7

TUESDAY, 8:30 A.M. TO 12:07 P.M.

The story was prominent in the newspapers. It was prominent in the Herald-Tribune, which Mrs. North read. It was prominent in the Times, around which Mr. North reached groping for his cup of coffee. Martini tossed a wadded cigarette package into the air, jumped straight up after it and came down twisted, with her tail and back bristling. She made a lunge for it, paused suddenly to scratch her right ear, and then batted it to Pam North’s feet. Martini sat and looked at Pam expectantly. Ignored, Martini spoke. She put out a paw and touched Pam’s nearest leg.

“Last pair of stockings, Teeney,” Pam said, in a reasonable tone. “Don’t.”

“What?” Jerry North said. “Say something?”

“Stockings,” Pam said. “Last pair. The Herald-Tribune didn’t get North Salem in.”

“No?” Jerry said, pleased. “The Times did. New lead.” He read it to her. “Police of Westchester County and New York today were investigating the apparently linked murders of Dr. Andrew Gordon, widely known oculist, slain yesterday in his office in the Medical Chambers, and of Grace Spencer, his nurse, beaten to death hours later at the Gordon home near North Salem, in Westchester County,” Jerry read. He paused. “A mouthful,” he added. “Ouch!”

“What?” Pam said.

“Teeney,” Jerry said. “The Herald-Trib hasn’t got the nurse?”

“It’s an earlier edition,” Pam said, defensively. “We usually get an earlier edition of it. Don’t!”

Martini, deciding that Pam’s leg offered the greater responsiveness, had returned to it. Martini made comment, deep in her throat, comprehensible only to herself.

“And don’t talk Siamese,” Pam said. “Talk cat.”

“Yah,” Martini said, drawing it out.

Nobody answered her. She kicked the wadded cigarette package aside, ran after it, jumped on it, smelled it, and wandered back, talking low in her throat. Still nobody paid attention. Seemingly without effort, almost absent-mindedly, she floated to the top of the breakfast table.

“No!” Pam North said. “No, Martini!”

Martini could ignore with anybody. She moved, delicately, to the cream pitcher, looked quickly at Pam, and hurriedly put her face in it.

“No!” said Pam, explosively.

Martini did everything at once. Her head came out of the pitcher, her fur bristled and she got under way. It was all one movement. It took the cream pitcher with it for an instant, and left the pitcher on its side, cream spreading. Martini landed in the cream she had spilled. Infuriated, she went up and over Jerry North, sailed to the windowsill and bounced to a chest. She stopped there, shook her feet one after another, looked at the Norths with an expression of hurt astonishment, said “Yah!” with anger and began to lick her feet. As she licked them, she began again to make the low, throaty noise.

“I do wish,” Pam said, mopping up the cream, “that you wouldn’t let her on the table.”

“I wouldn’t!” Jerry said, mopping cream tracks off his shoulder with a napkin. “I—” He ended, baffled. He tried again. “Listen,” he said, “it was your leg she was at. Not mine.”

“No discipline,” Pam said. “That’s the real trouble. No discipline at all. Poor Teeney.”

She went over to Teeney, who stopped licking her left hind foot, but remained in position. “Poor Teeney,” Pam said. “Nobody tells her anything.”

She stroked Martini’s head. Martini purred briefly and called attention to the fact that she still had a foot to lick. There would be time later, Martini indicated, for head rubbing.

“Which reminds me,” Pam said, coming back and sitting down at the table again. “What was Grace Spencer going to tell?”

Jerry put his Times down, looked at the empty toast plate, said, “oh” mildly, and pointed out that they did not know that Grace Spencer had been going to tell anybody anything.

“As good as,” Pam said. “Otherwise why?”

“Why go there?” Jerry said. “Or why killed?”

“They’re both the same thing,” Pam told him. “Part of the same thing. She remembered something and was going to tell Bill—no, she didn’t know Bill was there, did she?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Jerry said.

“Then Dan Gordon,” Pam said. “Or the wife. So that they could take it up with the police. What?”

