork. The neat, comfortable apartment, my pride and joy, was not neat, not comfortable. The cushions were off the chocolate-brown divan, scattered on the floor. The divan itself was upended, cloth at its base torn loose. A bookcase had been turned over, hassocks ripped or cut open, the leather chair I like to sprawl in had been slashed, stuffing pulled from it.

In the kitchenette, the refrigerator door was open, stuff had been dumped from shelves. In the bedroom, the livingroom shambles had been repeated. My suits, sport coats, black and white dinner jackets, gaudy sport shirts, everything was strewn on the floor. After a while I straightened Amelia. She was hanging awry, and she hangs enough awry without being slanted on the wall. I couldn’t do much about the rest of it.

I said to Alexis, “Well, they sure gave it a tossing.”

“It’s awful, Shell. Who would do a thing like this?”

Mink and Candy, I said to myself, who else? But to Alexis I said, “Some guys who are going to get pretty much the same kind of tossing one of these days.”

“Why did they do it? What were they looking for? Or were they just tearing up your apartment?”

“Both.” They must have been looking for the stuff Braun had stolen from Ragen, mainly the tape recordings, probably. And Dr. Frost had those now. At Blue Jay—if he was really there. I began feeling uneasy. “We’d better get to Blue Jay,” I said to Alexis.

She moistened her lips. “This can’t have any connection with my father, can it?”

“It might.”

The nagging worry stayed with me. And slowly another worry joined it. I was thinking about Kelly. She was probably all right; no reason to be worried about her. If she’d stayed in the Garden of Allah there wasn’t a chance in a thousand anybody could have found her.

But I stepped to the phone, anyway, picked it up. Way up. The cord had been jerked loose from the wall. Somehow that increased the pulse of worry in me. I took another look at the ripped hassocks, the rest of it, and saw it all in a little different way. The boys had obviously done a complete job. A slow, careful, even lazy job. It was almost as if they’d known they had plenty of time—perhaps known I was out of town.

But the only person here who knew I’d left L.A. was Kelly. She wouldn’t have told anybody. Not if she could help it. I told myself I was imagining things, but it still bothered me.

I said to Alexis, “Let’s go. I’ve one more stop to make if you don’t mind. The Garden of Allah.”

I walked rapidly past the bar, alongside the huge Garden of Allah pool, and on to Kelly’s villa. Moments after I knocked I heard that cool, gentle voice from inside the cabin. “Yes? Who is it?”

Suddenly I felt very good, like jumping up into the air and making my heels go click. Me and my imagination. Nobody had squeezed any info out of Kelly.

I said, “It’s Shell, honey.”

“Oh, Shell!”

It was good to hear that sound in a woman’s voice again. Again for me, that is.

She threw the door wide and I stepped in, slammed the door and grabbed her. There was a wonderful flurry of soft green eyes and soft white arms, hair on fire and lips on mine. After a bit of that I said, “Kelly, I’ve only got a minute. And we just used it up. I wanted to make sure you were all right, that’s all.”

“Oh, yes, I’m all right. Especially now. No trouble, Shell? Everything’s fine?”

“Better than fine. You sit tight. I’ve got a trip to make, but I’ll be back tonight. Right back here.”

“Wait. I want to tell you. Something ... funny happened. While you were gone. A man came here. I don’t know how he found me. But he did. That detective.”

A cold electric shock grabbed my spine. “Who?”

I knew before she told me.

“Chet Drum.” In the silence after that she went on, “Is it trouble?”

Every time I turned around I learned a little more about Drum. It was getting so hearing his name was like getting sapped on the ear. And this new bit was a disturbing one. No matter what else that guy might be, he was a hell of a good detective. I knew I hadn’t been tailed here Tuesday. It wasn’t likely that anybody looking for Kelly would have accidentally spotted her here, either. And as far as I knew, the only people anxious to get to her were Mink and Candy. And Ragen, of course. But Drum? Yet he’d found her. How?

Out of nowhere it came. The napkin from the bar here, with the print of Kelly’s lips on it and the name: Garden of Allah. I remembered putting it in my pocket. But I’d left that jacket in my apartment, when I’d changed clothes there after getting out of the hospital. Drum couldn’t have found the napkin—unless he’d been in my apartment.

I was thinking about that shambles when Kelly said, “Shell, what’s the matter?”

“What did Drum say he wanted? He give you any trouble?”

“No, he was rather nice. Said he was looking for you.”

“I’ll bet he was.”

“He also told me he was working for the Hartsell Committee.”

“Yeah, I got that from him, too. Hartsell and Ragen, maybe. I don’t know. I’m surprised he didn’t say he was a special investigator for the President.”

That pulse of worry was banging in me again now, slamming at my brain. I spotted the phone, put a call through to Patrick Donovan, the guy I’d asked for help in locating Ragen.

When he answered I said, “Shell here, Pat.”

“Where in hell you been? I tried to call you.”

“Out of town. Anything break?”

“Not yet. But it’s all set. There’s nearly a hundred of the union boys peeling their eyes all over town—and out of town—wherever they drive their trucks. No news of Ragen and his crumbs so far. They’re keeping out of sight.”

“With that many guys looking, they can’t hide forever.”

“I expected a break before now, though. We’ll keep on it. I’m staying here at the house so the boys can phone in to one location. They’ve all got my number.”

It sounded good. I asked, “Hear anything about a guy named Drum? He’s been in town the last day or two.”

“No. Who’s he?”

“Private detective from D.C. He’s up to something, but I don’t know what it is. Remember the name.”

“Right, Shell.”

“I’m heading out of town for a few hours, Pat. I’ll call you a time or two while I’m gone, so stay with it.”

“You think I was going somewhere?”

We said good-by and I hung up, called Tootsie’s home phone number. She sounded glad to hear from me, and I asked her, “Anything new here, Tootsie?”

“Haven’t seen Ragen, or Mink and Candy. But they must still be around town somewhere. For one thing, the men are still looking for Rex Marker, but there’s no news of him so far as I know. For another, Ragen moved his plane this afternoon.”

Ragen owned a private plane—purchased with union funds—and ordinarily kept it at a private field near Pasadena. I said, “You know where it is now, Tootsie?”

“No. I wouldn’t even have known he’d moved it except a call came in from the airport for Ragen, saying the plane was gassed and ready. I took the call. Apparently Ragen was supposed to have called them about it and hadn’t yet. They wanted to let him know. I was curious and phoned back a few minutes ago. Ragen had been there, taken the plane somewhere else.”

“Gassed and ready, huh? Ready for what?”

“I don’t know that. But with everything else that’s been happening, it sounds a little odd.”

“Sounds like trouble. That guy Drum we were talking about. You see or hear from him in the last day or two?”

“No. Never have.”

“Well, thanks, Tootsie. I’ve got to take off.”

“So long, Shell. You ... you gladiator.”

I laughed and hung up. But that made me think of Chet Drum again. Prince Chet. Valiant Drum. Some meeting it was going to be if I ever caught up with the man. Him and a gladiator. If nothing else, it would be bloody.

Kelly said to me, “Is everything all right, Shell?”

“I wouldn’t say that, honey. But numerous things are on the fire. Something’s bound to boil before long.”

Before leaving, I arranged for Kelly to occupy a different villa—uncontaminated by Drum—unregistered, and told her to stay inside it, with Candy’s gun. She kissed me good-by, and told me to take care.

Alexis and I headed for Blue Jay.

CHESTER DRUM STRINGS ALONG THE BRASS

Los Angeles, 8:32 P.M., Friday, December 18

As he stood in the motel doorway, Rex Marker’s eyes looked mean and confused. His automatic was six inches from my chest. The Magnum was six inches from his. I shut the door with my left elbow. Behind him, the woman stood cowering.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I swear to God.”

“Ragen didn’t send me. I’m from the Hartsell Committee.”

He didn’t hear the words. His mind was cornered by fear and pinned down by an idea: Ragen had found him, and I was Ragen’s goon. The knuckle of his index finger was white inside the trigger guard.

“Drop the gun and beat it,” he said. Sweat stood out like blisters on his high forehead. “I never killed a man, so don’t make me do it now.”

“You put a good man in the hospital,” I said. “Dan Moody.”

He blinked. “What? What you say? I didn’t touch Moody. Roe Mink and Candy, they ... who the hell are you?”

“I’m with the Hartsell Committee,” I said slowly and clearly. “Put the gun away and we’ll talk, Marker.”

The woman cried out, “I saw him with the cops this afternoon, honey. He ain’t from Ragen!”

Marker pawed at the sweat on his forehead with a wide, blunt hand. “I’m a dead man if I make any deals,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that now?”

“If you make a deal with the Committee, we can put you in protective custody.”

“Protection?” He sneered. “Who the hell protected Moody, tell me that. I got a fast car. They’ll never take me alive.”

“What makes you think they care if they take you alive or not? You’re expendable, Marker. They tried to get you once.”

“Leave me alone. I got nothing to say.”

“Where’s Gideon Frost?”

“Rex,” the woman urged. “Please, Rex. I’d kill myself if anything happened to you.”

His fear-widened eyes darted to her for a moment. I reached out for his gun-hand, deflecting the muzzle of his automatic upwards as it went off. Powder seared my cheek, and Marker’s eyes blinked blindly shut. He clawed at my jacket, ripping the lapel. The woman screamed. Then Marker hit me in the belly with his left fist. He could throw a punch—it felt like an enormous elephant stomping me.

I dropped the Magnum and got both hands on his right wrist. With his left fist he went to work on my side, but slowly I swung him, and then I had his right hand behind his back. I shoved it up between his shoulders in a hammerlock. His fingers opened and the automatic thudded to the floor. He tried to find my instep with his stamping heel. When I shoved the arm higher he bent his head and lowered his shoulders. I ran him that way against the wall. His head struck hard. A lithograph of surfboarders hanging there came down on top of him. I let go and he slid to the floor.

But by then the woman had both guns. “You hurt him,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Did you have any other ideas?”

“You didn’t have to hurt him.”

“Give me those guns.”

She shook her head, but suddenly she was crying. She didn’t fight me as I took both guns away from her. Groaning, Marker sat up.

“Where’s Frost?”

“...Blue Jay. A town near Lake Arrowhead. He has a cabin there.”

“And Ragen?”

“Happy Jack figured how maybe he could reason with the guy. Otherwise...” Marker shook his head. “You can’t reason with a guy like Frost.”

Whether I could reason with Marker or not didn’t matter. All the fight had gone out of him. I went to the door, called the taxi driver and told him to phone the sheriff’s substation. A prowl car must have been cruising nearby, because it came inside of ten minutes. A tall deputy wearing a buff-colored whipcord uniform made his way through the small crowd. I showed him my identification and gave him the setup as quickly as I could.

“Then we take Marker into custody for you?”

“Right. And call Blue Jay. Send a man up there. Hell, send a riot squad. There’s liable to be trouble—if it hasn’t happened already.”

He shook his head. “We’re pretty short-handed in the county, Mr. Drum. Early Christmas furloughs, a couple of forest fires down south. We’ll send a prowl car from Arrowhead, though.”

I nodded and went to the cab. “I heard what you told him,” the cabbie said. “About Blue Jay and the truckers and all. You going up there? It’s forty miles from here.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So a couple of years ago the Brotherhood tried to organize us hackies. We got a pretty good union of our own going, see, but does that bother them? Like hell it does. It was pretty rough for a while. I got me a busted nose.” He showed me the memento of the union jurisdictional dispute proudly. “What I’m trying to say, I’ll drive you up there. Okay? Anybody who wants to clobber them Brotherhood guys is all right in my book.”

“You,” I said, “have got yourself a passenger.”

As we climbed into the taxi, the deputy was talking into the prowl car radio.

To get there you take the Freeway to Berdoo, then State Highway 18 north. The State Highway twists and climbs and switches back on itself. It is called the Rim of the World Drive and maybe by daylight you could see why, or even on a clear night with the Berdoo lights spread out far below you as you climb into the San Bernadino Mountains. But as we reached Berdoo we left the clear night behind us. It was cold in Berdoo, and raining—a hard, pelting, icy rain that followed us higher into the mountains.

We stopped at an all-night gas station in Blue Jay. A freckle-faced kid was reading a movie magazine inside, his knee-boots propped on a battered desk.

“Be right with you, pal,” he said. “You didn’t have to get wet.”

“What I want is information. A man named Gideon Frost has a cabin up here, right?”

He scowled. “Yeah, I think so. Half a mile back toward Berdoo, mister. Dirt road on the left side. It’s the only cabin up that way.”

I thanked him and ran back through the rain to the cab. We turned around and backtracked half a mile, then found the unpaved side road that led to Gideon Frost’s cabin. The cab sideslipped and floundered in the mud as we made our turn. The road was narrow and very steep. It ended at a boulder the size of a four-story building. There was a turning circle with two cars parked close to the boulder and two a little way off. One of those near the boulder was a black and white county cruiser, the other a black Volkswagen. Figure if Dr. Frost was here the VW belonged to him. The other two cars were a Caddy sedan and a Merc. And the Merc might have been the one the cops followed away from the boarding house in downtown L.A.

“Am I going up there with you?” the cabbie asked me.

“You’re staying put.” I gave him Rex Marker’s automatic, keeping the Magnum for myself.

“I never shot one of those things in my life,” he said. But he took the gun.

“Got a flashlight?”

He thumbed open the glove compartment and produced one. I took it, flicked it on and went out into the rain.

A flight of rickety redwood steps ascended the side of the boulder. Even with the flashlight I couldn’t see the top. I started climbing. The boulder jutted out of a steeply sloping hillside, and when I climbed high enough I could see the underside of a redwood porch looming precariously over it.

But I never reached the top because I saw something else too.

A dark figure huddled on the rickety redwood stairs.

It was a man. He wore the buff whipcord uniform of the sheriff’s office. He’d been slugged. He had a lump almost the size of a tennis ball behind his left ear. Blood was trickling from the ear itself. I dug fingers into his wrist and felt a weak, fluttery pulse.

Then, down below, I heard another car.

I thumbed off the flashlight and waited in the absolute darkness. I couldn’t carry the unconscious deputy up the rest of the way. The flashlight was slippery in my left hand, the .357 slippery in my right. I waited.

SCOTT TAKES THE HIGH ROAD

San Bernardino, 9:20 P.M., Friday, December 18

It took me forty minutes, driving fast on the San Bernardino Freeway, to reach Berdoo. It was raining by then, heavy drops splatting on the Cad’s hood and plastic top. By that time the gas gauge was pushing the empty mark and I pulled into a service station. While the tank was being filled I left Alexis in the car and used the station’s phone to call Pat again.

I barely got, “Hi, Pat, Shell here—” out of my mouth when he said, “Hold it. We’ve spotted Ragen.”

“Where?”

“All those boys looking for the crumbs finally paid off. A driver for Coast Transport called me. Ragen’s big Cad passed him on Eighteen out of Berdoo. In a hell of a hurry.”

I could feel the sweat start out on my forehead. “He see him?”

“Just recognized the Cad. Two or three men in it—and a Merc filled with more guys right behind.”

“How long ago?”

“Called me ten minutes ago, no more than that. And Ragen’s Cad had just passed him. I didn’t know how to reach you, Shell. Just about to take off myself. Hell of it is, I don’t know where they were heading.”

“Up Eighteen, you said?”

“Yeah.”

Highway Eighteen goes straight north from San Bernardino, into Rim of the World Drive which rises high into the mountains. To Lake Arrowhead—and Blue Jay.

“I know where they were going,” I said, and hung up.

The gas station attendant had finished filling the tank when I ran back to the Cad. I threw him a ten-dollar bill, jumped in and pulled out with the tires shrieking.

Alexis let out a little yelp. “What’s the matter?”

“Ragen’s on his way to Blue Jay. He must have found out Dr. Frost is there. How, I don’t know. But the word is, he was moving fast.”

She let out a soft sound, almost a whimper then she said, “Oh, hurry ... hurry,” over and over.

She didn’t have to tell me. We hit Eighteen and I let the Cad go. And when I let it go, you just hang on and moan. But I had to make as much time as I could on the straight stretches. In the San Bernardino mountains the highway twists and turns, swoops around corners, rising higher and higher as it climbs toward Arrowhead. In some places you can glance off the road and look down thousands of feet—on the way down them if you’re not careful.

That was a ride. I’ll never think of it without getting cold and sweaty. The most I hit was eighty but eighty on a twisting turning mountain road is about like a hundred and fifty on an ordinary highway. And it was raining even harder now. At two thousand feet you can usually see the lights of San Bernardino miles away, spread out below, and at least half a dozen times I thought we were going to be spread out below, I’ll give Alexis this: She only screamed twice.

When we hit the Blue Jay turnoff I hadn’t even caught sight of Ragen’s Cad. So he was still ahead of us. I swung off Rim of the World into the road leading to the small, quiet village of Blue Jay, tromped on the gas again. Snow had recently fallen here, but it was light, melting in the rain. The roads were slick, slushy and dangerous.

“About half a mile.” Alexis stopped, gulped some air and went on shakily, “On the right. I’ll tell you where. It’s a narrow dirt road, sharp turn.”

In a few seconds I started slowing and soon Alexis pointed. “There. Slow down. You’re going too fast!”

I hit the brakes and released them, tapped them again. The Cad swerved, slid on the rain-slicked road and angled toward big pines at the road’s left, right again. We slid into the turnoff, came almost to a stop, and I fed a little gas to the engine. The road went up, curving and narrow, muddy and rutted. It was slow going. Alexis said, her voice catching in her throat, “Right around this next bend. The road ends there, that’s where the cabin is.” As I swung slowly left again she gasped and pointed. “That’s Dad’s car!”

My headlights had fallen on a huge boulder looming up out of the darkness, disappearing over our heads where the headlights failed to reach. Before it was a cleared space with room for several cars. And several cars were there. I saw the little black Volkswagen, but four other cars were there, too—Ragen’s big Cad, plus a black-and-white sheriff’s car, a Mercury and a taxicab. Even while the tension started to build up in me and my heartbeat swelled harder and heavier in my chest, I wondered what the hell was going on. And why the prowl car?

I swung left, tires slipping in the mud, came to a stop behind the Volkswagen and doused my headlights. “Stay here,” I said to Alexis, pulled the .38 from its holster and stepped out of the car. Cold rain sliced through pine limbs overhead and pelted me, soaked my hair and ran down my neck.

On the way here, Alexis had described the cabin and surrounding area for me. I knew the cabin was well above me on the slanting hillside, and that a flight of wooden steps led from the boulder’s base up along its side and to the cabin’s deck. I moved forward momentarily blind in the almost complete darkness. Under the bandage on my head, pain throbbed dully and continually.

I found the steps, felt for the handrail. It wobbled slightly under my touch. I started up slowly, hand on the rail to guide me. There was a small landing and the steps went off at right angles from it, ascending steeply. As I turned there, started up again, a horn honked below. It had come from the clearing where the cars were parked, but it wasn’t the Cad’s blast. I hadn’t seen anybody in the other cars; but someone had been there. Just the one short sound. Then silence. I didn’t like it.

Forty or fifty feet above me, a faint glow filtered through pine limbs. That would be a light in the cabin. I gripped the Colt tighter, started up again. A loose step wobbled under my foot; another squeaked with startling loudness, even above the roar of the rain.

I stopped for a moment, straining my ears, but could hear only the rain. Only that and the rush of my blood, a whisper in my ears. I started up again, breathing through my mouth, eyes straining at the darkness, pulse pounding through my body.

Suddenly harsh white light flashed in my eyes from only a few feet away, slightly above me on the stairs. Automatically I ducked, tensing my right leg and starting to drive forward as a man’s voice cracked, “Hold it right there.”

But I was already snapping my right leg, springing forward and up, flipping the Colt toward him. I saw the gleam of light bounce from gun metal, saw the form moving behind the light. And, at the man’s feet, another form, crumpled, sprawled on the rickety steps—a man in a deputy’s uniform.

In the same moment I saw the man holding the flashlight, snub-nosed gun in his right hand, saw with sharply etched clarity in the light bouncing from me and spreading from the flashlight’s rim, the man’s face.

I’d seen it before, in a newspaper morgue yesterday in D.C. And I had heard the name, heard it too many times now. The name, the face, the gun suddenly swinging down at my head and glittering in the light, all belonged to the man I’d been hoping, for days, to meet. I’d met him now.

I’d met Chet Drum.

DRUM GETS A KICK OUT OF SCOTT

Blue Jay, 10:08 P.M., Friday, December 18

I heard the sound of a horn in the darkness down below. That would be the cabbie, warning me. Then faintly the sound of footsteps coming up the redwood stairs.

When the man was very close I stood up suddenly and snapped on the flashlight. I said, “Hold it right there.”

But he didn’t stop. The beam of the flashlight caught a husky face with white eyebrows, the forehead topped by short-cropped white hair. I swung the Magnum at him, but he picked it off with his forearm. He had a gun and swung it too. I ducked and parried the blow with my left hand, dropping the flashlight. We came together hard over the deputy’s body. I tried to shove him back down the stairs, but he held on and got his left hand free to judo-chop the side of my head. A little lower and he might have broken my neck.

