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Roy Glashan's Library
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G-Men Detective, Summer 1949, with "Trust Me to Slay"
When Jim Hardy marries a pretty girl who has an ugly past,
he wed murder, murder, murder, and still more murder!
PLANTED before the closed door of my flat, the detective's stocky body had the solidity of granite. He seemed to be entirely unaffected by the stifling August heat that bathed me in sweat.
"It's no use, Mr. Hardy," he told me. "I can't let you in. That's a murder in there."
"That's my wife in there," I shot back at him. Ann had been my wife for just a week and a day. We had returned from our honeymoon only last night. "She needs me."
"That's what you think." I couldn't tell if the undertone in his low voice was amusement or sympathy. "Take it from me, what she needs right now is a lawyer."
"I happen to be a lawyer," I said. I was, in fact, a very junior associate in the firm of Loring, Folsom and Carruthers, having been admitted to the bar a mere three years before. "What's going on here? Who are you?"
"I'm Detective Sergeant Dan Carson." The chunky man ran his hand up under his hat, scratched the clipped short, grizzled hair thus revealed. "But I can't tell you what's going on. All I know is your wife phoned us there was a dead man in her living room, and when we got here, there he was—with a bullet in his brain."
My scalp prickled. I'd seen corpses enough in Normandy and all across France, but to hear about one in my own home was not the same.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"She says she never saw him before." The 'says' was faintly stressed. "She says he told her the renting agent sent him to straighten out something about the lease. So she let him in and went to that phone in the foyer to call you and ask you what she should do about it. But before she got an answer, she heard this thump behind her. She twisted around and saw this bird down on the carpet. When she got to him, he was dead."
I pictured Ann bending over the sprawled body, horror coming into her triangular face. She was such a little thing, so almost elf-like, and so dependent, it was a wonder that she'd had the presence of mind to do the right thing, call the police at once.
"Perhaps he was looking for a place to commit suicide," I said. "Perhaps he rang this bell at random, and when Ann let him in, he shot himself."
"Could be," the detective agreed. "Except where's the gun he did it with? We'd have found it if it was anywheres in the flat. Somebody must have carried it off. But the way she tells it, there wasn't anybody except her and this bird."
HIS insinuation brought a burr of anger into my voice. "Are you implying that she's lying?" I demanded. "That she's shielding someone?"
Carson's eyes went stony, unreadable. "I'm just telling you what you want to know, mister. Come to think of it, maybe I'm talking out of turn. Maybe I ought to shut up."
I needed him. and I was a fool to antagonise him, I realized. "I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I guess I'm a bit touchy."
"Sure you are." There was something warming in the smile that briefly illumined his flinty mask. "Me, I'd be burning up if my old lady let me walk into a mess like this without tipping me off. She had plenty time to phone you before we got here."
He was dead right. Ann should have—wait a minute. I had the answer.
"She probably tried to call me, but I must already have left the office." I said. "It's way down on Rector Street, a good half-hour's subway ride from here, counting the walk at both ends."
"And you got here at—" Carson glanced at his wristwatch—"Yeah, at about twenty to five. You was in all afternoon, I suppose?"
"I certainly was. I was right at my desk till a few minutes past four, and—"
I broke off, abruptly aware how deftly this detective had extracted my whereabouts at the time of the killing. It was a trap into which I'd have almost surely stepped if I were the one Ann was shielding.
She was not, of course, could not be shielding anyone. But the only other alternative, that she herself had shot the stranger and disposed of the gun, was just as unthinkable.
Was it? An iron band seemed to tighten about me as I recalled something she'd said that morning when I was leaving for my first Monday back at the office. She'd clung to me in the foyer just inside this door.
"Jim," she'd murmured. Just, "Jim," but I'd understood all she was saying to me, just saying my name. And then she'd said, "Will you always trust me, Jim darling? Will you always believe in me, no matter what?"
"How could I do anything else, kitten?" I whispered. "You're the other part of me, aren't you?" And I kissed, one more time, the lips that were the color of raspberries, and as soft and sweet.
Later, going over with Mr. Loring—George Hamilton Loring, head of my firm—an appeal brief he wanted me to draft, I'd found myself wondering what had impelled Ann to make that strange plea, and I found myself realizing how little I knew about her, although I knew her so well.
We'd met at one of the parties the Lorings loved to give for young people, being childless themselves. I enjoyed going to them mostly because of Rose Loring, even though she was twice my age.
Tall, slim and graceful, Rose had a quality of eternal youth that belied the traces of silver in her chestnut hair.
That night, Rose brought me a gray-eyed girl who seemed, in contrast to my bulk, no bigger than a minute. Before our hostess had finished saying, "You and Ann Dane ought to know one another, Jim," we were both caught up in a vast tidal wave that swept us out of that house and to far, shimmering horizons.
The next three weeks were a dizzy, glorious dream. Ann's silver laughter threaded it, and her gamin joyousness, but they did not mask from me her depth and wonder. It was the present that engrossed us in those weeks, and the future, but not the past. Then George and Rose Loring stood with us before the altar where a man of God pronounced us one, and afterwards—Well, a man does not cross-examine his bride on their honeymoon.
When, at about four, Mr. Loring returned from a real estate closing uptown, he found me staring at a sheet of legal cap on which I had written, instead of preliminary notes for that brief, something like this:
Age—About 20.
Home town—Montville Penn.
Education—Local high school only, but has done a great deal of reading, mostly history, and is well versed in classical music.
Family—Mother died long ago. Father died last March. A. then came to N.Y. to look for job on magazine or newspaper, but had no success. Was living at the YWCA.
That was all, absolutely all, I knew about the antecedents of the girl I'd married. Perhaps. I thought, Loring could tell me more.
"You know, sir," I remarked casually. "I've never thought of asking how Ann happened to be at that party."
PORTLY, imposing, his white-maned head set on broad exquisitely tailored shoulders, Loring permitted himself a dignified smile. He adjusted the ribboned pince-nez riding his aquiline nose.
"The person you should ask that of is Mrs. Loring, my boy." he said. "I've only a vague recollection of her telling me that she got talking to Ann at some lecture or concert or something, liked her and invited her to our next soirée." The smile became a teasing chuckle. "Can't get your little bride off your mind, eh? Why not call it a day and go home to her?"
I'd shot out of that office like a third string back sent into the crucial moment of the Big Game. When the crawling subway at last brought me to my station at 110th Street. I'd been too eager to get to Ann to be curious about the police cars parked in our block and the crowd buzzing on the sidewalk.
I'd taken the flight of stairs two at a time and at my own door had been confronted by a uniformed policeman who refused to permit me to enter.
Nor would he answer my startled questions, but when I told him who I was he'd gone inside. In another minute this grizzled detective, this Sergeant Dan Carson, had come out to me.
Now he was turning at the sound of the doorknob rattling behind him. The door swung inward and the officer who'd gone inside came out.
"Okay, sergeant," he announced. "The lieutenant says it's all right for you to bring in Mr. Hardy."
I went across the threshold, over which I'd carried my bride the night before, into the furnished two room and kitchenette suite which Rose Loring—a friend if ever a young couple had one—had scoured the housing-starved city to locate for us.
The flat swarmed with men doing the things police technicians do at the scene of a homicide, but I had eyes only for Ann, bolt upright and pale, on the edge of a high-backed foyer chair. In beige shorts and flowered halter, that in deference to the sweltering heat were all she wore, she was like a frightened little girl waiting in the anteroom of some camp directress' office to be disciplined for some such heinous crime as filching a pie from the mess-hall ice-box.
But she was no child. She was the woman I loved with every fibre of my being. She looked up at me.
A wan smile trembled to her lips and she sobbed, "Jim." The sound of it was desolate. "Oh. Jim."
"Okay, kitten." I managed a grin. I knuckled her small jaw. "Papa's home now and everything's going to be okay."
I hoped that I sounded confident. I was not.
A hand touched my arm and I turned to Detective Carson. The man with him was not very big. He was a bit stooped in his old blue serge suit, and he looked like anything but a detective.
"This here's the boss, Mr. Hardy," Dan Carson said. "Lieutenant John Struthers of the Homicide Squad."
Struthers was soft-voiced and very polite. He apologized for the trouble he was causing my wife. He apologized for the shambles his men had made of the flat, hunting for the missing gun.
"Would you mind looking at the body, Mr. Hardy?" he went on, as if asking a favor. "It would help us greatly if you can identify him."
The two of them led the way through the archway into the living room. The lamps were all on there. It was still broad day outside, but the room was on a dark court and the technicians needed all the light they could get for their work.
The glare made the cheap rooming-house furniture seem, more than ever, battered and tawdry. It made startlingly white the sheet that covered a long and narrow mound on the floor in front of the sofa. Carson bent and took hold of a corner of the sheet. I swallowed hard as he lifted it.
"Take your time." Struthers murmured. "Take a good look at him."
He was in his late forties, I judged. His tan gabardine suit was disarrayed, and the dark brown shirt had been unbuttoned, I supposed by the medical examiner, to expose a hairy chest. The heavy, jowled face, dissolute even in death, glistened with a peculiar waxy sheen and it was altogether strange to me. The hole above his left ear seemed very small.
"No," I sighed. "I don't know him."
"Neither does the renting agent." Carson let the sheet drop. "There wasn't a thing on him to tell us who he is. The clothes labels are all national brands and there's no laundry or cleaners' marks. He had some money, but no letters or social security card or anything like that."
NN was hidden from me by the jut of the wall through which the archway was cut, but she could hear me, I know.
