Front matter (continued 2)

It was an unusual story, a powerful story. He'd put virtually everything he had into it. And now—it had been slammed, thrown back in his face, with probably a miserable, printed rejection slip. Editors just didn't give a damn how much they hurt you—or insulted you. Quite famous authors occasionally got printed rejection slips. He knew that, but it didn't make the outrage even slightly more palatable or easy to accept.

He looked at the neat, printed address—Ralph Gilmore, 559 West 38th Street, New York City—and an angry flush mounted to his cheekbones. Not typewritten—printed—as if some incredible new machine had been used to add insult to injury.

He tore the envelope open and hesitated for an instant before removing its contents. What if he had been jumping to an unjust conclusion? He had no absolute assurance that the envelope contained a rejection slip. Quite possibly the editor had written him a long and sympathetic letter, expressing sincere regrets.

No ... that would have been worse. A hundred times worse. The manuscript had been returned to him, so obviously it had been rejected. What the hell did he care about how sorry the editor might feel about it?

Nora was staring at him with a look of bewildered concern on her face, as if she didn't quite know what it was all about, but could tell from the way he was glaring at the envelope that he had no intention of tossing it on the typewriter table, crossing to the bed and putting an arm about her waist. Not immediately, anyway, and she'd hoped it might happen this time, that he might turn to her for comfort at least. Three bulky envelopes in a week, and she knew how much rejections upset him. Writers were different from other people and probably most of them were a little crazy.

She'd dreamed about it and hoped for it, but how could she make it happen when he was so strange, so different, from anyone she'd ever known. The men she'd known had made it plain just what they'd expected from her in return for taking her out, making her feel important, a somebody. If she hadn't liked them she wouldn't have given them anything in return—she could be a real little bitch at times, why deny it—but she had liked them, she had, she had! All except that Duncan worm she could have killed and that piece of—

She didn't say the word, even to herself. He didn't like that kind of coarseness, got upset whenever she came right out and said what she knew to be true. Not in a woman anyway. He could use worse language himself, could go way beyond anything you'd hear in a bar unless you were standing close to someone who mistook you for a hustler and was too drunk to tell the difference even when you moved quickly away from him.

She wanted to please him—God help her, she did want to. She couldn't explain it, because there was nothing so wonderful about him, even if he was a writer. But if he really wanted her, if he did or said something to make her sure, she'd go all the way with him. She'd have to be sure, because she had to like a man terribly, to worry about him and think about him and want to buy him things—a new scarf, a necktie, no matter how many neckties he had or how much money he spent on her—and be jealous of him and swear she'd kill any other woman who looked at him twice ... she had to love him that much and that terribly to go to bed with him.

All right, he wasn't the first one. There had been ... four others. But she'd never ... cared for ... anyone quite so much and if he was too blind to see it, or thought the stories he was always writing and getting returned were more important than a woman in bed with him, a woman who knew how to make him forget everything but the warm, clinging sweetness of....

All right, those were his words. Words from one of his crazy manuscripts. She'd copied them down and read them more than once, because they'd excited her. But that didn't mean she didn't feel that way herself. She couldn't use fancy words, maybe, but she knew what it meant to a man to hold a woman close, and pass his hands up and down over the smooth flesh of her shoulders and fondle her breasts.... And she knew what it meant to a woman.

Poetry too. He wrote poetry. "There's nothing in it," he'd said. "A great poet can starve to death, even quicker than an important novelist can. I won't be victimized to that extent. Read these if you want to—I don't give a damn about them. I probably won't write another poem in the next twenty years."

It didn't make much sense to her. If he was so worried about starving to death why couldn't he go out and get a job in a bakery?

She watched him closely as he tore open the envelope, quite sure that he would go into a rage when he read the letter attached to his story. It had happened ten or twelve times before, when she'd brought him his mail—either a letter or a printed slip which he'd tossed at her as if he expected her to become angry too.

What was there to be angry about? If he couldn't write well enough to get his stories taken by the magazines, what was to prevent him from going out and getting a paying job?

She had expected him to be angry, and felt a little let down, disappointed even, when she saw that he was reading the letter with only a slight frown on his face.

The frown vanished before he stopped reading. It changed to a smile and then, quite suddenly, he was laughing, yelling, waltzing around the room like a real gone beat. She got up, a little frightened, and stood staring at him, unable to believe her eyes.

"It's accepted," he shouted, "Believe it or not, it's accepted and it's going to be published. A female editor who knows strong writing when she sees it—who isn't scared off by the kind of candor that goes a little beyond Faulkner but is too genuine to ignore. And to think that I used to say unkind things about female editors!"

"You mean—the story's sold and you're going to get paid for it?" she asked, a stunned incredulity in her eyes.

"Of course it will be paid for," he said. "It's one of the biggest magazine groups in the country. Their check is as good as a signed order from the Secretary of the Treasury, for sixteen hundred dollars from the United States mint."

"Gee—that's wonderful."

"Wonderful isn't the word for it. I don't give a damn about the dough. What's the matter with you anyway ... haven't I tried to explain? Oh, sure, the dough means a little something to me. I wouldn't be human if it didn't. But the important thing is the story is going to be published. It's the best thing I've ever done—tremendous writing, really tremendous writing. I'm not being egoistical, I have very high standards. I know precisely what literary distinction is and when I've achieved it—quite by accident perhaps, once in a blue moon—but I've written enough and torn up enough manuscripts and suffered enough to know. This is a great story. It will knock the critics' eyes out."

"I guess I don't—"

"Don't apologize, don't say a word. It's a little too much for me at the moment, too. Did I ever tell you that you're beautiful?"

"No," she said. "You've never told me that. And I don't think I am."

"But you are. How would you like to have dinner with me tonight? We'll celebrate. We'll really kick over the traces."

"Ralph, I don't know. You've never asked me before. How come you've never asked me before?"

The "how come" grated on him, but he did his best not to look aggrieved.

"It's because I've been too busy—and too worried," he said. "You don't know what a writer goes through—eight, ten, twelve hours a day. The creative agony does something to you—makes you feel either detached, way off in the clouds somewhere or so nervously keyed up that you can't take down-to-earth realities in your stride. You forget things, make a fool of yourself, miss priceless opportunities. Like ... telling you how beautiful you are and how much it would mean to me if you'd say yes ... yes ... yes. You will have dinner with me."

Her surrender was complete, because it had already been decided upon. But it was the kind of surrender he hadn't expected, hadn't really wanted at all. It was physical and immediate and it appalled him, brought with it a commitment he hadn't planned on, an involvement he might have welcomed in a moment of desperation, when the sex hunger was a gnawing ache in him and loneliness was a gnawing ache, and a woman—any woman—would have been better than the gross mental images no sex-starved man can avoid conjuring up at times. But he wasn't desperate now, he'd been thrown a lifeline, and all the east was gold, bathed in the bright rays of an unexpected sunrise.

"Say what you just said again," she said. "Tell me I'm beautiful, even if we both know it's a lie. Say anything you want ... so long as you really need me, and we're not kidding each other about that part of it. Tell me I'm just a crazy kid, bitten by some kind of bug and I won't mind at all. Say I'm well-stacked even if I'm not beautiful, as if you were talking to someone about a girl you didn't respect too much. I won't care if you really need me, and do respect me, deep down...."

She was in his arms before he could say a word in reply, was straining against him, running her fingers through his hair, opening her lips and almost forcing him to kiss her with the kind of ardor it would have been impossible for him to wholly avoid. He suddenly realized that all she was wearing was a skirt and blouse, that both garments were so thin he could feel the texture of her skin through the cloth.

He could feel more than just the texture of her skin. Every movement of her body, every impassioned ripple of her flesh, increased the intimacy of her embrace and made him lose his head completely.

It was over almost before it had begun and although it had been sudden and maddening, tempting them both to abandon all restraint, he had found the strength to gently but firmly grasp her by the wrists and prevent her complete surrender. He felt cheated, tortured for an instant and then a wave of relief swept over him, because what had almost happened would have been a very serious commitment and he was not the kind of man who could take complete physical intimacy lightly.

Casual love-making was impossible for him. It never failed to stir him to the depths, to awaken impulses of loyalty and devotion, to place him under an obligation. He was perhaps different from the general run of males, but if he had gone out on the street and picked up some pathetic little prostitute and gone home with her the relationship would not have been entirely sordid and physical.

He sat now on the edge of the bed as if turned to stone, watching her get up with shining eyes and a deep flush on her face, cross the room to the door and go out, closing the door very softly behind her. He'd known what she was thinking. Next time it will be completely wonderful and he won't feel awkward and embarrassed afterwards and not know what to say.

