<code> Chapter One

She yanked the door open with a crash and said, “Gran — ” but then she stopped and stared at me. She was nude as a noodle.

I stared right back at her.

“Oh!” she squealed. “You’re not Grandma!”

“No,” I said, “I’m Shell Scott, and you’re not Grandma, either.”

She slammed the door in my face.

Yep, I thought, this is the right house.

My brain was reeling. Now that I had time to consider it, that had been a gorgeous babe. Even dressed in a Father Hubbard she would have been gorgeous. But wearing only a doorway, she had looked like the next step in the evolution of women.

I rang the doorbell again and waited.

When the lovely reappeared she wore a thin blue robe and a pink blush, and she really looked me over carefully, maybe to get even. She ran big eyes over the short hair that springs up all over my head like healthy white grass, recently mowed, the whitish miniature-boomerang eyebrows over my gray eyes, the slightly broken nose. She appeared a bit startled, which was no enormous surprise to me. It seemed to take her quite a while, but I didn’t mind; it was a real thin blue robe.

She was about my size. However, since I am pushing six-two and two hundred five pounds, that means she was a big girl. She had reddish hair and her large eyes were green, like a Go signal.

She blinked the green eyes. “I’m sorry. I really thought you were Grandma.”

“It’s quite all right, believe me — “

“You see, she rings the doorbell and then pops away. It’s a game. She’s skulking near here somewhere.”

“Skulking, eh?” I looked around. “There she is,” I said. “She’s down there in the bushes.”

This was Elm Street, a pleasant, tree-lined street in east Los Angeles, and this particular house was at 844 Elm. At either side of the doorway grew thick green bushes. And Grandma was, in fact, down there in the bushes.

It didn’t surprise me. Already this afternoon I had talked to the man with a glass skull, and another chap who’d said the world was coining to an end in six minutes. We’d waited six minutes. Then he’d looked at me and yelled, “See? What did I tell you!”

It was part of the job. The office of “Sheldon Scott, Investigations,” is in downtown L.A.; I’m a private detective. I was conducting a legitimate, and conceivably important investigation for a committee of the California senate. For the last two months, “the committee had been investigating lobbying activities and related matters in the state of California, and had recently concluded hearings in San Francisco. Hearings were scheduled to begin soon at the Civic Building, and I had been hired a week ago.

The committee had naturally received a lot of publicity in the local newspapers. The San Francisco hearings had been noisy at times, and uncovered some evidence of corruption, bribery of public officials, even a little mild blackmail. But nothing of staggering importance had developed. There were rumors that the men able to bring the most pressure on legislators hadn’t been bothered enough — or at all. One of the Los Angeles newspapers rode almost to death the idea of a “Secret Boss,” or a powerful behind-the-scenes puppet master, pulling strings while senators and other men of some importance jumped. The series had been titled, “Who Is Mr. Big?”

The committee had received a large number of communications from Los Angeles citizens. Some were helpful, some abusive, and a few were plainly goofy. In L.A., that was inevitable. Even the crackpot letters and phone calls had to be checked, though, on the chance that the man with the glass skull, say, might conceivably have information that would help. Part of my job was to follow up all the possible leads received from Los Angeles citizens. I had set aside this afternoon for the wildest of the lot. One afternoon wasn’t going to be enough.

What had brought me to 844 Elm Street was a letter signed “Zeldy Beware.” It had been addressed to “Lobby Committee” and said simply, “I know all about Mr. Big.” I’d put it in the file with four other “hopeless” cases; but even so there’d been just a little hope that maybe this one was on the level.

Now, however, I had lost hope. This one was down there in the bushes.

The girl had stepped closer to me and was peering along the house.

“Grandma,” she said sharply. “I see you. You might as well come out.”

The bushes wiggled and a little woman stood up and marched through them. She was a real cute old lady, with pink face and somewhat scraggly gray hair. She wore rimless glasses and had on a plain black dress. She was five feet tall, or less, and might have weighed ninety pounds, counting the leaves in her hair.

“Hello,” I said.

“Ha.” She peered at me. “Are you one of them?”

“Well, I’m one of us right now. Now, which one of us is Zeldy Beware?”

The lovely gal in the doorway said, “Who?”

“Zeldy Beware.”

She hugged the blue robe tighter around her. “I’m Zelma,” she said. “And Grandma’s Zeldy. But her last name’s Morris.”

I reached into my coat pocket and took out the letter.

Grandma Zeldy said, “That’s mine.”

I showed her the signature, “Zeldy Beware.”

She said, “Just signed my first name. Zeldy. That last isn’t my name. It’s beware. Like look out! On guard!”

I looked at the young girl. She smiled. This was lots of fun. She said, “What’s this letter you’re talking about?”

I handed it to her, and explained why I was here.

She nodded. “The committee investigating lobbying and like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I read about it. Grandma did, too. We wondered why you’d be investigating lobbies. At first we thought it was theater lobbies and hotel lobbies and like that.”

“No, ma’am.” I smiled at her. “You’re a little off there.”

She laughed and went on to say that she knew what it was all about now. She and Grandma. Ordinarily I’d have tried a little harder to get down to the crucial facts faster, but Zelma had those big green eyes and red hair and that thin blue robe. And she had stopped blushing.

I asked Zeldy about her letter, and who Mr. Big was.

She brushed a leaf out of her hair and looked at a palm tree.

I asked her again. She went back into the bushes.

This time she got almost out of sight. “Grandma!” Zelma shouted, “you come out of there this minute.”

“Won’t.”

I said, “Ma’am, you did write the letter. Now if you’ll — “

“I just wanted to have some fun with you.”

I grinned through clenched teeth. “Fun, hey?”

“Sure. I get tired of crossword puzzles. I don’t know who Mr. Big is. I just read about it in the papers.”

“Uh-huh.” I was starting to hope that nobody would pass by on the street and see me talking to bushes. There are people in this town who would consider that proof of what they’ve been claiming for years.

“I wrote lots of letters. Not just to you. About all kinds of things. You’re not mad, are you?”

“Not — well, no. But don’t write any more letters, huh?”

“I won’t. Can I have my letter back?”

“I’m afraid not. It has to be kept in the committee files.”

“Don’t want it anyway.”

Zelma stood in the doorway, the blue robe held loosely around her. I said, “Thanks. Guess that’s all I can do here.”

“You might ring the doorbell again.”

“Uh-huh. Good-by.”

I walked toward my Cad parked at the curb, then stopped and looked back at the house. Ring the doorbell again? What could she have meant by that? But the door was closed. Zelma was gone. Maybe a little too far gone. Ah, well. I got into the car and headed downtown. Zelma was nice, yes; but Paula was even nicer, and I hadn’t met Paula’s grandmother.

Paula was the first person I saw when I got back to the Civic Building. That’s because she was the one I looked for. She did some of the committee’s secretarial work, and I’d met her when I’d first started working for them myself. She was in the big conference room with three of the senators, taking dictation from Beasley, when I walked in.

She glanced around and gave me a big smile, then continued making pothooks on a pad. They must all have been about ready to go home; it was long after dark. All four of them were seated at a large mahogany table.

Beasley finished his dictation and looked at me. “Scott. You get anything?”

“Yeah. A man who said we were tuning in on him, another who watched the world come to an end with me, and an old lady living in some bushes.”

“Scott,” Beasley said, “how many times do I have to tell you this is serious business?”

He was reprimanding me. The hell with him. I said, “And a man with a glass skull. Not much help, though. He was pretty lightheaded.”

Beasley looked as if he were going to draw. Not really; it was just that I thought of him as carrying two strapped-down Colts. His exact title was Chairman, Senate Fact-Finding Committee On Lobbying Activities, and he was a lean hard guy who made me think of an old-time Western sheriff relaxing after cleaning up on all the outlaws in town. By shooting them in the back. He was competent enough, and in a way I admired his let’s-get-the-job-done-and-start-another-one attitude. But he had no sense of humor.

Paula, however, had a delightful sense of humor. And everything else. She grinned at me and murmured, “Set a thief to catch a thief.”

I winked at her and rolled my eyes horribly. She pretended she was going to faint. Beasley was ready to draw both those guns. I said, “Well, let’s get down to business. Let’s knock off and go home.”

Beasley’s mouth was working, but he didn’t say anything.

Wise said, “Shell, that’s the best idea you’ve had since you started to work for us.”

“That’s the only idea I’ve had,” I told him. “But tomorrow is a new day. Anything may happen.”

Sebastian Wise. An improbable name, a probable man. He was the only one of the three state senators who looked the part. He looked it, talked it, and acted it as if it were the lead in a play. He was good-looking, with gray hair in loose waves, an executive jaw, and a trained voice, the kind of man the boys in the back room like to run for governor. Two minutes after we’d met, he’d started calling me Shell.

Beasley called me Scott, or Mr. Scott. If he had a daughter, and I were to marry his daughter — which isn’t likely, since I’m still a bachelor at thirty, and since I can guess what his daughter would look like anyway — he would undoubtedly continue to call me Mr. Scott.

Senator Carter wouldn’t call me anything unless he had to. Andrew Carter. Andy. Only you’d expect to see it written andy carter. He was definitely a lower-case kind of guy. The sort of man who, when completely still and quiet, becomes invisible. Where Sebastian Wise was big and expansive, and Lester Beasley was thin and hard, Andy Carter was little and soft and seemed constantly to be shrinking.

He had the blank, washed-out look of an underdeveloped photograph — but he was brilliant. He was probably brainier than the chairman and Wise and me put together. And that explained why he was a senator. It wasn’t personality. It was his brain — and his beautiful voice. That voice seemed incongruous coming out of him; like the dog’s bark with the flea’s bite. It could range from the boom of ocean waves to the whisper of a hummingbird’s wings. On radio he’d be a king, on TV a peasant. I understood he was responsible for introducing several of the most important bills now before the house. He was quite well thought of by his fellow senators. He was married to a former model, and had six children. You never know.

The three senators began talking together, discussing a witness they wanted subpoenaed, and other details about the upcoming hearings. Paula walked up to me and said, softly, “Hi, you nine ball.”

“What’s a nine ball, my sweet?”

“That’s one worse than an eight ball. Ah, I have it. You’re a section-eight ball.”

“My love.”

“Want to drive me home?”

“I’d like to drive you mad.”

“In your car, I mean.”

“In the car — anywhere — “

“Oh, shut up. I’m serious.”

“Me, too — and I’d love to drive you home. We could play cootch, what?”

“Oh, Shell. I wish you’d settle — what’s cootch?”

“Well, first we get a bottle of hootch — “

“No, we don’t.”

“Then we go to my place and put some nice cootch records on the gramaphone — “

“That’s enough.”

“Enough? We aren’t even dancing.”

“That’s the way I planned it. Now, are you going to drive me home?”

“Sure, if Jesse James over there is through with you.”

“He said I could go.”

Paula was looking up at me, her lips slightly parted, a moist shine on the lower one.

We’d known each other a week and had two dates. She was twenty-four, single, fun, and she lived alone and liked it. On both our dates I had suggested, at what I thought the psychological moment — which proves I am a detective, and not a psychologist — that we go to my Hollywood apartment and watch radio, or do something creative like making spaghetti, I had wound up taking her home, failing even to see the inside of her apartment, and going to bed hungry. Paula was delightful, nonetheless.

I said, “What does your apartment look like?”

“All reds and greens and bright things thrown about.”

It sounded like a good setting for her, because she was dark. Tall, long-limbed, languorous, with black hair and long black lashes, exceptionally high cheekbones, and deep dark eyes with moonlight in them. Her conversation was peppy enough, not quite what you’d expect from the soft, low voice. And she was deliberate in her speech, in her movements. Everything about her was soft and dark. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

A phone rang. It was one of two against the far wall, and Paula turned and walked to it slowly, deliberately. She lifted the phone and listened a moment, then put one hand over the mouthpiece. “Somebody named Hazel,” she told me. “Says you’re to call a George Stone at the Melody Club. Want to talk to her?”

“Yeah.” Hazel is the gal at the switchboard in the Hamilton Building, where I have my office. She was working late. As I walked to Paula and took the phone, all three men at the long table stopped their conversation and looked at me. Hazel told me that a man had called my office and given his name as George Stone. He wanted to talk to me and said it was important. Hazel had told him I’d call him back and he’d given her the number of a phone booth at the Melody Club.

Hazel went on, “I guess he thought you were still in your office and I was your secretary, because he certainly was insistent about talking to you right that minute. I didn’t tell him where you were.”

“George Stone, huh? Never heard of him. He say what it was about?”

“No. Said you’d want to talk to him, though.”

I thanked Hazel, hung up and put a call through to the Melody Club. After the first ring of the phone, I heard the receiver at the other end of the line go up and a gruff voice said, “Yeah?”

“This is Shell Scott.”

“About time. This is Stone. George Stone. You know who I am?”

“No. Should I?”

“You will, brother, you will. Scott, you’re investigator for that committee on lobbying, right?”

“One of them.” There were actually three local investigators doing work for the committee. A bright young kid named Joe Rule worked with me part of the time. Stone coughed into the phone. His voice had sounded a little slurred, as if he’d had a couple drinks too many. “What about it?” I asked.

“I’m the boy that can give you everything you want, brother. The works. A to Z.”

“I hear the words. I’ve heard them before.”

“Not like this. I’ve put in seven years work for the biggest crook in the state of California. I can hang him. But I got to get home free. You follow me?”

I followed him well enough. He sounded to me like another crackpot, but if he did have anything to spill, this was the old story of a man wanting to get out from under; wrap up somebody else tight enough that he’d escape prosecution himself. I said, “Immunity, huh?”

“That’s it. Hundred per cent.”

“That doesn’t sound likely — but it isn’t up to me.”

“You can help, though. And you’re the only one I’ll talk to. You comin’ out to the Melody Club?”

“I’ll be there. How’ll I find you?”

“I’ll find you. And, Scott. This is gonna knock your ears off. This will make the news wires from here to New York. No detours — come straight here. Don’t talk to nobody about it. Right?”

“Okay.”

“And make it quick. There’s some people don’t like me, and ain’t gonna like me any better now.”

He hung up.

I could believe the last part of what he’d said. He hadn’t sounded lovable. Chairman Beasley said; “What was that all about, Mr. Scott?”

“Another guy with all the answers for us. If he’s on the level, he sounds long overdue for the clink. Just in case he does have something, can we do him any good?”

Beasley said, “If he’s a criminal, you know we can’t allow him to avoid prosecution.” He paused. “We, ah, might be able to help him a little, of course. Depends on what he knows, how much help he is, how deeply he’s involved. What did he have to say on the phone?”

“Nothing specific. I’m going out to see him now. If he wasn’t kidding, he could be the man we’ve been looking for.”

Senator Carter spoke for the first time since I’d come in this evening. “Perhaps we should wait here until Mr. Scott can report on what he learns. This might be important.” With that voice, it sounded as if he were singing “Old Black Joe.”

Beasley shrugged, but Sebastian Wise got to his feet. “You can call me at home if anything important comes up. I’m rather tired.” He looked at me and grinned. “But I shall continue to hope he’s not one of those we’ve been tuning in on.” He went out.

After a little more conversation I was ready to leave. Paula stopped by me a moment at the door. “I’ll wait till you come back — if you hurry.”

I told her I’d be back in no time, and she gave me a smile that would last me at least an hour. Then I left.

The Melody Club was out on Olympic, a small spot with low-key lighting and high prices. I turned my Cadillac over to the parking attendant and went in. Just inside the door was a big poster which declared that Paul Dutton’s band was being held over for another month, and that the highlight of the three floor shows was something called Satan and Satin. I got a brief glimpse of a color photograph, something red and white. It looked like a guy in devil costume and a babe in very little.

The velvet rope was already stretched before the three steps leading down into the main room. I could hear the clink of silverware on dishes, the soft babble of conversation. A tuxedoed waiter stood, arms folded across his chest, in front of the rope. Things got off to an early start here at the Melody.

Before speaking to the waiter, who was straight in front of me, I looked around. The checkroom was on my right. Directly behind me was the men’s room, and a couple yards from it was the ladies’. At least I assumed that was the order. On the one door was nothing; on the other one behind me was a painted red devil. I’ve got a hunch that designers of nightclub restrooms are the same people who paint those modern paintings that get hung upside down, the way the painters should be hung, at galleries.

I stepped up to the headwaiter, who looked at me stonily.

“You have a reservation?”

“No. I’m meeting a gentleman at his table.”

His lip twitched. That was a likely story.

“George Stone,” I said. “You know him?”

His eyebrows went up a bit. “Oh, Mr. Stone. Of course.”

“Why of course?”

He didn’t reply, but waited until he was sure I wasn’t going to tip him, then turned and unhooked the velvet rope and led me between tables to one at which a big black-haired guy was sitting, gulping a highball.

The big guy looked up at me. “Hello, Scott. Sit down.”

I sat and he waved a white-jacketed waiter over, ordered a Scotch highball and asked me what I wanted. Stone looked as if he’d had plenty to drink already. I told the waiter bourbon and water. While waiting for the drinks, Stone and I sized each other up.

He was, I guessed, about five-ten and two hundred pounds. He looked strong and muscular, but white, like a toadstool, and he had a lot of teeth that showed when he talked, and a lot of black hair. Stone was somewhere between forty and fifty years old.

He said, “You took your time gettin’ here.”

“Let’s get something straight. If you’ve got a story to tell, I’ll listen, but not to any of your lip.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m wound up a little. Big deal, this thing. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.”

“The way you talked on the phone, you had some high-powered stuff to spill. This seems like a funny place for it.”

“It’s safe,” he said. “Nobody can get to me here. And there isn’t anybody going to hear what we’re talkin’ about.” He paused. “Besides, I didn’t decide to call you till after I come here. Just tonight. There’s — trouble buildin’ up. I can smell it. Time I pulled out of it.”

“It’s time you told me what you got me here for.”

He took a cigarette from a pack before him, picked up his lighter from the table and lit the cigarette. Then he stared at the lighter flame for a couple of seconds before snapping the cap down and snuffing out the flame.

He took a deep drag and blew out smoke. “You want to know about lobbying. Pressure on the law boys. Blackmail. Bribery. Payoffs. I can give it to you till the middle of next week. You don’t know me, do you? Don’t know what my job is or anything?”

“No.”

“Electronics, and radio. That’s my racket. I can tap a phone, wire a house, listen to conversations anywhere, any time, with wires or without. That’s another reason I met you here; nobody else’ll be listening. I can get an ear into almost any place except the mint. And that’s just what I’ve been doing for seven years.”

I started getting interested. After the people I’d talked to earlier today, I was going to be pretty hard to convince; but although Stone was talking softly, so that people at other tables wouldn’t hear us over the music, he talked like a man who had a lot more to say. And he sounded to me like a man who was telling the truth.

He seemed nervous, too. He kept looking around, like a man who expected trouble.

I said, “What’s the rest of it, Stone? And how come you decided so suddenly that you wanted to talk to me?”

“I already told you. Enough, anyway. And here’s my problem. I had to bend a few laws doing this job of mine. If I spill everything, that part’s gonna come out, too.” He paused and dragged on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. “But we can talk it over, and I can get an idea of where I stand. Just the two of us, it’s your word against mine, see? And you don’t know it yet, but you can do me some good.”

“Let’s start with you doing me some good. You claim to have been tapping wires for seven years. Who’d you do all this work for?”

“Oh, yeah. I meant to tell you that. Well, Scott, there is a Mr. Big.” He grinned, and it was like a thick muscle splitting open. “Mr. Big. Just like that paper said.”

“Who?”

“That’ll wait a bit. I don’t spill anything unless I get a free ticket.”

“I haven’t got any authority, Stone. I just work for the committee, and you know it.”

“Yeah, I know it.”

The orchestra had been playing steadily until now, and several people had been on the dance floor. But the music ended and Stone stopped speaking in the relative quiet. We had a good table, at the left side of the dance floor, and I noticed Stone was looking past me. I followed his gaze toward the floor and was just in time to get a healthy double wallop to my nervous system. The first one was a wild fanfare from the orchestra; the second was a woman, and twice as wild as the fanfare.

It was a willowy silver-blonde with ice-blue eyes and a shape that must have turned more heads than a dozen chiropractors. For a nerve-jangling second I thought that shape was clad only in skin like the lovely-in-the-doorway episode earlier today, but then I realized that she was the female half of the floor show, but I knew that for me she’d be the whole show.

What I had thought ivory skin was shimmering cloth that covered her from the neck down, that covered her arms and fingers, was molded to her breasts, flowed over a tiny waist and sharply swelling hips, then separated to cling like paint to her firm thighs and calves. She wore no shoes, and the white cloth covered even her feet.

She was standing in the cloth-draped archway through which performers would enter and leave the floor, just a couple of yards from our table, both arms raised at her sides to hold the dark curtains apart. She turned her head and winked, and for a happy moment I thought she’d winked at me, but then I noticed she was looking past me.

I glanced around to see George Stone grin and nod at her. But that was all I saw him do, because while I cursed under my breath I was swinging my head around to focus on the gal again. It was hard to focus, too, because there were so many places you wanted to look. If eye exercises improve vision, this gal’s approximate thirty-six, twenty-one, and thirty-five would give a blind man twenty-twenty.

As the fanfare echoed in the club a voice spoke over a mike, introducing Satan and Satin for the first show of the evening. The woman, Satin, ran lightly forward, arms stretched behind her, as the lights in the club went out. A spotlight speared down from the ceiling and fell on her as she stopped and stood motionless, raised up on her toes, arms down and back, her stomach sucked in and her breasts high and prominent, gleaming in the white light.

It was easy to forget that every inch of her body was covered by the cloth; it fit without a wrinkle, followed every curve and undulation of her form, was thrust forward at the right places. It was obvious that she wore nothing except the satin covering.

There had been no sound, no music, but suddenly a chord crashed violently from the orchestra and the sound was held, sustained and growing louder as, simultaneously, a second spotlight flashed from overhead. It fell on another figure, the tall red-clothed devil, with his arms raised over his head, wrists bent down so that his fingers pointed to the floor. A black-lined cape hung from his shoulders, and his lips were spread apart in an expression that was half-grin, half-snarl, like the smile of a satisfied sex fiend.

For several seconds both the red form and the white were motionless, then the long-held chord flowed into another and Satin turned slowly. The scene was immensely effective, with the spotlights sharply outlining the two contrasting bodies, and darkness surrounding them. Satin looked at Satan, then reached her hands toward him — not reaching for him, but with palms out, arms bent slightly at the elbows, as though she were trying desperately to keep from being drawn to him.

But her feet raced toward him, slowed suddenly, then advanced hesitantly; and all the while she pushed forward with her outthrust hands, squirmed the upper half of her body from side to side. It was almost possible to believe that she was really being drawn forward while she fought to keep away from Satan; as if she were powerless to prevent him from controlling her body.

The spotlights blended together as the two bodies touched, the white pressing against the red. For the first time the red Satan moved, his arms dropping and his hands encircling Satin’s tiny waist. She pulled away from him, but her white legs flashed up to entwine about the devil’s middle. Her legs linked tightly about him, and her arms were thrust above her head as she leaned completely away from him, her body twisting from the waist up, head back and the long silver-blonde hair brushing the floor.

Barely a minute had passed, but this was already about the most sensual and stimulating act I’d seen in a nightclub. If this got any better, there was only one thing they could do for an encore. Light flickered on my left as Stone spun his lighter wheel and puffed on another cigarette. Then there was a heavy thud and I looked toward him. It had been Stone’s hand. He’d banged it hard against the table.

I couldn’t blame him. I was beginning to feel like banging the table top, or even taking a bite out of it, myself. I’d merely glanced to my left at the sound of Stone’s hand hitting the table, and then started to return my attention to the interesting area of the club. But I could see Stone’s hand on the table, palm up — and something else that was so incredible that it didn’t penetrate my awareness for a second.

It was as though the sight registered, but couldn’t bring forth any normal reaction. I just stared at his hand. Maybe part of it was that my mind was still on the dance floor with Satin, following the twists and curves of her smooth body. But that was only part of it.

Stone’s cigarette lighter, which he’d used a couple of times before, was the kind that lights when the small wheel is spun, and remains lighted until the top is snapped down again. It lay now in the palm of Stone’s hand where it rested on the table. And the lighter was still burning.

It was burning the flesh. As I watched I could see the skin of his curled fingers begin to blacken. A tiny fissure opened in one of them; it split for a fraction of an inch. Wetness bubbled in the fissure.

The orchestra was playing more softly, the music swelling and throbbing behind me. Somebody coughed. I heard a padded foot slap against the dance floor near me. And that lighter burned, searing the motionless hand in front of me. I could smell the burning flesh.

The thought crept into my mind, then. It was crazy. But it had to be true.

Stone was dead.

</code>

<code> Chapter Two

I don’t know how long I stared at Stone’s hand, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. It seemed like a long time.

But then, when it really hit me, I slapped my fist forward, hitting his fingers and knocking the lighter away. It winked out and clattered against the floor. I’d knocked over a glass and it rolled on the table top, the liquor and water dripping off the table’s edge.

There was no illumination behind Stone, only the reflection from those spotlights focused on the dance floor, but there was enough of a glow so that I could see him start to move.

He seemed slumped in the chair, but was still upright. His head rolled to the side and his body followed it. He moved slowly, and at first the motion was barely obvious. Then everything happened suddenly.

His body seemed to lurch sideways and he fell to the floor with a jarring crash. A woman at the next table screamed. She screamed and kept on screaming. She couldn’t have seen that the man was dead, couldn’t have known. But something made her scream. Maybe it was the way he fell; or maybe she smelled that burned flesh.

But her voice was high and gasping, carrying a choking fright through the sound of the orchestra. The music stopped suddenly. Lights came on in the club, and at the nearby tables men and women jumped to their feet. I still didn’t know what had happened to Stone. But I could see him clearly now, and I knew he was dead.

A moment after the lights went on I was kneeling by him, my fingers searching for his pulse. I knew there wouldn’t be any. There wasn’t.

“My God!” somebody cried beside me. “My God, it’s George!”

Satin stood almost touching me, staring down at Stone’s body. I was surprised to find that she was only about five-two or five-three. I could see long, artificial eyelashes that were part of her make-up, the orange rouge on her lips, the paint hiding her own eyebrows, and the thickly penciled false brows arching high on her forehead.

She looked shocked, as if she might suddenly faint or start yelling, but there wasn’t time to worry about that now. Near me was a table at which were four men; I touched the biggest one’s arm and said, “Keep everyone away from the body, okay?”

He nodded and stepped forward without even looking at me.

Up front I collared the head waiter. He knew that somebody had keeled over, but that was about all. I told him to keep the doors closed and not let anybody leave, then used the phone booth to put in a call to the police.

When I came out of the booth, the head waiter was wandering about in a daze. I asked him if he’d put men on the doors and he nodded and added, “Those two men had already gone. Is Mr. Stone really dead?”

“Yeah. What two men?”

“I don’t know — that is, I talked to one of them, the shorter one, when he asked me where Mr. Stone’s table was. And I saw the two of them going out, just before all the commotion. Did he have a heart attack?”

“Could be. What about this man? He asked where Stone was?”

“Yes.”

“And you told him?”

“Of course. He gave me five dollars.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was short, perhaps, thirty, thirty-five years old. And his teeth stuck out. He had a black mole at one side of his mouth, too. I remembered him fairly well because of the five dollars.”

“When did he ask you about Stone? And what did he do then?”

“It was just before the show. A few moments before the lights went out. He just looked into the room, then went into the men’s room.” He paused. “Why do you want to know all this?”

I showed him my identification and said, “I’m a private detective, the nearest thing you’ve got to the law until the police get here.” He looked at me as if that wasn’t near enough. There wasn’t much more he could tell, anyway. He hadn’t seen the short man again, nor had he seen the second man in the light; he had merely seen the short form and a larger one going out during the show, which had struck him as odd. People, he said, especially men, didn’t often leave while the show was on. It struck me as odd, too.

Before I left him, I asked where the manager’s office was. He pointed to the door I’d thought was the ladies’ restroom. Then he wandered off. He seemed all unstrung. I went through the door he’d pointed at, and found myself in the ladies’ restroom.

Fortunately there were no ladies resting and when I came out I saw the word “Manager” on a door across from me, but the room beyond it was empty. I went back to where Stone lay. The big guy was still standing alongside the body.

Satin wasn’t in sight. I went through the curtained archway and down a narrow passageway to a hall lined with closed doors. I saw one door with a silver star on it and knocked. A woman’s voice said, “Who’s it?”

“Shell Scott. I’d like to talk to you if it’s okay.”

Satin opened the door. She held a cloth in her hand and was removing the make-up from her face; but she hadn’t changed the outfit she wore in her act. It took a few seconds for me to explain who I was and what I was doing here, but then she invited me inside her dressing room, shut the door, and walked over to lean back against the dressing table.

“My psychic told me something ugly was going to happen tonight,” she said. She was looking straight at me when she said it. I know I’m not beautiful, but I’m not really ugly. I told myself, though, that Satin hadn’t meant me. At least she hadn’t sounded very bitter about it. The way she was leaning against the dressing table, both arms behind her and that sensational body arching gently backward, might have been an accidentally assumed posture; but if so it looked like the most practiced accident a man would care to see.

From where I stood, I got not only the startling front view of this lovely, but a good deal of the rear view reflected in the dressing-table mirror, and it was almost too much. Even in the mirror it was an unparalleled rear view, or you might say an unparalleled-rear view. That costume was definitely designed for an intimate nightclub act, to be viewed from several yards away and under special lighting — not to be viewed in bright lights from so close by one such as I.

She went on, “Has he really inspired?”

“Has he what?”

“Inspired. Died. Is he dead?”

“Oh. Yeah, he’s dead.” I’d just got my first clue that Satin was perhaps not quite as well developed of brain as she was of body.

“He looked like it. But I guess that’s natural.”

“Yes. You knew Mr. Stone pretty well, I take it.”

“Why d’you say that?” she asked.

“Well, you winked at him, for one thing. And you seemed quite shocked when you saw him on the floor.”

“I’d be pretty shocked to see anybody on the floor. I’d be shocked to see you on the floor. Wouldn’t I?”

“Why, sure, but — “

“Besides, I was just getting warmed up in my act. And then zowie, all of a sudden, lights are all over the place.”

I thought, Just getting warmed up, huh? If I did nothing else this month, I was going to manage to see the rest of that act. The next few questions elicited the information that her name was really Virginia Waring, but she preferred to be called Satin.

“It sounds so soft and sinful,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does.” I grinned at her. “Are you — I mean, it’s certainly very pretty.”

“Not that I’m soft and sinful. I’m soft, yes, but not really sinful.” She laughed. “But I guess we all have depressed desires.”

“I guess we…”

She had been dabbing at the orange make-up and painted eyebrows with the rag in her hand, and had almost completed removal of the paint. Consequently she turned to face the dressing-table mirror and remained standing, but bent forward to dab at her cheeks. This changed the view into something only slightly less appealing than before, but still so fetching that it almost fetched me over there to her. I barely heard the sirens. But they penetrated, and I knew the police would soon be here.

“Satin,” I said, “you did know George Stone, didn’t you?”

She turned partly sideways and looked at me quietly, then she said, “You must be a good detective.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re so persistent.” Then she turned and looked into the mirror again and said, “Yes, we were friendly. Good friends.” Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Now I have to change.”

She reached under her arm and pulled gently. I could see now that a well-concealed zipper was there. So that was how she got into and out of the thing. She pulled the zipper down about a foot, then stopped. The darker, rosier tone of her flesh showed in the small gap. Satin glanced at me and I went out. There wasn’t really a lot more to see anyway.

A couple of uniformed policemen and two plain-clothes officers were approaching Stone’s body as I stepped out onto the dance floor. One of the plain-clothes men was Rawlins, a detective working out of Central Homicide. I knew him well.

“Hi, Lieutenant,” I said. “That was fast.”

He glanced around and smiled slightly. “Shell. What’re you doing here?”

I pointed to the corpse. “I was sitting at his table when he flopped over.”

In the next couple of minutes I told him all I knew. He said, “No idea why it happened, huh?”

“He just keeled over. I didn’t touch him except to check his pulse.”

Other officers arrived. The customers were questioned, a crew from the crime lab arrived and photographic bulbs flashed as pictures were taken. A little later Rawlins was kneeling by the body. He waved me over and said, “You can stop guessing about heart attacks. His heart stopped, all right, but that’s because his brain wasn’t working.” He pointed at the side of Stone’s head.

I got down on one knee and looked, without touching the body. There was a small dark hole in the right side of Stone’s head. It was an inch or so above the temple, and hardly visible in his thick black hair. There’d been almost no bleeding.

By the time the deputy coroner arrived and looked over the corpse, we were sure. Stone had been shot. The bullet was still inside his skull, and from the looks of the entrance hole, the weapon had been no larger than a .32 caliber, and quite possibly the slug had been from a .22 pistol.

“You didn’t hear anything at all, huh?” Rawlins asked me.

“No. Orchestra was playing, but if a gun was fired, even a little gun, somebody here should have heard it.”

I sat down in the chair Stone had been in. I assumed the same position he’d been in when shot, as nearly as I could remember it. Then I pointed at the side of my head, above the temple, and said to Rawlins, “Where’d it come from?”

“Take a look.”