“She saw young Gordon come back with his father between two and three,” Jerry said, promptly. “She saw Mrs. Gordon having lunch with a gangster and paying him money. She saw somebody—Smith—say, carrying the doctor out of the last examining room, and began to think, later, that there was something a little strange about it. She saw Debbie having lunch with Westcott and urging him to do something to—I can’t finish that one.”

“To kill Dr. Gordon, who was keeping her under hypnosis for his own evil ends,” Pam said. “Anybody can finish any of them if you want to make it easy. What did she really have to tell?”

Jerry discovered cream that he had missed, and rubbed at it, dampening his napkin in his glass of water. He shook his head.

“Two times,” Pam said. “When he was going out, before lunch. After she came back from lunch and before she found the body. One or the other.”

Jerry shook his head again.

“Any time between the doctor’s return from the hospital and the time she found the body,” he corrected. “Something she saw or heard, either one. You can’t shut out the time she was at lunch. It’s quite possible she ran across something then.”

Pam considered; she nodded. He was making it harder, she said. But you couldn’t get away from it.

“Actually,” she said, “you know what I think?”

“Good God, no,” Jerry said.

Pam ignored this.

“I still think it was something she saw when he was leaving,” she said.

“I know,” Jerry told her. “Because people who are about to be murdered look different from people who aren’t. It—shows in their faces.”

“Well,” Pam said, “I should think they’d be worried.” She looked at Jerry and smiled quickly and shook her head before he could speak. “No,” she said. “Really. Because murders are the end of something else, almost always. They don’t just—just come out of a clear sky. They come out of circumstances—worrying circumstances. And the victim is worried too, just as much as the murderer.” She paused. “Oh,” she said, “differently, I suppose. But you don’t just get up all bright and cheery in the morning, all’s right with the world, and get murdered at eight A.M. with the orange juice.”

Jerry said he saw what she meant, although he thought her example badly chosen.

“Everybody’s worried in the morning,” he said. “It’s the natural state of man. Particularly at what would be about seven thirty. Unless he didn’t take his shower.”

“What?” Pam said. “Oh. That’s frivolous.”

All their guessing was frivolous, Jerry told her. Any guessing when you had nothing to go on was frivolous.

“And,” he said, “I’ve got to see an author about a contract. You know what they want now? Control of reprints.” He stood up and sighed. “Authors used to be milder in the old days.”

“And, to be honest, broker,” Pam said. “Did you ever hear of a publisher dying in a garret?”

“Thousands,” Jerry assured her. Pam looked doubtful.

“Anyway,” she said, “I think that Dr. Gordon probably looked worried, because he was going to be murdered. Or was in a hurry, as if he had an appointment. Or said something that didn’t mean anything at the time, but did afterward.”

“Like ‘we who are about to die’—?” Jerry said.

Pam stood up, too.

“Go see about the contract,” she said.

Jerry came around the table and kissed her. He said she tasted of jam. “Very nice,” he said, consideringly. “Strawberry.”

“Black raspberry,” Pam told him. “Lunch?”

Jerry said he would call her up.

“You’ll be here?” he said, getting his hat off the sofa.

Pam North looked vague, suddenly.

“Look,” she said, “suppose I call you? About noon? And then we can go to Charles early, because otherwise they’re full up and it’s so embarrassing for Hugo. And we have to have two drinks while we’re waiting and sometimes I wonder whether they’re good for us.”

Jerry looked at her, not without suspicion.

“Look,” he said, “you’re not going to be here. Right?”

Pam told him he sounded like Bill.

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said, “wouldn’t it be fun just to let Bill do it? For—for a change? Instead of leading with that agreeable chin?”

“Jerry,” Pam said. “You can say nice things.”

She kissed him, and this time he did not think of jam. He was still not thinking of jam when he remembered, as he got out of the elevator, that Pam had not, even remotely, agreed not to lead with her chin.