She'd be thinking that, but it wouldn't be the truth. He had no intention of letting it happen again, of going even as far as he had before he'd found the strength to save himself from absolute disaster.

A moment or two before, with the returned manuscript still unopened in his hand, he'd had a momentary impulse to let himself go and accept the consequences, even if they would have been as binding in his scale of values as a marriage ceremony. He could never have walked out and left her—unless love died and they both agreed that the relationship had deteriorated and ceased to be important.

But all that was changed now. He'd opened the envelope and the letter had changed the world for him and if she hadn't thrown her arms around him and kissed him so passionately when he'd merely asked her for a dinner date in a moment of unreasoning exaltation....

It had been a physical response solely, the kind of response which any normal male with the blood warm in his veins would have been unable to exercise complete and instant control over, no matter how great his strength of will. It had been instinctive, the touching off of sex's trigger-mechanism in his brain, the automatic arousal which yielding softness, sweetness, femininity in all of its rapturous abandonment made inevitable in the male.

There was no reason for him to reproach himself or feel guilty about it. If for a moment he'd abandoned all restraint, carried her to the bed, and seared her lips with kisses which she had welcomed, demanded, insisted upon—had not the tightening of her arms, the almost convulsive straining of her body against him proved that she had been equally aroused?—if for a moment he'd become almost savagely primitive in his love-making, was that something which called for sackcloth and ashes and the covering of his head, as if he were a grieving widow instead of the completely normal, robustly endowed man he knew himself to be?

Hardly. Since she had been so completely eager and willing the cynical and unjust could brand his restraint as amusing if they wished and regard him as something of a fool. But he had his own standards and preferred to maintain them. An old maxim came almost unbidden into his mind. "They say what they say—let them say."

For a moment the exaltation he'd felt on reading the letter had been scattered to the winds, like dust particles in a rising gale or dust in a city apartment blown in all directions by a draft from an open window, or swept under the bed by an untidy housekeeper. And it had been the most precious kind of dust—a fine sprinkling of gold, each particle brightly shining.

There was no one with a broom who could sweep it into view again, but it was coming back now by itself, creeping slowly back, and he could feel the splendor of it beginning to suffuse him. In a moment, if he just remained quietly seated on the edge of the bed, he could gather up all of the shining particles, and go out and put through a phone call from the drugstore on the corner.

She'd suggested he phone her as soon as he received the letter. Returning a manuscript for minor revisions when it was practically bought and paid for was unusual. But he had a feeling that he had sent the story to a very unusual editor. A woman who did things in her own, independent way, ignoring what was customary and established and rule-of-thumb, but with no sacrifice of efficiency.

Most editors would have kept the manuscript in the office, written him a letter of acceptance, and asked him to call and discuss the changes which would have to be made in it. But she'd sent it right back, assuming, no doubt, that the acceptance would so gratify and stimulate him that he'd sit down immediately and make the most important change while he was keyed up and at his best creatively.

It had probably seemed to her a gamble worth taking. All it had cost the firm was a dollar in postage and there could be no substitute for that kind of emotional stimulation, especially when there were a few pages that the author had perhaps grown cold on, or lost interest in.

It was a strong indication that she understood writers, knew precisely how their minds worked. Most writers, anyway. It wasn't her fault that she had gone slightly astray in his case. Every writer was unique—no two individuals in any creative field were ever exactly alike. For a moment he had been stimulated enough to sit down, and make the most important change without even going out to buy a fresh pack of cigarettes and take a brisk, six-minute walk around the block.

It was just that—he felt too damned good right at the moment to sit down and concentrate. All of the golden dust had been gathered up now and it set up a shining—both inside his mind and outside—so that the whole room seemed filled with a glow that outshone the noonday sun.

Fifteen minutes later he stood in a drugstore phone booth so oppressively over-heated that it would have bothered him, if he had been about to phone a friend who never knew when to hang up. But now he was scarcely aware of the heat and it gave him no concern. Few editors had time to waste in inconsequential talk, and he had no intention of making a bad impression on her by baring the innermost secrets of his life.

That would come later ... if at all. He had a feeling that it would come eventually, because a woman who understood writers as she seemed to do would be unlikely to find that kind of conversation boring.

Everything was happening so fast it took his breath away. The miracle had increased in brightness and now he was sitting in a taxi on his way to Cafe Seventy in the East Sixties.

His phone call had been switched to her office very quickly and her voice had been decisive and a little sharp on the wire. But the instant he'd told her who he was no woman's voice could have taken on more graciousness and charm.

Informal, too. Delightfully ... no, intimate wasn't too presumptuous a word. There had been an unmistakable undercurrent of intimacy in her voice, as if she'd known him for a long time and they shared a secret ... a very precious kind of secret she preferred not to talk about within the four walls of a cold, briskly efficient magazine office.

It had meant, of course, that she was suggesting that they have lunch together, but before he could think of just the right words she herself had done the inviting. She had picked the cafe and the time—"About two ... I'm afraid it has to be a little late...."—and now, in about five more minutes, he would be there.

It was a very warm day and the air felt almost solid enough to cut with a knife. But the high humidity didn't bother him, because a breeze fragrant with springtime scents was blowing through the cab, even though the driver and no one on the streets—no one anywhere except himself—seemed to be aware of it.

When the cab drew into the curb in front of the cafe he added a tip to the fare that dispelled most of the driver's gloom. He got out, walked into the cafe as if he'd just decided while taking a stroll that the place looked all right, and so why should he stop to examine the three-dollar-minimum luncheon menu pasted to the window? He had an almost irrepressible impulse to tip the uniformed doorman too, just for the hell of it.

He saw and recognized her quickly enough, because she'd told him what kind of hat she'd be wearing and there was only one woman in the place that went with the kind of voice he'd heard on the phone.

It came as a distinct shock to him to discover that she wasn't alone. There was a man seated opposite her at the small table she'd chosen—or he had chosen for her—in a softly-lit recess on the left side of the cafe, about half-way to the back.

He disliked the man straight off, without precisely knowing why. He was about forty-five, with slightly graying hair cut rather short, a bland, almost mild-mannered way of smiling and nodding as he talked, and features which were distinctly on the handsome side. He was wearing a tropical worsted suit of expensive weave—the kind of suit you couldn't purchase readymade anywhere for less than a hundred dollars and you knew it was custom-tailored. Three hundred dollars would probably have been a more likely estimate of what the suit had set the man back. He wore a small red carnation in his buttonhole which the July heat had not yet succeeded in wilting.

Ralph became aware suddenly that she had raised her eyes and recognized him. But before he could respond with a nod and smile and draw closer to the table all of the blandness went out of her companion's face. His face hardened and an angry glint came into his eyes. He arose from the table, so angrily and abruptly that he overturned the chair he'd been sitting in.

What he did then was totally outrageous, unheard of. He leaned across the table and slapped Helen Lathrup on the right cheek, putting such force into the blow that the smack was audible to everyone in the cafe.

There was complete silence for an instant; no one moved or spoke. Helen Lathrup sat rigid, an ugly redness suffusing the right side of her face from temple to throat.

Then a woman gasped and a man muttered: "Why doesn't somebody kill the bastard?"

It was exactly what Ralph felt like doing and he made no attempt to control the impulse.

Helen Lathrup's escort had straightened on delivering the blow and was just starting to swing about when Ralph reached him, caught hold of his right arm, making the turn complete, and sent his fist crashing into the man's face.

It was a nose-breaking kind of blow, aimed directly at the bastard's—he was certainly that!—nose and mouth and not at his jaw. Ralph didn't just want to drop him to the floor. He wanted to send him to the hospital.

He thought he heard a cartilage crunch and splinter, but he couldn't be sure.

The man made no attempt to fight back, to defend himself in any way. However much he may have wanted to do so, he was clearly incapable of it.

The blow had stunned him. He swayed for the barest instant, back and forth like a marionette on a wire that had gone suddenly slack, and then his knees gave way, and he crashed to the floor and rolled over on his face.

Ralph stood very still for an instant staring down at him, almost equally stunned but feeling a hot surge of triumph pulsing upward through his chest, rising to his brain, half-intoxicating him.

He was kneeling on the floor at the bastard's side, turning him over, looking with satisfaction at the thin trickle of blood that was running from his mouth, when he felt the tugging.

Helen Lathrup was bending over also, close to Ralph, her breath hot on his face, her fingers biting into his arm, as if she knew that only pain could bring him quickly to his senses.

"We must leave," she breathed. "We must. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'm known here—they won't try to stop us. And he won't lodge a complaint. I'm sure of that. John Darby wouldn't dare—"

He raised his eyes and saw that she was deathly pale, that even the redness, where the vicious ugly bastard had slapped her, was starting to recede. He could see that it had left a slight welt, and all of his fury returned again for an instant, so that he could scarcely breathe.

