The Girl with the Frightened Eyes

A HOMER BULL & HANK MacANDREWS MYSTERY

Lawrence Lariar

CHAPTER 1

The Red Cross bus sailed down the incline and turned to stop in the broad concrete field before the Staten Island ferry slip. I lifted myself down to earth and smiled up at the pretty matron who had driven me down from Halloran Hospital.

She smiled back automatically. “End of the line. Good luck, soldier.”

“Thanks. Maybe I’ll be needing a little luck from here on out.”

I walked straight for the ferry entrance and the earth felt strange to my feet. It was a fall day. November blew a cold wind in my face, loaded with the smell of automobiles and tar and salt and ship-smoke. A hundred new and wonderful noises beat against my ear. I heard the sound of many voices, the cacophony of horns, whistles, sirens and bells common to the waterfront. All this was a tonic for me. I paused in the shelter of the ferry entrance and breathed it all in, enjoying every sound and smell of civilization.

I lit a cigarette and squinted at myself in the mirror you get with your chewing gum. My face was pale and lean, as it had always been before I joined the army, a few million years ago. There was a fleck of gray over my ears that added age to my five and twenty. There were new, hairline wrinkles in the corners of my eyes, over my eyebrows and alongside the ends of my mouth. It all added up to me: Geoffrey Keye. It smiled at me in the mirror and I walked away from it.

People moved before me, all of them aimed at the ferry, walking fast, talking fast. I stood there looking back at the Red Cross truck and after a little while it pulled away up the ramp and disappeared in traffic.

I watched it go without regrets. It was my last tie to the army, my last memory of Halloran Hospital and the long row of beds and the cast on my left arm and the endless hours of restful monotony while waiting for this day and this hour and this minute.

Now the minute had arrived and I felt the immediate past slip away from me. I was back where it had all started, in New York City. Once across the bay I would walk into my past, my present and my future. The routine of city life would absorb me easily; I would slip back among old friends, into the free and easy groove of the cartoonist’s life. I would draw funny pictures and think funny gags and meet funny people again.

It would be easy. My name had sold cartoons and caricatures three years ago—it was still fresh and vital and important to magazine editors and all the advertising agencies.

I walked over to the newsstand and stared at the magazine covers. The sight of them quickened my pulse, for these were the showplaces of the cartoonery trade. I found myself taking enjoyment from the bustle and clatter of life around the Staten Island ferry.

I bought a pack of cigarettes and surveyed the headlines. Our men were going places now. They were sprinkling Hitler’s inner Fortress with well-aimed batches of screaming death. They were bombarding the deep and hidden fastnesses of the Reich and softening the monster for the kill. I thought of Normandy and the invasion and for a moment I was part of it again, marching through the hedge rowed fields with Kip Smith.

I swallowed hard when I thought of Kip. He and I had planned long ago to share this moment—this first bright day at home. We had discussed it at great length—in great detail. We were optimistic about our homecoming. Soldiers think of home and disregard the threat of bullets and pain and sudden death. But a bullet had banished Kip Smith’s dream forever.

I reached into my pocket and brought out the small packet of correspondence Kip had given me. These were the last seven letters his sister Paula had sent him—a long time ago. Now I would call Paula Smith and arrange to see her. There were many reasons for meeting Kip’s sister as soon as possible.

I walked into the phone booth and asked information for the telephone number of Mrs. Preston’s place.

Calling Paula Smith excited me. The address was familiar because Paula and I had corresponded for two years. It was through Kip, after Kip and I had become buddies. Kip would read me her letters, in the beginning, and then sit for hours with me, discussing the vagaries of fine arts. It was because Paula was a painter that I wrote to her. Painting had been my first love, in the quick years of decision before I began to cartoon for a living. And Paula answered that first stumbling letter of mine and encouraged the correspondence. I had mailed many a rambling dissertation on art to her in care of Mrs. Kay Preston. We were old friends, yet strangers to each other. We had never met personally. I had never seen her face, even in a photograph. I wondered how her voice would sound.

I dialed the number.

A girl’s voice answered, high and sharp. “Paula Smith? She isn’t here.”

“When will she be back?”

“I don’t know. She moved out of here a long time ago.”

I said, “I’ve got to reach her. Where did she go?”

There was a pause, a whispering and another voice, older, higher, said, “Paula Smith left no forwarding address.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s rather important that I get to her.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you. Paula didn’t tell me where she was moving.”

I hung up and stood in the booth uncertainly. I studied the address on one of Paula’s letters: 17 Quaker Lane, and tried to visualize the house. I checked my daydream and fought rising disappointment. I had been building this moment for two years, the exciting revelation of a new voice. It would have meant that I could meet Paula. I put her letters away and tried to forget them for a while. I failed. If I forgot Paula, I would be forgetting Kip.

I walked with the tide of people swarming toward the main gate and let myself be drawn into the stream, through the doors and turnstiles, across the waiting room and inside the upper deck of the familiar squat ferry.

The deck was crowded, as usual, jam-packed with hardy souls who relish the long boat ride across the bay to and from South Ferry.

A whistle hooted and a deeper hoot answered from somewhere out on the water. We edged out into the bay and into the scattered traffic of the harbor. A stiff wind skittered over the water and rolled the ferry gently in her course. A fat tug puffed diligently alongside a giant tanker. A few lazy gulls hung over our stern in easy grace.

The crowd in the ferry was a mixture of young people, old people, and a few servicemen. There were girls in the crowd, young and smartly dressed, and I caught myself scanning their faces and thinking about Paula Smith again. I caught myself wondering about her face and her figure and the way she might do her hair.

Kip Smith would have laughed at my state of mind. My befuddlement always amused him. “You look constipated, Jeff,” he’d say. “When you start to gawk and cloud up your eyes and act ingrown, you look absolutely constipated.”

We had gone through basic together, through the long and sweaty routine of conditioning. You live with a man for two years and if you like him it isn’t long before he knows you as he knows a brother. You march with a man on maneuvers, you grunt with him and curse with him and after a while the gates are down and you see inside each other. And if you like what’s inside, the man is your friend.

I liked Kip Smith from the moment I saw him. He was a tall boy, freckled, blue eyed and handsome in a roughhewn sort of way. He moved about the camp slowly and awkwardly, overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. He was given to honest thinking and it was this honesty that first amazed me.

“I’m not quite sure all these men know what we’re fighting for, Jeff,” he would say. “Do you know?”

“Democracy,” I said. “Stab in the back. Pearl Harbor. Hitler. Mussolini.”

“Those are the symbols. But how many of these fellows will ever recognize Hitler in a business suit on Main Street?”

I said, “Give them time. Once they learn the background for this shindig they’ll be able to spot the Fuehrer even if he dresses up as Santa Claus. Besides, Hitler doesn’t walk down Main Street very often these days.”

“These days won’t last forever. And Hitler has a million ghosts to carry on for him after he takes the leap into oblivion.”

“You’re worrying a lot about a little,” I said.

“This is big, Jeff. This is the biggest, the longest war we’ve ever had,” he said. “Fifteen million servicemen may come out of our country to do this job. It hits a man every once in a while and makes him sit back and close his eyes and think a little. I get to thinking about all the other camps like this and my mind can’t handle all the details. I look at these barracks and begin to multiply this camp by all the other camps in the country and after a while I get a headache and give it up. The mathematics are too much for me. The man who’s planning it all must be a genius. He’s got to think of a few billion coordinated moves before we beat all the Fascists.”

I liked the way his mind worked. He had a capacity for seeing ahead, looking around the tricky corners. He figured things out and adjusted himself for the problems of the future. His awkwardness vanished when we began to train on the big guns and it wasn’t long before he had developed a skill that kept our yammering sergeant on his toes.

Kip Smith was the first man to get a stripe, but it left him cold.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s not good to pick one man out of a company and give him glory.”

“You earned that glory,” I told him. “The rest of us are still sluggards.”

“One man doesn’t fire a gun alone, Jeff. Every man on our gun deserves one of these.”

He sat down on his cot and stared at the piece of cloth.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Aren’t you going to tell the folks back home about this? People will be glad to hear about it, even if you aren’t.”

He smiled up at me. “People? I haven’t got any people. When I write my next letter to Paula, I’ll let her know.”

Paula Smith was his younger sister. There was an older one, too, but Kip didn’t talk about her much. She was ten years older than he and he hadn’t seen her in years. Jenny Smith had run away from home a long time ago, when his parents were alive. She had left the family to strike out for herself in the theatrical business. She became a dancer in burlesque and after that married a gangster and had her name in the papers. That was a long time ago, when the leftover gunmen from the prohibition era were exploring new fields. Later Jenny Smith tried to come home, but her parents never forgave her.

Paula and Kip had been brought up by an uncle in Brooklyn, a man with an unforgettable name—Benjamin Franklin. Kip’s parents died in an accident and Uncle Ben took the children in and sent them to the local high school. He was a practical, kindly man.

“He was a martyr, really,” Kip said. “Consider the problem we gave him and you’ll understand. Uncle Ben had always been a bachelor. Imagine a man of fifty suddenly taking on two brats of high school age, both strangers to him. Oh, we liked him well enough, but we were a little too old to begin to love him, for all his goodness. We were with him until he died, on the day I reached my eighteenth birthday. He left us his fortune—a few thousand dollars and the old house in Flatbush. We stayed on in the house for a few months until Paula decided that we should move uptown so that we could be nearer our schools. She had enrolled in The New York Art School and was hell-bent on becoming a fine artist.”

I was interested in the art angle and asked him how talented she was.

“Paula is good, Jeff, but she’ll be a lot better after she finds herself.”

“How long has she been painting?”

“Three years. She started out the way most beginners attack art, doing buck-eye academic things. She made fancy pictures of grapes and vases—you know, the usual trash. Then, suddenly, she dropped all that and began to paint her own way, big and broad and kind of screwball.”

“Screwball?”

“I always called it screwball,” laughed Kip, “but that was probably because I couldn’t understand it. I’m no art critic. I like the sort of stuff the eye can enjoy—the kind of art that doesn’t have to hammer at your brain and scream a hidden meaning to you in a very subtle way.”

“You lowbrows are all alike,” I said. “But you’ve got millions of members in your school of art appreciation.”

He grinned at that one. “All right—I admit I’m no connoisseur, Rembrandt. I like the simple things in life—a painting by Norman Rockwell, a mural by Dean Cornwell. I’m the jerk who always says, ‘I don’t know what’s good art, but I know what I like. Paula called me an academic diehard.”

“Paula was right.”

“Of course she was right. We never fought about it. After a while she gave up asking me for my fruity criticisms because I always reacted the same way to her stuff. It was much too modern for a moron like me.”

“What kind of modern?” I asked. “There are a thousand variations on the theme.”

He made a face. “I wish I knew the name you art bugs use for it. All I can tell you is this—it was pure American screwball, screwball figures and screwball heads, screwball back grounds and screwball foregrounds.”

“And the color?”

“Screwball.”

We both laughed at his routine. I said, “Paula is probably wandering in the fields of impressionism. Maybe abstractionist or a cubist, or even a Dadaist from the way you describe her work. All of which means that she’s probably on the right road, Kip. Invariably those people are the brave ones, the talented ones—and their severest critics are the small-change academicians who haven’t either the guts or the talent or the imagination to make room for themselves in the field of modern art. Paula must be one smart little girl.”

“You’d like her, Jeff.”

“Pretty?”

“She’s as pretty as her pictures are un-pretty. She’s smart, too—plenty smart.”

“An impossible combination,” I said. “The only pretty and successful female artist I ever knew was a gal who did fashion designing and molded her creations to the lines of her own lush torso. She could drape rags on that figure of hers and sell them at phenomenal prices. She could also—”

“I’ll get you a picture of Paula,” Kip said. “She hasn’t perfected that type of approach. She’s got a pretty head and a good figure and a sense of humor that should panic even a cartoonist. She likes to laugh and she’ll probably split a rib laughing at a jerk like you.”

But he never did get me that picture. He wrote to his sister and told her about me. Her next letter had a few lines for me, telling me that she knew my cartooning and even liked it a little.

I began to exchange letters with Paula soon after that. Her letters were crisp, amusing and full of the joy of living. Kip enjoyed my interest in her. We spent many an hour talking about her career and her talent and his great love for her.

For a while after we reached England Paula wrote more often and her letters were filled with a new and fresh excitement. She was making progress. She was doing great things and would soon get her first commission.

“Is that good?” Kip asked.

“Most girl artists would swoon with delight to get a job of painting—anything. I knew a girl in art school who fainted when she saw her first picture hanging in a gallery.”

‘I guess I should feel proud of Paula,” he said. “I don’t. She’s the sort of girl you expect to go places. I suppose any art job for dough is called a commission?”

“Paula sounds as though she’s found an outlet for her fine arts—a rare thing in these hectic days when women labor at machines and fine arts go a-begging. Maybe she’s located a gallery man who’s giving her a small show in one of his empty seasons. Or maybe somebody else is buying her right off the easel. It’s not impossible if she’s got the talent.”

“She’s got the talent.”

Her last letter arrived three months before we crossed the Channel into Normandy. Kip read it, shook his head over it and handed it to me with a face full of worry.

Dear Kip:

Forgive my delay in answering your last note and tell Jeff that goes double for him. I’m just getting over a shock—the shock of business in art—for in art as in everything else there is always the customer to please. My latest adventure in the art business is a grisly mess—a mess that frightens me, full of intrigue and petty grubbing around the money sacks. An artist needs money—wants money desperately, because money means time and time means the chance to play with one’s talent.

But now I’m ashamed of myself, and afraid of the future. I’m ashamed of myself for not resisting temptation when the lure was money—filthy money, money that brought fear and worry and nightmare instead of the security I prayed for.

I’m in a mood to chuck it all—and I probably will, after settling accounts to my satisfaction. Perhaps if the accounts are settled, the worry and the fear will disappear, too. I hope and pray that this will be so.

Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. I miss you more than ever these last few miserable weeks. I need your honest, academic brain to help me start all over again. I’ll write to you just as soon as the smoke of my own personal battles clears away.

With love, Paula

But she never wrote again.

Kip worried about her and so did I. We kept our silence about Paula because I knew I couldn’t help him by theorizing. I didn’t like the undercurrent of frustration in her letter and knew that Kip must have read the same message of fear between the lines.

We crossed the Channel together in one of the first great assault waves on the Normandy coast. We went in under heavy fire, but landed safely and became a part of the great mass of men who struck out for Cherbourg.

I saw Kip last on the night a machine-gun bullet smashed my arm. I lay on the ground and he kneeled beside me and his face was bearded and strange to me. He was a different Kip now, suddenly older and steadier.

He held my good hand. “You’ll be going home soon, Jeff. I want you to do me a favor.”

I knew what was on his mind. “Paula?”

He nodded. “I kind of thought you’d figure it the way I did. Something back there has gone wrong for her. That last letter frightened me. I want you to find her after they let you out and see that she’s okay. You can do it. You and she will speak the same language—the same screwball double-talk.”

I said, “I can try.”

“It won’t be tough. You and Paula should get along well together. You’re a cinch.” He gave me a broad grin and a slow wink. “And, besides, I always wanted a cartoonist in the family.”

A dull whistle blew in the night and Kip stood over me, fumbling for a good-bye.

I said, “Forget about Paula. I’ll write you as soon as I can get to her. It’s probably nothing at all, so don’t go batting your dome around—you’ll need all the few brains in that head of yours once you guys get started rolling toward Paris. When you get there drink a Pernod and think of me.”

He shook my good hand and said good-bye to me with his eyes and then he walked away in the rain.

That was the last time I saw Kip Smith. He was killed in action the day before our boys jerked the Jerries out of Cherbourg.

CHAPTER 2

Quaker Lane was in Greenwich Village.

It was a typical village street, lined with typical village houses sitting close to the narrow curbing, thin and old and fading in the gloom. A regiment of ashcans decorated the sidewalks. There were a few stores at the far end of Quaker Lane, now lit for the last few moments of business. No traffic passed through the street but the drone of city movement sang around it.

Mrs. Preston’s place was a three story brownstone. It was a very old house, asleep and dreaming of its past. The brownstone was dirty with age. A narrow porch faced the street. An incongruous yellow mail box hung on the front door. A white glass sign in a window said:

MRS. K PRESTON

ROOMS FOR RENT

A pretty girl answered the bell. She looked at me with her small mouth open and fiddled with the thin black bow on her ample bosom. She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly.

I said, “Paula Smith—is she home?”

“She don’t live here anymore.”

“When did she move away?”

“I don’t know, really. Maybe you’d better see Mrs. Preston.”

She showed me into the living room. It was late Nineteenth Century Brownstone, typical of all such living rooms of that period. It was a long layout, narrow and dark and claustrophobic. On the street side a bay window allowed the gray city light to filter into a small section of the room beyond the heavy green drapes and the tiny oval table. The walls were papered in brown and gray, a crawling vine design that squirmed in several directions at the same time. An old chandelier, heavy with poorly wrought glass ornaments, hung from the dirty ceiling. The furniture was overstuffed and there was a preponderance of dull purple and green in the motif, enough to make an interior decorator die by his own hand. The rug was dark and red and figured with confusion born in the brain of some oriental craftsman east of the Mississippi. There was a small lamp lit at the far end of the room, near the dining room.

Only the pictures on the walls surprised me. Mrs. Preston was evidently a woman of discernment. Her taste in art was good and leaned toward the standard and accepted masters of the modern schools. The pictures were well framed and skillfully hung against the horrible wallpaper background. They were freaks in that room. They gave the place an air of incongruity and impermanence. They were hors d’oeuvres in a cafeteria.

There was a Rivera original—a lithograph, hung neatly over the small marble mantel and on the long wall a line of water colors, framed in wide mats and in light woods. A giant oil decorated the square wall on the dining room side. This was a landscape resembling Utrillo in technique, but too well hidden in the gloom for me to see the signature. On the small occasional tables sat many plaster copies of authentic African sculpture.

My observations were cut short by a polite cough from the girl who stood watching me from the hallway door.

I said, “Is Mrs. Preston an artist?”

She tittered a bit. “An artist? I don’t think so.”

She blushed slightly and I walked over to her. “She’s got a fine collection of stuff in the room, that’s why I asked. Is there much more of it around?”

“The place is full of it, I guess. I’m used to it so I never really look at it.”

I said, “Is this a boarding house?”

The girl nodded. “You might call it that. But Mrs. Preston won’t take everybody in. She likes arty-people, you know—painters and musicians and people like that. We’ve got all artists in here now, but last year there were a couple of musicians, too—and a sculptor.”

I looked down the hallway toward the dining room. The table was set for dinner. Highlights glistened on a large lazy Suzan.

“It’s certainly a homey place,” I said. “Might be tempted to move in here myself. How many boarders has Mrs. Preston got now?”

“Just five. Four of them are men. The only lady is Mrs. Crandall—an old lady artist who’s been here a long time. She’s upstairs sick now. I have to take her meals in bed sometimes. Always getting sick.” She was twisting her apron nervously.

I took out my cigarettes and offered her one. She smiled and waved it away politely.

I said, “How long did Paula Smith live here?”

“I’d say over two years. She lived here when I came to work for Mrs. Preston, over two years ago.”

“And you can’t remember when she moved out?”

“Not exactly. What happened was I had to leave here to see my mother back in Pennsylvania, because she was sick. Then, when I came back, Paula was gone. I was away from here maybe two months, you see.”

She was trying to help me. She had a simple face, too naïve for well-constructed lying.

I said, “When was it you went away to see your mother?”

“Sometime in June. I came back in August. So I guess Paula left sometime in between.”

I took out Paula’s letters and found the last one sent to Kip. It seemed to fit into the pattern. It was dated May 16th. Kip had received it in London, just before we crossed the Channel together. Evidently Paula had moved out of Mrs. Preston’s house a while after mailing that letter.

I said, “How well did you know Paula?”

“Paula was a swell girl,” she said. “She was always nice to me, and she didn’t treat me like a servant the way some of the other crazy artists in this place seem to. I was sorry she went away because she was a real friend to me.”

I said, “How did she act around the time you left for Pennsylvania?”

“How did she act?”

I explained that I was a friend of Paula’s and the last letter she had written to me seemed full of worry.

“I didn’t notice it,” the girl said. “Paula isn’t the kind of girl that shows when she’s upset. The last time I remember seeing her she was acting just the way she always acted.”

A thin, high voice from somewhere upstairs chirped, “Lucy! Lucy! Where’s my dinner?”

Lucy rubbed her hands on her apron. “That’s Mrs. Crandall, the old lady artist I was telling you about. I’ll have to go inside and bring her some dinner. Why don’t you just sit down and wait—Mrs. Preston will get in any minute now. She’ll be able to tell you a lot more about Paula Smith than I can.”

I watched Lucy disappear into the kitchen at the far end of the dining room. I walked into the dining room and strolled around the big oak table. I wanted to see more of Mrs. Preston’s art collection. I wasn’t disappointed.

The dining room was square and dark although the wallpaper had changed from crawling vines to huge blocks of filigreed floral designs, calculated to add dignity to an eating room back in 1887. The walls were well filled with art of all kinds and all sizes. There was a collection of small abstractions, quickly done, and probably the preliminary sketches for a larger picture. A group of eight etchings decorated the far wall. A well framed reproduction of Burchfield’s “Ice Glare” hung over a small buffet.

I was walking up that icy street with Burchfield when Mrs. Preston entered the living room.

I heard the front door slam and when I turned she was standing at the far end of the red rug, half silhouetted against the bay window. She stood there slowly pulling off her gloves, a well-built woman, not tall, not short, and well molded.

I walked to meet her and saw that her hair was black and her face angular and not unpleasant in the features. She had a fine head for caricaturing. Her eyes were two shades blacker than her hair. Her skin had a fresh quality that was almost overdone in the make-up department. Her face shone because of her eyes and because of them she appeared sharp and keen and almost theatrical. She had a good figure, high in the bust and wide in the hips. Her simple suit was cut to reveal these features.

She gave me the full strength of her smile. She said, “Were you looking for a room, soldier?”

I returned the smile. “I could use one. But I’m not quite ready to settle down yet. I have to locate Paula Smith first.”

She stopped pulling at her gloves and stared at me. “Do you? That’s very odd—because I’m looking for Paula myself.”

I said, “I don’t understand. Didn’t she leave a forwarding address?”

Mrs. Preston sat down with a long sigh. “She left absolutely nothing. Paula woke up one day and evidently decided to go somewhere where nobody could find her, because she left without a word to anybody.”

“She owed you rent?”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Preston. “She always paid her rent regularly. She left here a few weeks before her room rent was due…very sudden and very mysterious.”

I said, “That doesn’t sound like Paula.”

“No, it doesn’t.” She was studying my face curiously and suddenly her eyebrows went up. “But of course—you must be Paula’s brother Kip. She’s told us all about you.”

“No, I’m not Kip. Kip Smith died some time ago in Normandy. That’s one of the reasons why I must locate Paula.”

She said, “I’m sorry. Paula will be heartbroken.” She got up and crossed the room to stand at the window. “She was a queer girl in many ways, but I suppose you knew her well?”

I said, “I’ve never met her, but I feel that I know her personally after living with Kip for over two years. In what way was she a queer girl?”

Mrs. Preston shrugged daintily. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, really. What I meant was the fact that she thought so much of her work. I’ve never met a girl who worked harder to become an artist than Paula Smith. She would stay in her room for days at a time working away at certain problems in color. It struck me as rather queer that a pretty girl like Paula should go at it so seriously. You’ll admit that pretty girls are more often busy with men?”

I said, “That doesn’t always hold, or they wouldn’t accept beautiful women in our art schools. She went to an art school, didn’t she?”

“Not while she lived here. She mentioned having gone to The New York School of Art some time ago.”

“How can you be sure that she wasn’t still going up there?”

Mrs. Preston shrugged. “She just wasn’t going anywhere—regularly. She did most of her painting in her room, I guess. We rarely ever saw her go out, you know—I just didn’t happen to be around when that happened. This is a boarding house and there are things that keep me busy all day long. But I saw her once or twice with a portable kit for painting outdoors.”

The question and answer game wasn’t getting anywhere and I sensed resentment in Mrs. Preston’s manner. I decided to appeal to her feminine impulses.

I said, “Then Paula never got the telegram?”

“What telegram?”

“The army must have sent the usual death notice.”

“You’ll have to ask Lucy that question,” she said. “I’m sure I never got a telegram for Paula.”

I made a mental note to check this item with Lucy. I said, “The business of her art instruction mystifies me. Paula seemed the sort of girl who would want somebody to look at her work occasionally. Didn’t she ever mention a teacher?”

“If she talked art, it was only art, not teachers. Paula scorned all formal instruction because she believed that artists shouldn’t imitate. It was her contention that all students sooner or later begin to draw like their masters.”

“She’s not far wrong about that. But how did she go about learning to paint?”

Mrs. Preston settled back in her chair. “She seemed to be trying out all art from the French Impressionists right up to the present schools and styles. She claimed that the only way to understand these schools was to experience them.”

“You mean that she painted in each style, one at a time?”

“That’s it, exactly.”

I looked around the room and wondered how good a judge of Paula’s art Mrs. Preston would be. “What was she doing just before she left here?”

“Paula never really let me see her work, but I did manage to look at it occasionally when Lucy was off and I had to straighten some of the rooms. The last time this happened was back in April sometime. I saw a few canvases in her room and they seemed to be wildly modern things—so modern that I’d hesitate to label them anything.”

“Was the work good?”

She squirmed a little. “I’m not much of an art critic, of course, but I like to think I know a little about it and I’d say that Paula’s work was—well, it was just fair.”

We were getting nowhere. “How about her friends? A girl as pretty as you say she is must have had at least one boyfriend.”

Mrs. Preston hesitated. “If she did, I never met him.”

“And no women friends?”

“She had visitors, occasionally. I seem to remember a girl of Paula’s age coming here every once in a while.”

“But you never met her? Isn’t that rather odd?”

“I said she was queer, didn’t I? I sensed Paula’s aloofness and never tried to pry into her affairs, but that doesn’t mean that we weren’t friendly.”

The smell of roasting meat floated in through the dining room door. It was the dinner hour. I stood up and toyed with my cap, hoping that Mrs. Preston would invite me to dinner. I would have enjoyed meeting the other roomers, asking questions. But the invitation never came. I walked into the hall and Mrs. Preston followed me to the door.

I said, “All this can’t be very serious, I’m sure. Paula has probably gone out of town to paint some landscapes and I’ll be able to locate her through someone in the art world.”

“You know the art groups?”

“I used to know my way around town among the painters and sculptors before the war. It should be fairly easy to get some information soon because artists are a pretty clannish gang.”

“They most certainly are,” she said, warming a little. “Do you know, I’ve had them in my house for years—only artists.” She paused, smiling. “Artists are the nicest people in the world, don’t you think?”

“Some of my best friends are artists,” I said.

“Are you?”

“Not quite. I’m a member of the vermin fringe in the art world, Mrs. Preston. I’m a cartoonist, or maybe a caricaturist, depending upon my audience.”

“How interesting,” she said and clasped her hands before her. “I’ve known many cartoonists, too. George Wolfe used to live in this very house years ago when he was just getting started in the cartoon world. I’d love to see your work sometime. You work for the newspapers?”

“I did. Maybe I will again.” I stood on the porch and looked past her into the hall. There were two men walking toward the dining room and I kept talking fast about my activities in the cartooning business, hoping that Mrs. Preston would still find it in her heart to invite me inside for dinner.

But somebody shouted to her and she edged back to the door and ended the conversation abruptly. “Let me know where Paula is as soon as you find out,” she said. “I liked her a lot and hope that everything is all right with her.”

Before she could close the door I asked, “That girl, Mrs. Preston—the one you mentioned a while ago as Paula’s friend. Do you remember her name?”

She shook her head firmly. “I don’t remember.”

I crossed the street, disappointed. It seemed impossible for a pretty girl to live for so long in one place and yet keep most of her life hidden from her landlady—especially a landlady like Mrs. Preston. Her dialogue was geared for ferreting information. It occurred to me, suddenly, that maybe Mrs. Preston was not telling me the truth. Perhaps Paula had given her a secret and Mrs. Preston was being faithful to her trust.

I paused on the corner, meditating my next move. Searching for a Smith in the city of New York would not be an easy job. The phone book would be chock full of Smiths.

In the small stationery store opposite Mrs. Preston’s boarding house I began my search. There was no Paula Smith listed in the phone book. I called information and asked for a Paula Smith. The closest to Paula Smith was a certain Pamela Smith.

I bought some cigarettes and lit the first one outside under the ragged awning. It was quite dark now and a light shone through the big bay in 17 Quaker Lane. I took a deep drag and stared across at the curtained window.

Somebody was silhouetted in the window, looking out at me. It was Lucy.

The front door opened and she ran across the street holding her peasant skirt to prevent it from billowing in the wind. She faced me breathlessly. “I just had to run after you, Mr.—”

“Keye. Jeff Keye. But you can call me Jeff, honey.”

She liked the honey. She lowered her eyes and smiled at the red bows on her shoes. Then she looked up. “Ever since you spoke to me about Paula I’ve been thinking back, trying to remember things about her.”

“That’s fine, Lucy. But first, tell me, did a telegram come for Paula not long ago?”

Her brow wrinkled and cleared. “Sure. That’s another thing I forgot about. The boy came with a telegram and I told him she wasn’t living here anymore and he asked me for a forwarding address. I called up to Mrs. Preston, but Mrs. Preston didn’t know any address.”

That took care of the telegram. “What else do you remember, Lucy?”

“Not much,” she said. “It may be nothing at all, but I can’t forget about it because it happened so funny. This was a little while before I went back to Pennsylvania to my mother.”

“May?”

“About then, I guess. Anyhow, I remembered it because I got to thinking how nice Paula used to be to me. Every once in a while I’d be cleaning her room and she’d show me some of her pictures. She had some funny pictures up there, but I always told her I liked them fine because I liked Paula so much I didn’t want her to feel bad.”

“What kind of pictures? Funny peculiar, or funny ha-ha?”

She smiled at me impishly. “I guess they were what you might call funny peculiar.” She thought a moment. “They were like designs—but I can’t say the colors were funny. The colors were beautiful. She called them by a crazy name—”

“Abstractions?”

“That’s it, abstractions… What I wanted to tell you really wasn’t about her pictures. It was about the man I met with her. I thought maybe if you could find that man he would know where Paula is.”

“What’s his name?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I just can’t think of it. That’s what’s driving me crazy. He was about your size, but he spoke kind of funny and he had a mustache. His name was kind of foreign, like it might be Spanish or French.”

I said, “Which name would you remember?”

“The first one.”

I ran the gamut of Spanish names quickly because I couldn’t think of many. I did better in France, starting with André and going through the alphabet. She stopped me at Pierre.

“That’s his name—Pierre!”

I said, “Fine. So his name was Pierre. Where did you meet him?”

“On Fifth Avenue. It was my night off and I was standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, sort of making up my mind where I’d go. Then, all of a sudden, I saw Paula walking over to me with this Pierre fellow. Paula stopped and introduced me to the man but he acted sort of stuck up and not friendly at all. Paula asked me where I was going and I told her and she said why not come with them for a cocktail. That’s the part I’ll never forget—the name of the place where she wanted to take me—it was called The Frog.”

“The Frog? A night club?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t go with them, after all. When Paula invited me the man—Pierre—looked at her sort of queer as if he thought she was crazy to invite me. I would have gone except I felt funny about having a drink with that man. It would have been all right with Paula, all alone. But the way he looked at me I knew I wasn’t wanted.” She threw out her hands and stared at me. “That’s all of it. Do you think it will help?”

I took her hand and patted it. “I hope so, Lucy. Maybe I can locate this Pierre man and he can tell me something. I’ll let you know.”

She said, “Yes. I’m sure Mrs. Preston would like to know, too.”

I watched her run across the street and disappear into 17 Quaker Lane. I took out a scrap of paper and wrote the names Pierre and Frog and drew a quick sketch of a man with a mustache and after it all, I placed a big question mark.

CHAPTER 3

I walked up Fifth Avenue slowly, enjoying the bite of the fall air. All this was new to me again—the taxicabs, the darkened store fronts, the erratic pedestrian tide.

I headed in the general direction of Hank MacAndrews’ place, wondering whether he could help me. The business of finding Paula Smith was beginning to load my head. It was the idea that Kip’s sister might be somewhere near me that bothered me. It annoyed me to admit that I couldn’t seek her out easily, meet her and get to know her personally—and soon. I wanted to know her as well as I had known Kip. She was a great part of our friendship because Kip loved her so.

I crossed Fifth Avenue and steered my course directly toward Hank MacAndrews’ place. I walked with an infantryman’s step, fast and with the swinging rhythm the army develops in all foot soldiers.

Something in the air, or in my pace, or in the gentle slope of buildings on the quiet street ahead of me reminded me of Kip Smith and London. You see a building with a funny roof and the funny roof suggests another building on another street, in another town. Your mind slips back to that other town and for a while you relive the past.

Kip and I were walking down just such a quiet street not too long ago. We were walking slowly, enjoying the coolness of the London night and building a memory of it.

I looked up over my shoulder at Kip. He was worrying about Paula, I knew. Paula’s letter was bothering him again.

I said, “Don’t go pulling that Gary Cooper strong and silent stuff on me, Kip. You’ve got the same expression on your pan that you use when you drink British coffee. You’re either thinking of the coffee spigot at Horn and Hardart’s, or worrying about that letter from Paula.”

He smiled slightly. “Let’s talk about the coffee. I could go for a couple of buckets of that Automat variety. Paula can take care of herself.”

“So Paula can take care of herself,’ I said. “She’s probably got herself a mural to do, or maybe a commission from some fat-tailed society dame from the art belt on West End Avenue. Absolutely nothing to ever worry about in the art business when you’re a doll, except a certain type of art instructor who insists on demonstrating certain complex techniques with his hands.”

Kip laughed. “You really ought to know my kid sister, Jeff. You and she would have a swell time together. She’d go for your corny gag routine.”

He was trying to be off-hand about her but his eyes were a dead giveaway. I said, “You look terrible.”

“It’s just that Paula’s all alone, Jeff. She’s got nobody to go to if something’s gone wrong. Not that Paula would want to share any of her troubles with anybody but me. You’d have to know Paula to understand what I’m getting at. She’s a bright kid, wide awake and alive. Didn’t you get that impression from all her other letters?”

“I know her well,” I said. “I can tell you plenty about how she thinks, but I can’t for the life of me guess at her profile or the lilt of her girlish laughter.”

“She’s pretty,” said Kip.

“Is she Hedy Lamarr or Joan Blondell?”

“Neither. Paula is sweet and simple. She’s sort of a redheaded Joan Fontaine.”

“Short or tall?”

“Medium.”

“What a picture,” I groaned. “I was ready to fall in love with her soul, but how can I dream about a soul?”

“That’s your worry, soldier,” said Kip.

Well, the worry was still mine, with variations. A worry that stayed with me, loaded with mystery. After checking with the telephone company I had gone to the post office. Paula Smith left no forwarding address. There were no letters for her in the Dead Letter Department. Had I seen the Missing Persons Bureau? Weren’t there any relatives? Friends?

I paused before Hank MacAndrews’ familiar door.

Hank welcomed me with more than his usual enthusiasm. He was a tall man, broad in the shoulders and big in the hands. He had a heavy head, small featured and ruddy.

The studio was full of old friends and swing music and a bucketful of mixed cocktails. Hank held me in the doorway and put an arm around my shoulder. He lifted his glass and shouted: “Hail the conquering hero, cruds!”

They hailed me and crowded around.