"Doesn't his having stripped himself of identification support my notion that he shot himself?" I asked.
"I've known men to light cigarettes just before they did the dutch, but not ever a cigar." The detective jerked his grizzled chin at one on the rug nearby, a quarter inch of ash at its tip. "Besides, this bird would have had to have a rubber arm to hold the gun far enough away so's it wouldn't leave powder marks nor an exit wound."
"Not very far at that," Lieutenant Struthers disagreed. "The wound was made by a low caliber bullet, probably from a small pistol such as some women carry. It wouldn't have had to travel far to lose the velocity to carry it all the way through a man's head."
"About as far," Carson added, "as from the foyer to here."
They were talking to Ann too. They were working on her. They were telling her that the evidence against her was damning.
"I wonder, Mr. Hardy," Struthers was saying, "if you can persuade your wife that it would be to her advantage to be a little more—er—cooperative. You know, as a lawyer, that the district attorney always is willing to accept pleas of guilty to the lesser degrees of homicide. You might advise her—"
"As my wife's lawyer," I broke in, heatedly, "I shall advise her to stick to the exact truth. Which," I added "she has already told you."
"Oh, now, Mr. Hardy," Carson drawled. "You ain't talking like a lawyer, but like a husband. Not that you can help it." His eye corners crinkled. "You know that old saying. 'A man who's his own lawyer, has a fool for a client.'"
I realized my situation then. That adage is as ancient as the legal profession, and, like most old maxims, it is crystalized wisdom.
"Thanks," I growled, and looked at Struthers. "I presume I may use my own phone."
"Of course."
As I stumped stiff-legged out to the foyer, two policemen brushed past me, carrying a long wicker basket. Ann still sat stiffly in her chair, her hands twisting at one another in her lap. I threw her a kiss and then I was at the phone, jabbing the dial to my office number.
Miss Evans, our receptionist, must have departed for the day. It was Loring himself who answered.
"Ann's in trouble, sir," I told my senior partner. "A man's been killed in our flat and the police think she did it."
"Good Heavens!" he gasped. "When was this?"
"Apparently about the time I was starting home. I wonder if I could ask you to represent her?"
"Represent her? Of course. I'd never forgive you if you didn't ask me to. Sit tight, my boy, till I get there."
As I fumbled the instrument back into its cradle, my hand stayed on it, tightening. Loring had been startled by my news. But if Ann had called me before the police arrived and found me gone, she naturally would have asked for him.
That meant she had not called me. Why hadn't she?
DETECTIVE Carson was watching me, his faint smile grim, his lids narrowed and speculative. The two policemen came between us, their basket heavy now. They carried it out into the hallway, and Ann rose, as Struthers came toward her.
"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Hardy," he said, "but I am forced to place you under arrest on suspicion of murder. I suppose you will want to get into a dress—"
"One moment, lieutenant," I broke in. "I've decided now that I was being childish when I turned down your suggestion before. May I talk with my wife now, along the lines you suggested? In private, of course."
He looked pleased. "I will be very happy if you will," he said. "You can take her in the bedroom back there, but I'll have to ask you to keep the door open."
I took Ann's hand and it was ice in mine as I led her through the living room. The police had been in the bedroom too. They'd stripped the bed and dumped out the contents of the valises we'd not bothered to unpack the night before. I turned to Ann.
"All right, sweet," I said. "They can't hear us, so you can tell me exactly now what happened."
A pulse fluttered in the shadowed hollow of her throat. "I was putting your things away in the closet when the door buzzer buzzed. I thought it was Rose Loring—she'd promised to come at about half past three and help me get settled—but it wasn't. It was this man from the agent, and he said there was something about the lease."
She was telling it without inflection, like a lesson learned by rote. "I said I didn't know anything about the lease. He'd have to come back tonight and talk to you. He said he couldn't. So I asked him to come in while I phoned you. I had to wait a long time for the dial tone, and just as it came. I heard him fall."
"And when you got to him he was dead," I said wearily. "Shot by a phantom gun. Who do you expect to believe that?"
"I expected you to believe it, Jim." Her hand pulled from mine, clenched into a little fist at her side. "I expected you to trust me." Her lips were ashen, stiff, and in her gray eyes there was outrage. "You promised me to, remember, only this morning."
I remembered. And I could not endure her look of accusation, of condemnation. My eyes went to the floor and were caught by a small band of scarlet-and-gold paper that was curled near a bed caster.
I brought my eyes back to Ann's face, but before I could frame the question that strip of paper suggested, a familiar voice boomed in from the foyer.
"Loring's the name. George Hamilton Loring. Mr. Hardy called me—"
"Yeah?" Detective Carson broke in, dryly. "You got here awful fast."
"I drove up the Hudson River Highway, and traffic stepped right along." It must have. I thought, for even his Packard to have made the seven miles from Rector Street to 107th and Columbus in less than twenty minutes. "Where's my client? Oh, there you are, Ann my dear."
As Loring came toward us, his big form blocked the detective's view of me.
Ann turned to him, and I stooped and snatched up the scarlet cigar band for whose presence in our bedroom there could be only one explanation. I do not smoke cigars.
But the man, whom my wife insisted she did not know, had just lit one when he was shot!
MISS Evans' eyes flared rather widely, when she saw me stumble into the office the next morning.
"Gosh, Mr. Hardy," she exclaimed. "You look like something the cat—pardon me. I mean, you look like you haven't slept a wink."
"Could you sleep, Miss Evans?" I leaned heavily on the top of her switchboard and let my weariness wash up in me for an instant. "Could you sleep, knowing that your wife—that someone you love—is in prison, held for the grand jury, without bail, on suspicion of murder?"
"It's just awful. Mr. Hardy." She tucked a stray blondined tress under the band of her headset. "Mr. Loring left word he wanted to see you soon's you came in."
"I want to see him, too, but first I'll ask you to do something for me. Please call Tom Greene, in the Patent Office in Washington." Our firm did a lot of business with that office and Greene knew it was to his advantage to give us quick service. "Ask him to look up the registered owner of this trademark." I handed her a description I'd written on a paper napkin in some grimy lunchroom somewhere on the waterfront, some time around dawn. "Hold the line while he does, and give me the answer as soon as you get it."
"Even if you're in with Mr. Loring?"
"Particularly if I'm in with Mr. Loring."
I went through the gate beside her, and was glad I met no one as I plodded past the door of my own cubicle and those of other juniors into Loring's big room.
"Good morning, my boy," he rumbled from behind the enormous bisque-toned desk where he sat sipping the coffee it was Miss Evans' morning chore to brew for him. "Have a seat." And when I'd sunk into the deep leather armchair, "Have some coffee."
I wondered drearily what he'd have done if I'd accepted. There was only the one cup.
"Have you thought of a line of defense for Ann, sir?" I asked him.
He put the cup down on its silver tray. "You know I can't do that until she decides to tell us who the slain man was, and what justified her in killing him."
I winced. "You're certain that she did kill him?"
"Aren't you?"
I could not honestly deny it. "How about the gun?" I asked. "I understand it's still missing."
"Which means only that she contrived to hide it so cleverly that the police have been unable to find it."
Had she gained the time to do it, I wondered, by not phoning me?
"All right." I yielded. "Then, since Ann won't tell us, it's up to us to find out who the dead man is and what was the tie between him and my wife."
The cup clinked against the creamer as Loring shifted the tray so its edge was more precisely parallel to his desk's edge.
"What makes you think we can do a better job of identifying the dead man than the police?"
"A hunch that came to me last night, some time after I left you outside Night Court," I said. I hadn't yet told him about the cigar band. Fumbling it out of my wallet, I did so now. I told him that I had picked it up in the flat, but not where in the flat.
"The Homicide Squad men must have overlooked it because it was a gun they were hunting for," I said, "and because they didn't know I don't smoke cigars."
I laid on the desktop the narrow curl of scarlet paper with gold letters, Flor de Amazone, circling the embossed white silhouette of a woman's helmeted profile.
"Before coming here this morning," I went on, "I stopped in at the office of a chain cigar store on Fourth Avenue, and they confirmed my suspicion. This is not the trademark of any big national manufacturer. It's the private brand of one of those little cigar-makers you see on side-streets, rolling cigars in their shop windows and selling them to neighborhood customers."
"I see." Loring poked the thing with a fingertip. "Your thought is that if we can locate him, he may recognize the dead man from his description. But there are dozens of such shops in the city. It would take weeks to visit them all."
The burr of the intercom box at the desk's far corner interrupted before I could answer. Loring flicked a switch key. "Yes?"
The box's metallic voice rasped, "I have the information Mr. Hardy wanted from Washington. About who registered that Flor de Amazone trademark."
I was up and leaning across the desk and the pen I'd snatched out of an onyx stand was quivering in my fingers as I took over.
"Go ahead, Miss Evans."
"The name is Martin Stock. S for Samuel, T for theatre. O for—"
"I know how to spell Stock." I'd already scrawled it on a memo pad. "What's the street number?"
"No street. Mr. Hardy. Only some place in Pennsylvania. Just a sec." An embarrassed little laugh rasped from the box. "I can't read my scribble. It's—"
"Montville?" I cut in with the name of Ann's home town. It had to be. "Montville, Pennsylvania?"
"That's right. M-O—"
"Thank you." I flicked off the switch, looked at Loring.
"It seems your hunch has paid off," he murmured approvingly. "Good work." He held out his hand for the sheet I was tearing from the pad. "Let me have that and I'll send a private investigator down there to see what he can find out."