She was trembling now and there was a pleading urgency in her eyes. "Hurry, before they feel they'd better send for the police, if only to protect themselves. We don't know how badly he's been hurt and it will take them a minute to find out. They won't try to stop us, I tell you, if we go right now."

In one way, it was like a nightmare that had come upon him in broad daylight, been thrust upon him unexpectedly when he had thought himself fully awake. And in another way, it was an intoxicating kind of trance, filled with sound and fury, but a trance from which he had no desire to escape.

Sitting in a cab at her side, with the sound and the fury behind him, it seemed suddenly that he was in another dimension of time and space, where nothing but miracles could take place. The fact that she was trembling still, her very agitation, seemed to make her more desirable, for it awoke in him protective instincts along with a feeling of adoration.

He had never thought that any woman could be quite so beautiful. He had never dared to hope that he would find himself so intimately involved with a famous editor who was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

For he had become intimately involved with her. He had fought another man in a very primitive way as her champion and defender, and it was impossible not to think of that as intimacy. It had brought him as close to her, if only for a moment, as a lover's embrace would have done.

Was not that kind of violence one pathway to intimacy? A murderer was intimate with his victim in a quite terrible way, even when physical love-making was completely absent. This was not that kind of intimacy. But in defending her and trying his best in a moment of savage rage to injure the man who had struck her, hadn't he come close to her in much the same primitively intimate way? The only difference was—he hadn't come close to her with the intention of doing her harm. But the same savage currents had flowed for an instant between them, bringing them very close.

She was sitting so close to him that he could feel the warmth and yielding softness of her body through her thin summer clothes—a softness that was also a firmness, a roundness—and his temples began to pound, and a trip-hammer started up in his loins.

He glanced at her quickly and saw that her eyes were shining in a very strange way. A wild kind of excitement seemed to be stirring in her.

It should have given him warning, should have given him pause. It should have at least flashed across his mind that a woman can become wildly excited in the most primitive of all ways—by just the sight of two men fighting over her, willing and eager to kill for her. And even if one of the two had just struck her brutally and no longer desired her, just the fight alone....

But he did not realize that for many days.

For a fortnight they were together constantly, and his admiration for her had become like a singing flame, his every instinct had whispered that he had found the one perfect woman at last, and that nothing could mar for him the perfection of her body when she came, slender and white and trembling a little, into his arms.

It had not taken him long to discover that wherever Helen Lathrup went—people whispered that she went everywhere, but never in his presence had one of those whispers been heard—she stood out, was the center of all eyes. In a crowd, at concerts and recitals, in smoke-filled Beatnik-patronized expresso restaurants in the Village, on the exclusive, walled-off beaches of fashionable summer resorts there was and could be only one Helen Lathrup.

And when the blow finally came and she refused even to speak to him on the phone, when he surrendered all of his masculine pride and allowed himself to become defenseless and completely at her mercy, he had not at first completely despaired, or turned against her like some sick and humiliated dog backed into a corner and forced to bite at last.

He had gone on begging for her favors, for one more dinner date, one more hour alone with her, one last opportunity, however brief, to prove to her that their quarrels had been needless, and he would find a way to please her still.

He had gone on pleading even when he could no longer deceive himself about her. Tormenting him gave her pleasure and she was not only the most beautiful but the cruelest woman he had ever known.

It was only when she attacked him where he was most vulnerable ... in his work ... it was only when she sneered at the novel she had once praised and returned it to him with blue-pencilings that made him no longer want to go on living ... it was only then that he decided that he could endure no more, and that only her death would set him free.

Chapter V

Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to coast by hundreds of millions of copies.

He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember. He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was always a shock to him.

Every time he saw a beautiful white body stretched out cold on a mortuary slab he remembered how he'd fainted at the sight of the first one, twenty-five years in the past when he'd been a young rookie. Just fallen to the floor and passed out, the way medical students sometimes do when they first have to dissect a cadaver—the organs are put in separate trays, each neatly labeled—and even experienced, case-hardened surgeons when an operation is especially sanguinary ... like on the human eye, for instance. He'd read that somewhere, and he didn't doubt it, not for a moment.

Well ... there was no danger of that happening to him now. He'd seen too many of the really gruesome ones, and the badly marked up ones, and the "floaters" with no fingerprints left to identify them by, every vestige of flesh dissolved away by weeks in the water, and ... the beautiful unmarked ones who were in some respects the most tragic of all.

He had watched many of them carried away in baskets, feeling angry and resentful but forcing himself to remain calm, refusing to let the photographers and print men suspect that he was dying himself a little inwardly, and had kept right on dying, inch by slow inch, across the years. His hair was white now and his face a little more heavily lined than it should have been, but otherwise it didn't show on the surface.

In some of them he had sensed a strange kind of peace—like a hand reaching out to touch him from beyond the grave; cool, steady, no longer feverish. But over most of them there still seemed to hover a penumbra of violence, a crying out for vengeance and retribution, a protest that even death could not wholly silence.

There was no need for him to remind himself that the Lathrup case was one of the explosively violent ones, with that strange residual violence remaining, making itself felt, every time his thoughts returned to it. Not only in the magazine office itself, with her loveliness only slightly marred by the small, dark hole in her temple—the wound had bled profusely, but the blood had not spread over her features—but later, when the body had been lifted into a sheet, and removed from the office, and the last flash-bulb had gone off and he'd been left alone with the medical examiner. He had been just the same as being completely alone, because Hunter had completed his preliminary examination, and his thoughts were back in a smoke-filled room where a poker game was in progress. To Hunter it had been no more than a routine interruption, breaking in on a winning hand and making him so morose and ill-tempered that Fenton, who had always found him a hard man to deal with, had shut up after asking him only two questions.

The residual violence was there, all right, a something in the room that seemed to point an accusing finger, to demand that justice be not too long delayed, to threaten reprisals if the vanished killer were not relentlessly tracked down and made to answer for his crime. It was a feeling Fenton had—nothing more. The threat of reprisal was not directed at him, but at the nebulous entity known as society. But it was always there, always present, a demand for retribution from beyond the grave, a screaming and a pleading, an insistence that justice be done or all hell would yawn for someone.

All right, it was only something he imagined, peculiar to him alone. But he knew from experience that it was unwise to take even imagined horrors lightly. They were part of a man's thinking, his inner life, his individuality. It was a mistake to take them too seriously, but just as bad to brush them aside as of no importance.

All right, the violence had been there, but in another way the office had seemed the opposite of crepe-somber. It had seemed still filled with her living presence, as if she were still striding back and forth from her desk to the window, or sitting at her desk impatiently talking into the intercom.

That she had been a strong-willed, very determined woman despite her aspect of pulse-stirring femininity he'd strongly suspected the instant he'd entered the office with its costly but severely functional furnishings. The choice of furnishings had quite obviously not been influenced in any way by feminine whims and extravagances. No woman, surely, would have really liked such severity in the décor surrounding her. But a woman determined to keep her professional and private lives in separate compartments might well have made such a choice deliberately and taken pride in her ability to impose a severe discipline upon herself.

The conclusion he'd drawn, the kind of woman he'd pictured her as being, hadn't been based on anything very solid. It had been a mere hunch at first, a gathering together of intangibles. But the few questions he'd had an opportunity to ask the editorial staff immediately on his arrival had completely confirmed it. She'd been a considerable woman, and had ruffled a great deal of fur the wrong way, apparently, and there had probably been some baring of claws.

Well ... all right. The Lathrup slaying was one of the sensational ones. It would arouse widespread indignation if it were not solved quickly and even more indignation if it remained unsolved for the next fifty years, as well it might. If the murderer was caught and stood trial—the newspapers would have no reason to complain and it would enrich a great many other people in a dozen or more ways, perhaps even the murderer himself if he wrote the story of his life for a major news syndicate the week before he went to the chair.

He couldn't take it with him—but what the hell. There'd be the thrill of making all that money overnight. Or was the stipulation that a murderer couldn't profit from his crime a bugaboo in that department too? Thirty years on the Force, and he still didn't know for sure.

Well ... there was nothing to be gained by shaking his head and dwelling with anger and pity on the tragic circumstances of a crime he could have done nothing to prevent. Her beauty, so cruelly hidden now from all but the eyes of a mortician—there would be a brief moment when it would be again on view—every aspect of her personal life; the way she'd walked and talked and held herself, her wardrobe, her personal likes and dislikes, the friends she'd made, the enemies who did not think too highly of her, her jewels, her rumored affairs, her choice of restaurants, had all become the emotional property of the public.