Hank held up a hand. “Our guest of honor, the mighty Corporal Keyes, the warrior who single handed turned the tide of history in Normandy!”

I said, “I did it with both hands.”

It was good to hear their voices again. All the old faces were there and several new ones who were women. This was the small group of friends from the world of cartooning.

You come home from a war and suddenly people are out of drawing. You are the center of their attention and curiosity. There are so many questions and answers and more questions. But after a while the questions die away and you are home at last, a normal man with a cocktail glass in his hand talking to another normal man.

The other man was Hank.

I said, “Are you still Homer Bull’s white haired lad?”

“The hair is still white,” laughed Hank, “and the old belly is still full.”

I had noticed that. He was getting a bit paunchy, but you didn’t mind it on MacAndrews. “Even when you didn’t have the Doctor Ohm strip you ate like a fiend, Hank.”

“But not caviar,” he winked and slapped his beltline. “Doctor Ohm is now a classic, Jeff. It’s outselling Superman and Batman. The green stuff is pouring in from over five hundred newspapers from here to Sheboygan. Since Homer worked on the Lumpy Nose case last year his stock has boomed beyond our wildest hopes. Of course, Homer was always a great writer, but the public likes to feel that a good mystery writer could be a great detective. Now the public knows all about him. His name was sold on every front page in the country when he stepped in to help McElmore round up that gang of Nazis and throw Lincoln Winters back to his ancestral Fascist fathers.”

I knew part of the story. We had read about it in England, in detail. Homer Bull, the writer of Doctor Ohm, a comic strip, had been responsible for the finale. They trapped Lincoln Winters in his midtown studio and finally killed him in a gun fight. Winters was the head of a group of Nazi agents in New York. He was a cartoonist, a man who drew comics for the nation’s biggest magazines. He had murdered an editor and several other assorted characters. Bull tracked him down, finally, by one of the cleverest pieces of deduction I’d ever read about.

I said, “Where can I reach Bull?”

He eyed me curiously, “Why the sudden interest in the fat man?”

“I’ve always wanted to meet a fat man with brains.”

“Bull would be flattered. He’s always wanted to meet a cartoonist with ditto.”

“We’re not moving in any direction, Hank. How do I get to see Bull?”

Hank sobered. “Bull gets ideas every once in a while. Temperament. Now he wants to be alone, and all of a sudden, nobody sees him but poor little me—and that’s only because he needs me for the damned comic strip. I haven’t seen the great man for over a week, because this time he really went hermit on me. He’s out on Long Island in some swampy cove, maneuvering his friendship sloop to where the fish might bite. He’ll probably pull into a dock one of these fine days and give me a buzz, order me to board the Long Island Railroad and proceed to a spot six points off the starboard beam where we can pick up where we left off with the strip.” He gave me another drink and another cigarette. “Anything I can do for you?”

I said, “What I need, you can’t give me.”

“I know something about the way Bull operates. Try me.”

I tried him. I told him the story, starting with Kip Smith and then following through to Paula Smith and my experience at Mrs. Preston’s. I brought it right up to date and Hank thought about it, sipping his drink.

He said, “I know this Mrs. Preston; seen her around down in the Village. She’s a big-boned art phony; the way I remember her. She hangs out where she can dip her ear into fine arts talk, mostly in the bars and grills where the alcoholic artisans promote their theories after a quart of bub. She can carry a mean load herself, that babe. Aside from all that, she’s a reputable character, collects her rents, badgers her tenants and serves the best corned beef hash this side of Canarsie Bay. Her story is probably straight about the Smith dame. A lot of these cute dolls who paint are a little loose in the brain basket, sort of whacky in a nice artistic way.”

“Paula Smith isn’t whacky,” I said, angrily. “She’s perfectly normal.”

He held up his hands. “All right, so she’s perfectly normal, Commander. We’ll start from there and see what we’ve got—good looking young dame leaves boarding house suddenly and disappears—no forwarding address—no relatives—”

I stopped him there. “There is a relative, but we won’t be able to find her. Paula has a sister, name of Jenny Smith.”

Hank moaned. “Gad—another Smith?”

“She’s not a Smith anymore. She’s married, used to work in burlesque. She married a big-time gangster and retired from the stage. I don’t know anything more about her.”

Hank came alive. “Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Bull would never accept a statement like your last, General. Think back—do you know whether this sister lives in New York?”

I shook my head. “Could be. Then again, it could be Chicago. Gangsters don’t all live in New York.”

“How about her looks?”

“Never met her. But wouldn’t you take for granted the fact that the little lady had something on the face as well as the hips?”

“You don’t take things for granted, Jeff.” Hank stubbed his cigarette out. “How about her age?”

I said, “You’re off the beam, Hank. All I know is that her original name was Smith—she married a gangster—and then retired from the runways.”

“Maybe that’ll do,” said Hank and reached for the telephone. “I’ve got a little guy who might be able to put two and two together and get your Smith dame. You know Zimmy Zimmerman on The Star?”

“The camera fiend?”

“He’s got more than a camera, Zimmy has. He’s been taking pictures of theatrical dames for the past twenty years. But Zimmy has a brain for the business. He knows every hip shaker on any burlesque wheel that ever amounted to anything at all in the runway racket. He can recognize them from a three quarter rear view to a close-up of their eyelashes.”

Hank dialed a number and spoke with hearty good humor to his friend Zimmy. He listened to Zimmy, then threw him a few gags and hung up. “Zimmy will try to track down all the Smiths on all the wheels. If he gets any leads he’ll let us know.”

“How soon?”

Hank shrugged. “He says the gangster tip may lead him to her because it’d be almost hopeless working only on the Jenny Smith angle. All those hip heavers change their names as soon as they strip and some of them enter the ranks deliberately using names like Smith and Jones and Brown to hide their identities. What happens is this—you get a dolly named Gladys Zybisco. She goes to the booking agent, and gets a job. Name? Gladys remembers that Mamma Zybisco always told her that to dance in burlesque would bring disgrace to the Zybisco name. So she tells the booking agent her name is Gladys Smith, or Gladys Jones. Whereupon the booking gent immediately changes her name to Bubbles Lavere, or Peaches Divine or other such classic monikers.”

I said, “We’re probably wasting our time with all this. It isn’t likely that Paula went to her sister—she hadn’t seen her in years, and with that name routine she couldn’t have found her even if she had wanted to.”

Thurston Wilkinson, the cartoonist, ambled over and cut short our dialogue.

I said, “You’re a bit of a long hair, Thurston. Where would I go to meet somebody who’d know the current crop of painters?”

“You’re looking at him,” said Thurston. “Which crew do you want, moderns or jerks?”

“Moderns.”

“That lets me out then,” Thurston chortled. “I thought you were after the uptown academy boys. The man you want to see for the modern is Boucher. Down in the Village. There isn’t a modern painter from here to the backhouse school that he doesn’t know. He’s an expert on all the schools, especially the French. Who do you want to meet?”

“Boucher?” I said. “Is his name Pierre Boucher?”

“George Boucher. Who do you want to meet?” Thurston repeated.

“Paula Smith.”

“An artist?” He screwed his face. “It’s a familiar name. How does she paint?”

“Modern, I guess.”

“Modern Paula Smith.” Thurston rolled the name around on his tongue. “Familiar, but I just can’t place her.”

I turned to Hank. “All this reminds me of Lucy down at Mrs. Preston’s. She told me a little story I forgot to mention. What is The Frog Club? A night club?”

“Not quite. It’s a combination intellectual cave and sightseeing dump and winery.”

“It sounds like something out of Billy Rose.”

Hank frowned. “Maybe it is. I haven’t been down there in some time. The dump started as a hangout for French stumblebums who called themselves modern painters.”

“Any particular school?”

He laughed. “For my money they all came from the Bowery school. They wore un-pressed pants and dirty shirts and crazy neckerchiefs out of the sewers of Paris. They covered the walls with surrealism and Dadaism and all the other isms in the book. They got a lot of publicity because of these cockeyed paintings and after a while they began to draw the long-nosed uptown crowd with heavy dough and light morals. Of course, as soon as Park Avenue seeped in the bums were forced out of the place and the prices jacked up above your ears. The joint changed hands several times and finally went to a gent named Lecotte—”

I held him there. “Pierre Lecotte?”

“You guessed it.”

“I hope so. Lucy told me that she saw Paula with a Pierre something or other. I’m looking for a Pierre. It might be Lecotte.”

“New York is lousy with Pierres. And plenty of them hang out in the dark alleys of the Village.”

“What does Lecotte look like?”

“Nothing much. About your size, sports a mustache, a French accent and a wonderful art routine. He eats, drinks and sleeps with his art. Class.”

I said, “He sounds like my man. Paula might have known him if he’s any kind of an expert in art, is he?”

Hank nodded. “A connoisseur, an authority. An intellectual—and a damned smart business man. Lecotte took over the place and set it up as a combination night club and art gallery. Smart, eh?”

“I don’t get the angle. You mean he’s actually making money on the art and liquor deal?”

“Plenty,” said Hank. “He holds exhibitions in the place and, believe it or not, shows the works of some of the biggest names in the art trade. You can’t blame the painters for falling for the gag—Pierre lured back the uptown snobs with his real art angle and still holds the regulars, the art dilettantes, the dealers, the out of town gapers and the after-theater New Yorkers who like to get drunk while glimming a wall full of lush dames. Everybody goes there now—it’s part of the city culture—the glamour of the big town, plus damned good drinks at fair prices. Pierre hit the jackpot with his formula. You ought to drop in sometime if you go for fancy art with a hangover. Me, I can’t take it—modern art goes right to my ulcers.”

I said, “It sounds good and it might be a lead to Paula. Besides, I’m in the mood for a spot like that—I haven’t seen the inside of a night club since the night you bounced me on my head up on Fifty-Second Street. Shall we leave?”

He looked through the door at his guests, now gathered about the huge radio Victrola and listening to the cacophony of boogie-woogie.

“They’ll never miss you,” I said, grabbing his elbow.

“Maybe you’re right” said Hank. “And even if you’re wrong, I’m a sucker for doing soldier boys favors.”

We took another quick one and Hank led me to his roadster and we left for The Frog.

CHAPTER 4

The Frog was incongruous.

On a dark, tenement-lined street, away from the bright-fronted windows of the central Village amusement section, The Frog was a small yellow canopy over the sidewalk. The building itself was squat and dirty, as dirty as its brothers around and about it. A heavy wrought iron lamp glowed over the door. A black giant, festooned in a Moroccan costume, stood alone at the door, looked into the darkness beyond him and yawned at us as he opened the door.

Inside, the darkness closed about us. It was designed, this new gloom. Some paranoiac interior decorator had unleashed his libido in the small lobby and bar. The color scheme was black. The walls were padded, mattress fashion, in a black cloth and dotted with black buttons. The floor was carpeted in black and the ceilings painted to match. On the small tables, black shaded lamps threw tiny circles of light, dead light, for the black cloths reflected none of it. The bar itself, beyond the lobby, sparkled in the background, shone against the backdrop of ebony. It was painted enamel white, and the brightness of it gave it an odd perspective. It was hanging in air, this white bar alone in the black, and the customers hung with it, sharply outlined against the whiteness.

Hank said “Cheerful, isn’t it? A nice place for a hangover.”

I followed him through the bar and then to the left into the main drinking cell. A large, square room, skillfully lit to feature the gallery of paintings adorning the walls. The current show promoted nudity, well painted, well drawn and academic nudity. The work was photographic and the artist clearly a specialist in his own somewhat florid line. All of which probably accounted for the well filled room. Customers sat around midget tables, leaned uncomfortably over their drinks, cast furtive eyes at the art and loaded the room with smoke and the buzz of conversation.

A short, bald man at a white piano shrugged up his sleeves and began to roll out “St. Louis Woman” with a heavy left hand. Nobody gave him an ear.

We edged through the maze of tables and found a place against the far wall. A waiter appeared out of nowhere and reached down to shake Hank’s hand.

Hank said, “Hello, Ike. What in hell are you doing in this joint? I thought you’d stay over at The Haystack until they pensioned you off.”

Ike was a caricature of a caricature of Charles Laughton, sulk and all. He said, “I am here for the last five months. This is because I find out The Haystack is strictly a two-bit job with buttons for tips compared with this hole.” He swept a hand around the room. “Look at this trade and you will catch what I mean. This mob is loaded with moo. When they have it, I maybe get some, you follow me?”

“Don’t kid me,” said Hank. “You made the switch because of the naked dames on the walls.”

Ike scowled at the painting, sour faced. “That oil painting stuff leaves me cold as a herring under sour cream, mister. In a place like this I haven’t got time for culture. Take a look at this mob and you’ll see what I mean right away. They all look at pictures, sure—but they drink a lot of drinks and keep a waiter on the run just the same.” He wiped his ample brow with a red striped handkerchief and sighed. “Besides, when you get to be my age you don’t bother with art or naked dames or anything else off the beat. I got no time to bend my neck at artistic stuff—I got tips to collect.”

“How often does the art show change in this dump?” Hank asked.

“Every week it’s different. Last week we had the crazy stuff, lots of botched-up pictures, looked more like jigsaw puzzles or dress patterns. Or maybe the boss hung them upside down on purpose, who knows?”

“You remember the name of the artist who did last week’s show?”

Ike scratched at his memory through his chin. “I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he walked in here the night his pictures were hung. A little guy with two hairs on his head and a big black beard. You know him?”

Hank said, “That sounds like Barney Tripp, the nut from Passaic. Claims he paints the soul.”

“Maybe he does,” sighed Ike. “But most of his souls looked to me like a dish of meat blintzes mixed with mustard and sitting on top of a sewer pipe.”

“Do many of these meat blintzes ever sell?” I asked.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” said Ike, and his eyes rolled upward. “Me, I can understand these art boys going for a nice clean picture of a naked dame on a rug peeling herself a grape. But the stuff these people buy! And the prices they pay for such junk! Last week I saw a customer take a quick look at one of those blintzes. He half closes his eyes, he holds his thumb in front of his nose and then he takes a deep breath and sighs like a baby after his bottle. ‘Lovely,’ the customer says. ‘Absolutely sheer perfection and a beautiful rendition of form and space set against a background of the universe’. Then he digs into his coat pocket and writes a check for nine hundred smackers.” Ike glared down at us and his face was a study in frustration. “Is this a price to pay for a blintze on a sewer pipe? If the OPA ever hears about it they’ll come down here and close the dump.”

“Spoken like a true art patron,” said Hank. “You and I have the same point of view about modern art. Me, I’ll take the naked dames and leave the pot roast and cheese blintzes to the long hairs. And talking about long hairs reminds me—when does the great Lecotte walk in?”

Ike laughed. “The blintze merchant? You want to buy one of these dames maybe?”

“Not tonight,” said Hank. “Tonight I just want to talk fine arts with the great man.”

“You’ll have to wait,” said Ike. “The boss walks in the same time every night, regular. After twelve-thirty you can catch him down the hall there in his office. Meantime, you want a couple drinks now?”

“Not yet,” said Hank. “Maybe you can help the soldier boy. He’s looking for a doll named Paula Smith. Know her?”

Ike rolled the name on his tongue, dubiously. “Who’s Paula Smith? She work here?”

“I’m asking you,” said Hank.

“Paula Smith?” Ike shook his head slowly. “Never heard of her.”

I told him that she was a good looking redhead, an artist who knew his boss.

Ike’s face brightened. “That’s different, now that you give me something to go by. Redheads I don’t forget. There was a nice number I used to see with the boss once in a while. Some time ago, it was.”

“She visited the club regularly?”

He waved his hand in negation. “I don’t mean that, soldier. She used to visit the club, sure, but not in here. Reason why I remember the doll is because I used to bring drinks in to Lecotte when she came into his office to see him. She used to see him often, come to think about it, sometimes at night, sometimes even in the afternoon. I’d be in here around six, getting my tables ready, and I’d see her waltz in and go back to his office. Then, pretty soon the buzzer would ring and I took ’em back some drinks. She always drank the same stuff—Daiquiris they were. I would mix ’em myself on account of the barman didn’t come on that early.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Some time ago. Maybe a month, maybe three weeks ago.”

We ordered two Old Fashioneds and Ike moved off toward a heavy woman with a ham-like head and too many diamonds around her neck. The man at the piano still banged his left hand too hard on the bass. From somewhere near the bar a woman’s voice took up the lyrics. It was a vile combination.

I caught myself studying the crowd. It was like the old days when I worked The Star as their theatrical caricaturist. I would move into a place like this when the customers were warming up with liquor. I would sit in a corner, alone with my small sketchpad and do one head after another. It was good practice, for my models were never still, never posed. It was a challenge to my skill and I developed many new tricks in the art of caricature because of it. I was able, after a while, to set down a head in a few sure strokes, a dot for an eye, a flick of the pencil for a nose.

I took a few scraps of paper from my pocket and borrowed Hank’s pencil. He watched me set down my first sketch, the woman with the ham head.

He said, “You get them fast, Jeff, but you get them right. That beagle-nosed dame you just put down is a masterpiece of understatement.”

“She’s easy,” I said. “She’s a living caricature.”

“Don’t be a modest goon,” said Hank. “You’ve still got the touch, chum. You remind me of the great Barton, another man who made a line mean something.”

“You flatter me. Barton was a genius at this business, but he was never known to put them down fast. He belonged to the other school, the school of sweat and blood caricaturing. He hammered out his masterpieces over his drawing board, far away from his model. He had the patience of a real genius. Me—I’m a man who really just takes notes.”

I continued to sketch and my right hand enjoyed the exercise. There were plenty of models and I let myself run hog-wild over the customers. I ground out one thumbnail sketch after another, limiting myself to the simplest elements—the turn of a head, the tilt of a nose, the expression of a mouth.

I tired of the seated figures and began to draw a few of the characters at the bar. A short man in a sport jacket held my eye for a few minutes. I set him down simply, catching the angle of his hips as he leaned against the bar. I finished him and rubbed a few shadows on him and then left him alone.

The next bar standee was a woman. She was half hidden behind a pillar, but I recognized her at once.

I nudged Hank. “There’s your good friend Mrs. Preston.”

He followed my finger and nodded. “She always was a one for alcohol, Jeff. I remember the last time I saw her. It was at a brawl over in Bailey’s Grill. I’ve never seen a dame lap up more of the stuff with greater finesse. She’s a human liquor vat.”

Mrs. Preston was mooning over a tall glass that might have been a Tom Collins. She was with a man, sipping her drink with regularity, staring ahead into the mirror before her and saying nothing.

I said, “Who’s the gent with her?”

“That looks like Boucher, the art dealer.”

I was finishing my sketch of Boucher’s head when Hank put a hand on my arm. “Here come a couple of sketches you won’t want to miss. Get a load of the fat boy who just walked in. He looks like an elephant’s end with a nose in the middle.”

The fat boy in the gray double-breasted suit stood on the top step. He was a mountain of fat, a tall mountain. He held the elbow of a short, well curved woman with Golden Bantam peroxide hair.

Her big black eyes were worried as she studied the room. She nudged the fat boy with a dainty elbow and they stepped down among the tables. He followed her stolidly, staring dead ahead with a school boy’s belligerent pout.

They sat in the middle of the place, near the little white piano. They were well posed for me, facing each other in profile, and the range was good.

I studied the fat boy, sharpening his image to a fine point. His head was a broad oval, yet flattened on the hairline in a way that accented the flabbiness of his face. His eyes were two pale dots in a sea of flesh. They were queer eyes, too small for his head, too wide open. They were the eyes of an adolescent, there was a look of childishness in them; something I couldn’t catch with my pencil.

I tried again. I set down the basic shape of his head, bunched his nose and mouth in the center of his face; flicked a few quick lines for his mustache. I worked on the small mouth, fascinated by its effeminacy. The upper lip had a delicate curve that suggested weakness and girlishness and other things too involved to catalogue. I made the mouth smaller than it really was and went back to studying his eyes again. They were empty blue pinpoints, staring dead as a child would stare at a cloud, unseeingly.

Then I discovered, suddenly, why fat boy always stared. He had no eyebrows.

Hank lifted the sketch away from me and held it up for approval. “You got him, General.”

I shook my head. “The man I’ve put down might be Herbert Hoover, or Fatty Arbuckle, or any other fat man with a round and fleshy head. But I’ve missed this fat boy because I don’t know him well enough, perhaps.”

Hank pointed to the woman with the yellow hair. “How about the babe? Or do you have to walk over and examine her birth certificate?”

“She’s easy,” I said.

And she was. The little woman with the turned-up nose rolled off my pencil almost as smoothly as my own signature. She was duck soup for caricaturing. Retroussé noses are simple for any cartoonist with a flair for exaggerating his handiwork into the realm of pure caricature. You draw the nose, playing hob with the upswing. Then you hang everything around that nose, the big black mascaraed eyes, the over-long lashes; the false crimson blob of mouth.

I finished the picture with a bomb burst of hair that swirled over her shoulder theatrically. I warmed to my work and whipped out a red crayon, rubbing it gently over the high cheek bones for the desired effect. I dug it in around the mouth, squeezing the color out of my pencil until it shone bright and lush on the paper.

Hank said, “I see what you mean now.”

Out of the corner of my eye I watched the dame survey us. She leaned over and spoke a few crisp words to the fat boy. She pointed a long fingernail in our direction.

“Grit your teeth,” muttered Hank. “The tub of lard is headed this way with a small fire in his eyes.”

The tub of lard waddled between the tables, red faced. I watched the fat boy approach us. In the close-up, there were new and interesting details on his face. A short S-shaped scar burned purplish red high on his left cheek, near the eye.

He reached our table and stood over us, arms akimbo, big ham-like fists knotted on his hips.

He pointed a finger at my sketch. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, soldier?”

I said, “Who wants to know?” I looked up and smiled at him, feeling no anger.

He came closer. “Who gives you permission to make a picture of the lady?”

Hank said, “It’s a free country.”

“You stay out of this,” snarled the fat boy and turned to me again. “Hand over the picture.”

I folded the picture and stuck it away. I gave the pencil to Hank, still holding back my anger. “You play too rough, mister. Maybe if you were nice about it I would have given you the sketch. Go back to your girlfriend and tell her about it.”

He banged a fist on the table. “Get up, soldier. Get up and I’ll bat your head in”

I didn’t get up. The shock of his anger was amusing and I sat there laughing at him. He reached out for me, but before he made the distance I pushed back my chair. It caught him off balance and he fell forward a bit. He hit the table and his hands slid along the cloth, carrying our drinks near the edge. Before he straightened up I saw the blonde watching him with alarm.

He came at me again but I sidestepped his hand and brought up my fist until it hit his larded jaw. It was a hard blow, well timed. He went down on one knee and held his face.

Ike appeared from nowhere and helped the fat boy to his feet. He piloted him back to the blonde and stood there for a while, talking to her.

When he returned he was grinning. “Lecotte will thank you personally for that, soldier. This big dope is a regular customer, but all the time he’s picking fights.”

“He shouldn’t,” I said. “He was wide open and easy to hit. Someday he’ll find his head in a sling.”

“That’s right, he’s easy. But most of the time he gets away with it, you understand? He scares a lot of people and they back away from him on account of he’s so heavy. I got to hand it to you, soldier, you gave him the smear, all right. Maybe you taught the lug a lesson.”

“Who is he?” Hank asked, as we rescued our drinks.

“You don’t know him? Harry Semple.” He laughed into his towel. “Everybody calls him Simple. You see why?”

“And the blonde?”

Ike rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “That’s Mrs. Joe Gant, in person. You remember Joe Gant?”

I put down my glass with a jerk. I remembered Joe Gant. He was a gangster—a gangster long dead—the commander of the New York liquor trade when drinking was taboo. But Mrs. Gant? Who was she? I stared hard at her through the fog of smoke. I tried to concentrate on the cut of her face, to link her to Kip Smith through some similarity in structure, some small gesture.

A face is a face. I closed my eyes and reached back into my memory for the picture of Kip Smith’s familiar profile. It came to me in its general outline and I remembered the brow first, and the simple planes of his jaw. I opened my eyes and looked at Mrs. Gant again.

Women are deceptive. Mrs. Gant’s brow was lost under hair trained to swirl in gay and generous puffs and drop carelessly over one eye—the eye nearest me. Her cheeks, too, were highlighted with color, accented to deceive. Her mouth was a wide smear, enlarged and reshaped to hide its original pattern. Her nose? Kip Smith’s nose was not at all like this one. Kip had a longer nose, set in a longer face.

And suddenly she smiled and I caught my breath. There was something in the smile that held my eye and tugged at my brain and reminded me of Kip Smith and nobody else on earth. It was the turn of the mouth that did it. A woman can disguise her lips but no makeup on earth can change the true angle of her smile.

I nudged Hank. “She might be Paula’s sister.”

“Why?”

“Paula Smith’s sister married a gangster.”

Hank laughed and turned to Ike. “How long ago was she shaking her heart out on a runway, Ike?”

“She had the prettiest pair of hips in burlesque. How long ago? Maybe ten years? I can’t tell on account of burlesque got murdered here in New York.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “She was the best shaker in the business, the best I ever seen in my life.”

The “best” in the country approached our table. I made a mental note of her hip swing as she came. She walked in an easy, accented rhythm, a provocative strut.

She stood over us for a brief moment, allowing us the enjoyment of her torso. Then she sat down near Hank. She lit a cigarette and smiled into his eyes and he wasn’t at all uncomfortable under her smile.

Hank said, “Hello, photogenic.”

She let it pass, still frozen in a smile. She said, “Do I know you?”

“We’re old friends,” said Hank. “We met exactly ten seconds ago.”

She rolled her head my way to let me share her. “Your boyfriend is very clever with the lip. Do you make jokes, too?”

I said, “I’m a good listener.”

She turned to Hank. “Seriously, Mister, haven’t we met before? Where have I seen you?”

Hank grinned. “I’ve been around. Was it at Monte Carlo or the sands of Nice? Or are you the doll my mother wanted me to marry back in Centerville?”

Her smile began to fade and she shrugged gently. “Bad comedy,” she said to me. “Your friend was only good in his opening lines. He got corny in the stretch.” She put her hand on my sleeve. “I came over here to apologize for my fat friend. He loses his temper. I thought maybe he embarrassed you.”

“He flattered me. He’s the first active seeker after my art work in almost three years.”

She really laughed at that one. She showed me all her teeth and leaned my way. “I had you pegged right then. You’re a real artist?”

“I used to be.”

“I like artists,” she said, “especially in uniform. Can I see the sketch you did of me?”

I handed her the sketch and she leaned back and laughed at it long and loud. She had a rich, deep laugh, feminine and yet hard boiled.

I said, “You’re killing me. For that laugh you can keep the masterpiece.”

She patted my hand and her hand was cold on mine. She thanked me and tucked the sketch away. I took one of her cigarettes and let her buy us each a drink. She was good company, tough and loud but full of laughs.

After a while she asked Hank again, “Where have I seen you, big boy? I know you—I’m just positive I do.”

“Fine,” said Hank. “It’s like I said—we’re old, old pals.”

She looked at him long and hard, unsmiling. A small light filled her eyes and she leaned forward. “Maybe it was in a picture. You ever had your picture in the newspapers?”

“Every day including Sundays.”

“You kidding?”

“In the comic section, baby. You’ve seen me in the comics—and that’s no gag. I’m in between Superman and The Captain and The Kids—daily. On Sundays I ride alone, in sixteen boxes, or maybe fourteen, and all colored up fancy—that’s me.”

She snapped her fingers. “That’s it! You’re the cartoonist who draws the strip for the fat detective. You’re the one who helped him on that big case last year. The Nazi business. I remember you now. You’re Hank MacAndrews.”

Hank sighed a deep and mournful sigh. “You see, Jeff. A celebrity like MacAndrews can’t walk around incognito any more. All the time this sort of thing is happening to me—autograph hunters, insurance salesmen, and now pretty little dolls who remember me from a half tone in a newspaper a year ago.”

She said, “I’ve got a good head for faces.”

“You’ve got a good head for other reasons, lady.” He studied her curiously. “But how does it happen you can remember a fizz like mine which some of my best friends tell me shouldn’t happen to a dog?”

“I like all dumb animals. Especially dogs.”

“Me, I’m a bird man,” said Hank. “I’m nuts about our feathered friends. You ought to see my collection of wrens sometime, lady. Chickadees I like, too.”

She laughed at him softly. She leaned over the table and touched his arm. “You’re funny. You should be on the radio. All you need is a good writer and you’d panic the public.” She turned to me and winked. “Is he always such a funny man, or is it just me bringing out the smartness in him?”

I said, “He works best with the ladies.”

Hank said, “I don’t figure a dame like this. She walks over and tells me she remembers my handsome profile out of a news clipping. She also remembers the case.”

“Everybody in New York remembers that case.”

“Nuts,” said Hank. “You must be the type of wench who follows the squad cars. I’ve heard of such dolls—all the time waiting around for a nice grisly murder to happen. Homer Bull used to brush them away from the rear exit of the morgue whenever he had an especially weird stiff down there. You see the same type of thrush at the fancy funeral parlors whenever some handsome Hollywood ape goes to meet his fathers. You get a kick out of such stuff?”

She didn’t stop smiling. “Nothing pleases me more than a good squint at a bleeding corpse, mister.”

“Aah, now you’re pulling my good leg,” said Hank. “Give it to me straight, sister—do you really follow the Black Maria? Or is it that MacAndrews has a face to be long remembered?”

“Everybody in New York followed that Nazi business last year. The papers were loaded with it. You probably lost maybe a million readers from that corny comic strip of yours while that hunt for the lumpy nose guy went on. Me—I just remember seeing your picture, is all.”

I saw Semple waddling toward our table and nudged her elbow. She got up quickly and there was a small flicker of alarm in her dark eyes. She said, “It’s been peachy meeting you two men—even if I nearly choked to death on some of your popcorn. Maybe next time you’ll have a new writer, though. I’ll see you later, boys.”

“It’s been charming,” said Hank.

She started away from the table, waving Semple to a standstill. Then she turned, suddenly, and came back.

“You still connected with Homer Bull, MacAndrews?”

“I’m his personal valet.”

“You see him regular?”

“I tuck him away every night.”

“Thanks, sonny boy. Be seeing you in the funny papers.”

She went back to her table and spoke to Semple at great length. She was talking seriously and Semple bent his massive back to listen to her. She turned her back to us so that she had a commanding view of the bar and the entrance to the room.

Hank said, “There’s a little doll with character. I’ll bet she must have been a hell cat back in her day. What do you make of her?”

“Love at first sight,” I said. “She just couldn’t resist coming over here to meet you, Casanova. That stunt the fat boy pulled was probably just an opening for a way to meet you and stare into your baby blue eyes. I never remember seeing a babe put on such a swell show just to sit and goggle at a big gorilla like you. You’ve never seen her before?”

He shook his head. “The babes swarm around when they see something like me. It’s just personal magnetism. Charm. That’s me—Hank, the charm boy.”

I said, “You must have become quite a newspaper personality through that case with Bull she mentioned.”

Hank winked. “Nonsense, mon capitaine, I’m just a simple corn-fed country boy. These little incidents with the women happen at least once every six years. It’s my bulk that appeals to characters like mademoiselle over there.”

It was getting late.

People stood in a knot at the bar, casting sly eyes our way for a sign of departing merry makers. Very few departed. The place hummed with the drone of conversation, the high-pitched laughter of the drunk, the half drunk and the cacophony of women hell-bent for hilarity.

The man at the piano loosened his collar, sipped a cocktail delicately, closed his eyes, put down his glass and began to beat out a boogie-woogie, stamping the pedals violently with both feet. The smoke was a heavy gray cloud of eye-bite. My throat was tight with the smell of it and my eyes fogged with the film of fatigue. Mixed into the broth of noise came the reflex thumping of many feet under many tables to the rhythm of the pedals and some hands strummed the table tops and beat it on glasses.

The pianist grimaced and bore down hard into a thudded climax until he ran himself out. There was a short burst of applause and he rose to bow and mop his corrugated forehead, nodding his head jerkily and smiling the pat smile all performers reserve for late audiences. The noise flattened out, wavered and rose again to its original pitch.

Then I saw her.

She stood on the edge of the crowd at the bar, facing our way. It must have been her red hair that attracted me. I had been looking for redheaded girls ever since that moment on the Staten Island ferry. I had built up a picture of the redhead I wanted, but none had matched the girl in my brain. This one was different.

Her hair was an off shade of red, not deep, but rich and subtly red. I remembered Kip’s words: “She’s sort of a redheaded Joan Fontaine.” This girl was Joan Fontaine in many ways. Her figure was good, well curved and appealing. Something about this girl made my heart jounce out of its accustomed beat. It may have been her beauty, or the look in her eyes, the frightened, searching, yet sightless stare as she looked out over the tables for a split second and for another second aimed those eyes into mine.

Then she was gone, through the crowd at the bar and out of my line of vision.

I got up quickly. I said, “Wait for me here.”

Hank half rose to follow me, then sank back. I began the slow and bothersome task of edging my way through the customers into the clearing near the entrance to the bar. It took time for this operation. It took more time to struggle through the crowd of anxious customers at the bar and make my way into the lobby.

The lobby was empty.

On the street, the big colored doorman leaned against the canopy.

“A girl just ran out of the club,” I said. “Did you see her? Which way did she go?”

“Lady just went down that way,” he said, pointing a long finger in the direction of the far corner. She was a small figure, running quickly toward the traffic of Seventh Avenue. I ran after her but I knew I couldn’t catch her. In another moment she would he at the corner, within hailing distance of a cab.

I shouted, “Paula! Paula Smith!”

She was at the corner, under the street lamp when I yelled. I saw her turn when I shouted the name, but in that fleeting moment a cab pulled up alongside her and she got in quickly. The cab disappeared beyond the building on the corner, headed uptown into the traffic of Seventh Avenue.

I increased my pace and continued down the street at the fastest speed I could muster. Halfway down the darkened block I passed a black alley, a narrow lane between two tall buildings. A well placed foot came out of that alley, kicked sharply at my shins and sent me rolling in a heap down the curbing. I fell on my right arm and spun dizzily. The shock stunned me. I wasn’t prepared for the heavyweight who followed his attack with a professional tackle that completely smeared me on the pavement.

He was on me and all over me in one muscled heap. I tried for a fist at his face, but my effort was only a reflex. My blow hit the air with and went on from there to smite the sidewalk a healthy blow. The sharp needlepoint pain of flesh against stone shot up my arm and brought a curse to my lips. I tried again. I missed again.

My third effort never really got started. A ham-like fist had hold of my throat and I felt my head drawn back and then thrown forward sharply until it met the concrete. After that a period of complete emptiness set in. I rolled off a dangerously high precipice into a sea of flames that swirled around me and developed into lightning flashes.

I was out cold.

I revived at a small dark table, supported by Hank and the doorman and surrounded by several bright constellations of personal stars. My head rolled among the stars, unhinged and away from my body. Hank fed me a shot of whisky.

Hank was questioning the doorman. I heard the doorman say, “All I see is this heap of fightin’ down the street. The man took a powder before I got there.”

“Did you know him?”

“It was powerful dark down there, mister.”

I gulped the rest of the liquor and retrieved my head and part of my consciousness. I said, “Who came out of the club after that girl?”

“You did.”

“He means before he came,” said Hank.

“People comin’ out all the time.”

“After me?” I asked.

He rubbed a long finger over his jaw. He said, “Lemme think, now. You come out and then after you Mister Boucher. (He said “Boosher.”) After Mister Boucher comes fat boy and his lady.”

“Where did they go?” Hank asked.

“They went home, I guess.”

“By cab?”