I folded the paper carefully. "No. No hired detective's going to dig into my wife's past."
"Surely you don't intend to turn that over to the police?"
"Surely not." I put the paper and the cigar band in my wallet, and flicked on the intercom switch. "Miss Evans," I said. "Please call Penn Station and find out the first train I can take to Montville, Pennsylvania."
HERE was no train direct to Montville. I had to change at Harrisburg and again at Fall River Junction, this time to something called a "combination local." Made up of an express car and a single antiquated passenger coach, it lurched interminably through the darkening countryside behind an asthmatic locomotive belching coal gas and cinders. Grimy, sweaty, bone weary. I was the only passenger to alight at Montville.
"Bo-oard," the conductor bawled to no one I could see. "Awll abo-o-oard."
He waved his lantern, swung back into motion. A shadowy form dropped from the express car behind its tender then, darted across the end of the dimly lit platform and vanished into darkness. Some railroad employee, I decided, deadheading home.
The train puffed up the tracks. Its racket was replaced by the shrilling of a million cicadas. From beyond the station, a hill rose ominously black against the overcast sky, a few lights scattered at its crest. The only other intimation of human life was the clack of a Morse sounder within the station and the yellow brightness of the window in its unpainted wall.
Despite the heat, the station door was shut. Its hinges squealed as I went through into the ammoniacal stench peculiar to rural depots the country over. Angling past the pot-bellied stove, I looked in the ticket wicket at a wrinkled face with rheum-ridden eyes.
"Can you," I asked the shirt-sleeved and weazened old man to whom the face belonged, "direct me to Martin Stock's place of business?"
"Why couldn't I?" The drooping ends of his mustache quivered.
"It's bin right in the same place fer more'n twenty year."
"And how do I get there?"
"What do yuh want tuh get thar fer this hour of night?"
The hour, I saw by the round clock on the wall behind him, was nine-twenty. "I want to get to Stock's place," I explained, "because I've come all the way from New York to talk to him."
"Yuh got plenty uh time, then. Mart won't be thar till mornin'. He closed up an' went home long ago."
A hinge creaking behind me pulled my head around to the door opposite that by which I'd entered. It could not have been wind that had swung it open an inch or so. The night was breathless. But I turned back to the station agent.
"Where's Stock's home?"
"Out Furnacebrook Road two, three mile."
Three miles. The way I felt, it sounded like thirty.
"Can I get someone to drive me out there?" I asked.
"Mebbe. Try Tom Stukely at the Eagle Inn up on Main Street."
I went toward the door that had creaked. Or had it? It was tight shut when I reached it. I stepped outside and paused to orient myself.
A road came past the station, paralleling the tracks. A branch road curved off toward the hill. At either side of the intersection were one-story buildings.
Both were dark, but in the glow reaching the larger one on my left. I read the sign:
GRANGE HAY AND FEED CO.
I was almost abreast of the roofless porch fronting the other before I could make out the faded lettering beneath its eaves:
MONTVILLE WEEKLY COURIER
JOB PRINTING
HENRY DANE, PROP.
I stopped short, my temples pounding. Dane. That had been Ann's name before she took mine!
This Henry Dane, I realized, must be a relative of hers, and it was a better bet I could get the information I wanted from him, rather than from the cigar-maker.
The prospect of again enduring the station agent's moronic routine, however, was appalling. Perhaps a card on the print shop's door gave the owner's home address. I went up on the porch, fished out a book of matches and struck one. No card was tacked to the door's raddled wood. The padlock that hung from its hasp was rusted and a spider web, specked by the husks of devoured insects, angled from it to the jamb. A window, a big one, took up most of the rest of the shop's wall.
I had to drop the match as I moved to peer in through the grimed glass. It seemed to me I glimpsed movement within. The movement wasn't within, however. It was the reflection of someone, or something, coming stealthily up behind me, I turned—I faced a squat black shape, arm upraised, steel glinting from its clenched hand.
The knife plunged down.
BECAUSE of my sudden turn, the blade intended for my back plucked harmlessly at my sleeve. I drove my fist to the knifer's chest.
It jolted him back, but not enough so that I could get away from his knife, lashing out again. All I could do was grab his wrist. It was corded steel and I barely was able to hang on to it as I blocked a vicious left with my own right elbow.
My counter missed. The fellow was faceless in the darkness, but although I had height and weight on him, he had the strength of a python. And the knife. That would give him the edge if he got it free.
But why did he want to kill me? Even as our feet thudded—the only sound of our fierce struggle—the question hammered at me. Why should anyone in this town where I'd arrived scarcely ten minutes before, utterly unknown, want to kill me?
Knuckles glanced off the corner of my jaw and I reached a dimly-seen shoulder with a blow into which I put everything I could. It staggered him—and freed his wrist from my grip! He was free to strike, but for a split-second he teetered off-balance. I dove in to make the most of that instant, found air instead of solid footing.
I'd stepped over the edge of the platform on which I'd forgotten we fought. Arms flailing, I hit ground, rolled, saw the assassin leap after me panther-like, his blade lifted for the kill.
A gun went off. The knifer went rigid, his eye-whites gleaming above me. Then hinges squealed and he whirled away into the darkness.
I shoved hands down on dirt, dazedly, but was only to my knees when the old station agent arrived.
"What's goin' on here?" he panted. "Who fired thet shot?"
I got legs under me, rose. The station agent's hands were empty. The road he'd crossed was empty and the feed store across the intersecting road was dark and silent. It was from there that the gunshot had pounded, I realized. The depot's door hinges squeal had come only afterward. The old man had seen nothing of the fight.
"Who done thet shootin'?" he asked again.
"Maybe you can tell me."
The drone of a car speeding away along the valley road told me that the knifer was now beyond reach. Reporting his attack on me, I knew would merely involve me with the local constabulary and delay, possibly defeat, my mission here.
"Do you folks in these parts, when you're out hunting at night, make it a habit of firing at anything that moves?" I asked.
"Huntin'? So thet was it! Must of bin thet tarnation Joey Belcher, then, out gunnin' fer skunks, the way he's ben doin' ever since he got the notion he'll make a skunk coat fer his gal. Was he my brat, I'd sure fan him good."
"Fan him!" I growled. "He ought to have the daylight whaled out of him." My gag for excusing the gun-shot had worked. "Look here, Mr.—?"
"Adams. Lem Adams."
"I'm thinking, Mr. Adams, that it's too late for me to try and see Stock tonight." What I really was thinking was that I had no desire whatsoever to climb that black-dark hill road alone now. "I might as well get me a room at this Eagle Inn you mentioned, and talk to him at his shop in the morning."
"Sounds like good horse sense."
"You wouldn't be going up that way soon, would you? I notice, you've turned off the platform lights."
"Yeah. Yeah, now the night train's bin through, I'm lockin' up. Yuh want tuh wait five minutes?"
I accompanied him back to the station and the five minutes stretched to ten and then to fifteen as Adams puttered around in his cubby behind the ticket window, but neither that nor the hardness of the bench on which I waited bothered me much. I had an engrossing puzzle to occupy me.
Two puzzles.
THAT anyone from Montville should have tried to knife me made no sense, but there was an alternative which did. Suppose the man I'd glimpsed dropping from the express car were not the railroad worker I'd presumed him, but someone who'd trailed me from New York. He would not have worried about my noticing him in the first two crowded trains, but he would have been conspicuous in the local's single coach. That would explain why he had kept out of sight in the express car.
I recalled my impression of an eavesdropper as I talked with Adams. I remembered that once or twice during my weary wanderings the night before I'd had the uneasy sensation of eyes on me.
I'd shrugged it off, too miserable to care if I was followed or not. Now, however, it seemed clear that I'd been shadowed ever since I'd left the Night Court where Ann had been arraigned—and that I'd been trailed here to Montville and attacked as soon as it became evident why I'd come there.
This meant that the detective, Dan Carson, had been right in the first place. Ann had not done the actual killing herself. She was shielding the murderer. It was the murderer who'd followed me, who'd tried to kill me when he'd made certain, eavesdropping, that it was Martin Stock I'd come there to talk with.
And this, of course, meant that Stock held the key to the mystery.
"Be ready in two shakes," Adams called.
The second riddle was more difficult. Who had fired the shot that had saved me, and then vanished? No farm youngster out hunting—no one who'd merely chanced on one stranger in the act of knifing another and had taken a hand—would have failed to show himself. It seemed certain that the gunner was tied in with the rest.
The station's abrupt blacking out stalled me there. Keys jingled and Lem Adams demanded. "Yuh comin', or be yuh figgerin' on sleepin' here?"
"Sorry." I scrambled up. "I hadn't noticed you were set to go."
He locked up, and we started off up the steep slope. It seemed to me that there were fewer lights than before up there. It seemed to me that the black thickets crowding close on either side of the road held a sinister rustle which kept abreast of us.
"What kind of chap is this Stock?" I asked.
"Mart? Oh, Mart's steady-goin' enough now. Hard-workin'. Good husband, good father to them four kids he an' Jen's raised. Regular hellion once, though."
I pricked up my ears. "A hellion. Mr. Adams?"
"Shucks, he warn't no worse than the whole passel uh youngsters around here, right after the last war. They sure were a wild bunch, but they settled down when they grew up enough tuh get some sense. Most of 'em, that is. One or two left town two jumps ahead of ruination."
This was ancient history. It could not concern Ann. She was an infant in those days, or not yet born. "World War Two affect Montville's young people the same way?"