Not too short a life perhaps. But to die at thirty-six always meant ... many of the great moments, the moments of complete fulfillment and happiness, however brief, which every human being born into the world had a right to look forward to, would never be experienced at all. A cruel and tragic outrage had been perpetrated upon her, cutting off her life in mid-stream.

That the outrage could be attributed to the inscrutable workings of Fate or Destiny or whatever you cared to call the big, continuously revolving wheel ... that it struck down thousands of women just as beautiful every day all over the world ... that illness and accidents took a far more grievous toll ... did not diminish by one whit the tragedy of it. And when it was brought about by a deliberate act of willful criminal violence it had a special quality which made it seem a hundred times more cruel and unjust.

Fenton looked down at the three letters, spread fanwise on the desk before him. Each was neatly typewritten, neatly creased and just as neatly signed in a firm, precise hand. Michael Willard.

An article writer, and a good one, if the staff at Eaton-Lathrup were right about him and there was no reason to doubt their competence. A free-lance article writer who had quarreled violently with Helen Lathrup three weeks before her death. Fenton had found the letters in the slain woman's desk.

Each was a hot-tempered letter and one was extremely violent, not quite threatening Lathrup with bodily harm but strongly hinting that such harm might be visited upon her if she did not correct what the writer claimed was a very serious mistake.

It seemed incredible to Fenton that anyone, no matter how enraged, would send a prominent editor such threats and sign the letters with his own name.

The man had practically started himself on a walk to the chair. And that particularly irritated Fenton, because Willard would have to be captured before he could complete the walk, and a three-state alert had proved as ineffective in locating him as a fast-moving city dragnet and three Westchester roadblocks in the vicinity of his suburban home....

Fenton was still frowning down at the letters, the only strong lead he had, when someone said from the doorway: "He's given himself up."

Fenton looked up quickly, annoyed, the statement not registering immediately, as First Grade Detective John Gallison had apparently assumed it would.

Gallison was a big man, almost as big as Fenton, and he had much the same look about him—the look of a man aged in some ways beyond his years, but with a curiously unlined face, and the almost boyish aspect that seems to hover until late in life about big, ruggedly built men with beat-up features who never take the trouble to comb their hair.

"What is it, Gallison?" Fenton asked, and then the words themselves penetrated, and he rose from his desk, a look of stunned disbelief in his eyes.

"Is it Willard you're talking about?"

"Who else?" Gallison said, coming into the office and sitting down opposite Fenton in a chair that was two sizes too small for him.

"He came in and gave himself up. He said he knew we'd found the letters, and it would only be prolonging the agony for him to hide out in a furnished room somewhere and live in fear until we closed in on him. He thought of heading north into Canada, or south into Mexico, and even of hopping a freighter to South America. That's what he said, believe it or not. I'm practically quoting his exact words."

"Well, what made him change his mind? We've had such a tough job tracing him he could have gotten all the way to Brazil by this time. If you're going to tell me he was afraid the Brazilian non-extradition policy doesn't cover murder ... skip it. I'm not in a very humorous mood right now."

Gallison smiled slightly. "He said he just wasn't capable of it. Too sensitive, too imaginative, too afraid of life in the buff to take it by the horns that way. I'm still quoting him. He said he was never cut out to be a fugitive. Anything connected with the police terrifies him. If a Government agent should call on him about some trivial, completely innocent matter he'd have a heart attack. He just can't take that sort of thing. He has made a full confession. He says he killed her because she pulled an outrageous gyp on him."

"Yes, I know," Fenton said. "It's what he claims in these letters. He claims he wrote a series of articles for her about juvenile delinquency, and I guess you saw the major, six-million-dollar movie that was based on his material. The Clark Gable-Monroe sort of thing. And now it's on TV, a two-year contract for a weekly series and I think the sponsor is General Motors, but I'm not sure. In case you don't know, all of that is about as big-time as you can get. It would make practically any writer feel entitled to walk down Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with the biggest names in TV and stop for a moment to shake the paw of the MGM lion. The lions in front of the library would look that way to him."

"He says he didn't get a cent out of it," Gallison said. "Not one single penny."

"That's hard to believe," Fenton said. "It seems he sold the Eaton-Lathrup Publications all rights to the material. I haven't looked too deeply into the technicalities involved in such transactions but I'm pretty sure that 'all rights' means exactly what it says. If a magazine buys material on that basis it is entitled to all of the profits accruing from subsequent re-sales, to TV, the movies or whatever."

"Willard practically admits that," Gallison said. "In fact—"

"Wait a minute," Fenton said, a little impatiently. "Let me finish. It's my understanding that not many of the really big magazine groups buy all rights. There's usually a contract involved, with a stipulation in it concerning the rights. And even when they do buy all rights they're seldom one hundred percent legalistic about it. They'll often lean backwards to see that the author gets a break, gets at least a slice of the pie if the work passes into the so-called big-time. I don't know how Lathrup felt about that or just what her policy was, of course. But if he claims he's been gyped out of money he's entitled to in a strictly legal sense, I don't believe he has a legal leg to stand on. Not if he sold the group all rights, with no reservations whatever."

"That's just it," Gallison said. "That's where he claims she took advantage of him. He says that, like plenty of other writers, he's no businessman. You'd laugh to hear the way he's been going on about that, if he wasn't a self-confessed murderer. Nothing a murderer says or does is ever funny. But the way he put it would have gone over big on a TV comic program. He claims he has no more business sense than a two-year-old; would sign any contract that was pushed under his nose without looking at even the large print, let alone the fine. He claims he's—well, the term he used was 'a commercial imbecile.' He takes a sort of pride in it. And he thought she understood that some writers were like that—some of the biggest names, in fact, in the writing business.

"They can't even bring themselves to glance twice at a contract. It's not important to them, they're way off in the clouds somewhere, figuring what their characters are going to say and do in the next chapter."

"He could be right about that," Fenton said, sighing. "Up to a point anyway. I've known two or three big-name mystery writers in my time, and my wife sort of—well, collects them. Writers in general, I mean, along with painters and musicians. It's an odd hobby for the wife of an old police warhorse, but show me just one thing I can really understand about women and I'll get you a lieutenancy tomorrow, if I have to go down to Center Street myself and beg for it. You'd be the biggest asset the Homicide Squad could possibly have."

It was Gallison's turn to sigh. "I guess I'm the way Willard is about contracts when it comes to understanding women," he said. "You seem to forget I've been married myself for fifteen years. Every day my wife is a different kind of woman. But the big difference came between the day before and the day after I married her."

"It's usually that way," Fenton said. "You wake up and discover your wife is a human being."

His expression sobered abruptly. "Where is Willard now? In a cell or still under the lights. If you've got a signed confession—"

"We've got it, all right—signed, sealed and delivered."

"So you just went ahead without even consulting me, is that it? What am I supposed to be around here—a rookie fresh from the asphalt?"

"It couldn't be helped, Lieutenant.... It all happened so fast."

"John! You're asking for trouble, boy!"

"All right then, Joe. I swear it really couldn't be helped. It all just poured out of him, so fast we had trouble in taking it down and had to ask him to read it over three times. We wouldn't have laid a finger on him, anyway. You know that as well as I do."

"Sometimes I wonder. A cop can get terribly angry at times and once, about four years ago, I saw something I deliberately shut my eyes to, and I've never regretted it. They had this ... human animal ... stripped to the waist in the tank room and were ... well, never mind. He committed a brutal sex crime and when they were through with him ... they had a full confession. I just turned on my heels and walked out."

"We still wouldn't have laid a finger on Willard."

"I know, I know. I guess I'd better have a talk with him."

Willard was sitting alone in a cell that dwarfed him a little, despite its narrowness, because he was both a very small and a very frail-looking man. Fenton put his age at about forty-five, although he could have been four of five years older.

He didn't look very much like a writer, but Fenton knew that few writers conformed to the picture people had of them. In general, they looked remarkably like everybody else.

Willard was about five-feet-two in his socks, and he was in them now because both his belt and his shoes had been taken away from him. He had thoughtful gray eyes, and rather handsome features and there was nothing in the least aggressive-looking about him. He was hard to picture with a gun in his hand, taking deliberate aim and shooting a defenseless woman through the head. It was difficult even, to think of him as a man with a violent temper who could write threatening letters or resort to any kind of extreme physical violence, even under the goadings of rage.

He looked up quickly when Fenton and Gallison entered the cell and then got slowly to his feet.

Fenton frowned a little and gestured toward the cot upon which he had been sitting.

"Sit down, please," he said. "No sense in standing. We're just going to have a brief talk and then you can see your lawyer, if you wish. You don't have to say a word, if you prefer to wait until he gets here. It's my duty to tell you that, even though you've signed a confession. Anything you may decide to tell us can be used as evidence in court, in addition to the information in the statement you've just signed. Is that clear to you?"