I turned my head to the right. My gaze went straight out past the chair in which I’d been sitting, on by the velvet rope into the lobby, and ended at the painted red devil on the door of the men’s room. “Uh-huh,” I said. “Head waiter told me the short guy spotted Stone, then went in the men’s room. Place would be empty during the act. Stone lit a cigarette with his lighter — in the darkness, his face would have stood out like a house. Bang.”

Only the police couldn’t locate anybody who’d heard a bang, or any sound other than the usual ones. Rawlins said to me, “Well, a twenty-two doesn’t make much noise to begin with. And it could’ve been a dumb gat. Come to think of it, if a kill were planned for inside the club here, the murderer would be almost sure to use a silenced gun if he could.”

That made sense. I knew that silenced .22s, which couldn’t be heard ten feet away when fired, had been used as far back as World War II. Even a homemade silencer, good for only one or two shots, could effectively silence a gun as small as a .22 pistol.

But whatever it had been, it had done the job.

I put in a call to the Civic Building and talked to Paula. I gave her the story and she said she’d pass it on to Beasley and Carter, who were still waiting in the conference room. She also said that she would go on home alone, since I’d be tied up a while longer. I phoned Wise at his home and told him what had happened. He was as startled as Paula had been.

“Shot? Right there in the club?”

“Yeah. By an expert, I’d guess.”

“Didn’t he have time to tell you anything that would help us?”

“Nope. Just that he could spill all the beans about Mr. Big and give us a lot of dirt. He wanted immunity.”

Wise was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Immunity. Well, he got it.”

“Yeah. That’s about it. Police are still here.”

“Yes. Well, do what you have to do. I’ll see you in the morning, Shell.”

I told him good night and hung up. It was late when I drove home, to the Spartan Apartment Hotel on North Rossmore in Hollywood. It had been a busy evening, and until now I hadn’t been able to slow down and think much about what had happened. So it wasn’t until I was walking up the stairs to the second floor that I really considered it carefully.

When I’d sat in Stone’s chair at the Melody Club, and tried to imagine the path the lethal bullet must have taken, my gaze had ended up at the painted red devil on the men’s room door. But, I remembered, my gaze had also gone right by the chair in which I had been sitting at the time Stone was shot in the head.

It hadn’t even occurred to me until this minute. I’d assumed that because Stone had been killed, the killer had been an excellent shot, and had hit smack where he’d aimed. But maybe he wasn’t that good after all.

Maybe he’d been aiming at me.

</code>

<code> Chapter Three

The next morning I checked in at my office, and said hello to Hazel at the switchboard down the hall. Nothing of importance had come up so I drove to the Civic Building.

I had a small office in the building, but I went into the big conference room where I’d been last night. Here in these severely elegant surroundings, where so many polished phrases had bounced off the polished mahogany and paneled walls, here where serious business was conducted, the members of the lobbying committee kept the coffee pot boiling almost continuously.

Beasley and Wise were already present, having a cup, but Carter hadn’t shown up yet. Wise tossed his handsome head as I came in. “Shell. We’ve been anxiously awaiting you.”

“Yes,” Beasley said. “What can you add to the little you told us last night?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “But I’ll give the whole thing to you the way it happened.”

Wise smoothed his wavy gray hair. “Have some coffee. It’s not good to discuss murder without coffee to wash it down.” He grinned. “Besides, the coffee’s good this morning. I made it.”

I groaned. “This may be worse than the gory details.” You could talk to Wise the way you would to any ordinary human being.

But Beasley’s brows were trying to merge. We were being frivolous.

So I got my coffee in a hurry. As I sat down at the long mahogany table, Paula came in. Paula, however, came in with Joe Rule. And Joe is a very handsome guy. I glared at them both, telling myself that they must have met just outside the door. They got coffee and joined us.

I spent about twenty minutes filling everyone in on details of what had occurred last night. When I finished, Beasley said slowly, “It would seem that he really might have helped us.”

“Sure looks that way. I think he would even have tagged Mr. Big.”

That name “Mr. Big” was one that we had begun using half in jest during the tune that the papers had leaned on it so hard. But we did know that somewhere in the maze of bribery and blackmailing, both the legal and illegal pressures, the lobbyists and “business representatives” and the bought men we were investigating, there was actually a Mr. Big. One man, that is, among the many lesser ones, who had enormous power, who peddled influence like shares of stock, who bought men and sold them out.

There was enough evidence to show that the man existed, but we didn’t know anything else about him, not his name or what he looked like or who his associates were. It was like knowing of the existence of a huge narcotics ring, and the names of some of the pushers, but not being able to get close to the man at the top. And, of course, our Mr. Big was the one individual the committee was most interested in. We weren’t concerned, naturally, with legal lobbying or lobbyists; just the ones who got on the wrong side of the law — and especially the big one.

Beasley went on, “Unfortunate that he didn’t have time to name names. Even if he could have given you the leads before he was killed. Said he worked for the man, right? Wiretapping?”

“Uh-huh. All sorts of electronic eavesdropping, I gathered. Seven years of it. It seems he got plenty of dirt on plenty of people and turned it all over to his boss. Which would indicate a very nice blackmail factory. But — no names, nothin’. He seemed pretty scared, as if he thought somebody might be on his tail.”

Wise said, “What about his girl? This Satin?”

“Not the type that reads the dictionary for enjoyment. Just told me that she’d been friendly with Stone. Doesn’t sound like much — but it depends on what she meant by friendly. I’ll try to see her again today.”

I heard somebody come in and looked around to see Senator Andrew Carter approaching us. I glanced at my watch. It was nine a.m. precisely. Carter loked even paler than usual, as if he had quietly bled a little. He sat down and nodded hello. The chairman told him, briefly, what we had been discussing, and Senator Carter rolled that around in his admittedly gigantic brain.

Then he said to Beasley, “Lester, I’m sure you’ll agree that this should take precedence over all other investigative work right now?” It was a statement, but put as a question.

Beasley nodded, then looked at me. “You and Mr. Rule seem to work well together, Mr. Scott. It might be best if you both concentrated your efforts on this for a while. Without, of course, neglecting any of your work.”

I thought that had been very well put. Like: “Get to the top of the City Hall immediately, only don’t go any higher up.” But I said, “Right,” and looked at Rule.

He grinned and nodded.

We did work well together. Joe Rule was a young guy of twenty-six, but he looked barely old enough to vote. He was plenty smart, though, and good at his job. He was medium size, slim but strong, with hair so black it looked dyed, and laugh wrinkles around his light blue eyes. Joe raised merry hell among the feminine population, and I meant to ask him, casually, where he’d met Paula this morning.

After a few minutes of discussion, Joe and I left the conference room and went to my office. We discussed the case, and decided that Joe would check with the police today and try to run down the man answering the description of that guy who’d asked about Stone last night. Asked about Stone, and almost surely had a hand in killing him — the short man with the protruding teeth and a black mole at the side of his mouth. I would run down all I could on Stone himself.

Rule said, “Well, this is better than checking those letters.” I had given Rule three that had come in to the committee. There had been at least a possibility that mine would lead to some helpful information, no matter how remote the possibility, but Joe’s had been impossible. He said, “I don’t know how some of those characters get through the day. They must be good at dodging nets.” He paused. “If it goes slow today, I might use a couple of hours finishing up on the Britton thing. All I need is about that much time in the Recorder’s office.”

He meant Sam Britton, one of a dozen men we’d been checking on as possible witnesses to be subpoenaed for appearance before the committee. We knew Britton had spent several thousand dollars in Sacramento in an attempt to influence legislation affecting a company he owned. And we knew most of the men who’d taken the money.

I said, “Swell. Once we cross him off, there’s plenty more to check.” I paused. “What’d Paula have to say this morning?”

Deadpan it came back. “What do you want for breakfast?” Then he peered at my face and laughed like a fiend. “Actually, you freak, I met her about six feet from the conference room door. She said, ‘Hi, Joe.’”

“That’s better,” I said. “And what did you have for breakfast?”

He grinned, waved a hand, and went out.

I had to clear up some accumulated paperwork, and Joe phoned in before I left the Civic Building. He was calling from the Police Building, and told me that the police hadn’t come up with anything helpful yet. They had taken a .22-caliber bullet from Stone’s brain, but that was about it so far.

Right after lunch I drove to the Brandwell Hotel, where I knew George Stone had lived in a top-floor suite. I’d got an okay to check the place, so the officer on the door told me to go on in when I identified myself. It sounded as if somebody were already inside, moving around, but he didn’t mention anything about it. I went on in.

Somebody was inside. I walked through the sitting room into one of the bedrooms and there she was. She was facing away from me and bent forward at quite an angle, yanking frilly feminine things out of a bottom bureau drawer, but I recognized her immediately: Virginia Waring — Satin.

She straightened up and turned around. “Well,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Scott. What are you doing here?”

“It’s Shell. And I was about to ask you the same question.”

“Oh.” She shrugged in answer. “Just picking up my things.” She waved a hand toward the bed. Piled on it near a small suitcase were a filmy negligee, striped red and white pajamas, a beautifully formed brassiere, and a little make-up kit.

Satin walked into the bathroom, came back with a tooth-brush, put it and the clothes into the small suitcase and snapped it shut. Then she straightened up and looked at me. “There,” she said, “that’s it.”

She really looked good. Not better than she had last night in that marvelous act — which would, of course, have been almost impossible — completely different, but smart, vital, sexy, smoothly attractive. She was wearing a turtle-neck sweater in white and two shades of brown, with a beige skirt, and no belt, so that the fine curving line of the cloth was also the fine curving line of Satin. Her long, nearly straight hair was pulled behind her head in a pony tail. The word for Satin today was sleek; probably that would be the word for her any day.

“Satin,” I said. “Would you mind a question or two?”

She sighed. “I know what they’ll be.” She walked over to me and looked up into my face. Wearing high heels, she seemed quite a bit taller than she’d been last night, but she still wasn’t very big. Or, rather, not very tall. She said, “Let’s see, you’re about twenty-eight … thirty?”

“Thirty.”

“Adult, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I’ve got an apartment of my own, in the Gentry. But once in a while — when George was out of town — I stayed here. Now that he’s — not renting this spot any more, I won’t be coming here. So I’m picking up my things. I spent an hour or so last night talking to the police, and I’ve just come from all morning at the Police Building talking forever to two nice policemen. And I finally convinced them I didn’t shoot George — I didn’t have any place to hide a gun, remember?”

“Yes, I remember. Every square inch. Though you don’t have any square inches, do you? Ha, ha … Ah, well. If he’d had a heart attack, though, you would have been the lethal weapon.”

She smiled and sort of threw her eyes up and down. “And I told them I didn’t know anything about George’s business, which I don’t. He was just — just George.” She frowned. “What would your other question be? Did I answer it?”

“No, and it’s more of a statement You don’t seem about to fling yourself under the wheels of the first passing truck.”

“What?”

“Well, you don’t seem to be all broken up with grief.”

“Oh. You mean I’m not putting on one of those heart-rendering acts like I can’t go on living?”

I grinned. “That’s close enough.”

“I wasn’t in love with him. I liked George; he was for kicks. And he spent money like it was before taxes. So now he’s gone. Well, we all got to go, don’t we? I never heard of anybody saying, ‘No, I think I’ll stay.’ Seriously, Mr. Scott — “

“Shell — “

“Shell, I can’t sleep in his coffin, can I? Would it do George any good if I cried for a couple of hours?”

I shook my head.

“So all right,” she said.

“Yeah. But tell me, didn’t George ever talk about anything but your big blue eyes and so on?”

“He talked quite a bit about those and-so-ons, but not much about anything else. Oh, he told me he did work with electrons and tubes and things, and that he worked for one of the most important men in California.”

“What was the man’s name? The one he worked for.”

“Police asked me that, too. I don’t know. I never asked — and like I said, George didn’t volunteer much information. That’s really all.”

“And you don’t have any idea who might have killed him?”

“I didn’t even know anybody wanted to kill him. Why, I must have been as surprised as George was. Well, nearly. And that’s really all.”

Satin finished puttering around the apartment while I looked it over myself. I didn’t know what I was looking for. It was likely the police would have found anything of importance before me, anyway. But I looked around, and found nothing. Except, of course, Satin. Maybe she was a clue.

A few minutes later she picked up her little suitcase and said to me, “That does it. About George.”

“Yeah?”

“He was my boy friend. Not the only one. But the main one. Now he’s gone. It’s almost like being alone in the world.”

“Must be miserable.”

“Nobody to carry my suitcase or anything. A girl could get a complex.”

I held out my hand. She smiled, walked forward and looped the suitcase handle over my fingers. The whole thing weighed a good two pounds.

“You’re a doll,” Satin said. “It’s only a couple of blocks.”

Satin let herself into her apartment on the third floor of the Gentry, waited till I walked inside, then closed and locked the door. She smiled over her shoulder at me. “I always do that. Gives a girl a feeling of security.”

We were in the living room of Satin’s swank apartment. It looked expensive, with a thick rug, and deep cushions on the divan and chairs, colorful pillows, two massive hassocks on the floor. I liked it. I also liked being here with Satin, but it took a little imagination for me to convince myself that this was strictly business. I told myself I was investigating Stone’s murder, and that I had no real lead except Satin, the dead man’s girl friend. And what better lead might there be?

I said, “Satin, why did you bring me here? Seriously.”

She’d walked halfway across the big room toward the divan. She turned and looked at me. “Why? Well, for one thing, I wanted somebody to carry my suitcase.” She smiled.

“Yeah. Seems funny. Your boyfriend’s just been murdered, and I’m investigating his murder, and here I am with you.”

Her smile faded a little. “Oh. You mean like I’ve got inferior motives?”

“It’s possible.”

Satin shook her head. “Well, you can leave if you want.”

“Huh?”

“Look, mister. I do things because I want to do them. You must have a pretty low opinion of yourself if you think your competition’s, a corpse.” Her voice, usually pleasant, was tighter, pitched a little higher.

“Well, I wouldn’t say — “

“Listen. The fact is, though it’s none of your business, George and I split up a couple months ago. I went there today, like I said, to get my stuff. I didn’t have one idea in a million you’d be up there. How could I have? But I figured we could kill an hour or two.”

“No reason why — “

“Listen. I saw you sitting with George last night, and I wondered who you were. I liked the looks of you. And how could I miss you? You looked like Rock Hudson got hit by a train and it turned his hair white.” She paused. “Anyway, when you talked to me in my dressing room, I thought you were okay. I just looked at you and thought, boy, how about that? Didn’t that ever happen to you?”

“Sure. Happened last night, as a matter of fact. I — “

“Don’t soft-soap me. Not till I’ve finished.” Suddenly she laughed, “Soft-soap me — it sounds like taking baths together. Where was I?”

“Taking ba — “

“I know — I said to myself last night, ‘This boy’s a live one.’ That may sound heartless, with George lying dead there, but you know what I mean.”

“Yes, ma’am, I — “

“I liked the way you looked at me, too. You didn’t peek, you looked. Admiring, like. Not pretending, you know? Made me feel good. All guys look, or want to. But ninety per cent of them try to cop a stare when nobody’s going to notice it. I’ve seen lots of them in the mirror — they bugeye you with a look on their faces like Sex dying, like the Grim Raper, and then if you turn toward them they pretend they were studying the dust in the air. Or did I lose you?”

“I think you just found me.”

“Well, that’s my reason. And you’re big as all outdoors, and you’ve got that go-to-hell look, and I thought maybe we’d click. Usually I don’t explain anything to people; I’m an independent woman, and they’re going to think what they want to anyway. But there it is, and you can drop dead. Or have a Martini.”

“Let’s have that Martini.”

It just popped out. I wasn’t especially anxious for a drink, but somehow this Satin built up from a standing start to a sprint and swept a guy along. She was at a small portable bar in one corner with ice cubes in a mixer and pouring vermouth before I recovered and said, “I’m supposed to be investigating — “

“George. I know. You feel like you shouldn’t stay here with me and have a Martini. You should be out tracking down clues.”

“Uh-huh.” Sometimes I wondered if maybe this gal wasn’t quite a bit brainier than she pretended to be.

“I can fix that,” she said. “I’ll tell you all about George, while we have a Martini. Maybe you’ll get lots of clues that way.”

What the hell, I thought.

It seemed like practically no time later that we were on the big divan having our second Martini and she was saying, “You liked the act last night then?”

“Liked it? Satin, it was great. It was sensational. My only regret is that I didn’t see all of it.”

“Oh, it really gets good.”

“It gets good? Gets good? Satin, if you merely walked once around the floor in that outfit — “

“Oh, you liked the skin suit then — that’s what I call it.” She jumped up, her face glowing. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll get even with you.”

“Even? Why? How?”

“For suspecting me of all sorts of things. Having secrets.”

“Secrets?”

She smiled widely. “Yes. I’ll put on one of the skin suits.”

“Fine. No secrets in that outfit. There’s a dandy idea.” I paused. “But what did you mean, get even?”

“Because I know how much you like that costume. And I have to leave after a bit. I’ve got an appointment. I’ll teach you to suspect me of things.”

I still didn’t know quite what she was driving at, but I didn’t argue. Any man who would argue with Satin when she was about to put on a skin suit would be deader alive than George in the morgue. She tripped off toward another room and said, “Mix us a Martini. I’ll be right back.”

I’m a bourbon-and-water man, and it’s probably a good thing. There is something about Martinis. They are made from equal parts of cosmic rays, nitroglycerin, and lighter fluid. The lighter fluid ignites in your stomach and the rest goes off in your blood. I didn’t even question the logic of mixing a third Martini. It seemed like the only thing to do.

But Satin still hadn’t returned when the drinks were made, and I couldn’t afford to start thinking about what she might be doing, so I wandered around the big living room. There was a small bookcase against one wall. In it were a number of strange-sounding titles about stars and planets and such, and on one shelf were several copies of an astrological monthly. Astrology. And a slim book titled, Where Do the Dead Go?

I’d started to glance through it when I heard the soft pad of footsteps and looked around. Satin was back — and I put the thin volume on the bookcase, having completely lost interest in its subject. I just wasn’t going to die. Not, at least, while there was still something like this around.

It was the same Satin as in the act last night; but the intimacy of being alone with her in her apartment made her appearance even more exciting, more skin-flushing and pulse-quickening. She stood in the open doorway across the room, semidarkness behind her, light glistening on the satin smoothness that clung so closely to her body that it was like a heavy coating of metallic powder on her bare flesh.

“Isn’t this better, Shell?” she asked.

I nodded, looking at her. She walked to a record player at the end of the divan and turned it on, placed the needle on a record. Music throbbed softly, sensually. The music sounded familiar.

Satin curled up on the divan and lifted her Martini. “Come and join me.”

I joined her, both on the divan and with the Martini. When I put my glass back on the low table, she did the same, then turned and in one smooth movement leaned back over my lap and put her arms easily around my neck. I put my hands behind her back and pulled her up to me, saw her tongue flick over her lips as her face came nearer, then her mouth was against mine, hot and hungry. My hand flowed over the satin cloth with almost no friction, effortlessly, smoothly. She didn’t discourage the caresses, but rather encouraged them, her body squirming as my fingers traced a pattern on her thigh, up over her rounded hip, across her taut stomach to her swelling breast. One of her arms left my neck, she placed her hand behind mine and rubbed my palm and fingers against her breast, mashing it, her nails digging into the back of my hand.

The she pulled her head from mine and looked into my face. “Relax a minute, Shell.”

“Relax?”

“What time is it?”

I blinked at her, but looked at my watch. “A little after two.”

She scooted off the divan, but said, “I’ll be back, so don’t jump out the window.”

She padded into the next room and came back with a large, ugly alarm clock. At least I thought it was ugly. Probably at that point I would have felt that anything indicating time was ugly. Satin busied herself setting the alarm and pulling out the little doohickey in back, then she put the clock on a table and said, “Now. I don’t have to worry.”

I laughed.

“Woo,” she said. “Those Martinis. Boy. Woo.”

I knew what she meant. The lighter fluid had ignited, the nitro was off. I shook my head. For the briefest moment Satin wavered out of focus but then came back.

“Shell,” she was saying, “you said you wanted to see the rest of the act.”

“You bet. Yes, indeed. Indeed, I do.”

“Well, I have an idea.”

“I’ve got a couple myself.”

“Why don’t we do the act?”

“We?”

“Sure. You can be Satan.”

“The devil you say!”

“Won’t that be fun?”

“Well — I’m gamy. Game.” I thought a moment. “But it might end different. I might ruin the act. I — “

Satin was at the record player, tapping one foot. “Zah, zoo, zah!” she said vibrating a bit. I was vibrating a bit, myself.

The record just beginning to play again was the one she’d first put on and now I recognized it as the one I’d heard last night at the club. Satin turned toward me and said, “Back up. Raise your hands over your head — you know how. We’ll have to pretend there are spotlights, but I suppose that’s all right. Ready?”

“Hell, I been ready for — “

“Here I come!”

I’d backed up several steps and raised my arms high, like that guy had done last night. Satin turned and looked at me, thrust her arms forward and started that hesitant movement toward me. I pulled my lips back in a half snarl, beginning to live it.

Yeah, I thought, this is all right! This hadn’t been such a bad idea after all. Satin was gyrating a bit more, I thought, than she had at the Melody Club, and from where I stood it was one of the most delectable sights imaginable. She was almost up to me, her whole body apparently trying to get away from me while it got closer, but then she took another step forward and her body touched mine, rubbed against it as she leaned back and shook her shoulders from side to side.

I put my hands down to grip her small waist and she let her weight fall gently against my hands, looking up into my eyes with her lips moist and parted but her teeth pressed tightly together in a hot, tense expression that went into my blood like those Martinis. Then she raised her white-clad legs, wrapped them around me as she had with the red Satan last night, and let her upper body fall away from me.

Not for a moment was she still, her body twisting, jerking, writhing, and shuddering against me.

My hands slipped, down from her waist, lower on her quivering body, but it wasn’t really done on purpose, or as Satin might have said with inferior motives, but merely because I was getting weaker.

This couldn’t, I realized, go on all afternoon. It was silly, really, to even consider such a thing. As a matter of fact, it was about time we tried something else. “Satin,” I said. “Sat-in. Hadn’t we better — Satin!”

And just as I said that, there was a clanging, clamorous ringing from the alarm clock.

</code>

<code> Chapter Four

Satin stopped moving as suddenly as she had begun, and it was like the first second after an earthquake.

“Well, hell,” I said. “You can’t stop now. I know there’s more to the act.”

The bell continued to clang, ran down, pinged, pinged again and stopped.

“Oh, dear,” Satin said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Go?”

“Yes.”

“You mean leave? Leave the apartment?”

“Yes.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.”

“But Satin! I — you — we…”

She was lying clear back so that her shoulders touched the floor and her neck was bent, the back of her head also on the carpet. It made her words slightly distorted when she spoke, but I understood everything she said.

She said, “You’ll have to go, Shell.”

“But — “

“Really, I have to get undressed and leave. I mean changed.”

“But — “

“I guess I lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”

“But — “

She let her legs fall gently to the floor, propped herself up on her elbows and tossed her head, long white hair swirling.

“We’ll finish the act some other time,” she said. “It gets better.”

I snorted. “I think not.”

She got up, took my hand and led me to the front door. “‘Bye, Shell. We’ll have to get together soon.”

Then I was out in the hallway, in a dazed condition. I took the elevator down to the lobby and walked outside. Even though it had been only two blocks from the Brandwell Arms to the Gentry, I’d driven my car up. The Cad was parked out front at the curb, and I climbed in and drove about half a block up the street. But then I stopped where I could watch the entrance to the Gentry. I watched it with a grim, unwinking gaze. It had dawned on me that Satin had told me nothing about George!

In a few minutes Satin came out of the Gentry and caught a taxicab. I followed the cab. Just before 3:00 p.m. Satin got out of the cab and went inside another apartment house on Wilshire. I parked in a hurry, but barely managed to get inside in time to catch sight of Satin getting into an elevator. The doors closed and it started up.

There was nothing for me to do but watch the arrow move over the numbers and stop at 5. When the elevator came down again, I took it up to the fifth floor, but there was no Satin in sight. I waited. I was pretty sober when, half an hour later, she came out of 520. I ducked out of sight before she saw me, and went half a flight up the stairs. She took the elevator down and I walked to room 520.

A small card in a neat brass bracket was centered in the middle of the door: “Madame Astra — Psychic Consultant.”

I rang the bell.

While I waited for somebody to answer my ring, I thought about those books I’d seen in Satin’s apartment. Now maybe I knew what she’d meant by a remark that had puzzled me last night. She’d said something about her “psychic” telling her something ugly was going to happen.

The door opened and a middle-aged woman looked out at me. She was dressed in black, with a black cape over her shoulders. “Yes?” she said. Her voice was deeper than most men’s.

“Madame Astra?”

“Yes.”

“May I see you?”

She stepped aside and I walked into a strange, small room. One entire wall was covered with those odd charts you’ve seen of the zodiac, complete with pictures of bulls, rams, and so on. The other three walls all had decorations, too, but I was lost. One appeared to be planets and suns and stars, but the other two looked like bad dreams.

Madame Astra said, “You are fortunate. I have no other sitting until four. Who recommended you?”

“Miss Waring.”

She looked a bit surprised, I thought, but said nothing. We seated ourselves at opposite sides of a small table and she asked me, “What did you wish?”

I took a flyer. “I’d like to communicate with the spiritual essence of George Stone. I’ll spare no expense to accomplish this.”

“Spiritual essence is not a term with which I am wholly familiar. Is the gentleman still with us or has he passed beyond the veil? Of course,” she added quickly, “in either case, I feel sure communication can be established.”

That was one of the things I’d wanted to know about Madame Astra. There are in L.A., and other cities for that matter, more fake psychics and ghost chasers and even astrologists than you might care to imagine; but every once in a while you run across a sincere one, if you look hard enough. The sincere ones may never have achieved any kind of positive results, either, but at least they never promise them, even when the customer will “spare no expense.” I had Madame Astra tagged as a gal who was fond of a buck. Furthermore she’d showed no reaction at all to the name George Stone.

“He has passed beyond the veil,” I said. “He was shot in the head last night.”

This time I got a reaction. “Shot?” She caught herself and frowned at me. “What’s your name? And just what do you want?”

“Shell Scott. I’m a private detective, and I want to know all you can tell me about George Stone and Virginia Waring.”

“Out you go, boy.”

Well, we understood each other. But I found out that Madame Astra was a gal you could talk to, once she was sure she couldn’t bamboozle you. I found out by offering twenty bucks and settling for fifty. She didn’t know any George Stone; at least she claimed not to. But she’d been giving readings for Miss Waring for nearly a year, once a week. Readings, seances, astrological charts, the works.

“It’s a steady twenty-five bucks a week,” Madame Astra said, “which is very good. And she believes everything I say. I could tell her that the sun’s going to come up in the west, and tomorrow night she’d think it was morning.”

“She goes for it all, huh?”

“All the way. We toss a seance once a month, and she lives it. She likes to talk to the spooks — I always use the voice of an Indian. As the control, you know. From India, that is.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She thinks the ectoplasm is ghost blood. She calls it ectoplasma.” Madame Astra chuckled.

“That’s my girl,” I said. “Well, if she asks to talk to George Stone, let me know.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Scott. Same price, of course.”

“Of course. By the way, last night, right after George Stone was shot, Miss Waring mentioned that you’d told her something ugly was going to happen. Now how would you have known?”

She smiled. “I didn’t see it in my crystal ball, if that’s what you mean. Or shoot him. No, every once in a while I tell Miss Waring that something ugly — or beautiful, or sad — is going to happen. Invariably there’s some occurrence she can interpret as the ugly — or beautiful, or sad — one, at some time during that day or night. Get it?”

“I’m afraid I do. Lady, what a horrible fraud you are.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Before I left, Madame Astra even showed me through her seance room, and the more important room next to it, where the ultraviolet lamps, fluorescent paints and powders, and cheesecloth ectoplasm, among other things, were kept in readiness.

I assumed Madame Astra was being nice to me because I knew most of the tricks of her racket already, but as I was about to leave she explained a little more of her motivation. “Mr. Scott,” she said, “a local investigator could be a lot of help to me. You know, get dope on clients before they show up.”

“And then you stun them by plucking the info from the air, right?”

She nodded. I declined her offer of employment, and left.

I climbed into the Cad and pulled away from the curb, headed for the Civic Building. It didn’t, look as if I had come up with much today, but you never know.

For the next few days I kept busy, but didn’t develop any leads to Stone’s murderer. Neither did Joe Rule, or the police. I got caught up on my work for the committee. I hadn’t seen Satin again, but I was looking forward with eager anticipation to our next dance; there were a couple of steps she had taught me that could completely do away with the waltz and fox trot if the word got around. I did see a lot of Paula, however, who became daily more delightful.

A couple of peculiar things happened. An odd letter arrived for me and wound up in the “crackpot” file, but had me going for a few minutes. In the first place, it was marked “Special Delivery” “Personal” and “Deliver only to Shell Scott.” In the second place, the writer claimed to know who had murdered George Stone. The Stone case had been all over the papers, so there was nothing especially significant in the unsupported statement, and the letter had the definite stamp of the eight-ball upon it, I thought. I’d never heard of the signer, somebody named Gordon Todhunter. It turned out that Sebastian Wise had, though. He was in my temporary office when the letter was delivered. I showed him the thing and he read it through and shook his head.

“You do get some beauties, Shell,” he said in his rich baritone. “This one isn’t too bad though, is it?”

“No. But it’s got a strange thread running through it.”

“That it does. Well, let me know how it checks out, will you?” He tossed the letter onto my desk and started out. He’d actually gone past the door when he stopped and turned. “Tod — what was the name signed to that letter?”

I looked at it. “Todhunter. Gordon Todhunter.”

He frowned for a moment, looking at me, then his face cleared. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

I followed him into one of the small rooms set aside for records and files. He went to a green filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. “Communications that were received here at the Civic Building regarding the hearings,” he said. “All these arrived here a couple weeks or more ago, before you started working for us. Nothing very important, but you might want to go through them before the hearings start.”

He was flipping through manila folders, then he paused and pulled a sheet of white paper from one of them. He looked it over, then handed it to me, smiling broadly. “Thought I recognized that name,” he said. “Todhunter. It’s an odd one.” Wise laughed. “And odd is definitely the word.”

It was another letter in blue ink, with the large round letters like a boy’s scrawl. The message was short.

“I know all about the lobbying practices that you are investigating. I have ways of learning such things that are forbidden to ordinary men. I know where the guilt lies. But I must keep my silence; my lips are sealed. And I give you fair warning — leave this town. Investigate not. Only evil can come of looking for evil. Be happy.” It was signed Gordon Todhunter.

“Well,” I said to Wise. “That does it.” I read the later letter again, and this time the words seemed even more goofy than before. “I know the identity of the man who murdered George Stone. I cannot put his name here, nor will it be revealed while I live. But Stone’s killers will try to murder me. If I am killed, you of the committee can find both Stone’s murderer and my own by investigating yourselves. If I am killed, your life will be in danger. Show this letter to all other members of the committee. That is your protection. Gordon Todhunter.”

“This isn’t as bad as the first one,” I told Wise.

He smiled. “Maybe he’s improving.”

“Yeah. Let’s hope so.”

The third letter from Gordon Todhunter arrived a couple of days later and ended hope that he was improving. This one was also marked “Special Delivery” “Personal” and “Deliver to Lester Beasley only.”

It arrived when Beasley, Wise, Garter and I were all in the conference room after lunch. Paula was talking to somebody on the phone. I didn’t realize that another of those dandy letters had arrived until I noticed Beasley and Wise talking, and then Wise took the letter and slid it across the table to me.

“This should make you happy, Shell. Maybe I’ll get the next one.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it didn’t take long to catch up. Just a couple of words, because this one started right out with a bang. “Murderers! I warned you that evil would come of looking for evil. It has been always thus. Now I will tell you who murdered George Stone — you! You killed him. But the real guilt lies with — man! You can find evil by investigating yourselves. Look within for the source of evil. Know thyself. Show this letter to everyone who seeks the truth! Gordon Todhunter.”

Wise was grinning at me when I looked up and shook my head.

“So he had a relapse,” he said.

Beasley frowned. It occurred to -me that maybe I had him all wrong. Maybe his shoes were a couple sizes too small and he had corns. Maybe his teeth pinched. Maybe his dandruff was daily getting bigger. Maybe something like that was why he seemed so miserable all the time.

He frowned and said, “Couldn’t a man like that be dangerous?”

“Not as long as he just writes letters,” I said.

“What is the difficulty?” Senator Carter asked quietly. I wished he would talk more, because listening to that voice was better than listening to flutes and bassoons, even if you’re crazy about flutes and bassoons.

Beasley mentioned the letter he’d just received and Carter asked to see it. I took it down to him. He read it, and handed it back to me without a word.

I asked Senator Beasley if it was all right for me to keep the letter.

“Why, of course. It’s committee business, I suppose.”

“Just thought I’d ask, since it was addressed to you.”

“Well, I don’t know the man.”

“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir. I got one of the things myself, and I don’t know him, either. Don’t want to know him. He’d want to change me. But I suppose I should keep all the Todhunter letters together.”

He nodded. I grabbed a cup of coffee and took it to my office.