Then we stumbled over the deputy’s legs. The Magnum went off, searing the night harmlessly with orange. And we went down the rickety stairs together. Sections of the handrail gave like matchwood under our combined weight. It was a thudding, tumbling, bone-jarring fall for both of us. I never knew when we reached bottom, but all at once I felt oozing mud under me.

When the white-haired man rolled clear, I got to my knees and then collapsed in the mud, wondering vaguely but not really caring at the moment if any bones were broken. I tried to rise again and went down on my face.

A woman’s voice said, “Shell? What happened, Shell?”

But it was me she came to, and then her voice changed. “You’re not...”

I looked up at her. She was wearing an oyster-white trenchcoat. Her face was gleaming with rain. She was Alexis Sand.

“Why ... you’re Chet Drum!”

Footsteps came pounding down the redwood stairs. I groped in the mud for my .357, couldn’t find it.

“Drum?” a voice cried hoarsely. It was the white-haired man. He made it to his knees, took a lurching step toward me and fell in the mud. She had mistaken me for him, had called him Shell. It didn’t take much to know I had met Shell Scott at last.

“Drum?” he said again, and “Scott?” I bellowed at the top of my voice, and we moved toward each other like grapplers in a slow-motion film of a mud-tank wrestling match.

There weren’t any more footsteps on the stairs, and then Alexis cried out, “Behind you, they—”

And then the back of my head split open to admit the rain and the darkness; and everything else, even Shell Scott, went away.

SHELL SCOTT SWEEPS UP SOME CRUMBS

Blue Jay, 10:10 P.M., Friday, December 18

All I could see clearly before me was his face, Chet Drum’s face. The swinging gun was a blur in my consciousness and I must have thrown my left arm up without thought.

The hard metal of the barrel cracked against my forearm. I swung my own gun at his face, felt it hit somewhere on his hand or body as the flashlight jerked in his grip, the beam spraying tree limbs above us. And then we hit. Our bodies smacked together hard, the impact jarring me, pain ripping through my head. From the corner of my eye I saw the flashlight fall, spinning, heard it clatter on the wooden steps. He shoved violently at me and I sliced my open left hand at his throat, felt its edge bounce off his skull.

He lunged forward over the deputy’s body, his gun blasting the night, light flaring momentarily around us as we fell together, crashing against the steps, rolling. I held onto my Colt, tried to club him with it, but then we smashed into the handrail. And suddenly we were falling.

I lost my grip on him, fell through darkness. The blackness below became solid, hurled itself against me. I landed on my side, rolled, felt my neck snap over, head pounding into the mud. For a moment it felt as if the top of my head were coming off, the sharp knife of pain stabbing into my brain.

I couldn’t move. The breath had been smashed from my body, and I gasped for air. Mud that had oozed around my face and slid into my open mouth was sucked into my throat. I coughed, spat, rolled onto my knees, head seeming to split open and close, spinning, throbbing.

Faintly I heard a woman’s voice. Alexis. She was calling my name. My head cleared slightly and I heard the sharp rise of her voice saying, “Why ... you’re Chet Drum!”

I couldn’t see him. I called, “Drum ... Drum!”

He shouted my name in reply. I placed the voice, swung my head toward him. It had sounded as if he were several yards away, near the stairway. Alexis cried something—as I heard the pound of feet on the steps above. A lot of feet, as if several men were moving rapidly down the stairway.

A light flashed on, swept over the muddy ground toward me. In its glow I got a glimpse of Alexis and saw two men near the bottom of the stairs. I couldn’t know how many were up above the light, but the two below were a heavy-set man with bushy gray hair, his arms behind his back—Dr. Gideon Frost—and Candy. Big, hulking Candy, gripping Frost’s wrists, shoving him forward.

Before the flashlight’s beam fell on me I snapped a shot at it, fired again and heard the slug hit, then rolled fast to my left, still out of the beam of light. I rolled over once, mud squishing beneath me—and then the night erupted in a blast of sound as at least two guns, maybe more, crashed, the flare of the shots swelling and almost instantly dying. The bullets plowed into mud near me; one smacked into a tree.

I heard a man wailing, mouthing unintelligible words. The man I’d hit, the one holding that light. The light had fallen, was out now. I stayed motionless in the darkness, left hand against the rough bark of a pine tree, right hand gripping the slippery butt of my Colt.

Rain droned around me, hiding sounds of movement. I got to my feet slowly, waited, took a step forward. Then I heard the grind of a starter, the roar of an engine—and a second car’s engine. In moments lights flared. I started to run as the sounds increased in volume.

My right foot struck something and I sprawled on the ground. The sound of the car engines got fainter. It took me a while to get up and for a crazy moment, in the complete darkness and with my brain spinning, it seemed almost as if I floated in thick black space, with no sense of touch, no awareness of up and down, completely disoriented. I might have been suspended in air, or buried in that thick mud. It was a crazy moment, a frightening moment.

And then I heard a noise. It was an ugly sound, weird. It came from behind me and I turned, staring, seeing nothing. The noise was repeated, a muffled sucking sound, repeated and again repeated. And with it was a high soft moaning, a mouthing of unintelligible words, almost like a child babbling, crying softly in the darkness.

I moved toward it slowly. And as my foot pulled from the deep mud it made that same sucking sound. Relief washed over me, and I forced my mind ahead, mentally following the man. It bad to be a man there, walking in the mud.

The sucking sounds grew more rapid, fainter. I heard something thump, as if he’d stumbled into a tree. And then I heard his voice, weak, torn with pain and shock, “Oh, God ... Oh, my God. Help me, help ... Oh, God...”

It was the man I’d shot. I knew the voice. And not even those words twisted in his throat could make me sorry he was hit, bleeding, maybe dying.

It was Mink’s voice.

There wasn’t any other sound but his moans, and the drumming of rain. I moved toward him. When I found him, finally, he had staggered, stumbled, quite a way from the cabin, then fallen and rolled part way down the steep hillside. I listened for his whimpering in the darkness, found him.

I knelt by him. “Mink,” I said. “You hear me?”

“Help me.”

“Sure. This is Scott, friend. Shell Scott.”

He moaned. I felt for him, ran my hand over his body. My fingers slid into blood on his chest. One bullet had hit him high near the center of his body. His moan was liquid, bubbling. The slug had torn his chest, ripped into his lungs. Blood was crawling up into his throat now, bubbling there. It would be oozing from his mouth, melting in the rain.

“Mink,” I said. “You’re hit bad.”

“God, I know. I’m...” There was a long pause before he finished it in a gurgling whisper, “...dying.”

“Yeah, Mink. Like Braun. Like Braun Thorn. So this helps even the score, doesn’t it?”

“I ... got to tell you. Scott, I didn’t kill him. Ragen and Candy.”

“Sure.”

“I swear. Candy and me was tailing Sand’s wife all the time from Frost’s to your apartment. When she left there we shook you and—agh!” His voice twisted again in his throat as a wave of pain hit him. In a moment he said, “Oh, dear God. I’m dying. My God, I’m dying!”

“You are, Mink. You haven’t long.”

For a little while he spoke rapidly, his voice soft with fright, as if he were trying to get it all out in a rush. “Shook you and tailed her to the Ambassador ... phoned Ragen, he had Thorn with him then in Spring Canyon. He said for me to keep the tail on the dame, Candy to ditch the Buick and meet him. The car was hot ... and you’d seen it. Candy left, met Ragen, it was him and Ragen. Not me, Scott.” He paused, said weakly, “Where’s Ragen ... the boys?”

“They left you behind. While they beat it. It’s just you and me now. Mink. So spill it. That gray Buick you were in. That’s the car you used to run Braun off the road?”

He forced himself to speak. The words sounded bloody. “Yeah. Me and Candy. We was ... watching Frost’s, knew Thorn would probably go there, account of them tapes he grabbed. We ... seen Thorn when he left, picked him off and brung him to Ragen. Frost must of powdered while we was busy with Thorn.”

“I know how Braun got those tapes, Mink. What was so important about them? And did he get anything else?”

“Yeah, but them ... tapes was the main thing. Of Sand, phone calls he made in D.C. Some to L.A. Not from the Truckers, but ... phone booth near there. Sand thought it was safe, but...” Mink stopped for seconds, and the rain seemed to swell louder in the silence, then he started again, “...Ragen got Holt to bug it. Ragen knew them tapes would ruin Sand, but Frost ... might not use ’em. Sand’s wife—”

His voice trailed off. I said, “What about Braun Thorn? What’s the rest of it?”

Mink groaned, went on. His words sounded like individual cries now, each one a gasp. But he got them out. “Told me later, beat him, shack on Spring Canyon ... Thorn wouldn’t spill a word. Thought he was out cold, but he ... started running. Candy was the one been working him over, Ragen had the gun out, shot him. Didn’t want to kill him ... until he spilled, so they’d know for sure if he’d passed them tapes to Frost. But ... cars on road ... couldn’t let him get away.”

He stopped speaking. I thought he was dead.

I felt for the pulse in his throat, found it, the skin slimy under his blood. The pulse was weak, but he was still alive. “Mink!” He didn’t answer. I shook him and he groaned again. “Mink,” I said. “Where did they go? They had Frost, didn’t they?”

“Yes.” I could barely hear him. Rain drowned out the sound. I leaned over him, put my ear close to his mouth. Softly, whispering, his voice came, “Ragen ... plane. Flying with Frost and ... stuff Thorn give him...”

“Flying where?”

“Meeting, Sunday night. With Sand ... Abba ... showdown, settle—”

He coughed, warm clots of blood spewing from his mouth onto my face. I swallowed, kept my ear close to his lips. “Where, Mink. Where?”

“Out of D.C. South ... on Ben...” His voice stopped. It didn’t start again. It wouldn’t.

I got up slowly, wiped a hand over the side of my face, let the rain beat on it. The night was quiet now. They were all gone. I remembered Alexis and called her name, called again. There was no answer.

I made my way to the Cad, slipping and sliding. Alexis wasn’t in the car. Neither was the suitcase she’d brought along from the Statler, the one she’d had with her all the time. Probably she was with Ragen, I thought. The men would have seen her. She would have seen them, too—with her father. So they could hardly have left her behind.

They would have to go back down Rim of the World Drive if they were heading toward an airfield. I didn’t think I could catch them. But I had to try. I backed the Cad up, swung it into the dirt road. As I turned, my headlights illumined the rain-darkened boulder, fell on three cars still there: Volkswagen, sheriff’s car, taxicab. Ragen’s Cadillac and the Mercury were gone. Nobody was in sight. I headed down the road, swung left and hit Rim of the World Drive, going down.

CHESTER DRUM BEATS UP SOME YEGGS

Blue Jay, 10:40 P.M., Friday, December 18

“Neat,” a voice croaked. “Ragen’s goons were up in the cabin with Dr. Frost, ready to come down. They had Shell Scott waiting off the road, in case of trouble. Then I came along. Trouble in knee-pants. They took me out of the play like a junior G-man.”

“All right, all right, take it easy,” a second voice said. This one I could recognize. It belonged to the taxi driver. I saw his dark form huddled in the rain. I was on my feet. The first voice, not near, not far, but lost in the middle distances between consciousness and unconsciousness, belonged to me.

“They’re all gone,” the cabbie said, latching onto my shoulder when I began to move aimlessly around the muddy turning circle. Dr. Frost’s VW, the black and white patrol car and the cab were still there. Deep tire-ruts criss-crossed the mud. “They came trooping downstairs like an army,” the cabbie added. “One of them slugged you. There was some shooting. I guess I was kind of hiding off in the woods.”

I couldn’t blame him. He’d have had no reason to mix with the pros. Even I had come off second best. But if Scott was waiting for Ragen and his boys, I thought, waiting to help them, what was Alexis Sand doing with him? I shrugged. She’d come to Washington once to deliver her father’s papers to the Brotherhood, hadn’t she?

No, that wasn’t quite right. She’d brought the papers East for Mike Sand. She’d refused to surrender them to Abbamonte. Then maybe Sand, I thought, had decided to salvage what he could by lining himself up with Ragen, against Abbamonte.

The sheriff’s deputy came down the redwood stairs, lurching at their base and stumbling in the mud. When I identified myself and outlined as quickly as I could what had happened, he spent a few minutes on the patrol car radio.

“It’s probably too late for roadblocks to do any good,” he told me, “but we’ll try.”

“What about the airports and train stations?” I asked.

“You think they’ll take Dr. Frost out of the country? You don’t think they’ll kill him?”

“They need him. The Brotherhood’s splitting wide open. Some of them will want Frost on their side. And they’ve got his daughter.”

The deputy made a face, then used his car radio again. After that we went up the stairs together to Dr. Frost’s cabin. We saw evidence of occupation by one man—the single bed, the unfinished meal set out on the plank table, what clothes were left on the wall hooks in the bedroom. We couldn’t find any signs of a struggle.

The cabbie drove me back into L.A. When I took out my wallet in front of the Moody house, he shook his bead, pushed my hand aside and gave me Rex Marker’s automatic. “I don’t want any of your money.”

I couldn’t get him to change his mind. “Anyhow, listen,” he said before he drove off. “I got me a feeling about you. You’re going to clobber those Brotherhood guys good. I’ll be there in spirit, pal, when it happens. That’s all the pay I want. Good luck to you.”

Cora Moody said, “He’s out of danger. He’ll be all right. He...” Then she surprised me, and it all came out fast. “He’s so ashamed, Mr. Drum. He was trying to tell you. He couldn’t, though, because ... it made him look like a coward, but he’s the bravest man I ever...”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dan. Don’t you see? He wanted me to tell you. Marker told him where Dr. Frost was hiding. You see, Marker was going to give his testimony to Dr. Frost, then Frost left town, then he called Marker from Blue Jay, but by then Marker was worried and anyway Dan had got in touch with him. Ragen’s hoods made Dan tell them what Marker had told him. About Blue Jay. They hurt him. You saw how he was.”

I didn’t say anything right away. Who the hell was I to blame Dan Moody? But at least it explained how Ragen and Scott had got a line on Frost’s whereabouts.

“He...” Cora began to cry. “If only he’d told you earlier, you would have got out there before they did. You would have...”

“Okay. It’s done. Dan couldn’t help himself.”

She blew her nose, cried some more, sniffed and blew her nose again. “Really? You’re going to just—forget it?”

“What do you expect me to do?”

She had no answer to that. She told me there was a phone call for me from Senator Hartsell. I was to return his call at any hour.

She put some coffee up and gave it to me strong and black and laced with brandy while I put the call through.

“They got Frost,” I said on the phone. “He was hiding out in a cabin and they got him. Ragen’s goons and Shell Scott.”

“Scott? I heard he was here in Washington.”

“When?”

“Thursday.”

“Well, he flew back to the Coast.”

“Not before he stirred things up here.”

“What things?” I sipped some coffee.

“For one thing, Charlie Derleth’s sprung.”

“I thought he confessed to killing Townsend Holt.”

“That’s what I thought. The Front Royal cops deny it now. They’ve got a warrant out for the new suspect. And extradition papers. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

I took a long swig of the coffee and brandy. I had a hunch who the new suspect would be.

“You’re their man, Chet,” the Senator said, confirming it. “They’ve got a couple of Brotherhood punks named Kane and Mahoy who’ll swear they saw you running out of the Torgesen place in Front Royal at the time of the killing.”

“Then why, for crying out loud, would I have gone back?”

“Because you were scared off and didn’t get what you’d gone out there to find.”

“Torgesen’s papers?”

“His diary, yes. We got that little piece from Hope Derleth. You see, Holt had gone out there after Torgesen’s diary, but while he wanted what was in it he had his own reasons for leaving the diary put. He’d called Hope Derleth to take down what he wanted in shorthand, but when she got there he was dead.”

I finished my coffee and fingered the swelling on my head. “Why didn’t he just take the diary and get out of there?”

“Strategy, Chet. Get the overall picture. Holt was selling Mike Sand out to the California bosses. To Ragen. But he didn’t want the diary to appear as evidence any more than Mike Sand did. Figuring Torgesen would destroy it if pressured by Sand, he decided to take the poop be needed. Or Ragen needed. With it, but not incriminating Holt in the process, Ragen could lever Sand out of the top spot in the union and pick up the pieces after our investigation. But Holt was killed and the diary apparently stolen or destroyed.”

“Ragen’s going to have his own troubles,” I said, and explained how I would bring Rex Marker back to Washington with me. The Senator was delighted. Since the hearings would begin on Monday, and with Frost still among the missing, Marker gave the Committee something to open with.

“And that’s not all,” the Senator said. “Charlie Derleth did some talking. Not to us, but to his sister. And she’s playing ball.”

“What kind of talking?”

“You can be filled in on the details when you get here. Which you can do, by the way, despite Kane and Mahoy and the warrant for your arrest. It was a pretty feeble framing attempt, especially since they have a pretty good cop—hell, a real crackerjack—in Front Royal named Ballinger.”

“But a rotten apple named Lindzey.”

“Exactly, and Ballinger’s been getting wise to him ever since Lindzey let Eric Torgesen impersonate a Committee lawyer. It was also Lindzey who must have destroyed Charlie Derleth’s phony confession. Why he did, I don’t know.”

“Lindzey must have scared Charlie Derleth into confessing. They’d brought his sister in and Lindzey must have convinced Charlie they could pin it on Hope. The only trouble was, if Derleth was dumb enough or scared enough or bewildered enough to take the rap, that would bring the Brotherhood loan-shark, Abbamonte, into the picture. And Abbamonte wouldn’t want that.”

“Sure, but so what? If Mike Sand needed a fall guy, wouldn’t Abbamonte be tailor-made for him?”

“Derleth works for Abbamonte and Mike Sand’s just a loner now, heading out on greased skids. Abbamonte’s taking over.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Then that means Lindzey’s working for Abbamonte too, doesn’t it?”

“Indirectly. He probably jumps when Eric Torgesen blows the whistle, but it’s the same difference. Little Eric owes Abbamonte six thousand bucks. Chances are they’re gambling debts. Chances are Eric was in debt to some local pros, Abbamonte got wind of it and bought his IOU’s at a discount. Better men than Eric Torgesen have been bought that way, and for less money. Anyhow, it was easier for Lindzey to destroy Charlie Derleth’s confession than to have him repudiate it, Senator.”

“Just as soon as it can be proven Lindzey was taking orders from the Brotherhood, that will take care of that. But the interesting thing is this: they didn’t try to close the frame on you until this Shell Scott arrived in the D.C. area. So apparently he was either a messenger boy for Happy Jack Ragen or he was giving orders on his own.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. There is no fraternal organization of private detectives. The most successful ops, outside of the big outfits like the Pinkertons and the Burns’ army, work alone and are proud of it. Which is why it is so pathetically easy for one guy like Shell Scott to put the whole profession under a cloud.

“Listen, Senator,” I said. “Scott will probably go East for the Brotherhood strategy conference if we don’t catch up with him out here. If he does, I’ll want a favor. I’d like a few minutes alone with Mr. Scott before the boys with the nippers get him.”

“Under the circumstances that sounds fair enough. Are you flying East soon?”

“Pretty soon,” I said. “But there are a couple of things I’ll try to clean up out here first. Any luck with that Benning Road place, by the way?”

“No,” the Senator growled. “And we’ve been all over the area with a fine-toothed comb.”

“What about putting a tail on some of the union big shots in Washington?”

“We’ve tried that too. Nobody’s been out that way. Or if they have, they managed to give us the slip. Are you sure you have your facts straight?”

“As sure as I can be, but don’t forget I was blindfolded.”

“It’s that damn flag you hear flapping. A big flag means a public building like a school or maybe a courthouse or even a post office. We’ve tried to match that up with a garage and a cyclone fence off Benning Road in Tidewater, and all we get is a blank.”

The Senator told me to call again before flying home so a man from the D.C. sheriff’s office could pick up Rex Marker for safe-keeping. Then I hung up. Cora Moody had a bed waiting for me, and I crawled into it. If someone turned the lights off, I didn’t remember who.

Saturday morning I put on my other suit, the one that didn’t look as if it had been dragged fifteen miles through a muddy riverbed, and went down to police headquarters. They had a dragnet out for Ragen and Shell Scott. No warrants issued as yet, but they were wanted for questioning as a result of the statement I’d made to the deputy from Arrowhead. They had issued a warrant for the arrest of a Brotherhood thug named Norman Candello, who’d been identified by Dan Moody as one of his assailants, but neither the dragnet nor the warrant got any results. Ragen and Scott had disappeared and Candy had disappeared with them. Candy’s partner, Roe Mink, was found shot dead at Blue Jay.

At eleven o’clock Kelly Thorn was brought in for questioning. She was very indignant when the cops tied Scott’s name to Ragen’s. Scott was trying to find her brother’s killer, she said. I liked her, and maybe some of the cops in on the cross-questioning liked her too, but I don’t think anyone in the room believed her.

The cops were banging their heads against a brick wall, and knew it, especially since the roadblocks around Blue Jay had come up with nothing but indignant tourists. So, though I’d told the Senator I had a few things to clean up in L.A., that wasn’t the way things worked out. By noon I knew I was wasting my time here, and by one o’clock I had picked up Rex Marker at the county sheriff’s office, after paying a quick call to the hospital where Dan Moody was smilingly awake and even said he had an appetite.