"Nope. Mebbe it's our not havin' Prohibition this time thet's made the difference, but they're pretty much all right. We've got a good town to live in now, mister. 'Course, some folks like Hank Dane are forever grouchin' 'bout this political gang thet's got the county sewed up, but I dunno, I guess if it wasn't one gang puttin' two tax dollars in their pockets fer every one they spend on roads an' sech, it'd be another."
Which, I thought but did not say, was the attitude that made so-called good citizens as responsible for corruption as venal politicians.
I meditated how I could bring the talk to Ann Dane without giving myself away, but before I could find an inspiration, the road flattened out into a wide street running between small white houses, each drowsing in its own hedge-fenced garden. Adams stopped before one of these.
"Wall, this is whar I live. Inn's down yonder, just past the Town Hall."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot and good night," I said, and went on alone.
Literally alone. At ten-thirty of a midsummer evening a New York street would be teeming. Here I was the only one abroad. Then I heard a footfall, some distance behind me, a footfall loud in the stillness.
I turned in time to glimpse someone duck into the cover of a high hedge a block back.
T WAS only some belated townsman turning into the path that led to his home. That's what I told myself, but I lengthened my stride till I was all but running. I passed a block of stores shut for the night. I passed the Town Hall's wide stairs that mounted to a columned portico too pretentious for this two-by-four village. Beyond those stairs a narrow flight of steps led down to an open door above which was the sign, JAIL.
Across the street was a building with the sign, EAGLE INN, swinging from its porch. I went up on that porch, across it and through wire-screened double doors into a linoleum-floored lobby.
There was little light in there. No one was behind the counter-like desk. The only living being in evidence was a sandy-haired, rawboned youth in a plaid shirt and dirty white trousers who slouched in a wooden chair, intent on a magazine. I turned to him.
"How does one get a room here?" I asked.
He looked up, blinked startlingly blue eyes at me. "Maw." he bellowed. "Oh, maw," and went back to his reading.
An electric fan, bracketed to a square wooden pillar, whirred monotonously. I drummed impatient fingers on the desk. Then feet shuffled on the stairs angling over the counter. A woman appeared coming down them.
Her straggly hair had been the exact color of the youth's before the gray had begun to thread it, and her eyes were the same vivid blue, but what, in him, was simply bigness, in her, became an odd, disturbing voluptuousness.
She palmed sweat from her glistening forehead, looked across the counter at the youth.
"What is it, Tom?" she asked.
He jerked a thumb at me and mumbled, "He wants a room."
"With bath," I added, "if you have one, Mrs. Stukely."
She accepted my guess at her name without remark. "That'll be eight dollars a week."
"I'll want it only for one night."
"One night will be a dollar and a half."
"Fair enough. I have no bag, so I'll pay in advance."
I got out my wallet and it was an index to the state of my nerves that I jumped and dropped it as a phone bell shrilled into the stillness. The ring was short. It was followed by another, a pause, then three more.
"Ours," Tom grunted and was up and to the wall instrument with a lithe speed that belied his long-limbed gawkiness. He rattled the receiver from its hook, said. "Who is it?"
His mother's fingers touched her lips, and I thought some vague apprehension glimmered at the back of her eyes.
"Yes," her son said tonelessly. "I get it." And then. "Okay, Chief. I'll get right out there."
He hung up, vaulted the desk and stooped behind it, all in one fluid motion. I heard a drawer scrape open. He straightened up, a web belt dangling from his hand. A leather holster was attached to the belt, a revolver butt curving from the holster. As he buckled on the belt I saw the nickeled star pinned to it, and its embossed words: "Deputy Marshall."
"Trouble, Tom?" Mrs. Stukely asked quietly.
"Bad trouble, maw," he drawled, but only in his tone was there indolence. "A knifing."
"Who, Tom?"
"Mart Stock."
I recalled the drum of a speeding car down there in the road near the station, recalled that someone had listened in on Adams telling me where Stock lived.
"Jen Stock told Fred," Tom Stukely was explaining, "that they heard a ruction in the henhouse. Mart went out to see if maybe a weasel hadn't got in there. When he didn't come back right away, she went to see why, and found him in the yard with a knife in his back, stone dead."
The attack on me had failed, but I saw now—I would learn nothing from Martin Stock!
TOM STUKELY went into the darkness under the angle made by the stairs and his mother stood looking after him, her fingers at her lips, the apprehension on her face now plain. Somewhere in there a door slammed, and then she turned to me.
She pushed toward me the ball point pen that lay in the center fold of a ledger open on the desk.
"If you'll sign the register, mister, I'll show you to your room."
I scrawled my signature. There no longer was any doubt that I was in danger every minute I remained in town, but I could not leave until I'd at least contacted the Henry Dane whose name was on that print shop. Yet if it became known that I was interested in contacting him. Dane too might be marked for death. Mrs. Stukely turned the register to read what I'd written.
"James Hardy," she read aloud. "New York." Her eyes lifted to my face. "Don't tell me you're the young man Ann Dane married."
I was too startled to deny it. "Why, yes." As far as I knew, Ann had not written anyone in Montville since we met, certainly not since our marriage, and there had been no notice in the papers. "How did you know that?"
"I—I don't dast say." A blush mounted into the woman's cream-tinted, smooth cheeks. "He made me promise not to."
She was obviously embarrassed, and I sensed either a third puzzle involving Ann, or a clue to one or both of the puzzles with which I already struggled.
"Let me get this straight, Mrs. Stukely," I said. "Someone told you about Ann's marriage and made you promise not to tell anyone he had—is that it?"
"Well, no. That is, he didn't rightly tell me. The way it was, he wasn't around when Len Adams phoned up the telegram from the depot, Saturday, so I wrote it down. When Mr. Chester came in, I gave it to him, and that was when he asked me not to tell anyone about it."
It was something I had to look into, and at once. "Where can I find this Chester?"
"You can't, Mr. Hardy. He checked out right after he got that wire, and he didn't leave any forwarding address." The woman's hand rubbed the ledger page. "He was only here since last Thursday, but I had to air out his room all weekend to rid it of the stink of those cigars he was always smoking."
I thought of the cigar on our living room rug. I thought of the band in our bedroom....
"Aside from that," the woman prattled on, "he was a perfect gentleman, even if he was awful close mouthed about himself."
"Chester," I mused, trying hard to seem only mildly interested. "The name doesn't ring a bell. What did he look like?"
"Kind of heavy set. Dark hair and dark-complected. I'd guess he was maybe around fifty."
That settled it. Chester was the corpse under the sheet Detective Dan Carson had lifted yesterday afternoon. I was amazed that I could keep the slightly puzzled frown.
"No," I said evenly. "I don't know him, and I don't recall Ann's ever mentioning the name. Queer that he should have received a wire about her."
"I wouldn't say that," Mrs. Stukely objected. "'Cording to Lem, it was an answer to one Mr. Chester sent Friday. Lem didn't say what that one was, of course."
"Of course not. He knows that would be a Federal offense. Because he's an employee of the communications company," I added hastily. "The law doesn't apply to you, so you can tell me what was in the telegram you took down over the phone."
She hesitated, then shrugged as if she'd come to the conclusion that having divulged as much as she had, she might as well go the whole hog.
"All it said was, 'Answering your query, find marriage license issued Ann Dane to James Hardy, July twenty-two. Shall we follow up?' Don't tell you much, does it?"
"Not much."
But it did tell me that Chester had employed some professional skip tracing agency to make at least the preliminary move in locating Ann. They always start their searches with an examination of public records like those of the License Bureau.
Ann had given the YWCA as her address on the license application, had notified the Y where she was moving.
"Did Chester drop any hint as to why he was trying to find Ann?" I asked.
"No-o-o. But from the questions he asked around. I got the notion he was interested in the Courier. Maybe he was investigating if it would pay to start it up again. If he wanted to, he'd have to get hold of her, wouldn't he?"
"Why?" I exclaimed. "What has Ann to do with the Courier?"
AS SOON as I saw the woman's stare, I realized I had made a mistake. I was already dredging my mind for a plausible explanation of my apparent ignorance, when she translated her surprise into words.
"You're her husband, ain't you? How come you don't know she owns the press and the type and all, now her father's passed on?"
That gave me my cue, that and the 'Henry Dane, Prop.' painted on the print shop.
"She doesn't own it yet. Mrs. Stukely," I said. "Not legally. The estate's still held up in the surrogate's office, and any sale would have to wait till it's settled. Which," I added, to forestall any further question, "is why I'm here, to try and hurry along the settlement."
I had plenty to think about now, and I knew I had to put a stop to these questions before I made another slip.
"Gosh," I yawned, "but I'm tired. How about that room before I go to sleep on my feet?"
The woman started to say something, but changed her mind. She turned to the rack of keys behind her, took one from its hook.
The upstairs room to which she led me was a corner one, neatly furnished and almost comfortable despite the heat because of four screened windows open to the faint breeze that stirred their curtains. Two of the windows overlooked the street along which I'd come. The other two faced the Town Hall on the opposite corner. In the bathroom was a tub and a nickeled showerhead goose-necking over it.
That was what I needed. Desperately. The moment she left me, I shucked out of my sweat-sodden clothes in nothing flat, padded into the bathroom and turned on the shower's cold tap full force.
I felt more like a human being when five minutes later, I finally stepped from the tub and started a brisk rubdown with the Turkish towel I lifted from its bar.
"Maw ain't going to like it," a voice drawled, "if you get the floor in here all slopped up like that."