An hour later Joe Rule arrived back at the building. When he came into my office, I gave him the three letters. He read them through, then blinked at me. “I suppose you want me to follow up on this one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you’ll regret it if he destroys me in a clap of thunder.”

“It’s possible.”

“That you’ll regret it?” Joe asked.

“That he’ll destroy you in a clap of thunder.”

“Wait‘11 I tell you what I had for breakfast.”

“Joe — “

“Actually, I didn’t eat. So I’m going to have brunch now. Okay?”

“Let me know what you find out about this guy.” I jerked a thumb toward the letters. “Now he’s got me curious.”

“I can tell you about him now. He’s eighty years old, and he’s a woman. He eats only spiders’ eyes, and — “

“Oh, get the hell out of here.” He grinned and left….

The following morning I was tooling the Cadillac along the Freeway, on the way from my Hollywood apartment to the office. My turnoff was a mile or so ahead, but I started watching for a chance to swing over into the right-hand lane. Sometimes it’s murder to get from one lane to another. But I found a spot and got into the right-hand lane without any trouble — and then it happened.

A big truck-and-trailer combination, one of those with the high cabs, roared up alongside on my left and passed me, going maybe twenty or thirty miles an hour faster than I was. The trailer was loaded with pipes a foot or so in diameter. I noticed that a couple of them stuck way out in back of the trailer, farther than they should have. One of them had a little red flag tied to it.

The driver pulled sharply in front of me, so sharply that I started to brake, figuring he must have underestimated the length of his trailer. One of those round pipes was so close that I could see the groove on the inside of its lip. And then, all of a sudden, it looked as if that truck, the whole truck and trailer ahead of me stopped on a dime.

It must have still been going ahead at a good speed, but the driver had braked sharply and for a second it appeared to me that the load of pipes was hurtling back at me. My foot was already on the brake pedal and I slammed it nearly to the floor. The power brakes did all the work, but I still jammed the thing down as hard as I could — and pressed back against the seat as the one protruding pipe loomed up right in front of my face.

The Cad’s tires screamed on the pavement as the brakes caught and I’d yanked the steering wheel hard right at almost the same moment I had hit the brake pedal — but there just wasn’t going to be enough time. I knew, a second before the impact, that I wasn’t going to make it. We were going to hit.

</code>

<code> Chapter Five

That pipe must have stuck ten or more feet out behind the edge of the big trailer. It was as if my car were leaping toward it. The pipe passed over the Cad’s hood and came toward the windshield like the barrel of a cannon. I threw myself away from it, to my right, let my body fall toward the floorboards. And then we hit.

I was already on the floorboards, but right after the jar and crash of the windshield splintering itself on that projecting pipe, the Cad’s front end ground into the trailer’s rear. The impact jammed me forward even more, smashing my face against the floor mat. There was a hell of a grinding, pounding crash, and I bounced up into the air a foot, then was banged down again. The noise continued for a moment, then it was suddenly quiet. There was a roaring in my ears and I felt stunned, halfway between consciousness and blackness.

I could feel the warm, sticky blood coursing from my nose down over my lips. My arms were, under me and I pushed, got away from the floorboards and half onto the seat as my head cleared.

I got out a handkerchief and pressed it against my mouth and nose. Nothing seemed broken, or too badly banged up. I was shaken, and my head ached, but it appeared that I’d come out of the tangle very well.

But when I got up into a sitting position I could see that heavy pipe right alongside me. It had come through the windshield and was touching the upholstery of the seat. On the way it had turned the steering wheel into a metal pretzel. If I’d thrown myself toward the floor half a second later, the insides of my face and head would have been resting against the upholstery.

There was the sound of sirens. Cars went by on the Freeway, people turning to look open-mouthed at the truck and my car. I got out of the Cad on its right side and walked around behind it as a husky young kid trotted back toward me. A police car, siren growling, stopped behind the Cad at the same time.

The kid’s face was white. “My God,” he said in a too loud voice. “What happened?” He looked in past my broken and splintered windshield, then at me. I mopped some more blood off my mouth. He said, “Was that you? I mean, were you in the car? My God.” He seemed in worse shape than I was.

I was still a little dazed, but that was all right with me. In the next few minutes, the officers got the essential information from us. The truck driver produced identification showing he was Robert Gates. His address was 1429 Garden Street in Los Angeles. I identified myself to the officers, who didn’t know me by sight, but did by name. Gates was insured and we exchanged all the necessary information.

The kid was apologetic as the devil, explaining that somebody ahead of him — no telling now who it was — had slowed down suddenly and he’d had to jam on his brakes. He hadn’t even thought about anybody behind him; there wasn’t time. I gave the officers my story, and that was about it.

Just before I arranged to have my Cadillac hauled to a garage, Gates apologized again and shook my hand. I noticed that a couple fingers were missing from his left hand.

“I’d give anything if this hadn’t happened,” he said fervently. “Thank God you weren’t badly hurt.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and added not very originally, “Accidents will happen.”

Because of the wreck, it was nearly eleven a.m. before I got settled in my office. There’s a dark blue wall-to-wall carpet on the floor, two big leather chairs, a couple of filing cabinets. On the top of the bookcase, which contains the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Who’s Who, and some Henry Miller among other things, is a ten-gallon tank containing guppies, which are fish colored like eighteen cans of spilled paints.

The window behind my mahogany desk looks down on Broadway, which wasn’t very crowded today. The sky was overcast and it looked like rain; there was a damp chill in the air.

I was going through accumulated mail, throwing away advertising, when I noticed that somebody was outside my office. I knew it was a woman, too, because of the shadow she cast on the window. I’ve seen lots of shadows on that frosted-glass window, but this was the first one that threatened to defrost it. That shadow alone made my jaw sag. And that was probably a good thing. I was prepared that way; my mouth was already partly ajar.

The doorknob turned, the door opened and she came in.

My mouth dropped the rest of the way, then slowly closed, and I stared. Friend, I have seen plenty of them. I have seen them in all shades and colors, shapes and sizes, in and out of everything from bikinis to mink. I have practically made a career of babes. But this one hit me. She really shook me up. I drank her in like a man dying of thirst would go for Coca Cola. I hugged her with my eyes and with the first glance started trying to memorize her.

She closed the door easily behind her, took one step toward me and stopped.

A man could describe all the colors and curves about her, and still not tell what she was like. Because she was something more. She was “Ah-h” in all languages, the slow, unconscious release of breath between parted lips. Her hair was the warm, burnt color of toasted marshmallows, and her brown eyes hit me like a velvet hammer. She looked young, sweet, almost shy, but at the same time shapely, sexy, and hotter than sunspots.

Satin was beautiful and brazen, Paula was dark and smouldering, but this one was like a blend of the best of each, the light and the dark. Her skin was bronzed, healthily darkened by the sun, but it still had the softness and glow and smoothness of nudes airbrushed on black velvet — and that’s the kind of body she had, too, like a dream become three-dimensional, with full firm curves, but a softness all about her. The brown eyes were large and bright, and her lips were fully curved, merry, provocative. She was about five-six, and she might have been twenty-one or twenty-two.

That’s about what she was, but she was more, too. Something more than just the flesh and the blood and the bone. It was something she brought in with her that you couldn’t see, but that you knew was there. It was a kind of electricity or tension, an excitement and warmth that seemed to crackle noiselessly around her. It was something you felt, that reached out from her and touched you.

She said, “Mr. Scott?” Her voice was the voice you’d expect with the rest of her; soft but firm, with the warmth of summer in it, and that same electrical excitement charging the words.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m Shell Scott.”

She smiled. “I’m so glad you’re still alive.”

That is exactly what she said. And I was so wound up in looking at her and listening to her voice that the implication didn’t penetrate right then.

I got up and walked around the desk and grabbed the nearer leather chair that’s for clients. I kept it a few feet back from the desk, facing me, in case fat men come in smoking foul cigars. But now it was time for action; maybe I had been stunned by this luscious lass, but I would now for sure look alive.

I pulled the chair over the carpet and right up alongside the desk and then I said, “Sit down. Tell me about it.”

I watched her walk over and sit, then I got behind the desk as she said, “I really was afraid you’d be dead. And I do need help desperately.”

“You’ve come to the right place, Miss — Miss?” I looked for rings, but I couldn’t see her left hand.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s — ” she broke off, hesitated, then went on rapidly. “They’ve put him into a hospital for the mentally ill, and he’s normal. Just as normal as you are.”

That, it seemed to me, was a poor choice of words. But I said, “I see. When was this? When did it happen?”

“I guess it must have just happened.”

“Must have? Don’t you know?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been abroad for nearly a year now. I just got home and found this letter in the mailbox.” She rumbled in her handbag. “Here it is.” She handed it to me.

I took the envelope and pulled the single sheet of white paper from it. It was to “Barbara,” and was a short, odd sort of letter. It said that the writer was all right, happy, in Ravenswood, well taken care of and there was nothing to worry about. And that Barbara should stay away. It was signed, “With love — Dad.” That was repeated a couple times.

I looked at the girl. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

She said, “I’m so upset — I thought I’d told you. Under the flap. Under the flap of the envelope.”

The envelope hadn’t been opened with a knife or opener, and the flap was still attached and could be pulled up. I raised it and saw scrawled, almost illegible writing there. The first two words were my name, Shell Scott, and after a minute I’d deciphered the entire message: “Help me, I’m sane. Your life in danger, they’ll kill us both — $10,000 for you, come here, but be careful — letter true — ” and it ended that way, abruptly.

I blinked at it, then looked at the girl. “Why is this written to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Scott. I’m just frantic! Dad’s in Ravenswood and I guess he doesn’t want even me to see him — it’s some kind of plot, something’s terribly wrong — “

“Hold it,” I said. “Let’s take it easy, and maybe we can figure out what the score is. This is strange, though.” I smiled at her. “Nobody’s tried to kill me for months. At least, not that I — ” I paused, thinking of the accident on the Freeway. I wondered … But then I shook my head; I was probably imagining things.

The phone rang. As I reached for it my eyes fell on the letter and envelope before me. Something about the round, looped handwriting jarred me. I looked at the envelope as I put the phone to my ear. The letter had been addressed to 954 Fern Road in Los Angeles, but it was the name that smacked me hard — Miss Barbara Todhunter!

I looked at the lovely, worried face near me and asked, “Is your name Todhunter?”

Her face smoothed and she smiled then. “Yes. Barbara Todhunter.” The smile got wider, brighter, more provocative. “You can call me Toddy, though, if you want. A few of my friends call me that.”

The only thing I could think of was those three crazy letters from Gordon Todhunter.

“Miss Tod — Toddy, what’s your father’s name?”

“Gordon Todhunter.”

The phone was still against my ear, and somebody had been saying hello at the other end of the line for several seconds. I said, “Hello. Shell Scott here.”

The man speaking was my insurance agent. I’d called him right after the accident this morning. He said, “What kind of deal was that crackup?”

“What do you mean?”

“This Robert Gates, guy you claimed banged into you — or you banged into, whichever way it was. I can’t find anybody with that name — none in the phone book, or city directory either.”

“There must be. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-four or -five — “

“Look, I checked the address he gave you on Garden Street. That address is phony. It’s a vacant lot.”

I told the agent to forget about the claim, because he’d never collect it, and hung up.

“Toddy,” I said, “from here in I’ll listen a little better. I think somebody did try to kill me this morning.”

I stopped as a thought struck me. If that had been an attempt at murder, if it hadn’t been an accident, then it meant that somebody with a lot of time and money and imagination was trying to knock me off. And that was a damned dangerous combination.

As a murder method it would have been tricky and, difficult of execution, which explained why it had missed. But if I had been killed this morning, if I’d moved half a second later, then nobody on God’s green earth would ever have suspected murder. Not when the dead man, me, had obviously driven his car into the back of a truck. That’s the number-one cause of accidents on the Freeway, anyhow.

Another thought puzzled me for a moment. What if I’d been killed? The truck driver would surely have been held, at least for a while. The truth about his fake name and address would have come out and he’d have been in the soup. The only explanation I could think of was that he must have been prepared with two sets of identification — maybe one of them in the truck — with his real name and address in case I was killed, and he was held; and a phony set in case the try backfired.

Toddy had a shocked expression on her face. “This morning?”

“Yeah. We almost didn’t meet.” I grinned at her. “And, believe me, that would have been almost as sad as the dying.”

She threw back her head and laughed softly, then looked at me. It was as if she had a rheostat somewhere that could step up the voltage of those brown eyes whenever she wanted to, because they bored into me like arc lights for a moment. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

“That’s what was meant.”

Then she sobered, turned down the rheostat. “What about my father?”

“Well, I — ” I didn’t know whether to tell her about those goofy letters or not. The guy quite obviously was way off the beam. But under the flap of that letter he’d said that somebody would try to kill me. They apparently had. If Todhunter knew who was trying, I wanted to see the man even if he talked gibberish on every other subject.

“I’ll check up,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m so glad. I hoped you would. It’s all so strange.”

We spent a few more minutes talking. Toddy hadn’t seen her father in nearly a year, she said; she’d returned home only yesterday, right on schedule. She’d got the letter then, and since had been trying to find out what had happened. There had never been anything even slightly peculiar about her father; he was sane, normal, and of course he’d never been fanatical about anything. This morning she’d found out where the Shell Scott mentioned under the envelope’s flap was, and driven downtown to see me.

“So I really know little more than you now, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell.”

“Shell. You will help me, won’t you?”

“I’ll do the best I can.”

She reached into her bag again. “I’ve a couple pictures of Dad here, Mr. — Shell. I thought you’d want them, so I brought them along. Here.” She handed me two snapshots.

One of them showed a tall, dark-haired, fairly rugged man of about forty-five or so, a lean man with a sharp, angular face. The other was a snap of the head and shoulders of the same guy. I put the snaps into an envelope, and the envelope in my pocket.

Toddy gave me a thousand-dollar smile, and a hundred-dollar retainer. I explained that I’d give the case whatever time I had left after my committee work. Before she left, Toddy told me she had a reservation at the Biltmore and would be staying there. She urged me to come by if I had anything to report. She’d leave the latchstring out, she told me.

</code>

<code> Chapter Six

After toddy went out the door, I sat at the desk for a couple minutes just thinking about her. Then I called around till I located Joe Rule. I asked him, “What happened on your check of those Todhunter letters, Joe?”

“Don’t you remember my telling you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We were both pretty busy that day. I told you that the eighty-year-old lady who ate spiders’ eyes would be writing no more letters because she’d been committed to the crazy house. Anyway, you said that seemed sensible, and great work.”

I groaned. “How in hell was I supposed to know — Never mind. What did you find out, in plain English?”

“Well, the guy’s been put away.”

“Yeah. When did this happen?”

“Just a day or two after you gave me the letters. I checked up on him. He used to be an attorney, but he retired pretty young. Anyway, I found out he was going to be committed to a hospital for the mentally ill. So, just to follow it all the way, I was in court when they held the sanity hearing before Judge Sweet.”

“You saw the man then?”

“Yeah. Real tall guy with a lot of brown hair with a little gray in it. Been a fine looking man if he’d had all his marbles.”

“How’d he act during the hearing?”

“Hell, how do you expect? Crazy. Real gone.”

“Listen, Joe. It’s important. Is there any chance the guy could have been sane?”

“Not a chance. Not sane, not faking, nothing. He was gone — eyes rolling, trying to hide, talking gibberish some of the time. Medical diagnosis was schizophrenia, but in any language the verdict was non compos mentis.”

I thought a minute, trying to reconcile what Joe had said with the note under that flap, and what Todhunter’s daughter had just told me. “You got anything else, Joe?”

“Not much. Odds and ends. You want it?”

“Yeah.”

“Just a minute.”

Rule was young and full of hell, but he was as thorough and efficient as they come. If there were anything worth knowing about the man he could probably tell me.

He said, “Nothing else except a little history, Shell. But here it is. Gordon Raymond Todhunter. I told you he’d been an attorney. He’s now forty-seven years old. He married and divorced one Margaret Bruce. Daughter Barbara, twenty-two — she’s not around, off galivanting I think — Todhunter’s worth plenty, but I didn’t try to examine his tax returns.”

“I’m surprised. Thanks, Joe. Nobody could ask for more than that.” We hung up.

It looked as if it were time for me to take a trip to Ravenswood, but my car was in the garage, so I called a cab. While I waited, I took the .38 Colt out of the spring shoulder holster in which I carry it, and looked at it. Usually I keep an empty chamber under the hammer. But I got an extra cartridge from a box in my desk and put that sixth slug into the cylinder. Somehow I felt better.

It was the cab driver’s first trip to Ravenswood and he was happy. It was a good fare, a round trip of over twenty miles. He exuded a stream of inconsequential chatter all the way up Eucalyptus to the turnoff which led to Ravenswood. Eucalyptus is one of the most heavily traveled streets other than the Freeways, but the turnoff was merely a narrow dead-end dirt road that had been put in privately for traffic to and from Ravenswood only. There wasn’t another car in sight on it.

We went up the dirt road for four or five miles, then came out of a grove of eucalyptus trees into view of the hospital. The road looped around behind the building and came back to join itself like the noose on a lariat, but went no farther than this somewhat isolated spot.

It seemed more isolated than it really was. Four or five miles from us was the roar and bustle of frenzied activity, but we might have been a thousand miles from civilization. Ravenswood seemed peaceful. But, then, death is peaceful.

It was a gloomy day to begin with; the air was muggy, heavy and still, leaves drooping on the trees and the sky gray and low. It was the kind of day that makes a man feel uneasy, depressed, melancholy.

I could see activity, people moving around a big two-story building as white as bleached bone, but for some reason I was reminded of little live things crawling upon something dead. There was green grass around the building, but it wasn’t green enough, not a healthy green, and faintly yellow patches of incipient decay dotted its surface like the pockmarks of disease.

The cab driver stopped before the hospital’s entrance and said, “Want me to wait, Mac?”

“You’d better.” I got out and went up four cement steps to the small landing before the wide double doors. They were closed but not locked, and I walked inside. A few yards down a waxed and polished corridor, on my right, there was a counter, behind which a young man was writing something. I stepped to the counter and he looked up, then came over to me.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Todhunter. Gordon Todhunter.”

He looked at me for a while, then said, “Your name?”

“Shell Scott.”

“Hmm.” He looked at me some more. “One moment, please.” He walked out from behind the counter and down the corridor and into another room. Shortly he came out with another man who stopped before me while the first one went back behind his counter.

This new one was an older guy, about fifty, with graying hair and small sharp eyes. He was three or four inches shorter than me, and much heavier through the middle. His voice was very deep when he spoke, mellow, soothing.

“You’re Mr. Scott?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’d like to see Mr. Todhunter?”

“That’s right.”

He smiled gently, like a man smelling a rose and at peace with the world. Nothing would disturb him, it seemed, unless you began cutting him open with an ax.

“I am Dr. Beecham, the director,” he said. “Please come into my office, sir.” His voice poured over me like syrup.

In his office he sat behind his desk and I used an upholstered leather chair. He wanted to know my reasons for desiring to see Mr. Todhunter. “You must realize that you can’t simply pop in and see one of our patients,” he said.

“Do you mean I can’t see him?”

“Not today.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a very sick man. Suffering from schizophrenia. He’s completely withdrawn, uncommunicative. We’re preparing him for electro-shock treatment today.”

“Just what does that do, Doctor?”

“We apply a very small electric current to the brain. It produces convulsions. Like epileptic convulsions.” He spoke very slowly. “From this apparent brutality, comes — sometimes — light into a darkened mind. We hope that Mr. Todhunter can be made accessible to treatment. Right now he is completely inaccessible.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“That will be impossible.”

“When may I see him?”

“I’m afraid not for several weeks. It will be — “

“Just a minute,” I interrupted him. “I’m afraid several weeks won’t do. Today or tomorrow would be about right. Perhaps I didn’t mention that this is, well, an official visit. I’m employed by the Fact-Finding Committee of the California state senate, and I merely wish to determine if Mr. Todhunter can discuss a matter with me.”

He was shaking his head. “Mr. Todhunter is in no condition — “

“Whatever his condition, I would like to see him.”

“I’m sorry — “

“Doctor, I am going to see him.”

He looked at me for several seconds, then he said quietly, “You really mean it, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. He was quiet for a few more seconds. “Very well. Tomorrow, Mr. Scott. Tomorrow morning at ten. Will that be satisfactory?”

“All right.”

The director added, “Perhaps today’s therapy will help Mr. Todhunter. I sincerely hope so.”

I don’t know why, but this Beecham impressed me as phonier than a crooked politician two weeks before election.

The door opened and a white-uniformed nurse stepped inside. The doctor looked up and said, “Yes?”

“Doctor Beecham, what about Mr. Howard? Dr. Mellor was going to handle his insulin shock. But he’s not here today.”

The director said, “Yes. Well, get Doctor Gant. He’s free this afternoon.” The nurse went out and Beecham turned to me, “You can see I’m very busy, Mr. Scott.”

“Just one more thing.”

“Yes?” He had looked down at a paper on his desk. It seemed to take him half a minute to get his eyes pointed to me again. He would run the hundred-yard dash in about eight years.

“Who’s paying Todhunter’s bills?”

“Bills?” he said. “That is hardly any concern of yours.”

“Believe me, it is.”

“What makes you think anybody has to pay his bills?”

“This isn’t a state hospital. It’s private. Somebody’s paying.”

“I can’t divulge that information.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in an hour. Then you’ll tell me.”

He looked at me, mentally sniffing his rose. “You are a violent man,” he said. “Well … Doctor Parka. Los Angeles.”

“He pays the bills?”

“He pays the bills.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow at ten, Doctor. Thanks for the information.”

He smiled sorrowfully. “I’m delighted to have been of help.”

I left. The cab driver drove me back to town where I checked a phone book for Dr. Parka’s address, then visited his office. Ten minutes there wasn’t much help. Dr. Parka said he’d been treating Todhunter for over a year. Todhunter was not only a patient, but a friend. They’d been friends for many years. But he hadn’t seen him for two or three months until just before the commitment. Dr. Parka suddenly realized he hadn’t seen Todhunter around for quite a while, dropped in to see him, and found him in a terrible state.

“Dirty, hungry, the house a mess.” He stopped and grimaced. “I made arrangements for his commitment to Ravenswood right away, of course.”

“What about his daughter? Toddy. Wasn’t she informed?”

He blinked. “Barbara? Frankly, I don’t even know where she is. Last I heard, she was traveling around Europe, I think. This all happened rather quickly, you understand. Had to, for Tod’s own good.”

“Uh-huh. I was just out at Ravenswood. Not the cheeriest place in the world, is it?”

“No. I find it a bit depressing myself — from the outside.” He paused. “Ravenswood does have an extremely well-qualified staff. Was there anything else, Mr. Scott?”

“No. And thanks very much, Doctor.”

“Not at all.”

It was dusk when I paid off the cab at the Biltmore Hotel. His fee was a healthy chunk to deduct from my income tax. I called Toddy from the lobby. The first thing she said was, “How about Dad? Did you get to see him?”

“No, but I have an appointment for tomorrow morning. I did talk to the director, and to your father’s doctor.”

She asked me to come on up. She didn’t have to repeat the request. Toddy opened the door and stepped back as I walked into one of the Biltmore’s big, high-ceilinged rooms. She was dressed in a simple blouse and skirt, but on her it looked like a negligee.

She waved me to a chair and said, “What did you find out, Shell? Is he all right? Have they hurt him?”

“Toddy, this is a screwy deal.” I told her about my visit to Ravenswood and I added, “I’ll see your father in the morning. You see what I mean, don’t you?”

She bit her lip, slowly shook her head, looking at me. “You think he’s crazy.”

“Now, Toddy, I don’t know what — “

“I tell you, he’s perfectly normal. There’s nothing wrong with him — look at that note he wrote. Dad must have had to write it in a hurry, yes. But it made sense as far as it went, didn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose so.” I paused. “The director told me they were preparing him for electro-shock treatment, and — “

“Electro-shock?” Toddy jumped to her feet. She seemed very agitated, and I took her hands in mine, tried to calm her down. Finally she said, “Don’t you understand? He’s completely normal; there’s nothing wrong with him. Can’t you imagine how horrible it would be for a sane man to be in a hospital for the mentally ill? An asylum?” She paused. “And what would electro-shock do to a sane man?”

Not only her words, but the urgency in her voice hit me. I said, “Toddy, relax a little. Another thing. I talked to Doctor Parka. He told me he’d been treating your father for a long time, and that when he found — “

“Who?”

“Parka. Doctor Parka, your father’s doctor.”

“What are you talking about? I never heard of Doctor Parka!”

I blinked at her. “That’s funny. But you told me you’ve been away, traveling, for almost a year. Couldn’t he have started going to Parka in that time?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. It doesn’t — seem right. And I’ve told you, and told you — he’s all right. There’s nothing wrong with him!”

She was in a pretty edgy state. I couldn’t blame her. But I told her that I’d come to see her the next day the minute I had anything new to tell her. She went with me to the door.

She looked up at me and said, “I’m sorry if I’ve been — oh, kind of making a scene, Shell. It’s just that I’m so worried.”

She looked as if she were going to cry. We were facing each other, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to step close to me, lower her head and press it against my chest. I put my arms around her, pulled her gently to me. That was all. I didn’t mean to do anything else, wasn’t even thinking of it.

But then Toddy raised her head and looked up into my face. “I’m so scared,” she said. “For Dad. You’ll help him, won’t you, Shell? Help me?”

I nodded.

She kept looking at me, her lips parted and trembling. Her breasts were pressed against my chest, her arms partly around me. “Oh, Shell,” she said softly, and again, “Oh, Shell.”

A steel statue would have kissed her, and I am no steel statue. I pulled her tight, feeling her thighs pressed against mine and I pressed my mouth to hers, to those trembling lips. They seemed to keep trembling under my mouth, her lips and tongue sliding against mine as if they possessed a hot independent life of their own. Her arms went around my neck and that magnificent body moved against me.

It was a kiss that melted on my mouth like liquid velvet, warm and infinitely smooth. It was a kiss in a class by itself. After this, kissing other women would never be the same. It would be as if other women kissed with their ears.

Toddy broke away and stepped back. Her breasts were heaving and her big dark eyes were wide. “Well,” she said. “That came out of nowhere. You’d better go, Shell,” she added softly.

I would have much preferred to stay, but Toddy made it plain that she did want me to leave. I went out, but I could taste her lips, feel them, feel the warmth and softness of her body, all the way to my Hollywood apartment.

But as the cab neared the Spartan Apartment Hotel, I forced my thoughts back to Gordon Todhunter, and that note under the envelope’s flap. The hell of it was, if the man weren’t crazy, then I simply couldn’t afford to miss a trick anywhere. Not if he had information about people trying to kill me. And, of course, there were plenty of other good reasons. The cab dropped me off almost in front of the Spartan and across the street from it in near darkness. I paid the driver and watched him start to pull away from the curb.

My mind must have been soaking up impressions right then, impressions of little things I wasn’t consciously noticing, getting ready to ring the alarm bell in my brain. I watched the cabbie pull away and go around the corner, then I turned and took one step toward the Spartan’s entrance.

The feeling started with a funny coldness quivering on my spine. No real warning, nothing but a sudden premonition. The whole thing took maybe half a second. Between my first and second step I felt that coldness, then a series of sights and sounds seemed to repeat themselves in my brain, more urgently then when I must actually have heard and seen them.

There was the almost inaudible purr of a car’s engine running; the darker mass of it farther down the street, the shifting of it as it started to move, the quiet fact of an automobile parked but then moving without lights; and something else that I couldn’t name, more of a feeling than anything else. A sudden feeling of urgency, fright, tension. And I knew there was something on my right.

The Spartan faces the unlighted grounds of the Wilshire Country Club. The area isn’t very bright, but it isn’t completely dark, either. There wasn’t anything I really saw that made me move. But I knew suddenly that I had to move, and fast.

I’d just started across the street toward the Spartan, and as my foot hit the pavement on that second step I jammed it down and shoved my body aside, threw my weight to the left. There was a hell of a booming sound. Light flashed on my right. I hit the hard cement of the street with a breath-pounding jolt, and rolled, digging under my coat for my gun. There was another boom and something jerked at my coat, burned across my wrist and arm.

The sound and flash had come from my right, and ahead of me, near the corner of the Spartan. It had surprised me more because of the location than the fact of noise and light. Until that last fraction of a second I’d been expecting some kind of noise or trouble from the quietly moving car. My hand wrapped around the butt of the .38 and I yanked it free, thumbing back the hammer as I rolled onto my back, then got to one knee.

In the dim light a man was running from the spot near the building where he must have been waiting, toward the car that was now racing up the street, getting close, its engine whining. I jerked up the gun and snapped a shot at the running man, but missed.

He ran into the street, angling away from me toward that car. The car’s lights came on as I steadied my gun on his running figure again. Its beams flashed into my eyes and made me squint, but they fell on the running man, too. He was carrying a big double-barreled shotgun in one hand, but the light fell on his face, too, and maybe that’s what made me miss. Because I recognized him.

It was the same man who’d almost killed me on the Freeway, the guy with two fingers gone on his left hand, the man who’d said he was Robert Gates.

</code>

<code> Chapter Seven

I got off two shots as the car slowed and its door swung open for the man, but he leaped inside without hesitating a moment. And then the car jerked a little in the road as the driver pulled on the steering wheel, straightening it out and aiming it at me like a two-ton bullet.

The headlights half-blinded me and the car suddenly looked like a four-story house flying at me. My first impulse was just to run, get the hell out of there. I even got both feet under me, spun away from the car and started to sprint down the street. But then I grabbed onto my nerves again. All that would get me was a couple of tire tracks over my back. I slammed my feet against the asphalt, swung around, raising the gun in my right hand.

The car was about ten yards away, but it was coming fast. It looked as if it were already climbing up me, but I managed to keep my feet planted squarely on the ground for a second longer. Long enough for me to try to kill somebody.

The sound of the car engine grinding up the scale as the driver jammed the accelerator down built to a high whine that banged almost solidly against my eardrums. My right arm was extended in front of me as if it would touch the car’s hood. I squeezed the trigger twice. Two holes appeared, one right after the other, three or four inches apart in the windshield where the driver should be sitting, hunched over the wheel and trying to run me down.

The car was so close that it seemed like part of me. It was almost touching me; the headlight beam hit me like something solid. But as that second, shot left my gun I straightened my bent legs with all my strength and leaped to my right, both feet leaving the asphalt. I would never have made it except that the car lurched suddenly, jerked to its right, away from me. I heard the bang and scrape as it hit something, but I couldn’t see what it was. Pain leaped through my right shoulder as I hit the asphalt street again. Fire seared my right leg, the cloth of my trousers tearing, the flesh of my leg scraping against the asphalt.

As I rolled and slammed a hand down to steady myself, I raised my right hand, still clutching the gun and saw the car sliding against the curb. It straightened, slowed, then began to pick up speed. I pointed my gun at it and fired once; then the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder. I kept pulling the trigger. I could feel my jaws working, but it was seconds before I realized I was swearing, cursing, shouting epithets and threats and just words, any kind of hot, angry words after the disappearing car.

A man raced up from somewhere. “What happened? What — Can I help?”

“Get the hell away from me!” I broke it off. I was squeezing the butt of my gun so hard that it shook visibly; muscles in my hand were pulled painfully tight. The man stepped back, started to turn. “Wait a minute,” I told him. I apologized for yelling at him, told him everything was all right.

He started off. I didn’t move for a moment, but shook my head hard, trying to clear the red film of anger and pain from behind my eyes. Then I got my feet under me and straightened up, my right leg almost buckling. It felt as if somebody had poured gasoline from my thigh to my ankle and then lit it. And then I heard sirens.

In fifteen minutes I’d told my story three or four times, and one of the officers in the radio unit had called the information in to Communications. Before it was all over, three radio cars had arrived, and the inevitable gaping citizens.

Right in the middle of all that, somewhere, I stopped suddenly and thought about Gordon Todhunter. And at that moment I got the conviction that he was just as sane as I was, and maybe even a little more so. But whether that was true or not, I did know that, without his warning under the flap of that envelope this morning, without my thoughts being turned to what he’d said about somebody’s going to try to kill me, I would right now be lying in the middle of North Rossmore with a heavy load of buckshot in my guts.

So it really didn’t make much difference now whether Todhunter was sane or not; I owed him plenty. More than I could pay, maybe.

The sergeant from one of the radio cars was named Kinnins. He worked out of Homicide. He said, “Nothing you’ve left out, now, huh?”

“No, Sergeant. That’s the works.”

“You did recognize this man.”

“Uh-huh.” From a pipe-loaded truck to a double-barreled shotgun was quite a switch; but it had been the same would-be killer, a young, heavy-set, one-hundred-per-cent sonofabitch. And give me time, I said to myself, and I am going to kill me a young, heavy-set, one-hundred-per-cent sonofabitch.

I said, “Sorry I can’t do better on the make of car, Sergeant. But frankly it never even entered my mind to examine it closely.”

He grinned and looked me up and down. I was a mess, with one leg of my trousers ripped partly off, my coat torn, two holes from buckshot pellets in the coat’s fabric, and one unimportant furrow in my arm.