It had been hardly any trouble at all to get the names and addresses she wanted from Sergeant Mullins, although he talked at some length, and anxiously, about the inspector. Pam had had a twinge of conscience at circumventing Bill Weigand, but she paid no attention to it and obediently went away. She had more trouble circumventing Martini, who, chagrined that Jerry had escaped while she was giving a final polish to the right rear leg, was determined to block the escape of the one who smelled different, but did supply food when sharply spoken to. Pam backed out again—and almost bumped into a very surprised young man she had never seen before—but she caught Martini in the air as the little cat sprang, put her back and closed the door firmly after pushing out of it one hopeful, enquiring paw. This time, however, there was no taxicab. She waited ten minutes on the curb of Sixth Avenue, under a sign which called it “Avenue of the Americas,” and then was forced to take a bus.

Four of the addresses she had were in Manhattan, one was in Harlem and the sixth was—distantly, she feared—in Brooklyn. She would take the Manhattan ones first and then Harlem and then, if her strength and time lasted, the distant Brooklynite. The first, she decided, was the one in West Fiftieth, beyond Ninth Avenue.

It was a tenement and the one she wanted was on the fifth floor. It was a long way up; above the third floor the narrow wooden stairway sagged away from the wall, so that walking up it one instinctively hugged the wall and fought against a tendency to slip outward. “Some day,” Pam thought, “fire will go up these stairs and—and spread out at the top.” She shivered. The fifth floor was the top; that would be where the fire would mushroom. The air was staler there than it had been below where a sometimes-opened door let dead air out. But there was a glimmer from a dirty skylight above the stairwell—a skylight ideally situated, Pam thought, to provide a draft for the fire. She picked out one of the doors and knocked, and the door opened almost immediately. At first there seemed no reason for this response, and then Pam looked down.

“Hello, dear,” she said, looking into round brown eyes, “is your father Mr. Dunnigan?”

“I’m Mabel,” the little girl said, each word formed carefully on small lips. “Mabel Dunnigan. Who are you?”

“I’m Pamela North,” Mrs. North said.

“That’s a funny name,” Mabel told her. “Goodbye.”

She started to shut the door.

“You mean ‘hello,’ dear,” Mrs. North said. “Hello, Mabel.”

“I mean goodbye,” Mabel said. “They’re different woids. Goodbye.”

“Words,” Pam said. “But I want to see your father, Mabel. I—”

A woman came out of a door into the inner corridor of the flat. She picked Mabel up and held her under an arm. The woman was taller than Pam by a good deal, and heavier by more. She looked down.

“Whatever it is,” the woman said, “we don’t want it. My husband’s sick.”

“I know,” Pam said. “I want to see him. About yesterday. About Dr. Gordon.”

“There was a cop here,” the woman said. “You from a paper?”

“No,” Pam said. “I—”

“You’re sure not a cop,” the woman said, looking at Pam.

“In a way,” Pam said. “I help Lieutenant Weigand.” She looked at the woman. “And Sergeant Mullins,” she said, making it stronger.

A man’s voice came out of the room the woman had left.

“Who is it?” the voice said. “Mabel! Who is it?”

“Some woman says she’s from the police,” the woman said, and raised her voice. “I said you’d seen the police.”

“Well, bring her in,” the man’s voice said. The woman looked at Pam, made a gesture with her head, and stood out of the way, still holding little Mabel.

“She’s pretty,” Pam said, moving in. “Sweet. Hello, Mabel.”

“Goodbye,” Mabel said, still under her mother’s arm. The woman said nothing, but she smiled. It was a worried smile, but it was there.

John Dunnigan was sitting in a morris chair by a window which opened on an airshaft. He half got up when Pam went in. The room was unlighted; gray light came in unwillingly from the window, but Dunnigan faced away from it. When her eyes were adjusted to the gloom, Pam saw that his eyes were red and swollen.

“If you’re from the police,” Dunnigan said, “I’ve told everything I know. Which is nothing. The doc was all right when he finished with me. I went out and came home.”

He spoke as if he had planned it; had it ready.

“We know he was all right,” Pam said. “That is, we know he was alive, Mr. Dunnigan. That isn’t what I want.”

“Well?” Dunnigan said. His eyes blinked when he looked at her. They were bloodshot.