Two sheriffs deputies drove Marker and me to International Airport. At two o’clock we took off in a Boeing 707 bound for Washington.

And, I hoped as I had never hoped for anything in my life, another meeting with one Sheldon Scott.

SCOTT DRESSES TO KILL

San Bernardino, 10:50 P.M., Friday, December 18

I made it to Highway Eighteen and almost to San Bernardino again, then pulled to the side of the road. It was the second time I’d had to stop. Halfway down the mountain road, fighting dizziness and nausea, I’d slid on the muddy shoulder at the wrong side of the asphalt, almost gone over—and down. A long way down. I had known then that I wouldn’t catch the men ahead of me. But the meeting, as far as I was concerned, had just been postponed a little.

I lit a cigarette, dragged the smoke deep, and thought of what had happened there at Blue Jay, what Mink had said. I didn’t know it all yet, but I knew a lot more. I knew who’d killed Braun. Barely alive after Ragen had shot him, Braun had phoned me. Everything then had centered around Dr. Frost, who had the key, the tape recordings. So Braun had managed to force out that one word, “Frost...” Undoubtedly he’d meant to say a lot more—including naming Ragen and Candy—but just hadn’t been able to make it. He’d sure tried.

The conspicuous omission in Mink’s story had been any mention of Drum. But Mink hadn’t had a lot of time; not time to tell me everything.

He had told me where Ragen was headed. But roughly. Washington, D.C., and Ben-something. “South on Ben...” he’d said. It didn’t mean anything to me. Maybe it would when I reached Washington again. And that would be just as soon as I could get there.

An hour later I pulled into a gas station on the outskirts of Los Angeles, parked in shadow at its rear. In the rest room mirror I resembled a man made of mud. The stuff was in my hair, on my face, all over my clothes. I scraped off what I could, washed my face and hair in the basin, then went out. Next to the rest room was a pay phone booth and I called Tootsie.

In fast sentences I told her what had happened. “The one I ran into was Chet Drum, on the stairs. I don’t know where the law came from, but it looked as if Drum had just slugged a deputy. He half ruined me up there, too, or I might have—”

Tootsie finally got a word in, interrupting me, “Shell, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“I mean, the police haven’t got you yet?”

“Police? Of course not. Why would they ... what do you mean, yet?”

“I know what happened. It just came over the TV, the news. The police are looking for you and Ragen.”

"Me and Ragen!" I yelled at the phone. “What in hell’s the matter with—” I stopped. Drum had seen me there. So I probably had him to thank for this miserable development.

I asked Tootsie to give me the story slowly. What it boiled down to was that the police knew Dr. Frost had been taken forcibly from his cabin at Blue Jay; a deputy sheriff from Arrowhead had been slugged; John Ragen and Sheldon Scott were being sought for “questioning.” Tootsie didn’t know any more about Ragen’s plane, or destination.

I said, “That phrase, ‘South on Ben,’ doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“I’m sorry. Shell.”

“Don’t be. If I hadn’t called you, I might have walked into the Police Building to ask what was new. And they’d have told me. Thanks again, Tootsie.” I hung up.

It would not now be wise even to phone the law. Enough of the L.A. Department knows me, and my record, so it would work out all right in time. In time—but that might be a day or two from now, when much of my story could be checked. I was not about to spend a day or two in the can at this point.

I went back to the Cad, smoked another cigarette. I thought of what Mink had told me, especially about Candy beating Braun Thorn and Ragen shooting him in the back. Perhaps most of all I thought of the tapes that Braun had stolen from Ragen and given to Dr. Frost, that he’d died for, as it had turned out. Ragen would have them now, along with the doctor and Alexis.

By now, or certainly soon, Ragen would be in the air on his way to D.C. Also by now, my description, plus the description and license number of my Cad, would be on the police radio. With thousands of cops keeping their eyes peeled for me, I couldn’t roam around asking questions, hunting for him here. In Washington, D.C., maybe I could. But how to get there? A train was too slow. A Jet Flagship was fast enough, but the law would be covering trains and airports, especially. Besides which, I knew I didn’t have much money left. I checked my wallet: thirteen dollars.

I used the phone again to call International Airport. The next jet flight was scheduled to leave before dawn. It would arrive in Washington as soon as Ragen’s slower prop job, maybe sooner. But the passenger list was filled, and there was a waiting list. There wouldn’t be space available for at least five days. Even so, I stayed on the phone and tried to scare up some money. I scared up nothing.

I pushed it around a minute more, then went to the car, opened the luggage compartment. In it I keep equipment I’ve used in my work. Electronic equipment, large portable tape recorder and small Minifon, extra cartridges for the Colt, among other things. I rummaged through it, got a snap-brim hat, the brim of which was no longer snappy, and the largest pair of dark glasses I own. The glasses were large enough to cover my brows and a good chunk of forehead. I couldn’t do any more about the muddy clothes, but there was an old, still fairly good-looking raincoat in the back of the Cad, and I hauled it out. I never smoke a pipe, so I found a beat-up briar which I sometimes stick into my mouth when tailing a man on foot. I grabbed a box of .38 Special cartridges, dumped them into the coat pocket and slammed the luggage compartment door.

Then I walked a block away, put all the stuff on somebody’s lawn. I didn’t want the guy in the service station describing a man dressed in a raincoat, wearing a hat, dark glasses, and smoking a pipe. Then I walked back to the station.

A lot of such small stations are run by the owner. I went inside and asked the man seated at a paper-littered desk, “You own this place?”

“Yeah.” He’d been writing something and he glanced up at me then.

I said, “How would you like to buy a hot car?”

“Huh?”

“Cheap.”

He had an open, honest face, which worried me. But suddenly it got more open and less honest. “Do what?” he said carefully.

“Buy a new Cadillac.” I pointed.

“Ho—hot?”

“As it stands, base price and what I’ve put into it, the Caddy’s worth seven thousand dollars. It’s yours for three thousand.”

“Two thousand?”

“Sold.”

It had been a little too fast for him. I told him the price didn’t include my equipment in the trunk, but I was short of time and needed cash and he’d have to make up his mind in a hurry.

It took two more minutes. He turned from the open cash register. “I got eleven hundred dollars, that’s all.”

“Give me the eleven hundred and your note for nine hundred. Don’t report the sale, if at all, for—” I looked at my watch—"at least four hours, and I’ll tear up the note. Okay?”

He was all excited. “Okay.”

I signed over the pink slip, gave him the keys, took his cash and the note for nine hundred. If he gave me the four hours, my plane would be in the air. He could call all the cops he wanted to then. Of course, that was cutting it kind of close if I missed the plane. I didn’t mean to miss the plane.

But I did need those four hours. “Friend,” I said softly when our business was over, “if you don’t wait four hours, I’ll come back here.”

He swallowed. “I’ll wait.”

I took a last look at my car, that beautiful Caddy, and felt a swift, sharp twinge of pain. Then I walked rapidly to the corner, put on my coat, hat, and glasses, chunked the pipe between my teeth and—"disguised”—got out of there.

The third taxi I’d used during the evening dropped me a quarter of a mile from International Airport. I walked the rest of the way. I had phoned Kelly again, told her I’d be out of touch for a while. At the airport, I walked to the desk. No space, no cancellations.

Thirty minutes before flight time I found my man. By then I had directly or obliquely approached fourteen others and received fourteen direct No’s. But he said maybe.

He was a small man named William Flinch, and he had to be in Washington on Monday. This was Saturday morning just getting started, but he was the careful type. Besides, he wanted to jazz it up a little over the week end. I told him how nice it would be if somebody else paid for his plane ticket—on a later flight from this or another airport. Think how he could jazz it up. When he weakened a little, I convinced him. All I had to do was give him enough money to cover his round-trip plane fare. That, and five hundred dollars.

But I got his ticket. At the last minute before takeoff, with his hat pulled down over his big dark glasses, wearing an old but still fairly good-looking raincoat, a large, pipe-smoking William Flinch boarded the Jet Flagship about to take off. There wasn’t any Shell Scott on the passenger list. It was close, but I made it. And I couldn’t help hoping the smaller William Flinch made it, too, by Monday.

I didn’t really relax until the jet took off and left Los Angeles behind us, pointed toward Washington, D.C. I was on my way, and I was eager. More than just eager. I thought of the hell I’d been given, the slug bouncing off my skull, the wreckage of my apartment, even my Cad—somebody else’s Cad now—and there was no one word that quite summed up my almost joyously anticipatory emotion. I had the feeling it was almost over, that the wrap-up, one way or another, was just a little way ahead, getting closer every minute. It was all coming to a head like a bloody boil.

I had nearly four hundred dollars, a loaded Colt Special and a pocketful of extra cartridges, and I’d made it to here. Everything was going my way. Nothing could stop me, I told myself.

Yeah, that’s what I told myself: Nothing could stop me now.

So who’s right all the time?

DRUM FEELS BEAT

Washington, D.C., 2:15 A.M., Sunday, December 20

After I delivered Rex Marker to a man from the District Sheriff’s office at Washington National Airport at one-thirty Sunday morning and took a taxi through the clear cold night to the slushy streets, I had a feeling of being let down. I’d been living on the thin edge of violence since Monday night. I’d seen a simple man who’d driven a hack for a living get beaten to death. I’d been clobbered with brass knuckles. I’d walked in on a dead man who I didn’t know at all in a house bought with misused union funds that I couldn’t have put the down payment on with every cent I had to my name. I’d seen a good man, Dan Moody, come as close to death as you can without being carried out for the last time feet first. I’d been unable to prevent the kidnaping of a famous citizen who got himself written up in Who’s Who more times than I’d applied for a renewal of my pistol permit. And I’d almost made love to as nice a brunette lovely as I was likely to meet this year or any year. Some of it ugly and some of it frustrating, and here I was driving along Canal Road in Georgetown heading for my apartment, and still I had that let-down feeling.

I let myself into the apartment, left the B-4 bag unopened on the living-room floor and went into the kitchen to make myself a tall, stiff drink. I drank it off too fast, in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Then, leaving the B-4 bag where it was and shutting lights behind me, I went into the bedroom, unlaced and took off my shoes, took off my tie, jacket and shirt, told myself it was too late to call Hope, stretched out on the bed, and smelled perfume.

Then I heard a sleepy sigh, and the leather chair across the room from the bed creaked. I sat up, turning on the night-table lamp.

Hope Derleth was curled comfortably on the black leather chair. She stretched, and as I got up her eyelids fluttered. Her blue-bowed glasses were on the dresser near the chair, and she was using her camel’s hair polo coat for a pillow. She wore a dark gray or black suit, and as her eyelids parted her lips did too, in a warm, cozily sleepy smile.

“You’re back,” she said. “You’re here. What time is it?”

“Oh, about two-thirty, I guess.”

Her smile widened. “Why don’t you look at your watch?”

I was too busy looking at her, but I didn’t say that. I looked at my watch. “Twenty-five after two.”

“The Senator told me you were due in tonight. I came right over I—I was such a fool out in Front Royal, Chet. When I saw you with Eric Torgesen, I thought you were giving me a line all along, thought you were working for Abbamonte. I’m sorry.”

“How’d you get in past the booby traps?”

Hope laughed. “The only booby trap was a crotchety-looking old landlady who’s really pretty nice once you get to know her.”

Hope was still seated on the chair. I still sat on the edge of the bed. I felt awkward suddenly and stood up. “Like a drink? As a reward for breaking and entering?”

“Yes, but just a mild one, please.”

I realized then that she felt awkward too, and though her eyes were smiling there was something else lurking in their depths. Fear? Worry? Something was eating at her.

I went into the kitchen and made us drinks. Hope didn’t follow me. The overhead light was on in the bedroom when I returned with the tumblers. Hope stood with her back to the dresser and her hands behind her on its edge, her breasts thrust forward against the fabric of her jacket. We toasted each other silently and worked on our drinks for a couple of minutes.

Then I went to her and put my arms around her, and then her fingers dug into my shoulders.

“I’m so glad you’re back, Chet, I’m so glad.”

“I’m glad to be back. Now. Did they give you a rough time in Front Royal?”

“Not me. They ... Charlie ... I don’t want to talk about it. Not now.” She stepped back away from me. “It’s funny, I came here wanting to talk about it. I have a lot to tell you. I ... but all of a sudden I don’t want to talk about it. I guess I ought to be with Charlie, but—”

“Where is he?”

“Home. He won’t budge out. Oh, he’s safe enough, I guess. They have a twenty-four hour shift of police watching the apartment. I sneaked out. But Charlie—he’s so lethargic. As if he knows ... knows...”

“Hey, take it easy.”

“...he’s going to die. There was a cop named Lindzey in Front Royal, he told Charlie they had me all set up as Townsend Holt’s killer. One of the things that hurts, Charlie believed him.”

She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but once she started it all came tumbling out almost compulsively. “Our parents died when I was very young. Charlie’s been like a father to me, and he ... he was always suspicious that any man ... Lindzey told him that I was having an affair with Townsend Holt and there was some trouble, and ... well, I was out there with Holt, that much Charlie or anyone could believe. What really had happened, Holt called me. There were some notes I had to take for him in shorthand, but when I got there he was dead. He was already dead.”

“Did you see Charlie there?”

“No. No, I didn’t. And he didn’t kill Townsend Holt!”

“I didn’t say he did.”

“I—I’m sorry. I think I could use another drink now.”

I brought the bottle back with me, and when I poured Hope tilted it further, then held the glass in both hands like a little girl and started drinking.

“Here’s what throws me,” I said. “Then did Lindzey kill Holt himself? Is that why he was so desperate for a quick confession? Or maybe he was protecting someone else. The Senator said he was working hand-in-glove with Eric Torgesen, but—” I shook my head.

“What’s the matter?” Hope asked.

“Figure Charlie went out there to get the diary for Abbamonte. That would leave Lindzey out of the picture, because if Abbamonte had wanted Lindzey to get it, he wouldn’t have sent Charlie. Which means there ought to have been someone else.”

“Nels Torgesen?”

I shook my head again. “Eric sent his father on a wild goose chase. It could have been Eric. Eric could have gone in there after the diary, found Holt with it and killed him. Except that Eric’s job was to get his father out of the way so Charlie could search the place. They were both working for Abbamonte, and—”

“Why couldn’t Eric have done the job for Abbamonte? Getting the diary, I mean.”

“Because whatever was in it would hurt Nels Torgesen as much as it would hurt anyone, and Abbamonte probably didn’t trust Eric enough—not to the point where he’d incriminate his own father. So Abbamonte sent your brother, but before he got there someone else showed up, fought with Holt and killed him. And that’s where Lindzey comes into the picture. Whoever this someone else was, Lindzey thought he was working with Abbamonte and thought he would need protecting.”

“But you’re going around in circles. Charlie was working for Abbamonte too, and Lindzey worked on getting a confession out of Charlie.”

“Sure, but Lindzey was wrong ten ways from Sunday. He thought this other guy, call him X, was more important in Abbamonte’s setup than Charlie. He had to act fast, and he made the wrong move. It was Charlie who, pressured, could tie the Holt killing around Abbamonte’s neck. The last thing Abbamonte would have wanted was Charlie taking the rap. Because, though Lindzey thought X and Abbamonte were working together, Lindzey was all wet and they weren’t. X had to be someone who Abbamonte wouldn’t want to protect, someone who Abbamonte would be delighted to see take a fall, but also someone who had to get his hands on Nels Torgesen’s diary. Someone like—” I drained my drink—"Mike Sand.”

“You mean Mike Sand killed Holt?”

“That’s just what I mean.” I thought about it, liking it better all the time. “Look, Lindzey was just on the fringe of things. His connection with Abbamonte may have been no more than doing an occasional favor for Eric Torgesen. How was he to know Abbamonte had muscled Mike Sand aside, had taken over the Brotherhood himself? So of course, thinking Abbamonte worked for Sand, he’d want to protect Sand. Which is why he leaned on Charlie.”

“And I didn’t want to talk about it,” Hope said, shaking her head and smiling a little.

I hardly heard her because I felt that sense of elation I always get when I’m on the verge of cracking a case. I lit a cigarette and went on, “Then figure Lindzey got his new orders on Thursday, when Shell Scott showed up in town, figure—”

She took the cigarette from my fingers, drew on it and dropped it in her whiskey glass. There aren’t many girls who can do it, but Hope looked up at me and those dark eyes were laughing and snapping mad at the same time. “I came here,” she said. “Just for once, just for tonight, I wanted to get away from all of it—all the ugliness and the violence and Charlie like that and I—I had to pick a private detective. Next time maybe I ... I ought to fall for a Fuller Brush salesman. I put on my best suit, as the feller said, and you ... you...” Her voice trailed off and she turned and flounced to the dresser and grabbed for her blue-bowed glasses and put them on.

“And you stand there jabbering and it’s almost three o’clock and if you want anything, Chester Drum, you’ll have to come and ask for it, if you want what nobody else could ever have and what’s yours and ... I’m getting out of here.”

Flouncing again, she left the bedroom. But she didn’t go very far. She went as far as the dark living room and sat down on the sofa.

I saw a face in the mirror, and the face had a foolish grin on it. “Sap,” I said very softly, and went into the living room after her.

The first thing I did was sit down next to her. She moved away a little. The second thing I did was remove those blue-bowed glasses. The third thing I did was take her face between my hands and kiss her lips. Then it got pretty wonderfully wild because we’d both been waiting for it since that time in her apartment. But she was playfully kittenish and once she fended me off, but not very strenuously, long enough to say, “You haven’t asked me anything,” and then she added quickly, “But I guess a man’s home is his castle and you...”

“Now who’s jabbering?”

So I lifted her up, and carried her back to the bedroom brushing the overhead light switch with my elbow on the way in. That left the dim night-light on, and it stayed on.

She wore a pale blue blouse under the dark, fitted suit jacket, the curves of her breasts bold against it. It came off charged with static electricity, rustling. Her skin was like ivory against the black bra she wore under that. I touched her white throat and could feel a pulse racing there, then she clung to me and her heart was beating against my ribs. Beneath the black skirt she wore a half-slip and beneath that a pair of black lace panties as insubstantial and as apt to stay where they were as a spider web in a hurricane.

“Victorian woman,” she murmured. “Layers and layers of clothing.” But her voice was unsteady and she didn’t say anything else because the layers and layers of clothing were now on the rug and then she was against me, her long thighs firm and warm and a long time after that we got under the covers together and drifted off in each other’s arms.

Dawn was faintly blue at the window when I awoke. I was alone in bed. I heard the throbbing hiss of the shower, and pretty soon it stopped and Hope came out of the bathroom with a big towel draped around her.

“You up?” she said.

“No. I’m probably dreaming.”

“What are you dreaming about?”

That was an easy one. “You.”

“Me too. About you.”

She came close to the bed. She smelled warm and steamy from the shower. Her hair glistened. I grabbed an end of the towel and pulled. The towel came off and she spun down to my side, her skin pink from the shower, her head back, her hair dampening the pillow, her lips moist.

“I feel as if I’ve known you a million years,” she said. “But I also feel as if I just met you. I ... like that.”

I liked it too. It was fully light out when I shaved and showered.

And, after we dressed, she was as shy as a virgin on her first heavy date. When we’d eaten I said lightly, “That was good. You’re going to make somebody a fine wife.”

Her cheeks colored, and she smiled a little. “Pardon my wistful look, but I take it Chester Drum is not the marrying kind.”

“I tried it once. It didn’t work out.”

We didn’t say anything for a while, then I asked, “What makes Charlie so sure they’re going to gun for him?”

Hope looked startled. “I ... gosh, Chet. I had a whole night when I didn’t even have to think about it at all. For which, kind sir, I thank you.” She took another cigarette from her pack. I lit it for her. “Two reasons, I guess,” she said slowly. The first you already know. If the Committee calls him, he can testify how Lindzey tried to scare him into a phony confession in Front Royal, so if the relationship between Lindzey and the Brotherhood can be spelled out—”

“It can. Have they subpoenaed Charlie?”

“No, not yet. But Senator Hartsell had a talk with us. I think the Senator’s a little afraid Charlie won’t cooperate. If he doesn’t he can do more harm than good at the hearings.”

“You said there were two reasons.”

Hope stood up and went restlessly to the window. With her back to me she said, “I wasn’t sure I’d tell you when I came here. I’m still sort of mixed up. The truckers need a union. Charlie remembers what it was like in the thirties, before they had one.”

“They need a good union. One that can work for them, not against them, Hope.”

“I guess I know that, but I ... well, here goes. As a taxi dispatcher, Charlie has friends in the Virginia State Police. Well, the night Hank Cambria was beaten to death in his cab, there was some luggage.”

“I know. The cops impounded it along with the cab. Alexis Sand had her father’s papers in it. They’re dynamite. But at least they’re safe with the cops.”

“That’s what I’m getting at. Charlie has the luggage now, got it from his friends in the police.”

“Charlie! Abbamonte would kill to get his hands on those papers.”

Hope turned around. Her eyes were big with fear. “Oh, that fool!” she cried. “That fool! He was scared, knew he’d need something to bargain with. He called Abbamonte.”

“And told him about the papers?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did Abbamonte say?”

“I don’t know.”

I got Hope’s polo coat from the bedroom and my trenchcoat from the chair I’d draped it across in the living room. Take it easy, I thought. It’s going to be all right. He’s under police guard, isn’t he?