I’d been given treatment for the minor gouges and scratches, so all that was really wrong with me was the two burns; the burning on my leg and arm, on the outside — and the burn inside.

The sergeant turned his head to listen, then walked to his unit, which was parked at the curb near us. A calm feminine voice was repeating his call letters. He leaned inside, picked up the mike and acknowledged the call, talked a few seconds, then waved me over.

“Get in, Scott. Another unit located a new blue Ford coupla miles from here. Abandoned.”

“Was it a Ford I shot up?”

“It was, Scott. New Ford, and a guy about thirty-five years old. Dead man in the car, Scott — hole in his throat.”

It was a big, jagged hole, bigger than you’d think a .38 caliber bullet would make. But after I’d fired it, the slug had passed through the windshield, and maybe nicked the steering wheel before tearing through his neck. The slug had apparently sliced a carotid artery.

Anyway, there was blood all over. It had splattered the windshield, the steering post, the dashboard. And of course it was all over the front of the dead man’s body. I’d never seen him before, but the beam of a flashlight showed him to be a small man with buck teeth and a black mole alongside his mouth.

I called Sergeant Kinnins over. “Remember when George Stone got hit?”

“Stone? Yeah, I was filled in on it.”

“Remember the waiter’s description of the short guy that asked about Stone just before the shooting?”

Kinnins nodded. “Sure, but what’s that — ” He looked at the dead man’s face. “See what you mean.”

He called in. The police would have come up with the connection in another hour or so, maybe less. But it was no great trick for me to get ahead of them. I had a lot more reason for remembering.

A fingerprint man finished dusting the glove compartment, then opened it. There were two guns inside it, plus some ammunition, and after the print man had checked the guns, Kinnins looked them over. He showed them to me. One of them was the standard heavy gun, an Army .45 automatic. But the other gun was a real cute one.

It was a .22-caliber target pistol with the outside of its barrel threaded. There wasn’t any silencer on it now, but the threads for one were there.

Sergeant Kinnins’s words were anticlimactic. “We’ll get this down to the crime lab. But I can tell you without waiting for the ballistics check — here’s the baby that killed Stone.”

One hour later, just to wrap it up, I was in the morgue with Kinnins and other officers when the headwaiter from the Melody Club was brought downstairs in the Hall of Justice. He was shown the body. He looked at the man’s white face for several seconds, then he said, “Yes. That’s the man. He’s the one that asked about Stone.” The headwaiter shook his head, cleared his throat and added, “He looks different.” He swallowed. “But that’s him.”

He looked around and his eyes fell on me. “Why hello, Mr. Scott,” he said. “I haven’t seen you — ” He fainted.

That was about it. I stopped by Homicide for half an hour and dictated the report, and then Kinnins drove me back to the Spartan Apartment Hotel. Nobody shot at me this time. I went up to my apartment and to bed.

But I lay awake for a while, putting bits and pieces together. Big deal, this one tonight. Odd, too. A couple of men out to kill Shell Scott. One of them was a guy who had almost certainly killed George Stone; the other man had probably been in on the Stone murder, and had already tried once before tonight to kill me, in more complicated but no less messy a fashion. Drowsily I thought that this certainly tied something together, pulled two pieces of a puzzle side by side. I’d sure worked myself into the middle of something.

In my mind other thoughts and pictures drifted, trying to join together in some kind of sense. An investigating committee. Beautiful, beautiful women. Crazy letters, and a warning on an envelope. Ravenswood. Finally they all went together and shrank to a point and started spinning around, and I was asleep.

In the morning I staggered out of bed, wincing at the new aches and burns, showered, then groaned through breakfast. Except for occasional twinges I felt pretty good. I would see Todhunter today, and I had the irrational feeling that much would then be explained.

I called the garage, but my Cadillac wasn’t ready. A new windshield had been put on, but there was work to do on the steering post and also on the front of the car. Nothing was seriously wrong, and I could pick it up this afternoon. So it was another cab for me.

It was a different driver, and we went by a different route this time. He drove down a street paralleling Eucalyptus until he came to a blocked road with a couple of detour signs, arrows pointing to the right. My driver swore fluently, explaining that he was an old hand, but this was a new detour. I barely heard him jabbering, concerned with my own thoughts.

The .38 was cleaned and loaded, comfortably heavy against my left armpit. I didn’t expect to be using it this soon after last night’s party, but there were again six slugs in the chambers. There was a little tingle of tension winding itself through my nerves and muscles. I thought about Todhunter. I hardly knew what to think about that man, but I did know that if Todhunter knew anything about the identity of the men out for my blood, or why they wanted to kill me, then the most important move I could make was to talk to him.

I had called Toddy just before leaving for Ravenswood in the cab. Her voice had been thick, slurred with sleep, and the husky half-formed words and phrases had sent a hot hunger for her through my body so sharply and suddenly that it surprised me.

I’d told her who was calling and she’d said sleepily, “Shell, darling … Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that!” There was a mumbled word or two I didn’t catch, while I told her not to be sorry. She told me I’d waked her up, that she was still in bed — and of course you know what the hell that did to me.

It was a dazed and dazing conversation, and it ended finally when after my telling her I was going to Ravenswood again and would come to see her immediately after, she said, “Do, Shell. Just come up.” The sound of what might have been a stifled yawn. “I like to sleep late, but … I’ll try to be out of bed and dressed.”

“You — Don’t go to any trouble, not just for me.”

She laughed. “Oh, go on. I’ll see you here when you get back.” But then her voice sobered, became more awake. She told me to find out what was going on out at Ravenswood, but to be careful. Her voice was worried. She seemed awake, finally, and remembering.

The lift that conversation gave me lasted me clear out to Ravenswood, detours and all considered. But the sight of that bare white building standing alone in the clearing and surrounded by trees, the mottled grass before it, took most of the pleasure out of my system again.

The driver waited while I went inside. The same man was behind the counter. He walked to the same door, brought back the same man — Director Beecham.

“Ah, good morning, Mr. Scott. Right on time.”

“Yeah. How’s Mr. Todhunter?”

“The same. Of course, electro-shock usually takes a few weeks and several treatments. This was Todhunter’s first.”

It took him about fifteen seconds to get out those few words. It was as if he had to examine each word, weigh it, spell it, look it up in the dictionary, and finally say it.

“Let’s go see him.”

“Very well. Come along.”

He turned and walked down the freshly waxed and polished corridor to approximately its middle, where another hallway bisected it. There he turned left. On our right were closed doors numbered 100, 101, 102 and so on up to 110. The director stopped before 109.

“You understand,” he said softly, “that — Well, you mustn’t be too disturbed by the change in him.”

That rang a little warning bell in my brain. I said, “What do you mean? Doesn’t he look the same as he did a couple of weeks ago.”

The director looked straight at me. “Of course. In every measurable sense, Mr. Scott. But surely you know what I mean. The eyes … the attitude … the posture…”

The words, his voice, the grating sound as his key turned in the lock, make me feel clammy, uncomfortable, a little chilled. It was the kind of feeling you get on a cool moist day when the sun suddenly goes behind a cloud and you don’t at first realize what caused the change.

Beecham pushed the door open and stepped inside. He motioned me to join him.

As I stepped into the room, Beecham shut the door gently.

A tall man with thick brown gray-flecked hair sat on the side of a small bed. He wasn’t looking in our direction as we came in, and his profile was toward me. It was a striking face. The lines were sharp, angular, strong. It made me think of a not-quite-finished sculpture, the head done in a rough masculine fashion with the chisel marks and lines and gouges obvious in the stone.

Because he was seated I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed extremely tall, probably taller than I, with a loose raw-boned frame and a nice breadth of shoulder. His hands rested one over the other in his lap, and they were big, strong hands. There was nothing weak about this man. Nothing, at least, that I could yet see.

And in every respect he was identical with the photographs of her father that Toddy had showed me. It was Todhunter, all right.

“Mr. Todhunter — Gordon,” the director said softly. “Gordon?”

The man didn’t move. He didn’t turn his head toward us.

All sorts of ideas went through my head. This was the man who had scribbled that note to me on the envelope sent to his daughter. A hastily written note, yes, but not necessarily insane, nothing that a sane man in trouble might not have hurriedly written. And I thought that perhaps Todhunter had been pretending here, for days, held against his will and pretending to be ill so that when the proper time arrived…

Then Beecham repeated, “Gordon. Gordon Todhunter. This is Mr. Scott. He wants to talk to you.”

The man’s head turned slowly. “Not — not — not — ” he said. His lips lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped again, then became still, pressed together. His brows pulled down sharply, deep creases appearing suddenly between his eyes, and his forehead wrinkling. He turned his head far to his left and down, but the eyes stayed on me, rolled far to the right and raised to look at my face. The eyes were wildly staring, filled with dark suspicion.

He stared at me. And then, suddenly, he began to giggle.

Todhunter’s lips spread loosely and he continued to giggle, inanely, senselessly.

His eyes rolled away from me, then back.

Look at the eyes around you, or at your own in the mirror. A man’s eyelids normally rest close to the pupil, or perhaps halfway between the pupil and the iris’s edge. But this man’s eyes showed no semblance of normality. Around the eyes, in the skin and flesh of his forehead and cheeks, and the lines of his face and at the bridge of his nose, were the little puffs and wrinkles of stress and torturing emotions. The lids were pulled wide, an ugly band of white between them and the dark brown iris of his eyes.

I heard the director saying, “It’s no use, Mr. Scott. Are you satisfied now?”

There seemed something strange in the way he said it, but maybe I was just imagining that. I went outside with him, watched him as he closed and locked the door.

With part of my mind still in that small room, I asked, “What have you done to him?”

He’d started to walk back down the corridor, but he stopped and looked at me strangely. “I don’t understand.” He paused. “You might, rather, ask what God has done to him.” Then he shrugged and walked ahead of me down the corridor.

I stepped along with him. As we walked he said, “The mentally ill, Mr. Scott. They are ill just as a polio patient is ill, or a man with a severe infection. But in most cases we still do not know what happened in their brains, what it is that races like tiny mice along the channels of their nerves.” He shrugged. “Some we can help. Perhaps we can help this one. Who knows?” At the door to his office he said, “Did you wish anything else?”

“No. Thank you, Dr. Beecham.”

“Not at all. Good-by, Mr. Scott.”

The cab driver took me downtown to the Gorgon Cafe, where I got out. There I phoned the Civic Building and talked to Senator Lester Beasley, bringing him up to date on what I’d been doing. He agreed that the investigation of Todhunter, Stone’s death, and following up on the two men who’d tried to kill me last night, was the most important thing I could be doing — not only from my point of view, which was obvious, but also from the committee’s.

I asked Beasley where Joe Rule was and he gave me a couple addresses where the kid was going to be. I told Beasley I’d like to borrow him for part of the afternoon, and got an okay.

It took me about ten minutes to locate Rule, but he said he’d come to the Gorgon as soon as he could. I’d finished a big lunch of rare prime ribs and a massive baked potato when he arrived. He joined me in a beer while I brought him up to date.

“So,” I went on, “I’ve just got back from there. This Todhunter’s a big, gray-haired egg with a face like cliffs and valleys, right?”

“That’s him. Got a Viking look. Seemed too bad when I saw him, the day he was committed.” Joe took a swig of his beer, looking almost too young to be drinking it legally.

I said, “Is there any chance the man you saw was somebody else? Not Todhunter?”

He shook his head. “Not a chance. Don’t know why you’re asking that one, but there’s nothing there.”

We batted it around. He gave me a dozen reasons why the man was Gordon Todhunter, and he convinced me, but there was still one angle I wanted to check. “Okay, Joe,” I said. “Now, I’d never seen Todhunter before this morning, though I’ve got some pictures of him. Here.” I got them out of my wallet and showed them to Rule. “This the guy?”

He studied the pictures and nodded. “Close enough. Hard to say for sure from little snaps like those. But it looks like the guy.”

“Uh-huh. Well, here’s the deal. You saw the man at the commitment proceedings. If you got a peek at the one in Ravenswood, then you could say for sure whether or not it’s the same man. Right?”

“Right.” He finished the beer and looked at me. “Doesn’t sound like a mountainous job — but what’s got you so hot on this angle, Shell?”

“It’s pretty important to me to find out if that guy’s Todhunter or not. And to somebody else. Which reminds me. Have you met his daughter?”

Rule shook his head. “Dope I got said she was out of the state.”

“She was, until just a day or two ago.”

“Should I meet her?”

I looked at his handsome, square face, the glossy wavy hair, the grin showing strong white teeth. “No. She’s a horrible bag.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, I’m kidding. But you wouldn’t want to meet her. You’re too young for such a shock. Let your nervous system get all toughened up first. Like mine.”

He kept grinning. “Oh, sure. Well, what’s with this Ravenswood bit?”

“Here’s how it looks. There’s a crazy guy out there in Room One-oh-nine. If he’s Todhunter, that’s the end of it. Check it. If it’s not Todhunter, but just somebody who looks a hell of a lot like him, that’s a different story entirely. Whichever way it is, one peek by you should wrap it up.”

Rule said, “So he’s a crazy one. So was the guy in court — and I know he was Todhunter. So what do you expect to prove?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure, Joe. But something’s real wrong out there. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but if we keep poking something ought to give.” I got out my cigarettes, lit one and went on, “Here’s one way you could work it. I overheard something about a guy named Howard in One-oh-three while I was out there. Maybe you could pretend to be visiting Howard, and get a chance to open One-oh-nine with a skeleton key and peep in. They’re pretty close to each other, in the same wing of the building. Just a thought. You got any ideas?”

“That sounds all right. I’ll check the records before I go out, and dig up all I can on the guy this afternoon. Couple other things I have to do before I drive out to Ravenswood, anyway. That all you got? Just the last name Howard?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ll get more dope on him — or pick somebody else out of the records. That’s all you want, huh? Make sure the man in One-oh-nine is the guy I saw at the hearings?”

“That’s it. But listen. It could be that this Todhunter knows why those eggs last night tried to blast me — even if he is clear outside his skull most of the time. There’s already murder in this mess, and there might be more. So don’t stick your neck out.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I’d do it myself, only they know me out there already. I wouldn’t have much chance of sneaking into the right room.”

“Good enough. Want me to call you when I’m through there?”

“Yeah. I’ll be at my apartment, or — ” I thought a minute, then got out pencil and paper and wrote on it not the name of the Biltmore Hotel, but the number, and Toddy’s room number. I handed it to him and said, “Or this number and extension.”

He looked at it. “That’s a funny number.”

I didn’t say anything. I had said too much about the lovely Toddy already. If I told him that was her hotel and room, it was quite possible that I’d knock on the door later, and Joe would open it. This way, he might never know. He stuck the paper in his shirt pocket and said, “Good-o. Well, I’m off. Call you later.” He left.

I headed for the Biltmore, making one short detour on the way.

I went though the big lobby and on up the stairs. Toddy, after all, had told me over the phone this morning to “Come on up.”

At her door I knocked gently and waited. There wasn’t any answer, so I knocked harder. After that Toddy’s soft voice said, “Who is it?”

“Shell.”

“Oh, Shell. Just a moment.”

Then she swung the door open and stood there blinking at me. I blinked at her, too.

She bad, I supposed, been lying down, for she was wearing the kind of thing that lovely women lie down in. It was some filmy and lacy garment that, while not actually too revealing, was enough to overtax my endocrines. A couple more sights like this and they would disintegrate in small explosions.

“Come on in, Shell.”

I went inside and she shut the door. “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” she said. “At least it seemed like it. Worrying, wondering … I Just now woke up. I’m sorry I always seem half asleep when we talk.”

“I’ve no complaints.”

“What’s all that? Why, Shell — you’re sweet. But what’s it for?”

She was looking at the stuff in my arms. I’d stopped down below and picked up some roses and champagne, and even two champagne glasses in a paper sack. “This,” I said quietly, “is to take a little sting out of what I’ve got to tell you.”

“Oh.” Her face got sober, a little tense. “He’s all right, isn’t he? Isn’t he?”

“Wait a shake. I saw him — I think. And he was — he wasn’t well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. The man I saw needed help, treatment. He was mentally ill. That doesn’t mean he won’t be all right in time, but he’s sick. Just like a man with pneumonia’s sick; it takes time for a cure.”

She shook her head slowly back and forth, groped for a chair and sank into it. “Here, take this stuff,” I said. I handed her the flowers and champagne and the paper sack, wanting to give her something to do, for these few seconds at least.

Toddy got to her feet again, took the flowers and wine and walked out of the room. In a minute she returned with the roses in a vase, still carrying the big magnum of champagne and the two glasses. I described the man at Ravenswood and Toddy said, “It’s Dad. Nobody else looks like that. Even just from hearing you describe him I know it’s Dad.”

“I’m sorry, Toddy.”

“But I don’t understand.” She really looked bewildered, dazed. “How could anything like that happen so fast?”

“A lot can happen in a year.”

“What?” She looked at me as if she were really hearing my voice for the first time and identifying it with me. At least she looked surprised.

I said, “It’s just me, Shell Scott, bearing champagne and roses — “

“Shell, that was sweet of you. I’m sorry, but this is sort of a shock. Maybe I expected it, but — Here — ” She handed me the bottle. “You open it. I’ll have a little sip with you.”

“Good. Toddy, you might as well let what I’ve told you sink in. But you should know, too, that I’m still working an angle — that is I’ve got a guy named Joe Rule working on it. If a call comes from him, it’s for me. It’s just possible things aren’t as bad as they look.”

“What’s that?”

“No sense explaining it. I just thought I’d mention it.”

She shook her head again. “It’s so strange. Can a man get so sick in less than a year? And what about that note to you, Shell? What does it mean?”

I shook my head. “There you’ve got me. But I mean to find out before I’m through.” I was working at the cork on the magnum.

Toddy held one of the champagne glasses forward as I worked the cork loose. I knew that Toddy must be used to drinking champagne, so I tried to do it like that smooth guy on radio and TV. I smiled, tugged, and the cork came out with a hearty thoop, narrowly missing Toddy’s right eye, and bouncing off the wall.

I poured the clear bubbling wine into the glass Toddy held forward, then filled the second one.

“It’s a lovely sound, isn’t it?” she said. But her eyes, and I guessed her thoughts, were still distant.

“It is, Toddy. Well, here’s to better news.”

Toddy walked to a black divan against the wall, sat down on it and crossed her legs. “Sit down, Shell,” she said. “Relax a little.”

I sat down in a chair near her, but I didn’t relax.

I was torn between two desires. Toddy was absolutely gorgeous in the intimate apparel she wore, and it was delightful to look at her. But I was almost ready to ask that she put on something else, like old blue jeans or a quilt, because all I intended to do, no matter how long I sat here, was just talk and maybe look a bit.

That kiss Toddy had planted on me yesterday had set up vibrations I could still feel, and they felt good, and I would have welcomed even newer and perhaps better vibrations. But not today. Not when I was the bearer of bad news that could conceivably cause her to let her guard down. Not when she perhaps felt so alone and desolate that she might welcome a kiss or caress for that reason and for no other. I am without a doubt a lustful old cat at times, but I intended neither to take the pennies from a dead man’s eyes nor to woo Toddy this afternoon. Any other afternoon, yes. Yes, indeed. But not today, of all days.

But man, I was starting to wish she’d put some more clothes on.

I had meant to talk to Toddy most of the afternoon if she’d have me. To sit and sip the champagne — just keep her company, at least until Joe Rule called. But it looked as if I’d have to take that call at my apartment. We’d had the one glass of champagne apiece, and while it wasn’t much, it was warm in my stomach. It was warm, and getting hot.

Toddy, I thought, was a lot like the chilled champagne. When her face was composed, quiet, she had a look of coolness about her but you knew there was warmth inside.

She turned her head and looked at me, and those brown eyes hit me hard when her gaze fell on me suddenly. She didn’t look away.

Finally I stood up. “I have to go, Toddy.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. I’ve let my work for the committee go too long. Wanted to sit around a minute, make sure you’re all right.” My tongue felt thick. There was a tension all through my body.

She was looking at me strangely. “It’s funny,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You’re not at all the way I had you pictured.”

“I didn’t know you had me pictured any way.”

“I mean when I first started in to see you. Shell Scott. Detective. Little fat man, cigar, movies for divorce cases. You know.”

I grinned at her. “There’s nobody like that.”

“You’re certainly not.”

“Well, I’ll give you a call.”

“Come here.” She patted the divan at her side. “You can’t just jump up and bolt out like a skittish horse.”

“Oh, yes I can.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Sit down here. Just for a minute.”

I walked to the divan and sat beside her. It was entirely too close. I could smell the fragrance of her, of something delicate in her hair, and a soft scent upon her skin.

She said, “You can go if you want, although I’d like to have you stay for a while, Shell. But I haven’t even thanked you for the roses. And champagne. And for being so nice.”

“Toddy, I could hear you better if you had some other clothes on. Maybe you should put on a couple of bathrobes or — “

“Look at me. Aren’t you going to kiss me before you go?”

“Toddy, if I kiss you, it will be before I go, all right. It will be so long before, that — “

I didn’t finish it because her face came nearer mine. I stopped talking and reached for her. I put my arms around her, pulled her easily to me, watching her head tilt slowly to one side and her lips part and her lids slowly droop over the big brown eyes until the eyes were closed, the smooth rounded lids trembling slightly, her mouth partly open as it reached for mine.

It was like the kiss yesterday, only sweeter at first, and then with more warmth, more fire; with her body close against me on the divan, her perfume flooding my nostrils. She turned her face, rubbed her cheek against mine, and I pressed my lips against her throat, her shoulder. My hands were at the neck of her blue gown, and almost with a breath of pressure the small bow came undone, fell apart and Toddy raised her body toward me, lifting her shoulders as the blue cloth slid down the whiteness of her to her waist.

She rested upon the palms of my hands against her back, and I pressed my lips to her warm flesh. Her hands went behind my head to pull it gently, pressing my mouth a little more firmly against her. Her fingers moved, the nails straying easily through my hair as I moved one hand against her back, holding her with the other. My hand traced the smoothly arching curve of her spine, caressed the mound that was her hip and her indented waist and then her breast.

She slid against me, her cheek touching mine again and then her mouth against mine, her lips moist, her tongue alive and restless, darting and probing. Her hand closed convulsively against my arm, the fingers gripping tightly and then relaxing, suddenly gripping me again.

Her voice was hot in my ear, the breath washing against my neck as she said softly, “Shell. Oh, Shell darling. This is crazy. Darling, darling — “

She said some other things, but that one stupid phrase stuck in my mind. “This is crazy.” She’d spoken softly, barely audibly, but I’d heard the words. They slapped across my mind like a wet towel. Crazy — that was the word that stuck. It made me think of Gordon Todhunter. And of me sitting in my chair across the room, a few minutes ago, and getting ready to leave.

I pushed Toddy easily away from me, looked at her. Her eyes were closed but she opened them and stared unwinking at me. For a moment I looked at her, at the swelling and smoothness of her, my hand touching her breast, her fingers clutched against my arm.

“Toddy,” I said. “I — That must have been the wrong kiss. I told you to put some clothes on. And I told you I had to go.”

She moistened her lips, straightened up. “Go?”

The way she spoke, so softly, her voice slurred, I couldn’t tell for sure if the word were a question or a statement. A question or plea, a gentle request. I said, “I should go, Toddy. I’d better right now. If I don’t — “

She sat erect, and blinked once, then pulled the blue gown up over her shoulders, gathered it together in front of her. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose so.”

That was all that was said. A kind of uncomfortable silence hung around us. It was, I thought, a hell of a situation. I didn’t know what was in Toddy’s mind or thoughts. I did know what was in mine. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look at me.

Finally I stood up. “Honey.” She glanced at me then, and away. “I’ll call you. The minute I hear anything. I’ll call you anyway.”

She nodded.

I let myself out. Before I closed the door behind me I looked across the room. In front of the divan was the coffee table, the opened magnum of champagne on it, getting flat. Next to it was the vase of roses. Behind the table, Toddy sat quite still on the divan.

That was the last thing I saw, the picture I took away from there with me. Toddy’s heavy-lidded eyes on me. Her right hand in front of her, holding the gown loosely together.

</code>

<code> Chapter Eight

I stood outside the door for a few seconds, then went down to the Biltmore’s big lobby and stopped. I was really dizzy.

Man, I thought, you belong at Ravenswood. I thought a lot of things, all of them reasonably stupid. Then I went on out of the hotel and into the sunshine. I took a cab to the garage where my car was being fixed up. The mechanic told me they were about through with it, so I waited twenty minutes and then drove it out and home. It handled just like new. Up in my apartment, I waited for Rule’s call. The hours passed; I stayed wound up like an eight-day clock.

And in the privacy and quiet of my apartment I wondered if perhaps Toddy were throwing darts at a crude drawing of me. Or if she were burning incense to me. Or if she were out helling around with a less idiotic male. And, too, I kept seeing her in front of my eyes, in my mind.

Just to look at Toddy, to let your eyes glance over her, was enough to rev up a man’s generator. But to come from where I had just come from, well, I went in to the bathroom and took a cold shower. It didn’t help. How could it?

I wandered barefoot into the kitchenette, wandered out into the living room again and flopped on the chocolate-brown divan. I leaned back and dug my toes into the thick shag nap of the carpet, and my eyes fell on the wildly colorful nude, “Amelia,” over the fake fireplace.

I had a mild bourbon and water and called the Civic Building. It was just about time for Paula to be knocking off work. She came on, her voice filled with dusk that brightened when she found out who was calling.

She was really a delightful creature, I thought. Had a bit of temper when she got aroused, but a little spunk’s good in a woman. Yes, I could really go for Paula.

“Paula, my sweet,” I said, “you’ve never been up to my apartment.”

“No, I haven’t have I?” she said.

“No, you haven’t. And listen to this. I have steaks. Luscious, thick, oozing-with-vitamins-and-minerals steaks.”

“Oozing with vitamins?”

“And minerals. Come up and we will throw them on the range in my cozy kitchenette. I’ll take off the grill and throw them right on the gas flame, and we’ll have practically charcoal-broiled — “

“I have to work.”

“Wha-at?”

“I have to work. Late, for the Committee. Hearings start in three days, you know.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I’d have loved to come up, too, Shell.”

“You would?”

“Uh-huh. Really. I’ve given you a sort of bad time, haven’t I?”

“How’s that?”

“Never coming up to watch your radio, or whatever it was you said. Not even letting you see the inside of my apartment. It was cruel.”

“Yes, cruel. For a kind, sweet, lovable, delightful woman, it was cruel.”

“Shell, you say the nicest things. I’m just going to have to be nicer to you, that’s all. But not tonight. I’m sorry, but you know what they say about duty.”

“Yeah, and I know what they can do with it, too.”

“‘Bye.”

I hung up. I almost wrapped the phone wire around my neck and really hung up. Whew, I thought. Wouldn’t that frost you. Or, rather, wouldn’t that unfrost you. And she’d wanted to come up.

Satin, I thought. Too bad she’s working at the Melody. Well, I can call and talk to her, can’t I? I used the phone again and rang her apartment in the Gentry.

“Hello.” That was Satin.

“Hi. This is Shell Scott.”

“Oh, Shell, hi. Where’ve you been?”

“Keeping my distance from you.”

“Why?”

“Ha.”

“But you haven’t even been down to the club.”

“Satin, my lovely dancing girl. If you think I am going to grab a ringside table at the Melody, and watch you prance onto the floor and leap about on the devil and scream and gurgle, while I am at a ringside table, then you are more mixed up than the alphabet in Campbell’s Soup.”

“My goodness. That was almost a speech. You’re not still angry because I chased you out of my apartment that day, are you?”

“Well, I — “

“I really did have an appointment. Besides — ” she paused and a little more hell crept into her voice — “don’t you know that anticipation is greater than realization? And it lasts longer, too.”

“Yeah,” I snorted. “It sure does with you, babe.”

“Oh, Shell! And anyway, you know what they say.”

“What’s that?”

“Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.”

I groaned. “Well, I ought to be nuts about you by now.” Then I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it, shaking my head. I put it back just in time to hear her saying “I don’t scream and gurgle anyway. I gurgle. But what girl doesn’t?”

“Satin, wait, please, stop. We better quit this or pretty soon we’ll be talking another language.”

“What?”

“This is awful. I don’t have any idea what we’ve been talking about.”

“Oh, you do too, silly. We were talking about — Oh well, it couldn’t have been very important.”

“Satin, listen carefully. Just shut up and listen carefully. Okay?”

Silence.

“Satin, you there?”

“Yes; you told me to listen.”

“The reason I called is that I thought perhaps, if you weren’t working, or the Melody Club had burned down, or who knows, you might want to come up to my place. What the hell, we could dance or something.”

“Sure, I’d love to. Give me twenty minutes.”

“Huh?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“No, Ed broke his leg.”

“Ed?”

“Sure. My partner in the act. The devil.”

“Broke his leg?”

“Yes. We were practicing and he stepped in the toilet.”

I actually dropped the phone. What in hell is going on? I thought. Have I lost my mind? Am I at last hearing those voices they talk about. I knew that if Satin had said it, whatever she had said, it was something that I’d remember until I fell cackling into my grave. I tried to find out with different forms of the same question what she’d meant, but, well … it was like fishing for minnows, using whales for bait. It just didn’t work out.

And I was in such a state that I actually spent a couple minutes asking her those stupid questions before it dawned on me that she had said she’d love to come up. But once I got that thought firmly in my brain I asked her if it would be all right if I sent a cab for her since I was waiting for a phone call, and she said of course. I told her to hurry, hung up, called a taxi, and started getting ready.

Cling, clong, the chimes went off and I threw the door wide.

Satin looked resplendent, lovely, completely delightful in a bright fuchsia dress with a scoop neck, and a silver-blue mink stole draped carelessly over her shoulders. The extremely blonde hair was smartly piled on top of her head this time. She gave me a big smile and came in, looked around the living room and said, “Nice, Shell. Ni — What a ghastly picture.”

She was looking at Amelia. There has never been a woman up here who didn’t make some derogatory remark about Amelia.

“Oh, she’s not half bad,” I said. “Let me take your things.”

She swirled the mink off her shoulders and gave it to me, and I kept waiting, and she said, “Oh, you’re silly,” and I took the stole into the bedroom and hung it in the closet.

When I got back. Satin was at the phone, and the phone was lying on the table, off the hook. “You calling somebody?” I asked.

“No. Just taking the phone off the hook.”

“Why?”

“So it won’t ring. You can have me or the phone ringing all the time, but I don’t want to be distracted.” She smiled at me.

“That’s nice. I’m pleased, Satin.” I walked to the phone and put it back on the hook. “But I’m expecting a call.” I looked at my watch. “Should have got it already. Ought to be coming in soon, though.”

“But I always take the phone off the hook.”

“I’m sorry, my sweet. But I need the phone. And the bad old company might disconnect it, if we left it off the hook. Besides it might wake the desk clerk up.”

I made Martinis. Since I seldom fool around with fancy drinks, I had phoned a bartender friend who gave me explicit instructions.

Proudly I sat them on the low coffee table. Satin lifted hers and took a healthy glug. “Boy!” she cried.

“Ho-ho,” I chuckled, beaming.

“These are lousy!” she yelped.

“What in hell are you talking about? I made ‘em exactly — “

“You got lots of gin and vermouth?”

“Sure, but — “

“You wouldn’t want to drink these, would you?”

“Well, now, I don’t think they’re so — “

“I’ll pour them out, huh?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Pour them out. Naturally pour them out. What else?”

Zip, she was in the kitchenette, and zip she was back with two Martinis.

“That’s how you do it, huh?” I said.

They did go down easily, I’ll admit that.

Satin looked at me and smiled happily. “Good, huh?”

“Yeah, boy.”

She spotted the radio and went over to it. She turned it on and stood there switching her hips about fetchingly, tapping one foot and jiggling gayly while the radio warmed up. “Boy, oh, boy,” she said happily. “Zah, zoo, zah. Let’s dance.”

I was aleady over there next to her. “Zah, zoo, zah,” I said. “You bet.”

She twirled the dial until she found something peppy, then spun about and leaned up against me and we started dancing.

“Lively enough to suit you?” she asked.

“Honey, you’re lively enough to suit anybody.”

“I mean the music.”

“That. Sure. Well, I’ll be the devil now, huh?”

She laughed. “No, no.”

“Yes, yes.”

“No, no, no, — I don’t have my outfit, anyway.”

“But we can pretend.”

She batted those ice-blue eyes at me, and smiled, and kept on dancing. The music stopped and we headed for the chocolate-brown divan, but on the way it was zip, gurgle, and back she came with a couple new Martinis. We sat together on the divan and looked at the drinks.

“I put two olives in them this time,” she said. “We’re drinking too much.”

“Oh.” That seemed to make a lot of sense. Satin seemed to be making more sense all the time. She was bent over my Martini glass, staring down into it. “What’s the matter?” I, asked her.

“Look at those lil ol’ eyes,” she said.

“What?”

“Lil ol’ olives, I mean. They look like eyes.”

She moved her head and I took a look. They were dark green olives stuffed with pimientos, and both the olives in my glass were pimiento-side up. They did look like ghastly eyes, all right. I told Satin that.

She said, “Like eyes. Lil Martian eyes.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lil Martian eyes. All bloodshot. Like he’s been drinking.”

“What you expect?” I asked her. “He’s in the Martini.”