Willard nodded and sat down again on the edge of the cot. "What does all that matter now?" he said. "I'm going to plead guilty anyway. I killed her because—well, you don't know what kind of woman she was, so you probably won't be able to understand how a man can be driven to desperation—"

"I've just read the statement you made," Fenton said. "It doesn't tell me what kind of woman she was, but it tells me a great deal about you. I've read the letters you wrote to her as well. You seem to feel that you've been very shabbily treated. I would like to know a little more about that."

"What more can I say? What more can I possibly say? When a writer who has lived most of his life on a very modest income loses at least a hundred thousand dollars—"

"You mean ... your rightful share in what your series of articles has brought the Eaton-Lathrup publications in cash so far? Or will bring them within the next few months? Or merely what you believe should be your rightful share, putting aside for the moment all legal considerations. You signed a contract giving the concern all rights, didn't you?"

"Yes, but she gave me to believe—"

"Just what did she give you to believe?"

"That she was prepared to be very generous about the entire matter if the articles should make a great deal of money for the magazines. She wouldn't hold me to the strict letter of the contract. She'd waive the 'all rights' clause. A great many magazines do that. It's taken for granted—"

"I see. But are you sure about that? Don't you think you should have made sure before signing the contract, if you had any doubts at all? There's nothing in the least unethical about a magazine group buying all rights, you know. It's their privilege under the law."

"But she knew how impractical most writers are! She knew how—well, yes, even infantile they can be about such things. And she made me feel that she was my friend, that she'd never dream of taking advantage of me in any way."

"But she didn't, if you signed a contract giving the concern all rights, unqualifiedly, with no strings attached."

"And I still say she did! She led me on, deceived me. She—"

He was on his feet again now and some of the mildness, the constrained look, the look that didn't make him look like a man who might be capable of resorting to violence under stress, was gone from his eyes.

"She led me on, I tell you. There was something about her, something I mistook for great generosity and warmth—"

Fenton looked at him steadily for a moment, carefully weighing what he was about to say. He asked the question in a quiet tone, but he knew that it was emotionally charged, and strategically just the right question to put to the man at that particular moment.

"Were you her lover, Willard?"

Willard flushed scarlet and lowered his eyes.

"Were you?"

Willard compressed his lips and said nothing, but a look of torment had come into his eyes.

"You slept with her, didn't you, Willard?"

"Yes, damn you!" There was a look of naked agony in the frail man's eyes now, and the words came out choked with rage.

Then, quite suddenly, he was trembling violently, clenching his fists like a man deranged.

"Why don't you ask me if she was good in bed? Or if I was? Haven't you a spark of decency in you? I've heard of the third degree but a question like that is worse. Oh, damn you to hell!"

"Why, Willard? I mean—why do you feel it's such an indecent question, a question I've no right to ask? You've confessed to a very serious crime. You've confessed to—I'm going to use another police term I hope won't shock your sensitive spirit too much—you've confessed to what we call the Big One. You can't stand on the niceties when you've taken a human life—or question the right of a policeman, sworn to uphold the law, to ask what, under ordinary circumstances, you might consider a damned impertinent question, an invasion of privacy. Sensitive women, wives and mothers, have been asked far franker questions on the witness stand. There are times when every question must be asked and answered, no matter how much it may anger you or make you writhe."

Perhaps, deep in Willard's nature, there was a submerged substratum of logic ... a willingness to give ground before an incontestable fact or an argument he could not hope to win. Fenton knew that to be true of the more volatile types ... on some occasions, at any rate.

Most of the anger went out of Willard's eyes and he sat down again on the edge of the cot, and cradled his head in his arms.

Fenton took a different tack. "The statement you signed wasn't too clear in a few respects," he said, casting a glance at Gallison that was generously forgiving, but still a little on the withering side. "I'd like to go over a few of the details with you. Just what happened when you entered the office and Miss Lathrup looked up and saw you standing there with a gun in your hand? Just what did you say to her before you shot her—and what did she say to you? Was she genuinely frightened from the start? It would be strange if she wasn't, but I'd like to have you tell me more about it in your own words. There are a few other questions I'd like to have answered. Take your time, try to think clearly. I'm not pressuring you. It's just that we've got to be convinced that every statement in your confession is true."

Willard looked up quickly, some of the anger sweeping back into his eyes. "Why should you need to be convinced? Don't you sometimes slap around poor devils who are completely innocent just to get any kind of a confession out of them?"

"You've been reading too many paperback novels," Fenton said.

"I'm not a fiction writer," Willard said. "I haven't read a paperback novel in five years."

"You should," Fenton said, wryly. "Some of the strongest, most realistic writing in America today is being done in that field. But cops get slandered in them a helluva lot. Not always, but sometimes. Some of the writers don't seem to like cops too well. They are often very sensitive, imaginative guys themselves and they don't like what cops sometimes do, even when they try to be very hard-boiled and call a spade a spade. And I won't deny that cops sometimes do step a little over the line. But it isn't as bad as you might think. Not nearly as bad."

"I've only your word for that."

"You may take my word for it. I've been on the force for thirty years. You get sadists in any department of life—I'll challenge anyone to deny that. And if an innocent man happens to get a bad break—comes up against the wrong kind of cop—it can be very bad. You could justify a certain degree of cop hatred in almost anyone on other grounds. The world we live in isn't for children. If cops were mild-mannered intellectuals, or held completely modern, psychiatric views about crime—and the causes of crime—society in general might be in for trouble on a day-to-day realistic basis."

"It might not do any harm at all if we gave it a try," Willard said.

"On a theoretical level there are times when I'm inclined to agree with you," Fenton said. "But there's another part of my nature that says there has to be a kind of binding cement to hold society together meanwhile—I mean, until Utopia's here. Cops have to be picked for toughness—to a certain extent. But that doesn't mean they can't be completely fair. A lot of them lean backwards to be fair, will be a big brother to young hoodlums if they think there's an ounce of decency left in them and all they need is a little of that 'not being completely rejected' feeling to give them a different slant on things. You know what I mean. But some cops can be sadistic, mean, even downright vicious. I would be the last to deny it."

Fenton smiled, trying his best to bring a little warmth into his words, to get the man on the cot to trust him. "There are times when I don't like cops myself, any better than you do. It's a very human feeling. Could I go any further than that, considering that I'm supposed to be just about as tough as they come in some respects, being a Lieutenant of Detectives on the Homicide Squad?"

"What do you want to know?" Willard asked. "What do you want me to tell you? I walked into her office and shot her dead. Isn't that all down on the record now? Haven't I confessed to it?"

"It still needs a little filling out," Fenton said. "Suppose we start at the beginning and just go over it all again, step by step."

A half hour later Fenton sat again at his desk, drumming with his fingers on the big double-file spread out before him.

Gallison hadn't seated himself this time. He stood awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot, and casting an occasional glance toward the window and at the large framed photograph of an Inspector in uniform on the opposite wall—Inspector Henry Millard, who had been dead for twenty years. He did not seem to want continuously to meet and hold Fenton's level, almost accusing gaze.

"He didn't do it," Fenton said. "I knew that the instant I started questioning him, but I had to make sure, beyond the faintest possibility of a doubt. All of the things he told me—and at least one-third of the details in his signed confession—are completely wide of the mark. He wasn't there, didn't shoot her, couldn't even tell me how she'd looked in falling fifteen seconds after the shot was fired. How she must have looked, I mean, for her head and shoulders to strike the desk the way they did, upsetting an ashtray, and to be consistent with the position she was in when Miss Prentiss found her. And the body wasn't moved—not a half-inch—until we arrived.

"Other things—a dozen, at least. I had the impression he wasn't even sure just where the bullet had entered her head. Oh, a murderer can be mistaken about many things, way off in some respects. But not quite that far off. Not nearly that far off, in fact, when he's studied everything published in the papers about the case, and has been in that office many times. There were details we didn't tell the reporters, details he couldn't possibly have known and he was completely wrong about all of them, with one or two exceptions. And that only strengthens the case against him—the very damaging evidence which proves that he wasn't the killer and couldn't possibly have been."

Fenton nodded, his fingers still tapping on the file. "You'd naturally expect him to be right about one or two things, even if they didn't appear in the papers. He's no dumb-bell. He couldn't have written those juvenile delinquency articles and foster-fathered a major movie if he was. He'd naturally be pretty good at guessing games. It's always the exceptions which strengthen, lend real weight, to that kind of rule."

Fenton cleared his throat. "It's like in medicine. You take a very rare, unusual kind of disease. Say there are twenty symptoms which are very diagnostic of that particular disease. But one of them only occurs in one case of the disease out of a hundred. And the patient has that one symptom, along with the others. Now ... let's say that in the whole United States, in the course of the year, only about two hundred people die of that rare disease.