“No, suh! Mr. Semple and his lady they come in their own car. Chauffeur. Big black Rolls. They down here most every night in that there Rolls. I know that boat just by the sound of that motor by this time. Swank.”

“Which way did they go?”

He laughed a rich, deep laugh. “Only one way they can go, suh—Seventh Avenue. This here’s a one way street.”

Hank slipped him a dollar bill and we let him go.

Hank asked, “Did you spot him?”

“I’d know his fist anywhere.”

“Big?”

“Big enough to handle my neck like an accordion. I’ll be needing a few more short ones and a few longer than that before I feel that my tongue is connected to my body.”

Hank went to the bar while I tossed things around in my whirling intellect. I tried to wipe away the conviction that the girl was Paula Smith. I knew her from only an eight word description given to me half in jest. Any other redheaded girl in the same situation might have turned at a shout, whether or not her name was yelled at her. It came to me, suddenly, that I had been caught when this girl looked at me for a watch-tick moment in The Frog. It was her eyes that had set me moving and driven me on to near annihilation in the street. Her eyes had been full of fright when they met mine. In my mind this fright had somehow tied in with the quest for Paula Smith. Paula Smith, then, was running away from somebody in The Frog.

I credited Semple with my disaster. Semple was a yellow dog, the type of fistic genius who limits his encounters to fitting circumstances. He would lie in wait for me in that alley, trip me, rush me and pound me to bits in the darkness. I pictured him leaving his buxom girl friend, running ahead of me into the alley and waiting there.

My imagination took Semple to the alley, but my clearing head refused to accept him in that spot. After all, the doorman had seen Semple drive away in the Rolls. If he left the Rolls before Seventh Avenue, his girlfriend was a willing accomplice to my mutilation. It didn’t make sense.

I stood up and walked gingerly to the bar.

CHAPTER 5

From the table to the bar was only a distance of ten or twelve long and well-aimed steps, but in that distance I felt my brain take hold of itself again and begin to think rapidly and in several directions.

I meditated upon the purposes of my assailant. I hadn’t been robbed. I hadn’t been challenged. Somebody had deliberately stopped me from proceeding in the general direction of that taxicab and that girl. For this reason my mind soldered the link between my antagonist and Paula Smith. The solder never really set. I couldn’t quite convince myself that the girl in question was Paula for certain.

Hank was waiting for me at the bar, still sober. He said, “You didn’t catch her?”

“I caught a fist and nothing more.”

“Too bad. You might have ended it all tonight if you had reached her.”

I suddenly developed a great respect for his observation. “How did you know I went after a girl?”

“Detective logic,” he smiled, enjoying his deduction. “You’ve been getting astigmatism all night staring out at that mob in there and hoping for a squint at your girlfriend, Paula Smith. I gather that the doll you finally spotted sold you a bill of goods, somehow. You thought the beautiful redhead near the bar was your mystery girl?”

“How would I know? All I really saw was her head, in here. Outside I saw much less. I caught a glimpse of her figure at about two hundred feet. She had a fine back, but it might have belonged to Lana Turner or Lauren Bacall for all I know. Still, she turned when I shouted her name.”

Hank said, “That proves nothing at all. Lots of dames in New York would have turned at a whistle.”

I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock. People were beginning to filter out of the place now, although the line of regulars at the bar still held their ground. I signaled Ike as he crossed toward the kitchen and he came over.

I said, “It’s one o’clock. When does Lecotte arrive?”

“I don’t wait for him,” smiled Ike. “I don’t watch for him to come in. Maybe he came in already, who knows?”

“How about dragging him out?” Hank asked.

Ike’s shoulder went up in a gesture of horror. “Me? You want me to lose my job, palsy? The cheap help never bothers the boss. When Lecotte calls me, I come. He whistles and I trot. But walk into his office without the whistle? You want my wife and kids to starve?”

“You mean that he’s a stinker?”

“Stinker, shminker—he’s got his job and I got mine. We understand each other.”

“Where’s his office?” I asked.

Ike pulled me gently away from the bar and pointed my nose to a door at the right of the bar, at the far end. “The last door on your left, down the hall.”

We entered the narrow, dark corridor. Far down at the end a small blue hall fixture shone with a dull light. A pine paneled door on the left stood slightly ajar.

I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again. A sudden draft of air swung the door inward a bit farther and an unoiled hinge sang in the quiet.

I pushed open the pine door and we walked into the office.

It was a small room, ribbed with the same pine on the horizontal and waxed to a high finish. In the corner, a big desk of the Empire period. A formal lamp threw a circle of light on the desk top. Many thin black frames decorated the walls. Each of these pictures was a Daumier lithograph, neatly framed and hung with a decorator’s eye.

I said, “I guess the great man hasn’t yet arrived. Shall we wait?”

Hank was bending over the desk and when he straightened he was serious. He held a pipe in his hand. “If Monsoor Lecotte is a pipe smoker, he was here not too long ago.” He winked at me. “This pipe bowl is still hot. Maybe it would be smart if we got out of here. Night club owners don’t like strange gents browsing in their inner sanctums.”

We stepped back into the hall, leaving the pine door ajar as we found it. My eyes were accustomed to the gloom now. In the blue light I saw that the door to the alley was open a bit. I saw, too, what was holding it open. It was a shoe—a man’s shoe.

Hank saw it at almost the same moment. He pushed open the door and it swung outward, into the alley. The alley was dark, but the blue light threw a meager beam beyond the threshold.

The gleam hit a spot far enough to reveal the figure of a man who lay in the alley on his face, arms outstretched; fists clenched. The glow was just strong enough to highlight the pearl-handled knife stuck up right between the man’s shoulder blades.

I heard Hank suck in his breath as I bent over the figure.

I said, “Is this Lecotte?”

“Leave him alone,” said Hank. “He looks like a dead pigeon from where I stand.”

I admired his coolness and his poise. The sight of a civilian corpse was a shock to me. I had seen death before, death in wholesale lots, on battlefields, in trenches, in hospitals. After a while such death became part of an infantryman’s daily routine. You looked at it, yet you didn’t see it, really. It was an impersonal thing, this death that visited soldiers. You felt sick and sorry for a while after viewing your first casualty, but after that only the death of a buddy could upset you.

But that was war. This was New York, and Pierre Lecotte. I stood there, staring down at him, my throat dry; my head whirling with a confusion of ideas.

It was then that the phone rang in Lecotte’s office. Hank pulled me back into the hall, back toward the bar, but I held him at Lecotte’s. I said “That call might be important.”

“Are you nuts?” Hank was annoyed. “Let’s get the hell and gone out of here.”

“Wait here for just a minute, Hank.” I ran into Lecotte’s office and lifted the phone.

“Pierre?” It was a woman’s voice, low and sweet and full of alarm.

“Hello, yes?”

There was a silence and her voice rose sharply. “Pierre? Is that you?”

“Paula?” I said, only because I wanted to believe that it was Paula. “Paula Smith?”

I thought I heard her gasp before she hung up. I felt my head break into sweat and turned to Hank desperately.

He said, “Who was it, detective?”

I shook my head. “Don’t be funny. You’re the detective. How do I trace this call? I want to find out where that dame called from. What do we do?”

“We get the hell out of here. Fast.” He got off the desk and ran out of the room. I followed him down the hall, past Lecotte’s body, into the alley and out to the street. He was running fast, surprisingly fast for a man of his weight.

I said, “Is this what you call tracing a call?”

Hank leaped into his car. “Exactly. We’ve got to report the call to the operator from another phone. It’s the only way to trace on a dial phone.” The car shot into gear. “It’ll take time—maybe fifteen minutes.”

We squealed to a stop before a drug store. In the booth Hank sweated and groaned. The minutes crawled. I heard him say, “Get after it fast, girlie—this is the police. You heard me—the police!” The minutes crawled. Finally, Hank said, “Say that again, operator, but slow and easy this time.”

He hung up. I said, “Where did the call come from?”

“Apartment house. Number 2543 West Fifty-Fourth Street. The telephone is listed under the name of an old man. Very old man, by name of Benjamin Franklin, she says.”

I said, “Bingo! That’s my number.”

“You know the number?”

I pushed him into his car. “The number is meaningless, but the name intrigues me.”

In the car, Hank stalled over the ignition key. “I’m getting too old for this kind of gay sport, Jeff. This thing is beginning to smell bad—it stinks. We’re up to our ears in it now, both of us.”

“Turn the key and step on it,” I said. “Or do you want me to take a cab?” I was feeling a lot better since Ben Franklin had entered the mix-up.

He started the car and moved it into traffic slowly. “Where will it get us? The cops will go down to the club any minute and Ike will sooner or later be put on the pan and roasted until his ears are red. He’ll remember seeing you and me going into Lecotte’s office.”

“He saw us walk into the hall, that’s all.”

“Did he see us come back? Will he remember your pretty pan passing the bar on the way out? Of course not.” He held his head with one hand and rocked it. “What a sucker I was to leave my peaceful little studio orgy and go searching for a phantom dame named Smith. Where are we going now?”

“To visit Mr. Benjamin Franklin.”

“Is he still around flying kites?”

“He’s an old friend of mine.”

“You know George Washington and all that bunch, too, I’ll bet.”

I slapped him on the knee and told him all about it. “Benjamin Franklin was the name of Paula’s uncle, Hank. But Paula’s Uncle Ben is dead. It stands to reason that if Paula wanted to go into hiding she’d be likely to use an odd name out of her past—no?”

Hank sighed. “Peachy. But suppose the dame who called Lecotte happens to be a genuine Mrs. B. Franklin who just happens to know Lecotte?”

“It could be,” I said. “But it would have to be a damned strange coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

“Franklin is a common name. Some of my best friends are Franklins.”

“You haven’t met a Benjamin Franklin since third grade American History and you know it. There aren’t many with that handle.”

The car slid around the corner and crept into West Fifty-Fourth Street. As it turned I saw a woman enter a parked cab far down the block. She carried a big package. Something in her fleeting silhouette held me. I knew her figure. I reached over and tapped Hank on the shoulder to slow him.

The approaching cab was rolling into gear as it passed us. In the sudden light of a street lamp I made out the sharp profile of a face I knew well.

I said, “That woman—the dame in the cab. It was Mrs. Preston!”

Hank tried for a glimpse of her, but it was too late. He said, “Are you sure?”

“I’d know her profile anywhere.”

“Wasn’t she at the bar back in The Frog?”

“I didn’t notice her after the incident with Semple. She might have left and come over here.”

“Impossible. You would have seen her on your way back.”

“Not if she had left before I did. She might have gone out and waited for Paula Smith, then followed from down the block where I saw Paula take the cab.”

“Paula your ear,” said Hank.

The car slowed and stopped before an ancient apartment house, loaded with rococo stone carving and the accumulated dirt of unwashed masonry. A tall iron fence protected six or seven inches of lawn from the sidewalk.

A tired old man dressed in baggy pajamas answered the bell. He shuffled through the marble hall and unlocked the door and yawned in my face. He looked at me over his spectacles and stepped back from the door and said nothing. I knew the type—he was a combination janitor and night doorman, a man who only opened a door and asked questions.

I said, “Franklin’s apartment?”

“Upstairs. Number 6-C. Elevator to your left.”

The elevator was ripe with the smell of unwashed linoleum and the stench of stale liquor. It was an old house, a house that had lived a grand life in its youth but had gone to seed in its old age. On the sixth floor the smell of paint blended with other and more subtle odors.

Our heels made noise on the marble corridor. We walked halfway to the stairs and paused at the apartment. The door to 6-C stood ajar. I rang the bell and stared into the blackness beyond.

Nobody answered the bell. I turned to Hank with a small question in my eyes and he answered it for me. He kicked open the door and stood back, bowing me in. “You’re not going to stop here, are you, Commando Keye? We must investigate this Benjamin Franklin. We must enter Mr. Franklin’s apartment and be thrown out on our tails.”

We entered. It was a nightmare stroll, our first few steps down the hall. In the first step forward it occurred to me that perhaps Hank was right and if he was right we might be arrested at any moment for housebreaking. We could also be shot, at simple range, by an infuriated Mr. Benjamin Franklin. Or perhaps Mr. Franklin would be the type of citizen who hits out with blunt instruments and asks questions later. We had no business trespassing on Mr. Franklin’s property. And yet I crept forward slowly until I came up against a wall and Hank MacAndrews came up against me, sighed, muttered a brief and appropriate epithet and prodded me to the right. He had caught the spirit of my idiocy and was signaling his approval.

To the right, at the end of the corridor, there was a halo of light from a small lamp. We walked toward this glow bravely for the light robbed us of all sinister motive. If anybody sat or slept beyond that light, there could be excuses. We had simply wandered into the wrong apartment.

But there was nobody beyond the light. The apartment was empty. We walked into a small living room, over decorated with cheap plush furniture. A heavy oak table, fat-legged and unpolished, crowded the far wall. A huge lamp, ornately tasseled in the Chinese style, sat on the table. It was lit. A number of women’s magazines were scattered beneath it. An ancient glass ash tray squatted near the lamp. An odor of paint hung in the room.

I whispered, “The lady was a painter. We’re halfway home.”

Hank scowled at me. “You’ve got wheels in your head. Where do you see paints or brushes?”

I pointed to my nose. “The nose is quicker than the eye. I’d know art paint anywhere. If I were three years younger I could name the brand she used.”

“If you were three years younger, I’d be home in bed.” Hank stood in the doorway, thoughtfully. He came in and walked around the room once, studying the furniture, fingering the drapes. He paused in the doorway again and pointed to the lamp. “This place has been jerked around.”

“What do you mean?

“Homer Bull would say that this room is set in an ‘un-casual composition.’ Look for yourself.”

I looked and saw nothing ‘un-casual’ in the layout. “Tell me more.”

He went to the oak table. “This table, for instance. There’s something about it that’s wrong. I’ve never seen a place of this kind laid out this way “

“You can’t expect a decorator’s dream in a dump like this.”

“I don’t,” he said. “But look at the lamp layout. The lamp on this table is lit, yet the two standing lamps are disconnected. Wouldn’t an easy chair lamp be plugged into a wall socket, usually?”

“Why? Maybe nobody ever read in this chair.”

“Could be,” said Hank. “If that’s the case, nobody ever read in any chair in this room. The only lamp connected is the one on the table. Both floor lamps are out of their sockets. They’d have to be—it’s a hell of a stretch from the chair you’re sitting in to the nearest wall socket.”

“So what?” I asked.

Hank shrugged. “Just an observation. I was taught to observe when I worked with Bull. You never know when you need these little things.”

I followed him into the bedroom. It was a square room, equipped with the bare rudiments of living. On the far wall, a window. In one corner, a small chest, three drawers deep. Above this chest, an oblong mirror framed in aged gilt fancywork with a long jagged crack down the length of it.

Hank stood at the far wall staring up at a small picture. It was a reproduction of “The Woman in the Red Caraco” by Henri Matisse. The color was good and I recognized the source. The picture had been taken from a book—the Hyperion Press collection of French Painting in the Twentieth Century. Matisse’s pictures have a rough, rapidly painted look, and their carefully thought out design is only appreciated by art students and art lovers.

Hank held his nose. “Modern junk. Maybe you’re right. Whoever lived in this dump must have had an eye for the long-hair in art.”

“Then you agree that we may be in Paula Smith’s apartment?”

“I agree to nothing of the sort. Benjamin Franklin may have been in the art game, remember?”

Hank walked to the squat table on the left of the dresser. It was an old-fashioned piece, a small night table of the type used in bedrooms. He opened the top drawer and stared into it. It was empty. I took it away from him and studied it. I smelled it. Somebody, not too long ago, had kept paints in this drawer. I rubbed my finger along the inner edge and when I held it up there was a smear of crimson on it.

“Blood?” Hank asked, his eyes wide.

“Crimson Lake,” I told him and held my finger under his nose. “An everyday color for anyone who paints in oils.”

“You’re a stubborn fiend, Jeff.”

“You’re the stubborn one. Everything in this place points to the fact that the tenant is a painter. All we’ve got to do is walk back into the living room and wait for Paula Smith to show.”

Hank frowned at the bed and picked up the pillow. The bed was unmade and in a great upheaval. The pillow was a large, striped affair, uncovered. He tossed the pillow idly, catching it with one hand. He put it down and pointed to some smears on the pillow and the bedsheet. They were small crimson stains. “More Crimson Lake? Or are these bloodstains?”

I examined the stains and called them Crimson Lake. He patted the pillow and returned it to the bed. We left the bed and went over to the chest of drawers.

Hank opened the top drawer and fingered the contents. There were assorted woman’s garments, many scraps of paper and the smell of a strong perfume. I picked up some of the papers and went through them. They were pages from some sort of notebook, perhaps a small ruled school book. On one of these sheets, written in a sure, straight hand, was the name Alice Yukon, Country Road, Woodstock, New York…next Saturday.

I showed it to Hank. He shrugged it off with a yawn. “So what? Somebody has to meet Alice Yukon in Woodstock, New York on a certain Saturday.”

I dug into my pocket and produced the packet of letters from Paula. I flipped open an envelope and turned anxiously to Paula’s signature—for all her letters to Kip were typed.

Hank said, “You’re driving yourself nuts, Jeff. You expect to match up the handwriting?”

I shoved Paula’s signature under his nose triumphantly. “Take a gander at this handwriting, Mr. S. S. Van Dine. Aren’t you chagrined? You’ll note that Paula wrote her name in the same type of heavy, librarian scrawl. Observe that the note we just discovered shows the same type of writing. Observe also the wide ‘a’—the wide ‘u’ and the general direction of the writing. Apologize?”

Hank massaged his brow. “A veritable ferret. I must allow as how you’ve maybe got something, General.”

“I’m hotter than an 88 at point blank range, chum. More than anything else, I’m sure we’re on the right track now.”

We entered the bathroom and continued our search for everything and nothing at all. Hank fussed around the medicine chest, rubbed his fingers along the shelves, examined his fingertips and said, “Maybe you’re right about an artist living here. You can slice the dust with a knife.”

“Why were you rubbing?”

“Hair,” he said. “Too bad there’s no comb around. I’d give ten bucks to find some black hairs on a comb.”

We returned to the living room and Hank leaned in the doorway, still studying the arrangement of the furniture. I sat in the easy chair rubbing my eyes and wishing that Paula Smith would come home.

Hank came over to me and stood, arms akimbo, staring at the chair. He moved back a few steps and I saw his eyes searching the rug. He said, “That chair, Jeff. I still think it looks out of place there. Nobody would ever dream of putting an easy chair in that spot—away from any reading light.”

“Maybe Paula didn’t read.”

He bent over and examined the rug in the other corner of the room. He felt the rug and then called me over. “Look here—this is where that chair stood originally. Here are the leg marks in the rug—see them?”

I saw them but was unimpressed. “People often move furniture around. What are you getting at?”

He didn’t know. He walked back to the chair and stood there scowling at it. Then, suddenly, he lifted it and moved it away. I shared his shock of surprise. There was a large oval stain under that chair, a twelve inch oval of dull crimson. Hank eyed it balefully and bent down to touch it. His finger came up stained with crimson. “Don’t tell me this is more of your Crimson Lake, Jeff.”

I felt the blot of red and examined my finger. I said, “It looks like blood, but I won’t swear to it.”

“You haven’t been around,” said Hank. “You’ve never touched it before. Or have you?”

“I’ve seen it—plenty of it. But you don’t go around touching blood on a battlefield.”

“I’ve touched it before. It’s blood.”

We stood there for a moment, fascinated by the crimson stain. The sight of it did things to my inner man. The faint smell of paint added to my nausea and the walls of the small room were suddenly too close to me and full of claustrophobic menace. I opened the window and a tired breeze blew in from the river and fluttered the drapes. In the silence a tug moaned from far away.

Then we heard the footsteps in the hall.

They were bold steps, sharp and clear and feminine, moving quickly toward us.

Hank muttered, “Here it comes, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

We faced the door and waited and a woman came into view. She was surprised to see us. Her mouth opened in amazement and she closed it and put a hand to her bosom and took a small step backward. She was a middle-aged lady, short and dumpy and overpainted. She had a sharp face, a face that was once beautiful but long ago had lost its glamour. Her hair was an incongruous color and her make-up matched it perfectly. There was an overabundance of rouge and the over-powdering made it burn high on her cheeks. Her eyes were bright blue, heavily mascaraed, heavily lidded. She opened them wide, blinked them and opened them wider still. You had the feeling that she was acting a part, measuring her audience and dramatizing.

She said, “What the hell is this, Grand Central Station?”

CHAPTER 6

Hank said, “Mrs. Franklin?”

She took a step into the room and threw her bag on the oak table. She turned to face him and when she moved she moved with a bounce. She put her hands on her hips and frowned at him. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Franklin. Who are you two and what do you want?”

“It’s all an accident, Mrs. Franklin. We’re here by mistake,” Hank said. “Must have gotten into the wrong apartment.”

“Wrong apartment, he says. So you got into the wrong apartment and figured you liked it here and would stick around all night?”

“We were just leaving,” said Hank. “We haven’t been here long.”

I studied Mrs. Franklin whilst I had the chance: she wasn’t looking at me. I was standing close to the spot of blood near the window but I didn’t hide it from her sight. If she had wanted to see it she had only to look beyond my feet. But she didn’t turn her head my way.

“When did you get here?” Mrs. Franklin asked.

I said, “About a half hour ago.”

She jerked her head my way and stared suspiciously. “A half hour, he says. You telling me it took you a half hour to make up your mind this was the wrong apartment?”

“Not exactly. You see, we couldn’t tell whether this was the right place because we’ve never been here before. If somebody had been in, it would have been different. As it is, we thought we were in the right apartment.”

She frowned, confused. “Start the record again, soldier, and play it slower.”

I said, “We were looking for a girl named Paula Smith.”

“What made you think she lived here?”

“She’s supposed to live here.”

Her suspicions were filling her face. “You telling me you walked in here without looking at the name on the door?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

She threw her head back and gave a shrill laugh. She let it run its course, then: “You expect me to swallow that? If you didn’t have that uniform on I’d maybe walk over and call the cops. That kind of malarkey would tickle them. What gives you the idea anybody named Smith lives here?”

Hank saved me. His poise had returned, out of nowhere, and he stepped forward casually and offered her a cigarette. He said, “My friend Keye is a little tetched in the head. You know how it is, Mrs. Franklin—he got a letter from a girl named Smith while he was overseas. Romance, and all that stuff. She told him she lived in this apartment. But I can see now what happened. The last letter he got from her was dated maybe three months ago. The girl probably moved. You been in this apartment long?”

Mrs. Franklin handled her cigarette delicately, and tipped the ashes with her little finger. When she looked back at me she had softened. She walked over to a chair and sat down, smiling faintly. “Three months ago, he says. It’s possible…I moved into this place about two months ago.”

“That’s the answer,” said Hank. “The Smith girl must have lived here before you.”

“Maybe she did at that.” She dropped out of character for a moment and began to play a new role. She was the sympathetic friend, the kind woman. “I heard of stories like this where a soldier can’t find his girlfriend. Lots of times the girls do it on purpose because of getting married to somebody else or something like that.” She reached into her bag and withdrew a small black book. “You give me your name and address and I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow if I hear anything about her. Maybe the neighbors on the floor would know her.”

I gave her my name and address. I said, “It’s pretty important that I find her. I’ll appreciate anything you can do.”

“Sure, sure,” she clucked. “I’ll do my best. But what you ought to do is maybe forget about that girl. Any girl who does such a thing to a nice boy like you isn’t worth finding, maybe.”

“This girl is worth finding.”

She laughed softly, “Love is a kick in the pants.”

Hank said, “You’ll find him in a bed at Bellevue if he doesn’t locate that doll soon.”

“I know how he feels,” said Mrs. Franklin. “I wish I knew a Smith with a Paula handle.” She shook her head gently. “Once I read an article about the Smiths in New York City alone. We got fourteen thousands of them in this town. Doesn’t that do things to your head when you figure the odds?”

I said, “I like long odds. Odds perk up a man’s imagination. I could have sworn that Paula Smith called me from this apartment tonight.”

She dropped the sympathetic role as quickly as she had put it on. “She called you from here? You’re nuts!”

“Are you sure? Were you here all night?”

She stood up, angrily. “That, my friend, is none of your business!” She flounced over to the doorway and showed us the hall. “Now that you’re getting so damned nosey you can beat it the hell out of here. Fast!”

We walked out quickly. Hank paused in the outside hall and said, “No hard feelings?”

She slammed the door in his face and we heard the slip-lock fall into place.

Downstairs, Hank held me in the marble entrance hall. He said, “Something tells me we shouldn’t leave here yet. Homer Bull would do something clever at this point.”

I said, “Maybe Homer Bull would tell us to go home to bed.”

We moved into the street and walked into the shadows on the other side. Hank stared up at a lone light on the sixth floor. A figure appeared at the window, remained there for a moment and then disappeared.

Hank whispered, “Mrs. Franklin.”

I yawned and started away, but he grabbed my elbow and pointed up to the window. “Watch,” he said.

I watched. The bulky silhouette that was Mrs. Franklin appeared again, leaned out of the window and scanned the street. She couldn’t see us. We were hidden behind the stone porch of an old brownstone. We saw her figure move back into the room and her silhouette crossed the window on the way to the hallway.

I said, “Now what?”

“Watch,” said Hank again.

After a long minute there were signs of activity up in 6-C. But this time the action was hurried and the shadows of movement flickered against the window shade confusingly. A figure moved to the window and stood there. But this time it wasn’t Mrs. Franklin. I caught the bulky outline of a man’s shoulders and head and the pattern of a felt hat.

Hank said, “See?” He edged me back into the shadows and gave me a cigarette. “We sit here and wait.”

“For what?”

“We don’t know. We just squat here and wait. I have an instinct about situations like this. If Bull were here he’d tell you that people who go in must come out.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Whoever the man is up in Mrs. Franklin’s nest, he can’t be her husband. Her husband would have walked in with her.”

“And what do we do if he walks out?”

“We give chase, but he mustn’t know we’re after him. I’ll show you the technique. Bull himself taught it to me—but I perfected it.”

We didn’t wait long. I felt Hank squeeze my arm and looked across the street. Mrs. Franklin stood on the narrow stone porch, making a great show of nonchalance as she surveyed the street. She flounced down the steps and started spryly toward the east.

We gave her a lead, then strolled casually across the street, entered Hank’s car and began the slow crawl to Eighth Avenue. On Eighth Avenue, Mrs. Franklin hailed a cab and started uptown. We gave the cab a small lead and then shot away after it. We roared uptown, hit Broadway and followed Broadway to Central Park West. At Central Park West and Sixty-Seventh Street Mrs. Franklin left her cab and stood on the corner, deliberating. When the traffic light changed she walked uptown. We parked the car and followed.

We hugged the shadows close to the buildings, allowing her a full block lead. At Seventy-Third Street she slowed her pace and occasionally looked back into the shadows behind her.

I said, “She’s spotted us.”

“Maybe—we’ll know in a minute.”

We knew in less than a minute. Mrs. Franklin suddenly turned to the left and disappeared down Seventy-Fourth Street.

We ran up to the corner, rounded the corner and were halfway down the block before Hank pulled up short. A yellow cab was starting away in the distance.

Hank let out a giant sigh of anger and breathed obscenities.

We walked down the darkened street. At the corner he paused and eyed me glumly. “We’ve done exactly the opposite from what we should have done. We have been outsmarted.”

“By Mrs. Franklin?”

“By none other. She has led us a merry goose chase.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, because I didn’t. “Mrs. Franklin is clever, suddenly?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I have an idea that she deliberately waltzed out of that apartment to have us tail her. She must have known that we might wait for her. It could be that our Mr. Franklin instructed her. If we hightailed it after his spouse we cleared the street for him. He sent her out as a lure. It was the best insurance for his getaway.”

“Keen deduction,” I laughed. “Then why did we follow her?”

He shrugged dismally. “I’m an honest moron, Jeff —I admit my mistakes.”

An early morning wind sang up the street and there was a bite in it. The city was fast asleep but the main arteries were still alive with taxis and lights.

We went to a nearby dogcart for some coffee.

Hank spread his elbows on the counter and wrinkled his forehead in deep thought. I busied myself with some personal mental gymnastics involving the mysterious apartment, Paula Smith and the elusive Mrs. Franklin.

I said, “It occurs to me now that maybe I acted the role of a quiet moron up in Mrs. Franklin’s apartment.”

“What did you do wrong?”

“Nothing. That was the trouble. I stood there chewing my cud instead of aiming a few questions at her. I should have upped to her with that scrap of paper. I should have asked her whether she had written that note about Woodstock. I should have asked her to show me a sample of her handwriting. Now that it’s too late, it all becomes very clear to me.”

“She would have thrown us out a little sooner if you had opened your big mouth,” said Hank. “You think a dame like that would have asked you to analyze her handwriting? I doubt it.”

“It would have been worth the try. A smart guy could have tricked her into writing a few lines.”

Hank laughed wryly. “Forget it, Jeff. Nine chances out of ten the dame didn’t write that note. So what?”

“I’d like to be sure. It would help.” I pulled out the Woodstock note and compared it again with Paula’s signature.

Hank said, “Forget Mrs. Franklin. Your girl friend Paula Smith wrote this business about Woodstock. I know a little bit about handwriting. Studied some of it with Bull. Your dame wrote the Woodstock note. Stet.”

I drank my coffee, half satisfied again.

Hank munched a doughnut sleepily. “That guy up there with her—I can’t figure him at all. I’m wondering whether we made a thorough search of that dump before she walked in. Did we miss out on any closets?”

“There were only two of them—in the bedroom, and both of us gave them a going over.”

“Nuts,” said Hank. “There must have been other closets in the dive. Trouble was that we walked down that hall in the dark. We considered ourselves inside the apartment after we passed through that catacomb of a hall. That was why we missed out on the hall closet. Our fat friend was probably squatting in it as we passed down the hall toward the light.”

“Fine,” I said. “And why was he hiding in the closet?”

“He probably wasn’t. If he was waiting for the floozy dame, he would have been sitting in an easy chair in the living room when we walked in. He couldn’t have been waiting for her in the hall closet. That’s what annoys me, Jeff. There’s no reason for thinking of him in that closet.”

“Maybe he’s a mental case. Maybe he lives in that closet. Maybe he likes to startle his little woman.”

“Or he might have come up later,” said Hank, brushing off my humor. “He might have come up with her in the elevator and then stayed outside in the hall until she detoured us out of there.”

“Fine. Now, all of a sudden, he knew that we were up there. You figure he can look through walls?”

“Don’t be funny. How did we discover that he was up there, mon capitaine? Remember? We caught a squint at him from down in the street. Maybe he and the dame looked up at the apartment window the way we did and saw us against the light up in that living room. Maybe they figured she could get us out quickly by herself.”

“A fat coward,” I said. “If her boyfriend saw us up there from the street, why didn’t he walk in with her?”

“Ah! A good question. But the answer’s simple—the fat guy just didn’t want to be seen with the doll. You understand? An illicit relationship, as they say in the divorce courts.” Hank’s eyes opened wide with another idea. “Or maybe he just didn’t want to be seen by us. That, my friend, is the probable answer. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll leave it. Why didn’t fat boy want to be seen?”

Hank shrugged. “I’m no mastermind. I’m just a thick-headed cartoonist trying to think like a bigshot detective. The whole business of Mrs. Franklin doesn’t make any sense to me. A couple of the new angles leave me cold. The fat guy in the apartment. The apartment itself. The blood on the floor. The rearranged furniture. Do you think it might have been the doll we just met who called Lecotte?”

“Definitely not. The woman who spoke to me had a young voice.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Mrs. Franklin’s voice was old—it was pitched higher and had no undertones. It had a flat quality that couldn’t have changed on the telephone. It couldn’t have been Mrs. Franklin who called Lecotte.”

“So now we have a young voice full of undertones.” He leaned on his elbow and appraised me with a thin smile. “You’re positively sold on the idea that Paula Smith made that phone call.”

“I’m sold on the idea that it could have been Paula. I’m also sold on the idea that she might have used the name of Benjamin Franklin if she wanted to disappear. Names like Benjamin Franklin aren’t just coincidences, Hank.”

He got off his stool. “I want to sleep on all this. Once I dreamed that I was a brilliant sleuth and when I woke up I handed Homer Bull a small idea. It could happen again.”

I said, “How about the police? Shouldn’t we return to The Frog?”

He tapped my chest lightly with a finger. “You’re doing as Uncle Hank tells you. I’m driving you back to your hotel. Get yourself some shut-eye. There’ll be plenty of time for the police. They’ll get to you before you know it and it’s better to talk to them when your head is clear. They’ll ask questions. They’ll be after both of us before long. I’ll call you in the morning.”

He drove me back to the hotel.

CHAPTER 7

The telephone jerked me into consciousness early in the morning. I turned on the light and saw that it wasn’t quite seven. I tried to rub the sleep out of my eyes.

It was Hank. “Did I awaken you, General?”

“What do you want, or must I insult you?”

“I want you, General. And a couple of other guys down here want you, too.”

“Where?”

“Police Headquarters.”

I felt my eyes snap open and the sweat broke out on my hand. “You there already?”

“I’m not at the races.” His voice sank to a whisper. “Have yourself a cold shower and a half dozen cups of black coffee on the way downtown. You’ll need them.”

I said, “Is it bad?”

“Oh, no—it’s heavenly. Inspector Trum and I have just finished a breakfast of toasted kidneys, fried scones, caviar canapés and a dish of rigor mortis. You must come over.”

“I can’t wait,” I said.

“Neither can Inspector Trum. Get moving, General.”

I took a long, cold shower, dressed quickly and went down for my breakfast. I ordered a newspaper and found the story of last night’s murder on the second page. There was the usual provocative copy in the first few paragraphs, but the prose thinned down to nothing but a review of Lecotte’s career after that. He was a Frenchman, an art critic, an author, and a great hand with the ladies. He was handsome, debonair, a playboy and a great art merchant. He left no heirs.

There was a short quote from Police Headquarters: “Already two suspects are being rounded up for questioning by the police. One of these is an ex-servicemen, recently discharged from the army, who disappeared mysteriously shortly after the crime was committed.”

I braced the coffee cup in my hand. The prospect of being interviewed by the police unnerved me. They would ask me many cold and scientific questions, and I would have to tell them all about Paula Smith.

My mind had already accepted the fact that Paula was somehow involved in the murder of Lecotte. She had run out of the club at a bad moment. She had left just at the time when somebody walked back into Lecotte’s office and put a dainty knife in his back. I checked myself: nobody knew who the redhead was. I didn’t know, certainly, and even if I told the police that she was Paula Smith they couldn’t believe me.

A thousand and one other angles suddenly presented themselves to my weary brain. How could I be sure that Lecotte was killed just before the redhead ran out? Lecotte may have walked into this office earlier than usual. He might have been stabbed while Hank and I were talking to the blonde doll.

Inspector Trum’s office was alive with the smell of fresh coffee and stale cigars. Hank MacAndrews sat in a large leather chair, sipping from a container and munching a cruller. He was at ease in the chair. He might have been a detective himself, sharing breakfast with his superior officer. He got up with a grin and introduced me to Trum.

He said, “Don’t let his hatchet face scare you, Jeff. The Inspector is an old friend of mine.”

Trum sat hunched over his desk. He was a lean man, with a face carved in simple planes, sharp and bony. He looked up at me out of gray blue eyes, at once friendly and alert. He waved a long arm at a chair and I sat beside him.

Trum said, “Relax, soldier, and tell me all about it.”

I glanced at Hank and he winked at me and said, “All of it, Jeff. The Inspector will want to hear about Paula Smith.”