“Sure. Poor lil ol’ dear Martian. Drowned, I guess. You gonna leave ‘m in there?”

“No. What you think I am?” I got up and went to the kitchenette and poured out the Martini and the Martian. Satin came along with me.

“Oughta tell Orshon Welles,” she said. “We’re invaded. They’re smuggling ‘em in gin bottles.” In an off-key voice she made the trumpet sound of a newsreel, “Ta-ta-ta-taaa-ta-taaa. Flash! Ever where you look. Martians. Landed in Alabama, California, Georgia. Martian through Georgia — hey! Martian through Georgia!”

She started marching around the room humming Sousa. She was Sousa’d to the eardrums. She marched through the bedroom. She marched into the bathroom, me right behind her, beating a drum and going “Boom. Boom.”

Suddenly she turned and looked at me wide-eyed, and I went back a full step.

“Oh, good!” she said. “Shell! Shell!”

“What? What?”

“Can I use your bathtub?”

“What — do you want to use it for?”

“Silly. What do people generally use bathtubs for?”

“Most people take baths in them I guess. Never really thought about it much.”

“Well, that’s what I want to do. Soak, I mean. I love tubs. Love soaking in tubs. And, Shell.”

“Yeah?”

“I only have a shower.”

“You poor kid.”

“Only a shower. And I love a tub. I just love to soak in a tub. Is there anything more fun than soaking in a tub?”

“I can only think offhand of about seven thousand things — “

“Shell. Is it all right? If I use your tub?”

Talk about silly questions. I even turned on the hot and cold faucets for her. She made me leave the bathroom but promised that she’d hurry and join me. I busied myself making Martians.

I sat them on the coffee table before the divan — three olives in them this time; I was going to scare hell out of Satin. And then I waited. I could hear her splash every once in a while.

And all of a sudden it dawned on me: Satin, the lovely, shapely, sexy, gorgeous Satin is in there nude with no clothes on, taking a bath in my tub. This was something that had never happened to me before. Really. And here I was out here in the living room. I got up and walked to the bathroom door.

I knocked gently.

I heard a splash. Then soft laughter. “Who is it?”

“A — a friend.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m — I have something for you.”

“Slip it under the door.”

“Baby, this isn’t a telegram.”

“It won’t go under the door?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“You mean you want to bring it to me?”

“Now you got it. Exactly. Now you’re cooking. And how — “

“Well, the door’s not locked.”

It wasn’t. I opened it and walked in. After all, it was my bathroom.

Satin said, “Now, what is it you have for me?”

I spread my arms wide: “Me!”

She was lying back in the tub, an inch or two of water moving gently over the surface of her skin, or rather some of her skin. The water was clear. Very clear. I had thought, when I’d danced with Satin in her apartment and she was wearing that clinging, form-fitting, satin outfit, that there really wasn’t an awful lot more to see. That had been a foolish thought. Carried away, I put one idiotic foot into the tub — complete with shoe, sock, and trouser leg.

She wasn’t impressed. “You know what?” she asked.

“What?”

“This warm water kind of sobered me up.”

“The water did, huh? Well, no sense me staying plastered.”

“Wait a minute.” She sat up in the tub and scooted clear to the back, all scrunched up. “There. Now there’s room.” She smiled up at me, happy as could be. Then she got a sort of surprised look. “Shell, you’re not coming in here with your clothes on!”

Cling, clong.

Faintly I heard it. It had sounded like the door chimes. I shook my head. Couldn’t be, I thought. Ignore it and maybe it’ll go away.

Cling, clong.

“It’s somebody at the door,” Satin said. Cling-clong, cling-clong. “Oh, make them stop,” she said. “It bothers me. You know how I am about telephones. And this — ” Cling-clong, cling-clong, cling-clong. “Hurry, Shell,” she said. “Make them go away.”

“Yeah.”

“And hurry back. Get rid of them and hurry back. I’ll put in some more hot water.”

“That’ll be nice,” I said, and I went out of the bathroom and across the living room to the door.

I wasn’t a bit happy, and I grabbed the doorknob and twisted it viciously, flung the door open and said, “What’s the big — Oh, murder! Oh, Paula! You — darling, you. You came anyway. Well, I’m busy, Paula, busy, busy…”

She swept by me and into the living room, then wheeled about to face me. A big smile was on her face. The dark eyes smouldered. “I got off anyway, Shell. Senator Wise was working late, too, and he told me to go. Isn’t that grand?”

“Yes. Grand.” My voice was lifeless, leaden. It had none of its old fire. And I didn’t know what to tell Paula.

Paula went into the bedroom and came back without her coat, then sat down on the divan and looked at the Martinis. She blinked and then looked at me. Her eyes were still smouldering. But differently. I have mentioned, though I have not dwelt on it, that Paula had a temper. In fact, it is such a temper that that is the reason I have not dwelt on it. For one so soft and dark and nice, it was the temper of a longshoreman who’d been given an acetylene hotfoot. I didn’t mention it; I don’t even like to think about it.

In the voice of a longshoreman with a hotfoot, Paula said, “What’s this?” She pointed at the two filled Martini glasses.

“This? That? Them? Oh, they’s Martinis.” I paused, my mind getting all gooey. Then, inspiration: “One of them’s yours.” It was true; I’d just decided to give her one.

The old light came back into her eyes; the smile grew on her lips. Slowly she sipped at the Martini. Slowly — I groaned.

I had meant to get rid of her, quickly, by feigning dizziness or something — Lord knows, I was dizzy enough — but now I realized I’d have to let her drink the Martini. I thought, now I’ve put my foot in it.

And that reminded me. My foot. Only one leg, fortunately, had got in the tub — and it is a tribute to my undying optimism that I considered this fortunate — and I was dripping. I was dripping on the yellow-gold carpet. A damp, dark trail of huge right-foot prints led from the bathroom door to me, as if some monster had hopped out of the drain and across the room, which perhaps wasn’t completely opposed to the truth.

Paula followed my gaze. “What in the world?” she said.

“Paula,” I said, “I think you’ll have to go after all.”

“What do you mean, after all?”

“Just — after all.”

“Why, Shell. I believe you’re trying to be funny.”

Talk about hollow laughs. It echoed in the room like a man coming to in his casket.

Finally she said, “What did you do to your foot? And your pants leg? It’s all wet.”

I exclaimed, “Why! So it is!” After a moment of shock, I said, “I stepped into something. Excuse me a moment, Paula.”

I walked to the bathroom. The difficult part is that the bathroom door is in view of the living room, this being a small apartment. I couldn’t afford to go inside, for if Paula should happen to look at the right moment — I refused to think about it.

I tapped gently on the bathroom door.

Satin cried out raucously.

“Heigh, hi, ho,” I shouted, and burst into “The Halls of Montezuma.” Then I said to Satin, “Shhh! Don’t make any noise. Don’t even make any waves.”

“Shell! Shell, what are you doing?” That was Paula.

I tried to hush Satin, explain, keep her quiet, but she merely invited me to come in and tell her. I knew I couldn’t go in there. I couldn’t even talk any longer. I’d never been in such a mess. Paula called me again and I went into the living room. “Did you get it fixed?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

“This is nice. I like your place. It’s got just about everything.”

“What do you mean, just about?”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “You don’t act the same, Shell. I thought when I came up you’d throw your arms around me. Give me a big kiss. Do something crazy.”

I didn’t even answer her. Finally I said, “Let’s go, huh?”

“Go?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t understand. You’ve been practically pleading with me to come up here. Now, I’m here.”

“Let’s go, huh?”

“Just let me finish my Martini.”

She got up and went into the bedroom. If she asked me where the bathroom was, I was going to shove her out the window. I felt as if I were coming apart.

Paula came back with her coat over her arm. She said, “Shell?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“Out you go!”

“What?”

“No — I’m sorry, I mean my mind was somewhere else. You — What do you want a bathroom for?”

“Oh, Shell!”

“Bathrooms are … are passe. Outmoded. I…” I stopped.

No, I just wasn’t going to let her go to the bathroom. I realize that I was taking a lot on my shoulders, but that’s the way it was. I could just see, as if it were happening before my eyes, what would happen once Paula stepped in through that door. I realized that I was groaning aloud.

Cling-clong.

I slumped into a chair and buried my face in my hands. I felt shattered, useless, all used up.

Cling-clong.

I ground my teeth together, took a deep breath, got to my feet and stomped to the door. Thinking I had very little more to lose, I threw the door open.

My nerves peeled open like old telephone wires. I staggered back into the room. I was groaning aloud again.

Toddy stood in the doorway. She took a step forward, staring at me curiously.

Well, I thought, I’m dreaming. It must be about three or four a.m. That’s when I have my nightmares. I figured that soon the sun would come up over the horizon and creep into my bedroom. It would fall on my fat head, illuminating the big smile on my face, because soon everything would work out the way it does in dreams. Boy, I thought, this should be a good one. There’s even cold Martinis in it. Wonder how I’ll get out of this?

Toddy said, “Aren’t you going to invite me in? I tried to — “

And then I noticed that she was looking past me at Paula. This wasn’t a dream. It was life. Real, earnest life. Life that was almost death.

The silence thickened. Then there was a horrible gurgling sound. For a moment I thought I was making it, like the involuntary groans. But no. That sound as of water gurgling out of a bathtub was, in fact, water gurgling out of a bathtub. Everybody knew I didn’t do it. We all looked toward the bathroom door.

Then I saw the two girls looking across the floor, following a dark, stained path of huge footprints that led across the carpet from the bathroom door to — my huge right foot. They looked at my bloodless face. And then they swung their heads around with simultaneous snaps to stare again toward the bathroom door.

The door opened and a cloud of steam came out. Then Satin came out. She was smiling. A towel was wrapped loosely around her. “Shell,” she was calling; “Shell?”

Then she saw the rigid tableau before her. She stopped suddenly and gasped, dropping the towel. The towel crumpled up at her feet. Everybody looked at everybody. Heads were aimed at me; six cold eyes were riveted on me. There was one of the longest stunned silences on record.

And, believe me, for every second of it my mind was blank. Nothing stirred up there, not a cell, not a nerve, nothing. Just blank.

And then, like the death rattle of my undying optimism, one last tattered thought sort of limped into view. “Wait a minute, girls,” I said stupidly. “I can explain everything.”

</code>

<code> Chapter Nine

A lot happened then, all at once, undoubtedly more than I’ll ever recall, but several of the things were pretty obvious. And I was, of course, practically sober by now anyway.

Satin cried, “Shell, you promised!” and ran back into the bathroom. As she slammed the door a Martini glass sailed by my nose and shattered on the wall. Paula made a noise like a wounded animal and ran into the bedroom.

Toddy said, “I tried to phone you, but the line was busy.” She paused. “But I didn’t realize you were this busy.”

I looked at the phone. Yep, off the hook. “Satin,” I shouted. “We’re through!”

I looked around me, too, at the footprinted carpet, the towel still on the floor, the pieces of Martini glass — at what seemed the shambles of my apartment and of my life. For a man who had, moments before, had so much. This, I figured, must be a little like the crash of Twenty-nine. Guys had even jumped out windows then, and all they’d lost was money.

But here I was, still on my feet, still taking it on the chin. I felt proud, I told myself. Actually, I felt sick.

I looked at Toddy — and the first little trickle of something completely apart from the Martinis-and-women-in-bathtubs routine, touched my thoughts. In the space of perhaps five seconds while we stood looking at each other, my feelings changed completely. All but the very last wisps of liquor fog left my brain. Something was wrong.

I said, “What — how come you’re here, Toddy?”

“I tried to call you, but I said that, didn’t I? I was phoned at my hotel. You’re to call the police.”

The tone of her voice, or maybe the way she looked, made me suddenly feel cold. Or maybe it was even the thought in her mind, brushing my brain. But I felt a shiver go over my neck and my skin seemed just a little cooler. “Police?” I asked her. “Why?”

“It’s something about a man named Joe Rule. That’s why they called me — my number was on a paper in his pocket. I thought I remembered your mentioning his name this afternoon.”

“I did.”

“And I thought you’d want to know.”

“What about Joe?”

“He’s dead.”

I don’t know how long I looked at her, not speaking, my mind trying to close around the fact of Joe Rule’s death. I didn’t really believe it yet. And the bald statement was too suddenly shocking after what had just happened here. I’d been expecting Joe to call any minute, half waiting to hear the phone ring. I could see in my mind his white grin, the way he ran one hand through that wavy black hair. A lot of things about him.

I shook my head. All I’d asked him to do was go out to Ravenswood, check up on Todhunter — on Toddy’s father. I looked at her just as she started to turn away.

“Toddy. About Joe. Joe Rule. Did they say anything else? Who called?”

“It was a Lieutenant. Rawlings or something.” That would be Lieutenant Rawlins. Toddy went on, “He said the man had been murdered. He was shot.”

She turned silently and left. I looked after her until she was out of sight. Then I went to the phone and called Homicide. The police had tried to phone me, but my line had been busy. Rawlins was still out at the scene, I was told. The body hadn’t yet been moved. The call had come in half an hour or so ago. I got the address where Joe’s body had been found. It was off the road between here and Ravenswood, not far from Ravenswood at all.

I walked toward the bedroom to get my coat and gun. Paula came out and went past me. She said something, but when I didn’t answer she went on out. I put on my gun harness, then my coat over it, made sure the gun was fully loaded and dropped a few extra cartridges into my pocket. Then I shoved the gun into the spring clip and went out.

They were just putting Joe’s body into the dead wagon when I got there. The crime lab boys had taken all their pictures, done all the work requiring the body’s presence. But I got one last look at him. At his white face, the bullet hole in the back of his head. It was Joe Rule, all right.

He’d been beaten before being shot. His lower lip was split. There was blood on his face. Dirt almost filled one of his eyes.

I didn’t feel any anger, not yet. It would come. But looking at him I just felt sorry. The car pulled away, carrying his body.

Lieutenant Rawlins stood beside me. He was wearing a plain gray suit and smoking a cigarette. He gave me one, lit it, and said, “Got anything for us, Shell?”

I hadn’t had a chance yet to talk to him. I’d just arrived, spotted him and asked about Joe. Now I said, “Yeah. I sent him out to Ravenswood to check up on a man named Todhunter.” I told Rawlins about my talk with Rule earlier, and what he’d planned to do.

“What time would he have gone out there?”

“Late in the afternoon, probably. He had some checking to do first, he said.”

“Uh-huh. You think maybe he was killed because of something happened out there?”

“I’m sure of it.”

Rawlins pursed his lips. “Maybe. Be kind of hard to prove anything by now, I imagine — assuming that you know what you’re talking about.” He asked me for more of my reasons, and I gave him practically the whole story about Todhunter — the letters, Toddy, the note under the envelope’s flap, my visits to Ravenswood, the works.

Rawlins looked at me. “Shell, you’re way out on this one. Way off the beam.”

I shook my head.

He said, “Look, man, we’ve known each other a long time. You’ve pulled some pretty nutty ones. But you say yourself this Todhunter was all the way gone. Why, you don’t even know that Rule ever went out to Ravenswood.”

“He did. Anyway, you can check.”

“We will. Could be the reason he never phoned you is because be was dead. Might’ve been shot before he even started for that hospital — you private boys get hoods mad at you once in a while, you know.”

“True, but — “

“He could’ve been killed for any of a dozen reasons. And, Shell, if you’ll use your head a little, the most likely angle is that somebody about to get hurt by this committee investigating lobbying pulled this job.”

“Maybe.”

“You guys do a lot more than check out crackpot letters, don’t you?”

“Of course. Matter of fact, Rule had come up with quite a bit of info some of the boys around town won’t like. So have I, for that matter. We’ve got documentary proof that Sam Britton, for example, poured twelve thousand into Sacramento this year, to influence legislation. Names, dates, amounts over and under the table.”

“Britton’s a tough mug turned respectable, Shell. You know that. There’s where you ought to be looking for a motive here.”

“There’s a chance you’re right. I just don’t believe it.”

Rawlins looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Shell, there’s a woman in this, isn’t there?”

“Woman? What the hell’s that got to do with it?”

He laughed. “So there is a woman. No wonder you’re in a spin.”

That was the way it went. Rawlins just didn’t believe my theory. And I had to admit it was weak and full of holes. But even so I had an almost unshakable conviction that Rule had been killed for one reason only: because he’d gone into Ravenswood to see Todhunter. Besides my other reasons, it would simply have been too coincidental if Rule had been killed, just by chance, on the same day that I’d talked him into going to the hospital.

It started hitting me then, getting to me, that I had sent Joe to Ravenswood, sent him to meet that bullet in his brain. If I hadn’t called him today, had let him go on about his business, I thought, he’d be alive now.

There’d been a little commotion several yards from us. Two uniformed officers were talking to a man in overalls and a faded gray shirt. Rawlins walked to them, then waved me over. It turned out that the civilian was the man who’d called the police.

We were on an unlighted stretch of Valley Road, about four miles out of Los Angeles. A couple more miles, maybe three, in the opposite direction, was the turnoff for Ravenswood, the dirt road up which I’d traveled twice. And, I thought, up which Joe Rule had traveled once.

Rule’s body had been found in the woods about twenty yards off the road. He hadn’t been covered up or put into a shallow grave; he’d just been dumped there. The overalled man said that he had a little “ranch” near here — a ranch in California being anything over a half-acre of ground with a house on it. His name was Tom Hill, he said.

“Well, I was drivin’ home,” he told the officers. “Seen this here car parked alongside of the road with the door opened. Looked funny, but I thought it was maybe just some kids.” He paused. Then he clicked his tongue against his teeth and said, “You know what I mean, boys.”

Rawlins said, “Yes, sir. What was it that made you phone us?”

“Yeah. Well, it was right then I seen the man runnin’ toward the car. Outa the woods there — ” He pointed to the spot where Rule’s body had been found. “Runnin’ lickety-split. Wasn’t quite dark, and I hadn’t switched my lights on. When I seen the car settin’ there, I turned on my lights. That’s when I got a look at the man runnin’. Didn’t even know he was there, but when my lights went on, all of a sudden there he was, goin’ lickety-split.”

Rawlins said, “You get a good look at him?”

“Pretty fair. Not so’s I could pick him out again, I don’t suppose. He wasn’t real close — and he flang a hand up and covered his face. That’s the part made me suspicious, see?”

Rawlins nodded. “What’d he look like?”

“Medium size. Had on a suit. Dark suit I think. Looked sort of stocky. That’s about all.”

“Did you get a look at his face?”

“Not enough. Just a quick look before he covered it. Anyways, when I got on home I thought about it and figured I’d better call the cops. So I did. After a bit, I come on down to see what was comin’ off.” He was quiet for a moment, then added, “My golly, hidin’ a body out there. Who’d of thought it?”

I’d been listening to the conversation, but not paying a lot of attention to every word. But then Rawlins asked the witness, “Is there anything you can tell us about the man that might help us identify him?”

“Oh, sure. Almost forgot.” He smiled. I turned all my attention on him. He was nodding his head. “When my lights hit him, he acted automatic, I guess. You know, didn’t want me to see his face?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he flang his hand up. Kept it there while I drove on by. Looked like a couple of his fingers was missin’.”

Five minutes later I was still talking to Rawlins. “That ought to help bolster my theory.”

“It doesn’t.”

“But it was obviously the same guy that tried to smash me up on the Freeway and blasted at me last night.”

“I’ll go along with that.”

“And he’s probably a hired gunman.”

“I’ll go along with that, too. But it still looks to me like an outgrowth of your investigation of the lobby boys; maybe somebody with blackmail on their schedule, something to hide. Who knows? I’ll bet if you make a good check of the dope you and Rule dug up, separately and together, including the bits you handled as a team, you’d come up with something to explain why the same man would try to kill you and Rule. That is, if you can come up with it anywhere.”

That’s where we left it. While I was with Rawlins, a report came in over the car radio that a team of police officers had checked with the director and others at Ravenswood. They’d been informed that nobody except the usual visitors had come to the hospital that afternoon; certainly not anybody answering Joe Rule’s description, or of that name. There was no evidence to indicate otherwise.

After Rawlins and the other police officers left the scene, I sat alone in the Cad, thinking about Joe and about the man who’d killed him. I thought about everything I could remember of my work with Rule, cases we’d cooperated on for the committee, and bits of the same cases which we’d handled separately. I didn’t get anywhere. And I always wound up with the same guy: that young, husky sonafabitch with two fingers missing from his left hand.

And all of a sudden, while I was concentrating on that guy, I had an idea.

It didn’t seem like much at first, but the longer I considered it, the more chance there was that I might have something. I started the car and drove to 1429 Garden Street. That was the address my would-be killer and Rule’s murderer had given me after that Freeway accident. And, as my insurance agent had reported, it was a vacant lot. Actually, it was one of two vacant lots in a sparsely settled area of Garden Street.

But I looked at the house numbers on either side of the vacant lots. On one side was a white house with the number 1427, and on the opposite side of the lots a house bore the number 1433. In other words, the phony address which that truck driver had given was the number that really belonged on the vacant lot, if a house had been there. And a man who knows an area so well that he can put the right number on a vacant lot would seem to know the area very well indeed. He might hang around that area a lot — or even live there.

I parked the Cad, got out, and started looking.

Three hours later I’d just about decided that the little flash I’d had earlier had been in the pan. But I’d put in a call to the Police Building and talked to Lieutenant Rawlins, and they hadn’t come up with anything. The witness had still been going through the mug books then, but hadn’t had any luck, either. I didn’t think he would. And I didn’t have any other good lead, so I kept looking.

It was well after midnight when I walked into a bar six blocks from the vacant lots. It was a place called Lane’s and it sat all by itself, on Garden, two blocks from the last house on the street. I had knocked on the doors of a lot of houses, hit one other bar and a service station, and so far I’d got nothing but blank looks. So I didn’t expect anything different here.

A few people were at the bar, and couples sat in two of the booths against the wall. The bartender was leaning against the bar down at its far end, his arm on the bar segment that was hinged so he could get in and out. I walked down to that end.

I said hello and he asked me what I’d have.

“Like some information,” I told him. “I’m trying to locate a man about five-ten, fairly husky, dark hair. He’s got two fingers missing from his left hand.”

It rolled out by rote, I’d said it or approximately the same thing so many times. But the bartender said, “Him? That sounds like Doe.”

“Doe? You mean you recognized the description? What’s the rest of his name?”

He grinned. “Take it easy. Doe’s the only name I ever heard him called. He doesn’t talk much. Don’t know whether it’s Dough, like money, or Doe, like John Doe.”

“Probably the last one. You got his address?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. I was just starting to swear when he added, “But I know where he lives.”

He explained that Doe had left the bar just as he closed up one night, and pulled out from the curb in his car ahead of the bartender. The bartender had been going in the same direction, and followed him to where the man turned in alongside a small house.

” ‘Bout a mile down Garden here,” he said. “Maybe a half mile more. Only house out there, though. You can’t miss it.”

He described the man for me himself, saying that he came in lots of times for a beer, and the description was my boy all the way down the line. And it was funny the way it happened, but the anger I might have felt back there looking at Rule’s body, the anger that hadn’t touched me yet, started building up in me there, at the bar, when I’d finally found him, when I could finally afford to feel that I’d get my hands on him. I could almost feel him in my hands as I thought about it.

I remembered that wreck, those shotgun blasts coming out of the darkness at me, a hell of a lot of nice things I knew about Joe Rule, along with the picture of Joe in the dirt with blood matted in his black hair. A red-hot anger bubbled up in me along with anticipation, swelling so big and hot that it felt as if it would lift me off my feet.

“Hey, mister.” The bartender was looking at me.

“Huh?”

He had a kind of sickly smile on his face. “You ain’t gonna kill him, are you?” It was half a joke, half a serious question.

I took out my wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill and started to hand it to the bartender with thanks. He looked at my face again and slowly shook his head. “Thanks. But I — I don’t think I want it. Thanks just the same.”

“Suit yourself.” I put the money and my wallet away. “You say Doe comes in here a lot, huh? Any of his friends hang around here?”

“No friends. Doesn’t seem like a guy that has many friends. Acquaintances, sure. People he yaks with some in here. Like Pat — ” He’d started to nod toward a stool at the bar near us. “Ain’t that a funny one,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Old Pat there. Must’ve took off in a hurry.” He looked at me. “Didn’t even pay for his beer.”

</code>

<code> Chapter Ten

I drove right by Doe’s house. It was a small, one-story white job, easy enough to find from the bartender’s description and directions. There wasn’t another house for several hundred yards on either side.

I drove a mile past it, then cut my lights, made a U-turn and headed back.

It seemed fairly certain the man called Pat had been well enough acquainted with Doe that he’d taken off to warn him that a guy was asking about him in Lane’s Bar. Even if he’d just happened to leave without paying for his drink, I couldn’t take the chance on barging up to Doe’s in the open.

And if the guy called Pat even started to describe me, Doe would know right away who I was. That is one of the penalties of looking like I do. But it wouldn’t make any difference if I was in one direction and Doe was looking in the other.

I parked a couple of blocks from the house, and took a big flashlight and a ring of skeleton keys from the car’s trunk. I put the keys in my coat pocket and held the flash in my left hand, drew my gun and walked with it in my right hand.

The house was off the road about fifty feet, surrounded by flat land, with no protection for me except a few trees and shrubs. No light showed inside the house. I was largely depending on Doe’s being unaware of the fact that I knew he was most likely warned, and waiting for me. So I left the road when I could barely see the heavier shadow of his house. It was a dark night with only a dim crescent moon. I walked around behind the house, came up from behind and on its left side, just opposite where he should be expecting me to appear.

Close to the house, I hunched over and scuttled toward its back door, moving as quietly as I could but with the gun pointing in front of me, my finger tense on the trigger. I made it to the back door with no trouble. There was a screen door, latched, and behind it a regular wood door, undoubtedly locked.

I stuck the flashlight down inside my belt and took the ring of keys from my pocket. These were keys I’d been given by a reformed thief and he’d told me they’d open anything except a bank vault. On the ring, too, were several straight and curved metal pieces, three or four of which would easily go through the screen and lift off the latch.

I selected one, thrust it through the screen, put it under the latch, and lifted. The latch fell against the door frame with a small clicking sound. I could feel the surge of my blood, the quickened tempo of my pulse. That plus the hot anger that rode at a constant level in me now, made me feel more than normally alive — stronger, wider awake, nine feet tall.

The screen door came open with a thin squeak of protest. I chose a key by touch, running my fingers over its web, and inserted it in the lock. It wouldn’t turn. I felt for and found another and tried it; still another. The fourth key turned in the lock. I grinned, feeling tense, my skin tingling.

I put the keys back into my pocket and gripped the flashlight in my left hand again, pushed the back door partly open with my gun-weighted right hand. Then I paused and listened, holding my breath. There wasn’t any sound except the drumming of blood in my temples. I pushed the door farther open — and something fell over with a sudden, shocking crash.

Right after it I heard a partly muffled curse from the front of the house, a filthy monosyllable in a man’s voice, the word startled from him. For only a second after that sound I hesitated. My mind seemed abnormally clear and I thought, not with any fright — not yet, at least — that he was in there for sure, that he must have been waiting for me to appear, and that he must know I was back here.

If I turned and ran now I could get far enough away so that I’d be in no danger — but the man inside would have the same benefit, too. He’d have a good chance of getting away, if that’s what he wanted. I wanted him bad; but most of all I wanted him alive and talking. And, too, I thought, the advantage was all on my side. I was the man moving, going after him, the man with a dozen good reasons for wanting to get him. He was the one who had to sit and wait — who had been sitting and waiting — with time for fear to build up in him, to constrict his throat and squeeze the cold sweat through his pores.

It was just the space of a heartbeat that I stood there, maybe a second, then I slammed the door open hard, keeping my grip on the gun and with its butt hooked around the door’s edge. The wood hit whatever it was inside there and sent it banging and clattering over the floor. I leaped through the door at the same time, slamming it shut behind me. It made a hell of a racket. I landed four or five feet inside the room, then went down on my knees and lowered my body toward the floor.

Nothing happened. There weren’t any shots. He’d been warned by that first sound. But there wasn’t any point in silence now. In the faint light filtering in from outside I could tell that I was in a small kitchen; an open door two or three yards from me led into what must be the living room. So he would have been waiting in darkness by the living room window, watching the road.

I slid slowly, easily across the floor to the wall. The door was a yard on my left. “Doe,” I said softly.

There was no answer.

“Doe. Or Gates, or Sonofabitch. Or whatever your name is. You hear me?” Silence. “I know you’re in there, mister. Maybe you can make yourself a deal. You hear me now, Doe?”

Nothing for a while. Then: “Yeah. I hear you.”

“I’ll make a deal with you, Doe Tell me why you tried to knock me off. About Joe Rule, the kid you shot tonight — the works.”

“Yeah?”

“And I won’t kill you.”

“You talk big, Scott.”

“I’m here. I found you. I ran you down, you bastard.”

I didn’t want to kill him; I wanted him alive. I wanted him talking his guts out, the words stumbling over each other. And right now I wanted to hear him talk again, hear him say something.

He said, “You’re gonna wind up just like him, Scott.”

It was there. That was why I’d wanted to hear his voice again. He was afraid. The thin edge of fright touched every word. Surprisingly I hadn’t felt the dull nausea of fear myself — not yet. I knew what I’d feel like when this was over, though, if I were alive, if I could feel anything.

I’d be weak, wet with sweat, empty. Because the forces that were keeping me buoyed up now would soon dissipate, grow weak; there’d be the inevitable reaction, the letdown. But right now I was fine, I felt good, and I knew he was scared.

“Doe,” I said. “This is different, isn’t it? Not like riding twenty tons of truck, is it?” I listened after every few words, straining my ears for a sound. But I didn’t hear him move. “This isn’t like waiting for a guy with a shotgun. How do you like waiting for it yourself, mister?”

I had slid over almost to the door by then. I got to my feet, stood straight.

I heard him move then, and I said, “If you try to make it out the door there, you’ll get it in the back. Where do you want it, Doe?” After a pause I went on, “The easy way would be for you to toss your gun in here. Then come in with your hands up.”

He told me what I could do. He was scared, sure, but he wasn’t going to pull anything as crazy as giving up his gun. And I knew he had a gun, even though I hadn’t seen it. There wasn’t any way I could get close enough to him to take him without getting a bullet in me. It looked as if I’d have to shoot him. If I could.

So I told him I was coming in after him. I told him in two or three different ways, and I told him, too, that it wasn’t just words, or an idle threat. I said he’d better get ready, because he’d have time for one shot at me, just one.

I wanted him even more keyed up and on edge than he was now. Because I was going in there all right, but not as a target, if I could help it. I kept talking to him softly, knowing that even if he didn’t completely believe my words, they’d still have some effect on him; they’d hit his brain and bore into it. I told him that I’d just come from looking at Joe Rule, with a bullet in his head, and that even if he got me, caught me with a slug too, I’d get him because I was going to come in shooting.

I built it way up, even made it a little melodramatic for his benefit. He swore back at me a couple times, but mostly he just listened. When I thought he was ripe, I said, “All right, you bastard, get ready.”

I counted off five seconds that would seem a lot longer to him. Then I thumbed on my flash and as the light speared through the darkness I jerked my arm and threw the flash through the open door toward the spot where I knew Doe was. Simultaneously I stuck my gun around through the open door and fired twice, not even stopping to take aim.

And in the front room a heavy gun boomed once, twice. It was the deep blast of a .45 automatic, and as it coughed the second time I stepped into the open doorway. My flashlight was still in the air, almost against the far wall, and as I looked that .45 blasted again, flame spurting from the gun’s muzzle. Doe was half visible behind an over-stuffed chair. He wasn’t even looking at the doorway. I pointed the .38 at him and squeezed the trigger.

I saw his body Jerk when the slug hit him. A .38 doesn’t have much shocking power, but it must have hit bone because he lurched heavily to his side, sprawled partly on his back. The thrown flashlight bounced from the far wall and fell to the floor. When it hit the floor it went out.

I jumped inside the room, took a step to my left and stood motionless in the darkness. I knew I’d hit him, but I didn’t know how badly he was hurt. I did know that the last glimpse I’d got of Doe before we were in darkness again, he’d still been hanging onto his gun.

I heard him groan.

There was another sound, as if his feet were scraping along the floor. Then his soft, strangled voice cried out, “I’m hit — ” then another groan.

There was a marrow-freezing, spine-tingling quality to his voice. It was strangled, panicked. I’d heard the sound in the voices of dying men. He groaned again, “Oh, God, I’m hit — “

I felt along the wall, found a light switch. Doe had sounded hurt, badly hurt and frightened. But it wouldn’t be the first time a man had pretended.

I aimed my .38 at the sound of him on the floor, flicked the light switch and at the same moment started to squeeze down on the trigger. But then I saw him and relaxed. The gun wasn’t even in his grip. He’d got onto his hands and knees, his head hanging down between his shoulders. He had on dark pants and a white shirt, and on the right side of the shirt was a spreading red stain. As I watched him, blood dripped from the red stain to the floor.

I jumped toward him as his arms collapsed, bent at the elbow. His head fell, his face striking the floor. Then he slumped forward, sprawled out, moving feebly. It was an ugly thing to see. He barely moved, like a crab scratching at the floor.