“It’s hard to say,” Pam North said. “Had you ever been examined by him before?”

Dunnigan shook his head.

“Then maybe you wouldn’t know,” Pam said. “What I want is—something odd. Something out of the ordinary. Was he nervous? Excited? Anything like that. As if, say, he’d just got bad news? Or heard something—frightening? But you don’t know how he usually was, do you?”

Dunnigan blinked at her. Then he shook his head again.

“To tell you the truth, lady, I didn’t pay much attention,” he said. “He was just the doc. You know?”

“Just somebody looking at your eyes,” Pam said.

“Sure,” Dunnigan said. “All I wanted to know was, when could I go back to work? Do I get the insurance money?”

That was natural, Pam told him.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s what any guy would be interested in. Outside of that, I didn’t pay much attention.”

“He wasn’t nervous, that you noticed?” Pam said. “Or anything?”

“Nope,” Dunnigan said.

Pam North said nothing. She waited.

“I told the detective all about it,” Dunnigan said. “What there was. I heard him moving around in the next room. Then he came in and shut the door. I said ‘hello, doc’ and he said ‘hello.’ Then he sat down on the stool and told me to look at a place on the wall and turned on a light and looked at my eyes. He made me look this way and that way and then he wrote something down on my card and that was all.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“Sure. He said, ‘Don’t worry, mister’—and, then he looked at the card and said, ‘Dunnigan, I’ll get in touch with your doctor. Leave the card here as you go.’”

“That was all?”

“Sure. He went on into the next room and I got up and got out of there. Went down a sort of hall and—”

“By the way,” Pam said, “how did you know to go out that way?”

“Nurse told me, when she told me to go in the room,” Dunnigan said. “She said something about when I went out, go down the corridor and turn right and I’d find a door. Sure enough.”

Sure enough he had, Pam interpreted.

“And nothing—strange?” Pam said.

“Not as I noticed,” Dunnigan said. “If there was, I wouldn’t know, lady.”

Mrs. North stood up.

“Oh, by the way,” she said, “which room were you in?”

“Third from the end,” Dunnigan said.

Pamela North turned to go. Small Mabel was standing in the door of the room and Pam smiled at her.

“Goodbye, Mabel,” Pam said.

“Hello,” Mabel said.

Really, Pam thought, as, outside the flat, she started down the canted stairs, it can’t be me altogether. It must be the little girl, this time. There’s simply no pleasing her.

Pam went on down. She was disappointed, and almost inclined to give the whole thing up. Whatever it was she had vaguely hoped for—and she had to admit to herself that her hopes could hardly have been vaguer—she had not got. Like Teeney the time she had jumped for Jerry’s leg, intending to climb to his shoulder, and Jerry had moved at the same moment. Like Teeney when she went sailing through unoccupied air, with a blank look on her masked face.

“Well, what do you want?” Henry Flint, occupant of Room No. 5 the previous afternoon at Dr. Andrew Gordon’s office, demanded. He was uncompromising. He stood at the door of his furnished room in the far West Eighties and bristled. He was hardly taller than Pam herself; he was square and broad shouldered and he looked as if something had recently disagreed with him. Me, Pam thought; I disagree with him. But probably lots of things do.

“Who’re you?” Henry Flint demanded. “You don’t look like a cop.” He looked at her again. “Or a do-gooder,” he said. “What do you want?”

He did not leave the door.

Pam North, speaking as briefly as she could, told him what she wanted. Not so concisely—a little confusedly, even—she told him who she was. It might have been understood that Mrs. North, while not exactly a cop, was not exactly not a cop either.

“Hell,” Henry Flint said. “Nothing strange. Is it strange to get kicked around? Is it strange to have some big shot treat a workingman like he was a animal? Like he was trying to grab something off, when all he wanted was to get what was coming to him? What the big shots were trying to gyp him out of? What’s strange about that, huh?”

“Well,” Pam said.

“Like I was inanimate,” Flint told her, still standing in the door and bristling at her. “Like I was too low to have any feelings, see? That’s your Doctor Gordon or whatever his name is.”