“Your car here? Mine’s down at Brotherhood Headquarters.”

“No. I took a cab.”

I called for a cab. Fifteen minutes later, at a quarter to nine, we were heading north toward the Derleth’s apartment.

Sunday morning, the gray, cold streets almost deserted. I paid the cab off and heard a church bell toll somewhere, distantly. A lonely sound. I took Hope’s arm and went inside and upstairs with her. The uniformed cop outside their apartment door touched the bill of his cap to Hope and gave me a questioning look. I showed him my identification.

Hope let us into the apartment. Charlie came out of the bedroom in pajamas and a bathrobe. “Get dressed,” I said. “We’re going to issue a subpoena for you and put you on ice in the District Sheriff’s keeping. It’s your only chance.”

“In a pig’s neck. And I thought I told you to keep the hell away from my sister.”

“I’m begging you, Charlie,” Hope said. “Listen to him.”

“Yeah?” His eyes were bitter, and the veins stood out on his bald head. “Where were you all night? My own sister, after all I did for you. My own sister with a pair of round heels.”

“That’s enough, Charlie,” I said.

“Is she any good. Drum? I can’t picture—”

I hit him. He spun halfway around and went down on his knees. Hope took a step toward him, stopped. Glaring up at us, he climbed to his feet then moved on wobbly legs through the doorway into the bedroom. Hope started to go after him, but he came right out again holding a .45 in his hand. “I’m giving you a chance,” he said. “Get out of here, get out of my life. And get out of hers.”

“You’ve been seeing too many TV shows. Go ahead, pull the trigger. Give a punk a gun and he thinks he owns the world.”

“Who you calling a punk?” Charlie shouted hoarsely.

“You’re acting like one. What good’s the gun going to do you? There’s a cop outside, Charlie. Or are you going to shoot him too?”

“Keep away from me!”

He had backed up until he was against the window and had nowhere else to go. And then Hope ran between us. “You’re sick,” she cried. “You’re sick if you really want to use that.”

Charlie dry-washed his face with his left hand. Hope grabbed his right arm. The gun went off.

Then three things happened almost simultaneously. Charlie thudded back against the windowsill, a shocked look on his face. Clutching at her forearm, Hope cried out and stumbled to her knees. And the cop came in on the run through the front door, a revolver in his fist.

“What’s going on in here?”

I took the automatic out of Charlie’s hand. He surrendered it meekly, looking down at Hope. “Oh Jesus, Hope,” he said. “Jesus, what did I do?”

I knelt near Hope. There were tears in her eyes, but she was trying to smile. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing, honest. He didn’t mean to do it. He didn’t mean it.”

Tenderly I pushed back the sleeve of her black jacket. It was torn and at the rip, wet with blood. A red three-inch furrow, the trail of the bullet as it had grazed her, marked her forearm. It was bleeding freely and it looked like hell, but the slug hadn’t penetrated.

I bound her arm with my handkerchief. Hope kept telling me it was nothing. The cop said we’d have to all go downtown.

And then, while I was still working on his sister, Charlie broke. It didn’t happen slowly, it happened all at once. He started to cry, and the wracking sobs tore at his body. Figuring Abbamonte was gunning for him hadn’t broken him, a talk with the Senator hadn’t and I hadn’t been able to do it. But now, watching me bandage his sister’s arm, where he had shot her, he suddenly got down on his own knees near Hope and cradled her head in his arms and cried into that jet-black hair of hers. Finally the cries became words and he said, “Forgive me ... swear to God ... didn’t mean it...”

“I know you didn’t, Charlie,” Hopes said softly. “I know it was an accident.”

He stood up, the tears running down his cheeks. He blew his nose noisily. “Glasses and Rover called in from the Parkway Monday night,” he said. “They needed a tow-truck. They were in trouble. Me, I been on Abbamonte’s list for years. He’s into me for a couple of G’s. Hope ... there was business college ... clothes ... she wasn’t gonna be no cheapie, not my sister, and I ... well, he was into me and I got them the tow-truck.”

“But they were working for Holt at the time, weren’t they?” I asked.

“Sure. So what? Abbamonte hadn’t made his big play yet. Holt, Mike Sand, Abbamonte—it was all the same to Glasses and Rover then. Holt figured Mrs. Sand was coming East with help for her husband. He got the word from a hood named Roe Mink out on the Coast and he figured if he could win her confidence, him and Happy Jack Ragen would have Sand and Abbamonte by the short hairs. So he set up this phony snatch, only it backfired on him.” Harsh laughter tore from Charlie’s throat. “You got there before he did, Mr. Drum.”

“That made up Mr. A’s mind for him,” Charlie went on. “If Holt was already in Happy Jack’s camp, Mr. A figured he could make the move to take over on his own. He tried to get Nels Torgesen to cooperate, but Torgesen, he was still—like living in the past. He still saw Mr. A. as a fat, sweaty bookkeeper who also did some loan-sharking which kept the boys in line. He had this diary, though, and Mr. A. wanted it. So he sent me out there to Front Royal, and when I walk in, Holt’s on the floor with his head bashed in.”

He looked at the cop suddenly. “I didn’t do it! Jesus, I didn’t do it!”

The cop shrugged. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, mister.” His eyes caught mine. “Shall I call downtown?”

“Call the Sheriff’s office. Tell them we’re bringing Charlie Derleth into protective custody.” I stared at Charlie. He nodded slowly. “With Dr. Frost’s papers?” I asked him.

His eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Instead he looked at Hope. Her face was pale. She smiled at him.

“With the works,” he said.

And Hope went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

While Charlie dressed, the cop called the District Sheriff’s office. Then I called Senator Hartsell at home and told him we had Charlie Derleth ready to cooperate and some or all of Gideon Frost’s papers. The Senator was ecstatic. The subpoena for Charlie Derleth, he said, would be waiting for us at the Sheriff’s office.

Then Charlie came out of the bedroom with a slim blue portfolio in his hands. “Here they are,” he said, but he didn’t give the portfolio to me. He gave it to Hope. Just a gesture, really, but it was symbolic of the decision he had made.

At nine-fifty we all went downstairs and outside, where the cop’s patrol car was waiting.

A gray four-door sedan was just pulling to the curb across the street. The sidewalk was deserted, the air cold, the sky bleak and threatening. Charlie walked ahead of me toward the patrol car, the cop at his side. Hope walked with me, holding my hand, the blue portfolio tucked under her other arm.

Three men had got out of the sedan across the street. They looked at us and started running.

“Hey!” the cop shouted, clawing for the revolver at his side.

The lead figure sprinting toward us wore glasses and a hat pulled low over his face. Still running, he reached under his coat. Then he had both hands on a stubby black tommy-gun. Then his arms began to shake and the sound burst explosively on the silent Sunday street as the tommy-gun chattered and roared and slugs clanged and whined off the metal of the patrol car.

The cop fell first, spinning completely around and landing heavily on his shoulder. Hope screamed. I dove after the cop, grabbed for his revolver and ripped it loose from its lanyard. Another burst from the tommy-gun split the cold air.

“Get down behind the car!” I yelled at Hope.

Charlie lurched against the rear fender of the patrol car. When the tommy-gun chattered again, he folded and staggered back as if someone had used a sledge hammer on his middle. Crying out, Hope ran to him with the portfolio still under her arm.

Glasses reached her before I did. He chopped brutally with the barrel of the tommy-gun at the side of her head. She fell into him and with both arms around her waist he pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger.

It merely clicked. The pan was empty. Because he held Hope in front of him, shielding his body, I couldn’t use the revolver on Glasses. I moved toward him. He backed into the street with Hope, dragging her.

A shotgun roared from across the street. Pellets hailed on the patrol car and I dove behind its fender, but got up fast and fired three times. A big man was standing in the middle of the street with an automatic in his hand. A smaller man was lounging against the open door of the gray sedan. He had gone back there, probably, for the shotgun. They hadn’t expected this much trouble. They had expected to take Charlie in bed. One of my bullets hit the man with the shotgun, and he sprawled in the street. The big one, who was Rover, backed slowly across it with Glasses and Hope.

If I fired again I might hit Hope. If I ran after them, Rover would cut me down with his automatic. I crouched behind the patrol car. The cop groaned. Then Glasses and Rover and Hope were in the gray sedan, and the doors slammed.

I started running.

I heard a window bang in one of the apartment buildings on they side of the street. A man shouted something. The guy I had hit was the kid, Morty. He got to his knees and pointed the shotgun at me. Then he collapsed, falling forward, and discharged the second barrel at the street.

The car started with a lurch. I hurled myself at it, got my feet on the rear bumper and the weight of my body on the trunk-lid. I saw Hope’s face in the rear window, three inches from mine. Rover was sitting next to her, looking out at me. He said something. The car picked up speed and began to swerve. I couldn’t find anything to hold onto, felt myself slipping. When they took a corner fast, I was in the air suddenly. And then the street came up fast and hard, hitting me and spinning me. I jolted against the curb and lay there breathing like a man who had tried to run a three-minute mile.

Someone helped me to my feet. There were faces going in and out of focus and voices first soft then loud then soft again. I went back to the police car. The cop had dragged himself into it and was gasping into the shortwave mike. His right aim hung at his side; he’d been hit in the shoulder.

I went to where Charlie had fallen. He lay on his back, in a pool of blood, the whites of his eyes wide and reflecting the gray of the sky. Slugs from Glasses’ tommy-gun had stitched across his middle, almost ripping him in half. He was dead.

I got up. Staggered across the street to Morty. His eyes looked up at me.

“Where’d they go?” I said.

He mouthed two unprintable words, but no sound came from his lips.

“Where’d they go?”

His eyes shut slowly and his face went slack. He had long eyelashes that curled almost like a girl’s.

The cops came in two riot cars.

Morty died on the way to the hospital.

They took me to the hospital. I had bruises on my arms, legs and chest but nothing had been broken and I kept telling them I felt all right. They wouldn’t let me go for an hour, and when they did, a cruiser took me to police headquarters. They asked me questions. Nothing tough, no leaning on me, I was one of the good guys and had my credentials to prove it. But they kept asking the same questions over and over again and I kept answering them and kept saying “You don’t understand. Hope. They’ve got Hope.”

At two o’clock, the Senator came for me. He drove me home and waited while I changed out of my ripped suit. He oo’d and ah’d at the bruises. I felt all right, I said. He shook his head, and we drove to his office.

Ballinger had delivered the last of my property from Front Royal. It was the .44 Magnum in its shoulder rig, and I strapped it on and headed for the door.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“I don’t know. They’ve got Hope. I have to find them.”

“Sit down. Here.”

What he gave me was raw whiskey. I drank it down. He gave me more. I drank that down too. There was only a watchman at Brotherhood headquarters on Sunday, he told me. No help there. They checked out home addresses for Abbamonte and Mike Sand. Two more blanks. Ballinger was called, but the Torgesen place in Front Royal wasn’t occupied and hadn’t been for almost twenty-four hours.

We looked at maps, close-scale maps of Tidewater Maryland. “This is the area,” Senator Hartsell said, jabbing a big finger at one of the maps. “The Quaker School, the Congregational church half a mile down the road, then a row of bungalows on the beach, boarded up this time of year, then some sand dunes and scrub pine, then Haycox Airport, then more scrub country and a really big development of those beach-shacks, also deserted this time of year.”

A flag on a high pole, a cyclone fence, an old garage...

“They’ve got to have taken her there,” I said. “They killed Charlie and she has the papers and maybe they think there are other things she can tell them and—Alexis Sand!” I shouted suddenly. The Senator looked at me. I picked up the phone on his desk and called the Statler, but the Sand suite didn’t answer.

“What about the Maryland State Troopers?” I asked the Senator.

“You tell me what about them. If we had one shred of real evidence to show Hope Derleth had been taken there, the State Troopers might cooperate. With a really large-scale search they’d probably be able to find the place.” The Senator scowled over a cigar. “But let me tell you something, if you won’t jump down my throat. In a way I’m glad you don’t have that kind of evidence, not yet. I want them to have their meeting, Chet. I want them to try to cut each other down to size—Sand and Abbamonte and Ragen from the Coast if he’s there—all of them. Because, maybe, one of them will crack. And boy, if he does, we’ll have them.”

“And they’ll have Hope.”

There was nothing he could say to that. I looked down at the map, lit a cigarette, put it out immediately, rolled the map up and said, “Is it okay with you if I go out there looking? I mean, I wouldn’t want to bust up this meeting too soon to suit you.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Chet. Everyone’s got a lot at stake in this.”

I shoved the rolled-up map under my arm. “As much as Hope?”

He stood up suddenly. “I’m going to make a speech. Hell, boy, that’s what they pay me for. Maybe Hope Derleth’s the salt of the earth. I only met her once, and I liked what I saw. But do you think she’s the only innocent person given a rough time by the Brotherhood? Don’t you think there are good men all over the country who died because they tried to buck the union? Don’t you think a guy like Braun Thorn out on the Coast, who got more than a little fed up with the way they use the Brotherhood Welfare Fund out there, had people who cared when they shot him in cold blood? Don’t you—”

“I met his sister,” I said.

“Don’t you think it’s going to continue, business at the same old stand as before, with a new set of leaders, unless we give them enough rope to tie themselves in knots? Do you suppose if the hearings fail and we don’t lean on them as heavily as the law will permit—do you suppose for a minute there won’t be other killings?”

“That’s enough. Senator. I see your point. But I’m going out there. I’ve got to.”

“Of course you are. I never said you shouldn’t. But call out the Troopers and make a frontal attack on them today and they’ll burn every record they have and we’d be right back where we started.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

And, “Okay,” he growled, and we shook hands and I got out of there with the map.

It was after four o’clock and beginning to snow.

All I had to do was comb a couple of dozen square miles of Tidewater Maryland, find the Brotherhood hideout, bust in on them single-handed and somehow come out alive with Hope and without upsetting the Senator’s applecart.

Snap your fingers. Like that.

SHELL SCOTT AND CHESTER DRUM HIT IT OFF

Tidewater, Maryland, 10:00 P.M., Sunday, December 20

Shell Scott

My joyously anticipatory emotion was all shot to hell.

It was late Sunday evening; and for hours I had been driving, first through rain and now sleet, getting more and more frustrated and all out of sorts. If there had been any more sorts to be out of, I would have been out of them, too. A little more of this and I would go to the cops, let them toss me into the house of many slammers, and take over the search themselves.

They would toss me into the slammer, for sure. Heat had pursued me from Los Angeles, and though there was as yet no definite news that Shell Scott—or Ragen—was in the D.C. area, radio and television reports had wafted word of that bilious possibility eastward.

After the jet had landed at Washington National Airport shortly after noon Saturday, I had rented a Chevy and started looking. Mink’s last words had told me Ragen was flying here for a Sunday night meeting with Sand and Abbamonte, and he’d used the words, “showdown ... settle,” so I knew it would be a good-sized gathering—not one of that ugly trio would meet the others privately without several personal gun bearers along—and that they were probably gathering right now. But Mink hadn’t told me enough of the where, just “South on Ben...”

Saturday I had phoned the Automobile Club, asked questions at gas stations, even checked fruitlessly with Trucker Headquarters, pored over maps, traveled over half the area in and near Washington. Mink hadn’t said “D.C.,” though; his exact words had been “Out of D.C.” And a map had showed me that Maryland Avenue in D.C. became Benning Road, and crossed the state line into Maryland.

So now, late Sunday, I was in Tidewater, Maryland. On Benning Road this tune, driving up and down Benning Road. I had checked on Sand, Abbamonte, and Drum, knew the year and make of the cars they drove. But neither that info nor anything else had paid off, and my mood was beginning to match the weather.

All afternoon the sky had darkened, the wind had increased in intensity until now, in the black night, it was almost blowing a gale. Icy sleet whipped by the wind slapped against the windshield, to be swept away only momentarily by the clicking wipers.

I had slowed to swing around a curve, peering through the windshield, when something across the street was briefly etched in my headlights. It was a man running. Behind him was a small, brightly lighted cafe, a big truck-and-trailer rig parked on the asphalt before it.

The man was running from the cafe’s door, sprinting toward a car. I couldn’t see him clearly through the fogged glass, and so I rolled down the window on my side.

Just before he jumped into the car, I got a good look at him.

Chester Drum

A flag on a high pole, a cyclone fence, an old garage.

An old garage, a cyclone fence, a flag on a high pole.

A cyclone fence, an old garage...

I sat hunched over the counter inside an all-night truckstop on Benning Road with those words turning over in my brain, chasing each other down dark blind alleys in which there were no answers, just questions.

I had driven back and forth along Benning Road from the Anacostia River bridge to the Chesapeake shore, had explored side roads, had poked around the scrub-pine country and the boarded up beach-shacks, had prowled through the rain and the sleet and the wind. I was wet, tired and pessimistic. It was ten o’clock, Sunday night. In this weather, Benning Road was almost deserted. A single trucker, his big diesel rig parked outside near my Chrysler, was fighting a pinball machine at the back of the truckstop. An old geezer in a soiled apron was reading a paper behind the counter while I drank strong coffee as black as my mood. I spread Senator Hartsell’s topographical map out on the counter and stared stupidly at it.

Keep trying?

There wasn’t anything else I could do. They were out here somewhere. They had Hope.

The old geezer, pawing lazily at the counter with a limp rag, stared at me and the map. “You from that development commission, mister?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Fellers out here Friday. Had a map like yours. Gonna see about developing some of that there scrub country, they said.”

I nodded, hardly listening. Those would have been some of the Hartsell Committee people, on the same fruitless search I was on.

“Making a mistake,” the old geezer went on dogmatically. “Five, six years back, when we had us an airport over to Haycox, maybe then they could of made something out of the scrub country. They got a big airport over to Chesapeake City now, though. From here to Haycox these days,” he said regretfully, “scrub pine and dunes is all we got, and all we’re gonna need, I reckon.”

“I was out here the other night,” I said. “Went somewhere and can’t find the place now.” My bleak mood made me imitate the clipped drawl which characterizes Tidewater Maryland speech without meaning to. “All I can remember was a flag flapping in the wind on a high pole, an old garage, and a cyclone fence.”

“Flag, mister? You must have the wrong stretch of tidewater. Got us no flags here. None all along Benning, far as I know. What’s so special about it?”

When I didn’t answer, the old geezer told me, “Now, you come along five, six years back, I could of found you as many flags as the Yew-nited Nations, over to the airport. Had them a row of flags and pennants there, before the airport went broke. No flags now, though. Just the hangar and that old admin building a-sitting out there in the Tidewater wind, no planes, no people, no phone even. Control shack coming to pieces now, you bet, with a raggedy old windsock on top of it falling apart like your old Aunt Maggie’s red wool drawers.” He sucked in his dental plate, giving me an old man’s grin.

At first what he said hadn’t registered. Then I looked at him, and the map. I grinned back at him foolishly as it dawned. I stood up fast, spilling my coffee.

“Hey, mister! Be ten cents.”

I tossed a dollar on the counter and ran outside.

With a raggedy old windsock on top of it falling apart like your old Aunt Maggie’s red wool drawers.

A flag on a high pole, flapping in the wind.

A windsock on the control shack.

As I sprinted across the wet shell parking lot to the Chrysler, a car chased its headlights along Benning Road, heading for the Anacostia River bridge. For an instant the lights raked me as the speeding car hit the turn in Benning Road near the truckstop, spewing wings of water at the night. Then I got behind the wheel of the Chrysler.

Haycox Airport. I felt like singing. It had to be Haycox Airport.

I started driving.

Shell Scott

Shock pulled my foot from the accelerator.

The man running to the car, leaping into it, was Chet Drum.

I stared through the open window, sleet whipping in against my face, saw him start the car, a new Chrysler, rip into the road and roar down it—away from me. Automatically I started swinging in a U-turn, hit the brakes barely in time as headlights loomed before me, yanked the wheel back as the Chevy slid on the wet asphalt. But half a minute later I got turned around, tromped on the gas and headed after him.

My fingers were wrapped tight around the wheel. If the crooks were meeting around here, they naturally couldn’t have the meeting without that guy. So South on Ben was South on Benning Road—and with a little luck Chet Drum would lead the way for me. Sudden exhilaration lacked up my pulse.

I passed several cars in the next mile, but none of them was Drum’s Chrysler. As I swung out to pass the next one I saw a narrow road on my left, leading off from Benning. It was the only turnoff I’d seen so far. I kept going until I was sure he’d either turned there or was so far ahead I’d never catch him. I swore, pulled to the right of the road, whipped around and headed back, swung into the narrow turnoff with tires skidding. If I’d lost him, if he’d gone ahead and out of sight, then I’d had it, really had it. Everything would be over by the time I found Ragen and the rest—if I ever did.

Soon, ahead and on my right, shadowy, even blacker than the night, long and low, a building loomed. Ahead of me light glinted faintly, on something else. As I got close I saw that it was a car—the Chrysler, Drum’s. That settled it. In that long low building the gang must be meeting; all the big and little hoods would be there now.

I stopped behind the Chrysler, got out and looked inside the car as cold rain pelted me. It was empty, but Drum couldn’t be far away now. I grinned, took out my Colt and turned, eyes squinted against the rain and wind. Near me something moved. Shock rippled through me. The light was faint, but not so faint that I couldn’t see the man and his features clearly enough. It was Chet Drum.