I grabbed him, rolled him slowly over onto his back. “Doe!” I said sharply. “Listen to me. Who hired you? Why did you kill Rule — and try to kill me?”

He coughed. His eyes were closed.

“Doe. And what about Todhunter? The guy at Ravenswood? What — Doe!” He still had his eyes closed, his face pale. I slapped him hard across the cheek. “Listen to me, you sonofabitch. Don’t die on me.”

His lips moved and his eyes opened slowly. Then he spoke, and I guess he just said what he wanted to get off his chest first. And that was, logically enough I suppose, the thing that had happened last; the murder of Joe Rule. Doe spoke of him as the “kid,” but I knew he meant young Joe Rule. There were long pauses in his speech, but he got some of it out.

“Somebody saw him — the kid — talking to that guy Todhunter … in his room. They grabbed the kid … got word to me.”

He went on talking for a few seconds, and I heard the words all right, but my mind focused on the first part of what he’d said. It was true, then, that Rule had been murdered because of his visit to Ravenswood, because he had talked to Todhunter. I’d been right in just about everything I’d been telling Rawlins earlier — but I still didn’t know why all this was happening.

Doe went on, “I was … just hired to do a job on him. Like I was supposed to do on you. And Todhunter.”

“What about Todhunter? What do you mean, you were supposed to do a job on him?”

He coughed again and bloody foam spilled over his lips. “Tonight,” he said feebly. “I was supposed to … but this came up. The kid…”

“Supposed to what, Doe? Tell me!”

I was scared now, for fear he wouldn’t be able to get the words out. I knew now that he wasn’t just hurt; he was dying. When you’ve watched men die, it’s not hard to recognize the signs. And Doe was almost gone.

“Two o’clock,” he said. “Planned for about,then. Must be done by now. Too late…”

“What, Doe? What’s going to happen at two o’clock?”

I could see my wristwatch, the hands pointing nearly to the hour. It was about five minutes till two a.m.

” … quiet then. At hospital. Nobody’d be around to bother … they’re gonna…”

He stopped. His head flopped to one side and his lips worked but no sound came out. I slapped him again. “What, Doe? Tell me!”

“Got to get rid of him … they’re…” He paused for a long time then. His voice was so faint I could barely hear it. I leaned forward with my ear close to his lips as he forced the last words out, “…gonna hang him.”

“Why, Doe?” I said. “And who wanted him dead? Who’s behind all this? Who hired you?”

He didn’t move. His lips were slack.

“Damn you, Doe. Who hired you? Who was it, Doe?”

I slapped him again, shook him. It wasn’t any use.

I sat alongside his body for a few seconds. There were twenty other things I’d wanted to know, things he could never tell me now. But I guessed I was lucky to have learned as much as I had. My eyes fell on my watch again. Four minutes until two a.m.

At about two a.m., Doe had said, they were going to hang Todhunter. Right there at the hospital. It sounded as if they were going to make it appear to be suicide, although Doe hadn’t said so. Maybe he hadn’t had time to say so. But he had said “Todhunter;” he’d used the man’s name. Not “the guy that’s supposed to be Todhunter.” Not “the fake one” or “the ringer” but the name, Todhunter.

And I couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to kill a crazy man.

I turned and jumped to the front door, sprinted out of the house and down the road to my car. I knew it would take me close to ten minutes to reach Ravenswood from here. I started the Cad’s engine and yanked the wheel around in a U-turm. I thought about phoning the police, but there wasn’t time now. There wouldn’t even have been time if I’d tried to call the moment Doe had told me. By the time I could get through to the proper individuals and explain it would have been too late.

I jammed the accelerator down to the floorboards, trying to make my mind work, come up with something that would make a little sense about my going to Ravenswood. I knew that I had to try to save Todhunter; not just for his sake, but for what he might be able, sometime, to tell me; and for Toddy, too.

I knew that the chances were I would find Todhunter dead. But even if that were the way I found him; I’d want to keep his killers from getting away — and keep from getting killed myself. But what could I do alone?

A thought brushed my mind, but went away. I prodded my brain, pushed it. There was always at least a chance Todhunter would still be alive; as long as there was that chance I had to act on it. I kept the accelerator down, but it just didn’t make sense for one man to barge out to Ravenswood. More likely I’d set up another killing — mine.

I swung off Garden and hit Eucalyptus, yanked the steering wheel right and slid around the corner. Even at this hour, there was a lot of traffic on the highway. I felt a little shaky, weak, and I guessed it was reaction from the tension of this last half-hour. I felt depressed, tired — and then weaving through the other cars on Eucalyptus, I had an idea. It wasn’t a big idea; but that last one, checking the area around the vacant lot on Garden Street, hadn’t seemed like a very big one either. Maybe, I thought; maybe I can surround Ravenswood.

I swung left at the next corner, trying to remember where … then I recalled the route one of those cab drivers had taken. It was barely out of my way, and in half a minute I was at the detour I’d seen so recently. I stopped, got out and grabbed one of the wooden detour signs and tossed it into the back of the car, then climbed in and took off with a screech of tires again.

On Eucalyptus once more, I slammed on the brakes at the turnoff leading to Ravenswood, jumped out of the car and planted the detour sign in the middle of the highway, the arrow pointing right. Then I got behind the wheel and swung right, shoved my foot down on the accelerator. It was two o’clock, on the button.

As I drove I bent over and fished a small flashlight from the glove compartment. Then I held the steering wheel steady with one knee while I reloaded my .38. That was all I could do, and it wasn’t much, but I had to hope it was enough. The depression and weariness that had been creeping over me shortly before were gone now. For a while, anyway. All I could think about was what might be happening ahead there, inside Ravenswood. The noose or sheet or cord around a man’s neck, the lungs straining for breath, and then the blood becoming still, growing cold.

Long before the hospital building was in sight, I switched off the car lights and slowed down a little. I couldn’t be sure, but when I thought I was a hundred yards or so from the spot where the road split to loop around the building and rejoin itself, I slid to a stop and jockeyed the car back and forth until it was pointing back the way I’d come, on the same side of the road where I’d been traveling, but facing in the wrong direction. I parked my big Cadillac there so that it blocked that side of the road, but left barely room for other cars to go by — assuming other cars would be going by, and that’s what I was assuming.

I locked the car doors, then sprinted down the dirt road. In the dim light I almost missed the spot where the road curved left, but I caught it in time and veered that way. Then the mass of Ravenswood loomed ahead of me. From here it didn’t look as if any lights were on within the building. I ran across the grass, a dull ache starting to grow in my side. I went on past the big front doors and on around the building, continuing on about halfway down along the wall. There didn’t seem to be anybody around.

From my previous visit to Todhunter’s room I knew it was near the end of the hallway bisecting the main corridor. And I had noted, at the end of that hallway, a heavy wooden door. That’s where I was headed now. The ring of keys was still in my coat pocket, and I pulled them out as I reached the door, flashed my light briefly on the lock and then started choosing keys. The second one turned the lock noiselessly. I pushed the door open easily, slipped inside and shut it. The hallway was pitch-black, no lights burning overhead, I didn’t see a light burning anywhere.

It was very quiet, then I heard a thin cry, a kind of wail. Muscles in my body tensed. I moved quickly to the door of the room where I’d seen Todhunter — but then I heard the wailing sound once more. It came from far down the hall and was repeated over and over again. From another direction I heard a different sound, a lower sobbing, the human sound of sadness and maybe pain.

I got a skeleton key into the lock, just as Joe Rule must have done. In moments I had the door to 109 open, stepped inside and shut the door behind me, flicking on the small flashlight. The beam fell on the legs of a man. They dangled before me, feet only inches off the floor.

I raised the light and it fell on the tight-wound noose of a twisted sheet wrapped around the man’s neck. He hung from it, head bent awkwardly to one side. The light splashed on Gordon Todhunter’s craggy, angular face.

I jumped forward and grabbed him, lifted his body higher.

It took me only seconds, holding him up with one arm and shoulder and jerking at the noose with the other hand, to get him free, then I eased his body down to the floor. I’d dropped my flashlight, but it still burned, and I grabbed it, sent its beam quickly around the room. There was no window, and I jumped to the wall, turned on the switch there and flooded the room with light from the ceiling fixture.

The room appeared light-tight, but I grabbed bedclothes from the cot and threw them at the door’s base, just in case there was room at that spot for light to seep into the hall, then dropped to my knees alongside Todhunter. He was still warm, but there was no heartbeat, no pulse.

He’s dead, I thought. But even while the words repeated themselves in my mind, I’d put him into position on his face and was leaning forward to press air from his lungs, lean back lifting his arms, and then pressing forward and down again. He had stopped breathing, but so do men who drown, and often they can be revived. I kept working on him, losing track of time. I knew that he could have been unconscious only briefly; the breath couldn’t have been kept from his lungs and body and brain for very long. But still he lay motionless.

I kept on — and finally I knew that a breath had been his own. I continued the artificial respiration briefly, and then he was breathing unaided. His hands moved, and then he stirred. In a moment his eyelids fluttered. Soon his eyes opened and he tried to sit erect. I started to help him — and he let out a yell and swung a hard fist at my face.

I ducked aside, his knuckles grazing my cheek, then grabbed his arms, tried to hold them — He was surprisingly strong for a man just brought back from unconsciousness — from death, for that matter. He was shouting and straining against my arms, trying to slug me, and I thought: I’ve got my hands full of madman.

And suddenly he stopped moving, swung his head toward me. He was breathing heavily, but for a moment his breath caught in his throat and then he said, “Well, I’ll be damned — you’re Shell Scott!”

</code>

<code> Chapter Eleven

Todhunter looked beat, pretty well roughed up — which was natural under the circumstances — but he didn’t look mad. There wasn’t anything about him that looked insane. His eyes had a sharp, intelligent, piercing look instead of the wild and suspicious look I’d seen in them before.

But it was the same man.

There wasn’t any doubt about that. It was the same craggy face, made of angles and planes and flat surfaces, an almost geometric face. He had the look of an old-time sailing man, or plainsman, or Indian scout, and was even handsomer, more virile and striking in appearance than he’d been before, because he didn’t have the beaten, shrinking appearance and attitude he’d had the last time I’d seen him.

But that had been only sixteen hours ago. And I knew this man had been crazy then.

He was still looking at me and finally I said, “Yeah. I’m Shell Scott. Now tell me one thing: What’s your name?”

“I am Gordon Todhunter.”

He put one hand on his neck, rubbed it, turned his head from side to side. “What happened?” he asked me. “How did you get here? I don’t understand.” His voice was very weak, almost a whisper.

“I just busted in here — and you were hanging by the neck when I opened the door. I barely got here in time.”

He rubbed his neck some more. “Hanging? A couple of them came in and slugged me — “

I interrupted him. “Look, just a minute ago you let out some pretty good yells. If anybody heard you — “

This time he interrupted me. “This room isn’t completely soundproof, but it’s close … probably it’s the one used for the really violent and loud cases. When the door’s closed you can hardly hear anything from outside.”

I couldn’t get over the change in Todhunter. It was almost beyond belief. I said to him, “How did you recognize me just now?”

“I know your face well. Been in the newspapers many times — and you’re an investigator for the lobbying committee, too. Why, I put your name under the flap of an envelope, in a letter … you must have got it.” He stopped suddenly, then he tapped his head. He smiled slightly. “I see. You mean how does it happen I’m not out of my head now?” His voice was getting stronger.

“Frankly, yes. Do you remember seeing or talking to me before?”

He squinted his eyes and nodded. “Very vaguely. Was it yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“I was crazy then. I thought you were going to hurt me.” He paused only long enough to note the somewhat exasperated expression on my face, then continued. “Let me explain once and for all. I am sane. I am Gordon Todhunter, and I am of sound mind and body. The men responsible for my being in here, in this — this hospital, did a perfectly fantastic thing. Twice now they have forced me to submit while they injected something into my arm. Once yesterday, and once several days ago, before I was committed to this place. I was here when I became myself again.”

“That must have been at the time of your commitment.” I paused. “You mean they doped you? Before the sanity hearing?”

“More than that, Mr. Scott. They actually made me a mentally ill person. After a few minutes, perhaps half an hour, I began feeling strange. A bit shaky … crazy. It was hard to talk normally. And then, I don’t know how much later, within an hour or two I suppose, I really went all the way.” He shook his head. “Everybody looked flat. Like pieces of paper.” Todhunter looked at me and went on with a trace of wonder in his voice, “I remember thinking that if they turned sideways they would disappear. It was the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me.”

Listening to him, I had for a moment forgotten where I was. I was extremely anxious to hear the rest of his story, but we had to get the hell out of here. I said, “Look, we’ve got to put some distance between here and us. How do you feel?”

“I’m all right.” He was still on the floor, but he unfolded long arms and legs and got to his feet. But then he staggered and threw out an arm. I had to grab his hand to steady him.

“We’d better wait a couple of minutes,” I said. “There’s a hundred and fifty yards or so that we may have to run. But a few minutes is all we can spare.”

He nodded. “Mr. Scott, I’ve been pulling myself together. But apparently I owe you my life. How did you happen to get here just in — in the neck of time, as it were?” He smiled slightly.

“A guy named Doe spilled the beans to me just before he died — of a gunshot wound. It’s a long story. He killed a friend of mine. Did you talk to anybody else yesterday, during the afternoon?”

“Yes, I did.” He frowned. “I was in much better shape than when I saw you, Mr. Scott. More normal, I mean. This chap — young fellow with black hair, nice-looking boy — popped in the door. I was trying to tell him who I was, why I was in this place, when the director came in. He’s in on all this, you know.”

“I believe it.”

“He carries a gun. Well, he pointed the gun at us and there wasn’t much we could do. He took the young chap out and locked the door again. I don’t know what happened to the boy.”

“They murdered him.”

Shock spread over his face. “Good God!” He paused. “I knew they were murderers, but…” Then he straightened up. “Mr. Scott, it’s possible they may come in to ‘discover’ my body, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. You ready to make a run for it?”

“Quite ready now.”

“Okay, I’ll — ” I stopped. I could hear a funny sound. It was a faint, but very strange noise, like muffled harmonicas, or a far-off herd of elephants with upset stomachs.

“Do you hear something?” I asked Todhunter.

He cocked his head on one side and nodded. “Yes. Odd. Don’t believe I’ve heard anything like that before. Must be making a devil of a racket to come in here like that.”

“Well,” I said, “let’s — ” and then I actually recoiled a couple feet.

There was a great crash of sound, like hell exploding. By the time I noticed that the sound had come simultaneously with the opening of the door I also noticed a guy coming through the doorway with a look on his face that must have been at least twice as surprised as the look on mine.

The guy had, undoubtedly, been all unnerved to begin with by whatever was causing all the cacophony outside, and then had expected to come in here and find the dangling corpse of an inmate who had hanged himself. Seeing not only the “corpse” alive and kicking, but another big ape leaping at him — because by this time I was leaping at him — was, naturally, enough to surprise him a good deal.

I hadn’t seen the man before, but I knew he was no friend of mine, and he must have felt the same way about me because the surprised expression on his face started going away at the same time he balled his right hand into a fist and launched it at me. I landed close to him, ducked aside to let his arm whistle by my ear, and dug my fist into his belly, the knuckles sticking out so my fist would go in deeper, into a smaller space. He bent way over fast, with the air spewing out of his lungs and making a whistling sound I beard even over the wild noise all around us.

He wasn’t out completely, just out of commission, and I stopped paying attention to him for a minute because I saw another guy behind him. It was the pale-faced guy from behind the counter in the main corridor, but as I started for him he whirled around and took off like a deer.

I swung back into the room just in time to see Todhunter standing close by the guy I’d socked in the stomach. The guy was still bent over, barely starting to straighten up. Todhunter had a look in his eyes that I could only call the light of battle. A tight grin cut a straight line across his angular face and he had his right hand hauled about a yard back behind him. As I looked, he launched his fist from way back there and brought it down and under and up like a hunk of lead on the end of a rope. The hunk of fist smacked into the guy’s face and he straightened all the way up. He did even better than that. He kept on going back like an acrobat, and his head hit the floor before he crumpled completely like a rag doll minus half its stuffing.

Todhunter straightened up and his eyes flicked to the open door, then to me. That tight grin was on his face still, and he actually looked as if he were enjoying himself. He looked like a magnificent savage for a second, and in that moment I felt a warm liking for the man jump up in me, and I thought that he must have given somebody a lot of hell before they got him into this place.

I jerked my head toward the door and he nodded as I spun around and ran out. Finally there was a brief moment for me to figure out where all the noise was coming from. Hell, then it was obvious — that was the sound of people honking. It was automobile horns. It was people blowing their horns and tops.

For the first time in quite a while I had time to think about that detour sign I’d put on Eucalyptus. Then I’d acted on impulse, “in haste, grabbing at any idea that might offer a later advantage. I hadn’t stopped to consider the staggering number of cars that would pass a given spot on Eucalyptus in a quarter of an hour. And the bars would have been closing at two a.m. A lot of people in the cars now adding their blasts to the unmusical symphony threatening to split my eardrums, would be drunks, half-drunks, and people who wished they were drunk or half-drunk.

I was jumping toward the door I’d come through earlier, Todhunter right behind me, when the door opened and Director Beecham was framed in it. He had a big gun in his hand, and a stunned look on his face, as if he’d just run bravely outside to shoot the invaders from Pluto, only to find mere Fords, Buicks, and Chevrolets.

He looked bewildered and confused, and I might have been able to sympathize with him except for the fact that he raised the gun and aimed it at me — and it was obvious that he meant to shoot me in several places.

</code>

<code> Chapter Twelve

Todhunter’s feet slapped against the corridor and he skidded to a stop beside me. Beecham swung the gun to cover Todhunter and his jaw sagged lower and lower. Even in his condition Beecham’s movements were slow, and I imagined that his voice, if we could hear it, would pour slowly over us like syrup or honey, “Stick … ‘em … up … or … I’ll … I’ll … shoot…” He was obviously heading for a state of shock, but it was also obvious that he meant to shoot us just as soon as he recovered his wits. My gun was still in its shoulder clip, and I couldn’t get it out now without taking a chance on Todhunter’s getting shot — or getting a couple more holes in my own head.

As Beecham had come in from outside, he’d left the door standing open and beyond him I could see some of the pandemonium. At first all I noticed was cars’ headlights, pointing every way but up. The farther out my eye reached, the wider became the field of vision, and all told I could see about fifty cars. They were aimed north, south, east, west, and most of the compass points in between. They were pretty well jammed up. I saw two guys who had just gotten out of their cars start socking each other.

I took all this in — Beecham, the open door, cars and lights and two guys socking each other — in half a second. Then I saw Beecham’s gun wavering back toward me and I yelled at the top of my lungs that soon there would be about nine hundred people here asking what the hell — and if there were a couple corpses lying in his hallway he would be stuck for an answer.

My voice didn’t cut through the noise like light through darkness, but it reached him, and I almost felt sorry for poor Beecham. He wanted so much to shoot us; but he knew, too, that there was truth in my shouts. And I could almost tell from the pained, woebegone expression on his face that he had realized he couldn’t even shoot us and haul our bodies away from here, because the place was truly surrounded; we were hemmed in by sedans and coupes and panel trucks.

I yelled across about ten feet at him, “Beecham, we’re going out!” He looked from me to Todhunter, and I chose that moment to reach up and yank out my .38. When Beecham saw the gun in my hand, pointed at him, he just let his arm fall slowly to his side, the gun hanging almost forgotten in his fingers and pointing toward the floor.

Todhunter was already sprinting toward the door — at least I thought he was headed out. But he paused briefly to let go another of those looping blows with everything he had behind it, and his fist must surely have broken Beecham’s jaw the way it slithered around on his face before he sailed backward and landed on his fanny, out completely.

Todhunter jumped past him and through the open door. I raced after him. The horn-blowing seemed even worse now, and inside this building a number of the inmates in ordinary, not soundproofed, rooms were adding their bit to the bedlam. I ran through the door and turned left to see that Todhunter, despite his desire to get the hell away from here, had stopped and was gazing about him. That was understandable. There had never been a visiting day like this night at Ravenswood.

I guess there were countless cars in sight, and more were out of our line of vision, on the other side of the hospital building. I dreaded to think how many were on the narrow road leading from Eucalyptus up here. The first cars that had taken the new “detour” might have been able to circle the hospital and get back down the road past my Cad to Eucalyptus again; but that happy state of affairs couldn’t have lasted long. Soon the inevitable must have happened: the slow-moving mass of cars reaching the hospital, circling it, meeting other cars coming up, going around in circles, backing up and going forward with more, and more, coming from Eucalyptus all the time.

I slapped Todhunter on the shoulder as I raced by him. There were open spaces between the cars and I ran through them like a broken-field runner until I was almost at the Y where the road joined itself. There the cars were jammed so close that I had to slow to a walk and even step on a couple of bumpers to get through. About then I realized I was still hanging onto the .38, and I put it away, but not before I’d been given plenty of startled glances.

A couple of times I glanced around, but Todhunter was right behind me. Once he shook his head and gave me a wide grin, pointing to his ear, and then toward me. I assumed he was asking by sign language if I’d maybe had something to do with this unprecedented conglomeration of traffic here at Land’s End. I nodded and he threw back his head; I heard his laugh even over the honking.

When we reached my Cadillac I thought for a moment that we’d just have to leave it there and walk. Cars were still streaming up toward us from Eucalyptus, but there were still about fifty feet behind my buggy that weren’t jammed nearly solid. It was a good thing I’d parked with the car aimed back toward town, and quite a distance from the fork in the road near the hospital, because it looked as if we could still manage to get out of here. A few more minutes, though, and the pile-up of cars would have reached down the dirt road to this point, and we’d have been stuck for sure.

As it was, we didn’t have much trouble. I had to go partly off the road a few times, and almost got stuck once, but we were facing Eucalyptus and the real mess was behind us. As we got nicely under way down the dirt road, though, the noise behind us receded and I was able to breathe easily for the first time in quite a while.

Then I swung into Eucalyptus and stopped, jumped out of the car and grabbed the detour sign that was still in the road. I tossed it into the back seat of the car and got the hell out of there before somebody shot me.

Todhunter said, “That was your idea then.”

“Yes and no. I thought the detour might bring some help up there, but that mess wasn’t my idea.”

He said, “I assumed you had something to do with it. Your arrival simultaneously with the unprecedented occurrence could hardly have been an accident. You must have planned this all rather carefully.”

“I didn’t plan it at all. Frankly, if I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

He said soberly, “It’s well you did, Mr. Scott. There is no doubt in my mind that we’d both be dead now if it hadn’t been for the superabundance of witnesses.”

“I suppose so.” I stopped talking, my mind. turning to another problem. Then I said, “Mr. Todhunter, I didn’t even think beyond the point of seeing you at Ravenswood — dead or alive. And maybe talking to you. So we’d better figure out where you want to go.”

“A hotel, I dare say,” he said. “Register under an assumed name. I don’t want to wind up in a mental hospital again, or hanging.” He paused. “Incidentally, my name is Gordon. It sounds strange to hear you calling me Todhunter — when you’ve just saved my life. I certainly picked the right man when I put that note to you-on the envelope I wrote to my daughter. How is she?”

“Toddy? She’s all right. We’ll see her soon.”

“Fine, fine.” He smiled at me. “Toddy … is that what you call her?”

“Yes. Isn’t that her name?”

“A nickname. I’ve always called her Barbara.” He sighed. “I couldn’t even be sure she would notice the little note I scribbled — or if it would be legible. I never had a chance to read it. But that was the only chance I had.”

I swung off Eucalyptus and headed back toward downtown L.A. “How’d you manage to get it out?”

“I talked to Doctor Beecham. Told him it would be more sensible — from his point of view — to let me send the letter. He could read it, even tell me largely what to say if he wanted, to be sure I wasn’t sending some sort of message in code. Told him otherwise Barbara would be down on the hospital like a ton of bricks. I convinced him that my only concern was to ease my daughter’s mind.”

“She said she’d been traveling, just got back the day she found your letter in the box.”

He nodded. “Beecham, of course, didn’t know that. I expected her home. Didn’t know just when she’d arrive. Anyway, I convinced Beecham it was the wisest course to allow me to send my daughter an innocuous letter, telling her to stay away. Wrote it right in front of him.” He smiled. “I can still marshal a good argument. I’m an attorney, you know — that is, I was. Corporation lawyer. Good one, too. Retired now.”

“Uh-huh.”

Todhunter suddenly slapped his thigh. “Do you know,” he said briskly, “that you just earned ten thousand dollars?”

That surprised me. I said truthfully, “I’d completely forgotten about that. It was in your note, under the flap — “

“Yes,” he interrupted me. “I put it down, but wasn’t sure it was legible. Well, you’ve certainly earned it.”

“There’s still about twenty questions unanswered, Mr. Tod — Gordon.”

“I’ll answer all I can. But some of the questions you probably want to ask puzzle me, too.”

We were approaching the business district of Los Angeles and we let the explanations wait until I’d found a small hotel, the Preston, on Twelfth Street. Todhunter checked in as Mr. Elbert Jacobs and when we got settled in a room I said to him, “Well, Gordon, you want to start at the beginning?”

“Probably the best way.” He paused. “You know, I can’t get over it even yet. An hour ago I was hanging by the neck. I was the same as dead. And here I am…” He shook his head. “I don’t feel like playing handball, but I’m alive, talking.”

“I’m mighty curious about what information you have. And how you knew somebody was going to try to kill me.”

He leaned back in the chair, laced both hands around one knee and said, “I got into this by accident, and I don’t know to this day just what it was I got into. It was the night of Stone’s murder — out at the Melody Club.”

“George Stone?”

“Yes. I overheard two men talking about it — mind you, this was before it was in the newspapers. The following morning all the papers were full of it, but it wasn’t common knowledge then. I was in the Ascot Building, on Wilshire. I’d been talking to my tax man, a CPA there, left his office and went down the hall to the men’s room. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the building, but there are two rooms composing the restroom, and in the second one there’s a little alcove in the corner with a wash basin. Unless you know it’s there, sometimes you can look right at it and the room appears to be empty. I’m not making this very clear — “

“Clear enough.”

“At any rate, what is important, is that I was in that alcove and quite obviously the two men, who came in and looked around, thought they were alone. It would have seemed a good, safe place to talk, undoubtedly.” He paused. “I say, Mr. Scott — “

“Shell.”

“Shell, then. I … well, I mentioned it earlier, but I am rather anxious to see my daughter. Talk to her at least and let her know I’m all right.”

“Of course. Forgive me, I wasn’t even thinking.” I went to the phone, got put through to the Biltmore.

In a few seconds, Toddy’s delightful, but sleepy, voice was at the other end of the line. “Toddy,” I said, “this is Shell.”

“What do you want?”

“You’re not still angry, are you? I didn’t think you were the type to carry a grudge — “

“If that’s the only reason you called — “

I was afraid she meant to hang up and I said quickly, “It isn’t. Would you like to talk to your father?”

“What kind of a joke is this, Shell?”

“No joke.” I waved Todhunter over.

He took the phone, smiling. “Barbara?”

He listened, then laughed. “Yes, dear,” he said. “Mr. Scott — yes, Shell. He surrounded Ravenswood with a fleet of automobiles, and then got in somehow … What? Yes, I know it sounds crazy … they were hanging me. I mean, I was hanging. Practically dead — no, there’s nothing wrong with me. Yes, it really happened. Yes … yes … all right.” He gave her the hotel’s address and room number.

Then he turned to me. “She’s coming right over. She was afraid that being at Ravenswood for so long had done something to my mind. Then she was afraid that my being with you had done something to my mind. Oh, yes, she said she forgives you. For whatever she had to forgive.” The last part was almost a question.

I just let it die there. It would have served no useful purpose to tell him why his daughter had become somewhat miffed with me. Instead I said, “How about those two men?”

“Oh, yes. Well, I don’t recall their exact words, particularly after the events of these last several days. But one of them said Stone was taken care of. The other one — he seemed to be the more important of the two — asked if he was sure Stone was dead. The first man nodded — I was by then watching their reflections in the mirror.”

“I see.”

“Then the second man, the bigger one, said something to the effect that that was good, but that it looked as if he’d have to take care of Shell Scott, too — and would have to be more careful with Scott. That Scott’s death should look like an accident or there’d be — be a stink, I think he said. That’s it, roughly.”

“You got a good look at the men, then.”

“At one of them, the shorter of the two. I got only a glimpse of the big man, but I’d recognize him if I saw him again. And I’d know his voice. But right then the short one turned and saw me in the mirror. He swore and jumped for me. I … well, I’ve kept myself in rather good condition, and I hit him quite hard.”

I had a pretty good picture of what Todhunter meant, having twice seen him deliver the blow which, if often repeated, could become famous.

He went on, “The bigger chap immediately went out at a run. The one I’d knocked down was still conscious, and he pulled a gun. I didn’t wait around to argue any more with him. This all happened very fast anyway, and I ran out, got into the elevator alone and left the building. That’s really all that happened.” He paused. “The next day, of course, I saw the newspapers. There was a good deal about Stone’s connection with the mess you people were investigating — I’d followed the San Francisco hearings. So I immediately wrote you, saying that I knew who had killed Stone and so on.”

I started getting a little confused again. “Yeah. That part’s been bothering me plenty. That next day was the day all this hit the newspapers? About Stone’s murder?”

“Yes. I can only assume that one of the two men recognized me. I’m not completely unknown, especially among attorneys. At any rate, shortly after I’d mailed the letter — that very evening in fact — that same chap came to my house and held a gun on me, forced me to go with him. I don’t recall much after that. I was unconscious or drugged — or crazy — from then until I woke up in the hospital.”

“That’s all you know about whoever was responsible for your commitment to Ravenswood?”

“That’s all.”

“You say the same guy came to your house that night, after you overheard the two of them talking. Which one was it that showed up?”

“The same chap I’d knocked down in the restroom — the one with two fingers missing.”

I suppose I should have expected something like that, but it socked me a pretty good wallop anyway. And now a few things began getting more clear. I said, “Two fingers gone from his left hand?” Todhunter nodded, and kept nodding as I described Doe, the man I’d killed earlier.

But during all the time since I’d first heard Todhunter speak, after I’d brought him around earlier, one thing had been bothering me plenty — those goofy letters to the committee. They’d been brushed over in the conversation, and they were the item that had most puzzled me so far.

I said, “Gordon, there’s one other thing of some importance. Now that I’ve talked to you, been with you a while, I know you’re sane, completely normal. That is, I know you wouldn’t do anything without good reason. So why in hell did you write those crazy letters at all?”

He swung his head toward me, frowning. “Letters? What do you mean?”

“Those three goofy letters, I’ll-destroy-you-all and so on. It was like asking to be put away.”

He kept frowning. Slowly he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I wrote only one letter.”

I stared at him, and I imagine my mouth was hanging open.

And then it was as though a bunch of white rockets went off in my head. Talk about seeing light — I thought for a minute that I knew the answer to everything. But then I calmed down a bit, still charged up and feeling good but knowing I had to get more info. But once I got it, maybe I’d have the answer to who killed Stone and why, plus who was after me, and several other items wrapped up and ready for delivery not only to the police, but also to the committee.

Todhunter was on his feet, looking down at me with his eyes wide. “Three letters? What are you talking about?”

I told him.

He stood motionless for quite a while, then he swore. “What a fiendish, diabolical…” He stopped and looked at me, and then a small smile appeared on his face. “But it is rather good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I still don’t understand how, but it’s obvious what happened.”

“And by God,” he said, “that would certainly make it appear I was crazy.”

“It did. You should have seen the letters. Wish I could remember the exact wording, but take my word for it, you were pretty fanatical.”

I thought about it. The only letter Todhunter had actually written the committee was of course, the one I thought of as the second letter. It had said the writer knew who the killer of George Stone was, and so on — the same stuff Todhunter had finished telling me about. The first and third letters, it was obvious now, were forgeries. And that one letter which Todhunter had actually written wasn’t really crazy when considered all by itself. Only when read in conjunction with the others, which were obviously the work of a crackpot, did it also seem like a crackpot’s job. That much seemed clear now, but the reason for it still had me puzzled.

I thought a minute. “You say this guy with two fingers missing — Doe, I knew him as — grabbed onto you the same night you mailed the letter.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously, then, that was before the letter could have been delivered.”

“Of course.”

“Well…” I was puzzled. “Did you tell this guy who grabbed you that you’d written the committee or written me?”

He stared at me. “Why?”

“It might be important.”

He looked confused himself. “Frankly, I’m not sure. I don’t believe so. But as I mentioned before, my recollections after that are very blurred. I might have told him — I was drugged part of the time. Men who would make a man insane, commit him to a mental institution … well, they’d do anything.”

“Agreed. And you don’t know who else was in on this deal except Doe?”

“No. I have no idea.”

I lit a cigarette. “How did you happen to put that note to me on the letter to your daughter?”

“I had already written you as a member of the committee, Shell, and felt sure you would be interested in my predicament. Particularly since I had information about the murder of Stone, which I felt sure you’d be anxious to get.”

“And ordinarily I would have been,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not knowing about those other letters — or that you already thought I was crazy — I naturally felt that you would be the logical man to help me. Besides — ” he grinned at me — “you mustn’t underestimate your reputation. You are known as a man who gets things done, even if your methods are sometimes unorthodox.”