"Don't you see what I'm driving at Gallison—or do you? It would have to mean that only about two people die from that disease with that particular symptom attached to it every year out of a nation of a hundred and seventy-five million people. According to the law of averages, how likely would the patient be to have the disease? The very symptom which does sometimes occur in connection with the disease—but rarely—which you might think would strengthen the diagnosis, actually helps to weaken it, to make it so unlikely as to practically eliminate the possibility that the patient could have it."

"So it's medicine he's talking about now," Gallison said, unable to keep a slight trace of acidity out of his voice, but wishing, almost instantly, that he hadn't spoken at all.

"I only used that as an example," Fenton said, his voice sharpening slightly. "But it spells the difference between a crack medical diagnostician and a bad one. It's always those little, subtle intangibles you have to take into consideration. And that's really just another way of saying you have to have imagination to be either a good cop or a good doctor."

A slightly wistful look came into Fenton's eyes. "I sometimes wish I'd taken up medicine. Healing people is much better than wallowing in the kind of ugly—Oh, well, skip it."

"But you can't clear a self-confessed murderer completely on that basis alone," Gallison protested. "His confession could be off in a hundred ways, and he could still be guilty. At least ... it would remain a possibility. You practically just admitted that yourself. If we had other evidence ... and we do have a little additional evidence ... we could still take it before a jury."

"You mean the DA could," Fenton said, his voice becoming tinged with the kind of impatience a grammar-school teacher might have displayed toward a pupil who had just pulled a boner in geography. "What are you trying to do—add to our burdens? The DA could take it before a jury, all right. But he'd get his ears pinned so far back that the next time he ran for election it would be as a dog-catcher. Did you ever hear of an alibi, Gallison? Or is that too involved a point of law for you?"

Lieutenant Fenton sighed heavily and his voice softened a little. "Sorry, Gallison. That was a lousy thing for me to say. But at least you know that I wasn't pulling rank on you. It's something I've never done or never will do—unless you come in here and toss your badge on the desk and I have to hand it back to you and tell you to go through channels."

"Okay, Joe. I understand. Don't let it worry you."

"A policeman shouldn't have nerves, I guess. But things have been moving a little too fast for me in this case."

"Just how good is his alibi?" Gallison asked.

"Iron-plated," Fenton said. "And of course it isn't his alibi in a strict sense, because he didn't even present it to us. It's an alibi we'll have to force him to accept as absolute proof that he couldn't have done it, because we want him to walk out of here without hallucinating when we release him. Otherwise someone might get the idea that this is a side wing of Bellevue. We've done our best so far to create that impression anyway."

"You mean—you think he may be ... a psycho?"

"Yes—and no," Fenton said.

"That's sure enlightening. Gets right back to what you just said about medical diagnosis. Maybe you should have been a psychiatrist, Joe."

"Maybe I'd better explain. He's not only a very brilliant writer of true-fact crime articles for the better magazines, with the stress placed on juvenile delinquency—he happens to be pretty much of a confirmed alcoholic. The wild binge kind—once in every three or four weeks he loses a week-end. Completely, goes absolutely blotto."

"Like in that Jackson novel that made such a big splash about twelve or fifteen years ago, you mean? I remember the movie even better than I do the book, but I read the book—"

"We seem to be very literary today," Fenton said. "Everywhere we turn in this case we come up against famous novels, or big-name writers or major movies or guys with a grievance against female editors. I suppose that's only to be expected—considering what kind of murder it was and where it took place. But it's hard to understand why so much of it has to drift our way in a single day. To answer your question—yes, he's the Lost Week-End kind of heavy drinker."

"Then why did you say 'yes—and no,' when I asked you if he was a psycho?"

"Because it's not a term you can use loosely when you're talking about alcoholics. What I guess I should say is—it's not a term you should use unambiguously. It had to be 'Yes—and no,' with a lot of half-way stages in between. There is such a thing as alcoholic insanity, you know—a clear-cut psychosis with very definite symptoms. You can get alcoholic softening of the brain, which is something else again, because it's physical as well as mental and it's usually fatal. You can be just a periodic drinker—not a hopeless alcoholic at all, although you'll be headed that way—and have the D.T.'s occasionally. Or you can be a very heavy, constant drinker and never have the D.T.'s.

"It all depends on how alcohol affects you. Just a little alcohol, for instance, could give Edgar Allan Poe the D.T.'s. And when a man has the D.T.'s, he's a psychotic, if only temporarily. Or behaves like one in all respects. And just constant, heavy drinking can make a man behave so erratically at times you could practically call him a psycho. And when a man is dead drunk, under any circumstances, would you say his behavior was merely neurotic?

"The thing you've got to remember about heavy drinking—periodic or otherwise—is that one of the things it most often does is bring about memory lapses. Very serious memory lapses—prolonged blackout periods. And that especially applies to the Lost Week-End kind of drinker."

"So Willard had a memory lapse and couldn't remember whether he shot her or not. Is that what you're trying to say?"

Fenton shook his head. "Nothing of the sort. You're forgetting about the alibi, apparently."

"Sorry I interrupted."

"Think nothing of it. But I'd be very grateful if you'd listen carefully. I'm just giving you a few simple facts about alcoholism."

"Not as a warning, I hope. I hardly ever touch the stuff."

"I'll just bet. I might have gone for that idea—that he couldn't remember if he'd shot or not, if we hadn't got all this new information about him just in the last hour. He's had memory lapses going back ten or twelve years. He's been in the Bellevue alcoholic ward seven times. And he just happened to be there on the morning of the murder. He was picked up the night before in a bar on West Eighth Street, after a brawl that was a little on the special side. He was roaring drunk and he blackened the eye of one of his drinking companions and knocked the other down, almost giving him a concussion.

"They were good friends of his, so they covered up for him. No police charge was lodged against him. But he was carted off to Bellevue and he remained there for two days. I don't believe in murder by thought control, do you?"

"But why did he confess? It makes no sense at all to me."

"Doesn't it? It makes plenty of sense to me and I'm sure it will to you if you'll give it a little thought. You know what guilt feelings can do to an alcoholic, don't you? You must have arrested at least a dozen drunks in the last ten years who were burning up with impatience to confess. To homicides they didn't and couldn't have committed."

"Yeah, that's true enough," Gallison said.

"You saw what she meant to him, how he felt about her. When I just asked him if he'd slept with her it set off a trigger-mechanism in his brain. It was like a delayed time bomb. He was dead sober when he turned himself in and confessed, but alcoholics can be dead sober and still have a kind of emotional hangover—sometimes lasting for days after a real wild binge on a lost week-end. He was—still is—in a very abnormal state."

"But why should he feel so guilty about his relations with her?" Gallison asked. "Why the threatening letters. You mean that he didn't actually feel she gyped him on that article sale to the movies and TV? If he didn't, he sure is a great little actor. He should have played a leading role in the movie himself."

"Oh, he felt she gyped him, all right. And that increased his load of guilt. He couldn't remember just when he'd last spent two days in Bellevue—not the exact date. He thought he'd gone to the Eaton-Lathrup publications on the morning of the murder, had a showdown with her and shot her dead. He might not have been completely sure about it, but he couldn't forget his earlier memory lapses. Some alcoholics feel guilty on just that basis alone. They know they're subject to memory lapses and they're always wondering what terrible crime they just might conceivably have committed during the blotto stage.

"And every aspect of his relations with her was steeped in guilt, apparently. Just being her lover made him feel guilty, apparently. You saw how he flared up when I questioned him about it. It sounds crazy, but there are a few men like that left in this day and age. A Puritanic hangover that alcoholism makes a real fighting issue, if it's ever openly discussed.

"Don't you see? She probably threw him over, rejected him, told him he wasn't her idea of a lover boy just about the time that big movie sale went through. So he had a double reason for hating her—a triple reason, in fact, since he felt guilty about just having an affair with her—and it all came out in the wash when he walked in here and confessed to a crime he didn't commit."

"But how about that movie and TV angle."

Fenton frowned, staring down at the double-file on his desk. "That's the screwiest part of it, the part that really ought to be used in a book sometime, by one of those mystery writers I told you about—two writers I know very well and would probably give me a percentage for bringing it to their attention, if I wasn't more or less incorruptible regarding Homicide Squad files. Fact is ... she leaned backwards to be fair, to see that he made a fairly large sum out of the movie sale ... even though he wasn't legally entitled to anything at all. He did get pretty close to his hundred thousand dollars."

Gallison whistled softly. "Brother, that's hard to believe. What happened to the dough? He's still living in fairly modest circumstances. He has a small house just north of White Plains, as you know, but he bought it several years ago and it's mortgaged right up to the hilt."