I began my story. I started back in basic training and brought him up to date, including every detail of my conversation with Lucy, my theories and my stupid deductions. He listened to me without interrupting, tapping a slow rhythm on his desk blotter with a yellow pencil.

When I finished, he said, “I’ll ask you what I just asked Superman here, Keye. Why didn’t you return to the club after your visit to the Franklin apartment? You boys did an awful lot of traveling early this morning. You went damned near every place in town except back to The Frog. Why?”

I said, “I don’t know, really.”

Trum glared at Hank. “This soldier talks like a lawyer, MacAndrews. You been feeding him suggestions?”

Hank examined the ceiling and said nothing.

I said, “We decided that we could come down here and report to you early this morning and it would be time enough.”

“Time enough!” He elevated his bushy eyebrows and scowled. “Time enough for what? The police like to act quickly on a murder case, Keye. Your boyfriend here knows that. Homer Bull would rap you over the head with an axe if you pulled that ‘time enough’ gag on him.”

Hank said, “Homer Bull is a gentle man.”

Trum muttered an evil word. He leaned over the desk looked at me. “How do I know that one of you mugs didn’t kill Lecotte? How do I know but that you decided to bump him off and pulled this gag just to set yourselves up as a pair of cute boys? One of you could have done it and the other could have gone along for the ride. It’s happened before. Safety in numbers, eh, MacAndrews? You remember the murder out on Long Island last year?”

“We don’t know Lecotte,” Hank replied. “We never heard of Lecotte. Only thing I ever had against him was his lousy art exhibits down in that cellar slop joint. Why should we kill a guy we don’t know? We’re nice boys, Trum.”

“Naturally. You don’t know Lecotte and you don’t know this Paula Smith dame either. You also don’t know the Mrs. Franklin you met this morning up at her apartment. You just know from nothing except that you saw Lecotte in the alley with a knife in his spine and you heard a phone ring and decided to trace the call and waltz around the city looking for a phantom.” He slammed a hand down on the desk. “What do you think your friend Homer Bull would say to all this, MacAndrews?”

Hank woke up. “Homer would probably say what he usually says, that the great Trum is acting like a cop in a grade B melodrama. Also that Trum is a good guy, but a little weak in the head sometimes. He would tell me that he likes Trum and admires his methods on simple cases, but when a hot item lands on his desk, Trum likes to think he can solve it by yapping at everybody who enters his office. Bull would probably tell you to take a bromide, relax, and send a man over to the Franklin apartment to check.”

Trum controlled the explosion in his face. “I sent a man over there a half hour ago! He should be back any minute.” He turned to me. “MacAndrews tells me you waited in the Franklin apartment a long time. How long?”

“Maybe a half hour. Maybe longer.”

“How can you explain waiting there so long when you were only working on a hunch? How can you explain entering a strange apartment on a hunch?”

“I can’t,” I admitted. “A hunch is a hunch.”

“I suppose Bull would ask me to believe all this,” Trum sighed. “You must have been pretty psychic, or downright positive, to enter a place the way you did.”

“It was a hunch,” I repeated, feeling foolish.

“And you had never been in that apartment before? Never met this Paula Smith person?”

“Never.”

“Never spoke to her on the phone?”

I shook my head and felt the heat rise in me. “I admit I acted on impulse, Inspector. I told you that before.”

Trum shrugged. The buzzer sounded on his desk and he pressed a button and shouted, “Send him in.”

One of his detectives walked in. He said, “Nobody home up there. The place is clean. Everything except the furniture is out of there.”

Hank got out of his chair quickly. He said, “You must have been in the wrong apartment.”

The detective shook his head. “6-C was the number, wasn’t it? Nothing in it but the furniture.”

Trum’s sharp eyes pinpointed concern. “What about the rug, Hardeen?”

Hardeen shook his head. “There isn’t any rug in that living room.”

Trum said, “No rug, eh? No tenant, either? Did you see the superintendent, Hardeen?”

“I brought him with me. Thought you might want to talk to him.”

Hardeen brought in the janitor. He stood in the center of the room squeezing an old felt hat in his hands. He was nervous enough to work his tongue out on his lower lip.

Trum said, “Sit down, Pop. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

The old man put himself down on the edge of a chair. “What do you mean?”

“You let these two men in last night, didn’t you?”

“They woke me up. I was sleeping when they rang.”

“At what time?”

“I don’t know. It’s my job to open the front door for people. I used to look at the clock once in a while, at first. Now I don’t bother. It’s just a job—I do it automatic.”

“Did you see these men leave?”

He shook his head. “I went back to bed.”

“Who came in after them?”

“Nobody. They were the last.”

“I see,” said Trum. “Then all the regulars—the tenants—have keys to the front door?”

“That’s right.”

Trum moved out from behind his desk and walked over to the bookcase. He picked up a paper covered volume and flipped the pages. He put down the book and faced the old man. “Who rented the apartment?”

“A Mr. Franklin, about two, three months ago.”

“He sign a lease?”

“We got no leases. We rent the places furnished, a month at a time. We don’t ask questions about leases because nobody expects us to.”

“What did this Mr. Franklin look like?”

The old man’s eyes were watering. “He was—well, I guess you’d say he was a medium sized man. I didn’t see him except that once. He dropped his rent under my door after that.”

“You saw him just once?”

The old head nodded slowly. “Just the once.”

“And he was a medium sized man, eh, Pop? You took his money and never even looked at his face? Was he young or old? Was he bald? What was he wearing—a potato sack?” He stood over the old man and held his jaw out, scowling horribly.

The old man said, “I don’t remember.”

“What about the woman up there? Mrs. Franklin?”

“I never met her. There are lots of women in the building I never see.”

“You were never in the apartment?”

“Only before they got there. I cleaned it.”

“Describe it to me.”

“Describe it?” The old eyes searched the floor, absently. “It’s like all the others. It has living-room furniture and—”

“How about rugs? Was there a rug in the living room?”

The old man looked up at Trum and smiled for the first time. “Sure there was a rug there. All the apartments have got rugs.”

“Fine,” said Trum, and leaned against the desk. “And what color was the rug?”

He shook his head. “The rugs are different in each place. You can’t expect a man to remember a thing like that.”

Trum paced the room, swallowing his frustration. He sat down at his desk. I caught Hank’s eye and it was loaded with confusion. He walked over to Trum and whispered something in his ear. Trum looked at him glumly and then waved him away.

Trum said, “You say you were asleep right after you let these two men in, eh, Pop? You didn’t hear them go out?”

“I didn’t hear anybody go out. I fell asleep and when I woke up it was seven o’clock.”

Trum nodded to Hardeen and he got up and stood alongside the old man. Hardeen said, “You want his prints?”

“The works,” said Trum. He looked at the superintendent. “I’ll be talking to you again, Pop. If I were you I’d stay close to home for the next week or so.”

The old man swallowed and nodded.

Trum turned to Hank, his mouth a hard line. “Well, Boy Scout, what do you make of that fairy tale?”

“I make this: somebody got out of that apartment in a hurry last night. I also make this: whoever called Lecotte called from that apartment and then beat it. I add it up to this: whoever made that call was tied up with the murder of Lecotte.”

Trum snapped: “Did it ever occur to you that I have a damn good lead to this deal? I might hold both of you for the murder of Lecotte. It could fit the fairy tale you’ve told me.”

Hank got up slowly and leaned both hands on Trum’s desk. “Don’t try to frighten Boy Scouts like us, Trum. You know damned well that you wouldn’t be fool enough to arrest us.”

“And why not?”

“Arresting us would put you in our Boy Scout troop—you’d be operating against your better judgment—you’d be the big bad wolf in this fairy tale.”

Trum didn’t laugh. “Very funny. If this soldier here were a civilian, I’d be tempted to hold both of you. As it is, I’m just as tempted to let him go and keep you here, MacAndrews. After all, a soldier who’s been away from New York for two years or so doesn’t come back and commit a murder on his first day home.”

“Why not?” I suggested. “I might have discovered that Lecotte was making passes at my girl friend. I might have—”

Trum waved me away. “Not a chance. But, MacAndrews here—his deal is possible. Knowing Homer Bull might give him a certain type of courage. You know—the unsuspected detective’s assistant gag, MacAndrews?”

Hank held his nose delicately. “Now you’re talking straight out of the movies again, Trum. Are you’re holding me?”

“Not yet. I’ll let you know when I want you,” Trum said. “For the time being I’ll just watch you.”

Hank threw me a wink and I got up. I said, “I’d still like to find Paula Smith.”

Trum laughed out loud. “Take your troubles to the Missing Persons Bureau, soldier.”

I said, “It’s an idea.”

Hank said, “But not good.”

“You’ll find out some day that I’ve got a couple of good ideas up my sleeve, MacAndrews,” said Trum.

Hank paused at the door. “If you mean that you’re putting a man on me, you’re wasting the taxpayers’ money again.”

Trum shrugged. “I’ve wasted it before, MacAndrews. It’s a habit with me.”

“A bad habit,” said Hank, and we walked out.

CHAPTER 8

We took a cab to The Pen and Pencil and sat at the long table where all the cartoonists eat every day. For a little while we chewed the fat with Henry Boltinoff and Adolph Schus and the great and gusty George Wolfe. The respite was good for my soul, but Hank nudged me off to a small table so that we could talk seriously.

We had a Manhattan, a steak and a good slice of apple pie. We sat over the coffee for a long time. The search for Paula Smith had grabbed hold of Hank, too, and he was full of many theories all of which he outlined with great care.

Hank was a simple soul. He had a fine head for comic strip plot and a fine hand for the art that goes with it. He had trained his imagination to think along certain lines, but this was because of his association with Homer Bull. He was Bull’s good right hand in all extra-curricular work and had proved himself invaluable on many occasions. He confessed, however, that all stimulus, all direction came from Homer Bull.

Hank was the messenger boy, Bull the despatcher.

We sat near the long window facing Forty-Fifth Street. Hank stared across the street, watching a short man who leaned against the wall in the sunlight and puffed a fat cigar. The man was wearing a derby hat, and a black topcoat, too long in the sleeves. From where we sat, his face was a simple oval with a mustache.

Hank scowled. “That Trum is a louse at heart, Jeff. I don’t mind being tailed—I’ve been tailed before. But why did Trum have to put a Bellick on my tail?”

“A Bellick? What is a Bellick? A detective?”

Hank made a face at his coffee. “Bellick is no detective. Bellick is a Bellick. To understand a Bellick you’ve got to know more about police business. There are two kinds of detectives on any force. Type Number One is the smart kind. Trum probably has a dozen men of this type and he saves them for all jobs that require small doses of basic intelligence. These are the boys who come to you in the dead of night, ask you questions and draw conclusions. They are operators. They move with skill and sometimes daring. They work together, think carefully, move slowly in all directions until the pinch is ripe. Most of them are intelligent citizens, well dressed, muscular and not bad to look at. These are the lugs that detective story writers use as patterns for their fictional supermen.”

“And Bellick?”

“Ah, Bellick is another type, General. Bellick is a tail. Bellick is a machine. There are many, many Bellicks in every police office. They are a personal insult to any upstanding criminal, these Bellicks. Observe how well hidden he is out there in the sunshine, warming his fins under our very noses. He might just as well be in here with us having a cup of coffee.” He got up and went to the door. “Hey, Bellick! Come on over here and get in out of the shadows!”

Bellick came across the street at a half trot. His simple face was loaded with surprise as he approached Hank. He grabbed Hank’s hand eagerly.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “Imagine me bumping into you, MacAndrews. Well, well, it’s a small world, like they say.”

“Tiny,” said Hank. “Fancy meeting the great Bellick right here in New York City. Just passing by, I suppose?”

Bellick rolled the cigar in his mouth. “I am just getting a short walk after my lunch. This I always do, every day, regular.”

I shook his hand and waved him down.

Hank said, “Bellick here is one of the smartest tails on the force.”

Bellick studied his cigar sheepishly. “I am only doing my job, gents.”

“He’s modest,” Hank said. “He’s really a smart little tail. Take the way he was watching this place, for instance.”

“This place?” Bellick opened his eyes in mock astonishment. “What draws you to the conclusion I am watching this place? I’m just having a little fresh air after my lunch.”

“Inscrutable,” said Hank. “The great stone face of justice. The mask of honor, the soul of righteousness. The unswerving public servant, unflinching in his duty, relentless in his pursuit. Tell me, Bellick, you wouldn’t by any chance be tailing me?”

“You? Why am I tailing you?”

“Look, Bellick, let’s cut short the repartee. I’ll make a deal with you. Why don’t you just stick with me instead of watching me from across the street? I’m a nice guy. We could talk about things. We could be chums.”

Bellick shook his head, sadly. “You got me wrong, MacAndrews. I am just standing out there getting a little fresh air after lunch.”

Hank threw up his hands. “You see—he’s just a machine, after all, a cog in the wheel. Trum presses a button and Bellick goes into his act. It doesn’t matter that he breaks an old friend’s heart. Duty first, says Bellick. Bellick forgets that it was Homer Bull who gave him his first chance. Bellick forgets the days when he was only a simple flatfoot, pounding a beat out in Canarsie.”

“Aw,” said Bellick, “take it easy, MacAndrews. I got a job to do. I got a wife and kids—”

“That’s just it,” purred Hank. “The closer you are to me, the closer you’ll be to Bull. Then, if anything happens, you’ll be in on the ground floor.”

“Bull in on this?” asked Bellick.

“He will be, soon. I called him in today.”

Bellick studied his coffee cup. “I got to think it over.”

“You’ll be sorry, Harry. What’s going to happen when Bull and I lose you somewhere? I’ll be with Bull and Bull doesn’t like to be followed—it hurts his pride. You know what happens when Bull doesn’t want to be followed. You remember? We lose you.”

The little man sighed and took off his derby. “All right, MacAndrews, I am staying with you.”

Hank clapped him on the shoulder. “Now we’re over the first jump, Bellick. Now I can let you in on the ground floor, so you can help Bull crack this case.”

Bellick opened his cow-like eyes and put a fresh cigar in his jaw. “You got orders from Bull?”

“Straight from the feedbox. Here’s the set up: Bull wants me to tail somebody, you understand? It would be crazy for me to tail somebody while you’re tailing me, now wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to be with you.”

“Don’t be a sucker—I’ll be around when you want me. Trum doesn’t really think I had anything to do with Lecotte’s murder. The old hatchet face just wants to annoy me.” Hank lit a match to Bellick’s cigar. “I like you, Bellick. I like you well enough to give you the job Bull wanted me to do. It’s right up your alley.”

“Tailing?”

“Better than tailing. This time you’ll have to use science. You’ll have to be on your toes.”

“You mean I can talk?”

Hank nodded enthusiastically. “The works. You’ll be following a dame, but you’ll be picking up information about her. She’s the key to Lecotte’s murder, Bellick. Think of the chances. Think of your wife and kids.”

Bellick was selling himself fast. He took out a battered black note book and a pencil. “Who is this woman?”

“Her name is Mrs. Preston and she lives at 17 Quaker Lane in the Village. You’ll follow her everywhere, checking up on the people she sees, what she does with her spare time. She’s the biggest lead in the Lecotte case, Bellick. You get the dope on her and you’ll be bringing a murderer to justice.”

“When do I start?”

“Now. This very minute. You report back to my apartment twice a day.”

Bellick got up and then sat down again, tortured by some small thought. “You are a friend of mine, MacAndrews. For a long time I am considering you a personal type friend. Is this correct?”

“One hundred percent, Bellick!”

“There is only one thing I am worrying my head about in this type deal. Trum is my boss and if for one minute I forget it, I am winding up, perhaps, on a street in Canarsie. You remember this street? I would like to stay away from it, since the salty air is not doing my sinuses any good.”

“Trum will promote you after this deal, Bellick. So far as I’m concerned you’re still doing what your boss told you to do—you’re tailing me. I’ll never let him know otherwise. All right?”

Bellick rolled his cigar end adroitly in his mouth. “And is Mr. Bull also not letting him know otherwise?”

Hank nodded. “Bull will back you up to the limit. He always was fond of you, Bellick. He’ll be happy when he hears I called you in to help us.”

Bellick relaxed after that one. He shook hands with each of us soberly and departed.

I said, “I don’t get it.”

“You don’t know Bellick. He’s a leech. He can hang on to a lead for two weeks without closing an eye. He’ll do us more good away from me, Jeff. He’s liable to dig something down at Mrs. Preston’s that may mean something.”

“Then you think Mrs. Preston is important?”

“I don’t think she’s unimportant.” Hank settled down to a long explanation. “After all, who have we got that amounts to anything, so far? If Bull were here, he’d have all our leads catalogued and would probably be pointing his nose into the important directions. What have we got? We know that Paula lived at Mrs. Preston’s house. We know that she left there and moved somewhere else. We also know that she had an uncle named B. Franklin and we deduce that she might have used his name when she disappeared.” He held up his hands. “End of deductions. Beginning of confusion.”

I said, “How about Lecotte? Why don’t you send Bellick down to the club?”

“Paula is tied to Lecotte by only one small link of evidence—and that comes about because Lucy told you a story. You’ve built a mountain on this molehill and arrived at the conclusion that the redhead Ike mentioned must have been Paula. Then, to make matters still worse, you hightailed after one last night because you thought she fit your mental picture of your dream girl.”

“Never mind the dream girl,” I said. “Even if she wasn’t the redhead I saw last night, Paula may still be tied up with Lecotte’s dump and Bellick might possibly dig up something about her down there.”

Hank shook his head sadly. “You’re dreaming again. We’ve got nothing to follow but Mrs. Preston. At least, she should be first. Bull would tell you that she’s source material, the type of thread that fits into the main design later. You and I should try to follow the other threads, maybe, in the same way that Bellick will operate. We’ll have to dig into the Mrs. Franklin angle and explore that apartment again. We’ll have to keep after that janitor—his story smelled a little from dry rot. Then there’s the possibility of locating one of Paula’s friends, perhaps through an art group—”

I interrupted him there and dug out the slip of paper I had picked out of the drawer in the Franklin apartment. “This note reads: Alice Yukon, Country Road, Woodstock, New York—next Saturday. It may be a date with Alice for this Saturday. Today is Thursday.”

“And Woodstock is an artists’ colony. Could be.”

“It can’t do any harm to take a ride up there,” I said.

“It’s a thread. Why don’t you go? I’ll keep the search moving from this end.”

“I’m going.”

I took no luggage. I crossed town and boarded a ferry to the Jersey shore. The train was slow and crowded and I had plenty of time to meditate. Hank and I had built a top-heavy plan, a plan that worked out of Mrs. Franklin’s apartment and could very well lead me to Mrs. Franklin’s friends. There would be difficulty in meeting such people. I worked on several approaches to Alice Yukon and finally abandoned all of them. If Alice Yukon was a friend of Paula’s, there would be no need for subterfuge. If Alice Yukon was not…

At Kingston I boarded the bus to Woodstock. Kingston lay behind us and we rolled through the tortuous two-lane road that dipped and wound through the brown hills. Pre-war memories clouded my brain. Not too long ago, when art meant painting these hills on canvas, I had tested my hand in these ripe and rolling fields, dabbling in the mysteries of sunlight and shadow and the thousand and one problems of good landscape.

An artist came to Woodstock to live in simple style, unfettered by the hidebound customs and conventions of city life. It was a talented town, a town of musicians and theatrical people, cartoonists and authors. Here gathered the young future of all that was good and bad in American art and letters. Woodstock was a woodland Bohemia, a town of quaint buildings and charming corners.

I walked down the main street, feeling at home, and turned automatically toward Ben Chester’s carpentry shop for I knew that Ben would be glad to see me.

And Ben was. He sat me down and poured me a glass of beer and asked me nothing about the war. We talked about the “good old days” in Woodstock. I admired his latest cabinets and he showed me the new storage place for his special woods. We returned to the house, finally, and he opened another bottle of beer.

“You up here for a long visit, Jeff?”

“I don’t think so, Ben. I came up here to ask you a few questions and then pay a short call.”

“What on earth kind of questions could I answer for you?”

“Don’t be modest, Ben. You’re a specialist in your field—and your field is Woodstock. There isn’t a family within an area of fifteen square miles you don’t know about.”

“Who you itchin’ to know about?”

“Alice Yukon.”

Ben frowned. “The Yukons are quiet folks, Jeff. I can’t say that I really know much about them at all.”

“Them? How many are there?”

“Two. Alice Yukon and her much older brother, Gregory.”

“Artists?”

“They both are, I guess. I’ve seen Alice around in the meadows painting peculiar looking pictures.” Ben wrinkled his nose. “Kind of modern stuff, I guess you’d call it.”

“And her brother paints, too?”

“Never saw him working at it. But I heard he does some sort of work in the art line. I can’t rightly say just what it is. Never really met him myself. He’s kind of a stand-offish man, I’d say.”

I said, “He must be an ornery character if you don’t know him, Ben. How long have they been up in these parts?”

Ben thought. At length: “Four seasons this last summer.”

I whistled. “And you never met the gentleman? Come now, Ben, let me have it. What’s wrong with Gregory Yukon?”

Ben shrugged. “Quiet sort of fellow. Never went out of his way to be friendly with anybody here in town. Can’t hate a man for that.”

“How about Alice?”

Ben winked at me. “Alice is a smart looking girl. You’ll like her, Jeff. Regular pin-up girl she is.”

I said, “I can’t wait to meet one in the flesh. Did you ever meet a friend of Alice’s named Paula—Paula Smith?”

“Local girl?”

“Paula came from the city. New York.”

Ben thought about her for a while. “Never did meet a Paula Smith, Jeff. We’ve got lots of Smiths up here, but they’re mostly Janes and Marys and Toms and Bills.”

“I thought you might have seen a strange girl up here with the Yukon gal.”

Ben shook his head. “Not recently.”

“But you have seen Alice with a friend?”

“Last year, Jeff. Last summer.”

“Remember what the friend looked like?”

He eyed me curiously. “I do remember the girl, Jeff. I saw her a couple of times on the street with Alice, come to think of it. I remember she was a little shorter than Alice, but maybe twice as pretty.”

“Redhead?”

Ben nodded. “Prettiest red hair I ever saw. That’s how it happens I remember her.”

I stood up. “How do I get to the Yukon place?”

Ben gave me my directions and I set off down the road to Bearsville, walking with a nervous step, anxious to reach Alice Yukon. The Yukon house sat in a small grove of firs, well off the road and almost hidden in the tall trees. It was a ramshackle affair, patterned after a Swiss cottage, but neglected badly. The charm had long ago been beaten off this cottage by wind and rain. A few of the shutters hung crazily from their rusted hinges. One of the windows was cracked and covered with newspapers and sheets on the inside. In the silence, the house had an unhealthy look. It was a dead house. It sat among the trees looking for all the world like nothing more than a stage set—a papier-mâché prop out of a Hollywood hillbilly movie.

I stood on the road staring, fascinated by the house. Then my eye roved to the left and I saw the sleek maroon roadster parked in the driveway beyond the firs. The sight of the roadster jolted me back to reality and I kicked myself mentally for having fallen into a mood because of a Woodstock cottage. Many of the small places in Woodstock are kept in casual neglect deliberately. There are always people who fall in love with a certain type of shabbiness. It is part of the Bohemian spirit, sometimes, to retain the “flavor” of such shabbiness in such things as houses, fireplaces, dogs, cats and smocks.

I started down the path and a large and friendly cocker spaniel welcomed me through the gate and broadcast my arrival as he ran ahead of me.

There was a wide screened porch to the left of the faded yellow door. And on this porch sat a girl. She looked up from her book as I approached, then put down the book and waited for me, smiling.

She had a good smile, broad and well made up. There was a fullness to her lips that I liked and her teeth were regular and did the smile no harm. She had a long, pretty face, dark in the eyes and dark under the eyes. There was a sadness in the eyes that the smile couldn’t dissipate. Her hair was tar black and long enough to fall well over her shoulders.

She stood up and I saw that her figure was lithe and well molded. She wore a white silk shirt, opened low and in the mannish style. She wore bright blue slacks that were tight enough to promote her fine hips. Her nails were manicured with bright green polish.

She opened the screen door and came out to me. She said, “Hello, soldier. Looking for somebody? Come in.”

I was about to answer when a man came through the doorway on the far side of the porch. He was quite a lad. His body was fashioned in heavy masses, heaviest in the midsection and the shoulders. He had a shock of whitish hair, well rippled at the brow. His head was square and brutish, fat in the nose, fleshy in the jowls and yet not unpleasant because of his eyes. He had soft blue eyes, gentle and cold and incongruous in that face. He stood there frowning a little as I studied him. It wasn’t comfortable under his frown.

I nodded at him pleasantly, waiting for him to say something, but he returned only the nod and stood there staring at me.

I said, “This is the Franklin place, isn’t it?”

The man said, “Franklin? Who told you anybody named Franklin lived here?”

I recognized the hangover of some foreign tongue in his talk. I said, “Have I made a mistake? I’m sorry.”

Alice Yukon laughed nervously. “There aren’t any Franklins living here.”

The big man glowered at me. “Whoever told you that you should come here?”

“A woman. A girl on Fifty-Fourth Street in New York said so.”

“What woman?” His thick mouth spat the question at me. “The woman who told you that must be insane.” He waved his hands up near his ears and turned his back to me.

“Maybe so,” I said. The silence after each bit of dialogue made me uncomfortable. I caught a small flicker of sympathy in Alice Yukon’s eyes and turned to her. “Perhaps you knew somebody in the city named Franklin?”

She drew back in obvious alarm. “I? Why do you say that?”

“She spoke very highly of Alice Yukon.”

She was hit between the ears by that one. She was about to answer, but her brother crossed the porch quickly and grabbed her arm. She looked up at him and her eyes were loaded with terror. He dropped her arm and turned my way.

“We don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, quietly.

“Obviously.” I warmed to the game after that. Either Gregory Yukon was a fool or he thought me one. I let the silence hang around us for a while. Then I said, “Paula Smith sent me here.”

Gregory Yukon’s eyes were steady when he answered me. His voice dropped and he pitched it to a new low to register mild confusion. “All this is very interesting, I’m sure. But I’m afraid you are talking in riddles. You say Paula Smith sent you here? And who is this Paula Smith?”

“A good friend of mine and a good friend of your sister’s.” I saw Alice Yukon look down at her clenched hands. “Isn’t that right, Alice?”

Alice didn’t say. Her brother answered for her and this time his voice was loaded with venom. “Alice never heard of this—this Paula Smith! Tell him, Alice!”

I didn’t give Alice the chance. I said, “Paula Smith corresponded with me while I was over in France, Alice. I knew her brother, Kip Smith. We were buddies. Kip is dead.”

She began to sob. She said, “I don’t understand all of this—”

Gregory came toward me and stood between us. He was really angry now. He said, “What is all this nonsense? You are upsetting my sister. I must ask you to leave.”

I said, “Take it easy, big boy. I’m not going to harm your little sister. You don’t have to listen, you know. I came here to talk to Alice Yukon. You can forget all about the Franklin business.”

“Forget about it?” he roared. “What kind of a game is this you play?”

“The Franklin business was just a routine—a fraud. I knew you people weren’t named Franklin. I knew you were Alice and Gregory Yukon right from scratch. But I wanted to play. So I called you Franklin for a starter. It warmed up the party, didn’t it?”

Alice looked up at me from over her handkerchief. She didn’t smile at my little joke. Her brother wasn’t smiling either. He said, “Very humorous. Now that you have met us, what do you want?”

“What I have to say concerns your sister. Paula Smith had a date with Alice and I came up here to explain why she can’t make it.”

Alice Yukon stared at me. “Paula Smith had a date with me? But that was last—”

He stepped over and grabbed her arm again. He said, “I warn you, Alice, that you should not talk to this fool. Tell him to go away!”

“I’ll leave when I’ve had my say,” I said. “Evidently you people don’t read the newspapers up here. Maybe you don’t even listen to the radio, either, so it could be that I have some very interesting news for you.” I waited for their eyes. “It might interest both of you to know that one of your friends was murdered last night.”

“Paula?” Alice Yukon barely breathed the word.

I let them toy with their own confusion for a while. Gregory Yukon sat down and let his breath out in a great gasp. I saw his big hands tremble on the chair arm. “Murder? Our friend? Who was that?”

“Lecotte. Pierre Lecotte.”

I watched them take the news of Lecotte’s death and swallow it. It was a bitter pill for both of them. Alice Yukon’s hands went to her mouth in a reflex of terror. The big man dropped his jaw and I heard his breath sucked hard against his throat. They were both shocked to the shoes and showed it.

Alice began to sob.

I said, “Bad news, Alice?”

Gregory put a hand on her shoulder, gently. “There, there, ma petite, you must not carry on.” He turned his big head my way and for the first time registered soft and sweet. “This Pierre Lecotte—he was a good friend of my sister. A very good friend, indeed. It is a shock, all of this. And the way a man like Pierre should die—the murder, ah, that is the horrible thing. That is what takes my breath away.”

“You knew him well?”

“We knew him well. A good friend of ours, this Lecotte.”

“When did you see him last?”

“That would be hard to say. Perhaps one month, perhaps two months ago. What would you say, Alice?”

“Over a month ago, I’m sure. It was when we—”

“I would say close to two months.” He looked up at me with a question in his eyes. “And why should we tell you all this information?”

I shrugged that one off. “You can pull the clam act on me, Yukon; it won’t break my heart. I don’t give a hoot in hell who killed Pierre Lecotte, or why. I never knew the gent. Lecotte interests me for only one reason. It seems to me that anybody who knew Lecotte might have known Paula Smith. Do you follow me?”

He stared at me, deadpan again. “We do not know anything about this Paula Smith person. Absolutely nothing.”

“That’s too bad,” I said and started for the screen door. “You two have been perfectly charming company. I hope the police enjoy you as much as I did.”

“The police?” Alice Yukon’s head came up and I saw the tears brightening her eyes. “Why would the police want to talk to us? We were here—we’ve been up here all summer. Why should you tell them—”

“He has nothing to tell them, Alice,” said Gregory, softly.

“Your brother is right,” I said. “Nobody will accuse you of murder, Miss Yukon. There is more to this case than simple murder. The police will come up here for the same reason I did. Maybe they, too, will be interested in finding Paula Smith.”

“What is all this with Paula Smith?” Gregory asked.

“Nobody knows. I don’t know. She’s disappeared!”

“And you think we know where she is?”

“I was fiddling with the idea.”

“And that is all that interests you? You only want to know where this Paula Smith has hid?”

“You’re getting warm now.”

He walked away from me, his big hands clasped behind his back. He came back slowly, studying the floor. “And if I tell you that at one time we might have known where Paula Smith was located, but at this time we have lost track of her—would you believe me and leave us alone?”

“Of course not. I’m not in the mood for swallowing a routine like that, Yukon, and you know it. This thing is much more serious than I can get you to realize. People who disappear are baffling problems—that’s why we have places like the Missing Persons Bureau.”

“Pah!” He waved a hand at me. “Most of them come back.”

“Maybe they do,” I said. “Others never come back. They’re not only missing—they’re erased. Do you follow me? They’re murdered!”

CHAPTER 9

Alice Yukon closed her eyes and began to cry again, and her body was racked with sorrow. She covered her face with both hands and leaned forward and let herself go in a paroxysm of unrestrained emotion.

Gregory stood over her quietly. He put his hand on her shoulder. “You will please go inside, my dear. You must not let yourself go this way; it isn’t good.”

He waited for her to get up and rush off the porch before he spoke. He sat down where she had sat and lit himself a cigar. After a silence he said, “My sister is a very emotional young woman.”

I said, “I didn’t mean to shock her. But I wanted to find out just how much Paula Smith really meant to her. She broke down when I suggested that Paula Smith might have been murdered. Why?”

He surveyed me through a cloud of smoke. He took his time with me, like an expert tailor estimating a lapel. “Her outburst has nothing to do with Paula Smith. The fact is that she is broken up only about Lecotte.”

I laughed at him. “She doesn’t give a damn about Lecotte or she would have had her fit when I told her that he was killed last night.”

“Lecotte was an old friend of hers,” continued Gregory, disregarding my interruption. “She has known him for a long time. He was good enough to give her an exhibition in his club—The Frog. Alice was very grateful for this exhibition—it helped her in her work because of the publicity. In this way, Lecotte meant a lot to her. She was shocked when she heard of his death, of course. But her grief reached its climax, perhaps, when she realized that Lecotte’s death meant the finish for her forthcoming exhibition of landscapes. She had been working for this exhibit all summer. She had assembled perhaps a dozen fine paintings. You can understand, then, that she broke down as soon as it came to her that her work was in vain. That is a woman for you—she will cry louder because of an exhibit than she will for a murder.”

He was putting on a great show of honesty with his monologue. He used his hands freely while he talked and kept his voice well-oiled and smooth. He watched my face for a reaction.

I gave him one. I laughed. “You’re working too hard, Yukon. But you’re not getting anywhere. Suppose I tell you that I believe your double talk about your sister and her emotions. Let’s go on from there. How about Paula Smith?”

He gave a violent shrug. “Paula Smith is simply an old schoolmate. Alice met her in art school. That is all.”

“She has seen Paula recently?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Paula was up here last Saturday?”

“There might have been such an arrangement,” said Gregory. “However, she never came.”

“Has Paula ever been here?”

“Once or twice. Last year.”

I leaned against the railing. “Tell me about her.”

“What can I tell you?”

I said, “You seem to enjoy the business of understanding a woman’s character, Yukon. Surely you knew Paula well enough to remember the highlights of her personality.”

He laughed, briefly. “And if I were to tell you that I have only seen this Paula Smith perhaps a half dozen times—would you then be interested in my conclusions?”

“Tell me about her. What does she look like?”

“She is a pretty girl—a redhead.” He closed his eyes and toyed with his cigar. “A good figure. On the whole—a very attractive woman.”

“Fine. How did she hit you emotionally?”

“Paula Smith is not emotional. She is a well-balanced girl—sensible, mature and ambitious.”

“Approachable?”

He laughed again. “I cannot answer that. And I cannot understand why you ask it.”

“I like to ask questions. I figure that I can reach some conclusion about Paula as soon as I get a better mental picture of her. So far I’ve got nothing. If Paula Smith is sensible, mature and ambitious, she can’t be the type of girl who would hide herself for any adolescent reason. Yet she has disappeared.”

“It may be that she has gone off by herself to paint. Paula is an artist.”

“Even an emotional artist would leave a forwarding address. There’s more to Paula’s departure than a painting trip, unless, perhaps, she’s gone off somewhere for a special type of landscape. Did she specialize in landscapes?”

“She was versatile. She did landscapes well. She did portraits well.”

“Did Lecotte ever show her work?”

He gave me a look usually reserved for small children or dull adults. “How would I know that? I have told you that she was not my friend. I have been in his club a few times, yes. I have seen Alice’s exhibition there. I think perhaps Paula did have a show at Lecotte’s. Remember, I say perhaps.”

“You mean that Paula was good enough to have had a show in The Frog?”

“I am no art critic.”

He was brushing me off skillfully now. There was a new pitch to his voice, a new oil that smelled bad. Now he was talking down to me, playing a little game he had set up for his own amusement.

I said, “Thank you, Yukon. Maybe what you’ve told me will help. I want you to remember that I’m only trying to find Paula Smith. I’m not interested in Lecotte’s murderer. The police will get him soon enough.” I opened the porch door. “I’ll be staying at The Gables tonight. If you think of any information that might help me locate Paula, you can reach me there or in New York at the Danton Hotel. My name is Jeff Keye.”