“Speaking of unorthodox methods, that squirt-in-the-arm routine isn’t anything I ever heard of.”

“I wish I’d never heard of it. I hope there isn’t any aftereffect.” He smiled. “As there was with Dr. Jekyll.”

The French phone was on a table by the divan. I walked over to it, sat on the divan and picked up the phone. “Maybe I can find out. I’d hate to have that thought simmering in my head.”

I called the Spartan Apartment Hotel. Two doors from my second-floor apartment lives Dr. Paul Anson. He’s somewhat of a rake, but a competent medical man who keeps well up to date on the literature.

He was awake, and when I told him who was calling he said, “Well, how much is bail?”

“What?”

“Aren’t you in the can?”

“Hell, no. Why should I be in jail?”

“Cops called here, even called me trying to find you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Something about re-routing traffic — “

“Oh, that.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, that?’ I hear the local police, Highway Patrol, Mental Health Authorities, and half the population of L.A. and Cucamonga are after you. What in the name of grief did you do?”

“I stole a detour sign.”

“Sergeant Simmons told me at least fifty people phoned in your license number. Something about blocking a road and running around a hospital with a gun. I guess several people recognized you, and — “

“I’ll tell you all about it later. But, Paul, here’s why I called. What might a man be injected with that would make him seem, both to himself and others, goofy?”

“Found out what’s wrong with you, eh?”

“I’m serious, Paul.”

“Okay. Several chemicals from a class we call indoles cause the subject to make like schizos.”

“Schizophrenia? That fits.”

“Uh-huh. There’re several, including mescaline — even Huxley tried that one out and did a piece on it, remember?”

“No.”

“Oh, you illiterate. Several doctors and psychiatrists have taken doses of these chemicals for the specific reasons that they wanted to feel like a schizophrenic for a few hours. You know, have a better understanding of the patients afterward.”

“Yeah. About these gooks; I know a man who was actually given some of the stuff. Would there be any aftereffect? Maybe a kind of relapse?”

“No reaction at all that I know of. Not once the stuff wears off, after several hours.” “Okay. Thanks, Paul.”

“Main thing, Shell, is the possibility that if these little bits of chemicals can briefly produce mental illness, they — or some similar chemical imbalance in the otherwise normal body might be the cause of mental illness. See? That would mean the only difference between a so-called insane person and a sane one is a chemical difference. Just last year — “

I had to cut him off. Once he gets started, he’s hard to stop. I’d passed on the info to Todhunter when we heard the rapid patter of feet in the hallway, then a quick, light knock on the door. I went to the door and opened it. Toddy, looking inexpressibly lovely, stood in the hallway.

“Hi.” I said.

She didn’t even look at me. I suppose I could hardly blame her, but I felt just a bit put out, to tell the truth. She looked past me, then rushed clear across the room to fling her arms about Todhunter.

Ah, but my time was coming. In a moment she swung around and said, “Shell, you dear, you. How can I ever thank you enough?”

I knew a way.

She added, “You’ll have to excuse us. It’s been almost a year since I’ve seen Dad, you know.”

“Sure. I’ve got some things to do right now, anyway. Why don’t you two just stick here till I get back?”

Todhunter said, “Must you go? Don’t feel that just because Barbara is — “

“No,” I interrupted. “This is business. For Pete’s sake don’t budge out of here, okay?”

“All right.”

Toddy left him and walked over from the far side of the room to me, and took my hands. She walked around me, turning me so that my back was to Todhunter, and she was hidden from him by my body. Then she looked up at me, pursed her lips and blew me an imaginary kiss, with her brown eyes half-closed. “You’re quite a guy, Shell,” she said. “And I’ve completely forgotten I was ever angry with you.”

I looked around at Todhunter, who was practically alongside me, thinking that even though he must know his daughter was a big girl, he might not relish what I was about to do if that big girl didn’t turn off some of the juice. He had a rather interested look on his face anyway, and I figured it was time I got a little more distance between Toddy and me, at least while three was a crowd.

I pulled my hands from Toddy’s, put a hand on the door and said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Stay put, huh?” Both of them nodded and I took off.

As I left the hotel and started walking down the street toward my Cad I heard the engine of a car running and looked toward the curb where a new, dark Packard was parked. The lights were out and the car was empty, but the engine was running and the sound jarred me momentarily. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but then I remembered it had been a sound much like that which had helped to warn me of trouble on the night when Doe had let go a couple blasts at me with that shotgun.

So I shrugged off the momentarily creepy feeling. Undoubtedly, I thought, it was Toddy’s car. She would naturally have been in a hurry to get up to the hotel room and see us. Or, I amended, see her father. But she’d been friendly and warm enough during those last few moments.

In my car again, I headed for the Civic Building. I felt a little leery of being in the Cad, since its license number was by now most likely known to all law-enforcement officers in the seven Western states, but I was in a hurry. As I drove, I put into order again the things that Todhunter had told me, and tried to figure out what they meant.

He had overheard Doe and — call him Smith for now, I thought — talking about Stone’s murder, and the probability of knocking me off by “accident.” He had then written a letter about his being able to identify Stone’s murderer, and sent it to me in care of the committee. I had shown the letter to Senator Wise, who had, after reading it and looking at the signature, gone to the files and pulled out a previous letter supposedly from Gordon Todhunter.

I knew now that both it and the third letter, the one delivered to Beasley, had been forged so that the real letter would appear crazy, and the charges baseless. That meant the charges themselves must have been dangerous to somebody.

It meant, too, that the previous letter couldn’t have been in the committee’s files for two weeks, since it was forged after the writing of the real letter.

For a moment something leaped and flickered in my mind, but then I lost part of it. I was trying to remember exactly what Todhunter had said in that second letter. It seemed there was something about investigating ourselves, to find the guilty persons. I couldn’t pin it down and I wondered why Todhunter and I hadn’t discussed it already.

But I put that aside and looked again at what my deductions about Todhunter’s single letter had told me. And there it was.

The other fellow Todhunter had overheard talking to Doe in the restroom must have been Senator Sebastian Wise.

It had been Wise who, after reading the letter I’d received from Todhunter, had gone to the files and taken out that first letter. He had told me it had been in the files for a couple weeks or so. He had lied.

And once I got over my shock and really examined that thought; it explained everything. First of all, even though Todhunter had said he didn’t remember for sure, he must have told Doe — or Wise, or another of those in on his commitment — about sending me the letter. That would have given Wise time that night to forge, or have forged, a fake letter, much crazier in tone than the real one, and have it ready in the files to show to me when Todhunter’s valid letter arrived.

And now, I remembered that when that letter arrived and I read it Wise had been in my office, had in fact been waiting there for some time. The conclusion obviously was that he had known the letter was going to be delivered, and made sure he was present so that he could “remember” the odd name, Todhunter, and dig the faked letter out of the files.

When I pictured Todhunter in that restroom listening to a conversation — not between “a man with two fingers missing” and another man — but between Doe and Sebastian Wise, then the whole operation could be explained.

Once anyone had seen Todhunter’s letter, killing Todhunter would only serve to prove his charges — something that Wise could hardly afford. And if he had been seen by Todhunter in that restroom, it made no difference whether Todhunter knew who he was or not; once Todhunter appeared before the committee he would recognize Wise as the other man involved in Stone’s murder.

Since Wise couldn’t afford to kill Todhunter, he had to discredit the man, discredit his word, everything about him. And only now did I appreciate the cleverness of what he had done. Besides forging two letters which would appear to have been written by Todhunter before and after the real one, making all of them appear the work of a deranged mind — he had simply deranged the mind of the man himself. After that, it was Ravenswood for Gordon Todhunter, who would conveniently commit suicide.

I parked at the Civic Building and went up the steps. It was now nearly four in the morning, but I knew the night watchman would let me in. I had a key to my office, and to the file room, because on occasion I had worked late here. I felt that I had just about everything figured out as it must have happened, but there were some things that still puzzled me, things that I couldn’t explain. And I wanted to look at all three Todhunter letters again.

Twenty minutes later I’d practically torn the files apart, but I found none of the three letters. Well, that made sense. Wise certainly wouldn’t want them in the files. If Todhunter had hanged a few minutes longer, and that shotgun blast or earlier try had got me, then all Wise’s troubles would have been over.

But now they were just beginning — if I could find him.

I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t at his home. I phoned Lester Beasley, Andrew Carter, and Paula, without turning up any lead to where Wise might be.

Finally, while I was at a phone, I put in a call to the Preston Hotel, for Mr. Elbert Jacobs’s room. I wanted to describe Wise to Todhunter and ask him if that was the description of the man he’d seen talking to Doe.

There wasn’t any answer from Todhunter’s phone.

I wondered if perhaps I’d got the name he’d registered under wrong, and asked the clerk for Room 212. There was still no answer. Then I remembered that dark Packard, empty and with its engine running. I ran to my car.

Five minutes later I was racing up the stairs of the Preston Hotel. I didn’t even knock at the door of 212, just twisted the knob and shoved the door open. I didn’t see Todhunter or Toddy, and I went inside, looked around. Then I stood in the middle of the room, my mind momentarily blank.

There wasn’t any sign of a struggle. No chairs tipped over, no blood, nothing. The room was just empty.

I stood in the middle of the room breathing through my mouth, trying to fight down the cold fear swelling up in me, but helpless to stop it. Because now it wasn’t just Todhunter. Now it was Toddy, too. Soft, lovely, sweet, wonderful Toddy. And the thought of Toddy gone sent a kind of cold horror into my blood so that it seemed to touch every cell in me, chilling my heart, and my skin, and my brain.

Finally I went out of the room and slowly down the stairs.

</code>

<code> Chapter Thirteen

I wondered if Toddy and Todhunter might simply have walked out, gone someplace else. But that idea didn’t make sense, and they’d said they’d stay put until I got back. I was afraid that Wise, or men acting on Wise’s orders, had got to them. But for a minute I couldn’t imagine how. I knew that nobody could have followed me from Ravenswood, that no one could have know the Elbert Jacobs in the Preston Hotel was Gordon Todhunter. And then, of course, it finally penetrated. It was simple; I was simple.

I’d been concentrating my thought upon Todhunter; but anybody wanting to kill him, or find him, after his escape from Ravenswood, would undoubtedly have kept an eye on the man’s daughter, if they knew where she was. And they might have known. She could even have been found by somebody tailing me to her hotel. The important point was that she had been at the Biltmore, and might easily have been followed from there tonight — after I had phoned and asked her to come over. Again I remembered that car, with its engine running.

I swore. But there wasn’t time for regret about what was already done; I had to find them somehow, before it was too late. I could feel a kind of panic welling up in me as I thought of Toddy, but I pushed it down, forced my mind away from it. I wouldn’t get anything done if I let my mind dwell on what might now be happening.

I had already tried without success to find Wise. He wasn’t at his usual address, and neither Paula nor the committee members knew where he might be. I stopped at the desk on my way out. The clerk drowsily said he didn’t know if anybody had left or come in. He didn’t know anything about anything. But I noticed that the box for the key to 212 was empty. At least that told me for sure they hadn’t turned in their key and just walked out. I had to find Sebastian Wise. I felt sure that if I could find, him, I’d find Todhunter and Toddy; but I didn’t have the faintest idea how or where to find the senator. I went on out to my car.

I sat there for several minutes, just thinking, and every once in a while the fear and panic would start to rise and I’d have to fight it down. Much as I disliked to think Wise had grabbed them, I would simply have to face it and proceed on the assumption that Wise certainly wouldn’t kill them until he’d made Todhunter tell him everything about why I had showed up at Ravenswood. And I had a hunch Todhunter could hold out for quite a while. And Wise might not kill Toddy at all; not at least for quite a while. So undoubtedly there was at least a little time, and all I had to do was use it right.

Then, finally, I was able to force my worry about Todhunter and Toddy almost completely out of my mind and concentrate on what had to be done. My thoughts cleared, and I went back over the days, searching for some idea that might tell me where Sebastian Wise could be now.

I went back to the night George Stone had phoned me at the Civic Building. Paula had answered the phone, said aloud that a “George Stone” was phoning me. Wise — who it now seemed certain was the Mr. Big for whom Stone had been working — would have heard that. And he’d have known who Stone was and what Stone’s call to me meant. Stone must have thought he was talking to me in my office; he’d spoken to Hazel at the Hamilton Building, and she had merely told him that she’d have me call him back. Otherwise he’d have been much more guarded in his conversation.

Almost immediately, I recalled, Wise had left the building — even before I had taken off for the Melody Club. He must have phoned Stone’s killer then, made arrangements for the kill at the Melody. But none of that told me where Wise might be now. I thought of everything he’d ever said to me; but there weren’t any leads there. It seemed quite possible that a man in Wise’s position might have a hideout or separate address other than his usual one, a place where he could relax, maybe meet with his other-than-senatorial friends.

If only I knew some of those friends.

If only, I thought, Stone were still alive. That was the man who could have told me everything. Well, his girl friend, Satin, was still around. It seemed strange that Stone could have been emotionally entwined with that gal without spilling anything of importance to her.

I went right on by it.

But somehow Satin’s name kept cropping up in my thoughts. The more I considered it, the stranger it seemed that Satin would know nothing about Stone’s work for Mr. Big. Even if Stone had never told her anything directly, she and her Martinis should have got a few items-of interest from him.

And, thinking back, I remembered that up in her apartment that day she never had told me anything about George Stone. Whenever I’d brought his name up, that first night at the Melody or since then, the subject had soon been shifted. The lovely Satin, I began to realize, was not only the one possible lead I had right now, but perhaps the best one a man could hope for.

I thought about it a moment longer. She had run around with Stone; it was possible that she knew everything that Stone had known when he was alive; if so, she’d kept it from me, avoiding my questions, even lied. She would lie again. It was theory, but the best I had. My problem was not only to ask her the right questions, but to be sure she was telling the complete truth when she answered.

And that seemed impossible.

I couldn’t twist her arm, bang her around as I might have done to a man. And even if I were to get rough with her, that wouldn’t assure her telling me the truth.

And all of a sudden my problem didn’t seem impossible. If Satin knew the answers, maybe there was a way to get straight answers from her.

I phoned Madame Astra.

By the time I reached Madame Astra’s apartment, nearly twenty minutes had passed since I’d stood in the middle of the empty room at the Preston. For just a moment that thought was in my mind, then I pushed it away for good and rang the bell. From here on in I was a man with a purpose, and that’s all I was going to think about.

Madame Astra, her eyes still heavy with sleep, nodded at me and stepped aside. I walked in.

“Did you talk to Satin — to Miss Waring?” I asked her.

“Yes, did it like you said. Told her I’d had a visitation in my sleep, and it was something I felt she should know.” She yawned. “Too bad you wouldn’t let me set up a seance — “

“I told you there wasn’t time. This has to be good enough.”

“Oh, it will be, if I know that girl. Anyway, I told her I’d seen an image of this big, ugly blond man — those are your words, remember.”

“Yeah. You didn’t name me, though.”

“No. Said the man was lying very still. He’d been shot in the forehead. I got the picture across that you were dead.”

“Fine. How about her sins catching up, and so on?”

“Oh, sure. I said it was revealed to me she’d been partly responsible for the murder of that poor man I’d seen lying there, and now her sins would catch up with her: Though her plans had borne fruit, now she must pay. Did it real good, I thought.”

“Fine, Madame Astra. Exactly what I wanted — what is your name anyway?”

“Mrs. O’Mahoney.”

“My thanks, Mrs. O’Mahoney. You got the other stuff ready?”

“Yeah. There was something said on the phone about a hundred dollars. Plus deposit on the stuff.”

“Oh, yes.” I smiled at her and gave her the hundred and ninety dollars. “I’m ten short, but I kept a dollar for myself, and the bank is closed. I’ll owe it to you. Okay?”

“That’s all right. It’s just deposit. Come on.” She led me into the seance room and then to the room next to it and flicked on the overhead lights.

On the walls hung about twenty masks that seemed oddly painted, plus strips of veiling, cotton, gauze, and colored cloth. On the floor and upon a couple tables were several items which could serve no imaginable purpose that I could guess, plus a variety of lamps.

She waved a hand casually. “A little of everything, Mr. Scott. This’ll give you an idea.” She turned out the overhead lights and then pressed another switch which, she told me in advance, would flood the room with ultraviolet light.

I almost went blind. On purpose.

I do not believe in any kind of ghosts to begin with, and I was prepared by Madame Astra’s words, but never had I so suddenly seen a more ghastly and stomach-curdling vista of impossibilities. There were faces that were almost human except that they glowed wierdly in a variety of colors, seemed to move, to swell and fade; and there were masklike faces, chalky but insubstantial; and things like screaming horror silenced and frozen; there were wraithlike bodies, dismembered limbs, headless bodies and bodiless heads and apparently bodiless bodies. The place looked like Halloween in hell — and then Madame Astra turned on the regular lights.

“We do get some pretty good effects,” she said smiling.

I was scrunched back against the wall like a man trying to push his way through it, because that is just what I had been trying to do. “Not bad,” I said. “Not bad at all.”

While I recovered, Madame Astra explained that, by the use of fluorescent powders and paints which are either invisible or normally colored in ordinary light but brightly colored and glowing in ultraviolet light, some decidedly peculiar and interesting and even creepy effects could be produced. I agreed with her, and I began feeling sorry for Satin. And while I actually hated to think that Satin had been in as deeply as Stone, and was perhaps now allied with Sebastian Wise, I was beginning to hope it was true.

Because to do to an innocent girl what I planned to do to Satin would be as large a tragedy as Samson’s getting bald. But I reminded myself right then that I was a man with a purpose.

“You’ll probably have to give me a hand,” I said.

“Oh, I meant to. What colors do you want?”

I chose them while they were glowing under the ultraviolet light, because that was the only way I could be sure of the effect they would produce. Madame Astra did the job of make-up. I had my face done mostly in blue, but with touches of green and a bit of nauseous yellow. She used fluorescent theatrical make-up, artists’ oil paints, as well as some powders and poster paint, and as a final fillip, put a round black non-glowing spot in the middle of my forehead, just off center, with bright red “blood” streaming down from it between my silvery-glowing eyebrows.

It was a fast job, and when it was all done we splashed various powders over my clothes, and then she led me to a mirror. I had not yet seen myself in the ultraviolet glow, so she told me to prepare myself. It was well that I did. She flashed on the light and my face seemed to catch fire and wave at me. It glowed, it wavered, it fluoresced, it did everything except snap, crackle, and pop. Under the black light, that horrible face was still the face of Shell Scott, but it was a decomposed Shell Scott. It was definitely out of this world. Well, that was what I’d wanted.

With the regular lights on again, I still looked horrible, but not glowingly and compoundedly horrible. Madame Astra said, “You’d better take this big lamp. Biggest portable I’ve got. But you’d better stay within six or eight feet of it if you can, for the best effect.”

I was beginning to feel a few qualms. “You don’t suppose the shock will kill her, do you?”

She seemed to consider it, lips pursed and brows knit. “Don’t think so,” she said. “She’s seen lots of the departed returned. Nobody very close to her, of course. And nobody like you, that’s certain.”

“I’m pretty good, huh?”

“Mister, you’re the best I’ve seen, and I’ve been in this racket for twenty-two years.”

That was good enough for me. I picked up the portable lamp and went out. There wasn’t much time left. In less than half an hour the sun would be coming up. I had to finish this bit while there was darkness. Madame Astra had told Satin that she must rest on what remained of this night, and advised her to take a couple of sleeping pills. But whether Satin had gone along with the suggestion I couldn’t know. The main thing was that she did not see me sneaking in or putting the lamp in place on the floor.

I had been so engrossed in the preparations for this that I had forgotten I’d have to traverse several blocks between Madame Astra’s and the Gentry, and get past the desk in the Gentry, made up as I was. But I figured I’d just plunge on ahead and trust to luck. I reached the Gentry without incident, parked the car and looked up and down the sidewalk. Nobody was in sight.

I scuttled across the sidewalk to the Gentry’s side door, bent over and holding the portable lamp in both hands. I knew I’d play hell explaining if the police caught up with me now. But I seemed to be having incredible luck, and it continued inside the apartment hotel. At the desk, a lone clerk dozed, head down on his chest. An open elevator was across the lobby. I reached it and pressed the button for Satin’s floor.

The door closed, the elevator started up. I breathed more easily. There was a dim light in the elevator, and I figured this would be a good spot to test the portable light, make sure all was in working order. The big bulb was aimed up toward my head and I found the switch and turned it on and off a couple of times. The black light itself wasn’t in the visible range, but I could tell the light was working by the way the powders on my coat glowed. I turned the light off.

The elevator reached my floor and I took a step forward as the door slid open. Then I stopped. As I raised my head I noticed that a middle-aged woman was just about to step into the elevator. She started to smile at me, in that meaningless way people will smile when they are looking at you in an elevator.

It was a fiendish impulse. That’s my only excuse for what I did. I could pretend that I wanted to be sure my getup and the light produced a good strong effect. I could say my finger slipped. But that wouldn’t be true; it was just an impulse, some dirty bird whispering in my ear. But whatever it was, I did it.

I pulled the portable lamp even higher so that I would really light up magnificently, and then I flicked on the light and grinned. I grinned widely; I waggled my eyebrows; through clenched teeth I said, “Oooo-oo-o-o-o.”

In the first instant I knew I shouldn’t have done it. But then it was too late. The lady who had started to smile so fatuously and emptily at me was still smiling, but this was not an empty smile. This smile was so full that possibly it could never be emptied. She was a woman smiling at Dracula during the involuntary transfusion.

I did what I could. I turned the light off. But it seemed that I was doing everything too late. By that time she was on her way down. Her eyes rolled up and went blank, and around, and then out of sight, and if I hadn’t been so remorseful I might have been perplexed that so many things could happen, to only two eyes. But then she went down with a clunk and sprawled out ungracefully.

I felt for the pulse in her throat and it was still kicking along pretty well, so I just left her there. What could I do? And I had to hurry along anyway. The next one might scream before fainting and that could bring people popping out of doors and the screams would bring others running and there would be bodies strewn all around.

So I hurried to Satin’s apartment, let myself in with one of the skeleton keys, which seemed rather a nice touch, and walked through the darkness of her living room. I used my flashlight, the ordinary one, as little as possible but found Satin’s bedroom with no trouble. It was the room where she had changed that afternoon when she had set the alarm clock.

And suddenly I didn’t feel so bad about what was going to happen to Satin. Guilty or innocent, I could still hear that alarm clock ringing.

I flicked the flashlight over the bed and Satin was lying in it, half-covered by a sheet. I turned the living-room lights on then, and the glow coming through the bedroom door was just enough so I could see her fairly well. The light would be behind me, and if anything, would help, rather than detract from my appearance.

She was on her side, facing away from me, and it took me only seconds to walk easily across the room and place the big ultraviolet lamp on the floor beside her bed, then flick it on and step back. I was glowing good, I could tell. A phosphorescent glow flowed from my cheekbones and all around my eyes.

In a flat, dull, hollow voice I said, “Satin. Oh, Satin.”

She moved slightly, rolled over onto her back.

“Satin … I have come.”

She sort of smacked her lips together, then slowly opened her eyes. She looked at me, blinked a couple times at this ghostly, ghastly apparition beside her bed, and shook her head. Naturally there couldn’t be anything like this in her bedroom. She closed her eyes and started to roll back on her side. But suddenly she got rigid. Her body straightened out under the sheet with a snap. For perhaps fifteen long seconds she was like that, only her head moving, going back and forth while she said over and over again, “No-no-no-no.”

“Satin,” I cooed softly. “It is I. I have returned. I, Shell Scott.”

It seemed very strange to watch her do it, but her head continued to go back and forth while she turned it toward me and said, “No-no-no.” But then she got both eyes on me squarely at the same time. She got a good look at me, and that did it.

She screamed at the top of her lungs and leaped about nine feet into the air.

</code>

<code> Chapter Fourteen

Satin landed and bounced and grabbed the sheet and pulled it up in front of her, and it appeared she was going to scream again. So I held one hand toward her and said in sepulchral tones, “Silence.”

She froze again. In the faint light I could see her eyes opened wide, but her mouth was not open like that other woman’s had been. Satin’s was pressed tight shut, teeth jammed together, and the corners of her mouth pulled down.

“Satin,” I said, speaking in my lowest tone and drawing out each word, “I will not harm you. But you must speak the truth.”

Softly she got some noise out, “Ah, yes. Yes. I … will.”

“But,” I went on, “if you do not speak the truth, then you must…. come … with … me!”

That got her. “No,” she cried. “I won’t go! I won’t. You wouldn’t — “

“Then speak,” I said. “Confess. Tell me all. Tell the truth, confess your sins.”

Well, I had her convinced, all right, but I had asked the wrong question. She got almost the same color as me and started telling me all sorts of things, some sins, some not so sinful, but they were not at all what I wanted. Finally I had to break in, “No. No, not that. Satin, not that.”

The babbling slowed and stopped.

“Mr. Big,” I said. “Tell me about Mr. Big.” The incongruity of my asking her this question apparently didn’t strike her.

“Mr. who?” she said.

“Big. The big guy. The boss.”

“Huh?”

I began feeling not so good. But I wouldn’t let myself believe that Satin had nothing for me. I knew that somewhere in that skull of hers must be information that would help me. I tried again.

“Tell me about George Stone.”

“George?”

“Yeah. Yes. Whom did he work for? Whom — who was his boss?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to come with me — “

“No. No, you — “

I had to silence her again. Growing more and more worried, I asked the question in a couple of other ways, then I said, “Think, Satin. Be calm. Think. George had to see his boss, the man he worked for, often. Didn’t he ever visit him with you along?”

She had lost some of her fright by now. She sat up and dangled one foot over the side of her bed. “Yes,” she said. “Now I remember. Twice.”

It gave me a charge like four fast shots of bourbon. Now we were getting there.

She went on, “It was a big place on Fern Road and I remember two armed guards — What happened?”

She looked really scared, staring at me, and I couldn’t figure for a minute what it was that had frightened her. “You … disappeared,” she said. “Part of you went away.”

Then I got it. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but when Satin had stuck her foot over the side of the bed, she’d swung it out a little way a couple of times. And it had gone in front of the ultraviolet lamp on the floor, cutting off part of its beam. I couldn’t see what it did to me, but I could imagine. That part of me not in the beam would have changed appearance drastically, even if it didn’t appear to crumble and fall off.

But I had to keep Satin going, especially now. “It was nothing,” I said. “Sit still. It happens all the time. Sit still.”

“Happens all the time? Doesn’t it hurt?”

I said, “No. Here, there is no pain. Get on with it … You were saying?”

“Oh, yes. I went with George, but he made me wait in the car. He said there were two armed guards there. I saw them at the big iron gate in front of the driveway.”

I gulped. “Armed?”

“Yes. Armed. George said that was because the big boss lived there. The one he worked for. I remember now.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sebastian Wise?”

“I don’t know. George didn’t tell me who it was. There, you did it again.”

“Sit still!” I looked at her sternly. And in my condition, that was about as stem as you can get. She sat still. Then, with horror, I noticed that the sun was coming up. I was looking out a big window that aimed dead east. The first strong rays of the sun were about to leap up and smack me in the kisser.

I said more rapidly and not so sepulchrally, “Satin, tell me all you know about what George did. His work, the people he associated with, everything.”

“He didn’t talk much about it. But he did talk a little after several highballs. Or a Martini. He listened to other people’s phones and things. He got a lot of tape recordings and records of conversations. He gave all of it to the man he worked for. Once he said a lot of it helped get some laws passed. It was for lobbying or something. I thought that was nice.”

That was about the same info Stone had given me at the Melody. Satin went on, mentioning several things that seemed of little help, but then suddenly she stopped speaking. She leaned forward in bed and peered at me. Then she actually swung her legs out of bed and got up, standing on the floor. That put her legs squarely in front of my lamp. Moreover, the worst had happened. The sun had come up. I knew that now, finally, I stood before her in all my natural horror. With no ultraviolet, and with sunlight on me, and what probably appeared to be egg on my face.

Satin was gawking at me. “How did you do that?” she asked me.

Well, she had me there. “What do you mean?” I asked, stalling for time.

“Well, first part of you went away, then it came back. Then you went all away, and now here you are.”

Boy, she was getting me confused.

“I mean,” she went on, “you don’t look dead at all!”

Then I guess it hit her. It took a bit of time for this to penetrate to the depths of Satin’s intelligence, but then she cried, “It’s a trick! You’re not dead! Oh, how dirty!”

“Now, now, Satin,” I said soothingly. “I am, too, dead. But I … I decided to come back.”

“What?”

“From where I was. Over there. I … wanted to see you.”

“Shell, how nice. You mean you can come back? You really can?”

“Yeah, sure. Anybody can. Only it’s so nice there hardly anybody does.”

She looked at me for a long time, and it became obvious that she didn’t believe me. She just wouldn’t go along with this. “You,” she said. “You!” she yelled. “You really aren’t dead!”

“Now, Satin — “

“Don’t Satin me. Why you miserable fathead!”

That told me where I could get off. I’d had it now. And, of course, our conversation was over. Satin was, in fact socking me. She swung and slapped and clawed and scratched, yelling, “Ho, dead, hey? Well, I’ll kill you again, and we’ll see who comes back. Miserable — ” and all the time swinging.

I got the hell out of there. I even left the ultraviolet lamp, but I figured I could send somebody around to pick it up later. I was running through the lobby before I really started settling down. And right then there was a high-pitched yell.

It came from the desk in the lobby, and I noticed the clerk was pointing at me and jumping up and down and yelling. I probably did look like something that had slithered slimily up the drain from about twenty thousand fathoms down in the murk, or maybe the clerk had been seeing a lot of those horror pictures where ghastly things go around leaping at women. But anyway he had stopped shouting words and was now making a noise like an air-raid siren. It followed me out of the hotel.

Cold air and bleak sunlight hit me and I suddenly wondered why I was running. That clerk’s screeching revulsion must have been contagious. Anyway, I stopped trotting along, and let my mind glide back over the minutes in Satin’s apartment. At first I thought it had been a waste of time, all my plans had gone awry. But then I realized that it had worked out exactly as I had planned.

It sneaked into my brain like that, just sort of filtered in without any great excitement or roaring sound or anything. It sneaked in and settled there, and then came the explosion. It was as if all my convolutions straightened out and then curled up again while my gray matter blanched and then went back to normal.

Satin had told me. And how she had told me. I loved her, and Madame Astra; and my horrible paint and powder. I wheeled around and ran right back into the hotel. I dug into my pocket but there wasn’t any change there, so I fished the last dollar out of my wallet and ran to the desk.

The clerk leaped back two yards, flinging his arms across his chest like a coy maiden suddenly realizing she’d forgotten her bra and he cried, “No, you don’t!”

I stopped at the desk. “What?”

“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare!”

“Relax. How about change for a buck? I want to make a phone call.”

I had to threaten him, but I got the change and had him point out the phone booth. I ran to it and put in a call to my apartment building and Doctor Paul Anson again.

I woke him up, but when I had told him in fast sentences what I wanted he seemed alert enough. And he knew me well enough to know when I wanted no idle chatter, no questions. This was one of the times.

He said, “Forget the chloral hydrate. You might kill them with that. It’s tricky.”

I had told him, essentially, that I wanted to go into a place where there were two tough bodyguards, and that I wanted to feed them knockout drops or something which would incapacitate them. Naturally I didn’t want to kill them — but I didn’t want them to kill me, either.

He had paused, thinking, and now he said, “How you going to get them to take the stuff, anyway? You can’t jab a hypo into them.”

“I haven’t even thought that far ahead, Paul. Probably in food or drink.”

“You gonna pretend you’re the Red Cross or something?”

“No, but I might be able to work something like that. Take them coffee. At this time of morning anybody should want coffee. But first I have to know what to put in it.”

“Well, here’s a thought,” he said. “And I can handle it myself.”

He told me what he’d come up with, and it was exactly what I wanted, so I told him to get busy because I’d be there as soon as I could drive the distance. Then I hung up and raced outside. I was headed for my Cadillac — but I suddenly headed in the other direction. A black radio car had pulled up alongside my buggy and a guy in plain clothes was peering into the Cad.

I ran around the corner in the other direction. They were closing in on me. All this activity was beginning to affect my nerves; I realized that I had been going like a fiend ever since yesterday afternoon. I stopped running when I got around the corner, but I kept walking rapidly. I knew that as soon as that police officer back there could radio his information in, there’d be a whole flock of prowl cars converging on this area and I had to be out of sight or I’d be in the clink. This, of all times, was no time to be tossed into the clink.

Now that I knew where I was going, Toddy’s face kept coming before me again and again. The lovely face, the electric voice, that incredible body. A siren cut through my thoughts. It wouldn’t be long now — and then I saw what might be salvation. A taxi pulled up at the curb a few yards ahead of me. The driver got out, opened the door on the opposite side of the car and helped an old lady to the street. Then he picked up a couple of suitcases and walked toward a hotel with her. Probably she’d just come in on the train, but it made the moment just right for me.

I guess I hurried it too much. I should have waited until he was clear out of sight. But I started to climb into the car and he must have glanced over his shoulder right then. “Hey!” he yelled. “What the — “

I swung my head around to see him dropping the suitcases and starting toward me. Suddenly he stopped. He shook his head, wiped his eyes, and looked at me again. Before he’d recovered, I was in the cab. He’d left the motor running, and I made a U-turn and was gone.