"You've hung around bars quite a bit, haven't you?" Fenton said, smiling a little. "I mean, just in line of duty, of course. Haven't you heard guys say: 'I made three hundred dollars last week, but it was burning a hole in my pocket. I blew it all in one night.'"

"Sure, sure," Gallison admitted. "I've heard guys talking that way often enough. But a hundred thousand dollars—"

"Not quite, probably. Seventy thousand would be closer, I should imagine. And income tax would take a big slice. Half of the rest could go as a feedback."

"What do you mean ... a feedback?"

"Money squandered on her while he was still in her good graces, as her number one lover boy. That would also give him an additional reason to hate her, when he thought about it afterwards. Know what it costs to take a woman with her expensive tastes out five nights a week, for perhaps three months?"

Gallison shrugged. "How should I know? I get upset sometimes when my wife orders three cocktails before dinner at a midtown bar."

"He's probably been living very high for the past three or four months, ever since the picture was sold and she gave him a slice of what it brought in cold cash. Just why she did it I can't imagine. Maybe there actually was a generous streak in her, and she really thought the concern owed him something, despite the contract. She could even have been a little in love with him at one time. He's not a bad looking guy, remember. And she probably knew she'd get quite a bit of it back in jewelry, furs and expensive entertainment."

Gallison whistled again. "I'm beginning to get the picture," he said. "If the dough actually was burning a hole in his pocket and there are plenty of guys like that. And if he had blotto periods—"

"Well, that winds it up," Fenton said. "We'll have to release him, of course. No reason to hold him now. The poor little guy. In a way, I feel sorry for him. It's no joke to be an alcoholic and feel that guilty about getting himself a piece of very high-class tail."

"You're not fooling me, Joe. I bet you have a Puritan streak yourself. The only woman you've been interested in for the past fifteen years is the glamor doll you married."

"It could be," Fenton conceded. "My father was a farmer in Iowa and he went to church every Sunday, rain or shine. It's something you never entirely outgrow. But if I ever hear you shooting your mouth off about it—"

It was Gallison's turn to smile. "Don't worry, Joe. The secret's safe with me. I'm just glad I'm not that way."

"I see. You step out now and then—just tell your wife it's a double-duty assignment that will keep you up until dawn."

"I didn't say that. Hell, there's a difference between loyalty and the kind of act our little friend put on. He actually blushed, or didn't you notice, when you threw it up to him."

"Some day you'll become tolerant of every kind of human behavior," Fenton said. "We all have a chink in our armor somewhere."

"I suppose, I suppose."

"You don't have to suppose. It's goddam true. A guy can be a prig in one respect and a liberal-minded, very intelligent kind of human being in another. We're all jackasses one third of the time, at least."

"It's funny," Gallison said. "One of the Eaton-Lathrup editors is an alcoholic too. That Ellers guy. Do you suppose he has blackouts now and then?"

"With nothing more than that to go on," Fenton said, "we'd have no justification for suspecting him. Something may turn up, of course. We'll see. We've got a lot of digging to do, and our best lead so far has gone out the window. I didn't say that all confirmed alcoholics worry or feel guilty about what they may have done during a lost week-end. Only a few of them do, the ones who have criminal impulses or a strong reason for hating someone even when they're sober. We'll see, we'll see. Right now—"

The phone at Fenton's elbow started ringing.

He picked up the receiver, listened for a moment and re-cradled it, a very odd look coming into his eyes.

"Now nothing can surprise me," he said. "A first-class lead goes out the window and one just as promising comes flying in, like one of those goddam pigeons that are always messing up the sill."

"What is it?" Gallison asked. "Or would you rather make a production out of keeping me guessing?"

"Well ... there's a young writer whose work Helen Lathrup took very seriously at first and then tore into, ripping his self-esteem to shreds. I got that from the editor you just mentioned, Ellers. They were also sort of close and cozy for a time and then she refused to even see him when he phoned. She slammed his book manuscript back with a hell of a harsh criticism—Ellers read what she wrote. He also saw the manuscript and thought it was pretty good."

"Sounds sort of familiar," Gallison said. "Like the same record almost, but with a different groove maybe in it somewhere. I mean, she sure was an expert in the tease line. Give them every encouragement, the better to watch them writhe."

Fenton nodded. "Yeah ... in general I'd say yes. We've run into it twice before and in questioning the office staff I got the impression I'd just scratched the surface. She covered a lot of territory with her teasing. Except that most women who fall into that category either won't let a man touch them or won't go beyond a kiss. She was very generous with her encouragement, apparently."

"You mean she was willing to start off as if she was playing for keeps."

"If you want to put it that way. What puzzles me a little is that she didn't have to. Just one long, lingering look and most men would have been hooked, right through the gullet like a frog when you use it for bait. Ever fish for bass with frogs, Gallison? Sometimes they climb out of the water on a nearby bank and stare back, looking forlorn and pathetic as hell—pathetic enough to tear your heart out. But they're still hooked."

"So is the fisherman—if he doesn't catch any bass. Fisherwoman in this case, of course. What did she hope to gain by it?"

Fenton shrugged. "Who can say, exactly? Probably the same kind of cruel pleasure most women who fall into that category get from keeping a man dangling. Only, as I say, she seems to have been exceptionally generous-minded about it, at least at first. Women like that really fall into three categories. The first is scared stiff when a man so much as touches them, but they enjoy leading men on. The second had some kind of trauma in childhood which prevents them from warming up to men, but they'd genuinely like to be generous and don't intend to be deliberately cruel. The third kind is like Lathrup. What they are, basically, is men-destroying women. They can be both generous and cruel, and aren't actually repelled by men physically. They'll go all the way, but the hooked frog had better watch out."

"You know what, Joe? You really should have been a psychiatrist."

"Suppose we drop all that for the moment. You asked me what I'd found out. You want to hear it, or don't you?"

"Why not? We're supposed to be working together on a homicide case."

"All right, here it is. I put a trailer on the young writer. Not a shadow, no Squad close-check. Just did a little more digging, keeping him in view. He was just one of twenty suspects. Thought nothing important would turn up. His name's Ralph Gilmore, by the way. I gave you a brief run-down on him. Have you forgotten?"

"Naturally not," Gallison said. "But when you just called him a young writer—"

"All right, you remember. Good. I won't ask you how much you remember, because I went into most of this before and you failed to remember straight off. But anyhow, the digging paid off. All Gilmore did, about ten days ago, was go into a pawnshop on Park Row and buy himself a gun. The kind of under-the-counter deal that infuriates me, and this is one pawnbroker who'll wish he'd thought twice—or three times. He'll have the book thrown at him."

Gallison narrowed his eyes. "What kind of gun was it, Joe."

"What kind do you suppose? It couldn't have been any other kind, could it? She was shot with a forty-five, and if he'd bought a pearl-handled woman's gun did you think for a moment I'd have looked as stunned as I did just now?"

"You might have. It would have shown he had murder on his mind. At the last moment, he might have decided that a big automatic was what he really needed."

"Yeah, I can well imagine."

"I'm serious in one way," Gallison said. "You can fit silencers on smaller guns. An amateur doesn't usually commit murder with a forty-five—a big Luger cannon or anything like that—unless he just happens to have such a weapon lying around ... a war souvenir, say."

"You can't argue with a fact. Gilmore bought a big, long-barreled gun. Maybe the pawnbroker had only one gun to sell and that was it. Try buying a gun from a pawnbroker sometime. Gilmore was one of the lucky ones."

"And now you think his luck is running out?"

A weary, slightly embittered look came into Fenton's eyes. "How should I know, at this stage? If I was in his shoes I'd be plenty worried. But our job is simply to do what we can and take nothing for granted ... until we've checked and double-checked."

"Then we'd better get right after it."

"I think so," Fenton said.

Chapter VI

Ruth Porges could not have explained, even to herself, why the scream had unnerved her so. Like the others, she'd been unable to identify the voice. But she did have a faint, will-of-the-wisp kind of suspicion that it was Lynn Prentiss who had cried out in shock and horror. It hadn't sounded like Susan's voice at the desk or the voice of Joyce Sanderson from the linotype room.

And somehow, all morning, she's been expecting something alarming to happen. She couldn't have explained that either. It was just that—well, things were coming to a head as far as Lathrup was concerned. She was reaching the saturation point in arousing bitter anger and adding fuel to long-standing grievances.

Ruth Porges had only to close her eyes to bring it all back. She'd thought that what had happened had been filed securely away in her mind; was just a collapsed file covered with dust, the pages so yellow and brittle they'd crumble if she thumbed through them again.