He shook my hand and his grip was soft and weak. I walked down the long path to the main road, feeling his eyes upon me. I knew that he would be staring at me until I was out of range. When I turned to the right and started up the concrete road I looked back, briefly, at the cottage. I was right. The bulky figure of Gregory Yukon was leaning on the porch railing, on both hands. His eyes were aimed straight down the path at me. His face had returned to normal. It was loaded with a deep and brooding evil.

I went to The Gables and signed in for the night.

I had a good dinner on the broad, enclosed veranda overlooking the small but colorful gardens. The veranda was deserted. I was out of season. Woodstock caters to the summer trade and hotels like The Gables do a brisk business from June to September. Nobody but traveling salesmen and foolish ex-soldiers stop there in the off seasons.

The big room was quiet and I felt alone and cut off from everything but the landscape of the garden and my own tangled ideas. The solitude and the stillness rankled me. I had a feeling that I was wasting time in Woodstock. Alice and Gregory Yukon annoyed me. They were a new thread in the confusing pattern of clues that led everywhere but to Paula Smith. I felt that Gregory Yukon had bested me—had forced me to retreat when I should have held ground and continued to question him.

Woodstock was a long way from home, a long way from Fifty-Fourth Street. I wanted contact with New York again. I needed an encouraging word from Hank MacAndrews.

I went into the lobby and phoned him, and his personality came through over the wires.

“Glad you called me, Jeff. Anything new on the Yukon angle?”

I told him what had happened and he wasn’t impressed.

He said, “I wish to hell I were a Homer Bull. This stuff is meat for the fat boy, but on me it looks lousy. You’ve got to have a head for this kind of routine.”

“Where do you rent heads like that?”

“They grow on you. I’ll ask Bull the next time I see him.”

“Doesn’t he ever come home to work?”

He laughed. “He’s working all the time. He’s out on his friendship sloop—the Free Lance, unfurling his mizzenmast and porting his helm, but always thinking of next month’s story.”

I said, “Why don’t you get him and tell him about this thing? He might be interested. You’ve got a good angle, Hank. Send him a wire and tell him, you’re being tailed by Bellick. Tell him they may put you in jail. He’ll have to come home—he can’t live without you drawing Doctor Ohm.”

“Maybe you’ve got something there. Only trouble is Bull won’t go near Trum anymore. Trum doesn’t like the fat boy too much—Bull always gets there too soon with too much … and always before Trum.”

“The hell with Trum. Just get Bull back here and tell him about Paula Smith. He can’t be Homer Bull and not recognize the story in it.”

I sold him the idea. He promised to wire Bull immediately.

I said, “What happened to Bellick?”

“Bellick is doing fine. Listen to this report from the goon. He followed Mrs. Preston all afternoon. She went shopping in a knit goods store and remained inside for ten minutes. Bellick deduces she was matching yarn. Then she lammed into the A&P grocery store. Bellick followed her in and got an itemized list of her purchases from the clerk. He’s smart, that Bellick.”

“Uncanny. Mrs. Preston must be enjoying his company.”

“The great Bellick is never observed. He followed her back home and waited until she came out. She went to two bars and had three Martinis. After that she bought a girdle, a hat and a bracelet.”

“Where does she get her money?”

“Maybe you’ve got something there. A boarding house madam shouldn’t have too much moola to throw around. Maybe Bellick isn’t so dumb, after all. Listen to this—” I heard the rustle of paper. “‘She bought two dresses after that—$14.98 for one of them, $26.98 for the other. Then she walked around the Village, window shopping,’ says Bellick.”

“A veritable bloodhound.”

“After window shopping, she stopped in at the Boucher galleries. Can you tie that? She pays real dough for her art, too, I’ll bet.”

“Boucher? Isn’t that the art expert Wilkinson mentioned?”

“Check.” His voice rose, enthusiastically. “You’re getting as smart as Bellick, Jeff. It could be that Mrs. Preston was buying more art for her collection.”

“Originals? Where can she be getting all the dough?”

“Bellick will find out. I’ll put him to work on it.”

“Forget Bellick and get Bull.”

“I’m going to wire him,” said Hank, “just as soon as I get through chewing the fat with a mastermind named Keye.”

I left the hotel and wandered through the familiar main street of Woodstock. I walked for an hour along the quieter lanes; pondering the problem of Alice Yukon and getting nowhere.

I took the main road toward Bearsville, passed the Apple Rock and continued until I arrived at the path leading down to the Yukon cottage. I stood there for a while, tossing around the idea of continuing my little debate with Gregory.

When I turned down the path and came abreast of the first large tree the silence suddenly embraced me and the noise of a small breeze in the firs made my heart pound. It was then that I noticed that there were no lights on in the front of the cottage and the roadster was gone.

I skirted the house, making a wide circle so that I could view it from the rear. There were no lights. The cottage squatted in the darkness and the sight of it teased my imagination. Why, I pondered, should I enter the Yukon cottage? Certainly there could be no direct clue to Paula Smith on the inside. Or might there be one—some small fragment of direction—an old address—a note—a sketch?

I leaned against a big tree for a long time playing the question and answer game with my brain. My meditations pulled me closer to the house. It might have been a sudden gust of wind that sent the shivers prickling my neck, or the sound of a car edging away up the dark road to Bearsville. Or it could have been the quick shock of an idea that forced my feet forward toward the front porch. It occurred to me that the Yukons might have been hiding Paula inside the cottage while I stood debating with Gregory on the porch. It hit me, too, that they might have been holding her there against her will. And added to this were the myriad other conclusions I had reached in less than a half hour of concentrated study of the cottage.

I decided on a simple approach. I entered the screened porch, taking great care to make as much noise as possible. I crossed the porch and bent to look through the window into the living room. I rapped on the window several times and waited for an answering light to flash on.

Nothing happened.

The windows on the front of the cottage were well sealed, but there was an easy way inside through a rear door to the kitchen. I poked a hole in the screening and lifted the latch through a cracked pane on the kitchen door.

The kitchen was large and well kept. There was a small kerosene lantern on the sink and I lit it and turned the wick low and walked through a small corridor into the living room. This was the usual type of Bohemian layout—a big bay window facing the road, an immense fireplace, pine paneled walls, a huge studio couch covered with a red felt throw. In the corner near the fireplace stood an easel and on the easel an unfinished landscape done in the flat tones and simple planes of the modern school. This must be Alice’s handiwork.

There were many framed and unframed oils on the walls but only one of these attracted me. It was a large head of Alice Yukon. The handling of the subject was impressive, the color was fine. The underdrawing was loose and free, promoting the character of the subject in an effect of skillfully planned caricature.

I held the lantern up to this picture and saw the name “Paula” signed modestly in the lower right corner. This, then, was her work. I stood away from it and studied it until my arm wearied of holding the lantern above my shoulder level.

The sight of the picture moved me to action and I circled the room quickly, searching for something and nothing and everything. I went through a small antique desk and studied Gregory Yukon’s checkbook. I explored the cupboards in a large cabinet near the door and found nothing but sketchbooks full of Alice Yukon’s landscape detail.

The one small bedroom yielded little of interest. In the closet, a collection of unframed landscapes, loose canvas, an old paint box and many brushes. I pulled out the landscapes and examined each of them.

There were fourteen, all of them obviously done in the vicinity of the Woodstock hills. All of them obviously by Alice. I was about to replace her pictures on the top shelf of the closet when I saw the last small painting and pulled it down.

This was not an Alice Yukon creation. The dull light of the lantern played hob with the colors of this picture. This was an old one—a very old one, indeed. I recognized the school and placed the artist as Dutch or Flemish. It was a simple scene, an interior. A peasant woman sat on a stool in the foreground. She sat in darkness, but a strong light came through an open window on the left side of the room. I pulled the lantern up close to the picture so that I could examine the finish. It was dirty. It had a dust-like quality that meant age, or neglect. Even under the lantern light a picture of this type should have sparkled. I searched for a signature on the canvas but found none. I returned the picture to the shelf and walked through the living room to the front hall.

The hall was bare save for a small chest of the early American style. I lifted the telephone from the lid of this chest and looked inside. There was nothing but rubbers and an old umbrella.

This, then, was the end of my search. I was about to blow out the lantern when the small red telephone index caught my eye. I opened it quickly to “S” and scanned the names on the page. There were two phone numbers for Paula Smith. I ripped the page out of the book, blew out the lantern and left the house by the front door.

The trip to the Yukon cottage had not been a complete failure, after all. I had made two discoveries, either of which might lead to Paula. I had proved to myself conclusively that Alice Yukon and Paula were very good friends. Paula had painted a picture for Alice. Good portraits take time. Good artists don’t waste time on casual acquaintances.

The telephone listings proved, too, that Alice was more than an acquaintance. I wondered if one of the phone numbers might be the apartment on Fifty-Fourth Street. If this was so, Alice Yukon had kept in close touch with Paula after she left Mrs. Preston’s place.

The lights from a local tavern beckoned me and I felt the need of something to warm my body and my brain.

Dave Luffon spotted me at the bar and came over. Dave was one of the New York cartoon gentry, a man who had risen high enough in the trade to move away from the traffic of the city permanently. He lived the ideal life for a comic man. He inked his sketches and mailed them to his agent. Editors bought his funny pictures and kept the Luffon family well fed, well clothed and housed in one of the most picturesque villas in Woodstock.

Dave was glad to see me. We threw the usual questions at each other. We talked war and strategy—and finally, home front.

I said, “Are you still the friendliest cartoonist north of Kingston? Do you know all the residents hereabouts?”

“There are ten or twelve I don’t want to know.”

“Artists?”

“Artists—and Republicans.”

I held up a hand. “Let’s not wax political. Do you know the Yukons?”

His long face was deadpan. “I’m not in their social set.”

“Incredible. Who up here is in their social set?”

“Nobody but themselves. They are of the hermit crab variety. They live a self-sufficient life, never mixing with hoi-polloi.”

“Longhairs?”

Dave sighed. “Down to their knees. An ordinary cartoonist isn’t supposed to understand their double talk. We tried them one night, the little woman and I, but I gave up when the great Gregory drank a bottle of my best Scotch and then began to throw Picasso and Matisse at me.”

“You ought to hide your head in shame. What’s Picasso got that you can’t understand?”

“Picasso’s got Gregory Yukon. You follow me?”

“How about Alice?”

“Alice has got Gregory, too. Maybe Alice is sorry blood is thicker than solitude. Maybe she’d be all right without her ape man brother.”

“You don’t mind Alice?”

“Alice means well, I guess,” he said. “Matter of fact I’d turn longhair myself if she’d let me paint her some rainy Thursday afternoon when my wife is visiting her relatives in Flatbush.”

“You haven’t changed a bit since your Automat days. Have you seen Alice’s artwork?”

Dave dropped his mouth in a gloomy grimace. “I came, I saw—but I didn’t savvy. She paints the usual modern puzzle pictures.”

“I’ve heard that one before. You mean that you don’t understand them?”

“I haven’t got the time. I like a picture I can sink my eyes into. My brain is fuzzy enough from doing my weekly output of humor.”

I said, “How about Gregory?”

“His line is pure garbage.” Dave sipped his drink thoughtfully. “He’s some sort of a paint technician. Restorer, or something like that.”

“He works for a museum?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“In New York?”

Dave made a face at me. “How should I know? People up in this neck of the woods don’t ask questions of other people who think people in another art bracket are morons. We never got along with the Yukons. My wife sees Alice once in a while down here in the seething metropolis of Woodstock, but that’s all. We go our way and they don’t bother to look.”

“Then who are their friends?”

“Any friend of theirs is no business of mine. How about another drink?”

I begged off and wished him well and walked slowly back to my hotel. It was getting late. My head was heavy with speculation and I wanted sleep.

CHAPTER 10

The sun threw a square of yellow light through Hank MacAndrews’ big studio window. Hank sat at his board, bent into the working pose of the professional cartoonist, a pencil in his ear, sleeves up-rolled and a cigarette hung on his lower lip. Without pausing in his labors he waved me to a seat and pointed to a whole roast chicken and fixings on the large coffee table. I ripped away a drumstick and mouthed it, washing it down with Ruppert.

Hank said, “Hail the conquering hero. What, if anything, did you ferret at Woodstock?”

I told him about my walk in the dark, my visit to the Yukon cottage and my discovery of the old painting and the two phone numbers for Paula Smith.

He put down his pen. “I don’t understand the old oil painting. But the phone numbers sound interesting. Maybe we’ve got a strong link between Paula Smith and Alice Yukon. Did you try calling those numbers?”

“I checked both of them,” I said. “The first one is Mrs. Preston’s number. When I got back to the hotel this morning I compared it with the first number I called after I got out of Halloran. I had made a note of it that day”

“And the second?”

“The phone company wouldn’t say. They did tell me, though, that the number was disconnected.”

“Good enough. Bull will track that down when the time comes.”

I said, “I failed to mention another piece of business. I found a swell portrait of Alice Yukon up there—done by Paula.”

“Better and better,” said Hank. “That sews it up. I imagine Bull will beat a path to Alice Yukon’s door as soon as he hears these things. Obviously the dames were friends—good friends.”

“When does Bull begin to beat these paths?”

“Today.” He scowled at a sheaf of manuscripts, lifted them, flipped them and slapped them down on his drawing board. “The fat boy came home today with two months of Doctor Ohm—in advance! That’s the way he operates. He goes into hiding for a couple of weeks. He sweats out enough story to ease his conscience and break my back. Then, back he comes, full of fun, loaded with good nature and the smell of the sea. He struts into my studio, opens his gunnysack and drops enough work on my board to stagger an art service. The great man is finished. And so am I!”

“You can’t kick. You weren’t working either when he was away. It sounds like a fair deal.”

“I wouldn’t kick if I could, General.” Hank poured himself a beer and waved the glass at his trappings. “I’m a happy man with all of Bull’s flibbertigibbet routines. I’ll be holed up in this dump for over a month now. I’ll be batting my head off with a crow quill pen while Bull takes his ease in every bistro in town. But, am I downhearted?”

“Stop breaking my heart. Where is Bull now?”

“At work—on Inspector Trum. They’ll be calling each other names for an hour or so while Bull wheedles the facts out of the great stone face. He’ll be here soon—wants you to meet him today.”

I said, “I can’t wait. Where do I meet him?”

“At the morgue.” Hank smiled into his beer. “Bull always likes to meet the corpse personally. In this case he’s especially interested in the stiff—he knew Lecotte pretty well back in his Montparnasse days.”

The phone rang and Hank listened and nodded and said, “Okay, boss.” He hung up and grinned my way. “It’s Bull. He wants sometime with you before he sees the stiff. Wants you to meet him over at the Franklin apartment.”

“No morgue?”

“You’ll probably go there later. Bull moves with a system, Jeff. If he’s going over to the Franklin place you can bet he’s got a damned good reason for the trip. Bon voyage.”

I took a cab and on my way made a few notes on a large index card I had stolen from Hank’s studio. I itemized my experiences in haphazard fashion, underlining a few of the important highlights. I scrawled a few personal conclusions and then crossed them out. The best I could do for Bull would be a filling in of the minor scraps that Hank might have forgotten to tell him.

Bull awaited me at the Franklin apartment. My first sight of him was a surprise to me. He stood with his back to me, hands clasped behind him and peering out at the street.

When he turned to greet me I saw that he was short and fat, but his weight was not the fleshy and cumbersome type. He carried himself well and moved with a sure and spry step. He had a cherubic face, half sage, half child. His eyes were deceptive, grayish green and hidden behind sleepy lids. He was dressed in a simple sport outfit, tweedy above the waist line. I didn’t mind the tweeds on his ample frame.

He said, “Hello, Jeff: This is one hell of a place to bring a soldier. I’ve been standing at that window looking out to avoid the shudders inspired by the furniture and fixtures in this hole.”

I said, “It hit us the same way Wednesday night.”

He lit a cigar and settled himself on the edge of the easy chair as though it had been built for electrical wiring. He closed his eyes and listened to my story and as he listened he worked the cigar in his mouth diligently. Occasionally he removed the cigar to interrupt. He was a good listener. The interruptions were few and when they came they were brief questionings aimed at accuracy. I gave him the story from the very beginning, including the trip to Woodstock and my impressions of the Yukon family.

When I had finished his cigar was burned out. He walked away from the chair and went to the window. He opened the window and tossed away his mangled stub. For a few moments he stared absently at the surrounding buildings. When he turned my way he was ready to talk.

He reseated himself on the easy chair. “You’re a good story teller, Jeff. You’ve given me a pretty good picture of what happens to a man with an imagination and a purpose. You’ll be surprised to hear that Hank MacAndrews has reached the same conclusions.”

I said, “My deductions and conclusions are built on a solid structure of wishful thinking.”

Bull shook his head slowly. “Hank bows to coincidence, just as you have. But we can’t admit that all these coincidences are logical until we’ve checked them and established them as facts first.”

“For my money they’re all coincidences. But you must admit that they seem to be running in some sort of direction, don’t they?”

“They’re threads. You find a thread on a rug and what have you got? You’ve got a thread. Maybe the thread came from a sweater—maybe a suit—maybe a sock. But until you find the source of each thread, you’ve got nothing—absolutely nothing.” He held up a hand when I attempted to interrupt. “Think back, Jeff. Try to track down, in your mind’s eye, the first thread of evidence we can work upon.”

I said, “The Preston place?”

“I don’t think so,” said Bull. “I’d say the first important lead came to you from the maid. It was an important lead because it took you to The Frog. And after that?”

“The girl I chased?”

He smiled. “You learn fast. And now we’ve arrived at the point in our problem where coincidence runs hog wild and we must stop and search for other traceable threads. For this reason we must eliminate the girl who ran out of The Frog, for the time being. She may or may not have been Paula Smith. We can’t afford to include her in our reckonings at this point. Do you see why? We have no hook to hang her on. We have no way of checking her. Girls run out of night clubs for many reasons. It’s a common situation. I’ve had it happen to me.” He reached for another cigar, lit it and puffed smilingly. “Are you ready, then, to forget about the girl in The Frog for a while?”

I said, “I see what you mean. You want the next thread that can be tracked to its source?”

Bull nodded. “We want a line to something tangible.”

“The phone call at The Frog?”

“Touché!” said Bull. “That is exactly why we are here now. I like the lead to this place. It smells of something we can follow. I like the Benjamin Franklin angle and the trail to Alice Yukon. But more than anything else, I’m in love with the little lady who called herself Mrs. Franklin and led you away from this hole on a wild goose chase across town.” He got out of his chair and walked to the doorway. He stood there surveying the room for a while. “We’ll start in this room, Jeff. Hank tells me that the furniture seemed purposely scattered when you two walked in here. Are all the pieces in the same position as you found them with Hank?”

“Exactly.”

He walked to the easy chair, lifted it; moved it slightly to the right so that it sat closer to the window. He bent over the floor, rubbed it with a finger. Returning to the doorway, he asked, “Do you remember the color of the rug?”

I apologized for my memory. “It must have been a light rug, but I can’t recall the color at all.”

“You remember the stain as a vivid blot?”

“The bloodiest blood I’ve ever seen.”

“Then it could have been a very light rug.” He led me out of the living room and into the bedroom where once again he stood in the doorway and pondered the interior.

In the daylight the small bedroom was more squalid than ever. The fact that the bed was bare now did not add to its charm. Bull went first to the bed and examined the mattress thoroughly. He ran his finger along the surface of it and then heaved it over and did the same on the other side. He fingered the pillow, picked it up, turned it in his hands, smelled it and studied it carefully.

He said, “This bed—is it in the same position as you saw it that night?”

I thought back. “Exactly the same.”

“Was there only one pillow on it?”

“Could have been two pillows. I can’t remember. Maybe Hank might.”

“Was the pillow you saw covered?”

“Uncovered. I remember that definitely.”

“Good,” said Bull. He made a short note in his little black book. “How about the sheet?”

“It had stains on it. Hank pointed them out to me and I told him I didn’t think they were bloodstains. I thought they were oil paint smears.”

“What color oil paint would that be?”

“A crimson. Crimson Lake, possibly.”

“That color looks like blood?”

“It might, on a sheet.”

“Perhaps,” said Bull. “Are there many oil colors that might look like blood on a sheet?”

“I wouldn’t know. There may be. But Crimson Lake is a very popular palette color. A vermilion might do the trick, too.”

Bull said, “Too bad I couldn’t have taken a peek at that bedsheet.”

He bent over the bed and stared at the mattress for a little while. Then he kneeled and scrutinized the floor. He came up with a few tiny threads. He walked to the window and examined them in the light.

I said, “Clues?”

“Threads. It may have been that somebody tore that sheet. There could have been a fight in this room. It never hurts to have threads like these analyzed.”

He tucked the threads away and went on to the dresser, opening the drawers and smelling them. He examined the closet with great care. “This closet was empty, too?”

“Clean.”

He turned next to the Matisse reproduction on the wall, squinted at it and grinned. “Not a bad job of work, that. A little out of place in this type of bedroom, eh?”

He didn’t wait for my answer. I followed him into the bathroom and watched him continue his routine. The medicine chest held him for many minutes. I wondered whether he, too, was looking for stray hairs, stray red hairs that might have belonged to Paula Smith.

We paused in the hallway on the way out of the apartment. He opened the hall closet and studied it carefully.

I said, “We forgot all about this closet. It could have been that Mrs. Franklin’s boyfriend hid in there while she was easing us out of the apartment.”

“It’s big enough for three men,” said Bull. “And empty enough.”

He toyed with the lock on the front door for a few moments and after that we left.

In the cab, Bull said, “I still like the appeal of that apartment. Empty places are always a challenge to me. A man with an imagination can knock himself out dreaming up the people who belong in an empty apartment. I find myself drawing mental pictures of your Paula Smith. She doesn’t seem to fit up there, and yet the place smells strongly of art.”

“How does the Inspector feel about it?”

Bull laughed a short, humorless snort. “Trum and I don’t exchange theories. I finally persuaded the great man to allow me a few privileges. I’ll never persuade him to allow me a few conclusions. At any rate, I’ve sold him the idea that I’m not interested in his murder—told him I’m getting a fat fee from you for trying to locate Paula Smith. On that basis he’s allowed me to bring an important witness down to the morgue for questioning—the janitor. A lot depends on what I can get out of him.”

I said, “Then everything really depends on the thread to the Franklin apartment.”

“It begins there and it’ll end there.”

At the morgue, a little man named Flax opened the door for us and said, “The old guy’s here, Bull. You want me to send him to you?”

“Not at all, Herman. Take him inside and show him the stiffs. Steer him over to Lecotte’s slab and leave him there to meditate. I want him to get a good look at Lecotte. It may jog his memory.”

Flax said, “He’s a pretty old duck, Bull. A lot of these old boys can’t stand the sight of a dead one.”

“I’ll take the chance, Herman.”

Flax left us alone. I said, “The old man claimed he couldn’t remember Mr. Franklin. You think Lecotte was Mr. Franklin?”

“It’s worth the try. Pierre Lecotte was quite a man for fake names and foolish addresses. He’s been pulling that gag almost all of his adult life.”

“You knew him well?”

Bull closed his eyes. “Not too well. I met him years ago when I was starving gracefully in an unheated room on the Left Bank, back in 1928. In those days every artist in the Montparnasse area knew every other artist. The art group in and around La Rotonde was a well-organized mob, they used the same models, ate in the same dens, and so forth. I was one of the nosy outsiders who couldn’t crack the inner circle, because my art work was of a school nobody appreciated but myself—and even I tired of it after a while.”

I said, “I never knew you painted, Bull.”

“I didn’t. I had a working knowledge, however, of all the borderline idiots who managed to remain in Paris because they, like I, thought they were artists, or critics, or musicians or sculptors. Pierre and I shared a common dream, in those days. We both wanted to be artists. We both failed. His type of painting was too phony for even the modern intellectuals. He attempted to create a new school of art after his first big failure at showing his wares. He coined a weird name, gathered six or seven demented disciples to support him and then financed a small school by seducing the daughter of a millionaire American and blackmailing her for a big pile of money.”

“Versatile chap.”

“Lecotte was more than versatile, Jeff. He was a man who never gave up. His art school was a five star flop, but Pierre didn’t bat an eye. He disappeared from Paris and went to the south of France to try his luck with the gambling. I know this because I met him down at Nice. He was with another woman, of course—this time an English woman who seemed delighted to have him waste her money. He returned to the quarter about a year later—in a new role. He became Lecotte the critic, Lecotte the connoisseur, Lecotte the expert. He milked the tourist trade of many thousands of dollars in those days, peddling cheap art to the innocent Americans at art gallery prices.”

“What kind of art?” I asked.

“Any kind at all,” Bull said. “Lecotte could sell anything—anything at all. He sported fine clothes, lived in good hotels and spoke with a clear and varnished Oxford accent. His approach was masterful. He never went out on a limb. He would arrange his sales so that an assistant would bring a customer to him and beg him to obtain a certain picture for the customer. In this way Lecotte needed no pressure selling. He was always the aristocrat, trying to help the tourist. He was reputed to have married twice and well. He was the type of society lush who considered divorce a sound livelihood. Thus Lecotte prospered and when he had saved a tidy nest egg he moved across to New York and greener pastures.

“I lost track of him for a while,” Bull went on, “and then suddenly he flashed into prominence in the book world. He wrote a wordy opus, a book that lifted him high in the art world. A certain young debutante, stricken with Lecotte’s manly charms, is supposed to have, financed that one. Pierre did well after that. He rose to the heights as an art critic and became known as a sort of broker in paintings. I’ve never checked any of his sales, but I’m willing to bet that many a rich drawing room is decorated by one or more of his swindles.”

Bull got off the desk and we went outside. We walked down a narrow corridor and then through a large metal door into a long room. The smell of death hung heavily in the place. It was medicated death, sharp and cloying. The room was dark, save for the circle of light far down the end where the janitor stood under the lone lamp.

Bull lifted himself to a slab and said, “Hello, Pop. What’s your name?”

“Sammit. Mike Sammit.”

“Fine, Mike, fine.” Bull swung his short legs over the slab, a schoolboy at a picnic. “You know this dead man, Mike?”

The janitor stared at the corpse, blew his nose, shook his head, wiped his eves, fingered his mustache and said, “I can’t be sure, mister.”

“Why not, Mike?”

“A man looks different, stretched out this way.”

“Sure,” said Bull. “I understand, Mike. But his face isn’t real different, just quiet, that’s all. Isn’t this man Mr. Franklin?”

The janitor’s eyes were vague. “He was about the same age, I guess. Youngish, like this one. It’s funny, looking at a man stretched out this way—”

“You said that, Mike. You won’t go out on a limb and identify this man as Franklin?”

Mike renewed his head shaking. “I can’t do that. I just can’t do it. This one may be somebody altogether different.”

Bull slid off the slab. He paced slowly to the far end of the room letting his heels down hard in the silence. His face was aimed at the floor. At the end of the room he stood for a while as though enjoying the tableau under the green lamp.

He came back to the old man and faced him grimly, measuring him through heavy lidded eyes. Bull said, “You’re an old man, Mike. You’re old enough to be my father, but I’ve got to put it to you straight. You’re a damned liar! Why are you lying, Mike?”

Mike winced. “I’m not lying.”

“Who’s paying you?”

“See here,” whined Mike. “That’s not nice—”

The old man gave me his eyes for an instant. They were wet with pleading and fear. I looked away from him, studying the figure on the slab.

Bull said, “Nobody with a pair of eyes could forget a face so fast. This man came into your apartment and paid you money and probably signed some sort of paper. Where were your eyes while all this was going on? Nobody, not even an old man like you, Mike, could forget a face so easily. You’re lying like hell.”

“That’s not so. I tell you I’m telling you the truth.”

Bull didn’t hear him. He was off on another tour of the room. He walked to the far end, then came back casually. He stood at the head of the corpse and stared at Mike Sammit unmercifully. He said, “Who is this man, Mike?”

The janitor shook his head on a hinge.

Bull winked at me and jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. He said, “You’re going to be a little more than sorry before I’ve finished with you, Mike. You’re going to talk.”

He started for the door and I followed him. We walked to the door and stood there looking hack through the darkness at the old man. He remained under the low green shade and the light fell on his shoulders and cast a strong shadow under his quivering eyebrows. He was a small man in a small spot of light from where we stood.

Bull pulled open the big steel door. He reached for the light switch as he opened the door. He let go of the door at the moment he pulled the switch. We remained in the room with Mike Sammit, but Mike couldn’t have known it.

When the light went out we heard a stirring in the darkness. The old man was moving away from the corpse. There was a sound of scraping and a moan of horror and sudden movement. Mike was getting away from the corpse, fast. He hit something in his flight and there was a groan of pain and terror and we knew that he had hurt himself.

Mike Sammit lifted his voice in a thin, sharp wail.

“I’ll talk! For God’s sake don’t leave me in here alone!”

Bull threw the switch and the light returned to the small green shade. We ran down to him and he was on the floor clutching his knee in pain. We lifted him toward a slab.

“Not that!” he moaned. “Take me out of here, anywhere but in this place!”

We carried him out into Flax’s office and set him down on the leather couch. Bull put a chair cushion under his head and said, “Take it easy, Mike. I suspected you’d come to terms in there, but I didn’t want you to cripple yourself first.”

Flax brought in a glass of water.

Mike sipped the water and sucked in his breath unsteadily. He closed his eyes and sank back against the cushion. Bull waited until the frantic breath became normal.

Bull said, “Who paid you?”

“There were two men. They came just a little bit before you got there that night.” He looked at me. “You remember when you got there? Well, they were maybe ten, fifteen minutes before you. I didn’t see them come in.”

“They had their own keys?” Bull asked.

“Must have. I woke up when they were leaving and put on my robe and ran into the hall just as they got through the front door to the street.”

“What did they look like?”

“Wait, I didn’t see them. I only saw their backs when they were going through the door. When I went outside they were getting into a car. I didn’t know what to do. After all, they might have been tenants.”

“If they might have been tenants, why did you leave your room in the first place?”

“I’ll get to that,” said Mike Sammit. “I live down there in the basement. I can see from my window into the street. When I woke up I happened to look into the street. I thought I saw these men carrying something. That’s why I ran into the hall. I figured maybe they were crooks.”

“What were they carrying?”

The old man registered uncertainty. “I can’t be sure. It looked like something big—maybe something in a bag. I saw some white, when they were putting it into the car.”

“Something big?”

“Two of them were carrying it.”

“What shape was it?”

“Shape?” Mike asked himself. “It was big.”

“It could have been a body?”

“It could have been anything. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was a piece of furniture.”

“A chair?”

“Maybe. When I reached the porch the thing was almost in the car. I turned around then, to go back inside, because I was scared. I figured it’d be better if I minded my own business. Then they saw me standing there on the landing and came up after me.”

“You must have gotten a good squint at them. See their faces?”

“I wasn’t wearing my glasses and it was after midnight. How could I—”

Bull iced his voice. “You’re lying, Mike. I’ll have to cool you off inside again if you continue. Whoever hauled that package into the car was seen by you. What did they look like?”

Mike paused, swallowed hard and shrugged in despair. “There was a big man. He was the one who grabbed me by the arm and sort of shook me and told me I better keep my mouth shut.”

“Fat?”

“Kind of fat. Tough, too.”

“And the other one?”

“The other one didn’t do anything. He was shorter, but I couldn’t see his face, honest I couldn’t. He pushed the big guy away and slipped me a hundred dollars. He said there’d be plenty more if I’d keep my mouth shut, but that they’d kill me if they found out I spilled. Then the big one pushed the other guy away and told me not to think they wouldn’t be watching me. He said they’d watch my every move and if they caught me talking I would never know what hit me. This big guy kept talking that way even after the other one went back to the car. He was tough.” Mike paused for a short breath and stared at Bull. “What could I do? Anybody in my spot would have done the same thing.”

Bull nodded dreamily. “Naturally. Did you see either of them hanging around the house after that?”

“I didn’t go out. I looked out of the window a lot, but I couldn’t really tell because I’m under the sidewalk.”

“You’re sure they didn’t come back?”

“I hope I never see them again, those two.”

“Maybe you won’t,” said Bull. “How about that car? You remember it at all?”

“Be reasonable,” Mike Sammit pleaded. “I told you it was dark out there.”

“You must have seen a bit of the car. Take it easy and think back, Pop.”

Mike took it easy. “The wheels glistened a little. I can remember that, all right. They must have had some kind of bright metal on them, maybe on the hub caps. The rest of the car I can’t remember.”

“Big? Little? Roadster?”

“Big as hell.”

“A sedan?”

“A fancy sedan—it was a big, long car.”

“Fine,” said Bull. “And after you got the money, you went back to bed?”

“I was scared for real after he gave me the money. I no sooner got down to my apartment when the bell rang again and it was this man here and another one. I let them in and went back to my room and took a sleeping pill.”

“And nobody else woke you?”

Mike shook his head violently. “Nobody could have. I was out cold. I was too scared to want to stay awake.”

“Fine, Mike.” Bull put a gentle hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Now, how about that fellow inside on the slab?”

Mike closed his eyes wearily and muttered, “He’s your man, all right. He rented the apartment from me.”

“As Benjamin Franklin?”

“He’s Franklin—I don’t remember the Benjamin part of his name.”

Bull stepped back and lit a fresh cigar. He nodded to me soberly.

“That’s more like it, Pop,” he said.

CHAPTER 11

Bull moved with a purpose.

We left the morgue and went immediately to Boucher’s large art gallery in the heart of the fine arts belt in Greenwich Village.

The store front was a symphony of flat and simple planes, chrome and gray, highly polished and modern, undecorated and cold. In flamboyant italics, the name Boucher floated across the top third of the window. In the window, set against a crimson background, were a few choice pictures, framed in heavy wood, unadorned and natural in tone.

Boucher himself greeted us in the well-lit interior. He was a tall man, grayed in the temples. His face was pure Gallic, modeled in the aristocratic style. His eyes were soft, sober and gentle. His smile was white and went well with his gray and delicate mustache. He wore a blue pinstripe suit and a bright tie that might have been designed by Dali.

He spoke softly, using his hands in the smooth and pleasant gestures of upper bracket French society.

“But, of course, Pierre Lecotte was a good friend of mine,” he told Bull. “He worked with me often when he wanted certain artists for his night club shows. It is a shame that a man like Pierre was taken from the art world. He was on his way to great things for the American artists.”

“You knew him well?”

Boucher smiled into his memory. “We were friends, even in Paris—a long time ago.”

“Good friends?”

“Oh, yes,” said Boucher, quickly. “Pierre and I saw each other very often. After all, it was a matter of business, too, you understand. He was intensely interested in modern art. His book—”

“I’ve read it,” said Bull. “Did he ever sell any of your pictures?”

Boucher opened his eyes in amazement. “But, of course. Pierre showed pictures from this gallery, as I said. He had several important showings of my people artists.”

“You favor certain artists?”

“Naturally,” shrugged Boucher. “A gallery owner must favor certain artists. There are all kinds of modern painters, as you can imagine. A gallery man must select the ones he thinks will stand up. It is the element of time that is important in these paintings. Artists must have a quality of permanence,” he groped for words, “it is the exhibitor who must judge many painters, really. You agree?”

Bull nodded, smiling. “Who were these favored people?”

Boucher enumerated seven artists on his fingertips. He went no higher than seven. One of the seven was Alice Yukon.

“That is a long list for a gallery of this size,” he said. “Of course, there are others, occasionally, but they are lesser artists. They must yet develop their talents so that I have more faith in them.” He walked to the wall and pointed out a landscape done in a thick mixture of dead greens and browns and highlighted with a flame of crimson which might have been a barn if the artist had ever seen one. “This is Ormsbee, for example. He is good, yes. But he is still groping for a clear expression. I hang him occasionally, but I do not feature him until I believe in him.”