Of course, this cab’s license number and description would soon be reported to the police. They’d talk to the driver. But I had a little respite now. And I couldn’t help thinking of what that cabbie was going to tell the police, and how happy the policemen were going to be. Usually the interrogating officers ask a witness, “Was there anything about this man that would help us to identify him? Any marks or scars? Anything unusual?” Usually the witness shrugs and says “Nah. Just a guy.” This time it was going to be different. This time the answer would be a policeman’s dream.

I drove the cab hell-for-leather to the Spartan. Paul Anson was waiting in front with a big thermos and some paper cups. His stare reminded me about the gook on my face so I merely yelled at him to dump the stuff in the cab, then raced by him and up the stairs to my apartment. There I splashed soap and water on my face, quickly cleaned up a bit and put on a different sports jacket, then ran down to the cab again.

Paul pointed at the thermos resting on the front seat and said, “That’s really loaded. And those are the biggest cups I could scrounge.”

“Swell, Paul.” I tapped the thermos. “This won’t kill them, will it?”

“No, but a few minutes after they drink it they may wish they were dead. It hits like lightning.” He frowned at the broken-down taxi. It was old, with muscle steering, hand choke, and no extras. “What happened to your Cad? You get it painted?” Never serious, that’s Paul.

“I traded it in,” I said. “Couldn’t resist the terms. Seriously, I stole it.” I handed him a paper on which I’d scribbled an address while driving here. “Wait twenty minutes and call the cops, Paul. Give them this address. Send them along after me. I think I can take care of the bodyguards, but after that I may need some help.”

I was serious, but as I drove off I could see Paul reflected in the rear-view mirror, waggling his head about and slapping his thigh. By the time it dawned on me what that meant, it was too late.

</code>

<code> Chapter Fifteen

I drove to 954 Fern Road, where a monstrous two-story brown house was barely visible among a whole flock of trees, and a monstrous guard soon peered out at me from behind an iron gate barring the curving drive. He was a rough customer, and with another one like that behind him, I figured maybe I should wait for the police.

I knew the police would soon be on their way, but I had this planned so that it required rather delicate timing. I had to get past those guards and into the house, if I could, before the cops showed up. I knew that the instant the police got close to me, I was through. They would clap me into their deepest dungeon. They’d tie me to the bumpers of patrol cars. They’d shoot me.

I got out of the cab and walked up to the gate. “You gonna stand there gawping at me all day, Mac?” I said.

“Haw?”

“Open the gate, boy. Let me in.”

“Haw?”

That’s what I like about most muscle men. They are chosen only because of their muscle.

“That’s the boy,” I said. “I got the coffee.”

“Coffee?”

“Yeah. You know, that Brazilian stuff that comes from beans. You drink it, and then you are full of beans.”

“Brazilian?”

It looked as if I might have to try a new tack. But then he said, “Coffee sure would taste good.”

“Well, open up. I got a whole gallon of it. If you don’t want it, why did you call me?”

He leaned back and looked down his nose at me, mouth open. After a while he said, “Did I call you?”

“Man, if you don’t know, then I ain’t got the faintest idea.” I paused, wondering if this was how a cab driver would do it, and deciding that perhaps a cab driver would not be doing it at all, which is a big tribute to cab drivers. Then I added, “Somebody called me.”

“Ah,” he said. “Must’ve been the boss.”

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s who it was.”

He opened the gate. I drove in and parked before cement steps leading up to a front door the size of those they used in Gone With The Wind.

The big ape had locked the gate again and now he strolled up and looked in my window at me. He was really large. He was about the size of the front doors they used in Gone With The Wind.

“That coffee for me?” he asked.

I took my first chance then First big one, that is. “Coffee for two is what I was told.”

But apparently ray information was correct about the number of bodyguards, and this one didn’t get irritated or put out. I would have hated to get him irritated, because then I would be the one put out. I handed him the thermos and about four big paper cups.

“Nice of the boss,” he said.

“Yeah. Going to do this every day from now on.” I was just making conversation. But that wouldn’t last me long, I knew. And I had to stick around until some coffee was drunk. This big boy didn’t seem the suspicious type, and he would hardly be worried much about me alone, but I was pretty sure that soon I would be sent on my way.

The other guard strolled over. This character was bigger than I am, too. At least a quarter of a ton and probably more was spread around between those two. The gate guard poured himself a cup of coffee, then gave the thermos and a couple of cups to the other guy, and explained that the boss had sent for coffee; they were going to get it every day. He looked at me. “Ain’t that right, bo?”

“Well, you’re sure going to get it today. That’s what I hear, I mean. Coffee every morning.”

The second guy smiled and said they needed something to wake them up. Well, I thought, this is the stuff that will do it.

“Thanks,” the big guy said to me. “So long.” He walked back toward the house.

“What’s your name?” I asked the other king kong.

“Me? Bim. Just Bim. You better beat it, pal.”

“Bim. Bim. Ain’t we met before? Folsom? Q? Cannes?”

“Pal, we ain’t met, yet. You better beat it.”

“How about my thermos?”

“Pick it up in the morning.”

He was gulping at his coffee every once in a while. With that coffee, it would take only a few gulps. But it appeared to be time I moved. I started the cab, grinned at Bim and told him I’d see him in the morning, and the car started.

The drive curved around in a complete oval so that cars would go out at the same gate through which they’d come in. I drove almost to the gate, and for quite a spell before I reached it I had the hand choke pulled all the way out. Finally, when I thought I would be clear outside before it happened, the engine died with a gurgle, beautifully flooded. I could smell gas all over the place. Bim was standing by the open gate. When my cab stopped, he glared at me like a bull sighting the matador.

I pushed the choke back in, got out and raised the hood. Then, for just a second, I turned and looked at the big house. I was almost sure that Todhunter and Toddy were in there. There were a lot of windows in the front of the house, but I didn’t see movement at any of them. I hadn’t expected to. There had been almost no noise here except for the sound of the cab’s engine and our soft conversation. Soon, however, there would be quite a lot of noise.

Counting the time that it had taken for me to get out here, it had been well over twenty minutes since I’d handed Paul Anson this address and told him to send the tops here. Should be hearing sirens before long.

And that was when I remembered Paul yocking and slapping his thigh and waggling his empty head about. He must have thought it was a gag. I looked at Bim glaring down at me, and then, with a great sadness, I realized that the cops would not be coming. I was alone. Me, alone with two great apes and no telling what else.

I turned back to the engine and stared down at it. Bim walked over and continued to glare down at me. I got the impression that he had run out of patience with me. His big fist slowly closed on the paper cup, squashing it before he threw it away. But the cap had been empty. That meant Big Bim was full of it. And what was he full of?

Well, the concoction that Doctor Paul Anson had prepared for me was merely a super-potent mickey. Although it hardly seems right to speak of any mickey as “merely.” It was coffee, yes, but coffee laced with some potent foreign matter. It made even the caffeine completely unimportant.

This Bim, even counting all the other monsters I’ve seen, was the tallest, widest, and heaviest He would therefore probably have an enormous capacity, let alone an enormous resistance. So I knew that when the stuff hit him — if it was ever going to — I would soon win the battle. Win, that is, if I were still alive and in the fight. The whole idea of this operation was for me to stay alive and operating until these bodyguards were shell-shocked. That, it had seemed to me, was the only way I could get into the house to do what I had to do, and get out alive with Todhunter and Toddy.

But Bim might merely have taken an aspirin. He said, “What’re you tryin’ to pull, bo?”

“Engine died, Mac. Does that once in a while.”

I was starting to sweat. This couldn’t go on much longer. My nervous system simply wasn’t going to hold up much longer. I had been so jangled up with those three babes last night, and then the bits with Doe, and at Ravenswood, then with Satin, and everything else up till now, that soon there were inevitably going to be numerous mental and nervous short circuits in me. I would be seeing voices and listening to colors and smelling clouts on the head.

But then — at last, I thought, at last — there was a hoarse shout from out behind the house somewhere. The other guard that I had seen before came running around the house and at us. He didn’t quite make it.

He stopped halfway and ran around in a tight half-circle, a very tight half-circle. “Bim!” he was yelling. “Look out, Bim, It’s — I — think he put somepin inna cawfee!”

“What got into Coney?” Bim said wonderingly.

“That’s a good question,” I said. “A very good question. Sure acted strange, didn’t he?”

Bim nodded, his big jaw hanging down like the scoop on a steam shovel.

I edged away from Bim, watching the guy called Coney. He had spun around for only about two seconds, and then he did a really brave thing. He was still standing there facing us, still staying put while every normal impulse must have been shouting, “Go! Go!” and still throwing his features around as if he were trying to get them loose. He reached up with his right hand and slapped his chest, and then brought his hand back into sight.

He was moving with no speed at all, in fact his every move seemed filmed in slow motion, but in his hand was something even uglier than his face. It was a big, blunt .45 automatic.

His meaning was clear. He was going to shoot me.

And from the look on his face, or rather the looks, for one succeeded another with startling rapidity, he meant to shoot me where it would hurt most and last longest. I could tell by his expressions that he wanted me to die, but to die slowly, in the most awful agony. I imagine that if he’d had time, he would have planned something truly fiendish, like tickling me to death or letting ants eat me up, but it was obvious that time was something he had all too little of. As a matter of fact, there could have been only split seconds left, but still he tried, still he fought that silent battle with himself.

I didn’t even reach for my gun. I was in the presence of something greater than I. This was something I had never seen before and surely would never see again, an example of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

He had the gun outside his coat now. But you do not carry .45 automatics cocked and ready to go, so he had to cock it. Coney grabbed the slide, and then froze a moment, but got the gun cocked and ready to fire. And then he fired. Ah, but not at me. He let go one of the slugs from the automatic, but the gun was pointing out and up, and the bullet clipped off a small limb from a pepper tree.

And then Coney gave up. A man can only stand so much. He let out another hoarse shout. Then he ran right out past us and through the gate and down the street. He obviously didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t care where he was going; he was just going. Bim loomed on my right.

“You done it!” he said.

“Yeah. I done it.” I turned to face him.

He didn’t have a gun in his hand. He was just advancing toward me with his big paws opening and closing. I wanted into the house fast, now that there had been shouts and gunshots, but first there was Bim. After him, I’d have it made. I set my feet and let him come.

I have enormous confidence. As long as there is only one man facing me, I don’t much care how big he is. Much of that confidence is based on the fact that I have spent a staggering number of hours getting into and keeping in shape, and perfecting a number of judo holds and throws, as well as much unarmed defense. After an hour of that, anybody would be staggering. Besides which, I am an ex-Marine.

I sized Bim up. When he reached for my throat I knew he was going to be easy. All I had to do was grip one of his arms at the wrist and above the elbow, pivot around and slam my hip into him and then bend sharply forward. His own momentum, plus my strength, would send him crashing to the ground like Hoover Dam.

I timed it just right. His big face loomed behind his reaching hands and I got the grip easily on his right arm. I spun around, slammed my hip into him and bent forward, and sent him flying … and sent him flying … and I was up off the ground kicking my legs feebly, and then flying through the air. I hit with a crash.

I just lay there. I was in horrible shape, and it was a good thing I hadn’t had even a sip of that coffee. I was weak enough just from being tossed through the air. Then, reeling above me, spinning and going into and out of focus, was something that looked like a cross between Gargantua and a bull moose. It really did look cross. In what appeared likely to be my last lucid moment I noticed that it was Bim. Well, that’s the way it goes. So he was tougher than I thought. But at least I had confidence. And I was confident as hell that he was going to kill me.

He’d got his hands around my throat and was squeezing pretty good and lifting up my head and banging it down on the ground, and if you don’t think this rattled me you can go to the foot of the class, I could even hear my brain rattling, going clickety-click like the ball dropping into the slot on a roulette wheel.

I was flat on my back, and with him banging my head like that, I was pretty much at a disadvantage. But I managed to get my right hand up across my chest. Now, just a second more, and I’d have him. The bridge of the nose is paper-thin; a blow there will drive deadly bone splinters into the brain. Fire surged up in me. I was going to kill him! I lashed out with my hand. I smacked him on the nose. He snorted and whanged my head down.

Die! I thought. Die! I was getting addled. A guy can only take so much of that banging his head on the ground. But then, when I had even forgotten that there was such a thing as hope, hope surged through me. Something surged through Bim, too, and he dropped my head as if it had come loose and begun screeching at him.

Bun was hunkered over me, but the hands that had left my throat were now held out at his sides, fingers splayed wide. He snapped his head up — maybe there was something up there in the sky. Then he clenched his fists and stared down at me. But he wasn’t seeing me. For perhaps five full seconds he was like that, frozen rigid.

Then, on his fat face, grew a look of sheer horror, of curdled disbelief. His mouth sagged open and he let out a weird wailing sound, mostly bass, but with a few high squeaky notes, like a pig stuck in a foghorn. He leaped up then and literally twirled about, as if he were an elephant spinning on tiptoe, and then he lumbered off out of sight.

I got to my feet and stood swaying. The landscape reeled. My brain kept rattling slightly.

I was alone. I had won.

I took a step and fell flat on my face. But I’m persistent. I crawled to the steps before the entrance, then got to my feet. I walked to the big door and tried to open it, but it was locked.

I stood there for a moment as my head cleared. The craziness went out of my brain. I breathed deeply, managed to bring my thoughts back to what was inside this house. It seemed as if an hour had gone by since those first shouts, but I knew it could have been only a minute or so. And most likely less than half a minute had passed since that gunshot. Not too much time.

But there’d been enough noise so that there was no longer any point in silence. I took out my .38, looked at the Colt in the palm of my hand for a moment, then fired two shots into the lock on the door, and a third so that I could kick the door open. Inside was a big hall. On my right a curving stairway led up to the second floor. Nobody was in sight. I went up the stairs three at a time.

A hallway ran left and right at the top of the stairs. I could see the doors to half a dozen rooms. All were closed. I hadn’t yet seen another person in the house, but I knew Todhunter and Toddy must be here somewhere. I ran to the first door, threw it open. The room was empty.

I ran down the hall, turned the knob of the next door and threw it open. At a window across the room, his back to me, was Gordon Todhunter. He jerked his head around in surprise as I entered, and he partly turned toward me. A .45 automatic was in his hand. When he saw who it was, a smile cut a line across his craggy face.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you — ” and turned around.

I shot him twice.

</code>

<code> Chapter Sixteen

Todhunter crumpled slowly, hands coming up toward his chest and his knees bending before they buckled. Even when he fell, he didn’t go all the way down. He stayed in a sitting position, one hand pressed against the carpet. He hadn’t let go of the gun but he couldn’t quite get it up.

I jumped across the room to him and jerked the gun from his hand. He slid slowly back about a foot so that he could lean against the wall. He wouldn’t be feeling much pain yet, if any. Shock would take care of that for a while. But he was badly hurt. I could see that, from his face and from the spot where my two bullets had entered. He was wearing white pajamas, and blood was beginning to stain them, over his chest.

He shook his head slowly, then looked into my face as I squatted by him. He even managed to plaster on part of a smile. It was surprising, I thought, how much I’d come to like him in the little time I’d known him.

I said, “I’m sorry, Gordon. I am, you bastard.”

“It … evens it up.”

I knew he was referring to the fact that I’d saved his life by getting him out of Ravenswood. He went on, “It got pretty complicated, even for me. But where did I slip?”

“That letter to Toddy, mainly. The one that brought me in on your side. It was what started me on the right track, anyway. And that’s all it took, of course, just something to get me after you. I had Sebastian Wise figured as Mr. Big, the top man. But it was you all along.”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, I put Wise in the senate.” He looked at me for a long time. “Grooming him for governor. I might have put him there, too, but he got big ideas. Too big for him. If he’d been content to go along with me … But instead he tried to have me killed. He wanted my spot, my power.” Todhunter looked levelly at me. “In my vault in the basement I’ve got information on recording tape, movie film, in photographs and documents, that keeps twenty-seven fairly important men in line. Twenty-seven, including five legislators up at Sacramento. But twice that many do what I want them to do just because I’ve helped them up the ladder during these last twenty years. But finally one of them — Wise — decided he’d try to take over.”

“I guessed he must have tried to get rid of you. Otherwise you’d never have written that letter to me. When did it happen?”

“The same night he ordered Stone killed. You must have figured out that Stone was my man. Worked for me for seven years.” He paused. “I had another man before him, for twelve years. Knew what I wanted from the beginning.” He stopped again and a question grew in his eyes. “The letter to Barbara? How did that…”

“It had this address on it,” I said. “It had to have this address so she’d receive it, of course. And just a little while ago I learned from a girl named Satin that she’d come with George Stone to a big place on Fern Road — a place big enough to have a gate with two armed guards. She sat outside in a car while Stone went on inside. He told her this was where the big boss lived. Mr. Big. When I remembered that you lived on the part of Fern Road where homes have stone and iron gate houses, all the rest started falling into place.”

I hadn’t heard footsteps, but an adjoining door between this room and the next was thrown open. I swung my head around to see Toddy standing in it. She must have been asleep, and roused by the noise. Her hair was tousled, and she wore a red Chinese robe.

She stopped inside the door, then she saw Todhunter crumpled on the floor, with me beside him, and she screamed. She started to run toward him — or me, maybe — but I blasted one shot from the .45 past her legs. She stopped suddenly and stared at me.

“Back up, baby. Just keep your distance,” I said.

“Shell, you — “

“Shut up. There’s a phone somewhere in the house. Get on it and call a doctor. Then call the police. And don’t call anybody else. Fast, baby.”

Todhunter said to her, “You’d better do what he says, Jan. This man Scott isn’t fooling.” She went out.

“Jan, huh?” I asked him. “I’ve been wondering what her real name was.”

“Janet. Janet Welles. I thought it better to address the letter to my ‘daughter.’ My real daughter, Barbara, is still traveling in Europe. After all, I wanted your cooperation. And Jan is intelligent enough so that I knew she would figure out what I wanted. Close enough, anyway. At any rate, she did a good Job.”

I started to say, “You don’t know how good,” but bit it off. After all, Todhunter was dying. Instead I said, “Funny. I guess I’ll always think of her as Toddy.”

He talked a little longer. From what he told me, and what I’d already figured out, the whole thing became clear. I had, for quite a while, thought of Gordon Todhunter as a man who’d accidentally got into the middle of Wise’s plans and had to be taken care of because of that. But now, it turned out, the man in the middle had all along been Shell Scott.

As Todhunter had said, Wise got too big for his britches, planned to kill Todhunter and take over, at least, eventually, in the position Todhunter enjoyed. Perhaps George Stone knew something of the struggle for power that was about to start; perhaps not. But when he decided to spill what he knew to me, that had started the ball rolling; and now I could understand why Stone had talked to me instead of somebody else on the committee, and why he’d thought he might get complete immunity. The information he’d had for us, not only about Todhunter’s being Mr. Big, but Sebastian Wise, among others, being controlled by Todhunter, was almost enough that the committee would have absolved him of murder.

Most of my previous deductions about Wise had been valid; my error was in not including Todhunter as the man opposing him. Wise had ordered Stone’s murder that night after overhearing part of my phone conversation with him. He must have been worried that Stone might have spilled at least part of what he knew to me, until I’d phoned him at his home later that night to tell him I’d learned nothing. From that point on, it had been a battle between two big men, Wise and Todhunter, each one making a move only to have it countered by the other. And me in the middle.

When Todhunter had learned of Stone’s murder, and the circumstances surrounding it, he knew what must have happened, and who had killed Stone, and why. The real payoff came that night, Todhunter went on to say, when one of his own bodyguards made an abortive attempt to kill him. Todhunter, forewarned by his knowledge of Stone’s death, had been prepared for something like that, and the man was easily overpowered by trusted members of Todhunter’s little army, and Todhunter himself.

He said, “Name was Sam Beenis. I made him admit that Wise had given him five thousand to kill me. Then I shot him in the head. I knew that Wise would just keep on trying to kill me, after once making his move, unless I managed to stop him. And I didn’t want to kill Wise unless I had to. He’s a valuable man, swings a lot of weight in the legislature.” Todhunter paused. A red stain had oozed through his fingers and trickled down the front of his pajamas.

“That’s when I sat down and wrote the letter to you. I tried to put enough into it so that once Wise read it he’d realize it was impossible for him to kill me without ruining himself — and so that, with my death, you’d have acted on the information in that letter. While I remained alive it was very doubtful that you’d check up on any of the senators.”

“That’s right enough,” I said. “And it almost worked.”

“Yes. I was taking a little risk by signing my own name, but it was no good without my name on it. My name had to be signed, if that letter was to save my life. Which it was supposed to do — and did.” That thought amused him, and he chuckled softly, then went on.

“The devil of it was that neither of us could afford to let the other be exposed; In that case. Wise would drag me down with him, and vice versa. It was a ticklish business — either kill, or cooperate. Well, that was an important letter. I mailed it myself. You may recall it was special delivery and so on. I wanted it delivered to you, so I’d be sure Wise didn’t see it first and destroy it before anybody else got a look at it.”

He sighed. “Wise had men watching me. A lot of them, in two cars. They picked me up. I think they were going to kill me, but I told them I’d written a letter which would ruin Wise; that they’d better take me to him. They did, and when I told Wise about the letter; it stopped him for a little while. But he didn’t let me go. And, in fact, he told me that perhaps he couldn’t kill me — not yet — but it might be enough if he killed Shell Scott. And no matter what happened, that I was through. He was quite repulsive. At any rate, he was even more clever than I thought, and I wound up in Ravenswood.”

I knew what had happened then. The first forged letter that Wise had put into the files, ready for me; the second forgery that he’d mailed a day or two later; the injections of drugs into Todhunter’s veins.

In this whole case, the two most confusing factors had been, first, the fact that Sebastian Wise, a sort of first lieutenant to Todhunter, bad cleverly made it appear that Todhunter was mentally ill; and second, the fact that Todhunter, after I had rescued him from Ravenswood, had lied, and lied, and lied. He had lied about overhearing the two men in the restroom, about his reason for writing me, about his daughter, about practically everything except his name.

I said, “You really had me fooled with that baloney about overhearing Doe and some unidentified man in a restroom. I thought it really happened.”

“I’m a practiced liar. Besides, I had several days in Ravenswood to figure out a story to tell you, if I should ever get a chance to tell it. But you told me something that helped.”

“I did?”

“While we were still in Ravenswood you said that you had come there because of what a man named Doe had told you before he died. Doe was a member of my organization; he’d done various jobs for both Wise and me. Naturally I knew what he looked like, so I merely described him. Since he was dead, it was perfectly safe, and I knew it would make my story more convincing.”

I nodded and said, “About that scribbled note under the flap of the envelope you sent Toddy. How did you happen to write to me, of all people? And if you knew enough to mention that somebody was trying to kill me — which they were — how could you know I would still be alive?”

“I wasn’t sure, but the whole thing was a gamble anyway. Wise had, of course, told me that he might have to kill you. I’ve already told you about that part. But, thinking about it at Ravenswood, I decided you were the best man I could possibly contact, if I got a chance to contact anybody.”

His voice had been steadily getting fainter. I knew he must be aware of it. But he didn’t show, by word or sign, that he’d noticed. He went on, “It seemed to me that you were the man most likely to investigate that scribbled note, and perhaps be able to help me. You had the power of the senate committee behind you. You had already read that one letter from me, and I figured your interest would already be high because of that; remember, I had no knowledge then of the letters Wise had forged my name to. You’ve a reputation for coming out on top. And, too, I didn’t know for sure whom I could trust. Even the guards — Jan kept on the ones that are here now, but of my organization, Wise had made his move against me. Stone was going to, and had been killed. Sam Beenis had been bought by Wise.” He coughed. “All in all, you were the best choice. Besides, if my plan worked at all, Jan would take the envelope to you. That was definitely in my favor. You have a reputation for — for girls, too.”

“You sure had the right messenger handy.”

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Did you…

Were you sure when you came here?”

“Not positive.”

“But you shot as soon as you came inside.”

“You were going to shoot me, weren’t you?”

It was the barest trace of his grin this time. But he said, “If you’d waited half a second longer, I’d have killed you. And you wouldn’t have been the first man I’ve killed. I’ve had to … take care of men a time or two over the years, to get where I am. And I’m an excellent shot. I would have got you right between the eyes.”

He paused for a long time. “Shell, you must realize now that I planned in Ravenswood to kill you if you should somehow manage to help me … get me out of there. I meant to use you, and then kill you my first chance — but it had to be that way. Soon, a few days at most, you’d have known I’d been lying. You’d have found out why, and I don’t think I could have bought you off. You’d have exposed me.”

“Yeah. I was already wondering about something I remembered in that letter you wrote me at the committee. Something about your death pointing a finger at somebody on the committee. It wasn’t important while I thought you were crazy; but once I knew you were sane I had to ask you what you’d meant, and who. I figured it was Wise, but I wondered why you hadn’t mentioned it earlier, there in the Preston Hotel.”

“Yes, there’d have been other questions. I had to kill you, but I just didn’t get a chance.” He still had strength enough to chuckle softly. “Didn’t have a gun was the main thing. And you’re clever … and tough. I might have been able to hit you hard enough to knock you out. But … I couldn’t tip my hand or you’d have guessed everything. Almost tried there in the hotel.”

“Where?”

“Preston. Hotel room. You were leaving. Back was to me — she did that. I thought if I hit you hard once, when you weren’t looking, I could take you. I got close enough to you, but you looked around … and then left right away. So we got out of there, came to the house.”

His hand was slipping down the bloody front of his pajamas. “How did you get in here? How — “

“It’s a long story, Gordon.”

He knew what I meant. He just didn’t have time for a long story. But then he looked at me and seemed to make a special effort to speak. “I’d like to think you were really sure — positive — when you shot me.”

“I was, Gordon. Then, I was. If Wise had brought you here, you wouldn’t have had a gun in your hand. With all the rest, that settled it for sure. You’re in pajamas. And when you turned from the window, you had that gun aimed right at me. I barely beat you.”

“Yes. Little later it would have been you. And I would have been sorry, just a little … just as you’ll be sorry … a little…”

It didn’t seem that anything changed in him. He didn’t move. He just stopped talking, as if he’d come to the end of a sentence. But I knew he was dead. I got to my feet and looked down at him. There was still a trace of his magnificent bearing, even though he was crumpled up against the wall, and with blood all over the front of him. It seemed tragic. It was tragic.

I was still looking at him when Toddy came in. She walked over by me, looked down at him. “Is he dead?”

“Yeah.”

“God. I didn’t think he’d ever die. I didn’t think anything could kill him.”

“That’s another thing you were wrong about.”

She turned and looked up at me. And she still had it. For me, she still had it. Hair the color of toasted marshmallows. Deep brown eyes that still hit me like a velvet hammer. The red robe was pulled close to the curves of her body. She was completely covered, but that didn’t help much. And she had a quality about her that I couldn’t describe, that wasn’t something you saw, but a thing you felt, that crackled silently around her, an excitement, a pleasurable tension.

“Shell,” she said softly, “you won’t let anything happen to me, will you? I called the police, but — I haven’t really done anything, anyway.”

“Toddy.” I put one hand on each of her shoulders. “Or Jan. Remember in that room at the Preston Hotel?” I spoke as softly as she. Butter wouldn’t have melted in my mouth.

“Yes?” Her eyes narrowed ever so little.

“Just before I left, when you took my hands and turned me so my back was to Gordon. When you smiled at me with those brown eyes, and blew me a kiss.”

“What — “

“Well, my dear, when you left Gordon, and came to me, he was clear over on the far side of the room with you. But when I looked around, seconds later, he was right beside me.” Ah, my voice was soft, pleasant.

“But that doesn’t mean — “

“It means you were going to kill me, the two of you, if you could. It means that Gordon wanted my back to him because he was afraid I’d break him in two if I guessed what he was up to. And it means that’s why you turned me around, and smiled with your eyes and blew kisses. So he could bash me over the head.”

“That’s crazy!”

“And you could have left me there on the floor and nobody would ever have guessed how I got there.”

Her shoulders sagged under my hands. “He told you, didn’t he?”

“Some of it, sweet. The rest I remembered.”

The bitch in her flared up then. The soft lips curled a little. “Well, you sure made a fool of yourself that afternoon in the Biltmore.”

I grinned at her. “You’re right. I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Anyway, baby, it was nice knowing you.”

Then we heard sirens. It didn’t seem quite the right note on which to end our conversation, end it for good, but that’s the way it was. Looking at her, I knew she’d make out all right, though. No Jury with even one male on it would convict her of anything. When the police came in she was kneeling by Todhunter’s body, looking at him. Her face was still, composed. But it’s hard to tell what a woman is thinking sometimes. I know she didn’t even look up until a policeman touched her arm. And I didn’t notice until she glanced at me, just before the officer took her out of the room, that she was crying.

It was three days later before I could slow down enough to start unwinding, and think about relaxing. Sebastian Wise was in jail, and there’d been headlines about him, and Todhunter, and me, and a lot of things for three days. A number of other people were in jail; the Doctor Parka who’d been in on the commitment of Todhunter, and half a dozen mangy hoodlums. Director Beecham and his young assistant were missing and still at large, having disappeared the night of the hullaballoo at Ravenswood.

I was out on bail.

It seemed that about half my life was spent out on bail. What was going to happen to me because of my hell-raising hadn’t been determined. I had a hunch it was going to be “Nine thousand dollars or forty-five hundred days!” but I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

I’d told nay whole story to the police about twenty times, including Todhunter’s saying his blackmail papers and tapes and pictures were in a basement vault. They’d found it. What they’d found in it I didn’t know for sure, except that it was plenty, and potent. I’d washed my hands of the affair. The police would handle that part of it.

And now it was time to close up the shop for another day. Life was back to a fairly normal routine by now, and I’d spent the day in my office downtown. It was a little after 5 p.m. and I was restless. I wanted to be out amongst ‘em. And you know who “‘em” is.

For three days I had been talking to practically nobody except policemen, and unless you’ve tried it for three days, you have no idea how depressing that can be. I lit a cigarette, grabbed the phone, and with a big grin and that unflagging confidence burning in me I dialed the Gentry.

She came on like all the Sirens lamping Odysseus. “Hello-o-ooo!”

“Satin, my sweet. Ah, you lovely, wait until you hear the plans I have for us — “

“Who’s it?”

“Shell Scott.”

There was a great crashing and clanging in my ear; it really hurt my ear, but it hurt my feelings more. I’ve got feelings like everybody else. But then I brightened, because Satin was still, on the line. She said, “Shell, you still there?”

“Yeah, what — “

“I started to hang up, but I figured I’d better tell you. Don’t bother me. I hate phones ringing, remember?”

“But, Satin, all that was days ago. You’re always welcome at my place, you know, so why not just let bygones be — “

“Maybe you don’t know it, but you’re inspired — with a hole in your head. Remember?”

This time that clang was final.

Yeah, I thought sadly. A hole in my head.

With Paula, immediately after I told her that the latch string was out, and all was forgiven, she yelped, “Ha. All is not forgiven. Bathtub, indeed. I was never so humiliated.” And so on until the clang.

And, of course, there was no Toddy to phone. Not ever.

I thought a while. And then I remembered something. About Grandma, and hiding in bushes, and a beautiful babe. Those lights and wheels were flashing and spinning in my head, running down the proper channels. I almost had it, was getting closer, and I remembered Grandma’s name, Zeldy Beware, and then I got it: Zelma.

I wrestled with the problem until I remembered Grandma’s last name had been Morris, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number, then dialed.

I was fortunate for a while. Zelma herself answered the phone, and she remembered me, she said; and I remembered her, I said, but she was afraid she couldn’t go out to dinner and whatnot tonight. Grandma was off somewhere, and Zelma had looked through all the bushes without finding her.

“I’m afraid it’s serious this time. She’s been gone a couple of hours.”

“That long, huh?”

“Yes. If she doesn’t show up, I might have to call on you for help.”

“You are talking to Available Shell Scott.”

“Oh, good. I’ll let you know about Grandma. You’ll have to call me again — or just come out some time.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“Just ring the bell,” she said, and laughed. But then she went on, “And I’m so glad you called. We’ll work something out.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll bet we will.”

Then she said good-by with a little chuckle that might have meant she was happy, or pleased, or nuts, and I sat and stared at the phone for a while. After a minute or two of that I got out of my chair.

What the hell. Something would turn up. It always had. I lit a cigarette, dropped a pinch of salmon meal into the guppy tank, and went out.

By seven I’d had a light dinner, taken a shower, and was sprawled on my couch gazing idly at Amelia. One of these days she was probably going to start moving. Perhaps even come down and sit on my lap. I felt grim. Sour. Not good. I polished off the last of my bourbon and water, and thought I heard soft sounds at the front door.

Cling-clong.

I sprang to my feet. What could it be … Satin, perhaps? Could she have reconsidered? Should I rush in and start filling the tub? Or maybe it was a stranger — even a little man with a pointy head and a gun already cocked and aimed. Paula? Zelma? Trudy? Gloria? Laverna? Yvonne? Mabel? Jeanette? Mrs. O’Mahoney?

Ah, something always turns up, I thought. Always has. I was feeling very good again as I walked to the door and threw it open.

THE END

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