Those features had been burned into my mind with acid during these last miserable days, and all the boiling gripe in me suddenly erupted. He said something, but the wind swept his words away. I had my gun pointed at his heart, and for a long second I held it on him, then the tension drained from my hand and from the finger on my Colt’s trigger.

I could see his hands—empty. He wasn’t armed.

I didn’t want to shoot him, anyway. I wanted to get Drum, and get him good, but I wanted to do it with my hands. I could still see Drum swinging that gun at me there beneath the Blue Jay cabin, feel his fist bounce off my face.

I slapped the Colt back into its holster, dug in my feet and jumped toward him. He’d been standing apparently flatfooted only a few yards from me, and I thought I had him. But he wasn’t quite as flatfooted as it had appeared. He moved.

He moved in a hell of a hurry—and the wrong way. Instead of making a big leap to the side he stepped forward and a little to his left, bending, raising a big fist.

I ducked.

At least, that was the idea.

Chester Drum

It was less than two miles from the truckstop to the turnoff that led to the abandoned airport. I made it in less than two minutes, cut my headlights and drove slowly along the potholed secondary road. Pretty soon the low-pitched whine of wet asphalt gave way to the higher-pitched whine of wet concrete. I had driven off the road. I was driving across the airport tarmac now.

And then, crouched against the night, I saw the building.

It was long and low and I could barely make it out in the darkness. Curved roof of a hangar at one end. Flat roof at the other.

I pulled up about fifty yards beyond it. Sleet rattled on the roof of the Chrysler as I killed the engine. I got out with a flashlight and my .44 Magnum—and heard the unmistakable flapping sound of the tattered windsock.

Lighting the flash and cupping my hand over it, I walked across the tarmac. I could feel the stubble of dead weeds in the cracks where the concrete had buckled.

I counted eight cars parked between my Chrysler and the airport building. A gathering of the clan, I thought. The Brotherhood bigshots and their thugs, come to cut the pie of trucking across the continent. And they had Hope in there. Glasses and Rover had taken her, along with the Frost papers.

I cut the flashlight and went close to the building. It was rectangular, over a hundred feet long and maybe forty feet wide. At one end was the great corrugated metal overhead door of the hangar with a small personnel door at its base on the left side. The small door had a rusted lock on a rusted hasp. A couple of jolts from the butt of the Magnum ought to take care of that, but then what? It was utterly dark on that side of the building. I got down on my hands and knees. There was a crack under the hangar door. No light seeped through.

Walking some more, I found another metal door on the long side of the building facing the tarmac. I didn’t have to get down on my hands and knees to see the light under that one. And a few yards from it, fronting on the tarmac, I could barely make out the waist-high cyclone fence. If I’d ever had any doubts about Haycox Airport, that dispelled them. This was the place all right.

Another car, its headlights dark, came rumbling over the secondary road and across the tarmac. I couldn’t see it yet. Running in a crouch, I went through the gate in the cyclone fence and out toward the parked cars. Whoever it was, I had to take him out of the play before I found myself fighting a war on two fronts.

The car parked near my Chrysler, and a man got out. A big guy, at least my size. He was facing the Chrysler. I gripped the Magnum tighter. His back looked as big as the side of a barn. I felt my finger tighten involuntarily on the trigger. I had never shot a man from behind, and never in cold blood. But Hope was in there.

Common sense ended the moral battle for me. I couldn’t use the Magnum. They’d hear it inside. I’d have to take this guy out with my bare hands, whoever he was. Even using the Magnum as a club, struggling with him, it might go off. I thrust it into one pocket of my trenchcoat, the small flashlight into the other.

Then he turned around.

Less than five yards separated us now. I couldn’t see his face very clearly, but I could see how the driving rain and sleet had plastered his white hair to his skull.

I was looking at Shell Scott.

He recognized me at the same instant. He mouthed my name hoarsely, but without surprise. He had a revolver in his right hand. He could empty it at me before I reached for the Magnum. Then he looked behind me at the dark bulk of the airport building. I saw his teeth set in a grimace or a grin.

“Sentry duty, Scott?” I said. “You’re a little tardy.” It sounded only a little like my voice. I was staring at his gun. Staring at death.

He put the gun away and charged across the few yards that separated us. I met him halfway, without time to wonder about the gun. I missed with a left and he countered it with a right that rasped my ear as it went by. He was big and fast, and he knew at least one of the secrets of unarmed defense. He kept moving, his head bobbing, his wide shoulders making arcs in the rain.

And he could counterpunch, which is another of the secrets. I landed with a left jab. It snapped his head back. It is supposed to do that, and get him off balance. It did not get him off balance. The jab was a pretty good one, crisp and fast, but he countered with his right, hooking it hard, before I could draw the left hand back. That right hand rocked me. I felt my knees go rubbery.

I had a fight on my hands.

TWO PRIVATE EYES OUT OF FOCUS

Tidewater, Maryland, 10:25 P.M., Sunday, December 20

Shell Scott

I didn’t duck quite fast enough. Not the first time or the second time or the third time, but somewhere along in there Drum’s fists stopped battering my face and chest and I staggered back a couple of steps. I’d landed several good ones on him, too, during the flurry, and his face was marked.

He was bent forward slightly, both hands held easily before him, chin bent down toward his chest. It was a pretty big chin. Pretty big chest too, for that matter. He was big all over, and he looked tough, but that was fine with me. It meant he could take more punishment before going out, and I wanted him to take plenty before I finished ruining him,

We both stepped forward at the same time. I feinted with a short left and he looped a hook at me. I blocked the blow neatly, catching it on my right forearm, and leaned into a left jab. It was a good one. It was a hard, jolting left with plenty of steam behind it, and I was steaming more than normally now.

The blow landed on his big chin and I waited for him to fall down unconscious, perhaps groaning slightly.

“That one was for slugging me at Blue Jay, Drum,” I said through my teeth.

He wavered, like a tree in a gale, pivoted peculiarly, and something landed on my left ear. I think it was a rock in his fist. That bastard had hit me with a rock. I stumbled, sort of lost my balance, and went down.

Somebody had turned out the faint light completely, then brightened it slowly as if by turning a rheostat. Drum was stepping toward me and I was startled to see that no rock was in his fist.

I rolled aside, looped my right heel behind his left one, kicked hard at his knee with my left foot. It got him. When my foot landed I jerked backward with my right heel and his leg suddenly went out from under him. He changed direction, just as suddenly, and went down. He landed on the solid concrete and it seemed to shake. That was okay; so did he seem to shake.

We both started scrambling to our feet and he said, “Blue Jay? What did you and Ragen expect? Rewards?”

Me and Ragen. That was a laugh. I had scrambled this guy’s brains already. I got to my knees, and then onto my feet. Before knocking him down again—or had I knocked him down? The last half minute or so seemed a little jumbled. But before knocking him down, or down again, whichever it was, I said, “Just to refresh your memory, Drum, your pal Ragen is the next guy I’m going to mangle. Right after I finish with you.”

We were both on our feet now, panting. There appeared to be a lot of blood on him. That seemed swell to me, until I remembered that some of it was probably my blood.

He said, between pants, “Why, you simple sonofabitch, I’m a special investigator for the Hartsell Committee.”

“Sure. You used that gag before.” His language didn’t please me. In fact, nothing about this ape pleased me. I said, “With that mouth of yours, I can’t understand how you’ve kept all your teeth this long,” and moved in on him. But instead of stepping back, he moved toward me. I launched a hard left at his chin.

It got a little bit confused there for a while. But he seemed to get up more slowly this time. That’s the way it looked to me. I sat there on the concrete on my tired old butt and watched him get up. And he wasn’t moving like any spring chicken now. No, sir, he moved like an old man. I was beating hell out of the bastard.

He said, “Come on, you bastard. Get up off your butt.”

“You come down here, you bastard. Just get a little closer and I’ll tear you limb from...” It didn’t sound right. But if he tried to kick me in the head, I knew exactly how to grab his foot and send him flying around like a propeller. I know all the tricks. Right then, though, I wondered why he didn’t at least try to kick me in the head. Most of the hoods and slobs I tangle with will try practically anything. Kicking heads is one of the first things they think of. I felt as if he’d kicked me in the head, but he hadn’t used anything but his fists so far. It seemed—well, out of character.

But this Drum slob was standing up there sort of dancing around. At least, that’s probably what he thought he was doing. He moved his feet a little, hands up in front of him, stumbled and went down on one knee, then struggled up again. He was a mess.

Well, if he wasn’t going to fight fair, I’d have to get up. I sprang to my feet. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but I did get up. Drum stepped toward me, lips pulled back from his teeth. He wasn’t pulling them back on purpose, that’s just the way they went now.

Like a fool, he led with his right. I ducked into it and didn’t even feel it. I got up again and this time when he swung that fool right hand I was ready for it. His fist scraped past my ear and I hammered a left and right into his gut, then stepped aside as he swung a fist up at my chin. The uppercut missed, and I landed a good one on the side of his jaw.

He reeled clear around in a circle and I thought for an empty moment that he wasn’t going down this time either. But down he went. Slowly, maybe, with much resistance and a great lack of willingness, but down.

I stood over him, dancing about, and said, “You might as well just stay down there this time, Drum. You’ve had it. I know nearly every move you’ve made, anyhow. I know you were in on that Blue Jay job. I’m the guy who almost grabbed you then, remember. A couple minutes sooner and I’d have shot all you kidnapers and taken Frost back to Alexis.”

What was I saying? The words came out oddly, as if in pieces. And bells were ringing. In my head, they were ringing. All sorts of bells, big bells and little bells, even some cracked bells. It was almost beautiful. But I stopped dancing. I was pretty tired of dancing. In fact, I was pretty damn tired of everything.

Chester Drum

Rain and sleet pelted my face and I could taste salty blood in my mouth. If Scott was as fresh, now, as the flowers in May, he might have finished me. But I had hurt him too. He waited, panting, snuffling blood back into his nostrils, I moved around him, seeking an opening. I found one, and hooked his left ear. Felt the hard jolt of it in my knuckles and heard the meaty splat of bone against flesh.

But all Scott did was sidestep and plant himself and drive a battering ram into my solar plexus. Then he fell to one knee on the tarmac, as if my left hook had had a delayed fuse action. I looked down at him, and then I looked straight at him because I doubled over telling myself, breathe, breathe, you damn fool, while my diaphragm refused to move under my lungs.

My head rested on his shoulder. The rain and the sleet and the wind were far away. He cuffed at my ribs and kidneys weakly. Then I smelted the brackish tidewater, and I was breathing again, and Scott’s blows became more lusty. We straightened and leaned on each other. I tried to tie his arms up. He tried to tie up mine.

“What the ... hell were you babbling about Blue Jay?” I gasped against his ear. “You think I was sightseeing there?”

“You were in on the Frost snatch,” he gritted as we clinched and leaned our weight against each other.

“I was in on the Frost snatch?” I shouted. “You simple tool, is that why your buddies slugged me coming down the stairs?”

“My buddies?”

His rage and my indignation, or maybe it was the other way around or maybe it was both, got our hands loose. We broke the clinch. We glared at each other, sucking air through torn lips. My lungs were on fire. His guard was low and I went in over it. But that raised my hands and he went in under them. The same battering ran hit my abused solar plexus. I sat down hard.

But Scott was on his duff by then too—leaning forward with his head dangling. Get up and finish him, I thought. Get up and finish him. I tried. The only place it must have showed was on my face. For a moment we both just sat there on the tarmac.

“Soft?” I said.

He made it to his feet, wobbled a few seconds and launched himself at me. I managed to roll over. He went down on his face and I rolled back on top of him. Had a satisfying moment when I pushed his face against the wet concrete.

Then he twisted free and fought clear with arms like the sails of a windmill in a storm. I felt the concrete against my back. Scott was using me as an entrenching tool, trying to dig his way through it I grabbed the lapels of his coat. Something ripped. I did a flailing kickup with my legs. Scott went away. Then we scrambled toward each other on hands and knees, and then both of us got up. More slowly this time. Each time more slowly.

I put all my weight behind a right. It landed cleanly but lacked snap. It was the weight more than the blow which sent Scott down again. That’s it, I thought, waiting, panting raggedly. He can’t get up again. He’s all through,

Only he got up like a quarrel shot from a crossbow. He was mad. He was mad enough to pick up the Chrysler and throw it at me. At least that’s what it felt like. What it was, was a left hook with shoulder and body-pivot behind it. And what it did was hit the hinge of my jaw cleanly on the right side.

Down I went again.

Shell Scott

When Drum got up again, I hit him with a right and a left. His head rocked a little, and then he slugged me on the nose. Water poured from my eyes and I didn’t see his other fist coming. It landed alongside my chin and wrapped my head around about forty degrees. There was a little more of that and finally I realized no more blows were coming. Or going.

When I could see half clearly again. Drum was sitting on his hind end, arms resting on his bent knees. His mouth was open and he was breathing gustily through it. I was on my knees, leaning forward, hands pressed against the concrete, also breathing through my mouth.

Something dripped from my lip and splatted against the concrete. For a moment I thought it was my lip dripping from my lip, but it was only blood. In a way it made me feel good to know there was still blood in me to drip with.

That sleet was slanting down once more, and the wind was almost enough to knock me out, especially in my condition. When I got my head raised up again, Drum was looking dully at me. I ran a tongue over my teeth. They were still there. I apparently have extremely strong teeth.

“Drum,” I said. “You old bastard. You old bastard, Drum.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You sonofabitch. You look like you’re dying, you beat-up sonofabitch.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I’m going to live. I think.”

“Not a chance.”

“I may be bleeding internally, but I know you’re bleeding externally.” I paused. “Listen, Drum.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think this is going to work.”

He nodded his head in agreement, winced slightly, but didn’t speak for a while. Finally he said, “I could have told you that. It occurred to me.”

“It occurred to me first.”

He grinned. Before all this happened, I thought, he must have been an almost nice-looking man. Not like me, of course. I reached up and felt my strong, firm features. Hell, I wasn’t like me. Those bells were ringing very softly now, barely tinkling.

I said sagely, “Drum, you old bastard, we’ll have to figure out another way. But listen. The main thing that got me onto you was when Eric Torgesen sprang you from the Front Royal can. After you bashed Townsend Holt’s head in. So now that I’ve beaten you into virtual unconsciousness, tell me: Why did you kill Holt? What was your angle?”

He closed his eyes, opened them slowly. As far as they would open. Then he said wearily, “You fathead. I’ve been trying to tell you for—for hours now. You’re the guy in the soup. I didn’t kill anybody. I’ve been working for Mrs. Sand—”

“Hah! I’ve been working for Mrs. Sand. She hired me Monday morning to find her father. Caught you there, Drum!”

“—and the Hartsell Committee.”

Of course, he was lying. I could feel the anger swelling up in me again. Unfortunately, that was all that swelled up in me. He sat there and lied to me. While he raved on, I got into a more comfortable position, lying down.

I don’t know just when it happened. Maybe lying there on the cold concrete with the sleet freezing my face cleared my brain. But at some point he started making a little sense. It swept over me nauseously, sweatily, stickily, like hot sherbet. Some of his phrases settled in my mind like heavy dandruff: “...that phone call from Holt to Ragen must have been to tell him I’d fouled it up, all right. A phony snatch with Holt set to play the Lone Ranger and get Alexis to fly into his arms with her father’s papers. Only Holt didn’t show up. I did. I ran his two hoods off the road...” I remembered Alexis telling me about Prince-Flash Chet coming down on them in his rocketship, something like that. It was fitting together.

Feeling sick, I raised up on one aching elbow, then pushed myself to my feet. “Drum,” I said in a hollow voice.

“Yeah?”

“Who put the cops after me and Ragen? I thought it was you.”

“It was me. It figured that you were in on the snatch with Ragen. Hell, I saw you there with him.”

I felt sicker. “No, I saw you there with him. Drum ... I think in a moment ... we’re both going to faint.”

Chester Drum

Maybe Scott had a point there. Maybe we both were going to faint. Ever see a couple of well-matched heavies square off against each other in the Golden Gloves? They use sixteen-ounce gloves, and after a couple of rounds—if they’ve really been mixing it—the pound of weight on each fist begins to drag their arms down. Scott and I were like that now. He didn’t look so good, what I could see of him in the rain and the darkness. I must have looked as bad, if not worse.

I could hardly lift my arms. And whatever I thought of Scott, I had to admire him. That guy could fight with the best of them. Too, there were a couple of times when he might have stomped me, and he hadn’t. He could fight with the best of them, and he fought cleanly.

We were both still on our feet, but only that. And for a man who had sold himself out to Ragen, Scott had been saying some mighty strange things—when he wasn’t using his tongue to lick a pair of fat lips. He looked ghastly. I felt ghastly. It occurred to me after a while that he might have been trying to smile. “But what the hell were you doing out at Blue Jay?” he said.

My lips were puffy too, and the words came out thick and vague as I said, “I told you. Trying to get to Frost before Ragen’s muggs. I got slugged.”

“I didn’t slug you. If I had, you probably would have eaten the gun for vitamins.” He lifted a hand slowly and poked a swollen finger in my direction. “But why the hell did you go out there anyway?”

“Marker was ready to talk. A Hartsell op named Moody said so. I went out to help, but I was too late. A couple of hoods beat the Blue Jay hideout out of Moody.”

His left eye went wide. His right couldn’t. It was swollen half shut. “Mink and Candy?” he said.

“That was their names, yeah. But Moody also told the Senator you were poking around into Braun Thorn’s death, so I—”

“You bet your sweet life I was poking around. Braun was one of the best friends I ever had. You say you’re a Hartsell op?”

“On special assignment, yeah. Damn it, I told you.”

We looked at each other. He was Braun Thorn’s friend. I was working for Hartsell. I blinked one eye. I had some trouble with the other one.

“You had a pretty good rep,” I said, only a little grudgingly. “The Chet Drum of L.A., they called you.”

“Ten minutes ago I would have made them eat those words. Now I don’t know.” And he added, “You were pretty good out here tonight.”

“You can use your dukes,” I said.

“Circumstantial evidence,” he said. “It got so I saw red every time I heard your name, on circumstantial evidence.”

“The same in reverse, Scott. We had to, the way the case was breaking.”

“You heeled?”

“Yeah. I didn’t use my gun on you because I thought they’d hear it inside. That’s why you put your own gun away, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. That’s what I was getting at.”

We both stared a moment longer, then we smiled. He stuck his hand out, giving me a sheepish look. His face must have been mirroring mine. I shook his hand. He didn’t have much of a grip left. Neither did I.

I said, “Now that we’ve beaten each other to a pulp, what are we going to do about those hoods in there?”

Before he could answer, if he was going to answer, lights went on. Not inside our heads, as they had just done, but all over the landing field.

Runway lights.

THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES

Tidewater, Maryland, 10:40 P.M., Sunday, December 20

Shell Scott

We both jerked our heads around at the same moment.

Drum had told me during our battle and since then the highpoints of what he’d done during this case; I had filled him in on the action from my end. So we both knew what that sudden flare of light meant.

Runway lights are turned on so a plane can land. And who would be bringing a plane down here—at an abandoned airport—in the wind and sleet? To meet Sand and Abbamonte?

John Ragen.

Ragen—and another gang of armed hoodlums. I suddenly felt as if I were tied to a large bomb with a short, sputtering fuse. I said to Drum, “This ... kind of complicates my answer to your question. About what to do with those hoods inside. There are soon going to be hoods outside, in the air, and perhaps even popping up out of the ground.”

He swung his face back toward me. “Ragen and who else?”

“Candy and three or four gunmen, maybe more.”

He looked horrible. Now that the runway lights were on we could see each other clearly, and it had been better before. I guess I must not have looked amusing myself. In addition to all the rest, there was an expression almost of revolted shock on Drum’s face. He looked me up and down, then all over my head as if trying to locate my nose, and said slowly, “Maybe we could scare them to death.”

At the same moment we both realized we were standing out in the open, with plenty of reflected light on us. We sprinted for the building, which was perhaps forty yards away, and made it to the protection of a wall after staggering over no more than eighty or ninety yards a piece. Drum got there before I did, but only because he happened to stumble toward the building at the last moment. He sank to his knees, snorting enormously, and I ran right over him and fell on my head. There just wasn’t any stop in my legs once I’d gotten them going, and by the time I’d climbed up onto them again I knew there was no more go in them, either. And when you’re out of both stop and go, there isn’t much left to be out of.

Drum was still snorting. I said, “It’s no good. We couldn’t take one female pickpocket now. There must be at least half a dozen or dozen uglies inside. And now Ragen and all his uglies. Oh, it’s ... ugly.”

Drum said, “I cased the—” snort—"hangar and administration building. We can—” snort—"get inside and maybe ... maybe ... uh.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe ... uh—” snort. He paused. “Well, have you got a better idea?”

I had to confess that I didn’t. Which is an indication of how low it is possible for man’s mental processes to sink. And, actually, it wasn’t just Drum that was snorting. I was doing quite well there myself. In fact, we were practically carrying on the conversation in snorts, which seemed the right language for that conversation.