The towel taut across my back, I stared at Tom Stukely, his shoulder propped against the frame of the bathroom door.
"Go on and finish drying yourself." he told me, "and then come out here. We've got some questions that we'd like to ask you."
"Tell him to make it fast," someone in the room behind Tom growled. "We ain't got all night."
The shower had deafened me to the rattle of the key and the entrance of these intruders. I dabbed the rest of the wet from my skin, knotted the towel around my middle and went out into the bedroom.
"Thet's him," Lem Adams squealed. "It's him, all right."
A nightshirt was stuffed into the old station agent's frayed trousers. They flapped around ankles bare above broken-backed carpet slippers, and he was fairly dancing with excitement.
"Thet's the feller was askin' me all them questions about Mart Stock," he jabbered. "Didn't yuh? Didn't yuh tell me yuh'd come all the way from Noo Yawk tuh see him?"
"I certainly did. Is that a crime in this state?"
"No." It was the third man in the room who answered me. Wearing a rumpled gray seersucker suit, he was tall and cadaverously thin. "It ain't no crime, but when a man who's been all-fired anxious to talk to someone don't blink an eye when he hears that man's been murdered, it calls for investigation."
"And who," I asked with what dignity my lack of clothes permitted, "are you?"
"Mowery." He jerked his coat open to show me the star pinned to his emerald-green suspender. "Fred Mowery, marshal of this township. It's your hard luck that Lem listened in on the line when I called my deputy at the inn here, an' then hurried over to tell me about you lookin' for Mart."
So I owed this visitation to a rural party line and an old codger's curiosity about his neighbors' affairs.
"Did Adams also tell you that I was with him in the station or on the road when Stock was killed?" I asked.
"He did," Mowery acknowledged. "Which is why I figured there was no rush about gettin' to you. But that was only till Mrs. Stukely called Mart's house and told Tom about the fairy story you handed her."
Tom Stukely chuckled. "You almost had Maw believing you were this Hardy that Ann Dane married—till you pulled that phoney about old Hank's estate not being settled yet. Maw knew full well the whole kit and caboodle was turned over to Ann before she went to New York."
Y ONLY way out of this mess was to come through with the truth. I knew that then. I hitched the towel tighter around my hips.
"All right," I conceded. "I was embarrassed to admit that I know very little about my wife's business, but I am James Hardy." Mowery leered. "Like I'm Harry Truman."
"I can easily prove it." I stepped to the bed, picked up my jacket and slid a hand into its inside breast pocket.
I felt only sweat-damp cloth. The pocket was empty.
"Is this what you're looking for?" The marshal held up my wallet.
"That's it." I recalled, now, dropping it on the desk downstairs when the phone had rung. The shock of hearing that Stock had been knifed had wiped it from my mind completely. "If you'll look in it you'll find cards and a letter or two that should convince you I'm James Hardy."
Something about Mowery's grim smile reminded me of the city detective, Sergeant Dan Carson.
"We have looked into it, mister," Mowery said. "We found forty-three bucks and the return half of a two-way ticket from New York. An' that's all." He shoved the wallet back into his own side pocket. "Okay. We've got a murder on our hands and the trail's gettin' colder every minute we listen to your lies. Maybe that's what you're after. Maybe that's why you shoved this pocketbook under the register. Well, you ain't gettin' away with it!"
His lips thinned into cruel lines in the narrow wedge of his face. "We're scoot-in' right back to Furnacebrook Road, but we ain't leavin' you here. We're stowin' you safe in the lockup. If you're smart, you'll decide by the time we're ready to deal with you that your best play is to tell us who knifed Mart Stock, an' why?"
"And," Tom Stukely put in, "since you've been doing so much talking about Ann Dane, maybe you'll tell us what you know about her father shooting himself last March."
The coat dropped from my hold. "Ann's father shot himself?" My voice was unrecognizable even to myself. "How? Why?"
"We ain't never found out." Lem Adams put in. "All we know is Hank was workin' late that night, an' when Ann drove down tuh fetch him home, she found him dead as a doornail, with that little pearl-handled pistol he give her to scare off tramps layin' right thar on his desk."
It thudded into my midriff like a two hundred pound tackler's shoulder, that 'little pearl-handled pistol he give her.' It stunned me beyond protesting at Mowery's curt order to get dressed.
I was only vaguely aware of being taken downstairs and across the street, of being handed over to someone who met us at the jail door, of being shoved into an unlighted cell.
I didn't hear what anyone said. I heard only Lieutenant John Struthers' soft voice murmuring, inside my head. "The wound was made by a low-caliber bullet, probably from a small pistol such as some women carry."
THE dark cell reeked of disinfectant, and its heat was thick, all but tangible. My clothing had absorbed all the moisture it could. As I paced endlessly, the sweat trickled down my ribs and was clammy on my aching thighs.
I knuckled my throbbing brow and thought. They had no legal right to hold me, I knew. I reached the mattressless shelf that served as a bunk and turned and started across the four foot strip of stone floor for the hundred and first time. I would be out of there in the morning, and then I would go to work on the Stukelys.
I worked out that much in an hour of pacing. The fact that Mrs. Stukely had failed to ask me for her dollar and a half before taking me upstairs had given me the clue. She hadn't wanted to remind me of my wallet, and lose her chance to examine it.
She was the only one who could have taken my identifications from it unobserved.
Granted that premise, the rest followed logically. Mrs. Stukely had phoned Stock's house, out on Furnacebrook Road, to warn her son, Tom, that Ann Dane's husband was in town. Marshal Mowery had asked Tom who it was that called. Knowing what Lem Adams had told his chief, Tom had told Mowery it was his mother—but gave only enough of her message to send the marshal to the inn to question me.
All of which meant that the Stukelys were deeply involved in the mystery that had brought me here, probably were at the heart of it. Well, I thought, pacing, I'll break them wide open in the morning. I'll—Hold everything! A new thought halted me in the middle of the cell floor.
Mrs. Stukely's stunt with my wallet could have had only one purpose, to land me in here and gain time for themselves. It still was barely midnight. If I waited till morning to tell my story, the Stukelys would have had a full night to hide their connection with the murders or put miles between themselves and pursuit.
I must get hold of the marshal right now, and I must do it, somehow, without Tom Stukely getting wind of it.
The only way I could reach Mowery was through the jailer. But would the jailer help me? I tried to recall what the jailer looked like, but could not. I hadn't slept for forty hours. I'd just learned that Ann owned a pistol like the one with which Chester was slain, and that a bullet from the same weapon had killed Ann's father. With those things on my mind, I'd been aware of the jailer only as a gruff voice and rough hands shoving me into this barred and stinking cubicle.
But what difference did it make what he was like? I had to depend on him. Still uneasy, I went to the cell door and grasped its rusty bars. I froze then, my heart sledge-hammering my ribs.
The door had moved to the pressure of my hands. It was not locked. The bolt of its antiquated, clumsy lock had not quite shot home when I was thrust in there.
The realization was like a whiff of ammonia, clearing my foggy head. This changed the picture. I might not now have to chance that the jailer might be in cahoots with the Stukelys. Tom Stukely probably was still with Mowery out there on Furnacebrook Road with his mother alone in the inn right across the street. If I could get to her unseen, perhaps could force her to tell me the truth about what was going on in this town. The truth about Ann.
A blank brick wall, its whitewash gray with dust film, faced me from across the corridor. Any other cells must be on the same side as mine. I could not see them, but I'd heard nothing to indicate that they were occupied. I heard nothing to indicate that anyone stirred anywhere near.
I pressed the cell door outward. Slowly. When the opening was just wide enough to permit it, I squeezed through.
I'd been right about the other cells. The two ranged alongside mine were empty except for the striped shadows slanted into them by a single small bulb in the corridor. Just beyond where the bulb hung by its fly crusted wire, the passage right-angled away from the cells.
BREATH locked in my throat, I prowled toward that corner—went rigid again, flattening against the wall. From around the corner there had come to me the rasp of shoe leather on the stone floor. I heard it again. Then I realized—what I'd heard was not a footfall. It was a snore!
Sliding eyes past the corner, I looked into a room dimly illumined by the bulb above my head. The room held file cases, a wooden mourner's bench, a couple of desks. On the desk nearer the entrance a man's head was cradled on his arms, and it was he who snored. No one else was in there. I blessed the sultry heat that made an oven of the Town Hall's basement. The door straight ahead was fastened open to admit whatever breeze might be stirring, and through it I could see the short flight of wooden steps that mounted to the sidewalk.
The snore rose again, ended in a whistle. The next time it came, I was past the desk and climbing the steps, grateful that on one side at least I was screened by the casing wall of the stairs. Then a hoarse exclamation whirled me around from the top step.
In the doorway out of which I'd just emerged was the same squat, black figure I'd seen earlier on the porch of the print shop near the station, the same uplifted arm with metal glinting from its fist. This time, however, it was a revolver's barrel instead of a knife. And this time the killer did not have to get close enough for me to have a fighting chance. Nor be silent.
"Escapin', are yeh?" he rasped. "Not so long's Kurt Gaddin's got a gun." And he moved out from the threshold to make certain of his aim.
His weapon steadied—then arced away as the edge of a hand chopped down on his wrist. A fist slammed against the base of his skull. It was not my hand nor my fist. A shadow had dropped from the stair wall above us and struck almost before it had alighted!
Gaddin's eyes glazed and he crumpled, but I heard only the thud, did not see him hit the ground. I was gaping at the chunky features of Detective Sergeant Dan Carson as he sprang up the steps and grabbed my arm.