But now she knew better. It wasn't that old a file. It had all happened less than ten months ago, and it had left a raw red wound in her mind. It could be put in very simple terms—no file was really needed. It would have sounded like a musical comedy refrain if it hadn't been so cruelly tragic. Over and over, echoing still.

She stole my man. Went right after him, with no scruples and no holds barred. And when she discovered that he wasn't too accomplished a lover—not too good in bed, why not say it?—she cast him aside like an old shoe.

Ruth Porges leaned back and shut her eyes and let the memories come flooding back.

He was wearing a gray trench coat and his hair was short-cropped, and he looked handsome and distinguished enough to make her think of Paris in the spring and she was sitting alone at a table in a Left Bank cafe, and there he was coming toward her, smiling his handsome, slightly crooked smile and it was just three years after the end of World War II.

But of course it hadn't been like that at all. She'd met him at a party in the Village and he'd been a writer of a sort and a painter of a sort and knew quite a few important people in the musical world. As far as she knew he hadn't sold a single story or article to a magazine and he certainly wasn't wealthy, but he always seemed to have enough money to take a girl out for the evening and spend perhaps fifteen or twenty dollars and he never tried to economize by suggesting they go to little Italian restaurants where you could get red wine by the bottle and the bill never exceeded three or four dollars.

No lavish spender, no Rainbow Room sort of escort, but her own salary was large enough to enable her to go to the Stork Club occasionally in the company of girl friends with escorts to spare, so she didn't begrudge him a fairly modest evening's entertainment when he seemed to like her so much.

And he did like her—no question about that. Roger Bendiner, the only man who'd ever really thought of her, entirely and all the time, as a woman who had so much ... so very much ... to give to a man.

"So you want me to meet your boss?" he said. "That's quite amusing, you know. A reversal of the usual sort of thing. A harassed husband comes home to a wife who's a little on the uncooperative side and says: 'Darling, I'm bringing the boss home for dinner. Try to build me up instead of tearing me down, just for this one evening, and make the meal a little outstanding, eh?'

"But this way it's much simpler. Your boss is a woman and I just have to charm her a little. All you have to worry about is whether or not I have enough charm. But since we're not married yet I'll have an ace to start with. Every executive-type woman is interested in an unmarried man, no matter how much he may be lacking in the social graces and even if he has a bashed in nose."

"You haven't a bashed in nose and you're not lacking in the social graces," she reminded him, smiling a little.

"Well, that's a matter of opinion," he said. "Of course you're right about my nose. But my ears are much too large and only Clark Gable could get away with ears this size and still—well, you know what I mean."

"I think you're just as handsome," she said.

The evening went so well at first that any kind of resentment directed toward Lathrup would have seemed to her ungracious and lacking in common sense. She wasn't quite sure why she'd invited Lathrup to meet Roger; was unable to explain it later to her own satisfaction and would have been at a complete loss to explain it to anyone else.

The impulse hadn't been prompted by a desire to impress Lathrup with her capacity to attract and hold a handsome man or to ingratiate herself with the woman in any way. She'd begun to dislike Lathrup a little even then, along with every other member of the editorial staff.

Probably she'd done it to impress Roger. Not that he'd needed to be impressed in that way, but to a woman deeply in love and not quite able to accept the miracle at face value a desire to shine, to seem exceptional in all respects can become almost a compulsion. And Lathrup was decorative, an exceptional woman in so many different ways that it was a feather in Ruth Porges' cap to claim her as a close friend as well as her employer. Simply to parade her before Roger in that capacity was so irresistible a temptation that she had succumbed to it with no particular misgivings, since it had never even occurred to her that Roger could transfer his adoration from her to another woman.

The transference had taken place so gradually that at first she had remained completely unaware of it. Even when she saw them together on the dance floor, and Roger was holding Lathrup a little more tightly and intimately than most of the other men were holding their partners and their cheeks seemed to remain in contact for a surprisingly long time—seemed, in fact, almost never to separate—she did not become in any way alarmed.

Annoyed, yes. She was a little annoyed, because even during a lull in the music they remained so completely absorbed in each other that they did not once glance in her direction.

But she thought nothing of it, really, and when they returned to the table and sat down and kept looking at each other, completely ignoring her, it was a full ten or fifteen minutes before her color began to rise a little and a look of concern crept into her eyes.

She wasn't angry at Roger even then ... or with Lathrup. She put their behavior down to a momentary infatuation brought on by Roger's five Manhattans, and Lathrup's three Old Fashioneds, an infatuation which would evaporate like dew in bright sunlight the instant the next dance number began and she and Roger would get out on the floor together, and she'd mold her body to his and he'd hold her more tightly than he'd have dared to hold Lathrup, and their lips would come together at least once in the course of the dance in a long and passionate kiss.

The lights were dim; no one would see. It would not cause a scandal. It would be in bad taste and unacceptable on such a dance floor in the presence of patrons who would never think of going so far, however much they might want to do so, and if in a brighter light it might even have brought a tap on the shoulder from an irate head waiter.

But she'd do it anyway ... she'd prove to Lathrup that she was a woman who was not afraid to dance with her man like a hellion on a Village cellar dance floor, like a real gone Beat nineteen years of age with a rose pinned in her hair and an upthrust of breasts that could make the most distinguished of midtown, gray-templed, capital-gains league patrons feel as primitive as a Dawn Man.

There were swanky night clubs where it was winked at and took place all the time, of course—the danse primeval. But this just didn't happen to be that kind of night club. She'd make it that kind, however—for Roger and herself alone. And if anyone saw or objected or tried to interfere she'd really show them what a hellion she could be. If the protests really angered her—she'd take off her clothes.

She suddenly realized that she'd allowed herself to become more drunk that she'd ever imagine she could be. She'd had five Manhattans too, and the last one she hadn't sipped. She downed it in a gulp, her eyes on Roger's face.

Roger had apparently forgotten that there was more than one woman seated at the table with him. And that woman wasn't herself. He was looking at Lathrup now in a way that made her turn away with a half-sob of shock. The pure animal flamed in his eyes. He was undressing her with his eyes and she was smiling back at him, apparently not caring in the least, giving him the kind of encouragement that could only be characterized as lascivious, the look of a wanton lost to all shame.

Ladylike as well ... that was the most shocking, revolting, unbelievable part of it.

Ruth Porges had an impulse to get up, lean across the table and slap Lathrup's face.

In her present state of intoxication it would not have been a ladylike slap. She was quite sure of that. She'd lose her job, of course, along with the man she'd already lost—her satyr-lover whom she'd allowed herself to idealize. And to think that he'd held her in his arms, and she'd yielded her virginal body to him, surrendering utterly to his fiercely insistent, madly passionate caresses. A man incapable of loyalty, a man consumed by the kind of gross sensuality that degraded a woman by its complete lack of respect for her as an individual.

If he could look at Lathrup that way, at her thighs and bourgeoning breasts—the more bourgeoning because of the wanton way she'd constricted their swelling roundness—and her hair and lips and eyes ... he could look at any woman that way, feel the same way about any woman attractive enough to catch his eye and even some who were the opposite of attractive, but who had something about them that stirred men of primitive instincts to a frenzy of desire. The more coarse and slatternly the woman the more some men seemed to be stirred.

Not that Lathrup was coarse and slatternly—just the opposite. And Roger was the kind of man who would be repelled by a real slut. She gave him that much credit. He was nothing if not fastidious, he would seek to pluck only the unique and delicate blooms that grew very high up, on trees of rare growth arching above white marble terraces, their branches stirred by breezes from the blue Mediterranean, or the New York equivalent of such blooms.

What kind of woman was Lathrup anyway? A hard, executive-type woman two-thirds of the time, a woman some people might wonder about and even just possibly think a lesbian—although there was little about her to suggest that—and then, all woman, so completely feminine that she could bring a man to his knees before her with a single provocative glance.

How could she hope to compete with a woman like that? And she no longer wanted to, because Roger was clearly unworthy of her, not the kind of man she'd thought him, not the eternally devoted lover who had found in her alone something special that he had been searching for all his life, just as she had been searching....

She stiffened suddenly, an intolerable anguish arising in her and making it difficult for her to breathe. Roger had arisen from the table again and was moving out onto the dance floor with Lathrup held firmly in his embrace. The orchestra was playing a waltz now and the tempo of the music was slow and sensuous and Lathrup had abandoned all pretense of reserve.

The way their bodies blended, seemed almost to melt together, was more outrageous than the Village cellar wildness she had pictured to herself a moment before and which she would not have hesitated to engage in if she'd felt that Roger had wanted to feel that close to her in a defiantly intimate way.

This was a more outrageous intimacy, because it was unmistakably the clinging embrace of two lovers in a darkened room, behind the privacy of a securely locked door.