“Was,” Pam said. “He’s dead.”

“All right,” Flint said. “So he’s dead. Teach him to push good Americans around, that will.”

“Well,” Pam said, involuntarily. “I doubt it.”

“What?” Flint said. He seemed really to look at her for the first time.

“I doubt that being dead will teach him to stop pushing Americans around,” Pam said. “I doubt that it will teach him anything, particularly.”

“Now you said something,” Flint told her. “Now you sure said something. You an atheist?”

“No,” Pam said, “Not particularly. Why?”

“Sure you are,” Flint told her. “When you’re dead you’re dead. Nobody can teach you nothing. There you said something. Come in, why don’t you?”

He moved away from the door and let Pam in.

“Do you good to see the way a workingman lives,” Flint said, with animus. “Ain’t pretty, is it?”

It was neither pretty nor, arrestingly, unpretty. It was clean and bare; it was without character. But the window opened above the street, and spring air came into it.

“Actually,” Pam said, “I think it’s rather comfortable, Mr. Flint.”

“‘Comfortable,’ she says,” Flint repeated. “‘Comfortable,’ she calls it. Would you like to live here, lady? That’s all—would you like to live here?”

“No,” Pam said. “But it wouldn’t kill me. Or make me so terribly sorry for myself.”

“Who’s sorry for whose self?” Flint said. “You ain’t talking about me, lady. I’ll get what’s coming to me. They can’t kick me around.”

They seemed to go in circles, Pam thought. People so often did. They remained standing inside the room and Flint’s eyes—black eyes, she thought—blazed at her. There seemed to be nothing wrong with them, outwardly.

“Listen, Mr. Flint,” Pam North said, “I don’t want to argue with you. All I came for was to find out if Dr. Gordon acted strange when you saw him yesterday. As if—as if something had gone wrong. As if he expected to be murdered.”

Flint looked at her carefully.

“Scared?” he said. “People like that doc ain’t scared. They don’t know what’s coming. He was broos-kue.”

“What?” Pam said. “Oh. Broos-kue, of course. But not frightened?”

“Took about two minutes with me, he did,” Flint said. “Like I was a animal. No proper examination. Didn’t even have me take my coat off.”

Pam North shook her head slightly and, for some reason, reminded herself of Jerry.

“Coat off?” she said. “To look at your eyes?”

“How did he know it was just eyes?” Flint demanded. “Didn’t take the trouble to find out. Just looked at my eyes through a little metal thing and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Hint. I’ll contact your doctor,’ and went on to the next sucker. You call that a proper examination?”

“Did he really say ‘contact’?” Pam asked.

“Why not?” Flint said. “What’s wrong with it?” He seemed sincerely puzzled.

“Nothing, I guess,” Pam said. “You feel that he gave you an—an inadequate examination? Cursory?”

“Like I was a animal,” Flint said. “Like I was a—” He caught himself just in time, but Pam could see the participle which had formed on his lips. “Animal,” he ended, rather halfheartedly.

“Then,” Pam said, “you thought he was hurried. Not bothering to give you a real examination. Just—going through the motions? That was what I wanted, really. Something strange?”

“What’s strange about it?” Flint said, with renewed animus. “They’re all together, ain’t they? Push guys around. Gyp them out of what’s coming to them. Treat them like they were animals. What’ud you expect?”

“Then,” Pam said, carefully, “you don’t think there was anything out of the ordinary about the way he acted?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Flint demanded. “He rushes in, gives me a quick once-over with my coat on, writes something down and kicks me out. Takes about thirty seconds. Is that any way to examine a man?”

“Really, I don’t know, Mr. Flint,” Pam said. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Doctors!” Flint said, disposing of them. “What else you want to know?”

“Nothing,” Pam said. “Thank you, Mr. Hint.” She turned toward the door and stopped. “By the way,” she said, “not that it makes any difference. Are you a Communist?”

Flint glared at her. There was rage in his eyes.