"Let's go, Hardy." he gasped. "We've got to make tracks before we're spotted and I lose my badge."
I ran with him around the corner and along the hall's sidewall, then across a dirt road into a thicket whose brambles slashed at us as we crashed through them. Blackness closed around us. Carson dragged me to a halt.
"Far enough," he panted. "Till I catch my breath, anyways."
I listened, taut, fighting for breath myself. I heard only the shrill antiphony of the cicadas. I heard no shout, no trample of pursuing feet. The jailer must still be dead to the world. "He—he faked being asleep," I said. "He deliberately left the cell door unlocked so I'd try to get out, and give him an excuse to kill me."
"So that's the way he worked it." Carson rumbled. "I figured it was something like that when I saw he was going to gun you down without giving you a chance to surrender." He spat disgustedly. "I been told they got a name for it down in South America. The ley del fuego."
"The law of the escape," I translated, shuddering. "The police in this town are rotten, all right. They were all in on this thing, not only Gaddin and Stukely, but also the marshal himself. That's why Mowery hauled me off to the lockup without bothering to finish questioning me."
I turned to the blacker bulk in the blackness, that was all I could make out of my rescuer.
"If you hadn't been—" I broke off suddenly as the realization came through to me. "What in the name of all that's holy were you doing there on the stairs of a Town Hall a million miles from your bailiwick?"
"Not on the stairs, son. On a bench up atop them, behind those columns. It was good and dark there and I figured it was a swell spot from where I could watch for what was going to happen to you next." Carson's chuckle was unamused. "You're more trouble to me than all my money. Hardy. This makes the second time tonight I've had to haul you oft a hot spot."
"The second time!" A great light dawned. "Then it was you who fired that shot down there by the station!"
"Check."
I waited for him to go on, but he did not. I had to ask, "What brought you to Montville in the first place?"
"You, son." He groaned. "I swear the next time somebody rides on a camp chair in an express car, it won't be me. I'm getting too old for stuff like that." I heard him laugh softly in the darkness. "But you did give Tony Luccio a worse workout last night. You ought to see the way he was dragging his tail when he reported in to me this morning and told me how you'd led him on a goose chase through half of New York."
IECES began to fall into the puzzle. The eyes I'd felt on me then, as I'd wandered the torrid city streets had been those of a police shadower. The man I'd seen drop from the train when I'd arrived in Montville was Detective Sergeant Dan Carson of New York's Homicide Squad.
"We figured," Carson was explaining, "that your wife might have tipped you where she'd ditched that pistol. Matter of fact, that was why we let you talk to her back there in that bedroom, so's maybe you would lead us to it."
A bush threshed as he plucked a leaf from it. "When the copper who relieved Tony, tailing you, phoned me from Penn Station that you'd bought a ticket to your wife's home town, I decided I'd better follow you myself and find out what she'd sent you here to do for her."
"Ann didn't send me here," I said. "It was my own idea to come here and try and dig up something that might help her."
"Just on the off-chance you could?"
"Just on the off-chance."
Carson made a disgusted sound in his throat. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Listen, Jim," he said. "You can't stop us from putting your wife in the chair if she did this killing, but if she didn't, we're just as anxious to clear her as you are. But you can make it hard for us to clear her. You might make it impossible if you hold things back from us. So if you've got the sense I think you have, you'll tell me what you expected to get out of this Martin Stock who was knifed to keep him from talking to you."
Carson could know that only if he were the man who'd listened behind the station door. An elusive pattern was forming beneath the surface of my mind.
"And—" Carson's quiet, urging voice kept me from concentrating on that pattern—"you'll tell me what you did find out in spite of Stock's being bumped."
"What makes you think I found out anything?"
"Gaddin's pulling that ley del fuego stunt on you. It means you're mighty close to something. And if you keep it to yourself it's liable to die with you yet."
I was convinced. "I did learn a little," I said, "but I still can't see how it ties to Ann. Suppose I start at the beginning. Maybe you can figure it out."
I started with my spotting the Flor de Amazone cigar band, went right through to the moment when the cell door had moved under my hands. Carson interrupted me only twice.
The first time was when I told of learning the dead man's name, Chester.
"Yeah," he rumbled. "Steve Chester. We got the FBI report on his fingerprints just before I took out after you. Used to be quite a hand with the concrete foot-baths back there in the hooch-running days, but since he finished his last stretch in Leavenworth, all they've got on him is suspicion—but no proof—that he now and then does an odd job of gun work."
The other comment came when I told of my despoiled wallet and my certainty that the Stukelys were somewhere tied in near the heart of the web.
"That's pretty thin figuring. Hardy," Carson said. "You'd never make it stick in court."
"Why not? Who else but the woman had a chance to get at my wallet?"
"Kurt Gaddin. Just about when the windows of your room upstairs lit up. I saw him duck in the lobby below. Mrs. Stukely couldn't have had time to get back down there before he popped out again and scooted across to the jail. With no prisoners there, and these woods handy, he could also be the bird who tried to knife you and did knife Stock.
"Which." he added, "leaves the Stukelys and Mowrey clean. That's the way I like my cases, as simple as I can strip 'em down."
"Simple," I snorted, and went on. As I finished my story the dark design had come clear at last, incomplete but distinct, and so incredible that I dared not put it in words, but waited for something from Carson that would tell me he saw it too.
It didn't come. Instead, his head cocked to the noises that shattered the black silence of the thicket—the hiss of steam, the clack of wheels on steel rails.
"You ever hop a freight, Jim?" he asked.
"Why no. I—"
"Well, you're going to hop that one." He was plunging down toward the railroad at the foot of the hill and I followed, perforce. "That train is going back the way we came, and we're going with it."
"What about Gaddin?"
"The devil with him! Let the Pennsylvania cops take care of their own murders. Me, I've got one in New York to worry about."
THE box car racketed through the sultry night. "This danged hard floor's killing me," Dan Carson grumbled. "This is my last case, I swear, I swear I'm going to put in for retirement the minute I get back to Headquarters."
He shifted, growling. Then, "I was the only one tailing you, Jim. If there had been anyone else, I'd have been sure to spot him. Yet this Gaddin was waiting to knife you when you arrived and when he missed, he took right out after Stock. He must have been tipped off by phone from New York that you were coming, and who you were coming to talk to. Who in New York knew it?"
"My partner, George Loring," I said heavily. Miss Evans also knew it, but to think she was involved was, on the face of it, ridiculous. "Only George Loring."
"Which means that it's Loring who bumped Chester."
"It can't be!" Yet it was the conclusion to which I'd already been forced, but still couldn't accept. "Loring was in the office talking to me at four o'clock. Ann told us that Chester was shot in our flat at a little after three-thirty, and your medical examiner confirmed it. Loring's alibi is as ironclad as mine."
"The devil it is! You went home by subway and it took you a half hour, but he made it in his car in less than twenty minutes. It wouldn't take him any longer going the other way. Your boss is the killer."
And that meant Ann was his accomplice, shielding him. After all—the thought hammered—I had only Loring's word for it that he and Ann had known one another only since the party where I'd met her, and that it was at his wife's invitation that she'd come to that party.
"I don't get it," I mumbled. "Ann was only in New York a couple of months, and as far as I know Loring's never been in Montville."
"As far as you know." The detective understood what was running in my mind. "Do you know where he came from originally. How do you know it wasn't from Montville?"
"If it was," I said, "he must have left there years ago, before Ann was born." The phrase seemed to click. I remembered when I'd thought it before, and a few more lines of the murder pattern came clear. "Look, Dan. The station agent, Lem Adams, told me something about a wild bunch of youngsters who used to raise hell around Montville right after World War I. He said that Stock was one of them, and that some of the others left town, back at that time, under a cloud."
"It could be Loring was one of them."
"And you just told me Chester was mixed up with bootlegger gangs about that same time," I went on. The nape of my neck was puckering with excitement. "Couldn't that be the tie-up? Suppose Loring got in a mess when he was a youngster, that if it were revealed even now would ruin him. Suppose Chester knew about it, and turned up to blackmail him, and got killed instead. Does that make sense, or doesn't it?"
Detective Carson swore softly. "It makes plenty of sense, son. Especially if Stock knew about this thing too, so Loring was afraid you might pull it out of Stock if you ever got to him."
"Loring tried to keep me from going to Montville," I recalled. "He tried to get me to let him send a private investigator there. He wouldn't have, of course. It looks as if you're right, Dan. It looks very much as if it was George Loring who fired the shot that killed Steve Chester, but with what we've got, we'll never pin it on him."
"And he's too downy an old bird to have left anything around that will. Except what that little wife of yours knows, and she won't talk."
The bottom of my stomach dropped away. I'd succeeded only in tightening the noose around Ann's neck. Under New York law, a murderer's accomplice suffers the same penalty as the killer himself.
"But maybe I can outsmart him," Carson was saying, "with your help. Like this."
He went on to outline his scheme, and I could not refuse my part in it. To do so would be to admit I was convinced of Ann's guilt. I could only hope against all logic, that the scheme would not work and that in proving George Loring innocent, it would somehow also absolve Ann.
We stopped over at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's capital, while Carson visited State Police Headquarters, and then made a call to New York. It was not until nine Wednesday evening that I dialed George Loring's home number. It was his wife who answered.
"You're back. Jim!" she exclaimed.
"You—Did you find out anything in Montville?"
"How do you know I've been to Montville?"