We could hear the droning of the plane’s engines now, faintly through the wind and rain. “That’ll be Ragen, all right,” I said. And then another thought struck me. “Maybe even Dr. Frost and Alexis.”

Drum nodded. “If they’re alive. What kind of plane does Ragen have?”

“A DC-3.”

“DC-3 ... that’s a Dakota, old twin-engined executive plane. Carry about twenty passengers.”

“That’s great. Twenty. Probably it’s also a bomber, and they’ll drop things on us.”

Drum pointed. “There it is.”

I followed his finger. All over the sky. Finally it steadied enough so I could get the general area. And I saw something weird, frightening even. It looked like part of a huge, puffy eyelid, a hideous flesh saucer floating ... I closed my eyes and it went away. But of course; it was part of my huge puffy eyelid. I tried again, straining my lids up and using my merely bad eye, and this time caught the blinking red light on a plane’s port wing. In moments the other light was visible as the plane banked, turned toward us, aimed for the runway.

We couldn’t even get out of here now.

Drum was still worrying his idea, as if what was left of his mind at this point was all one-track. “If we could both get inside there in a hurry ... and somehow take care of them, we’d be ready for Ragen and his men.”

“It’s that ’somehow’ that bothers me. Drum.” I shook my head and groaned and said “Ow!” and stopped shaking my head and said, “I’m afraid the only way we could take these gangs of hoodlums would be if they all cooperated by shooting themselves. As for overpowering them ... I am out of power.”

He nodded glumly. “I know what you mean, Scott. That was some battle we had. You took more out of me than was in me.”

“Yeah. I won the fight, of course. But I feel like a loser.”

That was, for each of us perhaps, our moment of most monumental indecision. The low point. The blank hiatus. As though time had ruptured right there and smacked us. We gawked at the incoming plane, our expressions probably like that of un-blindfolded men eyeballing the firing squad. Soon the Dakota’s wheels would touch down on the runway. We gawked. But then Drum swung his head toward me again.

He looked at me strangely. That was about the only way he could look at anybody now, but I thought I detected a different strangeness. He said, “Scott, didn’t you say we could take them if they’d shoot themselves?”

“Yeah, but I’m likely to say anything...”

Then it hit me. And the indecision was suddenly over—for both of us. It was funny how we clicked then, as though the process of trying to murder each other had somehow welded us closer together than we could ever have been without it, as if during the blows and blood-spilling there had come about a kind of mental alchemy which let us think almost as one.

We spoke rapidly and softly then, and I could feel the excitement pulsing in me, starting to send more strength through my body. He said, “Abbamonte’s already pushed Sand halfway out. I was here at the airport when his goon slugged Sand on the jaw with a .45.”

“I saw the lump. And I know Ragen would kill Sand in a minute—if he thought he could get away with it.”

“Sand’s in a sweat to lower the boom on Abbamonte. And they’re both in there. Sand’s just hanging on by his teeth now. He might think Ragen’s in with Abba.”

“Hell,” I said, “we might really get them shooting at each other. None of these bums know you and I are here. If you can let go some shots at Ragen and his boys—from inside the hangar—Ragen’s gang will probably think the Sand-Abbamonte hoodlums are blazing away at them. And if I return your fire—from outside the hangar—vice versa. Sand and Abba will think they’re getting slaughtered by Ragen and his goons.”

Drum grinned. “It might work. All I have to do is somehow join Abba and Sand’s gang. All you have to do is get in the middle of Ragen’s bunch. That’s all. But it’s worth a try.”

“They’re ready for an explosion.”

“Let’s set it off.”

We were both on our feet by then. I could see the light of battle in Drum’s eyes, feel it in mine. The DC-3 was coming in for a landing, almost down. Drum said, “I’ll get inside somehow. Hope’s in there.”

“It works out right. I’d rather be close to Ragen.”

Those lights, I thought. I could never get close to the men from the plane—not without being recognized—while those runway lights were on. “Drum,” I said, and my voice was a little tight, “when you see the runway lights go out, you’ll know I got that far. There’s not time for us both to do that job. And you’ll have your hands full inside the hangar. What’s in there, anyway?”

In fast sentences Drum explained what he knew of the building’s layout from his trip around it and his one visit inside it. The hangar was at this end, nearest the landing strips; another section, probably the garage area, was in the middle; and there was a wing at the far end, apparently the administration building. That was the only section with windows in its walls—and all or most of the gathered gang was probably inside there.

“That’s good enough,” I said. “I’ve got the picture.”

He nodded. “We’ll take it as it comes. However it happens, I’ll let go the first shot, over your heads.”

“Make it three or four shots if you can. These guys are all trigger-happy—except maybe Ragen—but they have to think they’re really getting assassinated. Right after you blast at us, I’ll blaze away at the administration building.”

He was grinning. “It’s crazy.”

“Sure it’s crazy.”

It was. So were we. But there was a chance it might work. A chance. That was all I asked. I knew it was all Drum asked, too. He said, and his voice was almost cheerful, “Whichever way it goes. I’ll let you get close. I’ll wait till I see the whites of your eyes.”

“The way I feel about all this. Drum, you’ll see them with no difficulty.”

He stuck out his hand. “Luck, Shell.” Two words, but his voice and the firm pressure of his grip said the rest of it.

I grabbed his hand. “Luck, Chet.”

In the last moment before we went in our separate directions we looked at that plane again. The DC-3 had touched down on the runway now, was taxiing toward us. It was a little like that un-blindfolded look at the firing squad before, but there was a difference. Ragen’s trigger-happy hoodlums were still the firing squad.

But maybe we weren’t the target.

Chester Drum

After I smashed the rusted padlock of the hangar personnel door with the butt of my Magnum, I stood there in the rain, waiting. I could still hear the big motors of the taxiing plane, droning in the night. Making another careful circuit of the building, I’d taken a chance and used my flashlight on the hangar’s outside walls. Up near the roof the wood seemed weathered and rotten. If I could climb up there somehow on the inside I might find a vantage point to start our war from—if Scott took care of the runway lights. But even if he did and if I started shooting, what then? We still had to convince Sand and Abbamonte on the inside and Ragen on the outside that they were gunning for each other. If we didn’t, we were dead.

Suddenly, across the tarmac, they cut the DC-3’s engines. The wind moaned, the rain lashed concrete. I took a look back at the bright runway lights. From where I stood, the corner of the building cut off the DC-3. With the flash in my left hand and the .44 Magnum in my right, I went inside the hangar.

I expected complete darkness, but a lantern glowed dully orange on the floor at the far end of the place. That was just great. They’d been in here. They might decide to come back. With just enough light to see me by.

What I saw by the light of the lantern was the detritus of any abandoned airport—empty fuel drums, a propellerless motor up on blocks, the stripped skeleton of an ancient high-winged monoplane. I could hear the wind moaning above me and to my left, and when I homed in on the sound, I felt a spray of water. The inside walls of the hangar were raw wood. Constant buffeting by the salt and moisture-laden tidewater winds had done its job. But the feeble light of the lantern didn’t show me what I was looking for, and I had to use the flash.

Then I saw it.

High up under the sloping hangar roof, the wood had rotted away entirely. Windblown rain flecked golden there in the beam of my flash. It was the vantage point I needed.

But how to reach it?

I tried one of the fuel drums, standing it on end close to the wall and climbing on top of it. All I did was get myself drenched. My shoulders were still about three feet short of the rotted wood. I lugged another drum next to the first and up-ended a third on top of them. That was harder than it sounds, for the drums were stacked together like canned food in a supermarket display. If I moved the wrong one I could start a clatter they’d hear from here to the Anacostia River and back.

I climbed again and got a grip on the rotted wood. A piece broke off in my hand, and I almost fell. When I righted myself, I was staring through a hole about three feet long and one foot high. I could see the runway lights and the DC-3. It had no flight-stairs. The hatch was open.

Where was Scott? What about those lights?

I shifted my weight, because more wood was breaking off under my grip. Just then I heard a rolling sound, then a scraping, then a clanging clatter as the stacked fuel drums began to come apart. One of them rolled across the floor toward the skeleton of the monoplane. The others banged together like ten-pins falling before a strike. The sound echoed in the almost-empty hangar.

It was a sound to get me killed.

I just had time to get down off my perch and crouch behind the three drums when the connecting door between the hangar and garage sections of the building opened.

Shell Scott

I paused outside the door of the control tower. Overhead the tattered windsock popped in the wind. The runway lights were still on, and through a window I had seen two men inside the small room.

Running here, bent low to the ground, I had spotted a piece of timber, scooped it up. It was a little bigger than a baseball bat, not quite so heavy. As I balanced the timber on my right shoulder, reached for the door with my other, hand, I thought for a moment about Drum. I had to hand it to the guy. My end of this goofiness wasn’t easy, but he had to go inside where the boys were already assembled, where it was light and probably quiet enough so they could hear his movements. And where, if they spotted him, there was no place to run. But with the help of darkness and with the sound of my movement covered by the pounding rain and sleet, I would ... get killed much later than Drum.

Down on the runway they had cut the DC-3’s engines. Men were dropping out of the hatch. I could see half a dozen already assembled near the plane. The plane squirted out another, like a big chicken laying rotten eggs. The wind howled in my ears. More rotten eggs could be shooting holes in Drum’s corpse inside the hangar, and with this wind I wouldn’t even hear them. But, then, neither would Drum.

I shoved the control shack’s door open and stepped inside.

Both men jerked their heads around, eyes widening.

I stepped toward them, “Douse those lights, you damn fools!” I yelled. “You want the whole countryside down on us?”

One of the men turned automatically, reached for a switch. The other guy kept staring at me. So I hit him first. I took another step toward him, unlimbered my timber, and smacked him hugely square between his startled eyes. He got his right hand up to his chest, reaching for a gun, just as the club landed.

The lights went out for him and on the runway at the same moment. The second man, at the control panel, let out a great noise as I swung at him. I don’t know where I got him, but it did the job. They both had guns strapped against their chests. I grabbed them, two heavy Colt .45 automatics, used one to tap the second man again, then spun around and took off.

I ran in darkness over the tarmac. Ragen and his men must be almost at the hangar by now. Once I caught my foot on a clump of wiry weeds splitting the concrete, fell rolling and came up staggering but still running.

Then I heard Ragen’s hard, battering-ram voice. “What in hell’s going on there? Who in hell’s that?”

They had heard me, stopped alongside the building about ten yards past the hangar door. I ran right up to them, feeling my heart swell in my chest as if it were going to pop open. I lifted my voice half an octave and said from the side of my mouth, “What’s the beef? I just doused the lights out. We didn’t tink you was ever comin’.”

I thought it was weak. But it wasn’t. It worked, and if it works it isn’t weak. But I was weak. It was dark here, but not so dark they couldn’t make out my size, outline, a dim blur of my features. Even in bright light, though, my features would probably be a dim blur—and, finally, I could actually thank Drum for that.

“Well—” Ragen said his favorite cuss word again. The mob turned and moved forward once more, parallel to the long wall of the building. In my mind I ran over the layout Drum and I had so quickly discussed. First the hangar, then garage area. We were passing the garage now. Up ahead were rows of windows, light showing dimly behind the glass—the administration building. Sand, Abbamonte, their gunmen, would be inside there. Men were talking softly near me, but it was just a mumble. I wasn’t listening for words, I was listening for shots, praying they’d be from Drum’s gun. Not from somebody behind me. My heart was shaking like a hula dancer’s fanny.

We reached the door to the administration building. Close on our right were the windows. Faintly behind the fogged and rain-streaked panes I could see movement. And there was movement around me, too, shadows shifting in the dim light. I made out the shapes of eight or nine men around me. One of them reached the door, paused, pushed it open.

Drum! I mentally yelled. Where are you? Where in hell are you? Where in hell are you?

He didn’t answer. The guy was probably dead in there. My knees actually waggled. Not from fright—there hadn’t been time to get scared yet—but because I was crammed with tension, wound up like an amateur’s doily.

The first of Ragen’s men was stepping inside the building now. There was movement all around me. I let out my breath in a long sigh. It swept over me then. It wouldn’t work. It was crazy. There hadn’t been a chance it would work in the first place. We had been out of our minds. We were still out of our minds.

I reached into my pockets, stepped back, came up with the two .45’s in my hands. And my lungs in my mouth. More light spilled out that open door. If Drum wasn’t there...

I refused to think about it.

SCOTT AND DRUM KILL AN EVENING

Tidewater, Maryland, 10:46 PM., Sunday, December 20

Chester Drum

A man came running through the connecting door between the hangar and the garage. He held an automatic in his fist. He was a small guy and he wore metal-rimmed glasses. If you didn’t know him you wouldn’t have thought him very deadly. I knew him. A small guy, sure. But a tarantula isn’t very big either.

It was Glasses.

He prowled among the fallen drums, poking at them, then across the hangar to its outside door. For a moment he stood there. If he didn’t try the door I was all right. If he tried it he’d find the broken lock and give the alarm. I waited while he waited. As to brains he wasn’t particularly endowed, but trying the door seemed pretty elementary stuff.

When he got one hand on the doorknob, I started running.

He opened the door and had to hold it with both hands, the automatic pointing for the moment uselessly outside, to keep the wind from pulling it away from him. He heard the wind and the rain. He didn’t hear me.

I swung the Magnum up, then down. At the last possible instant he moved his head. No reason to he just moved it. The barrel of the Magnum struck his shoulder and in the same split-second I got my left arm around his neck in a mugger’s grip. He made a sound like, “Nya, nyah,” not very loud, and then he was silent because I had cut off his air. His shoes pounded the concrete floor. I lifted him. His toes scraped the concrete, then he was dangling. With his left hand he got a hold on my left ear. I didn’t let go. His fingers began to loosen. The wind was banging the door against the outside of the building. Just as Glasses went limp, the runway lights outside blinked off. He dropped the automatic. I dropped him and picked the gun up.

Whirled to face a big man I had never seen before silhouetted in the connecting doorway across the hangar. He had a gun in his hand and he used it. Behind him I heard shouting. The slug hit the doorframe next to my head. Splinters stung my face.

I fired twice with the Magnum. Once for the man in the doorway, once for the lantern. The lantern flew apart. The man, hit by a slug with the highest muzzle velocity a handgun is capable of, jerked back three feet and fell in the doorway, blocking it. The Magnum made a hell of a noise, but with the wind and the rain and the hangar walls interfering, Scott and Ragen wouldn’t have heard it.

I climbed the pyramid of drums again. This put me outside the direct swath of light from the open doorway, but if Abbamonte or his goons came through it, they’d find me.

I leaned on the rotted wood and poked my right hand through the hole. When I saw some of Ragen’s men coming toward the hangar I fired twice along the length of the building, waited, heard Scott’s answering shots—Scott’s, I hoped—fired once more and jumped down.

Three men rushed in through the connecting doorway just as I crouched behind the fuel drums again.

“Glasses?” someone shouted. “Where the hell are you?”

I shouted back, “It’s Ragen! Taking pot shots at us.”

“Jesus,” someone cried.

“That ain’t Glasses,” shouted another voice.

Outside, the fusillade continued.

Shell Scott

Drum was there. And how Drum was there.

Two men were stepping through that open doorway before me and I was squeezing the butts of my .45’s tighter and tighter in my fists, when the shots came.

The muzzle blast flared somewhere high on my left and the sound was like a cannon, Drum’s big .44 Magnum booming like a mutant bazooka, a tremendous, a marvelous blast. If you want a bigger gun than a .44 Magnum, you buy a rifle; its slug whistling past your ears can almost take them off. And the slug whistled past our ears.

Drum’s first shot was followed by a short pause—then another cracking boom. I squeezed the triggers of both .45’s and reeled around. I yelled, "They’re killin’ us!" and flopped to the ground, letting a couple more slugs fly.

As I went down I could see those two men in the doorway whirling around, heads jerking. A man near me jumped a foot straight up into the air. I raised my right hand, aimed high, fired two shots through the glass windows of the administration wing. Near me a man yanked a gun from under his coat.

And then there was silence.

It couldn’t have lasted for more than a second or two, but to me it seemed about a month and a half. Silence. And then, again, the boom of Drum’s Magnum. Just one more shot—but it did the trick.

That stunned silence ended, erupted, exploded and turned into pandemonium. I triggered the .45’s, yelling—and there were more yells, more .45’s went off, joined by .38’s and even the smack of a slug into flesh. On my right, only feet away, glass shattered as somebody inside the administration building slapped a gun muzzle through one of the window panes. The muzzle blast as the man fired seemed almost in my face.

Everything happened at once. Men were running, some toward that open door, some just getting out of the way. One man dived flat out in the air, landed on his belly with a smack I heard even over the sounds of rain and wind and shooting and shouting—and the splintering crash of other panes of glass as they were broken, either by guns or bullets.

It was bedlam. Astounding, amazing, unbelievable bedlam. But I believed it. Next to me a man jerked suddenly and blood splashed from his body onto my hand. He let out a high, soft sound and fell. Somebody screamed inside, really screamed, a man’s voice but high and shrill. He didn’t stop screaming; the voice just got weaker, softer.

Then, close to me, I heard a yell. “It’s Scott! It’s that lousy bastard—”

I jerked my head around, on my knees now. It was a man I’d seen before with Ragen, a fat red-faced muscleman and killer. I didn’t know his name. I knew his gun. It was a .38 caliber revolver, and it was pointed at me. I triggered the .45 in my right hand and nothing happened. The gun was empty. He fired at me, the bullet nicking my arm, splatting against the tarmac behind me.

I didn’t consciously squeeze the trigger of that other .45, but it bucked in my hand. It jumped again, then the hammer fell with a click. But both slugs hit the man, the first one slamming him backward as though a horse had kicked him, the second actually hurling him off his feet. He spun in the air, smacked into the building’s wall.

I rolled fast to the side. Suddenly it was light around us. I could clearly see the shapes of moving men. The runway was bright once more—one of those guys in the control tower must have come to, put the lights back on. I should have clubbed both of them a second time. I started to get to my feet as a gun cracked near me. I wasn’t hit, but jerked my head up to see the man behind the gun. Six feet away. Features contorted. Looking huge, enormous, looking like handsome death.

Candy.

Cold grabbed me, dived into every cell of my body. I threw the .45 in my right hand at him, jumped toward him as he fired again. The automatic bounced off his shoulder. Harmlessly, but enough to jar him, spoil his aim.

Then I hit him, dropping the other gun as we crashed together and fell. He bounced his gun-filled hand off my skull before I could grab his wrist. We rolled, came up onto our feet, clutching each other. He forced my arms back. He was strong, powerful, and I could feel my strength washing out of me.

Candy knew he had me. His features were still contorted, but a tight grin was splitting his face, inches from mine. He forced me back, brought a knee up between my legs.

I heard the gasp forced from my mouth. My legs buckled. Bile squirted into my throat.

I felt myself going down.

Chester Drum

“Where the hell is he?” one of the three men who’d just rushed in through the connecting doorway asked. “I can’t see him.”

“Over there. Back of those fuel drums.”

“Listen,” I told them urgently. “Ragen can trap us in the garage if we don’t hop to it. You three guys watch the hangar door. Use your rods. Let them know we’re in here. The rest of us will have to shoot it out from the admin—”

“Yeah?” one of them cut me off. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

I got up. I had to do it then. I couldn’t seem to be hiding from them. I had the Magnum in my right fist and Glasses’ automatic in my left.

“I ain’t never seen him before in my life,” the second man said, and raised his gun.

“Hold it,” the first man told him. “What’s the scoop, Jack? Who are you?”

“Me?” I said disdainfully. “I’m just the guy who got Glasses and Rover out of the worst spot in their lives Monday night, that’s all. I’m the guy who picked their car up in the wrecker after Charlie Derleth put the call through.”

I couldn’t see their faces in the dim light coming through the doorway. “What’s your name?” one of them asked suspiciously.

“Chester. Now will you for crying out loud get over to that door and keep it covered? If they come in here, we’re all washed up. Come on, move.”

The second man still had his gun pointed at me. The first one said, “Don’t be a fool, Perry. Okay, you never seen him before. So what? So how does he know Glasses and Rover beat that cabbie to death on account of the snatch got fouled up?”

“Who shot Harry?” the second man said, still suspicious.

Harry must have been the big guy I had hit in the doorway.

“Ragen’s boys,” I said. “Two of them broke in here. Winged Glasses, got Harry and the lantern.”

“That so? Where are they now? What you doing in the hangar?”

“Damn it,” I said, “do I have to write it all down for you? They busted the lock. They came in here. I was hiding from them behind the drums when you came in. They took off.”

“What you doing in the hangar?” he said again.

“I went outside the admin building a few minutes ago. Heard a commotion, saw the busted lock and came in.” I heard Glasses moaning behind me. If I didn’t get out of the hangar in a minute, I’d be carried out feet first.

Glasses moaned again. I advanced toward the three men. I didn’t go around them. They were my buddies, weren’t they? I had nothing to worry about from them. I headed straight for the connecting door. I went right through them. At the last minute they parted to let me by. They ran for the outside door, one of them shouting, “You take the left side, Perry!”

And Perry cried, fear finally overcoming his suspicion of me, “Jesus, they got us trapped in here.”

“Drum...” Glasses moaned.