“Me?!” he said. He almost shouted it. “Me a Commie?” His face was red with anger. “Watch out who you call a Commie, lady. Just watch out. Dirty foreign—”

His voice pursued Pamela North down the first of the flights of stairs which led to the street.

“Well!” Pam said to herself. She did not know whether she was disappointed or not, this time. Mr. Flint was baffling.

Fritz Weber was small and quiet, he was almost apologetic. His eyes were invisible behind dark glasses; his voice was soft and resigned. His wife, who let Pam in, had been crying. She was a small, gray woman and her eyes were red from crying. Both of the Webers, Pam thought, were in their late fifties. Their little apartment near Stuyvesant Square—their very neat, clean little apartment—seemed to have been lived in for a good many years. Mrs. Weber met Pam North at the door, and it was so dim in the apartment, so quiet, that Pam suddenly felt embarrassingly vigorous—discordantly bright and alive. She told Mrs. Weber who she was and, as nearly as she could, why she had come.

“The police?” Mrs. Weber said. “I’m sure I don’t know what my husband—A detective was here yesterday.” She paused. “He said he was a detective,” she said, doubtfully, almost as if she were apologizing.

Pam explained again. She was not a detective; she was a friend of a detective. The position did not seem entirely clear even to Pam as again she tried to explain. She was looking for an oddity, not even knowing that an oddity existed. But she was trying to find out—to help find out—who had killed Dr. Andrew Gordon. And Mrs. Weber asked her to come in.

“Doctor was a good man,” she said. “I’m sorry about doctor.”

Fritz Weber was sitting in a chair; he sat with odd, careful precision. His arms did not rest on the chair arms; they were tight against his sides. He was looking straight ahead of him and he seemed to be waiting. But when his wife and Pam North came in he turned his head toward them and there was, then, a personal quality in his waiting. He was polite, in his quiet; he even smiled a little.

“This lady, Fritzl,” Mrs. Weber said, and Weber began to nod. He spoke and his voice was soft and patient.

“I heard, mama,” he said. “I heard very well. She has come about doctor.”

“Yes,” Pam said. “About Dr. Gordon.”

“He was a good man,” Weber said. “He could do nothing. For me he could do nothing. But he was a good man. I will tell you. It was a piece of steel. I was a toolmaker and there was a piece of steel. In my right eye. A very small piece of steel and the other doctor took it out. But it did not go well. Even after he took it out, it did not go well.”

“I’m sorry,” Pam said. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Weber.”

“Yes,” Weber said. “Thank you. So he—the other doctor—sent me to Dr. Gordon. And it was not the small piece of steel. There had been the small piece of steel, but it was not that. It was a disease. It did not have anything to do with the piece of steel. And there was nothing doctor could do.”

“Oh!” Pam said. “I’m—” It seemed futile to say, again, that she was sorry. But Mr. Weber waited politely. When she did not go on, he nodded and smiled a little.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see—I can understand—that you are sorry. It is—unpleasant to hear such things. Naturally. Doctor also was sorry. He said he wished he could say it was the small piece of steel. So that I would receive the insurance, you know. But he said he could not say that. Doctor was an honest man, so he could not say that. It was a disease, not the small piece of steel.”

Pam said, “Oh!” again, realizing what the quiet little man was telling her. There had been an injury, which would have meant compensation. But what was wrong was not the injury; Dr. Gordon had not been able to attribute it to the injury.

“It will be a long time?” she said. “Before—I mean—” She broke off again.

“It will be always,” Mr. Weber said. “In a few weeks, I will not see anything. Now there is only a little light. And shadows. In a few weeks—shadows.”

The little man had dignity. He stated a fact.

“Even the doctor I did not see clearly,” he said. “That is what you wanted to know? He was a shadow. And, of course, I could hear his voice. He was sorry about what he had to tell me.”

“His voice,” Pam said. “It was—there wasn’t anything odd about it? Anything you wouldn’t have expected? As if he were—oh, nervous? Worried?”

“No,” Mr. Weber said. “I do not think he was worried. He was sorry he had to give me bad news after he examined my eyes. He told me to come home and—wait. He gave me the name of some people to see afterward. People who—he said there were things—work—one could do afterward. He said I should come and see him again in a week or two, although he did not think there was anything he could do. Doctor was an honest man.”