“I can understand,” said Bull. “His color is fresh from the sludge pots. You may have to wait longer than a year for Ormsbee. I know him well. He would do better if he gave up Benzedrine.” He strolled along the wall, appraising the pictures with a critical eye. He paused before a large canvas, a picture of a black man who kneeled in a field of bright flowers. He studied the painting carefully, stepped away from it, squinted at it, approached it again. “This is your Alice Yukon, a lady with plenty of talent. How long has she been painting?”

Boucher was ecstatic. “Alice will go far. She has not been painting long, but she has direction, no?”

“I like her color.” Bull turned to me. I walked over and examined the painting more closely, as though I had a reason for doing it. I nodded to Bull and made the face of a connoisseur who has tasted fresh art and found it likeable.

I said, “She’s almost as good as Paula Smith.”

We saw Boucher’s eyebrows rise suddenly. Bull said, “You know Paula Smith’s work?”

Boucher couldn’t hide his discomfit. “I have seen it, yes.”

“But you didn’t like it?”

“Not exactly,” said Boucher, with a small grimace. “I would say that she is in the same class with Ormsbee. She is a talented girl, yes—but far too erratic to be displayed now.”

“Erratic? That’s a queer word for art criticism,” said Bull. “You mean that she had no style?”

“Sometimes you do not like an artist for a combination of reasons, isn’t that so?”

I said, “Sometimes you just don’t like the artist?”

He looked at me tolerantly. “I did not say I disliked Paula Smith.”

Bull said, “Come, come, Boucher, I’ve seen the girl’s work and it’s far beyond Mr. Ormsbee and a few years ahead of Alice Yukon.”

A small light of anger shone in Boucher’s eyes, but he dimmed it quickly. “Art is, in the last analysis, a matter of personal opinion. A picture that might please me would perhaps infuriate you—”

“Nonsense,” said Bull, flatly. “I’ve heard many people talk of Paula Smith’s work—people high in the art world. A smart dealer operates on the consensus. You wouldn’t let your own prejudice affect your sales, would you?”

“Prejudice? Why should I be prejudiced?”

“Perhaps you knew Paula personally. Maybe you didn’t like the way she wore her hair. You knew her, of course?”

“I knew her. I met her with Pierre, occasionally.”

“Like her?”

Boucher was annoyed. “That is unimportant. I did not like her painting.”

“But Lecotte liked it.”

“Did he? That does not necessarily mean she had painting talent.”

Bull laughed shortly. “You knew Lecotte well. Was he in love with Paula Smith then?”

“All this is ridiculous,” said Boucher, raising his voice for the first time. “This has become no longer a discussion of art. You will forgive me, gentlemen, if I leave you now. There are things to do today. I have a show—”

“I won’t be a moment, Boucher,” said Bull softly. “But, of course, if you would rather talk with the police—”

Boucher was stopped by the word police as suddenly as though it had been a hand on his arm. He came back, full of alarm, his handsome face clouded with worry. “The police? I do not understand?”

“You were a friend of Pierre Lecotte.”

“I was a friend, yes. But they do not think that I—”

“The police do not respect friendships, Boucher. They are faced with a double mystery. Lecotte was murdered. Paula Smith has disappeared.”

“But why should she disappear?”

“A person may disappear and leave for another city, take up another life and exist under another name for years,” said Bull. On the other hand, another person may disappear and turn up later in a burlap bag somewhere in the Hudson. You follow me?”

Boucher sat down slowly.

Bull said, “When did you see her last?”

“Perhaps two months ago. With Pierre. We had drinks together.”

“Was Lecotte in love with her?”

Boucher stared at a small spot halfway up the wall. “Perhaps. I cannot say—I don’t know, really. Lecotte was not that close to me. I knew his reputation. He had many women. Perhaps this time he really fell in love. It is hard to say.” He lit a cigarette with elaborate care and then studied it. “She is a good looking woman, this Paula Smith. It could have been that he was in love with her.”

Bull changed the subject suddenly. “You were seen in The Frog on the night of Lecotte’s murder. You were talking to Mrs. Preston. Did you leave with her?”

Boucher showed no surprise at the new line of questioning. “I have no recollection of when Mrs. Preston left the club. I had a drink with her and then went out of the place.”

“Where did you go?”

“I went to my apartment, of course.”

“Of course,” said Bull. “Mrs. Preston is just a friend?”

“One of my regular customers,” Boucher smiled. “Although her purchases aren’t very expensive. She usually buys good reproductions.”

“She bought something yesterday afternoon. A reproduction?”

“Yesterday she bought an original. She has wanted to own a certain painting by the Austrian—Verdek. It is a simple thing—a landscape of trees and mountains, not well painted, but done in the Verdek manner, much thick paint and few leaves. She admired this painting for many weeks. Yesterday she bought it.”

“How much did she pay for it?”

“I sold it to her cheap, although she did not bargain with me. She paid $850.”

Bull whistled. “That’s a lot of money for a boarding-house landlady to pay for fine arts.”

“She fancies herself a connoisseur of a sort,” said Boucher, indicating with his smile that he disagreed with her. “I am in business to sell pictures, not to question incomes. She may have saved for years for such a purchase. Some people are that way.”

We started out of the place at last. In the doorway. Bull paused for his last question. “You know Gregory Yukon, of course. What does he do in art?”

Boucher came to the door. “Gregory is my good friend. He is an expert at restoring old pictures. He paints very well himself, but long ago gave it up to do scientific work with paintings. He is at present experimenting with the Black Light. You know of this?”

“A marvelous discovery. It will save art lovers a lot of money.”

On the way to Hank’s studio, Bull explained Black Light to me. Jack DeMent, a young genius in the scientific world; had discovered the light years ago. Art collectors, glass collectors and such used the light to prove their purchases genuine. Paint pigments used today contain elements unknown a century ago. A painting placed under Black Light is analyzed for age of pigment. Occasionally the name of an original artist, even erased can be read under the Black Light, which reveals the traces of paint pigment left in the canvas.

“Gregory Yukon is one of the best restorers in the city,” said Bull. “I know his reputation. I questioned Boucher about him to see whether he would deny knowing him.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Wouldn’t Boucher be rather proud of knowing a man like Yukon? He’s probably hired him on many a job for his gallery.”

“Undoubtedly. You’re forgetting the fact that a man like Yukon might be studying Black Light to discover a way to beat it.”

“You mean that Yukon may be a phony?”

“A man has to eat. There isn’t much stomach fodder in restoring ancient paintings these days.”

CHAPTER 12

“Alice Yukon is your chore, Jeff,” said Bull. “She’s in town.”

We had finished two Scotches each and Bull was comfortably past the middle of his latest cigar.

I said, “What do I do?”

“Pump her! From your description of her emotional breakdown when you last saw her, I’d say that she was ripe for a bigger and better breakdown under the right conditions.”

“Meaning what?”

He shrugged and smiled. “A girl like Alice Yukon will tell us more, much more, under the right set of circumstances. It should be easy for a spry Joe like you to break down her reserve and make her tell us a bit of the background knowledge we lack. She knew Paula Smith—they were good friends. Why did she weep when you questioned her? Was she sorrowing for Paula, worrying about Paula? Was Paula on her conscience in any way? You can find out, if you use the right approach.”

I said, “I begin to see what you’re getting at. Dream boy stuff?”

“Dinner—a few well selected drinks, perhaps?”

“An hour or two on the sofa?”

“You’re an optimist.”

“I’ve met Alice Yukon,” I said.

“I’ll be waiting for you at Hank’s place,” said Bull.

I took a cab to the Village. We wound through the maze of narrow streets and pulled up alongside a low, barn-like structure which housed the Yukon’s city abode.

The windows were oversize and built on a level with the small brick porch. I saw the dull glow of a lit lamp behind heavy curtains. It was almost dark now. The curtain in the window to the left of the front door stirred and I made out the shape of a woman’s head.

A moment later Alice Yukon opened the door for me.

I said, “Hello, Alice. Busy?”

She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. She said, “It’s the wandering soldier again. Come on in.”

The first floor of the building was all living room. There was profusion of assorted furniture in the place, odd antique pieces, well upholstered and inviting. A huge wall hanging decorated the far wall. On other walls, many good oils added warmth and livability to the room. A small fire burned steadily on the hearth. I saw a cocktail shaker on a little table. One glass sat alongside it.

Alice Yukon brought out the mate for this glass and filled it for me. She said, “Sit down, Jeff. Tell me how you’re getting on with your search for Paula.”

I sat. I watched her cross the room and drape herself on the big red couch near the window. She was wearing slacks again, this time yellow, but cut tightly around the hips. Her yellow blouse did her torso no harm. For a quick instant I thought of Matisse and the painting in the dirty apartment where we had met Mrs. Franklin. But you couldn’t daydream with Alice Yukon in your line of vision. She was a beautiful girl.

I said, “I’m in just the same spot I was in when I met you yesterday. Searching for missing women isn’t my forte.”

“You found me easily enough.”

“You’re in the phone book. Paula isn’t.”

She toyed with her glass. I wondered what had changed her mood so quickly. Yesterday the mere mention of Paula’s name had produced a different effect. Today she was calm, well poised, deliberately talking about Paula. I wondered whether she was half lit. But if she was tight, her control was marvelous. Her eyes held mine steadily, just as steadily as her hand held the fragile little cocktail glass.

I finished my drink and crossed the room for a refill. She watched me closely, then held up her glass for me. I filled it and sat down alongside her.

I said, “You mix a good drink. I’m in the mood for a few hundred of these. They’ll boost my morale, maybe.”

She leaned toward me and it was an attractive pose because of the tilt of her blouse. She said, “Why don’t you give up? Paula probably knows all about her brother, anyhow.”

“Does she?”

“Probably. After all, the army sends telegrams to relatives of all casualties.”

“They do, indeed. But I gathered from Mrs. Preston that Paula had left her place long before Kip died.”

She got up, took the cocktail shaker with her, and disappeared into a room that must have been the kitchen. I heard the sound of ice falling against metal. I meditated for a while upon the correct approach to this new personality.

She returned with a fresh batch of cocktails. She was walking a bit unsteadily now, humming a light tune to herself. Not too well oiled, I figured—but on the way.

We drank and talked about her art. She brought out several of her paintings and held them up for my approval. I approved. We drank some more. We finished the second shaker. She produced a large portfolio of nudes and we discussed them.

I said, “Kip used to say that Paula is a great artist. Do you think so?”

“Paula is tops. I’m just a rank amateur compared to her.”

“She painted a swell picture of you up in Woodstock.”

Alice put down her sketch. “You saw it?”

I nodded. “Fine piece of work.”

She was almost angry with me, but not quite. “You broke into our place last night?”

“Broke in? No—walked in. You should get a better lock for your kitchen door.”

She laughed. “I’m sorry I missed you. Gregory and I left for the city just after you visited us. I wanted to stay, but he had business here in town. If I had known that you were coming back, maybe—”

“I should have warned you. I liked that cottage.”

She came across the room to sit beside me. She sat very close—close enough for all the creature comforts.

I said, “A soldier without a purpose could really settle down in this place and enjoy himself.”

She opened her eyes wide at that one, studying me with the care and purpose of a big sister. When she reached for the cocktail shaker her arm rubbed my cheek and I remembered that my big sister was married and settled down in Akron with a husband and two kids.

Alice said, “Why don’t you give up the hunt for Paula?”

“I don’t give up easily.”

She put down her glass. “Where will it get you? Paula is old enough to know what she’s doing. When she wants to come out, she’ll come out and you’ll meet her and it’ll be nice and natural. Why knock yourself out doing a job a good detective might even bungle?”

“Ever meet a good detective?”

She shook her head. “Don’t tell me you’re a sleuth in disguise?”

I said, “I’ve just met one—without a disguise.”

She sobered a bit. “You mean you’ve called in a detective to find Paula? What is this between you and Paula?”

“A lot of nothing that might amount to something.”

“How jolly,” she pouted. “Maybe I ought to save my cocktails for a rainy Thursday. I’ve been brushed off before, but not on my own couch.”

I took her hand and she didn’t pull it away. She was close enough for kissing now. Paula Smith was Paula Smith but this was Alice Yukon and she was as pretty as I’d ever want a girl to be and the fire in the hearth was doing things to me. I kissed her and she didn’t mind at all. After a while she said, “Then you’ve really called in a detective?”

“I didn’t say that. You did.”

She got up and stretched. “I could go for another shaker full of cocktails. This time I’ll make a specialty of my own, a little concoction that makes soldiers forget their worries.”

I said, “How about some dinner first?”

“How can you think of food at a time like this?”

“Ever since my first taste of army rations I decided that I’d make a pet of my stomach if I ever got far enough away from the shooting. Put on some street duds and we’ll get us a swell feed.”

She leaned over me. She looked not at all like a big sister in that pose. “You military men are wonderful. Orders are orders, soldier.”

I decided that I could risk kissing her again on an empty stomach. She was well worth the effort.

After a while, she said, “Which will it be, soldier, eating or sitting? I’m broadminded. Look, I’ll put something together in the kitchen. I’m a good cook. You curl up with an issue of Esquire and hold yourself together until I come out with the steaming platters. I’ll yell when it’s ready.”

I didn’t ever enjoy the sound of a woman yelling so I followed her into the kitchen and helped her slice a roast chicken for some sandwiches. She went about the business of making coffee with a professional skill.

We ate at a small table in the dining nook. We talked of many things and the talk was good. Alice Yukon excited me. Her conversation was as well formed as her figure and I found myself paying far too much attention to the former as well as the latter.

Throughout our charming tête-à-tête we had run the gamut from modern women to modern art, from modern men to modern warfare. All of this was a perfectly delightful pastime for a returning soldier, talking to a type of girl I hadn’t seen in many moons. But we were only talking and eating, after all. Paula Smith had dropped into the shadows again and I suspected that this had been Alice Yukon’s purpose. I wanted to revive her.

I was about to ask a pointed question when we heard a troubled noise.

Alice put down her coffee cup, suddenly.

“Sit tight,” she said, “that must be Gregory.”

I said, “Must it?” and waited for her in the kitchen until I heard her scream.

I rushed through the living room and when I reached the hall I found her on the floor in a faint on the little red carpet.

Gregory Yukon’s collapse wasn’t quite so pretty. He lay sprawled beside her, a big heap of man; his body half through the door. His shirt front was a blot of crimson, from the left shoulder down to the beltline. He lifted his head feebly in the slow motion gestures of a dipsomaniac. He mouthed a foggy voiced syllable and then his head went down.

I said, “Take it easy, Yukon. I’ll take care of you in a minute.”

CHAPTER 13

Gregory Yukon’s wound was nothing more than a bullet nick and the big man was suffering more from shock and fear than pain and bloodletting. I washed his shoulder and after a while he stopped bleeding and I covered the puncture with a wad of cotton and antiseptic and adhesive tape. I let him sleep.

I revived Alice next and she came awake with a mixture of embarrassment and relief.

She said immediately, “Gregory—is he all right? What have you done with him?”

“I’ve got him inside on the couch. He’s okay.”

“The police—did you—?”

I shook my head. “That comes later.”

She bounded away from me and ran over to where big brother lay. She kneeled beside him and began to whimper a bit.

I tapped her on the shoulder and when she turned her head I put a hand under her arm and lifted her away from him and over toward the easy chair. I said, “Your brother is as healthy as I am. Look, he was shot, but the bullet only nicked the fleshy part of his shoulder and then buried itself somewhere else. Brother Gregory is suffering from shock—a common disease among the uninitiated in battle.”

“But who could have shot at him?” she whispered. “Who would want to hurt Gregory?”

“He’ll let you know in a minute. I’m going to bring him out of his nap.”

I wet a towel thoroughly in the kitchen and when I returned Alice was back at the couch again, breathing heavily over her brother’s head.

I said, “Step back, honey. He’s liable to come out of it waving his hands like a traffic cop.”

I slapped Gregory gently with the wet towel. He blinked his eyes and opened his mouth to suck in air. His gestures were wild and stupid and funny, all at the same time. He was a child having a nightmare, a drunken adolescent, a heavy clown. I shook him gently.

Gregory jerked himself upright. His eyes were wide open now and I noticed that they were heavily bloodshot. Alice went to him but he pushed her away and made a great show of concentrating on me.

He waved a hand, shakily. “Where did you come from?”

Alice said, “Jeff was visiting me. We were in the kitchen, eating, when you—”

He interrupted her with a short sob and a gentle quiver, accompanied by a grimace of pain that a dying man might use in a B picture. His dramatics brought Alice to his side again and this time he didn’t push her away when she comforted him. It made me sick.

I said, “You’re breaking my heart, Yukon. I’ve seen featherweight infantrymen stay at their posts for two days with better wounds than you’ve got. Maybe the antiseptic will sting a while, but you’ll be playing the outfield with the rest of the team tomorrow morning. Who shot you?”

His face fell into its accustomed angry groove. “That, my friend, is none of your business.”

I said, “I can make it my business.”

He looked from me to Alice and I thought I saw her color a bit. He said, “Exactly what are you driving at?”

“You’re slow on the uptake, Yukon. The police might be interested.”

“The police? Why should you tell the police?”

“It’s the law. When a man gets a slug in his shoulder, the police like to know who aimed the gun. They’re liable to accuse me of aiding and abetting a criminal. They can slap me in the clink and hold me for a year or two.”

Yukon was unimpressed. “You cannot prove that I was shot. Neither can the police.”

Alice said, “You’re both talking like fools. I don’t see any reason for your telling the police, Jeff. Why should you be concerned about who hurt Gregory?”

“I’m a curious Joe, Alice. I like to stick my long nose in other people’s vestibules and smell out what makes them panicky. I had an impulse to come down here today for a visit. Why? Maybe it was because I felt that I wanted to know you better, Alice. Then again, it might have been only the effect of your figure upon my artistic brain. Cartoonists like the dames when their figures are encouraging.”

“Charming,” said Alice. “I’m flattered.”

“You shouldn’t be. My impulses move in strange ways. For instance, I can’t understand why you rebel against telling me more about Paula. She was a pal of yours. Yet you refuse to talk about her, or worry about her disappearance. You’ve been sidetracking me for the past two hours. You’ve been making me chicken sandwiches and loading me with heavy cocktails. You’ve been giving me your eyes and your conversation and not a damned thing else. You don’t want me to know any more about Paula Smith. Or do you?”

She shrugged. “I’ve told you all I know.”

“Malarkey. You haven’t even begun to spill and you know it.”

Gregory interrupted. “You are absolutely wrong, Keye. You’re on the wrong track if you think Alice is holding back information about this Paula Smith.”

“More malarkey,” I said. “You’re going to get yourself into a mess of trouble one of these days with your double-talk. You should be anxious to have the police latch on to the gent who just winged your shoulder. And how do you react? You want to keep your secret to yourself, isn’t that it?”

“There is no reason to involve the police in my personal affairs.”

“The police have a bad habit of involving themselves in such things as gunplay.” I crossed the room and stood over him. “You’re quite a character, Yukon. I don’t figure you. I can’t understand, for instance, why a big strong man like you faints dead away from a bullet scratch. You’ve been around. You know the law. You know, too, that if I report this little incident you’ll have a couple of strong willed gentlemen from the police department down here who might sweat the information out of you. They figure that every bullet wound is caused by a bullet and every bullet comes from a gun. And that brings them to trigger fingers and maybe attempted murder, or attempted robbery, or attempted blackmail. Put them all together, Gregory, and they smell to high heaven. I figure that all of this horse play may somehow be tied to the mysterious disappearance of my girl friend, Paula Smith. Do you follow me, or am I talking too fast?”

Alice stared at me unbelievingly as I mouthed my dialogue. Gregory Yukon lit a cigarette but I caught the quaver in his hand when, he raised the match to it.

He said, “You are talking nonsense, my friend.” He stood up and made a small face at the pain in his shoulder. “I’m going upstairs for a minute. You will do me the favor of not phoning the police until I return?”

“I’m not in the mood for doing favors. When do you return?”

“I want to change my shirt. We can talk after that.”

“I’ll wait.”

Alice watched him go with worried eyes.

I said, “Anything left in that cocktail shaker?”

She poured me a drink. “Are you sure he’s all right? He looked pale.”

“He’s the anemic type, I guess. He’s only got a glorified scratch on his shoulder. Why doesn’t he want the police to nab his mysterious assailant?”

“You’ll have to ask him that one.”

“You don’t seem to know much about your brother’s private life, or are you pulling the same starry-eyed act you handed me about Paula Smith?”

She sat down beside me and gripped my hand and the grip was hard and full of meaning. “It’s getting so that you worry me, Jeff. You shouldn’t be mixing into other people’s affairs the way you do. You’ll get into trouble someday.”

“Trouble like this?”

She didn’t mind the kiss. “Suppose I were to tell you that whatever happened to Gregory has absolutely nothing to do with Paula Smith. Would you believe me?”

“Would you want me to?”

“Don’t be so stubborn. Forget about Paula, can’t you?”

“Not today.”

“I could help you forget,” she said, and kissed me again.

I got up and looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty. Gregory must have decided to make a new shirt for himself. Or had he?

I said, “Get your big brother down, it’s time for more double-talk, only this time maybe the police will umpire the game.”

She laughed at me gently. “Gregory is gone, silly. He left some time ago by the back door.”

“And you kept me interested so that he could scram?”

“I kept you interested because I wanted you interested.”

She wanted another kiss, but I brushed her off and grabbed my hat and made for the door.

“I’ll be seeing you again, lovely,” I snarled.

CHAPTER 14

Bull awaited me in Hank’s studio. I told him my story.

He said, “I’m glad you didn’t call Trum. He would have loused things up a bit. If Yukon was winged, I’d like to find out about all the details before our good friend Trum goes into his departmental mumbo-jumbo. Sometimes the police can ruin a good lead by following through according to their own set of rules.”

Hank said, “Funny about a big guy like him fainting that way, isn’t it?”

“Shock,” said Bull. “The bigger they come, the harder they collapse, sometimes. I wish we knew where he got that shot. It might help.”

The doorbell rang and Hank answered it. It was Bellick.

Hank said, “Here’s your friend, Homer. Bellick is here with a couple of aces up his sleeves.”

Bellick turned his derby in his hands, full of a nervous modesty.

“I am happy to see you, Mister Bull. I am busy on this case for you all day long.”

Bull whacked him on the back and gave him a chair and a cigar. “You are the most dependable man on the force, Bellick. There are too few detectives who operate the way you do. I’m proud to have you working with me again.”

Hank said, “So am I. You want a drink, maybe, Bellick?”

“I could enjoy a small drink. I am not supposed to be having these things when I am on duty, of course. But right now I am supposed to be having supper, so why can’t I have a drink with my supper?”

Hank said, “Are you hinting at a sandwich?” He faded into his kitchen.

Bull dropped into an easy chair. “Let it spill, Bellick.”

Bellick said, “I am considering calling my stuff to MacAndrews. Then I draw the conclusion maybe I better tell you first.”

“A good idea, Bellick. Start at the beginning and give it to me.”

Bellick nodded at his notes. “Like MacAndrews tells you, I’m down first at this Mrs. Preston’s house. I am standing there watching the place and I see a messenger boy walk up on the porch with a big package. I allow Mrs. Preston to grab hold of this package and take it inside.”

“You’re sure it was Mrs. Preston who took the package?”

Bellick smiled. “I am familiar with this woman. It is Mrs. Preston who takes the package. After she takes the package, I follow the messenger boy up the street and ask him what this package is that he delivers. He is a fresh kid and does not talk. I break him down and he admits that he is from the Boucher Galleries. This leads me to decide that this package is maybe a picture.”

I swallowed my laugh and Bull coughed over his cigar.

“Well done, Bellick. Anything else from the boy? The price of the picture, maybe?”

Bellick swallowed hard, embarrassed. “I unfortunately do not inquire about this, Mr. Bull.”

“What size picture was it?”

“Big—it is not a small picture at all.”

“And, of course, you weren’t interested in the artist who painted the masterpiece? You’re slipping, Bellick, you’re slipping. What next?”

Bellick consulted his book. “This Mrs. Preston walks out of her house at ten-thirty prompt. She takes a taxi and goes uptown on Fifth Avenue. I am following her, of course. She gets out of the cab at Ninety-Seventh Street, walks up to a big house there, one of the private ones, not an apartment house. I see her go inside and then I walk up to the door and catch the name on the bell. This house belongs to a Mrs. Shay Carruthers.”

Bull leaned forward in his chair and jerked the cigar out of his mouth. “Are you sure it was Mrs. Shay Carruthers? There weren’t any other names on the bell plate?”

“I am positive it is Mrs. Carruthers for the reason you mention, Mr. Bull. It is a one family place, big and old, like the spot where the society stiff Reynolds is murdered last year. You recall?” Bull urged him on. “Mrs. Preston stays in this Carruthers place for one hour and forty minutes and then comes out, takes another cab and heads down town again.”

“Is this Mrs. Preston carrying anything out with her?”

“Nothing at all. I follow her down to the Village and she stops at Fifth and Waverly. She stands there, sort of looking around like as if she has maybe spotted me tailing her. Then walks West, ducks down a couple side streets and winds up in front of Boucher’s Galleries. She goes inside for maybe five, ten minutes. She comes out with a tall guy.”

‘White hair and mustache?”

“Exactly correct,” said Bellick. “She and this tall guy walk back to her house. They go in and the tall guy stays with her for maybe a half hour. He comes back out and puts me on the spot. I do not know what to do—should I follow this guy or watch Mrs. Preston? I think fast and follow him.”

Bull whistled a tuneless dirge through his teeth. “You should have thought slow, Bellick. You’ve got a better mind when you keep it in first gear. MacAndrews assigned you to watch Mrs. Preston, not Boucher.”

“That is correct,” stammered Bellick, “but, I thought—”

“You should never think, Bellick. You should follow. I think I can tell you what happened. You followed Boucher to his gallery, then returned to Mrs. Preston’s?”

Bellick nodded to his knuckles.

“But Mrs. Preston didn’t show after that?” Bull asked.

“I waited there, but she didn’t show up. I figure maybe she went out while I’m tailing this Boucher. So I give up after a few hours and come here.”

Bull got up and shook Bellick’s hand. “Good enough, Bellick. I think you can leave Mrs. Preston alone now. From now on you continue with your new love—the tall man with the mustache. His name is Boucher—Henri Boucher. Don’t let him out of your sight. Just watch—don’t think.”

Bellick accepted one of Bull’s cigars and went away with renewed enthusiasm. Bull picked up the phone and dialed a number. He said, “Gurney? Check your files on Mrs. Shay Carruthers, will you? Find out whether she’s been off on another fine arts spree recently.” He turned to me with a grin. “This Mrs. Shay Carruthers is an original Thorne Smith character, Jeff. Her particular mania is picture collecting. She’s a bit unhinged mentally, buys originals by the gross and has the biggest collection of phony art in the world. Old man Carruthers left her five million dollars to play with and ever since his death she’s been gathering pictures for a forthcoming Carruthers Collection.” He stopped to listen to his friend Gurney. He nodded his head sagely and then shook it sadly. “You say she’s given up announcing her purchases? Since 1941, eh? Thanks, Gurney. Drop by some afternoon for a slug of Bourbon.”

Bull sighed. “The old lady was swindled so beautifully back in 1941 that she’s decided not to announce any more of her purchases. In 1941 she swallowed the bait of a phony Italian Count who told her he had unearthed an original Rembrandt, done secretly for the Prince Regent of Italy or Flatbush. It was a classic fraud, netting the Italian Count a cool $250,000. He was soon caught spreading his largesse among several of his aristocratic family in the tenement section of Williamsburg, a dark part of Brooklyn. The Count, it was discovered, was the son of an Italian fish peddler named Rocco Beneviti. The Count had learned enough art jargon in Erasmus Hall High School to gain confidence for the master stroke.”

“I remember the case,” I said. “I’m an Erasmus Hall boy, myself.”

“It was well publicized, that swindle,” said Bull. “It convinced Mrs. Carruthers, evidently, that she might better limit her purchases to the moderns. It also convinced her that she should keep her discoveries to herself. Publicity of that type can be very embarrassing to a dilettante.”

Bull lifted the phone again, asked information for the phone number of Mrs. Shay Carruthers. He dialed the number. He said, “Is Mrs. Carruthers at home? I’d like to speak to her. I’m an art dealer, I’ve just discovered an original—”

Bull put the phone down. “Her butler says that Mrs. Carruthers is not interested in pictures at present. It could mean that the old bag is involved in a deal and won’t consider another until the current swindle is climaxed.”

“Swindle with who?” asked Hank. “Mrs. Preston?”

“I don’t know.” Bull studied his cigar. “If we could only get closer to the Preston dame.”

“I can do that chore,” I said.

“She knows you,” said Bull. “It would be impossible.”

“There’s Lucy.”

The fat man chuckled. “Of course. Can you get inside the house?”

“If I haven’t lost my touch.”

“He’ll get in,” said Hank. “Give him your keys.”

Bull told me what he wanted and gave me a ring full of assorted keys. I would search Mrs. Preston’s rooms thoroughly, examine all records, look for cash, and especially pictures.

“What sort of pictures?” I asked.

“All sorts. List them, if you can—the originals.”

I returned to my hotel to freshen up. I called Lucy and found her a bit coy, but not unwilling to share my company for the evening. She went off duty at nine o’clock. It would be too late for a movie, she suggested. I asked if I could visit her at home. She giggled girlishly and told me Mrs. Preston might not like the idea. She told me to come at nine-thirty, finally. Mrs. Preston always went out to a bar at nine-thirty.

I took a shower and found myself singing under the spray. Things were moving and moving rapidly since Bull had entered the mix-up.

I had just finished shaving and dressing when the phone rang. It was a woman, a young voice, soft and yet heavy with purpose. She said, “Jeff Keye? I’ve been trying to get you all day. This is Paula Smith.”

I sat down on my bed, suddenly, filled with a confusion of excitement and relief. “Paula? Where are you? I’ve been looking all over the city for you.”

There was a silence. “Where I am is unimportant. I’m on my way out of town now and won’t be back for two months. I’d be glad to see you then.”

“I could come to you,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you—about Kip.”

“That would be impossible. I’m going to Hollywood. I’ve got a commission there.”

“Where can I write you?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I’ve settled. You’ve been very sweet, Jeff—I appreciate the trouble I’ve put you to.”

I said, “Who told you where to reach me?”

She disregarded my question. “I’ve got to be going now, Jeff. I’ll get in touch with you—I’ll write to you later.”

When I put down the phone my hands were clammy on the receiver and my collar seemed suddenly too small for my neck. I called Bull and told him about the phone conversation with Paula.

He said, “That’s interesting, but not unexpected.”

“Not unexpected?”

“I’m no superman, Jeff. People who disappear are sometimes filled full of an annoying schizophrenia. It’s hard to understand their motives. Paula is still among the missing, isn’t she? Maybe she wants it that way. Maybe the girl you heard wasn’t Paula Smith. We can’t be sure.”

“Then who—?”

“We won’t worry about her. Did you get the date with Lucy?”

“I’ll see her at nine-thirty.”

“Good hunting,” he said. “And report to me as soon as you get out of there.”

I hung up. I stood there, torn between leaving and taking another shower. I could have used another shower.

CHAPTER 15

Lucy welcomed me, bedecked in her finest. She was more than tolerable in her silk blouse and tweed skirt. Her face shone with simple glamour, the sort of finish a clever stenographer puts on for her best beau.

She led me into the living room and a lone light burned near the bay window. The sofa was well padded and comfortable. There was a hush in the house. I made the most of it.

At ten-thirty she answered a whimpering call from upstairs and left me to attend to Mrs. Crandall. I circled the living room and made a list of the pictures. My tally showed seventeen reproductions, including the Burchfield. There was a large lithograph, hung foolishly in the darkest corner of the room. It was a black and heavy item, overdone and uninteresting, by an artist named Falto. I crossed the threshold and entered the dining room to continue my cataloguing. The predominating motif here was black and white. The room was loaded with etchings, too many to list, too dull to be of any importance.

The hallway held seven pictures, five of which were standard reproductions, including Wilson Homer’s epic “Gulf Stream.” There was an oblong mirror set on a line with the stair railing, and on either side of this mirror a small etching—a Rembrandt reproduction, but well framed and clear and good in the line.

Lucy tiptoed downstairs and watched me examine the pictures.

She said, “Aren’t they simply beautiful?”

I led her back into the living room and we sat on the couch again. I said, “Honey, art is good for the mind but it does nothing for a man’s stomach. What could you be cooking in the kitchen for a hungry old soldier?”

She got off my lap and leaned over me. “Waffles?”

“Wouldn’t they take too long?”

“They’d be worth it, the way I make ’em.”

I said, “Make a gallon of coffee and a few hundred waffles and I love you forever.”

She skipped to the dining room door and then turned to face me. “You take a nap. When you wake up I’ll be back in here with a big bunch of waffles.”

“Suppose Mrs. Preston walks in and finds a sleeping G.I.?”

She wrinkled her small nose and tittered. “Mrs. Preston don’t ever get back before one-thirty. She’ll just about be filled up by then.”

“How about the others?”

“They’re all out until midnight.”

She left me then. When the door to the kitchen had swung closed I got off the couch and headed for the hallway. A small night light burned at the second floor landing. I climbed the stairs quickly and made a tour of the small hallway. There was a sound of steady breathing from the first room to the right. Mrs. Crandall. The room opposite would be Mrs. Preston’s. In most boarding houses the landlady reserves the best exposure for her own use. I tried the knob. The door was locked.

I set to work on the lock, testing Bull’s key ring. The fifth key unlocked the door.

The room was fairly large and fairly typical. There was an elegant four poster bed, canopied with the frilly network most antique lovers use to promote the age of their discoveries. I pulled the heavy drapes over the bay window and switched on my flashlight.

The walls held two large oils, ornately framed and finished in gilt. Over the bed: an oval job, depicting a sleepy nude in the process of dampening her feet in a silver bucket. Opposite the bed: a giant square painting of a farmhouse and a barn, done in the flat, simple planes of the modern landscapers. In the corner: a signature—Verdek.

This, then, was the picture Mrs. Preston had bought from Boucher. I stood away from it, studying it. I made faces at it and tried to understand the landlady’s love of it. There was a touch of the amateur in the composition and the color could have been better if the artist had used less white and more intelligence. Why would Mrs. Preston fancy an item of this sort? What impulse brought her to the purchase of a picture like this—a soulless creation, dull and uninteresting?

I removed it from the wall, fascinated by the frame. I set the flashlight on the bed and focused the beam on the picture. I knelt on the floor and examined the back of it. Evidently Mrs. Preston was uncertain about this frame. It was held in place by two brads, loosely stuck in each side. I removed these brads easily and slipped the canvas out of the frame, examining the tacked edges.

The canvas, too, was lightly tacked to the canvas frame. There was a reason for this, an obvious reason. Verdek’s picture had been tacked over another canvas. I began to remove the tacks.

I had pulled eight tacks when the flashlight suddenly went out. I dropped the picture in a reflex of terror and as it fell from my hands somebody hit me with a fistful of lead. It was a glancing blow, calculated to quiet me permanently, but it did nothing more than stun me. I fell over on my side and my assailant was quick to follow his advantage. The second blow missed my head and hit my chest. I grabbed for a throat but could find none. I felt the burred fabric of a man’s tweed jacket and heard the deep and throaty grunts of a man’s anger. My first wild swing missed him completely but I caught his jaw with my next and in that split second contact with his face I knew he was mustached.