That was all I heard, because by then I’d passed through the connecting doorway into the garage. The metal door had a sturdy bolt. I shot it home. The Haycox Airport garage, as an adjunct to the hangar, had probably been built later. The walls were solid cinder-block, not wood. Light bulbs dangled on chains from the ceiling, and about a hundred of those folding chairs you can rent from the local woman’s club or the local undertaker for that matter had been set up in neat geometric rows of ten each facing a desk and another metal door, shut, at the far end of the large room. The sound of gunfire was muffled, and the two men at the desk seemed to pay no attention to it, just as they paid no attention to me. One of them was seated on a corner of the desk, his shoulders slumped, his head lolling forward. The other one, a very big man, hovered aggressively over him.

The man on the desk was Eric Torgesen. The big man was his father.

“Oh, Christ, I’ve been hit,” Eric said. “I’ve been hit.”

His father sneered at him. “It’s just a scratch. You’re hardly even bleeding. You’ve got to go back in there. No son of mine is going to be called a coward.”

“What good would I do in there? I couldn’t hit the side of a barn.” The boy cowered as his father raised a big hand.

“Use your head, damn it. Stop whining. Someone’s going to come out on top of this mess. It doesn’t have to be Sand. It doesn’t have to be Abbamonte. It could be us.”

“You’re dreaming, old man.”

Nels Torgesen struck his son. Eric stumbled off the desk, his hands before his face. “I’ll kill you myself before I let them see what kind of a coward you are,” the older man vowed.

I said, “I’ll tell you who’s going to come out on top. Sand and Ragen.”

Surprise made Torgesen’s face go blank of all expression. He hadn’t seen me till now. “What are you talking about?”

“You think it’s Ragen’s own idea to shoot up the place? Abba had Sand down, and Sand knew it. This is his way of getting back.”

Nels Torgesen didn’t say anything right away. Eric looked up at me. “Don’t listen to him, Pop. He’s a Hartsell op.”

“Sure I’m a Hartsell op. Your old man’s right, Eric. The Senator knows someone has to pick up the pieces of the union. You can if you’re smart.”

Just then someone banged on the other side of the door I had locked. Glasses, I thought. Glasses had talked. I hadn’t jumped from the frying pan into the fire, but I was dangling.

Torgesen looked at me, and wheeled, and opened the door behind the desk. The sound of gunfire was suddenly very loud. I heard men shouting. “Close that damn door!” someone bawled. “The light, you bastard. The goddam light!”

“I’m coming in,” Torgesen hollered back at him, then he was gone. Eric stood cowering near the desk. I waited a moment, then followed his father.

It was dark in the administration wing. Dimly I could see figures crouching near broken windows. Abbamonte’s army. The acrid stench of gunfire filled my nostrils. Its sustained roar almost deafened me. A dark silhouette rose in front of one broken window and flame spurted from his outstretched hands as he let go a chattering blast with a tommy-gun. Abruptly he dropped the tommy and fell. A man next to him stood quickly and let go a blast from a pump shotgun. Others were firing handguns out the broken windows.

One man paced back and forth, not shooting. I recognized the huge shoulders and short squat figure of Mike Sand. His words were all but lost in the continuous din of gunfire. He’d approach one man, try to drag him away from the window, pace again, approach another. “...saps...” he was shouting at the top of his voice. “...all the Senate needs ... crucify us. Stop it! Have you all gone nuts?”

When the chips were down, really down, only Mike Sand had kept his head. He knew a firefight here at Haycox Airport would finish the union brass, whoever won. The rest of them were thugs, answering gunfire with gunfire, but Sand knew that only the Hartsell Committee could win now, no matter who remained alive to count corpses when it was over. He knew, and was powerless to stop it.

His powerful figure jerked suddenly. He had been hit. I reached him as he fell. He hit hard on his back and sat up immediately. He tried to stand but couldn’t.

I got down on my hams near him. “Where’d they take Hope?”

It didn’t register at first. “Shoulder ... nothing ... got to stop these lunatics before ... Drum? God, what are you doing here?”

“I want the girl, Mike.” I had to shout into his ear to be heard.

“...never should have taken her. Crazy fool Abbamonte. Small-change loan-shark in a big man’s world.”

“The girl, Mike.” I shook his shoulder, then realized as my hand came away with his blood that that was where he’d been hit.

“Cellar. Over there.” He jerked his head to one side.

As I got up, a big man shambled toward us. It was Nels Torgesen. He hadn’t been heeled in the garage, but he held a gun in his big fist now. “You sold us out to Ragen, Mike,” he said through clenched teeth.

Sand’s old fire returned. “Me? You stupid has-been!”

Torgesen raised his gun. I slugged him over the ear with the Magnum as hard as I could. He went down all of a piece, like a felled tree, across Sand’s legs.

I found the stairs that led down to the basement. Took them down two at a time. There was a damp cold corridor with a single naked lightbulb on one wall. At either end of the corridor, a door. I went to one of them and opened it.

To see a small room. Abbamonte’s hulking form was bent over a desk. He was cramming fistfuls of paper into a briefcase, working in a frenzy. It was cold in there, but the back of his jacket was dark with sweat.

I hadn’t heard the door at the other end of the short corridor open. Something hard prodded my back. “Drum,” a voice said. “This is gonna be a pleasure.”

One thing you should not do if a man is desperate and quick is get that close to him with a gun. I was desperate, and quick enough. I jabbed back with an elbow and flung myself to one side and down, whirling. Abbamonte had dropped the briefcase and raised a gun to shoot me. But it was Rover, standing in the doorway with an automatic in his hand, who he shot. The single slug from Abbamonte’s gun turned Rover’s left eye to red pulp. The other eye barely had time to look surprised. Rover was dead before he hit the floor.

I vaulted his body and plunged down the short corridor. No footsteps pounded after me. Abbamonte had gone back to job one, his briefcase. If he crammed it with the right papers and got away, he might have a chance. His loan slips could pull strings for him—at least enough, maybe, to get him out of the country. What happened to me didn’t matter.

Another door, just like the first. I opened it. The room was bare, except for a couple of packing crates. Hope sat on the floor. Lindzey, kneeling, had the fingers of his left hand entwined in her short dark hair, pulling her head back, arching the white column of her throat. Her blouse was torn. One bra strap had parted. There were red welts on her chest and her nose was bleeding. In his right hand Lindzey held a lit cigarette near the whiteness of her throat.

“...last time,” he was saying. “If Holt knew, you knew. What was Holt planning with Ragen?”

Hope’s eyes widened. She didn’t see me. She tried to fight Lindzey off with her hands, but he was very strong. He heard me come in. His back was to me. “She’ll spill, Mr. Abbamonte,” he said. “She’ll spill if I have to burn her.”

I said, “How are things in Front Royal, Lindzey?”

He let go of Hope and sprang to his feet, hands empty. This was the part I would have to live with later, this was the part that would bother me. But he had done that to Hope. Kill him in cold blood? No, not cold blood. He had done that to Hope.

I shot him as he reached for his gun. The slug hit bone on his chest and sent him reeling backwards and down.

Hope was only half-conscious. I went to her. I stroked her hair. She made a crooning noise against my chest. Her eyes blinked. “Chet,” she said. “Chet, thank God. You’re here. You’re here.”

Take her back upstairs with me?

But she’d be safer down here.

“I have to leave you alone for a few minutes more, baby.”

“He tried to ... Chet, don’t leave me.”

“You’ll be safer here. Can you stand?”

I helped her to her feet. The door was thick raw wood. It had a bolt. I gave her Glasses’ automatic.

“Lock the door after me. I’ll come back. If anyone else tries to come in, shoot if you have to.”

“Don’t leave me. I couldn’t...”

She was crying. I kissed the tears on her cheeks. “It won’t be long. I’ve got to leave you. Shooting war upstairs.”

Then she saw Lindzey’s body. I had to keep her from falling. I tugged at her earlobes.

Violence piled on violence. The body didn’t mean a thing now. Later, I would remember. But not now. Hope, though, had been through a different kind of hell. I dragged the body out into the corridor. Hope came to the door after me.

“Lock it,” I said.

She tried to smile. She shut the door. I heard her ram the bolt home.

Behind me Abbamonte pounded up the stairs with his bulging briefcase.

I ran after him. Fat man in a hurry, I thought. But he’d know which papers to take. Even if he got away with them the cops in Washington and L.A. and a dozen other transportation hubs would be rounding up Brotherhood thugs for months. But the big ones, the behind-the-scenes fixers and organizers, the interstate and local czars of commerce who’d sold out to Sand and Ragen for vicuna coats and deep freezes and the big houses on their wooded hills and the fast cabin cruisers and the sleek cars and the sleeker wet-mouthed blondes—these would get away untouched if Abbamonte fled Haycox Airport with his briefcase.

The gunfire upstairs was sporadic now. Only a few dark silhouettes huddled at the shattered windows. A door slammed. I didn’t get it at first, then I heard the sound of a car outside in the wind and the pelting rain and I knew that Abba’s goons were fleeing the airport.

Two men moved at a running crouch toward the door that had just slammed. I sprinted past Mike Sand’s big bulk on the floor. He was crawling slowly, laboriously, toward the door. I didn’t think he would reach it and even if he did, in the condition he was, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. I reached the door just as the two men did. They kept going. I didn’t. I saw a massive figure sprawled on the rain-lashed tarmac a few yards outside.

It was Abbamonte. He had slipped and fallen. He scuttled crabwise for his briefcase. He looked like a big black crustacean, too, glistening in the rain. As he got to his feet with the briefcase I pointed the Magnum at him and fired. Heard the click of an empty cylinder. I hurled the revolver at him, missing. Then I reached him. Turning, he slammed the heavy briefcase against my chest, reaching at the same time for his pocket and the gun that lived there.

I hooked my right fist into his meaty jaw. It knocked him down again. But Abbamonte didn’t cry out in unexpected pain. I did. I hadn’t used my fists on anyone since the fight with Scott. They were swollen puffy. Hitting Abbamonte had sent pain streaking up my arm to the shoulder socket. It felt as if a couple of knuckles were broken.

Abbamonte’s gun flashed orange as I dropped on top of him. The slug missed me. Gunpowder seared my face. Abba was immensely strong and incredibly quick for a fat man. He scuttled out from under and then his weight—almost three hundred pounds of it—came down on me. I caught his right wrist with my left hand, deflecting the gun-muzzle. His flesh was slippery and cold. His left hand, the fingers the size of a bunch of bananas, closed in my hair. My head struck the tarmac, lifted, struck again. Ineffectually I pawed at his face with the broken fingers of my right hand. I couldn’t hit him hard enough, now, to hurt him. Instead I found his fleshy lips. Something ripped, and all at once my hand was wetter than the rain would have made it. Abbamonte fell away from me, striking for my head with the gun. Missing. Metal clanked on concrete as his right shoulder rose over me. The force he had used, and his weight, loosened his grip on the butt of the automatic. Not long, but long enough. I grabbed for the gun and got it. Smashed it as hard as I could against his face.

The first time was nothing. The first time he merely grunted. Scott had been strong the way a human being is strong, but Abbamonte was a monster. Again I struck with the gun. Abbamonte made a bird-like squawking sound. I hit him again. He raised both hands in front of his face. I struck them down with the gun and hit his face again. Something gave under the barrel of the gun. He whimpered and shuddered.

I got the briefcase and stood up. Another car roared by. Rats deserting a sinking ship. They didn’t matter. They were known hoodlums and the cops could round them up. What mattered was the briefcase.

The car’s headlights raked the side of the administration building. A little man stood in the doorway, glasses ludicrously askew on his face. The gun in his hand was not ludicrous. He was Glasses. I swung Abbamonte’s automatic toward him, trigger-finger groping at trigger-guard. All in a split-second of instinctive response.

But my trigger-finger, swollen twice its normal size, wouldn’t fit through the trigger guard. Glasses’ gun pointed straight at me. “Where do you want it, you son of a bitch?” he shouted. I waited in the rain and the night to die.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Tidewater, Maryland, 11:15 P.M., Sunday, December 20

Shell Scott

Bile choked my throat. I could feel wetness spill over my lips.

Candy leaned over me, but I still held his wrists. I couldn’t hang on. He shoved me backward, yanked his wrists free, snapped the gun toward me.

I hit the concrete hard on my back, rolled convulsively, forcing my right hand under my coat to the .38 in its holster there, rolled as quickly as I could. But not quickly enough.

His gun barked behind me and the slug caught me in the side, sliced through the flesh. In the back. The way Braun had gotten it—in the back. He was a blur above me as I rolled all the way over, gun coming up in my right fist. And it came up firing. I squeezed the trigger three times, as fast as I could. Candy got off one more shot, but it was wild.

I don’t know which slug got him. One of them did. It tore through his grinning mouth, out the back of his head. I jerked my eyes from him as he fell. Another man was on his knees near me, hands pressed against his chest. Beyond him I saw Ragen. The dark, pitted face and black eyes staring. The spur-like nose, and scar livid now on his lip.

He was shouting, fists clenched and shaking before him in hopeless rage. Ragen had surrounded himself with thugs whose first impulse on hearing a gun go off was to yank out a beater and blast away. So he was getting no more than he’d asked for, a kind of crazy justice—it was too late for his angry shouts to stop the war Drum and I had started.

He saw me then. But anger had swept any fear from him. His eyes fell on me with an almost tangible impact and he shouted something, lips curling. But then he turned and ran. Ragen must have known his only chance now was to get away—like others who’d already run.

I got to my feet, dull ache deep in my belly and groin, fire in my side. The blood was warm, oozing down my hip now. Half a dozen cars were parked on the concrete ahead of Ragen and he headed for them. I ran after him, trying to straighten up.

I caught him before he reached his car. My gun was back in its holster by then. I yanked him back, drove a fist into his gut, held him with one hand and started to hit him in the face. His fist cracked under my chin, jarred me, slammed into his mouth. He jabbed stiff fingers at my eyes but they dug into my forehead.

I slapped my hands around his throat.

I felt my fingers dig in, sinking into the flesh, felt rubbing of bone, slide of muscle. His hands wrapped around my wrists. I held him, choked him. A kind of craziness settled in my brain, craziness and ugliness.

Ragen’s grip loosened on my wrists.

Movement fluttered in the corner of my eye. Two men were running from the administration building, racing toward those cars which were behind me now. They ran past us. At least one car, maybe more, had already left.

Another form ran from the open administration building door. A dumpy man, waddling as his short legs pounded over the rain-wet concrete, feet splashing in puddles. His foot hit the raised edge of a crack in the concrete and he went down. And then, for the first time in what seemed an age, I saw Chet Drum again. He sprinted toward the fallen man.

It all seemed strange to me, unreal. Ragen hung from my hands. I tried to pull my fingers from his flesh, but they seemed buried there, as though mired in sticky dough. The two running men had reached the car, started it, were in motion. The headlights swept over me, touched the open administration building door.

I saw a small man there. He raised his arm, aimed a gun, pointed it at two men scuffling. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly now, time warped again, out of joint. The men clutched together were that dumpy man and Drum. His broad back was to the man in the doorway. I felt my hands peel open from Ragen’s throat. He fell at my feet as I stared at the little man just outside the building. He was aiming at Drum’s back, then he brushed at glasses on his face. Slowly I realized the little man was Glasses, brushing sleet from his thick specs.

I saw Drum get up, turn, a gun in his hand. He didn’t fire. Glasses raised his arm again, steadied the gun on Drum’s chest.

The Colt came smoothly into my hand, automatically, easily. Behind me was sound of some kind, a rising whine. The light got brighter, brighter. I could see Glasses clearly. My finger caressed the trigger and I saw Glasses swing around, gun blasting up into the night sky. The sound was louder behind me, the light brighter.

Glasses turned toward me, bending gently forward. I fired again, saw him twitch and fall.

Chester Drum

Glasses crumpled in the doorway. He fired once at the rain as he fell.

I turned around. Ten yards across the tarmac, his shortcut white hair plastered to his head, Shell Scott was standing in the rain, a revolver in his big right fist.

Then I realized I could see him too clearly. He stood there, grinning. He was sharply etched against the night.

Light moved and brightened behind him and to his left. I heard the roar of a car engine racing. Saw headlights growing behind Scott. I tried to shout a warning. The rain and wind swallowed it. Scott just looked at me. The grin left his face as I charged across the tarmac toward him. He looked at me and the gun in his hand.

“What the hell—” he began.

Now the headlights were very big and very close. I dove at Scott, catching his middle jarringly with my right shoulder. It jack-knifed him and we went sprawling together on the tarmac as the car sped past about a foot behind me, its tires spewing water at us.

Shell Scott

As the car raced by Drum and me, two or three feet away, the wheels on its far side smacked something on the ground. The car lurched, and was gone. A form rolled over near us. It was Ragen. He’d been lying where I’d dropped him, and the car had run over him, over some part of him.

The engine whine got fainter, hushed by the low hiss of rain falling, as Drum and I pulled ourselves apart, sat up. We looked at each other. He had just kept me from being messily murdered, but I didn’t know how to thank him. Nobody has come up with the right words for that kind of thanks yet.

I put my hand on his shoulder, and the hand was wobbling a bit. “Drum,” I said shakily, “you can’t even save my neck without breaking my back. You’re a damn clumsy ox.”

He filled his big chest, let out air. “What in hell were you doing standing there? Admiring the scenery?”

I pointed toward the doorway. There were still sounds of movement and yelling in the area, but there weren’t any more gunshots. After the uprising we’d just been through, I figured just about everybody was out of ammunition.

Drum was looking at the sprawled figure in the hangar entrance. “Glasses,” he said.

“Yeah. He was drawing a bead on your navel or somewhere close to it when I popped him.”

He nodded, licked his raw lips. “That was a good idea of yours. Popping him.”

“Yeah. Seemed so at the time.” I paused. Not much was happening now out here, and it appeared quiet in the building where Drum had been. When I started to stand, pain knifed my side. Among all the other burns and aches and sprains I’d barely noticed the wound Candy’s slug had put in me. But I looked it over. The bullet had torn through flesh, and it was more than a scratch, but it wasn’t going to kill me.

I wadded a handkerchief and piece torn from my shirt over the gash, strapped it down with my belt. Then I said, “Chet, I’m bubbling with energy, of course. But I hope the really strenuous activity is finished.”

He glanced around. Bodies appeared to be strewn all over. Two men some distance away were crawling aimlessly.

“I get that impression,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

Chester Drum

The first body we reached was Abbamonte’s. As we walked over to it Scott said, “For a minute there, you galloping at me like that, I thought we were going to start that fight routine all over again. Drum and Scott. Maybe we ought to make it a vaudeville act.”

Then he kneeled near Abbamonte. “What did you do,” he said, “use a steamroller on him?”

“He still alive?”

“Jaw’s broken. Nose is crushed. But he’s breathing.”

“How’d it go outside?”

“Like World War Three. And inside?”

“Same war. The small-fry are fleeing all over the landscape, but we’ve got Abba and Sand’s inside, wounded.” I thumped the briefcase. “And we’ve got this. Senator Hartsell’s going to have a cinch. Cockeyed plan. It worked.”

“It worked,” Scott said.

Shell Scott

I heard a scratching noise. Somebody moaned. A few feet from Drum and me, Ragen was wiggling a little.

“That one’s still moving,” I said.

“Who is it this time?” Drum asked me.

“Ragen.” I watched him wiggling. “Happy Jack.”

We went over and squatted by him. He groaned something at us. “Man, I sure thought this one was dead,” I said. “I hit him and choked him a long time. A long time. Then that car clobbered him. He must really be a tough one.”

Drum said, “He doesn’t look so tough.” He sure didn’t now. A front wheel and also a rear wheel of that car had run over his legs, and they were bent every which way. His trousers were torn and I could see a lot of redness with some white in it, like a chunk of bone accidentally ground up with the hamburger.

I looked at Ragen. And his crazy legs. Then I found my Colt Special where it had landed after Drum landed on me, loaded it and we walked around the tarmac counting the bodies and gathering guns. Then we went back to Ragen.

He was conscious, gritting his teeth in pain and moaning. But he was in shock now. The real pain would hit him in a little while. Now was the time to get him. I had to talk to him for a couple minutes before he started answering. He wanted help bad, attention, medical attention, and I told him he might get it if his conversation made me happy.

Ragen wanted to make me happy. He was ready to tell me anything at all. I asked him. “Where are Dr. Frost and Alexis?”

“In ... the plane.”

“Why in hell did you bring them here?”

“Didn’t mean to in the beginning—didn’t expect nobody to know about it in the first place. But who could of figured all that heat at Blue Jay? We couldn’t stick around or even slow down after that, and once we got started we couldn’t stop. Couldn’t leave them after that, either, and I had to get back here. Besides, I figured maybe I could use them here, way I had it planned.”

He paused. His voice wasn’t the tooth-chipping, ear-bruising sound it had formerly been, but he talked easily enough except for long pauses and occasional groans. “What happened here?” he asked me. “Why’d everybody jump us? What happened?”

I ignored the question. “Are Frost and Alexis all right?”

“Yeah, I didn’t damage the merchandise none. Figured they’d probably go along with me, not put up any squawk.”

“All you did was snatch them both, force them to come here, set yourself up for a federal kidnaping rap. Why wouldn’t they squawk?”