I heard her breath whisper in the mouthpiece. "Oh," she said. "I had lunch with George yesterday and he told me you were going there. I hate to disturb him, Jim. Can't you give me the message?"
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Loring." My voice was flat with exhaustion. "I'm afraid what I have to say can be said only to him."
"Just a minute, then."
IT SEEMED more than a minute. It seemed unconscionably long before I heard Loring's hearty, "Jim, my boy. Where are you?"
"In a booth in Penn Station. I just got in."
"Did you learn anything from—er—the person you were to contact?"
Stock, he meant. He meant to convey that he didn't know Martin Stock was dead.
"I couldn't reach him, sir," I said. Or did—Loring really not know it? Was he innocent of any guilty knowledge? "But I did find out something I'm not sure I'm justified in keeping from the police. May I come out and talk it over with you?"
"We-e-ll—" He hesitated. "Frankly. Jim, we've a couple in for bridge and Rose would be upset if I broke up the foursome. You understand."
My fingers tightened on the phone. "I suppose it can wait till tomorrow," I yielded, dispiritedly. "I'll take a room at the hotel behind the station here, and—"
"Why go to a hotel?" Loring broke in. "Why not taxi home where you can get a change of clothes before you come down to the office?"
"You forget," I pointed out, "that the police sealed the flat and left a guard to make sure no one could get at the missing gun if it was still there somewhere."
"That's all over," Loring answered. "Lieutenant Struthers phoned this afternoon and left word that you're free to go home whenever you wish." He cleared his throat. "I'll tell you what, my boy. I'll call there for you on my way downtown, at about nine. And now you'll have to excuse me. They're waiting for me to deal."
I hung up. I looked at Dan Carson and said, dully, "He made sure I'd sleep here in the flat."
"I figured he would. Now how about your getting some sleep? You look dead for it."
I was. Undressing, dropping heavily into the bed that two nights ago I'd shared with Ann, I was certain I'd not be able to close my eyes. But fatigue welled up in me like a gray tide and washed me into oblivion.
WHEN my lids came unglued, night still filled the room. The luminous hands of the alarm clock on the dresser showed ten minutes after two.
The phone bell shrilled, out in the foyer.
I swung bare feet to the floor, heaved up from the bed. The ringing stopped as I started out there to answer it, began again as I stumbled through the door into the living room and past the sofa where the sheet-covered corpse had lain. Chill fingers grabbed my ankles and pulled them from under me.
I seemed to fall for an eternity, my larynx clamped on terror.
"Play dead," Carson whispered, urgently. "Stall him." He squirmed out from under the sofa where he'd lain hidden for hours. "And thank your lucky stars I tumbled to how he'd crossed us up, ringing the phone to get you out here."
He crawled away from me fast, keeping below the window sills. "If I hadn't pulled you down, he'd have potted you from across the court, just like he did Chester."
Carson got past the second window, sprang to his feet and dove into the foyer where the phone's shrilling finally had stopped. Motionless on the floor, I watched him snatch open the hall door, and, as he closed it behind him softly for all his haste, I was sending to Ann in her prison a silent plea for forgiveness.
Chester had been shot through the window which was open just above me, and Ann had never glimpsed the killer, had not from the foyer even heard the crack of his pistol. The trap in which I'd played bait not only had caught George Loring, but had proved Ann's story true to the last incredible detail.
My hint, when I'd phoned him, that I'd learned something, which he must keep me from taking to the police, had brought him here, but not quite as we'd figured. He'd gone to that other suite instead, dialed my number and hurried to the window to be ready to fire as I came out of the bedroom and across his sights. I—The door buzzer let go at that moment.
That must be Dan Carson, I thought. He'd nabbed Loring and was bringing him in here. I could get up now without fear of a bullet in my brain.
I padded to the door, opened it. The knob slipped from my fingers and I stepped back, gaping dry-mouthed at George Loring, not with Detective Carson—but alone!
HE CAME in and closed the door firmly behind him. His hand buried itself in the side-pocket of his double-breasted tropical jacket. His look probed past me into the living room, and there was light enough to show me the relief that came into his face. The lines that cut deeply about his mouth, the shadows under his eyes, were new since I last had seen him. "Surprised, Jim?" he asked.
I swallowed. "Can you blame me?"
"Hardly. It is very late." His smile was haggard. "We played till after one, and my friends couldn't get a taxi, so I offered to drive them home. When I left them I recalled how dreadfully disappointed you'd sounded at having to wait till morning to tell me what you'd learned in Montville, so I decided to come and get it over with."
You evaded Carson somehow, I thought, and figured you still can kill me and escape down the fire ladder outside the bedroom window. You'll drop into the arms of the man Carson posted down there in case we slipped up, but that won't do me any good. I'll be dead.
"Before I forget it," Loring was saying, "there's something Ann asked me to get out of her trunk."
My brows knitted. "What trunk?" If he wanted to stall. I was only too happy to play along. Every second's delay brought nearer the moment when Carson would give up the hunt and return. "Ann didn't have anything with her except some valises and a hatbox."
"Correct. The trunk would have crowded her room at the Y, so she stored it. But it was delivered here yesterday morning, and when the police guard phoned me for instructions. I asked him to accept it and put it in the bedroom."
I remembered now seeing it in there when I'd undressed, but I'd been too exhausted for it to make much impression.
"What does Ann want out of it?" I asked.
"An envelope containing some papers she thinks have some bearing on her case." The lump Loring's fist made in his pocket jerked. "We're wasting time. Jim."
There was nothing for me to do save turn and start into the bedroom. I went as slowly as I dared. George Loring's feet whispering on the rug behind me and my spine crawling with the feel of the weapon bearing on it. I realized the setup. The business about the trunk was to get me as far from the door as possible, so the shot would not be heard in the hall outside. When I reached the bedroom, it would be death for me. Period. But maybe I could spin out the time a little longer.
"I'm glad you decided not to wait till morning, sir." I managed to make the remark sound casual. "I've been lying awake, trying to puzzle out something I was told in Montville that apparently involves you in this affair."
"Involves me?" The sharp exclamation told me Loring had stopped short. "Directly?"
"Not quite," I picked up the cue as I came around to him. "But I hardly think you want my informant to repeat it to the authorities." He dared not fire now until he learned who had talked to me, so that he could arrange to have him silenced too. "I hope for your sake," I went on, with no clear intent except to keep him psychologically off-balance, "that you can convince me I should not take it to the police myself."
The ribboned pince-nez dropped from his nose. "I didn't expect this from you, Jim. I didn't think you capable of blackmail."
Blackmail! Did he really think he could buy me off—when he'd used Ann as a pawn in his murder plot? When he'd tried to have me killed, and had tried to kill me himself?
"What the devil are you driving at?" I demanded.
"You know," he said easily. "You've read the papers in Ann's trunk, the evidence she took from her father's desk and his typewriter when she found him dead." There it was. The gap in the murder pattern, Ann's place in it, was filled in. "Even if she could not quite bring herself to burn them, she had the decency to make certain no one else would see the article that would destroy, for a youthful error, one who has lived in honor for years." Only Chester's role, the thing that had brought him here to his death, was as yet unclear and Loring's next words threw a light on that. "To you, those papers meant only a chance to line your pockets." His sigh was heartfelt. "Very well. Hardy. How much are you asking for those papers and your silence?"
"How much?" The wrath that made me forget this man held my life at his mercy was the more overwhelming because I'd so admired him, once almost loved him. "You haven't enough," I said. "I'm turning that evidence over to the police, and you with them."
"I don't think you will."
His hand came out of his pocket and I leaped for him. My headlong tackle pounded him down. I kneed his soft belly, raised a fist to smash his face. Held it, staring incredulously at what I'd jolted from his hand.
A screwdriver! Nothing more lethal than a stubby screwdriver from a car's kit—a tool with which to force the lock of a trunk!
It was at that moment the buzzer sounded again. I don't recall getting to the door or opening it, but I shall never forget what I saw when I got it open.
I'd expected Dan Carson, of course. I'd half expected the plainclothesman whom he'd posted in the backyard. But between them—and obviously their prisoner—was Rose Loring!
OSE, in her crisply-ironed white summer frock, her head held proudly high, still seemed the gracious hostess of those parties in Rosedale, but on her always immaculate arms and on her meticulously tended hands were smudges of iron rust.
"By the time I'd picked the lock and got into her flat," Carson explained, quite needlessly, "she was going down the fire escape. Al Simmons here grabbed her and brought her back up."
All of which had taken time enough for Loring to come to an empty landing and be admitted by me.
"Looks as if I had his thing figured wrong," Dan Carson sighed, "in more ways than one. I told you I'm getting too old for this job."
Speechless, but with my thoughts racing, I pulled the door wider and the three came in. I closed the door, and Simmons switched on the foyer light. I turned to Carson.
"I don't get this, Dan," I said. "There must be some mistake."
"We took this off her, Jim," Dan Carson told he, holding out a bunched handkerchief in which nested a small nickeled pistol. "Five will get you ten that the bullet we took out of Chester's brain came from this gun."
I would lose that bet, I knew. I felt physically sick, seeing the whole thing now, seeing it clear.
"George!" Rose Loring exclaimed. "You here!" Loring came into the archway from the living room, halted there, his eyes on the weapon in Carson's hand. "I thought," Rose went on, "that you were going to stop and look over the brief Foster Randall was telling you about during the game."
Loring looked at his wife, his eyes miserable. "I suggested that Foster bring it to the office tomorrow, my dear." His right arm was behind his back in his habitual pose when pondering some difficult legal question, but the fat manila envelope in his left hand told me that he'd opened Ann's trunk. "Then I came here to see what I could do with Jim Hardy, as I promised you I would."