He outweighed me. He leaned his weight into me and lashed out at my head. His aim improved and his fist caught my jaw and my head jerked back to hit the wall. He hit me again and I kicked out at him, but the springs were out of my legs.

He left me then and I heard him curse me. He rolled away and ran out of the room. I heard him going down the stairs, fast. I rubbed my head and shook away a few of the stars and groped around me for the flashlight. I found it, lit it and aimed it around the room, dazedly.

The picture was gone.

I stumbled down the stairs and into Lucy.

She said, “My God! You look terrible. What were you doing up there?”

“Didn’t you see anybody run out of here?”

She shook her head. “I thought it was you coming down the stairs.”

“It wasn’t me, sugar. It was a big bad man with a big picture—Mrs. Preston’s latest. I heard him come in and followed him upstairs. He hit me with a small building up there and beat it with the picture.”

Lucy began to sob in a high key. “This is terrible. Mrs. Preston will blame it all on me.”

I said, “Not a chance.” I took her back to the kitchen and threw away the waffle batter, disposed of the nut brown waffles and poured the coffee into the sink. We eliminated the cutlery.

“Get your coat and hat,” I told her. “We’re going out.”

She got her coat quickly. We walked quickly to Seventh Avenue and entered a bar. I left her there. I bought her a drink and told her to nurse it until she felt that Mrs. Preston had returned home. I said, “You were out all night with me, understand? We left Mrs. Preston’s just after you saw Mrs. Crandall. You’ve got a wonderful alibi, honey—me. Don’t say a word about what happened. I’ll call you tomorrow and find out how you’re doing.”

I took a cab to Hank’s place, still bothered by a few birds in my head. Bull gave me a drink and listened to my story.

He studied my list of Preston pictures carefully. He stuffed the list into his pocket and said, “This artist Verdek is a rag-picker, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t hang him in a backhouse,” I said. “He’s one of the flat plane boys—slug nutty with surfaces.”

“And you didn’t see any part of the picture under Verdek’s?”

“Not even a corner of the surface, really.”

“That’s a shame,” said Bull. “It ties us up for a while. Mrs. Preston doesn’t sound like the type of art buyer who would pay Boucher prices for a ham like Verdek. Your list of her collection more or less sets her up as the middle of the road type of dilettante, the sort of dame who plays safe, buys enough of the recognized masters in both the academic and modern schools. And now we have her buying a Verdek and using it as a cover for another painting. It smells to high heaven of something more than simple art gathering. How about the tacks in the picture under the Verdek? Were they stuck in tight?”

“I didn’t have much trouble prying them out.”

“Two sets of tacks?”

I thought back. “One set of tacks, applied loosely.”

“That might clear Boucher,” said Bull. “A gallery man would probably pin down the first picture tightly and mount the phony over it so that it could be easily removed.” He paused and shook his head at himself. “I’m arguing like a Bellick. If Boucher did the job he might have tacked it that way, too. After all he’s a gallery man—an exhibitor. He may not know beans about framing a picture.”

Hank said, “Be yourself, Homer. Boucher must certainly know how to frame a picture. Even I can do it. Two sets of tacks in a good oil painting would be murder on the canvas. No self-respecting gallery man would do it that way.”

“I bow to MacAndrews,” said Bull. “How about your pugilistic friend, Jeff?”

I described him, emphasizing the effect of his fists on my head. “He had a mustache, too.”

Hank said, “It could have been Boucher. He sports a fringe under the nostrils.”

I said, “Could be. Boucher has a mustache.”

“We can’t build a man around a mustache,” said Bull. “Some of my best friends have mustaches. But Boucher is all bones and not very wide. You’d outweigh him, Jeff.”

“Weight isn’t everything. He may be the wiry type.”

“He didn’t seem to be. I can’t imagine Boucher putting you away. Are you sure the man had a mustache? You might have felt the fringe of his eyebrows.”

“I felt his nose. I was reaching for a way to get him off me. I wanted to throttle him and at the same time scratch his nasty eyes out. I’ve got a good memory for faces, especially after I’ve rubbed my hand over an upper lip that sprouts fuzz.”

Hank said, “How about Semple? Couldn’t it have been that type of mustache?”

“Semple’s mustache is only an excuse,” I reminded him. “It’s really only the shadow of his cute little nose.”

“I didn’t notice,” said Hank. “But you should know. Didn’t you do a sketch of him before he walked over and tried to act like a movie tough guy?”

“I did a sketch. That’s why I’m sure it wasn’t Semple.”

Bull chuckled. “Bad figuring, Jeff. You can’t be sure of what type of mustache your fingers caressed. You were pretty much wrought up at the time you reached for your assailant’s face. You may be mixing a bit of wishful thinking into your conclusions. It might easily have been Semple, from the way you’ve described him to me. He has beef and it was beef that downed you. On the other hand, we’ve got a gallery of mustaches. Mike Sammit, the janitor, has a mustache. It wasn’t Mike, was it?”

“You insult my good right arm. I’m weak, but I’m not dead. I could handle Sammit with my elbows. Sammit is no match for even a Boy Scout. It wasn’t Sammit.”

“And Yukon?”

I put down my drink. “I never gave him a passing thought. Gregory could have done the job, all right. He’s big and he’s heavy and he’s got a right arm like a meat axe. But Gregory is suffering from a bullet wound in his left shoulder. Do you think a man who just finished a fancy faint could rally enough to stage a brawl like I just had?”

“A man with a purpose might,” said Bull.

“What purpose?” I asked. “Getting that picture?”

“Yukon is in the picture business. What size is his particular lip fringe?”

“It could be the fringe I touched.”

Bull sighed. “Have we forgotten any other mustaches? This case reminds me of another man hunt I experienced not too long ago. That time I was hunting for noses. Remember, Hank?”

“Lumpy noses,” said Hank. “How could I forget?”

I remembered another mustache possibility. “We’re forgetting the character in the Franklin apartment, Bull.”

“You didn’t see him that well, did you?”

“We didn’t see him at all, really. From where we stood we couldn’t know whether he sported whiskers or a beard down to his knees. But he was a big man, and heavy, or am I miscalculating his fleeting silhouette, Hank?”

Hank nodded sagely. “He had a heavy frame, but I wouldn’t swear to his pan or his facial ornaments.”

“We can forget him for a while,” said Bull and reached for his coat. “Come along, Jeff, we’re going for a little ride.”

“Ride? Where?”

“Over to Mrs. Preston’s. She should be reeling home by this time. I’d like to get a firsthand look at her face when she finds that painting missing.”

We walked downstairs, opened the hall door and stepped right into the muzzle of a gun.

It was Semple.

CHAPTER 16

Semple said, “Put your hands up, both of you.”

Bull finished buttoning his coat, slowly. Semple grinned a stupid, wavering grin. His face was blotched with the bruise I had given him at Lecotte’s. He wet his lips with his tongue, blinked his weak eyes.

I said, “Hello, Semple. You don’t want this man. Let’s keep our fight personal.”

Semple killed the grin and toughened his brow. He jerked the gun toward the street corner. “Both of you. This guy is Bull, ain’t he?”

“In the flesh,” said Bull. “That eye looks sick, Semple. Too bad there’s a steak shortage, eh? A little fellow like you should learn to keep his big mouth shut and stay out of range.”

Semple shifted his weight around and his gun hand trembled. “Shut up! I got a good mind to let you have it, lug.”

“You’ve got a bad little mind,” I said. “And you’re as yellow as you’re fat. Put down that gun and I’ll add new color to your rosy cheeks.”

Semple stepped back. “Keep your hands up and walk over to that car. Try anything smart and I’ll beat your brains out with this rod, see?”

“Don’t frighten me,” said Bull. “I’m a nervous man. Where are we going?”

“Get moving.”

“I’m as nervous as hell, Semple,” I said, enjoying his stock bad man gestures. “You certainly are a frightening character.”

“Get moving!”

We moved.

The car was a Rolls and the driver was a Latin character with a dark face and long hair. The hair on the sides of his face dropped below the lobes of his ears. His teeth were very white in his smile. When we stepped into the spacious interior of the Rolls, the Latin was smiling.

Semple heaved his weight in after me and kept the automatic on his knee. The chauffeur started the car and it purred into gear. The chauffeur addressed himself to the rearview mirror.

“Is that the guy, fatso?”

Semple grunted.

“You mad at me, too, fatso?”

Semple said, “Shut up and drive the car.”

Louis shrugged. We turned up Second Avenue, Louis began to whistle a piece of slow rhumba, and tapping the rhythm on the wheel with his right hand. He stopped whistling to say, “You better maybe put the rod away now, fatso.”

Semple’s free hand poked a fat finger into Louis’s back, hard. “Cut the smart talk, Louis. One more crack out of you and I throw you out and drive up there myself.”

Louis threw back his head and laughed. When he stopped laughing he slid his eyes half around, pursed his lips and made a loud, vulgar noise. “Wait’ll we get back, fatso. I can’t wait to see you get your lumps. What’s gonna happen to your puss shouldn’t happen to a dog!”

Semple sat back slowly. “I’ll get to you later,” he grumbled.

We crossed town and went up Fifth Avenue at a good speed. There was no traffic and Louis had a way with the traffic lights. When we reached Seventy-Second Street, Louis swung left and eased into the park and under the bridge and through the park to the West Side.

At Central Park West the car swung uptown for a few blocks, U-turned and parked under a fancy canopy. Griffin House was a big place, one of the newer giant apartment houses opposite the park.

A man in a doorman’s uniform walked toward the car.

Semple nudged Bull. “Get out, Bull. Walk straight inside and don’t try anything.”

Louis laughed again. “Put it away, fatso. You’re knocking yourself out.”

Bull stared at the doorman. He said, “Class. I didn’t expect to wind up in the mink belt.”

Semple stood on the curbing, still holding the gun.

Louis leaned out of the car and whispered to him hoarsely. “Put the rod away, you dope. These guys ain’t running, are they?”

Semple said, “Shut up and get out of that car.”

Louis came around. “A goddam fat Boy Scout, if I ever seen one.”

Semple put the gun into his right hand coat pocket, grudgingly.

Bull and I led the parade, with Louis behind us and Semple dragging up the rear. We walked into the empty lobby and Louis nudged Bull toward the elevator.

In the elevator, Semple ordered the seventeenth floor.

Louis said, “I hope mamma is home.”

Semple wheeled on him. “I thought I told you to keep your big mouth shut?” The little white scar on his cheek whitened under his sudden color. “Clam up!”

We walked down a plush corridor to a door at the end of the hall. It was a short hall, of the kind usually found in the deluxe type of cliff dwelling where two apartments occupy the entire floor. Semple pressed the bell. He stood flatfooted before the door, allowing us a close-up of his back. I wondered whether this was the mountain that had dropped upon me not too long ago.

Semple’s right hand held the gun in his pocket. He was breathing audibly. Louis still whistled the rhumba.

Bull said, “I feel like a bit player in a grade D melodrama. Don’t these plug uglies simply frighten you to pieces, Jeff?”

I said, “The big man with the gun thcares me, poppa.”

The door opened and a little colored girl appeared. She accepted Semple unsmilingly, stepped back to let us in.

Semple said, “Tell her I’m here with the detective.”

The girl gave Bull the side of her eye and walked away through a doorway.

Louis said, “Walk right in and make yourselves cozy, gents.”

Bull and I sauntered to the wide entrance to the living room and looked inside. We walked in.

It was a long narrow room, overcrowded with what seemed to be expensive furniture, the sort of overloaded tripe that belonged to the French kings and should have been buried with them. Many odd tables stood in unusual places. There was a rococo-shaded pottery lamp on each of these tables. You got the feeling that perhaps some of these tables and lamps were for sale, there were so many of them. The rest of the furniture was scattered willy-nilly throughout the big room; small chairs, large and well stuffed chairs, antique and modern chairs, enough of them for a wake or a small convention.

The color, too, was as varied and nonsensical as the furniture, bright range reds and blues seeming to hold sway. The drapes on the east window were broad sweeps of blue material. The walls were almost free of color and their whiteness added havoc to the decor.

There were a few pictures, most of them of the French bedroom school of art. A lone lithograph dotted the far wall.

Bull said, “Charming little rat nest, isn’t it, Jeff? And yet some poor and innocent creature undoubtedly calls this home.”

“A work of sheer art,” I commented. “A gem of decorative skill. Phew!”

Bull crossed the room and studied the lithograph. It was a Daumier, a picture of a guitarist strumming his instrument and mouthing a song. The word MONOMANES was printed over the man’s head. Below the picture, the French verse read:

LE GUITTARISTE—AMATEUR

Narguant le baillement immense

Qu’il provoque en chantant ses vers,

Il chanterait une romance,

Sur les débris de l’univers.

The initials H.D. were signed in the left corner, over a mark reading: Chez Bauger Ft. duCroissant 16.

Bull said, “Charming thought. Daumier is the most permanent artist the world has ever seen. He’d make a fortune if he were alive today, just merchandising this stuff with fresh costumery.”

We went to the window and looked down at the kidney shapes that were the park lakes. Semple came after us, turning to stand in the wide entrance near the piano. Bull took a cigarette from a teak box.

“Sit down, Semple,” he said. “You’re a bundle of nerves. Your blood pressure will floor you if you don’t watch out.”

Semple stared at him. “Go to hell!”

“You’re frightening me again. Where’s your boss?”

At that moment the woman with the retroussé nose strode into the room holding her head high. She was a smaller character in her bright yellow robe. She carried herself with the same bold posture, weight on her hips. She made the most of her ample bosom. She swayed with a burlesque stride. The yellow robe was cut low.

She had a face that held a small spark of faded beauty, and the nose promoted it. Her eyes were well set in her head and loaded with mascara. Her lips were an orange smear. She was smiling a brittle, nervous smile when she reached us.

Bull didn’t rise from his chair. His eyes played with her hair and rolled slowly down to her shoes.

She leaned for a cigarette, lit it, and jerked her head toward the door and Semple. Semple wasn’t looking at her. He was making believe he liked flowers, plucking at the bowl of imitation gardenias on the piano top.

She crossed the room and swung Semple around by an elbow. Semple reddened to the ears. His right hand remained in his pocket. She eyed the pocket.

“You stupid fool!” she screamed and hit him hard with the full strength of her right hand. Semple’s gun hand came out of his pocket and moved up to protect his face. She felt his right coat pocket at that moment. She slapped him again, harder.

She used both hands and slapped him three times across the face with each hand. He didn’t move away from her. He stood there taking it. His eyes watered and his mouth hung open stupidly, but he stood there taking it.

“You imbecile!” she screamed. “Did I tell you to go get this man with your gun? What do you suppose he thinks of me now, sending a jerk like you after him with a gun?”

Semple didn’t know the answer.

“I told you to go get him—to ask him to see me,” she shrilled. “Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that? I should have known better, sending an ape like you. Hand me that gun!”

Semple put the gun on the table. His eyes were a sea of tears now, bathing his cheeks. He sucked in his breath twice, in quick, childlike gasps. He turned his head away from her, staring obliquely at the rug.

She jerked the gun away and put it in her robe. Then she slid an evil glance at Semple.

“Get out!” she snapped. “Get the hell out of here, you fat lush, before I lose my temper again!”

Semple left. He didn’t slam the door when he walked into the hall. With a great show of nerves, she crossed the room and sank into a chair opposite Bull. She sobbed great sobs into a lace handkerchief.

Bull said, “What’s eating you, Mrs. Gant?”

She brought her head up at the mention of her name. She cut the sobs with a knife and sat there sniffling, eyes wide. “I thought I was smart when I found out who you were, Bull, and where I could get you. But how do you know my name?”

“I used to read the tabloids when their editorials were comic strips. The good old days, when you were a great event in the lives of the press photographers.”

She managed a weak and artificial smile. “Sure. Of course.” She rose and drifted to the lacquered orange bar near the window, “Let’s have a couple of light ones before my head breaks open. You boys like Scotch, I’ll bet.” She fiddled with bottles. “I’ll bet you think I’m crazy, or something, the way that dope brought you up here.”

We accepted the Scotch. Bull said, “If you wanted me, why didn’t you come yourself? I’m not a hard man to see when a lady knocks at my door.”

She had big black eyes full of mascaraed slyness. “I guess I was afraid to ask you. I’m a home body,” she said. “I don’t go out much.”

“You patronize night clubs,” said Bull. “You were sitting in Lecotte’s place on the night he was murdered. Have you been interviewed by the police yet?”

“They know where to find me.”

“I wonder. Maybe they haven’t found out you were there. In that case you would be a lucky girl.” Bull walked to the window and eyed the landscape. “But Trum is a pretty thorough hound. He’ll get to you.”

“You won’t tell him?”

Bull threw up his hands. “Me? Not a chance. Trum and I aren’t sharing secrets. You didn’t call me up here on police business, did you? Because if you did—”

She walked over to him quickly and put a hand on his elbow. “Take it easy, big boy. I called you up here because I know you’re a better man than Trum. I’ve got a case for you.”

“I didn’t know I had a public. My trade is writing.”

“I know. I knew all about your detective work from the newspapers. The time you got that lumpy nose character—”

Bull turned away from her. “That was last year. Since then I’ve retired. I’ve decided to leave all the detective work to detectives like Trum and concentrate upon my muse. I’m not in the market for cases, you see. I’m no pro.”

She forced a laugh. “What difference does that make?” She took a long swallow of her drink, then sat down and crossed her legs. They were still all right—good enough for eager eyes over the runway—thin and well curved where curves should be. But her frame was fleshy now and far out of the big leagues in burlesque. There was something sad about her, something too big for me to grasp in between the quick dialogue.

She said, “I can pay you well, Bull.”

“No doubt, but I’m not interested in money any more. A man makes a certain amount of dough these days and takes it easy. Surtaxes, you know.”

She threw him a broader smile. “Every man has a price. I’ve got plenty of what it takes for a man like you.”

“Not today. Besides, you’ll be hearing from Trum one of these days. I don’t want to be mixed up with that guy anymore. He irritates me, and everybody he meets—especially people he can wangle under those big strong lights he’s got down there. He likes to take pretty little women like you and lock them in a room with a few of his handsome detectives. Then he turns on those runway lights and aims them into your mascara until your eyes water and you begin to sweat like overtime in a Turkish bath. After he has opened your pores he walks onstage himself, and begins to ask you funny little questions. You’ll enjoy those questions. Trum is quite a wit.”

“I’ve got nothing for Trum. Absolutely nothing.”

Bull smiled. “Trum is quite an art lover—he’ll be crazy about those pretty gams of yours. He’ll look at your legs while he shoots you a few funny little questions about a fellow named Lecotte.”

She stiffened but said nothing.

“You recollect the name?” Bull asked his drink. “You were very near Monsieur Lecotte Wednesday night, enjoying his good liquor and his fancy art work with your man Semple. Then, all of a sudden, you left. I wonder where you went?”

“For a ride. My chauffeur and Semple were with me, and can alibi me.”

Bull rose and put down his glass. “Where did these fine upstanding alibis take you?”

She narrowed her eyes, lost her smile. “I called you up here to ask you questions and pay for answers, Bull. How do I collect from you?”

Bull said, “You don’t. You answer my questions. Period.”

“You’re a stubborn little man, aren’t you? We drove through the park for a while. The boys will back me up.”

She got up again and moved in close to Bull. She stood on one side of the bar and bent low for her drink. The diamond brooch at her bosom had loosened and the robe hung lower than ever. The diamond brooch had a catch clip arrangement on the back. It was the type of clip that never slips unless a hand forces it.

Bull said, “Pull yourself together and think of a better gag. Trum will never swallow that routine.”

“It’s the truth.”

Bull stared her eyes down. He reached for his hat and put down his glass. “Maybe Trum will swallow that guff. Me, I have a weak stomach and it’s getting late and I want to go to bed.”

She watched him cross the room. “You win, Bull. I don’t know what you’re getting at and I don’t care much. If I give you the lowdown on where I went from Lecotte’s, will you listen to me and take my case?”

“I might,” said Bull. He came back to the couch. “I don’t give a hoot in hell about your case or about Lecotte’s murder. I’m just curious. I like to find out what makes people tick. But if I stay, you’ll have to cut out the burlesque routine. Lying women do things to my gastric juices.”

“I promise.”

“Start at the beginning and skip the embroidery. I’d like to know about Semple first. Where does he fit—errand boy?”

“That’s all. What did you think he was?”

“Let me ask the questions. What does he do? You pay him a salary for following you with a gun?”

Her laugh was low and throaty. “I thought everybody knew about Semple.”

“Everybody knows what he did for your ex-husband. He was the bully boy of Gant’s gang. I don’t quite understand his routine with you.”

She shrugged. “Gant was fond of the jerk. A human watch dog, he called him. That’s what I call him, too. He’s been with me ever since Gant died.”

“Why should you need a Saint Bernard?”

“I’m sentimental, I guess—he’s like one of the family.”

“You pay him a salary?”

“Why not?”

“How cozy. Semple intrigues me. He lives here?”

Her head shot up. “Don’t be funny! He lives downtown somewhere. I’ll get you his address if you really want it.”

“Don’t ever let me forget. How about Louis?”

“The same routine.” She took the glasses out of our hands and went to the bar with them. She spilled Scotch into them with a lavish gesture. “Let’s get off the merry-go-round, Bull. I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m a regular customer down at Lecotte’s joint. Ask the doorman. Ask the bartender, ask anybody down there, they’ll tell you I used to go there every night. So what? So I like the place. Last time I went there was the night Lecotte got cut up. Does that mean anything? Why don’t I go there anymore? Because I’m a lady with a weak stomach. That place will always smell of murder to me from now on.”

Bull got up. “That sounds like the prologue to some more song and dance, Mrs. Gant. There are probably a thousand night clubs in New York City. You’re no art lover. You’re just not the type of woman who would keep going back to look at Lecotte’s pretty pictures.” He fingered his hat again. “Either you give it to me straight or I’m saying good night.”

She settled into a chair and sighed. When she looked up at him her eyes gave her away. She was beaten. “All right—I had a reason for going down to Lecotte’s so often. That’s why I got you up here, Bull.”

“You were looking for somebody at Lecotte’s?”

She nodded. “I was looking for my kid sister. Paula Smith.”

CHAPTER 17

Bull put his glass down on the table. He said, “It’s about time you got around to Paula. What were you waiting for?”

Mrs. Gant lowered her eyes. “I was afraid—for Paula, I mean.”

“You thought she might have killed Lecotte?”

She eyed him balefully. “You’ve got a cop’s mind, after all, Bull. I couldn’t have thought anything about Paula. I haven’t seen her in maybe eight, nine years. I ran into her some time ago in that dive. Don’t look at me that way, I’m leveling now. I pleaded with her to lay off Lecotte. I knew his reputation and didn’t want the kid mixed up with him. I thought she might have been in love with him or something and wanted to steer her straight.”

“When did all this happen?”

“About five weeks ago.”

“And you’ve been visiting Lecotte’s steadily since then in the hope of running into her?”

Mrs. Gant nodded. “After all—I’m her sister.”

“You’re also an old Lecotte fan, aren’t you?”

She laughed. “Whoever told you such a thing?”

“A couple of gossip columnists told it to a few million people not too long ago. I read the papers. Everybody with half a memory knows that you were crazy about Lecotte. That Daumier lithograph on the wall proves it. Lecotte wouldn’t give up any of his precious Daumiers to any two-bit doll.”

“Don’t get dramatic,” she said. “I didn’t care that much for the heel.”

“Who knows?” Bull asked his fingers. “Maybe you were crazy about him. Maybe you and Lecotte had a little row that night and you stuck him with a knife and then returned to the club to set up a pat alibi. That would be a smart way of handling him, wouldn’t it? A big brain like Semple could work the deal out that way.”

“You don’t know Semple,” she laughed.

“Lucky me,” said Bull. He sighed and turned to me. “Tell her about her sister, Jeff.”

I told her about the phone call. She followed my story with her mouth open and there was pleasure and relief in her eyes. She smiled at me and put down her drink. She said, “That’s wonderful news. She’s safe, then?”

I said, “I wouldn’t know. As a matter of fact I can’t be sure it was Paula. I’ve never met the girl.”

“Let’s call her Paula,” said Bull. “Does that solve your little problem, Mrs. Gant?”

“I’m not sure. It sounds possible, though, doesn’t it? The kid found out that this man was looking for her and decided to call him before she left town.”

“Why would she leave town?”

“For a job, like she said.”

“Convenient, isn’t it? She’s leaving town suddenly after her boyfriend is butchered.”

“That’s more cop stuff, Bull. Maybe the kid didn’t even know about Lecotte.”

“She’s old enough to read the papers.” Bull took his hat and motioned me out of my seat. “However, if you’re perfectly satisfied, we can call off our hunt for her. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

She walked to the door with us. “Of course not. I still want to see the kid, Bull. I want you to keep looking for her.”

“It should be simple to locate her,” said Bull. “What would it be worth to you?”

“A thousand dollars.”

Bull chuckled. “That’s big money for a family reunion with a long lost sister. Anybody would think you two girls loved each other.”

“I want to see her. After all, she’s my sister.”

“You’ll see her. I’ll locate her for you by tomorrow morning.”

She worked her face into an expression of joy mixed with incredulity and surprise and disbelief. “You do that and you’re a wonder boy.”

“I’m a wonder boy,” said Bull.

On the way down in the elevator, Bull questioned the operator. He primed him with a five dollar bill and found out that the man came on duty at eight in the evening.

“How often did you go up to the seventeenth floor tonight?” Bull asked.

“Not too often.”

“Who did you take up? Remember?”

The elevator operator remembered. “I take up her maid first—at a little after eight. Later on, Mrs. Gant comes down with the fat lug. Then Mrs. Gant comes back without him. Next I take up old Doc Tucker, and—”

“Mrs. Gant’s doctor?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t know if he is her doctor. All I know is I take him up. He goes up there twice while I’m on.”

“How old a man is he?” Bull winked.

The operator laughed. “He’s too old for Mrs. Gant, if that’s what you mean. Doc Tucker is maybe seventy years old.”

“Anybody else go up there tonight?”

“Nobody but you two.”

Bull thanked him and we left. We left at great speed. We took a cab downtown add turned through Central Park.

I said, “I don’t get it, Bull. Where will you dig up Paula Smith by tomorrow?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I’ve got ideas. I wanted to see how anxious she was to see her sister. This mess is beginning to take some logical shape. Paula Smith was an artist. Boucher is an art dealer. Mrs. Preston is an art dilettante. Gregory Yukon is a painting expert. You get the pattern?”

I shook my head in befuddlement. “All I get is good clean confusion.”

The cab turned into Fifth Avenue and stopped at Seventy-Ninth Street. We walked up the steps to Mrs. Carruthers’s mansion. A butler answered Bull’s ring.

Bull said, “Mrs. Carruthers is at home?”

The butler assumed the injured air of a man accepting a large package of garbage. “And who is calling?”

Bull said, “The man from Mars.”

The butler scowled down at Bull along the side of his long nose. “The gentleman wishes something?”

“The gentleman wishes to know if the painting has been delivered to Mrs. Carruthers yet?”

“A painting, sir? Which painting?”

Bull grew impatient. He raised his voice and put a bite in it. “The gentleman is too busy to play cute games with the butler. But if Mrs. Carruthers prefers, the gentleman will, perhaps, write a long story for a periodical like The New York Times. The article will explain the latest purchases of the lady known as Mrs. Shay Carruthers. The readers of The Times would be fascinated by the old bag’s latest activities. Not too long ago everybody who knew anything about art enjoyed many a hearty laugh at Mrs. Carruthers’s expense. You remember the story?”

The butler was warming rapidly. “I think I know what you mean, sir.”

“I don’t think you do. This gentleman could write, for instance, about Mrs. Shay Carruthers’s latest ventures into the fine arts field. I could explain to the readers, perhaps how the dear lady was taken for a ride recently.”

The butler registered amazement. “Again, sir?”

“Again. Her latest purchases are two extremely delightful frauds!”

“The gentleman is sure?” said the butler in a hushed gasp.

“The gentleman is not kidding.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed the butler and licked at his lower lip with an expression of gastric unbalance. “Mrs. Carruthers would not like that one bit, sir. The good lady is not at home at this moment or I would take you to her immediately. She will be back, however, in about—”

“The paintings. Has she taken the paintings with her?”

“I didn’t see her take them, sir. But I couldn’t let you—”

“The gentleman could do the butler a lot of good,” purred Bull. “Lead the gentleman to the repository for these two dishonest paintings. Perhaps, after the gentleman has taken a long gander at these two miserable masterpieces, he may be able to reach certain conclusions. Such pictures must be studied carefully, so that the foul merchant who sold them to your elegant lady may be apprehended and brought to justice. Thus, it might be possible to return to the good Mrs. Shay Carruthers her investment in the pictures—a healthy investment, I might add. If such a thing came to pass, the butler would undoubtedly earn the lasting gratitude of his employer, do you understand? The old bag might lay a couple of thousand rugs in your lap. Follow me?”

“Quite, sir. But I—”

“Christmas is not a long way off—the season during which such wealthy wrens as your Mrs. Shay Carruthers are accustomed to reward all good and faithful servitors with a small token of their regard. Think of how the eminent Mrs. Carruthers will now regard you, sir. Think of that regard translated into good hard coin of the realm. You’ll be loaded with moola!”

The butler thought it over for a fraction of a second, then waved us inside. “If the gentleman will enter and be quick. I do not know when Mrs. Carruthers will be home, but she must not find you here.”

We strolled down the hall behind the butler. It was marbled and ebonied and thickly carpeted. We went through the giant living room. A heavy door led into another room, this one long and narrow and loaded with oil paintings hung monotonously against a background of umber sack clothing.

Beyond this room, the butler paused to open a closet. He disappeared for a moment and then emerged carrying two large paintings, covered with a linen cloth. He lifted the cloth and showed Bull one of the canvases. He held it gingerly away from us so that Bull could view it from the correct distance.

Bull studied it at six paces first and beckoned the butler to bring it closer. It was a fair sized painting, a landscape, done in the bright and scintillating colors of the Impressionists of France.

The butler said, “It seems impossible, sir, that this is a fraud. I would call it really charming.”

“A charming fraud then,” said Bull.

I looked at the painting over Bull’s shoulder and studied it. It was most certainly a fine job of paint and color and composition. Without bothering with the signature I recognized the master who did it, or was supposed to have.

I said, “If that job isn’t a natural Corot, it’s the best imitation of Corot in the world.”

Bull rubbed his fingers over the canvas. He put his nose down and smelled it. He leaned over it and examined the brushwork, holding the canvas at many angles under the light. He ordered the butler to hand him the second painting and repeated the process. He leaned both paintings against the wall and stepped back to view them again. He said, “Remarkable jobs. I’m a moron so far as these fine art fakes go, but I remember enough about Corot to know a damned good imitation when I see one. These are superb.”

I said, “How can you be so sure that they’re fakes?”

“If they’re genuine Corots they’ll be listed somewhere. If they’re newly discovered Corots it’ll take a board of experts to decide for Mrs. Carruthers. She’s been taken for fine art sleigh-rides before, however, and probably would never have reported the purchase of these pretty little numbers. Thereby hangs our tale. If these paintings are good Corots, we’re off on a fluff hunt and will have to start all over again.”

I leaned over the paintings again. Whoever had done them must have absorbed not only Corot’s system of color and drawing, but also achieved some understanding of his state of mind while painting a picture. The color and the composition were perfect.

I said, “How can you check on things like these?”

“We may not have to check,” Bull turned to the butler. “When was the first of these pictures delivered?”

“I should say about two months ago, sir.”

“Do you remember who sold it to Mrs. Carruthers?”

The butler wrestled with his memory, briefly. “I don’t rightly recall his name, sir.”

Bull began to describe Pierre Lecotte. The butler interrupted him politely. “That would be the man, sir. Now that you mentioned his name, I do recall the trace of a French accent.”

“Fine,” said Bull. “And who delivered the second picture?”

“A man. He came here not over two hours ago, sir. He was a foreign looking gentleman.”

“He’s no gentleman,” said Bull. “He had gray hair and a mustache?”

“That would be the man.”

Bull started for the door nimbly. He thanked the butler and instructed him to say nothing to Mrs. Carruthers about our visit.

CHAPTER 18

Bull started for Madison Avenue at a fast pace for a fat man. We entered a drug store and he went immediately to the phone booth, dialed a number and waited.

“Hello?” he said. “Hank? Did Bellick report?” He looked at his wrist watch. “That damned fool will stand out in front of Boucher’s apartment until he corrodes. We’ll leave him there. Listen. I want you to go over to Mrs. Preston’s house and watch it. She should be coming out of there soon. If she does come out, follow her. Take some money with you, she may take you for quite a ride. Phone me as soon as she stops running. I’ll be down at Trum’s office.” He frowned into the mouthpiece. “Not later—now! Right away.”

He hung up. “Now for the great Trum,” he said. He dropped another nickel and dialed a number. He was put through to the inspector. “Trum? This is Bull. You working overtime tonight?” There was a pause. Bull raised his eyebrows and a small smile curled his lips. “Semple? He murdered who? Oh, fine, fine—you’re moving fast, Inspector, but you’re not getting anywhere. Semple didn’t do the job. He’s fat and he’s tough and foolish, but he isn’t your man. Not this time.” Bull waited while the Inspector barked. He was barking loud enough for me to hear. He was saying, “That’s what you think!”

Bull said, “I didn’t call you about Semple. I want you to watch all the city exits for a man named Gregory Yukon. He’ll be moving out of town any minute now, if he hasn’t left already. Don’t interrupt. He’s a big man, gray hair, gray mustache, and talks with a bit of a foreign flavor. If you don’t want to snatch an art swindler, let him ride away. You heard me. He’s skipping town with a roll bigger than your head. Do as you like.”

Bull hung up and we hailed a cab.

I said, “What does he want with Semple?”

“Trum says that Semple was seen in the place when Lecotte was murdered,” sighed Bull. “He’s going to hang it on Semple and save the taxpayers’ money. He has a personal interest in Semple. He’s been trying to pin the fat boy down for the past ten years, ever since Semple was the bruiser for the Gant mob.” He laughed quietly.

We got in the cab and Bull turned to me. “Where do the Yukons live?”

I gave the cabby the address and we sped downtown.

I said, “Gregory Yukon was the man who collected from Mrs. Carruthers?”

“I think so. It was either Yukon or Boucher, but I’ve ruled out Boucher because he couldn’t possibly have gotten past the leech Bellick. Bellick would have phoned in the incident a long time ago if he had tailed Boucher up here. No—it was Yukon—and he’s machining as pretty an art swindle as I’ve seen in many a year. He probably learned the business at Lecotte’s knee. Lecotte would have had many uses for a good picture restorer.”

A small light lit in my brain, glimmered a weak glow and then expired. The pieces of the puzzle were fitting, suddenly.

Bull said, “Yukon must be on the way out of town, or I miss my guess. He delivered one of those Corot phonies to Mrs. Carruthers, collected a wad of cash for it and beat it out of town. He’s probably in a plane for Mexico this minute.”

The cab roared downtown, screamed west into Eighth Street, and slid to the curbing before the incongruous front that was the Yukon ménage.

Bull ran up the steps and rang the bell. We heard the ring from far inside but there were no footsteps approaching. Bull fingered the doorknob. It turned in his grip and he pushed the door open.

The vestibule was dark and empty. I walked into the living room and lit the large lamp near the couch. When the light went on I found myself standing only three feet from the body of Gregory Yukon.

He was as dead as last week’s funny sheets.