“I’m—” Pam said. “I wish there were something I could do.”

“You are good,” Mr. Weber said. “Isn’t she good, mama? But there is nothing.” He paused. After a time he said, “Things happen.”

Pam went, then; she made small, half-phrased sounds to Mrs. Weber and it seemed to her, grotesquely, that Mrs. Weber was comforting her. She left the little apartment, and its faded neatness, and Mr. Weber, waiting in the dusk for darkness. This time, she thought, I got more than I asked for. And then, against her will, she realized how much more she had got than she had asked for. It didn’t fit, all her emotions told her; it did not fit, all that she believed to be true about the aging, beaten people she had left. Humanly, it was unbelievable. But her mind stopped her there. About people little was really unbelievable; about people you had met but once you merely thought, without remotely knowing, that things were hard to believe.

Shut the people out of it. Make Mr. Weber merely a name. Turn him from a small, waiting man into a designation on a police file, and it was different. Then you had a man with a motive; with, she thought, the best motive they had found. Suppose his quiet was bitterness; suppose that repeated “honest” used to describe Dr. Gordon was bitter irony. Because what it amounted to was this—Dr. Gordon had ruled not only against Fritz Weber’s eyesight. He had, at the same time, ruled against the money which might have palliated blindness. He had said that the shop accident, which would be covered by the workman’s compensation law, was not the cause of what was wrong with Fritz Weber’s eyes. He had not stretched a point, as perhaps he might have. However sorry he had been, he had told Weber that his blindness was to be without recompense, while having it in his power to say something else. Men had been bitterly, violently hated for less. It was likely that men had been killed for less. And you could not guess what flaming hatred, what violence, there might be in even the smallest and quietest of men.

Pam North wished that she had not visited the Webers. She did not want to put into Bill Weigand’s mind what she would have to put there.

It was noon, and before very long she should call Jerry. Perhaps, Pam thought, she ought to give the whole thing up and call Jerry now. She didn’t really want to see any more people. Not after the Webers. It would be simpler to let the rest of it go, and it would please Jerry, who would think—if he knew about it—that she should have let all of it go, from the start.

But on the other hand, Robert Oakes lived very near. She could walk to the address on Second Avenue which was Oakes’s, and it was foolish to be so near and not finish things off, since she had gone this far. She hesitated outside the building on Stuyvesant Square and then, as if she had flipped a coin in her mind, turned and walked toward Second Avenue. Her heels clicked on the pavement. She walked as if she were under orders.

Robert Oakes, No. 2 examining room, lived in a five-story tenement which had been reconverted. It was now of yellow brick instead of red. It had an entrance two steps down instead of several steps up. Pam pressed a downstairs bell, waited, pressed it again and tried the door. The door was unlocked. She went up a rebuilt stairway; a fireproofed anachronism, surrounded by inflammable walls. Mr. Oakes lived on the third floor—third floor rear. And, as she climbed, Pam North realized that probably he wasn’t at home. People who were at home answered their bells.

She reached the third floor and went back down the hallways toward a door at the end. She was about ten feet from the doorway when something happened which was surprising and which was afterward difficult to describe. There was nothing in the hallway, except much used air, and yet something picked her up in gigantic, amorphous hands and threw her backward.

There was a feeling of being struck, but of being struck everywhere at once, and at the same time there was a tremendous roar and things began to come apart around her. The door she was looking at disintegrated while she still saw it, and while she was still throwing her hands up to protect her face. Then there was movement and a sudden, jarring, interruption of movement and a sharp pain in her left shoulder, which cut through a general feeling of terror and lesser pain. And then blackness swirled in around her and poured over her, except that at the last moment there was a red glow to the darkness.

“My,” Pam said, “that blew up in my face. My, that blew up in my face. My that—” And then, although she tried to stop she could hear herself giggling. “It isn’t me because I don’t giggle,” Pam said, “but it certainly blew up in my face. My but it—”