“Some tapes I got back from Frost. Account of them I had the doc and the Sand babe about ready to say they come along with me on their own. That way the feds got no case.”

Those tapes again. The ones Braun had stolen from Ragen, been killed for, the main thing that had sent Ragen to Blue Jay. I said to Ragen, “I know Braun busted into your safe for those tapes. What was so important about them?”

“I bugged Sand’s private phone calls, from a booth ... got every word he said for five weeks. Enough to hang him and plenty others.”

“What kind of words?”

“Phony strikes, shakedowns, arranging secondary boycotts to get a non-union joint in line. Once he sent some men to dump sugar in gas tanks, trucking company didn’t want no contract. They got it. Sand did a lot in five weeks.” He grunted. “Last call he made was the most important, though. About Frost.”

“What about Dr. Frost?”

“Sand found out he was going to be the head blabber for Hartsell. Called a torpedo in L.A. and passed on the word Frost was the surprise witness, told him to grab the old man. Hold him till after the Hearings ... but kill him if he had to—or if Sand gave him the word sooner.”

That explained a lot of things, including how Braun, from playing the recordings, had learned Dr. Frost was the surprise witness, and how Ragen had known Braun would almost surely go to see Frost. I asked Ragen, “So why didn’t that torpedo go ahead and grab the doctor?”

“He was supposed to hold off till Sand’s wife talked to her old man last Sunday night. Maybe she could convince him to lay off—account of being Sand’s wife—but if she couldn’t, the torpedo was to do the job.” He paused for several seconds. “But then the old man flew the coop.”

Understandably, I thought. With Sand’s torpedo after him, and Ragen’s hoodlums sweating for those tapes. I said, “Frost wasn’t on your side any more than on Sand’s. So how come he’s alive—if he is alive?”

“He’s in the pink. If I had to bump him, I wanted to do it near D.C. Let Sand take the rap for it.”

“Because Sand operates out of D.C.? That’s no proof of murder.”

“With them tapes I had it would be. Hell, it was Mike Sand’s own voice telling that torpedo to knock Frost off if he had to, and the trigger saying, ‘Leave it to me, Mike.’ Anybody hearing it would know Sand was the one who done it.”

He went on, “But I didn’t think I’d have to bump Frost. There was a good chance I could convince him to testify against the top Truckers here, leave me out of it, pave the way for me to take over. I heard about the trouble between Sand and Abbamonte, and with those recordings over Sand’s head I could make him step down myself—even swing his weight to me. If the doc tossed some dirt over Abbamonte in the hearings, nobody could of stopped me from taking over. That’s what I was going to settle tonight.” He paused. “They must of got wind of it. That’s what happened.”

He still didn’t know. I didn’t tell him. Instead I asked, “Where are those tape recordings now, Ragen?”

“We refueled the plane in Missouri, private field some of my Trucker friends got an investment in, near Springfield. I left them there with a guy.”

He told us who and where the guy was. That meant the Hartsell Committee would have Sand’s interesting recordings by tomorrow. I said to Ragen, “When I climbed into my Cad after that brush with you at Blue Jay, Alexis Sand’s suitcase was gone. She’d hardly have had time to grab it. So?”

“I told Candy to check your heap, grab anything in it. Thought Alexis might have something in that suitcase worth grabbing before the meet tonight. Wasn’t nothing, though. Just some pants and invisible nightgown things. Yeah, and a checkbook.”

“Yeah, and a checkbook,” I echoed sarcastically. “That wasn’t anything?”

He rolled his head on the concrete. “Hell, no. It was the babe’s own, no dirt in it. I looked it over good.”

He would have. I hadn’t. I said, “How about that other book? The little leather-covered one?”

“What other little book? There was just that big checkbook and pants. Sure pretty pants, though.” I knew it couldn’t be, but Ragen sounded as if he were feeling better.

Drum, squatting on his heels next to us, said, “What book are you guys talking about?”

I told him of going through Alexis’ luggage in the Statler, the two items I’d found among the lingerie, visiting the John to make sure she hadn’t left the checkbook there.

Drum said, “Could it have been a diary?”

“Yeah. There was writing in it. I didn’t have time to read the thing, but it was some kind of journal. Why?”

“Half the hoods in the Truckers were after Nels Torgesen’s diary the day Holt got killed. It spelled out a lot of crooked Trucker operations. That’s why Holt went to Torgesen’s to get it.”

Ragen groaned. It was a loud groan this time. “Are you going to get me a doctor?” he said. “Starting to kill me. My legs...”

“When we mop up here,” I said.

He cleaned up a few odds and ends for me. The men who’d shot me outside the Truckers had been Mink and Candy—and they also had tossed my apartment late Thursday night. Ragen admitted Braun had stolen some damaging-to-Ragen stuff besides the tapes, but when he’d recovered it all from Frost he’d destroyed that part.

Then I said, “One last thing, Ragen. I haven’t heard it from you yet, and I want to. I want Drum to hear it. Who shot Braun Thorn in the back?”

He hesitated, licked his lips.

“Come on, Ragen. Mink spilled it before he kicked in at Blue Jay. But we don’t move an inch until I hear it from you. Even if it takes hours.”

I heard him sigh. “You know it anyway. I plugged him. He got up and was running ... I had to stop him.”

I looked at Drum. He nodded. “I heard him.”

I put the black thoughts out of my mind, grinned at Drum. “Now do you believe me?”

He grinned back. “A guy’ll say anything when you break his legs. But ... finally, I believe you.”

We stood up—except for Ragen, of course. Drum said, “Well, Alexis and Dr. Frost are still in that plane.”

“Let’s go wrap it up,” I said.

We reached the DC-3, climbed in through the hatch, carefully at first, in case one last hoodlum was standing guard inside. But no more hoodlums were standing guard any place, and very few were standing at all. Nobody was in the plane except Dr. Gideon Frost. And Alexis Frost—Mrs. Mike Sand. That was all. Just the two people who’d started all this.

They were bound, in adjacent seats at the rear of the Dakota’s cabin. As Drum and I came into view Alexis let out a happy cry and Dr. Frost said something I didn’t catch. “Thank heavens, thank heavens!” Alexis said after some babbling. “I didn’t know what ... I was afraid...” She let it trail off, slumped in the seat as though all the strength had gone out of her.

I started working on the knots of the ropes binding Dr. Frost’s wrists, and we told them what happened, briefly, and mainly for Frost’s benefit. I wound it up, speaking to the doctor, “So your testimony tomorrow will top it off—even help explain what happened here tonight. And it can stand some explaining.” I grinned at him. “And let me say now that I’m happy to meet you. Both Mr. Drum and I have had quite a time catching up with you.”

He smiled gently. It was the face I’d seen before in the portrait in his home and briefly at Blue Jay. Almost handsome, though heavy, with the shaggy eyebrows and bushy gray hair. It was a kind face. But he looked very tired. Alexis appeared tired, too, but she had never looked more beautiful.

I was having trouble with the rope, since my fingers felt like broken arms, but the knots were loosening. Drum started on the rope around Alexis, and I said to him, “Let’s leave her wrapped up a minute more, okay?”

“Sure.” He peered at me, then nodded slowly, as if something had just occurred to him. Probably it was the same something which had just occurred to me.

Then Dr. Frost said, “I cannot ever find words to tell you how much I appreciate all you’ve done. Both of you. But ... I have decided not to testify before the Hartsell Committee.”

“What?”

"You what?"

That was Drum, and then me. I stared at the doctor. “But that’s—senseless. You’ve got to testify. Especially ... now.” I felt horribly empty, as if I’d digested my stomach. “We just set off a war. And this whole damned mess started because you—”

He broke in, still gently. “Please. I have made my decision. Last Sunday I was faced with that decision, the most serious, the most weighty of my life. Whether or not to testify against my daughter’s husband.” He was choosing his words carefully. “The problem, vital enough then, became complicated, which is why it was necessary for me to go secretly to Blue Jay. I had to be alone, make my decision. You won’t understand the complication...”

“Perhaps I do. Was it those tape recordings Braun Thorn gave you? With Sand’s phone calls on them?”

He was startled. “Yes.” He blinked. After a silence he continued, “I learned that Mr. Sand was willing to do violence to me in order to prevent my appearance in Washington. In my shock, I even ... thought my daughter might have been aware of his intentions. But now that Alexis and I have been able to talk, I know how wrong I was. It was merely part of that emotional crisis.” He looked at Alexis, and she smiled sweetly at him.

The rope finally came loose and Dr. Frost rubbed his wrists. I asked him, “What made you think your daughter could have been in on Sand’s plans for you? Besides the fact that she was married to him?”

“The idea was preposterous, of course. But in one phone call Mr. Sand made he told this ... this hoodlum that I was to be the surprise witness before the Committee. I had divulged that fact only to my daughter, and in the strictest confidence. My first thought was that she must nonetheless have informed her husband. I realize now that Mr. Sand must have gotten his information From members of the Committee, or even other sources.”

I had a hunch Dr. Frost had been right the first time. We still needed his testimony, too, but he wasn’t going to testify—maybe. But maybe he would.

As if paralleling my thought, Drum said to me, “It’s about wrapped up now, Shell—Sand, Abbamonte, Ragen. You’ve almost got your hands on those tape recordings, and they’ll take care of Sand and a lot of others. So the only thing we need now is the diary.”

“Right,” I said. “And I keep wondering and wondering about that little book I saw in Mrs. Sand’s luggage.”

“What book? What are you fools talking about?”

That was Alexis. She wasn’t smiling sweetly any longer. She wasn’t smiling at all.

Drum ignored her and said to me, “You mean the little leather-covered book you described for me when I was telling you about Nels Torgesen’s diary, right?”

“Precisely. So for now, let’s just call the little leather-covered book a diary.”

He grinned. “Didn’t you say it was in her luggage at the Statler?”

“I did indeed.” There was something I had to do before we went on with this, so I held up a hand. “Allow me?” I asked Drum.

He bowed about an inch, nodding. Whatever mental alchemy had occurred earlier, we were clicking the same way again.

I turned to Alexis. “Mrs. Sand, you hired me to find your father. Dr. Gideon Frost. Here he is. I’ve found him.”

Drum grinned again. Alexis’ eyes were as cold as the top of Mount Baldy. I said to her, “So we are now all finished, done, the relationship is ended.”

I turned to Drum, nodded about an inch, and said, “After you.”

He repeated, “Didn’t you say the little leather-covered book—we’ll call it a diary—was in her luggage at the Statler?”

“I did. But I failed to pay any attention to it. I felt sure the checkbook was a clue, though. Real crackerjack deduction, that.”

“Crackerjack.”

“She didn’t leave the checkbook in the john. I checked that very carefully. So carefully I’m sure she also did not leave the—the diary there.”

“And Ragen said it was not in her luggage.”

“That’s what he said. I believe him.”

“And you were with her all the time...”

“From the Statler to Blue Jay, almost constantly, yes.”

“Ragen grabbed her immediately at Blue Jay. So, if he didn’t get it—”

I finished it slowly, “She must still have it on her.”

We were both looking at Alexis by this time. Her face didn’t appear smooth and creamy white any longer. It looked pasty, sick, “You’re mad,” she said. “You idiots—”

Drum interrupted her. “It was the diary, wasn’t it, Alexis? Nels Torgesen’s diary?”

“You’re insane—”

I said, gently now, as gently as Dr. Frost had spoken, “If it wasn’t the diary, Alexis, you’re in the clear. No harm’s done. If it was, lady, you killed Townsend Holt.”

She tried to interrupt again, but Drum bored in. He said, “Between the Statler in D.C. and Ragen in Blue Jay that little book went someplace else. But it couldn’t have gone far. Not far at all.” He kept his eyes on her but spoke to me. “Where did she go, Shell?”

“Only the john in the Statler. Where else? She even took the bag in there with her. That’s when and where it had to happen. Frilly and gauzy things, indeed.”

Drum looked at Alexis. “Well?” he said.

I said, “We can search you, or you can tell us about it.” I glanced at the ropes binding her. “You’re not going anywhere.”

She didn’t fall to pieces or anything like that. Her face just got a little harder. Those blue eyes had always carried a little ice in them; now they merely froze solid.

“All right,” she said flatly. “It’s—under my girdle.”

And that was the unkindest cut of all. She wore a girdle.

Chester Drum

Alexis licked her lips. She was beautiful. That hadn’t changed. It probably wouldn’t change in death-house denim either. Until they strapped the electrode to her lovely leg.

“Listen,” she said, staring at Scott, her big eyes gleaming. “There’s still time. I can get away.”

Scott didn’t say anything.

Alexis turned to me. “Can’t I?”

Dr. Frost hadn’t even known Alexis had taken his papers to Washington. I told him now, and he stared at his daughter as if he didn’t know her. Then I fingered the little black leather-covered book. A has-been’s diary. But once Nels Torgesen had been top-man on the Brotherhood totem pole. A lot of what he’d written there, saving it for a rainy day, would match the Frost papers and other stuff which Abbamonte had crammed into his briefcase. The briefcase, the book and the tapes would do Senator Hartsell’s job for him. Naming names. Implicating men all across the country who, until now, were socially above reproach. And, of course, implicating Alexis.

“I have a lot of money,” she said.

My answer was the same no answer as Scott’s.

Sure she had a lot of money. It came out, later, at the hearings. Through Sand she’d picked up the papers of three big trucking firms, one on the Coast and two here in the East. She had close to a million bucks in liquid assets, and several times that in what had been the good will and business potential of the three trucking outfits.

Alexis turned those lovely eyes on her father. “Daddy,” she said, not the seductive woman now but the small girl turning to her protective parent, “I was worried about you. I hired Shell to find you. I never told anyone. I even denied it to Chet. I thought my husband would—”

He slapped her face. His own face was a study in tragedy. “I never would have gone to Blue Jay if I didn’t have you to worry about,” he said. “My own daughter. How could I implicate my own daughter? But you even stole my papers for that hoodlum you married.”

“She implicated herself,” I said, “in Front Royal.”

“But don’t you see?” Alexis cried desperately. “Ragen had ordered Holt to get the diary at all costs. Torgesen was boasting about how it would give him the whip hand over Ragen and Abbamonte and even my husband. I had to get the diary before Holt did. He ... he got there before I did. We ... struggled.”

“You hit him with the poker,” I said.

“And got the diary,” Scott said.

Dr. Frost turned away. He didn’t want us to see his face.

Distantly, beyond the wind and the rain and then a part of them and then closer, drowning them out, I heard the wail of a siren. I went to the hatch of the DC-3. In a little while I saw the headlights and the revolving red dome-light of a police cruiser. It pulled up in front of the administration building.

Scott and I untied Alexis and helped her and Dr. Frost out of the Dakota’s hatch. I felt Alexis’ pliant body against my hands. Her breast leaned on my arm.

“We could—” she began.

“Skip it.” I took her elbow in my hand, holding it harder than necessary. The four of us walked across the tarmac. I identified myself to a sergeant of the Maryland State Police. The Senate op ID card impressed him.

“How’d you get here so fast?” Scott asked.

“Through all that rain,” I said.

We were both being sarcastic. We’d had a hard night. But then we smiled sheepishly at each other. I think the Trooper missed the sarcasm entirely.

“What the hell, we’re glad to see you,” I said.

“Three punks in a car,” the sergeant said. “Speeding. They skidded into a light pole on Benning Road. Came out with guns in their hands.”

Another Trooper was busy at the car radio. Pretty soon three more cars and two ambulances came in along the secondary road. Before they arrived, I went down to the cellar and got Hope. They gave her first aid. They flushed Sand and Eric Torgesen and the few hoods that were left out of the administration building. There was some sporadic gunfire far across the tarmac, but the Troopers were here in force now and Ragen’s leaderless goons didn’t have a chance.

A medic worked over my face and Scott’s. He put a temporary bandage on my right hand and Scott’s side.

“You two look like you fell into a cement mixer,” he said.

We didn’t argue with him.

SHELL SCOTT AND CHESTER DRUM

Washington, D.C., 8:15 A.M., Monday, December 21

Well, that’s the way it was when Chet Drum and I met.

If it ever happened again, I was going to make very sure he was on my side from the beginning. I had been wrong about other people in my time; but never more wrong than about Drum.

It was right now.

I felt pretty good. If a man with aches in every bruise and a bullet slash on his left side, and a half-fractured skull can feel pretty good, then I felt fine.

I was at Washington National Airport again, this time going home. Really going home. Chet and I had said our too-terse good-by, and I’d waded through reporters to get here. The reporters seemed pleased with the story they had, and a British chap mumbled something about our being bloody heroes. Maybe we weren’t heroes, but we were sure bloody.

I’d left Chet at the Senate Office Building with Senator Blair Hartsell. Dr. Frost was there, too. He had originally decided not to testify because, from the tapes and other information, he had known he would have to involve and hurt Alexis “a little.”

But with Alexis tagged for murder, and her confession already taken down by a police stenographer, nothing the good doctor might say would make much difference to Alexis. Actually, he had even more reason now for testifying, and when Drum delivered him to the Senator, Frost had indicated he would pour it all out for the Committee. It was going to be hard for him, though. He loved Alexis very much.

Ragen was in the hospital. From there he’d be taken back to California and prison, if not to the gas chamber at San Quentin. The guns, choking, car banging into him, hadn’t killed him. But he would never walk again. Not on his own legs.

Before my plane took off, headed for home, I made two calls from the airport to L.A.. The first one was for Tootsie. Big, fat, sweet Tootsie Mellerbam. She had sure earned a call. She just about gushed all over the phone, and seemed delighted not only at the news, but at hearing from me. And suddenly, right in the middle of a sentence, I stopped. Remembering.

Remembering the help she’d freely given me. Remembering her saying, “If I come up with something good ... what’s in it for me?” smiling all over her face, which was a lot of smile. My saying, as a joke, that I’d take her to see Cesare Lombardi in The Dying Gladiator, and her surprised, serious, “Oh, would you?” The hints since then, like, “Did I come up with something good, Shell?” Hints which had bounced right off my thick skull.

And I remembered the look on her face that day when some of the hints had bounced—the last hints there were going to be. Remembered thinking she’d felt a small, sharp pain, as if a tooth were hurting her. It hadn’t been a tooth that was hurting. It had been Tootsie.

I finally finished that sentence I’d stopped, but I’ll never know what it was. The rest of the conversation was just as awkward. But I managed to struggle through another minute of it and hung up. I stared at the phone. Too bad she was so fat.

But then I made the last call, the big one, the important one—to Kelly Thorn, my Kelly. Her voice came sweetly over the miles to me, cool and soft, a throb in it, a heart-tugging sob in it that finally turned to laughter. Everything was all right now, really all right.

In my mind I could see her misty green eyes, her fiery red hair and lips, as I said, “Gotta run, honey. Can’t miss this flight.”

“When will you be here?”

“Tonight. Actually the jet puts down in Inglewood at five p.m. So—”

“Wonderful! Then I’ll see you tonight!”

“Well ... not tonight. Tomorrow, Kelly. A lot of tomorrows.”

“I like the sound of that, Shell. I like it a lot. But why not tonight?”

“Sorry, my sweet.” For a moment I thought of that awkward last minute on the phone, just completed. Awkward, but it got the job done.

“Tomorrow, Kelly,” I said again. “Tonight ... I have a date with Tootsie.”

Chester Drum

After Scott left Blair Hartsell’s office next morning, the Senator, needing a shave but looking as happy as I’d ever seen him and sounding twice as happy as that, alternated between reading some of the stuff we’d brought and slapping my back with his hard, heavy hand.

Earlier, Scott had told me, “I never did like saying good-by.”

“You’re a pretty good detective,” I said.

“So are you—for a D.C. man.”

“Stick around a couple of days? I owe you about a gallon of drinks.”

“I’ll buy the second gallon. But I’d better take a raincheck. Got to get back to the Coast. Business,” he said, and winked at me.

“That Kelly’s all right.”

“So’s Hope.”

We shook hands. I had to use my left. My right, in splints now, was as swollen as Scott’s jaw—or mine, for that matter.

Most of the rest, if you follow the papers, you know. The only big one who got away was Nels Torgesen. They didn’t find him for six months and then they did find him in the Dominican Republic at the wrong end of a gambling debt. He’d been shot dead.

The Hearings, after our night at Haycox Airport, were only a formality. The Hartsell Committee asked Dr. Frost to head a commission to work out the arrangements with the A.F.L-C.I.O. for a new truckers’ union. Alexis’ first murder trial ended in a hung jury. There’ll be another one.

There was a lot in the papers about the gangland convention at Haycox Airport that ended in a gangland war. Police all over the country have been rounding up small-fry hoods for weeks. The roundup is still going on.

Hope’s emotional scars are healing. She’s been building an image of her brother far enough removed from the truth so that it won’t hurt her. I’ve seen her a few times.

Scott?

Business as usual on the West Coast.

But I’m a pretty mobile guy with a penchant to hop on the nearest plane to anywhere.

My cases take me out of the D.C. area and, often, clear out of the country.

I have a hunch I’ll meet Scott again.

With both of us sneering in the right direction this time.

It ought to be fun.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1959 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1987 by Richard S. Prather

Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

ISBN 978-1-4804-9892-1

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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