He was sprawled once again on the floor, close to the fireplace. One hand was stretched forward in a macabre gesture, as though he might have been reaching for something in the fireplace when he died. His last live gesture must have been rather rudely interrupted when somebody walked into that room and shot in the side of his head. He wasn’t a pretty sight. It was an effort to look at his head. There was very little left of it to look at.

Bull hovered over the corpse silently. He kneeled to examine Yukon’s hands. He looked, but he didn’t touch.

I said, “He went out asking for it.”

“And I wonder who obliged?” Bull said. He looked at his watch. “Duty commands that I phone our good friend Trum. The body is still warm and the police love to move in when the corpse is fresh. But common sense tells me Trum and his boys would dirty up my thinking if they come. They would swarm all over the place, wake up the neighbors; mess up the furniture and crowd poor little me into a quiet corner where I couldn’t see the show. No—we’ll allow ourselves the luxury of a half hour of silent speculation before I phone Mister Trum.”

Only a few minutes had elapsed before we heard a hand on the outside door. It was Alice Yukon.

I rushed into the vestibule and held her away from the living room. She was dressed as I had last seen her and had added only a light topcoat.

I said, “Better not go inside, sugar. Your brother’s in there and this time he didn’t faint. He’s dead.”

She took it the hard way, but retained her consciousness. I signaled to Bull and he told me to bring her inside. When I got her a seat I turned it away from the figure on the floor. Bull had covered the head and shoulders of the corpse with the wall hanging.

We let Alice sob it out for a while.

Finally, Bull said, “Where was he tonight, sister?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

I said, “You mean you didn’t know where he was going when you pulled the stall on me tonight?”

She sobbed noisily. Then: “I wish I had known! I could have stopped him. I didn’t think he was in danger—”

“Danger from whom?” Bull asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Charming,” said Bull. “Fond sister screens brother’s activities. Loyal sister covers trail of wayward brother about to leave town with rich dowager’s money. Or didn’t you know about the picture deal?”

Alice Yukon didn’t answer. She gave herself up to a fresh outburst of sobs that shook her pretty frame.

Bull continued: “You must have known what your brother was doing all these months. Maybe you didn’t like it. Maybe you tried to get him to abandon his ideas. But if you expect to protect the fair memory of your brother by refusing to talk, you may be in for a big surprise. The police will begin to suspect a partner in Gregory’s enterprises. That partner might have been you, Alice. To the police it would be an obvious tie-up.”

Alice raised her head and her eyes were heavy with fear and worry and the promise of fresh tears. She looked at me hopelessly and I felt sorry for her.

Bull said, “You’d better talk.”

She said, finally, “I pleaded with Gregory to give up his plan. He just wouldn’t listen to me—he wanted money, lots of money. He wanted money until it became an obsession with him.”

“He delivered the painting?”

“I suppose so.”

“What was the subject?” Bull asked.

“Gregory told me about it. It was a landscape. A faked Corot.”

“Where did he get it?”

Alice shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Who did the painting—Gregory?”

“Gregory was no painter, but he was a technician,” she said. “He might have done something to the painting. I don’t know. I never actually saw it.”

“But Gregory might have had it somewhere else. He might have worked the age into it. He did that type of thing occasionally, didn’t he?”

“It was his work to restore old pictures. I suppose he could have done the opposite to a faked painting. He could have aged it, I guess.”

“He aged it,” said Bull. “But he was doing a job for somebody else, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not very convincing, Alice. You knew all about the picture and yet you didn’t know Gregory’s boss? Why would he have told you about the Corot if he wanted you in the dark? There must have been discussions about that picture. Or has he faked other pictures in the past?”

“So far as I know, the Corot was his first illegal job. If he did others he didn’t tell me about them.”

Bull smiled. She was breaking down slowly. “Who was his boss, Alice?”

She raised her eyes and tried to put the light of truth into them. “I honestly don’t know.”

“We’ll let it pass then. Could his boss have been Lecotte?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

I said, “Maybe Alice will tell us a little more about Paula Smith now, Bull.”

“I’m sure she will,” said Bull. “You know something about Paula, don’t you? Paula is in this deal somewhere. Tell me, did Paula kill Lecotte?”

Her eyes opened in a reflex of surprise and fear. “Paula didn’t kill Lecotte! Paula couldn’t have—she was in love with him.”

“And he?”

“Lecotte wasn’t the type of man to fall in love.”

Bull watched her carefully. “You knew him well?”

“I knew him…but only casually.” She lowered her eyes. “He exhibited some of my paintings.”

“Did he ever exhibit Paula’s?”

“Paula didn’t ever want an exhibit of her work. You’d have to know Paula to understand what I mean. Paula is a serious painter. She’s got much more talent than I.”

She broke into sobs again and Bull waited patiently. She quieted in a little while. I gave her a cigarette and lit it for her.

Bull said, “Tell me all about Paula.”

“All? I met Paula in art school. We were good friends. We used to go up to the Metropolitan on painting expeditions—you know, copying and studying the old masters for color and composition. Paula was a genius at that sort of thing. Her copies were accurate and full of the spirit of the painting she was studying. One day we met Lecotte up there.

“I knew him casually. I had met him at a party in the Village and he seemed to know his way around the art world. He was a great one for criticism and spouted the fancy phrases a young artist likes to hear.”

“You mean that Lecotte just happened to be up at the Metropolitan when you and Paula were there?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What I mean is—did you tell him that you painted up there? Think back—it may be important.”

She shook her head. “It never occurred to me to wonder about how he knew we were up there. I assumed that a man like Lecotte would frequent the important museums often. I don’t remember telling him that we went there.”

“He saw Paula’s work and liked it, of course?”

“He raved about it. After that, he came up there often and spent a lot of time with us. It wasn’t long before Paula became fond of him and looked to him for guidance. He immediately set her to work copying a Cézanne. He told her that he had a customer for it and promised to pay her well. Paula did a beautiful job copying the Cézanne. Lecotte took it away and later paid her $300 for it.” She paused to close her eyes and relive the next incident in her memory. “After that, Paula did two more paintings for him—one was a Monet and the other a Corot.”

“He paid her for these?”

“I don’t know. By that time Paula was in love with him. After the Corot she stopped painting at the Museum and I only met her at Lecotte’s club. She had changed, somehow. She seemed worried about something. I tried to help her, but Lecotte would never leave her alone with me.”

“Was she living at Mrs. Preston’s then?”

“No. She moved out of Mrs. Preston’s during that period. I never did find out where she moved, though I tried to locate her.”

I said, “You saw her Saturday, didn’t you?”

She avoided my eyes. “I should have seen her Saturday. I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to her. I might have helped Paula. But Gregory wouldn’t allow me to stay in Woodstock. We were gone when she arrived.”

“Gregory didn’t like Paula?” Bull asked.

“He was angry with me for inviting her up. He didn’t tell me why.”

Bull rose to end the interview. He paused at the door for one more question. He spoke softly and with sympathy. “Do you want to help me find Paula Smith?”

Her face came alive. “I’ll do anything you say.”

Bull said, “Do you think Paula painted that Corot?”

“She could have.”

On the street, Bull still walked fast, full of a new energy that surprised me. It was two-thirty in the morning, my legs were weary of the long routine. My head still throbbed in the soft spot where my mustachioed antagonist had struck. But the spirit of Bull’s movement and purpose kept me awake.

We took a cab uptown and when we stopped we were on the corner of Eighty-First Street and Central Park West. We entered an apartment and passed the sleeping doorman without waking him.

Bull bounded up a few steps and rang the bell marked: Dr. Archibald Trent Tucker. He rang the bell long and hard.

Dr. Tucker, himself, opened the door and peered out at us. He was an oversized character, pink faced, long nosed and bearded with an overgrown white goatee. He said, “These are not office hours. What do you mean by ringing my bell at this ungodly time in the morning?”

Bull didn’t wilt under the stare. “They’re not my office hours, either, Doctor Tucker. I’m here on police business.”

“Indeed? Then I shall have to ask you to leave, sir. That sort of thing can wait for the morning.”

He made a move to close the door, but Bull leaned against it and smiled up at him. “It would be a pity, Doctor Tucker, if your pigheadedness were the cause of murder—now wouldn’t it?”

“Cheap melodrama will get you nowhere.”

Bull tilted his hat back and smiled coldly. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you stand there and throw your professional weight around. You’re the man with melodramatic ideas. You’re in a position to help the police on a case that may have a disastrous climax. If you’ll stop waving your medical goatee at me, we’ll be out of here in five minutes.”

The doctor smiled faintly. “You have a very direct and pungent delivery, sir. I admire a man who doesn’t bandy words. What do you want of me?”

“The answer to one question. Why did you make so many trips to Mrs. Gant’s today?”

Dr. Tucker coughed gently into his hand. “You are asking me a question concerning one of my patients. It isn’t proper for a doctor to expose a patient to anything, you know.”

“It isn’t proper for a doctor to expose a patient to murder, either. I must know why you visited Mrs. Gant’s place today. You refuse to give me the information, despite the fact that it may involve the murder of one of your patients?”

The doctor fingered his lower lip. “I can give you a crumb, sir. I do this only for your ears and insist that you do not quote me. May I have your word?”

“I didn’t come here to bargain for evidence, Dr. Tucker. Let me put it to you this way—if I told you why you went to Mrs. Gant’s, will you tell me if I’m right?”

“I will.” Doctor Tucker crossed his hands over his chest. “Why did I go up there?”

“You went there to treat a patient, but the patient was not Mrs. Gant.”

Doctor Tucker smiled. “You’ve made a good guess.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.” Bull shook the doctor’s hand. “I won’t bother you again.”

CHAPTER 19

Bull and I walked quickly from Doctor Tucker’s to Mrs. Gant’s, a few blocks away.

Mrs. Gant answered her bell, wide awake, fully dressed and carrying a highball glass. Behind her, the apartment was lit and the sound of music filtered into the hall.

She said, “Come in, boys. Glad to see you. You’re just in time for a little nightcap.”

Bull said, “I’d like to see you alone. You’ve got company in there.”

She tugged him into the living room. “Aw, don’t be high hat—it’s only Louis.”

Louis stood at the end of the room, holding a glass to his Latin lips. He put down the glass slowly and started toward us with a crooked smile.

Mrs. Gant said, “Sit down, Louis. Take it easy. Make Mr. Bull and his friend a nice drink. Everybody gets a drink.”

She giggled crazily and dropped into a seat.

Bull took a drink from Louis. He watched the redhead rub her brow. He said, “You’re loaded. I came up here to talk business—I’ve got news about your sister.”

Louis throttled the radio. The silence was sudden and ominous.

Mrs. Gant set her glass down and opened her big eyes. “You got news about Paula? What are you looking at me that way for? Isn’t she all right?”

“I don’t know. She may be in bad trouble.”

She reached for his sleeve and dug in. “What do you mean? What’s wrong? Where is the kid?”

Bull pulled away from her and lowered himself into a soft chair and doubled up, hands on knees, laughing his head off. He leaned back and let the laughter run out of him. Mrs. Gant watched him sharply. Louis cat-footed across the rug and stood alongside her. Bull wiped his eyes and looked from one to the other.

“You’re a wonderful actress—for burlesque, baby. I like to see you dramatize. You’re ham, sister—pure ham.”

Louis muttered, “Lemme take a poke at him. He’s too wise.” He took a step forward. She waved a hand at him.

Mrs. Gant glared at Louis and he retreated to the window. She put her eyes into play again, this time acting the soft and innocent ingénue. “Let’s start all over again, Bull. What was so funny?”

“You. You’re a lot cleverer than I thought a few hours ago. You’ve got a flair for the dramatic—a talent that must have been wasted on the burlesque runways. I took the bait on your sister routine—almost.”

“Almost?” She was hurt now. “It was the truth.”

Bull smiled. “Of course it was the truth—with a thin coat of whitewash.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Suppose I tell you? Suppose I tell you I know where Paula is—that she’s in trouble—desperate trouble? Would you pay me off right now?”

“Of course I’ll pay.” She allowed her voice a tremor of excitement. I leaned forward in my chair, sharing it with her.

“The money. Get it and put it on the table.”

She ran from the room and returned with her bag. Her long fingers counted out a wad of bills. She placed the money on the table and put down her purse. “Now, Bull. Where is she?”

Louis slid away from the window and went to the liquor cabinet. He leaned over it, but kept his eyes on Bull.

Bull said, “Paula is inside—in your bedroom!”

She let her breath out in a sigh that degenerated into a laugh. “Did you hear that, Louis? This guy is nuts!” She backed into a chair and sat down hard.

Louis came closer, his hand in his pocket. “You want me to kick him the hell out of here?”

Bull faced him with a hard, sure smile. “I haven’t time to fool around, Mrs. Gant. Get this straight—I know all about your sister and Lecotte. You’re afraid she might have killed him, aren’t you?”

Mrs. Gant trembled but said nothing.

Bull went on. “You’re afraid she put a knife into Lecotte and then went back to her apartment to commit suicide. She didn’t quite make it, did she? You got there in time to tie a tourniquet and take her out of there. You tied it with the pillowcase in the bedroom, didn’t you?”

Mrs. Gant began to sob. Louis relaxed and padded away to the window.

Bull said, “You left Lecotte’s and took a ride for yourself. You were worried about your sister, so you rode up to her apartment. You found her there, bleeding from a wrist. Semple and Louis carried her downstairs and put her into the car, and when the janitor came out and saw what was going on, Semple bought his silence. It was a neat job—well done. I don’t blame you for trying to cover for your sister. I don’t blame you for sending an actress friend up there to impersonate Mrs. Franklin. I think you were very smart to have Semple return to the place to take out that rug and anything else that might have made the place smell bad to the police. You’re a clever woman. You almost fooled me when you asked my help in finding Paula. It was a perfect pitch—getting a detective up here and selling him your story. It meant that the detective would forget about you. I almost did—but not quite.” He finished his drink in a gulp. “Now let’s play it straight. Your sister didn’t kill Lecotte, I know she didn’t. When she regains consciousness she’ll tell you the story herself.”

Louis said, “I’ll be damned.”

Mrs. Gant wiped her eyes. “Paula is sick as hell. You’re not going to bother her?”

“I don’t want her. She’ll pull out of it with another infusion or so,” said Bull. “What I want is odds and ends.”

“I don’t know anything about Lecotte’s murder. I went down to The Frog hoping to see either Paula or Lecotte. If I had seen Lecotte I would have pleaded with him to leave the kid alone. If I had seen Paula I would have begged her to stay out of there and come home with me.”

“I believe you,” Bull said, giving her a small soft smile. “You’re a rare woman, Mrs. Gant. You’ve got a mind and a heart and an ingenuity that impresses me. You were the lady who called Jeff and said you were Paula?”

She nodded. “I wanted him to give up. I didn’t want him to think of Paula as being in the city.”

“You almost succeeded. But Jeff is a stubborn lad. He had a reason for finding Paula—a reason that wouldn’t be sidetracked.”

I said, “Paula and I corresponded. I wanted to meet her because I liked her. I wanted to tell her about Kip, too—”

Her eyes were full of a new torture when she looked at me. “Kip? Is something wrong with him?”

“He died. He was killed in Normandy.”

She began to sob again, in great gusts of genuine sorrow. We left her alone and walked to the huge window and stared into the darkness across the park. Bull allowed her a full measure of grief. He fiddled with a cigar, lit it, puffed it and said nothing. I filled my glass again and sipped it slowly.

She came to us, finally. She put a hand on my arm. “Paula will be all right soon and then you two kids can meet. You’ll like her, Jeff—she’s a swell kid.”

“If she’s anything like her sister, she’ll do,” said Bull with a smile. “I imagine that you wouldn’t have tried to save Paula if she didn’t ring a bell in your heart, Mrs. Gant.”

“Paula is good,” she said, and turned her wet eyes my way. “I had a feeling that I’d better make a last effort to pull her away from Lecotte. That’s why we were desperate. When I saw Paula run out of the club I decided to follow her. We got going in the car and I saw Jeff start down the street and figured he’d better not catch her. I sent Louis back to stop him. We picked Louis up later and beat it to Paula’s apartment. We got there just in time—she was bleeding badly.”

“How did you know where she lived?”

“I had followed her there before. I mean I had Semple follow Lecotte. That was how I found out they were living together in that hole.”

“Why did they live there? Lecotte had plenty of money—he could have taken her into his own apartment or set her up in a really fine place.”

Mrs. Gant shook her head and her eyes went hard. “That’s the angle I can’t figure, Bull—but I guess it’ll have to wait until Paula can tell her big sister all. She’s a sweet kid, and she’s nobody’s dope. I talked to her before all this happened—maybe six months ago—and I got the idea that Paula made up her mind about something. She was doing something that either she or Lecotte wanted to keep under cover. It must have been Lecotte who wanted the deal covered up. Paula is as straight as I’m curved. If you want the answer you’ll have to ask the kid—or figure it all out in that fat little head of yours.”

Bull said, “I’ve got a good start. Tell me, do you know any of Lecotte’s pals?”

She made a face. “Lecotte was enough for me. I never wanted to warm up to any of his pals. A pity…it might have helped me a lot. I could have—”

“How about Boucher?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Mrs. Preston? Gregory Yukon?”

Mrs. Gant shrugged the questions off. “The only friend of Lecotte’s I ever met was the long-nosed waiter with the kind heart.” She laughed. “And from the way he talked I gathered he was no special friend of Lecotte’s either.”

Bull said, “Has Paula told you anything at all yet?”

“She’s been out cold ever since the boys took her away from that rat nest apartment.” She frowned at her memory. “I’ve been knocking myself out trying to dream up Paula’s story, but I just can’t even get started. I suppose you’ve got to have a certain type of brain for that kind of stuff.”

“I know her story,” said Bull. “Not all of it, but I think I’ve figured out the bare bones of the deal. It started a long time ago when Lecotte visited two girls up at the Metropolitan Museum. Our friend Lecotte was no idle stroller through the galleries. He was on a mission. Somebody had told him that Paula Smith was a talented artist. Somebody had tipped him off about Paula’s great flair for copying the masters.”

Mrs. Gant interrupted. “So that was it? Lecotte bought her paintings? That two-bit heel was always talking big about arty stuff—he pulled the art line with me for a long time. But I didn’t figure him that way with Paula. I thought the kid was in love with him.”

“Maybe she was,” said Bull. “She probably painted the first fake for him because he sold her a bill of goods. I know a little about Lecotte. He was a shrewd operator. His talk carried authority—it smelled to high heaven of the language most artists love to hear. He fed her this routine until she was sold completely on his double-talk. Then he probably convinced her that she should try to create an original Corot.”

“Corot?” The art verbiage was staggering Mrs. Gant.

“Corot was a painter,” I said. “A Frenchman.”

“One of the greatest,” said Bull. “Lecotte must have convinced Paula that the supreme test of her talents would be the creation of a Corot original—as Corot himself might have composed and painted one. Paula is a talented girl—she must have done well on the job. Lecotte sold the painting to a rich old lady who can’t tell an original from a phony. He knew where these customers grow. But Paula must have found out about the swindle and tried to get him to refund the money. That was why she visited him. She went to The Frog to beg Lecotte to call off the swindle and return her picture. She walked down the hall and discovered her friend on the floor with a knife in his ribs. She ran out of the place, scared to death.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You mean Paula ran out of the club, returned to her apartment and phoned Lecotte’s office? Why would she do that?”

“Paula will have a few reasons when she regains consciousness,” said Bull. “I can give you theories. You must take for granted first that she was in love with Lecotte. She walked into his office and didn’t find him there. However, on the way out she saw a foot in the doorway. Her first reaction would have been shock and fright. I don’t imagine that Paula stopped to examine the figure. To her it was only a man lying in a dark alley. She ran away from the corpse and then what? In her apartment Paula began to worry. Was it really Lecotte she saw murdered? She had an easy method for checking up—a phone call. If Lecotte answered the phone, all would be well. But Lecotte didn’t answer the phone—you did, Jeff. You recollect a feeling of frightened anxiety in the voice of the woman you heard?”

I recollected.

Bull went on. “We can assume, then, that Paula made the phone call. What next? Still remembering that Paula was in love with Lecotte, we must try to reconstruct her mood immediately after she discovered that he had been murdered. Her first reaction would have been deep and heart-flooding sorrow. Add to this the fact that Paula herself was suspect. She must have assumed that somebody down at The Frog had seen her come in, walk down the corridor to Lecotte’s office and then dash out of the place. Circumstance had woven a net around Paula. In her emotional upheaval over the death of her boyfriend she must have gotten panicky. She saw no way out of her dilemma. She was trapped, cornered; desperate. You’re an artist of sorts, Jeff. Put yourself in Paula’s place, allow for her temperament and tell me what she did.”

I said, “Suicide?”

Bull nodded. “Exactly. She slashed her wrist. That was the reason for the blood stain under the big easy chair. When Semple and Louis found her bleeding to death, one of the boys ran into the bedroom and ripped up a pillowcase for a tourniquet. Then they carried her out to the car and convinced the superintendent that he had better keep his lip buttoned. Isn’t that the way it went, Mrs. Gant?”

Mrs. Gant covered her face with her hands. “The poor kid. I should have kept after her. I should have made her listen to me. I could have stopped the whole thing.”

“You did very well by your little sister,” said Bull. “I doff my derby to your ingenuity. You sent an actress friend of yours up to Paula’s apartment with Semple to remove the bloodstained rug. She got rid of Jeff and MacAndrews with neatness and dispatch. Then Semple came up to get the rug out of the place while the erstwhile Mrs. Franklin led her pursuers a merry chase uptown to nothing more than a dead end. Your Mrs. Franklin could have been a bit cleverer, though. She could have taken a cab downtown. She evidently intended to report to you, didn’t she?”

Mrs. Gant nodded.

“I figured as much,” said Bull. “She left her cab too close to your address. I had made a note of that. I was reminded of it when Mr. Semple escorted us up here this afternoon. The spot where Mrs. Franklin abandoned her taxicab was only a few blocks away.”

“That was her idea,” said Mrs. Gant. “And I’m not so damned clever at all, Bull. If I were really smart I could have stopped all of this before it got this far.”

“I doubt it,” said Bull. “Lecotte, as you well know, was a master at handling females. He must have had Paula paint two fakes—two Corots. It was only after she finished the second that the trouble began. She must have refused to give it to him. She may have threatened to expose him. We’ll hear about all that later from Paula herself—it’s not too important. There are other angles that still throw me. The whole mess is rather involved because there are a few missing characters in the design.” He picked up his hat and started out.

I said, “Would you mind me taking a quiet look at your sister, Mrs. Gant? It’s been a long and complicated struggle reaching here and I’d like to see the girl I was chasing.”

She led me to the bedroom and opened the door slowly.

Paula was asleep in a satin covered beds. The satin was yellow and the room was lit only by a small French lamp on a night table. The effect was startling. It was an illustration in a good juvenile—and Paula was the fairy princess. Her red hair shone against the background of diffused light. She had a face full of quiet beauty, now pale and deathlike and unreal. I wanted to cross the room and talk to her, suddenly, to tell her that my name was Jeff Keye and I knew her brother. I wanted to let her know that she was just as beautiful as I had imagined and that what she needed was a little less fright in her eyes and a little more joy and laughter, and I was a specialist in that line because I did cartoons.

Mrs. Gant closed the door and I said, “I’ll be sending her flowers. Then I’ll be seeing her. Often.”

She squeezed my arm. “Call me soon. I’ll let you know when you can see her.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, every hour on the hour.”

Bull paused at the hail door and took Mrs. Gant’s hand. “Don’t worry about Paula—I won’t breathe a word about her to Trum. You’ve only got Semple to worry about.”

“Semple?”

“He’s down at Trum’s right now. Trum picked him up on suspicion. If Semple talks you may have to spill Paula’s story to Trum. If Semple doesn’t talk, Paula can forget about the past completely.”

She winked at us.

“Semple won’t talk.”

CHAPTER 20

The dawn was struggling vainly through a thick layer of cirrostratus when we arrived at police headquarters. The first gray beams of morning found Bull as spry as ever.

Trum awaited us. He was angry, and his eyes had two or three added traveling bags that went quite well with his ashen face. He had been massaging his hair during the night. His tie hung limply from his unbuttoned collar. He faced us grimly, leaning both arms on the desk top.

Bull sat down. I stood at the far end of the room, waiting for the first shock of dialogue.

Trum said, “If I had met you two hours ago, Bull, I would have fixed your fat little wagon. You follow me?”

Bull said, “It’s too early in the morning for guessing games.”

“I should have sent a detail of men out after you, fat stuff, had them grab you and stick you in a little room I have for busybodies. It’s a cozy little place, with hot and cold running bars.” He waited for a reaction from Bull, got none and went on. “Where have you been, detective?”

“Visiting. Jeff and I have just returned from a visit to the Bronx Zoo. We were interested in observing the awakening of animal life at this hour in the morning. That reminds me, Trum—how long have you been up gathering those cream puffs under your pretty eyes?”

Trum grunted. “I could arrest you now, Bull. I’ve got the charge this time.”

Bull half opened one eye. “The only thing you can charge me with is public service. I don’t know why I knock myself out trying to do you favors, Trum. If it weren’t for my sense of civic duty, I would have been home in bed tonight instead of losing weight skipping around the city on police business. Why don’t you be sensible, rest your fat pants in your easy chair and forget about the sleep you lost tonight? It wasn’t my fault that some pixie whispered in your ear that Semple might have murdered Lecotte. Blame the pixie, chum.”

“I’m not talking about Semple and you know it.”

Bull didn’t alter his pose or the tilt of the cigar stub in his mouth or the expression of his face. “Then you must be referring to Gregory Yukon.”

“A good guess. You were down there when Yukon’s body was still warm. You didn’t phone it in, did you?”

“I tried. I got the wrong number and figured I’d be wasting time. His sister phoned in, didn’t she?”

“We’ve got her inside.”

Bull laughed, suddenly. He sat up straight and opened his eyes in unfeigned amazement and laughed loud and long. “You’re getting better and better by the minute, Trum. You didn’t think that Alice Yukon murdered her brother?”

Trum didn’t appreciate the laughter. He came around the desk and stood over Bull menacingly. “I can live without the sound effects, Bull. Sure, she told us all about you being there when she walked in. I’ve heard that song and dance before. What makes you think that she couldn’t have shot him and then walked back after you arrived?”

“She could have,” said Bull. “But she didn’t. She isn’t that type of sister. Gregory Yukon was killed because he was getting too big for his britches. I can tell you the whole story—under one condition.”

Trum said, “You’d better tell it for free, Bull. I’m not in a mood for bargaining.”

“Change your mood.”

Trum shook his head, slowly.

Bull got up. He said, “My heart bleeds for you, Trum. I came down here in the spirit of friendliness. I wanted to let you in on the ground floor—the bargain basement. I was prepared to give you the whole tale, with appropriate dialogue.” He shrugged and started for the door. “However, if you don’t want it … You’d rather play the Rover Boy detective? Rather pull your hair out and wait for the background of this mess to walk in and sit down on your desk? Come on, Jeff, we can’t do business with the man.”

I started across the room to join Bull. I took my fourth step before Trum broke down.

He said, “I’ll play, Bull. But I warn you—whatever you want me to do has to be legal.”

Bull kept his hand on the knob. “No dice.”

“You covering for somebody?”

“In a way. If I tell you that the person I’m protecting isn’t needed on your records, will you believe me?”

Trum sat down, finally, and showed us a face full of resignation. He waved Bull back to the big leather easy chair. “It’s a promise.”

Bull walked back to the chair and lit a fresh cigar. He made his fat frame comfortable in the chair.

Trum said, “Who are you hiding?”

“We’ll get to that later,” said Bull. “Your case began with Jeff Keye because it began with Jeff Keye. You’ll understand why as we go along. In the meantime, here’s a picture to build up in your brain. Consider how the stage was set for Jeff. He returned from the wars searching for his buddy’s sister. He tracked her down to her original lodgings and was stopped cold there. From that point on he was on his own, searching for clues to the disappearance of Paula Smith.”

Trum interrupted. “A hell of a way to build a story. What has this Paula Smith to do with the deal?”

“She’s my client. She’s the name we keep out of the records.”

“You found her?”

“I found her and I want her to stay that way. I don’t want you ferreting around to get her. She’s out of the police picture. She’s the beginning and the end of your story, Trum, but I’ll hand you Lecotte’s murderer without bothering her. I’ll also hand you Yukon’s murderer and still leave Paula Smith alone. That’s the deal.”

Trum said, “All right. I made a promise.”

“Fine. Now we can dig back and begin again from the point of view of Paula Smith. The whole story hangs on her. Paula left Mrs. Preston’s place for a good reason. We have an idea of what went on before Paula left Mrs. Preston’s. We know that she was sketching up at the Metropolitan one day with Alice Yukon when Lecotte happened along. Knowing Lecotte as I did, it occurred to me that he wasn’t the type of art connoisseur who visited museums just to look at pictures. He went there for a purpose, and that purpose was to meet Paula Smith. Our next question is this: who told Lecotte that Paula could be met at the Museum?”

I said, “Alice Yukon?”

“I’m more inclined to believe that Mrs. Preston gave Lecotte the information. Lecotte was working his swindles with a partner. I have an idea that Mrs. Preston was that partner. She’s attractive enough for Lecotte to have tied up with her. She knew her way around in the art world. She ran a boarding house for artists. She frequented Lecotte’s club. She was in the club on the night of the murder. She had contact with Boucher and bought fine arts from him. You follow me, Trum?”

Trum looked alive and nodded, “I’m right behind you.”

“Good. Mrs. Preston must have recognized Paula’s talents immediately. She probably went to her boyfriend, Lecotte, and together they developed the idea of getting Paula to paint what they wanted of her. Lecotte’s job was to work Paula into the plot. He had her paint a few copies and paid her well for them. In the meantime, Lecotte was cheating on his Mrs. Preston. He was making love to Paula. He was hell bent on crowding his old flame out of the payoff.”

I stopped him there. “But why the disappearance? I don’t get the reason for the fadeout.”

Trum said, “That’s easy, even for me. Lecotte decided to double-cross Mrs. Preston. He figured he’d pull Paula Smith out of the boarding house so that he could operate his art swindles away from his lady friend. In that way he could save a fifty percent handout. Right, Bull?”

Bull nodded. “Exactly. After Lecotte had Paula swooning with love for him, he decided to abandon Mrs. Preston. After all, Mrs. Carruthers was probably his customer—and he had dozens of others to whom he could sell Paula’s merchandise.”

“That means that Paula knew about the Carruthers deal, doesn’t it?” I asked

“She must have known. You can understand her position, Jeff. Painters find it tough to eke out a living while following their muse. Lecotte sold her a bill of goods and it wasn’t too tough a selling job for him because the girl was in love with him. He probably convinced her that she could make enough money from one fake painting to support her for the rest of her art career. Lecotte set about making plans for losing Mrs. Preston. Lecotte rented the apartment using the name of Benjamin Franklin—a real clue to the fact that Paula must have known what she was doing. In a burst of whimsy she selected her uncle’s name as a screen.”

“And Paula changed her mind later?”

“She must have changed her mind after Lecotte sold the first one to Mrs. Carruthers. That change of mind must have occurred when her brother got the letter from her over in England. Since then she tried to undo the damage she had done through Lecotte. She broke with him completely and then began to annoy him at his club, probably begging him to get her first fake Corot back from Mrs. Carruthers. Lecotte, of course, temporized. He held her off, made promises and stalled, waiting for a chance to get the second Corot out of her apartment. In this interval of temporizing, he must have gone back to Mrs. Preston, told her about the second Corot and perhaps instructed her to get the painting from Paula’s apartment since he was no longer welcome there.”

I said, “Then it was Mrs. Preston I saw in the cab the night of the murder?”

“She worked fast,” said Bull. “From murder to larceny in one easy jump.”

Trum looked up from his notes. “Mrs. Preston bumped off Lecotte? Why?”

“A combination of motives, Trum. The psychologists will tell you more about her after you’ve got her confession. I can give you the bare outlines of her emotional drive. She probably was insanely jealous of Lecotte in the first place. He dropped her and took on a new love. That meant that her jealousy was brimming over. She’s a wary dame, however, and sat back to think of a way to kill her flibbertigibbet paramour at the right moment. The moment came when he returned to her with a scheme for gaining Paula’s second Corot. It was made to order for a murderess, that moment. In one fell swoop she butchered her ex-boyfriend, stole a valuable picture and prepared to cash in on the deal and live happily ever after.” Bull opened his eyes for approval from Trum, caught the glint of understanding in the Inspector’s eyes and continued. “She might have beaten the rap if Gregory Yukon hadn’t found out about her scheme.”

“Yukon knew Mrs. Preston?”

“Yukon was an important member of the alliance. He was the final authority on those works of art. He examined them for painting flaws and added the correct touches when they were needed. When Boucher told him of Mrs. Preston’s purchase, Gregory knew immediately what she intended to do. When Yukon heard of Lecotte’s murder, he knew who the murderer was. I’m guessing that at first he threatened to blackmail Mrs. Preston. She followed him back to his city abode, and took a snap shot at him—but only winged him. She couldn’t risk following up when she saw you and Alice tending to him as he lay in his doorway, and drag him back inside.

“Later, suspecting it was Mrs. Preston who’d shot him, and that blackmail was out, he decided to go for broke. He went to Mrs. Preston’s apartment, found you there, Jeff, grabbed the painting and delivered it to Mrs. Carruthers on his own. Naturally, when Mrs. Preston found her precious piece of painting stolen, she knew at once that it could only have been Yukon who took it. No other living man had worked on Lecotte enterprises. For that reason she waited for Gregory after he had gone to Mrs. Carruthers. She bided her time, and when he returned to his studio alone, she killed him.”

Trum began to show signs of strain. He stood up.

“A very juicy tale, Bull,” he roared. “But where in hell is this Preston dame now? Where do we pick her up?”

Bull was unmoved. “I’m not given to relaxing unless my story has an appropriate ending. I’ve already phoned MacAndrews to tail our friend Mrs. Preston. At this very minute—”

The phone rang and Trum barked into it. We saw his eyebrows quaver and a small spot of color fill his cheeks followed by a smile and a gasp of honest amazement. He almost threw the phone at Bull.

Bull listened for a while and then said, “Stay where you are, Hank. The Inspector will pick up where you leave off.” He put down the phone and turned to Trum. “Hank is up at Grand Central Station, slowly going insane.”

“Grand Central?” Trum roared. “What’s he doing there?”

“Watching Mrs. Preston, in a manner of speaking.”

“Watching her? Why doesn’t he nab her?”

“Two reasons, Trum. Firstly, he isn’t a cop. And secondly, Mrs. Preston is in the ladies’ room. She’s been in there for the last half hour, waiting it out. She must have seen him tailing her. Hank says if you don’t send down a squad of cops he’s going in there after her and it’ll be on your head.”

Trum struggled into his coat. He picked up a phone and barked a few orders. He grabbed his hat and made for the door.

Bull watched him go. “Trum is quick and he’s thorough, once you give him the scent. He’ll go up and get her out of there with a special battalion of wash room raiders.”

“They’d better be female raiders,” I said, “or he’ll cause a riot up there.”

“They may be female,” said Bull. “But if I know my man Trum, he’ll be there to lead them inside personally. He always likes to be in on the pinch, Trum does.”

About the Author

Lawrence Lariar (1908–1981) was an American novelist, cartoonist and cartoon editor, known for his Best Cartoons of the Year series of cartoon collections. He wrote crime novels, sometimes using the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight and Marston la France.

     

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1945, 1973 by Lawrence Lariar

This authorized edition copyright © 2018 by the estate of Lawrence Lariar and The Mysterious Press

Cover design by Ian Koviak

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5641-0

This 2019 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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