"You said you'd talk to him in the morning, George." For the moment, she'd forgotten our presence. "I was sure you would be at the Randall's long enough for me to—"
"Please. Rose." Loring interrupted. "Let me handle this." It was the attorney's usual admonition to a client about to say too much, but it held a note of tender sadness. "I'll do the talking for you."
"You will not," Dan Carson said harshly. "She'll talk for herself. Go on, Mrs. Loring. What did you think you'd have time to do before your husband got back from these Randalls?"
Now she was aware of the detective again and suddenly there was no expression on her face. Her hand made a little gesture of appeal, of despair, and she swayed, might have fallen had I not sprung to her and eased her down into the same high-backed chair where Ann had sat.
Something of the same pity I'd felt for Ann welled up in me for this woman, out of whom all the fine pride had drained. Less to accuse her than to protect her from Carson's bludgeoning dawned on me when I'd seen the iron rust on her arms.
"You're the one who was born in Montville, Mrs. Loring," I said. "Not your husband, but you."
She looked up at me, her eyes grateful. "Yes, Jim." I could barely hear her. "George was never there."
"And it was something that happened long ago, before you left there, that Chester found out about, and it was that which led you to kill him and to attempt to kill me tonight."
"It wasn't Chester who found it out. Not at first." Her hand opened in her lap, as if relinquishing something that it had held too long. "It was Henry Dane who found it out first. Henry Dane, back in Montville, was the first one I killed."
Loring groaned. His wife's white look fled to him, and the smile that quivered on her lips was more poignant than tears.
"I didn't tell you that when Jim called tonight, George," she told him. "I told you only what was in those papers Ann had in her trunk."
I wanted to let it drop there. Ann was safely out of this thing, and for what Rose Loring had done to us, her agony was punishment enough. But the law would not have it so.
Carson, thrusting forward, would not let it rest there, so I said, gently, "Tell us the rest, Mrs. Loring. Tell us the whole story."
SHE told it, not to us, but to her husband—an explanation, a plea for forgiveness. The tale concerned a teenage country girl, caught in the toils of postwar disillusionment and the disrespect for law spawned by Prohibition, and an older youth who led her on.
"Kurt Gaddin wasn't good looking, but he had what we called 'It.' When he picked me for his steady I thought myself the luckiest girl in Mont County."
She still thought herself lucky when she discovered that the car in which Gaddin took her for long night rides was loaded with illegal liquor, that he was using her as a cloak for his bootlegging. That was exciting. It was fun—till the night they were almost caught and escaped only after a running fight that came breathlessly near ending in murder. She made a break then. She came to New York, met and married George Loring and with him started to build a good life.
The break was not clean enough. She kept secretly in touch with Gaddin. He wrote her how the old bunch had settled down. He did not write her that others, himself included, had become cogs in the corrupt political machine that had Mont County by the throat. Not, that is, till the frantic letter which had come last March. Her old schoolmate Henry Dane, this said, had raked up the old story and was planning to stir up the county people against the machine by publishing the unsavory history of its henchmen.
The piece, Gaddin wrote, would mention only her maiden name, but everybody in town of her generation knew whom she'd married. The story was sure to reach New York, one way or another.
"It would ruin you, George. You got most of your practice from the people in our social set, and they wouldn't have anything to do with the husband of a woman like me."
Feminine reasoning perhaps—the falsity of which her husband would have demonstrated if she'd gone to him—but she did not. She'd driven out to Montville, in her own car, to plead with Dane. Reaching there about midnight, she'd found the editor in his office, writing the article. He may have been threatened, he may merely have been cautious, at any rate the door was locked and when he admitted her, she'd seen a small pearl-handled pistol lying handy on his desk. When he refused to yield to her pleading, she snatched this up.
"I meant only to try and scare him with it, George, but he grabbed for it. It went off, and I saw that I'd killed him."
The pistol dropped from her gloved fingers and she ran out, panic-stricken, only to blunder into a burly stranger on the porch.
"Thanks for doing my job for me," the latter leered. "Only you forgot to bring the papers." He started in to get them, was halted by the sound of a car coming down the hill road fast.
"That must have been Ann!" I exclaimed, breaking in on Rose Loring. "Coming to get her father to come home. The stranger was Chester. The big shots in that political gang hired Chester to kill Dane and destroy the evidence he'd collected. You beat Chester to the print-shop only by a minute or so."
"Cut it, Jim," Carson growled. "Let her tell it."
Chester hustled her into her own car, Rose Loring resumed, took the wheel and did not stop until they were miles away.
"I lose what I was going to get for this job, Mrs. Loring," he said then. Skulking outside the office, Chester had heard Rose tell Dane who she was. "But you'll make it up to me. You'll hear from me soon." And with that, he leaped from the car and vanished.
By the time she did hear from Chester again, Kurt Gaddin had written her about the editor's apparent suicide, and that nothing pertaining to the expose had been found. She was safe. She sent the would-be blackmailer about his business, but could not relax. Those papers still existed somewhere, and as long as they existed they were a threat to her.
"Ann had them," I interrupted again, recalling what Loring had said to me. "Being the kind she is, Ann couldn't endure the thought of anyone's being ruined by follies of their adolescence, so she hid them. And when she came to New York," I continued, "she came and told you that you needn't worry. No one would ever read them."
"Yes. That was what this little gray-eyed girl had done for me, and I'd killed her father. The only way I could make amends was to do for her everything that her father and her mother could have done, and more."
The invitation to the party where I'd met Ann was the first step in this program. When she knew that we would marry, Mrs. Loring bought this house—secretly and with her own private funds—to provide us with a home. To enable her to keep close watch over Ann's happiness, she arranged to have the suite across the court held for herself, under a false name.
MONDAY afternoon she'd driven here to help Ann get settled, and had seen Chester climbing the stoop.
"He had just about enough time to locate Ann," I whispered to Carson, "after leaving Montville. He'd dug out what had happened there. Now he was after the papers so he could use them to renew his demand for hush money."
"I knew," Rose Loring was saying, "I'd never be free of him till he was dead." From the car's glove compartment she'd taken the pistol Loring insisted she keep there for protection when driving alone, and hurried up to the vacant flat.
From its window she'd watched Chester sneak into the bedroom, while Ann was at the phone, obviously to make a hasty search for what he was after. And when he came out. Rose shot him. It was not till her husband came home late that night that she learned how much trouble this had brought to Ann. And then he told her about my going to Montville to question Stock, whom she knew had been with her and Gaddin on that last wild ride. Afraid that I'd dig this out of him, she'd phoned Gaddin to keep me from Stock at all costs, and the latter had obeyed her all too literally. Rose Loring did not know about the murder of Stock, but the way I'd spoken to her when I'd phoned tonight had convinced her I'd uncovered the past she was frantically trying to hide. If I went to the police with it, they would trace one or both of her killings to her. She was faced with the choice of silencing me or dying in the chair herself.
The choice she made was, all things considered, inevitable. "Okay," Dan Carson said as she finished her confession. "Let's go. I'm taking you in."
"No," George Loring said. "You're not taking her anywhere." His hand came from behind his back and this time it did hold a gun—a small, pearl-handled pistol. "I found this in Ann Hardy's trunk and it occurred to me that I might have a use for it. Please do not move, any of you, or I shall be compelled to put it to that use."
Simmons' arm lifted toward his coat's opening. "No!" Carson barked. "No. Al." and Simmons' arm dropped.
"That was wise," Loring sighed. "Rose. Please go to the door and hold it open." She pushed up, her eyes shining, and obeyed. "Jim," Loring said to me, "Be good enough to ask Mr. Folsom to take over any matters I have pending. I shall not be down to the office for some time."
He circled us, the pistol wary. Abruptly he was through the door, and it had slammed shut on him and his wife.
"Cripes, Dan," Simmons exploded. "I could have plugged him if you'd have let me grab out my shoulder gun. Suppose he did fire that popgun first. It wouldn't have hurt me."
"It's killed one man already," Carson replied, heavily. "What was the use your getting the same dose when those Lorings won't get any farther than the cops I got hiding under the stairs down below, with orders to let anybody in that wants in, but nobody out unless I give the word?"
He plodded to the corner and picked up the phone. "I got to let Harrisburg know the State cops they got watching Kurt Gaddin can pick him up now without upsetting any applecarts here." He yawned. "Gosh, I'm sleepy. I'm getting too old to be staying up this late."
WHEN they'd released Ann and I'd brought her home, I asked her two questions. The first was why she'd not called me, after phoning the police.
"I tried to, Jim. I tried hard, but I couldn't get a dial tone till the police were already here. You know what a busy exchange ours is."
It was as simple as that.
The second question was not quite as easy to ask, nor the answer anything like as simple. "What made you tell me that business Monday morning—about my trusting you and believing you?"
She watched her fingers twist my coat button. "I was saying it to myself, really. I was thinking about how poor Rose Loring had begged me not ever to tell her husband about what was in those papers, and I was telling myself I must always rely on your trust and belief in me, no matter what." Her head lifted and silver flecks danced in the gray depths of her eyes. "I want to hear you say it again. Jim, right now."
"I shall always trust you, kitten," I said solemnly. "I shall always believe in you, no matter what." But as my arms closed tightly around her tiny form and my lips found hers. I wryly recalled the moments in the past three terrible days when I had almost failed her.
I swore a silent oath that it would never happen again.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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